Saturday's Child (42 page)

We were nameless, just “the Lower East Side group” or “the Tuesday-night group” until I, carrying both my Yippie sense of mischief and addiction to wordplay with me, came up with WITCH, soon destined to become our identity as well as our adaptable anagram.
⁷
The other two groups and outriders in New York Radical Women were understandably suspicious about our mixed loyalties: most of us in WITCH were still active in male-led organizations, had a Marxian or at least generally Leftist analysis, and exuded a “hip” counterculture style—that is, we were “politicos” as opposed to their being “feminists.” I deprecated the word
“feminist” as being “boring, a nineteenth-century left-over of a word.” I bragged that the women in our group weren't “anti-male” like those dreadful feminists. While
they
went about calmly talking and writing papers that would become classics,
⁸
we
in WITCH were into
action
.

These decades later, given my genuine regrets about the way we squandered WITCH, I have to admit that the group was lovably irrepressible. What's more, we were onto a real mother lode—identifying with the witches—although it was years before any of us would begin to give the tradition of Wicca the serious study it warranted, either as an ancient pagan religion, a contemporary belief system, or part of the buried history of women's rebellion—“herstory,” as I would rename it. I
meant
to read the anthropological, theological, and mythographic data on witchcraft—but I was busy doing actions. I
meant
to do research on the nine million who'd been persecuted as witches during The Burning Time—but I was too busy doing actions.

How I did love actions. Ideologically I identified with the confrontative tactics of the Left, stylistically with the proto-anarchist conniptions of the Yippies, temperamentally with anything romantic, and by training with anything theatrical—so naturally it seemed to me intolerable that we should “just sit around talking.”
Subtext: the talking was getting uncomfortably close to the bone
. When I discovered in one meeting of our small group that I wasn't the only woman duplicitous enough to have faked an orgasm, I was retroactively enraged at inept men in general and Ken in particular—but also so relieved that I thought I'd have one on the spot.

Whatever its excesses and errors, over the next two or three years, WITCH made its own mischief, fun, and headlines. Early one Halloween morning, having alerted the press, thirteen of us in full costume descended on Wall Street and hexed the New York Stock Exchange (for its capitalism and male supremacy) with an elaborate spell to seal its doors. When the bronze doors could not in fact be opened at 9:00
A.M.,
we were an instant media sensation. Nor did we blemish our reputation by informing the press (or the cops) that we'd helped the spell along with generous
applications of Krazy Glue oozled through the door locks a few hours earlier, just before dawn. One February, we demonstrated against the Bridal Fair being held at Madison Square Garden, offering the target-consumer brides-to-be free hot cocoa as they waited in line to get in, and distributing free ShopLifting Bags for sample products. The cocoa and bags were a success, other gambits a disaster. As we picketed, we sang “Here come the slaves, off to their graves” (
not
the friendliest approach), then released 150 live mice inside the Garden (I know, I
know
, playing on a stereotype of women's fears
plus
exploiting mice). Leftist and counterculture men “dug” us as being “Harpo Marxists,” but we began to understand that we were alienating women—the very people we wanted to reach. Finally, the original “mother coven” of WITCH, still composed largely of that Tuesday-night group, decided to retrench, in order to engage our own lives and that “man-hating” thing called feminism.

But before any of this, there had been a demonstration redolent of WITCH style even before WITCH existed, a demonstration that
was
, as it turned out, a kind of American revolution—in 1968, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

On the Boardwalk

I've written so often about what did and did
not
happen at that first protest that for those details I refer curious readers to
The Word of a Woman
. Suffice it to say here that No, we never burned bras (a myth perpetrated by an article in the
New York Post
likening us to the young radical men who were then burning draft cards), and Yes, we did crown a live sheep Miss America on the boardwalk (
not
one of my finest hours: it insulted the contestants and irked the ewe; my animal-rights consciousness had a long way to go). Also: No, I did not regret missing the Chicago “Days of Rage” for a moment, and Yes, to my amazement women arrived on the boardwalk from as far away as California and Florida, responding to pre-protest publicity, to join with us.
⁹
Ken's money was on the right bet: it
was
historic.

But at the time it seemed merely exhilarating. It was heady to be using the organizing skills I'd learned in the Left—getting the demo permit, booking the buses, writing the press releases, marking up the picket signs—but this time for
ourselves
, not for the guys. I even had buttons made, with a new feminist logo in red on a white background: a circle with a cross beneath (the universal sign for the female) and a clenched fist raised inside the circle. Almost a decade later, in
Going Too Far
, I finally came out of the closet and admitted having designed this symbol—which, astonishingly, has become the global sign for feminism. Since I draw badly, I'd described to Kenneth what I envisioned; he'd sketched it accordingly and skillfully; I'd had the first buttons pressed for the 1968 Miss America protest. Since then, I've seen the fist-in-the-circle-above-the-cross as graffiti in the Gaza Strip, Soweto, and Sicily; on rice-paper stationery in Nepal and posters in Rio, Manila, and Beijing; as jewelry in San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo; and on T-shirts sporting feminist slogans in most of the world's languages. Women physicians' organizations use it entwined with a caduceus. Women lawyers' organizations show the fist grasping the scales of justice. Lesbian activists draw the circle doubled and linked. It keeps being reinvented, and always gives me a private smile. It will be ironic if this turns out to be my most enduring contribution to feminism.

But I could predict none of that back then, as I proudly pinned on the new-minted button and watched women snatch up and pin on theirs. Intoxicated with our own leadership and freedom, we picketed, leafletted, chanted, and sang all day outside the convention hall where the pageant was taking place. Ever-impertinent Florynce Kennedy held reporters captive with her sound bites about how racist the pageant was (at the time there had never been a black finalist), while others of us pointed out connections between the pageant and commercialism (Miss America hawks products), militarism (Miss America is always sent to cheer up the troops, wherever they are), and most basically, the sexual objectification of women. The hot September sun and the site gave the event the feel of a day at the beach. Not all the passersby shared the goodwill, however. While most women seemed amused and were willing to accept leaflets, the men almost without exception appeared to feel threatened by this group of about three hundred women chanting, “No more Miss America!”
As the day wore on, the group of men on the other side of the police barricade grew larger and uglier, spitting out chants of their own.

“Dykes! Commies! Lezzies! You don't deserve to be Americans!”

We demonstrators exchanged glances of revolutionary sanctitude and bravado. We viewed ourselves, with a certain unsteady hauteur, as seasoned radical patriots used to accusations of being communists, scum, and the like—but for some of the women there, this was the first time they'd been called lesbians, and at
that
accusation many strong Leftist women dissolved into tears. (It would be almost a decade before we would come up with the button reading smartly,
How dare you assume I'm straight?
) Meanwhile, as the accusations of pervert and un-American drifted past, I chuckled to myself at a personal joke none of the other demonstrators knew about. The choleric men had no idea that their epithets, especially when screamed at me as the demonstration's organizer, were aimed at the Ideal American Girl.

There's an untold story of that protest that I can now tell here. It regards Charlotte Curtis, then editor of the
New York Times's
Style Section (for which read: renamed Women's Pages). Curtis was a rarity of the period, a well-known woman journalist. She'd been a foreign correspondent, but that didn't save her from being assigned, on her return, to fashion, flower shows, society, and—even when she was promoted to being an editor—to Style. Her revenge was to dip her pen in perfumed poison, and she became known (and feared by some) for her wit and trenchant writing about the social scene. It was Charlotte who coined the phrase “radical chic” in her wry coverage of Leonard Bernstein's notorious cocktail-party benefit for the Black Panthers. In later years, after she finally became editor of the
Times's
Op-Ed page (but never rose higher, though less-experienced men did), Curtis sometimes found herself in the position of being middle management, awkward for her as younger women began to organize against sex discrimination at the paper. Yet the truth is that for a woman of her generation and prominence, Curtis was unusually supportive of women
and
feminist ideas and actions, even if she had to express that support behind the scenes. Her mentoring of younger women journalists is well-known. But she went further, and therein lies my tale.

Charlotte, in an interview with me days before the first Miss America protest, had gone off the record to inquire personally about our guerrilla-theater
tactics. Did I believe they'd be effective? Might we alienate instead of persuading? Should we be more genteel, or was she being overly so? These weren't baiting questions. She was warm, curious, open, and our discussion was candid. I was touched when she left saying she now understood and would try to convey through her coverage what she termed the “eminently reasonable politics” behind our protest. She did. In fact, she made us seem downright wholesome—so much so that a few of my sister protesters cringed.

But Curtis did more. She came
along
to Atlantic City, elegantly dressed in black (gloves, pearls, and heels) amid our colorful informality, gamely warbling “We Shall Overcome” with us as we bounced along in the rattletrap buses. She stayed all day on the hot boardwalk with us, brought us cool drinks, laughed and applauded when we would recognize and respond to women journalists only. At the pageant that evening, we had snuck some of our demonstrators inside, where they managed to disrupt the then live telecast; they were arrested and hauled away. I stayed on after the buses left, raising bail by phone, and being sent from precinct to precinct in search of where our friends were being held. Finally, at 3:00
A.M.,
I learned they'd been released hours earlier, on cash bail put up personally by “some older woman” named Charlotte Curtis.

When I phoned the next day to thank her, she asked me to keep it quiet, as “these dreary grey guys running the
Times
” would not be amused. It's time to tell the secret now. She died some years ago, only in her fifties, of cancer. But Charlotte Curtis had a style all her own. She was what they used to call “a real lady.” But she was a real feminist, too. In her, this was no contradiction.

It wasn't surprising that some of the demonstrators had been offended by Charlotte's coverage making us look reasonable; they were scared their men might think they'd gone “bourgie.” Various members of New York Radical Women had helped me organize the protest and most had joined it, yet several disapproved sternly. Carol Hanisch, a former reporter and civil-rights worker, circulated her polemical critique. Kathie Amatniek, a Radcliffe graduate who, with her leprechaun haircut and grim bent was our pixie Robespierre, expressed grave concern about any press coverage at all. Aghast, I asked if she thought a protest taking place in secret would be effective. Kathie, ever uncorrupted by a sense of humor, snapped that
we weren't ready to spread the word; other women “out there” might get involved, and we had to “complete our analysis” about women's oppression before, at some point, serving it to the world. This sort of Lenin-in-a-closed-train proprietary thinking didn't sit well with me. Besides, we were just beginning to glimpse the enormity of this “analysis,” so I figured we wouldn't be winding it all up very soon. Meanwhile, I couldn't imagine sitting on what we
had
learned, from each other and our own lives, through a process that was part of the lesson itself. Last, I was damned if I'd let that “analysis” be left to a handful of young, white, middle-class, ex- or still-Lefty women, either.

Imagine my wicked delight then, when, to Kathie's indignation, at the next meeting of New York Radical Women after the protest, almost two hundred women appeared, crowded into one room. Too late to control storming the Bastille. We were on our way.

Yet Another Aside: Historical Context (But Only a Couch)

It was terribly unfair (and highly satisfying) that the media termed that 1968 Miss America protest “the birth of the feminist movement.”

The 1960s had already seen two streams of the Women's Movement emerge: a reform-oriented “equality feminism,” represented by such dues-paying, formalized membership groups as NOW, and a radical feminism represented by us, younger women activists seasoned in the student, civil-rights, and anti-war movements.

At its inception—under the influence of NOW's New York chapter, which mostly meant Betty Friedan and her colleagues—the moderate, reform-oriented wing was almost totally white, heterosexual, middle class, and politically middle ground, though later NOW would grow beyond its founders and become happily more risk-taking. The looser “revolutionary” wing of the movement, on the other hand, was from the start a mix of races, ethnicities, classes, sexual preferences, and ages, no matter how much the media claimed that only white women were interested in feminism. Despite the campus-centered activism of the period, the radical wing embraced neighborhood groups and welfare-rights organizations. Despite the homophobia of the time, lesbian feminists were at the forefront
of those first groups (though, deplorably, not always with the freedom to be out). Clerical workers and secretaries, pink-collar workers and household workers, disabled women, older women, rural women, and institutionalized women were all part of this eclectic, quarrelsome, enormously energetic wing of the movement.