In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

radical women could withdraw for a while and gain a perspective on their oppression.
    Shulie Firestone was moving to New York as well, to paint and to organize. The Chicago women sent her off with a list of SDS contacts. Pam Allen had her own list and began making phone calls. At aregional SDS meeting on the Princeton campus, she recruited Bev Grant, a folksinger from Portland Oregon, and Anne Koedt, an artist and set designer who identified herself as an idealistic socialist and was a ten-year veteran of the left. Anne Koedt would soon write one of the germinal papers of the new movement.
    “Nothing —nothing —could have stopped me,” Koedt recalls. “I was already on fire with feelings that went deeper than any political feelings I had ever known before. But when I had tried to talk about women’s oppression with my other political friends, they thought I was crazy. Some man actually had said to me, when I’d made a mild argument by today’s standards, “Boy, somebody must have kicked you in the head when you were little!’ There wasn’t even a minimum language to begin a discussion in those days. But I knew what I wanted: a women’s movement.”
    Reserved and contained—some called her aloof—Koedt was from Denmark. Her parents had been in theResistance during the SecondWorld War, harboring Jews in their basement until the refugees could be ferried to Sweden. Her father, a photographer, had made fake passports for the Resistance leaders. Unlike most of the founders of Women’s Liberation, Anne never developed a taste for open conflict.
    New York’s first Women’s Liberation meeting was held at Pam Allen’s Lower East Side apartment in November 1967 with Shulie and Pam, Anne Koedt, Bev Grant the folksinger and songwriter, Cathy Barrett from New Orleans, who did guerrilla street theater, and Minda Bikman, a nonpolitical friend of Shulie’s from Chicago. “Somebody else was there, too, but I don’t remember her name,” laughs Pam Allen. “She spent the entire evening telling us why we shouldn’t be meeting.”
    New York’s preeminence as a movement hub would solidify a few weeks later when two civil rights veterans, Kathie Amatniek and Carol Hanisch, appeared. They had been introduced to Shulie by Bill Price, a National Guardian reporter who’d covered the National Conference for New Politics and taken note of the spitfire who hadn’t gotten the floor. Amatniek and Hanisch would join Firestone and Koedt to become the leading visionaries and stubborn defenders of the radical feminist faith.
    Amatniek was a Red Diaper Baby who had been taught that there wassomething called male chauvinism. “As a result I’d always been battling it individually, I’d been a feminist since the age of twelve. At fourteen I’d read Beauvoir—it was my mother’s book, I’d thought it was about sex.” At Radcliffe, Kathie had been one of the few women on the Harvard Crimson . During Mississippi Freedom Summer, she had “battled the housework issue” in SNCC’s Batesville project. Kathie had close-cropped, honey-colored hair and a voice that was small and tenacious. Her propensity to do battle would reach legendary proportions inside the women’s movement, where she would assume the nom de guerre of Kathie Sarachild the following year.
    Carol Hanisch, an Iowa farmer’s daughter, red-haired and freckled, had quit her job as a wire service reporter in Des Moines to join the church-sponsored Delta Ministry in Mississippi the year after Freedom Summer. Impressed by her heartland values, theSouthern Conference Education Fund asked her to manage their New York office. SCEF was an Old Left organization founded by Carl and Anne Braden of Louisville, Kentucky, who never dreamed that their young Iowa protégée would strike out on her own in a feminist direction.
    “Kathie and I had been discussing a lot of personal stuff,” says Hanisch, “like how men treated us. Basically, we wanted them to shape up. We’d reached