In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (25 page)

As August 26 approached, Women’s Strike for Equality Day was billboarded in advance by newspapers and magazines with a lavish generosity that surprised the young movement. It helped that the press had a natural news peg. Prodded by visits from feminist delegations, mayors in several cities took note of the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage with official proclamations. The House of Representatives roused itself to reconsider the dormant Equal Rights Amendment, bottled up in committee for forty-seven years.

For the first time since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, newspapers and magazines seemed to expect women to stand up for their rights. On the Sunday before the Wednesday march,
The New York Times Magazine
ran a full-dress preview of the upcoming events; the
Post
and the
News
followed suit. On the morning of the march, the
Times
printed the parade route and the starting times of coordinated events.

The parade down Fifth Avenue exceeded the organizers’ wildest estimates as
fifty thousand marchers of all ages and occupations
swept past police barriers and claimed the thoroughfare as their own. Traveling into Manhattan by bus and subway with hand-painted placards, disgorging from office buildings and falling into the line on sudden impulse, the women seemed delighted by the newfound sisterhood, the unaccustomed militance, the coordinated release of anger and joy.

Few people were more exhilarated that week than Betty Prashker, the alert editor at Doubleday who had acquired
Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett. Summer was a slow time in publishing, ideally suited for a small printing of an intellectual treatise that bore the cover line “
A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly.” Millett’s rigorous feminist dissection of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, three writers usually admired for their sexual daring, had inspired her editor to reexamine many of her own assumptions, including the way she viewed her career at Doubleday. Prashker had expected
Sexual Politics
to reach a receptive audience, stir debate, and change opinions, but she had not expected a media avalanche.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the
Times
devoted two daily reviews to
Sexual Politics
because, he announced amid accolades, Millett’s treatise on male-female relations was “one of the most troubling books” he had ever read. Lehmann-Haupt had never published a two-day review of any book before. Then
Time
magazine had put Kate on the cover, a stark, glowering portrait in oil by Alice Neel. The cover story reported that
Sexual Politics
was already in its fourth printing, and that Millett was the Chairman Mao of Women’s Lib. The day after the August 26 march, the
Times
listed Kate’s name immediately after Friedan’s in its front-page coverage. Even better, a two-column profile pronounced Katharine Murray Millett the “principal theoretician and new high priestess of the feminist wave.”

Kate, the avant-garde sculptor and reluctant academic, was on a merry-go-round that was
spinning out of control. Her dark hair no longer confined in a braid or the prim bun she’d worn to her Doubleday
meetings, the author of
Sexual Politics
was vomiting before public appearances and gulping bourbon to quiet her nerves. If the media needed one personality to stand for the movement, Kate Millett resolved to fulfill that obligation. If a group at a college somewhere needed a public figure to rally the troops, Kate Millett would get on a plane. By September she began to think she was going crazy. Why did she have to answer the same questions over and over? Didn’t people listen? Had she really told the reporter from
Life
that she wasn’t “into” the dyke trip, that it wasn’t her bag? But the damning words were in print, along with a huge photo of her kissing Fumio, her husband. And who was behind the unsigned broadside that accused her of exploiting lesbians and ripping off the movement’s ideas?

The
neatly typed page, which scornfully called Millett “this woman,” had blasted her for telling the
Times
that she was a bridge between the lesbians and the rest of the movement, and for publishing
Sexual Politics
at $7.95, “which few women can afford.”

“
Rita Mae Brown did this thing anonymously,” says Martha Shelley, “and to my everlasting shame, I didn’t stop her. We were having a meeting of Radicalesbians and we knew Kate was coming. I was there early, setting up the room, when Rita Mae put the unsigned paper on people’s chairs. At that point I was as much a part of my time as other people. While I didn’t do it, I didn’t stop it either. Basically the statement attacked Kate for being a star and selling out to the male press, which of course as soon as Rita Mae could possibly do, she did.”

“
I never placed or wrote an unsigned statement regarding Kate Millett on people’s chairs,” Rita Mae Brown retorts in a blanket denial of Martha Shelley’s assertion. “If I had a disagreement I was up-front about it—to your face or a signed paper. Also, I thought Kate’s work critically important, and still do.”

“
Kate came into the meeting and everyone started discussing the paper,” Ellen Shumsky remembers. “Some people were appalled, some people thought it raised interesting points—you know, opinions ranged as they always did. I felt very protective of Kate, I hope she knows this. I knew she was fragile.”

“
Kate looked liked a whipped puppy,”
Sidney Abbott recalls. “When it was my turn to speak, I defended her strongly. I was sitting near her, and I remember her staring at the floor.”

Things came to an ugly head for Millett in November at Columbia, the school where she had written her doctoral thesis, taught in the English department, and organized the first campus meetings of Women’s Liberation. The venue was a panel discussion on Gay Liberation and sexuality at the MacMillan Theater. “People were wearing little bracelets identifying where they placed themselves—heterosexual, asexual, bisexual, homosexual,” Shumsky recalls.

Kate rushed in late from an out-of-town speaking engagement and took her seat on the stage. Minutes into the panel a voice from the back of the hall rang out, “Bisexuality is a cop-out!”

Sidney Abbott, another panel member, peered into the audience and recognized Ann Sanchez, one of the Radicalesbians.

The persistent voice catcalled, “Are you a lesbian, Kate? What are you afraid of? You say it downtown, but you don’t say it uptown. Why don’t you say it?”

“Yes,” Millett wearily replied. “You think bisexuality is a cop-out, so yes, I’ll say it. I am a lesbian.”

A reporter from
Time
was at her door the next morning. The story ran in December. Millett’s disclosure of her bisexuality, the magazine intoned, avoiding the word “lesbian,” was
“bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause.”

Dolores Alexander and Ivy Bottini of NOW urgently called a “Kate Is Great”
press conference. Artemis March and Ellen Shumsky of the Radicalesbians composed a statement of solidarity that was read to the reporters. Ann Sanchez showed up, horrified at what she had wrought and wanting to make amends. Sally Kempton and I were there. Gloria Steinem firmly held Kate’s hand for a significant photo in the
Times
. Ti-Grace Atkinson broke ranks to thunder that the statement “did not go far enough.” But the show of support did little to calm the fraying nerves of the woman who stood at the center of the media storm. “It was as if,” she said later, “
I was standing on a huge platform and suddenly this wind tore off all my clothes and the multitudes were looking up at me and laughing.”

During the following decades Kate Millett would be honored and celebrated as
the
American feminist in London and Paris and points beyond. She would continue to make and show her avant-garde sculpture, she would experiment with photographs and film, she would employ a personal voice and a stream-of-consciousness style in a half dozen books, and she would rise up and recover from periodic bouts of manic-depression. To her relief, her private life would be private again, except when she chose to reveal it in her autobiographical works.
Sexual Politics
would never be dislodged from its place as feminism’s first book-length bombshell, but the making and breaking of Kate Millett as the movement’s high priestess had run its course in four months.

Unlike many of the founders of Women’s Liberation, Shulamith Firestone was not ambivalent about wanting to be a national figure. Earlier that fall the young woman in a hurry who had helped initiate three signal groups in three years—Chicago’s West Siders, New York Radical Women, and Redstockings—abruptly quit her fourth creation, New York Radical Feminists, after a split over leadership inside her Stanton-Anthony brigade. Anne Koedt left with her.

With her angry departure, Shulie gave up on meetings and organizations, telling everyone within earshot that the book she was about to publish,
The Dialectic of Sex
, would place her in the firmament next to Simone de Beauvoir. She watched the media circus engulfing Kate and champed at the bit, awaiting her turn.

Robin Morgan’s anthology
Sisterhood Is Powerful
was also scheduled for publication that fall. Picking and choosing among the mimeographed outpourings, soliciting new pieces to fill the gaps, Morgan had remained faithful to her left-liberationist perspective. She ignored Dana Densmore’s “On Celibacy” and Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” two of the movement’s most powerful essays, and selected nothing by Firestone, but she added an impressive range of multicultural voices, printing poems and essays by four black women, two lesbians, and one Chicana. The youngest contributors were identified as founders of High School Women’s Liberation.

Dialectic
and
Sisterhood
both reached reviewers and bookstores in October, too soon after Kate’s triumph for another huge round of media attention, but just in time for a counterreaction. Critics who might have been charmed, if not dazzled, by a brash twenty-five-year-old’s assault on Marx, Engels, and Freud recoiled at Firestone’s excesses and overstatements. Shulie was pinned to the wall for asserting that women needed to be freed from childbirth, and for her flat-out challenge, “Men can’t love.” Even worse, she suffered the mortification of
a group review in the
Times
along with her enemy Robin Morgan in a grumpy essay by the normally astute John Leonard, who declared that the feminist tracts lacked the grace and wisdom of
Don’t Fall Off the Mountain
, an autobiography by Shirley MacLaine.

Sisterhood Is Powerful
became the subject of some acrimonious
inner-movement disputes. Kathie Amatniek Sarachild grumbled that Robin had appropriated
her
slogan for the title. Cindy Cisler charged that the book’s bibliography owed a debt to
her
mimeographed list. Her feathers ruffled, Robin tried to tough it out. Cisler circulated an angry letter inside the movement and filed a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Taking her portion of brickbats and plaudits in stride, Robin Morgan soldiered on, returning to poetry and essays, hanging in at
Rat
, redoubling her efforts on the college lecture circuit.

I believe that Shulamith Firestone, given her expectations for her book, must have seen the mixed reception accorded to
The Dialectic of Sex
as a crushing defeat. The inner forces that propelled her forward as a radical visionary may have allowed for nothing less than universal acclaim. What I know is that she disintegrated rapidly, losing her emotional equilibrium and her sense of herself in the world.

Morgan’s anthology and Firestone’s
Dialectic
spoke the unpolished language of the vibrant young movement in ways that Millett’s formal locutions had deliberately avoided. Read, debated, and studied in many editions and foreign translations, all three of these astonishing books from the watershed year of 1970 influenced thinking here and abroad and are acknowledged classics today.