by Robin Morgan
June 1970
A BRIEF ELEGY FOR FOUR WOMEN
The details for the following article were taken from the New York Times and the New York Post. It was no small task for the “feminist caucus” at Rat to convince the rest of the collective that a short article on the massacre of some secretaries had a place in the paper. But the piece was printed, and seemed to change some minds both within the collective and among our readers.
The type of everyday atrocity mentioned in the “Elegy” still goes on, of course. Each hour women are brutalized, beaten, and terrorized—as well as raped and murdered—and the patriarchy still conveniently refuses to see such crimes as “political” (even as the lynching of blacks in the South and, yes, North was “political”). But now women view such acts with a new consciousness, and have begun to mobilize against them.
PATRICIA CHROMICK, 22 years old
SANDRA L. PETERS, 24 years old
MARY ANN REINSCHE, 27 years old
LINDA D. WILLIS, 21 years old
LAST WEEK, Joseph White, a twenty-five-year-old administrative analyst in the State Employment Insurance Offices in Albany, New York, killed four women with a pump-action shotgun.
He had taken a sick leave from his job and had come in to pick up his first paycheck, which was not ready for him. Becoming enraged at the bureaucratic foul-up, he went on a rampage against the women in the office, and finally shot himself.
It was not a case of indiscriminate murder. White was in fact discriminating enough to pass up all the men he saw in between his killings of women. When one male bureaucrat tried to question him, White ran past him—until he found another woman to kill.
White had been screwed by his employer. So his natural response was to take out his rage on the people he had power over—women, all of whom were themselves powerless to live a decent life or even die a meaningful death. They were all four workers in the secretarial pool.
No matter where they are on the status ladder, men can always feel better as long as they can oppress women. White was a man who himself was oppressed, as a worker and a victim of bureaucracy, but his hatred detoured the real enemy—the System and his employer-job-whole-life-misery—and exploded instead against the convenient lightning rods: women.
Every day newspapers carry stories of atrocities committed against women: murder, rape, beatings, mutilations. Such news is presented as being either titillating or irrelevant. To us it is intensely political.
Sexual crimes are political assassinations, and at the rising rate and ferocity with which they are being committed, they approach attempted genocide of a people on the basis of sex and gender.
Only one thing can protect us. Women must defend our lives and bodies and minds against male violence, by any means necessary. We must learn and practice self- and sister-defense on all levels: physical, mental, emotional. We must learn to understand weapons. We are doing this already, but not fast enough, hard enough, seriously enough. Too many sisters who would be willing to die defending a radical brother would on the other hand find it difficult, if not impossible, even to relate to the daily suffering of any woman in a secretarial pool.
Such a shameful attitude must stop. We can afford no more arrogant dismissals of secretaries, housewives, file clerks, nurses, etc. No more snobbish, vicious statements like “But she’s so straight. But that’s so bourgeois. But they’re not hip. But that one reminds me of my mother.”
One of the four sisters who was murdered in Albany lay dying in a room where she had lived a daily death, in the midst of gray typewriters and gray metal file cabinets and gray chrome desks. Littered around her were squares of white paper to be typed and then filed—some “unfortunately” ruined now, because they were stained with her blood. She kept whimpering, “Please, please somebody help me. Somebody help.”
Remember The Albany Four, sisters. Never forget.…
October 1970
A DAY IN THE LIFE (OF A WOMAN)
Given Rat’s emphasis on covering the melodramatic actions that seemed endemic to the Left (those ejaculatory tactics again), it was vital that at least now and then there be some articles in the paper representing the commonplace, hackle-raising, undramatic forms the oppression of women often takes. This piece, “A Day in the Life (of a Woman),” while hardly purporting to represent all women, was an attempt to insinuate those realities into the frenzied rhetoric about male-defined radical issues. The reference deploring “NOW-type women” stemmed from my leftover Leftism, which had me trapped into playing more-radical-than-thou games. I have since discovered that the overall membership of the National Organization for Women is, across the country, dedicated and admirable. If I still find myself in political disagreement with some of NOW’s positions I have learned, at the peril of my own feminist consciousness, not to sneer stupidly at the entire organization. The reference deploring the Socialist Workers Party and its offshoot the Young Socialists Alliance, however, still stands. I confess that the women enmeshed therein evoke my pity for the utter irrelevance of all their hard work—and the men therein evoke my loathing, to this very day. I have changed, on the other hand, in that I no longer refer, as I do in this piece, to men I dislike as “bastards.” Epithets such as “pusillanimous troglodyte,” or even simply, “creep,” seem more to the point. I have also changed in that I no longer try to hide the sex of my child, euphemistically referring to him as “it.”
I’M A WHITE WOMAN in my late twenties, married, and with a small child just over a year old. I guess I’ve been a feminist for some time and also am struggling continually with the issues of class and race. Last week I had a “day in the life” of a woman, a day which certainly intensified the very contradictions we struggle with every day.
I had brought the baby to the opening of a new sort of “people’s park” on the Lower East Side, where we live. The community had taken an old junk-filled lot and turned it into a playground and park. In the afternoon, it was great: free food was being cooked outdoors, steel bands were playing, women and children laughing and talking in Spanish and English.
The men arrived toward nightfall. Wham. Sexual overtones. Machismo everywhere. And I was called a racist for asking an older kid not to swing his honest-to-god pickaxe around in the sandbox near the toddlers—until a Puerto Rican sister (also a mother) came to the rescue and made the kid put the axe away—and made the adult male “organizer” who had screamed at me back down fast, himself. Whew. I got depressed.
But I was lucky enough to have a pleasant evening to look forward to: my husband would be taking care of the baby, and I was going to an Open House at the Women’s Center. I decided to treat myself to the pure luxury of first having dinner out, alone, with a good book. What heaven.
I had forgotten that women do not dine out alone in New York on a Saturday night. But I was swiftly reminded, by being made to feel like a misfit, and/or a whore. Twice the waiter asked me when my dinner partner would join me (although he was gracious enough to permit me seating—two other restaurants, neither very fancy, had turned me away at the door for being unescorted). Twice I told him I was alone. By the time my food arrived, the joy of a quiet dinner by myself had deteriorated into despondency: I was obviously so awful no one wanted to share food with me. Then they turned the lights way down and lit candles for a romantic Saturday evening atmosphere—and I almost went blind trying to read my book. Enough, I thought. Off to my sisters at the Center; that will be a lift, at least.
I hadn’t reckoned on entering in the middle of a confrontation between some NOW-type women and some Young Socialist Alliance-Socialist Workers Party types. Gawd. Only one thing could unite them: a shared disgust for those crazy feminists who seemed to hate men and mistrust hierarchical organizations. So much for the Women’s Center. I split in the middle of a playwright’s lecture on how painful it was to sell out to Broadway but how her life had been saved by the Socialist Workers Party. I hit the street and started to walk downtown.
One block away, I was s
topped by two young women (neither could have been more than sixteen years old) who were both very high. One seemed drunk as well as stoned, and was positively reeling. They actually identified themselves as “groupies,” and wanted to know if I knew how much it would cost to get into a nearby discotheque. I said I didn’t know but told them that they could go up to the Women’s Center for free, where there would shortly be dancing and music as well as beer, soda, and coffee.
We were standing there rapping, and might all have returned to the Center, but for two bastards who cruised by in a convertible, came on to us, and managed to pick up the kids. One girl said to me, “We’ll rip ’em off for admission to the disco,” and shrugged sadly when I suggested that women are the ones who ultimately pay. The other girl was too far out of it to care. I couldn’t stop them.
Alone again, I resumed my walk, trying, at least, to enjoy the night air. After being hassled three times in the next block (once quite menacingly), I decided I couldn’t hack it, daren’t wait for a bus, was too far from the uninvitingly deserted subway in any event—and I hailed a cab. Emergency-gloom-splurge.
Settled in. Safe at last.
But the driver had seen my Women’s Liberation button. Oops. All the way home he proceeded to tell me how abortion was okay for them nigger and spic broads who breed so much, but no good for nice white girls like me. Soon I was shouting at him, then screaming for him to stop the cab and let me out. He blithely ignored my orders—and my basic consumer-rights. Finally, at the end of the ride, he told me that if we women really pushed “this liberation thing,” men like him were going to start killing us, literally. “You talk about ‘male violence’—you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. These rapes and beatings are going to soar up, baby. You can’t tell me I’m not a king in my own home and get away with it.” Besides, he informed me, he was a union man. Refraining from asking him whether his union had been organized for the express purpose of maiming women or whether that was a fringe benefit, I contented myself with sputtering that I was studying karate, as many other women were, and that we’d take a few of him and his friends with us if we had to go. I also didn’t tip him. Which was less a gesture of courage than a cowardly bow to reality, since after paying the damned fare I had no more money.
Anyway, home. All I could do was run for the baby and clutch its warm good little body, waking it up of course, then crying over it and rocking it until it fell asleep again.
I know this must somehow be relevant to other women’s struggles. All day long I had been properly, correctly, revolutionarily aware of the “contradictions”: race versus feminism at the park; social rituals versus feminism at the restaurants; sexual economics (and subculture social rituals) versus feminism with the two women on the street; and finally class versus feminism with the taxicab driver.
Being correctly aware didn’t help—because the other people weren’t. And how do we fight for ourselves without all the other oppressed assuming we are fighting against them? Or must we educate them and fend off blows at the same instant? What do we do with our pain, so busy feeling guilty about everyone else’s? Are all those other issues golden apples flung in the path of Atalanta’s race, to divert her?
We must find a way. Because, to be honest, this day, this evening “out on the town” was one of the better ones, in my experience.
How long, oh sisters, how long?
October 1970
PART FOUR
Radical Feminism
PART IV:
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
January of 1971 saw the beginning of multiple processes of change so rapid, simultaneous, and many-dimensioned as I never could have conceived until I found myself living them.
There were the political realizations, chief among these the glimmering comprehension of radical feminism. So it wasn’t merely a way of approaching socialist revolution; it wasn’t, in fact, a wing or arm or toe of the Left—or Right—or any other male-defined, male-controlled group. It was something quite Else, something in itself, a whole new politics, an entirely different and astoundingly radical way of perceiving society, sentient matter, life itself, the universe. It was a philosophy. It was immense. It was also most decidedly a real, autonomous Movement, this feminism, with all the strengths that implied. And with all the evils, too—the familiar internecine squabbles.
This section of essays reflects many of the realizations of that period. We were developing our own political theory, exploring our own terms, as I do in “On Women as a Colonized People.” We were beginning to articulate anger we had not even dared acknowledge before, to fight back, to make the connections—as in the article on rape and pornography. We were growing up—as individuals, feminists, as a movement in fact. True, we indulged ourselves, as perhaps every political group inevitably does, in attacking each other instead of our adversaries (see the piece on lesbianism and feminism, for example); it was safer and it felt deliciously self-righteous. But most of us were also seriously committed to a Feminist Movement which could transform our culture; and this meant study and respect for intelligence—as in the trends expressed in this section’s piece on women’s studies. We were spreading—ourselves, our consciousness—all over the globe; becoming a truly international movement, as the essay on the Three Marias demonstrates. And we were at the same time doing what no other political mass movement had dared: we were continuing to explore the personal—because for us this was political. We were reaching out to trust each other as women in new ways, which I try to express in “A New Fable of the Burning Time.”
The early seventies will always seem “filmic” to me—like a montage of thought, emotion, action. In a sense, I could date my commitment to radical feminism from my attendance, in late spring of 1971, at the Radical Feminist Conference in Detroit, organized by the same women who had written the Fourth World Manifesto (see pages 118 and 131). It was an exciting weekend—and one in which I discovered that, even if a large room is crammed strictly with radical feminists (no Trotskyites, Weathervanes, or the like) there is still sufficient disagreement within the fold to boggle the mind: Is marriage “incorrect”? Is any relationship with a man impossible at this time in history? Possible, hell—is it worth it? What about children? What about male children? Is lesbianism (1) an alternative, (2) a political choice, (3) a personal proclivity; (4) a vanguard position, (5) an escapist trend, (6) none of the above, or (7) all of the above? What about our ageism and older women? How can white feminists concretely support the growing feminism among minority women? What forms of organization and structure are unsalvageably hierarchical and male—but which alternate structures are so anarchical they lead to chaos? What about leadership? Do we need it / can we find it / how do we use it / what in fact is it / who do we believe / do we believe anyone but ourselves / what about tactical crises and the need for experienced people / what about the follower mentality / how can we redefine responsibility and accountability?
Yet this was only the beginning. There continued to be pressures from within and without, from all sides—the women of the male Left and, on the other hand, those women active in the civil-rights front of feminism (who were sometimes termed reformists). We were in danger of repeating what had happened in the suffrage days, where there were also, so to speak, three parts to the movement: the reformists, who wanted to settle for the vote, thinking that that eventually would win freedom for women in all areas—they were feminist but not radical. There were the social crusaders, who did superb work in exposing the brutality in the asylums and hospitals and factories but who shrank from having women as their priority—they were radical but not feminist. And there were real radical feminists—like Elizabeth Cady Stanton—whose challenging thought was finally ignored, ground down in the friction between the other two groups. That friction and, ironically, its reverse, a kind of bonding of the two across radical feminism, goes on to this day and requires the vigilance of radical feminists. Perhaps the peculiar bonding occurs because the women’s-rights-oriented feminists respond
guiltily to the radical women’s accusation of their being “privileged” and “reformist.” They feel they must become radical, and that being radical must mean Marx. Somewhere along the way, radical feminism gets missed. And it’s a pity (and most irritating) to think of women sitting around in study groups reading Lenin and Mao for political direction when they might be reading Stanton, Anthony, Pankhurst, Mott, Willard, and Fuller (not to mention Eliot, Austen, Sand, Brontë, Rossetti, Barrett, and Stowe, etc. etc.!).
There are few creatures more zealous than the convert. I, in 1971 a new refugee from male politics, seized the torch and lofted it high for my sisters still standing where I had lagged ten seconds earlier. And we learned from each other.
This was the year of that Radical Feminist Conference. It was also the year of the founding of Sisterhood is Powerful, Inc., or, as it came to be called informally throughout the Women’s Movement, “The Sisterhood Fund,” which I established to receive all the royalties from the anthology and “recycle” those monies into feminist projects. It was the first such feminist institution, and in the four years of its existence, it set a proud precedent. The year 1971 was also when I attempted initiating a Feminist Studies Program at an experimental college in Florida—an experience described in “The Proper Study of Womankind” on p. 189. Most of all, 1971 was my first year as a feminist “outside agitator.”