In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (9 page)

“Florika did these interesting collages,” Baxandall reminisces, “like putting Vietnamese women in an ad for Chanel No. 5. She also led an action against Revlon’s corporate headquarters, called Revlon Napalm.”

“There were spin-offs, covens, in other cities. Chicago WITCH, Washington WITCH,” recollects Morgan. “WITCH may not have known much about the real history of witches, but WITCH had joie de vivre.”

The short, colorful life of WITCH lasted approximately six months, going out in a blaze of confusion at a bridal industry fair at Madison Square Garden. If you believed that capitalism was the root of women’s oppression, it made sense to zap an industry that profited from women’s romantic hopes and dreams. It was okay to raise the slogan “Confront the Whoremongers,” but everyone agreed that releasing a cage of white mice on the convention floor hadn’t been cool.

Theory was taking precedence over action in other cities. Roxanne Dunbar and Dana Densmore, the two Solanas champions in Boston, had been inspired by the passions at Sandy Spring to try their skills at writing. At breakneck speed their small collective put together a journal of poetry and polemics in October 1968 that was a handsome step up from the movement’s usual mimeographed tracts. The art nouveau cover, a voluptuous nude adorned with curly pubic and underarm hair to complement her Medusa tresses, was designed by Dana’s sister Indra, and the text was composed on an IBM typesetting machine borrowed from a local merchant over a long weekend.

It had not occurred to the Boston women to date their journal or give it a title, although future issues would bear the name
No More Fun and Games
. “We were a strange, manic crew,” Dana Densmore reflects. “We didn’t see an orderly future which would in turn become history and require documentation. We saw ourselves on the verge of a great upheaval.”

The most talked-about piece in the debut issue was Densmore’s “On Celibacy,” a provocative call, in the age of so-called sexual freedom, “for an acceptance of celibacy as an honorable alternative … to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships.”

“Doesn’t screwing in an atmosphere devoid of respect get pretty grim?” Densmore wrote. “Why bother? You don’t need it. Erotic energy is just life energy and is quickly worked off if you are doing interesting things. Love and affection and recognition can easily be found in comrades … who love you for yourself and not for how docile and cute and sexy and ego-building you are. Until we say, ‘I control my own body and don’t need any insolent male with an overbearing presumptuous
prick to come and clean out my pipes,’ they will always have over us the devastating threat of withdrawing their sexual attentions.”

“There was never a point when we all went celibate,” Dunbar explains. “Dana had a husband. Actually we all had relationships. Celibacy was not meant to be a requirement but a positive choice, a breathing space for however long a woman desired it without thinking she was a barren old hag. A lot of people misunderstood Dana’s position.”

Meanwhile in Chicago, Naomi
Weisstein was also grappling with sexually subversive ideas. A Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley with a Ph.D. from Harvard, ranking first in her class, Naomi had wound up in the tiny psychology department at Loyola after a humiliating round of job interviews punctuated by “Who did your research?” and “How can a little girl like you teach a great big class of men?” Loyola was a job, at least, even if it wasn’t as prestigious as the University of Chicago, where her husband, Jesse Lemisch, was in the history department. Naomi was an experimental psychologist who specialized in the neural basis of visual perception; she needed sophisticated computers that were beyond the budget of Loyola’s underequipped labs. Worried that she was falling behind in her field, she worked out her rage in the West Side group, and in the speeches about Women’s Liberation she was being invited to make. On her feet she could be smart, fierce, and compassionate. She could make people laugh.

Invited to give a paper at the University of California at Davis in the fall of 1968, she presented “
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
as Scientific Law, or Psychology Constructs the Female.” Straying from her field of visual perception, she lambasted current Freudian psychology and two of its principal adherents, Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim. Erikson’s popular theory held that women possessed an empty “inner space” that could be filled only by motherhood; Bettelheim insisted that even women who wanted to be scientists wanted “first and foremost to be womanly companions of men.”

“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like,” Weisstein thundered from the platform, “because psychology
does not know.
”

After she’d finished reading her paper, there was a frightening moment
of silence, and then the audience of academics stood up and cheered.
I have become a powerful orator
, she thought.
The women’s movement has given me my voice
. Requests for copies of
“Kinder, Küche, Kirche”
poured in; it was anthologized widely.

Marilyn Webb’s plans for a national Women’s Liberation conference in Chicago were proceeding apace. In her mind the conference was to be an updated replay of the historic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In line with her politics, it would also include reports on the current status of women in revolutionary Vietnam and Cuba. With seed money from the Institute of Policy Studies, a leftist think tank, she paid four organizers twenty-five dollars a week to get the ball rolling.
Helen Kritzler, of New York Radical Women, went to Boston to solicit a contribution from Abby Rockefeller, a friend of the antiwar movement. Nervous about meeting the daughter of David, chairman of the Chase-Manhattan Bank, Kritzler invited Roxanne Dunbar to come along. The encounter turned into a boon for the Boston women.

“Abby had graduated the year before from the New England Conservatory of Music,” Dunbar remembers. “Studying the cello. And she’d gotten involved with draft resistance. She had this eighteen-year-old roommate, Jayne West, a scholarship student from Ohio, also a cellist, who had just gotten into tae kwon do. Both of them were depressed and overweight, pasty-faced, but then they joined our group and came alive. Jayne began teaching all of us tae kwon do, and the first thing Abby did was write a check for the
Chicago conference. Neither she nor I actually went to the conference, but she paid for the facilities at the YWCA camp and for the report that was written up afterward.”

Less than a month after Richard Nixon’s election, 150 radical women representing twenty cities in the United States and Canada—and perhaps fifty assorted shades of opinion on the left-to-feminist spectrum—convened over the Thanksgiving 1968 weekend at Camp Hastings, a YWCA retreat in Lake Villa outside Chicago. Some women carpooled, other arrived by plane. Anne Koedt made the journey by car with Shulie Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson. Irene Peslikis
had her plane ticket paid for by Kathie Amatniek. “Kathie insisted that I had to be there, she said it was us against the world,” recalls Peslikis.

“Cold. Bitterly cold” is what Jacqui Ceballos of NOW remembers. “Snowing. They were waiting for us at the airport with signs, and then we had a long, long trip to that camp. I was assigned to an upper bunk bed. There was no politeness or thoughtfulness that this was an older woman who maybe should have the lower bed. I had a feeling of hostility all around me. And the food, the hot dogs, ran out before the weekend was over.”

“Twice as many people showed up than we expected,” says Charlotte Bunch, one of the organizers. “We were frantically trying to find them places to sleep.”

“Charlotte was walking around with a lanyard and a whistle, like a YWCA counselor,” says Rosalyn Baxandall. “She didn’t want us to smoke—I guess she was way ahead of her time.”

“Once again Sheila Cronan and I were the only ones in dresses,” laughs Barbara Mehrhof. “We were still wearing dresses. Judith Brown was there from Gainesville, Dana Densmore was there from Boston, Dolores Bargowski was there from Detroit, and Anne Koedt’s sister, Bonnie Kreps, was there from Toronto. At the sex workshop I heard them speaking in Danish.”

“I came from Boston with two friends from SDS,” says Nancy Hawley. “I had one kid at home and I was pregnant with my daughter.”

“Some women brought their children,” recalls Baxandall, “but I left Finny at home with Lee. I had just stopped breast-feeding. Marilyn Lowen had her kid there, and we all breast-fed her kid.”

“Naomi Weisstein brought copies of
“Kinder, Küche, Kirche”
says Mehrhof. “It was the first time we’d seen it.”

“Ti-Grace Atkinson gave an eloquent speech,” says Marilyn Webb. “I don’t remember what she said but I remember feeling that she and the others were the most brilliant women I had ever met. I believed a real historic event had happened. The potential of a mass movement was so great. I had no sense at all that we couldn’t continue working together.”

“There was a lot of heavy, hard debate,” says Carol Hanisch. “Fights
about consciousness-raising, and how important it was. Fights about how independent the women’s movement should be, and what its relationship to the left should be. Fights about the establishment press, and what our relationship to it should be. Fights about whether we should copyright things or just throw them out there for anybody to use.”

“I was shocked at how strongly people denounced each other,” recalls Charlotte Bunch, who identified closely with the anti-imperialist women. “The polarization was so physically and emotionally exhausting that afterwards I couldn’t drive home.”

Choosing this occasion to adopt the movement name of Kathie Sarachild, in honor of her mother, Kathie Amatniek gave a workshop on consciousness-raising, but it was poorly attended.

“Everyone went to the sex workshop,” recalls Carol Hanisch. In that no-holds-barred session, Anne Koedt presented an expanded version of “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Dana Densmore shook up the proceedings by suggesting a respite of celibacy. Shulie Firestone drew outraged cries when she insisted that technology must offer an alternative to childbearing in the womb.

“I was doing a lot of listening,” says Nancy Hawley, who liked bearing children. (Soon after she gave birth to her daughter, Hawley would initiate the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the amazing array of young mothers who created
Our Bodies, Ourselves
.)

Unlike their more decorous sisters in NOW, the radical theorists who’d gathered at Lake Villa were temperamentally unsuited to hierarchical order. Neither could they agree on how to proceed. “There was a lot of distrust that weekend,” Jo Freeman sums up. “Nobody was willing to cede leadership to anyone, except to their friends.”

Although Marilyn Webb was reluctant to see it, the left-feminist split was irreconcilable. Lake Villa was the first and last time that a national conference of radical women would convene.

Cross-fertilization of ideas continued to take place, however, through intense personal correspondence, mimeographed papers and movement journals, and eventually mainstream magazine articles and popular books. But the radical, creative wing of the women’s movement would remain decentralized, localized in small groups from city to city, for the duration of its vivid existence. Ultimately New York, the
media capital of the nation, would triumph as the theoretical base of the pure feminist position, idiosyncratic Boston would continue to provoke and challenge, and the Washington-Chicago left alliance would cease being a force in the ideological wars.