In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (33 page)

Earlier in the summer, the July 23, 1970
Babe
had run an unsigned, tape-recorded account, “Anatomy of a Rape,” by a young artist in Marin. Buoyed by the experience of going to her first women’s meeting in Berkeley, the artist had waved off suggestions that she stay overnight, preferring to hitchhike home. Her first ride left her on Van Ness. Almost immediately two Vietnam vets in a truck pulled up. “Okay, now, we’re not gonna hurt ya, we’re just gonna take ya out and
ball ya,” one said as they approached the bridge. A couple of hours later they dumped her at a bus station.

“Two of them! You must’ve been nice and slippery,” her boyfriend teased in a lame attempt to cope with her trauma when she got home.

“That was the line that really got to us,” recalls Laura X, who taped the story for the
Babe
collective.

It Ain’t Me Babe
surrounded the account of the evening with two ex-hortive essays, “Disarm Rapists” and “Fight!”

The September 4
Babe
that Diane brought to our meeting carried a second rape story, news of a stunning retaliatory action. “Jack the Raper” was a report by a women’s group calling itself, with all due bravado, the Contra Costa Anti-Rape Squad #14. A go-go dancer hired to perform at a bachelor party in Pinole had been roughed up by the groom’s drunken friends, dragged into a bedroom, and raped by the sodden guest of honor. In a free-for-all, her gown was ripped, she was doused with wine, and her seventy-five-dollar dancing fee was stolen from her purse before her friends came to the rescue. The dancer, who considered herself a tough professional, filed a complaint that night with the Pinole police, but the district attorney in Richmond declined to prosecute under the boys-will-be-boys logic. He said it was the men’s word against hers, even though a hospital test showed evidence of semen.

On the day of the wedding reception at the Stockton Inn, the Contra Costa Anti-Rape Squad plastered the guests’ cars in the parking lot with a leaflet headlined “How Jack and His Friends Play When ‘Their’ Women Aren’t Around.” The flyer named names, including the groom’s friends and the dismissive D.A., and ended with the words “Sounds ugly? Well, it is. It goes on all the time, one way or another. These pigs know the law won’t touch them, they can always insist the woman is a liar or slut or crazy. We women are learning to see through that nonsense. We hope you learn to, too.”

After we read this story in
It Ain’t Me Babe
, Diane announced that rape was an important new feminist issue and proposed that we should begin to explore it through consciousness-raising. I wasn’t convinced. The prevailing opinion, which I’d absorbed without question, held that rape was a murky, deviant crime any alert woman could avoid. Rape
was political, I argued, only when it was “rape” in quotation marks, as the Old Left wrote it—the false accusation of white women against black men that lay behind some accounts of southern lynching. In fact, three years earlier I’d done a story about capital punishment and a Maryland interracial rape case for
Esquire
with no demonstrable sympathy for the victim. Our group had been analyzing femininity for months, and I was finding the revelations very helpful. I did not want to switch gears and talk about rape.

The others definitely wanted to talk about rape. Sara Pines quietly offered to begin the process. Sara was married, a professional psychologist, and the calmest woman in our group. Fifteen years earlier, she told us, she had been hitchhiking back to her school after a weekend at Harvard. The young man who picked her up asked where she was headed, and then said he wanted to make a detour to pick up a friend.

“Pick up a friend?”
I interrupted. “And warning bells didn’t go off your head?”

“No, he seemed okay.”

“In my hitchhiking days I’d never ride in a car with more than one man! I’d have gotten out right then.” “I trusted him,” she said simply.

Sara was raped in a deserted park by the man and three of his buddies. “I was told to be quiet or I’d be buried there and no one would know,” she recounted. The worst part of her ordeal had been at the police station. “Aww, who’d want to rape you?” an officer teased. Another said she was too calm to be credible—in his view she should have been crying hysterically. After several postponements there was a trial that Sara did not attend, and the men were given suspended sentences.

Listening to Sara Pines was the moment when I started to change my mind about rape. She was a trusting person; I wasn’t. I had to accept that not every woman viewed the world with my suspicions and caution. After Susan Frankel and Lucille Iverson finished their accounts of lucky escapes from threatening situations, I proposed that New York Radical Feminists hold a conference on rape with research papers and panel discussions. The others argued that personal testimony
in a public speak-out was the proper way to begin, the way abortion had been politicized by Redstockings the previous year. I doubted that we could find enough women willing to go public. Once again I was wrong.

West Village–One presented the two plans at the next general meeting of New York Radical Feminists. The bold idea of summoning women to gather in public to talk about rape, as authorities, to put an unashamed human face on a crime that was shrouded in rumors and whispers, or smarmy jokes, had never been attempted before, anywhere. In their wisdom the affiliated consciousness-raising groups of New York Radical Feminists voted to hold a speak-out on rape at the earliest possible opportunity, to be followed by a conference on rape three months later. We chose as our slogan “Rape Is a Political Crime Against Women.”

The speak-out took place on Sunday afternoon, January 24, 1971, at St. Clement’s, a tiny Episcopal church on West Forty-sixth Street that doubled as a home for off-off-Broadway productions. A one-page flyer, in Spanish on the reverse side, had been circulated to women’s groups, inviting everyone who’d had an experience with rape to testify. Admission was free, cameras and tape recorders were banned, and men could attend only if they paid two dollars and were accompanied by a woman. My job was to take tickets at the door. I collected thirty dollars, which meant that fifteen men actually showed up. Or maybe it was sixty dollars and thirty men. I do know that more than three hundred women crammed into the small circular arena, arriving early to fill the seats above a multilevel stage set designed for a less memorable drama. Latecomers hugged the walls, hunkered down in the aisles. Somebody commandeered a wheelchair, a production prop, for the last seat in the house. The ten women who were prepared to testify arranged themselves as best they could on the dimly lit stage.

In the hush, they began speaking. I took notes, which I’ve saved to this day, but the drama was too intense for pen and paper. Sara Pines recounted her hitchhiking story. Alix Kates Shulman described the childhood ritual of “pantsing,” getting caught by a gang of boys as she tried to run past a vacant lot near her home in Cleveland. (The incident
appears in
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
, published the following year.)

A dark-haired woman told of her date with a medical resident, arranged with great expectations by his aunt and her mother. The future gynecologist assaulted her in his room at the hospital. “I was so hung up on propriety,” she confessed, “that I went to dinner with him afterward as if nothing had happened. I didn’t tell my mother, much less the police.”

Another woman spoke of rape by her therapist—“Not a real doctor, a lay analyst,” she said amid groans—who continued to charge her for the weekly sessions. “When I took sleeping pills to kill myself, he dropped me,” she finished.

A gray-haired woman in her sixties told of being assaulted in her apartment after opening her door to a man who said he was delivering a package.

A modern dancer graphically described a street encounter that happened one evening as she returned home after a class. “He slammed me against the wall and clawed at my leotard. The leotard kept snapping back. This seemed to enrage him. Then I kicked him in his precious groin. The people on the street didn’t help, and the police talked me out of pressing charges. They said, ‘You did enough to the poor guy.’ ”

The kaleidoscope of revelations continued:

“I got into the elevator with him because he was wearing white shoes. In my prejudice I thought it’s all right, he’s a doctor.”

“It’s funny what goes through your head. I was thinking,
Please God, don’t let him rip my new dress which I just charged and haven’t paid for.
”

“Those teenagers weren’t sexually attracted to me. They wanted to degrade me in an asexual way. This was all about power.”

“I was afraid he’d kill me. The fear of murder was worse than the rape.”

In all, thirty women were inspired to speak out that afternoon, and their words were to reverberate far beyond the confines of the tiny church. So many varieties and aspects of rape had been revealed at St. Clement’s. Sexual assault was a crime of power that crossed all lines of age, race, and class; women feared they would be killed; resistance was
possible; the police were dismissive. All of us were reeling from the new knowledge.

Carolyn Flaherty of our Brooklyn Brigade #5 had done a great job with publicity, corralling Gail Sheehy of
New York
magazine and a husband-and-wife reporting team from
Vogue
.
Sheehy’s piece, which augmented the speak-out accounts with statistics and interviews with law enforcement people, was superb.

I’d been too much of an insider even to think of writing something.

Plans for our next event, the Conference on Rape, took over the general meetings of New York Radical Feminists. Lilia Melani, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, led the steering committee with Mary Ann Manhart, an opera student. (Melani went on to organize the CUNY Women’s Coalition in its successful discrimination suit against the city university system a few years later.)

I freely offered my advice on how the rape conference should be organized. We needed workshops on the psychology of the rapist, the psychology of the victim, rape and the law, rape in marriage, rape and sexuality, rape and the cultural climate, rape during wartime (we could discuss Vietnam). The more I talked, the more I saw that workshops by themselves could not produce the comprehensive research that an analysis of rape deserved and required. I realized that I’d begun outlining chapters for a book in my head, a book I very much wanted to write.

Joan Mathews from West Village–Four proposed that we invite Florence Rush from Older Women’s Liberation to be a speaker. Florence, a social worker in Westchester, could give a paper on the sexual abuse of children. Child molestation and incest? Once again I was slow on the uptake.

Minda Bikman and I were on Eighth Street, distributing flyers for the conference, when a guy goosed me. Maybe I was thinking of that dancer at the speak-out who had kicked her assailant in his “precious groin,” maybe I was thinking of Emma Peel in
The Avengers
, maybe I was just in a bloody rage from a lifetime’s accumulation of these petty assaults, the furtive hands reaching out to destroy my dignity on the
subway or on the street when moments earlier I’d been happily engaged in my own reflections. Maybe being the target of a lightninglike molestation while I was handing out flyers for a rape conference was just too ironic. Whatever, I galloped after my assailant’s retreating figure, swung my leg in a fancy arc, and sprained my ankle after connecting full force with his gluteus maximus.

“On Goosing,”
my story in
The Village Voice
, began, “I am sitting here with my ankle in the air, elevated, as they instructed at St. Vincent’s.” The rape conference was announced in an accompanying box. “On Goosing” was an intentionally funny parody of ideological tracts even as it laid out the sexual abuse continuum, but
Time
promptly cited it as an example of the humorlessness of the women’s movement. Oh, those feminists making issues out of everything! By then I knew I had found my mission. I laughed when I read a
letter to the
Voice
signed by a Maryland college student named James Wolcott, who wrote in the sepulchral tones of the future critic, “God help us if she is ever raped—we will be buried under an avalanche of rhetoric.”

I hobbled on crutches into Washington Irving High School on Saturday morning, April 17, for our New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape. My memories of the day are vivid and fragmentary. Rosemary Gaffney and Sheila Michaels had netted a swarm of reporters. Thomasina Robinson, a self-assured black karate teacher, demonstrated some basic flips and holds on her white partner. Phyllis Chesler, stomping the stage in blue jeans, full of pizzazz, gave a paper on rape in therapy, which she later expanded in
Women and Madness
. Germaine Greer, in town to promote
The Female Eunuch
,
slipped into a workshop to speak of her rape in Australia when she was eighteen, pregnant, and searching for an abortion.
A former Black Nationalist addressed the problem of not reporting her rape, because the assailant was Puerto Rican “and I felt it would be wrong somehow to retaliate against another third-world person.”