In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (32 page)

Toni Chestnut stayed for four years: “Sexuality took over and frankly I got real sick of it. I went into environmental and labor work.”

Chris Orr stayed for seven years: “I was getting tired of holding the paper together, pasting on the damn mailing labels. The center wasn’t holding anymore, we weren’t getting the next generation of volunteers. This was the early eighties and Reaganism was taking its toll. I was working as a waitress and I needed to earn a better living.”

“I stayed till the bitter end in 1986,” says general manager KDF Reynolds. “Drove a cab to support myself. Still do.”

Denver’s pioneer spirit attracted a crew of adventurous women who were to devote themselves, heart and soul, to
Big Mama Rag
. Chocolate
Waters, a Navy brat from Pennsylvania (she legalized her childhood nickname), got dumped in the city by her old college boyfriend. “Yeah, we were traveling across the country and he took off and left me with no money in one of those old-timey women’s bars. I was bisexual then, so I started hooking up with the dykes. At a women’s festival somebody had an idea about doing a newspaper. We passed around a sign-up sheet.”

Jackie St. Joan—then Jackie Bryson—arrived in Denver with her husband and two children. Her interracial marriage, the first in Virginia after the Supreme Court struck down the state’s notorious antimiscegenation statute in 1967, began to founder when the couple moved west. Jackie swallowed her pride and went on welfare for five months before she found work as a secretary. At a potluck dinner sponsored by the Denver Peace Coalition, she heard about plans for a women’s paper. “It was an ongoing conversation for nearly a year,” she recalls. “Eventually we got three hundred dollars from a private foundation, enough for an X-Acto knife and a light table.”

Big Mama Rag
came to fruition late in 1971. Maureen Mrizek, radicalized at college in Carbondale, Illinois, set the tone of the first issue by asking, “How can you conquer an oppressor when you sleep with him every night?”

“My Anabaptist cousin saw that and wrote she was praying for me,” Chocolate Waters laughs.

After leaving her husband, Linda Fowler from North Carolina had taken her child to a commune in the Colorado Rockies, burrowing into Russell Gulch, a miners’ ghost town with no electricity or running water. “Those were my days of pot and acid,” she says. “I was smoking dope, chopping firewood, learning carpentry, and trying to figure out who I was, and how lesbianism fit into feminism.” On a trip into Denver she stopped into a radical bookstore and saw
Big Mama Rag
. “The fog lifted,” she exclaims. “Within a month I left the mountains and got involved with the paper.”

Denverite Carol Lease had been the editor of her Catholic high school paper and had worked on the
Daily
at the University of Colorado. “One day back in Denver, I saw something on a lightpost: ‘We
are a women’s newspaper and we need help.’ So I went to a meeting and there was Chocolate Waters, dressed in black. She scared the hell out of me. At that point I was living with a man. I mean, I knew what a lesbian was, but she was kind of fierce and arrogant. I figured I was a better writer, though!”

Working in the basement of a house on Seventeenth and Gaylord in Denver’s old mansion district, a dozen to twenty-five volunteers produced one thousand copies of
Big Mama Rag
on a monthly or bimonthly schedule, reporting on the feminist issues of the day: lesbian separatism, rape, spirituality, women in prison, the movement’s internecine struggles. The sixteen-page paper was priced at twenty-five cents, or five dollars for a year’s subscription mailed in a plain envelope. Unsold copies were handed out at supermarkets in an effort to reach Denver’s housewife population.

“We paid maybe twenty-five dollars in rent,” Lease remembers. “We had little ads and a good distribution network, and we ran frequent fundraisers. If our budget was more than one hundred dollars per issue, I’d be surprised. Bourge Miller—now she’s Jean Hathaway—did the logo and was our art director. She was always saying ‘More white space.’ ”

Some of the women paired off: Carol with Linda, and Chocolate with Jackie, who solemnly chose St. Joan as her new last name. “Janet Sergi said, ‘Do you have a costume to go with it?’ ” she laughs. “But I’ve been Jackie St. Joan ever since.”

“We were always having battles,” remembers Chocolate Waters. “Either about sexuality or race or class. A lot of us were going through our processes or whatever, becoming lesbians, you know, if we weren’t already. The permutations on these themes drained a lot of our energy, but I guess it was part of trying to define ourselves. We were so busy having collective meetings about what was right and what was wrong that the paper almost fell apart. For a year and a half the main core people—me, Jackie, Linda, Maureen Mrizek—rented a house on South Pearl Street that turned into a workable commune. We shared secretarial and house-painting jobs, gave ourselves twenty dollars a week for spending money, and put the rest into keeping
Big Mama
alive.”

The paper’s one moment of solvency came in 1975, when the United Methodist Ministries of Denver gave it a grant. Chocolate Waters, developing her identity as a lesbian erotic poet and performance artist, received $125 a week as
Big Mama
staff editor. Jackie St. Joan used a small portion of the grant to report on Sagaris, a feminist think tank that convened in Vermont that summer. Carol Lease and Linda Fowler drove down to the International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City. On the way home they swung though North Carolina to cover Joan Little’s murder trial.

“The trial was not something the
Denver Post
was covering,” says Lease. “We’d learned about it through Liberation News Service. Basically I wrote that the issue of sexism was not addressed in terms of the rape. The defense only dealt with the issue of racism. So it kind of brought to the surface issues that are still with us today.”

That same year the women learned via the establishment media that “Carla Weinstein,” who’d been in on their start-up, was the fugitive Jane Alpert, wanted in New York on bombing charges. “She was obviously very smart and intellectual, but I’d thought there was something closed and standoffish about her,” Jackie St. Joan recollects. “When
Ms
. printed her essay ‘Mother Right,’ I was so excited, I thought it was brilliant. I insisted she read it, but of course she never let on that she wrote it.”

“And that explained the odd behavior of Robin Morgan when she came to town,” Chocolate Waters laughs. “Maureen and I were driving her all over the place and all she wanted to do was get away and meet up with Jane.”

The following summer
Big Mama Rag
went to Omaha, Nebraska, for a national Women in Print convention organized by June Arnold of Daughters, Inc., publishing house and Charlotte Bunch of
The Furies
and
Quest
. For a week the Denverites traded shop talk with two hundred of their counterparts from
Plexus, off our backs, Majority Report
, Diana Press, Womanbooks, and other alternative publishing houses, bookstores, journals, and papers.

Big Mama
expired in the early eighties, long after the original crew had departed. Chocolate Waters moved to New York to pursue her writing. Jackie St. Joan put herself through law school and eventually
became a Denver county court judge. “A lot of us had to reconnect with the need to make a living,” sighs Linda Fowler, who started a successful construction company. “The paper was too utopian to succeed—it was one of those things that burns brightly and can’t go on forever. But nothing has ever been like that time.”

“RAPE IS A POLITICAL CRIME AGAINST WOMEN”

Rape theory was conceived of and developed by the American movement. The international campaign against battery, or domestic violence, originated in England. In my opinion these issues were radical feminism’s most successful contribution to world thought.

Odd as it seems, although women had been living with the terror, their lives shaped and aspirations curtailed by the terror throughout recorded history, the pervasiveness of male violence had never been confronted by political action until the bold, creative organizing efforts of the 1970s. For obvious reasons. Militants of previous generations had been denied the social sanction to speak openly of sexual matters. The rules of polite feminine propriety, the universal bans on the use of forthright, realistic language in public forums, had kept the violence issues dormant, consigned to allusions spoken in hushed voices, relegated to the private, the personal, the shamefully unmentionable, until a freer climate permitted such things to be articulated aloud. Women in the seventies, after giving voice to such formerly unmentionable issues of physical autonomy as sexual satisfaction, birth control, abortion, and sexual preference, were finally ready to speak about rape and battery too. The brilliant, visionary strategy of radical feminism was to conceptualize sexual violence as a key link in the pattern of male domination and to attempt to put an end to it for all time.

Rape theory started for me in the fall of 1970 inside my consciousness-raising group, as part of a germination process that was taking place all over the country. Looking back, I can see that Cell 16 in Boston was
ahead of the curve as usual with its classes in self-defense and the essay on rape-murder, “More Slain Girls,” in
No More Fun and Games
. Working independently in New York, Kate Millett, a pioneeer in so many respects, had identified rape as a “
weapon of the patriarchy” in
Sexual Politics
.

What was to become a major, sustained feminist campaign against sexual violence began percolating at the edges, where I think new ideas and great discoveries always begin. Street harassment, a relatively minor but pervasive piece of the sexual abuse continuum, drew the movement’s first open confrontations.

Every woman in a big city lived with routine street harassment. You couldn’t make your apppointed rounds during a typical day without an incident of some kind or another, a catcall, “Oh, sweetheart, what I’d like to do to you!” from a truck driver, a murmured “Suck my dick” from an innocuous-looking fellow walking by in a business suit. And God forbid you had to pass a construction site when the guys were taking their break at lunchtime. Pam Kearon of
THE FEMINISTS
said it was like being under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance.

Many of us, made bold by our heightened consciousness, had developed individual strategies for coping with the harassment instead of scurrying by quickly with a lowered head as we had done in the past. Some women halted in their tracks and patiently tried to explain to the bewildered offender why an explicit sexual comment made by a stranger was so unpleasantly intrusive. My response had become a snarled “Fuck
you
up
your
ass,” a hollow threat to be sure, and one that dangerously escalated the confrontation on a couple of occasions.

In 1970 the movement began to politicize street harassment with collective action. The Ogle-In was a popular tactic. A bunch of us would gather on a street corner and turn the tables on leering, lip-smacking men by giving them a taste of their own medicine. After the newspapers reported that a bunch of stock exchange employees had developed a “fun” morning ritual before work, gathering on the street to
watch a particular secretary with large breasts emerge from the subway station, Karla Jay organized a retaliatory Ogle-In on Wall Street. She chose a March afternoon at lunchtime. It was incredibly liberating to reverse the wolf whistles, animal noises, and body-parts appraisals that customarily flowed in our direction. Wendy Roberts, a free-spirited hippie who called herself Wendy Wonderful, was my heroine that day. She sauntered up behind an unwitting passerby and grabbed his crotch. Oh, retribution!
Los Angeles feminists struck in September with their Ogle-In during Girl-Watching Week, an official Chamber of Commerce promotion. Trailed by the local media, the women boy-watched at several locations in Century City. One activist wielded a tape measure: “Too small!” “Too skinny!” “Hey, fella, can you type, file, and make coffee?” The Los Angeles boy-watchers dubbed themselves Sisters Against Sexual Slavery, or SASS.

After the Second Congress to Unite Women, where I’d been trashed for “seeking fame,” I had chosen to be less visible in the movement. I stopped going to meetings of Media Women and turned down offers to explain Women’s Liberation in print. There wasn’t much else I wanted to write about, however, aside from a children’s book on Shirley Chisholm. I fooled around with a screenplay. My income plummeted. I still believed in the potential of radical feminism with all my heart, and I never missed a meeting of West Village–One.

Tuesday had become our appointed night for consciousness-raising. One of our new members was Diane Crothers, an impatient, visionary activist from the defunct Stanton-Anthony brigade. Diane more than anyone else kept us clued in to the nuances and tremors of the national movement. One evening she arrived with a copy of
It Ain’t Me Babe
from San Francisco.