In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (8 page)

So I got off on the wrong foot with Ellen Willis. Over the years Ellen and I would disagree on other substantive issues, like the Jane Alpert case, antiviolence work, and pornography, but I want to give credit where credit is due. Ellen was a dazzler in New York Radical Women. Among her other achievements, she popularized the words “sexism” and “sexist” in her mainstream writings.

The one with the big soulful eyes and gritty wit is Irene Peslikis, a painter, proud of her Greek heritage and immigrant parents. Irene is not from the left, but she walked in the door one Thursday evening and thought,
Oddball women, rebels! Just like me!
Irene quickly converted to the movement look—no makeup, blue jeans, work boots—and helped to create the style of confessional discourse that lies at the heart of consciousness-raising.

Several struggling young artists are in New York Radical Women. Wanting to be a painter, like wanting to act or write, is a common ambition in the counterculture. The artists in Radical Women get sucked into the vortex, they become the vortex, adapting readily to consciousness-raising and producing some of the best early papers, the groundbreaking essays that are laboriously typed on stencils, mimeographed, and sold for ten cents through the mail. In an era of technological leaps, Women’s Liberation is the last major American movement to spread the word via a mimeo machine.

Artist Pat Mainardi’s paper is called “The Politics of Housework.” In it she examines every weaseling excuse that men put forward to avoid sharing the household duties, culminating, of course, with “Housework is too trivial to even talk about.” Mainardi’s paper is a knockout. It gives political importance to a formerly private and personal female complaint. In a household where both partners work, why are
we
the sex that does the unpaid, repetitive, boring, time-and-energy-consuming tasks? Where is it written in the book of law that
we’re
supposed to do the laundry, dust the table, wash the dishes? After I read
Pat Mainardi’s paper, I no longer think of housework as my private battle with the man in my life. It’s part of the universal male-female problem.

New thinking that flows from a reexamination of women’s daily lives is what this new movement is all about. As Pat Mainardi insists, “Participatory democracy begins at home.” As Carol Hanisch writes in her
paper on consciousness-raising and action, “The personal is political.”

The personal is political!
Housework is political. Abortion is political. Standards of feminine beauty are political. Women’s oppression is political. Sexual satisfaction is political. A reevaluation of male-female relations is political. What else are we on the verge of discovering? What other so-called trivial issues and private battles consigned to the “personal” will we bring to light and redefine as political?

In Ruth Hershberger and Elizabeth Fisher, New York Radical Women have a connecting link to an earlier generation of feminists who fought the good fight in the 1940s and were stifled a decade later. Hershberger’s 1948 classic,
Adam’s Rib
, prefigured many issues we had yet to rediscover. She even had a chapter on rape. During the early seventies
Adam’s Rib
was republished and gained a new audience, but it didn’t help Ruth’s bank account. She did proofreading to earn a living. Ruth was fun to hang out with. She’d seen the feminist uprising come, go, and come again. Elizabeth Fisher, cranky and difficult, was to found
Aphra
, the first feminist literary magazine, in 1969.

Most astonishing are the new people without any prior political involvement who leaped right in and became radicalized overnight, like Barbara Mehrhof and Sheila Cronan, two caseworkers for the Bureau of Child Welfare, who would produce exciting, germinal papers for the movement in the years ahead.

Mehrhof and Cronan had wandered over to NOW’s weeklong demonstration in front of the Colgate-Palmolive building on an impulse one day after work. The NOW women were protesting the soap company’s refusal to put women in management positions even though women bought most of its products. Kate Millett was there with one of her avant-garde art pieces, a giant toilet bowl with feet, to make the point that Colgate flushed women’s aspirations down the toilet.

Cindy Cisler told them on the picket line about another group called Women’s Liberation, although some people called it New York Radical Women. Mehrhof and Cronan decided to check out Room 412. Barbara had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn; her father repaired television sets. Sheila’s father managed a gas station in Southern California. What propelled these two bright young women from nonpolitical Catholic families to make the leap into radical activism besides a vague yearning to make something more of their lives?

To this day, Barbara Mehrhof cannot explain it, but she remembers that she and Sheila came to the meeting wearing dresses: “I’d never seen so many women in dungarees, T-shirts, and no makeup—at least not that many in one place. Kathie Amatniek stood up to start the meeting, and I heard her say, ‘Men oppress women.’ She said it real casually, like it was something they all knew. My reaction was,
Yes, that’s what it’s all about!
We were hooked.”

Pam Kearon completes the fierce triumverate of working-class Catholics who come into New York Radical Women and have an instant conversion. She gravitates naturally to Barbara and Sheila. Pam was a brilliant student at St. John’s, with a degree in mathematics. She hasn’t a clue about clothes, she trembles in social encounters, and she is painfully naive about the way the world functions. On the subway after a demonstration one day, Pam summons her nerve to ask me a question. She wants to know if I sleep with the editors of the magazines I write for to get my articles published. Gently I tell her that things aren’t as bad as all that. But there’s a lot more to Pam than first meets the eye. One of her papers, called “Man-Hating,” is circulated in mimeographed form. “Man-Hating” is smart, tough, and funny, a self-assured rebuke to the leftists who tell us that capitalism is the enemy we should hate.

Then there were the anti-imperialist women, as they were called, a hostile, inimical presence at the meetings they chose to grace, bristling to defend their worldview that capitalism was the root of all evil. Their enemy was personified by anyone who uttered the F-word, or looked
like she might. The F-word was “feminism,” an anathema, an imprecation, a dangerous right-wing deviation concocted by misguided members of the bourgeoisie, as Lenin so famously informed the German communist Clara Zetkin in 1920 in his
Conversations on the Woman Question
. In 1968 it was impossible to hold a women’s meeting in radical circles without a representative of the anti-imperialist clique on hand to proclaim, “Let’s make this clear once and for all—we aren’t feminists, we are radical women.”

Kathy Boudin, daughter of the revered left-wing lawyer Leonard Boudin, came by the night I was struggling to analyze sexual harassment on the street—this was before we had the phrase “sexual harassment.”

“Construction workers who whistle and catcall,” I floundered, searching for words, “are telling us that we may think we’re middle class but we have no class status at all if our men aren’t around to protect us. By whistling they’re proving that they can easily declass us.”

Boudin, sacked out on the floor, stolid and groggy in boots, jeans, and workshirt, opened one eye. “You’re full of shit,” she muttered, and went back to sleep.

One year later Boudin was a helmeted, street-fighting Weather-woman, clashing with the police in Chicago and Pittsburgh, acting on her creed that women would prove their equality with men in side-by-side armed struggle. In March 1970 she fled from the rubble of a town-house explosion on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, a bomb factory gone awry, to pursue her commitment to violence with the Weather Underground. Convicted in 1983 for armed robbery and murder, she is in the state correctional facility for women at Bedford Hills today.

By the time I got to the meetings of New York Radical Women, SCEF was already grumbling about the strange goings-on in their New York office on Thursday nights. Politically incorrect! A bourgeois tendency that needs redirection! One evening we are visited by Jane McManus, a friend of SCEF and the widow of a founder of the leftist weekly
The National Guardian
. On this trip to New York from Cuba to see old friends, Jane McManus makes us her political mission.

“You girls have it all wrong, sitting around talking about your sex
lives and your orgasms,” she scolds. “Why don’t you organize around the high cost of food in the supermarket? That’s a real women’s issue.”

Jane McManus is so hopelessly out of step with the times that even the anti-imperialist women cannot suppress a snicker.

We tumble out of the meeting at midnight, to go home or to extend the talkfest over coffee at the Yum Yum or Ratner’s. It is always at that moment that a tiny figure shrills, “Sisters, sisters, we didn’t resolve the question of structure!”

Judy Gabree, or Judy Thibeau, since she wishes to reclaim her premarriage name, seizes the moment to hand out her flow chart with squares, circles, and arrows. She distributes her structure proposal at the close of every meeting, but few of the Radical Women share her interest in orderly process. What is alive in this room, what is new, what is exciting, has been conjured into being in the absence of structure.

As the SCEF office empties, Carol Hanisch, armed with a broom and a dustpan, dutifully lingers behind, dumping ashtrays, sweeping up the debris.

So that’s what it was like in New York in the fall of 1968, and that’s what it was like, given the differences in locale and personalities, in five or six or eight other cities that season, that year, in Chicago, Washington, Boston, Seattle, Gainesville, Toronto. Each city quickly developed its own stamp, its original theorists, its acknowledged or unacknowledged leaders, its stars, cliques, rifts, and internal splits. The initial explosion was close to spontaneous combustion, but no movement for social change is ever a truly spontaneous occurrence. The grievances and dissatisfactions had been simmering for a number of years, among all strata of women. If not, they couldn’t have boiled over so quickly.

I have to admit that after my first flush of enthusiasm, my attendance at New York Radical Women was sporadic. In truth, the early meetings weren’t feminist enough for me. I wasn’t convinced in 1968 that this group, or this movement, would ever get beyond the interminable debate over whether the enemy was man or capitalism. I was wrong.

So, for other reasons, was Betty Friedan. I remember the night the author of
The Feminine Mystique
and the founder of NOW arrived in her trademark long skirt and high-heeled boots to brave the generation
gap and take notes on this scruffy, unladylike phenomenon called Women’s Liberation. As the voluble drama swirled around her, she scribbled page after page in a spiral notebook, alternating her labors with vigorous shakes of her head: No, No, No!

Bored with consciousness-raising and eager for action, that fall some of the politicos—Robin Morgan, Florika, Judith Duffett, Peggy Dobbins—had melded their small discussion groups into
WITCH. The useful acronym stood for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, but it could also mean Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History, Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays, and a host of imaginative variations. Proclaiming that witches were the original female rebels, hounded, persecuted, and burned at the stake because they had knowledge that men wanted suppressed, WITCH devoted itself to hit-and-run guerrilla theater, called “zaps.”

“I didn’t relate to the witches-as-matriarchy part,” says Rosalyn Baxandall, “but I liked the theatrical actions.” So did some other regulars in New York Radical Women. There was always fluidity between the two groups.

For Halloween 1968 the WITCH women donned rags and fright makeup to invade a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank and “put a hex” on Wall Steet. Robin still swears that the Dow-Jones index took a steep dive the next day. The strangely compelling, artistic Florika, vague about her Romanian ancestry, up-front about her bouts with prostitution and drugs, excelled at choosing WITCH targets. She liked to zap a bastion of capitalism and a symbol of the Vietnam War in one blow.