In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (4 page)

A southerner from a churchgoing Republican family, Pam had worked for SNCC at Holly Springs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year she’d moved to New York and married Robert Allen, a black intellectual and writer. As the white half of an activist interracial couple, Pam was afraid she was losing her political compass. She felt unwelcome and useless in the growing black power movement that attracted her husband, and she was out of her element in the predominantly white antiwar movement focusing on the draft. She saw Women’s Liberation in its small-group manifestation as crucial “
free space” where she and other radical women could withdraw for a while and gain a perspective on their oppression.

Shulie Firestone was moving to New York as well, to paint and to organize. The Chicago women sent her off with a list of SDS contacts. Pam Allen had her own list and began making phone calls. At a
regional SDS meeting on the Princeton campus, she recruited Bev Grant, a folksinger from Portland Oregon, and Anne Koedt, an artist and set designer who identified herself as an idealistic socialist and was a ten-year veteran of the left. Anne Koedt would soon write one of the germinal papers of the new movement.

“Nothing
—nothing
—
could have stopped me,” Koedt recalls. “I was already on fire with feelings that went deeper than any political feelings I had ever known before. But when I had tried to talk about women’s oppression with my other political friends, they thought I was crazy. Some man actually had said to me, when I’d made a mild argument by today’s standards, “Boy, somebody must have kicked you in the head when you were little!’ There wasn’t even a minimum language to begin a discussion in those days. But I knew what I wanted: a women’s movement.”

Reserved and contained—some called her aloof—Koedt was from Denmark. Her parents had been in the
Resistance during the Second
World War, harboring Jews in their basement until the refugees could be ferried to Sweden. Her father, a photographer, had made fake passports for the Resistance leaders. Unlike most of the founders of Women’s Liberation, Anne never developed a taste for open conflict.

New York’s first Women’s Liberation meeting was held at Pam Allen’s Lower East Side apartment in November 1967 with Shulie and Pam, Anne Koedt, Bev Grant the folksinger and songwriter, Cathy Barrett from New Orleans, who did guerrilla street theater, and Minda Bikman, a nonpolitical friend of Shulie’s from Chicago. “Somebody else was there, too, but I don’t remember her name,” laughs Pam Allen. “She spent the entire evening telling us why we shouldn’t be meeting.”

New York’s preeminence as a movement hub would solidify a few weeks later when two civil rights veterans, Kathie Amatniek and Carol Hanisch, appeared. They had been introduced to Shulie by Bill Price, a
National Guardian
reporter who’d covered the National Conference for New Politics and taken note of the spitfire who hadn’t gotten the floor. Amatniek and Hanisch would join Firestone and Koedt to become the leading visionaries and stubborn defenders of the radical feminist faith.

Amatniek was a Red Diaper Baby who had been taught that there was
something called male chauvinism. “As a result I’d always been battling it individually, I’d been a feminist since the age of twelve. At fourteen I’d read Beauvoir—it was my mother’s book, I’d thought it was about sex.” At Radcliffe, Kathie had been one of the few women on the
Harvard Crimson
. During Mississippi Freedom Summer, she had “battled the housework issue” in SNCC’s Batesville project. Kathie had close-cropped, honey-colored hair and a voice that was small and tenacious. Her propensity to do battle would reach legendary proportions inside the women’s movement, where she would assume the nom de guerre of Kathie Sarachild the following year.

Carol Hanisch, an Iowa farmer’s daughter, red-haired and freckled, had quit her job as a wire service reporter in Des Moines to join the church-sponsored Delta Ministry in Mississippi the year after Freedom Summer. Impressed by her heartland values, the
Southern Conference Education Fund asked her to manage their New York office. SCEF was an Old Left organization founded by Carl and Anne Braden of Louisville, Kentucky, who never dreamed that their young Iowa protégée would strike out on her own in a feminist direction.

“
Kathie and I had been discussing a lot of personal stuff,” says Hanisch, “like how men treated us. Basically, we wanted them to shape up. We’d reached the point of saying we needed a movement, but we hadn’t reached the point of saying we were going to organize one. Then Shulie invited us to a meeting.”

“It was at Anne Koedt’s apartment,” continues Amatniek. “I remember feeling—this is me, characteristically me—that I disagreed with practically everything that was getting said, but I was so grateful to them all for being there.”

Another grateful recruit was Anne Forer, a pot-smoking Red Diaper Baby with a contagious giggle who taught kindergarten in Chelsea. “
I vaguely knew that women were meeting, and then Bev Grant gave me Anne Koedt’s address, so I showed up one Thursday evening. Up to that point my big problem with women was that I saw them as competition. I walked into that meeting and witnessed something different. Women were seeing their interests as one. It was the most wonderful thing that ever, ever happened.”

Forer was to give a name to the women’s process of “going around the room and rapping.”

“In the Old Left,” she explains, “they used to say that the workers don’t know they’re oppressed so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and
called it consciousness-raising.”

By January the New Yorkers, who’d named their group New York Radical Women, were plowing into their first action. The venue they chose was a march on Washington against the Vietnam War called by Women Strike for Peace. Founded in 1961 in response to nuclear testing,
WSP was the largest, most important women’s peace group in the country. Its middle-class members, liberals and leftists, wore hats and gloves, and fur coats if they had them, when they went out to picket, and stressed their roles as wives and mothers when they lobbyied their legislators.

On January 15, 1968, the opening day of Congress, five thousand women, named the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in honor of the congresswoman who had voted against both World Wars, marched around the Capitol with their antiwar banners. A rump group of thirty New York Radical Women led by Firestone, Koedt, and Amatniek marched with their own float, a papier-mâché coffin draped with a big streamer proclaiming
THE DEATH OF TRADITIONAL WOMANHOOD
. A second banner proclaimed
DON
’
T CRY! RESIST!

The peace activists were appalled. So were several members of Chicago’s West Side group. Stopping the Vietnam War was still the chief priority, wasn’t it? New York’s action, they howled, was petty, disloyal, divisive.

New York was deliberately upping the ante. They were telling the women of the left that if they were going to organize
as women
, they should talk about women’s issues. It was time to end the pretense that they were some sort of ladies’ auxiliary composed of wives, widows, girlfriends, and mothers.

Some women got it. Marching with friends, Rosalyn Baxandall, a rangy blond community activist with a ready grin, saw the streamer-bedecked coffin and the offbeat slogans, and fell into step behind the funeral cortege.

“What are you doing next?” she asked Amatniek.

Next was a confrontation at the Women Strike for Peace post-rally meeting. The New Yorkers walked in with their coffin, and Kathie spoke about women organizing as women as chairs scraped and some of the WSPs left the room.

“Sisterhood is powerful!” Amatniek cried.

“People were shocked,” Carol Hanisch remembers.

On the train ride home Amatniek bumped into Gerda Lerner, who had been on the Jeannette Rankin Brigade march. The Austrian-born leftist historian had recently published
The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
, a biography of two abolitionist women. “You’re making the same mistake as the nineteenth-century feminists,” Lerner scolded. “You must not separate yourselves from the rest of the movement.”

“Gerda Lerner got it,” Amatniek says. “She understood exactly what we were doing, and she didn’t like it one bit.”

“I was very upset,” Lerner admits. “Their disruption had seemed to me quite incomprehensible.” She broke off her argument with Amatniek and moved down the aisle to engage the softspoken Anne Koedt. Koedt was also “incomprehensible,” she recalls, but Lerner continued to probe and prod in her disputatious manner. “By the time I got off the train I was already quite impressed,” she says, “and I was to learn how to work with these women.”

Back in New York, Ros Baxandall volunteered her St. Marks Place apartment for a new round of meetings. “
So we met at my apartment for maybe a month and a half before Carol Hanisch got us the SCEF office,” Baxandall relates. “Maybe twenty or thirty people would come once a week. We even had an early split at my house. Several little splits. Joan Lester and Marilyn Lowen wanted to do something about cooperative child care. They didn’t care about consciousness-raising, so they went off and did child care. And then Peggy Dobbins and some others wanted to talk about witches and matriarchy, that’s what they wanted to explore. I was into everything. More and more meetings.”

A series of shuddering events in the first half of 1968 rocked the nation. January: The Tet Offensive in South Vietnam defied the predictions of General William Westmoreland. March: President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the focal point of antiwar rage, said he would not seek re-election. April: An assassin’s bullet struck Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony of a Memphis motel; the black ghettos exploded. Days later, SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. May: Leftist students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. June: Moments after his victory in the California primary, Robert Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a
hotel in Los Angeles. Believers in Armageddon might think it had arrived.

Most women on the left were still focusing their activism on the Vietnam War, Black Power, and the November presidential elections. Some hurled themselves into the primaries on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Those who’d become implacable enemies of “the System” were to join in the plans, later termed the Chicago Conspiracy, to disrupt the Democratic National Convention.

Against this background of turmoil, and partially in response to it, the small groups of Women’s Liberation were proliferating around the country and gaining momentum. The flash point had been their second-class status inside the New Left, but
meeting in private without the intimidating presence of men had opened the floodgates to a host of larger dissatisfactions that none of them had dared to articulate before. Unaccustomed personal confessions led to intimate, searchingly honest discussions. The first generation of women to embrace the Pill, they were having more sex, and having it earlier, than any previous generation of American women, yet the mythic freedoms of sexual liberation were proving elusive. The Pill did not solve the problem of an unsatisfactory sex life, a thoughtless or promiscuous husband, an insensitive or clueless lover. Sexual liberation did not address the nuts-and-bolts reality of housework, pregnancy, abortion, child care. There were many issues to be resolved. Beyond the heady discourse at the weekly meetings, the rush of unaccustomed sisterhood, the thrill of newfound articulation, there was little agreement on how to proceed.

In Chicago, Heather Booth, Evie Goldfield, and Sue Munaker of the West Side group drafted a statement from a leftist perspective. Men were not the enemy, they insisted. Social institutions and conventional expectations constrained both sexes. The West Siders urged the new groups to leaflet women factory workers on Vietnam and women’s low wages, to form consumer co-ops and child-care centers, to wage antiwar guerrilla theater in shopping malls, to canvass door-to-door and talk “to the wives of working-class men about the war, racism, and the presidential election.” These actions, they said, would assuredly be liberating.

Not everyone agreed.
Naomi Weisstein wanted to
storm singles’ bars to talk about sex roles,
but on the night of her proposed action, Shulie Firestone’s sister Laya was the only other West Sider who showed up. Vivian Rothstein, who had traveled to Hanoi in 1967 with Tom Hayden and a select delegation of SDS-ers, made sketches for a radical women’s costume, a tunic, simple and cheap to make, that “would not be co-opted by the fashion industry.” The idea didn’t fly. Increasingly at odds with the male identified leftist faction, Jo Freeman continued to type mailing labels and cut stencils for the
Voice of Women’s Liberation
. “The women in that early group,” Freeman says, “were not only New Left, they were mostly the wives and girlfriends of New Left leaders. They weren’t ready to break with men.”