In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller Read Free Book Online

uppermost in her mind, Marilyn Webb in Washington, D.C., was afire with a vision of an autonomous women’s movement within the New Left. “I saw it as coalition-building,” she says. “I felt we could build a women’s movement that would work together with the antiwar and civil rights movements. Coalitions had already been built, mainly around the war, for the marches on Washington, and I saw women as yet another constituency, my constituency. At that point I did not see the need for a completely separate movement because I believed that the men I knew would be supportive of coalition-building, especially if you organized your other constituency to help with a range of broad-based issues. You know, “We have our issues, but we also have other issues.”
    Webb riffled through her Rolodex for the phone numbers of activist women, putting out feelers for a national conference that would address the new constituency’s concerns. Would key women in several cities like to convene in the Washington vicinity for an August weekend? With Dee Ann Pappas, who’d begun a women’s group in Baltimore, she booked a Friends meetinghouse and school in Sandy Spring, Maryland, a pastoral suburb of D.C. with a Quaker history.
    “Hi all,” Webb’s cheery last-minute instructions began. “This meeting should not be seen as one which comes out with a set program or structure. Hopefully we can come away with an idea of where we’re at and where we have to begin moving towards.”
    Two key SDS women declined her invitation. One was Bernardine Dohrn, a law school graduate in Chicago, soon to be the interorganizational secretary of SDS, and later a founder of Weatherman. Famous for her leather miniskirts and plunging necklines, Dohrn had tried her hand at a women’s strategy paper, “The Look Is You,” aftera mocking article on the fledgling movement appeared in Ramparts , the slick leftist magazine. But the siren of SDS wasn’t interested in leaving what she believed to be the main arena. Another no came from Cathy Wilkerson in Washington, an SDS-er from an upper-class background (her father owned radio stations) whose favorite putdown was “How bourgeois can you get?” Dohrn and Wilkerson were careening on another course, one that would ultimately wreck SDS in the name of violence.
    Last-minuteconfirmations for Sandy Spring came from some women who weren’t on Marilyn Webb’s list but who had heard about it on the movement grapevine. Roxanne Dunbar called to say that she and Dana Densmore would be coming from Boston. Sara Evans of SDS was coming from Duke University in North Carolina. Judith Brown and Beverly Jones from the University of Florida in Gainesville were preparing a strategy paper, and they were bringing an eighteen-year-old student, Carol Giardina. Toronto would be represented, and so would Detroit and Pittsburgh. Two, possibly three, groups with ideological differences were coming from New York. Baltimore and Washington promised to bring food for the weekend. San Francisco and Los Angeles struck out. Chicago’s West Siders pooled their money to send Sue Munaker and Fran Rominski; Jo Freeman hitchhiked east on her own.
    Ultimately only twenty conferees attended the Sandy Spring conference, but their volubility lasted all weekend. Agreement was harder to come by. Some women quoted Beauvoir, some quoted Friedan; others expounded on Vietnam and the Black Panthers. On Saturday morning the Gainesville theorists, Judith Brown and Beverly Jones, respected activists in the southern organizing branch of SDS, presented their paper, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement.” They asserted that the enemy “at this time” was man, not capitalism, and urged that women put women’s issues first. The heretical argument found few allies besides Carol Hanisch and Kathie Amatniek of New York. “It felt likeus against the world,” Hanisch recalls.
    Marilyn Webb shuddered when Roxanne Dunbar, in a miniskirt and combat boots, read