In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (11 page)

Boston was seething with small liberation groups in 1969, all going their own way. The most visible and adventurous was the Dunbar/Densmore/Warrior group,
Cell 16 of Female Liberation, named for 16 Lexington Avenue, Cambridge, where Abby Rockefeller had turned her basement into the group’s office. Buoyed by the success of
No More Fun and Games
the previous October, the women put out a second issue in February. Nearly half of the 128-page journal was written by Dana Densmore, expounding on sex roles, liberals, sisterhood, and “The Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object.” The editors proposed that the movement adopt the newly coined word “sexism,” which had popped up in a southern newsletter, in place of the Old Left’s “male chauvinism” and “male supremacy.” They explained, “A sexist, then, is a person who promotes sexism.”

In May, Roxanne Dunbar joined with Nancy Hawley, who’d attended the stormy Lake Villa conference outside Chicago, to organize a New England regional meeting on Women’s Liberation. Six hundred women flocked to
Emmanuel College, a Catholic girls’ school in downtown Boston, over the Mother’s Day weekend. Reporters were barred, but a few sneaked in and wrote mocking accounts of Cell 16’s karate demonstration.

The Emmanuel College conference was a signal event for the
Boston movement. It inspired the formation of the socialist-feminist Bread and Roses, led by Meredith Tax and Linda Gordon, and it brought together, at Nancy Hawley’s Saturday afternoon workshop, the nucleus of a group of young mothers who went on to make history as the authors and editors of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
.

But that year it was Cell 16 that represented “Boston” to the national movement. Invited to address the first Congress to Unite Women held in New York in November, Cell 16 treated the assembly to a Chinese revolutionary drama. They strode on stage and proceeded to cut off their long hair to cries of “No, no! Don’t do it!”

“Mine was matted and stringy but Martha Atkins had beautiful auburn tresses,” chuckles Dunbar, who lectured the audience on how long hair “belongs” to men.

“Men like my breasts—should I cut them off too?” Anselma Dell’ Olio of NOW called out.

“Hair grows back,” Dunbar retorted.

Ivy Bottini, the president of New York NOW, was transfixed: “
People were sobbing and crying. This was pure performance art, but who ever saw performance art affect an audience like that?”

Bottini grew alarmed when she saw a camerman filming the sequence. Marlene Sanders of ABC, the movement’s only ally in television, and a member of NOW, was doing a documentary on Women’s Liberation, but Bottini thought the
haircutting drama was too intimate for public consumption. Seizing her opportunity later that evening, she
diverted the crew’s attention while a relative newcomer named Rita Mae Brown poked into the unattended ABC film bag. A full magazine of conference footage was removed and destroyed. “I wasn’t trying to hurt Marlene,” Bottini insists. “This was for us. We needed to digest it before it went out to the world.”

Sanders and her crew discovered the film was missing when they packed up to leave. “
The theft didn’t lend the movement any credibility in the ABC newsroom,” she wrote years later. She believed it reflected the split in the movement between those who wanted to work through the system and those who wanted to undermine establishment institutions.

Roxanne Dunbar still wishes the film had survived.

Soon after the haircutting incident, Dunbar’s autocratic charisma began to pose problems for the other visionary theorists in Cell 16.

“
To her credit, Roxanne wasn’t afraid to work with strong women,” Dana Densmore reflects. “But a leader needs followers, and we weren’t followers. We all had our own opinions, and too often our sense of what we needed to do did not coincide with hers. In those days Roxanne was a great admirer of the Chinese revolution. If any of us disagreed with her, she thought we should have a criticism/self-criticism session and hash it out until we saw the error of our ways.”

One evening Dunbar threw Cell 16 into turmoil by declaring that it was counterrevolutionary to keep pets.

“Abby Rockefeller had two dogs and some cats, and one of the cats had had kittens,” Densmore relates. “We’d sit on the floor in Abby’s basement with puppies and kittens crawling around. I don’t see where it had any influence on our activism, but Roxanne came in late that night and said that she’d had a dream. She was in China and she saw an inscription on a wall. Someone translated it for her and the mysterious inscription said ‘Too many yip-yips.’ She understood this to be a message that there were too many little animals around, so she wanted Abby to take her
dogs and cats to the animal shelter.” Abby stood firm, however.

Most of the
group was relieved when Roxanne left Boston in December 1969 to pursue her radical vision in New Orleans. Dunbar’s role as a catalytic feminist founder and thinker had run its course. The rest of Cell 16 fought a takeover attempt by the Socialist Workers Party and stayed together until 1973, when the sixth and final issue of
No More Fun and Games
was published.

New York had the reputation of a sea of barracudas to movement women in the rest of the country. Although New York represented the roiling center of pure feminist theory (in opposition to Chicago and Washington’s socialist/feminist/anti-imperialist vision), inside the city the divisions between the leftist “politicos” and the pure feminists ran deep.

New York Radical Women had grown so large and unwieldy that
each time a newcomer walked in the door, the interminable debate, “Is the enemy man or capitalism?” cranked up anew. The January 1969 Counter-Inaugural fiasco in Washington had been the last straw for Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis. They announced they were forming a new group whose key principles would be “feminist” and “action.” Firestone came up with the name.

“You know how women intellectuals used to be called Bluestockings?” Shulie said one evening to the group at Irene Peslikis’s loft. “We’re radical women intellectuals, so we should call ourselves
Redstockings.”

The appealing name would resonate in movement history, not always, alas, for comfortable reasons. Redstockings acquired instant cachet when, for their first action, the women disrupted a New York State hearing on abortion law reform. Five weeks later their public speak-out, “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is,” would mark a turning point in the national campaign to legalize abortion.

After that powerful beginning,
fights over equality began to sap the group’s cohesion. As Barbara Mehrhof saw it, Kathie Amatniek, Shulie Firestone, and Ellen Willis functioned as a leadership clique, and everyone else’s ideas were disregarded. Sheila Cronan proposed that Redstockings hang a banner from the Statue of Liberty, and she and Barbara spent many nights sewing the words. “Free Abortion on Demand” on a huge cotton sheet at Irene Peslikis’s loft. They were hurt and bewildered when the leaders scuttled Sheila’s plan. As a result the outsiders started meeting separately on another night of the week. Calling themselves the
Class Workshop, they began to explore their family histories.

“
We got together out of a feeling that no one was paying any attention to us,” says Cronan, “and we came up with the idea that it was because of our working-class backgrounds. A lot of the Jewish women had grown up in radical families and had gone to expensive colleges where they’d been involved with radical groups. They were used to speaking out and being listened to, at least to some extent. We didn’t have that confidence. We felt that the Jewish women thought the Catholic women were intellectually inferior or kind of stupid because we didn’t speak their political language.”

For a while Redstockings rented a storefront on Avenue A and East Eleventh Street where new women were processed through monthly orientation sessions.

“
Kathie was very nervous about the new people,” says Irene Peslikis. “She kept saying, ‘Who are they? How can they call themselves Redstockings? We don’t know their level of consciousness.’ ”

“
Shulie would never work on ordinary stuff,” says Mehrhof. “She said she could only work on creative things.”

After covering Woodstock, the rock concert of the century, for
The New Yorker
,
Ellen Willis took off for Colorado with the man she lived with to organize for the antiwar G.I. Coffee House movement. Irene Peslikis felt betrayed.

“
Sending literature through the mail became our big contribution,” she sighs. “I was the only one with a car, so I went to the far reaches of Queens and Brooklyn carrying bulk literature and delivering it to outposts, to organize new groups. I’d get up in the morning, make a list, and think
movement, movement, movement
. It seemed endless.”

When Ti-Grace Atkinson had departed from NOW, she formed the October 17th Movement, which had died aborning. She revived it as
THE FEMINISTS
, with capital letters.
Cofounder Anne Koedt recalls, “At first it was a very good little group, a place where you could hear yourself think without the din from the politicos.” But when Koedt returned from a short vacation in the summer, she was handed a new and rigid set of membership rules. She bowed out quickly.

In Koedt’s absence four women from the Class Workshop, Mehrhof, Cronan, Pam Kearon, and Linda Feldman, had switched their allegiance from Redstockings to Ti-Grace. Atkinson, raised in a wealthy, conservative Louisiana family, yearned for an army of disciples. Mehrhof, Cronan, and Kearon possessed inventive feminist minds and poorly developed egos. Linda Feldman, the only Jewish woman in the group, was equally insecure.

“
Ti-Grace’s philosophy was that we were all supposed to be equal,” says Sheila Cronan. “We were supposed to share power and not have any hierarchy. She really believed in that philosophy, and
probably still does, but her personality made it difficult for her to follow through.”

THE FEMINISTS
set up a mailing address on Liberty Street and met twice a week, usually at Cronan’s Upper West Side apartment. “That’s where we put the mimeo,” Barbara Mehrhof remembers. “Ti-Grace said every revolution needs a mimeo machine.”

In this self-styled vanguard of egalitarian activist-thinkers, missing a meeting became grounds for expulsion, and no more than 30 percent of the members could be married. Eventually
THE FEMINISTS
banned all women living with men from their ranks. As a vanguard collective,
THE FEMINISTS
was a curious experiment in churchlike discipline and ultra-democracy.
One of their tasks was to figure out how to counter the domineering tendencies of Ti-Grace, a bundle of nerves in constant motion who talked nonstop at their meetings and snagged all the media attention because she was already a “movement star.”
THE FEMINISTS
devised a random lot system for their political work. Ti-Grace took her turn cutting stencils, running the mimeo, and stapling the group’s theoretical papers, the humdrum chores they labeled “shitwork,” while Linda, who was easily flustered, was sent out to do the Barry Gray radio program.
Feldman’s performance, they had to admit, was poor.

Pam Kearon found a way for the timid ones to gain practice in public speaking. They scoured
The Village Voice
every week for notices of other people’s political meetings. “If we couldn’t find something to do with women,” Cronan relates, “we’d go anyway and stand up and make statements during the question period. I remember a meeting of the Gandhi Society where we stood up and denounced him. The people running these meetings must have been bewildered, but we found the exercise very helpful.”

Ti-Grace abandoned her philosophy studies at Columbia to earn her living on the lecture circuit. The other
FEMINISTS
conceded that they had no right to stop her—Atkinson’s love affair with the media brought in speaking engagements and fees. Barbara, Sheila, and Pam applied themselves to writing, which they loved. Separately and together, they composed position papers on marriage (a form of slavery), prostitution (it separated women into the bad and the good), Amazon women (true feminist heroines), and the biological origins
of women’s oppression. Pam tried her hand at movie criticism. Ti-Grace worked up a broadside on the oppressive nature of love. All
THE FEMINISTS
’ papers were sold through the mail for ten cents a copy, yet something was still out of balance. Even though each
FEMINIST
put her name on her own theoretical work, to the public the only
FEMINIST
was Ti-Grace.

“Sometimes she came up with cockamamie ideas,” Mehrhof laughs, “like when she said we shouldn’t appear with men in public. Linda Feldman was devastated—she asked if the ban included her father. And then Ti-Grace returned from an out-of-town speech and told us about the famous man she slept with.”

The group was also having trouble with their leader’s talking jags and constant motion, and her irate mood when they didn’t apply themselves as hard as she did.

“We weren’t fledglings anymore,” says Mehrhof. “By then we knew that we could fly on our own.”