by Robin Morgan
Free Kathleen Cleaver!
Free Kim Agnew!
Free Anita Hoffman!
Free Holly Krassner!
Free Bemardine 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!36
January 1970
1 East Village Other, an “underground” newspaper celebrating the so-called hip culture—at the expense of women; no longer being published.
2 David Dellinger, a leader in the male-run peace movement, subsequently divorced by Betty Peterson, his wife of many years.
3 Progressive Labor (Party).
4 Weathermen, or the Weather Bureau. A reference to their pre-fugitive attitudes, as sexist as their later ones.
5 Convicted mass murderer and self-styled harem-keeper of “slaves.”
6 Alleged used-car salesman.
7 Used-revolution salesman.
8 Victim (murdered) of Manson “Family.”
9 Victim (?) of Senator Edward Kennedy.
10 Victim of the welfare system; organizer in welfare rights.
11 Victim of alleged used-car salesman.
12 Victim of Leftist loyalties which led to her indictment in a bombing conspiracy, but saved from Rightist patriarchs by the sacrifice and support of feminists.
13 Revolutionary Youth Movements (I, II, and III), spin-off groups from SDS (Students for Democratic Society).
14 The Conspiracy Seven or the Chicago Seven. Male activists who were on trial for conspiracy in organizing demonstrations against the previous Democratic Convention.
15An example (along with the phrase “son-of-a-bitch”) of male-supremacist linguistics which can transform a word into a pejorative term in order to place the blame for sins of the son upon—who else—his mother. This had not been borne in upon me yet, in 1970.
16 and 17 Two hack writers.
18 The extremely conservative judge who presided over the trial of the Conspiracy Seven. Supposedly their adversary.
19 A counter-culture “leader,” dictator of the traveling commune so delicately named The Hog Farm.
20 A New York discotheque of the period, capitalizing on sexism.
21 A misogynistic cartoonist.
22 Founder and owner of Playboy magazine. Enough said.
23 A vulgar rock band of the period; specializing in sexist lyrics.
24 Abbie Hoffman, a minor “nonleader” leader of hip culture at that time. Currently a fugitive from the FBI (after having been charged with selling hard drugs), and a self-proclaimed bigamist of wives #2 and #3.
25 Editor of The Realist (a sexist paper of satire), and a used-humor sales man. Also the former son-in-law of Norman Mailer, cited earlier.
26 Puerto Rican radical group of the period.
27 Still another “nonleader” leader of the hip Left. Currently into “bio-karma.”
28 New Nation and Earth People’s Park: both of them so-called radical organizing projects which dissolved.
29 Then leader of the “White Panther Party,” jailed for ten years on a drug charge—but soon after, of course, released.
30 and 31 Rock festivals attended by masses of people, where women and blacks were vulnerable to rape and murder.
32 This, of course, was before most lesbian activists deserted the “Gay Movement” for the Women’s Movement.
33 A leading Leftist revolutionary woman, later a fugitive who, in an open letter from the underground (“Mother-Right—A New Feminist Theory,” Ms., August 1973), denounced male-style politics and embraced radical feminism.
34 A male-approved “toughie” group of Leftist women who had contempt for feminist issues.
35 I have learned since that it has actually been ten to twelve thousand years since the rise of patriarchy.
36 All of the women on this list were at that time captives of a male-supremacist Leftist man and/or of patriarchal Leftist political beliefs—with two exceptions: Kim Agnew, the publicly rebellious daughter of Spiro Agnew (used-cash salesman), and Valerie Solanas, then serving time on a conviction of having shot Andy Warhol (used-decadence salesman).
ON VIOLENCE AND FEMINIST BASIC TRAINING
I am including the following article in this section of Going Too Far because it was originally drafted for the Women’s Rat, although it never appeared there, due to our plague of priorities. It went through several reconceptions and revisions and over a year later, in the spring of 1971, I finally presented it as a paper at the Radical Feminist Conference in Detroit. Yet the piece still bears the unmistakable influence of that year at the newspaper: the tone of Rat is present—Leftist style mixed uneasily with Feminist content, the whole thing whipped to a froth of urgency to avoid curdling at the boil. There is an aura of Playing War in this article, which at the time did seem preferable to Playing House, but which now strikes me as equally infantile and even more unsatisfying.
Still, we were not playing games. Agnew was calling for “preventive detention” camps; friends were going underground or being sent to prison for twenty-year terms in punishment for political actions. People one had known and worked with and demonstrated with were suddenly dead of gunshot wounds in the middle of their college quads or on the city sidewalk two blocks away. To dare focus energy on women’s needs per se seemed at times to constitute a betrayal of humanity. Fortunately, such “betrayal” continues today, in 1977, where the magnificent women forging a peace movement in Northern Ireland are termed “traitors” by both Protestants and Catholics—for demanding an end to the massacre of their children.
Betrayal or no, I was unable to escape my own feminism; unable to deny that another woman could better teach me how to handle a rifle in one afternoon than all my patronizing Leftist brothers could in months. (Why? something in her manner? I couldn’t understand; sympathy? patience? humor? why?) I was unable to overlook child-care demands as “bourgeois” now that I was a mother (even though I still treated the issue of child care peremptorily and guiltily, as I do in this paper).
No, we weren’t playing games. The Rat year was the same one in which both Kenneth and I were fired from our jobs in publishing—he for refusing to remove a poster denouncing the My Lai atrocities from his office wall, and I for union organizing on the job. It was the year, too, that I first went to jail. “Bring the war home!” was one chant I remember, and it seemed that the war certainly came home to us in 1970.
I had been working at Grove Press as an editor for two and a half years when, in the spring of 1970, I and four other employees were summarily fired. The reason officially given was “reorganization needs,” but the real motive for the firings, as later confirmed by Arbitrator Thomas A. Knowlton, appointed by the National Arbitration Association of the National Labor Relations Board, was punishment for the sin of trying to organize a union.1 Grove Press had built a facade reputation as a Left-liberal, avant-garde publisher, but much of its output consisted of sexist paperbacks which objectified women. I had refused to work on these, restricting my editorial duties to the political books, but I could not ignore the unequal treatment of women employees (from editor to janitor) all around (and including) me.
Publishing, a white-collar business and the third largest industry in New York, was beginning to experience feminist stirrings. More than 80 percent of all publishing employees are women, and we are mostly at the bottom of the pyramid; men control the field.
There was talk of forming an industry-wide women’s group in publishing, possibly an industry-wide v
ertical union. Meanwhile, organizing efforts were going on in a number of individual houses—the Grove Press firings (which amounted to more than seventy people by the end of what we dryly called The Purge) were broadcast as a clear warning to publishing employees elsewhere. In this, at least, Grove was avant-garde. It was also an exception in playing unwilling host to a seizure and barricade of the executive offices by myself and eight other feminists protesting the firings, the discrimination against women, the sexist publications. This action was the first such militant move taken in the current feminist wave. It was also the first time since the days of the suffrage fight that women were arrested in a purely feminist cause (Grove Press had us charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, a felony—and we pulled down resisting-arrest charges in addition, by demanding policewomen as our arresting officers, since we refused to recognize male authority). It was the first time the liberal realm of publishing had been attacked by women; the first time feminists openly declared pornography as an enemy; and the first time feminists proclaimed our sympathy with women who were jailed as prostitutes, accurately naming such women political prisoners.
In strategic terms, the action was a success. The punishment was comparatively light, the results rewardingly vengeful. Not only the Women’s Movement but much of the Left supported the feminist action. Boycotts of Grove Press books, both by individuals and by radical bookstores, became commonplace. Carl Oglesby (a leading New Left theorist who had, along with Kathy Boudin, James Forman, and other Grove political writers, joined the support demonstrations for the feminists) severed his publishing association with the house. In a letter to the GP-owned magazine Evergreen Review, he prophesied, in part:
“You’ve squandered the only coin that’s current among the people you’ve tried to speak for … Nobody is going to pay the slightest attention anymore to what you have to say … Maybe you have half a year before the word gets around … of every three women you meet, or maybe of every seven men, one will be thinking of ways to deal with you for what you’ve lately done.”2
In personal terms, the action had a more complicated effect, of course. I experienced the redundantly radicalizing effects of losing my livelihood, seeing the liberal mask peel from the faces of white-collar coworkers, being behind bars while my nine-month-old baby was enduring a high-fever reaction to his smallpox inoculation and, in general, feeling the impotence of powerlessness. That frustration left me impatient with rhetoric and lustful for action and the means wherewith to act, and it, more than anything else, influenced the reworking of the following piece.
All this time later I find that I completely affirm what I wrote about discipline, and about our need to learn how to teach one another without the intervention of power games. The subsequent years have created their own versions of feminist learning situations: institutes on political theory such as Sagaris, feminist retreats, women-run self-defense dojos, and even educational institutions like Womanschool in New York City, providing courses in everything from garage mechanics to poetry—these are flourishing today. If the emphasis is less on militarism than proposed in my article, this is for a number of reasons. I would number among them the raised consciousness of the American public, in part due to the war and to Watergate, which in turn creates a (slightly) more responsive environment and permits of less extreme forms of protest. Perhaps the most important ingredient, though, is emerging still as the insistence of most women on finding a way to better the world with a minimum of violence. This is not expressed in a goody-goody-aren’t-all-women-peaceable manner, but rather in a ferocious refusal to give in to old means and become the very enemy we claim to be fighting.
The entire question of violence is one the Women’s Movement has engaged only indirectly, and I sometimes wonder if it isn’t a question that preoccupies mostly those women who like myself came to feminism from the Left. In my more cynical moments I ruminate that the reason is simply because feminists spend all our violence on one another, which nicely settles the question of whether or not to employ any of it against the patriarchy. Yet the question runs deep, and remains unanswered. I find myself both envious and contemptuous of those for whom such questions seem simple.
Less than a month ago, in broad daylight one block from where I live, a man assaulted me on the street. Because I yelled bloody murder and there were people around, he ran. Had it been nighttime, he probably would have reacted differently, and then I would have been reminded again—by my own bloodpulse, by the surge of adrenaline along my limbs, by the gush of rage exploding into fury inside my brain and along my muscles and through my very nails and teeth, I would have been reminded that I do not reject defensive violence, that my reflexes recall their martial-arts training, that hatred must be released against the cause someway, somehow, or be turned in against the victim who has been forced to host that feeling.
Yet less than one week ago, the television screen glared at me with hours-old scenes of children lying dead in Londonderry streets, of women killed in Lebanon, of men slain in Soweto. On my streetcorner pavement, pale bloodstains remain one morning from a knife fight the night before. It’s always defensive violence, isn’t it? My son’s schoolmates revive their pressure on him to play war games, which he tries to translate at least into playing Knights of Queen Guinevere (the Malory influence from poet parents) or Robin Hood (Marxism cum the English literary folk tradition) or even Followers of Wonder Woman versus the Bad Men. I watch him suffer the scorn of his peers, watch the message of death-as-diversion trickle into his games, watch his natural human longing for adventure become corrupted by their already socialized male longing for violence.
And I want to smash their little war-mongering faces.
So am I caught, trapped, cramped suddenly with horror at my own rancor.
Somebody tell me again this is simple.
Damn, damn, damn.
WOMEN IN GENERAL, and the Women’s Movement in particular, have always had our strategic options shockingly limited by our lack of certain tactical skills, especially those required for independent survival and militant struggle. This is a condition common to all oppressed people, and is not their/our fault. But it becomes our fault if we do not act to change that condition. At a certain point it is contingent upon the oppressed to seize knowledge and skill for themselves, in order to free themselves. It is no longer sufficient to bewail our lack of the very tools we will need in order to create a Feminist Revolution. We must begin, by hard work and commitment, to take ourselves seriously.
This does not mean that every skill we acquire we must use. Rather, it means that we begin to amass our own independent resources of knowledge and effective practice so that we are prepared for any situation. If we lack the skill altogether, that most certainly limits our chances of using it—unless of course in the crunch we are willing to rely on men who have those skills. Myself, I prefer to be prepared.
The idea behind the following proposal was born out of personal frustration with my own ignorance and technical incompetence, as well as political despair at seeing myself and many other women drop out of training programs, such as karate, which require an intense and lengthy commitment. For women with jobs outside of as well as in the home, and/or children, plus political meetings, demonstrations, etc., the discipline required for nightly karate class falters, particularly given the atmospheric noninducement of a male-dominated dojo (which is almost always the case). Lack of progress creates discouragement, laziness, apathy. This goes for other learning commitments, too. So much of the dropout syndrome is attributable to a pathology of oppression—the self-fulfilling prophecy of inferiority which is so well taught by the powerful to the powerless as to make the latter group collaborate in its own undoing, thus proving the rule in order to win the approval of those who invented the rule. This is a kind of success-in-failure, frequently the only type of success available to the oppressed.
It occurred to me that perhaps if a “crash plan” could pack into a short time some basic facts and op
portunity for practice, possibly women who, like me, find it difficult to integrate long-term study into their daily lives could, as I could, somehow set aside time during the summer (vacation from job or whatever) to single-mindedly commit themselves for just that period—and consequently have the reward of seeing a few fast results, at least enough to carry us psychologically through follow-up at home the rest of the year. It’s easier to keep up a skill once you’re trained in the rudiments of it and the awesome mystique of it has been penetrated.
This is a proposal, then, for (possibly regional) Women’s Skill Summer Sessions. These would be six-week-long sessions, held away from home, in a “summer camp” atmosphere, on land donated or rented. Child care could be provided nearby or even on the premises, although the latter presents problems requiring continually divided attention for the mothers. Between thirty and sixty women could attend one “term” and there could be three such terms or sessions a summer. It would not be impossible to keep expenses down so that each woman would have to pay only about sixty dollars for the entire six weeks. Food preparation and cleaning tasks would be rotating and all would participate, in addition to teaching and studying with and from each other. The attached list (meant only as a draft) shows proposed required skills as well as optional ones. The required concept is included at all because (1) The list is based on an informal survey of what many feminists (myself included) seem to feel is necessary for us all to know, and (2) It is embarrassingly true that we all carry tendencies which would tempt us to learn only what interests us rather than what is most needed—by us and others.