The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  Later, Friedan would conclude that the FBI had likely infiltrated the Congress to Unite Women (in both 1969 and 1970), as well as various NOW national conventions. She was also convinced that the FBI had somehow manipulated the gay/straight split. “I think it is possible that the CIA or FBI manipulated some of the lesbians. . . . The agents deepened the divisions and I think that agents used ambitions and other issues like the lesbian thing and so on.” As an example, Friedan pointed to a talk she had given in Seattle. The organizers asked if she would share the platform with a lesbian. When Friedan refused, women picketed and “that night the people that were picketing came in, occupied the first rows, and made it impossible for me to speak. . . . I think the Seattle thing was [the result of] agents.” When asked about the impact of such infiltration, Friedan quickly responded, “It prevented the passage of the ERA.”56 Friedan’s assessment is just one example of how some feminists attributed the divisions within the movement—or the backlash against the movement—to intelligence activities.

  Younger feminists also blamed the FBI for what they saw as a change in the political direction of the women’s movement. Porous and inviting, the movement permitted easy access and infiltration. For feminists, it was next to impossible to distinguish between informers and ordinary women who behaved oddly, suggested weird actions, held rigid positions, had poor judgment, or created dissension every time they opened their mouths. They also assumed informers were the same as “agents.” Journalist Marilyn Webb, for instance, felt certain that agents had infiltrated the Washington, D.C., feminist newspaper Off Our Backs, which was then “taken politically from a centrist position to a radical lesbian fringe newspaper. I was absolutely devastated . . . and I knew one of those people was an FBI agent.” Over time, Webb said, she noticed a pattern in which a small number of women used “innate disagreements that people had anyway and put a certain spin to them so that it destroyed the group . . . it was very skillful, these people were not fooling around and were highly trained.” Later, Webb discovered that a man whom she had met in Cuba who had been her lover was a paid FBI informer.57

  The story of Sagaris, an ambitious, would-be feminist institute and think tank, provides a snapshot of how fear could turn into paranoia and help destroy a feminist institution. In 1974, a group of faculty and students at Goddard College in Vermont decided to create a feminist summer institute. According to Joan Peters, one of the founding members of the collective, Sagaris would be for women of “all backgrounds and all persuasions of feminism,” and the women who applied to the school did indeed range from “welfare mothers to college presidents.” The dream was ambitious. At the two initial five-week summer sessions in 1975, ideas were to shape future activism, activist experience would inform theory, and egalitarianism—rather than hierarchy and elitism—would be the norm. As Susan Sherman, who taught poetry at the second session, later reflected:

  It was almost too perfect. And perhaps a more experienced and less enthusiastic observer might have predicted from the beginning that isolating over one hundred women of all ages, interests, and levels of emotional stability along with some of the strongest, most diverse and opinionated voices in the feminist community on an isolated hilltop for a period of five weeks would itself be a dangerous thing to do.

  In the end, the dream met a nasty death, unraveling amid fierce political and cultural conflicts, crushed by a collision between purists and pragmatists that would have seemed familiar to political activists in all periods of history.58

  The first session, though not exactly “harmonious,” appeared to be quite successful. Mary Daly, a major feminist spiritualist thinker, Rita Mae Brown, a well-known lesbian novelist, Candace Falk, a socialist-feminist, and Charlotte Bunch, a former civil rights, antiwar, and lesbian rights activist, were among the teachers. Candace Falk remembered meeting women from small towns, who confirmed her sense that “women’s liberation was a truly grassroots organization.” She felt that her course on socialism and feminism, even though filled with angry women who had “left the Left,” turned into a stimulating and sustained debate on feminism and socialism and on the directions women and their movement should take. Although some women “resented her remaining on the Left, and living with a man,” Falk never felt trashed. Banter, good will, and humor seemed to contain differences.

  Like most good teachers, Falk learned as much as she taught. A token socialist at Sagaris, Falk was also one of a handful of heterosexuals. “Living among women who lived without men was a new and powerful experience,” she recalled. She learned “how oppressed lesbian women must feel in a straight culture,” and she learned to

  grasp the solidarity and integration that lesbians enjoyed in the core of their intimate as well as their public life. . . . I had the deepest gut sense that women always have a choice to go on with their lives and not deal with men at all . . . and I think that affected my relationships with men.59

  During the first session, Charlotte Bunch taught a course on political strategies in organizing.

  I was talking about building feminist institutions, about women’s centers, about the whole controversy over women’s businesses, class and feminism. . . . It was very creative and exciting, and the women were from all over the country . . . and eager to have a place for five weeks to discuss feminist strategies. I think at least half of the people in the first session said afterwards how it had changed their lives. . . . It was one of those real catalysts for people.

  Later, Falk received letters from students who told her how much her course had changed their lives, something “too threatening” to acknowledge in the intense radical feminist environment of Sagaris.60

  In late July, Sagaris succumbed to splits and squabbles. The event that sparked the conflict involved funding. The Ms. Foundation, the nonprofit educational foundation supported by the magazine, had already given Sagaris $5,000 for seed money for the first session and now responded to a request for additional funding by offering the leadership $10,000 for the second session.

  Only three months earlier, the Redstockings had issued their press release on Gloria Steinem and the CIA. The faculty who taught during the second session were angry that Gloria Steinem still had not responded to charges that she was guilty of political treason. To the leadership, Ti-Grace Atkinson argued, “You can’t take that money. The Redstockings have just accused Gloria Steinem of being a CIA agent. The money is tainted, that money is suspect, and you’re going to pollute Sagaris with it.”61

  For six hours, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Joan Peters publicly debated whether or not to accept the money from the Ms. Foundation, but they failed to reach an agreement. Afterward, a majority of the community voted to accept the financial support. Still, Atkinson disagreed so strongly that she began conducting classes off-campus, where she was soon joined by other faculty—Marilyn Webb, Susan Sherman, Alix Kates Shulman—who formed an alternative institute. According to Joan Peters, Atkinson and her student followers “rented a place in town and lived in our dormitories and ate in our dining hall, but had nothing more to do with the school.”

  While Sagaris waited for Steinem’s response, the scene turned ever uglier. “There were fist fights in the courtyard,” recalled Peters. “We were at war. It became more fashionable to go with the people who saw themselves as revolting against the institution. . . . We had become, in the course of six weeks, ‘the establishment.’” As tempers flared, women began to accuse one another of the serious crime of “reformism,” or not being sufficiently radical. Students criticized the Sagaris leadership collective for charging tuition, even though they did so on a sliding scale based on financial need and also provided scholarships. Other students accused those who had created an alternative institute of “elitism.” “I guess that’s the worst thing you could have called anybody in those days and so everybody was calling everybody elitist,” Shulman recalled. Students who were mothers complained that Sagaris discriminated against them because it only provided six hours of child care each day
(even though everyone at Sagaris had to take her turn as a child care provider).

  As Sagaris unraveled, its culture of celebration turned into one of suspicion. Before the split, according to Alix Kates Shulman,

  every night there were dances. Women would dance after meals. Even the meals were highly charged. We would start with announcements and the announcements got wilder and wilder. And after that there would be dances and it was erotic. And I don’t just mean people making love, I mean, the air was charged with rebirth, which I guess I associate with eroticism.62

  Now women circled one another warily. As Candace Falk noted, the students, many of whom came from smaller cities and towns, resented those leaders “who were more New York sophisticated.” On the other hand, hero worship, which had begun earlier when Rita Mae Brown auctioned off her socks, became increasingly common during the second session. Some students picked particular “stars” and followed their decisions like so many disciples practicing the gospel. A newsletter issued by the “alternative school” condemned Sagaris for its lack of purity and described the think tank as “the McDonald’s of the women’s movement.” In hindsight, Alix Kates Shulman deeply regretted her behavior and wished the dissident faculty had accepted the money. In her view, “Sagaris was a study in paranoia.” She, like others, had been swept up by the atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Marilyn Webb, who was inclined to think that the accusation against Steinem might be true, wanted the leaders to wait for a statement from Steinem, but by the time she published her open letter, it was too late.63

  The demise of Sagaris cannot be blamed exclusively on ideological differences. True, “revolutionaries” attacked “reformists,” “purists” condemned “pragmatists,” and everyone accused everyone else of “elitism.” But Joan Peters offered a simpler explanation that spoke volumes about American political culture. “The women’s movement entailed a lot of sacrifice and a lot of collectivity and a communal sense of ‘we women together’ and I think it was too much of a strain on people who were essentially individualists.”64

  Fueling these tensions was a national controversy surrounding Jane Alpert, a former secret member of a freelance bombing collective who had gone underground in 1970, after her alleged role in a bombing incident. After surrendering to the FBI in November 1974, Alpert was reportedly giving agents information about her former female and male compatriots who were still underground. Her conversion from armed revolutionary to radical feminist, she explained, had been provoked by her disgust with the Weathermen’s sexism. Her statements and her decision to turn informer for the FBI sparked a heated debate among American feminists, which had not died down by the following summer. Some leftist women circulated petitions, attacking Alpert as a collaborationist. But many feminists, including Gloria Steinem, supported and defended her. Steinem even wrote an introduction to “A Letter from the Underground,” a controversial article penned by Alpert that was widely reprinted. Many leftist feminists criticized Alpert’s theory of “Mother Right,” published in Ms. magazine, which based a woman’s authority on her innate maternal nature. (Years later, Alpert also rejected this theory.)

  Alpert’s transformation from underground revolutionary to mother nurturer polarized feminists at Sagaris as well as elsewhere. Fearful of FBI infiltration, some women viewed Alpert as the enemy; others welcomed her as a convert who had come to grasp the significance of feminism—or, in some cases, women’s moral superiority.

  The tensions between the Left and feminism revisited earlier splits and resurrected old resentments. Journalist Judy Coburn wrote that “in a year’s time, the net of the Alpert affair has been cast wide enough to include questions about the relationships between feminism and the Left and the infiltration of the women’s movement by police, the FBI and the CIA. Scores of local and national feminist groups and institutions have been affected by the theoretical and practical questions, including Ms. magazine and the new Vermont-based feminist institute Sagaris.”65

  Fanning these brushfires at Sagaris was a widespread belief that FBI agents had infiltrated Sagaris and that spies, not feminists, had destroyed the second session. Living in close quarters made nearly any kind of behavior seem suspicious. Here is a case in which the belief in FBI infiltration, whether true or not, cast suspicion in every direction. Joan Peters suspected a few women “whose behavior we found very provocative . . . no one knew them beforehand, they knew each other, but they didn’t have any group allegiances.” But she thought that spies, if they were present, had catalyzed—not ignited—the political tensions and personality conflicts that afflicted the Sagaris community. In her view, the FBI amplified the differences, but did not cause them. Marilyn Webb suspected spies, rather than feminists, of dirty tricks, like stuffing apples up car tailpipes and painting obscenities on her door. Candace Falk thought that the level of anger was too high to be explained in any normal way. “It didn’t fit, it didn’t make sense. In the second session, [infiltrators] were even more sophisticated on how to bring it down.” Falk suspected “certain women who looked like they had just gotten release time from prison. . . . They were very tough and very obstreperous.” Alix Shulman distrusted a few women “who lived in this Swiss chalet. They had taken a house somewhat at a distance, much more bland. Everybody else lived on campus in the dorms. Everything about them was incongruous with everything else.” Shulman, a wonderful novelist and highly intelligent woman, even pointed to the fact that “the spies had copies of the New York Review of Books in the chalet.” Paranoia had spiraled out of control.66

  The dream was over. Joan Peters concluded that “the factions, the schisms, were finally what tore everything apart. . . . I could not believe women could treat women so brutally . . . and behave in ways that were certainly no better than what I was accusing men of doing to me.” Much later, she said, “What happened during the two sessions was that you watched the complete potential of the women’s movement, everything that could happen perfectly, happen in the first session. In the second session, every disaster in the women’s movement emerged. So that Sagaris ended in fist fights, animosity and division. In this way, Sagaris for me epitomized the larger movement.”67

  Did the FBI’s infiltration decisively alter the trajectory of the women’s movement? Probably not. Although it intensified paranoia, the FBI did not really change the movement’s course. Without infiltration, women’s liberationists still would have trashed their leaders, censored group members for having the wrong appearance, the wrong partner, or the wrong job. Without informants, Betty Friedan still would have blamed lesbians for causing the gay/straight split. Without informants, Sagaris would just have likely witnessed attacks on leaders, political divisions, and clashing egos. This was hardly the first time in history that social activists became increasingly dogmatic as a movement grew larger and more diverse.

  Still, we should not diminish the significance of a government agency infiltrating a social movement. The FBI committed a flagrant violation of what Americans rightfully cherish as their civil rights. As Letty Pogrebin wrote in 1977:

  The important fact is that they tailed us and invaded our privacy, both psychic and physical. They snooped. They pressed their candid camera against a one-way mirror to our private lives. It seems impossible not to feel outrage at these flagrant violations of the rights of free speech, association and assembly. The FBI conducted a criminal investigation against women who were not accused of any crimes. This activity is unthinkable in a democracy.68

  The FBI’s impact, in my view, was that it exacerbated the movement’s growing tendency to judge other women by examining the smallest details of their personal lives. Fear of provocateurs paralyzed some protestors. Fear of agents and informers eroded trust. Given the widespread assumption of infiltration, feminists sometimes found it easier to accuse one another of being informers than to accept the inevitable differences among them that, even without the FBI, would naturally result in different feminist perspectives and different ideas of sisterhood.


  Ironically, the FBI searched for signs of subversion in the women’s movement but couldn’t recognize what was truly dangerous. While they looked for Communists and bombs, the women’s movement was shattering traditional ideas about work, customs, education, sexuality, and the family. Ultimately, this movement would prove far more revolutionary than the FBI could ever imagine. Feminism would leave a legacy of disorientation, debate, and disagreement, create cultural chaos and social change for millions of women and men, and, in the process, help ignite the culture wars that would polarize American society. But at the time, these ideas were not what the FBI considered subversive.

  Part Four

  NO END IN SIGHT

  Chapter Eight

  THE PROLIFERATION OF FEMINISM

  “I have seen some of the best minds of my feminist generation go mad with impatience and despair,” wrote Robin Morgan in 1975. By then, many feminists sensed a change in the Zeitgeist. Like a swollen river, the women’s movement had spilled over its banks, creating hundreds, then thousands of new tributaries, as it flooded the nation. All over the country, women were discovering feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, labor, spirituality, education, ecology, and peace. “Feminism” and “sexism,” language not widely used even in the late sixties, had now become commonplace household words. The distinction between women’s liberation and women’s rights had blurred into what was now simply called “the women’s movement.” But that movement had splintered, and fragmented; it was everywhere and nowhere.

  The media had repeatedly announced the death of the movement, and now even some activists worried about its health. Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth, two experienced movement organizers, decided to take stock of feminism in an article titled “Will the Women’s Movement Survive?” As longtime activists, they knew that movements change, even die. Now they worried about the growing belief that a “changed consciousness” was all that women required to change economic and political structures in American society.1