The World Split Open (29 page)

Through their attempted solidarity with women of Vietnam and women of color more generally, New Left women hoped to link their commitments to both the antiwar effort and the new women's movement. In the middle of a shooting war, a few New Left women traveled to
Canada, Hanoi, and Budapest to meet with Vietnamese women who were fighting U.S. involvement in their country. In 1967, for example, Vivian Rothstein attended a conference in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, between American antiwar organizers and North and South Vietnamese political activists. From there, she traveled to North Vietnam, where she spent nineteen days with a delegation of seven Americans visiting bombing sites, learning about Vietnamese history, studying American weaponry, and meeting women from the Women's Union of North Vietnam. “It was there,” Rothstein later recalled, “that I was introduced to the idea of a women's union and the possibility of organizing women independently of men. When I returned to Chicago, I helped found the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, served as its first staff director, and started the Chicago Liberation School for Women.”
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The effort to stay in the Left proved costly to some women. Margaret Randall, who spent decades studying and writing about women revolutionaries, later concluded that “a fundamental error of twentieth-century revolutions has been their inability—or unwillingness—to develop a feminist agenda.” Roxanne Dunbar, an early and influential radical feminist, abandoned her initial focus on women. Later, she wrote, “I had been tamed by Leftist arguments and was dedicated to bringing the women's liberation movement ‘inside' the revolution movement. In the worst mistake of my life, next to marriage, I had back-stepped to that servile leftist-woman position.”
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Women exited the male Left in their own ways, at different times. Some simply stopped going to meetings. In Berkeley, a woman in the campus Radical Student Union stood up and spoke about the need for a women's anti-imperialist contingent for an upcoming antiwar demonstration. The membership burst into laughter. She stormed out, precipitating an exodus by all the women. Afterward, when the organization collapsed, Wendel Brunner, then its president, explained the reason for its demise. “What men would keep coming to meetings without women?”
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By 1970, many New Left women knew that they were speaking to a new constituency. In her powerful essay, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” Marge Piercy, a novelist and poet, wrote, “My anger is because they have created in the movement a microcosm of that oppression and are
proud of it. Manipulation and careerism and competition will not evaporate of themselves. Sisters, what we do, we have to do together and we will see about them.”

In a widely reprinted essay, Ellen Willis declared her independence from the Left and argued that to “work within the movement is to perpetuate the idea that our struggle is secondary.” Fed up with countercultural ridicule, feminists bristled at articles on “Pussy Power,” or headlines like “Clit Flit Big Hit” (for a story on clitoral orgasm), and classifieds that advertised the selling of female flesh. In New York, a coalition of women (including radical feminists, self-proclaimed Witches, and Weatherwomen) led a coup at the underground paper
Rat
and produced an all-women's issue (February 9, 1970), the centerpiece of which was Robin Morgan's unforgettable farewell, “Goodbye to All That.”
⁸⁹
“It is the job of the revolutionary feminist,” Morgan exhorted,

to build an even stronger independent Women's Liberation movement, so that sisters in their counterfeit Left captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues in their own style—whatever that may be.

Morgan's splenetic diatribe against the male Left reminded some of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem
Howl.
Like Ginsberg, Morgan's words shrieked with pain and outrage. “Goodbye, goodbye, forever, counterfeit Left, counter-Left, male-dominated cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the Amerikan nightmare. Women are the real Left.” After blasting the hypocrisy, sexual exploitation, and discrimination of the male Left, Morgan concluded:

We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing, mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying wild eyes staring, wild voice keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this life in this time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the scream of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths
for children we couldn't have or couldn't
not
have, or didn't want, didn't want
yet
, or wanted and had in this place this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive.
Power to all the people or to none.
All the way down, this time.
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Could it have ended differently? Probably not. Even had New Left men never ridiculed their female comrades, black separatism and identity politics were in the air. The “movement,” which had begun to romanticize violence and to believe that a revolution was imminent, no longer appealed to many women. The people who were now identified as the vanguard of the “New Left” seemed to have lost their grip on reality. In 1969, Naomi Weisstein concluded that some of its members had “dropped off the edge of the world.” For many men, whose entire adult lives had been lived in the movement, that movement ended in 1969, leaving behind a powerful sense of loss and disorientation. “Sisterhood was powerful partly because movement brotherhood was not,” wrote Todd Gitlin. In contrast, the women's movement had not only re-created a new sense of community, but also provided the exhilarating opportunity to start all over again, to rethink priorities, and to view the world for the first time through the eyes of women.
⁹¹

Still, however crazy and violent the New Left had become, it was family, where you'd grown up, where you'd learned equality and justice. Like an ambivalent wife who seeks a divorce, New Left women required rage to fuel their departure. Just as Britain's North American colonists listed their grievances against King George in order to declare their independence, so, too, did these women need to repeat every insult and etch every humiliation into memory—men's treatment of women at SDS conventions, at the New Politics Conference, at
Ramparts
, in underground newspapers, at the 1969 “counter-inauguration,” and in the counterculture.

Endlessly repeated, Stokely Carmichael's joke about the desirable position of movement women resonated in ways he never intended or imagined. With these few words, he expressed the subterranean sexual and racial tensions that had always threatened to shatter the movement. For what drove white women out of the New Left, aside from searing humiliations and rising expectations, was their unarticulated anger at the hidden injuries of sex.

Soon after I arrived at college in 1963, campus officials invited all the women who lived in the “girls' dorm” to an important meeting. The university asked us whether we wanted to abolish all curfews and to enjoy the same freedom granted to male undergraduates. The alternative was to sign out, sign in, and when we missed curfew, get hauled up before a judicial council—all to protect us from ourselves. I barely listened; of course we would vote to eliminate such a demeaning rule. But to my astonishment, a majority of the women voted to retain it.
¹

What I didn't grasp then was just how ambivalent my generation of young women felt about the new sexual freedoms then looming on the horizon. Armed with contraceptives but lacking access to legal abortions, the elders of the baby boom generation were beginning to live what the American media would dub in 1965 “the sexual revolution.”
²
Suddenly, peer pressure to say yes replaced the old obligation to say no, threatening to eliminate a young woman's sexual veto. No longer could young women trade sex for love and a future commitment. The students who voted to keep the curfew intuitively understood that new freedoms brought new dangers as well. With one foot firmly rooted in the fifties—and the other sliding into the sixties—many of them were uncertain whether to embrace new freedoms or to protect themselves from the possibility of sexual exploitation. The historic connection between sex and reproduction had finally been ruptured, but what replaced it was the dangerous idea of casual sex. Curfews offered a perfect compromise; they created limits, while still providing enough opportunity for sexual experimentation.

As the sexual revolution accelerated, some young women began to view these new pressures as part of a “male” sexual revolution that needed to be redefined in terms that would ensure gender equality, not exploitation. But how? Between 1965 and 1980, thousands of women participated in an enormous archaeological dig, excavating crimes and secrets that used to be called, with a shrug, “life.” Without any training, these amateur archaeologists unearthed one taboo subject after another. Typically, a major book or article by a feminist writer would redefine or “name” one of these hidden injuries. National magazines would rapidly turn the subject into a cover story. Soon, the general public would learn that sometimes a custom is actually a crime.

The cumulative impact was breathtaking. Like the “hidden injuries of class” described by authors Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, feminists discovered far more than they had expected. Having emphasized the similarity of men and women in the wake of the fifties, this excavation would remind them of the significance of their biological difference from men. Once they had named so many specific injuries, mere “equality” with men would no longer be sufficient. Rather, they would insist upon a society that valued women's contributions, honored women's biological difference, and supported women's childbearing and sexual experiences.
³

In the avalanche of sixties' literature that condemned the men of the Left, Marge Piercy's devastating critique, “The Grand Coolie Damn” (1969), was perhaps the most widely publicized. Tellingly, she observed how much changing sexual mores had altered movement culture. Piercy excoriated men for turning sex into movement currency.

Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of what passes for common practice in many places. A man can bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up, or is after someone else; and that purge is accepted without a ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for no other reason than one of its leaders proved impotent with her.

Some movement men treated women's new sexual availability as if they had been let loose in a candy shop—and many women didn't like being treated as free goodies to be tasted. Looking back, Tom Hayden admitted that the “new sexual freedom only tended to legitimize promiscuity. Women could freely take multiple boyfriends, but not as freely escape their image as passive objects. For male students like myself, the new climate simply meant that more women were openly ‘available,' but it told us nothing about the souls and needs of those women.”
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As SDS mushroomed between 1965 and 1967, the sexual revolution intersected with a movement increasingly made up of strangers, rather than old friends. All too many men began to treat movement women with a disrespect that had been previously unthinkable. The libertine counterculture, which elevated freedom over equality, intensified such sexual exploitation. In 1968, recalled Todd Gitlin,