by Robin Morgan
October 1968
1 In September of 1974, more than two thousand women demonstrated against the pageant, marching intrepidly in front of Convention Hall; this, according to the wire-service stories and the New York Times. The prophecy was not an empty rhetorical flourish, after all.
2 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
TAKE A MEMO, MR. SMITH
During the late sixties, when I was writing article after article for Leftist journals, it seemed I was saying the same thing in a hundred different ways. The message was earnest, desperate; a trustful and patient eagerness to convince those men that women were oppressed. Don’t you see, I said over and over, women’s liberation is a valid part of “the larger Movement,” too, just like black power and student rights and all the other acknowledged aspects of the revolution. Let us in, let us in, we cried, pounding our newly-calloused-from-karate-practice fists on the doors to the pot-smoke-filled rooms of the Left. We suffer, we are in pain, we are angry, we are ready to fight. Only let us fight with you. Let us fight together.
This article has that same intense plea not very well concealed beneath its tough approach. In it, I make an analogy we women were to rely on frequently: between the oppression and consciousness of black people and that of all women. This was done with the fragile hope that white radical men, at that point finally in support of the Black Movement, would realize that they were still making the same patronizing comments about women which they had made a few short years earlier about blacks. I was not yet ready to see that the analogy works the other way: that racism stems from sexism; that, as black feminists have pointed out, black men were “womanized” in the process of their oppression—long before women began to claim we had been “niggerized.” The model for an oppressed people, in the eyes of the oppressor, has always been his first victim: woman.
This article ends on what seems to me now a poignant note. I was still calling the men who ridiculed us, who broke up our meetings, who purged us from their groups, who snarled that we were divisive, bourgeois, selfish, dumb, and reactionary for daring to speak our own feelings—brothers. I had been in the Women’s Movement for two years, and I was still calling such men brothers.
TAKE A MEMO, MR. SMITH: Madame Nguyen Thi Binh leads the Vietnamese National Liberation Front delegation to the Paris peace negotiations; Indonesian women demonstrate to demand a legal voice in their husbands’ taking of second wives; Sweden passes a law creating enforced shorter work hours for men, providing that this extra time is spent in child-raising and household duties; Chiang Ch’ing seems to be more in evidence than Mao; the Episcopal Church considers admitting women to the priesthood; and on and on. And in the United States, the Women’s Liberation Movement is becoming more vocal, visible, and active every day.
Women’s Liberation in the United States is composed mostly of women from the larger Movement, veterans of civil-rights summers, peace demonstrations, and college sit-ins who became fed up with being handed the same old second-class status in the Movement as out of it. Women’s Liberation has sometimes been accused of more often attacking male chauvinism among Movement men than among Establishment males. But surely even a male reactionary on this issue can realize that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male “revolutionary”—supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around and absent-mindedly order his “chick” to shut up and make supper or wash his socks—he’s talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical?
In September of 1968, Women’s Liberation was ready for its first major action, zapping the Miss America Pageant at Atlantic City. Not resting on any laurels after that, Women’s Liberation gave birth to WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Aware that witches were the original guerrilla fighters against oppression, and that any woman who was intelligent, articulate, nonconformist, aggressive, or sexually liberated was usually burned at the stake, WITCH took off on, of course, Halloween. WITCH would seem to be the striking arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and as such is firing women’s imagination in totally unrelated places where covens have sprung up and witch guerrilla actions have occurred.
Meanwhile, back in the ghetto-harem of our society, all sorts of different women are digging the Women’s Movement. College women are organizing to protest patronizing dorm rules, and to demand courses in women’s history. High-school women are demanding the right to take “shop” instead of or as well as “home ec” if they choose, to wear slacks to school, to have an equal voice in high-school student politics. Pacifist women are getting weary of the delicate-smiley-flower image—Grace Paley1 was the first woman to bum a draft card—and of functioning only as “support groups” for men in the Movement. Women in The Resistance2 have formed a Women’s Liberation group; they’ve had it with typing and groundless coffee-making, and with being used as sex-object bait for GI’s. Black women don’t dig the male-supremacy trend in their struggle—black women’s liberation groups are forming out of SNCC as well as the Panthers, spurred on, one hears, by Eldridge Cleaver’s new jokes about “Pussy Power.” Welfare women are already making their voices heard loud and clear.
Like any young movement, we have our problems, and not only the usual ones, like lack of bread, like police harassment; we must also cope with the derision of our oppressors as well as their anger. Yet we know that the sexual mores of this culture dehumanize both men and women. We have energy and ideas and dedication and a double knowledge: that women alone cannot be free unless the system itself is destroyed, freeing all people. But we know, too, that no revolution can succeed unless once and for all women can call their bodies their own, unless all our minds are liberated from sexual stereotypes, unless each life is self-determining—truly, not tokenly, free. Join us, sisters!
And a word to the brothers.
You few “male radicals”: Civilize your own “communities” (other men); as blacks said to whites, rap with your brothers about the so-called petty ways they continually make women suffer. You’re beautiful, and we need you, and you need us. The revolution begins at home.
“Male liberals”: Watch that you practice what you preach about “digging Women’s Liberation.” We see through that bullshit when your Hemingway mystique of super-maleness begins to brutalize us.
And you smug “male reactionary” bigots: Dig it—women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We’re not inherently anything except human.
Take a memo, Mr. Smith: Like every other oppressed people rising up today, we’re out for our freedom—by any means necessary.
November 1968
1 One of the few public women leaders at that time in the peace movement (which was comprised in the rank and filing cabinet mostly of women), and herself a distinguished writer.
2 The Resistance was a working coalition of anti-war groups, primarily those concerned with supporting draft resisters.
THREE ARTICLES ON WITCH
WITCH was a child of New York Radical Women. After the first Miss America demonstration, NYRW meetings were attended by more women than we could handle. Not everyone could speak in one evening, thus making impossible the techniques of consciousness-raising, where the “testimony” goes around the room with each woman contributing in turn. So we decided to split up into small groups, coming together in the “umbrella group” once a month for information exchanges, business meetings, and continued communication. The splits were actually political divisions, though. Out of this mitosis came Redstockings, founded by those women who declared themselves radical feminists; a number of small, nameless groups which fell somewhere in the middle politically; and WITCH, founded by those women who were self-styled “politicos”—women’s liberationists who still strongly affirmed a Marxist analysis and a hip Left style. I was a founder of WITCH, of course, and I was proud that we were not “man-haters” like those dreadful Redstockings women. While they quietly wen
t about doing steady consciousness-raising and writing papers which were destined to become new feminist classics (“The Politics of Housework,” “Resistances to Consciousness,” “Techniques of Consciousness-Raising,” “The Personal is Political,” “The Redstockings Manifesto,” and “The Pro-Woman Line,” to name only a few1), WITCH became an action group.
All this time later, and even given all my regrets about the way we squandered WITCH, I still must admit that the group had something going for it. For one thing, its insouciance was undeniable. For another, we were on to a valid theme-identifying with the witches—although it is only now, eight years later, that women are taking up that theme with the serious study it warrants, recognizing it as a part of our entombed history, a remnant of the Old Religion which pre-dated all patriarchal faiths and which was a Goddess-worshiping, matriarchal faith. We in WITCH always meant to do the real research, to read the anthropological, religious, and mythographic studies on the subject—but we never got around to it. We were too busy doing actions. We also meant to have more consciousness-raising meetings—but we were too busy doing actions. We meant to write some papers of theory and analysis—but we were too busy doing actions.
Our frantic activity was the result of a number of goads. We were women who identified politically with the confrontative tactics of the male Left and stylistically with the clownish proto-anarchism of such groups as the Yippies. Dense as we were in our persistent identification with such disastrous models, we were also, in all fairness, newly aroused and angry about our own oppression as women—and we wanted to move. It seemed intolerable that we should sit around “just talking” when there was so much to be done. So we went out and did it.
Except that, not having raised our own consciousness very far out of our combat boots, we didn’t know what we were doing, or why. In our Halloween action for example, described in the first of the three following pieces, we emphasized the class struggle between the rich and the poor, with little mention about the class struggle between the class of men and the class of women. We demanded an audience with Satan, our superior, at the Stock Exchange—an ignorant faux pas which now makes me cringe: the members of the Old Religion never worshiped Satan. They were followers of a tripartite Goddess; it was the Christian church who invented Satan and then claimed that witches were Satanists. We had bitten the patriarchal bait on that one, and on so many others. We called the Samhain Sabbat (one of the four Cross-Quarter Days of the Wiccean lunar calendar) by its patriarchally given name—Halloween. We didn’t even know that the word witch had its roots in wicce, Anglo-Saxon for “wise one” or “wise woman.” We were plain dumb.
But we were dumb with style. The wordplays, the theater, the sheer audacity of our image caught on. WITCH covens began to spring up around us, spreading across the country. The anagram was a convenient one; originally Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, it became in other groups and at other times: Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment, Women Indentured to Traveler’s Corporate Hell (a coven who worked at the insurance company); Women Inspired to Commit Herstory; Women Intent on Toppling Consumer Holidays, and further variants. In Portland, Oregon, a WITCH group hexed Mrs. Pat Nixon when the then First Lady appeared there (as if the poor soul had any power of her own); in Washington, D.C., WITCHes had a spell-in at United Fruit Company (for oppressing South American peasants and North American secretaries); in Chicago, another coven hexed the Transit Authority. In New York, Berkeley, and Boston, WITCH groups disrupted commercial horrors such as Bridal Fairs, and college covens took to zapping those gross fraternity mixers and homecoming-queen contests.
Leftist men began to approve of us because we were getting media attention (therefore useful for bringing more women into their groups, as if the movement were a body count), and because they “dug” our style. Some other feminist groups quite understandably did not “dig” our style, and there were heated arguments at those umbrella meetings of NYRW. We in WITCH joked to conceal our discomfort, telling each other that we should rename ourselves “The Pantyhose” because we were “more together” than Redstockings.
The factionalism peaked during the Washington, D.C., counter-Inaugural demonstrations in January of 1969, described in the second article of this trio. I wrote this piece for circulation among women’s groups, with a thought to publishing it in The Guardian (a vomitously dull Leftist newspaper which everyone Took Seriously), but I never went ahead with publication. I print it here precisely because the chart of a changing consciousness, including detours, should be presented without convenient revisionism. The article is an excellent example of where we “were at,” in our language, our defensiveness against feminism, and our general zaniness. In it, I calculatedly make fun of what was a sincere tactical disagreement between the other women (over whether or not to burn voter-registration cards). I defend our rip-off of their materials. I proclaim my contempt for a feminist slogan which was effective in its very simplicity. I play the wounded innocent when it turns out the feminist women are mad at us. I try to make us seem enchantingly good, funny, militant, and lovable—while making everyone opposed to us appear dreary at best and obnoxious at worst. And I wriggle away from dealing with any of the real political differences which caused the split in the first place. Yet a confession is in order: I think I do all the above with a certain skill and wit; I still chortle with pleasure in realizing that. (This is probably why political movements distrust artists—we tend to appreciate satisfactory work even when its content is abysmally “incorrect.”)
The inauspicious scene in Washington ought to have taught us in WITCH something, but we had a way to go before we would bring ourselves up short and look at what we had been doing. In February of 1969, we organized the Bridal Fair protest—again with such catchy sloganeering and Harpo-Marxist joie de vivre that young women all over began zapping Bridal Fairs in their local communities in the WITCH manner. We were obviously doing something right—but we were doing it wrong.
The Bridal Fair protest was a new low for us in our pattern of alienating all women except young, hip, Leftist ones like ourselves. We wore black veils and sang “Here come the slaves/off to their graves” at the prospective brides. This did not win them over to the cause. Plastering stickers all around the city which read “Confront the Whore-makers at the Bridal Fair” wasn’t helpful, either—although we really meant well twice-over on that slogan: (1) we were punning on the anti-war movement’s slogan “Confront the Warmakers,” and (2) we thought it would be clear that this time we were blaming the men who forced women into the institution of marriage, not pillorying the women. We might have realized that brides-to-be don’t like being called whores. We then compounded our exercise in How Not to Stage a Demonstration by releasing live white mice inside Madison Square Garden—which of course scared and consequently humiliated the brides and their mothers, not to mention the extent to which it scared and humiliated the mice.
In fact, we did very little right at that action; serving free hot cocoa was a nice idea, and distributing “shop-lifting bags” was clever, but that just about took care of the plus side. Our leaflet was mindlessly against marriage without taking the trouble to explain why, or to differentiate between the patriarchal institution of marriage and what “marriage” as a committed bond of love might mean. The same leaflet was crystal clear, however, on what we thought was wrong with imperialism, consumerism, and capitalist corporate power. The entire action was a self-indulgent insult to the very women we claimed we wanted to reach.
After this, WITCH retrenched. We were serious about our commitment to a revolution, and we were capable of self-criticism. Besides, various individual women in our group had been having nervous breakdowns, marriage breakups, and hive breakouts—all without any support from their group sisters, because we had very little time for such “personal” things. We had been too busy doing actions. At this stage, though, we finally settled down to talking, listening, and even reading (a lot of those feminist tr
acts). The original WITCH group, our group, the “mother coven” as it came to be called, stayed together for almost another year, doing—at last—consciousness-raising.
During that year, I began putting together the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, an experience which, combined with the birth of a child and the initial “engaging of the struggle” with my husband, created a triple-play of events which would conspire to drag me, kicking and screaming all the way, closer to radical feminism.
I: WITCH HEXES WALL STREET
ON THE TRUE Underground’s Holiest Day of the Year, All Hallows’ Eve (known to mortals and Woolworth’s as Halloween), at the stroke of High Noon, a Coven of WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) emerged from the Underground Gates of the IRT at Wall Street to pit their ancient magic against the evil powers of the Financial District—the center of the Imperialist Phallic Society, the enemy of all witches, gypsies, guerrillas, and grooves.
WITCH, the child of the Women’s Liberation Movement, first surfaced aboveground (aptly enough) at the recent HUAC witch-hunt hearings, and is motivated by the awareness that witches have always fought oppression (of women, and men as well) down through the ages. A fourteenth-century Church tract refers to witches as “politically dangerous,” and it becomes more and more obvious all the time why they burned at the stake people who were joyous, creative, scientifically minded (the study of early medicine via herbs and potions) or actively rebellious (witches were the first to disseminate birth-control information, the first abortionists, the first Heads and Friendly Dealers).
So to liberate the daytime ghetto community of the Financial District, the Coven, costumed, masked, and made up as Shamans, Faerie Queens, Matriarchal Old Sorceresses, and Guerrilla Witches, danced first to the Federal Reserve Treasury Bank, led by a High Priestess bearing the papier-maché head of a pig on a golden platter, garnished with greenery plucked from the poison money trees indigenous to the area. Bearing verges, wands, and bezants, the WITCHes surrounded the statue of George Washington on the steps of the building, striking terror into the hearts of Humphrey and Nixon campaigners nearby, who castigated the women for desecrating (with WITCH stickers) the icon of the Father of our Country (not understanding that this was a necessary ritual against a symbol of patriarchal, slave-holding power). The WITCHes also cast a spell rendering the hoarded gold bricks therein valueless—except for casting through windows.
