Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  HEATHER BOOTH (SDS member, feminist activist)

  In December of ’65 there was a national SDS meeting in Champaign-Urbana [Illinois], and I was already part of SDS on my campus at the University of Chicago. That conference was designed to discuss the “woman question,” and I went to the meeting in order to be part of that discussion. One of my professors was Dick Flacks, who was also at Port Huron, and he encouraged me to go. At that meeting the men wouldn’t let the women talk, and would finish their sentences. So women would say, “I felt no one listened to me.” And someone would say, “What do you mean? Anyone would listen to you,” or, “Maybe you didn’t have anything to say!” So it was acting out the very reason there needed to be an independent women’s movement.

  In those meetings I was for continuing the conversation with men and women. A guy named Jimmie Travis, a black SNCC worker who has since died, got up with a group of friends and said, “Look, the women aren’t going to make progress on this till you get a chance to talk by yourselves.” He had the experience with the black movement doing that. I thought, Oh no, we can work this out. Black and white together, men and women together. Then after about another hour I realized, We do just have to talk amongst ourselves.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  In those years, from when I started traveling—’67, ’68, ’69—tremendous changes were happening. Women were speaking up, and there were arguments about it all the time in SDS chapters and in resistance groups around tactics. Women were starting to do separate actions, meeting together, and telling men to shut up, or get a grip, or to change themselves. All those kinds of confrontations were happening.

  One of the things I’ve wondered since then is, Do people change without confrontation? I really don’t know, because in my formative experience, people don’t change because of gentle persuasion. People change because they’re confronted by people they care about, or people they have been close to. I can’t tell how much that’s my temperament, and how much that’s true. But certainly that was happening across the country and in big universities and small. It was exciting and it was conscious; it wasn’t like, “Okay, women are just in the back room serving coffee.” It wasn’t like that, but it was shocking. Men expected privileges. Men expected sexual privileges, though it isn’t exactly like the sexual revolution was imposed on women. This was the moment of the Pill, and this was the moment of the crack-up. None of us wanted to be our mothers, or to live lives in the fifties.

  ROBIN MORGAN

  We were idealistic young women who wanted to change the world and we really thought our brothers did as well. We didn’t mind grinding the mimeograph machines and grinding the coffee and grinding our teeth because we were doing it for what we thought was a shared thing. To find then that they would say, “Give me a little of my civil rights tonight, baby,” and that that’s what they really wanted us for…or to see women get beat up or punished by rapes in Weather collectives, was brain-blowing. I mean to keep yourself from turning right-wing was not a small thing. You could feel yourself wanting to become the antithesis of this because it was so hypocritical and hurtful. So to try and keep your vision of profound societal change in the face of this was hard.

  This period comes after eight to ten years of, for many of us, me certainly, intensive involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements, where we marched and we picketed and we signed petitions. We were pacifist. We felt we were getting nowhere. So when people turned into the downward spiral of violence, on the one hand it is emotionally and historically understandable. But it is also very much classically about manhood, and women go along because either they have a man involved or they want to have a man involved or they want agency in making societal change—and the only model they see is a male model, so they want to be just as tough as a guy, they want to be an imitation guy.

  FROM “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,” BY ROBIN MORGAN

  Goodbye to the Weather Vain, with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males. “Left Out!”—not Right On!—to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better—they know) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that the machismo style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by “free choice,” and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make her revolution…all the while, oh my sister, not meeting my eyes because Weathermen chose Charles Manson as their—and your—hero. (Honest, at least, since Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy, whether he is Dick Nixon or Mark Rudd: master of a harem, women to do all the shitwork, from raising babies and cooking and hustling to killing people on command.) Goodbye to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne which is the face of Beulah Saunders, which is the face of me which is the face of Pat Nixon which is the face of Pat Swinton. In the dark we are all the same—and you better believe it: we’re in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variations: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice—take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister—don’t you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.

  HEATHER BOOTH

  I was a leader on campus. I was in student government; in SDS; I was the head of Friends of SNCC; I headed a tutoring project on campus, and at this meeting I was talking, and one of the SDS guys said, “Shut up.” I just wasn’t used to people talking to me that way, so I went around the room and tapped every woman on the shoulder, and all the women left. We went upstairs and formed a group called WRAP, Women’s Radical Action Project, which was out of SDS’s set of community-based projects called ERAP [Economic Research and Action Project].

  ROBIN MORGAN

  You have to remember the comments coming out of the male left at this point—and I refer to it as the male left even though we were in it as women. This was the period of Stokely Carmichael, who said the only position for women in SNCC is prone. Everywhere you looked there were guys saying obnoxious things. Either just ignoring women, or with the generic male pronoun, or the assumption that the draft—which I might add affected only men—was a universal issue, but childcare, which ought to affect everyone because it’s the next generation, was a fringe issue. To talk about rape was to be a frigid hysteric. The homophobia was enormous. To raise the issue of a leftist guy hassling a woman, sexually harassing a woman, raping a woman was to invite censure on the woman.

  The Weather collectives began to do militant actions, and their model for security was that every woman who joined the group had to sleep with every man in the group. This was “smash monogamy” from a male perspective. Whether the women wanted to be monogamous or not didn’t matter. Why a woman coming into a group sleeping with every man in the group was a test of her security when every man coming into the group was not made to do the same thing is—well, what the hell does that have to do with security? Nobody asked. Despite the image of a lot of the decade, it was a time of tremendous conformity and peer pressure—and toxic sexism. Abbie Hoffman called for “revolutionaries” to “kill your mothers.”

  FROM “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,” BY ROBIN MORGAN

  Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituting oppression by another name. Goodbye to the assumption that Hugh Romney [Wavy Gravy] is safe in his “cultural revolution,” safe enough to refer to “our women, who make all our clothes” without somebody not forgiving that….

  Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catt
y, dykey, Solanasesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about.

  And let’s put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism—the lie that there can be such a thing as “men’s liberation groups.” Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a “threatening” characteristic shared by the latter group—skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed fucked up by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not oppressed. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism; the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight. In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men—but in the short term it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is not the fault of women—kill your fathers, not your mothers.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  To me it’s a later writing that says we weren’t part of the women’s movement. We felt very much a part of the women’s movement, just like women who were teaching, and starting the first free clinics, and going to communes felt a part of it. It wasn’t like there was only one place to be, and that was in New York City with a handful of women who were writers and were working there. We felt very much a part of it. We did come to feel by ’71, ’2, ’3 that we had chosen to identify these two issues that we felt couldn’t be abandoned, even with the persuasive argument that women were always putting aside our issues in favor of bigger issues. That’s a very persuasive argument. And yet we felt, “Really, your country is killing thousands of people a day in Southeast Asia, and that’s not what you’re talking about? You’re talking about these other things? And the spearhead of the black freedom movement is being shot down in front of you?” Anyway, we felt we couldn’t go there, but we didn’t feel that we were not part of the women’s movement.

  ROBIN MORGAN

  “Goodbye to All That” was crossing a bridge and burning it behind me because the male left did not forgive. I didn’t want it to forgive. I was done with it. It was coming also from a very deep place inside of real rage and real hope. I thought it would explode on me. I thought, None of these people will speak to me again, and I don’t care. I knew other women had gone through this because we all would whisper among ourselves. He’s such a sexist pig, what about that group? And did you know that he goes and he shakes a woman’s breast instead of her hand? And have you heard he raped her?

  FROM “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,” BY ROBIN MORGAN

  Goodbye, goodbye forever, counterfeit Left, counterleft, male-dominated cracked-glass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn’t have, or couldn’t not have, or didn’t want, or didn’t want yet, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or to none. All the way down, this time.

  Free Kathleen Cleaver! Free Kim Agnew!

  Free Anita Hoffman! Free Holly Krassner!

  Free Bernardine Dohrn! Free Lois Hart!

  Free Donna Malone! Free Alice Embree!

  Free Ruth Ann Miller! Free Nancy Kurshan!

  Free Leni Sinclair! Free Lynn Phillips!

  Free Jane Alpert! Free Dinky Forman!

  Free Gumbo! Free Sharon Krebs!

  Free Bonnie Cohen! Free Iris Luciano!

  Free Judy Lampe! Free Robin Morgan!

  Free Valerie Solanas!

  Free our sisters! Free ourselves!

  ROBIN MORGAN

  I brought it to the collective, and frankly I thought they wouldn’t publish it. Sharon Krebs said, “We have to publish this. I disagree with Robin completely—although some of her points are well taken.” Then Jane Alpert*5 said, “Yes, we really have to.” So we published it, and within a day the shit hit the fan. I mean the phone began ringing off the hook. I received anonymous death threats from quite a few so-called revolutionary brothers. Some of them are still alive and around and should be ashamed. They would call and say, “You’re a fucking cunt, you’re going to be dead, and if the cops don’t get you we will.” There were Panthers, but it was mostly the white boys.

  People came by and informed me that they were reprinting it in the Berkeley Barb and lots of other publications. It became this odd badge of honor among male left newspapers, “We can print this, we can handle self-criticism.” And some of them printed it, saying, “This is a serious criticism, and while we don’t agree with it and we feel that its tone is sexist in itself, we are going to do self-criticism and examine.” But since the piece named names, each movement newspaper would bowdlerize it so that whichever men or male left groups were big in their local area just “happened” to be cut out.

  MICHAEL KAZIN

  (Harvard SDS leader and Weathermen member)

  I remember I was living in this apartment with all women in Cambridge, Mass., when “Goodbye to All That” came out. It was painful, because they were saying, “Michael, you know, I think she’s talking about you.”

  Later, I wrote in my book American Dreamers that “Goodbye to All That” became as widely known as any document by a woman radical since the 1848 declaration at Seneca Falls.

  MICHAEL UHL

  (Vietnam veteran, Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry organizer)

  Reading the women who were writing about male chauvinism in Liberation magazine or in The Guardian was no more or less like reading Das Kapital for the first time. It was all part of the new consciousness, the new ideology.

  Robin Morgan was a heartthrob. I had a boyhood crush on her when she played Dagmar on I Remember Mama!*6 Her wing of feminist separatists was very much present in our circles of second-wave feminist friends and lovers. Tod [Ensign]’s girlfriend Pamela Booth knew all of them. Shulamith Firestone was briefly in her consciousness-raising group. We men stayed safely at a distance as the women fought it out among themselves. However, most New Left activist men I knew had at least read Our Bodies, Ourselves; many (me) had a copy on their own bookshelves. We were all “in struggle” against “male chauvinism,” and, as I have written in several places (i.e., Vietnam Awakening, my memoir), quite happy to cede our positions in the male world of professionals and breadwinners to a woman: Good luck with that, baby!

  ROBIN MORGAN

  I could never have imagined that “Goodbye to All That” would have unlocked such rage of leftist women against their men, which had been boiling all this time. I had not assumed that women would step forward and it would be like “I am Spartacus!” But this was an amazing result. I mean you have to remember when we hexed the Pentagon in 1967 and Shulamith Firestone and Marilyn Webb stood up and tried to talk, the men pelted them with raw eggs. When Naomi Jaffe and other women tried to talk at an SDS convention in 1966, demanding a plank on women’s liberation be inserted in the SDS resolution, they were pelted with tomatoes and eggs and were thrown out of the convention. It was absolutely unbelievable. The token women were picked by the men and they were the Motor City Nine*7 who dangled chains or the Bernardines, and there were very few of them.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  I wish I had been smarter about integrating women’s issues into all the other issues. It’s so obvious that the oppression of women and war ar
e integrated. We knew it at the time, and we talked about it, but I could have done more, certainly in the years that I was the head of SDS, to promote young women’s leadership and development. I wish I’d had that one extra late-night meeting just with women.

  I was one of the first through the door, or the glass ceiling, but an awakening was happening. So it would have been easy and doable to put extra energy into promoting the women who were activists. Every SDS chapter, for sure, was half women by that period of time, but they usually weren’t giving the long speeches; they didn’t have the loudest voice.

  ROBIN MORGAN

  The Miss America Pageant protest in Atlantic City in September of 1968 was the first mass demonstration of the women’s movement in this contemporary wave of feminism, and it announced our existence to the world, and is often taken as the date of birth of this feminist wave, as differentiated from the nineteenth-century feminist suffrage struggle. We had arrests and it made history.*8