In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (53 page)

So, I might add, was I.

Indianapolis signaled the downhill phase of the feminist antipornography struggle, but it was by no means the end. Insurgencies cropped up in other locales—in Bellingham, Washington, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts—that were led by young radical women barely out of college. Arriving on the scene a decade after the movement’s groundbreaking work on rape, battery, incest, and sexual harassment, the young radicals had imbibed the classic texts of their elders in their Women’s Studies courses. They were the first generation to grow up with the legal right to abortion, which they tended to take for granted, but they had never known a world that wasn’t saturated with pornography. Amid radical feminism’s general decline, which they bravely tried to resist, they searched for ways to make their own contributions to theory and practice.

Twenty-two-year-old Amy Elman was working at
Sojourner
, Boston’s feminist newspaper, when Kathy Barry sent her a copy of the ordinance and a packet of information. “I found a lot of it overwhelming in terms of the legalities,” she recalls, “but
it made brilliant sense to me, to be able to sue pornographers for harm.” The future political scientist and her friends Suzanne Melendy, Ellen Abdow, Eve Goodman, and Barbara Findlen already had organized against pornography in campus actions, bringing in Linda Marchiano to speak, staging a
Playboy
protest. “Barbara was still at Boston University, and Eve had just graduated,” Elman reels off. “Ellen and Suzanne had been Mary Daly students at Boston College, and I had been a Kathy Barry student at Brandeis.”

For their first foray into the real world, the friends borrowed a page from the Cambridge antinuclear movement, which had succeeded in placing a referendum for its cause on the city’s electoral ballot. In the
summer of 1985, Elman’s group, the Women’s Alliance Against Pornography, took the first steps to organize a voter referendum for the ordinance in Cambridge, setting up their headquarters in Suzanne Melendy’s tiny apartment.

“Pornography attracted a lot of the radical minds of my generation,” Elman reflects. “It seemed to be a synthesis of so many things we were interested in—all the violence-against-women issues; and poverty, because the women drawn into the industry had so few economic options; and racism, because black women, Asian women, and Jewish women were racially stereotyped in pornography magazines; and homophobia, because the porn images of lesbian sex were lesbian-hating; and capitalism, because here was a part of big corporate America grossing billions of dollars by selling what they said was sex. The FACT women’s charge that we were part of the religious right just didn’t make any sense to us. We didn’t see the pornography industry as
challenging
conservatism, we saw it as
part
of conservatism. You had Larry Flynt out there calling himself a born-again Christian,
hello
!”

The Women’s Alliance Against Pornography collected enough signatures to get the ordinance on the ballot. “For months it was basically the five of us and Betsy Warrior knocking on doors and sitting at tables with signs lettered by Magic Markers,” Elman recalls. “A locally formed FACT chapter worked with the ACLU—they were our opposition.” As Election Day drew near, Andrea and Kitty gave speeches at MIT and Harvard, Therese Stanton, their best Minneapolis organizer, arrived in Cambridge to oversee the campaign, and Dorchen Liedholdt and Norma Ramos of WAP doggedly took the train up from New York on weekends. In a light turnout on a rainy day, the referendum lost by a margin of 5 percent.

“We were in despair,” Elman says. “It was hard enough to be fighting pornography, to see the posters—
DON
’
T LET THE LEZZIE CUNT KIKES TELL YOU WHAT YOU CAN
’
T READ
—that some crazy people put up around town, but it was devastating to realize that we’d been defeated by other women, by feminists who called us homophobic and who connected us with the right wing. Those were ludicrous charges, and they knew it. They knew damn well that our group was largely lesbian, largely radical, and largely Jewish. In Cambridge the pornographers
learned that they didn’t have to fight us themselves, they could find a woman to do it for them. We cried. We felt like, who do we trust now?”

There had been an innocent bravery to the anti-pornography campaign in the beginning, a quixotic tilting at windmills in the best radical feminist tradition. But the innocence was soon submerged in a tide of philosophical differences and name-calling. Movement women were waging a battle over who owned feminism, or who held the trademark to speak in its name, and plainly on this issue no trademark existed. Ironically, the anti-porn initiative constituted the last gasp of radical feminism. No issue of comparable passion has arisen to take its place.

EPILOGUE

Militance evaporates for a variety of reasons, and exhaustion is only a symptom, not a cause. I felt the feminist tide recede while I was writing
Femininity
. Less than fifteen years after the Miss America Protest consigned high heels and push-up bras to the dustbin of history, the cluster of trappings I called the feminine handicap had returned with a vengeance.

A more ominous sign of the decisive shift in social currents was the long, slow failure, from 1975 to 1982, of the Equal Rights Amendment to achieve ratification. Even as the opposition grew louder, the state-by-state lobbying effort, primarily a NOW initiative, never captured the imagination of movement radicals, who were less convinced of the ERA’s revolutionary potential than its hysterical opponents. Whatever the wisdom of the pro-ERA strategy and NOW’s decision to give it priority over other feminist goals, its failure was a huge repudiation and defeat for us all. In a similar vein, Walter Mondale’s selection of Geraldine Ferraro, a pro-choice Catholic, as his running mate in the 1984 presidential elections created a bubble of euphoria that burst in two months as the reality of her doomed campaign set in. And what malevolent trickster in the government mint honored Susan B. Anthony and the suffrage struggle with a dollar coin that looked and felt like a quarter?

It is a happier task to chart a movement’s explosive rise than to
record the slow seepage, symbolic defeats, and petty divisions that attend its decline. At some indefinable point in the early eighties, the feminist discourse was declared passé, replaced and superseded in the barometer of media interest by inflationary Reaganomics, the fundamentalist backlash, and two-income, have-it-all yuppie couples weighing their affluent lifestyles against the countdown of their biological clocks. Although analysis and theory had moved from the joyous spontaneity of consciousness-raising in somebody’s living room to the structured world of academic research and government grants, important work continued to emerge: Carol Gilligan’s studies of female developmental psychology; the analysis of the sexual politics of touching and speech patterns by Barrie Thorne, Nancy Henley, and Robin Lakoff; the numerous (and ongoing) studies by anthropologists, zoologists, biologists, geneticists, and brain researchers to get to the tantalizing heart of intrinsic sex differences and their effect on aggression; the rich and fertile fields of historical research, literary criticism, and popular culture studies.

The drive for equality in the workplace marched forward, even as its beneficiaries, dressed for success and armed with a new sense of entitlement, sought to distance themselves from the rough-edged militants who had cleared the path. As the workplace underwent its transformation, thanks to an insistent barrage of Title VII class actions and the gradual enlightenment of men in power, female ambition was no longer suspect, the subject of dire psychoanalytic caveats and mocking portrayals. Women flooded into the nation’s law schools, won acceptance at medical colleges, took graduate degrees in business administration, underwent rigorous training to pass stringent physical tests for the armed services and military academies, for firefighting jobs and police work, and stepped over the fallen barriers at construction sites and executive suites. Although many obstacles remained—entrenched pockets of male resistance, inadequate day care, the Glass Ceiling, inflexible working conditions that made it difficult to balance job and family life—the biggest barriers to equality had been toppled.

Tennis and figure skating were no longer the only female athletic pursuits to command an audience and popular participation. A rethinking of the role of sports in shaping the lives of young girls led to
breakthroughs on the playing fields from the primary school to the university, effectively prompted by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that threatened withdrawal of federal funds from discriminatory programs. The following decades saw a passionate surge in women’s gymnastics and soccer, and vastly increased opportunities for female swimmers, runners, skiers, speed skaters, and basketball players in college, professional, and Olympic competitions.

Feminism had found a voice in the Democratic Party early on in the life of the movement; within two decades it made significant inroads in Republican circles as well. The new thinking reached beyond the temporal discourse of electoral politics to have major impact in the sacral arena. Unanticipated by secular radicals, or by those devoted to goddesses, witches, and Eastern spirituality, a powerful movement to achieve equality emerged inside traditional Western religions, changing the rituals in many houses of worship, and enriching the theologies of the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faiths.

Yet for all these concrete manifestions of triumph, all the incontrovertible proof of the absolute rightness of the feminist vision, the radical movement whose brash confrontations had made the world larger for women was in retreat, and its first unifying issue appeared more controversial than ever, under constant assault from religious conservatives touting the slogan of family values. More than a quarter-century after
Roe v. Wade
, the battle to keep abortion safe, legal, and accessible had remained at the forefront of the fight for equality, in an unending war against rights-of-the-fetus lawsuits, Medicaid cuts, clinic blockades, and attempts to push through a ban by constitutional amendments. We live in an age where “pro-life” now embraces—although spokesmen for the cause publicly disavow—terrorist acts of murder against abortion providers.

As the movement waned in its organized forms, its heroic volunteers, never sufficiently honored and seldom financially rewarded, turned their belated attention to their private lives, renewing emotional relationships with men, forging life partnerships with women, seeking fresh purpose as single mothers. The years when a person could live well enough with a cheap apartment and a part-time job and have time for social activism were over. Financial security had become
an urgent imperative, but by and large it was a younger generation just coming into its own that stood to benefit from the new career opportunities that feminism had wrought. Attempts to forge self-contained women’s communities (that is, lesbian-feminist communities) fell apart, faring no better than most other utopian experiments in communal living. The devastation of AIDS prompted many lesbian feminists to redirect their priorities and reassert their political kinship and activist ties with gay men.

By the mid-eighties most of the feminist bookstores and coffeehouses had closed their doors and
off our backs
in Washington and
Sojourner
in Boston were the last remaining vestiges of the previous decade’s lusty, indigenous feminist press. Weary of trying to keep
Ms
. afloat, Gloria Steinem sold the magazine to an Australian publisher in 1987. (She has since bought it back.)

My conflict with the battered-women’s advocates over the culpability of Hedda Nussbaum came at the close of a decade that had begun with the debilitating pornography wars. It was the coda that marked my decision to retreat as a public spokesperson in the feminist cause. Radical movements that are past their peak often latch on to sectarian quarrels fought with the passion of earlier times, but the new social contract we had brought into being was awash in subtle complexities and unenvisioned ambiguities that required reasoned analysis, not passionate oratory. Gains had been won from which there could be no retreat, and the victories had been sufficient for the majority of women to desire a less confrontational, more peaceable time. We had moved into a holding pattern. Put simply, feminist theory had gone as far as it could go in the twentieth century.

Still, Women’s Liberation outlived the two movements that spawned it, the civil rights and antiwar struggles. By questioning traditional sex roles, we opened the door, in turn, to Gay and Lesbian Liberation. Those academicians who cry in their beer about the destructive narrowness of “identity politics” have it all wrong. The sequence of black struggles to women’s struggles to gay struggles that defined the latter half of the American twentieth century seems inevitable in retrospect, as it was while it was happening. It is worth remarking that the progression toward social justice on all these fronts
required fresh insights, bold commitments, and new forms of organizing that rose to the surface outside the leadership of a white/male/heterosexist left.