The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Young Americans for

Freedom

I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William

Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I

knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white

supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.

I had an English teacher in honors English who was the

equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because

he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex

outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced

Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide,

which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he

was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up

to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism

seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?

It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home

from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No

55

Heartbreak

one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired

model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was

downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair

beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come

inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never

supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,

and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because

curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.

Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he

was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on

how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s

running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than

what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media

and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went

easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt

ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew

that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a

strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and

when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did

get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous

crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just

trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I

could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the

stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought

of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew

the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote