Saturday's Child (46 page)

When the small women's groups meet in monthly coalition, it's clear that leadership battles, power struggles, and ego fights are upon us. Shulamith Firestone announces to Redstockings that she is a Great Thinker and therefore cannot be forced to take turns sweeping the floor at their temporary storefront headquarters; this is not received as a sign of sisterhood. Ti-Grace Atkinson purges certain members of The Feminists, who in turn pronounce her a Stalinist. Barbara Kaminsky (now calling herself Barbara Susan) confronts Kathie Amatniek (Sarachild) over Kathie's flirting with her husband, Hank Kaminsky (whose name remains Kaminsky); this come-on is embarrassing Hank and upsetting Barbara. To the alarm of all present, Kathie concedes her flirtation and further proclaims that
although she is pro-monogamy, there are simply too few men with any feminist consciousness around, so their wives ought to be willing to share them in the name of sisterhood. Being an excessively fair person, Barbara actually considers this but then declines, remembering that the reason Hank has any consciousness at all is that she's labored to develop it. Meanwhile, a well-known British Marxist-feminist and Freud defender (which should have warned us) goes chirpily to bed with the husband of one of our New York Radical Women colleagues—while a houseguest in the New Yorker's apartment
and
while her hostess is in the hospital giving birth to her host's child. This is pretty odious stuff. “Sexual revolution” casualties litter the ground like the last-act cast of
Hamlet
.

We activists work hard to keep these troubles out of the courts and the press, because we know the freedom to fail is one of the freedoms denied us. Where differences among male politicos are covered with respect, the slightest disagreement among political women is regarded as a “cat fight”—and if word were to get out about any
sexual
scandals, the reporters would have a field day. So we whisper and hiss among ourselves, but having to conceal our altercations while engaging in them seems to make them more intense.

All things are relative, and we in WITCH consider ourselves by comparison fairly sane. We don't always succeed, but we
try
to avoid what we call “horizontal hostility,” try to take out our ire in actions undermining patriarchy, not each other. We're a tightly knit cabal, ferociously loyal and snottily proud of our risk-taking, high visibility, and humor. We snitter among ourselves that because we are “more together” than Redstockings we ought to call our group Pantyhose. Our attitude is reminiscent of the Us-versus-Them tendency I know well from my marriage; it's a not always unprovoked proclivity of radicals in general, and it fits the paranoia of the day. We in WITCH consider ourselves the incarnate quiddity of revolution—blending female rebellion with Leftist revolt. We will suffer our own casualties in years to come, but for now we love each other, trust each other, laugh helplessly in curative recognition at our C-R meetings, offer each other dinners, solace, and Kleenex, baby-sit for each other. We are mostly white, mostly young—in our twenties and early thirties. We are ready not only to change the world but to do what we don't yet know is harder: change ourselves.

There is a core group in WITCH, plus outriders who come and go. Judith Ann is our calm rock of integrity, her quiet, unsought authority, our center; what Kenneth calls her “sword-steel eyes” can gleam a warning nobody wants to mess with.
²
Peggy Dobbins, a southerner trained as a sociologist, is our resident political analyst; she is nursing her son Jeb at the same time I'm nursing Blake; we sometimes switch babies during meetings, hoping to make them “milk brothers.”
³
Florika—she of the cappuccino skin, wild gypsy mane, keen mind, and love of puns—has survived being a child-prodigy violinist in Europe; she never touches the violin now; she and I understand one another in private ways.
⁴
Bev Grant is our singer-songwriter-guitarist; Page, a would-be filmmaker, heaves her cumbersome 1960s video equipment along to our actions; Marcia is our graphic artist, in between doing her own woodcuts.
⁵
Barbara Susan comes to us, a welcome refugee from Redstockings. Sue Silverman/Silverwoman is our youngest member, in her late teens; Lynn Laredo is our den mother (maybe all of forty, which is
ancient
); Cynthia Funk is our resident wit, with beauty (she looks like Liv Ullmann and gets irked when men ask why
she
“needs feminism”). Mary, Perry, Ingrid, Jackie, and Naomi round us out, and Alix Kates Shulman
⁶
sometimes sits in on meetings. It is to Judith that I can finally admit how damaging the group-sex years in my marriage were for me, crying for hours in her arms.

All of these women seem so damned
wise
. Each is an expert—on her own life, certainly, but that in turn relates to
all
our lives. Each has a special slant to contribute. The revelations I experience in an atmosphere of safety, support, and laughter among these women make me want to shout to the world how amazing this politics is.

I want to help them
back
, to help other women help
other
women. I want
millions
of women to connect with this consciousness, not just those we try to reach by handing out our smudgy mimeographed papers on street corners. I've already been the poetry editor of a small collection,
The New Woman
, published by
Motive
magazine—but if only there was a more effective, practical use for writing and editing skills! If only … it hits like Newton's apple falling on my head.

“
I
know!” I think to myself. “
An anthology!
”

In what will later be termed “networking,” I start to reach outside the WITCH group. I hear about a woman who's a sculptor and also an academic; she's writing her dissertation on what she calls “sexual politics” in literature. I get in touch with her, read a draft, ask if she'd be willing to have an excerpt of it appear in a women's anthology. She thinks that's a great idea, confessing she yearns to publish the dissertation as a book, “even if nobody wants to read an academic thesis.” I say she should try, that maybe the excerpt will help her land a book contract. Her name is Kate Millett.

I watch a woman being interviewed on William F. Buckley's TV show. She's presented as a feminist Roman Catholic theologian by Buckley, himself an arch-conservative Catholic. His description of her sounds oxymoronic. But she mops the floor with him, wrings him out, and proceeds to dust up the Vatican. I must have
her
in this anthology. I track her down. Her name is Mary Daly.

My old friend from SNCC days, Eleanor Holmes Norton, agrees to write one of a number of essays I plan to include on black women. Another pal from the civil-rights days, Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, is happy to organize a section on Latinas. Interestingly, I can't find anybody willing to admit she's old enough to write an essay on ageism or on being
an older women (which means, in the context, only
over fifty
), so Marge Piercy generously volunteers to write it under a nom de plume, even though she's too young but has, she reminds me, a novelist's imagination—and she'll also contribute an essay on sexism in the Left, under her own name. Martha Shelley, an early activist in Gay Liberation, will write on radical lesbians; the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil-rights organization in the United States, formed in 1955, will also be represented, by Gene Damon, a foremother; Rita Mae Brown offers a poem on loving women. …

My brain goes into overdrive. In the middle of the night, I sit in the rocking chair, baby at my breast, notepad and pencil in my lap.
Young
women's voices, high-school students, have to be represented! And women in medicine, the military, the media! What about how psychology creates the norm of what's then considered “natural”? There
must
be an article on mothering! And statistics—
have
to have statistics! And those basic early documents we've been handing out: the NOW Bill of Rights, the Redstockings Manifesto. … We'll need a big appendix, listing sexist sayings and fight-back sayings—I'll call it Verbal Karate—and oh! there
has
to be a listing of groups to join, with addresses and contact people, so readers can
act
, and as complete a bibliography as can be assembled, so people can study more, think more. There should be poems, too, and songs for demonstrations. The book should be a primer, a key. The book should be
alive
. The book should be an
action
.

I begin to play with titles. I'll call it
Women in Revolt
. No, I can see the reviews—“a book on revolting women.” I'll make up something funny, like
The Hand That Cradles the Rock.
⁷
No, best to go with something simple, like a slogan we use on marches but also whisper to each other when our spirits sag. Something plain and true. Something like “sisterhood is powerful.”

The men in relationships with the women in our group are not happy. They are just now discovering that this consciousness pertains to sex. And housework. And money. We women are not happy to discover that our men really and truly are just now discovering this. Big scenes. The men storm about. Some leave, some return, all of them complain of being depressed. They have no friends anymore, their old male buddies sneer they're “pussy-whipped,” and most of the women they know are interested in being friends with each other, not with men. They are lonely for us, envious of the fun and energy we generate for each other. We women joke that our men need a play group more than our babies do. We try to reassure them that this is all in their own self-interest. They're having a hard time seeing the act of ceding power as being in their self-interest. Among ourselves, we defend them, feel guilty when we defend them, feel guilty when we don't.

Our men decide to form a men's group. They will be each
other's
friends! They will meet weekly, cook together and eat together, share their problems! They're elated. We're uneasy but can't locate why. Don't we
want
them to challenge and support each other in changing? Don't we
believe
in solidarity? Of course we do! Why are we so jittery?

It takes only a few months to explode in our faces. John wants to know why
he
has to do the laundry when it turns out that's not one of George's tasks. George wants to know why John gets off with laundry, a once-a-week task, when he's stuck with dishwashing and drying, a three-times-a-day task. Kenneth and Hank quarrel over whether it's a one-upping, masculinist, elitist gesture to bring Häagen-Dazs ice cream to a group potluck dinner. There is competition about who is the most antisexist revolutionary man. There is competition about who knows his Engels better and who can quote most from “Resistances to Consciousness.” There is competition about which man is more sensitive, about who cries more. There is serious discussion about whether they should all “turn gay” as a political statement of support for not pestering women.

We women are in a stupor of disbelief. We're being set against one another. First only two of the Witches spend hours on the phone mending fences after their men have traded private sexual stories; soon all of us are spending hours on the phone doing damage control. We decide that, at this moment in history, men in groups bond to reinforce their power,
not to divest themselves of it. We march together to disband their next meeting.

Things are pretty sullen in everybody's home life for a while.

Random House will publish the anthology. John Simon, a politically engaged person and a senior editor, will be its shepherd. But he is a man, and white to boot—a combination virtually required to hold power in the publishing world at the time.
⁸
In a leap of principle, I proclaim that John can be the titular editor but that all hands directly involved with the book must be women's, even if women at Random House are mostly assistant or junior editors. To my surprise, he graciously concedes—but I learn later from these women that he thinks me terrifying. I don't feel terrifying. I don't think it extreme to want the first anthology on women's liberation to be in women's control.

Meanwhile, back at WITCH, several women are uncomfortable with the idea of the book. They worry that it will make me rich and famous and that they're not in it. I explain that the advance doesn't even cover the permission fees, that I've already
been
famous and found it overrated, that I'd be delighted for us to do the book as a collective, and/or that I'll gladly put them in it—so what would they like to write about? Silence. But the majority supports the book. I'm grateful, because I suspect I'm so far gone into it by now there's no turning back. This is the first time I've dared “defy” anyone in our own tight group, so I'm a wreck with the stress of losing even one woman's approval.

Meanwhile, Random House editorial and production folks are pressuring me to deliver the manuscript ahead of schedule. They worry that “this women's liberation fad” is peaking and will soon decline, so if we don't get the book out fast, we'll miss the boat.

The year 1970 hits like a meteor.

In January, I get a phone call from Jane Alpert, one of the women at the “underground” newspaper
Rat
. She says that women have decided to seize the paper for an issue and need ideas and support from women's liberationists. I'd written some pieces for
Rat
in 1968 and 1969, but hadn't been able to tolerate the paper's lifestyle emphasis aimed at young white straight males—sex-wanted ads, pornographic articles and graphics, and Rolling Stones coverage had begun to bury political reporting of any substance. So I find it wonderful that the few women on
Rat
have finally had enough, too.

We come from all parts of the nascent Women's Movement, most of us knowing zip about putting out a newspaper. But we do it. A few feminist newspapers have already begun—
Everywoman, It Ain't Me, Babe
, and
Off Our Backs
among them, but this is the first time women have seized a male-run periodical, and it creates ripples all across the Left, with women in other cities taking over local media on a temporary or permanent basis. We do not, in fact,
ever
give
Rat
back to the boys, although we never manage to change it into a real feminist paper, either.