Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  PART THREE

  Feminist Leanings: Articles for a Women’s Newspaper

  PART III:

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  In the late 1960’s, Rat was one of the major “underground” newspapers of the New Left and the so-called alternative culture. Although published in New York and focused partially on local issues, Rat had a national circulation and in fact an international list of subscribers. More serious at its inception than most underground papers, Rat was perhaps best known for having dared be the first to publish documents stolen by anonymous students from the administrative offices of Columbia University during the Columbia student rebellion. The documents seemed to implicate the university in the U.S. war in Vietnam, and Rat’s “scoop” in publishing them created a sensation in both the mass and alternate media.

  Yet despite its attempts at genuine muckraking journalism, Rat nevertheless had been created and sustained by and for men and male attitudes. As the gentle flower-children style of the middle sixties flared into the confrontation tactics of the late sixties, these male attitudes solidified themselves in Leftist consciousness—being tough, butch, “heavy,” and “a street-fighter” were now prerequisites for being a radical, male or female. Not surprisingly, most men had a better chance at cutting such a figure than did most women. Rat reflected these changes, and began presenting as well a kind of “cultural nationalism” for young white males: rock music coverage, pornography articles, and sex-wanted ads (euphemistically called “Personals”) began to clog the pages. As the women Rat staffers later wrote, “Rat has given the impression that [it] regards politics as that thing the Black Panthers and the Young Lords are into. White youth and non-Panthers/Lords (one would think after reading back issues) just lie back and groove on pornography, rock, dope, and movies.”

  In 1968 I had written some articles for Rat on the emerging “Women’s Liberation Front”—a front, that is, of the real movement, the New Left. During the following year I had been inching my way toward a more feminist position, although my attitude of Marxism-überalles persisted. Still, even I could no longer tolerate the blatant sexism of Rat, and by the winter of 1969 I refused to write for the paper any longer. I had heard that the women who worked at Rat (none of them in any positions of power, naturally) were also angry and had been confronting the men about the paper’s sexism and its hierarchy, which employed men as editors and feature writers, women as (usually volunteer) secretaries and bottle-washers who were sometimes permitted to write a short article. I had even warned one of the Rat men that women might take over the paper if there were no change forthcoming. But I was still unprepared for the delightful telephone call I received in January of 1970 from Jane Alpert, one of the Rat women, in the course of which she serenely informed me that the women on the paper had seized it and now needed ideas, support, and the physical presence of Women’s Liberationists to sustain their action.

  We came from all parts of the then Women’s Movement in New York: from Redstockings and WITCH, from what remained of New York Radical Women, even from NOW. There were lesbian women from Gay Liberation, Weatherwomen from the then-overground Weather Communes, women from various caucuses in male-Left organizations. Most of us knew precisely nothing about typesetting, layout, advertising, dealing with printers, or distribution. But we put out a paper. And the first “Women’s Rat” became a reality.

  A few feminist newspapers were already in existence, Everywoman, It Ain’t Me Babe, and Off Our Backs, among them. But this was the first time women had seized a male-run newspaper, and the action created ripples all over the Left, with women following suit in other cities and taking over their local underground media temporarily or permanently.

  It was not until after that first issue had been put together by women that we ourselves realized we weren’t about to give the paper back. We intended to keep it, in fact, as a radical newspaper written and published collectively by women. And our Rat did continue, with a kind of core collective comprised of those women who stayed and worked regularly on the publication, and a larger group of women who for various reasons drifted in and out. I myself remained on Rat for a year, as did six or seven other women of the original collective. During that time the overall group kept shifting and changing; this had the salutary effect of refreshing our ideas and energy, but it also was expressed negatively in a lack of solidity or real knowledge of each other.

  I wrote “Goodbye to All That” for the first issue of the Women’s Rat. Sometimes I wonder how I could publish my parting statement to the male Left there—and then remain for a full year on such a Leftist newspaper. Yet I know the answer. In “Goodbye” I was saying farewell to working with men in the Left. I could not have foreseen that working with Leftist women on those same male-Left-defined issues of importance would be little different. These were, after all, women. Besides, I myself was not that free from a Marxist analysis; my own political priorities were largely defined by guilt for whatever I was not doing at any given moment.

  Rat’s priorities were never clarified either. We put out a paper by women, but we didn’t want it to be “only” for women. In fact, we wanted to show all those men who thought we couldn’t do it that we could—and so we had to keep the coverage of subjects interesting to them, to win their approval. We never openly admitted this last, of course—even among ourselves—but it was pathetically true. And as Leftist women joined the collective in greater numbers during the ensuing weeks that tendency became more noticeable. New York feminists were not without blame, however; many began to stay away out of a sense of disdainful purism instead of coming around and helping to turn Rat into the feminist paper they claimed, accurately, it had not yet become.

  The double guilt suffered by those of us who remained was ulcerating then, if humorous now. We came to be called “the feminist caucus”—a small group of women who dared to be more and more concerned with women, but who still functioned within a larger group which was concerned with “the real revolution.” We tried frantically to cover all bases. I myself had a six-month-old baby, and I was involved in a union-organizing effort in the publishing house where I had an editorial job. Yet I wrote for and worked at Rat most evenings; in addition, I took part in a separate weekly consciousness-raising group (with non-Rat women of a more feminist stripe); was involved in the founding of the Women’s Center (more feminist points on my chart); helped organize two demonstrations in support of the Panthers (Leftist points); carried the Manual of an Urban Guerrilla or The Golden Notebook to different meetings (double points) and actually read both; salivated every time the bell rang that a Weatherperson had been busted and rushed out to be rent-a-body at the ritual riot (Leftist points plus a red star); and struggled with my husband (feminist points—although these stung more than being tear-gassed).

  During this same period I was finishing Sisterhood is Powerful, a task which in itself involved a considerable amount of work. It was that work, perhaps more than anything else, which gradually drew me closer and closer to radical feminism. It became harder every day to put other oppressions first when my brain was barraged with objective facts, figures, statistics, and analyses—and subjective anguish—all on and of women. The anthology transformed my own views at least as much as it has those of other women, thousands of whom have told me it wrought drastic shifts in their attitudes and in their daily realities. The statistics came alive vividly in my daily realities, too, when I found myself suddenly unemployed and soon after in jail for political reasons.

  Meanwhile, back at Rat, the contradictions certainly were becoming clearer. Labels like “feminist” and “politico” (incredibly enough implying that feminism wasn’t political) were flung around. It was like the old New York Radical Women polarities—but now I was on the feminist side. The majority of the collective appeared to feel that issues such as rape, abortion, sexuality, child care, and menopause were basically insular and bourgeois when compared to those issues that were universal and radical, like GI rights. Or organizing th
e workers (housewives were never considered bona-fide “workers” in the Left). For each token article the feminist caucus was able to push through in an editorial meeting, there were three or four on the NLF, the IRA, the FLN, or the BPP. There was an area of compromise, to be sure: we ran articles on how well women drove tractors in Cuba, threw grenades in Palestine, carried rifles in Vietnam, and, by implication, obeyed orders with dedicated socialistic consciousness. One eight-hour editorial “dialogue” ensued when the feminist caucus insisted on printing a statement critical of Cuba for having held a Miss Havana Beauty Contest.

  There was little space left for me to avoid facing The Awful Truth: that it was the politics of the Left, not solely the men who mouthed them, which were male supremacist. It was the politics, the analysis itself, which ignored or patronized more than half the human species. Because of that analysis, which had stopped short at its greatest challenge, the Black Liberation Movement as well as the New Left was sexist—and doomed to perpetuate that oppression. And the student movement. And the GI and war-resister movements. And the emerging Native American movement, the Puerto Rican rights movement, the revolutionary governments of China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Algeria, North Korea—all, all had sacrificed women in their struggle to attain freedom for “man.” It was not merely the practice, but the very politics—which had been created by men—that was responsible. And that politics was as responsible for the continued suffering of women as the capitalist system—which had also been created by men for the freedom of a comparative few. The realization of these no longer avoidable ideas kept me in labor pains through all of that year. I was terrified of such thoughts. Then, three dramatic contractions broke through and delivered me into an unequivocal feminist position.

  One was a paper written by some Detroit feminists,1 entitled The Fourth World Manifesto, in which the authors talked about female culture and history, and in which they said “goodbye to all that” to the politics of the New Left, whether held by women or men. It was (and still is) a brave and historic statement.

  The second was Shulamith Firestone’s brilliant book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,2 in which Firestone proved that both Marx and Freud were less than radical, and herself devised a lucid political analysis more far-reaching than either—more revolutionary, in fact, than any theory I had yet encountered. Today, Dialectic seems almost axiomatic to current feminist thought; it is a basic building block, and as such, one on which we have built. I even find myself disagreeing with parts of the book for not going far enough. But I could not have got Here from There without it, and it still stands for me as the classic articulation of what I could call the antithetical feminist position; I feel we are now in a new synthesis (which in turn will become a new thesis, of course), and so it goes. In 1970, however, Shulamith Firestone helped save my feminist soul, and I shall always be grateful.

  The third and final ingredient in my conversion came about because my writing, the core of my existence, was being threatened. We were all (in the Left, in the Women’s Movement, in the alternate culture) indulging each other at that time in an orgy of downward mobility and anti-intellectualism, accompanied, expectably, by a rejection of art. When I look back at such attitudes from my present perspective, they seem to indicate a guilt reflex carried to almost suicidal extremes combined with contempt for the real poor, for whose sake we were supposedly making these sacrifices. (The poor, the black, the working class, naturally, were thought of as anti-art dolts.)

  Thus, when the Rat collective decided it was elitist for any member to sign her name to her work, I dutifully dropped my by-line (back to Anon.; do not pass Go). The articles in this section of Going Too Far were written during this period and some are here acknowledged for the first time as my own. When the collective, a few months later, criticized me for writing in a style which was apparently still identifiable to our readers (“You write too well” was the flattering accusation), I even tried to worsen my writing: I spelled America with three k’s instead of one, as I had done previously in the Left; I dropped my g’s in print; I peppered my articles with words like imperialism, running-dog-of-a-capitalist-swine, and other phrases which would have given George Eliot the vapours. But this still was not sufficient, and at one meeting it was suggested that I not write for the paper at all—but not quit, either (that would be a cop-out); I should stay and work on proof-reading, layout, and distribution—just not write. Appallingly enough, I even did that, wearing a fixed Maoist smile to cover my indignation—for about a month. Then something cracked open inside me, and it was all over.

  I went on a trip around the country to promote the publication of the anthology; I threw myself into the plans for Sisterhood is Powerful, Inc., into which all the royalties from the book were going in order to further women’s projects; I met women in Detroit and Chicago and California and Boston and Cincinnati and Baltimore—and they were feminists. They were working on all those counter-revolutionary, middle-class issues like rape and child care and abortion and gynecological care (do only middle-class women have cervixes?), and they were working steadily, uninterrupted by guilt binges about men (oppressed men or unoppressed, black or white, GI or civilian). They were not all white women, either, not all young, not all middle-class-ashamed-of-their-origins, not all hip or heavy. They were coolly going about making a genuine revolution—and liking one another while doing it.

  The explosions chain-reacting inside my skull were indescribable. I felt as if I had discovered a whole new continent: the authentic Women’s Movement. When I returned to New York I told the Rat collective that I was leaving because the paper was not and at this rate never would be a paper for women. The other last few feminist-sympathizers were leaving, too, it turned out, and the parting was tearful but firm. In fact, it was more of a drift-away than a doorslam, which was fitting, since we were all women. A few months later, Rat ceased publication; during those months, three separate groups of Leftist women had taken over from each other in turn as the publishing collective, each one holier and more “correct” than the preceding.

  Rat has become fiction in many recollections—especially those of women who never were in the core collective but who since claim to have been, by the hundreds. I’ve heard Rat referred to as a “radical-feminist newspaper” (meant, depending on the speaker, either pejoratively or complimentarily), and as a “women’s voice of the Left” (also meant, depending on the speaker, as insult or praise). To me, Rat was neither, and should not be condemned or eulogized for other than what it was: a spirited, precedent-setting attempt to seize some power for women within the Left; to articulate the concerns of young, white, guilty, but idealistic women; to learn and teach each other the skills involved with putting out a newspaper; to reach out to one another; to work committedly together. Once Rat was seized, the New Left was never to be the same.

  More important, none of us women would ever be the same. When I think of the Rat year, I remember anger and tremendous excitement and exhaustion and much laughter and not a little love. I only wish we had done what we talked of doing so many times: I only wish we had changed the paper’s name.

  1 Kathleen Barry, Barbara Burris, Terry Moon, and Joanne Parrent, among others. Reprinted in Notes from the Third Year, available from KNOW, Inc. (P.O. Box 86031, Pittsburgh, Penn. 15221).

  2 Published by William Morrow, Inc., New York, 1970.

  GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

  “Goodbye to All That” was my contribution to the first issue of what came to be called “The Women’s Rat,” in January 1970. Beneath the by-line, I identified myself as a member of WITCH—in this case, “Women Inspired to Commit Herstory”; this was the debut of that word. (The coinage has literally changed history.) Since this women’s seizure of a male-run newspaper was the first such action in the Left (though not by any means the last), it seemed the right moment to say those things which had been boiling inside me for some time. I knew that such a step would alter my own life, but I could never have foreseen t
he effect “Goodbye” was to have on so many other women. It apparently articulated the felt experience of most women in the Left and so became an instant classic. It was read aloud in struggle meetings, quoted, fought about, cried over, excerpted on posters and banners, used (individual lines and phrases) for slogans, and widely reprinted. The Leftist media almost always editorialized shockingly while reprinting: the tendency was to cut the critical reference to whatever group was strongest in the local area. (In Michigan, the denunciation of Sinclair disappeared; in Boston, ellipses replaced my attack on the Progressive Labor Party; in Berkeley, the Weatherman section was deleted.) This outrageous attempt at co-optation was ultimately overshadowed, however, by the more accurate reprinting of the article in most of the then existing feminist media. San Diego women named their newspaper after the article, and in the following months and years women making their own farewells to various male-dominated groupings (the Gay Liberation Front, the Catholic Church, certain Third World movement groups) would refer to their statements as “daughters” of “Goodbye to All That.” Leftist men, as could have been expected, were furious, and the former Rat men tried unsuccessfully to re-seize the paper. This piece clearly had “gone too far.” I received death threats from quite a few revolutionary brothers—a radicalizing experience, that. I had shut one door behind me forever, and when I looked back it had vanished; a solid wall stood in its place. I was free, then, to go forward, wherever that direction should take me.

  Although “Goodbye” has been anthologized repeatedly, this will be the first time it appears in print complete with my own footnotes. I have written these clarifications specifically for the article’s inclusion in this book, because (O, triumph of feminism!) most of the men and male-dominated groups named in the article—all of them so “heavy” and notorious at that time—have since oozed ignominiously into oblivion. Women reading the piece for the first time in anthologies both in the United States and abroad frequently write to ask me who in hell these men were. It is a heartening irony that their names seem to be relevant only as historical curiosities fortunate enough to have been at one point denounced by a feminist.