In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (5 page)

New York, however, continued to up the ante. In February, Anne Koedt, unaccustomed to speaking in public, summoned her nerve to challenge a citywide meeting of women on the left. The large room at the Free University on West Fourteenth Street was packed with ideologically warring “heavies” from various SDS factions whose rage had turned against the capitalist system. “It is not enough,” Koedt said with quiet clarity, her eyes glued to her written speech, “to speak in terms of ‘the System.’ We must expose and eliminate the causes of
our
oppression.”

Women’s oppression was primary, Koedt insisted. It went deeper than economics and reached wider than the self-doubt and subordination they were experiencing in the male revolutionary movements. “We’ve never confronted men,” she said. “We’ve never demanded that unless they give up their domination over us, we will not fight for their revolution. We’ve never fought the primary cause.”

“What about Jackie Kennedy?” the leftists catcalled. “Is Jackie Kennedy oppressed?”

The following month Shulie Firestone addressed a small rally in support of the peripatetic abortion crusader Bill Baird, a messiah of birth control whose confrontations with the law were getting him arrested up and down the East Coast. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” she taunted the crowd. “It’s not a distant aunt who faced this problem. We do, ourselves. And if by some accident any of you women have avoided
it, you can count yourselves lucky or bless the Pill. Let’s face it. Woman is scared shitless. She’s been told to shut up and stop talking a million times. If she dares to have an opinion, she is called shrewish and opinionated. Even I—after months of work in Women’s Liberation—had my fears about speaking openly for free abortion today.
God, what would my father think?
”

But the days of fear and cowardice were over, Shulie predicted. “Women are angry at last. So angry, Bill Baird, that we no longer need you to fight our fight.”

Prodded by Firestone, New York Radical Women spent the spring of 1968 putting together its first collection of writings. Mimeographed and stapled, it bore the ambitious but accurate title
Notes from the First Year
. Nearly half of
Notes
, which sold for fifty cents to women and one dollar to men, consisted of transcribed material from consciousness-raising sessions and speeches. Shulie contributed an analysis of the nineteenth-century suffrage movement, its successes and failures, that ended with her exhortation “Put your own interests first, then proceed to make alliances with other oppressed groups.”

Anne Koedt provided the dynamite and the fuse for
Notes
in an essay that took up one single-spaced page. She called her paper “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.”

In this
landmark essay Koedt struck at the heart of young women’s disappointments in the midst of a media-celebrated sexual revolution. The dread charge “frigidity” that psychoanalysts had thundered from the Freudian pulpit in the forties and fifties had destroyed the potential for sexual happiness of their mothers’ generation, sending countless healthy, normal women to the analyst’s couch. Determined not to suffer the same fate, the daughters had thrown themselves joyfully into sexual activity, claiming new freedoms promised by the Pill. But the Freudian dictum that “a mature climax” was achieved only through vaginal intercourse still ruled the day. Cowed by male authority as their mothers had been, the daughters had viewed their failure to reach vaginal orgasm as their own sorry fault. Even worse, they’d accepted the judgment that clitoral orgasms were “immature.”

And here was Anne Koedt, synthesizing the newest scientific information in simple language, claiming there was only one kind of orgasm
no matter how it was achieved, taking apart the old myths within a political framework of male sexual exploitation and female oppression. “ ‘Myth’ threw people
into a tizzy,” Koedt recalls. “It never occurred to me that would happen. At the time I thought that sex was a less important concern than getting the left off our backs so we could have some space to do our own thinking.”

Notes from the First Year
was ready for distribution in June. Cindy Cisler designed the cover. Shulie rode herd on the job because she was leaving for Paris and wanted to take a copy to Simone de Beauvoir. The hoped-for meeting did not take place. Beauvoir had left Paris for
her
summer vacation, Anne Koedt recalls—“But she
sent us a nice note later.”

(
Notes from the First Year
would be followed by
Notes from the Second Year
, a thick, substantial newsprint edition. The third year’s
Notes
was the last of the ambitious, historic project. By then a sea-swell of movement theorists had contracts with commercial publishers, and many of the
Notes
contributors were working on full-length books.)

A few days before Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, an unstable hanger-on in Andy Warhol’s circle had barged into the pop artist’s New York loft and shot him in the stomach, claiming he had reneged on his promise to make her an underground star. Warhol was hospitalized in intensive care while the gunwoman, Valerie Solanas, was trundled to Bellevue for psychiatric observation.

A would-be writer and artist, Solanas had chosen extreme means to fulfill Warhol’s assertion that everybody should have fifteen minutes of fame. Prior to the shooting she had been a familiar figure on downtown street corners, peddling a manifesto for her one-woman organization, the Society for Cutting Up Men. The
SCUM Manifesto was the fulmination of a sadly disturbed woman who had somehow arrived at the truth that men held all of society’s power. Solanas had written with chilling insanity, “A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”

Solanas was represented at her pretrial hearing by Florynce
Kennedy, an irrepressible, eccentric, black activist lawyer who handled the Billie Holiday estate and lent herself freely to a rainbow of causes, from Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, to NOW. Flo Kennedy was not the only NOW member to latch on to Solanas as a vivid symbol of woman’s oppression.
Ti-Grace Atkinson, Betty Friedan’s slim and elegant choice for president of the New York chapter, summarily announced to the press that she would monitor the Solanas trial on NOW’s behalf. NOW’s membership immediately voted that she retract her
statement.

Several months later Atkinson would cause another ruckus when she demanded that NOW revise its by-laws to have rotating leaders chosen by lot.

“She wanted chaos,” explodes Dolores Alexander, who had quit her job as a reporter for
Newsday
to become NOW’s first executive secretary.

“I was torn,” admits Jacqui Ceballos, a Friedan loyalist who had left her husband after reading
The Feminine Mystique
. “I told Ti-Grace I’d vote for her resolution, but I would not leave NOW if she lost.”

She lost. Atkinson walked out of NOW and announced she was forming a new organization.

Roxanne Dunbar, a doctoral student at UCLA, was among those who were very taken with Valerie Solanas. She was honeymooning in Mexico City when a small squib, “Superwoman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol,” appeared in an English-language paper. “I took it as a sign,” Dunbar reminisces, “a mystical symbol that women were rising up in the United States.”

Named Roxie by her father, a truck driver and tenant farmer, Dunbar had fled the rural poverty of western Oklahoma and settled in California with her husband and daughter. By 1968 she and her husband were divorced and he had remarried, taking custody of their child. “Those were confusing, volatile times,” she relates. “The war was driving me crazy, the Panthers were getting killed in Berkeley, people were talking about Free Love. Now that sounded like a man’s idea!” On impulse Dunbar had driven to Mexico with her current lover, found a justice
of the peace to marry them, and was making plans for a honeymoon in Cuba.

“It was May,” she recalls. “Students were rioting in Paris, and Mexico City was afire with demonstrators protesting the Olympics. Then, after a few weeks, comes this little story about Solanas. I imagined I had an obligation to start a movement for women. Boston had been a center for abolitionists and suffragists in the nineteenth century, so the idea came over me, “I will go to Boston.’ ”

A stranger to the city and completely alone (her new husband had been left behind), Dunbar placed an ad for a women-only meeting in
Resist
, a publication of the New England draft resistance and sanctuary movement. It drew one response.
Dana Densmore had been searching for like-minded souls.

Densmore, a volunteer draft counselor, was a second-generation radical. Her mother was the indomitable Donna Allen, a founder of Women Strike for Peace. “That January, I’d gotten a phone call from my mother,” Densmore relates. “She’d uttered the magical words ‘Women’s Liberation. For us! It’s begun.’ In her usual enthusiasm Donna was skipping over the hard part, but the powerful conjuration just sizzled.” Donna Allen and Dana Densmore were the first of several mother-daughter pairs to cast their lot with the new movement.

Roxanne and Dana composed a second ad and placed it in the
Avatar
, a countercultural paper run by Mel Lyman, a local guru with a large following in Boston. “Women!” the copy read. “Come and join us if you need to breathe.”

Betsy Marple Mahoney, a white working-class mother from the South End, answered the call. Betsy had quit high school at seventeen to get married and have a child. Seven years later, when her husband began beating her, she’d gotten a divorce. The shy, stubborn, introspective young woman hung out at a leftist bookstore, reading whatever she could get her hands on, and flirted briefly with the Communist Party. “I was always analyzing things in my own head,” she says, “and I didn’t trust the left’s attitude toward women. So I joined this new group, and we called ourselves the Female Liberation Front. Our second name, Cell 16, came later. We knew we were flying
in the face of all leftist conventions, committing blasphemy of the first order.” When Roxanne Dunbar proposed that their little group start putting their thoughts down on paper, Betsy named herself Betsy Luthuli, in honor of the famed African chieftan, for her first piece of writing. But quite soon she renamed herself
Betsy Warrior, and Warrior she has remained ever since.

Although the war in Vietnam was still uppermost in her mind, Marilyn Webb in Washington, D.C., was afire with a vision of an autonomous women’s movement within the New Left. “I saw it as coalition-building,” she says. “I felt we could build a women’s movement that would work together with the antiwar and civil rights movements. Coalitions had already been built, mainly around the war, for the marches on Washington, and I saw women as yet another constituency,
my
constituency. At that point I did not see the need for a completely separate movement because I believed that the men I knew would be supportive of coalition-building, especially if you organized your other constituency to help with a range of broad-based issues. You know, “We have our issues, but we also have other issues.”