In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (31 page)

“We are working on revisions,” the Collective declared. “We want to add chapters on menopause and getting older and attitudes toward children, etc., etc., but we haven’t had time.”

There was no shortage of feedback. “The first edition was weak on the dangers of high-dose-estrogen oral contraceptives,” Barbara Seaman remembers. She mailed the women a copy of her book,
The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill
, and was gratified to see that the next edition reflected her concern.

“A woman in Iowa wrote in and said, ‘You didn’t mention ectopic pregnancy.’ ” remembers Jane Pincus. “And we said ‘Great, write about it and we’ll put it in.’ This is really how the book evolved.”

It was only a matter of time before New York publishers learned of the phenomenal underground success. In the fall of 1972 both Random House and Simon and Schuster came courting with modest offers. For the first time in their experience as a working collective, the Boston women were unable to reach a consensus. Random House was owned at the time by RCA, a conglomerate with huge government defense contracts, rendering it complicitous in the war machine. An independent company and seemingly purer, Simon and Schuster won the agonizing vote by a narrow margin.

Freezing their ranks, the women incorporated as a nonprofit foundation. Judy Norsigian, their “baby” at twenty-three, and Norma Swenson, their “old lady” at forty, were the last to come aboard. They were to become the public face of the Collective in the years to come.

When the news of the commercial sale appeared in the penultimate New England Free Press printing, the mail-order leftists commandeered a page of their own to cry foul, warning that a capitalist publisher would impede the building of socialism. The women dodged the ideological brickbats as best they could while they readied their beloved creation for its aboveground debut. “Everything had to be decided by consensus,” Simon and Schuster editor Alice Mayhew remembers. “It took a long time. But we knew they were in touch with a generation of young women who wanted to be talked to straightforwardly. We would have been dopey to interfere.”

Rape, an emerging issue for feminists, became a chapter in the handsome, large-format 1973 Simon and Schuster
Our Bodies, Ourselves
. Judy Norsigian, who’d been in the commune movement, wrote a chapter on nutrition. Mindful of the rising tide of lesbian consciousness, the OBOS women—who were then all heterosexual—sent out a call for the appropriate expertise. A Boston gay women’s collective responded with “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes,” insisting on anonymity and complete editorial control of their chapter.

Illustrations for the aboveground
Our Bodies, Ourselves
included many drawings and photographs of African-American women, in keeping with the politics of the newsprint editions. A sharp dig at the U.S. military presence in Vietnam survived, but the proviso “Don’t forget that Ortho and Tampax are capitalist organizations pushing their own products for profits” got axed. “Women, Medicine and Capitalism,” a lengthy polemic in the earlier versions, shrank to a paragraph that was buried amid the nitty-gritty on yeast infections, cystitis, and crabs. Softer rhetoric was a Collective decision, in line with the women’s desires to reach the mainstream and include more facts. However, they resisted the ladylike language a copy editor they nicknamed Blue Pencil wished to impose. “Where we wrote ‘pee,’ ” says Jane Pincus, “Blue Pencil changed it to ‘urinate.’ We changed it right back.”

Our Bodies, Ourselves
sold more than a million copies and earned more than a half million dollars in royalties during its first five years of commercial distribution, and became the premier sourcebook for a generation of sexually active young women, crossing all lines of race and class. Copies were deeply discounted or given out free at birth control clinics; the book found an audience among hard-to-reach teenagers when it was adopted as a teaching tool in hundreds of high school sex-education programs. With aching honesty the women dispersed their royalty money to movement projects, except for the pittance they paid to their staff people, chiefly Norsigian, Swenson, and Rome. By the end of the seventies the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, convening periodically to work on updated editions, had witnessed four divorces and three second marriages. Jane Pincus and Ruth Bell were living with their husbands in other parts of the country; Wendy Sanford had discovered her lesbian identity; Nancy Hawley had developed a deep interest in Buddhism. All told, the women reared nearly two dozen children. “People used to come from overseas and ask to see the house where the Collective lived,” says Norma Swenson. “I think they were disappointed to find that we led individual lives.”

In the summer of 1973 a singer-songwriter named Helen Reddy released “I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar),” a hit record that reflected the changing
times. On another front, Billie Jean King trounced an aging male chauvinist braggart, Bobby Riggs, in a nationally televised tennis match billed as “The Battle of the Sexes.” The women’s movement had rapidly moved beyond the initial phase of mimeographed position papers. Abortion rights, electoral politics, and legislative campaigns were commanding many women a full-time attention.

Yet the search for community, the warmth and support of kindred souls, was still uppermost in many radicals’ hearts, and so was the opportunity to grapple with new ideas through writing, feminism’s chief means of expression from the beginning. These two abiding interests merged in the founding and running, on a shoestring basis, of another wave of women’s newspapers. Defiantly countercultural, the papers’ writers and editors cared little for establishment values and mainstream success. They represented “the movement” on its most basic level. For at least a decade, until the advent of the Reagan era, there was a political and economic climate that permitted their voices to be heard.

Berkeley native Becky Taber, five feet tall with waist-length hair, who founded
Plexus
in San Francisco, called herself a cosmic tramp. A college professor’s daughter, she was go-go dancing in Portland, sewing her own costumes, when she happened upon New York Radical Feminists’
Notes from the Second Year
. It changed her life. Quitting the go-go life, she took a job selling water beds in San Mateo, managing a store. In February 1974 she had a deep talk with Sandra Dasmann, her childhood chum, in East Oakland.

“The Full Moon women’s coffeehouse was opening, women’s music was happening, A Woman’s Place bookstore was going strong, and Patty Hearst had just been captured by the SLA,” Taber relates. “Sandra was scared, she was freaking. The papers were full of the lifestyle of the SLA women—their former boyfriends, their female lovers, their black lovers. It was too close to home for us, right down to their cats and their plants. Sandra said the Bay Area needed a women’s newspaper—we needed to sort things out.”

The first issue of
Plexus
appeared the following month. It carried Dasmann’s review of
Women and Madness
by Phyllis Chesler, and
Taber’s Open Letter to “Fahizah,” Nancy Ling Perry of the SLA, with whom she felt a bond. Perry, who was tiny in stature like Taber, had also worked as a topless dancer. “I think honesty and bravery, not weapons, differentiate the free person from the oppressed and the oppressor,” Becky wrote to her counterpart in the SLA.

Copy for
Plexus
was typed with ragged right margins on an IBM Selectric and pasted up with rubber cement. Transfer letters were used for headlines. Robin Cox, into spiritual art, did the layout and illustrations. Ann McConnell, a single mother volunteering at Friends of the Earth, donated three hundred dollars from her welfare check to pay the printer for five thousand copies of the premier issue.

“We built
Plexus
around news, poetry, and a calendar of upcoming women’s events,” Taber reminisces. “Sixty women came through as volunteers the first year. I ran all over San Francisco, collecting ideas for articles and gathering lists of resource groups and events on scraps of paper. I fetched and carried for
Plexus
as though I was carrying the sacred fire. ‘Write it up, the deadline’s the fifteenth’ ‘Would you like to learn layout?’ The advertising people got a commission that turned into a minimum wage for them. They were the only ones who got paid.”

“Joining the
Plexus
collective was definitely not a career move,” says Toni Mester, a college English instructor who wrote book reviews and cultural reports as Toni Chestnut. “It was a community-building exercise and a new way to express ourselves. We published everything interesting that came in that was feminist, lesbian, spiritual, environmental. Because we weren’t ideological, the Marxists held us in contempt.”

“I have so many vivid memories of
Plexus,
” says Nancy Stockwell, writer, editor, and ad seller. “I met Becky Taber in A Woman’s Place bookstore just after I’d moved to the Bay Area from Boston. Right on the spot I volunteered my unemployment check to cover the third issue. It turned out we didn’t have to use that money because we sold enough ads.

“I was in the office when the FBI came looking for a tape we’d been sent by Bill and Emily Harris, who were part of the SLA group that kidnapped Patty Hearst. We told them we threw the tape out because
it had a man’s voice on it. That seemed to satisfy them, but they followed us for weeks and then they arrested Jackie McBee, my neighbor, thinking she was Patty. I guess they thought we were all one big conspiracy.

“And I remember getting up in the middle of the night to help photograph the huge, lit-up Smirnoff billboard on top of the department store in downtown Berkeley. We knew women were going to change the sign from ‘What’s an Ice Pick? Smirnoff Vodka’ to ‘What’s an Ice Pick? One Answer to Rape!’ ”

A photo of the altered billboard appeared on the
Plexus
cover for September 1975.

Hoping to get a friend’s poetry published, April McMahon went to an open meeting for
Plexus
at the Bacchanal, a women’s cafe in North Berkeley. The scholar of French literature ended up working at the paper for ten years. “First as the classical music critic,” she relates, “and then as the bookkeeper. We’re talking tiddlywinks money, but after we incorporated, suddenly there were quarterly payroll taxes, corporate taxes, county property taxes. I took a bookkeeping course at Contra Costa College and slowly got an accounting degree.”

At its peak the print runs for
Plexus
reached eight thousand copies. The women had a monthly budget of eight hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on the number of paid ads, and were able to rent three small rooms from a Baptist seminary on Dwight Way overlooking People’s Park.

“We had collectives for everything,” April McMahon laughs. “News, Reviews, Features, Letters, and Calendar. Also an Office Collective, and a coordinating council. Every collective was supposed to send one person to the council meetings, which would go very late sometimes. Poor Jane Bicek, who had to get up very early in the morning, would fall asleep.”

“We discussed stuff like how do we bring women of color into a largely volunteer organization, and oh, lots of serious things,” says production manager Chris Orr. “Often someone would create a crisis and call a special emergency meeting. Once the whole News Collective walked out. I ran to the Bacchanal to find Nancy Stockwell—‘Nancy, Nancy, we’re not going to publish the next issue!’ Stockwell slammed
her beer on the bar and growled, ‘
Nothing
stops
Plexus!
’ Sometimes the meetings were so disruptive we wondered who the disrupters were working for. We evolved an m.o. that I called Roberta’s Rules of Order, with a chair and motions and calling the question. That helped.”

Sandra Dasmann drifted away after the first year: “People were becoming lesbian; I wasn’t. If I had a choice, believe me, I would have jumped over the line, just for the community. But I was pregnant and I wanted to do what was best for me and my baby, so I joined the back-to-the-land movement, which I regret to say was very male dominated.”

Nancy Stockwell stayed with
Plexus
for three years, until she moved back east: “Becky Taber always said that the most political thing we could do was to run the calendar so women could find each other and have places to meet. She was right. It led to the whole Lesbian Nation and women’s music scene. I think at the time we didn’t quite realize how much the women’s presses did change things for women in this country.”

Becky Taber burned out after three years: “Okay, the first major split was ‘Who are we and what do we believe?’ Some people wanted us to stop publishing and go on a retreat to figure it out. In the middle of the meeting I walked into the bathroom and saw running sores all along my jawline. That fight I won. We continued to publish. The next big split was over the voting rights of new people. I thought the interns should be included. That fight I lost. It took me another three years to recover, but my three years at
Plexus
were the most exciting in my life.”