The World Split Open (45 page)

Phyllis Chesler, whose contribution to the psychology of women had influenced the movement a great deal, also encountered the dark side of the women's movement. “Behind closed doors,” she wrote, “we behaved toward women the way most women did: we envied, competed with, feared, and were ambivalent about other women; we also loved and needed them. . . .”

I saw feminists steal each other's work, money, job, spouses, physically hit each other, padlock doors, turn other feminists into the police. I saw feminists either refuse to pay or grossly underpay their female employees, or “groupies,” whom they sometimes also treated as if they were stupid, slaves or servants. . . . I saw feminists instigate whisper-and-smear campaigns to wreck each other's reputations, both socially and professionally.

Chesler also watched some feminists dropped from guest lists, even from the movement itself.

Perhaps some thought she was too pretty, too angry, not the right color, or class, too outspoken, unpredictable, perhaps she slept with the wrong people, refused to sleep with the right person, or had chosen the wrong side. . . . As much as we longed for sisterhood, we only started the process and we failed at the task.
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One of the strangest consequences of such anti-elitism was that activists pressured one another to write without bylines. Writing anonymously had been required of modest ladies of the nineteenth century. Now, in the name of solidarity, some women's liberationists asked that
no woman take credit for her words. In 1970, a fed-up Robin Morgan decided to leave the
Rat
alternative newspaper collective. “I had been told that I wrote too well and that people were buying the newspaper to read me and that all I could do was to take my name off the piece. So, of course, dutifully, I took my name off my writing.”
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The novelist Alix Kates Shulman also feared being silenced by the movement. “The worst thing for me was what happened to writers. I had started writing half a year before I met the movement, and so I felt I had to write.” She thought she might be accused of “ripping off” the movement, which in those years meant using the movement for one's own career goals. Even more, she worried about the “snide remarks” she received about her writing

because it was literary [rather than polemical]. That was elitist. That was even worse than ripping off the movement. I didn't want to be elitist, but I was going to write. That was for me the worst. I always felt as if at any moment I could be kicked out. I know this is extraordinary because I couldn't have been. And yet, whenever the question of spies came up, I would think they must mean me because I was married and had children.
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Erica Jong, having written a novel about a woman's passion for sex and independence, found herself described by some feminists as an opportunist. Looking back at how she suffered in those years, she wrote:

You got the feeling that unless you had the trappings of radical lesbianism about you, you would be shunned. And trappings there were. There was a style prevalent then in which you were expected to
look
like you'd stepped right off the commune. Lipstick and eyeshadow were not only counter-revolutionary, they would be mentioned in reviews of your books.

At one festival, women “hooted and booed” as Erica Jong read poems about motherhood, “though many of them had children in their arms. At the time, I was devastated. The criticism by women hurt far more than criticism by men.”
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Later, Jong wrote about her sympathy for the many mothers and wives who wanted to be involved with organized feminism
but had encountered “the same kind of painful rejection I had experienced.”

She understood this punitive attitude in generational terms and referred to second-wave feminists as the “whiplash generation.”

Brought up in the fifties, they whipped into the sixties with little preparation. How could our generation suddenly forswear the values with which it had been raised? It couldn't. So some of us became extremist, as all frightened people do. As usual in revolutions, the zealots drove out the moderates. And the haters of feminism exploited the split for their own end. Thus, a whole generation of daughters grew up turned off by the word “feminist.”
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Perhaps no one suffered greater public trashing than Gloria Steinem. In May 1975, a newly constituted Redstockings in New York City, led by such early and important leaders as Carol Hanisch and Kathie Sarachild, issued a statement in which they publicly accused Steinem of having worked for the CIA—in the past, as well as in the present. They wrote that she was, in fact, a government spy or informer in their midst who had redirected the course of the movement toward moderation and capitulation.

The truth was quite a bit more complicated. During the late fifties and early sixties, Steinem helped found the Independent Research Service, a foundation set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which recruited American students to attend Communist-sponsored international youth festivals in order to proselytize the superior American way of life. Sponsored by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the hope was to cultivate personal relationships with the youth of all nations. The CIA both funded and recruited many of the delegates. Steinem attended two International Communist Youth Festivals in 1959 and 1962.

Like many liberal young women of her generation, Steinem viewed the effort of “building bridges, deepening understanding, and identifying similar concerns among the world's youth” as important work. In the absence of organizations like SNCC or SDS, liberal students viewed these activities as an opportunity to enhance world peace. At the time, Steinem knew that the Independent Research Service was at least partly funded through the CIA and their various conduits. She perhaps believed that the CIA did so to help prevent wars, not as part of a
systematic effort to contain and subvert Communism. In fact, still in the waning penumbra of McCarthyism, she at first worried more that the funding might secretly be coming from Communist-front organizations.

This, of course, was the fifties, when the CIA was still honored for protecting Americans from Communism. Few liberal students at that time knew about funding by the CIA. By the seventies, the very letters CIA dredged up images of assassinations, coups d'états, dirty tricks abroad, infiltration of radical organizations and surveillance of ordinary citizens at home. When the Redstockings issued their accusations, they also charged Steinem with using
Ms.
magazine to collect information on feminist activities in her ongoing work for the CIA. In fact, the magazine had resisted all such attempts, including an FBI request to use its subscriber list in a search for female fugitives.
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Steinem wasn't sure how to respond to these charges, though they were hardly new. In 1967,
Ramparts
magazine had exposed how the CIA had funneled its money secretly through foundations to the National Student Association. At the time, Steinem said she approved of the CIA effort in this operation because it was the work of liberals “who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the Festival.” But that hardly meant that she had infiltrated the women's movement for the CIA a decade later. Since the mainstream press had not yet picked up the Redstocking story, friends advised her in 1975 not to dignify their accusations and just to let the matter drop. But that turned out to be impossible, in part because Betty Friedan seized upon these accusations, discussing them with reporters from New York City's
Daily News
and the wire service United Press International at the UN International Women's Year World Conference in Mexico City in 1975. Linked to Friedan's name, the story now spread swiftly though the mainstream media. Friedan compounded Steinem's difficulties by demanding that she “react” to the charges and by implying that a “paralysis of leadership” in the women's movement “could be due to the CIA.”
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For both the Redstockings and Friedan to accuse Steinem was a profoundly disturbing matter. Still, Steinem didn't respond, fearing that people would only remember the charges and not her answers. All summer, Steinem brooded and agonized. After three months, she wrote a six-page letter and released it exclusively to feminist publications. But the mainstream press, excited by a feminist scandal, now picked it up, as she had feared, and amplified the accusation as it flew though the nation's news services and newspapers. In her letter, Steinem pointed out
that the Redstockings had made no new discoveries, that she had revealed years before that her work in youth groups was partly funded by the CIA. She also systematically refuted the charge that she had ever been a full-time employee who worked for the CIA or any other government security agency. “I will repeat the facts one more time,” Steinem wrote. “I worked on two of the World Festivals of Youth and Students for Peace and Freedom (to give them their proper name), held sixteen and thirteen years ago in Vienna and Helsinki, at which some of the American participation was partially funded by foundations that were in turn funded by the CIA. . . . I naively thought then that the ultimate money source didn't matter, since in my own experience, no control or orders came with it. (It's painfully clear with hindsight that even indirect, control-free funding was a mistake if it couldn't be published, but I didn't realize that then.)”
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There the story would perhaps have ended had not Betty Friedan seemed determined to keep it alive. On television programs, she would announce that she refused to discuss Steinem and the CIA connection and then proceeded to do so, even if just by implication. She never directly charged Steinem with anything, but clearly she did not want the American public to forget the accusation. In
It Changed My Life
, her next book published in 1976, Friedan again raised the CIA issue. Perhaps unwilling to share the feminist stage with any other leader, Friedan blamed the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment by various state legislatures on “extremist groups,” like
Ms.
magazine. She also used innuendo to tarnish the reputations of both Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. In a review of Friedan's book on July 4, 1976, in the
New York Times Book Review
, Stephanie Harrington wrote, “This is heady stuff. . . . Is she saying Steinem and/or Abzug have CIA and FBI connections? If so, why doesn't she say so plainly?”
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Why did both Friedan and the Redstockings—embracing such different politics—attack Steinem? One answer is that the relationship between the CIA and youth organizations still remained very murky. They could confidently smear Steinem precisely because so little was known. In the aftermath of the
Ramparts
exposé, there was, according to political scientist Karen Paget, “a ‘deal' made between the National Student Association leaders and the CIA. Knowledgeable NSA officials and the agency agreed to confirm the relationship but to provide no details.” Both Friedan and the Redstockings also seemed motivated by their ardent belief that FBI-paid lesbians and
Ms
. magazine, even if
evidence was not at hand, had somehow conspired to take over
their
movement.

In Friedan's case, her obsession with Steinem also seemed driven by rivalry. She undoubtedly felt upstaged. She had ignited the American women's movement. She had named resentments that had been invisible. It must have pained her to watch the media cast her rival as a leader. Like Cinderella's older sister, Friedan had to watch as the media lavished attention on the telegenic Steinem. And she may have found it more than she could bear. “I was no match for [Steinem],” she wrote with some bitterness, “not only because of the matter of looks—which somehow paralyzed me—but because I don't know how to manipulate, or deal with manipulation myself”—an assertion that many feminists found odd and without much credibility.
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The Redstockings, for their part, believed that a CIA-funded conspiracy of lesbians and liberals had taken over
their
radical movement. Kathie Sarachild had long accused
Ms.
magazine (along with
Newsweek
, the
Washington Post
, Katharine Graham, and several well-known authors) of working to eliminate the real voice of radical feminism. Steinem, using the slick magazine she founded, had turned herself into a star. Sarachild and Hanisch felt that they had never received proper appreciation and recognition for their work. And they were right. Hanisch had coined the slogan “The personal is political,” and Sarachild had “invented” the idea of “consciousness-raising,” and promoted the idea of the small group as a way to create a new kind of movement. Yet they were not household names. In addition, Sarachild was perhaps miffed that
Ms.
had offered her an advance to write a book on consciousness-raising and then had decided to publish its own anthology on the subject. Although
Ms.
allowed her to keep the advance, Sarachild may have felt betrayed.

In the view of Sarachild, Hanisch, and Friedan, distinctive if very different leaders whose originality shaped the first decade of the movement, Steinem didn't deserve to be viewed as a leader. Yet, with her good looks, intelligent journalism, and successful magazine, she seemed suspiciously effective in mobilizing women around feminist causes. Nonetheless, to call Steinem a tool of the CIA, as biographer Carolyn Heilbrun has pointed out, was a “terrible accusation indeed. The Redstockings made a very clever move against a woman they perceived as having usurped their movement and the celebrity owed them.” After years of careful research on Steinem's life, Heilbrun found
the accusations to be “without substance and often ridiculous” and concluded that “there is simply no evidence to substantiate the Redstockings' reckless charges.” Heilbrun eloquently summed up both what happened to Steinem and the more general phenomenon of trashing in the women's movement: “Just as men victimize the weak member of their group, women victimize the strong one. Why this is so is not entirely clear, but let us hope it disappears before the next wave of feminism crashes into women's lives.”
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