The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  The personal often became too political. Some activists began to scrutinize women’s private lives, bedmates, and career choices. Some feminists felt threatened by women who did not act, look, or think like themselves. The belief that activists should “live” their politics, as though a feminist revolution had already taken place, created some of the darkest moments the movement would ever experience. Barbara Haber watched as empathy turned into judgmentalism in her group. “I remember at one point there was this very aggressive conversation going on about why anyone would get married and I said, very naïvely, that I wanted emotional security, and I got really trashed.” Accustomed as she was to questioning received wisdom, Haber felt “when it came to the core of my life and my desire to be a married woman, I didn’t want that touched.”6

  Along with rage and exhilaration came the guilt of never being sufficiently radical. “Guilt-tripping” was the means by which trashing took place. Women made other activists feel guilty for having married, borne children, or prepared for a professional career. Some women grew fearful of wearing fashionable clothing, using makeup, or shaving their body hair. As one feminist quipped two decades later, “In 1970, it was less shameful to have venereal disease than to wear eye shadow.” Some heterosexual women, fearing such criticism, refrained from cuddling their men or children in public. Responding to lesbian-feminist vanguardism in the movement, some married women became almost apologetic for their lives as mothers and wives. Some movement activists, for instance, trashed Robin Morgan for being a wife and a mother. “I had a male child and had kept him. I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to put him in a garbage can or what I was supposed to do, but I felt guilty about that, too.”7

  Class-baiting was another popular form of attacking other women. Many members of women’s liberation, who had grown up in middle-class homes or gained middle-class status through their educations, felt perfectly free to trash anyone who had grown up in a more privileged family or who dressed in conventional middle-class outfits. At one of the earliest women’s liberation conferences, Cindy Cisler, who had worked tirelessly for abortion rights throughout the sixties, felt embarrassed to admit that she had gone to the best universities. Half a decade older than most liberationists, she also felt harshly judged for her “grown-up lady” clothes. “I didn’t have Mississippi Summer blue denim jumpers or anything like that. I didn’t get a pair of slacks until 1971.” People also “criticized the indomitable Flo Kennedy for wearing eight-foot eyelashes. The truth is, people were slightly obsessed with the correct cultural politics.”8

  Cindy Cisler felt unfairly attacked. “I was the perfect target because I had the effrontery to work with a man, the effrontery to be straight, to work on these tiresome, tedious women’s issues.” Cisler received letters from women who didn’t even know her, accusing her of having too much money. “There was a tremendous effort expended to trash me and destroy and crush me, and it basically worked.”9

  Some women hurled the accusation of “elitism” at other feminists. To be an elitist meant you thought yourself superior to others—which quickly destroyed your reputation. Marilyn Webb, who had gained experience as a journalist and speaker before she helped organize the women’s movement, was dogged by accusations of elitism whatever she did. “Somebody from a Washington paper called me up and asked me for a quote, and I ended up on television . . . and people were furious, because we had been having this whole thing about stars and they kicked me out of the Magic Quilt [a Washington, D.C., group]. They said I had to leave women’s liberation. I was really shocked . . . they went around the room and it was like a witch hunt.”10

  Trashing occurred in part because many feminists had unrealistic expectations of the movement’s capacity to fulfill their deepest needs. “From saying men are my best friends,” confided one woman,

  it flipped to the opposite, which is “all women are wonderful” and I remember being badly hurt by a woman I thought was marvelous and I thought was my best friend. . . . Lots of us had tremendously deep bonds, because we had done so much work together. But that was not necessarily the basis for long-term friendships. Sisterhood was not all that it was cracked up to be.

  Phyllis Chesler, the author of Women and Madness, later wrote, “I expected so much of other feminists—we all did—that the most ordinary disappointments were often experienced as major betrayals. We expected less of men and forgave them, more than once, when they failed us. We expected far more of other women, who paradoxically had less (power) to share than men did. We held grudges against women in ways we dared not do against men.”11

  Some feminists trashed other women for committing themselves to an intellectual life. Too many young movement activists viewed writing and thinking as “male-identified” behavior. Using one’s mind, no less preparing for a life of the mind, turned you into an instant “sellout,” even if your goal was to excavate women’s history, create a women’s health clinic, or support women prisoners. Barbara Haber encountered such an anti-intellectual atmosphere in Boston. “Having [an academic career] was just plain individualistic—not properly collective,” she recalled. “There was a lot that said it’s not okay to strive for the rewards that society gives you. It’s definitely not okay to be academic. I bought into that and it took me a long time to undo the damage.”12

  To stand out in any way was to risk being attacked. Fear of feminist “stars” shadowed the movement for years. Looking back, Naomi Weisstein felt that “the kind of radical egalitarianism which doesn’t let each member of a group use her gift in the service of the movement is simply destructive. The implications of that distrust of stars was very damaging.” Weisstein, a charismatic speaker who had helped create a speakers’ bureau, agreed that different women should speak in public. But, over time, some members of Chicago Women’s Liberation Union asked her not to speak so often, to which she agreed. Later, with much sadness, she realized that “the movement gave me my voice. Now please let me use it. Well, the decision was no.”13

  Not surprisingly, talented writers, artists, speakers, and professionals suffered the worst attacks, the most painful rejections. Weisstein, who was already a young scientist, had been an active New Leftist and had started a Women’s Liberation Rock and Roll Band. At one point, she needed to leave the band for two months to write a grant application for her scientific research. The band members felt betrayed.

  And after that there was very heavy trashing of my motives and my politics and my heterosexuality. By that time the band had gone gay. So here was my movement telling me to get out of pig science; here was my band telling me to go gay; and here was the Left telling me I was a bourgeois feminist; and here were the feminists telling me that I was a Left serpent.14

  “My feminist generation ate our leaders,” wrote Phyllis Chesler. “Beheading of leaders was the name of the game in those days,” recalled Ann Snitow. Trashing had “happened in the black movement and it had happened in the peace movement,” recalled Susan Brownmiller, “but they didn’t destroy their leaders quite the way we did.” At the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, fear of stars grew so strong that “a resolution was read on the floor that Lucy Comisar and Susan Brownmiller [both writers] were seeking to rise to fame on the backs of the women’s movement.” “I yelled out,” said Brownmiller, “‘that’s my name you’re saying there,’ and kind of exploded a bit.” When asked why feminists had attacked her so fiercely, Brownmiller suggested that her accusers saw “her as a media-anointed star and they felt that the media divides, that certain people are going to become successful. I think they were so shut out of success and had no idea of some normal ways that one might actually get to do what one wanted to do in life.” On one occasion, some women from The Feminists demanded an explanation for her journalistic success: “They asked me if I slept with my editors.” On another occasion, Brownmiller helped to organize a conference and invited Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in order to gain greater media coverage. When photographers asked for pictures, “Gloria a
nd Bella pushed me in the middle of them and the Times took a lovely picture of the three of us, which was in the paper the next day.” Then movement activists screamed at her, “You had no right to be there.”15

  Phyllis Chesler, whose contribution to the psychology of women had influenced the movement a great deal, also encountered the dark side of the women’s movement. “Behind closed doors,” she wrote, “we behaved toward women the way most women did: we envied, competed with, feared, and were ambivalent about other women; we also loved and needed them. . . .”

  I saw feminists steal each other’s work, money, job, spouses, physically hit each other, padlock doors, turn other feminists into the police. I saw feminists either refuse to pay or grossly underpay their female employees, or “groupies,” whom they sometimes also treated as if they were stupid, slaves or servants. . . . I saw feminists instigate whisper-and-smear campaigns to wreck each other’s reputations, both socially and professionally.

  Chesler also watched some feminists dropped from guest lists, even from the movement itself.

  Perhaps some thought she was too pretty, too angry, not the right color, or class, too outspoken, unpredictable, perhaps she slept with the wrong people, refused to sleep with the right person, or had chosen the wrong side. . . . As much as we longed for sisterhood, we only started the process and we failed at the task.16

  One of the strangest consequences of such anti-elitism was that activists pressured one another to write without bylines. Writing anonymously had been required of modest ladies of the nineteenth century. Now, in the name of solidarity, some women’s liberationists asked that no woman take credit for her words. In 1970, a fed-up Robin Morgan decided to leave the Rat alternative newspaper collective. “I had been told that I wrote too well and that people were buying the newspaper to read me and that all I could do was to take my name off the piece. So, of course, dutifully, I took my name off my writing.”17

  The novelist Alix Kates Shulman also feared being silenced by the movement. “The worst thing for me was what happened to writers. I had started writing half a year before I met the movement, and so I felt I had to write.” She thought she might be accused of “ripping off” the movement, which in those years meant using the movement for one’s own career goals. Even more, she worried about the “snide remarks” she received about her writing

  because it was literary [rather than polemical]. That was elitist. That was even worse than ripping off the movement. I didn’t want to be elitist, but I was going to write. That was for me the worst. I always felt as if at any moment I could be kicked out. I know this is extraordinary because I couldn’t have been. And yet, whenever the question of spies came up, I would think they must mean me because I was married and had children.18

  Erica Jong, having written a novel about a woman’s passion for sex and independence, found herself described by some feminists as an opportunist. Looking back at how she suffered in those years, she wrote:

  You got the feeling that unless you had the trappings of radical lesbianism about you, you would be shunned. And trappings there were. There was a style prevalent then in which you were expected to look like you’d stepped right off the commune. Lipstick and eyeshadow were not only counter-revolutionary, they would be mentioned in reviews of your books.

  At one festival, women “hooted and booed” as Erica Jong read poems about motherhood, “though many of them had children in their arms. At the time, I was devastated. The criticism by women hurt far more than criticism by men.”19 Later, Jong wrote about her sympathy for the many mothers and wives who wanted to be involved with organized feminism but had encountered “the same kind of painful rejection I had experienced.”

  She understood this punitive attitude in generational terms and referred to second-wave feminists as the “whiplash generation.”

  Brought up in the fifties, they whipped into the sixties with little preparation. How could our generation suddenly forswear the values with which it had been raised? It couldn’t. So some of us became extremist, as all frightened people do. As usual in revolutions, the zealots drove out the moderates. And the haters of feminism exploited the split for their own end. Thus, a whole generation of daughters grew up turned off by the word “feminist.”20

  Perhaps no one suffered greater public trashing than Gloria Steinem. In May 1975, a newly constituted Redstockings in New York City, led by such early and important leaders as Carol Hanisch and Kathie Sarachild, issued a statement in which they publicly accused Steinem of having worked for the CIA—in the past, as well as in the present. They wrote that she was, in fact, a government spy or informer in their midst who had redirected the course of the movement toward moderation and capitulation.

  The truth was quite a bit more complicated. During the late fifties and early sixties, Steinem helped found the Independent Research Service, a foundation set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which recruited American students to attend Communist-sponsored international youth festivals in order to proselytize the superior American way of life. Sponsored by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the hope was to cultivate personal relationships with the youth of all nations. The CIA both funded and recruited many of the delegates. Steinem attended two International Communist Youth Festivals in 1959 and 1962.

  Like many liberal young women of her generation, Steinem viewed the effort of “building bridges, deepening understanding, and identifying similar concerns among the world’s youth” as important work. In the absence of organizations like SNCC or SDS, liberal students viewed these activities as an opportunity to enhance world peace. At the time, Steinem knew that the Independent Research Service was at least partly funded through the CIA and their various conduits. She perhaps believed that the CIA did so to help prevent wars, not as part of a systematic effort to contain and subvert Communism. In fact, still in the waning penumbra of McCarthyism, she at first worried more that the funding might secretly be coming from Communist-front organizations.

  This, of course, was the fifties, when the CIA was still honored for protecting Americans from Communism. Few liberal students at that time knew about funding by the CIA. By the seventies, the very letters CIA dredged up images of assassinations, coups d’états, dirty tricks abroad, infiltration of radical organizations and surveillance of ordinary citizens at home. When the Redstockings issued their accusations, they also charged Steinem with using Ms. magazine to collect information on feminist activities in her ongoing work for the CIA. In fact, the magazine had resisted all such attempts, including an FBI request to use its subscriber list in a search for female fugitives.21

  Steinem wasn’t sure how to respond to these charges, though they were hardly new. In 1967, Ramparts magazine had exposed how the CIA had funneled its money secretly through foundations to the National Student Association. At the time, Steinem said she approved of the CIA effort in this operation because it was the work of liberals “who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the Festival.” But that hardly meant that she had infiltrated the women’s movement for the CIA a decade later. Since the mainstream press had not yet picked up the Redstocking story, friends advised her in 1975 not to dignify their accusations and just to let the matter drop. But that turned out to be impossible, in part because Betty Friedan seized upon these accusations, discussing them with reporters from New York City’s Daily News and the wire service United Press International at the UN International Women’s Year World Conference in Mexico City in 1975. Linked to Friedan’s name, the story now spread swiftly though the mainstream media. Friedan compounded Steinem’s difficulties by demanding that she “react” to the charges and by implying that a “paralysis of leadership” in the women’s movement “could be due to the CIA.”22

  For both the Redstockings and Friedan to accuse Steinem was a profoundly disturbing matter. Still, Steinem didn’t respond, fearing that people would only remember the charges and not her answers. All summer, Steinem brooded and agonized. After three
months, she wrote a six-page letter and released it exclusively to feminist publications. But the mainstream press, excited by a feminist scandal, now picked it up, as she had feared, and amplified the accusation as it flew though the nation’s news services and newspapers. In her letter, Steinem pointed out that the Redstockings had made no new discoveries, that she had revealed years before that her work in youth groups was partly funded by the CIA. She also systematically refuted the charge that she had ever been a full-time employee who worked for the CIA or any other government security agency. “I will repeat the facts one more time,” Steinem wrote. “I worked on two of the World Festivals of Youth and Students for Peace and Freedom (to give them their proper name), held sixteen and thirteen years ago in Vienna and Helsinki, at which some of the American participation was partially funded by foundations that were in turn funded by the CIA. . . . I naively thought then that the ultimate money source didn’t matter, since in my own experience, no control or orders came with it. (It’s painfully clear with hindsight that even indirect, control-free funding was a mistake if it couldn’t be published, but I didn’t realize that then.)”23

  There the story would perhaps have ended had not Betty Friedan seemed determined to keep it alive. On television programs, she would announce that she refused to discuss Steinem and the CIA connection and then proceeded to do so, even if just by implication. She never directly charged Steinem with anything, but clearly she did not want the American public to forget the accusation. In It Changed My Life, her next book published in 1976, Friedan again raised the CIA issue. Perhaps unwilling to share the feminist stage with any other leader, Friedan blamed the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment by various state legislatures on “extremist groups,” like Ms. magazine. She also used innuendo to tarnish the reputations of both Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. In a review of Friedan’s book on July 4, 1976, in the New York Times Book Review, Stephanie Harrington wrote, “This is heady stuff. . . . Is she saying Steinem and/or Abzug have CIA and FBI connections? If so, why doesn’t she say so plainly?”24