The World Split Open (49 page)

every night there were dances. Women would dance after meals. Even the meals were highly charged. We would start with announcements and the announcements got wilder and wilder. And after that there would be dances and it was erotic. And I don't just mean people making love, I mean, the
air was charged with rebirth, which I guess I associate with eroticism.
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Now women circled one another warily. As Candace Falk noted, the students, many of whom came from smaller cities and towns, resented those leaders “who were more New York sophisticated.” On the other hand, hero worship, which had begun earlier when Rita Mae Brown auctioned off her socks, became increasingly common during the second session. Some students picked particular “stars” and followed their decisions like so many disciples practicing the gospel. A newsletter issued by the “alternative school” condemned Sagaris for its lack of purity and described the think tank as “the McDonald's of the women's movement.” In hindsight, Alix Kates Shulman deeply regretted her behavior and wished the dissident faculty had accepted the money. In her view, “Sagaris was a study in paranoia.” She, like others, had been swept up by the atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Marilyn Webb, who was inclined to think that the accusation against Steinem might be true, wanted the leaders to wait for a statement from Steinem, but by the time she published her open letter, it was too late.
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The demise of Sagaris cannot be blamed exclusively on ideological differences. True, “revolutionaries” attacked “reformists,” “purists” condemned “pragmatists,” and everyone accused everyone else of “elitism.” But Joan Peters offered a simpler explanation that spoke volumes about American political culture. “The women's movement entailed a lot of sacrifice and a lot of collectivity and a communal sense of ‘we women together' and I think it was too much of a strain on people who were essentially individualists.”
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Fueling these tensions was a national controversy surrounding Jane Alpert, a former secret member of a freelance bombing collective who had gone underground in 1970, after her alleged role in a bombing incident. After surrendering to the FBI in November 1974, Alpert was reportedly giving agents information about her former female and male compatriots who were still underground. Her conversion from armed revolutionary to radical feminist, she explained, had been provoked by her disgust with the Weathermen's sexism. Her statements and her decision to turn informer for the FBI sparked a heated debate among American feminists, which had not died down by the following summer. Some leftist women circulated petitions, attacking Alpert as a collaborationist. But many feminists, including Gloria Steinem, supported and
defended her. Steinem even wrote an introduction to “A Letter from the Underground,” a controversial article penned by Alpert that was widely reprinted. Many leftist feminists criticized Alpert's theory of “Mother Right,” published in
Ms.
magazine, which based a woman's authority on her innate maternal nature. (Years later, Alpert also rejected this theory.)

Alpert's transformation from underground revolutionary to mother nurturer polarized feminists at Sagaris as well as elsewhere. Fearful of FBI infiltration, some women viewed Alpert as the enemy; others welcomed her as a convert who had come to grasp the significance of feminism—or, in some cases, women's moral superiority.

The tensions between the Left and feminism revisited earlier splits and resurrected old resentments. Journalist Judy Coburn wrote that “in a year's time, the net of the Alpert affair has been cast wide enough to include questions about the relationships between feminism and the Left and the infiltration of the women's movement by police, the FBI and the CIA. Scores of local and national feminist groups and institutions have been affected by the theoretical and practical questions, including
Ms.
magazine and the new Vermont-based feminist institute Sagaris.”
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Fanning these brushfires at Sagaris was a widespread belief that FBI agents had infiltrated Sagaris and that spies, not feminists, had destroyed the second session. Living in close quarters made nearly any kind of behavior seem suspicious. Here is a case in which the belief in FBI infiltration, whether true or not, cast suspicion in every direction. Joan Peters suspected a few women “whose behavior we found very provocative . . . no one knew them beforehand, they knew each other, but they didn't have any group allegiances.” But she thought that spies, if they were present, had catalyzed—not ignited—the political tensions and personality conflicts that afflicted the Sagaris community. In her view, the FBI amplified the differences, but did not cause them. Marilyn Webb suspected spies, rather than feminists, of dirty tricks, like stuffing apples up car tailpipes and painting obscenities on her door. Candace Falk thought that the level of anger was too high to be explained in any normal way. “It didn't fit, it didn't make sense. In the second session, [infiltrators] were even more sophisticated on how to bring it down.” Falk suspected “certain women who looked like they had just gotten release time from prison. . . . They were very tough and very obstreperous.” Alix Shulman distrusted a few women “who lived in this Swiss chalet. They had taken a house somewhat at a distance, much more
bland. Everybody else lived on campus in the dorms. Everything about them was incongruous with everything else.” Shulman, a wonderful novelist and highly intelligent woman, even pointed to the fact that “the spies had copies of the
New York Review of Books
in the chalet.” Paranoia had spiraled out of control.
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The dream was over. Joan Peters concluded that “the factions, the schisms, were finally what tore everything apart. . . . I could not believe women could treat women so brutally . . . and behave in ways that were certainly no better than what I was accusing men of doing to me.” Much later, she said, “What happened during the two sessions was that you watched the complete potential of the women's movement, everything that could happen perfectly, happen in the first session. In the second session, every disaster in the women's movement emerged. So that Sagaris ended in fist fights, animosity and division. In this way, Sagaris for me epitomized the larger movement.”
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Did the FBI's infiltration decisively alter the trajectory of the women's movement? Probably not. Although it intensified paranoia, the FBI did not really change the movement's course. Without infiltration, women's liberationists still would have trashed their leaders, censored group members for having the wrong appearance, the wrong partner, or the wrong job. Without informants, Betty Friedan still would have blamed lesbians for causing the gay/straight split. Without informants, Sagaris would just have likely witnessed attacks on leaders, political divisions, and clashing egos. This was hardly the first time in history that social activists became increasingly dogmatic as a movement grew larger and more diverse.

Still, we should not diminish the significance of a government agency infiltrating a social movement. The FBI committed a flagrant violation of what Americans rightfully cherish as their civil rights. As Letty Pogrebin wrote in 1977:

The important fact is that they tailed us and invaded our privacy, both psychic and physical. They snooped. They pressed their candid camera against a one-way mirror to our private lives. It seems impossible not to feel outrage at these flagrant violations of the rights of free speech, association and assembly. The FBI conducted a criminal investigation against women who were not accused of any crimes. This activity is unthinkable in a democracy.
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The FBI's impact, in my view, was that it exacerbated the movement's growing tendency to judge other women by examining the smallest details of their personal lives. Fear of provocateurs paralyzed some protestors. Fear of agents and informers eroded trust. Given the widespread assumption of infiltration, feminists sometimes found it easier to accuse one another of being informers than to accept the inevitable differences among them that, even without the FBI, would naturally result in different feminist perspectives and different ideas of sisterhood.

Ironically, the FBI searched for signs of subversion in the women's movement but couldn't recognize what was truly dangerous. While they looked for Communists and bombs, the women's movement was shattering traditional ideas about work, customs, education, sexuality, and the family. Ultimately, this movement would prove far more revolutionary than the FBI could ever imagine. Feminism would leave a legacy of disorientation, debate, and disagreement, create cultural chaos and social change for millions of women and men, and, in the process, help ignite the culture wars that would polarize American society. But at the time, these ideas were not what the FBI considered subversive.

“I have seen some of the best minds of
my feminist
generation go mad with impatience and despair,” wrote Robin Morgan in 1975. By then, many feminists sensed a change in the
Zeitgeist.
Like a swollen river, the women's movement had spilled over its banks, creating hundreds, then thousands of new tributaries, as it flooded the nation. All over the country, women were discovering feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, labor, spirituality, education, ecology, and peace. “Feminism” and “sexism,” language not widely used even in the late sixties, had now become commonplace household words. The distinction between women's liberation and women's rights had blurred into what was now simply called “the women's movement.” But that movement had splintered, and fragmented; it was everywhere and nowhere.

The media had repeatedly announced the death of the movement, and now even some activists worried about its health. Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth, two experienced movement organizers, decided to take stock of feminism in an article titled “Will the Women's Movement Survive?” As longtime activists, they knew that movements change, even die. Now they worried about the growing belief that a “changed consciousness” was all that women required to change economic and political structures in American society.
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Others, too, sensed the change. In 1975,
Harper's Bazaar
asked seven prominent feminists to assess the status of the movement. Susan Braudy, an editor and writer, replied, “We're in a period of transition.” Erica Jong responded that the question itself was a predictable media trope: “First we discover a fad, then we say that it has run out of steam.”
Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman noted that the ERA was in trouble. Betty Friedan replied that “goals get higher with greater success.” Cynthia Glacken, a member of the board of directors of Stewardesses for Women's Rights, answered, “As each group of women organize, they will see how the movement applies to them and it won't be a theory anymore.”
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Time seemed to have taken a toll, noted Charlotte Bunch, commenting on the striking numbers of burned-out women “among long-time activists who had been involved in building feminist institutions.” The initial euphoria was long gone; consciousness-raising groups had all but disappeared; feminists felt more isolated; and many movement institutions and collectives had collapsed. Differences, not solidarity, now seemed more compelling to some activists; straight, white women had, in some cases, replaced men as the new enemy. At the same time, a growing anti-abortion movement had launched a fierce campaign to repeal legalized abortion and the ERA had stalled at the state level. By 1982, it would be dead.

Fragmented and wounded, the movement remained immensely alive. In religion, for instance, women scholars in theological schools and seminaries challenged orthodoxy, reexamined translations, and reinterpreted religious texts. Some women in established religions began designing their own services, writing their own prayers, and inventing rituals that honored women and their experiences. The first time one feminist heard a woman cantor's voice soar through a Jewish synagogue, she wept. “Why haven't women been singing Hebrew for the last five thousand years?” she asked. Upon hearing a sermon given by an ordained female Methodist minister, another feminist felt, for the very first time, that she had come home, that she belonged.
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