The World Split Open (24 page)

A small group of these women prepared the paper in secret and presented it anonymously. They had reason to fear derision. In King's
words, the “reaction to the anonymous position paper was one of crushing criticism. . . . People quickly figured out who had written the memo. Some mocked and taunted us.” Other women, including black women, didn't feel they had experienced any sex discrimination. Hayden later wrote, “Whether women held leadership positions didn't matter in actuality prior to this time, since the participatory, town-hall style, consensus-forming nature of SNCC's operation meant that being on the Executive Committee or a project director didn't carry much weight anyway.” Still, the paper—with specific but relatively mild complaints—was a ringing indictment of movement men's insensitivity toward their female comrades.
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The most famous response to the position paper came from Stokely Carmichael, whose words—“The only position for women in SNCC is prone”—would become infamous, providing shocking evidence of men's disrespectful treatment of women within the movement. At first, Carmichael evidently meant it as an inside joke, a reference to all the sexual adventures that took place during Freedom Summer. After a day of exhausting confrontations and debates, a group of SNCC staffers had “gravitated toward the pier with a gallon of wine.” (Casey Hayden remembered some marijuana as well.)

According to Mary King, “Under a bright, cloudless sky, we talked and laughed among ourselves as we walked to the bay seeking humor to salve the hurts of the day.” Carmichael's monologues supplied some of the evening's entertainment. Born in Trinidad, educated at New York City's Bronx High School of Science and then at Howard University, the articulate, handsome, and gregarious Carmichael was gifted with a quick wit and “the ability to joke like a professional stand-up comedian.” King remembered that

he led slowly and then began to warm up. One humorous slap followed another. We became more and more relaxed. We stretched out on the pier, lying with our heads on each other's abdomens. We were absorbed by the flow of his humor and our laughter. He reveled in our attention as we were illuminated by the moon. Stokely got more and more carried away. He stood up, slender and muscular, jabbed to make his points, his thoughts racing. . . . He started joking about black Mississippians. He made fun of everything that crossed his agile mind.

Finally, he turned to the meeting under way and the position papers. He came to the no-longer-anonymous paper on women. Looking straight at me, he grinned broadly and shouted, “What is the position of women in SNCC?” Answering himself, he responded, “The position of women in SNCC is prone!” Stokely threw back his head and roared outrageously with laughter. We all collapsed with hilarity. His ribald comment was uproarious and wild. It drew us all close together, because, even in that moment, he was poking fun at his own attitudes.
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His joke offended neither King nor Hayden, who, at the time, regarded Stokely Carmichael as one of the men most sympathetic to their position paper. But one northern white woman, who had just had a brief sexual encounter with Carmichael during the conference, overheard him say that “he'd rather masturbate than go to bed with a white woman.” To her, his joke did not seem humorous at all.
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What began as a joke soon entered Carmichael's repertoire of humor. Cynthia Washington heard Carmichael's one-liner at a district meeting in Mississippi:

I was standing next to Muriel Tillinghast, another project director, and we were not pleased. But our relative autonomy as project directors seemed to deny or only override his statement. We were proof that what he said wasn't true—or so we thought. In fact, I'm certain that our single-minded focus on the issue of racial discrimination and the black struggle for equality blinded us to other issues.

In England, Sheila Rowbotham, the British socialist-feminist and author, listened with shock as Carmichael spoke at a Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London in 1967. Asked about the role of women in the revolution, Carmichael uttered one word: “Prone.” “As a socialist,” Rowbotham recalled, “I obviously supported the black movement in America. Now here was the person I thought I was supporting sneering at [women].”
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But it was not just Carmichael's repetition of his crowd pleasing one-liner that amplified the impact of his words. Clearly, he had touched a very raw nerve. His joke captured the growing racial and sexual
tensions within the movement, North as well as South. Raised to be “nice” girls, movement women generally welcomed sexual adventure, but as daughters of the fifties, they also feared sexual exploitation. They wanted respect—as political comrades
and
lovers. Carmichael's joke reinforced their fears, legitimizing the need for an autonomous women's movement.

By 1965, those in SNCC who favored a more centralized structure and black separatism had triumphed, and whites were asked to leave the group and to organize poor whites. The interracial movement was over; in its place was the demand for black power and self-determination.

Many former SNCC members naturally turned to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By 1965, both SDS and SNCC had cut loose from their parent organizations, severed their alliances with liberals, and embraced a generational politics that shut off input from elders. Like SNCC, early SDS had begun as a small community whose values and goals were cemented by personal friendships. But most of the group's original members—the Old Guard—had already graduated from college and now worked in SDS's Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). A new generation of recruits, largely from the Midwest—dubbed “Prairie Power”—had taken over the leadership. Many younger recruits only knew the Old Guard men and women by reputation, if at all. As in SNCC, the older sense of community had vanished and it was unclear what would replace it.

Unlike SNCC, with its emphasis on direct action, early SDS had been best known for its intellectual discourse and position papers. Its founding statement, drafted by Tom Hayden and others in 1962 in Port Huron, had proposed the immodest goal of ending racism and war, questioned America's exploitative relations with the rest of the world, condemned the corporate control of economic life, denounced the materialism and anonymity of American life in general, and condemned the bureaucratic, profit-making, and dehumanizing aspects of American society. Through participatory democracy, people would make the decisions that affected their own lives. Rejecting the hierarchic, dogmatic, and centralized nature of the Old Left and the American Communist
Party, SDS created a national office loosely tied to autonomous local campus chapters. Fearful of the tyranny of leadership, the organization rotated its leadership positions.

In the spring of 1965, Casey Hayden went north to work with SDS's organizing project in Chicago. ERAP projects, seeded in a number of cities from Newark to Cleveland, reflected SDS's efforts to organize poor whites. To live with and organize the poor was meant to convey a powerful statement of revulsion with American materialism. The journalist Andrew Kopkind, who visited ERAP projects in various cities, thought its members lived in worse poverty than SNCC staffers in the South:

They are part of the slums, a kind of lay-brotherhood, or worker-priests, except that they have no dogma to sell. They get no salary; they live on a subsistence allowance that the project as a whole uses for rent and food . . . they eat a spartan diet of one-and-a-half meals a day, consisting mainly of powdered milk and large quantities of peanut butter and jelly, which seems to be the SDS staple.

In Chicago Casey Hayden watched SDS men try, but fail, to organize young men, some recently arrived from Appalachia, whose violent and retrograde attitudes toward women they accepted—and even imitated. Marilyn Webb, an early SDS activist, recalled that in the unsuccessful Chicago project to organize former hillbillies, “The [SDS] men seemed fascinated by the violence; they even tried to imitate the men's swaggering and violent postures. Worst of all, some of the men tried to pressure SDS women into sleeping with community men.”
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As it turned out, the major successes in urban organizing came thanks to women organizers. “Much of ERAP was a dismal failure,” one former SDSer now concedes, “but what
we
did in Cleveland and Boston later turned into a national welfare rights movement.” With pride, former SDS member Sharon Jeffrey recalls what she and Carol McEldowney accomplished in Cleveland. “We quickly realized that the most promising strategy was to organize women at the food stamp redemption center. The men tried to organize—and even imitate—ghetto men, but it never worked. While they hung around pool halls, trying to speak and act tough, we organized women on the food stamp lines.”

“That's where we learned that women really knit together a community,” observed a former ERAP organizer. “Standing up at city council
meetings against landlords and welfare bureaucrats taught us to value our abilities and skills.” According to another, “Community women really taught us a great deal about solidarity and strength—something we would need later on in the women's movement.” One woman, who worked in the Newark ERAP project, proudly recalled that some SDS women remained there long after SDS abandoned the project, and opened the first women's center in the city.

Women welfare recipients, like their black counterparts in the South, were the glue that held together the poor white community. Casey Hayden's experience now taught her that organizing women was the key to social change. In the fall, feeling at loose ends, she headed for Mary King's family cottage in the remote woods in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Together they holed up in the remote rural area, and Hayden wrote a manifesto about women's position that would ignite the women's liberation movement. “There, in the quiet isolation of a forest,” wrote King,

and with wood smoke from the cottage fire scenting our walks, on November 18, 1965, Casey wrote the first draft and then together we polished our challenge to women who were involved across the spectrum of progressive organizing. This call would go out to [forty] women in Students for a Democratic Society, the National Student Association, the Northern Student Movement, and the Student Peace Union as well as SNCC.
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Hayden's paper summed up what they had learned during their years in SNCC. King, for example, attributed many of her ideas to Ella Baker, who had taught young activists “that a fundamental purpose of the civil rights movement was to teach people to make their own decisions, to take responsibility for themselves, and to be ready to accept the consequences . . . you must let the oppressed themselves define their own freedom.” Reflecting on the origins of the women's memo, King wrote, “Wasn't that in fact what we were seeking to do, to define our own freedom?”
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For Hayden—cut off from the movement that had sustained her for half a decade and recently divorced from Tom Hayden—the writing also represented an effort to create a new community. Blacks had decided that whites could no longer organize blacks. Men had begun organizing men against the Vietnam War. In part, the manifesto represented her effort
to re-create SNCC's beloved community: “It was a search for a home, a sisterhood, an attempt to create real discussion. The means and ends were one. . . . The paper was not a rebellion; it was an attempt to sustain.”
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Hayden and King called the manifesto “A Kind of Memo,” a title whose modesty masked their actual ambition to mobilize women in the movement. In order to analyze women's relations to men, they once again drew upon the language and world they knew best—that of race relations. Unlike the 1964 list of grievances, the “Memo” focused on the larger problems women were experiencing in the movement. Searching for a way to situate women as a group, Hayden settled on the concept of a “caste.” Unable to imagine a separatist women's movement, she predicted that women would not withdraw from the situation “à la black nationalism.” “Objectively,” Hayden wrote confidently, “the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full time on problems such as war, poverty, race.” That settled, Hayden went on to question woman's “natural” role in society, as well as a range of movement assumptions from “who cleans the freedom house, to who accepts a leadership position, to who does secretarial work, and to who acts as spokesman for groups.”

In SNCC, women had enjoyed considerable freedom from hierarchy and learned to question the “natural order of things.” It was only logical to apply these ideas to the most intimate aspects of their lives. “The reason we want to try to open up dialogue,” the “Memo” explained, “is mostly subjective. Working in the movement often intensifies personal problems, especially if we start trying to apply things we're learning there to our personal lives.” Years before feminists invoked the slogan “The personal is political,” Hayden had defined the political dimensions of personal relations.

We've talked in the movement about trying to build a society which would see basic human problems (which are now seen as personal troubles) as public problems and which would try to shape institutions to meet human needs rather than shaping people to meet the needs of those with power. . . . [We've learned] to think radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before [and now] a lot of women in the movement had begun trying to apply those lessons to their own relations with men.

Already, in 1965, Hayden was articulating what women's liberationists would later call “consciousness-raising”—“trusting
our inner feelings,”
as she put it, “learning to see the world through women's own experiences.” Hayden also realized that the ghost of the fifties haunted their highly politicized lives. Under the heading of institutions, Hayden underscored their growing rejection of the very institutions of traditional family life: “Nearly everyone has real questions about those institutions which shape the perspectives about men and women: marriage, child rearing patterns. . . . People are beginning to think about and even to experiment with new forms in these areas.”
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