by Robin Morgan
Proceeding to the New York Stock Exchange, the women sang (to the ancient melody of “Tisket-a-Tasket”): “Wall Street, Wall Street, Crookedest Street of All Street / Foreign Exchange / Student Exchange / Wife Exchange / Stock Exchange / Trick or Treat/Up Against the Wall Street!” When the guards resisted their entrance, the WITCHes demanded a check with their superiors, claiming they had an appointment with the Chief Executor of Wall Street himself—the Boss, Satan. The guards tried to phone for help—but the line went mysteriously dead. (Dig it: these are guerrilla witches.) The frightened serfs, anxious to gain the WITCHes’ good will, forced the guards to cease their persecution of the women long enough to beg stock quotations from the Coven, and then over two hundred local vassals watched in fascinated delight as the WITCHes formed a Sacred Circle (joined by two “normal” women from the crowd who were eager to round out the Holy Thirteen—undercover witches, no doubt). With closed eyes and lowered heads, the women incanted the Berber Yell (sacred to Algerian witches) and proclaimed the coming demise of various stocks. (A few hours later, the market closed 1.5 points down, and the following day it dropped 5 points.) One businessman, when asked if the bombing “halt” and peace move were responsible for the market drop, naturally denied the connection vehemently, shrugging that it must have been the witches. He had obviously read the article in Business Week describing a case in President-elect Nixon’s law office involving the suit of General Cigars against labor organizers in Puerto Rico, charging the latter with using witchcraft in a labor dispute.
The WITCHes then wended their way toward One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the glass erection abhorrent to their sister witches in South Africa, Bolivia, and elsewhere, who know damned well they Have A Fiend [sic] At Chase Manhattan. They encircled the building mumbling an elaborate curse containing references to Jericho, and allusions to a future insurrection involving buglers.
The Coven next manifested itself in the lobby of Manufacturers’ Hanover Dis-Trust, informing the guards there that they had an appointment with the Devil on the Thirteenth Floor. Elevating themselves accordingly, they haunted the investment house of Bache & Co., leaving the dreaded letters WITCH stenciled ineradicably on the carpet, and echoes of a curse to drive the Dow Jones Index down. In the bank itself, the WITCHes Trick-or-Treated the tellers’ windows; unTreated, they vanished, having magically cast WITCH and Women’s Liberation stickers against various marble surfaces and nameplates. (The same hex stickers also appeared in subways across Virginia Slim and Diet Jello ads—WITCHes are not co-optable.)
At dusk, the WITCHes came into their own element, and also their own turf. They alighted on the Lower East Side, beginning with a siege at McSorley’s (a men-only bar), and moved on to exorcise two girlie burlesque houses (mortifying one uptown-type customer who was trying to sneak in inconspicuously—he even asked for his money back, was refused by the cashier, and fled in misery). They descended on a beauty parlor singing: “What’s the Factor, the Factor in Max/Dirty old man with the Hollywood tan / Fact you, Factor, Hex on Max.” Upon their invasion of a discotheque on St. Marx Place, four bouncers rushed the women, hitting and pounding until two women were thrown downstairs. Noting that male physical violence employed against women is always at the heart of a repressive society, the WITCHes retaliated on two fronts—some, who are trained in judo and karate, landed a few lumps on their attackers, and then they assembled on the street in front of the building and blew the minds of the bouncers (who were black) with a rap about the temptation to sell out to the Man. This went down well with the indigenous crowd of black guys hanging around the street, who joined in the WITCHes’ calls to “desert to our side.” The bouncers, utterly freaked by this, fled back through the bosses’ portals.
At Max’s Kansas City (an “in” restaurant with The Would-Be-Beautiful People), the Coven distributed garlic cloves and cards reading: We Are Witch We Are Women We Are Liberation We Are We, chanted “Nine Million Women, Burned as Witches” (historical fact), and questioned women customers about selling themselves like pieces of meat for the price of a dinner. One woman said, “My god, it’s true, it’s true,” and began to cry. Her escort was amused.
The wind-up of the Sabbath peaked when the Coven trooped over to the Theater of Ideas where the usual group of chic liberals were klatching, this night about the subject of Media. Witches being the original Mediums, and therefore the original Message, the women simply walked in and took over the meeting, passing a small cauldron for contributions to the Women’s Liberation Legal Defense Fund (under the helpful prodding by a guerrilla WITCH of a broom and a—toy?—machine gun); and creating a genuine discussion on theater, media, ideas, women, the revolution, and other topics relevant to Halloween.
A fund-raising celebration the next night included spells, fortune-telling, apple-bobbing, solemnization of a Pact toward the Unholy Undoing of the Fillmore theaters and their cock-rock assault on women-exotic herbal smoking rituals, and a stunning light show. The WITCHes then went temporarily underground again until their next (secret) action, leaving behind a trail of zapped stocks and bonds, broom straws, and torn Humphrey/Nixon/Wallace/ and Nudie posters. Further evidence included WITCH stickers on burlesque houses, in men’s rooms, and on the front doors of known male supremacists. Little old Ukrainian men are still crossing themselves furiously on Second Avenue. In the Holiest Names of Hecate, Isis, Astarte, Hester Prinn, and Bonnie Parker, we shall return!
November 1968
II: WITCH AT THE COUNTER-INAUGURAL
BY NOW, many people know what WITCH is. This statement will attempt to say a few things about what WITCH is not. There appears to be a necessity for this in light of recent unfortunate occurrences during the counter-Inauguration demonstration in Washington, D.C.2
A group of people from New York Radical Women had decided to go to Washington some time in advance; WITCH as a coven had decided not to go, since many of our people had flu, and since we are generally bored by marching and would prefer to demolish things—by magic, of course. At the last minute, quite unplanned and unbeknownst to each other, it happened that about six individual WITCHes, on a whim and a broom, turned up in Washington.
Congratulating ourselves on our synchronicity, we proceeded together to the center of women’s activities, of all places the Institute for Policy Studies. We figured that was a pretty bizarre place to meet, but never ones to carp, we walked on in.
We entered squack into the middle of some very bad-vibe internecine power struggles between the New York and Washington women: who would give which speech and when; what “image” to present; to burn voter-registration cards in solidarity with the draft-card burners, or not to burn; to tear up voter-registration cards or not to tear; to chew up and swallow voter-registration cards or not to chew. WITCH was freaked by all this, so on the synchronized signal (the right foot of each of us falling asleep), we rose and mysteriously split for the basement of the Instrument for Palsy Sturdies [sic], to try and regain a feeling of sisterhood from each other, if not from those in the above-world.
Lacking a complete coven, we put ourselves together as best we could—spontaneity being one of our strong points. We unearthed a local broom, quickly made our own posters and headbands, found some chest-banners printed with the yawn-provoking slogan “Feminism Lives” and reversed them, crayoning WITCH, which sounded a lot less pompous, on the other side. We also threw together some songs and chants to make the marching endurable, and lugged along a seven-foot-tall mock tube of Vote toothpaste one of us had made, as a possible prop for an unplanned, play-it-by-ear theater action at the end of the march. Happily humming “You’ll wonder where the power went/when you cast your vote for President,” we made for the rally to join our other sisters who were to speak there.
On our arrival at the tent, we found we were excommunicate, anathema, and also not welcome—by those same sisters. They had obviously been united by our presence, and had resolved to chew us up instead of those divisive voter-registration cards. We were gratifi
ed that our existence seemed to unify and give meaning to theirs, but we didn’t understand why. We wished only to join them near the stage, to help form an honor guard around the women speakers, and to cheer and shake our tambourines at the appropriate places.
But they barred us from getting near them (employing a line of male Mobe3 marshals, who looked like bouncers, to help). They screeched various epithets over the pony-tailed heads of their smug male accomplices, such as: WITCHes should be burned, You’re going to try and disrupt our speeches, We know you’ve been planning this for months, You’re thieves (a reference, we presume after much analysis, to our use of the leftover banners they had been selling each other at a quarter each), You’re undignified freaks (a patent untruth—we are dignified freaks), and other vilifications.
They would not listen to our protestations (or those of a Boston women’s group who had joined with us—and who were promptly accused of being dupes in our conspiracy), and they ignored the one woman on the platform who tried to allay their paranoia and vouch for our good intentions.
We stayed and cheered anyway, since WITCHes are good sports even when listening to dull, overlong speeches. And we marched near those sisters, but far enough away to be protected from their bell-book-and-candle glares. Then we split and grooved together over food and good talk, regrouping at the tent that night to hear rock bands dedicate “Season of the Witch” to us at the counter-Inaugural Ball.
The point of all this is simply that, although a small and we feel unrepresentative group were horrified by everything we did or didn’t do, many other people loved us. We rapped with women on the march, with high-school kids and children and plain folks (even with some brothers—so there). They liked our style, our humor, our tone of militance, fun, revolution. If this same style disturbs some people, we are sorry, but as we do not try to liven up their comatose tactics neither should they try to de-, re-, or op-press ours. There is room in the Women’s Movement for all of us, and the more styles, tactics, and approaches the better. We can’t be monolithic in our thinking or paranoid in our relations, especially with each other.
This is not the first time that a small group has attempted to inflict their will on us, or to insist that they alone represent all women. Our positions vary widely, which is fine, since the goal—freedom for women—is the same for all of us. Why not hit on every front then, with every available style and strategy? This, we would hope, is the way our other New York and Washington sisters would also feel, and we felt it necessary to get our side of the story to them through this paper—since at present none of them are speaking to any of us.
We heard that they think we wanted to hex them. Given the general conception of what we mean by a hex, we can understand their terror. But WITCHes do not hex their sisters. We are irrepressible, mythic, action-oriented, guerrilla-theater, and plain guerrilla—and we are dangerous. But only to those who have reason to fear us.
January 1969
III: WITCH HEXES THE BRIDAL FAIR
ON SATURDAY, February 15, 1969, the first New York Bridal Fair was held in Madison Square Garden. A rather tacky, motorboat-showtype extravaganza-commercial, this fair was sponsored by radio station WMCA, and. boasted exhibitors from the “Bridal Industry”—manufacturers and marketers of gowns, wedding pictures, caterers, furniture, appliances, honeymoon trips, etc.—the biggest daddies being Chase Manhattan Bank (where you get the loan in order to buy all the things you don’t need), International Coffee, American Telephone and Telegraph, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and J. P. Stevens.
Appalled at the notion of the Bridle Un-fair, as they termed it, and smelling the corporate rats behind such an American tradition, members of WITCH issued a call to other groups in the Women’s Liberation Movement to join them in a demonstration at the Garden on the opening day of the fair. The slogan of the action was “Confront the Whoremakers”—and ten thousand stickers appeared all over New York City two weeks earlier, issuing that call.
Accordingly, while the brides-to-be and their mothers shivered in the cold, waiting in line to get into the fair, the women demonstrators assembled, about a hundred strong, to leaflet, picket, perform guerrilla theater, and cast a hex on the manipulator-exhibitors. Some of the demonstrators carried signs reading: Always a Bride, Never a Person, Coffee Causes Chromosome Damage, Ask Not for Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls, and Here Comes the Bribe.
The women demonstrators were protesting not only the obvious chicanery of the buying ritual which insists one must have sixteen appliances and a matched bedroom set—all the commercial and legal trappings—before one can simply live with another person; they were also bent on exposing the Dracula face of capitalism behind all the orange blossoms, pointing out how Chase Manhattan enslaves and murders in South Africa, how International Coffee exploits the peasants of South America, how AT&T and Blue Cross oppress and control people at home. But the heart of their attack was aimed at the institution of marriage itself, and at the structure of the bourgeois family, which oppresses everyone, and particularly women. In a “WITCH Un-Wedding Ceremony,” performed in the morning, the women made the following pledge of disallegiance:
We are gathered together here in the spirit of our passion to affirm love and initiate our freedom from the unholy state of American patriarchal oppression.
We promise to love, cherish, and groove on each other and on all living things. We promise to smash the alienated family unit. We promise not to obey. We promise this through highs and bummers, in recognition that riches and objects are totally available through socialism or theft (but also that possessing is irrelevant to love).
We promise these things until choice do us part. In the name of our sisters and brothers everywhere, and in the name of the Revolution, we pronounce ourselves Free Human Beings.
Later, inside the fair itself, women disrupted the “question-and-answer” period for brides, and zapped the trousseau fashion show by releasing 150 live white mice (a permanent present to the Garden). There were no arrests, but fifteen women from Brooklyn College SDS were roughed up by cops and thrown down a flight of stairs. As they were being carried out through the audience, they cleverly co-opted their bouncers by screaming, “I won’t get married, no, no, I won’t.”
A few days later, San Francisco women’s groups disrupted a Bridal Un-Fair on the West Coast with almost the same tactics. Yes, Betty Crocker, a conspiracy does exist.
February 1969
1 Regrettably, the original large Redstockings group no longer exists. Even more distressing are the recent attempts of a few women to wear the honorable name “Redstockings” while initiating patriarchal-style attacks against a number of feminists and feminist groups.
2 A general convocation of all Leftist groups, to protest the Vietnam War and to solidify the male “Movement.”
3 Mobe: Mobilization Against the War—umbrella group of the demonstration.
BEING REASONABLE: TWO LETTERS TO MEN
If considering some women sisters was trying to one’s patience, considering some men brothers was trying to one’s sanity. As each “movement man” came forth with his reasons why “the woman question” should not be seriously considered by radicals—or why it should be taken up and used to further the antiwar effort—I began to think that there was hardly a Leftist male alive able to chafe two brain cells together into the spark of a genuine thought.
I got angrier and more militant as a women’s liberationist. But I hadn’t yet stopped answering them. I replied, I shouted, I even reasoned with these jock “revolutionaries” whose intellect seemed to hover perilously near that of a drunken gnat.
It took a lot of time, adrenaline, and idealism. It also took a lot of rather touching stupidity.
DEAR RAT:
BARBARA GARSON’S1 husband’s article, “The Feminine Mistake,” in your October 4th issue was a masterpiece of male supremacist liberalism combined with love-freakiness of the most nauseating type.
That Garson could ever assume Women’s Liberation was a
“joke, a lesbian conspiracy, or a Trotskyist splinter group” just shows where he’s at, and he cops the Rennie Davis award of the year (for misogyny, subtle variety) for “hoping we will soon be finished with the phrase ‘the women question.’” Dig it, Marvin: More than half of humanity are women—the only majority to be treated like a tiny oppressed minority.
Sure, the system oppresses men as well as women, which is why all of us must work to destroy the system together. But there’s a sub-oppression, a “pecking order” that permits oppressed white people to take their rage and misery out on blacks, oppressed men to do the same to women, etc. A concrete example, small but enraging: how many “Movement couples” stagger home from a demonstration, or from jail, court, etc., so that he, exhausted, can collapse, while she, exhausted, fixes something to eat for them, or cleans up the pad, or picks up the kids, or, or, or. (If in certain cases there is cooperation between them on the gray shit of everyday living duties, is it because the guy has volunteered to do his part naturally, or because after hassling and pressure he is forced to cooperate, despite his inclination and power to do otherwise?)
Garson claims that “women oppress men as well.” Sure, baby, and what else is new? The blacks were the white man’s burden, eh? It’s rough to be an oppressor, particularly when the oppressed begin looking around and see where they’re at. Then: speak up for yourself and you’re a castrating bitch. Plead for your rights and you’re a nag. Refuse to be a sexual object and you’re a tease. Shriek your rage and you’re a hysteric. Articulate your anger quietly and you’re a manipulator. Get disgusted with the whole bag and you’re frigid, neurotic, etc. Sure, pity the poor oppressor “man-un-kind.” Well, we want to free men from that role, too—and by any means necessary, no matter what we are called.