A Revolutionary Moment Women's Liberation in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

1 Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, Presented as part of "A Revolutionary Moment: Women's Liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s," a conference organized by the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program “SUPER-WOMAN POWER ADVOCATE SHOOTS . . .” That news headline propelled me to action. On Tuesday, June 4, 1968, I sat in Sanborn’s restaurant in México City across from the beautiful Bellas Artes building. As the original Sanborn's, the walls are lined with sepia photographs of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and their soldiers celebrating their revolutionary victory in that very place in 1914. Jean-Louis wanted me to meet his old friend Arturo. Arturo was a Mexican poet and anarchist intensively involved in organizing against the Olympics. I was sullen and angry because Jean-Louis had introduced me as mi esposa, his wife. Screaming fights between us had become normal, and I was trying to devise another way to go to Cuba. I suspected that the purpose of the meeting with Arturo was to dissuade me from going to Cuba. Arturo called Fidel Castro a statist who was wedded to “Soviet imperialism,” and he complained that Cuba had agreed to participate in the Olympics. 2 Arturo was smart, intense, and angry, his personality similar to that of Jean-Louis. When he spoke, he hit the palm of his left hand with the rolled-up tabloid in his right hand. Then he opened the newspaper to illustrate his argument that the CIA controlled the Mexican secret police. The newspaper was the Mexico City News, the English language weekly of the “American community” (meaning rich American businessmen and their families) in México City. Arturo informed us that U.S. advisers on crowd control had arrived to train México City police to handle demonstrators at the Olympics. My eyes caught the headline of a small article, and I grabbed the paper to read it: "Dateline, Monday, June 3, New York: Super-Woman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol." I looked more closely. I couldn’t believe the words: Super-woman power advocate. The article said that Warhol was in serious condition but was expected to live; I was relieved about that. I was a fan of Warhol's art and films. It wasn’t the possibility of Warhol dying or even Warhol being shot that thrilled me, rather, that some woman somewhere was a super-woman power advocate and had acted consciously as a superwoman power advocate, that a woman had publicly shot a man. “Yesterday, a woman shot a man because he was using her,” I told myself. During the hours that followed, I pieced together the story. Valerie Solanas, the shooter, was twenty-nine years old and surrendered two hours after the shooting. She was a writer and the founder of S.C.U.M., which the article claimed meant "Society for Cutting Up Men." The article stated that Solanas was a street person, perhaps a prostitute, 3 perhaps a lesbian. According to the article, she claimed that Warhol had ripped off her play Up Your Ass and that she had been selling copies of her radical anti-male brief, the "S.C.U.M. Manifesto," on the streets of Manhattan. My mind raced: Could it be true that finally women were rising up? Who was this Valerie Solanas and what did her act mean? It changed everything for me, and gave a focus to my mental chaos. I realized that if I spent a year or two in Cuba the moment might evaporate, or women would rise up in huge numbers in the United States and I would miss that delicious, exciting, formative time. I wanted to be a part of it; I had to be part of it. The next day, after winning the California primary election, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Winning the primary meant that he was sure to get the nomination from the Democratic Party, and there had been a celebration at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. As he was leaving through the kitchen, he was shot dead. Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian Christian immigrant, a member of the Rosicrucian sect—another lone madman, it was said—was the assassin. I thought back to only two years before when Audrey and I had formed a committee for a Robert Kennedy/William Fulbright presidential ticket. Now I felt sadness for his death, and even fear, but I no longer had illusions that his presidency would have changed anything. I blasted out of México like a rocket. I chose Boston, a city I had visited briefly the summer before. I knew very little about Boston, but I did know that the earlynineteenth-century feminist and abolitionist movements had been born and blossomed there. I decided to go to that source and unearth the past as a guide to the present. I would 4 change my dissertation topic to nineteenth-century abolitionism and feminism and live on student loans. I also knew that the largest anti-draft organization was based in Boston—the Boston Draft Resistance Group—as well as the churches' sanctuary movement for men who refused to go to war or had deserted and wanted to avoid prison, the New England Resistance. There I would seek out warrior women fed up with being the “girls who say yes to boys who say no,” in the words of the charming slogan of the draft resistance movement. I planned to form—or find and join—a female liberation movement. I would also find Valerie Solanas and defend her. I had never been so sure of anything, or of myself, or as determined. Blueberries were in season when I arrived in Boston that steamy summer, and I could eat them because they weren’t from California, where the United Farm Workers were calling for a national boycott of nearly everything raised there. Even eating had become a political act. I rented a room, and I ate blueberries and read the just-released Bolivian diary of my dead hero, Ché Guevara. And I wrote and wrote, my own life story writ large as a microcosm of U.S. history and dysfunction. I loved Boston and Cambridge, and there I entered one of the happiest and most satisfying periods of my life. Beginning in June 1968, Central Square in the Cambridgeport district of Cambridge was my neighborhood and anchor for the eighteen months I made Boston my temporary home. I lived on a street named Pleasant only two blocks from Central Square and the subway on Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave, as the locals called it, was the main thoroughfare in Cambridge, connecting the great elite universities, the Massachusetts 5 Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. That was the territory of my new life and of the small women’s group that came together. Cambridgeport was a mixed, working-class enclave in prosperous Cambridge. Irish, Puerto Rican, French Canadian, and African-American families lived in the drafty, wooden tenements that lined the narrow, leafy, cobblestone streets that were alive with children playing. I rented a room in the third-story flat of a run-down three-story building. In the flat below lived Ellen, with her husband and two daughters. Now a housewife, formerly a prostitute, Ellen would play a key role in my developing women’s liberation consciousness. When winter came, fires ignited in the wooden houses, some burning to the ground, leaving the residents homeless. Often the fires were caused by the loss of heat due to unpaid bills, which soared into the hundreds of dollars in deep winter. Freezing families would gather kindling, sometimes their own furniture, and build open fires on metal sheets for warmth and for cooking. I had not witnessed that level of poverty since childhood and it made me angry, very angry, which in turn infused my developing feminist consciousness with class-consciousness. Being among the poor and powerless in that neighborhood brought back a flood of memories of what it felt like to be on the edge, to see the pain of helplessness and hopelessness in adult eyes, and to be reduced to the simple choices of survival or death. At first, news of the Vietnam War consumed me since we had received very little information on the war while in México. One evening, a meeting at the church in Harvard Square featured an antiwar organizer who had just returned from Cleveland, where she had seen an army photographer’s slides of a massacre during the Tet Offensive in January 6 and February. A unit of the Americal Division’s 11th Light Infantry Brigade had entered the undefended village of My Lai on the Vietnamese central coast and methodically massacred hundreds of children, women, and old men. The photographer told of torture and mutilation, rape and sodomy. He described such actions as ripping fetuses out of pregnant women, cutting off breasts, testicles, ears, gouging out eyes. He described teenage American boys on a killing spree, a visitation of the ghost of Custer at the Washita, of the Sand Creek and Wounded Knee massacres. There was not a word about it in the mainstream news. (It would be over a year before the My Lai massacre became widely known, thanks to an investigation by journalist Seymour Hersh, published in the New Yorker.) Meanwhile, lame-duck president Lyndon Johnson sat cloistered in his White House, guarded by armed marines, protected from the chants outside on Pennsylvania Avenue: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” News of my mother’s death in Oklahoma arrived in a letter from my oldest brother. It had been sent to me in México, and by the time it reached me in Cambridge, she had been dead for a month. I was now freed to mourn her life of discrimination, poverty, violence, and alcohol. My first month in that small room, at a table in front of a window that overlooked leafy Pleasant Street, I wrote about my childhood of rural impoverishment, the violence of poverty, the confusion and terror, and in doing so, was overwhelmed by compassion for my mother. The writing that summer was also a continuing rant against U.S. wealth, against capitalism and landlords, against fancy ladies and bankers, against the bombing of Vietnamese farmers and the poisoning of their fields and forests, the slaughter of their farm animals. Daily talks at the kitchen table with Ellen gave me the confidence that I 7 was not mad—angry, yes, but not mad. Poverty was madness, and anger brought me back to life. I wrote to Jean-Louis almost daily, answering his long letters that protested my absence. I tried to transform him into the leader of a male feminist movement, but I didn’t succeed. He was disturbed by my admiration of Valerie Solanas. I had found her S.C.U.M. Manifesto, which had been hurried into publication as a cheap paperback by the notorious pornographer Maurice Girodias and his company, Olympia Press, with an introduction by Paul Krassner, under the title: S.C.U.M. MANIFESTO: Society for Cutting Up Men. Later, I learned from Valerie that SCUM was not an acronym and Girodias had made it up. Rather than acronym, it was a reference to rebel women. She had not been consulted about nor given permission for the publication. I wrote JeanLouis: I haven’t rejected Ché in admiring Valerie Solanas. For me, Ché will always be a saint, and I learn from him, try to be like him. Yet I know he did not mean what I have made of his message. He was dedicated to patria o muerte, and for me it’s humanidad o muerte. Ché, in using an old symbol and an inherently oppressive fixture, the nation-state, did not deal with patriarchy and how the state reproduces it, requires it . . . I think you are wrong to focus on Valerie Solanas’s 'insanity.' Perhaps you fear the consciousness in her statements. Sure she was 'crazy' to shoot Andy Warhol. The kind of oppression we experience as women does make us kind of crazy one way or another. I think compulsive shopping and plastic surgery are acts of madness . . . 8 Valerie’s is a voice in the wilderness shouting her rebellion, saying she will accept no arguments to the contrary, allow no loopholes or fancy devices that could be used to counter her argument. She is EVERYWOMAN in some basic sense. She is my mother and other broken and destroyed women, a martyr for all women everywhere. In that way she is not so different from Ché. Read her SCUM Manifesto closely. She wants to see, not a new man, but a new human being created, and now. I answered an ad for volunteer teachers in Resist, the local draft-resistance newsletter. When I arrived at the cavernous warehouse headquarters of the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG) in the Back Bay district, I found only a young couple. The woman introduced herself as Sue Katz. She was tense and tiny, her wild, reddish hair topped by a black beret with a red and gold Mao button. She fingered a thin red booklet that was somehow familiar. “What is that?” I asked. “We’re an authorized chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, Wobblies. You know about them?” Sue asked and pointed to a red and black button on the side of her beret that I hadn’t noticed before. I was stunned. The IWW. It no longer existed. My own father had told me about its death long ago. “My grandfather was a Wobbly. He named my father after the founders, Moyer and Haywood. I didn’t know it was still around,” I said. 9 “No shit. Yeah it’s still alive, hard as J. Edgar Hoover tried to destroy it,” the man said. I marveled at the fact that my grandfather had the same adversary, J. Edgar Hoover, in 1918 that my generation had a half-century later. “So the IWW’s kind of symbolic now, you mean?” I asked. “We’re getting it going again. Hey, why don’t you sign up to teach labor history?” Sue said. “No, that’s not my field,” I said. “Aren’t you a Marxist?” The man asked. “Yes, but I don’t know labor history well enough to teach it. I would like to teach women’s history from a Marxist perspective,” I said. “Look, we don’t want no chicklib here, but, sure, you can post your course,” Sue said, and lit a cigarette. (A year later, Sue would become a militant feminist.) “Can I join the IWW?” I asked. Their faces brightened and Sue said, “Sure thing, just a dollar.” I gave them a dollar and took the thin, crisp booklet—a ghost from the past. I clutched it as I walked through the Boston Commons and over the Charles River Bridge to Cambridge, reading the Preamble to the IWW Constitution that was printed inside the booklet. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes, a struggle must go on until the 10 workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. I recalled the stories my father used to tell me about my grandfather and the Wobblies. That talk had thinned in the early fifties as the new Red Scare escalated and having a commie in the family tree became dangerous again. The rage about our poverty was transformed into pride for being “real” Americans. By 1968 my father supported George Wallace for president and claimed that communists had duped his own father. He even mailed me copies of a disgusting newspaper, Common Sense, which was racist and anti-Semitic, claiming that Jews controlled communism and the banking system. It seemed to me that I was the only one in the family to carry on my grandfather’s convictions. I did end up teaching a women’s history course through BDRG. I used the opportunity mainly to present the concept of Valerie Solanas as superwoman, but also presented Simone de Beauvoir's thesis. It was there that I encountered a soul mate in Dana Densmore, a NASA computer programmer at MIT, who also volunteered at BDRG as a draft counselor. She was married to her second husband, a quiet man who was also a scientist. I had not encountered such a healthy model for a heterosexual couple before. To me, their marriage seemed more like a partnership and friendship than marriage. Dana’s mother, Donna Allen, was one of the founders of Women Strike for Peace, originally a post–World War II antinuclear lobby, now focused on ending the Vietnam War. Their powerful, brilliant, and independent mother had raised Dana and her sisters to respect themselves as women. 11 Dana had graduated from St. Johns University in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, and she considered picket lines, marches, rallies, and civil disobedience part of normal life. She had already heard a new movement term, “Women’s Liberation,” from her mother in January. I had never heard it before, and when I did, I was overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement. It was happening, women were rising up. Dana mentioned that her mother had been in New York at an organizing meeting for the Spring Mobilization Against the Vietnam War, and that another organizer, Bernardine Dohrn of Students for a Democratic Society, had uttered those two magic words. Searching further, Dana had found a Chicago newsletter, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and began corresponding with its editor, Joreen (Jo Freeman). Dana shared my enthusiasm for the SCUM Manifesto, and we discussed how we might support Valerie, perhaps by confronting the pornographer Girodias who had distorted Valerie's message. We brainstormed and decided to try to find like-minded women by running an ad in the local free weekly. **************** ANNOUNCING: Formation of the FEMALE LIBERATION FRONT FOR HUMAN LIBERATION Goals are personal-social, surely inseparable. To question: All phallic social structures in existence. The historic-psychological role of females. 12 The ability of any human to be half a person. To demand: Free abortion and birth control on request. Communal raising of children by both sexes and by people of all ages. The end of man’s exploitation of human, animal, and natural resources. For females no longer or have never been able To Breathe! (Men are invited to contribute money, materials) **************** Betsy, a white, welfare mother who was active locally in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), was the first to answer the ad, and she brought along Stella, another white, welfare mother, to the first meeting. Betsy had changed her last name to Luthuli when the African National Congress chief died in the spring of 1967. Soon after we met, she changed her name again, to Warrior, in honor of Clyde Warrior, the Ponca Indian leader from Oklahoma who co-founded the National Indian Youth Council and died of alcohol poisoning during the summer of 1968. I persuaded Ellen to attend our meetings, and Marilyn, a vibrant young intellectual, also joined the group. Maureen, who was a Harvard graduate student in biology, joined us, and soon became my roommate when we rented an apartment in the building next door to the one where I had sublet a room for the summer. 13 A poet, Gail, who was a member of the Daughters of Bilitus, soon found us. Following in the path of the Mattachine Society, which was founded by gay men in Los Angeles in 1951, lesbians had established the Daughters of Bilitus in San Francisco in 1955 to protect themselves from both general bigotry and draconian laws that forced them into closeted lives. Gail was white, but had grown up and still lived in Roxbury, Boston’s predominately African American neighborhood. This was a powerful core group. Dana and Gail had already advanced their feminist consciousness, and Betsy and Stella had been active in the National Welfare Rights Organization since it had begun a campaign in Boston the year before. Using classic civil rights, direct-action, civil disobedience tactics, NWRO organizers—a majority of them women—had changed the attitudes of social workers and broken through the bureaucracy that transformed welfare recipients into beggars and schemers. They framed human welfare as a civil right rather than a gift from the government. NWRO membership in many urban areas was 90 percent African American, but in the Boston area, the group was mixed due to the extraordinarily high percentage of poor white (mainly of Irish and French-Canadian heritage) and Puerto Rican women, and the local NWRO president was Irish-American. The analysis of welfare was the same, however: welfare was a necessity created by the unjust economic system, not the choice or fault of individual women. At our first meeting as a group, I read aloud the parts about the family in The Second Sex. I explained that I could trace my rejection of marriage in a straight line back to reading The Second Sex in the summer of 1963. I had come to believe that the family as an institution was the institutional root of women’s subjugation—women were reduced 14 to their “natural” function and thereby dehumanized. Their sole power lay in sexuality and childbearing. Reduced to those functions, they atrophied and became twisted, even became oppressors, particularly of their children. They lived through their sons, who became their fantasy lovers, and they formed daughters in their own twisted image. Dana and I also introduced the group to the SCUM Manifesto, almost as a sacred text. We laughed hilariously at Valerie’s wicked satire in passages like this: “Sex is not part of a relationship; on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time.” That sentiment in the midst of that era of sexual liberation was quite shocking. I didn’t want to deceive the women, and I told them about my radical views and that I’d decided that women’s liberation would be necessary for a revolution to occur. I told them about losing custody of Michelle for going off on a trip by myself. “Men have always gone on the road or off to sea without consequences. They are heroes, from Ulysses to Kerouac. A woman who ventures forth on a quest is considered a deserter.” I argued that the freedom of women would require a revolution and a revolution would require liberated women. The two were inseparable. That was why none of the revolutions—not the Leninist nor the Trotskyist nor the Third World liberation movements—had triumphed and created real freedom and equality. Perhaps there was some hope in China, maybe in Vietnam and Cuba, I thought, but I also believed that control of women was too much for men to give up voluntarily, even when they condemned authoritarianism and militarism as did Marx and Engels, Lenin, the Wobblies, Fanon, and Fidel. A special reserve of my anger was directed at Freud (formerly one of my heroes) for having labeled women “neurotic” when they resisted their “natural” roles. Then there was Marx, who wrote that the “wife and children are the 15 slaves of the husband . . . the first property” and told his daughter that his favorite virtue in a man was strength and in women weakness, although what he hated most in a person was servility. And Ché wrote in his guerrilla warfare manual: “The woman as a cook can greatly improve the diet and, furthermore, it is easier to keep her in these domestic tasks; one of the problems in guerrilla bands is that all works of a civilian character are scorned by those who perform them.” Several of the women at the first meeting believed that our modus operandi should focus on validating women’s experiences, to modify definitions, and to raise the status of housework, childbearing, and motherhood by demanding that women be paid for those services. I disagreed and insisted that those tasks should be validated for men’s participation and that the whole society must be organized to participate in them. To promote traditional female roles as positive would be to validate what already existed— slavery. I stressed the importance of individuality and my fear of “group-thinking.” I believed that individuality would be the source of our energy and power. I strongly believed that only when each one of us felt autonomous and powerful could we multiply that power by joining together, but that our separate selves should never be submerged, not for any cause or leader, ever. We began making plans. One woman suggested that we integrate the Boston bars that did not allow women. She said, “I can drink any man under the table.” I suggested we all read The Second Sex and discuss it for the next meeting. Marilyn told us something I was not aware of. In de Beauvoir’s new book about turning fifty, Force of Circumstance, she had written that the greatest achievement of her life was her 16 relationship with Sartre. Of course, Sartre would never say that his greatest achievement in life was his relationship with her, so I was disappointed. We tried to think of a name for our group, but were reluctant to define it at that early stage. None of us wanted the emerging movement to be called women’s liberation, however thrilled we each had been when we first heard the term. Influenced by de Beauvoir’s contention that women were created not born, that a female was born and then forced into the social role of being a woman, we insisted the movement should be called female liberation. We never did convince anyone else of this, especially not the media, so only our group was called Female Liberation, as if it were an organizational name. Later, the moniker Women's Liberation Movement, which we came to accept, also disappeared and was replaced by “feminism.” We came out of that first meeting with a sense that we could change the world if we worked at it. We decided to start the process with our own journal, which we published in early August 1968; I used the remaining balance of my student loan to pay the printer. Each of us contributed whatever we wanted and we put it all together without anyone editing. Each contributor who was able typed her own material, and I typed those who couldn't type; I also did the layout and chose the graphics. The journal had no name, no table of contents, no page numbers, and no date or price. The cover featured a drawing by one of Dana’s sisters of a nude woman entrapped by her own hair. The first journal remains a remarkable document—as fresh and angry and radical and timely in the twenty-first century as it was in 1968. Through poetry, fiction, testimony, theoretical essays, quotes, and art, every idea and issue that would emerge in the Women's Liberation Movement—and later in postmodern, feminist theory—was 17 identified, sexual roles were deconstructed, and a vision of the future without mandated gender roles was visualized. The articles raised a range of questions analyzing and condemning rape, wife-beating, sexual harassment, marriage, prostitution, pornography, advertising, the media, double standards, female genital mutilation, male domination of the radical movement, patriarchy, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and war. Taken together, they called for a total replacement of the existing system with one that would prioritize the needs of everyone in society, beginning with the needs of the most powerless, namely children, the ill and disabled, and the elderly. Ellen’s haunting poems filled the center ten pages of the eighty-page, saddlestitched booklet. Her essay—under a pseudonym—on prostitution began with the observation that the old truism that “as long as there are men, there will be prostitutes” implied that women were not inherently anxious to give away their bodies: “The statement does not say ‘As long as there are women there will be prostitutes.’” Dana’s theoretical essays included one entitled “On Celibacy.” Apparently it was far more shocking to men, and even movement women, than the most extreme pornography, as it promoted the right to abstain from sexual relations. That essay mythologized our group as having taken “vows of celibacy.” In it, Dana argued that sexual liberation had nothing to do with women’s liberation; on the contrary, it was a male strategy to maintain supremacy and to control women. “This is a call not for celibacy but for an acceptance of celibacy as an honorable alternative, one preferable to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships.” I titled my essay on the same topic “Asexuality,” and proposed: “Considering what one must go through to attain a 18 relationship of whole to whole in this society, or any other I know of, the most ‘normal’ person, the most moral, is the celibate.” Gail’s riveting poems appeared throughout the journal. Maureen wrote a piece calling on female radicals to form an autonomous Women's Liberation Movement, and Stella, in her first attempt ever to write, contributed a heart-rending essay about female powerlessness. In an effort to address the lack of African American women in our early group, I obtained permission to publish Cordelia Nikkalaos’s column from a recent issue of a civil rights publication, the Mississippi News Letter. It began, “Watch it, you guys!” and makes the point to her fellow civil rights militants who were male that “no kind of inequality works.” I used six of Jean-Louis’s collages in the journal. One of his pieces resulted in the metaphor for the dawning of feminist consciousness, “the click.” That collage features a news clipping of the back of a man’s head in which Jean-Louis had inserted a light switch set on “off.” The caption read, “click.” The journal ended with a full page of spoofs on slogans to which we all contributed, the result of brainstorming sessions where we had tried to come up with a name for our journal. In the end, we decided to use no name at all. By the time we published the second issue in early 1969, we had decided on a name: NO MORE FUN AND GAMES: A Journal of Female Liberation. I was excited about the journal, but also itching for action. I didn’t have to wait long for an opportunity. One night near midnight, I heard noises at the door and found Ellen crumpled in the hallway. She was bruised and battered, her clothes torn and muddy. She begged me not to tell her husband, who was downstairs with the children. I assumed he had beaten her up; I already had suspicions that he did so when he came home drunk. 19 Ellen had two preschool daughters, and confided to us that she had supported them by working as a “call girl” until she married her present husband. She was a fragile, quiet-spoken, blonde woman who could dress up and transform herself into a sexy bombshell—a “female impersonator,” as we called the result. I tried to calm Ellen. I ran a hot bubble bath, coaxed her into it, and massaged her neck and shoulders. She blurted out that she had been raped. “We have to report it,” I said immediately. “No cops, no way. To them women exist only to be fucked,” she shrieked and began sobbing again. “Anyway, the cops around here know I used to hustle, and I’ve just washed away the evidence.” I convinced her to file a report anyway. “I will do it for all women, to raise consciousness,” Ellen agreed. The two policemen on duty at the local precinct treated Ellen as a suspect rather than the victim. Ellen was subjected to tests, and reports were filed. We stayed cool and spent hours filling out forms. Ellen filed for legal aid and was assigned a pro bono lawyer. “I have to tell you something. I know the man who raped me. I know his name,” Ellen informed me at the end of the exhausting week. She said he was a john from the old days, an English professor who had claimed to admire the poetry he had seen in our journal and told her he could get her into the Harvard poetry workshop. He had asked her out for dinner to discuss it. Then, with a knife to her throat, he raped her on the banks of the Charles River. “Now that I’ve told you the truth, you won’t want to support me,” she said. 20 “It would be easier if he were a stranger, but at least we have a case now that we have a name. You’ll have to give the police and the lawyer his name.” The lawyer was an idealistic young man involved with Planned Parenthood, and he interested in establishing a test case based on the principle of the integrity of a woman’s body, whether raped by a husband or a date or even a prostitute raped against her will. Society had never considered rape as something that could happen to prostitutes at the hands of their customers or to wives as victims of their husbands. The trial day arrived, and the courtroom was packed with scandal seekers. The professor-defendant had hired a well-known criminal lawyer and lined up an array of character witnesses. I was Ellen’s only witness. Thankfully, the jury was half women. Our strategy was for me to appear as an expert witness to present a female liberation perspective about rape. Ellen’s lawyer put me on the stand and questioned me for an hour. I traced the history of patriarchy and woman as property. We won, and it was a sweet victory even though the penalty was light—six months in jail, suspended, and a $200 fine. Ellen was satisfied, though. During the following week, Ellen’s bruised face told the story of her punishment at home. After the trial, I took the court transcript and rewrote what I had said into my first manifesto on female liberation. I entitled the essay “Caste and Class: Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” a ten-page tract that ended: The value of a woman for a man is much greater than the value of a machine or hired person to satisfy his sexual urges and fantasies, do his housework, breed and tend his offspring. It is convenient for a man to have these satisfactions from “his woman,” but his relation to her as a person, his position of 21 being of a higher caste, is the central aspect of his power and dominance over her and why men and the society they control will do anything to maintain that dominance—it is POWER. The journal also provided opportunities for action. We emulated Valerie Solanas by hawking it on the streets. Betsy was particularly adept and fearless at that task, and she was the only one of us who would go out alone, often taking her nine-year-old daughter, Dawn, who had become a member of our group. Most of the time we worked Harvard Square, but all along Massachusetts Avenue we would approach women, men, and couples, assertively if not aggressively, engaging many in heated dialog. Women sometimes fled in horror and many men heckled us, but nothing deterred us. We favored the non-elitist method of organizing and recruiting. We sold the journal for $1 a copy and gave away more than we sold. I then came up with a solution to repay myself for the printing cost. After seeing a feature-length documentary about a female impersonator beauty contest, we persuaded the theater manager to allow our group to hold a benefit showing. We set a date, designed and copied fliers, and hit the streets with them.