In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (6 page)

Webb riffled through her Rolodex for the phone numbers of activist women, putting out feelers for a national conference that would address the new constituency’s concerns. Would key women in several cities like to convene in the Washington vicinity for an August weekend? With Dee Ann Pappas, who’d begun a women’s group in Baltimore, she booked a Friends meetinghouse and school in Sandy Spring, Maryland, a pastoral suburb of D.C. with a Quaker history.

“
Hi all,” Webb’s cheery last-minute instructions began. “This meeting should not be seen as one which comes out with a set program or structure. Hopefully we can come away with an idea of where we’re at and where we have to begin moving towards.”

Two key SDS women declined her invitation. One was Bernardine Dohrn, a law school graduate in Chicago, soon to be the interorganizational secretary of SDS, and later a founder of Weatherman. Famous for her leather miniskirts and plunging necklines, Dohrn had tried her hand at a women’s strategy paper, “The Look Is You,” after
a mocking article on the fledgling movement appeared in
Ramparts
, the slick leftist magazine. But the siren of SDS wasn’t interested in leaving what she believed to be the main arena. Another no came from Cathy Wilkerson in Washington, an SDS-er from an upper-class background (her father owned radio stations) whose favorite putdown was “How bourgeois can you get?” Dohrn and Wilkerson were careening on another course, one that would ultimately wreck SDS in the name of violence.

Last-minute
confirmations for Sandy Spring came from some women who weren’t on Marilyn Webb’s list but who had heard about it on the movement grapevine. Roxanne Dunbar called to say that she and Dana Densmore would be coming from Boston. Sara Evans of SDS was coming from Duke University in North Carolina. Judith Brown and Beverly Jones from the University of Florida in Gainesville were preparing a strategy paper, and they were bringing an eighteen-year-old student, Carol Giardina. Toronto would be represented, and so would Detroit and Pittsburgh. Two, possibly three, groups with ideological differences were coming from New York. Baltimore and Washington promised to bring food for the weekend. San Francisco and Los Angeles struck out. Chicago’s West Siders pooled their money to send Sue Munaker and Fran Rominski; Jo Freeman hitchhiked east on her own.

Ultimately only twenty conferees attended the Sandy Spring conference, but their volubility lasted all weekend. Agreement was harder to come by. Some women quoted Beauvoir, some quoted Friedan; others expounded on Vietnam and the Black Panthers. On Saturday morning the Gainesville theorists, Judith Brown and Beverly Jones, respected activists in the southern organizing branch of SDS, presented their paper, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement.” They asserted that the enemy “at this time” was man, not capitalism, and urged that women put women’s issues first. The heretical argument found few allies besides Carol Hanisch and Kathie Amatniek of New York. “It felt like
us against the world,” Hanisch recalls.

Marilyn Webb shuddered when Roxanne Dunbar, in a miniskirt and combat boots, read portions of The SCUM Manifesto aloud. “
I’d never heard of Valerie Solanas. I thought the stuff was completely off
the wall. Roxanne said, ‘I’m not advocating you should go out and shoot men, but you must see that metaphorically she was standing up for herself as a woman.’ People started picking up on it. And I was thinking,
This is a complete disaster.
”

Sunday’s anguished session on how to attract black women to a bigger, more comprehensive meeting in November was mired in frustration. Everyone in the room felt the absence of black women keenly, but the realists argued that aggressive recruitment was doomed.

On a reel-to-reel tape of the meeting, which has been preserved, one can hear loud cries of racism, humble apologies, painful explanations. Someone suggested trying to contact Kathleen Cleaver, wife of the Black Panthers’ Minister of Information. Someone else replied that the Panther women would not take a step without their men.

“It’s absolutely essential,” insisted a speaker, “that we have a militant Black Power woman in on the formation of our ideology. It’s for our own good that we need it.”

“Black militant women are into very different things now,” someone retorted. “I don’t understand how if you’re women and your concentration is
on women, why you are just picking black militant women as opposed to all kinds of women with different ideologies. Why don’t we have Women Strike for Peace, the NOW women, Vietnamese, Cubans …?”

“Black women hold the cards on oppression, they hold the cards on being shot down in every single way, and they let white women know that. I don’t want to go to another conference just to hear a black militant woman tell me she is more oppressed than I am and what am I going to do about it.”

“This group could expand and expand and be essentially all white, that is a real possibility.”

“If that happens, our ideology will be wrong.”

“The Panther women won’t come. Panthers don’t speak to whites on policy matters, they negotiate with whites only on very strategic situations. The women would be killed if they came to our conference.”

Roxanne Dunbar suggested trying to get in touch with Flo Kennedy, the New York lawyer in NOW who’d been drawn to the case of Valerie Solanas.

It is fashionable today to criticize the women’s movement for being white and middle class from its inception, yet no movement agonized more, or flailed itself harder, over its failure to attract vast numbers of women of color. As early as January 1968, just before she left New York to resettle in San Francisco, Pam Allen had circulated her “Memo to My White Sisters,” a plea and a warning that unless the new movement reached beyond itself “to make alliances among poor black women,” and with underprivileged women everywhere, “we will lose our chance of finding our humanity.”

Belief in human perfectibility was the chief driving force among
the Women’s Liberation founders. Horrified by the specter of an all-white movement, multicause utopians like Pam Allen would criticize, exhort, and berate, and eventually become disaffected. Feminist visionaries like Shulie Firestone and Kathie Amatniek, Carol Hanisch and Anne Koedt, would forge a new path, acting on the necessity to wrench free from this paralyzing, no-win debate.

“There were so few of us then who even wanted to call ourselves feminists,” remembers Anne Koedt. “I realize now how badly it could have gone if we hadn’t broken loose. That was the thrilling thing about Kathie and Shulie—they were so cleanly feminist. I include myself in this small group as well. We didn’t feel we had to apologize all the time when the leftists talked about Vietnamese women or black women or poor women. Of course we cared about all of those women, but we wanted to care in the context of feminism.”

During the life of the movement, the flagellation that took place at Sandy Spring would repeat itself periodically. It was reinforced by the belief, born of feminine insecurity, that middle-class white women had no right to make any demands for themselves, or to achieve something of political importance on their own. Black women did come into the movement singly, and sometimes, although rarely, they came in groups. Burdened by two distinct forms of oppression—three, when the voices of black lesbian feminists began to be heard—they never forgot their divided loyalties, and how could they?

Criticism is easy; working for specific goals in an imperfect, complicated world is hard. The failure to attract poor black women, or
poor Hispanic women, or “ghetto women,” or “welfare women,” would be used as a club against Women’s Liberation by its critics with numbing consistency for the next thirty years. Yet no other movement in our lifetime achieved such broad-based societal changes that cut across so many class and racial lines.

AN INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT

On the ride home from Sandy Spring, Carol Hanisch presented her idea to Kathie Amatniek and Cindy Cisler. The leftist women had called them self-indulgent for sitting around doing consciousness-raising while people were dying in the ghettos and getting killed in Vietnam. She knew their chief task was to develop an analysis of women’s oppression, but it was time for an action, something brave and audacious to put Women’s Liberation on the map. She’d been thinking about the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.

“
I’d always watched the contest as a child,” Hanisch reminisces. “With new feminist eyes it suddenly clicked that Miss America was a very oppressive thing—all those women parading around in bathing suits, being judged for their beauty. So we took it back to the group in New York. The biggest resistance was the fear that some people wouldn’t take it seriously; they might think that protesting Miss America was a silly women’s action. But then we started doing consciousness-raising, and everybody turned out to have strong feelings—maybe not about Miss America specifically, but certainly about standards of beauty. So we sort of threw ourselves into it.”

No one threw herself into it harder than Robin Morgan, who had begun to attend meetings of New York Radical Women. A poet married to a poet, the flamboyant, bisexual Kenneth Pitchford, Morgan thrived on the theatrical confrontations pioneered by the Yippies, the
New Left pranksters led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. She was a savvy organizer who could fire up the troops, run off the flyers, get the police permits, order the buses, and alert the press.

“
Atlantic City and Chicago happened within one week,” Morgan recalls in movement shorthand.

Atlantic City was the Miss America protest of September 7, 1968. Chicago was the assault on Mayor Daley’s city by ten thousand radicals during the Democratic National Convention, August 25–30. Robin told the Yippie steering committee she would not be available for Chicago.

“They looked at me like I landed from nowhere, not even Mars, and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, the revolution is going to start in Chicago.’ And I said, ‘No, the revolution is going to start in Atlantic City.’ ” Then she pulled together the women she was close to, Peggy Dobbins, Judith Duffett, Barbara Kaminsky, Lynn Laredo, Florika Romatien, Naomi Jaffe, Adite Kroll, and went into high gear.

“Miss America was perfect for us lefty Women’s Liberationists,” Morgan explains. “Made to order. She touched capitalism, militarism, racism, and sexism, all in one fell swoop. Capitalism because they used her to sell the sponsors’ products, militarism because she went off to entertain the troops, racism because there had never been a black Miss America at that point, and clearly she was objectified as a woman.”

Lindsy Van Gelder was a cub reporter at the
New York Post
when the city editor tossed Morgan’s “No More Miss America” press release on her desk.

“It said
‘women reporters only,’ ” Van Gelder recalls. “The city desk thought this could be a funny story. I was writing a lot of funny stories as well as general news at the time. This is very difficult to explain to my daughters, and to younger women who are my friends, but in those days we didn’t have a context to think about Miss America. We weren’t even using the word ‘feminism’ yet. Miss America was a sacred cow, the kind of thing that women were supposed to aspire to. It made perfect sense that anybody who would be protesting Miss America had to be a kook. So I set off to interview Robin Morgan.”

Midway through the interview, Van Gelder revised her assumptions. “The original press release was strident and rhetoric-filled, the way
that many things were in that era, but Robin in person exuded an intelligence that was literary. She was very good at making links with other political movements, with the antiracist and antiwar struggles. I also recognized her from
Mama
, but I thought it wouldn’t be cool to bring that up till the end of our conversation. So I came back to the
Post
with what I thought was a serious political story about a serious new movement, but the city desk still wanted ‘funny.’ So I complied. This was how the term ‘bra burner’ got coined.”

Robin had mused about a Freedom Bonfire, in which the oppressive paraphernalia of femininity—girdles, bras, eyelash curlers, and copies of
Playboy
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
—would be consigned to flames on the famous old boardwalk. Brightening her first-paragraph lead, Van Gelder composed the fateful words “Lighting a match to a draft card has become a standard gambit of protest groups in recent years, but something new is due to go up in flames this Saturday. Would you believe a bra burning?”

The
Post
story, “Bra Burners & Miss America,” ran the next day. “Robin was not listed in the phone book,” Van Gelder relates, “so there I was, sitting at the city desk, getting inundated with calls from all over the universe from people who wanted to talk to Robin Morgan.”

“Lindsy thought she was doing us a favor,” Morgan explains. “What happened was that before we even hit the boardwalk, our permit was revoked. I had split my ass to get the damned permit. So I went back to the police and said, ‘We’re
not
going to have fires, we’re going to have a Freedom Trash Can. We’re going to
throw
bras into it. Nobody talked about a fire—where did this idea come from? We’re not burning anything.’ But that’s where it got started, before the demonstration.”

“And in fact,” Van Gelder says, “they never burned their bras because of the fire laws in Atlantic City. But the term became history. I shudder to think that will be my epitaph—
She invented bra burning.
”

“But we got a good press turnout,” says Morgan, “because of Lindsy Van Gelder’s piece in the
Post.
”

“
It was a gorgeous day,” recalls Jacqui Ceballos, a divorced mother with four children who was one of the mainstays in New York NOW. “Sunny, perfect. Sometimes you don’t forget the weather. At 9
A.M.
the
buses were lined up in Union Square. I think I was the only NOW member to get onboard. They handed out these song sheets, so we sang all the way: ‘Ain’t she sweet, making profits off her meat. Beauty sells she’s told so she’s out pluggin’ it. Ain’t she sweet?’ ”