In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (37 page)

Sheila Farrell found an unfurnished three-bedroom house near Monterey that the defense committee was able to rent on a short-term basis. The women brought in sleeping bags and stocked the kitchen with bean sprouts and peanut butter, augmenting their veggie fare with inexpensive locally grown artichokes. Hedy Sarney posted the house rules on the refrigerator: no dope, clean up after you eat, kick in a dollar a day (food stamps acceptable), and no long-distance calls without the committee’s approval.

The first rule at the defense house was “Don’t bug Inez.” Garcia had her own room, where she tended to the mysterious cups of red wine and water she kept in the closet. A devout Catholic in public, the private Inez put her faith in Santeria, the old Caribbean religion, to cast a spell over Judge Stanley Lawson, who was determined to
keep the trial focused on murder, not rape. Jim Wood, a sympathetic reporter on the
San Francisco Examiner
, was a popular guest at the house (no one suspected he was writing a book). As the trial progressed it attracted national interest, including a team from
People
magazine.

Santeria or not, things went badly for Garcia. “I killed the motherfucker because I was raped, and I’d kill him again,” she shouted from the defense table in one notable courtroom outburst. “Judge,” she continued, approaching the bench, “why don’t you just find me guilty and put me in jail?”

Lawson ordered her removed.
“Pigs! Take your hands off me!”
she screamed at the bailiffs as the judge rapped his gavel to adjourn for the day. Everything happend so fast that Susan Rothaizer was in a state of shock, she reported in
Plexus
, but she and most others on the defense committee thought it was good for the jury to see the depth of Inez’s feelings.

Goaded on cross-examination a few days later, the defendant erupted again, defiantly sputtering, “The only thing I am sorry about is that I missed Luis Castillo.”

The jury found Inez Garcia guilty of second-degree murder. In the recriminations that followed, some militants blamed Charles Garry, some blamed the defense committee, and still others, including Garry, blamed Inez for playing to the militants in her courtroom outbursts. “Even I got trashed,” Rothaizer remembers. “The Oakland Women’s Health Collective blamed
me
for Garry’s defense.”

While the prisoner did time in Frontera, where she went to begin her five-year-to-life sentence, the defense committee redoubled its efforts. Garcia appeared on the cover of
Ms
. with a story by Nan Blitman and a sidebar by Gloria Steinem asking “What do we do with our rage?” Susan Jordan, a young lawyer who represented Emily Harris in the Patty Hearst case, took over the appeal.

“I felt,” says Jordan, “that Garry had done it wrong. Inez hated that he argued diminished capacity and presented her as a crazy woman. There wasn’t much communication between them. He couldn’t see that this was a classic self-defense case, imminent threat, even with the half-hour time lapse after the rape.”

To fast-forward, Garcia was acquitted at her second trial in March 1977, thanks to the defense strategy of Susan Jordan, who at one point had been fired by the volatile defendant and then rehired after the trial was underway. The feminist lawyer convinced the jury that her client shot Jimenez because she feared that he would return after the rape and kill her. Inez was a model of decorum this time around. She forsook her false eyelashes and wore a demure jacket; there was no grandstanding in the courtroom to her militant supporters. Jordan also wore a demure jacket, set off by a pretty, feminine scarf. Of course, by 1977 rape consciousness was riding high; in addition, several prosecution witnesses from the first trial failed to show up.

Lawyer and client posed for a victory picture on the courthouse steps. “And then Inez went off into the sunset,” Jordan laughs. “I never saw her again.” Neither did the defense committee, although one of the women once got a Christmas card from Miami.

The third of the trio of rape defense cases concerned
Yvonne Wanrow, a Colville Indian in Spokane, Washington. Hobbling on crutches with a cast on her leg, Wanrow had shot and killed a neighborhood drunk, known as Chicken Bill, after hearing he had molested her son and raped a friend’s daughter. After her trial and conviction the Native American movement publicized her plight and brought it to the feminist movement’s attention. In 1977 the Washington State appeals court overturned Wanrow’s conviction in response to briefs filed by Susan Jordan and New York lawyers Liz Schneider and Nancy Stearns, who raised fresh issues about a woman’s perception of physical danger and self-defense. “We worked out a deal for her,” Jordan recalls. “Something like three hundred hours of community service. She didn’t serve any time.”

Some people felt that the rape defense cases, and the battered women’s defense cases that followed in their wake, were tantamount to giving women a license to kill. I did not share this alarmist perspective, but neither did I feel that fund-raising concerts for murder defendants were the best way to promote rape consciousness. However, I certainly understood the cases’ popularity. Each defendant had a double constituency: each represented both an oppressed minority
and
the growing awareness about sexual assault.

Richard Nixon resigned in the summer of 1974 and Gerald Ford became president. In another development, admittedly of less earth-shaking significance but of avid interest to me, a few fast-moving men alert to the new interest in rape dashed into print but most of them were unable to write about sexual assault without eroticizing its violence. Their books sank without a trace.

Well, that’s not exactly true. One fellow had to be torpedoed several times. Frederic Storaska wrote
How to Say No to a Rapist and Survive
, in which he exhorted victims to urinate, defecate, or vomit in a rapist’s face. He claimed he ran a national organization for the prevention of rape and had studied four thousand cases. Anatole
Broyard, one of the critics taken in by Storaska, gave
How to Say No
a respectful review in
The New York Times
. Armed with this testament and a few other glowing commendations, Storaska started lecturing at colleges across the country until the real antirape movement
hounded him off the circuit.

Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women
, edited by Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, was the first feminist book wholly devoted to sexual assault to appear via a mainstream publisher. The
Sourcebook
, published in 1974, drew on the testimony and speeches three years earlier of the pioneering New York Radical Feminist speak-out and conference. A major breakthrough occurred in network television that February when
A Case of Rape
, starring Elizabeth Montgomery, was broadcast on NBC. The heavily promoted TV movie with its sympathetic treatment of a rape victim received the week’s highest Nielsen ratings.
Against Rape
by Andra Medea, a self-defense instructor, and Kathleen Thompson, a member of Women Against Rape in Chicago, was the next feminist book to arrive, followed by Diana Russell’s
The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective
. Russell went on to organize the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels, which drew two thousand women from forty countries.

Against Our Will
was published in October 1975. Seven years after attending my first Women’s Liberation meeting, five years after
I’d begun to think about rape and to organize against it, I was about to be thrust into national prominence as a movement theorist and leader. Rape awareness was entering mainstream thinking, thanks to the movement’s efforts, but the movement itself was struggling to recover its balance after a painful internal crisis that had begun that spring and had lasted all summer.

INTERNAL COMBUSTION

In 1975 the women’s movement was at its height, with antirape strategies at the forefront of the revolution’s new thinking. Abortion rights seemed inviolable two years after
Roe v. Wade
. Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment appeared imminent. NOW, with Eleanor Smeal and Karen DeCrow at the helm, had pledged its forces to a state-by-state campaign, and President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty had given the ERA their endorsement. With such broad-based support, what could possibly stop it? Feminism had gone global. Acknowledging the movement’s indigenous strength, the United Nations declared 1975 International Women’s Year and sponsored a conference in Mexico City. In the literary world, Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
had put “zipless fuck” into the lexicon; while
Newsweek
declared that
a new wave in fiction was wrenching the image of women from male hands.

Change was afoot on many fronts. Ella Grasso in Connecticut became the first woman to govern a state without following a husband into the job. Bella Abzug, the first voice in congress to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment, was preparing a run for the Senate. Billie Jean King, with Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, had led women’s tennis into the main court in sports. The circulation of
Ms
. topped 400,000. Women-owned businesses were springing up all over the place. In New York some people I knew even opened the First Women’s Bank.

The New Left, however, was in disarray and confusion. The war in Vietnam was over, but a decade of militant upheaval had taken its toll. Of the name-brand radicals from the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, Abbie Hoffman was in hiding after a drug bust, Jerry Rubin was exploring yoga, meditation, and est, Rennie Davis had found spiritual peace with the Maharaj Ji, Bobby Seale had fled the Panthers in fear of Huey Newton, and Tom Hayden, married to Jane Fonda, was trying his luck in the Democratic Party. As the weary rank-and-file New Leftists tried to pick up the pieces of their fractured lives, some turned to environmental issues or returned to academia; a number of women reinvented themselves as socialist-feminists, lesbian Marxists, or lesbian-feminists with a third-world perspective. A handful of political fugitives who had gone too far out to come back drifted aimlessly “underground.” Isolated clusters of aboveground radicals, unable to shut off their spigots of anger, rededicated themselves by forming minuscule, inconsequential revolutionary units.

The most hallucinatory manifestation of the far left’s derangement erupted in San Francisco when a handful of whites led by an escaped black prisoner named themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army and kidnapped the heiress
Patty Hearst, demanding a ransom of free food for poor people. As the bizarre drama played out for the public in crackling audiotapes, lurid headlines, and video footage, Patty metamorphosed into Tania the urban guerrilla, robbing a bank with her captors; in the next unbelievable installment, six of the terrorists perished in flames during a televised shoot-out. Hearst was recaptured nineteen months after the start of her strange odyssey. A very confused heiress asked from jail for some books on “the women’s struggle.”

The final act of another movement drama, this one dating back to the late sixties, the American left’s most despairing and violent years, was played out when several of that era’s radical fugitives resurfaced or were captured. In the absence of forward motion, the
issue of noncooperation with the government was seized on by their dispirited sympathizers and friends. The subsequent fallout would reach into the women’s movement, creating a fresh round of suspicions, divisions, and virulent paranoia.

Although the left had fallen apart, the women’s movement was still vigorous and growing. A generation that had been in high school during the sixties was entering its ranks even as many of the original stalwarts vanished, needing to get on with their private lives or drawn to eastern religions, ashrams, gurus, the spiritual quest. I felt bereft and took it as a personal repudiation when Sally Kempton, a gifted writer and one of my closest feminist pals, disengaged from the temporal world to seek bliss on a spiritual path.

Inevitably and predictably, professional writers and media communicators had superseded the broad-spectrum radical theorists whose fiery speeches and mimeographed papers had driven the juggernaut of Women’s Liberation. New issues, such as lesbian rights and rape, had exceeded the vision, and in many instances the understanding and sympathies, of some of the movement’s key founders. Anger as well as anguish widened the conflicts over differences in direction.

This combustible mix—the male left’s disintegration, the expanding popularity and growth of the women’s movement, and the eclipse of some feminist founders who did not take their displacement lightly—imploded during the spring and summer of 1975, plunging the ranks of Women’s Liberation into vicious internecine battles at the very moment of its greatest success. Rifts, accusations, and countercharges pitted woman against woman with an ugliness and intensity few of us had experienced before.