In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (10 page)

A raucous antiwar rally in Washington early in January 1969 gave the feminists their final proof that the left was not ready to embrace Women’s Liberation. The unhappy target on this occasion was none other than Marilyn Webb, the woman who had not wavered in her belief that everyone could work together.

MOBE, the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, had selected the weekend of Richard Nixon’s swearing-in to hold a
Counter-Inaugural rally. Through her impeccable SDS connections, Marilyn had been given the go-ahead to speak on behalf of Women’s Liberation. Generously she agreed to share her time with Shulie Firestone, so that New York’s stronger feminist position would get an airing.

A newcomer to New York Radical Women named Margaret Polatnik had come up with a wild idea on the drive home from Lake Villa. If the MOBE men were going to burn their draft cards after the rally, as they usually did, the women should burn their voter registration cards to dramatize that electoral politics had failed to secure equal rights.

“Everybody thought that was a great idea,” remembers Barbara Mehrhof. “So we decided to work on this action of giving back the vote. We met a lot at Irene Peslikis’s loft, making sashes that said ‘Feminism Lives.’ One night someone got the bright idea to call Alice Paul, the last living suffragist in Washington, to ask her to join us.”

Octogenarian Alice Paul had led the radical wing of the suffrage movement during the Wilson era. She had chained herself to the White House gate, imperiled her health with a hunger strike, and gone to jail for the vote. “She told us,” says Mehrhof, “she did not think giving it back was a good idea.”

Kathie Amatniek Sarachild did not think giving back the vote was a good idea, either. Neither did Anne Koedt. And when WITCH heard
that New York Radical Women was going to raise the slogan “Feminism Lives” at the Counter-Inaugural rally, they were enraged. They threatened to wear sashes with the counter-slogan “Feminism Sucks.”

“Thank God, or Goddess, we did not do that,” says Robin Morgan, “But we came
this
close. I still thought of ‘feminism’ as a dirty word.”

The day before the Counter-Inaugural, women from New York, Boston, and D.C. met at Marilyn Webb’s apartment to review Marilyn’s and Shulie’s speeches. “The general feeling,” says Webb, “was that mine wasn’t militant enough and that Shulie shouldn’t attack movement men at a public rally.”

“Marilyn was very good about taking suggestions,” says Rosalyn Baxandall, “but Shulie said we could take it or leave it.”

“Shulie said her speech was like a poem, and if she couldn’t read it the way she wrote it, she’d leave the movement,” Webb recalls.

“After the meeting, Shulie and I went to visit Alice Paul,” says Barbara Mehrhof. “We still wanted her to join us. She lived in a very old house near the Capitol with a plaque on the front,
THE WOMAN
’
S PARTY
. The first thing she asked was, ‘Are you the women who called from New York?’ We said, ‘Oh, no, absolutely no.’ So she let us in. I remember the house was dark, and the long dining table was stacked with leaflets for the Equal Rights Amendment. She took us upstairs and there were all these paintings, portraits of women, on the wall. She asked if we recognized the women, these nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century suffragists, and we didn’t. She was a little contemptuous of us; she didn’t see us as the new generation ready to carry the torch. I think she knew that we were the women who’d called from New York.”

It was drizzling on Sunday, so the Counter-Inaugural rally was held in a large circus tent on the Washington Mall. “I believe,” says Marilyn Webb, “that twenty thousand people were there.”

“Dave Dellinger announced the speakers,” relates Mehrhof, “the speaker for the Chicago Seven, the speaker for the Fort Hood Three, the speaker for the veterans, the speaker for the blacks. And he forgot us. Somebody called up, ‘What about the women?’ and he said, ‘Oh, yes, we’re gonna hear from the girls.’ ”

“Women, you schmuck,” shouted Ellen Willis.

The grounds were muddy and the rickety platform was swaying by the time the final speakers, Marilyn and Shulie, were called. The women’s plans to burn real voter cards had been scuttled, so Sheila Cronan and a few others carried big mock-ups instead. Down below, the crowd had grown restive.

“Dellinger set us up very badly,” says Webb. “He said, ‘Now the women are going to speak and they’ve asked all the men to clear the stage.’ I don’t know where that came from. Not in my memory did anyone ask that. There was this paralyzed GI in a wheelchair—they had to lift up his wheelchair and hand him down from the stage. Shulie was standing next to me, telling me to hurry. They’re handing down the GI in the wheelchair, and I’m trying not to read the speech but just say it.”

“Women must take control of our bodies,” Webb chanted into the mike. “We must define our own issues. We will take the struggle to our homes, to our jobs, to the streets.”

And then it happened. From somewhere in the restive crowd came a yell.

“Take her off the stage and fuck her!”

“Take off your clothes!”

“I’ll go to the streets with you. Down an alley!”

“The men went completely nuts,” recalls Ellen Willis. “From our point of view this was the mild, conciliatory speech. And they were going berserk.”

“Screams and fistfights were breaking out in front of me. Screams and fistfights,” says Webb. “Men were hitting each other. Beating each other up. And Dave was getting hysterical, like a riot was going to happen.”

“Dellinger was trying to get us to leave,” Willis remembers. “He was saying, ‘Cut it short for your own good.’ ”

“Shulie was afraid she wouldn’t get to speak,” says Webb. “She grabbed the microphone before I had finished.”

“By that time,” says Mehrhof, “you could barely hear her. The rally was over.”

That evening the women were holding a postmortem at Marilyn Webb’s apartment when the telephone rang. A voice Marilyn believed
might have been Cathy Wilkerson’s, from SDS, bellowed, “If you ever give a speech like that again, we’ll beat the shit out of you.” Then the connection went dead.

For Marilyn Webb, who’d worked so hard for a left coalition, “that was the moment when it all broke up. That was the moment when I suddenly knew that Women’s Liberation was going to be an independent movement.”

WHICH WAY IS UTOPIA?

Visionaries by nature are difficult, impatient people. In 1968 no one besides Betty Friedan and a handful of radicals could imagine a mass feminist movement. One year later the prophetic author was already complaining that people, issues, and events were spinning out of control. So it goes when passions are released, the overlooked find their voices, and new ideas float into the culture.

Collectively and individually, the movement was mining new thoughts, and finding a receptive audience, on a daily basis. As ideas built on ideas in voluble profusion, an avalanche of poetry, essays, and theoretical papers poured from the typewriters of the young activists in Women’s Liberation who suddenly and vividly had something important to say. The restless founders of Women’s Liberation reckoned it might take five years to transform the future. In the meantime their movement was going to be the perfect social model of things to come. Unaccustomed to working together, awash in ideological disagreements, and sharing the New Left’s distrust of leaders, they gravitated to small, nonhierarchical groups where, in principle, everyone got a chance to speak and be heard. The small groups, however, did not turn out to be leaderless. Strong personalities with forceful opinions inevitably emerged.

Few of the emerging leaders cared to admit that they were, or wanted to be, in command, even as they pushed for the ascendance of their beliefs or were singled out for media attention. Others protested
that if everyone could not be equal inside the movement, how could the movement transform the world? Resentments with some logical basis were compounded by the competitive emotions of jealousy and envy.

Group pressure becomes a powerful weapon inside movements for social change as people fall under the obligation to surrender a portion of their independence in order to work toward common goals. During the late sixties and early seventies, the group pressure exerted inside the Women’s Liberation Movement was particularly intense. The Cultural Revolution raging in China had captured the imagination of many American radicals. In addition, the battle against male privilege had made the Liberationists wary of advantage, success, and achievement, especially in the women they’d bravely begun to call their sisters. Those at the bottom of the undefined hierarchy invented a special vocabulary of accusations to put a brake on standout figures in the name of a utopian collective ideal.

Getting your name in the paper was “personal publicity” that made you a a “star,” guilty of the sin of personal ambition. Verbal fluency and confidence were defined as the “advantages of class privilege.” Writing for a mainstream publication, even putting your full name on your work in a countercultural paper, was castigated as “ripping off the movement’s ideas.” Often an activist had only to distinguish herself by a talent for public speaking or a forceful ability to get things done in order to be tagged a “star,” an “elitist,” or a “male-identified woman.”

Flo Kennedy defined the phenomenon of ganging up on an individual as “horizontal hostility,” misdirected anger that rightly should be focused on the external causes of oppression. As a frequent target of collective antagonism, I privately dubbed it “the herd mentality.” Most people simply called it “trashing.” In Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, and elsewhere, trashing had a pernicious effect on the movement’s inner life.

Jo Freeman was the odd woman out in Chicago’s West Side group. It perplexed her to see a friendship network develop among the other
West Siders from which she was excluded. Wounded by a string of machinations—meetings she wasn’t told about where important votes were taken, a coup that took
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
out of her hands—Freeman quit the Chicago movement late in 1969, although she continued to write theoretical pieces under her movement name of Joreen. In two critical essays, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and “Trashing,” she tried to pin down the unexpressed group dynamic that had worked against her.

Naomi Weisstein believed that Jo’s isolation had been brought about by her blunt, peremptory manner and her tendency to sulk when things didn’t go her way. Yet Naomi, agreeable and well liked, was to learn that even she was not exempt from group criticism and pressure.

Urged on by Vivian Rothstein, the West Siders had organized the
Chicago Women’s Liberation Union as a citywide umbrella group to promote their socialist/feminist/anti-imperialist ideals. Their tiny office on West Cermak gave way to larger space on West Belmont. Jane, the underground abortion service with the codelike name, was affiliated with the Union but avoided its hot and heavy ideological debates. A graphics collective produced some of the era’s most striking, sought-after posters, none signed. (
WOMEN WORKING
, a twist on the ubiquitous construction-site sign, still hangs in my office.)

Naomi and Vivian set up a hugely popular speakers’ bureau to handle an average of twenty-five requests a month from colleges and community groups in the Midwest. To demonstrate the movement’s leaderless nature and to encourage the confidence of timid, inexperienced women, the bureau sent out its speakers in pairs. Naomi, a dynamic speaker unafraid of crowds,
conducted training sessions for the neophytes with sample scenarios, videotapes, and group critiques.

Ellen DuBois, the historian, who joined the Union while a graduate student at Northwestern, remembers the egalitarian policy of the speakers’ bureau as a crucial part of her feminist empowerment when she was “just a student, a kid.” Naomi Weisstein, one of its principal architects, looks back on the policy with deep regret. Because Naomi far and away overshadowed the less adept speakers, the bureau asked
her to refrain from public speaking altogether. She began to feel that the movement that had given her her voice was now taking it away.

“
The motivation was not to stop Naomi,” Ellen DuBois insists. “The whole point of the speakers’ bureau was to teach others how to do it.”

A zealous believer in the collective process, Naomi bowed to the group’s will.

“We were all desperately ambitions,” Weisstein reflects, “but people didn’t want to recognize that there were enormous differences in individual talents, abilities, gifts. I spent years trying to appease other women in the movement, trying to be less powerful, so they wouldn’t hate me.”