long, highly psychedelic years. There I fought for on-campus
contraception - a no-no when colleges and universities functioned in loco parentis - and legal abortion. I fought against the Vietnam War. I tried to open up an antiwar counseling
center to keep the rural-poor men in the towns around the
college from signing up to be soldiers. Most of these were white
men, and Vietnam was the equivalent of welfare for them. But
the burning issue was boys in rooms. Bennington, an all-girls'
school with a few male students in dance and drama, had
parietal hours: from 2 a. m. to 6 a. m. the houses in which the
students lived were girls only. One could have sex with another
girl, and many of us did, myself certainly included. But the
male lovers had to disappear: be driven out like beasts into the
cold mountain night, hide behind trees during the hour of the
wolf, and reemerge after dawn. The elimination of parietal
hours was a huge issue, in some ways as big as the war. In
colleges across the country girls were required to be in their
gender-segregated dormitories by 10. Girls who went to Bennington in the main valued personal freedom; at least this girl
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Heartbreak
did. As one watched male faculty sneak in and out of student
bedrooms, one could think about lies, lies, lies. As one saw the
pregnancies that led to il egal abortions from these liaisons,
one could think about the secret but not subtle cruelty of ful y
adult men to young women. Everyone knew the Bennington
guard who was deaf, and one prayed he would be on the 2-
to-6 shift so one could have sex with a man one’s own age
without facing suspension or expulsion. When a student would
go with a boy to a motel, she could expect a cal at the motel
from a particular administrator, a lesbian in hiding who tried
to defend law and order. It was law and order versus personal freedom, and I was on the side of personal freedom.
The college had a new president, Edward J. Bloustein, a
constitutional lawyer, or so he said. The U. S. Constitution is
amazingly malleable. Regardless, he was a law-and-order guy,
and he didn’t belong at Bennington. You might say it was him
or me. He wanted a more conventional Bennington with a more
conventional student body and a fully conventional liberal-
arts curriculum. He wanted to expand the student body, which
would make classes bigger. He wanted al the hippies gone
and al the druggies gone and al the lesbian lovers gone. He
was for abstinence at a time when virginity before marriage
was highly prized; he was against abortion and once told me
in a confrontation we had in his of ice that Jewish girls tried to
get pregnant - thus the problem with pregnancy on campus.
That was a new one. He considered the faculty blameless.
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Strategy
Feeling under siege by this gray, gray man, students elected
me to the Judicial Commit ee of the college. It was clear that
he was looking for a scapegoat, someone to expel for defying
parietal hours especially but also for smoking dope and
having girl-girl sex. The students knew I could stand up to
him, and I could. The scapegoat he wanted to punish was my
best friend, and he just fucking was not going to get the
chance to do it.
She had been seen kissing another girl on the steps inside
the house in which she lived. I’ve rarely met a Bennington
woman from that time who does not think that she herself
was the girl being kissed. Someone reported my friend for
shooting up heroin in the living room. I recently asked her if
she had, and she said no. In the thirty-five years that I've known
her, I've never known her to lie - which was the problem back
then. The college president confronted her on marijuana use,
and she told him the truth - that she only had a joint or two
on her right then. Knowing her, I’d bet she offered to share.
The house where I lived, Franklin House, was a hotbed of
treason, so first we had her move there. She could not quite
grasp the notion of turning down music while people were
sleeping, and in our house that was a crime. One could shoot up
heroin or kiss girls, but one could not be a nuisance. Nevertheless, everyone knew a lot was at stake and so the music blared. To protect the personal freedom of each person living
in Franklin we seceded from the school. We declared ourselves
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Heartbreak
entirely independent and we voted down parietal hours. So
stringy, hairy boys were in the bathrooms at 4 a. m., as one of
the few female professors noted in outrage at one of the many
public meetings. If they weren’t bothering anyone, it was no
crime. If they were, it could be bright and sunny and midafternoon and it was a crime. We elected an empress, an oracle, and other high of icials. (I was the oracle, though I
preferred the tide “seer. ”) This was a pleasant anarchy. No one
had to live there who didn’t want to, but my best friend was
not going to be homeless because some rat as was upset by
some deep kissing.
The secession heightened the conflict between students and
the administration. It was just another version of adults lying,
having a pretense of order, as the foxes on the faculty sneaked
into the henhouse with impunity. They impregnated with
impunity. They paid for criminal abortions with impunity.
The apocalypse was coming. Each day the class warfare
between students on the one side and faculty and administration on the other intensified. The lying, cheating faculty began to piss a lot of us of . They always presented themselves as being
on our side against the administration because this was how
they got laid, but slowly the truth emerged - they wanted the
appearance of professorship during the day and randy acces to
the students at night, between 2 and 6 being hours that carried
a lot of traf ic. As the tension grew, my best friend was closer
and closer to being tied down on the altar and split in half.
8 6
Strategy
I worked out a plan. The school was governed by a constitution. The Judicial Commit ee had the right to expel students.
My plan was to cal a school meeting, ask everyone to submit
a signed piece of paper saying that she had broken the parietal
hours, and then expel everyone, as we had the right to do. Out
of a student body of a few hundred students, only about six
refused. The Judicial Commit ee expelled everyone else. In
effect the school ceased to exist.
It’s always the law-and-order guys who turn to tyranny
when they’ve been legally beat. In this case Bloustein exercised
raw power. He waited until graduation before reacting; he
sent a let er to al the expelled students' parents that said they
could not come back to school unless they signed a loyalty
oath to obey the school’s rules. I didn’t go back to school. I
would never sign any such oath. But I thought his tactic was
disgusting: it’s bad to break the spirit of the young, and that’s
what he did. In order to go back to school, students ha
d to
betray themselves and each other, and most did. I learned
never to ignore the reality of power pure and simple. I also
learned that one could get a bunch of people to do something
brave or new or rebellious, but if it didn’t come from their
deepest hearts they could not maintain the honor of their
commitment. I learned that one does not overwhelm people
by persuading them to do something basically antagonistic
to their own sense of self; nor can rhetoric create in people a
sustained determination to win. I thought Bloustein did
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something evil by making students sign that oath; how dare
he? But he dared, they did, and I left sickened.
8 8
Suf er the Lit le
Children
In Amsterdam I knew a hippie man whose children from an
early mar iage were coming to stay with him. They were thirteen and eleven, I think. The older girl had been incested by her stepfather. This came into the open because the older girl
tried to kill herself. This she did at least in part valiantly
because she saw the stepfather beginning to make moves on
the younger girl in exactly the same way he had gradually
forced himself on her. The stepfather had started to wash and
shower with the younger girl. The mother, in despair, wrote
the hippie man, who had abandoned al of them, for help. She
wanted to mend the relationship with the second husband
while keeping her children safe. The hippie man made clear
to those of us who knew him that he considered his older
daughter responsible for the sex; you know how girls flirt and
al that. His woman friend made clear to him that he was
wrong and also that she was not going to take care of the children. She wouldn’t have to, he said; he would be the nurturer.
When the girls arrived in Amsterdam, one recently raped, the
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Heartbreak
other exceptionally nervous and upset by temperament or
contagion or molestation, the hippie man forgot his vows of
responsibility, as he had always forgotten al the vows he had
ever made, and let al the work, emotional and physical, devolve
on his woman friend. She wasn’t having any and simply
refused to take care of them. Eventually she left.
One night I got a cal from her: the hippie man had given
each kid 100 guilders, set them loose, and told them to take
care of themselves. He just could not be with them without
fucking them, he told her (and them). In a noble and compassionate alternative gesture, he put them out on the streets. His woman friend made clear to me that this was a mess she was
not going to clean up. I asked where they were.
They had taken shelter in the frame of an abandoned building, squatters without a room that had walls. They lived up toward the wooden frame for the ceiling. Their light came from
burning candles. I found them and took them home with me,
although “home” would be stretching it a bit. At that moment
I lived in an emptied apartment, the one I had lived in with
my husband, a batterer. I had married him after I left Bennington for the second time (the first was Crete, the second Amsterdam). After I had played hide-and-seek with the brute
for a number of months, he decided I could live in the apartment he had cleaned out. By then I was grateful even if it meant that he knew where I was. A woman’s life is ful of
such trade-offs. So when the girls came with me, it wasn’t to
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Suf er the Lit le Children
safety or luxury or even just enough. The apartment, however,
did have walls, and one does learn to be grateful.
The older girl thought that she was probably pregnant. Her
father, the hippie man, did light shows, many for rock bands;
he had the habit of sending musicians into the older girl’s bed
to have sex with her; the younger daughter slept next to the
older girl, both on a mattress on the floor. They were wonderful and delightful girls, scared to death; each put up the best front she could: I'm not afraid, I don’t care, none of it hurts me.
The first order of business, after get ing them down from
the wood rafters il uminated by the burning candles, was getting the older one a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion, I said. I’m not proud now of
using my authority that way, but she was a child, a real child;
anyway, for bet er or worse, I would have forced one on her.
In Amsterdam the procedure was not so clandestine nor so
stigmatized. It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant.
One day she was suddenly very happy. One of the adult
rockers sent into her bed by her father was going to Spain and
he wanted to take her. This was proof that he loved her. I knew
from the hippie father that he had paid the rocker to take the
girl. Finally I was the adult and someone else was the child.
I told her. I told her carefully and slowly and with love but
I told her the truth, al of it, about the rot en father and the
rot en rocker. Her mother now wanted her and her sister
back. I sent them back. Nothing would ever be simple for me
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Heartbreak
again. A strain of melancholy entered my life; it was the
fusion of responsibility with loss in a world of bruised and
bullied strangers.
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Theory
I went to Amsterdam to interview the Provos - not the blood-
soaked Irish Provos but the hashish-soaked Dutch ones. They
served as the prototype for the U. S. yippies, though their
theory was more sophisticated; as one said to me, “Make an
action that puts crowds of ordinary people in direct conflict
with the police, then disappear. This will undermine police
authority and politicize those they beat up. ” The man I eventually married said that he envisaged social change as circles on a canvas; the idea was to destabilize the circles by adding
ones that didn’t fit - the canvas would inevitably lose its
integrity and some circles would fal off, a paradigm for social
chaos that would topple social hierarchies.
What I found infinitely more valuable, however, were three
books: Sexual Politics by Kate Millet ; The Dialectic of Sex by
Shulamith Firestone; and Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology
edited by Robin Morgan. These were the classic, basic texts of
radical feminism; what happened when women moved to the
left of the left. I was hardheaded though; I defended Norman
Mailer even though his attacks on Mil et were philistine; I
stil liked D. H. Lawrence, though now I find him unbearable
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Heartbreak
to read, such a prissy and intolerant hee-haw; and I again
learned the power of listening, this time because of someone
who listened to me.
Her name was Dr. Frankel-Teitz. I had found out that when
you told people your husband was beating you, they turned
their backs on you. Mostly they blamed you. They said it
wouldn’t be happening if you didn’t want it and like it. You
could be, as I was, carrying al you could hold in an effort to
escape or you could be, as I was, badly hurt and bleeding, and
they stil told you that you wanted it. Yo
u could be running
away fast and furious, but it was still your will, not his, that
controlled the scenario of violence: you liked it. You could ask
for help and they’d deny you help and it was still your fault
and you liked it. I’d like to wipe out every person on earth
who ever said that to or about an abused woman.
I had a lot of physical problems from having been beaten
so much and from the tough months of running and hiding,
including terrible open sores on my breasts from where he
burned me with a cigarette. The sores would open up without
warning like stigmata and my breasts would bleed. Finally
women helping me found me a doctor. “Al the lesbians go to
her, ” they said, and in those days that was a damned good
recommendation. I went to her but was determined not to say
I had been beaten or I was running; I couldn’t bear one more
time of being told it was my fault. Stil , I said it; it fel out of
me when she saw the open sores. “That’s hor ible, ” she said -
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Theory
about the beatings, not the sores. I'l never forget it. “That’s
horrible. ” Was she on my side; did she believe me; was it
horrible? “No one’s ever said that, ” I told her. No one had.
A few years later, back in the United States, I sent Dr.
Frankel-Teitz a copy of Woman Hating and a let er thanking
her for her help and kindness. She replied with a fairly cranky
letter saying that she didn’t see what the big deal was; she had
only said and done the obvious. The obvious had included
get ing me medicine I couldn’t afford. I thought that she was
the most remarkable person I had ever met. “That’s hor ible. ”
Can saving someone really be that simple? “That’s hor ible. ”
Horrible, that’s hor ible. What does it take? What’s so hard
about it? How can the women who don’t say those words live
with themselves? How can the women who do say those
words now, thirty years later, worry more about how they
dress and which parties they go to? In between the early days
The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant Page 8
