The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
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and now someone must have meant what she said enough so
that it could not be erased. How much can it cost? Horrible,
that’s hor ible.
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It was a tender conversation. The woman who had helped me
most in Amsterdam, Ricki Abrams, sat with me and we held
hands. I was going to go back to New York. I talked with
Ricki about how she had saved my life; I thanked her. I talked
with Ricki about having prostituted and having been homeles . Back then I never talked about these parts of my own life.
I talked with her about bringing what I had learned into the
fight for women’s freedom. I talked with her about my fierce
commitment to the women’s movement and feminism. I
talked to her about how grateful I was to the women’s movement - to the women who had been organizing and talking and shouting and writing, making women both visible and
loved by each other. I talked with her about the book she and
I had started together and that I was going to finish alone,
Woman Hating. We had shown a draft of the chapter on Suck,
a counterculture pornography magazine, to those who ran the
magazine, ex-pats like ourselves, from the same generation,
with the same commitment to civil rights and, we thought,
human dignity. They cut us cold. Ricki could not stand it. I
could. There’s one thing about surviving prostitution - it takes
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a hell of a lot to scare you. My husband was a hel of a lot, and
he taught me real fear; the idiots at Suck were not much of
anything. Writing had become more important to me than the
ir itability of wannabe pimps.
Sit ing with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her:
that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women’s movement stronger and bet er; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement.
I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women,
to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to
live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some
thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.
I took two laundry bags fil ed with manuscripts, books, and
some clothes, the Afghan sheepskin coat I had as a legacy
from my marriage, an airplane ticket given me by a junkie,
and some money I had stolen, and I went back to New York
City. Living hand to mouth, sleeping on floors or in closetsized rooms, I began working on Woman Hating. I had up to four jobs at a time. Every other day I would take $7 out of
a checking account. I ate at happy hours in bars. Any money
I had I would first tithe to the Black Panther Party in Oakland,
California. Huey Newton sent me his poems before he shot
and killed a teenage prostitute, the event that caused him to
flee the United States. Since I didn’t believe that the police
had framed him, one might say that a rift had opened
between him and me. But I still kept sending money for
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Heartbreak
the breakfast and literacy programs sponsored by the Black
Panthers.
I went to demonstrations as often as I could. The Three
Marias of Portugal had written a feminist book that got them
jailed. I demonstrated in their behalf. I went to prolesbian and
antiapartheid demonstrations.
One of my part-time jobs was organizing against the
Vietnam War, the backdrop to most of my life as a young
adult. In Amsterdam my husband and I had helped deserters
from the U. S. military hide on their way to Sweden. Vietnam
had been shaping my life since I was eighteen and was sent to
the Women’s House of Detention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser,
who also worked against the war, hired me as her assistant.
Muriel had a long and distinguished life of rebellion, including the birth of a son out of wedlock in an age darker than any I had experienced. He was now a draft resister in Canada.
With another woman, Garland Har is, I organized a conference that brought together artists and intellectuals against the war. Robert Lifton, Susan Sontag, and Daniel Ellsberg
participated. With director Andre Gregory I helped organize
a special night on which al the theaters and theater companies
in Manhattan would donate their money to help rebuild a
hospital in North Vietnam that U. S. bombs had leveled. I was
not real y able to face the chasm between the left and feminism even though I gloried in the essays in Sisterhood Is Powerful that exposed the sexism of the left. I couldn’t stop
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working against the war or, for instance, apartheid just because
the men on the left: were pigs. I became part of a consciousness-
raising group, but even that had its roots in the Speaking
Bitterness sessions in communist China. I worked hard. One
of my mentors, the writer Grace Paley, who had helped me
when I got out of the Women’s House of Detention, helped
me again - this time to get an apartment. It was on the Lower
East Side, in an old tenement building. The toilet was in the
hall and the bathtub was in the kitchen. I had a desk, a chair,
and a $12 foam-rubber mattress. I bought one fork, one spoon,
one knife, one plate, one bowl. I was determined to learn to
live without men.
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My Last Leftist
Meeting
There were only seven of us. I was the menial, a part-time
of ice worker. The movie director Emile D’Antonio seemed to
lead the meeting by sheer force of personality. There were
three women, including myself. That translated into six
eminents, two of whom were women. Our goal was to find
the next project for celebrities organized against the war in a
group cal ed Redress. The idea of the group was 100 percent
Amerikan: famous people organized to fight the war, their
names having more pull than those of professional politicians
or ordinary citizens. It was a time when fame was not dissociated from accomplishment: most of our members had earned through achievement whatever fame they had. But the
hierarchy of fame always favored those in the movies; intellectuals per se were low on the list. As an of ice worker, I was not expected to have ideas, but I had them anyway. In the larger
meetings when we had a whole roomful of the famous or
somewhat famous, I would be cut in two for put ing an idea
forward. I remember being torn to pieces by some famous
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My Last Leftist Meeting
divinity professor. Whoever he is, I hate him now as much as
I did then. Another noneminent and I apparently called his
moral purity into question. I have no idea how or why; I
didn’t then and I don’t now.
In this smaller meeting in a tiny room around a nondescript
table there was more congeniality. Cora Weiss was there, I
remember - her family owns or owned Revlon. A man named
Carl from Vietnam Veterans Against the War headed the
meeting in the official sense; he was famous in the antiwar
movement, prominent, in no way a servant, instead a rather
cunning leader. The women’s movement was going full tilt but
never seemed to penetrate the antiwar movement (and hasn’t,
in my opinion, to this day). No one appeared wil ing to
rethink the status quo. In fact, no one was prepared to understand that the women’s movement had outclassed the peace movement with both its originality and its vision of equality.
I had once been at a meeting at Carl’s apartment, shared with
a woman. He proudly showed me the self-hating graffiti her
consciousness-raising group had etched and drawn and painted
onto a canvas on the wall. He enjoyed it a lot and especial y,
as he made clear to me, that the women had done it themselves.
See, he seemed to be saying, this is what they think of themselves so I don’t have to think more of them. I remember being very troubled - why was this woman-hating graffiti what
they thought of themselves? I remember noting in my mind
that this was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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Heartbreak
We took a break in the middle of our little meeting - someone had to make a phone cal - but returned to the table wel before the break was over. None of the women, including
myself, talked. Our col eagues of the male persuasion did talk:
about Marilyn Chambers, the pornography star who had
sold Ivory soap in television commercials until she was booted
out by a morals clause in her Ivory contract. The conversation
came from out of nowhere; nothing logically led to it and
nothing explained the fact that the men al liked the conversation and participated happily. They talked in particular about how much they would like to fuck her in the as . This seemed
to derive from her most famous movie, Behind the Green Door,
which they al seemed to have seen.
I sat there in dismay and confusion. Weren’t we trying to
stop exploitation? Weren’t we the love children, not the hate
children? Didn’t we believe in the dignity of al persons?
Wasn’t it clear - surely it didn’t have to be pointed out - that
pornography defamed women? Even if Carl’s woman friend
and her friends debased themselves, commercial pornography
required male consumption and brought the defamation to
a new level. What the men said was so vile that I was real y
wounded by it. I seemed unable to learn the lesson that pornography trumped political principle and honor. (I may have learned it by now)
I found myself nauseated and in my mind debated whether
or not I would give a little exit speech or simply get up and
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My Last Leftist Meeting
leave. The exit speech would have the advantage of let ing
them know how they had let down me and mine, others
like me, women. Were these men worth it - were they worth
fighting for the right words, which was always so hard? Were
they worth overcoming the nausea, or should I just puke on
the table (and I was damned close to it)? I noted that the men
were having a good time and that the women not only did not
raise their eyes but had their heads lowered as if trying to
pretend they didn’t hear or weren’t there. I noticed that the
men did not notice that the women had suddenly become
absent, at the table yes but not present, not verbal - there was
a quiet resembling social or political death; in ef ect, the women
were erased. I got up and walked out. I never went back to the
group and stopped get ing my $75-a-week paycheck, which
was the mainstay of my existence. Everything else I earned
was chump change.
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Petra Kel y
Some twenty years after my last leftist meeting, I went to a
memorial service at the United Nations Chapel for Petra Kel y
Petra Kel y was the daughter of an Amerikan father and a
German mother; she was a pacifist and a feminist. Living in
Germany she founded the Green Party, which was devoted to
ecofeminism, nonviolence, and anti pornography politics. She
brought one of the first lawsuits against a pornographer for
slander, libel, and hate. She put up a hell of a fight but lost
the case. The lefties within the Green Party didn’t support her.
Before her death she was doing antiwar work in the Balkans.
The memorial service was organized and at ended by my
old pacifist friends from the anti-Vietnam War days. Petra had
been shot to death by her male companion-lover who then
shot and killed himself. The companion-lover had been a
general with NATO in Germany; Petra had been responsible
for his transformation into a pacifist.
Cora Weiss was the emcee of the event. There were seven
or eight invited speakers, most of them male or maybe al of
them but Bel a Abzug. Many of the speakers, touched by the
conversion of the NATO general to nonviolence, spoke at
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Petra Kelly
length about his courage and honor; his stunning contributions
to pacifism and world peace (through renouncing NATO).
Some of them mentioned Petra in passing. One or two did
not mention her at al but called him “brother” and nearly
dissolved in tears. (And we thought that boys couldn’t cry. )
The sentimentality on behalf of the male convert to pacifism
was astonishing. Many of the speakers appeared to accept that
Petra and her companion-lover were the victims of a plot,
probably CIA, because the CIA saw him as a turncoat and
wanted to kil him - she was, as monsters say, collateral damage.
Others thought that there had been a mutual suicide pact,
that Petra had agreed - ladies first - to be killed by the former
NATO general. I waited for Bella Abzug, one of my heroes,
to speak. She spoke last, I think, but nothing she said challenged the notion of Petra as a helpmate who wanted to be kil ed. She even managed to say something nice about the boy,
though she nearly choked on the words. I was devastated.
I got up to go to the front to speak. I was not on the agenda.
Cora motioned me back to my seat and said in a loud whisper
that there wasn’t time for anyone else to say anything. She
gestured in a way that implied she couldn’t be more sor y.
I forced myself through the ropes that marked the speaking
area and kept it sacrosanct. I turned to face the audience of
mourners. Here were men I had known since I was eighteen
- from my earliest days in fighting against the war in Vietnam.
I couldn’t believe that nothing had changed - peace, peace,
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Heartbreak
peace, love, love, love; they did not understand nor would
they even consider that a man had murdered a woman.
I said that while Petra’s life had been extraordinary her
death was not; it was an ordinary death for a woman. Petra
had been kil ed by her lover, her intimate, her mate. She was
kil ed in her bed wearing a nightgown. (I knew but didn’t say
that Petra would never commit suicide by any means while
unclothed or even partly exposed - the pornography of it
would have been repellent to her. She also would never have
used a gun or allowed its use. ) She had probably been asleep.
Nothing could be more commonplace or cowardly. The audience of pacifists started hissing and some started shouting.
I said that there was probably no conspiracy and certainly no
/>
acquiescence on the part of Petra; everything in her life and
politics argued against any such complicity. It had to be faced,
I said, that pacifists had not taken a stand against violence
against women; it was stil invisible to them, even when the
woman was Petra Kel y, a world-class activist. I said that the
male’s life meant more to them than hers did. By this time the
pacifists were in various stages of rage.
No pacifist woman stood up to support me, though Petra
would have. I said that, hard as it was, one had to understand
that Petra had died like millions of other women around the
world: prematurely, violently, and at the hands of someone
who was presumed to love her. I said that nonviolence was
not possible if the ordinary, violent deaths of women went
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Petra Kelly
unremarked, unnoticed. However extraordinary Petra had been
in her life, I repeated, her death could not have been more
commonplace.
The mourners were angry Some were shouting nasty names
at me. I said that I had to speak because not to do so would
be to betray Petra’s work and the work we had done together,
in concert. I ran from the room. One woman grabbed my arm
on my way out. “Thank you, ” she said. That’s enough; it has
to be enough - one on-site person during a conflict showing
respect.
I felt that I had stood up for Petra. I knew she would have
stood up for me.
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Capitalist Pig
I started speaking and lecturing as a feminist because I had a
lot of trouble getting my work published. I spoke on violence
against women. In the early years of the women’s movement,
this subject was marginal, violence itself considered an anomaly,
not intrinsic to the low status of women. I accepted that
valuation; I just thought that this was work I could do and
therefore had to do. When something’s got your name on it,
you’re the one responsible for finding a way to create an
awareness, a stand, a set of strategies. It’s yours to do. There