The Martin Duberman Reader (16 page)

She begged to differ. Aside from the physical asymmetry in reproductive equipment, she believed that men and women shared a common humanity, and that no task was more crucial at the current time than boldly to question the so-called differences between the genders. Every individual, Barbara argued, “is born
both
to assert herself or himself,” an attribute previously considered primary in males, “
and
to act out of sympathy for others trying to find themselves,” presumably the preserve of women.

She felt it urgent to reclaim both attributes, aggression and compassion, for both genders, and as Carolyn Heilbrun had recently argued in her seminal
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny
, to hold out androgyny (combining in every individual all the traits previously and artificially parceled out to men
or
women) as the ideal state. Barbara advocated that fathers also needed to become mothers and that motherhood needed to be redefined so that it no longer represented the female parent “giving one's very life for the father, then the son, to feed upon.” Everyone had to learn that “we must give of ourselves, we are members one of another.” Mutuality needed to replace sacrifice (the woman) and dominance (the man).

The genius of nonviolent action, Barbara added, was that it combined two impulses long treated as distinctly masculine
or
feminine: self-assertion and sympathy. Recombined, they restore “human community. One asserts one's rights as a human being, but asserts them with consideration for the other, asserts them, that is, precisely
as
rights belonging to any person.” Barbara's further conviction was that there existed between any two individuals (“if only they will allow themselves to be individuals”) sufficient polarity “for desire to flourish.” Love, she concluded, did not mean the woman “cleaving to the man” and the man “cherishing his so-called better self.” There could be “deep eroticism in comradeship.” Indeed, Barbara—long “out” as a lesbian—suspected that one significant reason why homosexuality was generally viewed as threatening was because “loving comradeship”
was
its ideal.

The second article, “On Anger,” which deeply impressed Adrienne Rich, remains one of Barbara's most influential essays. She started from the proposition that many of the people who were struggling in liberation movements—blacks, welfare mothers, women, gay men and lesbians, vets, GIs, prisoners, etc.—were angry people. Yet the anger, she was convinced, had to be expressed nonviolently “if we want to make the changes that we need swiftly and surely . . . and if we want to see the fewest possible people hurt in the struggle.” In regard to the women's movement, Barbara felt that men were so accustomed to the present state of things that they were almost bound to panic at the very idea of women's liberation. It was important, she felt, for women “to reassure men continually,” as their singular entrenched privileges were removed, that the pleasures of relating to others as equals were greater than those of treating them as subordinates or appendages.

Barbara felt that one kind of anger was healthy: “It is the concentration of one's whole being in the determination: this must change.” Such a state does involve agitation and confrontation, but is not in itself violent because it respects oneself
and
the other. Barbara recognized that it was difficult for pacifists to acknowledge anger, “to have to discover in ourselves murderers.” Yet it
was precisely when repressed anger surfaces that a movement for change begins to show signs of life. But what one does with the anger is all-important. If one disciplines it—takes the murder out of it—and uses it to join with others comparably oppressed, the anger is transmuted into a determination not to destroy the oppressor but to change one's subservient status through conscious solidarity with those who are similarly situated or at least sympathetic to one's plight—often because they recognize some tyrannized portion of their own lives.

Barbara and Adrienne Rich began to correspond a little, met once, and then soon after spent an evening together with Robin Morgan and Mary Daly (“whom I would name a genius,” Barbara wrote), neither of whom Barbara had previously known. She was especially impressed with Daly's “wonderfully bold mind,” just as she had already been excited by Daly's articles (“. . . did not read your essays but ate them, and they are now part of my flesh and bone”). Daly and Barbara agreed that “a genuine psychic revolution” had begun, with androgyny as its goal and with what Daly had called “the sisterhood of man” central to that evolution.

To Robin Morgan, Barbara emphasized her conviction that women, because of their ability to give birth, understood “that we are members one of another, that nobody, nothing, is strictly
other
.” But it's not that men can't learn about connectedness; “it seems to me that we have to insist they can.” For Barbara, the truism that nobody is simply
other
lay at the very heart of the nonviolent struggle. Those aspects of oneself that we currently despise and cast out are the same ingredients central to an androgynous vision. Men cast out in fear “all that is ‘womanish' in them, then long of course for that missing part of their natures, so seek to possess it by possessing us.” Critical to the potential revolution in consciousness was the need to embrace those very elements we previously chose to disown—which would mean destroying maleness and femaleness as we currently know them. But if women claim that their powers are unique, “we defeat ourselves. . . .
Won't we
always be men's prey
until they come to acknowledge that in each one of
them
is what Adrienne beautifully calls a ‘ghostly woman' . . . ?”

Barbara had a much longer-standing relationship (some fifteen years) with David McReynolds, the War Resisters League (WRL) stalwart, than with any of the feminists she was now connecting with. She and David had worked together as nonviolent radical activists in a variety of organizations (like WRL) and movements (like the struggles for black rights and against the war in Vietnam). They also shared a same-gender sexual orientation. But in 1976, and then sporadically for another half dozen years, Barbara and David got intensely tangled up in disagreement. It began when Barbara asked David to sign a petition calling for censorship of the notorious film
Snuff
, which purportedly (though it was never proven) captured on camera the mutilation and murder of one of the actresses in the movie.

David refused—heatedly. Though he hadn't seen the film, he strenuously objected to what he rightly presumed was Barbara's underlying assumption that most men on the Left (as he wrote her) were “deserting women—or have always seen them as less than human.” Besides, as he wrote Barbara, he himself, on principle, opposed
“any
censorship.” Where would Barbara draw the line? He told her to walk through a porn shop one day and she'd see depictions of scenes they'd both deplore—young boys being violated by older men, bound and gagged women being raped, whip-wielding women beating men
and
women. He claimed to fully understand the outrage at
Snuff
, but “for women to protest
this
movie implied that they accept the brutalizing” of all the other ones. He insisted the broad issue was not that women's lives were held cheap, but that most lives were.

In saying as much, David strenuously denied that he was antifeminist: “The women's movement interests me much more than the gay liberation movement which, at least in the ‘men's division,' I find more concerned with arranging dances than overturning a structure.” He felt, moreover, that “there is a certain natural
contour of nature which puts both of us, as homosexuals, at its edge and places the heterosexual much closer to the center.” He'd decided that he was basically an “integrationist” and did not want to live within the context of a “gay community.”

As regarded feminism, he wanted Barbara to know that his support was not unconditional: “When women tell me they know all about men or that men are such and such, I know they speak
part
of the truth.” He reminded her that for some time now she'd talked of “waiting, of silence, of hoping left-wing men would change and see patriarchy as the enemy.” Yet in his view, “the attack on the patriarchy is possible only because it is, in a sense, already over.” He felt that Barbara's pain was “a human condition, not a female one,” and believed she was edging away “from the over-arching humanity which is at the core of nonviolence,” to which both of them had long been committed: “We need one another, our common humanity being more urgent in this short life than our blackness, whiteness, or elseness. That is a truth you once knew and I sense you have lost or are losing it somewhere along the way.”

Barbara felt deeply hurt at David's vehemence, and his painful misunderstanding of her position. Yet characteristically—“We must
listen
to the Other” was central to her being—she began her reply by thanking him “for taking such care in writing me. I take it as an act of brotherliness.” She asked him to take equal care in reading her response. And in the various exchanges by phone and mail that followed, she (and David as well) often reiterated their love and respect for one another—though that didn't prevent either from forcefully speaking their minds.

Barbara began by accusing David of making assumptions about her that were “inaccurate.” She was
not
a “correct liner: I just try to act out the truth I feel as best I can.” She did
not
believe that “men and women are different in essential nature.” She did
not
want to turn the clock back and reinstall the Matriarchy though she did believe that eons ago women were either co-partners in power, or fully ruled. She was
not
a separatist: “I have never given myself that name”; it was true that she felt that women for a time must, in
consciousness-raising groups, “talk above all among ourselves, act above all together” so that later—“may it be soon”—“we can come into each other's presence as distinct persons.” Nor, as a corollary, did she to any degree repudiate her past. She remained proud of having worked side by side with David and other radical men—with “kindred spirits”—in WRL and against racism, the arms buildup, civil defense, and the war in Vietnam.

When, in the early seventies, she'd begun to read and encounter radical feminists, she'd been convinced, she wrote David, that her brothers “would welcome feminism and would come to see feminism and nonviolence as ‘inextricable,' and would be quick to acknowledge that women have been oppressed by men.” But only a few “have moved in this direction” and most had not.
Why
they had not had deeply puzzled and upset her, though she continued to regard her male comrades as “brothers.” But how could they not understand that “under patriarchy
all
our natures are distorted. If patriarchy were dissolved, I think we would all of us,” among much else, “be not heterosexual or homosexual but simply sexual.” She was shocked at David's belief that the power of the patriarchy was “already over”—“you leave me wordless. Please do try to persuade me that it is so. And I'm not being sarcastic.”

Barbara had become unhappily convinced, she told David, that the vast majority of men, including those on the Left, had no real feel for the profound power that (white) men continued to exert over all others. She now felt that “our lives, women's lives, are not real to you (and to men generally)—except insofar as they support the lives of men.” Yet she felt strongly that those who called themselves “anti-imperialists” (as both she and David long had) needed to recognize “that
women
are treated as a colonized people—here and everywhere.”

Barbara urged him to read—she knew only one man [Arthur Kinoy] on the Left who had—at least some of the “extraordinary” books that feminists had written over the last few years, and specifically named the works of Firestone, Millett, Rich, Daly, and Dworkin. David would have none of it, though he acknowledged
his ignorance of the books Barbara cited—along with many other books he never seemed to have time enough to read. But he accused Barbara of “guilt-tripping” him and of setting “a bad example of communicating.” Besides, he indignantly added, he refused to “read a book written by someone who won't attend planning meetings with men, someone who insists on separate demonstrations, separate book stores, separate bars” (none of which was true of some of the women Barbara had mentioned, including herself)—“They can bloody well have a separate audience for their writing.”

They were at a stalemate—these longtime friends and political allies who shared so many values, as well as personally holding each other in high regard (“For all my disagreements and angers,” David wrote in one letter, “I love and respect you”—and Barbara felt the same). Given the time frame, the divergence between them was hardly unique. The midseventies and early eighties were marked by sharp divisions among activists on the Left—which had always been true but was more pronounced during some periods than others—as well as between self-identified gay men and lesbians. Antagonism between the New Left and the Old went back to the sixties and hinged on whether or not one believed in the centrality of the class struggle. David had been one of the few older leftists—in 1970 he was forty-one—who strongly identified with the New Left (though not with its patronization of women's liberation).

Both feminism and the gay movement had also, from their inception in the late sixties, been marked by internal conflict, with the mid-to-late seventies marking a period of heightened infighting. Liberal feminists like Betty Friedan denounced “the lavender menace” specifically, and radicals generally, for putting the women's movement in the wrong light and jeopardizing its growth. Radical feminists were themselves split into divergent ideological factions, some wanting to retain their ties to the male Left and to broad social reconstruction—even while opposing male supremacy—and others arguing for an autonomous women's movement that focused on building alternative institutions and was grounded in the conviction (which mistakenly discounted significant variations in class,
race, and ethnicity) that all women shared a universal and biologically intrinsic identity different from that of men.