Daring (17 page)

“You just try being a woman in this society. It's like being a cripple. For nineteen years I thought it was just me, but now we're getting a sisterhood together. I'm sorry, Jerry”—she slipped off her engagement ring—“we've come to the period of separatism.”

Jerry was left speechless.

“I suggest,” Polly said, as she rolled his pants and shorts into a neat bundle and lobbed it into his arms, “you form a men's consciousness-raising group as fast as you can.”

This may sound like dialogue you just heard in the next seats at the movies. One might have hoped that fifty years after the arc of male privilege began to end, only the angriest white men would still feel a sense of aggrieved entitlement. But there you are.

AS COFFEE WAS SERVED
in the Erpfs' living room, Clay raised the subject of women in politics. Gloria had begun raising money for women as political candidates.

Tiger ridiculed the idea that women could be effective in politics. “The problem women have is they can't bond with one another.” That touched a raw nerve. Of course we didn't know yet how to bond; we had been competing for crumbs from the table. Gloria made a provocative suggestion. A woman might run for president in the next election. (No one had yet dreamed that an African American woman, Shirley Chisholm, would do just that a year later.) Tiger's face gave a shrug of disbelief. Gloria looked to me to back her up. Here, I must confess that my memory may have rearranged the climax of that evening. I would like to think that I came up with some smart riposte to Tiger's hyperchauvinism. I must have voiced at least some lame defense of the right to self-determination that was surging in women like Gloria and Barbara and myself. When I later asked Gloria for her recollection of the evening, she gently administered the shock of counterfeit memory.

“It was at that dinner that you said women had ‘labial personalities,'” she wrote to me. “It came across to me that you were taking sides with the biological determinism of Lionel Tiger, who was a clear adversary. To be truthful, I had hoped you would be an ally.”

Did I really say “labial personalities”? What on earth did that mean? That women's heads were dominated by their carnal desires? I don't think I was aware yet of the manifold delights of the female erotic response system, much less their anatomical names. I'd certainly never uttered the “v” word; it would take thirty more years for Eve Ensler to make
vagina
a household word. I might have said women had “labile” personalities, which wasn't much better. That would just have reinforced the stereotype that women's emotions were in constant flux. What was I afraid of? Clay thinking that I was one of those ball-busting barracudas who seemed to be taking over the fledgling women's movement at that time?

Whatever words I used, I am ashamed to admit that I let Gloria down.

Rather than allow Tiger the triumph of goading two women into disagreeing with each other, Gloria remained silent as we finished coffee. The dinner party was becoming unbearably uncomfortable. Clay tried to lighten things up. “When I was at
Esquire
, I gave Gloria the assignment to write the first article on the Pill. She came back with an exegesis on the science behind birth control.”

Gloria laughed. “Clay told me, ‘You have performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.'” Tiger wouldn't let it go. “The Pill is the biggest put-on of the century,” he declared. From notes, I recall him stating that the Pill maintains women in a constant state of counterfeit pregnancy, thereby rendering men highly dispensable and no threat.

That was a clue to men's fear that drugs and technology could make them irrelevant (not an unfounded fear, as it turned out). Armand Erpf weighed in. “Men have the power. We will always be dominant.” His wife, happy chatelaine of his vast apartment and his thirty-two-room country estate, nodded and raised her crystal goblet in a toast to the status quo.

The dinner party didn't so much end as dissolve, with each of us fumbling among the hanging coats for something safe and familiar. Gloria and Barbara rode down in the elevator together. Standing on the street to hail a cab, Barbara looked at Gloria and vowed, “I will never, ever, ever again in my life keep my mouth shut.” Gloria looked at Barbara and repeated the same vow. I heard later that Gloria let loose with one of her zingers: “Tiger wouldn't be so addicted to his idea of ‘masculinity' if he were three inches taller.”

Clay hailed a taxi and opened the door for me. I glared at him. “I can take care of myself, thank you.” Inside, I couldn't wait to light up. Fumbling for the box of Newports in my bag, I remembered that Clay disapproved of smoking, especially in women. I took my sweet time opening the new box, tapping to tease out one long tube of pleasure with its fine white filter, probably replaying in my mind the commercial of a young couple playing tag in the waves and then flopping down on the beach so he could light up a Newport for each of them. This was my pathetic little passive-aggressive retaliation for the evening's scenario. All the way back to his apartment, we snapped in personal acrimony. Clay never lit my cigarette. This was the paradox of our early radicalization. I still wanted to be the girl.

“
YOU
'
RE NOT GIVING YOURSELF
the huge credit you deserve for changing, as most of us were doing profoundly, in different ways,” Gloria wrote to me after reading the first draft of this chapter. Gloria's recollection of that early period in the movement was that “Women began to actually tell the truth and not to ‘Uncle Tom' and be ‘feminine.' We were less likely to seek a derived identity through men—and thus manipulate them or expect the impossible.”

What made me fear changing was the prospect of choosing between an either-or. I was not then, not ever, willing to give up being feminine. And neither, by all evidence, was Gloria, which is what made her so effective. With her low, creamy voice and natural beauty, Ms. Steinem as she came to be called, having invented that simple honorific, rarely if ever antagonized men. On the contrary, she charmed them, played games of wit with them, politely listened to them, and never argued without insulating her words with a warm laugh. Men often found themselves nodding to curry her favor, until they got home and analyzed her actual words and had a virulent attack of indigestion.

Here was the dilemma for me in those early times: how to preserve the best of our inborn feminine nature—our nurturing, compassionate, and ferociously protective instincts, our insights, our powers of love and, yes, female attraction, which are vital in ameliorating the more aggressive nature of men—while we discovered our power to say No! to inequality.

Up to that moment in 1969, I didn't consider myself a feminist; I thought of myself as a humanist. Gloria was a few years older and far more sophisticated politically, but she wasn't a card-carrying feminist yet, either. Yet she was breaking new ground. Clay had given her “The City Politic” to write. She was one of the first women to pen provocative essays on politics. Gloria had no interest in marriage or children. In her spare time she raised money for female political candidates and flew to California to organize protests for migrant workers. I wondered when she had time for men. In fact, she was one of the more sexually prolific women of our generation.

When my early dream of working to put hubby through graduate school was smashed, I'd had to start all over again. Who was I if not my father's little winner? Who was I if not my husband's helpmate? I didn't even have a name to call my own. “Sheehy” belonged to Albert. Who would I be when I didn't belong to anyone? These were the kinds of shattering questions that millions of women were being forced to confront. Gloria had been invited to join Betty Friedan's new organization for women, NOW. She had politely refused. When asked by NOW to join a sit-in at the Plaza Oak Room in February of 1969, she begged off. You will find this hard to believe: for women to be served lunch there, we had to be accompanied by a man. Nine years earlier, in 1960, four brave black American male college students had seated themselves at a lunch counter at Woolworth's and remained seated when they were refused service. Their passive resistance helped to ignite a sit-in movement all over the South to challenge racial inequality. Yet here we were, fortunate northern white women in one of the most liberal cities in America, becoming aware that we were being discriminated against in the same way.

Friedan had picked the Plaza to attract mainstream publicity. She urged her group of demonstrators to wear fur coats, intending to differentiate the proper upper-middle-class membership of NOW from the radical feminists who had recently been ridiculed for burning their bras at the 1968 Miss America Pageant.

Arriving at the Plaza in black mink and dark sunglasses, Friedan hardly looked like a revolutionary leader. Her group brushed past the maître d' to seat themselves at a round table in the center of the room. They were ignored. Finally, waiters hoisted the table over their heads and left the women sitting in a circle like kindergartners waiting for the teacher. Friedan turned to reporters and announced triumphantly that they were being refused service. That simple action thrust NOW to the forefront of leadership of the nascent women's movement.

Back in 1969, Gloria believed that Clay would like the idea of opposing us. News is conflict, after all. But Clay saw the larger shift that needed to take place in the culture: women would have to set aside our conditioning to compete with one another; we had to bond if we were ever going to coalesce around common goals for the women's movement.

“I want you to sit down with Gloria and compose your differences,” Clay told me one night in his paternal voice. He wanted us to be allies. “You're not that far apart, and you need each other.” He invited Gloria and me to have lunch with him at the Oak Room, no less. I squealed in protest. He looked smug. Whether or not the threat of a cover story in
New York
was responsible, the hotel had agreed to lift the ban on unaccompanied ladies having lunch. Clay had set the stage for a propitious conversation between two women he respected.

WITH AN ELABORATE FLOURISH
the maître d' beckoned Gloria and me through the French doors into an expanse of Old World luxury beneath an arched Gothic ceiling: the Oak Room. A men's drinking room, a favorite haunt of Fitzgerald's character Gatsby, was now open to women who were writing a new narrative for the New World. It felt good to be seated prominently at an oak table. Impishly, Clay pointed up to the chandelier. On it figures of lusty barmaids hoisted beer steins. While munching on bread sticks, Gloria and I began a friendly discussion only to discover that we had many points of agreement.

“I'm afraid the ball-busting faction seems to be getting all the attention,” I said, “after the bra-burning in Atlantic City. And I'm not anti-men. I don't think you are either.”

“Some of my best friends are men!” Gloria gave one of her disarming chuckles. We both smiled at Clay. “But we were raised in a culture that taught us to expect the normal male-female relationship was 70-30. That has to change.”

“What makes you think I'm against that?” I asked.

“You wrote about a woman left by a man, in your book,
Lovesounds
. I gathered you see women as victims.”

“I wrote that novel to understand what I was living. Thank God, because it turned my head around.”

“Great! That's why we have to keep writing.”

“And speaking out,” I added.

Gloria confessed that speaking in public terrified her. She had no stomach for confrontation. We agreed this was something we had to learn, like a new sport.

We agreed that we had Kate Millett to thank for defining Friedan's “problem without a name.” Millett's solution to women's helplessness was to “demolish the patriarchal system.”

That would take something like the Peloponnesian Wars, I was thinking. Patriarchy was as old as civilization, older; Cro-Magnon man was not into power sharing. No dominant group shares power unless it is persuaded that being blindly autocratic could undermine its status. What weapons did we have?

Numbers, for starters, Gloria said. At the time, women were moving toward becoming a majority of the American population. As we talked, and traded experiences, we began to grasp the concept that writer Robin Morgan was popularizing: the personal is political. As women dared to tell our real-life stories in public, it would expose gender inequality in every aspect of daily life. We could change the culture without going to war against men. That was a breakthrough for me.

The lunch that Clay had arranged for us turned into a consciousness-raising occasion that was being duplicated all over the country as women came together in living rooms and basements and on picket lines and antiwar marches and began to share our common experiences and join forces.

IN AUGUST
1970
OUR WORLD
began to change. Betty Friedan's culture-busting book,
The Feminine Mystique
, had been passed around among millions of tranquilized suburban housewives over the seven years since it had been published. I had found a paperback copy of it hidden under my mother's bed in 1964. It was the blueprint of my mother's life, but when I tried to talk to her about it, she clammed up. She had to keep up the illusion that she was totally fulfilled by the wife and mother role, when we both knew she had the DNA of a businesswoman and desperately wanted to use her mind. She dulled that lively mind with alcohol. I was hell-bent on escaping her fate. But I was also afraid of being linked with the extremist feminists like Redstockings, Radical Mothers, BITCH, WITCH—no joke—these were angry women whose resentment was turning the sterling silver concept of equal rights into corrosive man-hating sexual warfare.

It was comical to read deadly humorless treatises elevating the clitoral orgasm to a sacrament that would free women from dependence on the male penis. The media loved sensationalizing the man-haters as the face of the movement. Friedan, too, was worried about this radical offshoot scaring off not only men, but the mainstream working-class and middle-class women who were needed for a broad grassroots movement. Women were already a majority—51 percent—of the population, yet we were still stuck in second-class status. Slow, incremental changes were not going to get us anywhere. But how could we show the world we were mounting nothing less than a revolution?