M19 saw themselves as quite different from feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. They thought women’s liberation would only come about as a result of a broader revolution.
It was 1981 and Marilyn Buck, Susan Rosenberg, and Judy Clark had spent days casing Co-Op City, a housing complex in the Bronx. Hours passed as they watched people and businesses, including the armored trucks that ferried cash to and from a bank.
Now with the Brinks robbery, however, it was suddenly Buck, Clark, and Rosenberg—who escaped arrest but were identified in later witness testimony—who found themselves in the spotlight. The women had been essentially unknown to the FBI before the robbery, because they weren’t really members of the Family. In fact, the trio of women were rulers of their own radical organization, M19, believed to be the first—and to date only—domestic terrorist group founded and led by women.
Rosenau says he was also fascinated by the group’s endurance. Founded in the late ’70s, M19 existed until approximately 1985, long after many of the group’s extremist peers had either disbanded, fled, or been arrested. And what’s more, they only folded because its core members were finally caught, not because their ideals had in any way softened—if anything, they’d grown more extreme.
By 1977 the Underground was defunct. Clark, along with some others from the organization, wanted to further her revolutionary work, but with a focus on what she saw as the U.S. government’s cruel and brutal treatment of minorities and women—lesbians in particular. Now, M19’s members saw themselves as part of a bigger liberation movement in which, according to their manifesto, the “oppressed nations within the U.S.
Meanwhile, Buck, born and raised in Texas, inherited her activist leanings from her father, an Episcopal priest who advocated for integration, angering segregationists who once burned a cross on the family’s lawn. With high cheekbones and a fashionable wardrobe that included knee-high boots and oversized sunglasses, she looked more like a model than a radical activist.
Before M19, these women had been going to protests, handing out pamphlets, hosting film screenings, making signs, and otherwise helping out their male counterparts. But they wanted more. And after the Weather Underground splintered, they saw a chance to take control. “They wanted to keep this armed struggle going but they thought the Weather Underground had made an important number of mistakes,” Rosenau says.
The next night, at 10:48 p.m., an unidentified man called the U.S. Capitol switchboard and warned them to evacuate the building. “Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you one time,” he said to the operator. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.”
However, none of the women, according to Rosenau, were interested in the broader feminist movement of the era. “M19 supported women’s liberation, but they saw themselves as quite different from feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem—who were worried about equal pay and the Equal Rights Amendment,” he says. “They thought women’s liberation would only come about as a result of a broader revolution.
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