The World Split Open (33 page)

Feminists also began targeting Hugh Hefner, publisher of
Playboy
magazine. On April 15, 1970, Hefner hosted a benefit party at his Chicago mansion for the local antiwar movement. As one feminist explained, “[We] were anxious to expose the hypocrisy of Hefner's opposition to the Vietnam War while profiting from his own exploitation of women at home. . . . The
Playboy
Empire is built on the concept that a woman is a mindless big-boobed cunt; another accessory to a playboy's total wardrobe.” But since these women also supported the antiwar movement, they asked that guests sign their checks outside the mansion, but not attend the party inside.
⁴⁸

At Grinnell College in Iowa, women's liberationists gave Bruce Draper, a recruiter of “beautiful babes for
Playboy,”
an unforgettable welcome. Ten members of the local women's liberation movement met him stark naked to protest
Playboy's
exploitation of the female body.
“Playboy
magazine,” their leaflet declared, “is a money-changer in the temple of the body.” In a speech delivered on the spot, one woman explained,

Pretending to appreciate and respect the beauty of the naked human form,
Playboy
is actually stereotyping the body and commercializes it.
Playboy
substitutes fetishism for honest appreciation of the endless variety of human forms. We protest
Playboy's
images of lapdog female playthings with idealized proportions. . . . The
Playboy
bunnies are an affront to human sexual dignity.
⁴⁹

Soon protesters began to picket Playboy Clubs around the country. In Chicago, the Women's Liberation Union decided to wage war on Hefner. “Our first action,” recalled Naomi Weisstein, “was gluing together
Playboy
magazines. . . . We had code names and wore sunglasses and disguises. What we did was to go into every magazine store and deface and pour glue on
Playboys
.”
⁵⁰

Despite such protests, which only multiplied, most young feminists never felt they had gained the right to look “ordinary.” True, some women cut their long hair, stopped shaving hair off their bodies, ceased to use makeup, gave up high heels, and began wearing comfortable clothes. But this was a luxury of the young or the independently wealthy who did not have to keep jobs. As young feminists entered male-dominated professions and occupations, they experienced great pressure to conform to strict corporate and professional dress codes that implicitly stated what it meant to be a woman. In the late seventies, a New York City judge, for instance, ordered a female attorney, dressed in a tailored, designer pants suit and silk blouse, to leave his courtroom and not to return until she wore a skirted suit that demonstrated proper respect for the court. Dressing for success sometimes meant survival in a career or job, which feminists had no power to change.
⁵¹

In the midst of their battle against artificial female beauty, few young feminists seemed to realize that many of their sisters—both in and out of the movement—had never viewed themselves as anything but “ordinary.” Older women experienced themselves as invisible. No one whistled at them on the street; no one insisted they smile to keep their jobs.
⁵²
Embarrassed to talk about their invisibility as aging women, they tended to keep their sense of humiliation to themselves. While
attractive budding feminists worried whether movement men took their ideas seriously and denounced the exploitation of the female body they saw everywhere, other movement women, wishing they were more attractive to men, found it difficult to relate to the “problem” of being treated as a sex object. Later, some of them spoke of the resentment they felt when movement men listened to their ideas, but never approached them as desirable lovers. One woman, who had long felt excluded as a possible lover, confided, “[The men] had all the power. They could affirm your beauty and choose you as a lover and ignore your ideas. Or they could turn you into an asexual comrade, who by definition, did not qualify to be a lover.”
⁵³

In a culture that idealized blond, blue-eyed, slim white women, African-American, Mexican-American, Filipina, Native American, and other minority women knew that being a sex object was certainly not their greatest problem. Their color was too dark, their hair was the wrong texture, and their bodies didn't conform to the Anglo-Saxon societal ideal. In the view of black activist Frances Beale, a black woman was the “slave of a slave.” Not only had she been raped and beaten by white slave owners, but her beauty had been ignored by black men who viewed her through the lens of a white-dominated culture. When “they told us that we were black, ugly, evil bitches and whores,” complained a group of black women, these men demonstrated their preference for the white cultural ideal. The black nationalist slogan “Black is Beautiful” attempted to reinstate black features, bodies, hair, and movements as attractive, sexy, and desirable. But it would take several more years until most minority women gained the freedom to see their beauty through their own eyes.
⁵⁴

The women's movement helped liberate two generations of women from the loneliness and isolation they suffered as they hid in closets or cruised bars. To older lesbians, the movement offered an opportunity to embrace the identity of lesbian with pride and, if possible, to “come out” to friends and family. For younger women, feminism and the sexual revolution provided a safe space in which to explore a different sexual preference.

Born before World War II, Julia Penelope Stanley already “felt different” at an early age. “My first conscious expression of my Lesbianism,” she recalled,

occurred when there was a song about “the girl that I marry.” I was standing on our front porch, singing the song to myself when I turned to my mother and said, “I want to marry a girl just like you.” She said, “You can't marry a girl. Girls can't marry girls. Only boys can marry girls. You'll have to marry a boy.” I decided never to marry because I had no intention of marrying a boy. If I couldn't have what I wanted, I would have nothing.

By the sixth grade her “crushes” began. “I mooned, courted, wrote poems and followed numerous girls around.” By 1957, she had begun to discover the gay bars that flourished in Miami.

I had a new word for myself, “gay.” I wasn't “homosexual” or “queer,” I was “gay.” It's hard to explain now the tremendous freedom that word bestowed in those years. More than anything, I now knew for sure I was not alone, that I wasn't the only “one” in the world.
⁵⁵

According to another woman, named Merill, Miami Beach was a gay paradise during the fifties. “Countless gay bars entertained suntanned, white-ducked Lesbians and homosexuals all year round. Always there were parties, cliquey, of course, but there were so many lesbians that it didn't matter.” Like many other lesbians of the time, Merill and her friends chose either butch or femme roles.

In general butches looked and acted more-or-less like men, wore ducktail haircuts and men's clothing, were aggressive, drank, swore, led when a couple danced, held the door open for the femme, lit the femme's cigaret etc. . . . There was a great deal of public embarrassment and ridicule of a butch who “went femme,” and often the derision was enough to prevent many butches from allowing their lovers to touch their bodies in lovemaking.

“I practiced developing masculine movements,” Merill remembered, “aping and emulating the men we professed to despise. To be a man meant to be strong and to have power. The best we could do as wimmin was to be like men, since we had not yet learned of wimminstrength and wimmin power.”
⁵⁶

Before the movement, such women had few models for any other kind of relationship. Elana had spent many years trying to go “straight,” even while she enjoyed lesbian relationships with women. “The only knowledge I had about Lesbians came from Radclyffe Hall's
The Well of Loneliness
, which my mother gave me when I was 14 and in the throes of a serious crush on a girl in high school.”
⁵⁷

The women's movement would have a tremendous impact on this earlier generation. It encouraged them to come out; it named their desires. But it also rejected the butch/femme roles, that is, one woman dressing and acting manly and the other dressing and behaving in a traditional feminine manner. Instead, new feminists promoted loving relationships between two strong, independent women.

Still, the political and cultural upheavals of the sixties freed some of these women from self-hatred. “I first realized I was a Lesbian in 1968,” wrote one twenty-six-year-old woman. “I had always known that I loved, was attracted to, was comfortable with women, but before the Women's Movement I didn't have a word for someone who felt those feelings.”
⁵⁸

But lesbians still had no visible movement and no refuge. In 1969, gay men successfully fought off police raids at New York's Stonewall bar, igniting the gay liberation movement. Some lesbians joined them, hoping they would fight together for social acceptance and civil rights. But to their disappointment, many lesbians discovered that gay men could be just as blind to the needs of women as straight men. By 1970, Del Martin, a prominent lesbian activist, was already writing her “farewell” to the male gay movement, much as Robin Morgan had done to the New Left. She called her missive “If That's All There Is.”
⁵⁹

At the same time, lesbians who had joined NOW felt outraged by Betty Friedan's characterization of them as a “lavender menace” that would provide enemies with the ammunition to dismiss the women's movement as a bunch of man-hating dykes. Homophobia had injured countless women, confining them to the closet, condemning them to psychiatric wards, and taking away their children. Purging lesbians from the movement was a morally indefensible solution and, in the view of many, would have discredited the movement even more. The real menace would have been a feminist movement that stigmatized and excluded other women. Some lesbians now fled the Gay Liberation Front and NOW for the women's liberation movement, where they found a somewhat more open and hospitable atmosphere.

For younger women who had never identified themselves as lesbians, the women's liberation movement provided a political and highly sexualized
context in which to explore their sexuality. Between 1967 and 1970, relatively few women felt secure enough to come out in the women's groups they had joined. The feminist writer Susan Griffin, whom I met in our small group, never discussed her attraction for women at any of the meetings that spanned two years. Later, she told me, “I certainly didn't feel it was safe in this group either. But it wasn't as if it were a characteristic of this group as opposed to other groups; this group was safer than anything else. It's just that the topic seemed so completely
verboten.
”
⁶⁰

“In the early days,” explained Cindy Cisler, “we were boy-crazy. There was practically no discussion of lesbianism.” Rosalyn Baxandall remembered Robin Morgan asking her group to discuss their attraction to one another, but the group decided “we don't want to talk about that.”
⁶¹
In 1969, Martha Shelley began to articulate the political importance of lesbian feminism in an essay titled, “Notes of a Radical Lesbian.” “Lesbianism,” she wrote, “is one road to freedom—freedom from oppression by men. . . . The woman who is totally independent of men—who obtains love, sex, and self-esteem from other women—is a terrible threat to male supremacy. She doesn't need them, and they have less power over her.”
⁶²

In New York City, a group of young women who called themselves “Radicalesbians” started recasting lesbianism as a political choice in 1970. These lesbian-feminists declared themselves the “new vanguard” of the women's movement and denounced sleeping with men as “reactionary” political behavior. Only with women, they insisted, could feminists integrate their emotional, political, and sexual lives. Only with women could feminists discover emotional freedom and sexual satisfaction.

“Vanguardism” had long poisoned the movements of the Left, most recently in the sixties. Casting yourself as the “vanguard” meant that you were morally superior because you had suffered the most and had therefore gained the right to lead the much-awaited “revolution.” During the sixties, the “vanguard” kept changing—from students to black nationalists to the working class. In the end, it also fragmented movements, leading to separatist politics rather than to political coalitions rooted in inclusiveness.
⁶³

Political lines began to be firmly drawn. At the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, Radicalesbians wearing T-shirts that read “Lavender Menace” grabbed an open microphone to promote the politics of lesbianism, and passed out copies of an essay called “Woman-Identified
Woman,” a position paper that quickly swept through the nation's women's liberation groups. “What is a lesbian?” the paper asked.

A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society . . . allows. . . . On some level she has not been able to accept the limitation and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role.
⁶⁴

But who qualified to be a woman-identified woman? Did a woman have to support lesbians or sleep with them in order to be labeled a woman-identified woman? Some heterosexuals (wishfully) concluded that a “woman-identified woman” simply had to swear allegiance to lesbians as the vanguard. Yet others interpreted the “woman-identified woman” as a lesbian litmus test that decided each woman's political credibility.
⁶⁵