A postscript to the polar journey: when the narrator returns to the base camp, she discovers that one of the explorers is pregnant and on the verge of giving birth. Innocent Teresa hardly knows the facts of life and merely thought she was getting fat! When her daughter arrives, she calls the child “Rosa del Sur.” Thus the story of “Sur” is not just a narrative of polar exploration, it is the tale of the birth of a girl child.
Is “Sur” a utopia? For a few minutes, as the women cavort like sparrows while crossing the ice, their delight seems utopian. Yet their utopia is soon subsumed into the master narrative of patriarchal history. The women bury their tale in attics and bureau drawers, just as they had buried their dwelling place beneath the ice of the glacier. Back in so-called civilization, little Rosa del Sur dies of scarlet fever at the age of 5. The narrator has written her story only for her descendants: “Even if they are rather ashamed of having such a crazy grandmother, they may enjoy sharing in the secret.” But there is no need to tell Mr. Amundsen! The hero must have his day and way. “We left no footprints, even.” 67
A poem Adrienne Rich wrote in 1974 serves as a kind of precursor narrative to “Sur,” although it is based on a real-life incident. “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” spoken in the voice of a Russian explorer who along with the seven other women of her climbing team died in a blizzard while attempting to ascend Lenin Peak in Kyrgyzstan, elegizes and eulogizes the dead climbers.
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives68
Utopia? Dystopia? The dream of the climbers was utopian: their community was linked by the sisterly love that Rich characterizes as a “cable of blue fire.” Yet their immolation in the ice suggests that the price of their ambition was death. While the explorers of “Sur” left no footprint, returning to decorous lives as wives and mothers, Rich’s climbers leave their frozen bodies as marks on the landscape of Lenin Peak, a mountain named for a male hero. Must feminist defiance be either secret or suicidal?
7
Bonded and Bruised Sisters
AS THE SEVENTIES UNFOLDED and feminist networks expanded, creative women working in different media were inspired by a utopian ideal of sisterhood. Revisiting the decade, Vivian Gornick celebrated “the joy of revolutionary politics,” quoting from Wordsworth: “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Not an I-love-you in the world could touch it. . . . We lived then, all of us, inside the loose embrace of feminism.”1 Many women more isolated than the well-connected Gornick discovered that by working together they could challenge male-dominated organizations and traditions.
Yet quite a few confronted the ways in which the women’s movement could degenerate into dystopic misunderstanding, infighting, and trashing. Even those enraptured by a dream of sisterhood mourned ruptures in relationships with their “sisters.” While Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde weighed the political fallout of bonding and bruising on America’s second wave, Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party installation more graphically investigated issues of sisterhood—and daughterhood.
Unfortunately, efforts at coalition building between straight and gay, radical and liberal, white and Black, native-born and foreign-born women were undermined by the onset of a national backlash that was organized—at the apex of seventies feminism—by one woman, Phyllis Schlafly. At the end of the seventies, while feminists were beginning to address their disagreements, express their differences, and commemorate their achievements, it was not yet apparent that the high hopes generated by Title IX and Roe v. Wade would be dashed when ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment stalled. Only during the next decade, after the ERA was scuttled, would it become clear that equality of rights would continue to be abridged by the United States on account of sex.
GLORIA STEINEM AND ALICE WALKER AT MS.
Gloria Steinem’s alliances with women reflect the supportive and divisive relationships that characterized the seventies women’s movement, although she proved herself to be an unusually generous survivor of many upheavals. While the loyal (more than the rivalrous) dealings of women became a central topic of feminist discussion, Steinem traversed the country giving lectures and testifying for the adoption of the ERA, generally partnered with an African American activist: the child-welfare advocate Dorothy Pitman (Hughes) or the flamboyant lawyer Flo Kennedy or the civil rights activist Margaret Sloan. If her partner was the feisty Kennedy, “I always had to speak first because if I went after Flo, it was such an anticlimax.” These affiliations preceded her sponsorship of Alice Walker, a lifelong friend whom she revered: “We can change for the better if we know her,” Steinem attested.2
Pairing up on the lecture circuit helped cure Steinem’s jitters on public platforms, but it also demonstrated that feminism was not merely a white movement. Steinem refused to pose for a Newsweek cover in 1971 because, like Millett, she wanted to divert attention from herself to the women’s movement, but a photographer shot her secretly with a telephoto lens. Through her journalism and public speaking, she became a representative feminist who could also counter homophobic stereotypes. When asked on the road if she were a lesbian, she genially responded, “Not yet.”3 Her appearances dispelled assumptions about all feminists being lesbians and all lesbians being battle-axes.
Working with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Bella Abzug, Steinem helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus. But it was the appearance of the glossy, popular Ms. magazine in 1972 that solidified Steinem’s standing. The first, preview issue included Jane O’Reilly’s “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” Letty Pogrebin’s “Raising Kids without Sex Roles,” Vivian Gornick’s “Why Women Fear Success,” Judy Syfer’s “I Want a Wife,” and what was billed as “Sylvia Plath’s Last Major Work,” her “Three Women: A Play for Three Voices.”
The essays Steinem wrote for Ms. and other outlets—from “Why We Need a Woman President in 1976” to “If Men Could Menstruate”—were witty, as were her speeches. But backlash arrived fast. In 1973, when only five more states were needed to ratify the ERA, Screw magazine published an image of a nude in aviator glasses, oversized labia on display, with the headline “Pin the Cock on the Feminist.” There were penises on the border to choose from. That same year Hugh Hefner wrote a memo, leaked by a staff member: “These chicks are our natural enemies. It is time to do battle with them.”4
Less predictably, Betty Friedan began claiming that Steinem was in league with a destructive form of anti-male “female chauvinism.” Friedan smeared Steinem as a latecomer ripping off the movement.5 In Esquire, Nora Ephron mocked Friedan as brooding about her ownership of feminism: “It’s her baby, damn it. Her movement. Is she supposed to sit still and let a beautiful thin lady run off with it?” While Nora Ephron was thinking of Betty Friedan as the “Wicked Witch of the West” and of Gloria Steinem as “[Princess] Ozma, Glinda, Dorothy—take your pick,” she found herself walking down the street with her weeping friend after the Democratic National Convention. “I’m just tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends,” Steinem said.6
She was thinking of powerful men in the Democratic Party and the media, but leaders in the women’s movement were also harassing her. In 1974, the feminist constituents Friedan had reprimanded as a “lavender menace” joined forces against Steinem. Lesbian Nation brought an “indykement” against Ms. in a mock lawsuit, charging the magazine with “gross neglect and Psychic genocide against Lesbian women,”7 despite evidence to the contrary. Distressed, Steinem began cutting down her public appearances, although she continued to mentor younger women.
One of those women celebrated the attachments and experienced the acrimony that would affect Steinem. Alice Walker, the youngest child of Georgia sharecroppers, had left the historically Black Spelman College for Sarah Lawrence. On a white-dominated campus, the mentoring of the poet Muriel Rukeyser—
an early feminist beloved by younger poets—helped Walker decide to become a writer and led to her first publication. Subsequent works described the voter registration and welfare rights movements in Mississippi, where she lived under threatening circumstances with her white husband, the civil rights activist-lawyer Mel Leventhal. The stress of being part of an interracial couple—and then bringing up their daughter, Rebecca—as well as the cultural aridity of Jackson led the pair to move north but also led to the unraveling of their marriage.
At the invitation of Steinem, who had fallen “in love with Alice on the page,” Alice Walker joined the Ms. staff in 1974.8 Her essays took as their central theme the collaboration between women that was facilitating her own career. The same year that she started working at Ms., she joined Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde in “refusing the terms of patriarchal competition” for the National Book Award and “declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women.”9 Ironically, but rarely mentioned when this tale is told, there was another woman finalist, the 22-year-old impoverished Eleanor Lerman, who needed the money and refused to join the pact: if she had won the prize, she stated, “I would have taken it and cashed the check.” Decades later, she was still angry, remembering the pressure that had been put on her by “these elitist, educated, fancy-schmancy women.”10
In 1974, too, Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” appeared in the pages of Ms. and quickly became a landmark text. Walker begins by meditating on the thwarted creativity of Black women that turned them into “crazy Saints” staring “wildly, like lunatics—or quietly, like suicides.” As she wonders how a Black woman could become an artist under inhumane circumstances, she finds it necessary to revise Virginia Woolf’s discussion in A Room of One’s Own of the impediments to female creativity, noting that unlike the middle-class white women on whom Woolf focuses, enslaved women faced the horrors of “chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one’s body by someone else, submission to an alien religion.” Walker quotes Woolf’s meditation on the “contrary instincts” that would have doomed Shakespeare’s sister and then considers the “contrary instincts” evident in the slave-poet Phillis Wheatley’s encomium to a golden-haired goddess of liberty, lines that later earned derision from critics.11
“No more snickering” at Wheatley, Walker proclaims: “We know now that you were not an idiot or a traitor; only a sickly little black girl, snatched from your home and country and made a slave,” struggling to speak with a “bewildered tongue.” As for those who did not manage to sing the song that was their gift, Walker asserts that they, too, found ways to express their creativity. Turning to her own origins, she describes the quilts, stories, and gardens that her mother produced. Our conception of artistry must be widened, she argues, to include the creativity of generations of women like her mother. When she concludes by considering Phillis Wheatley’s mother, Walker speculates that perhaps she “was also an artist. Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatley’s biological life is her mother’s signature made clear.”12 Lyrically, Walker establishes a Black aesthetic matrilineage to affirm cross-generational, transnational links between women.
One year later, Walker recounted her effort to pay homage to her most significant literary precursor in that matrilineage. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which also appeared in the pages of Ms., resurrects a forgotten author who would soon become quite influential. Walker had fallen in love with Zora Neale Hurston on the page and decided to impersonate the author’s niece to find out what she could about the Harlem Renaissance genius whose work was no longer in print and who may have died of “malnutrition.”13 Wading through weeds in a south Florida cemetery, terrified of snakes, Walker finds what she believes to be Hurston’s grave, chooses a cheaper marker than the one she wants, and hands over the inscription to the engraver:
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH”
NOVELIST FOLKLORIST
ANTHROPOLOGIST
1901 1960
Later, an acquaintance of Hurston’s insists she “didn’t die of malnutrition.”14 Facts remain obscure even among the few people who remember Hurston (as it turns out, for instance, Hurston was born in 1891, not 1901), but they would be clarified by Walker’s support of later Hurston scholars.
Both essays display the passion with which Walker encouraged women writers as an editor at Ms., where she promoted the publication of Mary Gordon, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Ntozake Shange, the author of the 1976 Broadway hit For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Attacks by male critics had distressed Shange, who found refuge in a social group, the Sisterhood, that the poet June Jordan organized and Walker joined, along with Toni Morrison. When Morrison’s Sula was criticized in the New York Times—its author was informed that she needed to “transcend” the “classification ‘black woman writer’ ”—Walker came to the defense with a letter that Morrison deemed “splendid.”15
The 31-year-old Walker must have been disheartened, then, when her college mentor Muriel Rukeyser objected to her portrait of Hurston, who, Rukeyser claimed in a letter, was helped by “white women,” just as Walker had been aided by Rukeyser herself at Sarah Lawrence and “in comparable ways.” Rukeyser asked Alice Walker to “correct” her accounts of Hurston’s life and of Rukeyser’s positive role in Walker’s own career.16 In response, Walker tried to explain both her indebtedness and her need to distance herself: “Have you ever considered how like a beggar I felt those days when all of you were ‘helping’ me?”17 She admitted to overlooking Rukeyser’s assistance publicly, but also wondered why Rukeyser, whose letter hints that she had known Hurston, had not taught Hurston’s works in her courses on Southern writers.18 Undoubtedly painful for both of them, the damage done to their relationship reflects the tensions that troubled allies in the women’s movement.
In 1975, Gloria Steinem was wounded by attacks that came from feminists she had supported. The anger of two sixties radicals, Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch, had been brewing for some time. According to Susan Brownmiller—who published her groundbreaking book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape that year and later documented the period—Sarachild and Hanisch “did not understand how it had come about that the mainstreamers at Ms. were speaking for the entire movement while they, the founders, were shut out of the public discourse.”19
Sarachild and Hanisch released document packets at a media event that began by denouncing Steinem’s “ten-year association with the CIA . . . which she has misrepresented and covered up”; they then stated that “Ms. magazine . . . is hurting the women’s liberation movement.”20 While the radicals insinuated that Steinem had lied about her impoverished childhood, Ellen Willis, another Redstockings founder, left Ms., charging it with “a mushy, sentimental idea of sisterhood.” But Susan Brownmiller informed Betty Friedan that she would not help air the CIA charge against Steinem: it was “not only laughable, it was loony.”21
In 1959, Steinem had worked at a nonprofit educational foundation encouraging young Americans to attend International Communist Youth Festivals to represent free-world values. Responding to the attacks by retreating behind her usual nonconfrontational style, Steinem agonized and lost weight. In a belated statement to the press, she explained, “I naively believed then that the ultimate money source didn’t matter, since . . . no control or orders came with it.” Decrying her attackers, she concluded: “Every page of this meandering ‘release’ contains other distortions. To answer each one would be like [shaking] hands with an octopus.”22 Internecine quarrels about the validity of the charges against Steinem effectively destroyed the Sagaris Collective, a visionary summer retreat in Vermont that had presented itself as a utopia for feminist educators.23
The accusations inspired the republication in Ms. of the essay “Trashing”; written by “Joreen” (Jo Freeman), it begins with her dismay while she watches “as the Movement consciously destroys anyone within it who stands out in any way.”24 The article pr
ovoked numerous letters, many from those who had been trashed. In interviews, Friedan recycled reports that Steinem was a government informant, decried a “cannibalization of leadership” in the women’s movement because ratification of the ERA had begun to stall, and claimed that “followers of Total Womanhood or the Pussycat League or the League of Housewives” have started “moving in backlash against us.”25
Ironically, they were all probably being spied upon throughout this period on the orders of the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who used surveillance strategies against what he called WLM, the Women’s Liberation Movement.26 When it became clear that the FBI had sent informants to infiltrate feminist groups all across the country, Letty Cottin Pogrebin wondered in a 1977 issue of Ms. at all the smears in the extensive FBI files: “ ‘They’ kept tabs on ‘us’ with the aid of special agents, informers, observers, infiltrators, other law enforcement agencies, and Red alert signals from conscientious citizens.” Sadly, she concludes that the FBI “compiled a catalog of the Women’s Movement’s self-destructiveness and our lost opportunities—a requiem for once thriving coalitions killed by the death wish of ideological purists and a nostalgic reminder of extinct organizations and names since burned out and retired from activism.”27
Steinem was hardly the only one trashed, as her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun has explained, but she was “the most famous and the most publicized, therefore the most ardently hated.”28 Drawing on her own experience of being trashed, Erica Jong identified seventies feminists as a “whiplash generation” and wondered, “Why are women so ungenerous to other women?” Then Jong diagnosed the problem: “Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other.”29 She was implicitly agreeing with the psychologist Phyllis Chesler: “My feminist generation ate our leaders. Some feminists who were really good at this became our leaders.” Chesler, too, had an analysis of the dynamic: “Like other powerless groups, my generation of feminists found it easier to verbally confront and humiliate another feminist than to physically confront patriarchal power in male form.”30
Still Mad Page 20