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

portions of The SCUM Manifesto aloud. “I’d never heard of Valerie Solanas. I thought the stuff was completely offthe wall. Roxanne said, ‘I’m not advocating you should go out and shoot men, but you must see that metaphorically she was standing up for herself as a woman.’ People started picking up on it. And I was thinking, This is a complete disaster. ”
    Sunday’s anguished session on how to attract black women to a bigger, more comprehensive meeting in November was mired in frustration. Everyone in the room felt the absence of black women keenly, but the realists argued that aggressive recruitment was doomed.
    On a reel-to-reel tape of the meeting, which has been preserved, one can hear loud cries of racism, humble apologies, painful explanations. Someone suggested trying to contact Kathleen Cleaver, wife of the Black Panthers’ Minister of Information. Someone else replied that the Panther women would not take a step without their men.
    “It’s absolutely essential,” insisted a speaker, “that we have a militant Black Power woman in on the formation of our ideology. It’s for our own good that we need it.”
    “Black militant women are into very different things now,” someone retorted. “I don’t understand how if you’re women and your concentration ison women, why you are just picking black militant women as opposed to all kinds of women with different ideologies. Why don’t we have Women Strike for Peace, the NOW women, Vietnamese, Cubans …?”
    “Black women hold the cards on oppression, they hold the cards on being shot down in every single way, and they let white women know that. I don’t want to go to another conference just to hear a black militant woman tell me she is more oppressed than I am and what am I going to do about it.”
    “This group could expand and expand and be essentially all white, that is a real possibility.”
    “If that happens, our ideology will be wrong.”
    “The Panther women won’t come. Panthers don’t speak to whites on policy matters, they negotiate with whites only on very strategic situations. The women would be killed if they came to our conference.”
    Roxanne Dunbar suggested trying to get in touch with Flo Kennedy, the New York lawyer in NOW who’d been drawn to the case of Valerie Solanas.
    It is fashionable today to criticize the women’s movement for being white and middle class from its inception, yet no movement agonized more, or flailed itself harder, over its failure to attract vast numbers of women of color. As early as January 1968, just before she left New York to resettle in San Francisco, Pam Allen had circulated her “Memo to My White Sisters,” a plea and a warning that unless the new movement reached beyond itself “to make alliances among poor black women,” and with underprivileged women everywhere, “we will lose our chance of finding our humanity.”
    Belief in human perfectibility was the chief driving force amongthe Women’s Liberation founders. Horrified by the specter of an all-white movement, multicause utopians like Pam Allen would criticize, exhort, and berate, and eventually become disaffected. Feminist visionaries like Shulie Firestone and Kathie Amatniek, Carol Hanisch and Anne Koedt, would forge a new path, acting on the necessity to wrench free from this paralyzing, no-win debate.
    “There were so few of us then who even wanted to call ourselves feminists,” remembers Anne Koedt. “I realize now how badly it could have gone if we hadn’t broken loose. That was the thrilling thing about Kathie and Shulie—they were so cleanly feminist. I include myself in this small group as well. We didn’t feel we had to apologize all the time when the leftists talked about Vietnamese women or black women or poor women. Of course we cared about all of those women, but we wanted to care in the context of feminism.”
    During the life of the movement, the flagellation that took place at Sandy Spring would repeat itself