Going Too Far (10 page)

K. and I are trying to be humanly unisexual, or pansexual. Join us?

If any of us survive these next decades on this planet, you will live to make a society where people share and love and laugh and understand each other. If none of us survive, it won't matter, because then
we'll be free. Meanwhile, we can play with each other, and create poems and colors and songs and orgasms together, and learn to fight not so much for what we believe in as for what we love.

Dear Blake, I love myself right now.

Dear Blake, I love K. so very much.

Dear Blake, I love you, even though we've not been introduced.

Dear Blake, leave my body behind you quickly. K. and I together, throughout labor and delivery, will work hard to aid you in your struggle toward light and air and independence.

Dear Blake, welcome to the universe.

Dear, dear Blake, goodbye.

R.

11

The period following Blake's birth seemed like a violently upward-rushing vertical curve of frantic activity. Not only the staggering changes in living habits wrought by the arrival of a baby, but the fact that, after more than a year of “exterior” involvement in the Women's Movement, I finally “brought the struggle home” three months after our child was born. Feminist consciousness began to function as an “interior” force, and that process, in the months and years since, has transformed our life together. The struggle with K. became more verbal; the grievances did not have to be written down secretly anymore. They could be stated calmly, or shouted angrily, or even put openly into poems. That process has had an incalculable influence on both our lives, and on our writing. Of other letters that followed (for another book, another time, perhaps), and of the letters I have written Blake during my political travels, this last one seems a most fitting close to the present series.

Friday
, 13
April
1973
(A good day for us Witches!)

D
EAR
B
LAKE:

Here I am, in a BIG plane again, way up above the clouds and the snow-covered Rocky Mountains. I just ate some supper on a tray, and then went to the Flying Bathroom (remember that?), and now I'm drinking some coffee and thinking about you and dearest K.

Do I ever miss you! I miss you so much it hurts like a toothache.

This morning, very early, before I got on the plane in Rochester to fly to California, I went with some other women to see the home of Susan B. Anthony—who was a wonderful woman who fought some bad men very hard and for very long, many years in fact. She lived a long time ago (not
so
long ago, actually—although it would seem a lot of time to you, I bet, even though you are, as you often remind us, four whole years old). Well, she is dead now, so we also went to see where she is buried.

We stood by her small grave very quietly in the cold spring dawn,
and we thought about her, and we cried because she was so brave and we love her and wish we had known her. It was something to remember.

Now I am going on (like she did—she traveled a lot; her own worn and battered little suitcase still rests in her bedroom)—on to see some more women and talk with them about ways in which we can all fight some of the things that come from the bad men. I'll have a lot to tell you about all that when I get home next week. And I'll tell you all about Susan B. Anthony's house, too, and her walls covered with photographs of women from all over the world, and her odd old typewriter, and the locks of her hair that are displayed curled up in a glass case, and lots of other things. I am so glad you are interested in these stories about brave women (like the stories about Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, remember?), because that means to me that you are already fighting hard to grow up and not be like the bad men who are mean to women. I am so proud of you for being interested and helpful and brave.

I am sending you the drawing you asked me for, of the tree and the singing bird—but I have only two colored pens with me, black and green, so I hope you won't mind that the picture isn't
very
colorful, okay? Also, the plane sort of bumped once while I was drawing it so there's one wavy line that's not supposed to be wavy. But trees are mostly like that, anyway.

Take care of K. for me (and also of Hektor, of course). I love you more and more every day and can't wait to come home and tell you all the adventures that happened to me, and hear your adventures, too.

Tell K., who will help you read this letter, that I am no longer afraid of what I must do, not at all, not after this morning. Greatness is neither a blessing nor a curse, as they would have us believe. It is simply a way of life, and it must become so for everyone—that is what revolution really means. K. will explain that to you.

He will also explain what I mean when I say that you are the honey in my life—and he the salt.

I love you both.

R.

P
ART TWO

The Emergence of Women's Liberation

PART II: INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The private landscape of the previous letters coexisted in some multidimensional space with the public, general, shared realities of our time. There were periods when it could have been said, perhaps, that K. and I stayed together for the sake of the revolution—especially since the so-called revolution during the sixties was rarely defined as a struggle seriously inclusive of “women's issues.” We might have rejected splitting up as a time-wasting bourgeois self-indulgence at certain points
—
at least that would have been a convenient argument for staying together (how ingeniously creative can the shared delusion of lovers be!). The Women's Movement, ironically, would present at once the most serious threat to our relationship (as it then stood) and the most hopeful possibility
for
our relationship (as it would change
).

Meanwhile, we continued, both of us, to write. I took on a defense of “the woman question” even as I dived into groups and meetings and actions. The articles in this section were part of a flood of writing I produced during the middle and late sixties—mostly for Leftist journals such as
Liberation, Win, Rat, The Guardian (
and its ostensibly more radical spin-off
, The Liberated Guardian). I
know that even today there are some misguided pseudo-feminists who believe it possible to reach millions of American women—including housewives, secretaries, and other such sane folk—by spewing rhetoric onto the pages of magazines with names like
Red Star over the Bible Belt
or
Hammer, Sickle, and Breadbasket.

But this was still the sixties, remember, and the Women's Movement embodied startling new concepts: the Miss America Pageant was considered a fixture of popular American culture—a vulgar fixture perhaps, but a harmless one all the same; even to speak of reforming abortion laws was shocking to many—and the idea of repeal was outright seditious; furthermore, for such issues to be discussed
seriously
in the pages of the
New York Times
was seen by some as proof that the
Times
no longer knew what was fit to print
.

The distance we've traveled seems less astounding, though, upon considering that the Equal Rights Amendment is still a controversial issue. One could relax into despondency if not rescued by a sense of the ridiculous
.

Meanwhile, my own private landscape lay buried beneath the writings in this section. It can be glimpsed erupting between the lines, or blurring and merging in outline with some abstract political concept referred to in a tone quite different from any in the “Letters from a Marriage.” Toward the end of the sixties there would be no keeping the two terrains apart any longer; like a time-space warp they would impinge, alchemize each other, and simultaneously surface in my writing—the superimposition has begun irresistibly in the last piece of this section, “Barbarous Rituals.” I was to learn that when one has been fragmented ever since one can remember, the state of integrity—in all the meanings of that word—is an exhilarating but astonishingly uncomfortable one
.

Each part of this book seems to inflict an embarrassment on me peculiar to its own content. In this, Part II, I find myself discomfited at the Patient Griselda attitude I had toward men; younger feminists today, assuming at least a minimal lip service consciousness on the part of most men, might find themselves irritated by what may strike them as my shuffling. Yet I am much more embarrassed—mortified, in fact—at having clung for so long to Leftist analysis and jargon. I should not include some of these pieces at all, were there not still some sisters addicted to the same nonthought and nonlanguage. Perhaps it will help them to make some of the connections if they are able to watch another woman's gradual withdrawal. For it must be acknowledged that I did
not
come to feminism from a suburban kitchen or a classroom or factory or office: I did come from the New Left, with all its faults and failures and foolishness—and virtues. I came to feminism already with a radical view of society's ills, with the burn of tear gas still smarting in my eyes, the bruises from nightsticks still livid on my flesh, and the determination and vision of a generation whose ideals were originally strong, sensible, and beautiful. I should not have wished to be anywhere else in this country during the sixties than where I mostly was: on the streets in protest against war, racism, and poverty, and at my typewriter, in protest against these same evils
.

The right to criticize is earned fairly only through love. And when I hear anyone, even today, attack the Left from a
Rightist
viewpoint, my blood begins to simmer. A reactionary dismissal of unions, for example, or a sweepingly insensible statement like “After all, welfare recipients
do
cheat the taxpayer,” or “Socialism must inevitably produce a society of ants”—and I feel La Pasionara rise in me again and march hand-in-fist with the spirit of George Sand to the barricades
.

For me, the task was never one of retrenching from the radical
analysis of the New Left; it was simply to go further. “
Too
far,” said Leftist men, for obvious and shameful reasons unable to admit the failure of their politics and practice in recognizing the very center of the problem: sexism—because that recognition would in turn uncover the very heart of the revolution: feminism. What remains of the Left still seems unable to admit this. Naturally the weary rhetoric has been stretched a bit to include a new “constituency,” and what was called “the woman question” is granted the pretense of an answer, albeit an answer laughable to feminists
.

Yet if one is to acknowledge fairly all the factors in one's growth, and to attempt doing so with love (since to do other is merely to have contempt for one's own past self, an unnecessarily severe judgment which can only embitter one's present) then it is important for me to say that I, arch-critic of the sexist American Left who take back not one breath of my denunciations of that masculinist movement, nevertheless preserve in my heart an honorable loyalty to what we all—women and men alike
—hoped
to stand for then, and to our courage and idealism and innocence. We changed something in this country, in this world, for the better. And if I feel ashamed of how that movement perforce failed
because
of its narrowness, its sexism; and if I feel righteously justified, as a woman and a feminist, in its consequently inevitable failure; I can still feel proud at having been “a child of the sixties,” at having shared in all the tantrums—and in all the outrageous beauty
.

WOMEN DISRUPT THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT

The following piece is based on an article of mine which appeared in various New Left publications. I made no pretense at being an objective journalist (if such an animal ever existed); I had been one of the organizers of the demonstration, and so my article was a perfect example of what then was called proudly “participatory journalism.”

The 1968 women's demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City was the first major action of the current Women's Movement. It announced our existence to the world, and is often taken as the date of birth of this feminist wave (as differentiated from the nineteenth-century feminist suffrage struggle). If it was the birthdate, conception and gestation had been going on for a long time; years of meetings, consciousness-raising, thought, and plain old organizing had taken place before any of us set foot on the boardwalk.

It was out of that first group, New York Radical Women, that the idea to protest the pageant developed. Almost all of us had been active in the civil-rights movement, the student movement, or some other such wing of the New Left, but not one of us had ever organized a demonstration on her own before. I can still remember the feverish excitement I felt: dickering with the company that chartered buses, wangling a permit from the mayor of Atlantic City, sleeping about three hours a night for days preceding the demonstration, borrowing a bullhorn for our marshals to use. The acid taste of coffee from paper containers and of cigarettes from crumpled packs was in my mouth; my eyes were bloodshot and my glasses kept slipping down my nose; my feet hurt and my neck ached and my voice had gone hoarse—and I was deliriously happy. Each work-meeting with the other organizers of the protest was an excitement fix: whether we were lettering posters or writing leaflets or deciding who would deal with which reporter requesting an interview, we were affirming our mutual feelings of outrage, hope, and readiness to conquer the world. We also all felt, well,
grown up
; we were doing this one for
ourselves
,
not for our men, and we were consequently getting to do those things the men never let us do, like talking to the press or dealing with the mayor's office. We fought a lot and laughed a lot and felt very extremely nervous.