In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (7 page)

“
I wrote those lyrics!” exclaims folksinger Bev Grant. “I also was there to shoot the demo for Newsreel and Liberation News Service.”

“Martin, my husband, drove a bunch of us down,” says Alix Kates Shulman, then a thirty-six-year-old housewife and mother. “I never told Martin, but we needed to buy a block of tickets so a group could get inside Convention Hall. I took the money from our joint checking account.”

By 1
P.M.
, more than one hundred demonstrators were parading around a cordoned-off section of the boardwalk. Eighteen-year-old Carol Giardina had come up from Florida. Kathie Amatniek had brought her grandmother. Resplendent in a white pantsuit, the lawyer Flo Kennedy led a chorus of “Ain’t She Sweet?” with Helen Kritzler, who playfully hooked a wired brassiere over her dress. They were cheered on by an ebullient Kate Millett, the downtown artist and uptown scholar who was a presence in NOW and Radical Women; her landmark book
Sexual Politics
was two years in the future. Clara DeMiha, age sixty-eight, a stalwart from Women Strike for Peace, moved to the front of line, waving two huge posters:
GIRLS CROWNED
,
BOYS KILLED
and
END THE WAR IN VIETNAM NOW
. Leah Fritz, poet, housewife, and mother of two, took a stack of flyers and worked the crowd.

“
I came up from D.C. with Marilyn Webb and Donna Allen,” Charlotte Bunch, a cofounder of Women’s Liberation in that city, recollects. “We had our own flyer with softer language and a more leftist analysis of what Miss America was about, but the New York organizers would not let us pass it out because it didn’t follow their precise line.”

But it was hard to discern any “precise line” in the midst of the protest’s freewheeling antics. Someone had rented a live sheep. In high hilarity, the animal was crowned Miss America with a blue rosette and yellow ribbons. Carol Hanisch and Lynn Laredo escorted it around the boardwalk. More demonstrators arrived, scrawling new posters with fresh Magic Markers:
NO MORE MISS AMERICA
.
THE REAL MISS AMERICA LIVES IN HARLEM
.
CAN MAKEUP COVER THE WOUNDS OF OUR OPPRESSION?
IF YOU WANT MEAT
,
GO TO A BUTCHER
.
I AM NOT SOMEBODY
’
S PET
,
TOY
,
OR MASCOT
.

Dressed in a miniskirt and tank top, the artist Florika chained herself to an eight-foot, star-spangled Miss America puppet while Peggy Dobbins, playing a Wall Street financier in her husband’s suit, conducted a mock auction: “Step right up, gentlemen, get your late-model woman right here! She can push your product, push your ego, push your war!”

“People on the sidelines were yelling at us,” says Alix Shulman. “They were shouting, ‘Go back to Russia, you ugly, lezzie, commie whores.’ ”

“
They were alternating ‘Hey, good-lookin’—whatcha doing tonight?’ with ‘Boy, get a load of that one—what a dog!’ ” Leah Fritz remembers. “The men acted as if we were conducting a beauty contest. I’d never felt such humiliation. The experience was worth a hundred consciousness-raising sessions.”

“After a while some of us stopped demonstrating and began talking to them, person to person,” recalls Jacqui Ceballos. “We said, ‘Wouldn’t you like your daughter to aspire to something else besides Miss America?’ We really reached them. Some of the men agreed, but some women just clung to their men—they were afraid of us.”

“To their credit, some of our husbands also stood behind the barriers,” says Robin Morgan. “Kenneth Pitchford, Steve Kroll, Hank Kaminsky. They were very careful not to be protective.”

A Freedom Trash Can became the site of a joyous, incantatory purging of feminine trappings.

“No more girdles, no more pain! No more trying to hold the fat in vain!”
A ribbed corset sailed into the can.

“High heels mean low status!”
With a whoop Judith Duffett bade farewell to a pair of spikes.

A nervous Pam Kearon ran up and tossed in a long-line support bra.

Leah Fritz slam-dunked a set of falsies.

Eyelash curlers, fake lashes, tweezers, and tubes of mascara went into the trash.

Pirouetting on the boardwalk, her ponytail knotted in red chiffon,
Alix Kates Shulman had an inspiration: She would write about a fictional heroine whose life was governed by male standards of feminine beauty. Three years and many revisions later, she broke into print with
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
, the first feminist novel of the new generation.

That evening a score of demonstrators with tickets took their seats in the front row of the balcony at Convention Hall. As the outgoing Miss America, Debra Barnes, gave her farewell speech,
Amatniek and Hanisch unfurled their banner. It read
WOMEN
’
S LIBERATION
.

Security officers grabbed Naomi Jaffe as the others fled. Down on the convention floor, Bev Grant and Miriam Bokser took advantage of the confusion to release two
stink bombs. Sprinting toward the stage, Peggy Dobbins popped the cap and squeezed hard on a third plastic vial.

“Miriam accidentally sprayed me,” Bev Grant remembers. “It was more Keystone Kops than anything else.”

“Bev and Miriam got away and I got busted,” laughs Dobbins. “They took me straight to the Atlantic City jail.”

Afterward the women would say that the noxious fumes were from the setting lotion of Toni Home Permanent, a pageant sponsor. “This was pure stinky stuff,” reports Hanisch, wrinkling her nose a quarter century later at the memory of the smell.

Network television cameras broadcasting the pageant live to an audience of millions resolutely avoided the banner hanging from the balcony, but viewers at home (I was one) could detect a commotion, some faint shouts and cries, as the last of the disrupters were hustled from the hall.

Setting a pattern for future Women’s Liberation events, the organizers had insisted that they would speak only to women of the press.
Charlotte Curtis, the acerbic society reporter for
The New York Times
and the epitome of chic in her little black dress and double strand of pearls, had hitched a ride on the demonstrators’ bus. Her coverage in the Sunday paper was colorful and sympathetic.

“Charlotte was extraordinary,” says Robin Morgan. “God love her, she made us look reasonable and nice.”

Although “bra burners,” the dread appellation, was immediately affixed to the movement, the boardwalk hijinks and civil disobedience of the Miss America protest had global ripples as both national and foreign journalists seized on the story. Shana Alexander, for one, opined in her
Life
magazine column that she wished the protestors had “gone farther.”

Deep mistrust, serious divisions, emotional charges and countercharges always characterize the inner life of a movement for social change, and Women’s Liberation was no exception. The ripples inside the movement from its first national protest were profound. Unhappy rumblings, internal grievances, theoretical disagreements, personality conflicts, and jealousies among the founders gnawed on the fragile concept of sisterhood.

Robin Morgan had gotten too much personal publicity, some people griped—Miss America was supposed to have been a collective action, without leaders and spokespeople. In a written critique,
Carol Hanisch excoriated the protest’s individualistic “hippy-yippee-campy” aspects. Placards like
UP AGAINST THE WALL
,
MISS AMERICA
and
MISS AMERICA IS A BIG FALSIE
had come across as antiwoman, she maintained, and some demonstrators had been needlessly disruptive. (Because of Peggy Dobbins’s court case, she refrained from mentioning the stink bombs.)

The bottom line was control: Who had a right to speak for the movement? Whose strategy and tactics, whose worldview, would triumph? A deep division of style and substance separated the stubborn visionaries, Amatniek and Hanisch, Firestone and Koedt, who were groping toward an independent feminist position, from “the politicos,” led in New York by Robin Morgan, who were determined not to break with the left.

Scores of new adherents joined New York Radical Women after the Miss America protest. Attendance at the Thursday meetings jumped from thirty to fifty, then to one hundred and upward, and continued to grow. Latecomers stood pressed against each other in the tiny anteroom of the fourth-floor SCEF office. At times the meetings took on the flavor of a tent camp revival, a hallelujah chorus.

This was the moment when I wandered in and had my own instant conversion.

I set my eyes on the memory channel and “image” the room:

Wherever Kathie Amatniek sits is a locus of power. She is an apprentice film editor, but her heart is in political theory and writing. Kathie claims that we have no leaders, adding, “My leader hasn’t arrived yet—when she appears I will follow her.” Yet it seems to me that Kathie is making a bid for leadership every time she opens her mouth. Her insistence that we “go around the room” at each meeting so every woman “can speak from her own experience” can be irksome and controlling. Kathie speaks all the time, while some women never get to open their mouth. One day Kathie tells me her dream: to find the perfect revolutionary man and walk with him through life into the revolutionary sunset. Kathie reminds me of Amelia Earhart.

It is harder to track Shulie Firestone’s vaporizing trail. She waitresses in a Village coffeehouse and lives on the Lower East Side, where she paints big abstracts in swirling colors, although lately she has turned to writing. Shulie grouses about the lack of men in her life and exclaims in the next breath that it must be an omen that Simone de Beauvoir is also a Capricorn. She is going to be the American Beauvoir, she says. It is only a matter of time; it’s already too late for Susan Sontag.

The prim evangelist working the phone, her titian hair secured in a bun, is Lucinda Cisler, the abortion activist. Cindy is in NOW, Cindy is in New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal, Cindy is a devotee of Bill Baird’s, a messiah of birth control whose confrontations with the law get him arrested up and down the East Coast. Cindy is usually with James Clapp, her partner in activism, but Clapp is not allowed into these all-women meetings.

Cindy is on the telephone now, trying to reach Gloria Steinem, who writes a political column for
New York
magazine. “Gloria Steinem should be here to cover this meeting,” Cindy says into the phone. “This is important. I’m calling from Women’s Liberation.” Cindy is a trained architect. She writes letters and compiles lists in the distinctive block print that architects learn in school. But Cindy doesn’t work as an architect; she lives hand to mouth and works on abortion.

Here comes Kate Millett, fresh-faced, her long hair in a braid, bounding in late. Kate is one of those universal joiners, like Cindy and Jacqui Ceballos, who stand out in a group. A midwesterner from St. Paul, raised Catholic, Kate went to Oxford for her graduate studies before she returned to the States and ran into a wall of academic rejections. Finally she found a teaching fellowship at Barnard. Kate joined New York NOW at its first or second meeting while she was writing her doctoral dissertation, a feminist reevaluation of four male icons of liberated sexuality: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, and Norman Mailer. Kate has many irons in the fire and she’s tending to all of them, but her true love is art. She is an avant-garde sculptor married to Fumio Yoshimura, a Japanese immigrant who is also an avant-garde sculptor. An editor at Doubleday wants to publish Kate’s unfinished doctoral thesis, provisionally titled “Sexual Politics,” so Kate has something to groan about over coffee after the meeting. How is she going to turn her academic dissertation into a book?

I, too, wonder about Kate’s book. “But it’s obvious—women are equal! What’s to write about?” I mutter. Little did I know that Millett was inventing a whole new field called feminist literary criticism between her appearances at the meetings.

Like me, Ellen Willis starts coming to New York Radical Women after the Miss America protest, but unlike me, she hurls herself into the center of things and becomes an insider. Her posture is tense, her hair is frizzy. Ellen’s father is a New York anomaly, a liberal Jewish cop with a left-wing past. She is
The New Yorker
’s rock critic. Ellen sits on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, spinning original theory that brings down the house.

Ellen does not like to be crossed, I learn one evening when I top her rhetoric with a wiseacre remark. She is doing a riff on women’s unpaid labor and crescendoing to a climax—“We’ll go into the suburbs, we’ll invade every nuclear family, we’ll organize a union of housewives—”

“Nah,” I cut in, dragging on a cigarette. “The shops are too small.”

I get a big laugh from the room and a startled glare from Ellen, who is not used to being interrupted. But I mean what I said. Union organizing
requires a sizable group of workers at the target site. The housewives’ “shops” were too small.

“You’d better watch it if you want to stay in this movement,” Judith Duffett warns me. Judith is a Wellesley graduate in an unhappy marriage who does secretarial work at
Modern Bride
.