*4 The Panther Defense Fund raised $10,000 at the Bernsteins’ that night, and a total of $100,000 just in the month of January. It was a time when public sympathy for the Panthers ran high in the wake of Bobby Seale being gagged in the Chicago courtroom, Fred Hampton’s assassination on December 4, 1969, and the December 8, 1969, violent police raid of the Los Angeles Panther office. The Panthers peaked in popularity in 1970 with offices in 68 cities, an annual budget of $1.2 million, and circulation of the Black Panther newspaper reaching 150,000. That year, The New York Times published 1,217 articles about the Panthers. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, pp. 355, 392.
*5 After the party and New York Times editorial, the Bernsteins were inundated with hate mail, and the Jewish Defense League picketing outside their apartment building protesting their support of the anti-Zionist Panthers. Years later, documents proved that the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents generated the hate mail and provoked the picketing in a deliberate attempt to dry up liberal Jewish support for the Black Panther Party. Churchill, The COINTELPRO Papers, p. 159. Tom Wolfe immortalized the party in his New York magazine article titled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (June 2, 1970), in which he intricately dissected the social and cultural contrast between the rich donors at the party and the Panthers, and coined the phrase “radical chic.”
*6 Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun, pp. 324–25.
*7 Todd Gitlin, president of SDS in 1963 and 1964, is a Columbia University professor, sociologist, and prolific public intellectual who wrote, among many books, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (1980).
*8 Frank Serpico was a former NYPD officer and well-known whistle-blower. His testimony was central to Mayor John Lindsay’s 1970 Knapp Commission hearings on police corruption, which, at the time, caused the biggest shake-up in the history of the NYPD.
*9 When I interviewed Cathy Wilkerson at a diner in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on October 25, 2012, while her infant grandson slept in a stroller, she refused to discuss the townhouse explosion. This account of the explosion comes from her memoir, Flying Close to the Sun (pp. 345–55).
*10 Ted Gold graduated from Columbia in 1969.
*11 Diana Oughton, age twenty-eight, graduated from the Madeira School in 1959 and Bryn Mawr in 1963, then worked for two years with a Quaker group in Guatemala. The experience of working closely with indigenous poor people in Guatemala radicalized her. She eventually rejected her family’s Republican political values and became a revolutionary.
*12 Kathy Boudin, Bryn Mawr class of 1965, is the daughter of the late New York radical attorney Leonard Boudin.
*13 Actor Dustin Hoffman lived next door to the Wilkersons’ townhouse and the blast blew a hole through the wall of his apartment. Hoffman and his then-wife, Anne Byrne, helped Wilkerson and Boudin escape from the rubble. Hoffman’s star role in the 1967 classic The Graduate had made him an overnight icon of youthful discontent.
*14 On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led a small group of sparsely armed revolutionaries to attack the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba in what is widely seen as the start of the Cuban Revolution. Though Castro’s troops were quickly defeated, he later recast the event as a success.
*15 On April 24, 1916, during World War I, a group of Irish republicans mounted an armed insurrection in an attempt to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic. Over the six days of the Easter Rising battle, 450 people were killed, more than half of whom were civilians, and the rebels were defeated.
*16 From October 16 to 19, 1859, abolitionist John Brown and his cadre of freed slaves and white abolitionists raided a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The assault was meant to be the first step in establishing a stronghold of freed slaves in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. But Brown and his followers were defeated; those who weren’t killed in battle were hanged soon after. The raid was one of the precipitating events of the Civil War.
*17 The FBI sting that Rudd narrowly escaped was set up by FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, who was the only undercover FBI agent to successfully infiltrate the Weathermen. After the townhouse bombing, Nixon insisted that the FBI make a Weatherman arrest. Grathwohl was forced to blow his cover in order to arrest Linda Evans, who was one of twelve Weathermen indicted on April 2, 1970, for conspiracy and inciting riots in connection with the Days of Rage. Evans served a short prison term.
*18 Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun, p. 355.
CHAPTER 17
WOMEN’S LIBERATION
(January–September 1970)
There’s something contagious about demanding freedom, especially where women, who comprise the oldest oppressed group on the face of the planet, are concerned.
—ROBIN MORGAN,
Sisterhood Is Powerful
Fifty years after American women won the right to vote in 1920 came a second wave of feminism. After years of feeling exploited by the male-dominated New Left, civil rights, and peace movements, women began to blaze their own path to freedom and power. The movement had begun in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the passage of the Equal Pay Act, followed by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination based on race or sex. Founded in 1966, the National Organization for Women sought to gain equal access for women to work, education, and political participation.
By the late sixties, new and more radical women’s liberation organizations formed all over the country, with names like New York Radical Women, Redstockings, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), Radical Mothers, BITCH, Bread and Roses, and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. These groups tackled issues like abortion, rape, domestic violence, gay rights, women’s health, and workplace equality. At the same time, thousands of women were being radicalized by the experience of sharing their frustrations and life stories in consciousness-raising groups. “The feeling was that we were like Columbus, sailing at the edge of the world. Everything was new and intense,” said one feminist.
Achieving equality in the workplace would require a steep climb. In 1970, women comprised only 9 percent of all professions, 7 percent of doctors, and 3 percent of lawyers. Women held 9 out of every 10 elementary school teacher jobs, but only 2 out of every 10 school principal positions. Banks routinely denied women credit cards, and “head and master” laws, on the books in many states, gave husbands legal rights over their wives’ property. Declaring that “the personal is political,” second-wave feminism redefined the meaning of equality and challenged the way sexism had shaped relationships and every element of American life from the bedroom to the boardroom.
ROBIN MORGAN (peace activist, poet, feminist)
There I was one day in January 1970, a young mother, in my office at Grove Press, where I was an editor. Jane Alpert called me and said, “We’ve all been complaining about Rat, and I think we’re going to seize it. Will you come with us and give it feminist legitimacy?” It was the first time women had seized a male-run newspaper. I was slightly older by two or three years than most of the women I hung with. I was never in SDS. I was in MDS, Movement for a Democratic Society, which was for people who were not campus based. But I was quite delighted by this call, because I’d had run-ins with Jeff Shero, who was the editor of Rat Subterranean News,*1 and they had become this porn-infested boy thing, a lot of very crude kind of rock and roll, a lot of R. Crumb cartoons, less politics, profoundly sexist. So we took it over. We marched in and said, “Out, get out!”
Three or four guys were there and we threw them out. They thought it was amusing, and that it was for one issue only. They didn’t understand that they were never coming back. I’m not completely sure that we understood it, either.
So we did the women’s issue, which became quite famous. Jeff used to joke that it would sell better than any other issue. He thought, What’s the problem, after that we’ll take it back. But we changed the locks. We were radicals, aft
er all—we knew how to do this kind of thing. We seized the bank account. We seized the whole damned paper. And then Jeff was very angry and the men came back and tried to get in and there were, ah—altercations. But we took the position that they had been counterrevolutionary. Once you lobbed that at somebody in those days, or called them bourgeois, they were dead in the water.
Credit 17.1
Second-wave feminism grew out of the civil rights and antiwar movements and profoundly changed the role of women both at home and in the workplace.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
Every Weatherwoman thought of herself as a feminist, and we felt that we were part of the feminist movement. I remember when I moved to New York to work for the National Lawyers Guild, twelve other women and I formed a women’s consciousness-raising group, and we didn’t really know that in thousands of other apartments around the country the same thing was happening. I think we felt very much that we had been transformed by talking to other women, telling secrets about how we were raised, how we really felt about boyfriends; about the women who didn’t have boyfriends but had girlfriends; about sexuality; about dreams of work, where we were told by fathers and brothers that it couldn’t happen because we were girls. All of that, and the sense that all the movements, the civil rights movement, the black movement, the antiwar movement, were stifling women.
At one of the SDS conventions in 1966, a group of women took over the stage and there was practically a riot; there was just pandemonium. I was sitting on the steps up high when this happened, and there was just chaos. People were shouting and freaking out, and the more the men shouted and freaked out, the more the women freaked out; and we left that effort determined to not let our demands be shot down again.*2
TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)
Everybody had to learn the hard way about feminism. I remember I was living in this commune called the Red Family in Berkeley with several people. There were a bunch of women, and they started meeting at our house, and I was excluded. It was my house. You had to go in the front door to go into the house, and I had to sit outside. I didn’t know what they were talking about, and they said, “We’re talking about you.” What was interesting was that this was happening thousands of times at once. There was no steering committee; it just happened.
I couldn’t convert emotionally or attitudinally from chauvinism, since I had just been introduced to feminism. But I was very supportive of the idea and somewhat awestruck at how these things kept erupting. Everybody gives us credit for organizing this phenomenon called “the sixties” but in every occasion it was more spontaneous than anything else. If you had been organized in 1960 as a Friend of SNCC, or you went to Mississippi, you learned some organizing techniques and then you took it with you. So there were thousands of people that had rudimentary organizing skills, and we placed a very high value on organizing. We had organizing schools, organizer training. But when these movements happened, they weren’t organized. It was like an anarchist’s dream: self-organization; no need for hierarchy; no need for vanguards; no need for bureaucracy.
ROBIN MORGAN
Knowing what I know today about how deeply the word feminist threatens the existing social compact, to say radical feminist now seems to me almost redundant. But it was very important then because there were radical feminists and there were reformist feminists and there were socialist feminists and there were socialist radicals, and radical socialists. I mean it was a lot about compartmentalization and identity politics—how you dressed, who you hung with. I’ve written about the conformity of the period, but I’ve never really heard anybody else address it. I think it’s important.
We were all writing stuff for the first women’s issue of Rat. I wanted the left to be pure and to be feminist and to be good for women. I felt women were the real left and I felt that if we could transform the consciousness of the left we could change this country. “Goodbye to All That” came out very fast, in one whole night. I cried while writing it. I mean I sobbed.
FROM “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,” BY ROBIN MORGAN
So, Rat has been liberated, for this week, at least. Next week? If the men return to reinstate the porny photos, the sexist comic strips, the “nude-chickie” covers (along with their patronizing rhetoric about being in favor of women’s liberation)—if this happens, our alternatives are clear. Rat must be taken over permanently by women—or Rat must be destroyed….
And that’s what I wanted to write about—the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what “Women’s Lib,” as they so chummily call it, is all about—who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token “pussy power” or “clit militancy” articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more….
This literally nauseated me to write, and my palms would sweat with fear and I’d go throw up, and then go back to the typewriter and get it down. I’d lie to myself and say, “You don’t have to publish it, just get it written down.” And then once it was down I knew I’d let it be published. The lack of ethics by the men of the New Left was like breathing in ammonia to me. It was foul, it severed any longing I had for that connection.
Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It could just make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women—with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or “coin” as well). Goodbye to all that.
CATHY WILKERSON (SDS and Weather Underground member)
The women’s movement at that early stage was very embedded in middle-class concerns. It wasn’t against other concerns, but the women who were in the process of defining the women’s movement used their own experiences, which was good and honest. But it wasn’t my experience at that point.
Our women’s group would talk about dividing up the housework between a husband and wife. But many in SDS lived in communes; we had no housework because we had no furniture. Everybody shared the cooking. We had different concerns than the rest of the women’s movement. All of us women were in this hothouse environment where we felt like you had to participate in either radical politics or feminism and we were on both sides.
VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN (SDS peace activist, feminist activist)
The men in the movement were all smart, and pretty domineering. They were dismissive, arrogant, very fast-talking, and they intellectualized everything. Very few women could hold their own in that environment. Organizing women was not considered a particularly exciting or important thing to do.
ERICKA HUGGINS (Black Panther Party leader)
We [the women] ran the Black Panther Party. Because of the male dominant society, the first to be arrested, killed, jailed were men. So what happened was that we were at first leadership by a default because we were already running all of the day-to-day operations of offices and programs. And then as time went on, particularly between 1968 and ’71, when there was so much attack and harassment of Black Panther Party members by the FBI, women created a grounded and stable network between the chapters and offices. Women also were the editors and writers for The Black Panther, the party’s newspa
per, which communicated to the globe.*3
Credit 17.2
Women began to take over the leadership of the Black Panther Party by 1970 because so many of the male leaders either had been shot or were incarcerated.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.
ROBIN MORGAN
For the record it should be said that the heartbreak I and women like me felt was because we really thought we were building the brave new world together. We came out of the civil rights movement. We came out of being threatened and beat up and busted and water-cannoned and followed in cars in Mississippi in the middle of the night. And we were so young. I remember I’d thought at one point, I’m still a virgin and I’m going to die a virgin, I’m never even going to know what it’s like to have sex!
At that moment, in the summer of ’64, I was in the CORE, Congress of Racial Equality,*4 office in New York. I had been in the South doing voter registration, and now I was back in New York and we were all waiting for news of these three missing CORE workers—one black, two white—in Mississippi, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They were dredging the rivers and searching everywhere, and in the process they discovered the mutilated parts of an estimated seventeen additional bodies, and all but one of them were women. One of the men said, “There’s a brother who was lynched that we never even heard about!” And I looked around the room and all the women, black and white, were studiously studying the tips of their shoes, and finally I screwed up the courage to say, “But what about the women?” The women looked at the floor, and the guys all looked at me incredulously as if I’d landed from Mars, and said, “Those were probably sex murders, those weren’t political.” It’s not even anything against the guys in CORE. That was just the mindset of the time.
Witness to the Revolution Page 35