Saturday's Child (55 page)

These women would become part of the Sisterhood Is Global projects over the next twenty years—first the anthology, then the strategy meeting the book would inspire, then the institute the meeting would in turn spawn, then the various translations and editions of the book again—and they remain allies still.

But with Waring there was from the first something different. Not just a bond: a danger, an electricity. I was certainly not about to act on
that
, although the invitation was subtle yet clear, both in Oslo and a week later in Copenhagen, where she'd exchanged her blue jeans for the silk designer print frocks appropriate to her rank in her country's delegation. I, however, still a zombie from the consequences of my last run-in with erotic energy, was hardly about to take another such leap, especially with a woman; I reassured myself that the
frisson
must be residual libido from Yaddo, and that furthermore—considering my dismal experiences back in the group-sex days—I was hopelessly heterosexual. Anyway, I had my hands full: a kid at camp, a marriage to salvage, a conference to cover, potential contributors to network,
work
to do. Thank
god
for work to do.

There were caucuses and fracases. There was more than the usual backstage friction in the U.S. delegation, which greedily availed itself of the expertise of Koryne Horbal and the extensive groundwork she'd done for the conference's preceding two years (Horbal was an architect of the UN Convention to Eradicate All Forms of Discrimination against Women, or CEDAW, and at the time U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women), but then denied her minimal courtesies in Copenhagen
because she'd been openly critical of certain Carter administration policies on women. There were sign-ins and walkouts and sit-downs.

But most cherished among my Copenhagen memories
¹⁵
is the way that Abzug and I worked in tandem. Bella lobbied the Israeli delegates, who had confidence in her; I worked the Arabs, where I'd managed to earn trust. The two of us knocked heads and twisted arms to arrange early breakfast meetings for dialogue outside formal channels, knowing that if you got people together at 6:45
A.M.,
they would be so catatonic they would actually
want
to listen more than to talk. Iran was still holding fifty-two U.S. hostages at the time, but Bella and I managed to extract a pledge from the Iranian delegation's women that if U.S. mothers would demonstrate in Washington, D.C., for the shah's ill-gotten millions to be returned to Iran's women and children, then Iranian women would march simultaneously in Tehran for the hostages to be returned home “to their mothers.” All of us were already in the TV studio, about to go on air and announce this, when the man who headed the Iranian delegation stormed in, mullah-flanked, and shooed his countrywomen away like a flock of black-winged ravens. But it was one fine try, and seeing Bella work—the way she alternated cajoling, bullying, wheedling, reasoning, and humor—was to be spellbound, watching a political virtuoso. She too refused to stop. But unlike me, she was selective in her choice of issues on which to persist.

I returned to the States to write about the conference for
Ms
. and for the
Los Angeles Times
, to bring bagels and Chinese dumplings up to Blake at camp (where he was suffering Manhattan-withdrawal symptoms), and then to spin around and fly back to Europe for a four-day in-depth interview and cover shoot in Vienna with the feminists exiled from the USSR. On every flight, I filled pages of legal-sized pads with notes for the emerging anthology. We would have to transcend standard geopolitics. We would have to include both Israel and Palestine, both Germanies, both Irelands. This time there couldn't only be personal voices, though those would be the soul of the book. There would have to be statistics about
women's status in each country, facts that would be tools in the hands of activists and useful for women's studies, international studies, policymakers, funders. Much of this would mean original research. The rest would mean finding, assembling (and checking for reliability) existing data from sources all across the globe.
My god
, I would catch myself thinking,
this will be a veritable international encyclopedia on women. And there are no precedents
.

Then I would get petrified.

The best way to deal with fear is usually to keep forging on. Besides, the time felt right; anyway, the project drove me as if I were its plowhorse. Still, organizing
this
epic would be a task to make the years on
Sisterhood Is Powerful
by comparison seem lethargic. There was no way to do this one by myself. I needed a team.

¹
“Oh
well
,” Susan shrugs glumly, “you're into that international thing.” “Oh
well
,” I snort huffily, “yes. Merely the
world
.”

²
Ronald Reagan's popularity, for instance, was no coincidence. He was the logical apparition conjured up by a public conditioned to trust the worth of celebrity and distrust the work of cerebration. Things seem to be getting worse before they may get better; the borderline between governance and entertainment is becoming a permeable membrane labeled “Fame” or, even worse, “Notoriety.”

³
I did get some good ones off now and then, but usually only when exhaustion rendered me unable to self-censor. Once, when a man interrupted a woman questioner in midsentence, prefacing his question to me by sneering, “So, Miss, ah, Missus, or
Miz
, uh, what
do
you want to be called?” I snapped, “Your Majesty will do. Now sit down.” At another Q-and-A, a militant teenager with a crewcut, her new fatigues still creased and shiny boots squeaking from the army-navy store, demanded to know how I
dared
call myself a radical feminist if I wasn't living in a lesbian commune. Usually my answer to such a question would be lengthy and thoughtful—but on this occasion I was too tired to be edifying, and I heard myself reply gently but firmly, “Let's make a deal. If you'll forgive me for not answering that question, I'll forgive you for asking it.”

⁴
Alpert is the shadowy figure referred to as “the particular woman” in chapter 7 (“Longing for Catastrophe”) of
The Demon Lover
.

⁵
Melville was later killed during the 1971 prisoner uprising at Attica state prison in New York.

⁶
“Letter to a Sister Underground” in
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, and various poems in
Lady of the Beasts
.

⁷
His
Color Photos of the Atrocities: Poems
was published by Atlantic/Little, Brown in 1973, but his next,
The Contraband Poems
, was privately printed (Templar Press, 1975), with my support.

⁸
I was particularly disturbed by a Clairol ad with the slogan “If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a blond,” and I pointed out that a black woman also has only one life to live, and it's not likely to be as a blond. Once
Ms
. came into its own, it would develop precedent-setting policies in the magazine industry regarding advertising content, but this wasn't yet evident in its preview issue—which was as an insert in
New York
magazine, whose staff had solicited the ads.

⁹
Inside Ms.: Twenty Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement
(Henry Holt, 1997).

¹⁰
In 1988, after the magazine's sale to Fairfax, Ltd., of Australia, the new regime repositioned
Ms
. politically and restructured most of the editorial staff. In solidarity with Suzanne Levine, who was being forced out (Anne Summers of Fairfax coveted the job of editor in chief), and in disapproval of the slick, corporate, editorial slant, I formally severed my relationship with
Ms
. and requested that my name no longer appear even honorifically on the masthead. When that name reappeared in 1990, it was as editor in chief of a considerably different magazine. About which, more later …

¹¹
Sometimes this effort failed, sometimes it succeeded, and sometimes it was simply hilarious. I remember one editorial meeting during the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. I staggered in, having flown the red-eye from California after two weeks on the road with a book tour answering imbecilic questions like “Does the Equal Rights Amendment mean feminists want to share men's toilets?” The consciousness gap between Out There and the
Ms
. meeting widened to a chasm when one editor passionately pushed for a story on some new counterculture toys intended as playthings for ill children, and then demonstrated them: multiracial, anatomically correct, male and female cloth hand puppets suffering from various terminal diseases. Partly from lack of sleep but mostly from culture shock, I started giggling uncontrollably. Suzanne tried to deflect my hysteria but caught it instead. I remember laughing so hard I slid from my chair down to the floor. The whole staff got infected with helpless laughter, and the indignant hand-puppet editor took weeks to forgive me:

¹²
See, for instance,
Not a Love Story
, Bonnie Klein's award-winning film about pornography's effects, distributed by Studio D of the Canadian Film Board.

¹³
Gorier, and sometimes funnier, details can be found in the chapter on romance, “A Stake in the Heart,” in
The Anatomy of Freedom
, and in many of the poems in
Depth Perception: New Poems and a Masque
(Doubleday, 1982).

¹⁴
See
Creative Women in Changing Societies: A Quest for Alternatives
, edited by Torill Stokland, Mallica Vajrathon, and Davidson Nicol for UNITAR, with a Foreword by Robin Morgan (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: TransNational Publishers, 1982).

¹⁵
For further details about the conference and the non-governmental-organization forum, see the “Blood Types” chapter of
The Anatomy of Freedom
.

FIFTEEN

Exiles

When a woman loves a woman, it is the blood of the mothers speaking
.

—C
ARIBBEAN PROVERB

For the next four years, until Doubleday's November 1984 publication of its almost nine hundred printed pages,
Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology
would devour most of my literary and political energy. Considering what else was going on during those four years, the book would also serve as an anchor in the tempestuous seas of my life. In the Introduction, I wrote, “Somewhere in these pages there vibrates for me much personal mourning, fear, grief, celebration, and plain living. But the book continued. At times feeling like a curse of inexorable deadlines and self-chosen responsibility, it has been far more often a blessing of focused work and sanity, a demanding preoccupation which has borne me up even in moments when nothing else anymore seemed real. … [It] has functioned in my life like the rare gift of a creative obsession.”

The team came together, slowly at first, then swiftly as the project gathered momentum. It started with Jane Ordway, a smart young woman who'd been interning with me at
Ms.;
she worked for two years on the
project as a volunteer before there was a penny of funding available for salaries. Soon there was Karen Berry, who had worked in
Ms.'s
advertising department as a secretary, had become a friend, and had aided me with research when I was writing
The Anatomy of Freedom
. We began working in the corners of
Ms
. and in my study at home, but after a particular scene on the home front we moved the anthology files and its growing library to my office at the magazine.
Ms
.—chronically enduring its own financial crises as a result of advertisers' tantrums and attacks from the extreme Right—generously contributed support in postage, long-distance phone calls, and toleration of my divided attention. I was now writing the “World” column as well as doing in-house editing and being a gadfly on foreign coverage, which, considering much of the international subject matter, meant that I earned the office nickname of Atrocities Editor.

But it didn't take long to realize that
SIG
needed space to itself, and a production staff, a research staff, translators, a library … which meant rent, payrolls, phone, cable expenses (ah, had faxes and email been common in the early 1980s, our lives would have been much easier!). All of this meant fundraising. So now I was Alice in Foundationland, getting tips and contacts from Bella and Gloria, Pat Carbine, Koryne Horbal, Susan Berresford,
¹
Donna Shalala.
²
One person led me to another. Alida Brill, the author and social critic who would become a dear friend, was then working in the foundation world and took me under her wing; without her guidance my fundraising would have stayed at the level of rattling a tin cup. I was learning how to construct budgets and draft proposals in Fundingspeak: stay away from words like “feminism” and “patriarchy,” write “discrimination” instead of “oppression,” and when in doubt, bland it out. I was also studying a new role: how to recostume myself from my comfortable slacks, shirts, and boots to what the
SIG
staff would call “her fundraising look,” in order to perform the requisite fast shuffle at various foundations—in dresses and high heels.

The front matter and the acknowledgments of
Sisterhood Is Global
read like credits for a film with a cast of thousands—with reason, given all the people who made various kinds of contributions and had assorted involvements over the years. The steadiest financial backing came from two sources. One was the Ford Foundation, which, under the then presidency of Franklin Thomas, was the first major philanthropic institution to support not just women (who still receive only about 5 percent of all funding)
and
not just international issues but the juncture
between
them—precisely where
SIG
broke ground. The other source was a lone woman: Genevieve Vaughan, a feminist Texan so shy she insisted on being anonymous at first. Gen matched Ford dollar for dollar and, astonishingly, did so with no baroque proposal process. She said she knew my work and merely needed a letter outlining the project.
³