choose to abandon heterosexuality and the family? Are you
really saying, I asked carefully and clearly and slowly, that homosexuality is so attractive that no one would choose the heterosexual family over it? He stared at me, silent, a long time. 1 am afraid of
violence and the Klan, and I was afraid of him. 1 repeated my
questions. “You’re a Jew , ain’t y a , ” he said and turned away from
me, stared straight ahead. All the women in the row who had been
looking at me also turned away and stared straight ahead in utter
silence. The only woman whose head had been otherwise engaged
had not looked up except once: she had taken one hard stare at me
in the beginning and had then turned back to her work: knitting
blue baby booties, the Klan’s own Madame Defarge; and I could
imagine my name being transferred by the work of those hands
from the press pass on my chest into that baby-blue wool. She sat
next to the Klansman, and she knitted and knitted. Yes, I am a
Jew , I said. I repeated my questions. He memorized my face, then
stared straight ahead.
In my few remaining minutes on the floor, I implored the Mississippi women to talk to me. I went hurriedly from row to row, expecting somewhere to find one rebellious sign of interest or simple compassion. One woman dared to speak to me in whispers, but did not dare look at me; instead she looked down into her own lap,
and the woman next to her got jittery and upset and kept telling
her to “think again. ” She whispered that she was against the Equal
Rights Amendment because girls would have to go to war. I said:
we say we love our children but isn’t it true that if we send our
boys to war we can’t love them very much? why are we willing to
have them killed if we love them? At this point the marshals forced
me physically to leave the floor. They did not ask or tell or say,
“Tim e’s up”; they pushed. *
In the face of the Klan and the marshals, I risked one more trip
back to the Mississippi delegation. On the floor, delegates were
milling around; it was a brief recess (but the same strict time limits
applied for journalists). In the sheer confusion of the numbers and
the noise, the discipline of the Mississippi delegation had relaxed
slightly. A Mississippi woman explained to me that as a Christian
woman she was in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position. I asked her if she really meant to say that boys were less valuable; and was that why
we sacrificed them in wars— because we didn’t think they were
worth very much? She said that it was the nature of boys to guard
*The system o f press access to the convention floor that favored male
journalists over female was set up by a male “feminist. ” It was outrageously, unashamedly, and inexcusably sex-discriminatory.
and to protect, which included going to war and also taking care of
their families. She was not prepared to say that boys were less
valuable than girls, only that women were superior to men in
Christianity, had a favored place based on and because of the
male’s role as protector. God, she said, wanted her husband to
protect her. The Equal Rights Amendment would force her to take
responsibility for decision making and for money. She did not
