The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

FBI director Hoover snapped back:

  The Bureau does not concur with your recommendation that a report on WLM activities within your division is not warranted. . . . Interwoven with its goals for equal rights for women is the advocation of violence to achieve these goals. The WLM has also demonstrated its readiness to support or accept support from other extremists or revolutionary-type organizations. . . . SDS, BPP, SWP [Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, the Socialist Workers’ Party] . . . WLM members have also established ties with their Canadian counterparts.

  In view of the above, it is absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the WLM and to determine the potential for violence presented by the various groups connected with this movement as well as any possible threat they represent to the internal security of the United States.35

  By 1972, the San Francisco office still had not uncovered any subversive activity. The field office reported that “Women’s lib, as its partisans sometimes call it [actually, a derogatory term coined by the media] is an amoeba-like organism that reproduces by simple break-away.” When the New York and Chicago offices also asked to be relieved of their surveillance of the women’s movement, Hoover reminded all regional directors that members of the women’s movement “should be viewed as part of the enemy, a challenge to American values.” And so surveillance continued. From 1968 on, the New York office kept close tabs on the activities of women’s groups, down to attendance at potluck dinners and the hiring of the buses that transported antiwar protesters to the Pentagon.36

  Stuck with their assignments, FBI agents and their informers weren’t sure how to infiltrate, let alone understand, the women’s movement. In June 1969, Hoover sent the San Francisco field office this terse order: “San Francisco is instructed to identify the officers and the aims and objectives of this organization.”37 But they couldn’t. As a Detroit informant explained, “This movement has no leaders, dues or organizations,” which left FBI agents mystified. Nor could they make sense out of the names and references that were an everyday aspect of movement life. What did WITCH, Mother Jones, Molly Maguires, Anna Louise Strong, Keep on Truckin’, Uppity Women, BITCH, and Redstockings stand for? Which ones were dangerous? How could any male agent—or female informant—begin to grasp the fine distinctions between radical lesbians, radicalesbians, lesbian feminists, political lesbians, liberal feminists, radical feminists, dykes, social feminists, feminist socialists, Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists? The politics of the women’s movement flummoxed even the most experienced agents.

  Trained to infiltrate highly structured and disciplined political organizations like the Communist Party, agents filed bizarre reports with Washington, sometimes filled with comic confusion. They spoke of “a reactionary group of women fighting for equal rights” or “a radical women’s group which advocates complete equality for women.” Since they didn’t know the players, they wrote about “Case” Millett, not Kate Millett, discussed such “current” activists as the long-dead suffragist theorist Elizabeth “Katy” (actually Cady) Stanton, even the dead abolitionists “Grimshke sisters” (actually Grimké), reported on women’s “roll” of submissiveness and activists’ objection to “sexiest” practices, and worried about the influence of the Union of Soviet “Social” (actually Socialist) Republics and the activists who were “communistrically” inclined. Despite the search for Communists, none were discovered. One agent relayed an informant’s matter-of-fact conclusion that “there is no information indicating that the National Organization of [for] Women (NOW) or the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), a New York group, are Communist front organizations.”38

  Since they knew no women’s history, FBI informers and agents sometimes searched for leaders who had died long ago, thinking them dangerous fugitives. An FBI informer described a women’s liberation support rally for African-American Communist Party member Angela Davis, then fighting kidnapping and murder charges. The informer wrote that “no black women were present and the statement supporting Miss Davis was read by a quartet of members headed by Emma Willard” (a nineteenth-century educational reformer whose seminary was the first to include African-American students). We can only wonder how long the search for Emma Willard lasted.39

  FBI reports almost always identified activists by marital status, class, race, and sexual preference. But they could never make sense of such a baffling and odd assortment of women. As Ms. editor Letty Pogrebin wrote, “The Panther women showed up with the housewives. Revolutionary firebrands appeared to be comfortably middle-class. High school hippies marched beside established professional women. . . . While women were worried about FBI informants tearing the Movement apart, the FBI was worried about radicals and mainstream women joining together.”40

  Women’s appearance, predictably, interested FBI agents, partly because they were men, but also because they were searching for female fugitives. Informers, almost all of whom were women, dutifully padded their reports with endless descriptions of activists’ attire:

  The women in general appeared to be hippies, lesbians, or from other far-out groups. Most of them were very colorfully dressed, but the majority wore faded blue jeans. Most seemed to be making a real attempt to be unattractive. . . . One of the interesting aspects about other delegates’ dress was the extreme fuzzy appearance of their hair. . . . Some said this . . . was gotten by braiding and leaving it that way while it was wet until it dried. Then they would take out the braid. From the looks of their hair, they apparently really didn’t bother to try and comb it out afterward.41

  Since they had to submit regular reports, informers filled their dispatches with information on where members met, what they did, and when protests would take place. In New York, for instance, an informant reported on a group’s grievances against men, as well as their discussions about lesbianism, child care, and abortion. In Baltimore, an informer “exposed” the fact that the women’s liberation movement had held a dance. In Cleveland, an informant “revealed” that the women’s main issues seemed to be child care, abortion, and birth control. From Nashville and Memphis came an informant’s “exposure” of how Maoist thought influenced women’s communes; from New Orleans came the “revelation” of what a study group, composed of mostly straight women, had recently read.42

  Informers also stuffed their reports with women’s conversations. An informant who infiltrated a small consciousness-raising group in Palo Alto, California, reported on many of the group’s discussions. A mother of two boys, for instance, “feared she would lose her job if her connection with women’s lib were revealed.” Another member disclosed that the group had enabled her to “see myself as part of a larger population of women. My circumstances are not unique, but are due to the conditions of nuclear family life. I see that my frustration and self-doubts can be traced to the social structure.”43 Yet another member, a thirty-four-year-old mother of four children, who worked as a librarian at Stanford’s Linear Accelerator, reportedly said, “I was born a feminist and I’ve been waiting thirty-four years for society to catch up.” A twenty-seven-year-old writer and editor with an educational firm confided, “I’d always felt sympathy with the basic premises of Women’s Liberation. But I felt alone. I felt it must be a problem of adjustment within myself. In the group, you’re taken outside of yourself. Woman’s main problem is not legislation, but discovering mental attitudes that cripple her.” A twenty-four-year-old secretary added, “It’s a place where I’m able to express myself as an individual, something I’m not always able to do. The fact that women get together for their own reasons and benefit is part of liberation. It’s a place where you can get honest feedback.”44

  The FBI ordered especially close surveillance of those women’s groups that tried to organize women workers. When a women’s group held a rally in New York on March 8, 1971, protesting the firing of maids, the local office filed a detailed report. On the West Coast, the Bu
reau closely watched Union WAGE (Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality), a group of socialist feminists dedicated to helping gain equality for union women, and to organizing nonunion women.45

  The FBI was especially interested in locating female fugitives who had taken part in bombings or other violent acts carried out by the Weather Underground, a group of revolutionaries who had split from SDS in 1969 and dedicated themselves to armed revolution. A number of women—Susan Saxe and Jane Alpert among them—were wanted by the FBI for their alleged role in violent acts. Sometimes, the effort to locate female fugitives generated endless descriptions of women’s outfits and hair. On one occasion, an informer who claimed to have spotted a fugitive in a women’s group wrote, “The weatherman is wearing a short leather jacket, dark brown, multicolored dress over blue dungarees with a red slash at bottom. DELETED has short blond hair and [is] wearing large earrings.”46

  The FBI also infiltrated women’s communes suspected of “revolutionary tendencies,” or harboring fugitives from the Weather Underground. In New Haven and Oakland, where women’s liberation members had organized support rallies for the Black Panthers, the FBI suspected local feminists of harboring women of the Weather Underground or others dedicated to what the Bureau called “strategic sabotage.” The Washington, D.C., women’s liberation newspaper Off Our Backs described the FBI’s search for Jane Alpert, who allegedly had been involved in several bombings of military and war-related corporate buildings in New York City in 1969. Between 1970 and 1974, Alpert went underground with other fugitives. The Bureau suspected that she and other female fugitives had simply melted into a network of women’s communes. The FBI struck back with a series of grand juries that forced members of women’s communes to answer endless questions about these women’s whereabouts. As Brian Glick later pointed out:

  These criminal investigations provided a convenient pretext for escalated attacks. . . . In purported pursuit of anti-war fugitives . . . FBI agents flooded the women’s communities of Boston, Philadelphia, Lexington, Hartford and New Haven. Their conspicuous interrogation of hundreds of politically active women, followed by highly publicized grand jury subpoenas and jailing, wreaked havoc in health collectives and other vital projects.47

  Hoover also targeted women actively involved in the anti—Vietnam War movement. He even worried about mothers’ objections to war, which could be distinctly persuasive. After all, if the soldiers were their sons, mothers who protested carried a moral authority that could not be dismissed as unpatriotic. So the Bureau kept track of every women’s group that attended antiwar rallies, including where buses would be parked, and at what hour they would depart. The Bureau also paid careful attention to young feminists who remained antiwar activists. In 1969, a Washington, D.C., regional agent warned that women who now called themselves “the Anti-Imperialist Women of the Women’s Movement” were still linked with SDS activities. In 1971, the Washington field office warned that women who attended “The Women’s National March on the Pentagon” should be closely watched.

  Even more suspect was a group of activists who had written Madame Binh, the head of North Vietnam’s National Liberation Front’s delegation to the Paris peace talks. To most Americans, the NLF was still the nation’s enemy. The women’s letter, instead, offered solidarity as women “to turn toward each other and fight for our freedom.” Concerned about such political support for the enemy, the Bureau tracked several dozen New Left women who met with North Vietnamese women in Budapest, Toronto, Montreal, and even in Hanoi. An FBI clipping of a story published by the San Francisco Chronicle reported “that Anne Scheer, wife of Ramparts Editor Robert Scheer, was one of a three member American Anti-War Committee who visited North Vietnam in July 1968 and to whom the North Vietnamese released three U.S. pilots being held captive as prisoners of war.” This Left-feminist effort to make peace with the women of “the enemy” was regarded, in the middle of a shooting war, as treason.48

  On a lighter note, the FBI also moved to protect the Nixon administration from feminist-inspired disruptions. In 1972, the New York office discovered that ten women from New York, “who have participated in the New Left in the past,” had purchased tickets to a National Women’s Republican Club luncheon with mayhem in mind. According to the informer, the women intended to disguise themselves—as Republican ladies—and sit at different tables. After lunch, “one of the women will stand up and deliver a short diatribe about Governor Rockefeller’s [brutal] handling of the Attica [prison] rebellion. A few minutes later someone else will stand up and denounce the U.S. presence in Vietnam. As soon as the last woman denounces the U.S. Government’s failure to move on housing and child care issues, the five women carrying live rats [in their handbags] will turn them loose.”

  Armed with this information from an informer, the New York Police Department and the FBI jointly foiled the protest. They refunded tickets to the suspected women and tightened their security at the luncheon. No disruption occurred, but FBI agents did report that guests complained of rats seen scurrying around the hallways and trapped in the telephone booths of the hotel.49

  The FBI collected thousands of pages of memos, reports, teletypes, tape transcripts, press clippings, and leaflets published between 1969 and 1973, under the heading “Women’s Liberation Movement.” The Church hearings officially ended Cointelpro, but that didn’t mean that infiltration and surveillance of the women’s movement stopped. According to Brian Glick, whose book War at Home recounts the FBI’s post-Church surveillance, “the Bureau continued to infiltrate and disrupt feminist organizations, publications, and projects.” After the Church hearings were published in 1976, the Los Angeles Times broke the news that the FBI had been infiltrating the women’s movement all across the country. A few months later, Letty Cottin Pogrebin of Ms. magazine spent six weeks analyzing FBI files on the women’s movement. With “reactions ranging from shock to fascination to ennui,” Pogrebin wondered why “the FBI’s extensive file—the largest amassed since the Communist Party and the entire anti-war effort, according to one lawyer—received so little press and public attention.”

  As I discovered later, even the most passionate and respectable researchers of the Cointelpro program and FBI and CIA surveillance have barely looked into the government’s infiltration of the women’s movement. Ironically, the FBI deemed women activists more important than did the researchers who have exposed the agency’s violations of other citizens’ civil rights. The Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress in 1974, additionally led to the release of a complicated paper trail left by regional agents and informants. The documents, carefully vetted by the FBI, now show that from San Diego to Vermont, from Seattle to Florida, women spied on other women’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Who those informants and informers were we still don’t know.50

  It was not until I read FBI files on Berkeley that I realized that informers had infiltrated—and reported on—many activities in which I had participated. FBI informants noted my activities, right down to a talk I had given at a political conference (sponsored by the Socialist Workers’ Party, a group about which I knew nothing at the time). The FBI informer reported that “the speaker for this lecture [“Women in Revolt”] was listed as Ruth Rosen, Teaching Assistant, member of the Women’s Caucus of the History Dept. at the Univ. of Cal.”51 (There was no such caucus.)

  The accuracy of informers’ reports was haphazard at best. If a woman’s name were Elizabeth, the FBI might list her “aliases” as Beth and Liz. Informers rarely understood that a person mentioned in two different contexts was the same individual. In a subsequent document appeared my name, address, and phone number—here I was no longer a teaching assistant, but “a photographer who will do pictures for the women’s movement only.” (Ironically, I spent most of my graduate career taking pictures of famous men—Ronald Reagan, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, various New Left leaders, as well as police who might be guilty of excessive force—for the campus newspaper and alternative newspapers, but not for women�
�s publications.)52

  Long after the Church report came out, the FBI continued to monitor the women’s movement. When Margo St. James, the leader of the San Francisco union of prostitutes, sent for her FBI file in 1976, the Bureau replied that no file existed on either her or her organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). And when she checked with the San Francisco regional office, the agent replied with a grin, “We never considered COYOTE part of the women’s movement.” Later, the same agent “found” her files, brought them to her, and tried to convince her to be an informer.53

  THE SMELL OF FEAR

  Clearly, the FBI’s infiltration intensified paranoia and provided one explanation for unresolvable differences. In 1973, Robin Morgan spoke of the “new smell of fear in the Women’s Movement”:

  It is in the air when groups calling themselves kill-dyke separatists trash lesbian-feminists who work with that anathema, straight women, and trash these lesbian-feminists as “pawns, dupes and suckerups to the enemy.” . . . It was in the air when I trembled to wrench the Stones record from a phonograph at a women’s dance, and when I was accused of being a uptight, puritanical, drag. And of course a hung-up man-hating “straight” for doing that. The words are familiar, but the voice used to be male. And the smell of fear was in my gut, writing this talk, and is in my nostril now, risking the saying of these things.54

  But how can we distinguish paranoia from reasonable fear? We can’t. As the saying goes, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” What we can ask is how much the belief in FBI infiltration affected the thought and behavior of movement activists.

  Given her years in and around the Left labor movement, Betty Friedan never doubted that the FBI would eventually infiltrate any women’s movement. At the 1971 national NOW convention, she announced, “It should be recognized that because of NOW’s size and strength, that NOW is going to be ‘infiltrated.’ We shouldn’t worry, because we’re too big to be co-opted.”55