Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  Runaway girls had children, for instance, whose plight Didion represented in riveting detail: Michael, a “very blond and pale and dirty” 3-year-old who doesn’t talk but loves to play with lighted joss sticks; and Susan, a 5-year-old who is on acid and explains that her mother sends her to “High Kindergarten.”45 (Years later, in a documentary, Didion was to confide that her discovery of Susan was a journalistic treasure: “gold, pure gold.”)46

  “Minds and bodies are being maimed . . . a scale model of Vietnam.” In fact, as the historian Michael J. Kramer has pointed out, the connections between the increasingly horrific war in Southeast Asia and the insurgent hippie movement were intricate. “Girls say yes to boys who say no” appeared on antidraft posters blowing in the wind. And “just as the war became a central theme in the counterculture, the counterculture became central to the GI experience in Vietnam,” where marijuana use among soldiers “increased 260 percent” between 1967 and 1968, while the military brass tried to soothe the troops by adding “additional ‘acid rock’ programming” on Armed Forces Radio Vietnam. Wrote one observer in a letter to the Berkeley Barb, “There probably would be no Haight Ashbury without the war.” 47

  As the summer of love turned into a rainy winter in San Francisco, the faraway war became disconcertingly present. Writers and rebels wanted to go to Vietnam to understand for themselves what was happening. Didion yearned to report on the war, only to realize that she had just adopted a baby and couldn’t possibly bring little Quintana to the front with her, as she had insouciantly planned to do. But Sontag was distraught—and eventually would journey to Hanoi. The Vietnam War, she wrote, “blew up in my face. That and its aftermath derailed me for about 10 years.” 48

  WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE

  On March 16, 1965, the first antiwar protester to immolate herself on American soil (in imitation of Buddhist monks who were similarly protesting in Vietnam) was Alice Herz, a member of Detroit’s Women Strike for Peace. An 82-year-old German Jew who had fled Hitler’s regime in the early thirties with her young daughter, she had spent years demonstrating, but growing rage at President Lyndon Johnson’s approval of a massive bombing campaign in North Vietnam led her to declare that “I have chosen the flaming death.”49 Later that year, a delegation of ten American women, organized by Women Strike for Peace, met in Indonesia with high-ranking North Vietnamese officials and women from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

  The Americans’ reports of damaged or destroyed hospitals, churches, and schools moved the New Left activist Todd Gitlin to the realization that the Vietnam War was real now: “There were witnesses, individuals with names and faces at stake, asking for help.” 50 Soon more female witnesses would amass in the United States to testify to their outrage at the aggression they experienced daily as women. No one single literary woman can represent the multiplicity of voices raised in 1968, feminism’s annus mirabilis, when the connection between masculine aggression abroad and feminine servitude at home sparked major protests by what would become the women’s liberation movement.

  At first, though, women’s demonstrations against the war were based on the conventional idea that women’s life-creating capacity conferred on them the authority to protest the death-dealing apparatus of warfare. Although by the mid-sixties Women Strike for Peace was focused on the Vietnam War, the organization began back in 1961 when 50,000 women marched against the testing of nuclear weapons. “For the first time since the 1920s,” the historian Ruth Rosen has explained, “women emerged not as part of a mass movement, but as that movement, ready to take up the political activism that McCarthyism had interrupted.”51 They pursued lawsuits, engaged in sit-ins and boycotts, and published a cookbook, titled Peace de Resistance, often stressing their traditional roles as housewives, mothers, and widows. Strontium-90 from nuclear fallout, they contended, contaminated mothers’ milk as well as the milk of cows. “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race” was one of their rallying cries.

  Women Strike for Peace supported the growing number of antiwar protesters in the Free Speech, civil rights, New Left, and student movements who were united in efforts to end what was increasingly viewed as unjust aggression and to derail the draft system that facilitated it. At countless teach-ins and draft-card burnings, celebrated poets—Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Nikki Giovanni, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan—read antiwar poems to large audiences.52 Denise Levertov in particular captured the horror experienced by civilians who were watching the first televised war in history. Although in the seventies she distanced herself from the women’s movement, during the sixties Levertov declared that protest poetry made the antiwar campaign “a more revolutionary movement” in which ending the war could no longer be seen as “a single issue . . . divorced from racism, imperialism, capitalism, male supremacy.”53

  Levertov marched and spoke at rallies, as she began writing poems like “Life at War,” which focuses on what it means to see pictures of warfare on a TV screen or a magazine page. “The disasters numb within us,” she declares, and then she explores the anesthetizing effect of media coverage on viewers whose minds become “filmed over with the gray filth of it.” We turn “with mere regret / to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk / runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies.” The poet struggles to grasp the reality of such atrocities: “these acts are done / to our own flesh; burned human flesh / is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.”54

  The grotesque burning of babies takes center stage in “Advent 1966,” which also emphasizes the perspective of civilians horrified by what they watch. “Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe / is multiplied,” Levertov contrasts it with the singularity of “the flesh on fire” in Thomas Southwell’s sixteenth-century poem “The Burning Babe,” where the burning baby Jesus prefigures the purification and rebirth that Christ will bring to Christians. The flesh burning in Vietnam is neither visionary nor unique, neither purifying nor redemptive. Human, it is “repeated, repeated, / infant after infant, their names forgotten, / their sex unknown in the ashes.”55 Also writing as a numbed onlooker, Muriel Rukeyser placed the war in the context of twentieth-century carnage and similarly stressed the horror of war at a distance: “The news would pour out of various devices / Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.”56

  The literary women who traveled to Vietnam insisted, as Mary McCarthy did, that “the worst thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war”; they emphasized its corroding effect on their own country, its language, and sometimes, paradoxically, on themselves.57 Upon her arrival in 1967 Saigon and then especially in 1968 during her visit to the North, McCarthy lost her own “assurance of superiority” as a “confident American.”58 When Sontag’s “Trip to Hanoi” appeared in 1968, McCarthy noted that she and Sontag were both “driven to an examination of conscience.”59 Like a number of their male contemporaries, McCarthy and Sontag moved from denouncing the American warmongers to cheering the North Vietnamese communists.

  But they also found themselves struggling with the propaganda of their hosts. Even McCarthy’s objectivity feels “uncomfortable, like a trademark or shingle advertising a genuine Mary McCarthy product.”60 And Sontag—finding the Vietnamese sexless, bland—exposes her own imperial gaze: “I still feel like someone from a ‘big’ culture visiting a ‘little’ culture.” She ended up deciding that “the Vietnamese are ‘whole’ human beings, not ‘split’ as we are.”61 Grace Paley also suffered the shame of American aggression when she traveled to North Vietnam to bring home prisoners of war.

  She tried to understand her countrymen in a quintessential Paley moment: “It’s true, they are overkilling the Vietnamese countryside and the little brooks, but that’s America for you, they have overkilled flies, bugs, beetles, trees, fish, rivers, the flowers of their own American fields. They’re like overgrown kids who lean on a buddy in kindergarten and kill him.” Yet the analogy does not hold, for Paley comes to believe that the American prog
ram is not accidental but genocidal. “Some people do not like the word ‘genocide’ and we will leave the words alone; still, in this kind of war, every person takes part, and the next thing a logical military brain hooks into is the fact that every person is a military target, or the mother of a military target, and they live in the same house; since all military targets must be destroyed, it follows that the whole people must be destroyed.”62

  Most of the writers publishing tracts against the war found their witnessing discounted after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968, Hubert Humphrey obtained the Democratic nomination at a riot-torn Chicago convention, and President Nixon expanded the war to Laos and Cambodia. Levertov suffered the end of a crucial relationship when her friend the poet Robert Duncan equated her political zeal with the sacrifice of her individuality to a “demotic persona.” In his poem “Santa Cruz Propositions,” Duncan characterizes her as the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali, “whirling her necklace of skulls, . . . Revolution or Death.” She responded defensively in one section of a long poem: “No, / I am no Kali, I can’t sustain for a day / that anger.”63 In a later letter, Duncan attributed her antiwar verse “to the deep underlying consciousness of the woman as a victim in a war with the Man,” to which she replied, “That is unmitigated bullshit, Robert.”64

  But had Duncan glimpsed a powerful dynamic at work? To what extent did the anger of antiwar women arise from a “deep underlying consciousness of the woman as a victim in a war with the Man”? Surely the Americans who traveled to Vietnam were aware that the North Vietnamese insisted that women be included in delegations to their country. Female delegates from the States were often invited to meet separately with Vietnamese women. According to the historian Sara Evans, “the Vietnamese elevated the status of women delegates further by always requesting that they speak first, stressing their importance in view of the fact that there were many barriers to women becoming active, and pointing out the accomplishments of the Vietnamese women in surmounting them.”65 One American delegate felt her trip to Vietnam “was my most clearly women’s liberation experience.”66

  When young activists participated in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade on January 15, 1968, they seized on the connection between violence in Vietnam and violence in the States, and the women’s liberation movement dramatically surfaced. Claiming the name of the congresswoman who had voted against both world wars, the Brigade’s organizers determined to hold a rally in Washington, DC, calling for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The younger radicals—objecting to the idea of protesting as housewives, mothers, or widows—targeted male aggression and women’s historic complicity in it. They arrived to bury traditional womanhood, not to praise it.

  Within the ferment of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade rally, older reformers in Women Strike for Peace watched with ambivalence as youthful radicals paraded in a “funeral procession with a larger-than-life dummy . . . complete with feminine getup, blank face, blonde curls, and candle.” “Traditional Womanhood” had died “after 3,000 years of bolstering the egos of Warmakers and aiding the cause of war,” explained the feminist theorist Shulamith Fire­stone, who was one of the marchers. The Radical Women’s Group rejected any reliance on “women’s traditional role which encourages men to develop aggression and militarism to prove their masculinity.” Their leaflets asked the Brigade’s older members to refrain from serving as “supportive girl friends and tearful widows”: “We must not come as passive suppliants begging for favors, for power cooperates only with power.”67

  Despite the schism between younger and older participants, Firestone insisted that the protest “confirmed our belief that a real women’s movement in this country will come.” A phrase coined by the protester Kathie Amatniek—“Sisterhood Is Powerful!”—resounded for the first time.68 The young activist changed her name to Kathie Sarachild, in honor of her mother, as she dedicated herself to organizing for women’s liberation and created the term and the process of “consciousness-raising.”69 When the Jeannette Rankin demonstration was mocked by the left-wing Ramparts magazine as a “miniskirt caucus,” the alienation of sexual liberationists from their movement compatriots deepened.70 The transformation of radical women—their separation from left-wing men—began to accelerate as consciousness-raising groups sprouted across the country.

  VALERIE SOLANAS AND THE RISE OF THE SECOND WAVE

  Against the backdrop of Vietnam, the violence of the sixties accelerated: peace protesters jailed, students beaten by the police for trying to register voters, university strikes, political assassinations, inner-city riots, mayhem at rock concerts. One eccentric act of violence on June 3, 1968, quickly became associated with the birth of feminism, although its perpetrator repeatedly denounced feminists: the provocateur Valerie Solanas arrived at Andy Warhol’s famed Factory, waited till he appeared, rode with him in the elevator to his loft, pulled out a gun, and fired three shots, one of which hit him in the stomach.

  At her arrest, Solanas enjoined journalists to read the mimeographed manifesto she was trying to get into print. Both the vicious act and the vitriolic SCUM Manifesto reflected a life of childhood sexual abuse, two babies delivered (and given away) before she was 16, and grifting that somehow led to undergraduate study at the University of Maryland and a year of graduate work at Minnesota before she landed in New York City.71 Despite its incoherence, the pamphlet she had peddled on the streets signaled a crest of anger that was fueling emerging female liberation groups.

  Surreal in the intensity of its author’s rage, the SCUM Manifesto calls for the destruction of the male sex, arguing, “The male is a biological accident: the Y (male gene) is an incomplete X (female gene). . . . In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.” Studded with barbs, the diatribe turns common assumptions topsy-turvy: women “don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy”; “A ‘male-artist’ is a contradiction in terms.” In the new regime she wants to usher in, Turd Sessions will be conducted, “at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence, ‘I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd,’ then proceed to list all the ways in which he is.” On behalf of “thrill-seeking, freewheeling, arrogant females,” Solanas also directs her animus against “Daddy’s Girls,” who are “dependent, scared, mindless.”72 Women should abstain from intercourse so that men will disappear.

  Although the acronym SCUM stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men, the pamphlet called for a revolt of those its author identified as the wasted, the trashed, the scum of the earth. A deviant fantasy, it addressed Solanas’s own paranoia as she panhandled, turned tricks, shoplifted, acted in one of Warhol’s movies, hung out with dykes and drag queens in the Village, signed a literary contract that tormented her with the delusion that she no longer owned her own words, and ended up homeless. She had become obsessed with the idea that Warhol had reneged on promises to produce her play, Up Your Ass, and had stolen a copy of SCUM. He never fully recovered from the wounds she inflicted.

  Before and after her incarceration in a mental institution, Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto served as a catalyst, sparking radical feminists’ split from liberal feminists. At her pretrial hearing, the activist-lawyer Florynce Kennedy represented Solanas. Her case was also taken up by Ti-Grace Atkinson, who left NOW because it was distancing itself from Solanas’s man-hating.73 WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) picketed at Solanas’s trial. The group’s founder, the child-actress-turned-poet Robin Morgan, raised funds for her.74 Kate Millett, who likened the manifesto to Swift’s Modest Proposal, saw in the shooting “a female artist driven to terrible lengths by the response—or lack of response—from the art world around her, and then finally lashing out in this way against the superhero or leader of the avant-garde.”75

  Solanas exploited or libeled most of these radicals—she identified herself as a lone maverick and later threatened to throw acid in Robin Morgan’s face76—but SCUM wa
s published because of publicity about the shooting and inaugurated the late-sixties era of scandalized headlines about feminist militancy. Fed up with playing an auxiliary role in the sixties’ protest movements, women began forming groups of their own. Participants in such collectives as the Seattle Radical Women, the Women’s Radical Action Project in Chicago, D.C. Liberation, and New York Radical Feminists debated strategies. At consciousness-raising get-togethers, small groups of women “discussed everything from faked orgasms and concerns about the size of their breasts to long-repressed rapes or black-market abortions,” as Gail Collins put it. Kathie Sarachild expressed exhilaration about a grassroots movement in which each woman felt as if she was “standing up and saying, ‘I was shot into this movement and they’re going to have to shoot me to get me out of it.’ ”77

  Three months after the arrest of Solanas, a New York Post banner, “Bra Burners & Miss America,” launched the myth that Robin Morgan and her cohort burned bras to protest the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. What the protesters did do was crown a live sheep Miss America and hurl girdles, spike heels, falsies, cosmetics, and copies of Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and the Ladies’ Home Journal into a Freedom Trash Can.78 On Halloween in 1968, representatives of WITCH began demonstrating on Wall Street. Wearing witchy outfits, a coven would later invade the Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden, chanting “Here comes the bribe” and “Always a bride, never a person” while releasing white mice.79 Soon, too, one hundred protesters would occupy the headquarters of the Ladies’ Home Journal—famous for its column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”—demanding that its editors alter their portrayal of women.