Saturday's Child (39 page)

The thing is, I actually was. We both were. A line from one of Kenneth's poems of the period comes to mind: “It's no longer making beautiful things that I like, / but making things beautiful …”
⁶
Actually, each of us still wanted to do both, but everywhere we looked, there was an acute need for making things bearable, to say nothing of beautiful. Poor people were rising in the ghettos; students were rising on the campuses. We spent more than a few days and nights in support demonstrations for protests at New York area colleges, and we joined the fray outright at Columbia University, as part of the human blockades formed around the clock to keep riot police from storming the campus.

I've sometimes reflected that my (lack of) height had a major influence on my tactics, notably my growing preference for militant small-group actions as opposed to large-scale demonstrations—though I certainly recognize the need for the latter and went to more of them than I can count. The problem was that I could never
see
what was going on beyond the shoulder of the person in front of me, so I came to dread the moment when a voice off in the crowd would shout, “
Here come the TPF!
⁷
They're charging into the crowd! Watch out, here comes the tear gas!
” It was bad
enough being attacked by rioting cops for having committed the sin of exercising one's First Amendment rights, but it was worse being trampled by one's co-demonstrators as they surged this way and that while I screamed futilely into the din, “
Where?
”—sometimes running directly into the fire hoses or rearing horses. Is it so surprising that I became more interested in small so-called affinity group actions—a well-aimed brick through the window of a U.S. Army recruiting station, for example? I could run, after all, even if I couldn't loom. At my height, such actions seemed
safer
than a peaceable march.

Feminism had begun trickling into my awareness by the mid-1960s. The New Left was rife with women's caucuses (ladies' auxiliaries, really) wherein women might critique men's offensive behavior but never question the issues, focus, political analysis, or tactical strategy of the group itself; on these, male leadership was assumed. To challenge that, as eventually some of us did, was to invite being pelted with raw eggs, ripe tomatoes, and actual stones, as happened at more than one SDS meeting. If rebellion persisted, ultimately one walked out or faced expulsion, but only
after
having been denounced by the men (and most hurtfully by their loyalist women) as being “shrill, selfish, divisive, counterrevolutionary,” and that standby, the unkindest cut of all, “
bourgeois
.”

Yet I continued to be torn for almost a decade between my emerging feminist priorities and my allegiance to the Left (which I would in time call the Boys' Movement), even in its violent period. As if I were compiling an adult Perfection Chart, a ghost of that long-ago childhood one, I made a frantic attempt to cover all bases
and
retain male approval—no easy task. I became involved in a union-organizing attempt at Grove Press, where I'd become a part-time editor, but I also wrote for underground papers (Leftist points on my chart); joined a women's consciousness-raising group (feminist points); organized demonstrations supporting the Panthers and the radical Puerto Rican group The Young Lords (Leftist points); co-founded the first New York Women's Center (feminist points); carried the
Manual of an Urban Guerrilla
or
The Second Sex
to meetings (double points) and actually read both; did underground abortion referrals (feminist points); salivated when a Weatherperson was busted and rushed to be rent-a-body for courtroom support (Leftist points plus a red star).

By the early Seventies, I felt like a veteran. My police mug shots show
a young woman whose eyes gleam with exhaustion and whose jaw is set firmly in defiance. My days were filled with juggling editorial work, housework, and street demonstrations that ended in acrid clouds of tear gas; my nights were filled with meetings, candlelight vigils, stolen moments of writing, fearing the knock at the door—and “engaging in struggle” with Kenneth about sexism. My body was honed by karate training, my language salted with expletives. I had sat-in and smoked-in, made phone calls and made bail, raised funds and raised hell, been beaten up, busted, and afraid—for years already. I was in my late twenties, and I wasn't the only one convinced that I'd most likely be killed before I turned thirty-five.

It was hard to choose which front to fight on and difficult to focus on which tactic. The Nixon administration had begun calling for preventive detention camps for radicals; friends were going underground or to Canada or being sent to prison on twenty-year sentences as punishment for political actions. People we'd known or demonstrated with were suddenly dead of gunshot wounds in the middle of their college quads or on a city sidewalk two blocks away. To dare invest energy on “mere” women's needs was seen as constituting a betrayal of humanity—the operative syllable in humanity being the second one: the draft (affecting men) was considered a universal issue, but childcare (affecting parents and children of both sexes) was considered a marginal, self-indulgent, “special-interest group” issue.

Here I must indulge in a caveat and then be done with it. The New Left was terminally diseased with sexism and toxic with characteristic U.S. arrogance—but the right to criticize is earned fairly through love. To this day, when I hear anyone inveigh against the Left from a Rightist viewpoint—a reactionary dismissal of unions, or “socialism produces a society of ants” rhetoric—my blood starts to simmer. To this day, when I encounter women or men of my generation who somehow managed to sit out those years indifferent and unaffected—or who, like Bill Clinton, were already worrying about how whatever they did might look on their future political or corporate résumés—I wonder at their lack of moral vitality. And when I encounter those who
were
in the streets and on the barricades against war, racism, and poverty—but who are now comfortably settled into establishment niches of academia or the business world
while considering themselves lucky to have “outgrown” politics, I also wonder. For me, the problem was never one of retrenchment from a radical position or from fighting to stop an epidemic of misery. It was that the Left never went far
enough
, in analysis, vision, or practice; that Leftist men, for obvious and shameful reasons, were unwilling to include the larger half of humanity in their plans for changing the world. (What remains of the Left still seems unable to grasp this—although the fatigued jargon has been recycled to encompass women as “a target constituency.” They still just don't get it.)

Yet if I'm to acknowledge fairly the factors in my formation, then it's important to say that I, who take back not one of my denunciations of that phallocentric movement, nonetheless preserve a loyalty to what we all—women and men alike—
hoped
to stand for. We did change something in this country, for the better. If I feel saddened at how that movement failed
because
of its narrowness (regarding issues of sex and race and age and class and disability, and-and-and …), I'm still proud at having shared in the idealism, and in an energy that at times expressed itself in humorous, creative organizing tactics; proud of having shared in all the hotheaded-ness, and all the outrageous beauty.

But while living through it, I was every day more unable to escape the awareness of my personal frustration. I was unable to deny that, even given Leftist priorities, the men's leadership style reeked of egotistical power games; unable to deny that another woman could better teach me how to handle a rifle in a single afternoon than five of my condescending Leftist brothers could in weeks. I was angry at the commonplace use of grass and acid to get women high before gang-raping them—a counterculture tradition peaking in practice at Woodstock. I was livid at watching myself and other women grow depleted from fighting for “mankind's” freedom while staggering under inequalities of housework, childcare, sex, and similar “woman questions” the men dismissed as our personal hang-ups, not
serious
politics. I was enraged at a “sexual revolution” taking place for men only, leaving in its wake women who were pregnant, infected with STDs, drugged out, and desperate. In the
Times
piece I was cautious to understate it: “It was clear to me that the movement didn't really make room for women … here was a new politics, a new lifestyle, a new freedom
, and still, the notion of a liberated woman was someone who is indiscriminate about whom she sleeps with, not a realization that women don't want to be objects.”

Subtext: those group-sex years in the marriage still rankled like hell
.

Ironically, Ken and I drew closer during this time. There were so many Thems it made uniting as an Us easy. We might have formally rejected splitting up as a time-wasting bourgeois self-indulgence—at least that would have been a convenient argument for staying together “for the sake of the revolution.” But we shared an intellectual shorthand and now had mutual emotional scars binding us—and for me, he was solid, safe, trustworthy.
⁸
The boorishness of movement men threw Kenneth's intelligence and sensitivity into sharper relief. Besides, unlike them, he was authentically radical, not just due to his working-class origins, but because he was always drawn to the most original, even extreme, issue, position, solution, or tactic. His character was gripped by what Yeats called “the fascination of what's difficult,” and he had the courage to endure his convictions. This meant he was supportive of my being a heavy, even when that didn't include him. When I became more of a women's liberationist, he supported that, too—even after some of our Leftist brothers and their molls cruelly nicknamed us “the Ball-less Wonder and the Castrating Bitch.”

They weren't the only ones calling us names, though. In the 1970s, I was one of a number of radical activists who applied for access to files the government had kept on our activities (this was made possible by Bella Abzug, then a congresswoman from New York, who as chair of the House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights,
pushed through changes in the Freedom of Information Act, sometimes known as “the Sunshine Law”). Some of my files are permanently held back as classified; they've never said why. But those that were released were hilarious.

The FBI and CIA were so wide of the mark that their operatives should have been fired not only for infringing civil liberties but for incompetence and misuse of taxpayers' money. Most of the files consist of newspaper clippings, including interviews quoting me as being against racism, the Vietnam War, and what Eisenhower himself had termed “the military-industrial complex.” The Feds, working with New York City's hated Red Squad, apparently got an absurd amount of their information from the media—articles I'd written for
WIN
(the periodical put out by the War Resisters' League),
Liberation
, and other underground journals, as well as interviews in mainstream media. Files list me as “aka [also known as] Mrs. Robin Pitchford”—as if that were a code name, and as if I ever used it. Interestingly, the FBI and CIA didn't share the Left's dismissal of burgeoning women's activism as irrelevant.
They
were
really
paranoid. They were certain that telephone conversations (referring to editing jobs, or books I was reading or writing, or errands being done) were secret signals for militant actions—as if I would have been dense enough to discuss such things, even obliquely, over a telephone line so tapped the static sometimes interfered with conversation; Ken and I would jovially ask, “May I have an outside line please?,” through the hum of their tape recorders.

Yet it was educative that voluminous files had been compiled on me not only by the CIA and FBI but also by other agencies and even branches of the military. Despite the fact that I'd never been involved in any violence against
persons
—only property—and never been convicted of any charges, I was on the Secret Service list of “dangerous radicals” to be tailed whenever the president journeyed to New York, and on a list of people eligible to be picked up without charge and held in (illegal) preventive detention. The U.S. Air Force file remains a mystery; did the agents think I was organizing Amazons to zoom in over the Pentagon, darkening the skies in perfect formation on a thousand witchy brooms? The intelligence community just didn't have very much. One jewel of an FBI report from 1972 notes, “The WLM (Women's Liberation Movement) in New York City is no longer functioning as a group, but only as a movement.”

Bless 'em, they were tailing me a lot during certain periods, so various reports read sternly,

To All Appropriate Agencies and Field offices: Robin Morgan aka Robin Pitchford aka Mrs. Kenneth Pitchford
. Subject—born 1.29.42 in NYC [wrong date, wrong place, guys]—is an anarchist housewife [don't you
love
it?], reported to be a writer of poetry [“reported to be”: you'd actually have to
read
it to check
that
out] concerned with revolution. Subject attended a filming of “Pig for President” in NYC and attended a June meeting of the National Committee to Combat Fascism.

Or this one
:

Subject joined the April 1967 peace march to the UN; in October 1967 she went on the March On The Pentagon; in November the demonstration against Secretary of State Dean Rusk, then the demonstration against the Whitehall (NYC) induction center. In April 1968 she joined in demonstrations supporting the student “uprising” at Columbia University. … Subject is listed as one of the individuals on the CORE Southern Education Committee.

Interestingly, the more involved I became in women's liberation activism, the more my files proliferate. One report notes that my propensity for violence must be increasing because I'd written an “extremist” statement calling for “secretarial sabotage against white male power gone mad.” (And they say
feminists
have no sense of humor.) The surveillance continued through the late 1970s (probably even later but, bored with their prose style, I stopped demanding my files), and the Feds tracked me when I appeared in other states: