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

feminists,” Lerner scolded. “You must not separate yourselves from the rest of the movement.”
    “Gerda Lerner got it,” Amatniek says. “She understood exactly what we were doing, and she didn’t like it one bit.”
    “I was very upset,” Lerner admits. “Their disruption had seemed to me quite incomprehensible.” She broke off her argument with Amatniek and moved down the aisle to engage the softspoken Anne Koedt. Koedt was also “incomprehensible,” she recalls, but Lerner continued to probe and prod in her disputatious manner. “By the time I got off the train I was already quite impressed,” she says, “and I was to learn how to work with these women.”
    Back in New York, Ros Baxandall volunteered her St. Marks Place apartment for a new round of meetings. “So we met at my apartment for maybe a month and a half before Carol Hanisch got us the SCEF office,” Baxandall relates. “Maybe twenty or thirty people would come once a week. We even had an early split at my house. Several little splits. Joan Lester and Marilyn Lowen wanted to do something about cooperative child care. They didn’t care about consciousness-raising, so they went off and did child care. And then Peggy Dobbins and some others wanted to talk about witches and matriarchy, that’s what they wanted to explore. I was into everything. More and more meetings.”

    A series of shuddering events in the first half of 1968 rocked the nation. January: The Tet Offensive in South Vietnam defied the predictions of General William Westmoreland. March: President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the focal point of antiwar rage, said he would not seek re-election. April: An assassin’s bullet struck Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony of a Memphis motel; the black ghettos exploded. Days later, SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. May: Leftist students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. June: Moments after his victory in the California primary, Robert Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of ahotel in Los Angeles. Believers in Armageddon might think it had arrived.
    Most women on the left were still focusing their activism on the Vietnam War, Black Power, and the November presidential elections. Some hurled themselves into the primaries on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Those who’d become implacable enemies of “the System” were to join in the plans, later termed the Chicago Conspiracy, to disrupt the Democratic National Convention.
    Against this background of turmoil, and partially in response to it, the small groups of Women’s Liberation were proliferating around the country and gaining momentum. The flash point had been their second-class status inside the New Left, butmeeting in private without the intimidating presence of men had opened the floodgates to a host of larger dissatisfactions that none of them had dared to articulate before. Unaccustomed personal confessions led to intimate, searchingly honest discussions. The first generation of women to embrace the Pill, they were having more sex, and having it earlier, than any previous generation of American women, yet the mythic freedoms of sexual liberation were proving elusive. The Pill did not solve the problem of an unsatisfactory sex life, a thoughtless or promiscuous husband, an insensitive or clueless lover. Sexual liberation did not address the nuts-and-bolts reality of housework, pregnancy, abortion, child care. There were many issues to be resolved. Beyond the heady discourse at the weekly meetings, the rush of unaccustomed sisterhood, the thrill of newfound articulation, there was little agreement on how to proceed.
    In Chicago, Heather Booth, Evie Goldfield, and Sue Munaker of the West Side group drafted a statement from a leftist perspective. Men were not the enemy, they insisted. Social institutions and conventional expectations constrained both sexes. The West Siders