In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (14 page)

Small-group
consciousness-raising took hold so suddenly and spontaneously among American women in the suburbs and the cities that it cannot credibly be called a New York invention, although Kathie Sarachild and Anne Forer did name it and the New Yorkers were the fiercest champions of its political importance. Not everyone was temperamentally suited to the c.r. process, which required a high degree of honesty about intimate matters in front of relative strangers. Many of the “naturals” had been in group therapy or just adored talking about themselves. Others (I include myself in this category) had to overcome an inbred reluctance to speak confessionally, thinking it somewhat narcissistic. But we all believed in the political importance of our task. We expected that the pooled information would clear our heads and lead to analysis and theory, and it did.

Mimeographed sheets of suggested c.r. topics put out by Redstockings and the Radical Feminists found their way around the country, where they were used as guidelines for new groups that were forming. The weekly gatherings in somebody’s living room variably were called “my women’s group,” “my small group,” “my support group,” “my c.r. group,” or “my rap group” in the day’s parlance. By early 1972 a few NOW chapters had begun to offer “c.r. nights” in addition to their more structured programs; the first issue of Ms., in July 1972, carried instructions on how to organize a consciousness-raising group, along with a list of sample topics. The free and simple technique of “going around the room and speaking from your own experience” on a given subject with no formal leader was the movement’s most successful form of female bonding, and the source of most of its creative thinking. Some of the small groups stayed together for more than a decade.

As the new women’s discourse reached into the mainstream during the next few tumultuous years, many original perceptions that the pioneer consciousness-raising groups had struggled to express would become received information, routine and unexceptional, to a new
generation that would wonder what the fuss and excitement was all about. I can attest that in New York City during the late sixties and early seventies, nothing was more exciting, or more intellectually stimulating, than to sit in a room with a bunch of women who were working to uncover their collective truths.

CONFRONTATION

I had barely settled into the rhythm of my Sunday evening consciousness-raising group when
The New York Times Magazine
asked me to explore the curious new rumble known as Women’s Liberation. Then I found another group I wanted to organize for called Media Women. Writing about Women’s Liberation while organizing for it gave me my first taste of the movement’s ire.

The
Times
assignment came my way after the editors’ first choice, a male journalist of some repute, informed them that some movement women would speak only to women reporters. Since I’d written for the magazine before, I got the nod, along with the suggestion that I might want to peg my piece to Jane Alpert’s arrest. I replied that Women’s Liberation was about women’s issues, not about bombing, and confessed that I was
in
Women’s Liberation. My editor was surprised. I seemed so well adjusted, he said. Not at all angry. And what gripes could I possibly have—wasn’t I one of the few women writing for the
Times
Magazine?

Diving into the story, I sought out the leaders of the various New York factions. Kathie Amatniek Sarachild was the only leader to insist on a group interview, maintaining that the movement did not have leaders. My session with her and nine other women at a Redstockings apartment was stilted and awkward. Some of the Redstockings let me know that they were suspicious of the establishment press. Midway
through the exchange I recognized my old sofa, which I’d last seen at New York Radical Women.

Rita Mae Brown introduced herself during the group interview and told me about her resignation from NOW after Friedan had called her a Lavender Menace. I confirmed the remark with Friedan and put it near the end of my story, to address the recurring charge that all feminists were lesbians. Since what I wrote had such immediate reverberations, I will quote from “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” my
Times
article of March 15, 1970:

The supersensitivity of the movement to the lesbian issue, and the existence of a few militant lesbians within the movement once prompted Friedan herself to grouse about “the lavender menace” that was threatening to warp the image of women’s rights. A lavender
herring
, perhaps, but surely no clear and present danger.

I was proud of that invented phrase, “lavender herring.” In political usage a red herring is a smokescreen or a diversion from the issue at hand, and the issue at hand, as I saw it, was the feminist movement. Conjecturing that “lavender menace” owed its inspiration to “the Red Menace,” I played with Friedan’s color scheme to poke fun at her fear. I did not anticipate that some lesbians in the movement would read “lavender herring” and “no clear and present danger” as a scathing putdown, or that what I considered a cute turn of phrase would come back to haunt me.

While researching my article I joined Media Women, a spin-off from an antiwar journalists’ coalition that met in midtown at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. Media Women owed much of its energy to Lindsy Van Gelder and Bryna Taubman, two young reporters who had created a
furor at the
New York Post
during the pennant season of the Amazing Mets. Assigned to write “Women in News” features on two baseball players’ wives, they’d done the work grudgingly and refused bylines for the stories. When they were fired for insubordination, the entire
Post
newsroom rose up and went on a wildcat no-byline strike.
“The guys
may not have understood what we were doing, or why,” Bryna Taubman recalls, “but they understood reporters’ rights.” The women were rehired after the Newspaper Guild stepped in.

So Bryna, in her pigtails, and Lindsy, pregnant with her first child, were leaders in Media Women, along with Pam Jones from the Sunday Morning News at CBS. The Associated Press contingent consisted of two peppy reporters, Jurate Kascikas and Lynn Sherr.
Women’s Wear Daily
was represented by Trucia Kushner, a smart, able writer who happened to be the sister of Abbie Hoffman’s wife. Eleanor Perry, the screenwriter, and Nika Hazelton, the cookbook writer, occasionally showed up with Nora Ephron, then at
New York
magazine. Claudia Dreifus, Lucy Komisar, and Sophy Burnham were among the freelancers. A delegation of
Newsweek
women usually sat by themselves in a little huddle, immersed in a secret plot that would soon become public. A contingent of obstreperous radicals from Newsreel, a leftist filmmakers’ collective, asserted itself as another faction. Quiet as churchmice in the male-dominated Newsreel, Esther and Lynn (I won’t use their last names) underwent a remarkable personality change at our all-women’s meetings.

Despite or perhaps because of its tensions, Media Women was a high-spirited group that got things done. At one meeting Lucy Komisar mused on how nice it would be to have stickers emblazoned “This Ad Insults Women” to slap on offensive public advertising in the subways.

“Do it, Lucy,” I prodded.

She arrived at the next meeting hauling cartons of stickers. We divided the costs and became a slap-happy crew. Soon we were selling the stickers around the city.

At another meeting I proposed that we target one of the big women’s magazines that had remained immune to the changing times. From
Seventeen
to
Good Housekeeping
, all the slick publications instructing their readers in the feminine arts were run by men, except for
McCall’s
, where Shana Alexander was new on the job, and
Cosmo
, the brainchild of Helen Gurley Brown. Clubby male editors warred over circulation and ad pages while they pushed a happy homemaker line from the 1950s that was white-bread formulaic. In a make-believe world of perfect
casseroles and Jell-O delights, marriages failed because wives didn’t try hard enough, single-parent households did not exist, and women worked outside the home not because they wanted to, or to make ends meet, but to “earn extra income in your spare time.” The deceitful ideology discouraged the full range of women’s ambitions.

Okay then,
which magazine and what action? From the lunch counters of Greensboro, 1960, to the occupation of Columbia, 1968, sit-ins had been an electrifying tactic in radical movements. I suggested we try one, knowing that we had a surefire story that would get major coverage if we pulled it off.

Sandie North clapped her hands.
“The
Ladies’ Home Journal
, I used to work there! Let’s occupy the
Ladies’ Home Journal!
”

Most of the journalists with staff jobs bowed out of the action, feeling it crossed a boundary that professionals shouldn’t cross. They promised to do what they could to get us attention. The freelancers, used to living on the edge, held firm.

The Ladies’ Home Journal Sit-In Steering Committee was chaired by Signe Hammer, a junior editor at Harper and Row, and the planning sessions, in various people’s apartments, were volatile in the extreme. Esther from Newsreel wanted men in on the action.
No, Esther. No men
. Esther from Newsreel wanted a separate contingent “to stop the presses in Dayton,” where the
Journal
was printed.
Esther, we don’t have the woman power to stop the presses in Dayton
. Esther from Newsreel was opposed to chaired meetings and votes. Dealing with Esther, a self-proclaimed anarchist, led me to formulate a precept: “One movement crazy can do the work of ten paid
agents provocateurs.
” I would repeat that line like a mantra in the years ahead, whenever suspicions arose that our movement had been infiltrated by government agents. Obstreperous Esther did not show up on the day of the action, and I never saw her again.

Finally we picked an invasion date: Wednesday, March 18, 1970. Sally Kempton put together twenty pages of
article suggestions, the kind of material that the
Ladies’ Home Journal
never printed. The suggestions ranged from our idea of genuine service pieces—“How to get a divorce,” “How to have an orgasm,” “How to get an abortion”—to “What to tell your draft-age son” and “How detergents harm our rivers and streams.”

We learned about the cast of characters we would be confronting from Sandie North and her friend Brook Mason, who still worked at the
Journal
. John Mack Carter, age forty-two, the urbane, southern-born editor and publisher, had built his entire career at women’s magazines and was a member of Sigma Delta Chi, the fraternity of distinguished journalists that until 1969 had excluded women. Lenore Hershey, the
Journal
’s sole woman above middle management, belonged to a generation of tough lady editors who sat at their desks in flowered hats; it was unlikely that she would declare herself on our side. The
Journal
’s paid circulation was 6.9 million, with a readership four times that number, yet more than half its articles were written by men. Only one piece by or about blacks, a hometown memoir by Mrs. Medgar Evers, had appeared in the last twelve months, although the magazine estimated its black readership at 1.2 million.

The
Journal
’s slogan was “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman.” We kept that in mind as we worked on our “nonnegotiable demands.” Everyone was making nonnegotiable demands in those days. Looking back, though, I’m impressed at how farsighted we were.

We demand that the
Ladies’ Home Journal
hire a woman editor-in-chief who is in touch with women’s real problems and needs.

We demand that all editorial employees of the magazine be women.

We demand that the magazine use women writers for all columns and freelance assignments because men speak to women through the bias of their male supremacist concepts.

We demand that the magazine hire nonwhite women at all levels in proportion to the population statistics.

We demand that all salaries immediately be raised to a minimum of $125 a week.

We demand that editorial conferences be open to all employees so the magazine can benefit from everyone’s experience and views.

Since this magazine purports to serve the interests of mothers and housewives, we demand that the
Journal
provide free day-care facilities on the premises for its employees’ children, and that the policies of this day-care center be determined by the employees.

We demand an end to the basic orientation of the
Journal
toward the concept of
Kinder, Küche, & Kirche
and a reorientation around the concept that both sexes are equally responsible for their own humanity.