The World Split Open (44 page)

Beneath the proclamation of sisterhood, women injured one another deeply. In movement circles, some called it “trashing” or even “psychological terrorism.” No one has ever described or explained this destructive behavior better than Jo Freeman, who during the first years of the movement wrote under the name Joreen. In a classic essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Freeman observed how the movement's unwillingness to elect officials, and its tendency to reject emerging talented writers and orators, gave the media complete freedom to anoint their own “leaders.” It also created a vacuum in which any woman could promote herself as a leader. Such women were accountable to no one except themselves. Fearful of structure and formal officials, the movement ended up with “leaders” who had the loudest voice, the flashiest public style, or the most time to stay at meetings. “Contrary to what we would like to believe,” she wrote,

there is no such thing as a structureless group. . . . For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group
and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized.
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Freeman described “trashing” as

a particularly vicious form of character assassination. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally distinguished by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreement or to resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.

Feminists used trashing to punish women who seemed too concerned with individual achievement, or too eager to grab the spotlight. The punishment was heavy criticism, even ostracism. Accusations and rejection might be based on political differences or personality clashes. But some activists felt such intense jealousy and competition that these feelings could only be assuaged by tearing apart another woman's credibility. As Vivian Rothstein, an early founder of Chicago Women's Liberation Union, put it, “Many of us were damaged people. How could we not have created a damaged movement?”
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Whenever I asked former activists about their darkest moments in the women's movement, tears often preceded words. The wounds had never healed; the scars had never disappeared. Only through the language of romance is it possible to describe how trashing devastated feminists. Talented women fell in love with a movement that seemed to grant them a legitimacy they had never felt, gave them a voice, and welcomed their presence. Then, as one feminist put it, “like a lover who abruptly walks out on you and never tells you why, the movement rejected your talents, ordered you to cease speaking, told you to stop writing and to become invisible again.”
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The women who experienced such rejection often compared it to the searing pain of unrequited love.

Trashing emerged within a particular historical context. For sixties activists, the idea of elections or of hierarchies of any kind smacked of “reformist” organizations, not a movement set on turning society upside down and inside out. Having roundly criticized the elitist leadership of New Left men, these women had vowed to act differently. They were going to create a truly democratic, egalitarian, and participatory movement.
Distrust of expertise and talent—a central tenet of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, then little understood but much admired by some young feminist activists—deepened an existing rejection of authority and leadership. If Chinese professors could clean university toilets (widely publicized at the time), then feminist leaders, too, could do their share of what was commonly called “the shit work.”

Fear of leadership and of hierarchy—that is, fear of domination and subjugation—sometimes produced political paralysis. Meredith Tax recalled that when her Boston group began mushrooming into Bread and Roses, “All we did was argue about whether or not we should have an organization. People were so frightened of taking any leadership role and of being trashed for being elitist.” Some of the women felt, to her surprise, that the group should not be open to new women. They feared that “we would become leaders and we would be bound to oppress other women. And I said, ‘How would we be oppressing women if we decided to have a women's movement?'”

We had no strategy. Our feminist political culture got us into a box we couldn't think ourselves out of. . . . We said revolution meant the transfer of power . . . but we were terrified of power. To us power meant oppression; we knew what it felt like to be the object of other people's power and we couldn't stand the thought of acting like bosses or fathers and being hated. . . . Our organizations lasted five minutes. We didn't know how to keep them going, partly because no one would take long-term responsibility to keep things together. People fought to avoid power, not to get it. They didn't have the time or money to be leaders, or the social support. Or maybe the guts. It's not easy to be a leader in a movement that hates leaders.
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The personal often became
too
political. Some activists began to scrutinize women's private lives, bedmates, and career choices. Some feminists felt threatened by women who did not act, look, or think like themselves. The belief that activists should “live” their politics, as though a feminist revolution had already taken place, created some of the darkest moments the movement would ever experience. Barbara Haber watched as empathy turned into judgmentalism in her group. “I remember at one point there was this very aggressive conversation going on about why anyone would get married and I said, very naïvely, that I wanted emotional security, and I got really trashed.” Accustomed as she
was to questioning received wisdom, Haber felt “when it came to the core of my life and my desire to be a married woman, I didn't want that touched.”
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Along with rage and exhilaration came the guilt of never being sufficiently radical. “Guilt-tripping” was the means by which trashing took place. Women made other activists feel guilty for having married, borne children, or prepared for a professional career. Some women grew fearful of wearing fashionable clothing, using makeup, or shaving their body hair. As one feminist quipped two decades later, “In 1970, it was less shameful to have venereal disease than to wear eye shadow.” Some heterosexual women, fearing such criticism, refrained from cuddling their men or children in public. Responding to lesbian-feminist vanguardism in the movement, some married women became almost apologetic for their lives as mothers and wives. Some movement activists, for instance, trashed Robin Morgan for being a wife and a mother. “I had a male child and had kept him. I couldn't figure out whether I was supposed to put him in a garbage can or what I was supposed to do, but I felt guilty about that, too.”
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Class-baiting was another popular form of attacking other women. Many members of women's liberation, who had grown up in middle-class homes or gained middle-class status through their educations, felt perfectly free to trash anyone who had grown up in a more privileged family or who dressed in conventional middle-class outfits. At one of the earliest women's liberation conferences, Cindy Cisler, who had worked tirelessly for abortion rights throughout the sixties, felt embarrassed to admit that she had gone to the best universities. Half a decade older than most liberationists, she also felt harshly judged for her “grown-up lady” clothes. “I didn't have Mississippi Summer blue denim jumpers or anything like that. I didn't get a pair of slacks until 1971.” People also “criticized the indomitable Flo Kennedy for wearing eight-foot eyelashes. The truth is, people were slightly obsessed with the correct cultural politics.”
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Cindy Cisler felt unfairly attacked. “I was the perfect target because I had the effrontery to work with a man, the effrontery to be straight, to work on these tiresome, tedious women's issues.” Cisler received letters from women who didn't even know her, accusing her of having too much money. “There was a tremendous effort expended to trash me and destroy and crush me, and it basically worked.”
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Some women hurled the accusation of “elitism” at other feminists. To be an elitist meant you thought yourself superior to others—which
quickly destroyed your reputation. Marilyn Webb, who had gained experience as a journalist and speaker before she helped organize the women's movement, was dogged by accusations of elitism whatever she did. “Somebody from a Washington paper called me up and asked me for a quote, and I ended up on television . . . and people were furious, because we had been having this whole thing about stars and they kicked me out of the Magic Quilt [a Washington, D.C., group]. They said I had to leave women's liberation. I was really shocked . . . they went around the room and it was like a witch hunt.”
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Trashing occurred in part because many feminists had unrealistic expectations of the movement's capacity to fulfill their deepest needs. “From saying men are my best friends,” confided one woman,

it flipped to the opposite, which is “all women are wonderful” and I remember being badly hurt by a woman I thought was marvelous and I thought was my best friend. . . . Lots of us had tremendously deep bonds, because we had done so much work together. But that was not necessarily the basis for long-term friendships. Sisterhood was not all that it was cracked up to be.

Phyllis Chesler, the author of
Women and Madness
, later wrote, “I expected so much of other feminists—we all did—that the most ordinary disappointments were often experienced as major betrayals. We expected less of men and forgave them, more than once, when they failed us. We expected far more of other women, who paradoxically had less (power) to share than men did. We held grudges against women in ways we dared not do against men.”
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Some feminists trashed other women for committing themselves to an intellectual life. Too many young movement activists viewed writing and thinking as “male-identified” behavior. Using one's mind, no less preparing for a life of the mind, turned you into an instant “sellout,” even if your goal was to excavate women's history, create a women's health clinic, or support women prisoners. Barbara Haber encountered such an anti-intellectual atmosphere in Boston. “Having [an academic career] was just plain individualistic—not properly collective,” she recalled. “There was a lot that said it's not okay to strive for the rewards that society gives you. It's definitely not okay to be academic. I bought into that and it took me a long time to undo the damage.”
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To stand out in any way was to risk being attacked. Fear of feminist
“stars” shadowed the movement for years. Looking back, Naomi Weisstein felt that “the kind of radical egalitarianism which doesn't let each member of a group use her gift in the service of the movement is simply destructive. The implications of that distrust of stars was very damaging.” Weisstein, a charismatic speaker who had helped create a speakers' bureau, agreed that different women should speak in public. But, over time, some members of Chicago Women's Liberation Union asked her not to speak so often, to which she agreed. Later, with much sadness, she realized that “the movement gave me my voice. Now please let me use it. Well, the decision was no.”
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Not surprisingly, talented writers, artists, speakers, and professionals suffered the worst attacks, the most painful rejections. Weisstein, who was already a young scientist, had been an active New Leftist and had started a Women's Liberation Rock and Roll Band. At one point, she needed to leave the band for two months to write a grant application for her scientific research. The band members felt betrayed.

And after that there was very heavy trashing of my motives and my politics and my heterosexuality. By that time the band had gone gay. So here was my movement telling me to get out of pig science; here was my band telling me to go gay; and here was the Left telling me I was a bourgeois feminist; and here were the feminists telling me that I was a Left serpent.
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“My feminist generation ate our leaders,” wrote Phyllis Chesler. “Beheading of leaders was the name of the game in those days,” recalled Ann Snitow. Trashing had “happened in the black movement and it had happened in the peace movement,” recalled Susan Brownmiller, “but they didn't destroy their leaders quite the way we did.” At the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, fear of stars grew so strong that “a resolution was read on the floor that Lucy Comisar and Susan Brownmiller [both writers] were seeking to rise to fame on the backs of the women's movement.” “I yelled out,” said Brownmiller, “‘that's my name you're saying there,' and kind of exploded a bit.” When asked why feminists had attacked her so fiercely, Brownmiller suggested that her accusers saw “her as a media-anointed star and they felt that the media divides, that certain people are going to become successful. I think they were so shut out of success and had no idea of some normal ways that one might actually
get to do what one wanted to do in life.” On one occasion, some women from The Feminists demanded an explanation for her journalistic success: “They asked me if I slept with my editors.” On another occasion, Brownmiller helped to organize a conference and invited Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in order to gain greater media coverage. When photographers asked for pictures, “Gloria and Bella pushed me in the middle of them and the
Times
took a lovely picture of the three of us, which was in the paper the next day.” Then movement activists screamed at her, “You had no right to be there.”
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