by Honor Moore
* * *
In July of 1974, before he was engaged to Brenda and before we fought about his grandmother’s rug, my father, traveling in Venice, received a telephone call from his old friend Bob DeWitt, the bishop of Pennsylvania. Eleven women were to be “irregularly” ordained priests the next morning in Philadelphia by three retired bishops. The news reached me in Kent when, outside the market in a newspaper rack, I saw what I remember as front-page headlines of the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Hartford Courant announcing the event, and, on the front page of at least one paper, a photograph, a woman priest vested, kneeling, bishops bent over her. Shaking with excitement and barely able to hold back tears, I bought the newspapers and raced home.
Days later in the Adirondacks, my father just back from Venice, we began to talk about the ordination. I was surprised by the power of my reaction, I told him. It felt as if the earth had shifted on its axis. But he could barely listen. He was “damn mad.” With DeWitt and a few of the women who had been ordained, he told me, he had been working toward bringing the issue of women’s ordination to the floor of the General Convention of the church two years hence. Working within the legislative processes of the church, he believed, would make the acceptance of women priests easier; before breaking for the summer, the group had rejected a militant action such as this ordination. My father felt betrayed. It wasn’t ego, he said—he genuinely believed those opposed to women priests would overreact and that the conflict would ultimately set back the cause. “I cursed Bob DeWitt,” he told me later, “and called him a sonofabitch and God knows what.” His old friend said simply, “I know how you feel, Paul. We just wanted you to know.” Now, in preparation for an imminent emergency session of the House of Bishops, my father was working at damage control.
“We’re fighting two thousand years of tradition!” he argued at the supper table.
“I know that, Pop, for God’s sake!” Feminism had long since dissolved my childhood disdain for the women of the altar guild, at the submissive posture of the nuns in Jersey City. In 1971, I had been part of a service at St. Clement’s at which each woman had read, then burned a biblical or theological statement of women’s subjugation; when I saw the ordination photographs in the newspapers, my reaction had been visceral. How differently I would have seen the world if I’d grown up with women priests! These Anglican amazons were my sisters, the bishops who ordained them heroes. I remembered my mother at the dinner table in Washington: The church is just second-rate. I wondered what she would make of these women who had dared translate their anger into action. “Jesus was a revolutionary,” I argued, appropriating my father’s rhetoric. “Surely he would have been in favor of women’s ordination!”
“I have six daughters!” my father shouted back. “Of course I’m in favor of women’s ordination!”
“But these women did it without your permission!”
“The church moves slowly,” he insisted. He and others had been working “for years” on this issue.
“Oh, Pop,” I said, “what if Martin Luther King had waited?”
The next morning my father left for the emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, all 153 bishops summoned to a small meeting room in a motel at O’Hare Airport. It was the last weekend in August, the Chicago day was hot and humid, and the motel, as my father later described it, was “depressing.” The bishops were angry—some at having their vacations cut short, others dead set against women ever becoming priests. The debate was rancorous, old friends on opposite sides maintaining courtesy. There was the apostolic succession to consider! If Jesus had wanted women apostles, the twelve would not have been all male! But, my father argued, Jesus had spoken of the priesthood of all believers: one could argue, he maintained, that all worshipers are priests.
At this meeting, though, the task was not to settle the argument about women priests, but to decide whether the Philadelphia ordinations should stand and if the offending bishops should be censured. In the end, when the question was called, the rebel bishops were merely scolded, but the measure to invalidate the ordinations carried and a committee was appointed to study the situation; my father was in the minority that refused to nullify the ordination. Whatever he felt about taking such an action outside of canon law, he said later, “the Holy Spirit” had certainly been present in Philadelphia. That’s more like it, I thought to myself.
Within hours of the vote, Charles Willie, a Harvard professor of sociology and education and the highest-ranking black man in the Episcopal Church, made a public statement, drawing parallels between how the church had treated black people before the civil rights movement and what the House of Bishops had now done to women. “And I hereby resign my office as Vice-President of the House of Deputies,” he said to a bank of microphones, “and all other positions I hold in the national church.” I got a telephone call from Ms. magazine, then in its second year of publication. They planned to put the Philadelphia ordination on their December cover. Would I interview Charles Willie? My article appeared in the December 1974 issue—“When you’re fighting oppression,” Willie had told me, “the time is now.”
The first time I’d heard the phrase “women’s liberation” was in the spring of 1969, before I left Yale, and so, when I moved to New York that fall, I was in search of feminism. In the spring of 1970, I joined a consciousness-raising group which came out of the Left, and then in 1972, started the group with Radcliffe friends, actresses, filmmakers, and writers. We talked about Sylvia Plath as having broken barricades against speaking as a woman in poetry, as having paid with her life when she couldn’t change her situation. Now I was reading Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Diane Wakoski, and when I became involved with a poetry series at the old Manhattan Theatre Club on East Seventy-third Street, Sonia Sanchez and Rich were the first poets I invited to read. Downtown, women were convening readings for women poets, and at the first, at the Loeb Student Center at NYU in December 1971, I took my turn, reading my poems to a roomful of women, except for Venable. By 1974, when I was writing Mourning Pictures, I was part of a community, a cultural movement of women.
Sometime that spring, I went to a reading by Judy Grahn, a radical lesbian poet from California, at Westbeth, the artists’ residence in the Village. I had been given her first chapbook, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, by a Harvard friend, Andrew Wylie, who had a tiny bookstore on Jones Street. In person, Grahn was small and pale, dressed in tattered jeans and a leather jacket. To a hushed room of barely fifty women, she read the urgent, furious, devastating epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death,” in which the lesbian poet’s witnessing on the Bay Bridge of a late night accident in which a young white man on a motorcycle is killed by a black man driving a car becomes an opportunity for a meditation on the marginality of the lives of women, particularly the lives of lesbians. Afterward, trembling not only from the power of the poem and the reading but because of the company, I joined a group at Mother Courage, a feminist restaurant nearby. There I was introduced to Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, two young women who had resigned as junior faculty at Columbia and were assembling The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook, a sequel to their best-selling The New Woman’s Survival Catalogue, for which they had traveled the country, documenting the new world women were making—women’s centers, rape crisis centers, women’s publishing houses and music companies, bookstores and restaurants, credit unions and academic programs. A month later, they invited me to a party—the first I’d been to announced as “for women only”—to introduce the women of New York to the founders of the Woman’s Building, a cultural center for women in Los Angeles.
Alone and timid, I climbed the stairs to their Bowery loft, a harmonic rumble of women’s voices growing louder as I approached the open door. In two enormous rooms, one giving onto the next, were easily a hundred women, some of whom I’d only seen from a distance at readings or never at all: Adrienne Rich was there, the poets Audre Lorde, Robin Morgan, and
Susan Griffin, and the playwright Megan Terry, who put her arm around me and said hello with an inviting smile. The culmination of the evening was a presentation by Arlene Raven and Ruth Iskin, art historians who had started the Feminist Studio Workshop, the art school for women housed at the Woman’s Building, and by Judy Chicago, who showed slides of her work and described the process of “making art” with “a form language” integral to her identity as a woman. She had changed her surname to mark her departure from “the dominant culture,” she told us, though she remained married to her husband, also an artist, who was “very supportive.”
It was not enough, she explained, to make abstract images, as she had in a series called Reincarnation Triptych that hung on Susan and Kirsten’s walls, giant radiant pinwheel-bursts of color representing three great women—Madame de Staël, George Sand, and Virginia Woolf. The lives of these women had to be reconfigured, the women themselves “reincarnated” to take their places as avatars of the new consciousness women were now creating. Bordering the image for Virginia Woolf were the words “Virginia Woolf—first woman to forge a female form language in literature. Conscious to the point of agony, she controlled her anger, yet did not emerge undamaged from her struggle to balance the excesses of masculine culture with female values.”
What I heard that night thrilled me. I was attempting that very kind of reframing as I wrote Mourning Pictures, I thought to myself. In my play, the autobiographical character participates in the action as a daughter, but she comments on it as a woman poet, shifting the emphasis of the narrative so that the story told is a new, woman-centered version of the relationship between mother and daughter. After the party, I wrote in my journal that the evening had “made me feel that, rather than being an effluence of diseased narcissism, my poems could be meaningful to women.”
I found it reassuring that Judy Chicago was married. In 1974, in New York City, every woman my age whom I knew, whether she lived with a man or not, had either slept with a woman, was considering sleeping with a woman, or was definitely not going to sleep with a woman. All of us, in other words, had addressed the issue. It made sense: we were in consciousness-raising groups together, forming theater groups, editing magazines and newspapers, making music together, writing poems in which the newly powerful “I” was female. For some, living with men had become an impossible contradiction—sleeping with “the oppressor.” Others simply fell in love: “In those years, all the young women began to sleep together,” the novelist June Arnold, a lesbian, remarked once to me, “like puppies.” Some believed that instruments of female vanity like makeup and brassieres were marks of women’s servitude and dressed plainly, eschewing skirts, even pants cut for women. Others theatricalized their lesbianism, affecting the sapphism of Vita Sackville-West, Natalie Barney, or Romaine Brooks by wearing black velvet, high heels, long black capes, rings on every finger. I began to alter my style. I would be a sapphist in my imagination, but in life, a political and philosophical lesbian, what we called a “woman-identified woman” who continued to live with a man, Venable.
I remembered the first lesbian I ever met. I was nineteen, and she was older. She came to our table to say hello to one of the men I was with at a small bar near Boston University. As she slid in to sit with us, I took note of her self-possession, which I observed in silent fascination. Later, when she left, the man who knew her spoke of her using the word “lesbian.” This woman—I never saw her again or learned her name—was not what I then expected a lesbian to be: a woman who looked like a man. She was elegant, her gestures were casual, and she seemed more powerful than any of us, as she spoke of the theater, of Bertolt Brecht and the alienation effect, laughing, her eyes green, or maybe brown, her lashes dark and long. I remember she was wearing forest green, almost black. She could not have been older than twenty-two or -three, brushing a lock of dark opulent hair from an olive cheek, throwing back her big head and laughing, contralto, lush, her conversation a combination of warmth and sophistication. In her presence, I felt callow. She was a woman; I was a girl.
I met Sonia, the first lesbian I really knew, when I was at drama school. We had been friends for months when one afternoon she called and asked if she could come over, as if she were making an unusual request, which was strange since we often talked on the phone or met casually for lunch or supper or drinks after class. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I just need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Of course,” I said, and when she buzzed from the lobby, which was also unusual, I said, “Come up. Come up!” meaning to be reassuring. When she arrived, she wouldn’t sit down or take off her butter yellow car coat, and she didn’t look at me as she began to speak.
“I never want to see you again,” she announced. She was standing in the middle of the room. I was still sitting.
“What’s wrong?”
“I find you very attractive and I never want to see you again,” she repeated. My eyes filled as I tried to take in what she was telling me. I’d had no idea.
“Sit down, Sonia.”
“I don’t want to sit down,” she said firmly. “You’re too good. I won’t do this to you.” And then she lifted her hand in a half salute, smiled with half her thin mouth, turned, and left.
Grasping to make sense of something I was too naïve to understand, I realized that our conversations had never been the usual girl talk about boys but discussion about ideas, or about the play she was directing that I was producing. She had been an unusual friend because of her seriousness, and now I had lost her because of something she felt about me. At first I felt sorry for her, sorry that she had this—what? affliction? deformity?—but also I was self-conscious. What was it about me that she had seen? And angry. What she had said seemed a strange way of expressing love, or attraction. She hadn’t even given me a chance to respond, though I had no idea what I would have said if she had.
The next day I sought out a friend of hers. Had I done something wrong? I asked him. Of course not, he said, and he told me to respect what Sonia had said, and so I took her at her word, avoided her at school, tore up without reading them the love poems she left in my mailbox. Hadn’t she said she didn’t want to “do this” to me? From a distance, I watched as she talked to others in the greenroom, scrutinizing her to detect evidence of this new identity she’d presented. There was something unforgiving in how her bangs were cut, in how she moved her hands, an awkwardness I had first ascribed to intelligence but which now, with the cruelty of fear, I associated with her desire for her own sex, for me. She was nothing like the gay men I had come to know and love at the drama school. Nor like the woman in the restaurant booth that night in Boston, the woman with the beautiful big head she threw back, laughing. Or the girls in my teenage bed for whom I’d stretched my body until it curved like a bone, rubbing against them until the night tilted and banged, altering the texture of the darkness.
Now, in 1974, I found myself in a dream realm of women, which I imagined superimposed on, or interspersed with, real-life Manhattan, a gossamer Isle of Lesbos whose residents recognized each other in code, in gestures that had one meaning in the real life, another in this domain I now found myself part of. Now I understood Sonia’s awkwardness and regretted my ignorant response. What she had discovered about herself in a hidden world now seemed the revelation of many of the women I was coming to know. We found each other everywhere, introduced ourselves to each other with solemn respect. Our friendships were alliances, our encounters significant. We were changing the world. Toward the end of the decade, glamorous French feminists began to cross the Atlantic. Having read Monique Wittig’s apocalyptic Les Guérillères, I watched with fascination as, wearing a brown slouchy hat, a creamy shirt open at the neck, and riding boots, Wittig mounted a platform at a conference to give a paper. Now established poets like June Jordan and Carolyn Kizer were joining our NYU women’s readings. I would read “My Mother’s
Moustache,” wearing black, and Fran Winant would read her droll, marvelous epics, “Christopher Street Liberation Day, June 28, 1970” and “Dyke Jacket,” and when the glamorous Rita Mae Brown, then of the Washington, D.C., collective the Furies, declaimed a poem that culminated with the line, “an army of lovers shall not fail,” we ululated like the women in The Battle of Algiers, rocking the room with applause.
It worried me that there didn’t seem a place in those readings for love poems to Venable, but in any case, I couldn’t seem to write one. Instead I wrote a poem about an encounter with a sexist sales clerk called “Conversation in the Eighth Street Bookstore,” and a poem that began, “This is the poem to say Write Poems Women, / because I want to read them,” which, in order to dodge accusations of propagandizing, I titled “Polemic #1.” Was it that my relationship with Venable lacked the passion these young women celebrated in love poems to each other, or was it that I was falling out of love? When I tried to talk about my lack of sexual excitement, Venable, with the wisdom of a man in his forties, argued that intensity came and went. But I was restless. What were we together for? Venable would not consider marriage or having a child with me—his daughter was close to my age. I considered marriage a patriarchal institution oppressive to women, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to have a baby, but I felt his refusal to consider either constituted a limitation on his feeling for me, which I increasingly thought had more to do with his need for security than with love. “We have beautiful places to live and work,” he would say. “What more do you want?”
In my journal, I wrote of frustration about my writing, but not of the terror of being alone, which I tried to deny. One night when Venable was late coming home, I stood at the window watching for him; after an hour I was so tense I could hardly breathe. What was I afraid of? I was horrified at the power of this terror and embarrassed by my weeping when he returned. Neither his reassurances nor my tears got at the root of my anxiety. We began to have fights about the financial imbalance between us. I was too young and too privileged to understand the impact of his continuing inability to get screenwriting work, and I found his rages at those he considered more successful than he was overwhelming. In the fall of 1976, we took a trip to Russia, and there was something about the landscape that “opened me up,” as I put it then. I began to have a new ambition which I called “the romance of alone.” If I was to live a writer’s life, the life of an artist, I couldn’t be standing at the window weeping when my lover was an hour late. The poets I admired, like Adrienne Rich and Judy Grahn, seemed to face down their fear. What kind of poems would I write if I were “alone.” I was accepted at the MacDowell Colony for a month; the week I left, I noted in my journal my fear of upsetting the relationship with Venable, which had reached, with the successful publication of his biography of James Dean, a new calm.
