Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  When you read a novel, view a painting or listen to a symphony, you bring all your powers to the experience. Why futz around with somebody to interpret it for you? When I write a book review I try to be very careful and not interpret the book but rather place it in a literary context. I realize most book reviewers are journalists, not novelists. Their function is commercial, fundamentally; buy the book or don’t buy the book.

  The desire for direct experience is part of what shook the Catholic Church. When the Bible was printed on the Gutenberg press, that most revolutionary moment, mass communication was around the corner. You no longer needed a priest to intone the liturgy in Latin, you could read it yourself in the Vulgate (your language). No wonder the Protestant Reformation came after the spread of literacy.

  The arts are the same. You don’t need an intermediary. You need training, you need to know history and other works of art. You don’t need anyone else to do it for you.

  In some ways the explosions of the late sixties and early seventies are similar. A large number of American youth, thanks to the availability of higher education, wanted to participate in government. The doors were locked.

  If we hadn’t protested about the Vietnam War, I think we would have protested about something else.

  We were doing exactly what we had been taught to do: think for ourselves and exercise citizenship. When we were pushed aside, the eruptions occurred.

  The events around the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 need not have happened. I’m glad they did. They forced us to see how ossified and divided the entire process of selecting a candidate had become.

  The Republican convention in 1972, although less violent, was equally instructive. The mere fact that we were outside and Nixon was inside presented us with a clear picture of what we had become: a nation divided, a nation of insiders versus outsiders.

  My involvement grew from Dad’s reading me the opposing editorials when I was little. I witnessed my parents as active citizens. Aunt Mimi, too, worked for her party. It wasn’t anything you thought about or expected credit for. You just did it.

  “You have a duty to act and no right to expect approval,” Mother used to tell me.

  She might also have added, “You have no right to expect understanding.”

  The Student Homophile League, my first foray into politics at a student level, subsumed by the Columbia riots, tossed me into a larger arena.

  That women were used as cheap labor, messengers and coffee makers, as well as sex partners, could not have been more clear or more painful. As the quote goes, “I want to make policy, not coffee.”

  Whether the leader was Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton or someone else, the reality for the women was pretty much the same as it was for the Democratic and Republican women in the traditional parties. The difference was our men were much younger and dressed down, an affectation only a rich kid would find cool.

  Most of us women had read enough history to know how Lenin, Mao and Castro sold out women. We didn’t even have the chance to get sold out. The men were so ridiculing or hostile to our suggestion that we share this political burden together that even a fake gloss of equality was out of the question.

  Women bolted from the New Left. I thought of it as Left Out.

  While the black movement kept up a front of unity, we knew the struggle was hot there, too, and in many ways it was far more personal and damaging, since the men would argue that for a woman to think of herself was to abandon her black brother. I have never understood why the argument doesn’t work in reverse.

  The white boys, initially, were too cocky to think our defection had hurt them. The black movement, far cannier on this question, tried manfully, and I mean manfully, not to let a hint of feminism leak in or out of the tent.

  What happened once the women evacuated was that the New Left disintegrated. It didn’t happen in a day or even a year, but the loss of that many people, that much energy, hurt them.

  The New Left died the day Nixon resigned the presidency. To all apparent purposes, they had won. In fact, they lost. Shorn of numbers and weakened by internal strife (boys don’t learn how to negotiate until it’s too late, it would appear), they couldn’t capitalize on Nixon’s exit. They never took their place at the table. Only a handful ever were elected to public office.

  The crux is that while everyone celebrated that the system worked—a president had resigned, and the transfer of power had been smooth—the New Left should have mounted a massive attack on that very system. The system didn’t work. The system was corrupt.

  Instead, everyone fell for the line that Nixon was corrupt. He was no more corrupt than some who had gone before him and a good deal less corrupt than others.

  Nixon became the scapegoat for every jerk who wanted to save his congressional seat, for every newspaper editorialist who wanted to celebrate the cleansing power of journalism in driving out a president.

  While the nation patted itself on the back, nothing in our political structure substantially changed.

  But we changed. The women changed. Something good was coming out of this Feydeau farce. We no longer believed that government was good. We believed we could broker with government, even a corrupt one, but that five-year period from 1968 to 1973 changed women forever. Even the backlash against feminism was determined during those five years.

  I wrote for underground newspapers. No pay. I sent copies of my articles to bigger underground newspapers, hoping to get published in them. In this way I had made a name for myself by age twenty-four. It couldn’t be done today. It’s much harder for a young writer to find an audience.

  I attended a very early NOW meeting in late 1968 or early ’69. Ti-Grace Atkinson spoke. Betty Friedan was much in evidence, as was Flo Kennedy, the lawyer with the sharp tongue and no-bullshit approach. Flo wore white Courrèges boots. I can’t think of her without thinking of those boots. I never figured out how she kept them so clean in New York City.

  Being the youngest person by at least ten years, I kept quiet and listened. Perhaps fifty or sixty women attended. Most of them were professional women wearing pretty Emilio Pucci dresses. They knew their careers were stalled for no other reason than that they were women. Of course, they also went home at night and cleaned house, washed laundry, organized social calendars and took care of the kids. No wonder they were angry.

  The ten-year age gap between Betty’s earliest foot soldiers and me loomed large. These women had bought the myth of fulfillment through others. In their thirties they had discovered it didn’t quite work that way.

  I had never believed those fairy tales. Juts never once hinted that a man would ride up on a white horse and take care of me forever. She declared I’d have to take care of a man and that men were boys grown large. This was not an appetizing prospect for one as ambitious as myself.

  Some of my generation believed marriage would be heaven. Others didn’t. I couldn’t imagine the women I’d worked with in the antiwar movement, or the beginning creators of a more radical feminism, believing a husband would cure all and bring home the bacon, too.

  What happened to Betty’s generation, as well as to thousands of years’ worth of women before her, was that men didn’t keep their end of the bargain. Men left.

  Why was everyone surprised? Did they really believe the bogus Victorian ideal of a cozy family, a haven from the world?

  America contains strange contradictions. One is that we worship the Declaration of Independence but blanch at the thought of certain Americans being independent. Another is that we pride ourselves on being a democracy but we create few safe public places where people can practice the mixing that is so important to democracy. Europe abounds in beautiful public squares where people promenade, eat, talk politics and flirt. By contrast, the American, hermetically sealed in her/his car, drives home. We get our knowledge of each other through television. Our architecture and city planning divide people rather than bring them together.

  This
isn’t to say that other countries don’t contain contradictions, too. I’ve mentioned but two of ours. Still, our odd separation by income, race and gender makes us ignorant of one another.

  The act of women gathering in one room to discuss being women in a political context was exciting. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had started the ball rolling in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, but six wars diverted its momentum. The Depression didn’t much help either.

  The hypocrisy of the Vietnam War helped us to see other hypocrisies. Then again, I know of no war started by a woman unless you count the Trojan War, and Helen may have gotten a bum rap.

  Not everyone in that room knew their history but everyone in that room knew they were getting the shaft.

  Betty Friedan, forty-seven then, couldn’t contain herself. She glories in intellectual battles and once that mouth starts running it’s hard to turn it off.

  As I was young, poor and southern, I held little appeal for her. Once I started working on NOW’s newsletter with Dolores Alexander, the first professional executive director of NOW’s national organization, I was marginally interesting.

  I have often wondered if Betty Friedan and Yasir Arafat are the same person. After all, have you ever seen them together?

  Imperious, not fond of give-and-take, she considered NOW her baby. Given the smashing success of The Feminine Mystique, she felt she could lord it over the rest of us.

  The media attention she’d received had given her valuable experience. She understood how reporters framed questions to make you look idiotic or good. She knew short answers were better than long ones but she never could give a short answer. She had a lot to offer everyone. She offered it nonstop.

  Flo Kennedy, a gentler soul despite her rapier wit, understood the nuances of political argument and media attention every bit as well as Betty did, but Flo could tolerate dissent. Even better, Flo could learn from it. In the early days of the second wave of the women’s movement, Flo learned faster than anyone. She mastered sound bites before anyone called them that. She hit home and she hit hard.

  Intrinsically democratic, Flo went out of her way to hear other points of view. As the only African-American in our group, she could have succumbed to being “professionally black.” She never did. She never let anyone reduce her to another kind of stereotype, the glorious black sister who surmounts all obstacles, knows all things. Flo was and remains a complex human being who never, not even once, lost sight of the big issues.

  She’d drive Betty crazy since Betty wanted blind obedience, no matter how many times she invoked the words “democratic process.” But Betty couldn’t do without her. Flo had legal knowledge and Flo made Betty look golden on the race issue.

  In Betty’s defense, she hadn’t an ounce of racism in her, but Flo made NOW appear more ecumenical than it was. Apart from Flo and me, everyone was white, well educated and middle-class, and there’s nothing wrong with that so long as you acknowledge it. NOW pretended to represent all women. Still, this was the beginning of things, and a bit of overstatement isn’t the worst of sins.

  By this time Ivy Bottini, a mother from Malvern, Long Island, had discovered NOW. She and Dolores Alexander represented a far less rigid type of feminism. Up until then, the show had been a three-way game of kickball between Betty, Ti-Grace and Flo.

  Betty was enamored of the media, most especially herself being interviewed. While she created a compelling portrait of her generation for women of her generation, she mistakenly thought this illumination would arouse them from their torpor. When this did not immediately transpire she cast her glance toward the legislative process, a drain if ever there was one.

  Ti-Grace Atkinson, on the other hand, possessed a much broader intellectual view of women’s political involvement. She knew her history, she knew her political theory. While not averse to action, she wanted an intellectual understanding first. As time went on this program became grander and more airy. She was younger than Betty and a step closer to my generation.

  Their clash was inevitable and both wanted the blessing of Flo Kennedy, who was far too smart to get sucked into a triangle. She remained her own woman, which is to say she was more practical than either Betty or Ti-Grace; furthermore her knowledge of the law made Flo especially strong. She believed we could use the law itself to force open doors. Not that she was opposed to an intellectual understanding of oppression, and not that she was opposed to contacting the media or to generating legislation, but in the beginning her focus was more on the law.

  Ti-Grace, being southern, could respond to Flo better than Betty could. Betty was like most Yankee liberals; in the presence of a person of color they flutter with guilt or bogus admiration. Suddenly they understand your suffering. Not only do they want to share it, they want to vamp it. There must have been times when Flo felt like the movement poster child. Fortunately, she could see the humor in it. Neither Betty nor Ti-Grace is particularly strong in the sense-of-humor department.

  As nearly everyone was a liberal Democrat, weaned on the New Deal, there was no leavening point of view. They believed government could redress wrongs. I thought government interference did more harm than good regardless of the issue. I mistrusted their agricultural policies as much as their foreign policies. But I kept my mouth shut. No one wanted to hear what I had to say.

  Jerry, now working for DuPont, was in New York often. When I tried to discuss the issues of female equality with him, he demonstrated the point by cutting me off.

  Jerry’s line, close to Samuel Johnson’s, was that women didn’t need to be equal, they were superior. Patriarchy was revenge for that superiority. Men had to keep women in line.

  “The cream rises to the top. You don’t have to worry,” he’d tell me.

  Jerry betrayed no sense of community. His view was that if he took care of himself, he had fulfilled his obligation. Everyone else could damn well take care of themselves. I got mine, you get yours.

  In the last few years Jerry had become a cognizant schizophrenic in that he was straight as a stick at work and gay as soon as he left it. He thought he could get away with it. Everyone thinks that when they’re young. What he didn’t realize is that you pay for that kind of compartmentalization. In the long run you are a house divided and, as proclaimed in the Gospel according to St. Mark over two thousand years ago, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

  He’d hear none of it. We fought constantly.

  He continued to stay with me often, thrilled that my friend Ed Slough had moved to Chicago. The two men, birthdays one day apart, couldn’t have been more different.

  Ed enjoyed hearing about the political battles and the issues of women’s rights found a resonance in him.

  Jerry was becoming a corporate man. Ed stayed his own man.

  And I was very much my own woman, which made me an equal-opportunity offender.

  Betty, disenchanted with my speaking up at meetings, started to maneuver me out. Subtle at first, she dropped that pose when I raised the specter of lesbianism at Helen Leeds’s apartment during one meeting in 1969.

  No longer able to endure the constant bitching about men, I piped up, “I’m tired of hearing everyone moan about men. Say something good about women. I’ll say something good. I love them. I’m a lesbian.”

  They just about tore their Pucci dresses jamming the door to get out. Betty approached apoplexy. It wasn’t long before I was out on my ass, but I had the pleasure of sneaking an article into the NOW newsletter on why I was hitting the bricks.

  I was no worse off than before. Exciting as these new ideas were, they didn’t put a penny in my pocket. Poverty teaches you many things, not the least of which is that it stinks.

  I took to calling NOW by a new name: NOW WHAT? I also warned Ivy Bottini and the other lesbians that they would be purged. Depend on it. They didn’t believe me. Within six months they were erased from the books.

  Betty furiously accused me of harming NOW. This pressure to shut up and pretend to b
e straight followed me wherever I tried to work on feminist issues. Betty, at least, was straightforward about it once she knew she had won the battle.

  She won the battle but she lost the war. She didn’t know it yet.

  The bad thing about my NOW mess was that I was isolated. I could live with that, but it made political work difficult.

  And I knew I was right. If straight women treated gay women the way men treated women, why should we work with them?

  I was young. I enjoyed being right far too much.

  If nothing else, the NOW debacle proved to those women party to it that I had a realistic grasp of politics and power whatever the arena. I earned a grudging respect when the other lesbians were purged. No longer did they dismiss my analysis of a situation out of hand. But since they were all in the closet at that time, they didn’t help me either.

  Baby Jesus loved me, and I had the police horses to visit. I wrote constantly and worked at whatever jobs I could find. I wasn’t heartbroken but I was bloodied. I was hungry a lot, too.

  I visited Aqueduct and wished I could find work with the horses. I rejoiced in hard physical labor.

  I couldn’t stay away from the fight. For anyone reading this who didn’t participate in those political events, it must seem strange that we would sacrifice financial gain, career and comfort for an idea. Today we live in cynical times. The energy, the desire and the excitement drew me back. The closest comparison I can make is the raw electricity backstage before the curtain goes up.

  The curtain was about to be raised for me.

  45

  Enter, Stage Left

  I couldn’t vote in New York until 1968. I registered as an independent. Mother and Aunt Mimi both growled at me.

  “You can’t vote in primaries,” Mother complained.

  “Waste.” Aunt Mimi kept it simple for a change.