In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (2 page)

It happened without warning. From a centrally located chair, a young woman whose name, I later learned, was Kathie Amatniek asked a simple question. The question, it turned out, was one of her favorites, a key to the process called consciousness-raising, a group exercise designed to unlock the door to collective truths unmediated by the opinions of men.

“When you think about having a child,” Kathie asked, “do you want a boy or a girl?”

Oh brother
, I thought,
this is naive
.

One by one, the assembled young women “went around the room.” I got the impression that more than a few resented the topic or had exhausted their interest in it at previous meetings. In any event, a woman named Peggy Dobbins abruptly exclaimed, “I’ve already had a baby, Kathie. I gave birth while I was in college, because I didn’t know how to get an abortion. I had a perfect little boy, and I had to give him away.”

In the sudden hush, the next speaker picked up the theme. “I had a legal abortion in a city hospital. My parents paid two board-certified hospital psychiatrists to testify that I was too mentally unstable to bear a child. I wasn’t mentally unstable, I just didn’t want a baby, but all my life I’m going to carry that stigma.”

A third woman told of her Mafia-protected abortion, a blindfolded
trip by car to an unknown destination, a huge payment in cash, and a fee to the go-between; no questions, no names.

My turn was coming.
One
abortion? These young women barely out of college are talking about
one
abortion?

“I’ve had three illegal abortions, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico. The last one was a year ago. Jan, you’re my best friend but I never told you. I wasn’t sure what you’d think. What I want to say now is, I guess I’m lucky to be alive.”

And with that, my eyes filled with tears. I could not go on. I was in no shape to mention that in my second unwanted pregnancy my luck almost ran out, how the Park Avenue gynecologist looked at me helplessly and said, “You’re a resourceful person, ask around, you’ll connect with someone,” how in the month before I connected with the clinic in San Juan for a safe, surgical D & C, I’d been led on a wild-goose chase to Harlem, where a woman offered to do “a packing,” your basic wire hanger procedure, how I’d taken a bus to Baltimore, where a nervous doctor in the basement of a row house waited till midnight before shooting me up with sodium pentathol (a truth serum, to flush out a possible police agent), had me sign three blank sheets of paper (he could fill in a statement or confession later if something went wrong), and then said he wanted to try a saline injection (he must have known it could kill me at under three months), how I’d fled from Baltimore still pregnant, running on survival instincts and running out of time, how I arrived in San Juan with a name on a scrap of paper, how I found Dr. Pardo, who showed me his trembling, arthritic hand, how I screamed that I wasn’t going back to New York without an abortion, how he gave me directions to the San Turce clinic for poor women, how Dr. Manuel Otero Roque said brusquely, “Come back tonight with six hundred dollars,” how I showed him my three hundred in traveler’s checks, how he spat out, “Cash them,” and how he saved my life.

That was my second abortion. By comparison the first and the third were a snap. The Park Avenue gynecologist had been right: I was a resourceful person. Driven by desperation, I’d been canny enough, and sufficiently solvent, to flee from dangerous back-alley procedures, and I’d been secretive after the fact. For instance, there was the employment application I’d needed to fill out for the personnel department after
I’d been hired into the newsroom at ABC. Part of one page was divided down the middle, with one side labeled Male and the other Female. On the Male side there were questions about the applicant’s draft status. On the Female side I read the following: “Date of last period? Have you ever had an illegal operation?” People find this intrusive line of questioning on an employment application hard to believe today, but given my record of illegality it is burned into my memory. Naturally I lied.

Saying “I’ve had three illegal abortions” aloud was my feminist baptism, my swift immersion in the power of sisterhood. A medical procedure I’d been forced to secure alone, shrouded in silence, was not “a personal problem” any more than the matter of my gender in the newsroom was “a personal problem.” My solitary efforts to forge my own destiny were fragments of women’s shared, hidden history, links to past and future generations, pieces of the puzzle called sexual oppression. The simple technique of consciousness-raising had brought my submerged truths to the surface, where I learned that I wasn’t alone.

New York Radical Women in the fall of 1968 was filled with such stories. Women were reinventing themselves, a movement was being born. Before the year was out I had quit the safety net of my TV job for the marginal life of a feminist soldier. Diving into the swift current headfirst was a rash decision that I’ve never regretted. As Women’s Liberation careened forward during the next decade, its clamorous demands and bold new thinking profoundly altered the contract between the sexes, not only in the United States, where the grievances and political theories first erupted, but in the farthest reaches of the world.

At its inception the women’s movement appeared to have two distinct wings—the reformers of NOW and the radicals of Women’s Liberation. NOW was a dues-paying membership organization that welcomed the participation of men; its organizational structure, with an elected national board and state divisions, was determinedly hierarchical. Women’s Liberation, in name and spirit, sprang from the radical ferment of the civil rights, antiwar, and counterculture movements. Decentralized and antihierarchical, it functioned and flourished within an amorphous framework of small, ostensibly leaderless, usually short-lived groups (such as New York Radical Women) in which a male presence
was unthinkable. NOW’s commitment to equal opportunity in employment was its strong suit. The fast-beating heart of Women’s Liberation was analysis and theory. As a general rule, NOW preferred to rely on traditional forms of protest: committees and picket lines, lawsuits and lobbying, while Women’s Liberation broke new ground through theoretical papers, imaginative confrontations, and inventive direct action. The explosive creation of the antiviolence issues—rape, battery, incest and child molestation, sexual harassment—and later on, the controversial development of antipornography theory, belonged to the domain of Women’s Liberation, as did the early surge of lesbian feminism and the rise of a vital, alternative feminist press.

Having offered this neatly compartmentalized overview, I must amend it to say that in the early seventies the formation of a NOW chapter in a small southern or midwestern city was a radical act, while in New York some of the era’s most colorful, catalytic figures, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Florynce Kennedy, Rita Mae Brown, and Shere Hite, started their feminist journeys as NOW volunteers. Moreover, the entire movement, radicals and reformers alike, was known generally as Women’s Liberation or, slightingly, Women’s Lib.

Thinking, organizing, speaking, writing, litigating, and raising money are among the components that propel a movement forward. By 1970 the women’s movement had attracted a cadre of smart, knowing young lawyers and a legion of inventive law students, the first to be admitted to the great male academies. There was never a shortage of thinkers, organizers, speakers, and writers in Women’s Liberation, but money was elusive, to say the least. Our movement steamed into the popular consciousness without a dime. In the late sixties its first manifestations, awkward, original, and totally surprising, were ignored by the media or treated with uncomprehending hostility and humor. Yet only a few years later the story of Women’s Liberation had become
the
unfolding news event of the decade, the dissemination of feminist ideas through newspapers, magazines, books, and TV talk shows a political phenomenon unprecedented in history.

Our ideas of equality had gained popular acceptance. Heated arguments were erupting in the bedroom and on the street, at dinner parties, on tennis courts, and in public bars and bowling alleys. Liberation
battles were being fought on the home front of people’s private lives, at the workplace, on the college campus, inside the legal system up to the Supreme Court, and within the major political parties, labor unions, professional associations, and social clubs.

All these stories were reported as news, adding to the momentum, but paradoxically, as the movement grew in size and strength its diversity and healthy decentralization were slighted. The media’s habitual use of a single individual to define or symbolize a political issue led to the increasing identification of feminism with a mere handful of visible authors and journalists, chiefly Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, whose careers were inextricably entwined with the cause. These talented communicators, plus a few others—like Shere Hite, Marilyn French, and me—who broke into the public consciousness during the seventies by means of our books, were on average a generation older than the typical twenty-something activists whose radical impulses and bold perceptions were the revolution’s driving force. Although it was seldom commented upon at the time, the age advantage, with its acquired skills and worldly savvy, that the feminist “stars” brought to the movement was one of its sources of tension, which is to say, feminism made its public figures as much as its public figures helped to make feminism, but recognition flowed solely in one direction. By 1972, Gloria Steinem had emerged as feminism’s most articulate, effective spokesperson and leading iconographic figure, while
Ms
. magazine, the semi-mainstream publication she founded, assumed the role of feminism’s popular voice.

As for myself, I had cast my lot early with the radical wing because I found it intellectually thrilling to be on the cutting edge of new thought and action, and also because radical activism suited my temperament. When
Against Our Will
, my book on rape, was published in 1975, I was anointed with my own portion of media fame, but I wasn’t cut out for, and soon grew to dislike, its awesome demands, the peripatetic life of airports, speeches, sound bites, and public receptions. By then many of the original radical visionaries I had known, respected, and clashed with earlier in the decade were dispirited and inactive, and most had already lost what little name recognition they’d had, while a second generation of visionaries, building on the initial breakthrough,
was pioneering issues undreamed of by the movement’s founders. I continued to bridge the disparate worlds of movement organizer and author into the 1980s, the decade that marked radical feminism’s decline.

All movements eventually wane and nobody likes to be reminded of past injustices when conditions improve. It is also true that the pell-mell rush of events that got us from there to here, a better place indeed, was poorly understood in its time, if only because it is nearly impossible to gain perspective on great social transformations while they are happening. I set out to write this memoir with a sense of urgency because I could see that much of the movement’s story had already been lost or distorted. To fill the gaps in my own knowledge, I reached out to activists I’d known and worked with, and to many others I’d known of only by their reputations. It appeared that they all had been waiting for a historian’s call and the chance to illuminate the record. Their voices are as important as mine; I treasure the role they played in Women’s Liberation and am grateful for their memories and reflections.

The pages that follow, written from the partisan vantage point of a participant-observer, are my attempt to recapture a vivid piece of radical history that changed the world.

THE FOUNDERS

Of the thousand or so white volunteers who joined the southern civil rights struggle during the mid-sixties, at least half, including myself, were women. Many of us went on to found—or to play a major role in—the Women’s Liberation Movement a few years later. History seldom offers parallels this tidy, but as it happened, many of the female abolitionists of the nineteenth century had gone on to organize for women’s suffrage. These two vivid epochs were separated by more than a century, yet nearly identical forces applied. After fighting alongside men in a radical movement to correct a grievous wrong, the women then woke up and wondered, “What about us?”

Political organizers understand that the important thing about action is reaction. There you are, taking a stand, struggling to express a new idea, and the response is so powerful—positive or negative—that it reverberates into new responses and reactions, especially in you.

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were part of the American delegation that traveled to London in 1840 for a World Anti-Slavery Convention. As the high-minded congress got under way, the male abolitionists voted not to accredit and seat the women. For ten days Mott and Stanton watched the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery, where in mortification and anger they hatched the idea for a women’s rights congress that became the historic
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

White women in the civil rights movement during the 1960s were also consumed by a vision of equality, one that seemed important enough to risk our lives for. (And one white woman, Viola Liuzzo, did in fact lose her life to a sniper on the Selma-to-Montgomery March.) Although Martin Luther King, Jr., came to embody the stoic heroism of those hopeful years, to kids on the college campuses, and to many older radicals like me, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the true cutting edge of the movement.

SNCC had been formed after the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960. And it was SNCC that sent out the call for an army of northern volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, the call to which so many white women responded. SNCC was cast in the image of a young, fearless black male, a concept that may have been necessary for its time, but its corollary was that women of both races were expected to occupy a lesser role.