Saturday's Child (48 page)

It's yet another radicalizing experience. Which is becoming a daily occurrence.

Sisterhood Is Powerful
is published in the fall of 1970. It will be become a best-seller but not be listed as such on the
New York Times
list, because in that day the list excludes anthologies. It will become the “click,” the first feminist epiphany for hundreds of thousands of women, and the staple of mushrooming women's studies courses around the world. Toward the end of the 1990s, the National Association of Librarians will choose it as one of the World's 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century—up there with Marx's
Das Kapital
, Einstein's
Theory of Relativity
, and Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
. Random House's anxiety about missing the boat will be a touch off the mark: the book will remain steadily in print for thirty years, up to the turn of the millennium.

The dedication reads:
For Faith, my mother. With love. Finally
.

My mother says, “That's nice, dear.”

I swear I will never compile another anthology.

Meanwhile, the thought occurs to me that there really is a need for an international version. …

Book promotion. Movement promotion. The talk-show circuit.

The instant I hit the TV world,
they
know who I am—or rather, was. I insist my former career not be mentioned, not because I'm hiding anything, but because I know that this subject, once allowed in, will take over and bury whatever feminist ideas I'm there to discuss. Selfishly, I do dread gurgles of “
Look
who's grown up to be a
feminist!
” But I also worry that once I'm identified as a former child star, the tiny woman inside the lens, the woman in curlers and a housedress, ironing and watching TV, might dismiss me as being a celebrity too distant from her reality to carry a political message of any relevance to
her
life.

While still pregnant, I've had to do Merv Griffin's show, when another activist cancels from stage fright. This entails smiling grit-teethed while explaining the Basics (“
No
, women
don't
want to be drafted. Actually, we'd like to end the draft for men, too.
No
, rape survivors
don't
‘ask for it'…”), only to have Griffin fixate on my belly, asking, “How can you be a genuine feminist if you've got a bun in the oven?”

A few weeks after Blake's birth, I do
The Tonight Show
, at that time still aired live. The staff promises not to raise “my past,” but to treat seriously issues of my present. While on air, citing statistics on employment and education discrimination, I glance at a monitor and see that I'm really doing a voice-over, while clips from the network film morgue are being run: little Dagmar eating that eternal cookie, Alice arguing with the Cheshire cat. Mortified, I interrupt myself and call it. Carson puts on his quizzical, raised-eyebrows, whywhatssamatter look. Big laugh from the audience. I explain courteously but firmly that I agreed to do the show in order to publicize issues that affect women's lives, and that his staff had sworn not to trivialize that by focusing on my having once been a kid actor. He manages to turn my indignation into a joke. This is a no-win. I rise, politely wish him good evening, and walk off—off camera, off stage. There is panic behind me as I leave the stage door.
Nobody
walks off
The Tonight Show
, live, on air.

I'm certain they'll never have me on again, but I'm wrong. By this time they're pre-taped, though. Bob Hope is a substitute host for a vacationing
Carson, and another guest, Glenn Ford—a pro-gun, anti-choice conservative, it turns out—has at me. But several years have elapsed, and consciousness has begun to shift. This time I ignore Hope and Ford and appeal directly to the woman inside the lens, asking her to complain if she thinks it's unfair for men to gang up on and make fun of a woman trying to talk about women's rights. Hope makes a joke about rape and rapier wit. The LAUGH sign flashes, the audience titters. I save my laugh until later, when a feminist mole on the show's staff informs me that protest letters are inundating them, mailbag after mailbag.

The Phil Donahue Show
is live, originating in Dayton, Ohio. They want me to debate an editor from
Playboy
magazine, a man unforgettably named Anselm Mount. I tell them I don't debate such basic issues as human freedom. They promise they'll have us on in separate segments. When I check into the hotel in Dayton, Mount has left a chummy little note, asking me to have a drink with him in the bar so we can discuss tomorrow's debate. It's been a trap. I decline his drink and once in my room, get on the phone and start calling around Ohio to women's groups I know. All night they drive and arrive in stages—sixty women, from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron. A women's media group from Antioch College comes, complete with video equipment. We strategize in my room. The next morning, they all show up, smiling, docile, in line for the studio audience. Once on air, seated beside Mount (it
is
a trap, no separate segment is planned), I seize the mike from a startled Donahue and refuse to give it back, announcing that we will not be debating after all, that women are taking over the program. Indeed, they rise from all over the audience, the Antioch video women calmly elbowing aside the cameramen to take possession of the cameras, women moving up onto the set, women moving to guard the doors. Mount is reduced to jumping up and down, throwing a hissy fit, screaming that we're all just jealous that we're not cute enough to be a
Playboy
centerfold; he finally slumps into a sulk. Phil, to his lasting credit, goes with the flow, unprotesting that his show has just been yanked out from under him. He knows his audience—mostly women whose hair has been in rollers—and his audience applauds us. The switchboard is jammed with questions and call-ins of support. I stay in the studio for two hours after the show, answering women's phone calls. The producer claims this was the most watched Donahue show to date.
On subsequent appearances over the years, Phil will take naughty pleasure in starting each interview with me by running video clips from that first takeover.

As I knew he would, Kenneth makes a superb father, especially for a young child. His irrepressible creativity is given full vent, as if he and Blake were both children. They don't just
finger
-paint; they
body
paint, smearing their daubed bare torsos on big sheets of paper, making a joyful mess of which de Kooning would be proud. Kenny can make toys from nothing; he whittles a plastic milk carton into a knight's helmet with visor, bends and cuts a large cardboard box into a castle. (Kenneth is still a writer, though, so naturally he
writes
about his fathering, in articles for alternative media and in poems.)
¹⁵
Our shared love for this child has knitted us together, more closely than in a long time. I, meanwhile, am in a state of vigilant pleasure to discover that I'm not a half-bad mother, after all—neither a Faith nor a Mates reincarnate. It's so
easy
to love Blake, which makes it easy to be a good mother.

Of course, I feel guilty all the time: not being there every single second for Blake, not there every second for Kenny, not there every second for the movement, for
Rat
and WITCH and
Sisterhood Is Powerful
. Not earning enough money. Certainly not writing enough poems. I'd feel sanctimonious about my sacrifices, but I'm too busy feeling rotten about my deficiencies. The triumphs seem ectoplasmic; only the failures seem real. But guilt is a homey, familiar emotion for me by now. I'm also learning it's not just me; it comes with the territory of being female—guilt, plus fatigue so pervasive as to be invisible and normal. The word “multi-tasking” has not yet been coined, and won't be until men discover decades later that they too can do more than one thing at a time. The word “proletariat”
has
been coined, however. Etymologically, it means “bearers of children.” I understand why.

Relentless 1970 draws to a close with the book tour for
Sisterhood Is Powerful
. The anthology has generated requests from women around the country—to lecture, organize, advise, agitate. Well, the movement needs money and so do I, colleges can pay, and local groups need benefits, too. I can cleanse my old skills by putting them to work for a cause
I
choose.

At this point, the montage accelerates into a blur that I will later try to describe in
Going Too Far
. The spontaneous circle dance of hundreds of women in a Michigan gymnasium after a speech. The physical eviction of an especially obnoxious heckler from a seminar in New Mexico—all six-and-a-half-foot football hero of him being hefted out the door by five petite women. Forty-degree-below-zero dawn in Saskatchewan, Canada—sitting up and talking all night (as usual) with women before catching my 7:00
A.M.
plane on to another town, another college, another feminist community. The closing circle around me of about twenty jocks on a Pennsylvania campus, drunk and in an ugly mood, each man carrying a lit torch and screaming, “Burn the witch.” The growing presence of women of color in audiences, the growing presence of housewives, community women, working-class women. The Jesus freak who lunges at me from four feet away as if in slow motion, cursing me to eternal damnation, his knife raised high, glittering in the Los Angeles sun, at an outdoor speech. The sixty-year-old woman who stands up at the rap session after a lecture and, crying softly, says she's just realized she's been raped almost every night of her thirty-five-year marriage. The bomb threats in auditoriums before or during speeches, the pickets carrying signs declaring me a baby killer, the menacing letters and phone calls. But also the radical feminist nuns in Washington State doing secret abortion referrals who present me with an embroidered banner reading “Saint Paul was Just a Big Prick.” The women's faces, women's voices, tears, laughter, electricity, energy …

In 1971, I attend the Radical Feminist Conference in Detroit, organized by Kathleen Barry, Joanne Parrent, Barbara Burris, and Joanne DeLor,
women who had written
The Fourth World Manifesto
. This groundbreaking manifesto is in part a response to Charlotte Bunch (a former Christian youth leader then husbanded and hyphenated as Bunch-Weeks) and a group of women who'd formed the self-termed Anti-Imperialist Women's Movement, rather insultingly implying that anyone who wasn't in their group was pro-imperialist. I still consider myself a women's liberationist, but now find these omnipresent schisms tiresome. At the Detroit conference, I will re-meet Joanne Parrent
¹⁶
and Kathleen Barry,
¹⁷
a striking woman with prematurely white hair, a crisp wit, and a radical feminist mind. I don't yet know that Kathy and I will become lifelong friends, only that apparently her patience as well as mine has broken at the agonizing rhetoric of several Trotskyite women who have infiltrated to break up our “bourgeois, reactionary, divisive-of-world-revolution meeting.” One such woman has planted herself in the entrance way, cross-legged amid bundled piles of her lethally boring newspaper, the
Militant
. She shouts slogans and hurls half-punches at all who pass, refusing to budge, no matter how nicely or frequently asked.

I suspect rightly that Kathy will be not just a sister but a friend when, on the second day, with only a glance exchanged between us, we gently lift the Trot and place her, still in lotus position though in midair, stunned, together with her newspaper stacks, in the elevator. Then we smile and wave goodbye, press the Down button, and, as the doors close, shake hands and reintroduce ourselves.

Kenneth, who was part of the Stonewall demonstration—the formal birth of the Gay Movement—has co-founded the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The same ego games, leadership fights, correct-line squabbles are taking
place there as among women—but worse (gay or straight, these guys are
guys
). Meanwhile, lesbian women in GLF are ricocheting between the misogyny of their gay brothers and the homophobia of their straight sisters in women's liberation.

Kenneth is looking frayed around the edges, too. Apparently he's “too pro-feminist” for some of his gay comrades; besides, if he's married that
must
mean he can't be gay (though most of these men damned well know better). Since he and I have been quietly killing ourselves for years trying to work out this arrangement—with his practicing a guilty freedom and my practicing a guilty monogamy—the irony of this oversimplification is not lost on us. And since I wear the scars of being “insufficiently radical feminist” for certain women, because I'm married and a mother (of a
male
, yet), our wagons are drawn in a circle again.

Ken, Steven Dansky, and John Knoeble form a pro-feminist gay men's group and publish several issues of a journal, the
Effeminist
. It contains the earliest thoughtful antisexist writing by men in the current feminist wave, and lasts for a year or so. Ken is persona non grata in GLF now, for being too “pro-woman.” But at least Steve and John, together with some of the women from WITCH, help make a chosen, extended family for Blake.

Back in New York, the women at
Rat
announce they've decided I write “too well” and must drop my byline. Humbled, I submit. A few months later, they say I
still
write too well, that my pieces are identifiable even with a pseudonym. I try to oblige. I stick in lots of mutha-fuckin'-pig-dog conspiracy stuff, but fail miserably in sustaining sufficient solecisms. I am caught using the word “antithesis.” Finally, they tell me I may not write for the paper at all—but not
leave
either, which would be letting me off too easy: I must stay and just do office work instead.

God forbid I should act like Firestone and think I'm above sweeping. So I do it, all the shitwork, for some months, feeling morally superior in secret. I'm getting tired, though, of having to argue that a Miss Havana Beauty Contest is no better just because Fidel says it's different in a socialist country; tired of having to explain why feminism is not necessarily defined by a woman with a baby on her hip, a rifle in her hand, and a
tractor under her ass. I realize I'm tired of having to be in the feminist caucus—tired we have to
have
a feminist caucus at an all-women's newspaper in the first place. The lives of those “unrevolutionary masses” of women I've met in Montana and Iowa and Kentucky and Maine echo back at me.
That's
feminism, I think. It dawns on me, more than two years after having written “Goodbye to All That,” that it isn't just the
men
in the Left but the
politics
of the Left that are failing women.