The World Split Open (48 page)

The FBI collected thousands of pages of memos, reports, teletypes, tape transcripts, press clippings, and leaflets published between 1969 and 1973, under the heading “Women's Liberation Movement.” The Church hearings officially ended Cointelpro, but that didn't mean that infiltration and surveillance of the women's movement stopped. According to Brian Glick, whose book
War at Home
recounts the FBI's post-Church surveillance, “the Bureau continued to infiltrate and disrupt feminist organizations, publications, and projects.” After the Church hearings were published in 1976, the
Los Angeles Times
broke the news that the FBI had been infiltrating the women's movement all across the country. A few months later, Letty Cottin Pogrebin of
Ms.
magazine spent six weeks analyzing FBI files on the women's movement. With “reactions ranging from shock to fascination to ennui,” Pogrebin wondered why “the FBI's extensive file—the largest amassed since the Communist Party and the entire anti-war effort, according to one lawyer—received so little press and public attention.”

As I discovered later, even the most passionate and respectable researchers of the Cointelpro program and FBI and CIA surveillance have barely looked into the government's infiltration of the women's movement. Ironically, the FBI deemed women activists more important than did the researchers who have exposed the agency's violations of other citizens' civil rights. The Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress in 1974, additionally led to the release of a complicated paper trail left by regional agents and informants. The documents, carefully vetted by the FBI, now show that from San Diego to Vermont, from Seattle to Florida, women spied on other women's thoughts, feelings, and actions. Who those informants and informers were we still don't know.
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It was not until I read FBI files on Berkeley that I realized that informers had infiltrated—and reported on—many activities in which I had participated. FBI informants noted my activities, right down to a talk I had given at a political conference (sponsored by the Socialist Workers' Party, a group about which I knew nothing at the time). The FBI informer reported that “the speaker for this lecture [“Women in Revolt”] was listed as Ruth Rosen, Teaching Assistant, member of the Women's Caucus of the History Dept. at the Univ. of Cal.”
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(There was no such caucus.)

The accuracy of informers' reports was haphazard at best. If a woman's name were Elizabeth, the FBI might list her “aliases” as Beth and Liz. Informers rarely understood that a person mentioned in two
different contexts was the same individual. In a subsequent document appeared my name, address, and phone number—here I was no longer a teaching assistant, but “a photographer who will do pictures for the women's movement only.” (Ironically, I spent most of my graduate career taking pictures of famous men—Ronald Reagan, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, various New Left leaders, as well as police who might be guilty of excessive force—for the campus newspaper and alternative newspapers, but not for women's publications.)
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Long after the Church report came out, the FBI continued to monitor the women's movement. When Margo St. James, the leader of the San Francisco union of prostitutes, sent for her FBI file in 1976, the Bureau replied that no file existed on either her or her organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). And when she checked with the San Francisco regional office, the agent replied with a grin, “We never considered COYOTE part of the women's movement.” Later, the same agent “found” her files, brought them to her, and tried to convince her to be an informer.
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Clearly, the FBI's infiltration intensified paranoia and provided one explanation for unresolvable differences. In 1973, Robin Morgan spoke of the “new smell of fear in the Women's Movement”:

It is in the air when groups calling themselves kill-dyke separatists trash lesbian-feminists who work with that anathema, straight women, and trash these lesbian-feminists as “pawns, dupes and suckerups to the enemy.” . . . It was in the air when I trembled to wrench the Stones record from a phonograph at a women's dance, and when I was accused of being a uptight, puritanical, drag. And of course a hung-up man-hating “straight” for doing that. The words are familiar, but the voice used to be male. And the smell of fear was in my gut, writing this talk, and is in my nostril now, risking the saying of these things.
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But how can we distinguish paranoia from reasonable fear? We can't. As the saying goes, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” What we
can
ask is how much the
belief in
FBI infiltration affected the thought and behavior of movement activists.

Given her years in and around the Left labor movement, Betty Friedan never doubted that the FBI would eventually infiltrate any women's movement. At the 1971 national NOW convention, she announced, “It should be recognized that because of NOW's size and strength, that NOW is going to be ‘infiltrated.' We shouldn't worry, because we're too big to be co-opted.”
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Later, Friedan would conclude that the FBI had likely infiltrated the Congress to Unite Women (in both 1969 and 1970), as well as various NOW national conventions. She was also convinced that the FBI had somehow manipulated the gay/straight split. “I think it is possible that the CIA or FBI manipulated some of the lesbians. . . . The agents deepened the divisions and I think that agents used ambitions and other issues like the lesbian thing and so on.” As an example, Friedan pointed to a talk she had given in Seattle. The organizers asked if she would share the platform with a lesbian. When Friedan refused, women picketed and “that night the people that were picketing came in, occupied the first rows, and made it impossible for me to speak. . . . I think the Seattle thing was [the result of] agents.” When asked about the impact of such infiltration, Friedan quickly responded, “It prevented the passage of the ERA.”
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Friedan's assessment is just one example of how some feminists attributed the divisions within the movement—or the backlash against the movement—to intelligence activities.

Younger feminists also blamed the FBI for what they saw as a change in the political direction of the women's movement. Porous and inviting, the movement permitted easy access and infiltration. For feminists, it was next to impossible to distinguish between informers and ordinary women who behaved oddly, suggested weird actions, held rigid positions, had poor judgment, or created dissension every time they opened their mouths. They also assumed informers were the same as “agents.” Journalist Marilyn Webb, for instance, felt certain that agents had infiltrated the Washington, D.C., feminist newspaper
Off Our Backs
, which was then “taken politically from a centrist position to a radical lesbian fringe newspaper. I was absolutely devastated . . . and I knew one of those people was an FBI agent.” Over time, Webb said, she noticed a pattern in which a small number of women used “innate disagreements that people had anyway and put a certain spin to them so that it destroyed the group . . . it was very skillful, these people were not fooling
around and were highly trained.” Later, Webb discovered that a man whom she had met in Cuba who had been her lover was a paid FBI informer.
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The story of Sagaris, an ambitious, would-be feminist institute and think tank, provides a snapshot of how fear could turn into paranoia and help destroy a feminist institution. In 1974, a group of faculty and students at Goddard College in Vermont decided to create a feminist summer institute. According to Joan Peters, one of the founding members of the collective, Sagaris would be for women of “all backgrounds and all persuasions of feminism,” and the women who applied to the school did indeed range from “welfare mothers to college presidents.” The dream was ambitious. At the two initial five-week summer sessions in 1975, ideas were to shape future activism, activist experience would inform theory, and egalitarianism—rather than hierarchy and elitism—would be the norm. As Susan Sherman, who taught poetry at the second session, later reflected:

It was almost too perfect. And perhaps a more experienced and less enthusiastic observer might have predicted from the beginning that isolating over one hundred women of all ages, interests, and levels of emotional stability along with some of the strongest, most diverse and opinionated voices in the feminist community on an isolated hilltop for a period of five weeks would itself be a dangerous thing to do.

In the end, the dream met a nasty death, unraveling amid fierce political and cultural conflicts, crushed by a collision between purists and pragmatists that would have seemed familiar to political activists in all periods of history.
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The first session, though not exactly “harmonious,” appeared to be quite successful. Mary Daly, a major feminist spiritualist thinker, Rita Mae Brown, a well-known lesbian novelist, Candace Falk, a socialist-feminist, and Charlotte Bunch, a former civil rights, antiwar, and lesbian rights activist, were among the teachers. Candace Falk remembered meeting women from small towns, who confirmed her sense that “women's liberation was a truly grassroots organization.” She felt that her course on socialism and feminism, even though filled with angry women who had “left the Left,” turned into a stimulating and sustained debate on feminism and socialism and on the directions women and
their movement should take. Although some women “resented her remaining on the Left,
and
living with a man,” Falk never felt trashed. Banter, good will, and humor seemed to contain differences.

Like most good teachers, Falk learned as much as she taught. A token socialist at Sagaris, Falk was also one of a handful of heterosexuals. “Living among women who lived without men was a new and powerful experience,” she recalled. She learned “how oppressed lesbian women must feel in a straight culture,” and she learned to

grasp the solidarity and integration that lesbians enjoyed in the core of their intimate as well as their public life. . . . I had the deepest gut sense that women always have a choice to go on with their lives and not deal with men at all . . . and I think that affected my relationships with men.
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During the first session, Charlotte Bunch taught a course on political strategies in organizing.

I was talking about building feminist institutions, about women's centers, about the whole controversy over women's businesses, class and feminism. . . . It was very creative and exciting, and the women were from all over the country . . . and eager to have a place for five weeks to discuss feminist strategies. I think at least half of the people in the first session said afterwards how it had changed their lives. . . . It was one of those real catalysts for people.

Later, Falk received letters from students who told her how much her course had changed their lives, something “too threatening” to acknowledge in the intense radical feminist environment of Sagaris.
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In late July, Sagaris succumbed to splits and squabbles. The event that sparked the conflict involved funding. The
Ms.
Foundation, the nonprofit educational foundation supported by the magazine, had already given Sagaris $5,000 for seed money for the first session and now responded to a request for additional funding by offering the leadership $10,000 for the second session.

Only three months earlier, the Redstockings had issued their press release on Gloria Steinem and the CIA. The faculty who taught during the second session were angry that Gloria Steinem still had not
responded to charges that she was guilty of political treason. To the leadership, Ti-Grace Atkinson argued, “You can't take that money. The Redstockings have just accused Gloria Steinem of being a CIA agent. The money is tainted, that money is suspect, and you're going to pollute Sagaris with it.”
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For six hours, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Joan Peters publicly debated whether or not to accept the money from the
Ms.
Foundation, but they failed to reach an agreement. Afterward, a majority of the community voted to accept the financial support. Still, Atkinson disagreed so strongly that she began conducting classes off-campus, where she was soon joined by other faculty—Marilyn Webb, Susan Sherman, Alix Kates Shulman—who formed an alternative institute. According to Joan Peters, Atkinson and her student followers “rented a place in town and lived in our dormitories and ate in our dining hall, but had nothing more to do with the school.”

While Sagaris waited for Steinem's response, the scene turned ever uglier. “There were fist fights in the courtyard,” recalled Peters. “We were at war. It became more fashionable to go with the people who saw themselves as revolting against the institution. . . . We had become, in the course of six weeks, ‘the establishment.'” As tempers flared, women began to accuse one another of the serious crime of “reformism,” or not being sufficiently radical. Students criticized the Sagaris leadership collective for charging tuition, even though they did so on a sliding scale based on financial need and also provided scholarships. Other students accused those who had created an alternative institute of “elitism.” “I guess that's the worst thing you could have called anybody in those days and so everybody was calling everybody elitist,” Shulman recalled. Students who were mothers complained that Sagaris discriminated against them because it only provided six hours of child care each day (even though everyone at Sagaris had to take her turn as a child care provider).

As Sagaris unraveled, its culture of celebration turned into one of suspicion. Before the split, according to Alix Kates Shulman,