Going Too Far (15 page)

Still another pitiable example of my unconnected insights is obvious in my blaming Ethel Kennedy for having so many children—simply because she's wealthy. Labor contractions are labor contractions, and morning sickness is morning sickness, no matter how much money you have. Furthermore, had I stopped to think for a moment, I might at least have wondered whether there wasn't a wee possibility of family pressure on this woman to further extend the line of succession in a political dynasty. I hadn't even got to the point of affirming that if she was my “class” enemy, she was my “caste” sister,
as a woman
. I was too busy praising the male-Left-approved model of Madame Binh. Consciousness dawns slowly.

Legislative change approaches even more slowly. The Supreme Court decision and the abortion reforms that now exist in the United States came in late and remain insecure. Friends-of-the-Fetus types all over the country have been mobilizing day and night to roll back state reforms and to get a national referendum that would overthrow the Court's decision. (Right-to-Lifers are my special favorites in their revealing inconsistency: in between mobilizations against abortion, they frequently demonstrate in favor of greater military spending and the revival of capital punishment.) We can't afford to sit back and think of this issue as settled. It will be settled when
no abortion laws at all exist
on the books (where they have about as much place as tonsillectomy laws). Most of all, it will be settled when inexpensive, simple, safe contraception is available everywhere in forms which won't give a woman blood clots, weight gain or loss, cancer,
or
a baby (such reliable
contraception thus making abortion itself, always less desirable, also less necessary). It will be settled when we at last have self-determination over our own bodies.

D
URING THE WEEK
of November 11, 1968, the Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States wrestled with the Coil and the Loop and came up with a “Pastoral Letter” on the issue of birth control—a document so diplomatically evasive and theologically Machiavellian that it is worthy of the Borgia popes (who were also against birth control, albeit for rakishly different reasons). Nevertheless, the present pope, not one to have his miter pulled over his eyes, may just declare even this double-talk document invalid, adhering rigidly to a policy created by celibate septuagenarians like himself: a policy powerful enough to influence world population growth to the crisis point we now face—not in the distant future, but tomorrow—with a world famine now a ghastly probability which will make Biafra seem commonplace. How difficult it is to relate this attitude to that of the Catonsville Nine and their commitment to the preservation of human life!

Boston, Massachusetts, famous for Crispus Attucks and notorious for the Kennedys, is a heavily Catholic city. Massachusetts, in fact, has the alarming distinction of being somewhere to the
Right
of the Catholic Church on the issue of birth control. For example, in that state it is illegal to disseminate any information about any kind of birth control: the church itself breaks the law, since the Catholic Information Center displays books on the rhythm method (the scientific name for people who practice this form of contraception is “parents”). Forget about the pill, the diaphragm, IUDs, etc.—even foam can be purchased only by prescription from a regular pharmacy, and only married women can get such a prescription. So reads the law, which then adds the final touch: it is illegal to inform a woman that she can go to a doctor to
get
the prescription. Again, we have good old American race and class distinction—the wealthy know about the doctor anyway, and can afford not to have children they don't want (or, à la Ethel Kennedy, to
have
those they do). The poor, however, who don't know where to go or how to obtain relief—from dropping a child every year, from an incredibly high infant mortality rate (
in the United States
), from more dull-eyed, swollen-bellied hungry babies—for such people birth-control information is
verboten
.

The related issues of birth control and abortion have been of obvious major concern to the Women's Liberation Movement. In our society men legislate what women may do with our own bodies.
Ten
thousand women die each year from illegal abortions in the United States
. Each death is an execution by the State.

Protesting this bondage, more than one hundred women held a demonstration in Boston on October 18. Their specific reason for being there was to support Bill Baird of Parents' Aid Society on the anniversary of his original conviction for (1) having given a young, unmarried woman a can of foam, and (2) having publicly displayed a contraceptive device (the Pill). (Baird has already been convicted in the lower courts, and has now appealed to the State Supreme Court.)

The demonstrators, some of whom were from Women's Liberation and from National Organization for Women in New York, some from Mothers for Adequate Welfare, and some unaffiliated women from the Boston area, gathered at the Boston University Student Union and marched up Commonwealth Avenue to the State House, joined by considerable numbers of young women from junior colleges along the route. On reaching Governor Volpe's offices, the women picketed and held up cans of foam, a symbolic gesture identical to that for which Baird had been convicted. Women in the watching crowd eagerly snatched up leaflets, and when the foam was distributed, there was almost a crush as desperate women grabbed for a can and scurried away with their booty hidden under their coats. Yet the police averted their eyes; no one was hassled or busted.
²

On November 4, a follow-up demonstration was staged at the courthouse where everyone thought Baird's appeal would be taking place. (The case was postponed at the last minute.) This second group of women (who earlier that day had attended and supported the MIT sanctuary for a draft refuser), picketed, sang reworded nursery rhymes, and leafleted campuses as well as the streets.

Both seemed rather humble demonstrations: no surges, no guerrilla theater, no mace, no arrests. But one must remember that this is
Boston
, where to be a premenopausal woman at all is to invite suspicion, and where to whisper anything about sex is to acknowledge being a commie pinko pervert.

There were some women in the Women's Movement, nevertheless, who while sympathizing with Baird and his stand felt that the period for functioning as another “support group” was past. They said it was time to break the conditioning of “letting a man do it,” and urged women to challenge these depraved laws on their own. In fact, the best way to “support” anyone is to take up the issue yourself, especially if it is your own to begin with.

Out of this thinking come plans for workshops in ghetto areas by
the October 17th Group
³
(a “cell” of women who recently split from the more conservative NOW), the blueprint being penetration into areas where women's oppression is multifold. Black, brown, Spanish-speaking, spied on by the (perhaps reluctant) welfare worker and kept in ignorance of her rights to her own body, the woman in the ghetto has always been lowest on the totem pole—her man was allowed his concept of
machismo
, often at the cost of her health or even life. And now there's yet another turn of the screw: the feeling among (mostly male) militant blacks that birth control aimed at black communities is a form of attempted genocide. While it is imperative to understand the partial truth inherent in this accusation, it is even more imperative to reach our sisters whose bodies are being destroyed by that eighth child, and whose minds and souls are barred by such sexual stereotyping from participation in their own lives, let alone in the revolutionary restructuring of our whole society. Many women's groups are already at work disseminating birth-control and abortion information, and WITCH has been investigating a challenge through Abortion Ships—small, well-equipped, professionally staffed boats to sail just outside “legal waters” and perform abortions in a clean, competent manner for about twenty-five dollars. (If there can be floating gambling parties for high society just outside the twelve-mile limit, well?)

It's too late, Pope Paul. Over half the couples who seek help from Planned Parenthood are Roman Catholics. Many of your own nuns and priests have rejected your fallibility, choosing instead to follow the figure of a revolutionary agitator named Christ. Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Harriet Tubman, and many, many others right up to Madame Nguyen Thi Binh—they all have something to do with it, and they're bringing down a male-dominated system of oppression, rapacity, and egotism—crashing down right about your ears.

January
1969

¹
The
New York Post
, May 5, 1976, reported that Baird recently said he resented being told by women's groups to get out of their movement. “Since when did it become their movement?” said Baird as quoted by the
Post
, which further claimed he added the warning that this may be his last year fighting for the people's (
sic
) right to abortion; he may go into ecology crusading, the article concluded.

²
The foam fuss is pathetic. Foam is almost as ineffective as toothpaste.

³
Later to become The Feminists, an important New York group which made interesting contributions to feminist theory.

THE MEDIA AND THE MAN

This article was written for the Op-Ed page (Opposite-the-Editorial page) of the
New York Times
, where it appeared in December of 1970. Despite promises to the contrary, the editor of the Op-Ed page at that time—a male—made certain cuts which were politically expedient. This was done without my permission, and in addition to other cuts I had agreed on because of space limitations. The version included here is my original one.
¹

My attack on the Equal Rights Amendment in this piece was part of a general opposition I took at that time to the ERA—out of my leftover Leftism. My criticism was unfair and willfully misrepresentative of the proposed Amendment. To reply to myself, then: (1) One of the aims of ERA supporters is to get protective labor legislation
extended
to cover men, too—so that it will not be thrown out for anyone. (2) The ERA would not necessarily make it more difficult for women to get alimony: it could hardly be more difficult than it already is. In half of all the cases where the wife is awarded alimony the husband stops payments about two years later. The woman usually does not have the time, money, or energy to take him back to court repeatedly, so she lets it slide, having already got herself a (rotten) job to bring her income up to subsistence level. (3) The ERA might have made women eligible for the draft (there was some disagreement among lawyers and legislators about this), but it would have been for noncombatant service in any case. The question is now academic, of course, since the draft itself has been abolished for everybody.

I support the ERA today, although as a radical feminist I don't believe it is The Answer, and I wish the document were stronger and more inclusive. This is doubtless quixotic of me, since the Amendment even as it stands is having a difficult
time of it passing some state legislatures. The Founding Fathers did not view women as whole human beings, and their male descendants in Congress and in Statehouses two hundred years later seem to be wooden-headed chips off the same old block.

O
NE GLANCE
at the masthead on the opposite page is sufficient to reinforce the irony of a feminist writing anything in the pages of the
New York Times
. When C. Wright Mills included the
Times
in his listing of the Power Elite, he neglected to say (although it ought to be obvious) that the
Times
, with its brother listees, was/is dominated by rich white heterosexual males. In the United States of Amanica [
sic
], if you are poor, non-Caucasian, homosexual, and/or
female
, you are by all past definitions less than human, and by all present ones, dangerous as well. (If you happen to be all those things combined, God won't even help you.)

The growing repression clearly shows the basic means by which white male imperialism intends to try to keep “those people” from a righteous rebellion. With women, however, we see the Man trying to use a special tactic in addition to the usual brutality: co-optation. (The
Times
can congratulate itself on the liberalism of permitting such dissent in its pages—and thus retain the ability to “permit” what is a human right.)

Women struggling for their liberation have always been good for a laugh. The history books snicker about those crazy old ladies in bloomers; but did you know that the news journal published by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the late 1800's was titled
The Revolution?
Women have always been good for a patronizing smile and even a modicum of agreement—if we don't “go too far,” if we ask for things like nice ladies should, and if our demands require no basic change and do not threaten the phallic imperialism that is out to destroy the entire planet. And this is where, today, the media comes in to manipulate, ridicule, and co-opt.

Like the
Times
, all mass newspapers and magazines, both general and “for women,” are male-controlled. So is the electronic media; you sometimes see a token female reporter these days (frequently a Third World woman—two oppressions for the convenient price of one salary), but men still own the networks, write the news, determine the coverage and emphasis and analysis, and decide the programming, no matter how strong the rumblings of anger from the women themselves who work within those institutions.

This leaves the Women's Liberation Movement with a dilemma. Women
as women
do not even have the tactical advantage (from an organizing—and military—viewpoint) of a ghetto situation. We are
isolated from one another by the nuclear family structure, by cultural conditioning, and by the barriers of race, class, economics, age, and sexual preference. How does a new movement cut through that isolation to raise consciousness around the fact that all women are viewed in the same basic roles (nurturer, sexual object, reproductive vessel, cheap or even free labor, etc.) across those barriers? Leafleting on New York's Lower East Side for ten years could not reach the housewife in Escanaba, Michigan, but thirty seconds on the six o'clock news would. We were forced to use a medium which we knew was in the control of an adversary, one we knew would distort, truncate, and ridicule our issues. Even now, I am writing this in the context of the
New York Times
in order to reach still more women.
By any means necessary
means just that.