by Robin Morgan
Garson’s reaction to the “sexual electricity” that can make political meetings where women are present “unproductive” is a symptom of his being unable to see the person for the woman. And his description of the Movement “sexual code of freedom” (whatever the hell that is) I deplore for different reasons than he does. For one thing, it doesn’t exist—for women. Sexual freedom still operates on a double standard among radicals as everywhere else. For another thing, sex is not at the heart of women’s liberation (unless you’re a male liberal who still sees women in terms only of their genitals). The same issues are at stake here that are moving all oppressed people to rebel—we will not be dehumanized any longer!
And a new “revolutionary” society that carries with it contaminating stereotypes about more than half the human beings alive today is doomed, brother, doomed.
October 1968
DEAR LIBERATION:
DESPITE THE trepidation felt (so I understand) by certain fair-minded male editors of Liberation who wished to afford me the chance of replying to a letter attacking my article on the women’s movement, but who were afraid I’d “savage this man in true Amazonian fashion”—despite this reaction, which in itself is instructive, I prefer to draw attention to the ironies implicit in reading “blacks” for “women” in his statement, “In my opinion, women are a lower form of life that has not yet evolved to the human level.” I doubt that even Liberation’s fair-minded white male editors would ask any black leader to answer such a statement, so rephrased. Such a denial of my humanity makes any attempt to “be reasonable,” or indeed reply at all, unnecessary.
Actually, what is less simple and more insidious than this blatantly bigoted letter is one published last month in Liberation (November 1968) by Allen Ginsberg—a brother who, one might think, should know better. It was a gentle, loving missive which degraded women far more than any statement calling us “a lower form of life.” Allen, dear Allen, would never say that, and he’s too well-read to quote imaginary biological facts which every finding of modern science refutes. Yet he proposed busing hundreds (or better yet, thousands) of “calm girls” to Fort Dix and other military installations, to talk with the soldiers (not about politics, God forbid), to sing and look pleasant and give the boys a good time and not be hostile—all this as the “best strategy” for “transforming” the boys in uniform. Strategy it may be, and even a shrewd one, but at the cost of again presenting women as sexual bait, albeit in a subtle new “hip” disguise. It is interesting, too, how uninvolved and unempathetic Ginsberg allows himself to remain, as a declared homosexual, to the suffering of another oppressed people.
Look, Virginia, look. See the stereotype live. Color the A scarlet for Revolution. See how girls are calm, passive, unpolitical bait-objects to lure unsuspecting males in ways unavailable to other males who wish to manipulate both groups. See how the women are shamed by this misuse of their own political convictions. See how the soldiers are taken in by the ploy and then resent it. This destructive attitude-evinced by the leading gentle soul of our day—is precisely what I am fighting against. Ah, give me the equivalent of a Southern redneck like your other correspondent any time, rather than such a Northern liberal; with the former at least I know where I stand.
In any event, I propose a dialogue-duel between the two—Allen’s weapons being bells, flowers, candles, and a loaded hookah, and his twin adversary fighting with a volume of the Nazi Party’s theories on evolution. The two deserve each other. Please do not misunderstand the suggestion—it is hardly because I wish to return to the days of gentlemen fighting over ladies. It is rather that I think both parties might benefit from such an exchange, and besides, it really is their problem, just as racism is something whites, not blacks, have to “work through.” And although it’s a confrontation I personally would love to witness, nevertheless we in the struggle for the liberation of women—and men—have more important things to do with our time.
December 1968
1 Playwright; author of MacBird, The Co-op, and All the Live-Long Day.
HOW TO FREAK OUT THE POPE
When this piece was written, the Supreme Court decision on abortion and the liberalizing of abortion statutes in many states (including New York) seemed a far-off dream. I was doing secret abortion referrals, as were many other women in and out of the Women’s Movement.
The reference in this article to some women beginning to withdraw their support of Bill Baird is an understated forecast of what was to come. Baird turned out to be one of the more male-supremacist men around, despite his years of having fought for legalized abortion and contraceptives. (Men frequently support these issues in the hope that abortion reform and more easily available birth control will make women “come across” better and more often—a very different reason from that of women’s support in these areas, obviously.) Whatever Baird’s reasons had been, he came to feel martyred. He tried to crash various all-women conferences, and when he was turned away, he denounced the women therein as “ungrateful.” He thought of himself, it was said, as the leader of Women’s Liberation—a concept which not surprisingly offended many of us. We had been working on these issues, after all, and our bodies were the ones at stake. Yet Baird must have fallen into the trap which had closed around so many white radicals during the civil-rights movement in the early sixties: the arrogance of expecting oppressed people you claim to support to feel gratitude that you are doing only what you should have been doing all along, given your position of relative power and any sense of decency.1
I, in my chronic confusion, was at least clear about being for outright repeal of all abortion laws, not their reformation. That was one of the few things I was clear about. In other respects, I compartmentalized, carefully refusing to make the connections which would have raised that specter of genuinely feminist politics.
Thus I could, in this article, speak reverently of the Catonsville Nine (Catholic pacifist anti-war activists) and conveniently ignore the fact that no major Catholic Leftist—male or female, priest, nun, or lay person—had taken a public stand differing with their church on the issues of abortion or even contraception. On “politics” they were radicals, but on Faith and Morals they were Catholics. Unfortunately the church feels that a woman should be the repository of Faith and the carrier of Morals, as if these were a kind of gene, like that for hemophilia. We do not qualify—once more—as “political.” Simone de Beauvoir’s bon mot, that the church has always reserved its uncompromising concern for humanity to life in the fetal form, is still true. The Catonsville Nine, one might say, had an uncompromising concern for human life everywhere except in the female form.
Still another pitiable example of my unconnected insights is obvious in my blaming Ethel Kennedy for having so many children—simply because she’s wealthy. Labor contractions are labor contractions, and morning sickness is morning sickness, no matter how much money you have. Furthermore, had I stopped to think for a moment, I might at least have wondered whether there wasn’t a wee possibility of family pressure on this woman to further extend the line of succession in a political dynasty. I hadn’t even got to the point of affirming that if she was my “class” enemy, she was my “caste” sister, as a woman. I was too busy praising the male-Left-approved model of Madame Binh. Consciousness dawns slowly.
Legislative change approaches even more slowly. The Supreme Court decision and the abortion reforms that now exist in the United States came in late and remain insecure. Friends-of-the-Fetus types all over the country have been mobilizing day and night to roll back state reforms and to get a national referendum that would overthrow the Court’s decision. (Right-to-Lifers are my special favorites in their revealing inconsistency: in between mobilizations against abortion, they frequently demonstrate in favor of greater military spending and the revival of capital punishment.) We can’t afford to sit back and think of this issue as settled. It will be settled when no abortion laws at all exist on the books (where they have about as much place as tonsi
llectomy laws). Most of all, it will be settled when inexpensive, simple, safe contraception is available everywhere in forms which won’t give a woman blood clots, weight gain or loss, cancer, or a baby (such reliable contraception thus making abortion itself, always less desirable, also less necessary). It will be settled when we at last have self-determination over our own bodies.
DURING THE WEEK of November 11, 1968, the Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States wrestled with the Coil and the Loop and came up with a “Pastoral Letter” on the issue of birth control—a document so diplomatically evasive and theologically Machiavellian that it is worthy of the Borgia popes (who were also against birth control, albeit for rakishly different reasons). Nevertheless, the present pope, not one to have his miter pulled over his eyes, may just declare even this double-talk document invalid, adhering rigidly to a policy created by celibate septuagenarians like himself: a policy powerful enough to influence world population growth to the crisis point we now face—not in the distant future, but tomorrow—with a world famine now a ghastly probability which will make Biafra seem commonplace. How difficult it is to relate this attitude to that of the Catonsville Nine and their commitment to the preservation of human life!
Boston, Massachusetts, famous for Crispus Attucks and notorious for the Kennedys, is a heavily Catholic city. Massachusetts, in fact, has the alarming distinction of being somewhere to the Right of the Catholic Church on the issue of birth control. For example, in that state it is illegal to disseminate any information about any kind of birth control: the church itself breaks the law, since the Catholic Information Center displays books on the rhythm method (the scientific name for people who practice this form of contraception is “parents”). Forget about the pill, the diaphragm, IUDs, etc.—even foam can be purchased only by prescription from a regular pharmacy, and only married women can get such a prescription. So reads the law, which then adds the final touch: it is illegal to inform a woman that she can go to a doctor to get the prescription. Again, we have good old American race and class distinction—the wealthy know about the doctor anyway, and can afford not to have children they don’t want (or, à la Ethel Kennedy, to have those they do). The poor, however, who don’t know where to go or how to obtain relief—from dropping a child every year, from an incredibly high infant mortality rate (in the United States), from more dull-eyed, swollen-bellied hungry babies—for such people birth-control information is verboten.
The related issues of birth control and abortion have been of obvious major concern to the Women’s Liberation Movement. In our society men legislate what women may do with our own bodies. Ten thousand women die each year from illegal abortions in the United States. Each death is an execution by the State.
Protesting this bondage, more than one hundred women held a demonstration in Boston on October 18. Their specific reason for being there was to support Bill Baird of Parents’ Aid Society on the anniversary of his original conviction for (1) having given a young, unmarried woman a can of foam, and (2) having publicly displayed a contraceptive device (the Pill). (Baird has already been convicted in the lower courts, and has now appealed to the State Supreme Court.)
The demonstrators, some of whom were from Women’s Liberation and from National Organization for Women in New York, some from Mothers for Adequate Welfare, and some unaffiliated women from the Boston area, gathered at the Boston University Student Union and marched up Commonwealth Avenue to the State House, joined by considerable numbers of young women from junior colleges along the route. On reaching Governor Volpe’s offices, the women picketed and held up cans of foam, a symbolic gesture identical to that for which Baird had been convicted. Women in the watching crowd eagerly snatched up leaflets, and when the foam was distributed, there was almost a crush as desperate women grabbed for a can and scurried away with their booty hidden under their coats. Yet the police averted their eyes; no one was hassled or busted.2
On November 4, a follow-up demonstration was staged at the courthouse where everyone thought Baird’s appeal would be taking place. (The case was postponed at the last minute.) This second group of women (who earlier that day had attended and supported the MIT sanctuary for a draft refuser), picketed, sang reworded nursery rhymes, and leafleted campuses as well as the streets.
Both seemed rather humble demonstrations: no surges, no guerrilla theater, no mace, no arrests. But one must remember that this is Boston, where to be a premenopausal woman at all is to invite suspicion, and where to whisper anything about sex is to acknowledge being a commie pinko pervert.
There were some women in the Women’s Movement, nevertheless, who while sympathizing with Baird and his stand felt that the period for functioning as another “support group” was past. They said it was time to break the conditioning of “letting a man do it,” and urged women to challenge these depraved laws on their own. In fact, the best way to “support” anyone is to take up the issue yourself, especially if it is your own to begin with.
Out of this thinking come plans for workshops in ghetto areas by the October 17th Group3 (a “cell” of women who recently split from the more conservative NOW), the blueprint being penetration into areas where women’s oppression is multifold. Black, brown, Spanish-speaking, spied on by the (perhaps reluctant) welfare worker and kept in ignorance of her rights to her own body, the woman in the ghetto has always been lowest on the totem pole—her man was allowed his concept of machismo, often at the cost of her health or even life. And now there’s yet another turn of the screw: the feeling among (mostly male) militant blacks that birth control aimed at black communities is a form of attempted genocide. While it is imperative to understand the partial truth inherent in this accusation, it is even more imperative to reach our sisters whose bodies are being destroyed by that eighth child, and whose minds and souls are barred by such sexual stereotyping from participation in their own lives, let alone in the revolutionary restructuring of our whole society. Many women’s groups are already at work disseminating birth-control and abortion information, and WITCH has been investigating a challenge through Abortion Ships—small, well-equipped, professionally staffed boats to sail just outside “legal waters” and perform abortions in a clean, competent manner for about twenty-five dollars. (If there can be floating gambling parties for high society just outside the twelve-mile limit, well?)
It’s too late, Pope Paul. Over half the couples who seek help from Planned Parenthood are Roman Catholics. Many of your own nuns and priests have rejected your fallibility, choosing instead to follow the figure of a revolutionary agitator named Christ. Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Luxemburg, Harriet Tubman, and many, many others right up to Madame Nguyen Thi Binh—they all have something to do with it, and they’re bringing down a male-dominated system of oppression, rapacity, and egotism—crashing down right about your ears.
January 1969
1 The New York Post, May 5, 1976, reported that Baird recently said he resented being told by women’s groups to get out of their movement. “Since when did it become their movement?” said Baird as quoted by the Post, which further claimed he added the warning that this may be his last year fighting for the people’s (sic) right to abortion; he may go into ecology crusading, the article concluded.
2 The foam fuss is pathetic. Foam is almost as ineffective as toothpaste.
3 Later to become The Feminists, an important New York group which made interesting contributions to feminist theory.
THE MEDIA AND THE MAN
This article was written for the Op-Ed page (Opposite-the-Editorial page) of the New York Times, where it appeared in December of 1970. Despite promises to the contrary, the editor of the Op-Ed page at that time—a male—made certain cuts which were politically expedient. This was done without my permission, and in addition to other cuts I had agreed on because of space limitations. The version included here is my original one.1
My attack on the Equal Rights Amendment in this piece was part of a general opposit
ion I took at that time to the ERA—out of my leftover Leftism. My criticism was unfair and willfully misrepresentative of the proposed Amendment. To reply to myself, then: (1) One of the aims of ERA supporters is to get protective labor legislation extended to cover men, too—so that it will not be thrown out for anyone. (2) The ERA would not necessarily make it more difficult for women to get alimony: it could hardly be more difficult than it already is. In half of all the cases where the wife is awarded alimony the husband stops payments about two years later. The woman usually does not have the time, money, or energy to take him back to court repeatedly, so she lets it slide, having already got herself a (rotten) job to bring her income up to subsistence level. (3) The ERA might have made women eligible for the draft (there was some disagreement among lawyers and legislators about this), but it would have been for noncombatant service in any case. The question is now academic, of course, since the draft itself has been abolished for everybody.
I support the ERA today, although as a radical feminist I don’t believe it is The Answer, and I wish the document were stronger and more inclusive. This is doubtless quixotic of me, since the Amendment even as it stands is having a difficult time of it passing some state legislatures. The Founding Fathers did not view women as whole human beings, and their male descendants in Congress and in Statehouses two hundred years later seem to be wooden-headed chips off the same old block.
