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By Root 2039 0

to be served…Testifying before the Senate against the nomination to the Supreme Court of a sexist judge named Carswell who refused to hear a case of a woman who was fired because she had preschool children…Seeing the first sign of a woman’s underground in the student movement, when I was asked to lead a rap session at the National Student Congress in College Park, Maryland, in 1968…After a resolution for the liberation of women from the mimeograph machines was laughed down at the SDS convention, hearing the young radical women telling me they had to have a separate women’s-lib group—because if they really spoke out at SDS meetings, they might not get married…Helping Sheila Tobias plan the Cornell intersession on women in 1968, which started the first women’s-studies programs (how many universities have them now!)…Persuading the NOW board that we should hold a Congress to Unite Women with the young radicals despite differences in ideology and style…So many way stations.

I admired the flair of the young radicals when they got off the rhetoric of sex/class warfare and conducted actions like picketing the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City. But the media began to publicize, in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was hailed as the ideology of sex/class warfare by those who claimed to be the radicals of the women’s movement. After the man-hating faction broke up the second Congress to Unite Women with hate talk, and even violence, I heard a young radical say, “If I were an agent of the CIA and wanted to disrupt this movement, that’s just what I would do.”

By 1970, it was beginning to be clear that the women’s movement was more than a temporary fad, it was the fastest-growing movement for basic social and political change of the decade. The black movement had been taken over by extremists; the student movement was immobilized by its fetish for leaderless structure and by the growing alienation from extremist hate rhetoric. Someone was trying to take over our movement, too—or to stop it, immobilize it, splinter it—under the guise of radical rhetoric and a similar fetish against leadership and structure. “It’s fruitless to speculate whether they are CIA agents, or sick, or on a private power trip, or just plain stupid,” a black leader warned me. “If they continually disrupt, you simply have to fight them.”

It seemed to me the women’s movement had to get out of sexual politics. I thought it was a joke at first—those strangely humorless papers about clitoral orgasms that would liberate women from sexual dependence on a man’s penis, and the “consciousness-raising” talk that women should insist now on being on top in bed with men. Then I realized, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, that these women were in part acting out sexually their rebellion and resentment at being “underneath” in society generally, being dependent on men for their personal definition. But their resentment was being manipulated into an orgy of sex hatred that would vitiate the power they now had to change the conditions they resented. I’m not sure what motivates those who viciously promulgate, or manipulate, man hate in the women’s movement. Some of the disrupters seemed to come from extreme left groups, some seemed to be using the women’s movement to proselytize lesbianism, others seemed to be honestly articulating the legitimate and too-long-buried rage of women into a rhetoric of sex/class warfare, which I consider to be based on a false analogy with obsolete or irrelevant ideologies of class warfare or race separatism. The man-haters were given publicity far out of proportion to their numbers in the movement because of the media’s hunger for sensationalism. Many women in the movement go through a