Women tackle “Sin City”

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33091, 5 December 1972, Page 7

Women tackle “Sin City”

(Bff

HELEN HOWARD)

Phoenix City, Alabama, was the place where murders were committed almost on an assembly-line basis. Kidnapping, babies for sale, narcotics, abortions, illegal gambling—they all thrived in America’s “Sin City.” Then, just five years ago, 15 middle-aged housewives decided to clean up the place. Today, Phenix City has one of the lowest crime-rates in the state. There are new industries, more hotels and a pleasant, friendly atmoIn Windsor, England, the local council must soon begin hacking up the tarmac of its central two-acre carpark, turning it back into grass — and losing £30,000 a year in parking revenue. For 20 years, Miss Doris Mellor, aged 78, said that the area was common land which the council had no right to acquire. Now the Common Land Commission has decided that she is right. These are two examples of the results being achieved by a dynamic new driving-force which is shaking up officialdom round the world—-housewife-power. WEARY OF WAITING Weary of waiting for men to put things right and get things done, women are barging in and doing the job themselves. They ate getting results. For instance: East London housewives have barraged their local council for two years to have a pedes-trian-crossing installed at a dangerous comer. Now the council has given In. In Paris, 300 women matched through Orly Airport to protest against low flying at night which woke their children. Now the authorities are considering using an alternative runway. Wives in a London suburb have spent four years raising money to buy school gymnastic equipment which the authorities said was not necessary. Once installed, the experts were so impressed that the gear has been ordered for other schools. Noisy aircraft are a particular target for housewife power. In two months of this year, Mrs Vicky Dixon made more than 600 complaints to officials at Luton

Airport in Britain about excessively-noisy planes, and her protests will continue to pour in until something is done. While her husband photographs any low-flying aircraft passing over their cottage during the day, Mrs Dixon keeps a pad and torch by the bedside to log the times of night-flying aircraft. “We want the flight path off our village,” she says. “I am determined to fight I can’t throw petrol bombs or lie on the runway; my only weapon is my pen.” It is a weapon she shares with Mrs Lily Ebden, a housewife of south-west England, who, during the last two years, has written more than 2000 letters protesting against heavy lorries driving past her cottage door. PHENIX CITY Certainly it is what happened in Phenix City. By the mid-1960s the town was so riddled with vice and violence that the 15 housewives, most of them in their 30s and 40s, decided to do something about it. They formed the Women’s Betterment Association. At the first meeting, the tyres of all the cars parked outside were slashed and the vehicles were smeared with bad eggs. After the second meeting, the home of one of the leaders, Mrs Bernice Bentley, was blown up with dynamite. Gambling, illegal in Alabama, was a serious problem, and an appeal to the mayor did no good. So the wives decided to prove that local elections were rigged. They obtained statements from people who said they had been bribed, and a witness came forward to say he had seen an election official chew up and swallow votes he did not like.

All the time the women received telephone calls threatening them and their children. They supported a local lawyer to run for State Attorney-General and organised a public meeting so that he could explain his plans for ridding the town of its hoodlums.

The next day he was shot dead. "It was the mob’s greatest error,” says Mrs Bentley. "At last people began to believe there was something in our lurid facts.

“It was the end of ’Sin City.’ Vice dens were closed down, prostitutes run out of town, and 2000 gambling machines were smashed. It is a very different picture today. Phenix is a good place to live in.”