Clothesline Project

The Clothesline Project is an initiative that makes women’s testimony about abuse publicly visible: participants put their stories on T-shirts and hang them on a clothesline. In the book, it is presented not merely as an exhibit but as a way to challenge the concealment of violence. Its shirts bring personal accounts into shared view, while related making sessions invite survivors to take part in giving those accounts form.

Purpose and Method

The project’s stated aim is to help stop violence against women by encouraging women who have experienced abuse to tell their stories on T-shirts. Displayed together, the shirts make visible what the book calls society’s “dirty laundry.” That image joins two movements: experiences often treated as private or shameful are brought into public view, and an object associated with ordinary domestic life becomes a platform for testimony. The project’s method depends on the women’s own accounts rather than an outside spokesperson describing their experiences for them.

The book identifies the project’s beginnings as Hyannis, Massachusetts, in October 1990. It describes a process with two linked parts: women tell their stories through T-shirts, and the shirts are hung where others can see them. The clothing therefore functions both as a surface on which an individual account is recorded and as part of a collective display. The aim is not only to represent violence, but to make the fact of women’s testimony difficult to keep out of sight.

Campus Events and Public Display

At Washington University in St. Louis, the Clothesline Project was displayed alongside a performance of The Vagina Monologues. The book also describes a campus event where the project was present in the lobby and T-shirt-making sessions followed each show. These settings made the project part of a broader public gathering: audiences encountered the display, while participants had an opportunity to contribute to it themselves.

The project’s placement alongside performances matters because it connects witnessing with speaking. A lobby display gave testimony a presence beyond the stage, and the sessions after each performance carried that invitation into an activity. The book does not describe the project as a substitute for the performance or as a one-time backdrop; it records both the public display and repeated opportunities to make shirts as parts of the events.

Survivor Testimony and Participation

At one of the post-show sessions, a woman in her forties ran to the room where T-shirts were being made. Crying, she made a shirt that identified her as a survivor of abuse by a family member. She painted it while sobbing with anger, finishing in ten minutes. When she left, she thanked those present. The episode gives the project’s method a specific human scale: the shirt was made in a short, intense act, and the participant chose to make a previously personal experience visible through it.

The account treats this moment as a reason the show and its surrounding work mattered. Those organizing the event had encouraged women to share their voices rather than keep them hidden. The woman’s participation shows one possible consequence of that invitation: testimony took material form in a T-shirt, and the act of making it was accompanied by an expression of thanks. The passage does not claim that one session resolved the effects of abuse; it records a moment of participation and public voice.

Significance and Context

The project’s appearance across different campuses shows how its method could be adapted to local events. At Washington University in St. Louis, it appeared in conjunction with a performance; elsewhere, it was present in a lobby with making sessions held after each show. In each case, the shirts and the invitation to create them extended the work beyond watching or listening. The public display made testimony visible, while participation left room for women to contribute accounts of their own.

That approach resonates with the book’s wider attention to whose experiences are heard and whose remain concealed. Its account of women’s interviews spans differences of age, race, sexuality, work, and social position; elsewhere, it notes that poor women’s experiences of sexual violence often go unreported and that many lack access to therapy or other forms of healing. The Clothesline Project does not, in the passages describing it, claim to provide those services. Its specific intervention is to encourage testimony and place it in public view—a practical response to silence that makes women’s accounts, rather than the concealment surrounding them, the visible subject.