Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
My Beginnings
The Roads Not Taken
Patient Power
Abortionomics
Abortion as a Mother’s Act
The Politics of Courage
The Russian Front
The Loaded Gun
Amazing Grace
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Copyright Page
In loving memory of
Ruth Dubow Hoffman,
Jack Hoffman,
Martin Gold,
Mahin Hassibi.
For my daughter,
Sasharina Kate Hoffman,
in gratitude and joy.
Preface
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Twenty years ago I attended a party at which a numerologist offered to analyze my name. After performing what appeared to be complicated mathematical computations she told me my number was eleven—a “power number”—then looked at me quizzically.
“How strange,” she said. “This is the first time I have ever seen this.”
“What is it?” I asked, genuinely concerned.
“Your numbers tell me that you make money from war.”
I met her gaze steadily as I replied, “I do.”
AS AN ONLY CHILD growing up in 1950s Philadelphia, I occupied myself with warrior fantasies. My imagination soared with visions of knights, kings, and queens who populated the English history books I would get from the library. The dramatic tales of battles driven by focused energy and heightened danger excited me. It wasn’t conquest I was after; it was the warriors’ extraordinary sense of mission. I was moved by an empathic connection with the vulnerable and oppressed. I wanted to challenge a great evil power, to lead troops into battle for the most noble of causes.
Unfortunately, the world in which I was living allowed for few grand heroics. Rather than a battleground, it was a special kind of wasteland. I grew up at a time when one’s worth and acceptance as a female were measured by the width of a crinoline skirt, when French kissing branded you a sexual outlaw, and when little girls’ dreams revolved around their weddings and lessons learned from watching Queen for a Day’s ritual of “improving” one’s life with domestic conveniences. It was a vast wilderness of mothers, teachers, and friends encircling me in traditional femininity, creating a suffocating loneliness that I could not name or understand.
I felt powerless to change my fate until Queen Elizabeth I, whose story I discovered at age ten, finally broke that silence. Her survival skills were legendary: her mother was beheaded when she was three and her stepmother executed when she was nine; she was sexually molested at fifteen; and she spent two months imprisoned in the tower, a hair’s breadth away from execution herself. She learned to carefully scan the political and emotional landscape for signs of potential danger.
She ruled sixteenth-century England by herself, refusing to marry or to bear children. The androgynous strategies of this woman who wanted to be “both king and queen of England” were unheard of for a female monarch of her time.
I kept the lessons I learned from Elizabeth close to my heart and my head when I broke free from Philadelphia and came of age in New York City in the 1960s. The time was ripe to pick up her gauntlet and challenge women’s traditional roles. I became a child of one of the greatest social revolutions in history, at a time when it became politically possible for women to legally gain and exercise reproductive choice—the power of life and death. A time when the right to choose became the fundamental premise of the movement for women’s liberation, and when the expression of that truth was every woman’s entitlement. After years spent feeling I should have been born in some earlier, more romantic age, I have come to realize that my life’s work would not have been possible in any other era but this one.
In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade, I opened one of the first legal abortion clinics in the country and thrust myself into a world that came with battles to fight (replete with invasions, death threats, and killings), opportunities for courage and heroism, and the necessity for bold leadership, strategic thinking, philosophical debate, and entrepreneurial skill. There were barbarians at the gate, self-identified as Right to Lifers (anti-choicers, or “antis,” as I call them throughout this book), waving pictures of bloody fetuses and sometimes hiding bombs or guns under their coats. My sword was a six-foot coat hanger held high over my head as I declared my sisters would never return to back-alley butchery. I raised a bullhorn to rally fellow soldiers, decrying the clinic violence that swept the nation. This was my historic stage. It was a war, and I finally felt I was living my destiny.
I HELPED MIDWIFE an era in which women came closer to sexual autonomy and freedom than ever before in history. The very idea that women could rise up and act in their own best interest electrified men and women alike during those years, and the foundational works of second-wave feminists inspired millions of my peers. But my feminism didn’t come from books or theoretical discussions. It came in the shape of individual women presenting themselves for services each day. I began to understand the core principle of feminism as I held the hands of thousands of women during their most powerful and vulnerable moment: their abortions.
I wasn’t immune to the physicality of abortion, the blood, tissue, and observable body parts. My political and moral judgments on the nature of abortion evolved throughout the years, but I quickly came to realize that those who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives, but also the power—and the responsibility—of taking life in order to do that. Indeed, acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women’s reproductive freedom.
MY STORY IS THE STORY of women’s struggle for freedom and equality in the twentieth century, but it is also a personal story of obstacles, survival, and triumphs. Like Elizabeth, I did not want to give birth to my successor. I never dreamed of being a mother, nursing a child, shaping a young life. I wanted—needed—to give birth to myself. And, in the arms of the women’s movement, my delivery was aggressive, even violent, with pressures pushing down on me from every direction at times, crushing and battering me as I reached for the freedom to become. Most painful of all were my terrifying glimpses of the all-encompassing sense of being alone. Whatever one can say glowingly about the women’s liberation movement and our “collective problems requiring collective solutions,” this fact cannot be denied: becoming is nothing if not a solo journey. Yet my singular voyage has been enriched with allies, friends, lovers, and family, unexpected intimacies that bear meaning, depth, purpose, and joy.
Thomas Merton taught that there were three vocations: one to the active life, one to the contemplative, and a third to the mixture of both. This book is the story of my mixed life. I am an activist, a philosopher, a transgressor of boundaries. I strive to live in truth—or, perhaps, truths. I have not escaped this war unscathed; like all women who have gone into battle, I am scarred. But perhaps that is the definition of wisdom. Perhaps our wounds, the crevasses and cracks in our innocence of perception that come as the price of experience, are our marks of understanding.
My Beginnings
“To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel.... It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.”
—ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, “THE SOLITUDE OF SELF”
&n
bsp; I have always loved the smell of lilacs. They make me think of love and revolution.
I was six years old when my parents took me on the Staten Island Ferry to meet my aunt Natasha and uncle Vuluga.
We stayed for lunch, and as my parents sat smoking and talking with Vuluga, Natasha took me conspiratorially out into her small garden. She was quite old, with silver hair and light blue eyes. The soft edges of her accent caressed me as she proudly showed me the lilac trees in her garden, telling me she’d had them as a child in Russia.
Even then I was transfixed by the story of her life. In the late eighteen hundreds Natasha and Vuluga were part of the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), best known for multiple attempts and ultimately the successful assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. They were caught, tried for treason, and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for life. Somehow, they managed to escape. They made their way across miles of snow-covered Siberian steppes, crossing Eastern and Western Europe and finally the ocean to settle in Staten Island, New York. The family talked about Natasha and Vuluga in hushed tones of respect and awe. Audacious and courageous, they had put their lives on the line for their ideals.
Before we left, Natasha gave me a sprig of purple flowers from her tree. I clutched it in my small hands on the way home, desperately trying to pick up its magical scent through the overpowering smell of the Hudson River. Natasha and Vuluga remained fixed in my memory.
My relatives were warriors for a cause, but they also fought their own intimate war against cultural expectations. Never married, they lived together by choice at a time when alliances such as those were considered far outside the pale. And in confronting a common enemy, their love was strengthened and deepened.
MY MOTHER’S PARENTS were first cousins. They came from a long line of Russian radicals, musicians, and rabbis. The knowledge of their consanguinity was a cherished family albatross around all of our necks. Explaining to others and to ourselves why so many of us were extraordinarily talented, we would laughingly point to our “incestuous grandparents” as the organizing principle. The uniqueness of my mother’s family was a standard of being for me. Iconoclastic, intellectual, artistic, and temperamental, their lives put most other people’s in soft focus.
My paternal relatives were no less romantic. It was 1879 when my nineteen-year-old great-grandmother Blume Hoffman plucked up her courage, left her abusive husband in Lithuania, and with three children in tow, moved to London. Her siblings went further, emigrating to the United States to join an uncle who was well established in Leavenworth, Kansas. Blume’s brother Dave struck gold in Alaska and begged her to come to the United States, but she had used up her courage and was terrified of crossing the Atlantic. Her son, my grandfather Sam, decided that he would try his luck, and in his early teens he worked his way onto a steamer to the United States, eventually making his fortune in industry.
Wearing diamond studs and cuff links, Sam courted my grandmother Kate, rewarding her beauty by throwing bags of money onto her kitchen table. But I never knew my grandfather when he had money—only after he’d lost it, playing the horses. His nickname for me was “Citation,” after the famous Triple Crown winner, because I was always running about. He would sit at home, bitter and depressed, refusing to work because he considered paid employment beneath him. He is unsmiling and uncomfortable in the photos I have kept, like a deposed king mourning his lost empires.
I WAS BORN IN PHILADELPHIA in 1946, on the cusp of what would always be known as the “baby boom” generation. I shared a bedroom with my parents in a two-room apartment on East Tioga Street with my father’s mother living down the hall. The bedroom window looked out onto another four-story brick apartment building, rows of which defined our young middle-class neighborhood.
When I was a baby still in my crib, I would watch pigeons roosting on the windowsill. I heard them cooing and clucking while I writhed in pleasure at the touch of my parents’ hands oiling me, their lips gently passing over my body. This paradise was lost when I grew old enough to tell my mother that I liked the way Daddy played the drums. The thrusting of my father in intercourse, my mother’s body rising up to meet him, must have sounded like rhythmical music to me. But the idea that I had witnessed the primal scene shook them. I was given my own space, my parents self-banished into a foldout bed in the living room, and my acquaintance with solitude began. I don’t remember whether or not I missed the comfort of my parents next to me. But the separation was the beginning of a lifetime of aloneness in the form of both retreat and punishment.
Most summers my family would take day trips to Rocka-way Beach. One of my mother’s six brothers lived there, and we spent many lazy, fun days at the ocean. The highlight of these days was always the moment when my father took me in his arms to the water. He would hold me tightly as I laughed and jumped at the oncoming waves.
We would take winter trips to Florida. Once my father and I were in a pool and he playfully held me underwater, but he held me there too long. I felt I was drowning and had to push against his hand with all my strength so he would let me up to breathe. He let me surface in time, but I never again trusted his judgment or ability to protect me—in the water, in my home, or in my heart.
Even in my dreams, I was alone. My first nightmare went on to recur throughout my childhood. I walk along a beach, barefoot in a light summer dress. The sky is dark and foreboding and the ocean rises beside me in an enormous, pulsating, threatening wave. It is the color of old meat, and the cresting water creates patterns of stark white veins. I keep walking, my bare feet making patterns in the sand as the wave rises high with tension beside me. It never breaks, but the fear of it causes me to wake in the night.
I WAS THE ONE AND ONLY occupant of my mother’s womb. She used to show me an old photo of herself at eight months pregnant, vainly telling me, “No one knew I was even pregnant, like you weren’t even there.” But oh, she so much wanted a daughter, a reincarnation of her own loving mother, who was her protector and ally against her six older brothers, and who died when she was seventeen. And so I became my mother’s daughter, sister, mother—and her competition for my father.
Born in 1917, my mother was the youngest of seven children and the only girl. She came of age when not much was expected of girls except to get married and have children; her own mother had left the marital bed after finally giving birth to the little girl she’d always wanted. But my mother inherited a love of music, and a frustrated desire to compete, excel, and perform. She wanted to be on the stage so much that she had one of her brothers convince my grandparents that she could travel with a dance troupe when she was sixteen. “Good girls” did not go on the stage, but her parents finally gave in.
Her dream was short lived. The chorus line finished their contract after two months on the road, so her small taste of freedom and spotlights ended. She went back home to fulfill her biological destiny.
I felt my mother’s thwarted ambition, along with her ambivalence. She may never have had the ability to realize her own dreams, but the need to exert influence was there, and when I was born, it was transferred to me. Her ambition for me was so basic a component of our relationship that it influenced my very name. “A star is born—Meryl Holly” reads the first page of the baby scrapbook she made for me. She gave me that middle name because she expected it to be my stage name; she intended to mold me into a performer. I changed my first name to the more powerfully androgynous Merle—French for “blackbird,” I later found out—as soon I was old enough to understand the significance.
She was a good mother according to the mores of the time, but as a child, I couldn’t bear the degree of power my mother had over me and the lack of wisdom with which she wielded it. She exercised the ultimate power of no, withholding her approval and love when it suited her, and more importantly to me, preventing my father from expressing his own love and approval.
We moved to the second floor of a small redbrick two-family house in Northeast Philadelphia when I was
six years old. Every night I would wait at the top of the stairs for my father to come home from work, excited to see the top of his fedora hat, which led to his six-foot-two frame, then that invariable smile coming up the stairs to greet me. He would sweep me up in his arms, hold me a foot away, search my face as if seeing it for the first time, and say, “How’s my little girl today?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” my mother’s voice would call from the back end of paradise. “Do you want to know what she did today?” With a slow, well-practiced disengagement, my father would put me back on the ground and walk to the dining room to prepare for dinner.
As the youngest of seven children and the only girl, my mother was forever “Baby Ruthie.” My father, needing the security of her dependency, reinforced her immaturity, so that by the time he died she could not write a check or pay a bill. After a child’s fashion, she was stubborn, competitive, demanding, and full of rectitude. For this reason it was always she who bore the brunt of my frustration when my will to do what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted, was thwarted. I experienced the boundaries of her parental rule as a cruel fortress that I could not escape, and my rage toward her grew as I did.
My father was the parent I always wanted to be with, the one that I most related to and wanted to be special for. Like my mother, any dreams he had for himself had to be deferred and ultimately denied. Because of my grandfather’s refusal to work, my father had to leave school at age fourteen, selling balloons in the street to help support the family. His older brother died at twenty-one from a long struggle against rheumatic fever, increasing my father’s familial responsibilities even more. The week of my uncle’s death there was a funeral workers’ strike in New York City. As a result, my father was forced to dig his own brother’s grave with the help of a few friends.
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