In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (39 page)

Few early theorists and stouthearted activists had been so instrumental to the birth of Women’s Liberation as Kathie Amatniek Sarachild and Carol Hanisch. Hanisch had left New York in 1969 for a less stressful feminist life in Gainesville, Florida. Sarachild had hung in to become the acknowledged leader of Redstockings after its famous abortion speak-out, and seemed unperturbed when its membership declined in favor of some of the newer groupings the following year. Obsessed with ideological purity, she stubbornly promoted “the pro-woman line,” a theory that refused to blame women, whatever their circumstance, for their own oppression, and concentrated on a cluster of issues, chiefly equality in marriage and a strong pro-monogamy stance, that she considered crucial to the feminist revolution. When Redstockings finally disbanded, she founded and edited
Woman’s World
with a small group of colleagues. In its pages she noted with favor the appearance of
Ms.
, a helpful addition, she thought, to the liberal pincer of the feminist struggle. Subsequently she saw fit to criticize
Ms
. for publishing a guideline to consciousness-raising that she believed had diluted her method while her contribution as the c.r. evangelist appeared in a footnote.

Shortly afterward she received a call from Letty Pogrebin, the editor at
Ms
. who often initiated media spin-offs like books and records. The call had been made at Ellen Willis’s suggestion. Pogrebin wondered if Sarachild might like to write a book under the
Ms
. imprimatur that explained consciousness-raising and its techniques for a mainstream audience. Sarachild had several meetings up at the Ms. office. Toward the end of one session, she recalls, one of the
Ms
. editors dropped a bombshell.
She said that Gloria Steinem would write the introduction.

A quarter century later Kathie Sarachild reports, “I said to myself, ‘
What?
Gloria Steinem will introduce
me
? If anything, I should be introducing
them
, the newcomers at
Ms
.’ ”

Eventually the project faltered. “I’d begun to feel we were adversaries,” Sarachild says darkly. “It was during that time that we began to learn more about them.”

During the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy era, before her career in journalism took off, Gloria had directed the Independent Research Service, a CIA front that recruited anti-Communist students to attend Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe to defend the United States and its values. In 1967, when
Ramparts
had done an exposé on CIA funding, Gloria had defended her Cold War actions as something a good political liberal would do, and the story had died. When Kathie Sarachild and others looked at the story again seven years later, the CIA’s dirty tricks at home and abroad had become common knowledge, and anything, past or present, with a CIA taint was in bad odor. In the meantime Gloria’s meteoric rise to celebrity had given fresh currency to any unusual detail from her past, especially to a secretly funded activity that was so out of keeping with her popular image. Kathie was a Red Diaper Baby. In my opinion, Kathie’s interpretation of Gloria’s behavior was influenced by the belief system she’d grown up with.

Sarachild persuaded Carol Hanisch to return to New York to put together a book,
Feminist Revolution
, in order to reclaim the movement and their prideful contributions to its birth. A full laundry list of political tendencies had emerged in the last few years that they and their colleagues felt were wrongheaded and needed to be demolished. They had no use for feminist spirituality, goddess worship, and the matriarchists who claimed that women had ruled in prehistory. Alarmed by lesbian separatism, they deplored same-sex relations as a political solution to women’s oppression. And they did not understand how it had come about that the mainstreamers at
Ms
. were speaking for the entire movement while they, the founders, were shut out of the public discourse.

As they worked on their essays, trying to piece together what had gone wrong and what factors had led to their eclipse, all roads seemed to lead to Gloria Steinem. The amateur sleuths noticed discrepancies and ellipses in Gloria’s bios, particularly the ones that minimized her association with the Independent Research Service in later editions of
Who’s Who
. They scoured the pages of
Ms
. for sinister signs of its liberal obfuscation, and collected stories from people whose work was rejected or vitiated severely in the editing process. They pondered the role of Warner Communications, a giant corporation, in funding the magazine; they tried to trace the money flow in and out of the Women’s Action Alliance and the Ms. Foundation, Gloria’s other enterprises. When they were unable to create a solid trail of facts, their conspiratorial reasoning filled in the blanks. The CIA liked to set up “parallel organizations” as an alternative to revolutionary ones; it followed, then, that similar forces were behind the co-option of feminism by Gloria Steinem.

They were in too great a state of anguish to wait until
Feminist Revolution
was ready for the printers. In May 1975, Sarachild, Hanisch, and some of their political allies reconstituted the defunct Redstockings and released a documents packet at a media convention sponsored by
MORE
, a journalists’ magazine, and attended by representatives of the alternative press. Their statement began, “Gloria Steinem has a ten-year association with the CIA stretching from 1959 to 1969 which she has misrepresented and covered up. Further, we have become convinced that
Ms
. magazine, founded and edited by her, is hurting the women’s liberation movement.”

Establishment journalists were unimpressed by the Redstockings charges, but portions of the women’s movement reacted with shock and dismay. The unpaid volunteers who staffed the movement’s most ideological newspapers, women who had long labored in the shadow cast by
Ms.
, initially delayed publishing the broadside until they could do some independent fact-checking and get Gloria’s side of the story. This was the first time some of the antiestablishment radicals had ever telephoned the switchboard of the glossy magazine; their suspicions hardened when Gloria was unavailable to take their calls.

Joanne Edgar, Gloria’s loyal assistant, attempted to field their questions: Gloria was too upset to address the charges; Gloria had been a student when she’d gone to those youth festivals; Gloria was in Mexico City with Bella Abzug for International Women’s Year meetings; Who were these Redstockings women and where were they coming from; and no, Gloria had not read their statement.

“
Gloria and I had some long discussions,” Edgar remembers. “We were convinced that we could handle it, keep it contained in the radical press. What we did not want was to dignify the charges and take them to another level of credibility. Plus, she didn’t know what to say and I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.”
Ms
. was beset by another damage-control problem that season, one the editors deemed more serious than the Redstockings charges. Elizabeth Forsling Harris, the departed and disgruntled founding publisher, was suing Gloria and Pat Carbine for stock fraud, claiming they had schemed to shut her out of the magazine’s future profits. Feeling she had suddenly entered a twilight zone of paranoid suspicions, Edgar hand-lettered a sign,
CIA
, and taped it to the office door as a giddy joke.

Edgar was badly misreading the mood of the radical movement. So were Gloria and everyone else in the office, except for Ellen Willis, who chose this moment to exit the magazine with a long, angry blast. Willis, a founder of the original Redstockings, had not been happy in her two years at
Ms
. Taking the job because she needed the money, she had chafed from the outset under Steinem’s accumulation of power, her ties to the Democratic Party, and the magazine’s electoral-politics slant. In her accusatory farewell, later enlarged for
Feminist Revolution
, she charged that “
a mushy, sentimental idea of sisterhood” and “a pervasive upper-middle-class bias” had led the others down an antileft path, as evidenced by Gloria’s embrace of Jane Alpert and her refusal to deal with the CIA charge.

Joan Nixon,
an enterprising reporter for
Lavender Woman
, Chicago’s lesbian-feminist paper, caught up with Steinem in June at a fund-raising concert in Detroit for Inez Garcia and Joan Little. Pushing past photographers, elbowing Lily Tomlin and the Deadly Nightshade rock band aside, she approached her quarry with a determination made bold by her sympathies. As she related in print, “Redstockings has got Steinem by the ovaries and at the very least she should be yelling
OUCH.
” Her story captured Gloria’s beleaguerment with good will and humor.

“I’m defending you in this Redstockings thing,” Nixon began. “Are you still not talking about it?”

“Everyone is advising me not to reply,” Gloria answered, “but I will
have to do something. It’s very painful. Just because I went to a youth festival sixteen years ago, they are attacking me.”

Nixon’s heart sank at the naive bit of stonewalling, but she observed that Steinem seemed in genuine pain. She reckoned correctly that the women’s newspapers, especially the stern, ideological ones that had no use for Ms., would pounce on Gloria for not taking them seriously enough to address the charges, and here she was, offering her a friendly opportunity that was going unheeded. “Steinem looked vulnerable in her tailored blue jeans, even fey,” she wrote in a small digression. “Skinnier than I imagined. And beautiful, like everyone said. I wonder if she’s a dyke.”

The concert organizers were ready to take Steinem out to dinner. Gloria took a moment to give her hotel room number to the Nightshade women and gently informed Nixon she was meeting with some lesbian mothers involved in a custody battle later that evening, so there would be no time to discuss “the Redstockings thing.” A shy woman identifying herself as an American Indian approached with a “Free Yvonne” flyer. Gloria asked several questions about the Wanrow case, listened carefully, and took extra copies of the flyer as she ducked into a waiting car. Nixon’s brief encounter was over.

“As long as Steinem won’t answer Redstockings, she looks guilty,” she wrote in a short note to Joanne Edgar.

By the end of the summer,
Majority Report
in New York and
off our backs
in Washington had printed the charges in full, declaring their editorial sympathy for the Redstockings position.
Big Mama Rag
in Denver,
Plexus
in San Francisco,
Lavender Woman
in Chicago, and
The Lesbian Tide
in L.A. covered the story in detail but came down on Gloria’s side. “Many of us in the lesbian-feminist press knew each other,” Nixon says. “We wanted to defend Gloria because we saw her as pro-lesbian. We sure knew the Redstockings women weren’t.”

From Mexico City, where she, too, was attending the International Women’s Year meetings, Betty Friedan, at one of her low points in her relations with Gloria, fed the story of the CIA charges to a New York tabloid and found a receptive audience in some foreign reporters. Friedan had been trying ineffectually to ground Steinem’s airship for years, first by insisting that Gloria was a media creation and not a
leader, then by floating the ludicrous assertion that Gloria was an extremist who hated men. Betty’s proscribed list of extremist man-haters encompassed the Redstockings, naturally, but suddenly she found herself aligned with their thinking. I think the youth festival episode from Gloria’s past was so at odds with Friedan’s political values during McCarthyism and the Cold War that she exaggerated its current importance in her pain at being overshadowed by the glamorous, appealing figure the media and masses of women adored.

Earlier that spring, Betty had telephoned to ask me a loaded question: Didn’t I think the CIA charges, whatever their merit, “deserved a full airing”? Betty had called me only once before, to solicit my help in getting out a Women’s Political Caucus mailing. This summons, most obviously, was not as straightforward. My blood pressure jumped.

I told her flatly that I could not be of use to her. Morally and ethically my position on Gloria was similar to the one I had taken on Jane Alpert. I’d done plenty of foolish things in my youth that I hoped would never come back to haunt me. Yes, I’d been taken aback by the extent of Gloria’s energetic Cold War involvements, but it was amply evident that she had become a different person. Oh sure, on my bad days I had terrible twinges of resentment over Gloria’s fame. How could I not, remembering how I had been mauled five years earlier merely for getting my name in the papers during the movement’s “We don’t need leaders” phase. But Gloria had had nothing to do with that. Besides, the Redstockings’ assertion that the CIA was behind
Ms
. and its shortcomings was not only laughable, it was loony.

Still, I was bewildered that such a savvy political person as Gloria had chosen not to answer her accusers. All she needed to do to pull the rug out from under them, and disarm everyone else, was to say forth-rightly, “Yes, once upon a time I did work wittingly for a CIA front and today I’m sorry. If I’d known then what I know now,” et cetera. Instead, she was silent. In her silence more paranoia erupted. Before long it reached a fever pitch that would have unforeseen implications for a think tank pondering feminist issues that turbulent summer.

Sagaris, the mighty double-edged sword of Amazon legend, was the name given to a radical feminist institute that convened at a small college perched on a hilltop in rural Vermont during July and August of
1975. The experimental program was the brainchild of three women on the faculty at nearby Goddard College: Marilyn Webb, the founder of D.C. Women’s Liberation and
off our backs
who had moved on to create Goddard’s department of women’s studies, one of the first in the nation; Joan Peters, a professor of literature; and Blanche McCrary Boyd, a proudly out lesbian from South Carolina whose first novel,
Nerves
, was with Daughters, Inc., the feminist press that had an underground best seller in Rita Mae Brown’s
Rubyfruit Jungle
.