In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (17 page)

Two dozen “Lavender Menace” T-shirts had been dyed and silk-screened at Ellen Broidy’s apartment. Even counting the Vassar students who were coming down for the action (Rita Mae had read her poetry at Vassar to great effect), the Radicalesbians did not expect to exceed that number. Ellen Shumsky got a shirt with scrunched-up letters. Artemis March, arriving with her cartons of “The Woman-Identified Woman,” got stuck with a shirt that came out bright fuchsia. On Friday morning Michela Griffo and Jessica Falstein talked their way into the school, claiming they had been sent by NOW to check out the auditorium’s light board.

Four hundred women were in their seats for the Friday night opening session, listening to the welcoming address, when Michela, hiding backstage, shouted, “Jessie, the lights!”

The auditorium was plunged into darkness. When the lights went
back on, seventeen Lavender Menaces were on the stage and Martha Shelley had grabbed the microphone. Posters lined the sides of the hall:
TAKE A LESBIAN TO LUNCH
.
LAVENDER JANE LOVES YOU
.
WE ARE ALL LESBIANS
.
LESBIANISM
IS
A WOMEN
’
S LIBERATION PLOT
.

Jennifer Woodul, one of the Vassar students, watched in amazement as women unknown to the planners climbed onto the stage to join them. Others, some very well known to them, simply got up from their seats and formed an orderly line down below at the open mike. Sidney Abbott watched Ivy Bottini of NOW slowly made her way down the aisle. Then she spotted Kate Millett.

“I know what this oppression is all about—I’ve lived it,” Millett said softly when it was her turn at the microphone.

The Lavender Menaces held forth for two hours that night, and conducted consciousness-raising workshops during the next two days of the conference. Artemis March sold out her supply of “The Woman-Identified Woman.” A bunch of women, straight and gay, caroused happily on Saturday night at an all-women’s dance at the Church of the Holy Apostles. Lesbians would be silent no longer in the women’s movement.

I didn’t get to the Congress until Sunday because I was working. When I walked in, looking for a warm bath of sisterhood, Susan Frankel from West Village–One, my consciousness-raising group, greeted me with a nervous warning, “They’re organizing a petition against you.”

“They” were a handful of women who’d run a Saturday workshop on class privilege and oppression. Marshaling their assorted frustrations, they’d come up with a resolution condemning Lucy Komisar and me for “seeking to rise to fame on the back of the women’s movement by publishing articles in the establishment press.”

Lucy and I were movement women. Our accusers knew us from scores of meetings. But now they couldn’t see past our bylines. By no stretch of the imagination can a journalist’s byline be construed as “fame,” yet nothing threatened a particular kind of movement woman more than seeing another movement woman’s name in print. The previous month a radical floater named Verna Tomasson had said of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
action in
Rat
, “
Those of us who are writers and struggling just like Brownmiller et al. for recognition were especially resentful of being used by other writers to further their professional aspirations.” She had followed her rebuke with a private letter to me complaining that an essay of hers had been rejected by
Look
. Apparently my ability to navigate in mainstream waters made me the enemy, while her motivations in seeking publication, of course, had been pure.

Lucy and I weren’t the only reporters to have attracted resentment. Marlene Sanders of ABC had been sabotaged at the First Congress in November, but I hadn’t heard Marlene’s story and I couldn’t find Lucy. My consciousness-raising group advised me to lie low when the damning resolution was read to the plenary session. I thought about the show trials in Eastern Europe when loyal Communists remained mute because they believed the people’s revolution was more important than individual rights. I thought about the mass hysteria going on in China.

My accusers, some of whom I recognized, were trembling as they read their resolution aloud. When they got to the part about me, I leaped up and bellowed, “That’s
my
name you’re using,
sisterrrrs
!”

Necks craned. The Class Workshop women looked away and continued reading, arm in arm.

After they finished, discussion on the resolution was brief. Rita Mae Brown spoke for it. Eyes flashing, she skipped down the aisle, rapping about growing up in the South as poor white trash. For her finale she sassed, “We don’t need spokespeople and we don’t need leaders. All women can speak, and all women can write.”

Her rhetoric brought down the house. Rita Mae, at twenty-five, was not yet a published author.
Rubyfruit Jungle
appeared in a feminist press edition in 1973 and became a mainstream paperback bestseller in 1977, proving that Rita Mae Brown, for one, could write up a storm. I believe she had her own potential in mind at the Congress when she made her demagogic pitch.

When the applause for Rita Mae died down, the NOW women rose in my defense. They were appalled by the Class Workshop’s tactics, and their genuine outrage carried the day. The resolution was defeated by a comfortable margin.

Minutes later the Lavender Menace took over the stage again for a brief reprise of their Friday night action. The lesbian show of solidarity was so good-natured that the earlier ugliness was forgotten.

But not by me. I felt stamped on, repudiated, rejected by a movement I cared about more than anything else. When I got home that evening, Kevin handed me a Kurt Vonnegut
short story, the one about an equalized society in which graceful people are burdened by leg weights and smart people wear electronic contraptions that scramble their brains every twenty seconds. Vonnegut’s story was a tonic, though my misery lingered for months.

I was to watch the radical women’s movement turn on its own people many times during the next decade. Eventually I grew fairly philosophic about it. A certain amount of cannibalizing seems to go with the territory whenever activists gather to promote social change. You need nerves of steel to survive in a radical movement, and you have to believe that the Sturm und Drang are worth it.

The entire country seemed to be in a state of upheaval. On May 4, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed by National Guardsmen trying to quell a campus protest against the extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The same day, Jane
Alpert jumped bail and went underground, hoping to connect with Weatherman. On the morning of her departure Robin Morgan supplied her with a thousand dollars in cash and a satchel filled with makeup and hair bleach to create a disguise.
Rat
’s next cover bore a sketch of a dripping faucet and a handwritten scrawl, “Jane, you left the water running.”

Robin and Jane, torn between the new voice of feminism and the siren call of the radical left, would need another two years before they renounced armed struggle.

Robin’s anthology,
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, was in galleys at Random House. She squeezed her last-minute “Letter to a Sister Underground” into her introduction, dropping “Goodbye to All That,” her passionate critique of the male left, for Marge Piercy’s more tempered essay on a similar theme. Morrow had acquired Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex
, which the twenty-five-year-old author was speeding
to finish. Betty Prashker of Doubleday was oiling the gears for Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
, believing she had an important book on her hands but not one that was likely to hit the charts. Everyone in book publishing seemed to be of the opinion that the women’s rebellion, whatever it was, would last six months.

“ABORTION IS A WOMAN’S RIGHT”

Women’s liberation found its first unifying issue in
abortion, and abortion became the first feminist cause to sweep the nation. From 1969 to 1972 an imaginative campaign—rash, impudent, decentralized, yet interconnected by ideas and passion—successfully altered public perception to such an extent that a “crime,” as the law defined it, became a “woman’s constitutional right.” Its capstone was
Roe v. Wade
, the monumental Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973.

Ninety sixty-nine was a precisely defined moment, the year when women of childbearing age transformed a quiet back-burner issue promoted by a handful of stray radicals and moderate reformers into a popular struggle for reproductive freedom. The women had been dubbed the Pill Generation, and indeed, earlier in the decade many had heeded the persuasive call of the sexual revolution, only to be disenchanted. Exploring their sexual freedom with an uncertain knowledge of birth control and a haphazard employment of its techniques, they had discovered the hard way that unwanted pregancy was still a woman’s problem.

Unlike the isolated women of their parents’ generation who sought individual solutions in furtive silence, they would bring a direct personal voice to the abortion debate. They would reveal their own stories, first to one another and then to the public. They would borrow
the confrontational tactics of the radical-left movements from which they had come. They would break the law, and they would raise a ruckus to change the law, devising original strategies to fight for abortion through the courts.

Before the new militance erupted, abortion was a criminal act in every state unless a committee of hospital physicians concurred that the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life. Three states had extended the largesse to women whose health was threatened—broadly interpreted, health could mean mental health, if two psychiatrists so attested—but no more than ten thousand “therapeutic” abortions were performed in a year. To the general public, abortion was the stuff of lurid tabloid headlines that underscored its peril: A young woman’s body found in a motel room; she’d bled to death from a botched operation. A practitioner and a hapless patient entrapped in a midnight raid on what the police dubbed “an abortion mill.” There were shining exceptions like the legendary Dr. Robert Spencer of Ashland, Pennsylvania, who ran a spotless clinic and charged no more than one hundred dollars, but venality ran high in an unlawful business in which practitioners were raided and jailed and patients were pressured to be informers. Money was not the only commodity exchanged on the underground circuit; some abortionists extorted sexual payment for their secret work.

One million women braved the unknown every year, relying on a grapevine of whispers and misinformation to terminate their pregnancies by illegal means. Those lucky enough to secure the address of a good practitioner, and to scrounge up the requisite cash, packed a small bag and headed for San Juan, Havana, London, or Tokyo, or perhaps across town. The less fortunate risked septic infection and a punctured uterus from back-alley amateurs willing to poke their insides with a catheter, a knitting needle, or the unfurled end of a wire hanger. Still others damaged their health with lye or Lysol, the last-ditch home treatments.
Life
magazine estimated in 1967 that “five thousand of the desperate” died every year.

The writer
Jane O’Reilly’s story gives the lie to the too simple myth that “rich” women could always find a connection. In the summer of 1957, she was a Catholic debutante from St. Louis who was
looking forward to her senior year at Radcliffe when she discovered she was pregnant. Dr. Spencer was in one of his periodic shutdowns, Cuba sounded unreal and scary, and the trusted family doctor to whom she appealed insisted that she tell her parents. A classmate finally came up with an address in New York and lent her the six hundred dollars. O’Reilly recalls that a man with a mustache placed her on a kitchen table, prodded her with a knitting needle, and gave her some pills.

A month later she fainted in her college dormitory shower. Whatever had been done to her in New York, Jane O’Reilly was still pregnant. Moving out of the dorm, she joked about putting on weight and took her finals shrouded in a raincoat. The next day she gave birth at a Salvation Army hospital and signed away her baby daughter. For the next thirty-four years on every May 10, her daughter’s birthday, O’Reilly plunged into a sobbing depression. In 1991 the pain partially lifted when her daughter found her through an adoption search.