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

periodically. It was reinforced by the belief, born of feminine insecurity, that middle-class white women had no right to make any demands for themselves, or to achieve something of political importance on their own. Black women did come into the movement singly, and sometimes, although rarely, they came in groups. Burdened by two distinct forms of oppression—three, when the voices of black lesbian feminists began to be heard—they never forgot their divided loyalties, and how could they?
    Criticism is easy; working for specific goals in an imperfect, complicated world is hard. The failure to attract poor black women, orpoor Hispanic women, or “ghetto women,” or “welfare women,” would be used as a club against Women’s Liberation by its critics with numbing consistency for the next thirty years. Yet no other movement in our lifetime achieved such broad-based societal changes that cut across so many class and racial lines.

AN INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT
    On the ride home from Sandy Spring, Carol Hanisch presented her idea to Kathie Amatniek and Cindy Cisler. The leftist women had called them self-indulgent for sitting around doing consciousness-raising while people were dying in the ghettos and getting killed in Vietnam. She knew their chief task was to develop an analysis of women’s oppression, but it was time for an action, something brave and audacious to put Women’s Liberation on the map. She’d been thinking about the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.
    “I’d always watched the contest as a child,” Hanisch reminisces. “With new feminist eyes it suddenly clicked that Miss America was a very oppressive thing—all those women parading around in bathing suits, being judged for their beauty. So we took it back to the group in New York. The biggest resistance was the fear that some people wouldn’t take it seriously; they might think that protesting Miss America was a silly women’s action. But then we started doing consciousness-raising, and everybody turned out to have strong feelings—maybe not about Miss America specifically, but certainly about standards of beauty. So we sort of threw ourselves into it.”
    No one threw herself into it harder than Robin Morgan, who had begun to attend meetings of New York Radical Women. A poet married to a poet, the flamboyant, bisexual Kenneth Pitchford, Morgan thrived on the theatrical confrontations pioneered by the Yippies, theNew Left pranksters led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. She was a savvy organizer who could fire up the troops, run off the flyers, get the police permits, order the buses, and alert the press.
    “Atlantic City and Chicago happened within one week,” Morgan recalls in movement shorthand.
    Atlantic City was the Miss America protest of September 7, 1968. Chicago was the assault on Mayor Daley’s city by ten thousand radicals during the Democratic National Convention, August 25–30. Robin told the Yippie steering committee she would not be available for Chicago.
    “They looked at me like I landed from nowhere, not even Mars, and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, the revolution is going to start in Chicago.’ And I said, ‘No, the revolution is going to start in Atlantic City.’ ” Then she pulled together the women she was close to, Peggy Dobbins, Judith Duffett, Barbara Kaminsky, Lynn Laredo, Florika Romatien, Naomi Jaffe, Adite Kroll, and went into high gear.
    “Miss America was perfect for us lefty Women’s Liberationists,” Morgan explains. “Made to order. She touched capitalism, militarism, racism, and sexism, all in one fell swoop. Capitalism because they used her to sell the sponsors’ products, militarism because she went off to entertain the troops, racism because there had never been a black Miss America at that point, and clearly she was objectified as a woman.”
    Lindsy Van Gelder was a cub reporter at the New York Post when the city editor tossed Morgan’s “No More Miss America” press release on her