Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  Meanwhile, we continued, both of us, to write. I took on a defense of “the woman question” even as I dived into groups and meetings and actions. The articles in this section were part of a flood of writing I produced during the middle and late sixties—mostly for Leftist journals such as Liberation, Win, Rat, The Guardian (and its ostensibly more radical spin-off, The Liberated Guardian). I know that even today there are some misguided pseudo-feminists who believe it possible to reach millions of American women—including housewives, secretaries, and other such sane folk—by spewing rhetoric onto the pages of magazines with names like Red Star over the Bible Belt or Hammer, Sickle, and Breadbasket.

  But this was still the sixties, remember, and the Women’s Movement embodied startling new concepts: the Miss America Pageant was considered a fixture of popular American culture—a vulgar fixture perhaps, but a harmless one all the same; even to speak of reforming abortion laws was shocking to many—and the idea of repeal was outright seditious; furthermore, for such issues to be discussed seriously in the pages of the New York Times was seen by some as proof that the Times no longer knew what was fit to print.

  The distance we’ve traveled seems less astounding, though, upon considering that the Equal Rights Amendment is still a controversial issue. One could relax into despondency if not rescued by a sense of the ridiculous.

  Meanwhile, my own private landscape lay buried beneath the writings in this section. It can be glimpsed erupting between the lines, or blurring and merging in outline with some abstract political concept referred to in a tone quite different from any in the “Letters from a Marriage.” Toward the end of the sixties there would be no keeping the two terrains apart any longer; like a time-space warp they would impinge, alchemize each other, and simultaneously surface in my writing—the superimposition has begun irresistibly in the last piece of this section, “Barbarous Rituals.” I was to learn that when one has been fragmented ever since one can remember, the state of integrity—in all the meanings of that word—is an exhilarating but astonishingly uncomfortable one.

  Each part of this book seems to inflict an embarrassment on me peculiar to its own content. In this, Part II, I find myself discomfited at the Patient Griselda attitude I had toward men; younger feminists today, assuming at least a minimal lip service consciousness on the part of most men, might find themselves irritated by what may strike them as my shuffling. Yet I am much more embarrassed—mortified, in fact—at having clung for so long to Leftist analysis and jargon. I should not include some of these pieces at all, were there not still some sisters addicted to the same nonthought and nonlanguage. Perhaps it will help them to make some of the connections if they are able to watch another woman’s gradual withdrawal. For it must be acknowledged that I did not come to feminism from a suburban kitchen or a classroom or factory or office: I did come from the New Left, with all its faults and failures and foolishness—and virtues. I came to feminism already with a radical view of society’s ills, with the burn of tear gas still smarting in my eyes, the bruises from nightsticks still livid on my flesh, and the determination and vision of a generation whose ideals were originally strong, sensible, and beautiful. I should not have wished to be anywhere else in this country during the sixties than where I mostly was: on the streets in protest against war, racism, and poverty, and at my typewriter, in protest against these same evils.

  The right to criticize is earned fairly only through love. And when I hear anyone, even today, attack the Left from a Rightist viewpoint, my blood begins to simmer. A reactionary dismissal of unions, for example, or a sweepingly insensible statement like “After all, welfare recipients do cheat the taxpayer,” or “Socialism must inevitably produce a society of ants”—and I feel La Pasionara rise in me again and march hand-in-fist with the spirit of George Sand to the barricades.

  For me, the task was never one of retrenching from the radical analysis of the New Left; it was simply to go further. “Too far,” said Leftist men, for obvious and shameful reasons unable to admit the failure of their politics and practice in recognizing the very center of the problem: sexism—because that recognition would in turn uncover the very heart of the revolution: feminism. What remains of the Left still seems unable to admit this. Naturally the weary rhetoric has been stretched a bit to include a new “constituency,” and what was called “the woman question” is granted the pretense of an answer, albeit an answer laughable to feminists.

  Yet if one is to acknowledge fairly all the factors in one’s growth, and to attempt doing so with love (since to do other is merely to have contempt for one’s own past self, an unnecessarily severe judgment which can only embitter one’s present) then it is important for me to say that I, arch-critic of the sexist American Left who take back not one breath of my denunciations of that masculinist movement, nevertheless preserve in my heart an honorable loyalty to what we all—women and men alike—hoped to stand for then, and to our courage and idealism and innocence. We changed something in this country, in this world, for the better. And if I feel ashamed of how that movement perforce failed because of its narrowness, its sexism; and if I feel righteously justified, as a woman and a feminist, in its consequently inevitable failure; I can still feel proud at having been “a child of the sixties,” at having shared in all the tantrums—and in all the outrageous beauty.

  WOMEN DISRUPT THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT

  The following piece is based on an article of mine which appeared in various New Left publications. I made no pretense at being an objective journalist (if such an animal ever existed); I had been one of the organizers of the demonstration, and so my article was a perfect example of what then was called proudly “participatory journalism.”

  The 1968 women’s demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City was the first major action of the current Women’s Movement. 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). If it was the birthdate, conception and gestation had been going on for a long time; years of meetings, consciousness-raising, thought, and plain old organizing had taken place before any of us set foot on the boardwalk.

  It was out of that first group, New York Radical Women, that the idea to protest the pageant developed. Almost all of us had been active in the civil-rights movement, the student movement, or some other such wing of the New Left, but not one of us had ever organized a demonstration on her own before. I can still remember the feverish excitement I felt: dickering with the company that chartered buses, wangling a permit from the mayor of Atlantic City, sleeping about three hours a night for days preceding the demonstration, borrowing a bullhorn for our marshals to use. The acid taste of coffee from paper containers and of cigarettes from crumpled packs was in my mouth; my eyes were bloodshot and my glasses kept slipping down my nose; my feet hurt and my neck ached and my voice had gone hoarse—and I was deliriously happy. Each work-meeting with the other organizers of the protest was an excitement fix: whether we were lettering posters or writing leaflets or deciding who would deal with which reporter requesting an interview, we were affirming our mutual feelings of outrage, hope, and readiness to conquer the world. We also all felt, well, grown up; we were doing this one for ourselves, not for our men, and we were consequently getting to do those things the men never let us do, like talking to the press or dealing with the mayor’s office. We fought a lot and laughed a lot and felt very extremely nervous.

  Possibly the most enduring contribution of that protest was our decision to recognize only newswomen. There was much discussion about this, and we finally settled on refusing to speak to male reporters not because we were so naïve as to think that women journalists would automatically give us more sympathetic coverage but rather because the stand made a political statement consistent with our beliefs. Furthermore, it would raise consciousness on the position of women in the media—and maybe help more women get jobs there (as well, perhaps,
as helping those who were already there out of the ghetto of the women’s pages). It was a risky but wise decision which shocked many at first but which soon set a precedent for almost all of the Women’s Movement. Today most networks, wire services, and major newspapers across the country know without being reminded that newswomen should be sent to cover feminist demonstrations and press conferences. And this has perceptibly helped to change the heretofore all-but-invisible status of women in media.

  We also made certain Big Mistakes in our protest. Not so much the tactical ones: we had women doctors and nurses there, and women lawyers and stand-by emergency phone numbers and local “turf” to which we could strategically flee if the going got too ugly. Our mistakes were more in the area of consciousness about ourselves and other women—who we really were and who we wanted to reach. For example, our leaflets and press statements didn’t make the point strongly enough that we were not demonstrating against the pageant contestants (with whom, on the contrary, we expressed solidarity as women victimized by the male system). Too many of our guerrilla-theater actions seemed to ridicule the women participants of the pageant rather than the pageant itself. The spontaneous appearance of various posters sprouting slogans like “Miss America Goes Down” and certain revised song lyrics (such as “Ain’t she sweet/making profit off her meat”) didn’t help matters much.

  Still: we came, we saw, and if we didn’t instantly conquer, we learned. And other women learned that we existed; the week before the demonstration there were about thirty women at the New York Radical Women meeting; the week after, there were approximately a hundred and fifty.

  A year later, there was another demonstration in Atlantic City; I went as a reluctant “old organizer”—to help those who were putting it together that year out of my experience from the previous year. I had given birth less than two months earlier and was breast-feeding the baby, who was clearly too young to hack an all-day and most-of-the-night demonstration. Thus my memories of the protest in 1969 tend to focus on my worrying that the child would accept my husband’s bottle-feeding, and on my own keen discomfort with milk-full breasts—which I regularly emptied via a tiny breast pump I had brought along for that purpose, quitting the picket line every two hours or so to dash to the nearest ladies’ room and pump myself out. Such are the vicissitudes encountered by a feminist activist.

  The protests have continued, becoming an annual event in themselves. Meanwhile, the pageant gets sillier and draws less of an audience each year. The time will come when feminists automatically gearing themselves up for the Miss America protest will have to remind themselves that there is no longer anything there about which to protest.

  NO MATTER how empathetic you are to another’s oppression, you only become truly committed to radical change when you realize your own oppression—it has to reach you on a gut level. This is what has been happening to American women, both in and out of the New Left.

  Having functioned “underground” for a few years now, the Women’s Liberation Movement surfaced with its first major militant demonstration on September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, at the Miss America Pageant. Women came from as far away as Canada, Florida, and Michigan, as well as from all over the Eastern Seaboard. The pageant was chosen as a target for a number of reasons: it is, of course, patently degrading to women (in propagating the Mindless Sex Object Image); it has always been a lily-white, racist contest (there has never been a black finalist); the winner tours Vietnam, entertaining the troops as a Murder Mascot; the whole gimmick of the million-dollar Pageant Corporation is one commercial shill-game to sell the sponsors’ products. Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values—racism, militarism, capitalism—all packaged in one “ideal” symbol, a woman. This was, of course, the basic reason why the protesters disrupted the pageant—the contestants epitomize the role all women are forced to play in this society, one way or the other: apolitical, unoffending, passive, delicate (but drudgery-delighted) things.

  About two hundred women descended on this tacky town and staged an all-day demonstration on the boardwalk in front of Convention Hall (where the pageant was taking place), singing, chanting, and performing guerrilla theater nonstop throughout the day. The crowning of a live sheep as Miss America was relevant to where this society is at; the crowning of Miss Illinois as the “real” Miss America, her smile still blood-flecked from Mayor Daley’s kiss, was also relevant. The demonstrators mock-auctioned off a dummy of Miss America and flung dishcloths, steno pads, girdles, and bras into a Freedom Trash Can. (This last was translated by the male-controlled media into the totally invented act of “bra-burning,” a nonevent upon which they have fixated constantly ever since, in order to avoid presenting the real reasons for the growing discontent of women.)

  Most picket signs proclaimed solidarity with the pageant contestants, while condemning the pageant itself. An active solidarity has possibly been at work for that matter: it has been rumored that one of the contestants decided to function as an infiltrator and was responsible for the scrambling of Bert Parks’ cue cards, temporarily melting his perfect plastic smile. At night, an “inside squad” of twenty brave sisters disrupted the live telecast of the pageant itself, yodeling the eerie Berber Yell (from The Battle of Algiers); shouting “Freedom for Women!” and hanging a huge banner reading WOMEN’S LIBERATION from the balcony rail—all of which stopped the nationwide show cold for ten bloodcurdling seconds. One woman was arrested for “emitting a noxious odor”—spraying Toni hair-conditioner (a vile-smelling sponsor of the pageant) near the mayor’s box, although the sister-traveler among the contestants who shuffled Bert Parks’ cue cards was never apprehended. The upshot: the show may have to be taped in the future, possibly without an audience, and the action, widely covered in the press, brought excited new members pouring in to the Women’s Movement. Who knows? There just might be two thousand of us liberating women from the Miss America image some year.1 Women’s Liberation immediately set up a Legal Defense Fund for those busted in Atlantic City—bread and supportive letters piled in to help these sisters. One groovy by-product from the action is a film by women, to be used for organizing purposes. All along, Women’s Liberation has demanded the use of women reporters—much to the annoyance of the male-dominated media under- and over-ground, which like to keep “news chicks” covering flower and fashion shows.

  Some of the press were put through considerable changes by this insistence of the demonstrators on recognizing only women reporters, but the press as a whole weren’t prepared for anything as “heavy” as arrests; most of them had assumed that the protesters wouldn’t be taken that seriously. This assumption came from reading too much Marcuse, and from not realizing that the real soft white underbelly of the American beast was being socked in Atlantic City. So seriously were the women taken, in fact, that the original disorderly conduct charge for the militant use of hair-spray was later escalated to an indictable offense with a possible two-to-three-year sentence (ultimately, the sentence was suspended). Reports are also coming back that the fears of the pageant officials are not completely lulled by the idea of taping future events without an audience—since what will they do for contestants, when they no longer can trust even “their own”? It would appear that the demonstrators were taken quite seriously by the Man.

  Nevertheless, some male reactionaries in the Left still think Women’s Liberation “frivolous” in the face of “larger, more important” revolutionary problems. But what is “frivolous” about rapping for four hours across police barricades with hecklers, trying to get through to the women in the crowd who smile surreptitiously but remain silent while their men scream vilifications? What is frivolous, for that matter, about a woman who isn’t rich enough to fly to Puerto Rico for an abortion and so must lie on some kitchen table watching cockroaches on the ceiling articulate the graph of her pain? What is frivolous about the young black woman, proud and beautiful and militant, whose spirit cracks when she hears Stokely Carmichael say that “
the only position for women in SNCC2 is prone”? What is frivolous about the welfare recipient who must smuggle her husband or boyfriend out of the house when the worker arrives, denying her own sexuality or risking the loss of her sustenance (to say nothing of having her children taken away from her)? What is frivolous about the migrant-worker mother who must be yet one step lower than her oppressed husband, must let him beat her up a bit, impregnate her just after she’s dropped her seventh child, and maybe disappear for a year now and then so that he, at least, can feel a little of his “manhood”? And what is frivolous about the women in Fayerweather Hall at Columbia last spring, new-minted revolutionaries ready to be beaten and busted as well as anybody (and they were), ready to form a commune that would reflect alternative lifestyles to this whole sick culture, only to hear a male SDS leader ask for “chicks to volunteer for cooking duty”?

  Sexual mores lie at the heart of a society. Men will not be liberated until women are free—truly free, not tokenly equal. The Women’s Liberation Groups, already becoming a Movement, take on this task of liberating themselves and their society on a new (although the oldest) front. Their plans include twenty-four-hour storefronts providing everything from birth-control and abortion information to child-care services, crash pads for women “running away from home,” English lessons for Spanish-speaking women (and vice versa), judo lessons for all women, free food and coffee and liberation rapping. They are plotting actions against cosmetic and fashion empires for perpetuating ludicrous beauty standards, against male-supremacist No Women Allowed public eating places, against debutante balls and the conditions in decrepit women’s houses of detention.

  The death of the concept of Miss America in Atlantic City (which was celebrated by a candlelight funeral dance on the boardwalk at midnight) was only the beginning. A sisterhood of free women is giving birth to a new life-style, and the throes of its labor are authentic stages in the Revolution.