Going Too Far (25 page)

Relief
. Horrifying relief, at realizing I was glad to be alone, glad not to have to go through that charade, not to have to settle for anything less than what I needed and desired and deserved. Relief at being able to turn over and go to sleep, unmolested, alone, and free in my bed.

Embarrassment
. Omigod, what had I been doing, anyway, listening in on people fucking? It just isn't done, by my mother's standards or even by our own hip, radical ones. Am I turning into some sort of a sickie? The certainty that I would
(1)
never be able to tell B. about the experience, let alone
(2)
share all those feelings in the context of the awkward situation with other sisters. Which I
have
done, a sign that I'm beginning to really trust that sisterhood.

And then, just as I dozed toward an exhausted sleep, one last-minute flash of something unexpected, sharp.

Anguish
. Because my man and I had been out in a country meadow earlier that night, lying silent under a mandala of stars we never even glimpse in the city, breathing warm air heavy with the smell of earth and honeysuckle and wild roses, watching the summer moon tip the buttercups all silver and feeling the dew settle on our hair. And we had not spoken. Had not touched. Because his confusion and my pain grew between us in that meadow, and because I could no longer “make it right,” reach over as I have done a thousand times before and say it didn't matter.

We don't get out into the country and lie in a night-summer meadow much—hardly ever. We live in a poisoned-air city and are justly paranoid and tight and tired and rushed and fighting the System and we may be dead soon. And it was my
right
, goddammit, to have had my moment in that meadow, just the way it could have been in some other world, society, culture, dream. Because I'm only here once and I'll die and never, never have that moment. Because I can't settle for anything less, any more. Because I may never be the free, laughing, brain-awake, sex-alive, whole woman I'm struggling to be, and I may never live with the true brother I'm struggling to love still—but unless I go further and further, all the way, and throw every risk to the winds
in my commitment to that struggle, unless I settle less and less for nothing other than the total ecstasy of freedom, then I am dead. Not in a superficial way, like being killed, but in the more profound way: dead, like that part of myself I left behind in that redneck country farmer's summer meadow, where I lie on wet grass forever, not understanding, and waiting for a love that will not happen.

June 1970

A BRIEF ELEGY FOR FOUR WOMEN

The details for the following article were taken from the
New York Times
and the
New York Post
. It was no small task for the “feminist caucus” at Rat to convince the rest of the collective that a short article on the massacre of some secretaries had a place in the paper. But the piece was printed, and seemed to change some minds both within the collective and among our readers.

The type of everyday atrocity mentioned in the “Elegy” still goes on, of course. Each hour women are brutalized, beaten, and terrorized—as well as raped and murdered—and the patriarchy still conveniently refuses to see such crimes as “political” (even as the lynching of blacks in the South and, yes, North was “political”). But now
women
view such acts with a new consciousness, and have begun to mobilize against them.

P
ATRICIA
C
HROMICK
, 22
years old

S
ANDRA
L. P
ETERS
, 24
years old

M
ARY
A
NN
R
EINSCHE
,
27 years old

L
INDA
D. W
ILLIS
, 21
years old

L
AST WEEK
, Joseph White, a twenty-five-year-old administrative analyst in the State Employment Insurance Offices in Albany, New York, killed four women with a pump-action shotgun.

He had taken a sick leave from his job and had come in to pick up his first paycheck, which was not ready for him. Becoming enraged at the bureaucratic foul-up, he went on a rampage against the women in the office, and finally shot himself.

It was not a case of indiscriminate murder. White was in fact discriminating enough to pass up all the men he saw in between his
killings of women. When one male bureaucrat tried to question him, White ran past him—until he found another woman to kill.

White had been screwed by his employer. So his natural response was to take out his rage on the people he had power over—women, all of whom were themselves powerless to live a decent life or even die a meaningful death. They were all four workers in the secretarial pool.

No matter where they are on the status ladder, men can always feel better as long as they can oppress women. White was a man who himself was oppressed, as a worker and a victim of bureaucracy, but his hatred detoured the real enemy—the System and his employer-job-whole-life-misery—and exploded instead against the convenient lightning rods: women.

Every day newspapers carry stories of atrocities committed against women: murder, rape, beatings, mutilations. Such news is presented as being either titillating or irrelevant. To us it is intensely political.

Sexual crimes are political assassinations, and at the rising rate and ferocity with which they are being committed, they approach attempted genocide of a people on the basis of sex and gender.

Only one thing can protect us. Women must defend our lives and bodies and minds against male violence, by any means necessary. We must learn and practice self- and sister-defense on all levels: physical, mental, emotional. We must learn to understand weapons. We are doing this already, but not fast enough, hard enough, seriously enough.
Too many sisters who would be willing to die defending a radical brother would on the other hand find it difficult, if not impossible, even to relate to the daily suffering of any woman in a secretarial pool
.

Such a shameful attitude must stop. We can afford no more arrogant dismissals of secretaries, housewives, file clerks, nurses, etc. No more snobbish, vicious statements like “But she's so
straight
. But that's so
bourgeois
. But they're not
hip
. But that one reminds me of my
mother
.”

One of the four sisters who was murdered in Albany lay dying in a room where she had lived a daily death, in the midst of gray typewriters and gray metal file cabinets and gray chrome desks. Littered around her were squares of white paper to be typed and then filed—some “unfortunately” ruined now, because they were stained with her blood. She kept whimpering, “Please, please somebody help me. Somebody help.”

Remember The Albany Four, sisters. Never forget.…

October
1970

A DAY IN THE LIFE (OF A WOMAN)

Given
Rat
's emphasis on covering the melodramatic actions that seemed endemic to the Left (those ejaculatory tactics again), it was vital that at least now and then there be some articles in the paper representing the commonplace, hackle-raising, undramatic forms the oppression of women often takes. This piece, “A Day in the Life (of a Woman),” while hardly purporting to represent all women, was an attempt to insinuate those realities into the frenzied rhetoric about male-defined radical issues. The reference deploring “NOW-type women” stemmed from my leftover Leftism, which had me trapped into playing more-radical-than-thou games. I have since discovered that the overall membership of the National Organization for Women is, across the country, dedicated and admirable. If I still find myself in political disagreement with some of NOW's positions I have learned, at the peril of my own feminist consciousness, not to sneer stupidly at the entire organization. The reference deploring the Socialist Workers Party and its offshoot the Young Socialists Alliance, however, still stands. I confess that the women enmeshed therein evoke my pity for the utter irrelevance of all their hard work—and the men therein evoke my loathing, to this very day. I have changed, on the other hand, in that I no longer refer, as I do in this piece, to men I dislike as “bastards.” Epithets such as “pusillanimous troglodyte,” or even simply, “creep,” seem more to the point. I have also changed in that I no longer try to hide the sex of my child, euphemistically referring to him as “it.”

I'
M A WHITE WOMAN
in my late twenties, married, and with a small child just over a year old. I guess I've been a feminist for some time and also am struggling continually with the issues of class and race. Last week I had a “day in the life” of a woman, a day which certainly intensified the very contradictions we struggle with
every
day.

I had brought the baby to the opening of a new sort of “people's park” on the Lower East Side, where we live. The community had taken an old junk-filled lot and turned it into a playground and park. In the afternoon, it was great: free food was being cooked outdoors, steel bands were playing, women and children laughing and talking in Spanish and English.

The men arrived toward nightfall. Wham. Sexual overtones.
Machismo
everywhere. And I was called a racist for asking an older kid not to swing his honest-to-god pickaxe around in the sandbox near the toddlers—until a Puerto Rican sister (also a mother) came to the rescue and made the kid put the axe away—
and
made the adult male “organizer” who had screamed at me back down fast, himself. Whew. I got depressed.

But I was lucky enough to have a pleasant evening to look forward to: my husband would be taking care of the baby, and I was going to an Open House at the Women's Center. I decided to treat myself to the pure luxury of first having dinner out, alone, with a good book. What heaven.

I had forgotten that women do
not
dine out alone in New York on a Saturday night. But I was swiftly reminded, by being made to feel like a misfit, and/or a whore. Twice the waiter asked me when my dinner partner would join me (although he
was
gracious enough to permit me seating—two other restaurants, neither very fancy, had turned me away at the door for being unescorted). Twice I told him I was alone. By the time my food arrived, the joy of a quiet dinner by myself had deteriorated into despondency: I was obviously so awful no one wanted to share food with me. Then they turned the lights way down and lit candles for a romantic Saturday evening atmosphere—and I almost went blind trying to read my book. Enough, I thought. Off to my sisters at the Center; that will be a lift, at least.

I hadn't reckoned on entering in the middle of a confrontation between some NOW-type women and some Young Socialist Alliance-Socialist Workers Party types. Gawd. Only one thing could unite them: a shared disgust for those crazy feminists who seemed to hate men and mistrust hierarchical organizations. So much for the Women's Center. I split in the middle of a playwright's lecture on how painful it was to sell out to Broadway but how her life had been saved by the Socialist Workers Party. I hit the street and started to walk downtown.

One block away, I was stopped by two young women (neither could have been more than sixteen years old) who were both
very
high. One seemed drunk as well as stoned, and was positively reeling. They actually identified themselves as “groupies,” and wanted to know if I knew how much it would cost to get into a nearby discotheque. I said I didn't know but told them that they could go up to the Women's
Center for free, where there would shortly be dancing and music as well as beer, soda, and coffee.

We were standing there rapping, and might all have returned to the Center, but for two bastards who cruised by in a convertible, came on to us, and managed to pick up the kids. One girl said to me, “We'll rip 'em off for admission to the disco,” and shrugged sadly when I suggested that women are the ones who ultimately pay. The other girl was too far out of it to care. I couldn't stop them.

Alone again, I resumed my walk, trying, at least, to enjoy the night air. After being hassled three times in the next block (once quite menacingly), I decided I couldn't hack it, daren't wait for a bus, was too far from the uninvitingly deserted subway in any event—and I hailed a cab. Emergency-gloom-splurge.

Settled in. Safe at last.

But the driver had seen my Women's Liberation button. Oops. All the way home he proceeded to tell me how abortion was okay for them nigger and spic broads who breed so much, but no good for nice white girls like me. Soon I was shouting at him, then screaming for him to stop the cab and let me out. He blithely ignored my orders—and my basic consumer-rights. Finally, at the end of the ride, he told me that if we women really pushed “this liberation thing,” men like him were going to start killing us, literally. “You talk about ‘male violence'—you ain't seen nothin' yet. These rapes and beatings are going to soar up, baby. You can't tell me I'm not a king in my own home and get away with it.” Besides, he informed me, he was a union man. Refraining from asking him whether his union had been organized for the express purpose of maiming women or whether that was a fringe benefit, I contented myself with sputtering that I was studying karate, as many other women were, and that we'd take a few of him and his friends with us if we had to go. I also didn't tip him. Which was less a gesture of courage than a cowardly bow to reality, since after paying the damned fare I had no more money.

Anyway, home. All I could do was run for the baby and clutch its warm good little body, waking it up of course, then crying over it and rocking it until it fell asleep again.

I know this must somehow be relevant to other women's struggles. All day long I had been properly, correctly, revolutionarily aware of the “contradictions”: race
versus
feminism at the park; social rituals
versus
feminism at the restaurants; sexual economics (and subculture social rituals)
versus
feminism with the two women on the street; and finally class
versus
feminism with the taxicab driver.