In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (35 page)

For our first assault we leaped over the sidewalk railing of the Cafe de la Paix, the elegant outdoor terrace at the Hotel St. Moritz. Once my mother had tried to take me to this famous landmark on Central Park South as a birthday treat, but we had not gotten past the
maître d’. I wish she had been alive to see the outcome this time. Faced by twenty implacable feminists occupying his tables, the haughty manager caved in. Next we lined up shoulder to shoulder along the polished bar at the glitzy Russian Tea Room. After a protracted spell of “I’m sorry, mesdames, we do not serve unescorted women,” we got our drinks. P.J. Clarke’s, a venerable hamburger joint on Third Avenue, took longer to crack. An angry bartender threw a glass of water at Claudia Dreifus and Claudia threw a cocktail napkin at the bartender, or perhaps it was the other way around. Whichever, the situation grew incredibly tense before the management capitulated and the walls of segregation came tumbling down at P.J.’s. By then our unbroken string of victories had left us a little tipsy. Weaving unsteadily to our last destination, the “no unescorted women” bar at Gallagher’s steak house, we entered to hear the owner peal, “Welcome, ladies, welcome! Order what you want! I’ll call Leonard Lyons.”

The
New York Post
’s grand old man of the Broadway buzz materialized in minutes and gave us a full column. Robin Reisig did a fine story for
The Village Voice
. Never had a feminist action accomplished its objectives so swiftly. We went home to sleep it off. Blatant discrimination against women in public accommodations was doomed to tumble once enough women kicked up a fuss. A few months later the city council passed a law forbidding a public bar to refuse service to women.

We were totally unsuccessful in our next major campaign, a quixotic attempt to make the elimination of prostitution a feminist goal. The immediate impetus was a series of nightly street sweeps conducted by the New York City police during the summer of 1971. Vast numbers of street hookers on Times Square and Broadway were being chased by cops, hauled into vans, and shuffled through the judicial system, while their pimps and johns went scot-free. The city fathers were concerned about the rising rate of prostitute-related crimes, muggings and wallet heists, which were bad for tourism. While the cleanup campaign was creating headlines, some liberals suggested that legalized prostitution might be a more enlightened approach than nightly roundups. The mayor appointed a committee of six men to study the problem, and an all-male state legislative committee held a hearing on “Prostitution as
a Victimless Crime.” We feminists were in favor of the decriminalization of prostitution, but we were adamantly opposed to its legalization. The state, in our opinion, should not sanction the buying of women’s bodies.

I wangled an invitation to address the legislative committee with a speech that began “
Prostitution is a crime, gentlemen, but it is not victimless. There is a victim, and that is the woman.” Then we began our filibuster. Alix Kates Shulman read from the writings of Emma Goldman; somebody else jumped on a table and recited a poem. The filibuster went on all day; we were sixteen demonstrators with plenty of material. Our main point was that no one should have the right to buy another person’s body. It was a good point, and I still believe it.

New York Radical Feminists, in coalition with
THE FEMINISTS
and a women’s caucus of reform Democrats, held a
weekend conference on prostitution at Charles Evans Hughes High School in December. Mary Daly, the feminist Catholic theologian and author of
The Church and the Second Sex
, came down from Boston to give a keynote address; speakers from the Fortune Society and the National Welfare Rights Organization added their weight.

Things seemed to be going well until a half dozen high-priced call girls—white, expensively dressed, one a “baby pro” who had been in the life since her fifteenth birthday—walked in and let us have it between the eyes. It is funny in retrospect, but it wasn’t funny at the time. Our crisp, clean analysis of why men buy women’s bodies, and why they shouldn’t, had neglected to anticipate that the prostitutes would resist their depiction as downtrodden victims of male exploitation. Understandably they saw us as a threat to their livelihood. Well versed in left-counterculture rhetoric, they handed us the line that all work was exploitative, so what was the difference if one woman sold her body and another sold her mind to a big corporation? When that argument failed, they screamed, “Don’t you know that Weatherwomen are working in brothels to finance the revolution?”

Even if true, the information didn’t cut any ice with us. Barbara Mehrhof of
THE FEMINISTS
was eloquent about the honorable choices she’d made in her life, insisting that working a nine-to-five job for low
wages was preferable to selling her body. The call girls jeered. Holly Forsman, the former fashion model, gave an impassioned speech about how society rewards men for using their bodies with athletic scholarships and well-paying construction jobs while denying women those options. The call girls snickered. I volunteered some painful memories from my struggling years as an unemployed actress. “Your men come to us because you’re a bunch of tightasses,” the prostitutes shouted. Looking for a brawl, their ringleader took a sock at Minda Bikman, who started to cry. The conference broke up with Kate Millett standing on a chair, an unheeded figure, pleading for reconciliation.

That ended our campaign to eliminate prostitution. The prostitutes had “spoken from their own experience.” Our rhetoric, in contrast, sounded like a prudish condemnation of their behavior rather than a sharp analysis of economic injustice and male privilege. Eight years later we would run into similarly wrenching conflicts when we launched the feminist antipornography movement.

After the disastrous prostitution conference, I returned to the library and
Against Our Will
. I continued to gain sisterly support from the Tuesday night meetings of West Village–One until one evening in 1973, when I felt the heat of another blast of anti-elitist wrath. Jan Peterson, from a small town in Wisconsin, was one of the group’s original members; previously she had worked in CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), as had I. I respected Jan as a good, sturdy feminist, but we weren’t close. On the night in question I offered the good news that my book was coming together and the end was in sight.

“Do you have to put your name on your book?” Jan exploded. “Rape doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the movement. You should take a stand and be the first feminist author to do away with personal ego.”

A gifted organizer, Jan went on to make a name for herself in Brooklyn as the founder of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. That night as the movement’s familiar demons of fame and public recognition rose to the surface in her righteous anger, I knew I had reached the point of diminishing returns in West Village–One.

I never went back. New York Radical Feminists continued to publish a newsletter and hold speak-outs and conferences from time to time on subjects like marriage and motherhood, but its vanguard role in forging new issues had peaked with its work on rape. Its last stunning event, in my view, was a speak-out on sexual abuse conducted jointly with the
National Black Feminist Organization.

During the late sixties a small number of black female activists on the left had tried to establish a Women’s Liberation presence inside their male-led organizations. Frances Beal of New York SNCC was a notable example. Her powerful paper, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” directed some of its strongest arguments at white women. “
If white groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting racism and capitalism,” she wrote, “then we do not have common bonds.” Beal was instrumental in forming the short-lived Third World Women’s Alliance, which included revolutionary anti-imperialism among its principles and goals.

In the summer of 1973 a dozen black women in New York of varying ideological persuasions started a promising new entity called the National Black Feminist Organization. Doris Wright, Margaret Sloan, Jane Galvin-Lewis, and Deborah Singletary were the founders. Wright, the studious author of an early mimeographed paper addressed to black men, was serving on the board of NOW while she attended Hunter College at night and worked a day job at Rockefeller University. Sloan had been plucked from the South Side of Chicago to be the first black writer-editor at
Ms
. She was one of a number of women, black and white, whose lives were transformed on a direct, personal level by Gloria Steinem.

Sloan’s activism had started early. At the age of fourteen she was picketing for CORE at a local Woolworth’s to support the southern sit-ins. A few years later, as an unwed mother and a lesbian, she was working with her lover on the start-up of
Lavender Woman
, Chicago’s lesbian-feminist paper. When the Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were ambushed and killed by the Chicago police, she was invited to be a jurist on a People’s Tribunal.

“Flo Kennedy was also on the panel,” Sloan relates. “She was talking feminism, and I was amazed. At that point the media was polarizing black and white women, as it usually does, and very few black women on a national level were articulating feminism as it related to black women. So we sort of became friends. She wanted me to meet Gloria Steinem.”

In constant demand on the lecture circuit, Gloria customarily went on the road with a black speaking partner, alternating between Flo Kennedy and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, to link the oppressions of race and sex. One day when Flo was unavailable for a scheduled date in Rippon, Wisconsin, she recommended the young firebrand she’d met in Chicago. “Then Gloria got snowed in at some airport,” Sloan laughs. “These people were expecting Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy and they got no-name me! But I pulled it off okay.”

A few months later Margaret Sloan and her daughter were ensconced in a New York apartment, and Margaret had a contract with a lecture agent as Gloria’s new speaking partner in addition to a job at
Ms
. “The speaking thing worked, it really worked, it was a very interesting combination,” she relates. “I was twenty-one or twenty-two, a woman who came from nothing, and suddenly I was making big money. Somebody needs their rent paid? Sure, I’ll pay your rent for a couple of months. The household workers union needs a thousand dollars? Sure! It was like a dream come true. And oh God, I was also in this famous-women’s c.r. group that we had, with Gloria, Marlo Thomas, and Judy Collins. Insane, absolutely insane. But nobody ever told me I should save my money.”

Brash, effervescent, and wildly undisciplined in the face of her changed fortune, Sloan hit New York with a full head of steam and became the propulsive force behind the National Black Feminist Organization. “You’d go to these various things and you’d see a couple of sisters and you’d wave hello,” she remembers. “One day Doris Wright says to me, ‘Let’s have an all-day gathering so we can get to know each other.’ Doris was able to get NOW space because she was a NOW member. She invited about sixteen of us and it was so beautiful. We talked about the differences between our skin color, our differences in growing up. We talked about our self-hate. We talked about
white women, black men, everybody and everything. By the end of the day we were saying, ‘Why don’t we work on a black feminist conference?’ I was the one who said let’s do a press statement first. Around this time, Jesse Jackson was saying, ‘Thank God my mama didn’t have an abortion because I wouldn’t have been born’ and the press was always asking some nonfeminist black woman to give them a quote about feminism. I figured if we just came out with a strong statement, we’d shut them all up.”

Jane Galvin-Lewis, another of Gloria’s black speaking partners, arranged for the women to meet the press at the Women’s Action Alliance, where she had a staff job. Started by Steinem and Brenda Feigen Fasteau as a sort of clearinghouse project, the Alliance predated
Ms
. and was located in the same building. The small office kept an up-to-date list of media contacts.

“Jane, myself, Eleanor Holmes Norton, lots of us came to the press conference,” Sloan remembers. “And oh boy, did the press show up for this important statement by black feminists. Who knows, maybe they thought we were going to announce midnight castration parties—even fucking
Der Spiegel
was there. So the next day I thought it was my duty to go downstairs to the Women’s Action Alliance and thank them for letting us use their space, and somebody said, ‘Margaret, who is going to handle these phone calls?’ The phone was ringing off the hook! I picked up the next call and a woman says, ‘Hi, I’m from Montana and where is your chapter in Helena?’ She wants to know the date of the next meeting, and I’m thinking,
I didn’t know there were any blacks in Montana.
”