A Revolutionary Moment - The Queen Is Everywoman

We are born slaves. We are whores—A hot water bottle for your bed. We are pimps—Filling your ego with hot air. We are dolls—to be dressed in pretties for each new occasion. THE QUEEN IS EVERYWOMAN $2.00 for women and homosexuals, $3.00 for others ************ Both shows sold out and we made enough money to repay me and to print the second issue. We were overjoyed by our success. We were getting the hang of collective work and organizing, and learning to love it. When one of us read that a new Playboy Club was going to have its grand opening in Boston, we prepared a flyer denouncing the consumerism inherent in the Playboy creed, with women's body parts as one of the commodities. The gentlemen patrons who arrived in their Jaguars and Porsches were transformed into rednecked bullies upon encountering us, six angry women handing out leaflets. They spit out threats and grabbed our leaflets to crush in their fists or to stomp with their Italian, patent-leather footwear. The local entertainment-media representatives—all white males—from both TV stations and newspapers were present to cover the festivities, and they found our presence newsworthy, but we received a very hostile and distorted portrayal. Our sometimes-dangerous experiences on the streets and the highly publicized violence against women—the famed Boston Strangler had done his work three years earlier—brought us to the conclusion that we women needed to learn to protect ourselves. We signed up for a self-defense class at the YWCA. Taught by an off-duty cop, the training was sort of watered-down judo that was meant to make us more cautious rather than braver. Still, aping the Panthers, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, a few of us began patrolling the streets after dark near factories, hospitals, the telephone company, and other establishments where a great number of women were getting off work to escort them to the bus or subway stops. One night, several of us went to see the Shirley Clarke documentary Portrait of Jason, a monologue by an alcoholic and suicidal African American, gay prostitute. Jason’s deep perceptive, often hilarious observations struck a chord in us and we laughed and sobbed at the same time. Sitting in front of us was a young, Black woman who was laughing with such joy and pain that it seemed that she was a part of our small clique. After the film, we introduced ourselves and told her we provided escorts for women. We asked her if she would like us to walk her home, as it was near midnight. Mary Ann Weathers, who joined our group, marveled over the bizarre and wonderful experience of having five white women volunteer to protect her. I felt the need to find out more about other women’s liberation groups, and I wanted to meet Valerie Solanas, so in early August I took the train to New York. I had been able to contact some National Organization for Women (NOW) officials, one of whom managed to get my name on a visitors’ list at the Women’s House of Detention where Valerie was being held until her hearing. NOW was a five-year-old advocacy organization co-founded by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. The current president of the New York chapter was tall, beautiful, and gracious Ti-Grace Atkinson, a writer from a Louisiana family who had a doctorate in philosophy. Florynce Kennedy, a veteran African American, civil rights attorney and activist and a member of NOW’s board of directors, was trying to free Valerie, or at least save her from years in prison. It took several days for Flo to arrange the meeting with Valerie, so Ti-Grace took me to women’s meetings in New York and introduced me to dozens of women’s liberation activists: some reformists, some radicals, some extremists. One was a young lesbian biologist who avidly supported Valerie, whom she took quite literally. She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only. She said that once males were eradicated, she planned to introduce chemical reproduction without sperm. Furthermore, women would no longer carry the fetus; rather, the process would take place in the laboratory. She chatted about this idea as if she were discussing the weather. Now I understood what Stokely Carmichael had meant when he said that young, black militants in Chicago had called him “Uncle Tom.” When I challenged the young woman, she called me a “daddy’s girl,” Valerie’s term for male-identified women. Ti-Grace invited me to stay at her place. Her midtown studio on the East Side was near Flo’s apartment, and I spent many hours talking with both of them about Valerie’s case and about the emerging radical women’s movement. Ti-Grace was becoming involved with the more radical activists, and she was in hot water with the more conservative Friedan people in NOW because of her open support for Valerie and for her condemnation of marriage. A few months later, she would be kicked out of her position in NOW and would start a new organization she called The Feminists. One day we were glued to Flo’s TV watching the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. Antiwar protesters clogged the parks and streets of Chicago and were beaten brutally by Mayor Richard Daly’s police. Many were arrested, including seven, white, male, antiwar leaders along with Black Panther Party chairman, Bobby Seale; all of them faced vague felony conspiracy charges, which were not based on their actions or even coordination, but were, rather, a kind of random choice of well-known activists. The event lay outside my orbit, however, and seemed removed from the world of the Women's Liberation Movement. Not for a minute did it cross my mind that what was happening in Chicago might be more important than women’s liberation or helping Valerie. I didn’t deny that the Chicago phenomenon was important, but in my view it contained the seeds of the movement’s destruction because it reinforced male supremacy rather than questioning it; during the following eighteen months, the entire movement was expected to put all organizing on hold and to concentrate on the acquittal of seven, white, male leaders. When I finally visited Valerie, I was allowed to talk with her on a two-way telephone and to see her through a scratched and filthy window. I don’t think she figured out what I was doing there in the five minutes we shared. All I could see clearly were her piercing black eyes that mirrored my own. I had the odd feeling I was looking in a mirror; the experience was sobering. I saw madness in Valerie’s eyes. I saw my mother’s eyes. Later that month, Dana and I visited Valerie at the New York State Institution for the Criminally Insane at Mattewan. After a long ordeal of searches and fingerprinting, we were able to spend three intense hours with Valerie. I wrote Jean-Louis a glowing report: What a mind Valerie has. I can guarantee she is not a violent person, nor is she anti-male. She is angry and she is anti-Man. I wish I could capture what I felt about Valerie in her presence. It is difficult to describe what she is like. Her presence is overwhelming, heavy. I felt I was face to face with myself as I had felt the first time I met her. A part of it is that her explosion (shooting Warhol) came just at that moment when my own explosion happened (in México with you). I feel almost as if she is there in prison in my stead, and I am deeply grateful to her. (You should be, too!) I think of her more as Rimbaud than Ché, and I don’t think she will herself ever be a revolutionary in the left political sense. Perhaps destroyers like her can never transform their energy, but only inspire others. I do not know. But she will die or live in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from her internal freedom. She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence, that she was a free human being. I do not believe I have ever been in such a presence before. Mattewan is for those who are “hopelessly and criminally insane.” Isn’t that something? Neither Ché nor Huey nor Fidel nor Mao nor Stokely ever had to face that fate—jail, prison, penitentiary, torture, even death, but never a mental institution. Why must you be crazy if you are a woman who tries to kill a man? It is only surprising that it doesn’t happen more often. Despite my words to Jean-Louis, I realized that Valerie’s violent act had marked her and that she probably wouldn’t be able to become a whole person, much less a leader in the Women's Liberation Movement as I had hoped. Still, though, I felt a responsibility and commitment to defend and support her and to give voice and credence to the concerns that drove her mad. If we were lucky, she might even recover and direct her energy and anger to the new movement. Flo Kennedy eventually arranged for her release, but I never heard from Valerie again. (She was found dead in a San Francisco welfare hotel nearly two decades later.) In early August 1968, at the height of our focus on supporting Valerie, Dana and I arrived uninvited in Sandy Springs, Maryland, for an invitation-only women’s liberation meeting. The purpose of the gathering was to plan a national women’s liberation conference. It was Dana’s mother, Donna Allen, who had received the invitation, but she sent us in her place. The meeting site was on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and Dana and I stayed overnight with Donna, who was unlike any woman I had ever met. She was a true intellectual and revolutionary, as I imagined Simone de Beauvoir to be. The women who attended the meeting were militants with battle scars and medals from the front lines, facing police dogs and jail in Mississippi and organizing antiwar demonstrations for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Some were red-diaper babies, and all of them were true leaders, but with lesser status than their male counterparts. What I didn’t realize at the time was that those women were exhausted and weary of supporting “other people’s causes,” as they put it. The women were all in their mid- to late twenties, like Dana and me. Most were neither married nor had children. Their main concern appeared to be how to circumvent accusations of man hating and lesbianism. Marilyn Webb from the Washington, D.C., SDS chapter, who organized the meeting, had expressed these fears in the June issue of SDS’s New Left Notes in a commentary titled “Women: We Have a Common Enemy,” wherein she called on radical women to unite with radical men for women’s liberation. "We have developed our own kind of femininity and enjoy being women who love men and do not see them as the enemy. We are not the cold, grey-suited women of the Twenties, nor the “masculinized” ones of the present. Staid suits have been replaced by the colorful dress of a turned-on generation of women who are asserting themselves as females as well as intellectuals." My response to their discussions about their fear of displeasing men and losing their sexual seductiveness was to quote passages from the SCUM Manifesto, such as: Sex is not part of a relationship; on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily—far more easily than she may think—condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly-sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male “culture,” in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our “society” are raving sex maniacs. But, being just awfully, awfully nice they don’t, of course, descend to fucking—that’s uncouth—rather they make love, commune by means of their bodies and establish sensual rapport. That hit a nerve, all right. The participants did not appreciate Valerie’s humor or her use of words as a tactic to raise consciousness. On the other hand, I thought those women expressed more contempt and lack of hope for men than I could have ever imagined myself. I suggested that women force men to raise children and insist that they work in the community day care centers we envisaged; this would allow men to become civilized and sensitized by seeing life grow and taking responsibility, but nearly all agreed that men would desert or harm the children, even let them starve. I had never considered that. For all my resentment toward my ex-husband, I knew he did not behave that way with Michelle. I asked if they believed men were so inherently evil, why did they have them in their lives at all? I told them that they were self-righteous to think that women were morally and biologically superior to men and to refuse to accept that men could be caretakers, too. Being responsible for children would make men change, I argued, but it seemed they were not yet willing to relinquish their control over someone weaker than themselves— their children—and they were unwilling to admit that men were human, too. Dana pointed out that women could not be solely responsible for the survival of the human race while men made war and controlled everything. I insisted that both women and men must be liberated so we could strike at the real enemy—the state, the power elite that kept us all oppressed. In response to the strong “pro-woman line”—that we should never criticize another woman—promoted by two of the women, I read aloud Valerie’s view from the SCUM Manifesto: The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males, but between SCUM—dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling arrogant females . . . and nice, passive, accepting, “cultivated,” polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls . . . who have reduced their mind, thoughts and sights to the male level, who, lacking sense, imagination and wit can have value only in a male “society,” who can have a place in the sun, or, rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers, and breeders. By the end of the meeting, the women were a little more accepting of Dana and me. They were impressive women, but I disagreed with their conception of a Women's Liberation Movement. They wanted to organize a mass movement of women against war and racism and for socialism on the basis of their being mothers of boys who die in war and sisters across racial boundaries and poverty. I thought this was simply an extension of the long existing women’s peace movements, from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace. On the other hand, they also wanted to organize private consciousness-raising groups of like-thinking movement women to share their complaints about their oppressive personal situations and let off a little steam. Except for “pro-woman” women, they were certainly not talking about a women-centered movement for the liberation of women. Not yet. Race rightly was a central issue. These strongly antiracist activists were troubled that they were all white and all from middle-class backgrounds. But I was dismayed when they expressed the view that black women would reject women’s liberation and accuse white radical women of racism and selfishness for talking about “our own personal problems.” They felt they shouldn’t even go public until they had obtained the “approval” of leading black women. In the end, they agreed to organize a national conference at Thanksgiving in Chicago, and to try to persuade Kathleen Cleaver and other Black Panther women to participate. I objected to Kathleen Cleaver, insisting that she was not liberated herself, and that shocked them. It seemed to me that these women were patronizing black women, and I wondered if, at their age, they would ever escape being Valerie’s “Daddy’s girls.” Yet the conference was an important experience for me. I left confident that most of the women who were there would become active in a real Women's Liberation Movement if we could get it going. I thought of Frantz Fanon’s observation that the oppressed were inherently radical, that it was a matter of removing masks to uncover that radicalism. I believed that radical feminism lay behind the masks of those women at the conference. Then came the media attention to the budding Women's Liberation Movement. In early September, a television station arranged for me to fly to New York to participate in a discussion with Betty Friedan and novelist Rona Jaffe. I was reluctant to engage in a public conflict with two NOW feminists with whom I was certain to disagree, but TiGrace had given the television producer my name and encouraged me to go on the show and try to be as unifying as possible while raising radical feminist ideas to women in the viewing audience who otherwise might not be exposed to them. Betty Friedan, however, had no desire for unity with a radical women's liberationist. She began her verbal assault in the dressing room when I refused to have makeup applied and did not stop until the show was over. She attacked me as a representative of young militants and objected to the use of the term “women’s liberation.” I agreed with her and said that our group in Boston preferred “female liberation,” explaining that we were dealing not only with the equality of women in society but the liberation of the female principle in order to change the very structure of society. That made her even angrier and she began to attack my appearance. I had worn my best army surplus white cotton sailor trousers and a white man’s shirt. She said that scruffy feminists like me were giving the movement a bad name. I told Betty Friedan that I thought she feared losing her celebrity leadership position to women who were committed to collective action with no leaders, and that she wanted no more than to put a few women into political office and as heads of corporations. She called me an anarchist, and I agreed with the characterization and read a favorite quote from the most notorious of all anarchists, Emma Goldman in 1913: There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free. Betty Friedan huffed out of the studio, and I would have little occasion to cross paths with her after that. A few weeks later, while in New York to do another TV show, I attended women’s liberation meetings and spent hours talking to individual women, staying in their homes. I found that a kind of myth had developed about “the Boston women,” meaning our still-unnamed group. They were impressed that we had created and published an eighty-page journal in two weeks. I heard outrageous stories, for instance, that we had organized prostitutes into secret revolutionary cells. I tried to explain that, in fact, we did not yet even regard ourselves as a “group,” and certainly not an organization. The myths about us, while amusing, were also disturbing, particularly the perception of me as a cult-like figure. At that time, I was still innocent of the anti-leaderism that prevailed in the Women's Liberation Movement, a practice developed in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society that relied on consensus decision making and eschewed structures of authority. As I became familiar with how this practice played out, it was plain to see that consensus actually formed around the projects and personalities of certain individuals… Although Dana and I had shown up uninvited to the Sandy Springs meeting in August and our presence and ideas had initially been unwelcome, we had ultimately been included in the planning at the end of the conference for the first national women’s liberation gathering, which would be held outside Chicago at Thanksgiving. I had thought that I would attend, but after a tense group discussion, I bowed out. We feared that with my TV appearances in New York and my high profile at the Sandy Springs conference, our group might end up being associated too much with Roxanne Dunbar alone, which would defeat our attempt to become a powerful group of equal individuals. I also felt personally that putting myself into the spotlight was a mistake I didn’t want to repeat. We decided that Dana would go alone to distribute our journal and report back to us. Of course, I immediately regretted missing that historic conference attended by 200 women from thirty cities in the United States and Canada. I had to hear about it secondhand. Anne Koedt, author of Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, which our group had discussed and distributed, had impressed Dana. Anne and Ti-Grace Atkinson had organized a workshop to discuss the paper, and the discussion went on into the night. Dana had proposed that celibacy be a choice for women; that proposal was far more controversial than suggestions of sadomasochism, group sex, or homosexuality. “The myth of sexual liberation has so brainwashed them that they cannot distinguish between celibacy and frigidity,” Dana said. Dana also told us about Shulamith Firestone’s argument that pregnancy was destructive and oppressive and that women should choose not to bear children. In another workshop on alternative lifestyles, all had agreed that standard marriage arrangements should be abandoned, although most felt that married women themselves should not be condemned. Dana reported that the workshop discussions were riveting, but that the plenary sessions were chaotic with polarized arguments between New Left women, some of whom wanted to reject the Left entirely and opt for a woman-centered movement, and others who argued that women should concentrate on the antiwar and anticapitalist struggle while challenging male dominance. The women’s liberationists rejected the Left while the New Left women regarded consciousness-raising and a women-centered movement as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. I was most interested in what I heard about Marlene Dixon’s views. She was a radical professor at the University of Chicago who had been refused tenure and was fighting the decision. It seemed to me that her views corresponded with my own, that the radical feminist/New Left split was a false dichotomy and that a third alternative was necessary. Marlene Dixon argued that a women-centered, anti-imperialist movement with the goal of socialism was not only necessary but also possible. After Dana returned from the conference, the group discussed the possibility of merging with one of the larger groups in order to support a national organization. Instead, we decided to remain autonomous and to develop our own theory and base of operations. We surmised that if we were on to something, the movement would follow. Meanwhile, the journal would be our identity and voice, so we turned our attention to producing the second issue. As the only artist in our group, Hilary took on the design work. We liked the new name, NO MORE FUN AND GAMES: A Journal of Female Liberation. Our main problem was that we needed money to produce the journal and to organize. Help soon came in the form of a new member. Helen Kritzler, one of the organizers of the Thanksgiving Chicago conference, had come to Boston in early November to fund-raise, and she asked for my help. We had met in London the year before when she was there with Pallo Jordan, one of the young African National Congress members. Back then I had regarded her as Pallo’s uncritical girlfriend, but now she told me that she, too, had been angered by male chauvinism in the ANC. Helen said that she had an appointment with Abby Rockefeller, who lived in Cambridge, and she wanted me to go along. “One of the Rockefellers?” I asked. The name Rockefeller, a word that simply meant wealth, was almost mythical. “None other, daughter of David, the chairman of Chase-Manhattan Bank and niece of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller,” Helen said. I imagined a wealthy socialite. “I don’t think I’d be the right person,” I said and gestured to my oversized army surplus trousers and combat boots. Helen assured me that Abby was already active in the civil rights and antiwar movements and that she donated most of her trust income to organizing projects, especially the Boston Draft Resistance Group. “As a matter of fact, I think she will respond to you better than to me because I hear she’s very smart and only gives money to projects she understands. You can explain women’s liberation better than I can,” Helen said. I agreed, and we met Abby in her home near Harvard Square at the appointed time. Abby and I talked for three hours. I had brought her the book of Bakunin's anarchist writings that Kati had given me in the spring in México. Because Bakunin was a Russian noble from a wealthy family, Abby would identify with his call for revolution to empower the poor and dispossessed. The conversation gave voice and concreteness to her own anger as a woman, and a rich one at that. She wrote a check to Helen for the Chicago conference and came to the next meeting of our group. Soon the journal was no longer our only vehicle for communicating female liberation. Abby bought us a mimeograph machine and an IBM typewriter so we could create and print timely commentaries for local distribution. The New England Free Press, one of the major radical printing houses, agreed to print and distribute some of our essays through their network, the first being my “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution.” Abby also offered the unused basement of her house for office space. We bought large doors from the lumberyard to make tables for layout and collating. We partitioned work areas—one for typing, one for printing, one for files and a library. Abby had a telephone installed. Each day various members of the group emerged from the underground workshop and hit the streets, selling the journal and handing out thousands of informational flyers we produced on our new mimeo. Our group quickly became high profile and controversial, not just with the antiwar organizations led mainly by men, but among other radical women in the Boston area who were organizing women’s projects clustered in “consciousness-raising” groups. Our group was contemptuous of what we considered their touchy-feely self-indulgence, and we pushed for more radical women’s liberation positions. I wrote Jean-Louis: “The other radical women here really snub me. I do not understand those sure, steel-plated organizers. They are the next generation’s politicians, I guess.” We needed a name. As Dana pointed out, “Our group is more than just the journal, and everyone’s calling us whatever they want, like ‘the Boston women’ or ‘female liberation.’ If we don’t name ourselves, others will do it for us.” “What’s wrong with calling ourselves female liberation?” I asked. “But that’s the name we’re promoting for the whole women’s movement, not just our group. The movement is the organism and we’re a cell of it,” Dana said. “I almost feel like a member of a cell hidden out in this windowless basement,” said Jeanne, new to the group, who considered herself a hard-core anarchist. “A cell. Let’s call our group a cell, something that divides and grows rather than splitting and dying, something that is part of a larger whole,” Dana said, sounding like the scientist she was. “Our address is 16 Lexington. Why not call ourselves Cell 16?” I said. “Cell 16. I like that. And when we’re asked about the other fifteen we can make people guess,” Abby said. Cell 16 was considered by other women’s groups to be heavy on “theory,” but like Redstockings, NOW, and Radical Women in New York, we were action-driven. We had confronted the issue of rape by defending Ellen and the issue of objectifying women's bodies by picketing the Playboy Club; we had denounced the women’s fashion industry and advertising-ordained images by publicizing "The Queen" and by the way we presented ourselves in public. Next, we took on street violence against women. Abby and her roommate, Jayne, had been studying Tae Kwon Do for a few months. On a cold November night after a late meeting in Boston, Abby, Dana and I, and a few other women were walking to Abby’s car when suddenly a car full of men pulled up close to the curb and moved along with us, taunting us and yelling obscenities. I ran toward the car and jammed my fist through the open window, aiming for the driver’s giddy grin. He easily evaded my punch. I stood my ground, fists on my hips, and cursed them. “Who the hell do you think you are, talking to us uninvited?” Blinded by years of accumulated fury at men for intruding upon my privacy in the streets, I really forgot momentarily that the other women were with me, and I had no fear. Then the driver stopped, opened his door, and in one seemingly well-practiced movement, he reached down behind his seat and brought up a tire iron. He stood on the curb facing me, inches from me. He was tall and muscled, poised with his muscular arm bracing the weapon above his head like the Arm & Hammer logo. I refused to budge. I saw his eyes move from my face to the side, and then I heard a thump as he brought the tire iron down; it stopped in midair, just short of my skull. A look of shock spread over his face. Abby had stopped the blow with a Tae Kwon Do defense called an upperparts block. The man’s smirk crumbled in terror. He jumped back into the car and screeched off, leaving the smell of burning rubber. He skidded to a stop halfway up the block and screeched at the top of his voice, the words echoing off the buildings, “Fucking lezzies!” We checked the welt on the side of Abby’s forearm. Her face flashed joy, and then anger—at me. I felt both foolish and exhilarated. Women defending women was new and wonderful to us, and for me, being defended by a woman was one of the most satisfying moments of my life up to that point. After the incident, we formed a women’s class at the Tae Kwon Do studio where Abby and Jayne studied and we began to promote self-defense for women. This was the beginning of a commitment to martial arts and self-defense for women, which ultimately became the signature identity of Cell 16. I began thinking of Tae Kwon Do as a metaphor for revolution. The philosophy behind the practice was beautiful: self-defense to win. I believed we had to mobilize a social force to operate in that manner. I wanted our group to go out into every corner of the country and tell women the truth, recruit local people, poor and working-class people, to build a new society. There were so many areas of the country dependent on the defense industry—whole towns that would be unemployed if the industry left—that the government had to keep the war going. If a great many people lost their jobs, those who controlled the government would be exposed; capitalism itself would be exposed. I thought that women were more likely than men to rebel and organize—even if it were not economically beneficial in the short term—to save humanity, to build a new world for human values and for their own liberation. If women gained consciousness of their own oppression and learned the techniques of self-defense, revolution would follow. One member of our group wanted nothing to do with martial arts, however, and she kept me focused on racism. Mary Ann was a child of Roxbury, Boston’s black district, and was disillusioned with the Black Power movement; she feared violence on the horizon and was angry with its male chauvinism. She was writing a critical essay for the second issue of the journal. Mary Ann had been a follower of Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and until his assassination a year later. I had not given much thought to Malcolm X since his death, though his profound insights about colonialism, racism, and power had become a part of my understanding of the revolutionary vocation. Mary Ann brought him alive again for me. She possessed hours of audiotapes she had made of him speaking. One in particular changed my approach to organizing and teaching; it was a two-hour recording of a live Boston talk-radio show that had aired a few weeks before he was assassinated. I had heard Malcolm lecture and seen television interviews, but I had never heard him in conversation with ordinary people, let alone racists. Nearly all the calls were angry—from white supremacists and white liberals, from black liberals and black power advocates, from still-faithful Nation of Islam members. What struck me was Malcolm’s respect for each caller as a dignified human being. He validated each person’s anger, but pointed to the real culprit—the capitalist system, the greedy ruling class and its evil use of power and militarism. In each case, he won a friend if not a convert to his ideas. I listened to that tape—I still listen to it—hundreds of times, trying to learn Malcolm’s method of teaching. One night Mary Ann banged on the door in the middle of the night. Three of her coworkers in a black education project had been found dead, murdered execution-style in their Boston office where Mary Ann would have been, too, had she not been home sick with the flu. Mary Ann believed the killer was now stalking her. She stayed with Hilary and me for protection from possible danger. She drank whiskey and slept for days while Hilary and I took turns keeping guard. Working day and night on the journal, we had already developed the habit of sleeping and eating in short interludes over a twenty-fourhour period rather than in blocks, so we ended up with little sleep. It was as though we were sleepwalkers passing each other at odd hours. Mary Ann gradually regained her clarity and resumed work on her essay, which she titled “An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary Force.” Addressing African American, women activists, she wrote, “We have found that Women’s Liberation is an extremely emotional issue, as well as an explosive one. Black men are still parroting the master’s prattle about male superiority . . . you should be warned that the opposition for liberation will come from every place, particularly from other women and from black men. Don’t allow yourselves to be intimidated any longer with this nonsense about the ‘matriarchy’ of black women.” Two deep-winter New England experiences forced me to face the fact of class differences among women and began to make me wary of the direction women's liberation was taking. In December 1968, at Smith College in western Massachusetts, I sat on the edge of an avocado-colored, velvet-upholstered French provincial chair. I was at the all- women's college to answer questions from the daughters of the ruling class about the Women's Liberation Movement; many of them were daughters or future wives of presidents of the country or corporations, of senators and governors. In my army surplus trousers, Navy pea coat, and boots, I was uncomfortable in the elegant residence hall surrounded by formally dressed women. "Sisterhood," the term created by Redstockings in New York, had its limitations. We filed into the formal dining room. Some twenty women lived in each of the dozens of elegant residence houses, with a housemother in each. In preparing for the formal dinners, they learned about flower arrangements, table settings, and serving food and wine. They placed me at the head of the table as the guest of honor, the student president at the other end. Bowls of creamy clam chowder were served first, and we ate in silence. The main course was rare prime rib of roast. I declined a serving and asked for more clam chowder. A woman asked if I were a vegetarian. The silence was broken and all eyes turned to me. "I don't eat dead animals, not unless I'm willing to kill and dress them myself, and I can't stomach doing that." Several women poked bloody slices of meat to the sides of their plates, and one asked if it was a religious matter for me. I replied that it was not. "Do you think everyone in women's liberation should be vegetarians?" asked the student president. "I don't believe in rules of personal behavior. I think each person should be fully aware of what's going on and of the implications of every act and word, and make decisions accordingly." The next day I was back in Cambridge, at a demonstration in front of the huge Sears store near the Medford line before the doors opened. I had accompanied Betsy and her daughter to the National Welfare Rights Organization demonstration—they were demanding supplemental funds from the welfare department for winter clothing for their children. There were around three hundred women. Just as I was about to ask why exactly Sears was the target of the demonstration, someone yelled through a bullhorn, "Let's go! Charge!" I was swept along with the crowd inside the store. The women surged into the children's department, grabbing coats, rubber boots, caps, scarves, long underwear. I watched in amazement as the demonstrators yelled at the saleswomen: "Charge it to welfare!” and left with their loot. Looting. A shoplift-in. Outlaw women. Two worlds in twelve hours—the rich and the poor. There was no question that I felt at ease with the looters and an outsider with the rich women. The trick would be to organize the privileged women to join with the poor; otherwise, the poor would be once again abandoned to personal ambition.