In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (13 page)

“I’d been so active with the radical teachers,” Shumsky reflects, “but it was a totally schizophrenic existence because my personal life was in the lesbian community and the lesbian bars. The times were so homophobic, so toxic, that there was no way I could come out to my radical friends, or to the black community in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and especially not to the school system. I couldn’t put myself at risk.”

For her GLF activities, Ellen Shumsky became Ellen Bedoz, adopting the surname of a feisty old lady she’d met in France. Her friend Barbara Gladstone, a dancer, took Barbara XX as her nom de guerre in honor of the twin female chromosomes.

Nineteen seventy was the year when the women’s newspapers first blossomed. Offset printing, an inexpensive technological advance, had
spawned a lusty counterculture press from Boston to Berkeley, but now it would be the women’s hour. Marilyn Webb of D.C. Women’s Liberation first broached the idea to Heidi Steffens, Marlene Wicks, Coletta Reid, and Norma Lesser when they convened one night at her dining room table. Seven months pregnant, Marilyn was the only one in the group who had actually done any newspaper reporting. She was the Washington correspondent for the
National Guardian
, the left-wing weekly, and she had four hundred dollars in a movement bank account that she figured might be enough to launch the new paper’s first issue. The brainstorming session was joyous as the women scribbled down two lists of names—one for the paper and one for Marilyn’s baby.

Jennifer, the baby, missed her deadline of International Women’s Day, March 8, 1970, by twenty-four hours.
Off our backs
, a twelve-page tabloid, was right on schedule. Its premier issue, dated February 27, ran articles on abortion and the medical dangers of the Pill, plus an illustrated lesson in how to insert a diaphragm. During the first heady months, anyone who wandered into Heidi Steffens’s basement to type or paste up a few lines of copy could become a member of the
oob
collective. “We paid no rent, we broke all zoning regulations because we had no idea there were any, and we got no salaries,” Webb recalls. “We didn’t want a formal hierarchy, so jobs were never assigned. An informal hierarchy developed instead, based on who did the most work.”

The people who did the most work were Marlene Wicks (layout, production, subscriptions, fund-raising) and Marilyn Webb, who could knock out a story in two days while other
oob
collectivists often struggled for weeks to produce their copy. Resentments festered. Onka Dekkers, who came from a working-class background, was among the first to bring up Marilyn’s class privilege.

“What class privilege?” Webb exclaims. “My father worked in the garment center! But it’s true that I’d gone to a good college.” The collective asked Marilyn to cut back on her writing and help the others improve their pieces. Reluctantly she redirected her talents toward speaking about
oob
to college and community groups.

Marriages within the
oob
community were breaking up, replaced by
communal living arrangements. Some new women, burned-out activists for the defense in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, blew into town and into the collective, bringing heavy-duty emotions, and heavy-duty acid.

Marilyn’s speechmaking became the subject of intense group scrutiny. “The specific issue,” she recalls, “was my giving a keynote speech at a National Student Association convention where I shared the platform with Betty Friedan. They said the radical movement shouldn’t have any stars.” Before the year was out, Marilyn Webb, the founder of
off our backs
, had been expelled from the
oob
collective. “They said,” she recalls, “that I was taking up too much space.”

During the following years
off our backs
, which continues to publish, attracted a stream of new writers and editors for whom the departure of Marilyn Webb would be a distant, if uncomfortable, legend.

The women’s takeover of the radical underground newspaper
Rat
in New York had its origins in a bombing conspiracy that featured Jane Alpert. Alpert had graduated from Swarthmore with honors despite a secret abortion, an arrest in a civil rights demonstration, and a year’s suspension for what was in those days an illegal lover’s tryst. The tryst had had an unusually painful end: trying to elude the campus police, she had slipped off the roof of a college guesthouse, winding up in a body cast with three cracked vertebrae. At twenty-two Jane had moved in with Sam Melville, a moody, guitar-strumming revolutionary on the far-out left. Jane and Sam dropped a lot of acid while they vented their anger at the Vietnam War. Sam talked often about explosives and the need for secret revolutionary collectives. Jane quit her job at a university press after helping two Quebecois separatists hijack a plane to Cuba, and signed on as office helper at the
Rat
loft on Fourteenth Street. She sold all her books because Sam said the last thing the revolution needed was bookshelves. One evening when Jane came home late, Sam told her he’d planted a timed explosive at Marine Midland, a bank she had never heard of. They heard on the news, that several people were wounded but no one was killed.

During the next few months Melville’s small group was to carry out several more sorties against corporate America (Jane executed one solo mission), and
Rat
was always the first newspaper to get a copy of the
press release that accompanied the actions. Alpert, Melville, and David Hughey were arrested in November 1969.

Out on bail and denying all charges, Alpert was treated as a heroine at
Rat
, promoted to writing front-page stories. Hurrying to a fundraiser for her defense case one evening, she grabbed the latest issue and saw that the men had produced a sex-and-porn special.

“I felt personally affronted,” Alpert recalls. “I was the best-known name associated with the paper at that point—how could they do it? So I called Robin Morgan, whom I admired as the most compelling person on the subject of bridging the left and the women’s movement. I said the
Rat
women wanted to put out an all-women’s issue and we needed her help.”

Robin set aside her unfinished anthology and a book of poems and started recruiting. She summoned a few former WITCH women and Martha Shelley from the Gay Liberation Front. To the women’s surprise, the
Rat
men walked out and gave them the paper.

The easy takeover inspired Morgan to new heights of rhetorical eloquence. “Goodbye to All That,” her rhapsodic farewell to the male-dominated New Left, appeared in February 1970 in the women’s
inaugural issue. With its tell-all litany of movement abuses (“Run it down, run it all the way down”) and impassioned calls to “free” the New Left leaders’ wives and girlfriends (“Left out, my sisters—don’t you see?”) it stands today as one of the most powerful documents of the emerging feminist era. The rest of the paper reflected the usual politico interests. Jane Alpert interviewed Afeni Shakur of the Panther Twenty-one at the Women’s House of Detention, but a black fist superimposed on the page obscured some of the questions and answers. “A Weatherwoman” issued a call to smash male chauvinism and monogamy in the Weather Underground. Martha Shelley drew an allegorical comic strip about the storming of
Rat
with knives and rifles, which new volunteers would take as gospel, and Robin, under a pseudonym, saluted Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao, for her leadership in the Cultural Revolution. “My rhetoric in ‘Goodbye’ was ahead of my reality,” Morgan ruefully concedes today.

Several other women’s papers were born that year, some expiring almost as rapidly as the collective spirit fractured or the money ran out.
Seattle, already home to
Lilith
, a feminist literary magazine, gave birth to
And Ain’t I a Woman?
The famous rhetorical question from Sojourner Truth’s dramatic speech to a women’s rights convention in 1851 inspired another
Ain’t I a Woman?
in Iowa City. The Iowa paper announced, “We are a collective of ten women functioning either as a front for a worldwide conspiracy of Radical Lesbians or the house cornfield of the Women’s Movement.”

Everywoman
in Los Angeles was started by Varda One, the movement name of Varda Murrell, a suburban housewife with grown children, and Ann Forfreedom (Ann Herschfang), a pioneer in women’s studies at UCLA and a founder of the L.A. Women’s Center. Produced at the Murrell home in Inglewood until neighbors filed a zoning complaint,
Everywoman
relocated to Venice, a move that led to the founding of Everywoman Bookstore.
Tooth and Nail
, the product of New York transplants, survived for four issues in Berkeley. It was supplanted by
It Ain’t Me Babe
, a substantial twenty-page paper reflecting the lively voices of San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Liberation (cartoons by Trina Robbins, poems by Alta, political essays by Lynn O’Connor and Susan Griffin) that managed to stay afloat for six months. The
Babe
’s guiding spirits were Bonnie Eisenberg and Laura Murra, better known as Laura X, a charismatic activist who subsequently ran through her small inheritance by founding the Women’s Herstory Archives, the movement’s first attempt to collect and microfilm its historical records.

Up from Under
surfaced briefly in New York, where
Aphra
, a literary magazine founded by Elizabeth Fisher, lasted for several seasons.
KNOW, Inc
. was a fact-filled communique from Jo-Ann Evans Gardner in Pittsburgh. By 1972, Donna Allen in Washington was publishing her steady, reliable
Media Report to Women
. In time more papers and periodicals appeared:
her-self
in Ann Arbor,
Sojourner
in Boston,
Big Mama Rag
in Denver,
Plexus
in San Francisco,
The Feminist Voice
in Chicago, the
Women’s Press
in Eugene. At the height of the movement in the mid-seventies, Donna Allen recalls,
Media Report
was trading subscriptions with 250 local, indigenous
feminist publications.

In the fall of 1969, Shulie Firestone abruptly quit Redstockings, accusing Kathie Sarachild of an existential inability to act. She teamed up with Anne Koedt to found
New York Radical Feminists, yet another new group committed to theory and, the two women hoped, to outreach and organizing. They invited seven others to join their “leadership brigade,” named Stanton-Anthony to honor the heroines of the suffrage struggle. Casting themselves as the radical progeny of the suffrage movement was a defiant, clarifying tactic on the part of Firestone and Koedt, for leftists habitually denigrated the suffrage battle, belittling it as a racist, upper-class white women’s campaign.

Of all the factions in Women’s Liberation that were forming and dissolving like amoebae that season, Stanton-Anthony proved the most responsive to unaffiliated women who were desperately trying to find their way into, or reconnect with, the movement. Sorting through phone numbers on scraps of paper, the founders set out to organize consciousness-raising groups on a neighborhood basis. One of their ideas, that Stanton-Anthony would lead and the junior brigades would follow, proved less popular that season.

I wanted to reconnect with the organized movement after the demise of New York Radical Women, where my attendance had been sporadic because of the interminable “Is the enemy man or capitalism?” debates. Hearing that Redstockings was temporarily closed to new members, I joined the West Village–One brigade of New York Radical Feminists with my friend Sally Kempton, a gifted writer at
The Village Voice
. Sally brought in her friend Grace Paley, the dedicated antiwar activist and author of
The Little Disturbances of Man
. Grace was a vital presence among us for thirteen weeks before she went back to her antiwar work. Sally became my partner in feminist activism for eighteen months, until she embarked on the spiritual quest that became her lifelong commitment. I stuck with the program. West Village–One, with a changing cast of characters, became my home base in feminism for the next four years. Along with many others in NYRF, I went out and organized new consciousness-raising groups for those who wanted to join the movement.
At its height three years later, New York Radical Feminists had four hundred
members in neighborhood-based groups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and had staged pioneering speak-outs and conferences on rape, prostitution, marriage, motherhood, and the sexual abuse of children.