A more whimsical Nina Simone crooned the parodic folksong “Go Limp,” a mother–daughter dialogue warning against the sexual exploitation of young women in the civil rights movement, but performed with teasing innuendos and encouragements of audience participation. In an adaptation of lyrics by Alex Comfort, the mother cautions her daughter against marching with the NAACP, “For they’ll rock you and roll you / and shove you into bed.” But the daughter will defend her virginity by arming herself with a “brick in [her] handbag / And barbed wire in [her] underwear.” To the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and interspersed with the audience singing “Too roo la, too roo li ay,” the stanzas recount the daughter meeting a young man at a march. “And before she had time / To remember her brick . . .”—Simone pauses here long enough for the expected rhyme to elicit laughs before she delivers, “They were holding a sit-down / On a nearby hay rick.”73
In some of the recordings of “Go Limp,” Simone inserts a stanza that speaks to her ongoing alienation from the repertoire of pop music she was marketing. “If I have a great concert,” she warbles, “Maybe I won’t have to sing those folk songs again.” However, this folk parody then goes on to deliver a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the injunction “go perfectly limp and be carried away” that was used to encourage nonviolence upon arrest at protests. When the young man suggests a kiss, the daughter “remembered her brief / And did not resist.” Her carried-away character concludes the song with reassurances to the mother: “No need for distress / For the young man has left me / His name and address.” If they win their struggle for equality, her baby will not have to march “Like his da-da and me.”
While in “Mississippi Goddam” Nina Simone questioned nonviolence in the face of mounting Black anger against racial injustice, in “Go Limp” she queries the usefulness of passive resistance in the relationship between the sexes. For all of its joviality, “Go Limp” targets the masculinist bias of the Black power movement that Angela Davis called the “unfortunate syndrome among some Black male activists . . . to confuse their political activity with an assertion of their maleness.”74 Though Simone counted Stokely Carmichael a friend, “Go Limp” anticipates and critiques his infamous comment that “the position of women in SNCC is prone.”75
One of the most haunting songs that Simone herself composed broaches the difficult subject of color prejudice within the African American community. In it, she examines the fetishizing of light, nearly “white” skin. First recorded in 1965, “Four Women” offers the monologues of four very different women: each character describes her skin tone, hair texture, and body (in that order), all of which have overdetermined their collective fates.76 Although it was banned from some radio stations for being disrespectful, “Four Women” captures a self-alienation that Simone also addressed in the song “Images”: “She does not know her beauty . . . She thinks her brown body has no glory.”77
With black skin, woolly hair, and a back strong enough to take repeated pain, the first persona of “Four Women” declares, “My name is Aunt Sarah.” In an interview, Nina Simone pictured Aunt Sarah as elderly and exhausted from overwork, living in Harlem, but talking in a Southern dialect. Her name derives from “ ‘Auntie,’ like the whites used to call the mammies to suckle their babies.”78 With yellow skin and long hair, the second character belongs to two worlds, since her rich, white father raped her mother, and she concludes, “My name is Saffronia.” Simone described Saffronia as one of those “yellow bitches who think they’re better,” but then added, “It’s bad enough to be born black in America, but to be burdened down with the problems within it is too much.” With tan skin, fine hair, inviting hips, and a mouth like wine, the third speaker declares herself a “little girl” whom anyone “who got enough money” can buy, announcing, “My name is Sweet Thang.” Simone’s comments gloss over the situation of the prostitute, only commenting that she’s “fine” with herself; “she don’t give a damn.”
At this point there is a pause in “Four Women” and what Simone calls “a big rumble” of magnificent arpeggios before the emergence of the fiercest figure. With brown skin and a tough manner, the last woman, who would “kill the first mother I see,” has led a rough life and feels “bitter these days because my parents were slaves”: “My name is”—and she pauses—“Peaches.” The name, belted only once, enacts what Simone calls one of her “razor cuts”: “at the end, I cut you, I make you think and it’s immediate.” Peaches reminded Nina Simone of “Stokely Carmichael”; she is a fierce woman who has “gone to Africa, she’s got her ass together,” and “she probably was the sweetest of all.”
“When any black woman hears that song,” Simone remarked, “she either starts crying or she wants to go out and kill somebody.” Simone’s longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, considered Peaches “part of the persona that Nina became. You did not want to mess with her—she pulled out a knife in a second, she didn’t take any of the shit that the other three did or play the white folks’ games that the others did.”79 But, of course, it is possible to view Simone as a composite, an actress capable of identifying with four stereotypes foisted on women not born into white privilege: the mammy or domestic, the tragic mulatto, the Jezebel or whore, the tough bitch. The sadness underlying the piece resides in part in the formal soliloquies: there is no possibility of a conversation between these women.
Nina Simone does not comment on the single line that is repeated in every stanza without any variation, right before the declaration of each name: “What do they call me?” The issue of what “they call me” goes back to “Mississippi Goddam”: “You’d stop calling me Sister Sadie.” It suggests that the language inflicted on Black women comes from alien forces. Are the names of Simone’s women all wrong? What sorts of names are Aunt Sarah and Sweet Thang? Do the names of these women really define their true selves?
“Four Women” appeared four years after the publication of her friend James Baldwin’s best-selling collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961). The characters in Simone’s song struggle to establish an identity: “Black women didn’t know what the hell they wanted because they were defined by things they didn’t control, and until they had the confidence to define themselves they’d be stuck in the same mess forever—that was the point the song made,” Simone wrote in I Put a Spell on You.80 Before the term black feminism was bandied about, Nina Simone was expressing its insights.
Yet despite her creative success, Nina Simone’s sense of being coerced mounted. In 1967 she recorded Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: “I wish I could break all the chains holding me.”81 By the end of the sixties, she saw two faces in the mirror, “knowing that on the one hand I loved being black and being a woman, and that on the other it was my colour and sex which had fucked me up in the first place.”82 On stage, the diva would emphasize her roots by means of flamboyant jewelry, African fabrics, her hair sculpted into a coned crown or baroquely braided; but feverish recording schedules and hectic tours exhausted her, and she worried about her responsibility for a throng of musicians and dependents.
Her husband’s working her “like a carthorse” made her feel that he “loved me like a serpent”: “He wrapped himself around me and he ate and breathed me, and without me he would die.”83 Their mutually abusive relationship, as well as her undiagnosed mood swings and the unrelenting traveling, took a toll. About her self-division, she said, “Eunice is a woman who doesn’t get enough time off,” while Nina Simone is “the machine who must perform every night.”84 Experimenting with drugs, disillusioned about the efficacy of antiracist activism, in 1969 Simone deposited her wedding ring in her bedroom and left for Barbados, where a relationship with another woman left her distressed that she was “stuck between desire for both sexes.”85
It was the beginning of a peripatetic unraveling, struggles with mental illness, and a search for a homeland that would extend until her death . . . but not before she composed the tribute to Lorraine Hans
berry, “To Be Young Gifted and Black,” that she performed on Sesame Street and that the Black organization the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) deemed the “Black National Anthem.”86 With its title quoting Hansberry’s inspirational words to black youth,87 the song would continue to uplift students on college campuses, protesters at rallies, and concertgoers around the world.
4
The Sexual Revolution and the Vietnam War
NINA SIMONE’S RIBALD JOKES and daring garb reflect a shift in both racial and sexual attitudes. As powerful as the civil rights movement and coexisting alongside it, the sexual revolution began with the invention of the birth control pill but soon shaped changes in behavior that defied long-held prescriptions about virginity. Sexual intercourse originated “In nineteen sixty-three,” the poet Philip Larkin famously pronounced, adding plaintively “(Which was rather late for me—).”1
Larkin might have been thinking about a publishing revolution after legal battles, both in the States and England, overturned obscenity laws banning sales of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.2 Or he may have had in mind the popularity of the Pill—a medical breakthrough funded in part through the efforts of the birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Approved in 1960 for contraceptive use, by 1963 it had freed millions of women from fear of unwanted pregnancy.3 Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut legalized the use of contraception by married couples.
While William Masters and Virginia Johnson began reporting their data on the physiology of human sexuality, journalists and essayists—Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion—were responding first to the sexual revolution and then to the emergence of the counterculture. All their quite different perspectives were amplified by a maelstrom of protests against the Vietnam War that erupted, during the momentous year 1968, into the women’s liberation movement.
SEX IN NEW YORK CITY: GLORIA STEINEM VERSUS HELEN GURLEY BROWN
Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown were particularly notable as avatars of the sexual revolution, and though they followed different paths to success, the two had a lot in common. Both were raised by single mothers in Depression-era poverty. Both would later attribute their ambition to regret at the difficulties their mothers faced. Although Gurley could not afford college, she worked her way up as a secretary and then an advertising copywriter until, like Steinem, she entered the world of journalism. Both stayed unmarried—Gurley until 37, Steinem until 66—and both chose to remain childless. In the early sixties, Steinem and Brown focused on the situation of the urban single woman. Both rejected the double standard of monogamy for women and promiscuity for men, though again in different ways.
Amid the glitterati of the sixties, the photogenic Gloria Steinem—with her miniskirts and long hair (the aviator glasses would come later)—embodied the sexual revolution. Before she defined herself as a feminist, she lived an unusually independent life. Though she was involved in a series of what she called “little marriages” with men she admired, she had no wish to marry.4 She had landed in Manhattan after an education at Smith—overlapping Plath’s time there and, like Plath, attending with a scholarship—followed by a stint in India. Steinem shared an apartment with a girlfriend and dated a series of eminent men, some of whom aided her breakthrough into the world of magazine journalism. When a New York City Playboy Club opened, the editors of Show encouraged her to go undercover. She used her grandmother’s name (Marie Ochs) and Social Security card to apply for a job as a Bunny and then to expose what she later called “the phony glamor and exploitative employment policies” of Hugh Hefner’s enterprise.5
Steinem’s 1963 essay “I Was a Playboy Bunny” takes the form of a diary in which the 28-year-old Steinem records shaving four years off her persona’s record because she was “beyond the Bunny age limit.” Knowing how dumb bunnies should be, she purposely answered several questions wrong on the entrance test. She also had to submit to a gynecological examination before donning a bright blue satin Bunny costume, which was tight enough to make her fear bending over: “The bottom was cut up so high that it left my hip bones exposed as well as a good five inches of untanned derrière. The boning in the waist would have made Scarlett O’Hara blanch, and the entire construction tended to push all available flesh up to the bosom.”6 (She was encouraged to stuff plastic dry-cleaning bags into the bodice to inflate her breasts.) Bunnies were expected to pay for their own cosmetics, costume cleaning, black nylons, and shoes dyed to match. Half of Steinem-Ochs’s tips went to the club. The glowing ads to attract applicants camouflaged the grueling and not especially lucrative labors of the Door Bunnies, Camera Bunnies, and Table Bunnies, all sporting fluffy tails and floppy ears.
Why did Hefner fix on the Bunny for the centerfolds in his magazine and the waitstaff in his clubs? The bunny is “a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping—sexy,” he explained.7 (That they are hyper-reproductive did not seem to enter his thinking, though the phrase “fuck like a bunny” probably did.) Mainstreaming porn, Hefner marketed Playboy so successfully that the magazine appeared in many middle-class homes. The soft porn centerfolds made one young girl—who grew up to become the cultural critic Carina Chocano—think of “the taxidermied animals at the national-history museums.”8
Working at the club, Steinem-Ochs froze at the front door or served at the bar while her legs numbed from the knee up, her feet swelled, her hands—bearing heavy trays—ached, and her skin was rubbed raw from the costume stays. During her two-week stint, distress at propositions from patrons paled in comparison to exhaustion and starvation: she lost 10 pounds because the only food available was snatched on the run. At one point, Steinem considered her essay on this experience an “early mistake” because of the notoriety it spawned.9 But in a 1983 postscript, she declares that “all women are Bunnies.”10 The piece itself testifies with more nuance to the disconnect between the glamour surrounding the Playboy Bunny and the unpleasant realities that confronted the naive young women who signed on to the role.
At the time, Steinem believed, the “sex jokes” provoked by the Bunny exposé “swallowed up” her first major article: a 1962 Esquire report on the contraceptive revolution.11 “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” described interviews with college administrators and students on campus sexual mores. Although some college presidents still considered premarital sexual relations “offensive and vulgar,” among undergrads “the belief that pleasure in sex was created only to ensure the production of children seems to have disappeared.” Steinem describes coeds taking responsibility for affairs by obtaining diaphragms and lying to physicians about their marital status to do so. But it was the “first completely safe and foolproof contraceptive pill” that, “accepted so quietly,” quickly transformed women’s lives.12
“More aesthetic than mechanical devices,” the Pill did not need to be taken at the time of sexual intercourse and it was proven to be “one hundred percent effective.” What happens to young women when pregnancy fears are removed? Steinem wonders. She suspects that fearless girls gain libido while deciding “that their sex practices are none of society’s business.” Encountering young women who expect to find their identities “neither totally without men nor totally through them,” she claims: “The development of the ‘autonomous’ girl is important, and in large numbers, quite new.”13 Such a girl has been freed by the Pill to postpone marriage while pursuing a career without renouncing sexuality.
Steinem understands the downside of the trend she celebrates. “Society has begun to make it as rough for virgins and women content to be housewives” as it once did for independent women. With this insight, she foresees that the tension between single and married women in the fifties would morph into the friction in the seventies between so-called liberated women and those who are “only housewives.” Yet she praises educators who have begun questioning the pronouncements of Sigmund Freud and Helene Deutsch by suggesting that “women’s role i
s more learned than physically determined.”14
With these words, Steinem addresses the debate between what in the eighties would come to be called “essentialism”—the idea that the sexes are biologically hardwired—and what would come to be called “social constructionism”: the insistence that, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, men and women are made by culture, not shaped by nature. Similarly prescient, the conclusion of “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” considers the “real danger of the contraceptive revolution”: “the acceleration of woman’s role-change without any corresponding change of man’s attitude toward her role.”15 Maybe, Steinem suggests, there won’t be enough sexually liberated men to go around.
That view about the predominance of unliberated men helps explain the assumptions of Sex and the Single Girl, a breezy best seller published by Helen Gurley Brown in 1962. At the start, Brown emphatically agrees with Steinem that women should have a longer interval before marriage as a stage for pleasure and career: “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life,” she tells her readers. “During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozens.”16 Both the in-your-face flaunting of promiscuity (“cheaper . . . by the dozens”) and the opening proviso (“You do need a man . . . every step of the way”) distinguish her stance from Steinem’s, for Helen Gurley Brown was marketing a “fun” form of sexual libertarianism that encouraged women to enjoy plentiful sex before marriage while tapping their sex appeal to get their material needs met. “Good girls go to heaven,” she quipped, “but bad girls go everywhere.”17
Still Mad Page 10
