The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  As anger at both the leftist and the countercultural press grew, the mushrooming women’s liberation movement began creating its own network of publications. In the first issue of The Voice of Women’s Liberation, in March 1968, Jo Freeman wrote, “It is time Movement men realized”

  they cannot speak the language of freedom while treating women in the same dehumanizing manner as their establishment peers. It is time Movement women realized this is a social problem of national significance not at all confined to our struggle for personal liberation within the Movement and that, as such, must be approached politically.75

  Meanwhile, Laura Murra, a longtime activist in Berkeley, began to publish SPASZM, a newsletter that reported activities of women’s liberation groups all over the country. Within a year, Murra had changed her name to Laura X and Jo Freeman called herself Joreen. The black leader Malcolm X had argued that all surnames had been given by slave owners. In a similar spirit, Laura and Jo decided to erase the patriarchal legacy of their last names. Some feminists adopted their mother’s maiden name; Kathie Amatniek chose to reinvent herself as the daughter of her mother, Kathie Sarachild. Still others decided to go by a first name only, like the poet Alta.

  Laura X had the foresight to collect every document that came out of the movement. The Women’s Herstory Library, which took over her home, became a repository of all the tracts, publications, speeches, minutes, and newspapers of the second wave of feminism.76 Pamphlets and newspapers crisscrossed the country rapidly, read by women in distant cities, invariably ending up somewhere in Laura X’s home. With names like Off Our Backs (Washington, D.C.), It Ain’t Me Babe (Berkeley), Mother Lode (San Francisco), No More Fun and Games (Boston), Notes from the First Year (New York), Women: A Journal of Liberation (Washington), and Up from Under, and Big Mama Rag, women’s liberationists began declaring their independence, publicizing their actions, exploring new ideas, and offering referral services to women in need.

  BURNING HUMILIATIONS

  By 1968, some New Left women lived a schizophrenic life. Once a week, they went to their women’s group, where their understanding of their lives and the world around them kept shifting. At night, they slept with men whom they had just criticized in front of other women. In the morning, they worked with New Left men they had condemned the evening before.

  Meanwhile, insults seemed to pile up on top of ridicule and humiliation. During an occupation of Columbia University, the audience booed and jeered when a woman gave her first political speech, one that protested that institution’s racist housing policies and war involvement. At the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, the Yippies, a self-proclaimed group of countercultural revolutionists, suggested that their women pose as prostitutes and spike the delegates’ drinks with LSD. In 1969, the Black Panthers (an Oakland black power group that advocated the use of arms to defend their community) sponsored the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. Huey P. Newton, a cofounder of the Black Panther Party, broke his promise to permit women’s caucuses. Afterward, the women accused the Panthers of sexism and said, “The Black Panther Party, supposedly our brothers in revolution, oppresses us.” In another incident, the leaders of a “Venceremos Brigade” to cut sugarcane in Cuba denied a woman’s application because of her political naïveté, which was how they characterized her feminism.77

  Some insults, because they took place in public, caused irreparable harm. One day before Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, a group called the National Mobilization Committee sponsored a “counter-inauguration” and rally against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. As was the custom, the male organizers chose speakers from various groups, including SDS veteran Marilyn Salzman Webb and the New York radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, to represent two perspectives on the fledgling women’s liberation movement.

  Webb, who had remained within the Left, began her speech by declaring, “We as women are oppressed. We, as women [who] are supposedly the most privileged in this society, are mutilated as human beings so that we will learn to function within the capitalist system.” Suddenly, pandemonium broke out below the stage. Webb plunged on, denouncing a system that treated women as objects and property. To her horror, she watched as “fist fights broke out. Men yelled things like ‘Fuck her! Take her off the stage! Rape her in a back alley!’” Shouts followed, like “Take it off!”

  Webb was speechless. “It was absolutely astonishing, and this was the Left,” the movement she was defending to Firestone. Shaken, Webb finished and Firestone, who had already given up on the Left, strode on the stage to condemn men as well as capitalism. “Let’s start talking about where we live, baby,” she shouted. “Because we women often have to wonder if you mean what you say about revolution or whether you just want more power for yourselves.” The largely male crowd booed and shouted obscenities.

  Among the crowd was Irene Peslikis, also a New York feminist, who felt shell-shocked. “They were disgusting. The violence from the audience was just phenomenal.” Sitting on the stage was the journalist and radical feminist Ellen Willis, who wondered why none of the male leaders tried to subdue the crowd. Furious at Dave Dellinger, a well-respected veteran pacifist and an “indefatigably even-tempered man in his mid-fifties,” she asked, “Why isn’t he telling them to shut up?” Later, she wrote, “If radical men can be so easily provoked into acting like rednecks, what can we expect from others?” Standing in the crowd, the unflappable dissident journalist I. F. Stone found himself astonished by the antics of the entire New Left. “Their speakers,” he wrote in his newsletter, “sounded as if they had been invented by Art Buchwald with assistance from Aristophanes. Their accusation that men were only calling for revolution to get power for themselves was met by obscene jeers from the male audience in an uproarious climax of self-satire.”78

  Later, Webb, Firestone, and other women held a postmortem at Webb’s apartment. The New York radical feminists, who had given up on movement men, in effect said, “I told you so.” For Webb, married to a veteran SDS activist, trashing movement men had previously been unthinkable. But the event had traumatized her. “We stared at each other in disbelief. These were my brothers. We were very depressed afterward. I mean the Washington women had not expected it. They were not man haters.”79

  Then the phone rang. She picked up the receiver and heard giggling on the line. Then a woman’s voice warned her, “If you or anybody like you ever gives a speech like that again, we’re going to beat the shit out of you. SDS has a line on women’s liberation, and that is the line.” (To this day, no one is sure who made the call—perhaps a woman in SDS, an FBI agent, or some other person.) The SDS line on women was, of course, that women’s struggles were “secondary” to the fight against capitalism and imperialism.

  That was the last straw. Webb felt convinced that “we had to make a break from SDS and become an autonomous movement.” Firestone summed up the moment: “Worse than our worst suspicions were confirmed and for some of us, in a traumatic way. . . . We’re starting our own movement.”80 In her description of the day’s events, Ellen Willis wrote:

  A genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism. This will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity; radical men will stop oppressing us and make our fight their own when they can’t get us to join them on any other terms.

  A less-publicized repudiation came from Carol Hanisch, who worked for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, a civil rights organization. She decided then and there that working for women’s liberation within a mixed movement was a waste of time.81

  At first, few people noticed that growing numbers of women were leaving the male Left. By 1969, the New Left had splintered into competitive sects, each worshiping a different vanguard group—peasants, workers, or Third World liberation fighters. Some of these factions spoke in revolutionary jargon that further alienated women who were accustomed to exploring the
ir experiences in plain and accessible language. No longer a beloved community, the Left seemed more like a series of violent eruptions, with young men pelting police with stones and hurling tear gas canisters back at armed officers. Some women silently wondered if these activists were simply trying to earn the manhood they had forfeited through their avoidance of the draft. In response to violent antiwar protests by the Weather Underground, an offshoot of SDS committed to armed revolution, the Boston Bread and Roses women’s liberation group held up signs that condemned the violence of the male Left.

  In the spring of 1969, students and community people in Berkeley turned a muddy, vacant, urban lot into a “People’s Park,” complete with whimsical landscaping, newly planted sod, trees, and shrubs, nightly collective soup dinners, swings and slides for children, and endless dancing and celebration. When the University of California, which owned the land, circled it with a high wire fence, students and community marched “to take back the park.” Police riots resulted in the National Guard occupying the city for several weeks. For many women’s liberationists, it was the final straw; they loathed gratuitous violence and refused to become street fighters. Susan Griffin said, “I hated the romanticization of violence associated with the male Left and the Black Panthers. This is when I could no longer be part of the male Left.” As the clenched fist (of black power groups and the Weathermen) replaced the V sign for peace, growing numbers of women—and men—withdrew from what seemed like futile and dangerous fights with the police.82

  Although many women continued to work in the antiwar and black liberation movements, some had begun to concentrate on women’s liberation, which infuriated some movement men. Robin Morgan remembered having “huge arguments in 1968 with [Tom] Hayden, with [Jerry] Rubin, with Abbie [Hoffman] . . . they simply could not believe that I was going to go with these ‘dumb broads’ to protest against the Miss America Pageant when the revolution was going to be happening in Chicago.”83 Soon the men would learn that the only revolution about to happen in the United States would not take place in Chicago, but in their homes.

  From minority women, who viewed feminism as a white woman’s issue, or as a divisive threat to “liberation movements,” and discredited women’s issues as a “secondary form of oppression,” white feminists encountered little interest and considerable anger. Some young black and Chicana activists early recognized the “double jeopardy” they faced as minority women.84 But for most African-American, Chicana, American-Indian, and other minority women activists, the freedom to discuss sexism within their own movements would occur slightly later, and lead to the creation of autonomous organizations and independent feminist agendas.

  Rejected as racists or as irrelevant by minority women and fed up with the male Left, some white women tried to combine their left and feminist convictions by forging ties with the women of Vietnam. On International Women’s Day in 1970, the Berkeley Women’s Liberation Front, for instance, circulated a pamphlet titled Vietnamese Women: Three Portraits, which told of their heroism and suffering as women. “What does the Vietnamese war have to do with women’s liberation?” the pamphlet asked.

  Everything! Women in the movement here are talking about the essential right of people to live full and meaningful lives, demanding an end to the way women, throughout history, have been objectified and dehumanized. How then can we not recognize these same claims that are being made not only by the oppressed in our own country, but by those who are oppressed by this country abroad?

  Vietnamese women and their heroic struggle became a symbol of both American imperialism and the revolutionary potential of women. One of the most popular posters in the early women’s liberation movement, regularly seen on the walls of bedrooms and makeshift offices, featured a Vietnamese woman with a baby on her back and a gun in her hand. On the ABC evening news, Marya Mannes, a critic, writer, and editor, even offered a commentary in the early seventies in which she celebrated the high status that Third World liberation movements offered women. In particular, she cited Nguyen Thi Binh, the National Liberation Front’s representative at the Paris peace talks, where Americans and Vietnamese were attempting to negotiate an end to the war. Mannes then asked, “When will half the population of this country be given a proportionate voice?”85

  Through their attempted solidarity with women of Vietnam and women of color more generally, New Left women hoped to link their commitments to both the antiwar effort and the new women’s movement. In the middle of a shooting war, a few New Left women traveled to Canada, Hanoi, and Budapest to meet with Vietnamese women who were fighting U.S. involvement in their country. In 1967, for example, Vivian Rothstein attended a conference in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, between American antiwar organizers and North and South Vietnamese political activists. From there, she traveled to North Vietnam, where she spent nineteen days with a delegation of seven Americans visiting bombing sites, learning about Vietnamese history, studying American weaponry, and meeting women from the Women’s Union of North Vietnam. “It was there,” Rothstein later recalled, “that I was introduced to the idea of a women’s union and the possibility of organizing women independently of men. When I returned to Chicago, I helped found the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, served as its first staff director, and started the Chicago Liberation School for Women.”86

  The effort to stay in the Left proved costly to some women. Margaret Randall, who spent decades studying and writing about women revolutionaries, later concluded that “a fundamental error of twentieth-century revolutions has been their inability—or unwillingness—to develop a feminist agenda.” Roxanne Dunbar, an early and influential radical feminist, abandoned her initial focus on women. Later, she wrote, “I had been tamed by Leftist arguments and was dedicated to bringing the women’s liberation movement ‘inside’ the revolution movement. In the worst mistake of my life, next to marriage, I had back-stepped to that servile leftist-woman position.”87

  ANGRY FAREWELLS

  Women exited the male Left in their own ways, at different times. Some simply stopped going to meetings. In Berkeley, a woman in the campus Radical Student Union stood up and spoke about the need for a women’s anti-imperialist contingent for an upcoming antiwar demonstration. The membership burst into laughter. She stormed out, precipitating an exodus by all the women. Afterward, when the organization collapsed, Wendel Brunner, then its president, explained the reason for its demise. “What men would keep coming to meetings without women?”88

  By 1970, many New Left women knew that they were speaking to a new constituency. In her powerful essay, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” Marge Piercy, a novelist and poet, wrote, “My anger is because they have created in the movement a microcosm of that oppression and are proud of it. Manipulation and careerism and competition will not evaporate of themselves. Sisters, what we do, we have to do together and we will see about them.”

  In a widely reprinted essay, Ellen Willis declared her independence from the Left and argued that to “work within the movement is to perpetuate the idea that our struggle is secondary.” Fed up with countercultural ridicule, feminists bristled at articles on “Pussy Power,” or headlines like “Clit Flit Big Hit” (for a story on clitoral orgasm), and classifieds that advertised the selling of female flesh. In New York, a coalition of women (including radical feminists, self-proclaimed Witches, and Weatherwomen) led a coup at the underground paper Rat and produced an all-women’s issue (February 9, 1970), the centerpiece of which was Robin Morgan’s unforgettable farewell, “Goodbye to All That.”89 “It is the job of the revolutionary feminist,” Morgan exhorted,

  to build an even stronger independent Women’s Liberation movement, so that sisters in their counterfeit Left captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues in their own style—whatever that may be.

  Morgan’s splenetic diatribe against the male Left reminded some of Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl. Like
Ginsberg, Morgan’s words shrieked with pain and outrage. “Goodbye, goodbye, forever, counterfeit Left, counter-Left, male-dominated cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the Amerikan nightmare. Women are the real Left.” After blasting the hypocrisy, sexual exploitation, and discrimination of the male Left, Morgan concluded:

  We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing, mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying wild eyes staring, wild voice keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this life in this time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the scream of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn’t have or couldn’t not have, or didn’t want, didn’t want yet, or wanted and had in this place this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or to none. All the way down, this time.90

  Could it have ended differently? Probably not. Even had New Left men never ridiculed their female comrades, black separatism and identity politics were in the air. The “movement,” which had begun to romanticize violence and to believe that a revolution was imminent, no longer appealed to many women. The people who were now identified as the vanguard of the “New Left” seemed to have lost their grip on reality. In 1969, Naomi Weisstein concluded that some of its members had “dropped off the edge of the world.” For many men, whose entire adult lives had been lived in the movement, that movement ended in 1969, leaving behind a powerful sense of loss and disorientation. “Sisterhood was powerful partly because movement brotherhood was not,” wrote Todd Gitlin. In contrast, the women’s movement had not only re-created a new sense of community, but also provided the exhilarating opportunity to start all over again, to rethink priorities, and to view the world for the first time through the eyes of women.91