Intimate Wars (16 page)

When we traveled, our marriage felt like a continuation of the excitement of our affair. Abroad, we could be ourselves, with no expectations from others. We went on cruises to Alaska, safaris in Africa, visited beautiful hidden spas in the winter wonderlands of Scandinavia. Marty took me back to the Carlton Hotel in France, and this time we shared a suite overlooking the Mediterranean with my little dog Noodles. I sunned on the beach at Cannes without a bra, feeling totally comfortable with Marty by my side. He loved to show me off, and I reveled in his admiration. And yet, I remember watching the students lazily camped out on the beach in Cannes as I walked along the tree-lined avenues, wishing myself with them, envying their freedom. I had the feeling that my marriage was a garment that never quite fit. I was always attempting to move quickly, to stretch, to turn, to run, and even sometimes to dance—a Dionysian dance, one of release and forgetting—but that was impossible.

I tried to find ways to bridge the distance between us. Once, I came home on a Saturday to Garrison from a particularly intense meeting at Brooklyn Law School where Shere Hite had spoken. I was filled with philosophy and the danger
of the ideas we had discussed. It was summer, and Marty was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I wanted to talk to him about the meeting, but he could not engage on any level except a sarcastic one. He wouldn't even turn off the faucet so he could hear what I had to say. I gave up and went outside to set the table, my head spinning from the tension of my competing realities.

Guests we invited offered a bit of relief from what I often experienced as a deadening sameness. One evening Barry Feinstein, one of New York's most politically influential labor leaders (who was later revealed to have embezzled union funds), came to our house for dinner. My experience as president of NAAF and the success of my debate tour had led me to consider entering electoral politics, and I asked him his opinion on whether I should throw my hat in the proverbial ring. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he answered. “How do you think you could do anything in politics? You are a woman from Westchester who gives great parties.”

Another time Harold Fisher, then the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), floated in my indoor pool in his black glasses, pontificating on the nature of realpolitik. I sat at the pool's edge and argued my stance on an abortion bill that had been brought to the state senate. When I asked for his help and support, he dismissively replied, “There are no issues—only elections.”

I turned to animals to ease some of the loneliness and boredom I felt at home. I would respond to pleas on the radio from the local shelters: “If someone calls in the next two hours, you can save this cat's or dog's life.” Many of my companion animals came into my life that way.

On one of my long walks I became friendly with a neighbor who lived at the bottom of the mountain. She had a riding stable and led horse and pony treks on the Appalachian
Trail. I began going for rides with her as often as possible, but I soon grew tired of having to live by my neighbor's schedule. It wasn't long before I felt the desire to create my own equestrian world. I cleared two acres of rocky, mountainous land, built an eight-stall barn, and filled it with horses.

The barn became my private space. I approached riding with the same discipline that had kept me at the piano playing obsessively, and I would practice the delicate, difficult moves of dressage in the indoor ring for hours. I rode alone on the paths behind my land, writing speeches in my head. I loved jumping most of all; there is something extraordinary about flying on a two-thousand-pound animal—the degree of trust it involves, the courage of both horse and rider, the complete fusion of two bodies and minds at that one moment of suspension. With my horses there was no need for translation, no fear of misunderstandings. Our communication was clear and direct, with no detours through ego.

 

I WAS ALWAYS CAPABLE of hiding my inner turmoil from professional colleagues and political allies, conscious of projecting an image of impenetrable grace and power. I had become a feminist in solitude, separated from the movement and the writers of my time. This had its benefits: my perceptions were less contaminated by theory or polemics. But I was ready to strengthen my connection to other feminists, to join and help direct the feminist movement. Almost in defiance of the hermetic lifestyle I led with Marty and his difficulty in communicating with me intellectually, I decided to embark on a new project that would place me at the center of the network of feminists who I perceived were shaping the politics of the times.

We were still in the early years of legalization, and despite Reagan's war on abortion, feminists had enough sway to influence
the way the issue was handled in the media and reach out to those who'd been victimized by the guilt and judgment that characterized those years. After years of writing pamphlets, educational materials, and newspaper articles, I felt that the most effective way to communicate my personal and political ideas and catalyze a network of others who shared my values would be through a print publication that could be distributed to patients and mailed to pro-choice constituents and fellow feminists.

I started by publishing an eight-page Choices newsletter. I opened the first issue with the Euripides quotation “Woman is woman's natural ally” and wrote of my experience founding Choices and the catalytic inspiration of my patients. I purchased large mailing lists of health providers, women's groups, student health centers—any organization I thought would be interested—and sent out thirty thousand free copies of the newsletter.

It wasn't long before letters began pouring in. People wrote to me about the topics we covered, thanked me for publishing the newsletter, and even sent checks with their requests for more issues. Carolyn Handel, a cousin of mine who had worked in advertising and sales with the magazine
High Times,
suggested I take advantage of the groundswell and publish a real magazine with subscriptions and advertising. Not knowing anything about publishing, I did what came naturally: I jumped in headfirst and learned as I went. Carolyn started selling ads and promoting the vision, I recruited more writers, we published quarterly, and before I knew it,
On the Issues
magazine was alive and growing.

Subsequent editions covered the symbols and rallies of the pro-choice movement, the fundamental tenets of Patient Power, and the important work of pro-choice organizations like NAF. Feminist projects, workshops, and meetings were
announced and promoted in every issue. No topic was off limits: I included articles on obstacles faced by women of color, systemic inequalities that affected gays and lesbians, international women's rights, and animal rights. Articles were contributed by pro-choice activists, prominent feminists, providers, doctors, and even patients who had a message they wanted to share. The magazine gave me a long-sought-after intellectual peer group. It stimulated my thinking, functioned as an educational tool, and provided a forum for philosophical discussions. It was exactly what I needed.

Exhilarated by the success of
On the Issues,
wanting my ideas to reach even more people, I wrote, co-produced, and directed a thirty-minute film titled
Abortion: A Different Light
, which aired on several cable channels and reached eleven million homes. I structured the film as a group of interviews, a collection of stories related to abortion. Pro-choice leaders and Choices staff told moving stories of their experiences with the issue. Marty described his experiences on the “Midnight Express” and spoke about the struggles doctors faced in helping women who were hospitalized for attempting self-abortions, and Bill Baird described the firebombing of his clinic. I included a few clips from my debates and interviewed Lawrence Lader, longtime abortion rights advocate, Sarah Weddington, the lawyer for the plaintiff in
Roe
, and others.

The stories these providers and politicians told were illuminating, but I thought the true beauty of my film lay in the interviews with patients about their personal experiences. Their voices served as a form of resistance to the public's obsessive focus on the fetus, a way to recenter the issue of reproductive rights in the reality of women's lives, where it belonged.

The most striking of these voices was that of one of my
first patients, Helen Cole, a Catholic who had been against abortion until that moment came when she knew she had to have one. When I approached her to ask if she would participate in the film, she told me it would be very difficult for her to talk about her abortion. Then she met my gaze. “I want to be in your film,” she said. “It will be my gift to you and the movement.” The memory of her courage and generosity will always be with me.

 

IN 1982, I spoke to a large audience at a NOW meeting in Rockland County:

In the ten years since the creation of Flushing Women's, the
clinic had gone from serving five patients per week to becoming a nationally recognized model of a successful women's health care facility. I decided to throw a “Revolutionary Ball,” a costume party to celebrate Choices' tenth anniversary. It would be held at the St. Regis Hotel, and I would invite all the political players who had been involved from the start. Everyone was required to dress as their revolutionary hero.

The event was covered in Page Six of the
Post
, with the humorous headline, “Labor Big Shots Frolic In Fancy Costumes.” The great fun of having a political costume ball allowed otherwise serious heavyweights to play. Marty went as George Washington, in silk hose and a ruffled shirt. President of the Sanitation Union Ed Ostrowski was Thomas Jefferson, Jack Bigel was Lafayette, and Harold Fisher, the ex-MTA chief, came as Henry George, the nineteenth-century economist who pushed for a onetime land tax. Others came costumed as George Sand, Madame Roland, and Martha Washington. I was Fanny Wright, with a high white wig and a wide crinoline gown.

That night, I was completely in my element. So much had happened in the last decade. I'd helped pioneer and define an entirely new world. Traveling the country, debating on television, delivering my message to crowds of women, I was more myself than I had ever been. I felt a sense of completeness, happiness in the knowledge that my entire being was in use, as if every part of me was active and interactive. The light of the passion for my work kept the struggles of my marriage in the shadows.

—JOHANNES MÜLLER,
HINDRANCES OF LIFE
(1909)

 

 

 

 

 

M
iss Hoffman,” he said, “how many abortions did your facility do last year?” I was debating Jerry Falwell in Detroit in 1983 on national television.

“Reverend, I believe we did nine thousand abortions,” I told him proudly. To my thinking this high number was a measure of the excellence of our work. Like any medical practice, any business, the more people who come to you, the better your services are assumed to be.

But to Falwell's ears it was a measure of mass murder.

“When you meet your maker with the blood of nine thousand babies on your hands, what will you say? How will you justify that?”

“Reverend, when I meet
her
, I will be very proud, because I fought and struggled for women's rights.”

“Her? Her? Are you saying god is a woman?”

“No, Reverend,” I said. “God is beyond gender.”

A woman in the audience rose, obviously distraught, her voice shaking. She relayed her own experience with abortion:
the guilt still with her, the doctor's coldness, how “they”—the abortion doctors—would not let her see her child. She extended her hand, pointed an accusing finger at me, and declared, “You are nothing but a Hitler to me.”

Her words shot out at me like bullets. It was useless to attempt to respond to this angry woman. Caught in the same battle all women were fighting, drowning in her own society-inflicted guilt, she was only repeating the popular anti-choice rhetoric of the day.

By the mid-eighties we were firmly in the midst of a backlash against the calls for equality of the seventies. Women struggled to find their place among men who had not accepted the ideas put forward by feminism, entering the workforce in droves while deflecting the cry for “family values” that screamed at them from newspapers, the streets, inside their homes.

Men raged at women for having reneged on the traditional expectation that their primary role should be that of nurturer and total support system. They raged against women's expressions of sexuality, their recently acquired right to choose, and the continuing and escalating feminist demands for power and participation in society. Most of all, they raged against the radical new world order that female power represented.