Saturday's Child (41 page)

I regarded the letters as diary leaves written for my own sake. But I must have harbored the hope that one day I'd be able to show them to Kenneth, which eventually I did. It's to his credit and his loyalty to the printed page that later, when I was writing
Going Too Far
, it was he who urged me to include them, as artifacts of a couple's difficulties “pre-struggle,” and they did appear in that book. Most of them could serve as classic examples of a woman trying to find a personal solution for problems she is sure are singularly hers, and usually her own fault. A “Various Failures of Me” list is included in one of the letters, an inverse catalog ominously reminiscent of that Perfection Chart from my childhood. I was in real distress about my failures, and just beginning to acknowledge that I was in real distress about the marriage itself. In neither case did I yet recognize
the pain as something shared and commonplace, thus political—though it's also undeniable that “love
is
more complex than theory,” as a later poem, “Easter Island,” would note.
⁴

The letters were written from a pre-feminist perspective that saw our marriage and its problems as unique. Of course, every marriage is unique. Ours may have appeared more so, but therein lies an irony. It was precisely what made us
different
that constituted our strengths and bonded us: two intense poets, a decade apart in age, from widely divergent backgrounds, each obsessed with words, art, audacity. Obversely, it was what we had
in common
with most other couples on the planet that would fracture and eventually fragment the marriage, particularly after exposure to the erosion of time and the harsh clarity of feminist light: housework, money crises, sexual conflicts, ego clashes, work habits, career problems. In other words, Bloomsbury wasn't so very different from Bloomington. Doesn't this fragment from one letter sound familiar?

We've got a conflict of life-styles here, Kenneth. I know that I work best when my life is cleared away, things in order, no bills or errands or laundry on my mind. So I do them. It's not easy when I'm also trying to drift along with your schedule instead of ignoring or fighting it. … You, of course, also work best when things are in order, except it will never be you who orders them, by god. I'm tired of all this. Tired of doing the things I actually love to do: cook, clean, etc. Tired of your constant criticism, tired of failing and feeling it myself
and
tired of your alternating condemnation and condescension. Tired of your god-like manner, all the while you're complaining that people cast you as an oracle. Tired of your equality-in-our-marriage talk, which I've always heartily seconded, silently planning the dinner or how to get to the bank on time meanwhile. Tired of your moods, which you indulge in freely (mine, of course, are unfortunate—you can't help being sensitive to them, and they upset you and you can't get your work done). Tired of the way you come to a mutual project late, reluctantly, and then take it over completely. I
like
our home, our life together. It's the two of
us
I can't stand.

But love
is
more complex than theory. Another letter:

Where [do we go] from here? Tonight, coming home on the bus together, we saw a beautiful mother and baby … healthy, rare, commonplace. I want to have your child. Unsure again, afraid again, now it seems a fantastic dream. Still, I want that, us together, raising it and writing and talking for twelve-hour stretches. … This moment, when I'm numb and tired and want only to sleep and know you are lying in bed a few feet from my desk, one thin wall between us, waiting for me to lie down beside you, hating, fearing, and loving me at this moment when I've no heart for it, for anything but to finish this … and sleep, this moment when to feel even hopelessness is impossible, let alone hope—this is like being at the center of some simple emptiness …

Finally, there was a breakout, an explosion, an acting out of the anger I couldn't fully admit, even to myself, that I felt.

I tried to play sauce-for-the-goose, thinking maybe that would equalize things. I had an abortive affair with a young painter. The childhood patterns reasserted themselves handily: it was a situation ripe for lies and half-lies, self-consciousness, theatricals. But when it came to actual lovemaking, I couldn't go through with it, feeling that would be as much a betrayal of myself as of Kenneth and our marriage.

When I told Ken about it—which may have been the reason I did it in the first place—he erupted in fury. My confessions consisted of a series of coffeehouse meetings where the painter and I had talked and gazed mooney-eyed over candlelight, which seemed pretty tame in the circumstances. I'd anticipated Kenneth's being hurt, but I was stunned by his rage. I'd assumed a single standard, thinking Bloomsbury worked both ways. Arguments, tears, thick silences—the misery was constant between us for weeks, ceasing only long enough to lend us a faint renewal of energy sufficient to prolong the woe further. Then I broke the cycle, cracking the pattern of my usual refusal to stop. One freezing December night in 1966, I left him.

Our separation lasted only twenty-four hours. I stayed overnight with a woman friend, another painter, but when I came home the following day
to collect some clothes (having stormed out with only my purse and, naturally, a blank notebook), I was glad of the excuse to see him again. He, meanwhile, had cleaned the house and stocked it with wine, candles, and flowers. None of which, even so, might have tempted me. But the planes of his familiar, loved face, the sound of his loud tears and quiet voice, the words he said, met my longing at least halfway. So I stayed.

Within a year, I was positive I had
now
discovered the tools with which I could
really
speak to him. I was in a small women's group that met on the Lower East Side each Tuesday night, talking about our lives.

I was en route to the words “
the personal is political
.”

That phrase has been so misinterpreted that it's time once and for all to clarify its origins and meaning. Therefore, we'll pause briefly for

Another Aside:

Unless you were in hibernation on Mars during the late 1990s, you know only too well that an ostensibly antisexist president of the United States brought his satyriasis hang-ups and hang-outs right into the Oval Office. Since it's always open season on feminists, we too got blamed. If we defended Clinton, we were Democratic party hacks; if we denounced him, it must be that we shared the puritanical mores of his most rabid conservative detractors.

True, some of my feminist-spokeswoman sisters spun Clinton's sexual actions as private (in the
Oval Office?
) and as consensual. Mutual consent
would
have made a defense—except that after three consciousness-raising decades, most people finally understood that a power imbalance in the workplace
or
out makes “consent” a moot or at least highly questionable factor. Other feminists attacked Clinton with the wrath of a woman betrayed by the man she'd trusted. Most of us, of course, never trusted him to begin with—merely voted for him as the preferable alternative to a candidate and party in thrall to a religious-fundamentalist Right that plans to time-travel women back to the twelfth century—earlier, actually: twelfth is perilously near that pesky Eleanor of Aquitaine. As we've frequently had to remind politicians, women were
not
born Democrats, Republicans, or yesterday.

Yet the same folks who'd condemned our lack of pragmatism for
decades now complained that most of us were practicing realpolitik: deploring Clinton's behavior while supporting many of his policies, which were
still
preferable to the alternative. Adversaries sneered “Inconsistent!” at what was to them this apparently mind-boggling complexity, and they played Gotcha!—by wielding the phrase “the personal is political” against us. I could quote Emerson that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but the truth is that we
have
been consistent (
and
large-minded) all along.

If the norm was men occupying the public realm (the political), and women being largely sequestered in the private realm of home and relationships (the personal), then how
does
that offstage half of humanity enter political discourse? Who defines “political,” anyway? “The personal is political” was born of the small-group, consciousness-raising process, as we compared notes, for instance, about how our men all seemed to think the issue of who did the housework wasn't political. But the phrase became an open sesame toward general visibility, because it had wider applicability.

During the Sixties and persisting through the next decade (when people refer to the Sixties, they're really talking about the mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies), it wasn't only the New Left that vehemently opposed most of the emerging feminist agenda. The human-rights and civil-liberties groups—run by gentlemen accustomed to defining “human,” “rights,” “civil,” and “liberty” as reflections of themselves and their needs—were even more recalcitrant adversaries. (The American Civil Liberties Union, then under the leadership of Aryeh Neier, was proud to be the
most
resistant to us crazy women. In fact, concerned women in ACLU eventually split off to form a separate reproductive-rights group, since the harassment of their reproductive-rights unit within the organization was so beleaguered by Neier and ACLU men.)

Every feminist issue had its own backlash from these purported brothers. Rape? An accusing woman often lies; besides, she probably asked for it. Battery? Criminalization would be an invasion of privacy of the home; besides, she most likely incited him—
and
she must enjoy it or she'd leave him (the option of shelters barely existed yet). Marital rape? Outlawing it would violate the marriage contract; besides, she must have provoked—or
exaggerated—it. Violent pornography? First Amendment absolutism must reign—except of course in silencing critics of pornocrats. Sexual harassment? Hallowed free speech; besides, she probably welcomed—or imagined—it. And so on …
⁵

Today, most women and many men see through these Blame-the-Victim smokescreens. Yet in the late 1960s, such reactions from our alleged brothers were devastating. They periodically drove each woman back to anguishing, “Maybe it
is
just me,
my
fault,
my
problem.” So although much ridicule was visited on C-R groups as hen sessions, therapy circles, gossipy gabfests, or ladies' coffee Klatches,
this
is why the modest format of sharing real-life experiences was such a reality check. Whenever we broke through individual isolation to compare notes, what I termed The “You
too?!
” Moment was electric. Practically speaking, it helped build a movement: it connected us to realizations about sexism's dynamics, institutionalized male entitlement that comprised patriarchy, power patterns embedded in the social/economic/legislative
systems
surrounding us—in short, the
politics
of it all. But the thrill of mutual discoveries that ricocheted through us gets muted in the rhetoric of that preceding sentence. The real point is that this process connected us to each
other
, and most of all to
ourselves
.

In time, the phrase would gain still wider usage. We would become disgusted by senators who voted against a woman's right to reproductive choice yet arranged safe, secret abortions for their mistresses; congressmen
who moralized about family values yet gutted legislation to protect battered spouses or incest survivors or child-abuse victims; politicians (in this instance, like Clinton) who preached the sanctity of motherhood and preciousness of children while denying poor women the support of a
decent
welfare system to raise their kids. These were the
policy
hypocrisies we also confronted with “the personal is political.”

For the record, then:

We did
not
say the personal is
public;
that's been the tabloids' and the paparazzi's position.

We did
not
say the personal is
prosecutable;
that was Independent Prosecutor Ken Starr's claim.

We did
not
say the personal is
prurient;
that was the pornographer Larry Flynt (in addition to Ken Starr).

We did
not
say the personal is
puerile;
that was several neo-antifeminists trying to revive Blame-the-Victim theories with confessional yarns about their lust for belching cowhands and bikers.

We did
not
say the personal is
predominant;
that was certain lesbian and gay activists who—though motivated by understandable grief about young lesbians and gays committing suicide partly for lack of public role models—pioneered “outing” with a cold indifference to the rights of those being outed.

We simply said “the personal is
political
.” Because politics is about power.

That insight has genuinely altered our national consciousness. The old-boy network had always looked the other way regarding politicians' sexual misdeeds, as the press did with FDR, JFK, LBJ, and many others. But starting with Ted Kennedy and Chappaquidick, through Gary Hart, Clarence Thomas, and Bob Packwood, right on up to Clinton's stupidity and womanizing (magnifiable to “high-crimes” status only by a rabidly partisan prosecution), understanding that the personal is political has helped change the way we see things, and helped change the rules.

By the way, the political is also personal. That's just another way of phrasing former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's maxim “All politics is local.” But enough ideological etymology. To return to our narrative:

Forward to the Past

Once a month our little Tuesday-night group came together with other such groups from around Manhattan, in what we boastfully referred to as a “coalition” called New York Radical Women. This coalition, which topped out at the critical mass of perhaps thirty-five women, was composed of three basic groups. There was Redstockings, which had pioneered consciousness-raising (calling it, in Maoist jargon, “speak bitterness meetings”), led mainly by Shulamith Firestone.
⁶
There was the October 17th Group (later revamped as The Feminists), which had been formed by Ti-Grace Atkinson when she stalked out of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), declaring it insufficiently radical. And there was us.