In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (34 page)

Most vivid of all was the appearance of Florence Rush, the social worker from Westchester, diminutive, clad in a tailored dress and ankle-strap shoes, who peered over the lectern and read her analysis of the sexual abuse of children.

A civil rights activist in New Rochelle and the mother of three
grown children, Florence was one of the few women of her age—fifty-five—and background to make a successful transition from the Old Left to radical feminism. “
Once I started reading the literature, the stuff from Cell 16, Kate Millett’s book, that did it,” she recalls. “Everything seemed to fit my own experience—my dissatisfactions with my marriage, the arrogance of the New Left and its contempt for older women, that “Don’t trust anybody over thirty’ line. So I came to New York, attended a few consciousness-raising groups there, and went back and organized more consciousness-raising groups in Westchester County.”

Florence had been in the audience at the rape speak-out in St. Clement’s. “I sat there and began remembering that I had been molested as a child,” she relates. “My uncle Willie, our family dentist, the men who exposed themselves in the movie theater, on the subway, in the street. The pinching and feeling were so prevalent, yet nobody ever mentioned it. As my personal experience came flooding back, I began to feel that I could talk about child sexual abuse with some authority.”

At the lectern she calmly dissected four current academic studies and their “psychiatric mumbo jumbo”: Under the prevailing Freudian logic, exhibitionists and molesters were to be pitied rather than feared, sexual assault was not particularly detrimental to the child’s subsequent development, and the “unusually attractive child,” as one study phrased it, was often the actual seducer. Children’s silence after an assault probably stemmed from their guilt in succumbing to a forbidden attraction.

Jettisoning this Freudian interpretation with utmost dispatch Florence laid out her feminist conclusion: “
The sexual abuse of children, who are overwhelmingly female, by sexual offenders, who are overwhelmingly male adults, is part and parcel of the male-dominated society which overtly and covertly subjugates women.”

No one had ever said this before. Nineteenth-century feminists and social workers had battled to protect and shelter abused and abandoned children, but no one before Florence Rush had connected sexual abuse and its societal rationalizations with male dominance and the educative process of becoming a female. The applause for Florence broke like
thunder as everyone stood up and cheered. That in itself was a first for a radical feminist conference.

I was hopping around in high gear for the rest of the day. “Think of the lynching analogy,” I instructed a reporter for
Good Housekeeping
. “Rape is to women as lynching was to blacks. It’s a conscious process of intimidation that keeps all women in a state of fear.”

On Monday morning I was in the office of literary agent Wendy Weil with a four-page proposal for a book on rape. Simon and Schuster, the first publisher Wendy approached, offered a contract for ten thousand dollars. In my naïveté I agreed to deliver the manuscript in one year. That seemed right to Jonathan Dolger, my laid-back editor.

I spent the next four years writing
Against Our Will
in the New York Public Library, where the card catalogue had more entries for rapeseed than for rape but the stacks held treasures that could be retrieved if I followed a dim trail of footnotes and trusted my instincts. The book surprised me as it grew. All reporters are sleuths, but few are privileged to start their work at the beginning of a great discovery. I was finding answers to questions that no one had ever asked before. Hot on the trail of an elusive case or a legal point, sometimes I’d leave the Forty-second Street library at closing time and dash to the law library at NYU to browse undisturbed for another few hours. Occasionally I suffered paroxysms of doubt. Was it legitimate to isolate rape in war? Could I find the precise moment in English law when rape evolved from a crime of property to a crime against a woman’s body? Should I make fewer enemies and perhaps gain some friends by skirting the minefield of race and sex? Indeed, could I argue the premise that rape had a history without becoming the laughingstock of historians everywhere?

The movement, of course, was my buttress. In April 1971, coincidentally the month of our New York rape conference, the
San Francisco Chronicle
gave extensive coverage to the rape-and-kidnap trial of one Jerry Plotkin, a local jeweler. Plotkin was portrayed by his defense lawyer as a persuasive libertine. His victim testified that he had accomplished his feat of “persuasion” with the aid of a gun and several buddies. On cross-examination she was raked over the coals for her
prior sexual activity. After a full day of intrusive questioning, she blurted out on the stand, “Who is supposed to be on trial here? I did not commit a crime.”

“Grueling Day for a Rape Case Victim” was the
Chronicle
headline. The next day an ad hoc group of San Francisco feminists held a protest demonstration at the courthouse. As it happened, Plotkin was acquitted, in a verdict that was typical of the times, but the verdict had a galvanizing effect on Bay Area women.

In September 1971, Susan Griffin, a poet and past activist with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and a founder of Bay Area Women Against Rape, published “Rape: The All-American Crime” in
Ramparts
. Griffin’s trailblazing article, the first in a national publication to put rape in an historical context, was passed from hand to hand inside the movement.

Diana Russell, a Harvard-trained sociologist, had been among the protesters at the San Francisco courthouse for the Plotkin trial. A statuesque white South African from a proper Anglican family, she had joined a small, underground antiapartheid cell while she was a student in Cape Town. “
My first impulse after the Plotkin verdict was to throw a brick with a message on it through the window of his jewelry store,” she recalls with a faint laugh, “but I started doing research instead. I read the existing literature and found it was all victim-blaming.” Newly appointed to a professorship at Mills College in Oakland, Russell began to interview victims of rape for a feminist sociological study. For Diana this would be the start of a lifelong commitment to a scholarly examination of sexual abuse.

Women Against Rape groups, taking WAR as their acronym, sprang up in several cities during 1971. In Detroit, Kathy Barry, Joanne Parrent, Cate Stadelman, and eight other feminists compiled
Stop Rape
, a fifty-page handbook of theory and practical advice. The two-word title emblazoned on a red traffic sign packed its own consciousness-raising wallop.
Stop Rape
was sold by mail through Women’s Liberation of Michigan for twenty-five cents a copy, upped to sixty cents for a fourth printing one year later. In Boston, Betsy Warrior of Cell 16 produced the antirape movement’s most riveting poster, a powerful drawing of a barefoot woman vanquishing her assailant
with a well-aimed kick to the balls, and the legend
DISARM RAPISTS/SMASH SEXISM
. The widely distributed poster was reprinted in issue 5 of
No More Fun and Games
.

A fresh concept was born in the nation’s capital early in 1972 when eight women in consciousness-raising groups loosely attached to D.C. Women’s Liberation formed a special support group for rape victims. The prime movers were Liz O’Sullivan and Karen Kollias. O’Sullivan, quietly efficient, had been in the antiwar movement and was teaching political science at Dumbarton College while she worked on her doctoral degree. Karen Kollias, at American University on a financial-needs scholarship, grew up in a poor Greek neighborhood in Chicago. Karen partied hard, took a dim view of classroom assignments, and had sat in at the college president’s office to protest the lack of birth control services on her campus.

“We came together from these different streams,” O’Sullivan sums up. “Rape was our issue and counseling was an accepted form of political action. This was pre
–Roe v. Wade
, so we had some good precedents. We knew of counseling hot lines out there that told women where they could get an abortion.”

Assembling as a collective, the eight women began meeting intensively after taking part in a Women’s Liberation Conference on Rape held at George Washington University in April. (The George Washington University conference followed the model we had pioneered the year before in New York.) O’Sullivan and Kollias came up with a plan to offer emergency medical information and advice on police procedures by means of a rape hot line. They decided to staff their telephone service twenty-four hours a day, so volunteers would always be available to accompany a caller to the hospital or to the police, if that was what the caller wanted and needed. An all-day, all-night hot line would also ensure that raped women who had lived silently with the trauma for years could dial in at any hour and find somebody to talk to. With genius, they named their service a Rape Crisis Center.

The
D.C. Rape Crisis Center was ready to go public in June, when a dedicated phone line—333-RAPE—was installed in the rented town-house on Wisconsin Avenue that Kollias shared with a bunch of friends. “A typical student flophouse,” O’Sullivan explains.

“My house was the Center,” affirms Kollias. “First on Wisconsin, then when we moved to Fifteenth and Q, that house became the Center. Whoever lived there was part of it, but we never handed out the address. We put an extra bed in the hall in case a raped woman didn’t want to go back to her house and needed a place to stay.” Somebody gave them an old car to transport victims to the hospital or police station if need be, but the vehicle lacked registration and insurance. Volunteer counselors, augmented by Karen’s roommates, were assigned to phone shifts. They earnestly practiced
their script:

US: Crisis Center.

CALLER: I was raped.

US: When?

a. if just raped: offer to call a cab to bring her to the Center; possible that Jan or Sue will be able to go to the hospital or police

b. if a past rape: try to get her to talk somewhat about her feelings

The crisis collective printed up cards with the hot line number. Hoping to garner some helpful publicity, the women wrote a press release for the local newspapers and television stations.

“Nineteen seventy-two was President Nixon’s runaway reelection year,” O’Sullivan relates, “and we are in Washington D.C., with a lot of reporters who have nothing to do. So we open on June 1 and we get a five-part series on local TV and a lead editorial in
The Washington Post
. The editorial writer called us at one minute after midnight just to make sure we were really operating.” Within days, reporters from National Public Radio,
Time
, and a gaggle of local newsrooms were lining up to do stories on the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.

According to O’Sullivan’s analysis of the phone logs, 333-RAPE received between two and three hundred calls a month, discounting pranksters and hang-ups, after its media debut. A third of the calls were from actual rape victims, past or present, needing to hear a supportive voice, and from friends of rape victims seeking advice on how to be helpful. The rest were from eager reporters, women inquiring about
self-defense classes, and groups around the country requesting a speaker.

“From the beginning we saw our mission as political education
plus
practical service,” says Karen Kollias. “Nobody got paid; we weren’t a line item in some other organization’s budget. The speaking fees financed the operation. Liz was the quiet one, so I ended up doing the traveling. I went to places I’d never dreamed of, like Saskatchewan, Canada, saying “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power,’ and telling people how they could start their own center.”

Liz O’Sullivan’s unsigned forty-page booklet “How to Start a Rape Crisis Center,” including a sample press release, was ready in August. She mimeographed five hundred copies to fill the national demand. Jan BenDor at the University of Michigan opened a rape crisis center in Ann Arbor. A third center started in Philadelphia. After that the proliferation was extraordinary. Four years later
O’Sullivan compiled a list of more than one hundred functioning rape crisis centers around the country, and the record was far from complete. By then she and Kollias, succumbing to the inevitable burnout, had passed the baton to others at the D.C. Center, and the burgeoning rape crisis movement had moved beyond its volunteer origins to attract mental health professionals and federal funding.

“What blows me away,” says Kollias, “is if you watch a movie or TV show now and there’s a woman that’s raped, automatically they’re contacting the rape crisis center. It’s become normal, routine behavior.”

With rape successfully launched as an issue, New York Radical Feminists turned to other projects. One afternoon a bunch of us staged a roving sit-in at four popular drinking establishments that refused to serve “unescorted” women. Based on the quaint assumption that women unaccompanied by men were likely to be prostitutes, the humiliating policy was enforced by bartenders with uncommon zeal.