Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (17 page)

According to D.C. Women’s Liberation’s own analysis at the time, “While this was an active period with many political debates, by the end of May [1970] when over 60 women came together for a weekend retreat, it was clear that there were unresolved political problems. There was still no agreed upon political program; many new women felt left out and confused about our directions; many other women felt held back by the large number of new women and the need for consensus to act.”
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Those who were most involved in trying to maintain a central office and communications network felt overburdened and burned out while activist energy continually emerged at the periphery. By the fall of 1970 there were 24 discussion groups and 14 projects in D.C. Women’s Liberation, but litde communication among them except for the weekly meetings of Magic Quilt, which were, by turns, bureaucratic and contentious.
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This was a volatile mix of utopian expectations, high energy, and a
yearning for certitude and consensus in the face of constant argument. Seeking to claim the “radical” or truly “revolutionary” high ground, differences of opinion quickly became polemical absolutes. Fearing rupture, activists continually suppressed differences rather than engage them. With their horizon set on revolution, wanting every act (public or private) to be politically pure, they were unable to grasp the amazing success of their proliferating activities or to create structures capable of sustaining them. Instead, they debated things like how to “smash monogamy” in a desperate search for the “fundamental contradiction” that would hold the key to revolutionary change in their lives and in the world. Beneath the tension and self-scrutiny there was also an erotic current. Thrilling to some, frightening to others, lesbianism provided the political solution for a small group who broke the political stalemate decisively, traumatically, and creatively in the spirit of radical, utopian experimentation.

What was happening in Washington in 1970 and 1971 was of a piece with the rest of the nation. Participants wrote, “The most burning controversial issues of the fall [1970] were racism and relating to the Panthers, Imperialism and what it means to be international, and the smoldering controversy over lesbianism. Generally, we were asking how do each of these relate to building a revolutionary women’s movement.”
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As their own experiments gained in intensity, Washington women’s liberation’s relationship with the left, in particular with the Black Panther Party, deteriorated beyond repair. At two national conferences in the fall of 1970, the Panthers exhibited great disdain for the white women who showed up. In an interesting twist, though, it was at one of those meetings that Washington women came in contact with Radicalesbians from New York and were swept off their feet by their energy, their conviction, and their sheer radicalism.
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Inspired by the actions and writings of “Lavender Menace” and the arrival of Rita Mae Brown, a founder of Radicalesbians in New York, several women in Washington developed the conviction that lesbianism and feminism were one and the same and that women’s survival depended on the possibility of complete autonomy from men. They had found the “fundamental contradiction”: heterosexism. Lesbianism became
the key to overcoming male supremacy and—given that many of them had become lesbians through the women’s movement—they believed it could be a political choice for any woman, in fact the only way a woman could be free. “Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal and economic basis of male supremacy…. The Lesbian’s independence and refusal to support one man undermines the personal power that men exercise over women…. We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.”
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Their evolution wracked the D.C. Women’s Liberation Movement with conflict. Were lesbians appropriate models in the child care center? Could male children be allowed to come with their mothers to “all-women” events? At a spring 1971 retreat to assess the state of the movement and define directions, one group consciously and deliberately forced the discussion of lesbianism into every session, demanding that all women who were serious about feminism make the choice to become lesbian or at least talk about it.
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This group, who all lived together, later became known as the Furies.

The 12 women who named themselves the Furies in the manner of many revolutionary groups set out to erase the boundaries between public and private by eliminating the latter. If communist states had set out to create a “new socialist man,” the Furies were going to create a “new woman.” Founding member Rita Mae Brown articulated the vision this way:

We must move out of our old living patterns and into new ones. Those of us who believe in this concept must begin to build collectives where women are committed to other women on all levels—emotional, physical, economical and political. Monogamy can be cast aside; no one will ‘belong’ to another. Instead of being shut off from each other in overpriced cubicles we can be together, sharing the shit work as well as the highs. Together we can go through the pain and liberation of curing the diseases we have all contracted in the world of male dominance, imperialism and death. Women-identified collectives are nothing less than the next step towards a women’s revolution.
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They set out to cure these diseases with searing criticism and self-criticism sessions, a well-known practice on the left, in which they challenged each other’s political imperfections, pointing out instances of racism, classism, heterosexism, and ageism. Charlotte Bunch remembers it as a time when “we were obsessed” with creating an identity. As a consummate coalition builder, she found this detour into “the most extreme thing I ever did” a kind of liberation, an “exhilaration of just being bad” by taking one issue to its logical extreme and not worrying about bringing others along. Having splintered the women’s movement in D.C, however, they burned themselves out in about a year and a half. Soon they realized they were talking only to themselves. “It was great for about a year or so. Then, ‘so what?’ What do we do strategically, politically?”
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The extreme form of separatism the Furies tried to live out proved a dead end. Politically, at least, there was nowhere else to go because the rest of the world did not follow them. Their experiment, however, especially, the fiercely radical and uncompromising thinking in their newspaper, which began publication in January 1972, pushed lesbian feminism to the forefront of radical feminist thought, where it has remained, though in far different forms.

T
HOUGH THE
F
URIES
represent an extreme example, the women’s movement as a whole was prone to schism from the start. When Charlotte Bunch said that the Furies did not know any other way to do what they set out to do, her criticism was of the “all-or-nothing” dynamic not only within women’s liberation but also within the remnants of the New Left that entertained grandiose fantasies of revolution.
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Such movements (which sociologists have called “totalizing”) took over virtually every aspect of one’s life: relationships, recreation, and work as well as politics. “Living and breathing” the movement was a source of great exhilaration, but it was also draining and impossible to sustain, and it raised apocalyptic expectations that could not be realized. The rhetoric about “revolution” was not just about making history but about the
end
of history in which the movement becomes the entire society. Change (i.e., history) would become irrelevant because people would finally have gotten it “right” and understand the “truth.”

The early struggles about the definition of the emerging movement were themselves framed by a left-wing form of argumentation filled with invective and charges of reformism and selling out. For example, a widely read paper by Beverly Jones and Judith Brown in Gainesville, Florida, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement,” criticized a 1967 manifesto from the SDS women’s caucus as “soft-minded NAACP logic and an Urban League list of grievances and demands.” With such adjectives as “ludicrous” and “pathetic,” the authors accused women in SDS of “mimicking dominant groups’ rhetoric on power politics” and trying to advance personally in a male power structure. Against this background, they made their case for an autonomous radical women’s liberation movement.
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Of course, they were responding to similar rhetoric from leftists (both male and female), who freely accused women who chose to organize separately as lacking “revolutionary potential.”
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Marge Piercy reflected on her years in the Left when men insisted that “… for a woman to think of herself is bourgeois subjectivity and inherently counterrevolutionary”: “I once thought that all that was necessary was to make men understand that they would achieve their own liberation, too, by joining the struggle for women’s liberation: but it has come to me to seem a little too much like the chickens trying to educate the farmer.”
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In Boston, Cell 16, under the leadership of Roxanne Dunbar, advocated a strictly separate radical women’s movement. In the first issue of their journal, Maureen Davidica called for “radical women to dissociate themselves from male-oriented, male-dominated radical organizations and join together in Women’s Liberation groups.” Not only had women played secondary roles in radical movements and achieved their status by association with radical men, but Davidica also maintained the radical movement was “irrelevant” to women. “War is male. The draft is male. Power structures are all male.”
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Radical women in Boston who disagreed with Cell 16 founded Bread and Roses with the hope of building an autonomous women’s movement that could remain connected to the issues and concerns of the Left.
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In its first, formative year, women’s liberation meetings roiled with such debates. The Lake Villa Conference in November 1968 was the
first effort to bring together a national gathering of women’s liberation, and at least some of the planners had hoped that there might emerge from it an embryonic national organization. Reports from that conference, however, were extremely polarized. At a series of “body feminism” workshops on sexuality and lifestyle, participants were thrilled by the sense that they were pushing the edges of what they knew or thought possible. Together they explored what a feminist lifestyle might be like and how they felt about their bodies. But Charlotte Bunch, who chaired the final plenary, says it took everything in her to keep people from killing each other (metaphorically speaking) in a meeting that reenacted the worst of New Left-style debate. Women from New York arrived with a plan for consciousness-raising that became foundational for practices around the country, but they also believed that they had the
TRUTH
and that any deviation from their tightly defined way of conducting a consciousness-raising session constituted an unbearable dilution and loss of meaning. When others appropriated and improvised on their theme, they reacted fiercely. Little wonder that no one left that conference inspired to try to build a national movement organization.
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Most cities managed to avoid the sectarianism that characterized the New York women’s movement, where one group after another broke off to pursue its own utopian vision. New York was not so much different in kind, however, as in intensity. Everywhere, groups formed, grew large and unwieldy, divided, and battled over ownership of the movement. Characterized by an enormous intellectual creativity, the New York Radical Feminists (the initiating group and the one that invented consciousness-raising as a technique for building theory) also drew in a number of leaders with impressive egos and ambition. Some of them, like Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Anne Koedt, and Susan Brownmiller, had roots in the civil rights and antiwar movements, but their connections with New Left organizations were relatively tenuous as the women’s movement began. They were primarily intellectuals, not organizers, and they believed deeply in the power of ideas. Several of them wrote classic works—obviously at white heat when you realize it was late 1967 or early 1968 when they first started to meet: Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex
(1970), Kate Millet’s
Sexual Politics
(1970), Robin Morgan’s edited collection
Sisterhood Is Powerful
(1970), and Susan Brownmiller’s
Against Our Will
(1975). New Yorkers also had to deal with a part of the left that was notoriously schismatic, flamboyant, doctrinaire, and male-dominated. They led the effort to define “radical feminism” as a movement to eradicate sex roles and to criticize those who continued to have other social movement connections as hopelessly “politico.”
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The so-called politico-feminist split raged on ideological issues but frequently rested more on differences of emphasis, tone, and style. Often these issues boiled down to a willingness or unwillingness to work with men under any circumstances. Semantic games about who is the enemy (men or “the system”) masked these other differences. In part it was an argument about priorities, but in the polarized version of the debate, “feminists” cast everyone with any attachment to other movement issues as traitors to feminism and willing subordinates of men; “politicos” (who for the most part did not accept that label) accused feminists of being reformist and bourgeois. Each charged the other with failing to be truly radical and betraying the “real” revolution. In most cities there were debates but not a split. For 3 years before the Furies, in Washington, D.C., women’s liberation “the usual D.C. response to these debates was to discuss the issues, to agree we had to combine some of both sides (i.e. we agreed with feminists that women should organize separately and that men were individually oppressive to women and we agreed with ‘movement’ women that the real cause of our oppression was the system, not the men who were agents of it, and that while organizing separately we still had to address ourselves to other than women’s issues as well), and to breathe a sigh of relief that we in D.C. were not so factionalized.”
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