In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (42 page)

“Uh-oh, white women in polyester, they’re your people,” Cleaver muttered as we took our places on the
Donahue
set. Neither of us figured that the militant breast-feeders might be more suspicious of a radical feminist than of a former Black Panther wanting to recant about rape. Things started off well enough. I asked Cleaver to apologize to black women. He did. Then I asked him to apologize to white women. He did that as well. Penitence was an unaccustomed role for the irrepressible showman. Midway through the program the old Eldridge of the street smarts reasserted himself. He started playing to the crowd.

“Aww, you know what those young girls are like,” he teased with a big grin. “There’s a word for it—I can’t say it here but I know you all know it. C., uh, T.” The audience tittered. I tried to bring them back. Sensing his advantage, Cleaver leaped from his chair. “Damn, woman, you won’t let a man speak!”

Cheers and applause. It was all over for me. The La Lechers went for the kill. “Have
you
been raped? What makes
you
an expert?” one of them taunted.

We had a postmortem after the show. Donahue was devastated. His producers were devastated. I was devastated. So, curiously enough, was Eldridge Cleaver. As he packed his suit into a garment bag for his next public appearance, he looked at me gravely and said, “Don’t make the mistake I made. Don’t get too far ahead of the people.”

By late 1976, a moment in time when
Against Our Will
was reaching bookstores in its paperback edition and I was meeting
Cleaver on
Donahue
,
four hundred rape crisis centers were in place around the country. Few of the centers, however, bore more than a faint resemblance to the original radical feminist model run by a volunteer collective of movement women. Professional social workers and psychologists
had moved into the field, and even in cities where they hadn’t, most of the centers had applied for and received federal funding, either through the LEAA (Law Enforcement Assistance Administration) or the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health). The newly available public monies, a tribute to the antirape movement’s success, acted to turn the centers into pure service and counseling organizations with paid staffs and conventional structures. With amazing speed, the rape crisis centers became
part
of the system, not a radical political force in opposition to the system. I witnessed the evolution firsthand while I was on the road with my book.

Changes in the law took place just as swiftly. In one year, 1975, thirty states overhauled their rape laws to make them more equitable to victims. Between 1970, when the feminist movement first started to talk about rape, and 1979, when the militance had receded, every state in the union went through a serious reevaluation of its rape codes and made significant adjustments. Hospital procedures and police attitudes were transformed as well. The revolution in thinking about rape was profound. I am very proud to have been part of it, along with thousands of others who did not write best-selling books.

My tenure in the public eye was brief. Readers yearned to hear strong women’s voices in those consciousness-raising times, and the women had plenty to say. Shortly after
Against Our Will
was published, Shere Hite reached the top of the national best seller lists with the epony-mously named
Hite Report
on female sexuality.

Everybody knew Shere Hite in the New York movement, at least by sight. You couldn’t help but notice the willowy NOW person with the bulging briefcase, porcelain skin, and reddish-blond hair who stood up at meetings and pleaded with people to take home her questionnaire. I filled one out, more or less as a favor to her, but I was so absorbed with my own piece of the puzzle that I rarely saw the significance in what others were doing.

Shere was one of the movement’s great originals, a graduate student at Columbia who’d done some modeling and liked to dress in silky
blouses with dark red lipstick and platform shoes. She pronounced her name “Sherry” then. “Sheer,” as in stockings, or “Cher,” like the singer, came later, when the broadcast media put their own spin on the offbeat spelling and she decided she liked the authoritative ring.

In 1974, Shere had come out with a little paperback,
Sexual Honesty
, an interim study based on her first forty-five samples, which did not make any ripples. Another researcher might have quit then and there, but Hite doggedly continued her investigations, determined to acquire at least one completed response from every state in the union. Ultimately she collected three thousand responses. Her luck turned when Barbara Seaman introduced her to Regina Ryan, then a junior editor at Knopf. Barbara, who had followed
The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill
with
Free and Female
, was one of those rare and generous feminist authors who always seemed to know what everyone else was doing.

Regina Ryan was intrigued enough by Hite’s questionnaire project to set up a lunch. “
Shere arrived in something flowing and lacy and started talking about orgasms and clitoral stimulation,” she recalls. “Everyone in the restaurant kept staring at us. I was amazed at what she was up to. This was the first time anyone had asked women directly what they liked and what they didn’t like about sex. I knew it could be a major book.”

The Hite Report
was published by Macmillan after Regina Ryan moved there as editor in chief, the first woman in publishing to reach the top spot. Her all-male sales department hated the book so much that Ryan agreed to a small first printing.
The Hite Report
became a true reader phenomenon. The book ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies, but Shere had to go to court to free up her royalties because in her naivete she had asked for a contract limiting her pay-out to twenty thousand dollars a year.

The Hite Report
was tremendously liberating for its day—all those women’s voices talking frankly in minute detail about their orgasmic satisfactions, or lack of satisfactions, and reporting on their infinite varieties of masturbation, with Shere weaving in and out of the text in an encouraging manner. In a blow to male vanity, 70 percent of Hite’s voluble respondents admitted that conventional intercourse was just another,
and not very reliable, way to reach orgasm. Shere’s statistics and methodology were always under fire, and never more so than in
the next decade, when she became a lightning rod for the “profamily” backlash, but her powerful case for the intrinsic differences between male and female sexual pleasure freed a lot of women from the fear that their likes and needs were a personal problem. Men learned a lot from Shere Hite, too.

The next feminist best seller was
The Women’s Room
. None of us in the movement knew its forty-seven-year-old author, Marilyn French. She wasn’t a joiner. Even at the height of late-sixties radicalism, when she was living in Cambridge as a teaching fellow at Harvard, writing her dissertation on James Joyce, what she learned of the new stirrings she absorbed only by observation. But she had always known, ever since she was a rebellious little Polish Catholic girl in Ozone Park, Queens, that one day she was going to be a writer. Her circuitous path toward that goal reflected the compromises and choices taken by nearly all young middle-class women in the post–World War II era who came of age vaguely wanting to do something important. Marilyn got married while she was still in college, supported her husband through law school, and settled in a tract house in Levittown, where she raised two children. If at first the domestic contract seemed like a fair exchange for the few hours she was able to carve out of her day for her true ambition, the reality drowned her in misery.

Emboldened by her reading of Beauvoir and Lessing, the housewife-who-wrote observed the lives of her Levittown set as if she were an anthropologist in a foreign country. Typing at night when the house was quiet, she mailed her short stories to the women’s magazines, but the bitter tales always came back rejected. Undaunted, she retyped the pages and mailed them out again and again while she pecked away at drafts of unfinished novels. She had hopes for something she was calling then “Myersville,” a panoramic account of the choking despair of suburban housewives as reported through vignettes of their daily existence.

In a visible cause-and-effect process, one of many during the Vietnam War, the Selective Service Act of 1967 that eliminated draft deferments for male graduate-school students opened unexpected
opportunities for women. Marilyn applied to Harvard the following year and was accepted into its English literature graduate program. Leaving her husband behind, she moved to Cambridge with her two children to begin a new life, a generation older than nearly all the other graduate students she met on campus.

Six years later Marilyn’s own kids were in college and their mother was teaching Shakespeare at Holy Cross. During her summer vacation she finally solved a technical problem, a matter of voice and distance, that allowed her to graft long sections of the Myersville novel onto a new piece of fiction about Harvard in the late sixties. The result was a tale of two cultures, more than eight hundred typed pages long, that contrasted the unfulfilled lives of the women of her generation—housewives drowning in “shit and stringbeans,” in her unforgettable metaphor—with the kids coming up who believed they could change the world. “This sounds egotistical but I can’t help it,” she says with solemn pride. “When I finished the last page, I knew I had done something great.”

A struggling agent named Charlotte Sheedy received the bulky manuscript from another agent, who thought it a tough sell. “
It took me three days around the clock to read it,” Sheedy remembers. “For three days I never put it down. I hadn’t lived in the suburbs and I’d always been politically active, but I’d raised three children while I’d worked as a secretary and book scout, and I’d been one of the older women returning to school in the early seventies. So in many respects I felt
The Women’s Room
encompassed my life.”

Five years younger than French, Sheedy had marched with Women Strike for Peace and worked as a draft counselor for the antiwar movement before leaping into Women’s Liberation at Columbia in 1970, where she met Kate Millett and filled out one of Shere Hite’s questionnaires. On July 4, 1974, an infamous day in the Sheedy family history, she was waiting her turn at the cheese counter of Zabar’s with her daughter Ally when a customer goosed her. Grabbing the molester by the wrist, she yelled in vain for someone to call the police. “Even at the lox counter, where they knew me,” she reports with injured pride, “they said, ‘Mrs. Sheedy, why are you making such a fuss?’ ” The molester broke free
and escaped in a taxi, but the fuss for Zabar’s was just beginning. Taking her story to the newspapers, Sheedy won a settlement against the landmark appetizing store with the help of my lawyer friend Jan Goodman.

As soon as Sheedy finished reading the manuscript, she called Marilyn French to say she’d represent her. A few months later
The Women’s Room
was sold for ten thousand dollars, the typical feminist’s advance, to Jim Silberman, a respected publisher who was starting a new imprint at Simon and Schuster.

“
The Women’s Room
came at a time when the mass consciousness was changing,” Sheedy assesses. “It wasn’t for those of us who had been in the movement, it was for
them
, the ones who were just beginning to understand about consciousness-raising and the politics of housework. People started debating it in their living rooms. You could actually track its course for the first three months as it picked up steam across the country.”

Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
, Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
, and Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
had preceded the women’s movement and helped lay the intellectual groundwork for it. In the seventies an entire industry of feminist theoretical works, novels, biographies, literary criticism, art criticism, and movie criticism flowered. Women suddenly, and in many instances defiantly, had developed an urgent need to read women authors who were shedding new light on women’s lives, sexualities, and dissatisfactions. Publishing houses that initially predicted a six-month boom for the unexpected women’s phenomenon began signing up writers, good, bad, and indifferent, while bookstores carved out new sections labeled “Women” or “Women’s Studies.” Nancy Milford’s
Zelda
set the benchmark for the treatment of a woman in biography when it came out in August 1970, the month, coincidentally, of the first Women’s March for Equality and the publication of
Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett. A couple of years later biographies of forgotten or overlooked women had become a publishing staple. The coming-of-age novel, a reliably popular genre mined almost exclusively by men, was enlarged by the success of Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye
and Alix Kates Shulman’s
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
. A half decade later there was a mass audience for ethnic women’s coming-of-age memoirs, novels, and plays: among them, Ntozake Shange’s brilliant stage play
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
and Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior
, and women were also devouring lesbian coming-of-age books, like Lisa Alther’s
Kinflicks
and Rita Mae Brown’s
Rubyfruit Jungle
. Ursula LeGuin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
had stood alone in the male-dominated science fiction genre for years, until the new feminism spawned Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and others. The mainstream welcome accorded to so many of these books in the seventies (and into the early eighties, with the triumph of Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
) was akin to the excitement that greeted the movement’s mimeographed papers during the late sixties, but a wider audience carried bankable rewards, at least for some of us. I was very grateful.