In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (41 page)

For the next two years I crisscrossed the country, often hitting three colleges a week, giving what evolved as my set speech on rape. After a while I found the life of the circuit rider more alienating than rewarding. Years later I learned that students at several universities organized rape crisis centers after my visits. But once I mastered the technical challenge, life on the road wasn’t for me. I lost touch with my habitual rhythms and inner dialogues of the mind. I disliked the rustle of anticipation, the collective murmur I interpreted to mean “Now we’ll get a good show,” as I walked onto the stage. Plundering my own material, I felt fraudulent repeating the same speech over
and over. Relief came only with the spontaneous question-and-answer period at the end. Serious information is communicated to serious listeners on the lecture circuit, but I was in danger of making rape my shtick.

Once at some airport on a snowy night as I plodded toward my gate, I bumped into Gloria Steinem hurrying toward her gate, looking so alone and solemn. We hugged and promised to get together and take in a movie sometime, as we usually promised but never managed to do. One thing that always puzzled me about Gloria is how she could keep going from airport to airport, from speech to speech, year in and year out. It’s a kind of fortitude, a politician’s skill, that is not in my makeup. I was sublimely happy when I was organizing and writing, and I did get a kick out of some of the media stuff, but my sense of mission began losing its urgency in repetitive public speaking. I did not extract nourishment from the ephemeral adulation of strangers, the only sure palliative that can make the routine indignities and outbreaks of hostility bearable on a long-term basis.

Outraged criticism of
Against Our Will
started pouring in from the right and the left after the first positive wave of media attention. I should not have been surprised, since feminism overturns so many facets of conventional political wisdom, but I believed my arguments about male violence were so convincing, and my evidence for seeing the routine deployment of rape as a weapon of intimidation was so impressive, that thoughtful people would say “Aha!” and take it from there.

My first inkling that not everyone on the intellectual left was prepared to thank me for their enlightenment had come when an old acquaintance in publishing accosted me on the street. “You,” he thundered, shaking involuntarily and wagging his finger, “have set back the cause of civil rights and civil liberties ten years.”

New York’s certified male intellectuals, the
New York Review of Books
and
Partisan Review
crowd, had been caught off guard by the tidal wave of feminist thinking. We upset their applecart, trampled with muddy
boots on their tight little island of political certainty. Most male intellectuals reacted badly to feminism throughout its explosion, trying to ignore it and not give an inch. The two or three females in their midst, the loopholes, didn’t dare risk their standing by identifying too openly—or identifying at all—with the feminist camp. They had fought too hard to be honorary men.

The silliest response came from the nonconservative Michael Novak, who published a diatribe in
Commentary
that called my book “
a tract celebrating lesbianism and/or masturbation.”
Commentary
’s
readers bombarded the Letters column with fierce objections, bless their hearts.

The people who challenged my ideas most deeply were the women of the activist left. I must say I was unprepared for their concentrated assault. Several women, black and white, accused me of being a racist, a charge that still crops up from time to time. Nothing devastates me more.

When I wrote chapter 7, “A Question of Race,” in
Against Our Will
, I knew I was challenging Old Left dogma. After describing the bitter legacy of rape in slavery, mob lynching by whites, and the discriminatory application of the death penalty to black men convicted of rape, I had explored the Communist Party’s use of the interracial rape case, beginning with Scottsboro, as a dramatic symbol of American injustice. My point was that the left and those influenced by the left saw rape as a political cause only when they believed a white woman was falsely accusing a black man. Going further, I reserved my toughest comments for the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old youth lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. I said that Till and the men who lynched him shared something in common: a perception of the white woman as the white man’s property. For leftists with inflexible minds, this observation amounted to heresy. Some dogmatists willfully interpreted it to mean that I condoned the lynching.

Alison Edwards, a white attorney in Chicago with the National Lawyers Guild, wrote a pamphlet titled
Rape, Racism, and the White Women’s Movement: An Answer to Susan Brownmiller
that called
Against Our Will
a “dangerous law and order book which, unless repudiated,
will fan the fires of racism.” A broadside repeating the charge issued from Louisville, anonymously. I subsequently learned it was the work of Ann Braden, cofounder of the Old Left’s most venerable civil rights organization, the Southern Conference Education Fund. But it was Angela Davis who delivered
the worst blow. She devoted her radio program on KPFA in Berkeley one evening to my purported racism. Warming to the task, she extended her damning charge to
Diana Russell’s
Politics of Rape
and Shulamith Firestone’s
Dialectic of Sex
in a second program, and recycled her views in
Freedomways
and
The Black Scholar
.

Trapped by their intellectual dependence on Marx, Angela Davis and her colleagues wished to see rape as a sick manifestation of the deteriorating capitalist system that would vanish in a new socialist order. According to their theories, my view that economic exploitation did not explain the totality of male violence was deficient in “class analysis.” They concluded that the scrutiny I gave to black-on-black rape and black-on-white rape was a racist scare tactic. Davis wondered aloud if red-baiting was part of my secret agenda, since I’d taken some knowing jabs at the moribund Communist Party. She hinted that the media had conspired with my publisher to foist my reactionary ideas on an unsuspecting public—why else, after all, had I gotten so much attention? Angela Davis was an untouchable icon, not a good enemy to have. Even today I am perplexed by the Old Left rigidity in this intelligent, charismatic woman.

Diana Russell, living in Berkeley, was hurt by her attacks more than I was. Although Davis herself never stooped that low, other Bay Area leftists pointed to Diana’s South African birth as proof of her racism. Diana was hounded at conferences, shunned by some of her peers. The irony was that Diana’s work for an underground antiapartheid group in Capetown and my work with CORE and SNCC gave us better records in civil rights activism than many or most of our accusers.

In Louisville, while I was on the lecture circuit, a gray-haired woman, fifth row center, started heckling me during my speech. Scottsboro, Till, the death penalty—she wouldn’t quit. Neither would the small group of people with her. The political strategy of planned
disruption had come into flower during the Vietnam era as a desperate cry of the powerless who needed a dramatic means of getting their antiwar views across. We in the women’s movement had borrowed the technique and made effective use of it on occasion. It never crossed my mind that one day I would experience planned disruption from the vantage point of the target.

Louisville, the unsigned broadside? Click!

“Pardon me, are you Ann Braden?”

Flustered, she allowed that she was. It’s one thing to disrupt a speaker, and quite another to be recognized by name. I really was pleased to meet the legendary cofounder of SCEF, although a confrontation is not exactly a meeting. To my disappointment, Braden vanished right after my speech, along with her friends.

A couple of months later Angela Davis ducked a chance for us to meet live on radio KPFA when I was passing through Berkeley. When you demonize someone, I guess you need to stay at a safe distance.

I toughed out the racism charges publicly in my usual dukes-up manner, but I grieved inside knowing that
Against Our Will
would never be read by a substantial number of radicals whose opinions were formed by the harmful attacks. Anyone who thinks that the Index of the Catholic Church was unique as a censoring mechanism of political thought in these United States does not know much about radical history.

Far from operating as a conspiracy, the establishment media pursued their own agenda and interests when it came to rape. Even before my book was published, I had received calls from journalists asking if I could find them a victim or two willing to “go public.” TV people led the chase. Unashamed rape victims were news; producers wanted them for their documentaries and talk shows. At first I was happy to comply, because every woman who spoke out in the early days added a fresh perspective and an additional clue to rape’s dimensions. Later on the women started to feel exploited, and I began to feel like the number-to-call in Central Casting. The D.C. Rape Crisis Center
also grew weary of the media’s incessant demand for victims. An interesting paradox emerged. The feminist antirape movement was founded on the testimony of raped women, and its success in changing public opinion derived from their truths. Criminologists, psychologists, and law enforcers, proving to be quick learners, adjusted their theories to reflect the new thinking. As the seventies turned into the eighties, however, and self-disclosure became the stock-in-trade of the proliferating talk shows, the rape victim became indistinguishable from the typical fodder of daily TV, yet another person with a gruesome story. By then the issues of battery, sexual harassment, and date rape had been added to the mix, and critics of feminism began blaming us for portraying all women as victims. I think the criticism was simplistic. Our goal in politicizing rape had been to illuminate the role of the male aggressor, not to train a perpetual spotlight on women as victims. Of course, the political explication of male violence proved infinitely harder to keep in the public eye than the victimization of women, but the failure to do so wasn’t the movement’s fault.

I have to admit that my abilities as a media communicator were imperfect. I lacked a certain humility and betrayed too much impatience, interpreted as arrogance, before a live studio audience. The person who brought me down on
The Phil Donahue Show
was Eldridge Cleaver, a very adept communicator indeed. Cleaver’s unabashed confession in
Soul on Ice
that he had vented his rage against white men by raping white women, practicing first on black women to develop his confidence, had made him an obvious feminist target. Naturally I had given him what-for in
Against Our Will
. Even Angela Davis in her radio program was not about to defend Eldridge Cleaver, who had become anathema to black radicals during his exile for many acts having nothing to do with rape. Cleaver had undergone a strange transformation in Algiers and Paris after he’d been thrown out of the Black Panther Party by the Huey Newton faction. In place of “Power to the People,” he began promoting codpiece trousers of his own design as a masculine identity statement. (Cleaver’s spiritual
conversion took root and flowered after his unsuccessful foray into men’s fashion.) Returning to the States to square away some earlier criminal charges, the former Panther volunteered to reporters that he had been tremendously affected by
Against Our Will
. Quick as a flash, the Donahue producers arranged a two-part program for Cleaver and me, inviting the La Leche League of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to fill the studio seats.