Boston’s neighborhood high schools, like South Boston High and Charlestown High, produced few college-bound graduates, but they did form the nucleus of neighborhood pride. Young boys and girls were eager to grow up and play sports or cheerlead for their local schools. The annual Thanksgiving Day "Southie-Eastie" football game between South Boston and East Boston high schools was an age-old ritual, typically thronged by crowds of more than 10,000. But these community traditions died and the people of South Boston and Charlestown could not understand why. It was these communities, whatever their flaws, that people were defending when fleets of buses began rolling past their front stoops in 1974.

One day in fall 1975, about 400 Charlestown mothers marched up Bunker Hill Street, clutching rosary beads and reciting the "Hail Mary." They knelt in prayer for several minutes on the pavement between Charlestown High and the Bunker Hill Monument. And then they stood up and walked toward the police line, still in prayer, handbags held high to shield their faces. Soon a scuffle broke out between the mothers and the police. Some women were tossed to the ground.

Although the women’s movement was on the rise, the feminist establishment had no interest in the working-class woman’s struggle against forced busing. They were indifferent to the wailing mothers who where throwing themselves down in front of delivery trucks owned by the Boston Globe (the pro-busing newspaper) or fleeing from the dogs that police used to enforce curfews. The same people who celebrated when the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s "right to choose" to have an abortion were unmoved when a federal court revoked a mother’s right to choose where her children could go to school. When anti-busing mothers attended a rally for the Equal Rights Amendment downtown, one mother addressed the gathering to ask whether the ERA would guarantee a woman’s authority over her children’s schooling. They were all asked to leave.