In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (40 page)

“We incorporated as the Sagaris Collective, got a couple of small grants, and tried to hire every important feminist thinker we’d ever heard of,” Boyd recalls. “You can only do this sort of thing when you’re twenty-seven and very naive.”

Inviting a select handful of East Coasters, and ignoring the antirape movement in their unrepresentative mix, the Sagaris women leased part of the campus of Lyndon State College for their summer retreat. About two hundred students, drawn from ads in the women’s press, signed up for the program, not enough to cover its costs. Session One in July went off with only the usual grumbles.

“Charlotte Bunch’s lectures on lesbian-feminism were superb,” recalls the novelist Bertha Harris, another Daughters, Inc., author. “Rita Mae, I think, had gotten up a series on eighteenth-century male political theorists. Harmony Hammond was teaching tai chi. And I was teaching creative writing; it was unbelievable to get paid. Sagaris was one of the high points of my life. Little Dorothy Allison from South Carolina was one of my students—she’d saved up her money and wanted to come. Dorothy was very quiet and studious, and she taped all my lectures. I’m immensely proud of her today.”

A second crew arrived for the August session, and with them came trouble. A volcanic tension, some even said primitive and jungly, hung over the campus. Women danced bare-breasted on the rolling green lawns; the couplings at night were intense. Pat Swinton came by from Total Loss Farm to tell her story; “the Philadelphia women”—supporters of Susan Saxe—arrived to explain the details of her case. Sagaris from the inside looked like the revolution. That was the misty impression of novelist Alix Kates Shulman, caught up in the drama.

“We were broke, that’s the truth of it. We began the August session
about three thousand dollars short, and the
Ms
. Foundation had already given us five thousand,” Blanche Boyd relates. “So I placed a call to Aileen Hernandez, who was on their board. It turned out they were meeting that week. ‘What do you really need to feel comfortable?’ she asked me. ‘It would be a terrible shame if Sagaris went down the drain.’ Aileen drove up to Vermont with a ten-thousand-dollar check in her pocketbook. ‘Hey, good news!’ I shouted. ‘Glory be, we’re solvent!’ ”

“The
Ms
. grant came in at the last minute,” Marilyn Webb confirms. “Hand delivered. Blanche thought it was absolutely wonderful, but I did not think it was such a great idea at all. I mean, this was at the height of the Redstockings charges. It looked like they were buying us off. The least we could do, I thought, was to tell the entire faculty and the two hundred students.”

When Blanche made the announcement in the school cafeteria, all hell broke loose at the hilltop retreat. Faculty member Ti-Grace Atkinson, fresh from her attacks on Jane Alpert, howled that the grant was “dirty money.” Gloria’s speaking partner, Jane Galvin-Lewis, hired to lecture on race, roared back, “Bullshit, all money is tainted. What’s the big deal?” Poet Susan Sherman, an Atkinson ally, demanded that the grant be returned. Alix Kates Shulman, proud to have been an original Redstocking, proclaimed that she would rather forgo her Sagaris salary than take suspect funds. Joan Peters of the Collective laid out the facts: “We can’t pay our phone bill; we owe Lyndon State.” Blanche Boyd pleaded for trust and reason. Alix announced that she was withdrawing an essay she’d written for
Ms
. until Gloria produced some satisfactory answers.

The debates and discussions went on every night for a week. Barbara Seaman, hired to lecture on women’s health, packed her bags and went home. She would maintain ever after that agents—government agents!—had somehow fomented the unholy chaos. In the upshot, twenty-nine women, about one-third of the remaining Sagaris faculty and students, marched down the hill behind Ti-Grace Atkinson to conduct a free school at the Bemis Church community center
“with no stars and no bosses like those at
Ms
. magazine.”

Gloria’s long-awaited answer was delivered by another
Ms
. messenger
at some point during the furor. The rambling six-page mimeographed letter, single-spaced on legal-size paper with edit marks and cross-outs, bore the advise that it was a copyrighted exclusive to “Dear Sisters” of the feminist press. It looked like what it was, a document written under duress by a woman who had faced adversarial conflicts since childhood with external composure and tight inner control. “Control” was a conscious and unconscious leitmotif as she addressed the most serious of the Redstockings’ charges.

“
I took no orders at all from the U.S. government in any of its forms or agencies,” she said of her work for the Independent Research Service. “For better or worse, I have always been my own person. I naively believed that the ultimate money source didn’t matter, since no control or orders came with it. It’s painfully clear with hindsight that even indirect, control-free funding was a mistake but I didn’t realize it then.”

Although they would claim it as their triumph, the defensive confession they’d wrung from Steinem did not assuage the angry walkouts at the bottom of the hill. Their focus had switched from Gloria to the “elitist power structure” of Sagaris, Inc. Calling themselves the August 7th Survival Community, they marched to the campus only at mealtimes and to retire to their dormitory rooms at night.

At this inauspicious moment, Lucinda Franks of
The New York Times
, a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter of sunny good cheer, arrived at Sagaris to do a feature on feminist scholars in rural Vermont. A weary Blanche Boyd escorted her around the hilltop campus, then pointed her toward the August 7th Survival Community down below. Entering a meeting room, Franks distinctly heard a surly whisper,
“That’s the reporter who wrote about Jane Alpert!”
Three women glaring in her direction abruptly got up and walked out. Franks had been gathering tidbits about the clash over Steinem, and she most certainly was the reporter who had written sympathetically about Alpert, but she had no idea that the movement’s divisions had grown so venomous or were so flagrantly open.

“Lucinda was freaked,” Blanche Boyd remembers. “Somebody down the hill chalked on a blackboard, ‘A smiling face should be hit.’ She thought it was about her, and it probably was.”

Franks hung around Sagaris just long enough to pick up a few
quotes before she fled to New York to call more sources. Her story, “
Dissension among Feminists: The Rift Widens,” occupied three-quarters of “Family/Style,” the closely read women’s page, and was syndicated widely. Gloria’s containment policy during the long, hot summer had been blown sky-high by the Sagaris experiment and
The New York Times
.

In time the CIA contretemps was forgotten. The overheated militants had succeeded in giving Steinem an ugly black eye, but the attack launched by the Redstockings, with its strained link to the fugitives’ cases, was not a simple matter of revolutionary feminists engaged in a mortal stuggle against mainstream reformers, as Ellen Willis tried to maintain at the time. It did write “The End” to the longest chapter in the movement’s life, although in truth that chapter had been concluded a few years before. A second wave of theorists was forcing new breakthroughs—in rape, in battery, in sexual harassment—but by 1975 most of the early all-purpose agitators, the sine qua non of Women’s Liberation, had played out their historic role. Like most utopian visionaries at war with the world, they lacked the flexibility and the practical skills to triumph on the larger stage they had brought into creation.

Blanche Boyd and Marilyn Webb, on opposite sides of the great divide at Sagaris, never spoke to each other again, and both retreated for many years into political inaction. None of the Sagaris principals ever succeeded in writing its story, although several tried. (Twenty years later Boyd incorporated some of its crazy emotions in
Terminal Velocity
, a novel she published in 1997.) Robin Morgan replaced Ellen Willis as the house radical at
Ms
. Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch had a reprise in 1978 when Random House, through Betty Friedan’s intercession, published
Feminist Revolution
in paperback, but the material on Gloria was excised when she threatened to sue. The two stubborn Redstockings had their own falling-out a decade later over an arcane, unmemorable political dispute. Ti-Grace went on being Ti-Grace, in parlous financial straits, and Flo Kennedy went on being Flo. To her credit, she had declined to go up against Steinem, whom she deeply respected.

A profound sense of powerlessness and rage always drives revolutionary movements, often to the point of their destruction. The quake
of 1975 inside the women’s movement, admittedly high on the Richter scale, was hardly the last of its periodic convulsions. Those of us who were still trying to keep the movement going blinked hard, shook our heads, and carried on with our work, until one by one each of us arrived at our own pivotal moment when enough was enough.

Years later, in the context of another convulsion in which I’d become the main target, Gloria whispered something into my ear that I’ve never forgotten. “We’re lucky this is the women’s movement,” she quipped in a low voice ending in a light laugh. “In other movements they shoot each other.”

FEMINIST AUTHOR

Writing
Against Our Will
felt like shooting an arrow into a bull’s-eye in very slow motion. Few people are lucky enough to be in on the creation of a new cause, and then to publish a book on the subject five years down the line, when a large, mainstream audience is ready to receive it.

October 1975 was a great moment for me. A powerful publisher was committed to turning a heavy, provocative treatise into a commercial best seller, feature writers and book reviewers were prepared to treat a feminist analysis of rape seriously, and public interest programming was getting good airtime on television and radio stations. Individual women, wherever they had a foothold, rose up to help the cause. Joni Evans, Simon and Schuster’s director of subsidiary rights, alerted Lucy Rosenthal at the Book-of-the-Month Club, who took it upon herself to be my champion. The book became a main selection. All the general interest periodicals edited by men passed on prepublication excerpts, but
Mademoiselle
,
Glamour
, and
Family Circle
stepped into the breech, thanks to a determined feminist editor inside each house.

The first interview I did was totally a product of the movement’s positive strength and spirit. Sandra Elkin, a feminist in Buffalo, originated and produced a weekly half-hour talk show,
Woman
, for WNED-TV, her local educational television station, which was carried
by two hundred outlets on the PBS network. She invited me to Buffalo for a long, serious taping during the summer. PBS aired two successive programs on the book in October. The conversations with Sandy turned out to be the most substantive discussion of
Against Our Will
I ever had.

When I finished my telephone interview with reporter John Leo of
Time
, my first major brush with the real world, I staggered into the bathroom and retched. His story came out pretty well, even if he did claim I saw rape as “
a conscious conspiracy among all men.” Nearly every major newspaper and magazine treated the book with seriousness and respect.

Someone I’d worked with in television persuaded a reluctant Barbara Walters to take me for the
Today
show. The Walters line of questioning was followed by so many subsequent interviewers that I’ve got a permanent reel of tape embedded in my head. Press a button and I go into automatic:

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: I wrote this book because I’m a woman who changed her mind about rape.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Well, I used to believe all the myths and misconceptions, that no woman could be raped against her will, that a raped woman was asking for it …

As I was leaving the studio Walters confided that she’d worn a black dress with low décolletage that morning so one of us, at least, wouldn’t appear anti-male.

Simon and Schuster sent me on a six-week tour of twenty-one cities. Like so many authors, after a while I got punchy. I thought I had written a treatise of tremendous complexity that was going to change world opinion, but the questions, with a few shining exceptions, were so narrow.
So, what happens when a rape victim arrives at the police station? And how does the hospital respond? Are the laws getting better?
In Houston, I remarked to the S & S sales rep that the lobby of a television station looked oddly familiar. “You’ve been here twice today already. This is a third program,” he gently explained.

The sales reps were pleasant companions, but I was on my own when the hostility erupted. I walked out of one all-night radio show when the host got abusive, I was reduced to tears by another late-night show in Chicago, and I will never forget the
Denver Post
reporter. She barreled into my hotel room screaming, “You have no right to disturb my mind like this!” Her photographer, a sweet, thoughtful fellow, tried to calm her, to no avail. Who knows what experience in her past my book had tapped into? She got her revenge. Her story, “Author Says She Is Obsessed by Rape,” disturbed my sleep for several nights running, as did the article by a journalist in another city who began her lead, “Susan Brownmiller is the kind of woman who doesn’t hesitate to march into the men’s room if the ladies’ room is occupied.”

By the time I returned to New York,
Against Our Will
was a national best seller. Breaking its “Man of the Year” tradition,
Time
celebrated twelve women for 1975; I was honored to be on the cover in a montage that included Billie Jean King and Governor Ella Grasso.

I’d done what I could, and now I wanted to let the book speak for itself. That isn’t what happened. A professor in Athens, Ohio, invited me to speak at his university. Depleted and uncertain about what to do next, I’d become uncharacteristically dependent on others for my sense of direction. So I flew to Ohio and addressed my first live audience of college students. My tongue was thick from stage fright as I gripped the lectern and marched through rape’s history. College kids are very generous with their approval. They bowled me over.