In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (23 page)

Harry Blackmun had spent the summer in the library of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Among old friends, he firmed up his idea about a personal decision between a woman and her doctor, and devised a trimester formula for drawing the line. Stewart, Brennan, and Marshall sharpened and refined the drafts Blackmun circulated among the justices after the oral arguments that fall. Douglas was happy to have six votes. Chief Justice Burger was silent. At the eleventh hour he joined the majority, making it 7 to 2. With political delicacy he delayed the announcement of
Roe
until late January, after he’d sworn in Richard Nixon for what would be, in common metaphor, an aborted term.

Roe
was astonishing news, even as it was eclipsed the same day by the death of the Lyndon Baines Johnson. Sarah Weddington told the first reporter who called that the Court ruling was “a great victory for women in Texas,” too overwhelmed for a moment to grasp the national implications. Norma McCorvey read the story in Dallas and shouted to her current lover, a woman, “Hey, that’s me!” Carol Downer in Los Angeles scoured Blackmun’s decision and saw that the section on new technologies included a mention of menstrual extraction. “I didn’t know about him, but he knew about me,” she remembers thinking. Nancy Stearns in New York also found some familiar language in the Blackmun opinion. “The experiences of women got through,” she says. “Our decision to influence the law by presenting the experiences of women was successful.” Madeline Schwenk celebrated with crepes and champagne at a Magic Pan in Chicago. “I won’t be going to jail,” she cried. Then Madeline had a wild idea. “Hey,” she said to a friend. “Since we put ourselves on the line and did all this work and now they’re saying it’s okay and legal, do you think they’ll let us keep doing the abortions?”

Roe
fostered the euphoric delusion that the women’s revolution was
an unstoppable success. A new day had dawned; anything was possible. Those at the heart of the fight understood that our enemies were marshaling their forces for a sustained counterattack. As I write these words, and you read them, abortion remains our most important and pivotal issue, the linchpin, then as now, of women’s struggle for equality and reproductive freedom.

ENTER THE MEDIA

Shortly after the Miss America protest of 1968, David Susskind had given Women’s Liberation its first exposure on national TV. Taped in New York, where it aired on Sunday evenings, Susskind’s syndicated talk show was a liberal institution, a sounding board for ideas from the serious to the kooky. The kook spot, as I called it, was an occasional feature at the end of the program.

Jane Everhart, NOW’s liaison to the Susskind producers, remembers that they were “looking for the prettiest women who’d appeal to David.” Anselma Dell’Olio and Jacqui Ceballos made the cut, as did Kate Millett, at work on
Sexual Politics
. Rosalyn Baxandall was picked to represent New York Radical Women. The panelists were asked to bring movement people to fill the audience. I was one of them.

Susskind announced, “We’ve got some angry women here,” scratching his silvery head in genial bemusement, “and later in the show we’re going to find out what their gripes are.” Off-camera he said curtly, “You’ve got twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes? The kook spot! A slow rumble moved through the audience.

Susskind snapped, “Quiet in the studio!” He began again. “We’ve got some angry women here and they’ve brought their supporters with them.”

“Hey, Susskind! Is twenty minutes what you think women are worth?”

“What are you afraid of, David?”

“David, tell us about your divorce!”

Susskind threw down his notes. The panelists walked off the set. The producers ran after them. Anselma Dell’Olio broke into tears. Out on the street a dozen militants surrounded Susskind’s black limo and started to rock it.

A few days later the producers reassembled the panel for a full program’s taping. This time when Susskind scratched his head and announced, “We’ve got some angry women here,” he said it with conviction.

As the show began airing around the country,
letters poured into the post office boxes for NOW and New York Radical Women. Heartfelt and handwritten on pink or blue notepaper, they basically asked the same question, “How do I find a Women’s Liberation group near me?” Most of the letters went unanswered. The new movement was swamped.

One year after the
Susskind Show
the movement had grown sufficiently so that every important media outlet wanted large, interpretive stories. Through the fortunes of accident and serious campaigning, several of the assignments went to women who rallied to the cause. Their male editors had not expected such partisan allegiance.

Vivian Gornick, a wild-card intellectual at
The Village Voice
known for her cultural essays, was one of the first to declare herself in print. Ed Fancher, the
Voice
publisher, had approached her with the idea. He said, Gornick recalls, “All these chicks are gathering out there on Bleecker Street and every one of them has got a manifesto. They call themselves Women’s Libbers. Why don’t you do a piece?”

Gornick understood that she was supposed to produce a clever putdown of a lunatic fringe, a juicy plum for a freethinker from the Bronx whose Old Left childhood had made her allergic to ideologues of all stripes. As she pursued her quarry in tenement walk-ups and one-room studios from Greenwich Village to the Lower East Side, however, she experienced an epiphany.

“I truly felt that I was in the presence of revolutionary personages,” she remembers. “I could see the movement taking shape in an allegorical form. A vision had suddenly burst on everyone, and these difficult, marginal, exaggerated creatures with their distinct, vivid, dramatic personalities all had a piece of it.
Only feminism would be the answer for women!
I was instantly persuaded by the truth, the beauty, the shining whiteness of it all. How did Arthur Koestler describe his conversion to Marxism? That comes the closest. Shafts of light were bursting across the top of my head and I knew that life would never be the same again.”

An ecstatic convert returned to the office with her lyrical essay, “The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs.” Fancher cornered her with, “Jeez, are you sure you want to do this?” Dan Wolf, the
Voice’s
silent, cryptic editor, looked up from his desk with a puzzled stare. “The Next Great Movement in History Is Theirs” ran on November 27, 1969, and its catalytic effect was stupendous. It was even reprinted in
Cosmopolitan
the following April.

“I got so much mail on that piece, it was unreal,” Gornick remembers. “The mail just kept coming and coming and coming, on every conceivable type of stationery, from all over the country. Who knew that I would never get mail like that again as long as I lived?”

Several of us were happy soldiers marching on our own initiative that season. In December, Sara Davidson’s “An ‘Oppressed Majority’ Demands Its Rights,” with
jubilant photos by Mary Ellen Mark, ran in
Life
. In February 1970 Lucy Komisar’s “The New Feminism” made
The Saturday Review
cover. Over at
Newsweek
, my old place of employment, where women were researchers and men were writers, the male editors invited Helen Dudar of the
New York Post
to guest-write their March 23 cover, “Women in Revolt,” because they had no woman with the requisite professional experience on staff.

Dudar, the wife of
Newsweek
’s star writer, Peter Goldman, seemed like a safe choice, and indeed, she approached her assignment with a mind-set that hovered somewhere between ambivalence and annoyance. Stridency appalled her. She had forged a place for herself, so why couldn’t others? As she dug into her interviews, she began to suffer anxiety-related headaches. She found it helpful to thrash things out
with Lindsy Van Gelder, her young feminist colleague at the
Post
. By the time she sat down to write, Dudar had done a complete turnaround, concluding, “Women’s lib questions everything; and while intellectually I approve of that, emotionally I am unstrung. Never mind. The ambivalence is gone; the distance is gone. What is left is a sense of pride and kinship with all those women who have been asking all the hard questions. I thank them, and so, I think, will a lot of other women.”

The Sunday before Dudar’s story appeared,
The New York Times Magazine
ran my own unambivalent exposition, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” with the subhead “A member of the Women’s Liberation Movement explains what it’s all about.”
Esquire
, proudly billing itself as “the magazine for men,” took the plunge in July with Sally Kempton’s intensely personal “Cutting Loose.” Sally’s essay, like Vivian Gornick’s, was an emotional knockout. Her memorable last line: “It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”

Not every woman journalist that season cared to identify her interests with the ragtag battalions. Julie
Baumgold, an up-and-coming writer at
New York
, wrote a mocking story on Boston’s Cell 16 that the magazine illustrated with a composite cover photo of a woman flexing a grotesquely enlarged male bicep. Jane
Kramer’s heavily disguised profile of the Stanton-Anthony Brigade for
The New Yorker
kept its distance by focusing on the group’s internal squabbles. A treacherous blow came from Diane Arbus, the celebrated photographer of freaks. Commissioned by the
London Sunday Times Magazine
to illustrate a feature that dismissed the American movement as “a crusade of neurotic, unhappy girls,” the photographer employed a cheap bag of tricks. Arbus popped her flash at Roxanne Dunbar during a karate kick to capture a frightful grimace, switched to a wide-angle lens to portray Anne Koedt as a stark, solitary figure in an empty room, and crouched low for a shot of four Redstockings women to create the illusion of chubby legs. The Arbus pictures recirculated in
Time
and elsewhere. They weren’t helpful.

A trusting freelancer named Susan Braudy learned the hard
way that
Playboy
was not going to side with the feminists’ camp. Her sympathetic story was killed by Hugh Hefner, whose bare-knuckled interoffice
memo read “These chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart.” Hef got what he wanted in “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig” by another freelancer, Morton Hunt. An incensed secretary in the magazine’s Chicago office leaked the Hefner memo to women’s groups and the press, and was promptly fired.

Individual women asserted themselves in a positive fashion wherever they could. Mary Cantwell, the managing editor at
Mademoiselle
, commissioned a series of profeminist essays. Cantwell had an eager ally in Amy Gross, her young assistant. At ABC, Marlene Sanders constituted a one-woman corrective in television. Over at Metromedia, where no one like Sanders existed, an all-male unit produced “Women Are Revolting,” a snide documentary fully in keeping with its double-entendre title.

It was one thing for a freelancer to write a piece that came down on the side of Women’s Liberation. When women with staff jobs in the media began to rise up, feminism moved into another dimension. Their courageous actions were to change the face of journalism forever.

On Monday morning, March 16, 1970 (two days before the
Ladies’ Home Journal
sit-in), forty-six women at
Newsweek
filed a sex discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Seizing upon a natural news peg, they’d timed their action to coincide with Helen Dudar’s cover story, “Women in Revolt.”

The
Newsweek
women were sedate, polite, composed, and grim. Eight months of whispered exchanges in the ladies’ room and tentative feelers broached at lunch had preceded their decision to confront the magazine some of them had worked at for nearly a decade. No boisterous hijinks accompanied their press conference; they were happy to let their attorney, Eleanor Holmes Norton of the ACLU, do most of the talking.

Most of the women occupied a slot at the low end of the masthead
called “editorial assistant,” a code for researcher, although the men sometimes called them fact checkers, a term they abhorred. They’d also acquired an odious nickname, “the dollies.” Before the “dolly” business gained currency, the women had reveled in
Newsweek
’s clubhouse vernacular. It seemed to define the collegial esprit of the place, along with the crazy hours, the intense, semipublic office affairs, and the Friday night dinners at a nearby restaurant before the team buckled down to close Nation and Foreign, the big front-of-the-book sections.
Newsweek
insiders called the top editors “the Wallendas,” after the high-flying circus family that was prone to mishaps, but “Wallenda” was funny and “dolly” was not. “Dolly” was proof that the men did not think of the women as professional reporters, although reporting was the part of the job that the women loved. They prided themselves in producing files with colorful tidbits and sound assessments—good solid stuff—while young men barely out of college were brought in at a higher level, fussed over, and given a chance to write.