In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (3 page)

Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer. No longer part of the student community from which SNCC drew most of its volunteers, I was by then a researcher at
Newsweek
, stuck in a dead-end job, and Jan was directing inner-city programs for the Girl Scouts. During our orientation session in Memphis, we were told that Meridian needed emergency workers. Michael Schwerner, the project director, James Chaney, a local organizer, and Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer who hadn’t had time to unpack his duffel, had just been murdered in nearby Neshoba County, although their bodies would not be found for another forty days. When no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands.

“Shit!” he exploded. “I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.”

On other projects in other Mississippi towns that summer, white women were reminded of their second-class status as movement workers through a variety of slights. Because of the southern white male’s phobia about mixing the races, our presence in the volunteer army of integrationists was construed as an added danger to the movement’s black men. I do not wish to underestimate this danger, but there will always be a germ of a reason, sound or unsound, behind the perpetuation of sexist practice. When antiwar activism got under way a year or so after Mississippi Freedom Summer, there was also a logical reason why women in that movement were relegated to second-class status: the draft for the war in Vietnam directly affected young men.

Women the world over are required to modify their behavior because of things that men fear and do.

SNCC was a “beloved community” to
Mary King and Casey Hayden, an encompassing lifestyle dedicated to the perfection of moral virtue. They were among the first white women to have staff jobs in the Atlanta headquarters. Mary was the product of six generations of Virginia ministers on her father’s side. Casey, from East Texas, entered student politics through the Christian ecumenical movement and helped to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the primary force on the white New Left. She had married Tom Hayden but they were living apart.

The two women studied the French existentialists in their evening hours to broaden their understanding of theory and practice. When they’d exhausted Camus, they turned to Simone de Beauvoir. Certain passages in
The Second Sex
spoke to them so directly that they began pressing the book on others. Some people in the movement started grumbling that Mary and Casey were undisciplined sentimentalists “on a Freedom high.”

In the fall of 1964, Mary and Casey wrote a
position paper on women in SNCC that owed its inspiration partly to Beauvoir and partly to their experience in their movement work. “The average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior,” they wrote. “So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority.
Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”

Expecting ridicule, the two white women did not sign the paper they passed around that November at a staff retreat on the Mississippi coast. Thirty-seven manifestos and proposals had been prepared for the retreat at Waveland, and most were being ignored. A wrenching split within the organization was consuming everyone’s energy.

One evening Stokely Carmichael and a few others took a welcome break down at the dock. Camping it up, he joked, “
What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone.”

Alas for Stokely, his riff became nearly as famous as his later calls for Black Power. While language purists wondered if Carmichael had really meant “supine,” his jest came to symbolize the collection of slights suffered by women in SNCC.

One year later Mary King and Casey Hayden gathered the courage to sign their names to an expanded version of their paper and mailed it to forty women activists against the Vietnam War. The second broadside recounted a list of movement grievances—who gets named project director? who sweeps the office floor? who takes the minutes? who speaks to the press?—before it concluded “Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full-time on problems such as war, poverty, race.” King and Hayden titled their paper “
A Kind of Memo.”

Another year passed and “A Kind of Memo” found its way to a national SDS conference that convened at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana two days after Christmas in 1966. Fifty women, a lot for that time, caucused in the school cafeteria to discuss it.

“
Heather Booth and I were there,” recalls Marilyn Webb, who would play a significant role in the founding of Women’s Liberation in Washington D.C. “When the SNCC letter from Mary and Casey was read aloud, it precipitated a three-day marathon discussion about
women in SDS. We’d been dealing with civil rights, with the Vietnam War, we’d been urging resistance to the draft with slogans like ‘Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No’—that had been our mentality. This was one of the first conversations where we talked about what was happening with
us
. We ended up talking about everything, including our sexuality.”

Community organizers trained by Saul Alinsky, who ran workshops and wrote primers on the principles of activism, Marilyn Webb and Heather Booth were soon to marry New Left leaders. They were to try as well to marry the new women’s thinking to SDS. The political union, however, was not to be.

The following April, “A Kind of Memo” surfaced yet again, this time
in
Liberation
, a leftist-pacifist magazine. Having served as catalysts, Mary King and Casey Hayden then retired from the fray. SNCC, their beloved community, no longer welcomed white participation. They had lost their political moorings. It would be characteristic of the emerging feminist movement that various women would surface for brief moments in leadership roles and then, exhausted by the effort, depart from the scene.

Nineteen sixty-seven was a panicky year. There were riots in the northern ghettos, calls for Black Power, falling bombs in Hanoi and Haiphong, a lottery for the draft, demos at local induction centers, and a gigantic March on Washington to End the War Now. China was in the throes of its Cultural Revolution, Che Guevara was dead in Bolivia, and the sudden explosion of dope, hard rock, longhaired hippies, and flower children seemed to catch everyone by surprise. Women on the left, affected by all these phenomena and more,
were gathering in small, informal “rap” groups, study groups, and workshops to simply talk with one another.

In New York,
Robin Morgan, a poet and a former child actress—she had played Dagmar in the early TV show
Mama
—heard Judith Duffett, a community activist, defend “A Kind of Memo” in a debate on radio station WBAI. She got on the telephone, trying to locate the rap group Duffett said was afloat in the city.

“I must confess,” says Morgan, “that I went to Judith Duffett’s Tuesday night discussion group with a double agenda. The subconscious agenda was
Oh my God, I need this
. The conscious agenda was
I’m a good leftist revolutionary woman; I’m going to give these women some real politics because they obviously don’t know their Marxism and they don’t have an economic take on their problems
. So I went to a meeting. And with what I now realize was extraordinarily touching bravery, we talked about our lives.”

“Liberation” was in the air: Black Liberation, Third World Liberation. Vietnam and the draft dominated the national SDS convention in Ann Arbor that June, but standing out conspicuously among the scores of workshops was one called
Women’s Liberation, the earliest use on record of those soon-to-be-famous words. Elizabeth Sutherland, an editor in book publishing and a fundraiser for SNCC, and Jane Adams of the SDS staff helped get it going. Focusing on SDS, where men made policy and speeches while women stuffed envelopes and cooked dinner, they composed a resolution demanding “full participation in all aspects of movement work.” To soften the blow for the women’s male comrades, husbands, and lovers, Sutherland and Adams ended their exhortation—“Freedom Now!” with a conciliatory appeal: “We love you!”

Hoots and catcalls greeted the resolution when it was read to the full convention.
New Left Notes
, the SDS newsletter, mocked the women’s rebellion in its next report with a cartoon of a leggy doll in polka-dot bloomers waving a placard that read
WE WANT OUR RIGHTS & WE WANT THEM NOW!

Another nasty rebuke to the women occurred in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend, one that would push the new movement forward dramatically. Two thousand leftists had convened the
National Conference for New Politics to discuss a third-party campaign for the 1968 elections. (Martin Luther King, Jr., and Benjamin Spock were bruited about as ideal running mates.) The National Conference for New Politics, an amalgam of the Old Left and the New, was bedeviled by chaos. A black minority forced through a resolution giving them 50 percent of the votes. Debates grew violent over Zionist imperialism and the Palestinian question. At a women’s workshop chaired by Madlyn Murray
O’Hair, the successful litigant in the Supreme Court’s decision banning prayer in the public schools, the proposed topic for discussion was how women could organize other women more effectively against the war.

Antiwar work was not why Jo Freeman had come to the conference. Steeped in a family heritage of Democratic Party politics in Alabama, Freeman had been radicalized by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964. After working for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, she had transferred to SCLC’s Chicago office, but that phase of her life was behind her. Like her namesake in
Little Women
, Jo was a stubborn, coltish, no-nonsense doer. She believed that the time was right for a feminist movement.

So did Shulamith Firestone, who was fed up with the galloping male egos in her left-wing Jewish youth group. The young woman called Shulie had shrugged off the Orthodox Judaism of her family back in St. Louis a few years before and was now studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. At five feet one inch tall, she gazed at all comers through owlish glasses, tossing the mane of dark hair that cascaded below her shoulders. Somewhere along the line, the studious, nearsighted yeshiva girl had transformed herself into a fearless dynamo—abrupt, impatient, grandiosely self-important, consumed by a feminist vision. She was twenty-two years old.

Neither Jo nor the other women at the Chicago conference could remember having seen Firestone at political gatherings before. She was an unidentified comet. Working together, Jo and Shulie turned O’Hair’s workshop on its heels, ramming through a resolution to give women delegates 51 percent of the convention votes, to reflect the percentage of women in the general population.

The two insurrectionists headed for the mimeo room, where they commandeered a typewriter and stencils and worked through the night, adding and refining paragraphs: condemning the media for portraying women as stereotypic sex objects, calling for the overhaul of marriage, divorce, and property laws, demanding easy access to birth control information and the right to abortion.

Back at the main session, Jo ran down the aisles handing out copies
of the resolution while Shulie charged to the podium. “Cool down, little girl,” the session chairman told her. “We have more important things to talk about than women’s problems.”

“And
then
,” says Jo Freeman, “a guy grabs the mike and says, Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to speak to you about the most oppressed group in America today, the American Indian.’ ” So much for the resolution on women.

Days after the snub at the National Conference for New Politics, Jo Freeman hosted a meeting of angry women at her apartment. Shulie Firestone brought her kid sister Laya. Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Amy Kesselman, and Fran Rominski, all from SDS, filled out the room. Soon more SDS women, Sue Munaker, Evie Goldfield, Vivian Rothstein, came aboard. They called themselves the West Side group because Jo Freeman lived on the West Side of Chicago. They were probably the first Women’s Liberation group in the nation.

“
We talked incessantly,” Naomi Weisstein recalls. “We talked about our pain, we discovered our righteous anger. We talked about our orgasms, and then we felt guilty for talking about our orgasms. Shouldn’t we be doing actions? After all, the New Left was about action. We talked about the contempt and hostility that we felt from the males on the New Left, and we talked about our inability to speak in public. Why had this happened? All of us had once been such feisty little suckers. But mostly we were exhilarated. We were ecstatic. We were ready to turn the world upside down.”

Under
Jo Freeman’s editorship, the Chicagoans put out seven issues of a mimeographed national newsletter filled with short essays and reports on actions that was grandly titled
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
. Before its demise early in 1969, the
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
had eight hundred subscribers around the country.

“Other groups in Chicago were spinning off,” Freeman recalls. “Rogers Park, which is north of Chicago, and Hyde Park, the university district. The word went out exceedingly fast in the New Left network. I give Heather Booth the credit. She had the connections, and she had the commitment.”

Visiting friends at the University of Chicago that fall, Pam Allen had no idea that women were holding their own meetings until Sue Munaker, one of the West Siders, blurted it out in her presence. “I’m interested,” Pam heard herself saying. “
I can organize in New York.”