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

the point of saying we needed a movement, but we hadn’t reached the point of saying we were going to organize one. Then Shulie invited us to a meeting.”
    “It was at Anne Koedt’s apartment,” continues Amatniek. “I remember feeling—this is me, characteristically me—that I disagreed with practically everything that was getting said, but I was so grateful to them all for being there.”
    Another grateful recruit was Anne Forer, a pot-smoking Red Diaper Baby with a contagious giggle who taught kindergarten in Chelsea. “I vaguely knew that women were meeting, and then Bev Grant gave me Anne Koedt’s address, so I showed up one Thursday evening. Up to that point my big problem with women was that I saw them as competition. I walked into that meeting and witnessed something different. Women were seeing their interests as one. It was the most wonderful thing that ever, ever happened.”
    Forer was to give a name to the women’s process of “going around the room and rapping.”
    “In the Old Left,” she explains, “they used to say that the workers don’t know they’re oppressed so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution andcalled it consciousness-raising.”
    By January the New Yorkers, who’d named their group New York Radical Women, were plowing into their first action. The venue they chose was a march on Washington against the Vietnam War called by Women Strike for Peace. Founded in 1961 in response to nuclear testing,WSP was the largest, most important women’s peace group in the country. Its middle-class members, liberals and leftists, wore hats and gloves, and fur coats if they had them, when they went out to picket, and stressed their roles as wives and mothers when they lobbyied their legislators.
    On January 15, 1968, the opening day of Congress, five thousand women, named the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in honor of the congresswoman who had voted against both World Wars, marched around the Capitol with their antiwar banners. A rump group of thirty New York Radical Women led by Firestone, Koedt, and Amatniek marched with their own float, a papier-mâché coffin draped with a big streamer proclaiming THE DEATH OF TRADITIONAL WOMANHOOD . A second banner proclaimed DON ’ T CRY! RESIST!
    The peace activists were appalled. So were several members of Chicago’s West Side group. Stopping the Vietnam War was still the chief priority, wasn’t it? New York’s action, they howled, was petty, disloyal, divisive.
    New York was deliberately upping the ante. They were telling the women of the left that if they were going to organize as women , they should talk about women’s issues. It was time to end the pretense that they were some sort of ladies’ auxiliary composed of wives, widows, girlfriends, and mothers.
    Some women got it. Marching with friends, Rosalyn Baxandall, a rangy blond community activist with a ready grin, saw the streamer-bedecked coffin and the offbeat slogans, and fell into step behind the funeral cortege.
    “What are you doing next?” she asked Amatniek.
    Next was a confrontation at the Women Strike for Peace post-rally meeting. The New Yorkers walked in with their coffin, and Kathie spoke about women organizing as women as chairs scraped and some of the WSPs left the room.
    “Sisterhood is powerful!” Amatniek cried.
    “People were shocked,” Carol Hanisch remembers.
    On the train ride home Amatniek bumped into Gerda Lerner, who had been on the Jeannette Rankin Brigade march. The Austrian-born leftist historian had recently published The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina , a biography of two abolitionist women. “You’re making the same mistake as the nineteenth-century