Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  * * *

  If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything.

  During the 1960s and ’70s, Virginia Slims turned feminism into an advertising slogan. You’ve come a long way, baby! meant: You have come far enough to be able to buy the gender you were assigned at birth back in the form of special cigarettes. Companies fell over themselves to capture the earnings of the Fun Fearless Female. They sold her back her labor as liberation. Today we can thank them for ads that brand everything from pens to dildos to political candidates who oppose reproductive rights as “empowered.”

  Cosmopolitan continues to speak as if having choices were the same thing as having power. Its signature feature is the list. Every single issue lists dozens of Ways You Can Please Your Man. That the same tips show up, worded slightly differently each month, should tip us off that our choices may not be as infinite as the constant updates imply, and that they may have less to do with fulfilling our needs than with fulfilling those of the magazine to sell issues. Read one, and you will find that there are fewer choices than the cover led you to believe. Almost invariably, many are rewordings of the last month’s choices. At least three will involve applying pressure to the prostate.

  Most important, your pleasure rarely makes the list. Cosmo not infrequently lists, as one of the main reasons to enjoy sex, the fact that men like women who like having it.

  Brown was progressive in her positivity about sex. But she did not challenge a view of the world in which women were there to offer recreation to men. Part of the ways they were supposed to make things easy was by performing the familiar role of the woman-as-object. Brown did not call the power structures that enforced sexism into question. On the contrary, she directly told her readers that it was morally imperative, as well as professionally strategic, to accept these structures and work them to her advantage.

  “I don’t feel there’s any justifiable cause to criticize a boss ever,” she declared in Sex and the Office. “You must love him like crazy. Denying love and devotion to a good boss who spends eight hours a day with you would be like a yellow-breasted mother swamp finch denying worms to her yellow-breasted swamp-finch babies.”

  The opening pages of Sex and the Single Girl belie that although Brown encourages her readers to revel in their sexual freedoms, these freedoms do not make them independent. The book begins with a boast.

  “I married for the first time at thirty-seven,” Brown writes. “It could be construed as something of a miracle considering how old I was and how eligible he was.” She goes on to tell us that her husband is a successful Hollywood producer and that she herself did not start out with any unfair advantages. She was not unusually pretty and did not grow up with money; she did not go to college.

  “But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserve him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him,” she exclaims.

  Before we embark on the adventure of single girlhood with her as our guide, she wants us to know why we should trust her: In the end, she did get her prince.

  Given the choice between housework and working like a son of a bitch, it becomes easy to understand why a young woman might say “Fuck it,” toss her Valium and soy lecithin, and head for the West Coast.

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  The second version of the sexual revolution was more radical than the one Playboy and Cosmo developed. The hippies of the 1960s were not the first Americans to call themselves free lovers. The country has a long history of countercultural movements gathering forces beneath that banner. The white abolitionist Frances Wright established its first “free love” commune in 1825. She invited freed slaves and abolitionists to live and work together in a community that had no marriage and no expectation of monogamy.

  Many nineteenth-century Marxists, anarchists, and feminists denounced marriage as a form of “sexual slavery” or prostitution. They rejected the idea of private romantic contracts that, they said, led men and women to treat one another like property. These critics recognized the fundamental inequality on which marriage rested: economic conventions and divorce laws that heavily favored men. The fact that many wives had no means of earning money outside the home meant that they had to sit tight while their husbands screwed around. If a man left a woman, he lost only her. But if she left him, her livelihood dried up.

  In the 1870s, Victoria Woodhull, an activist who became the first female candidate to run for president of the United States, campaigned on a free love platform.

  “Yes, I am a Free Lover,” Woodhull told her audience in an 1871 speech. “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

  By this, Woodhull meant that women should have rights to marry and divorce freely. She argued that instead of economic needs and social obligations, affection and choice should govern loving relationships. But she recognized that in order for free love to flourish, the individuals who wanted to practice it would have to build new institutions to replace marriages and families.

  She told her listeners in 1871 that she had a “right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise” of her right to love. “It is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”

  The mistrust of institutions felt by many young Americans during the aftermath of the Civil War made a powerful comeback during the Vietnam War. Once again young people turned toward free love in order to express their dissatisfaction with the world of their parents. But in contrast to Woodhull, they focused on what they wanted to destroy rather than what they wanted to build.

  Young radicals in New York and San Francisco knew that they wanted something very different from the “sexy … successful life” that glossy magazines of the era promised. They did not want to grow up to be like their hypocritical fathers who pored over Playboy, or their stay-at-home mothers who sniffled when they found sticky issues stashed under the mattress. They did not want a more fun, fearless version of the society they had grown up in. They wanted a new world altogether. They were just not sure exactly how it should look.

  * * *

  One of the most influential free lovers was Jefferson Poland (at various points in his career, he went by Jefferson Fuck and Jefferson Clitlick). Together with the gay activist Randy Wicker and the poet and musician Tuli Kupferberg, Poland founded the Sexual Freedom League in New York. Members met weekly to debate just how many sexual taboos one could violate. Gender roles, they unanimously agreed, should be abolished. Bisexuality and group sex were in. Monogamy was out. Bestiality, they decided, was okay as long as the animal did not resist.

  The rallying cry of the Sexual Freedom League was “no rape, no regulation.” Consent, or the absence of it, was the only factor they believed ought to restrict anyone from engaging in any sex act he or she wanted. In 1965, Poland moved to San Francisco and founded a chapter of the Sexual Freedom League there. He held a highly publicized “nude wade-in” at a city beach and participated in the vibrant street culture of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

  Student protests at Berkeley, which had paralyzed the campus during the previous school year, produced an environment receptive to these ideas.

  The spiritualist Richard Thorne had been using the Berkeley Barb, an underground paper that started on campus, as a platform to argue that in the absence of monogamy, copulation was “holy.” “We must abstain from selfishness, jealousy, possessiveness,” he wrote, “but not copulation.”

  At the beginning of 1967, thousands of young people flooded Golden Gate Park for the “Human Be-In,” a public festival presenting Beat poetry, radical leftist speeches, and performances by hippie bands. The audience openly took drugs and sunbathed nude as rep
orters and photographers gawked and snapped pictures. The psychologist–turned–LSD evangelist Timothy Leary called on them to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

  It was the image of freedom, but some worried it wouldn’t last. Standing onstage waiting to read his poetry, Allen Ginsberg turned to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti and asked him a question below his breath: “What if we’re wrong?”

  * * *

  Images of the activities in San Francisco kept drawing more and more runaways and seekers. Many of them had no idea what they were looking for. They knew only what they were not looking for.

  Julie Ann Schrader remembered seeing a series of photos of San Francisco in Life magazine when she was still a teenager living in suburban Wisconsin. They showed “a group of people wearing big smiles and little else at a love-in,” she reminisced to an interviewer in 2013. The moment she saw it, she said, she realized that she had to flee.

  “If I remained in Wisconsin, I would marry my college sweetheart, teach Sunday school, have a family, and live the life my parents lived,” she wrote. “My future was locked in. The thought of it terrorized my spirit.” Schrader dropped out of school, ditched her middle-class life plan, and hitched a ride west. Many others did the same, eager to find love and romance outside the narrow possibilities that traditional marriage offered.

  In San Francisco, couples dispensed with the formalities of dating. They met, mated, and drifted apart at incredible speeds. This is not to say that their relationships did not involve drama. Sex in San Francisco could mean many things. A one-night stand might lead to a spontaneous common-law marriage. A whirlwind romance might ensnare you in a life of hard drugs.

  By the end of 1967, the Haight was flooded with runaways. The new world the hippies were trying to create was difficult to sustain. When they had repealed all the laws, they had not clearly established who would do the things that still needed to be done. In the absence of a plan, they often fell back onto highly stereotyped gender roles.

  In her essay about the Summer of Love, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion described her encounter with “Max,” a young man who earnestly insists to her that it is possible to have loving relationships without any responsibilities or constraints.

  “Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. ‘I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been balling some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say ‘That’s me, baby’ and she laughs and says ‘That’s you, Max.’”

  “Max,” Didion concludes, “sees his life as a triumph over ‘don’ts.’”

  Max may have rejected the repressive laws that had governed the lives of his parents. But what is striking about the relationship between Max and his “old lady” is how traditional it sounds. Max mentions his partner’s cooking offhand; he takes it for granted that she should make him meals and love him unconditionally. After the destruction of the institutions of marriage and family, it was unclear how else things would ever run.

  The Haight did have one rogue group of volunteers who attempted to respond to the mounting disorder that was taking over the streets: the Diggers. The core members of this semianonymous group of artists and radicals had met performing in the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Their guiding star was the concept of “free.”

  With a doctor named David Smith, the group established the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which treated the rampant spread of venereal disease and drug-related illness. They founded a “free store,” full of donated goods that anyone was allowed to take. They staged several “eat-ins,” serving free meals to runaways and municipal employees. They supported free street concerts by Big Brother and the Grateful Dead. They protested every for-profit, commercialized music event.

  “Suckers buy what lovers get for free,” their protest signs declared. “It’s yours. You want to dance—dance in the street.”

  The greatest ambition of the Diggers had been to teach by personal example.

  The actor Peter Coyote, one of the founding members of the group, later explained their philosophy: “Our hope was that if we were skillful enough in creating concrete examples of existence as free people, the example would be infectious.”

  Yet this process did not take place quite as spontaneously as they expected. Gathering clothes for the free store, cooking and distributing food—it all got to be a drag. And so, while the men planned spectacles to draw attention to the group, the women did the grunt work to keep things going.

  They woke up at five in the morning, got the old truck running, stole or charmed meat and vegetables from grocers, cooked up hearty stews, lugged them, steaming, out to the Panhandle in massive steel milk containers, and ladled them out. Susan Keese, one of the female Diggers, later helped found the Black Bear commune north of San Francisco. She recalled what it took to keep the philosophy of “free” going.

  “We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” she told a reporter in 2007. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.” It turned out that free wasn’t free. Like Charity Girls of the 1890s and 1900s, these activists had to flirt for food; once they had it, they handed it over to boyfriends and strangers. The ethos that the Diggers promoted depended on being able to take advantage of female work.

  Even the most politically radical men often sought traditional romantic relationships. In her autobiography, the activist and scholar Angela Davis expressed frustration and exhaustion at the sexism that she encountered while organizing with the Black Panther Party. “I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members … for doing ‘a man’s job.’ Women should not play leadership roles, they said. A woman was supposed to ‘inspire’ her man and educate his children.”

  The activist and writer Toni Cade Bambara reported that the men she worked with in the Panthers justified their disregard for the concerns of female members by appealing to their shared ambitions to win racial justice. “Invariably I hear from some dude that Black women must be supportive and patient so that Black men can regain their manhood,” she recalled. “So the shit goes on.”

  It made sense that many of the “dudes” Bambara worked with felt unmanned by the legacy of slavery. Systematic racism harshly punished black men for any show of sexuality and made it almost impossible for them to earn a living wage. Still, the fact was that the macho culture of the Black Panthers told its female members that they had to put their desires and aspirations second. Like the female Diggers, and like Max’s “old lady,” they should work and wait.

  The Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael famously dissed the sisters who were trying to assist his cause. In 1964, he heard about a position paper that female volunteers were circulating about the role of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the civil rights organization he would later lead. “What is the position of women in SNCC?” Carmichael joked. “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”

  * * *

  Many “hippie chicks” ended up paying for “free” with more than shopping and washing dishes. They endured a culture of rampant sexual violence—of rape or sex they forced themselves to endure. “If It’s Their Thing,” the Berkeley Barb advised women in 1967, “Just Let ’em Leer.” Pity the women who did not feel so nonchalant.

  In 1967, a member of the Diggers named Chester Anderson left the group in disgust and started publishing public communiqués on his mimeograph machine. Some of the bulletins that he posted around the Haight criticized the hypocrisy and racism of what he called “segregated bohemia.” Others criticized its misogyny. One announced that the streets had become dangerous for women.

  “Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes
[micrograms of LSD, twelve times the standard dose] & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. The politics & ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.”

  The policeman Colin Barker claimed in 1968 that rapes were so common in and around Golden Gate Park that they were “hardly ever reported.” The poet Ed Sanders described the neighborhood during those years as “a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”

  Even when they were not drugged and “raffled off,” women in the counterculture often strained to live up to the ideal that they should always want sex. Susan Keese recalled her fears of seeming counter–sexual revolutionary. “There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible … and you were uptight and hung up if you did not. Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not.”

  Within the counterculture, gameness for any sexual adventure was seen as proof of sophistication. Women felt enormous pressure to act on the principle of “free love,” even when their desires told them to act otherwise.

  “It became the personal responsibility of women in the 1960s to work at removing their inhibitions,” the feminist Sheila Jeffreys recalled in her memoir Anticlimax. “To be accused by a man of having inhibitions was a serious matter, the implication being that the woman was old-fashioned, narrow-minded and somehow psychologically damaged.”

  According to this logic, psychological health meant having to embrace a form of sexuality much like the one that Playboy purveyed. That is, sex understood strictly as (physical) “pleasure … without becoming emotionally involved.”

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  The sexual revolution did encourage many women to do what they wanted, when they wanted, despite any cultural inhibitions they inherited. But when free lovers described the revolution as the freedom from all inhibition, they failed to acknowledge that individuals should also have the freedom to remain as inhibited as they like. Most of us feel inhibited when we feel unsafe. Many of us feel inhibited when we are with strangers. We may suddenly rediscover inhibitions and “hang-ups” after losing trust or interest in a partner.