Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  The way the old Buckingham discipline was supposed to work was that I should have registered Democrat and Julia Ellen should have registered Republican, so Aunt Mimi and I would work together and Mom would work with her niece. In this way no one became overly enchanted with party ideology and one branch of the family wouldn’t be opposed to the other.

  As I’ve already mentioned, the entire point of this system was that the family in each generation should be able to work with whoever was in power, whether Whigs or Tories, Democrats or Republicans. Each age group would be involved so we could speak to our peers. The survival of the family motivated the process. The underpinning of the arrangement was a healthy mistrust of public political pronouncements.

  So great was the competition between the sisters that Mother’s attachment to the Republican Party became genuine just as did Aunt Mimi’s to the Democratic Party. This allowed them new fields to fight over and the reliability of a fresh battle every four years.

  Mother, outraged that I had denied her a crony in rounding up votes, wouldn’t write to me for a few months. How dare I turn my back on the Republican Party? And Julia Ellen was registered as a Democrat. If Sis could keep her daughter in the fold, then so could Juts.

  I’d tease her and say no true southerner could register Republican, and she’d say that she had always been a maverick. True enough.

  However, she had difficulty accepting that I, too, was a maverick.

  I had the disconcerting habit of thinking for myself, a quality that endeared me to no one. The emerging feminist movement asked for conformity just as did the Republican Party of the time. Their prevailing agenda was that all women were sisters, we all worked together, we were all straight and we could change the world for the better.

  The economic competition between classes was swept under the rug, as was anything that jarred this smiling image of the true feminist.

  Betty Friedan’s version maintained an ascendancy thanks to the publicity she had received for her book six years earlier. The underbelly of the movement was the women who left the antiwar movement, most of them ten to twenty years younger than Betty. Due to youth, lack of contacts, lack of reserve funds, those women and their ideas did not surface until a few years later.

  As it turned out, this was a good thing.

  Thanks to Marx, Darwin and Frazer, the big three of nineteenth-century thinking, personality in history was pushed into the shadows of study. The Germans and Italians in the 1930s shuddered in a convulsion of great-man worship, giving the democratic school more reason to shy away from the study of personality’s effect on history. The French fell prey to the great-man idea during the time of Napoleon, too. It seems to go in cycles.

  The cheapest way this tension is expressed is: Do the times make the man or does the man make the times?

  Substitute woman.

  I don’t know. But I do know that an individual’s temperament and character affect people, programs, results.

  Betty’s personality was and remains domineering. Her brilliance deluded her into thinking she was always right.

  Ivy Bottini’s sweet temperament prevented her from believing that people who were nice to her face would stab her in the back.

  Ti-Grace’s heavy reliance on her intellectual gifts, as well as on her willowy southern figure, her extreme femininity, eventually rendered her ineffective. All of her charm and physical attractiveness, so potent with men, fell flat with women.

  Flo Kennedy, the most realistic of the earliest leaders, survived as a political player until the vicissitudes of old age somewhat slowed her down. I say “somewhat” because she’s in her eighties and has a cable TV show, The Flo Kennedy Show.

  Those ladies represented the aboveground feminists in the late sixties and early seventies. The media liked them insofar as they were presentable, conservative in dress and speech. They conformed to their generation’s notions of femininity. Femininity and masculinity are social constructs. Female and male are biological. We don’t have to learn to be men or women but we do have to learn to be ladies and gentlemen.

  The next generation, not yet known to the public, contained Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, “Martha Shelley” (I never knew her real name), Barbara Kaminsky, Charlotte Bunch, Sally Miller Gearhart and myself.

  I was the least of these. My New Left credentials were shaky. My civil rights credentials were better, but since these women had emerged from the New Left they cared little for a white southerner’s troubles in the South with the exception of Sally Gearhart. They were white, middle- to upper-middle-class, articulate, angry, attractive, bursting with the energy of youth.

  Once eighty-sixed from NOW, I attended Redstockings meetings, a New Left small group much given to ideological harangues, where I met some of these women as well as Susan Brownmiller, who went on to write Against Our Will, a book about rape as relevant today as the day she wrote it. Susan was not by temperament an activist. She was the classic observer.

  The other women had marched and been galvanized by the Vietnam War. They hated Nixon, hated the government as it then stood, and believed the government was willfully lying to the people. They were right.

  My involvement was less ideological. I hated the war because I didn’t know why it was being fought and I didn’t want Wade shot to shit in a rice paddy. Nor did I want Jerry drafted, although with his chemical expertise he appeared safe for the rime. The government determined they needed him here.

  Being a country girl, my passions hardly meshed with their passions. I understood them. I had to in order to survive.

  Apart from the usual Marxist dogma—not that everyone was a Marxist—they read R. D. Laing, Noam Chomsky, Herman Hesse, Frantz Fanon. They smacked of the classroom and too many debates at hip bars.

  To the best of my knowledge not one had worked with her hands. No one, save myself, had been raised on a farm. No one, except Sally Gearhart, then living in San Francisco, was from the South.

  After digesting the required texts of the New Left, they finally got around to reading the works of the women responsible for the first wave of feminism. No one will accuse Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton of being literary wonders but they wrote clearly enough. Simone de Beauvoir was dragged into the mix. When French existentialism first appeared in Boston Harbor, it should have been dumped into the water just as we once dumped British tea. Although infected with this theatrical ennui, so inappropriate for an American, Beauvoir could write. The Second Sex is worth reading.

  I dutifully read all the above but I branched out to study the lives of Victoria Claffin Woodhull and Tennessee Claffin, those wild sisters who upset every applecart. They felt more familiar and I’m attracted to people who do as opposed to talk.

  While I had little in common with these young women, I liked most of them. I enjoyed listening to their debates for about half an hour, and then the unreality of it wore me down.

  I believe an ounce of work is worth a pound of theory.

  Back then it was mostly theory since no one wanted to risk anything until the ideology was absolutely in place. While a plan of action must be based on some undergirding of thought, isn’t it better to base ideas on experience instead of vice versa? There were times when I felt like a medieval student listening to professors argue about how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin.

  What motivated them was different from what motivated me. These women wanted to be right. They wanted to be morally unimpeachable. And underneath it all they wanted to be loved. They didn’t see themselves as competing with the Jerry Rubins of this world for influence; they wanted to share.

  I wanted power. I didn’t care if I was loved. I would prefer to be morally unimpeachable, but human beings, myself included, rarely come unsullied. Life leaves its marks on you.

  My urgings to build bridges to working-class women were politely listened to and immediately disregarded. I thought we’d create far more credibility by building day-care centers, establishing food distribution
centers (trying to dispense with the middleman) and conducting voter registration drives than by presenting flawlessly argued position papers.

  I was regarded as a redneck although a surprisingly intelligent one since I could follow their thoughts and read without moving my lips.

  They even laughed when I accused them of having subpoena envy. You weren’t anybody if you hadn’t been subpoenaed to appear in court. The heroes for them were the Chicago Seven. My heroes were Harriet Tubman, Hannibal and Robert E. Lee, people who risked everything for beliefs much deeper than politics.

  Anyone who disagreed with doctrine was called a fascist, a covert sexist or, my favorite, a running dog of capitalism. This latter phrase was a favorite of the Socialist Workers Party especially, although that group couldn’t crack the feminist movement. Thank God the girls were too smart to let those leeches in.

  Everyone said the Redstockings had no money. They had enough for dope and stereos. This isn’t to say that every young woman was rolling her own, puffing away, but the acceptance of marijuana was part of the rebellion.

  Marijuana was supposedly a liberating weed. I don’t know since, as I’ve said before, I’m not atrracted to alcohol or drugs. They don’t feel good in my system, so why bother? Most of my generation, male or female, was puffing at something.

  No matter how you look at it, I didn’t belong, although the Redstockings were polite even when I raised the issue of lesbianism as a legitimate oppression. They took it in stride. They had no intention of considering the reality of a gay woman’s life but at least they didn’t ask me to leave. My being drummed out of NOW gave me a certain cachet. But cachet doesn’t yield results.

  I was going to pull together gay women. This would be a neat trick since, as far as I knew, it had never been done before in the context of mass organizing in all of Western history. There were a few groups from the fifties. Daughters of Bilitis, cumbersomely named after the Pierre Louys poem, and the Mattachine Society for the men. Those groups might as well have come from the Paleolithic Age. They had served a useful purpose for those involved, especially giving one another emotional support, but they were not much use to us now.

  No one had ever directly appealed to gay women. I knew better than to appeal to gay men. I saw how quickly the Student Homophile League at Columbia had cascaded into cruising.

  I don’t care who sleeps with whom or how many whoms, but a political purpose is just that. The boys were lightweights. At that time they didn’t truly understand their own oppression. They just didn’t want to get busted in tearooms. This changed, thank God, but it took years.

  In terms of political understanding, the gay women were and remain ahead of the men. The men have been better able to organize via the Democratic Party because they have so much more discretionary income. If you doubt that women are not being paid equal wages for equal work, don’t listen to me, get the figures from the Department of Labor. Better yet, ask your friends.

  I started walking from bar to bar. Since I prefer rising early in the morning, this was hard on me; the bars don’t begin to hop until ten, sometimes eleven. I left leaflets everywhere. I asked Redstockings to refer people to me should they know of anyone. I put up signs in the student union at NYU. Forget Columbia. It lay in tatters.

  Thirty women came to the first meeting, held at my house. I had to find another place. The Lutheran church on Christopher Street just off Seventh Avenue let me use a room once, as did NYU. Judson Memorial helped and Washington Square Church also allowed me a room once. I was running out of spaces.

  One man told me that if I stopped canvassing the bars (I was urging people not to drink) he thought he could help me out. There was an old-fashioned firehouse for sale south of Houston Street.

  I knew I’d been hurting business in the bars just a tad. The bars then were owned by that well-known society of Italian men who swear their organization doesn’t exist. These men also would find you a prostitute, purvey drugs, loan you money at high rates and sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, should you admire it.

  He thought he could cut me a deal with that firehouse if I’d stop hitting the bars and especially if I would stop warning that alcohol and drug addiction rates were higher among gay people than among straight people.

  As much as I understand suffering, I don’t understand numbing your nerve endings. You can’t fight when you’re dulled.

  I declined this possibility without rancor. I could have used his protection but the association would do more harm than good.

  A week later I left the Sea Colony, where I had handed out mimeographed sheets concerning the next meeting, which would be in a church in Chelsea. I heard a crack. A bullet hit a brick in front of me to my left. The brick dust flew out like paprika. That was it. No other shots.

  I ran around the corner, flattened against a building in the dark and waited. No footsteps. No slow creep of a car. I was safe. I’d been warned.

  Shortly thereafter the firehouse was taken over by the Gay Liberation Front, a men’s group which had a few women members. Those women soon came over to us, not because the firehouse wasn’t a wonderful place, it was, but because men cared nothing for their issues, telling them so loudly and often.

  Lois Hart led the women over. Dead now, she was in her middle thirties then, a woman with light, bright eyes. Her approach to life was through the prism of psychology. We couldn’t have been more polarized.

  Since Betty Friedan had dubbed us “the lavender menace,” we took the name. Lois was a painter by profession and contributed a great deal to the group even though I sometimes could have crowned her. The consciousness-raising sessions alone were sheer torture. We’d sit around in a circle and everyone had to pull from the depths of their liver what they felt on a given topic. The topic could be your mother or Richard Nixon.

  I thought I would die.

  I used to write Mother about these groups and Mom would write back, “Join the Republican Party. Then you’ll get something done.”

  I’d write back, “Mom, the Republican Party isn’t going to take in a lesbian.”

  She’d airily reply, “You’ll win them over. You’re too smart to keep down, Big Brains.”

  She’d dropped calling me “the Ill” and had come up with “Big Brains,” although her favorite still was “Buzzer.”

  I often wonder what would have happened if I’d followed my mother’s advice, because if I have nothing else to offer, I do have energy and a strong back.

  But it was becoming harder and harder to find any good or honor in the current Nixon administration. The lies were so palpable you could taste them. Meanwhile more and more Americans were shipping out to Vietnam.

  Although oil and water, Lois and I worked together fitfully. The best job we did together was attending the Second Congress to Unite Women, in May 1970, to which we were pointedly not invited.

  We printed “Lavender Menace” on lavender T-shirts. Walking quietly down the aisles, about twenty of us took over the congress and patiently, without theatrics, informed the hordes of straight women why it was in their best interest to accommodate all women, even us.

  Our position paper, “The Women-Identified Women,” hit this congress like a bombshell. Seven of us worked on it.

  The message of this paper was that women needed to identify with women, not with men. Sounds simple enough, but from the time we are born, man is the measure of all things. Women pull away from other women, giving men and male institutions their best energy. The result is that our issues die on the table. As Alice says in Alice in Wonderland, “The rule is, jam tomorrow, and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

  This congress was being covered by Marlene Sanders for ABC. The congress included a symbolic session with women cutting off their hair onstage. I thought that was silly but it had a powerful resonance for many of the women there.

  Mother screamed with laughter when I told her. She understood why long, flowing hair was a symbol, but Mother was never one for symbols. You want to win, you
do two things: find a raw nerve and put a match to it, then get out the votes. The old girl knew her stuff.

  A lot of the film footage disappeared from the congress. I was always credited or blamed for this act. I’ll never tell.

  What I will tell is this. Marlene Sanders was and is one of the best reporters in the business. Her rise to the top was anything but easy and as she aged she was yanked from in front of the cameras. No one yanked Walter Cronkite. Realizing that too much of the reporting on feminism was being done by men, she actually understood the issues.

  However sympathetic Marlene may have been, the selection of images would have been made by her boss. Then, as now, ratings count, not truth. I had no doubt that television news producers would have selected either the most frivolous or the most inflammatory images available.

  Remember the march on the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in 1968? The media portrayed those women as bra burners. The hype stuck. I’ve got news for you. Not one woman took off her bra and not one bra was burned at that march.

  This complete misunderstanding of our intentions by the media nearly derailed the entire women’s movement. The organizers of the Second Congress, who chose not to invite lesbians (unless they were in the closet), were dumb enough to invite the media.

  The reason we showed up in lavender T-shirts was to let them register, visually, who we were and what they had to lose by not inviting us, because we were presentable, dedicated and ready to work hard for women’s issues.

  How can you freely exchange ideas, argue differences, when a camera is filming away?

  The film never made it to the studio. If nothing else, this theft gave more women time to realize the media had to be handled carefully by people who knew what they were doing.

  As to how Marlene Sanders felt, she must have been devastated.

  That congress shot me up and out as though from a cannon. Women knew who I was. My deeds flashed across the country to other women. Whether they scorned or admired me, people began to realize I had a few things to offer. Those who loathed my ideas began working overtime to trivialize me.