In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (30 page)

“Rita Mae really did have style,” Bunch laughs. “She came to the confrontation in a military jacket and sunglasses to show us that she was not the sort of leader who would take a trashing and cry. Later she said that she had been purged, but it wasn’t a purge, it was a classic confrontation with the leader-person of the moment. We were all so incestuous
that we were cutting each other up alive.” That fall and the following winter Bunch wrote a pair of essays for
The Furies
on the limits of separatism, in which she broke with her previous thinking. After nine issues in fifteen months, the newspaper ceased publication in the spring of 1973, but the creative energies it had unleashed found their way into new outlets. Some of the former collectivists went on to found
Quest
, a nonseparatist arts journal; Rita Mae Brown, on a grant arranged by Charlotte, began work in earnest on
Rubyfruit Jungle
; Ginny Berson became a founder of Olivia Records.

Jill Johnston also positioned herself
in the separatist camp for a couple of tumultuous years. Unlike most of the other evangelists, Jill had come into the lesbian-feminist movement as a fully formed personage, a celebrity in the art world’s avant-garde. Divorced from her husband, who took the two children when he remarried, she had joined the
Voice
as its unpaid dance and art critic in 1959, when the struggling paper had very few readers. A decade later the
Voice
was triumphantly riding the counterculture wave and Jill was earning eighty dollars a week for a column that had evolved into a stream-of-consciousness pastiche with lower-case spellings, eccentric punctuations, and dazzling, inventive wordplay. She was the
Voice’s
most original writer, and its funniest too. “A close reader could detect some occasional sapphic meanderings,” she laughs. “The
Voice
printed whatever I wrote, including the stuff from my time in the mental hospital.”

Invited by Lois Hart and Suzanne Bevier, two of her avid fans, to join the weekly dances at the Gay Liberation Front, Johnston initially had not been impressed: “I had been hanging out with the trendy, beautiful people at Max’s Kansas City, and the women at the GLF were definitely not
Vogue
cover models. They looked funny to me.” She was even slower to grasp the feminist part of the “lesbian-feminist” hyphenation when the Radicalesbians broke away from the GLF. “I had made my own way,” she reflects, “so my attitude in the beginning was just like a man’s—
What do these women want?
” When she figured it out, Johnston boldly announced “Lois Lane Is a Lesbian” in a March 1971
Voice
column.

Jill had a knack for raising the lesbian banner in unusual venues whenever members of the press were present. Her gambits, fortified in
those days by seriously excessive drinking, were essentially a form of performance art. She splashed topless in the swimming pool at a 1970 fund-raising party for NOW at art collector Ethel Scull’s house in the Hamptons, upstaging Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem on that occasion, and attempted a similar coup, with disastrous results and great personal embarrassment, at the 1971 Town Hall extravaganza starring Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer.

“The Radicalesbians hadn’t wanted me to be on the stage because the Town Hall event was elitist,” Johnston relates, “but I thought I had a great way to disrupt and destroy it. I’ll confess that
Marmalade Me
, my first collection, had just been published, and hell—we were living in a time of freaky, neo-Dada actions when any attention you got gave you a certain cachet. I wanted a whole bunch of people to join me onstage for my group grope, or happening, but the only ones who would do it were two friends from the dance world. One wasn’t even a lesbian. Maybe it would have been better if we’d just released some balloons.”

In the wake of Town Hall, Johnston came out on
The Dick Cavett Show
as America’s first nationally televised lesbian. She looked petrified during her segment, I distinctly recall. Her
Voice
column had already evolved into an open lesbian forum, or rather into a forum between Jill the stream-of-consciousness writer and Jill the improbable activist putting her column at the movement’s service. The pieces, augmented by jottings from her diary, were collected and published by Simon and Schuster in 1973 under the title of
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution
. “Lesbians were natural outsiders to begin with,” she says in reflection, “so separatism seemed normal to me, or a least a normal development at the time. I guess it ran its course and served its purpose.”

Two years after her book appeared, Johnston began slowly and painfully trying to reintegrate herself into the avant-garde scene she had summarily abandoned. Her individualism and erratic behavior had antagonized many of the movement people she was championing in her writing, and her ventures on the media barricades had driven her over the edge of her precarious emotional balance. “I was outing myself continuously,” she sighs, “for six fucking years. Well, it wasn’t all terrible.”

“Collective” was always a word with variable meanings in Women’s Liberation. The utopian desire to submerge individual ego for the greater political good led to a range of experiments such as fitful stabs at group writing and the founding of communal houses where personal lives intermingled at every conceivable level and food, clothes, and money were shared. Of all the experiments that marked the era, foolish and grand, to me the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective stands as the one unqualified success. It became the heroic achievement of a lifetime for the twelve little-known women who wrote and edited the feminist classic
Our Bodies, Ourselves
.

Nancy Hawley had grown up in radical politics. Her mother had been in the Communist Party, and Nancy herself was a charter member of SDS at the University of Michigan. After an inspiring conversation in 1968 with her old chum Kathie Amatniek, she started one of the first consciousness-raising groups in Cambridge, enlisting the young mothers in her child’s cooperative play group. Happily pregnant again, she attended the stormy Thanksgiving conference in Lake Villa, Illinois, but unlike Charlotte Bunch and many others, Hawley came away from it euphoric. After hearing Shulamith Firestone call pregnancy “barbaric” and assert that women would be equal only when science offered alternatives to biological reproduction, Hawley knew that the movement needed her pro-motherhood voice.

In May 1969, a month after giving birth, Hawley chaired an overflowing workshop called “Women and Their Bodies” for the New England regional conference on Women’s Liberation, which took place at Emmanuel College. Summoning an incident fresh in her mind, she repeated a glib sexist remark by her obstetrician. “He said,” she recalls, “that he was going to sew me up real tight so there would be more sexual pleasure for my husband.” Hawley’s outrage unleashed a freewheeling exchange on patronizing male doctors, childbirth, orgasm, contraception, and abortion that was so voluble and intense nobody wanted to go home.

“Everybody had a doctor story,” exclaims Paula Doress, who was
scheduled to give birth two weeks later. “We put aside our prepared papers and did consciousness-raising.”

Vilunya Diskin, who had been in another workshop, received an excited report from Hawley that night. Diskin, a Holocaust survivor, had undergone two traumatic childbirths with severe complications as a young married woman in Boston. Her first baby lived, but she had lost her second to a lung disease that the hospital had failed to monitor in time. “I was solidly middle class and well educated, and my health care had been appalling,” she says. “So I could imagine what it was like for others without my resources.”

A fluid core of activists from the Emmanuel conference agreed to continue meeting and compile a list of doctors they felt they could trust. They resolved as well to take the “Women and Their Bodies” workshop into the community, wherever they could find free space in church basements and nursery schools. “Our idea,” says Diskin, “was to go out in pairs. We hoped that the women who attended the workshop would then go on and give it themselves.”

To the core group’s bewilderment, the Doctors List kept dwindling. Every time it got up to four seemingly solid, unimpeachable names, somebody new showed up to exclaim, “Oh, do I have a story about
him
!” But the workshop project soared. As the summer turned into fall, the women amassed enough hard medical information, and confidence, to install themselves in a lounge at MIT where they offered a twelve-session course in women’s medical and sexual issues. Venereal disease and “Women, Medicine and Capitalism” were added to the program.

Ruth Bell, a stranger to Boston, went to the course at MIT in an oversized pair of denim overalls, her maternity outfit. “Fifty women were talking about their lives, their sexuality, their feelings,” she remembers. “I raised my hand and said, ‘I’m pregnant for the first time and I don’t know much about this and I’m having nightmares.’ Three or four other women got up and said, ‘That happened to me too. Let’s meet after and talk about it and maybe we can figure something out.’ That’s how it was. Somebody had a concern, she raised her hand, and three or four others said, ‘Boy, that happened to me too.’ ”

Joan Ditzion, married to a Harvard medical student and debating
whether to have kids, was transfixed by a large, detailed drawing of a vagina with labia and clitoris that the women had placed on an easel. “I’d only seen pictures like that in my husband’s textbooks. These women were speaking so easily, without shame. I got my first sense that women could own our own anatomy.”

Wendy Sanford, born into an upper-class Republican family, was battling depression after the birth of her son. Her friend Esther Rome, a follower of Jewish Orthodox traditions, dragged her to the second MIT session. Wendy had kept her distance from political groups. “I walked into the lounge,” she recalls, “and they were talking about masturbation. I didn’t say a word. I was shocked, I was fascinated. At a later session someone gave a breast-feeding demonstration. That didn’t shock me, but then we broke down into small groups. I had never ‘broken down into a small group’ in my life. In my group people started talking about postpartum depression. In that one forty-five-minute period I realized that what I’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency. It was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation. That realization was one of those moments that makes you a feminist forever.”

Ruth Bell gave birth to her daughter in the middle of the course and returned to become “a second-stage original member” of the amorphous collective, along with Joan Ditzion and a renewed, reenergized Wendy Sanford. “There was an open invitation to anyone who wanted to help revise the course notes into a more formal packet,” Bell remembers. “If you wanted to work on writing, you’d pair or triple up with people who could do research.”

“We had to get hold of good medical texts,” remembers Paula Doress, “so we borrowed student cards to get into Countway, the Harvard Medical School library. It was very eye-opening to realize that we could understand the latinized words.”

“Then we’d stand up at a meeting and read what we had written,” Ruth Bell continues. “People would make notes. Somebody would raise a hand and say, ‘I think you should add this sentence,’ or ‘You need a comma here.’ This was how the first editing got done.”

Xeroxed packets of the course material made their way around the
country. Judy Smith of Austin Women’s Liberation remembers getting the packet and building a “Women and Their Bodies” course around it. “The ideas were out there but the Boston women crystalized our thinking,” she says.

Closer to home, some of the women connected with the New England Free Press, a leftist mail-order collective in downtown Boston. “Basically they were a bunch of men, conventionally Marxist, who printed and sold pamphlets at ten to twenty-five cents,” Jane Pincus sums up. “They didn’t see us as political.” The mail-order collective grudgingly agreed to publish and distribute the health course papers if the women paid their own printing costs. “So we raised fifteen hundred dollars from our parents and friends,” Pincus relates. “And then we had to hire somebody to send out the orders because the demand was so great.”

Five thousand stapled copies of “Women and Their Bodies” on newsprint paper with amateur photos and homey line drawings rolled off the press in December 1970 bearing a cover price of seventy-five cents. The blunt 136-page assault on the paternalism of the medical establishment, a juxtaposition of personal narratives with plainspoken prescriptives, immediately sold out. A second edition of fifteen thousand copies, with the price lowered to thirty-five cents, bore an important change. In one of those eureka moments, somebody had exclaimed, “Hey, it isn’t women and
their
bodies—it’s us and our bodies.
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
”

Women’s centers in big cities and college towns were thirsting for practical information and new ways to organize. The Boston women’s handbook with its simple directive, “You can substitute the experience in your city or state here,” fit the bill. Subsequent press runs for
Our Bodies, Ourselves
were upped to twenty-five thousand copies each in an attempt to satisfy the demand. Three printings in 1971 were followed by six printings in 1972.