The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

to have sex with her; the younger daughter slept next to the

older girl, both on a mattress on the floor. They were wonderful and delightful girls, scared to death; each put up the best front she could: I'm not afraid, I don’t care, none of it hurts me.

The first order of business, after get ing them down from

the wood rafters il uminated by the burning candles, was getting the older one a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion, I said. I’m not proud now of

using my authority that way, but she was a child, a real child;

anyway, for bet er or worse, I would have forced one on her.

In Amsterdam the procedure was not so clandestine nor so

stigmatized. It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant.

One day she was suddenly very happy. One of the adult

rockers sent into her bed by her father was going to Spain and

he wanted to take her. This was proof that he loved her. I knew

from the hippie father that he had paid the rocker to take the

girl. Finally I was the adult and someone else was the child.

I told her. I told her carefully and slowly and with love but

I told her the truth, al of it, about the rot en father and the

rot en rocker. Her mother now wanted her and her sister

back. I sent them back. Nothing would ever be simple for me

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Heartbreak

again. A strain of melancholy entered my life; it was the

fusion of responsibility with loss in a world of bruised and

bullied strangers.

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Theory

I went to Amsterdam to interview the Provos - not the blood-

soaked Irish Provos but the hashish-soaked Dutch ones. They

served as the prototype for the U. S. yippies, though their

theory was more sophisticated; as one said to me, “Make an

action that puts crowds of ordinary people in direct conflict

with the police, then disappear. This will undermine police

authority and politicize those they beat up. ” The man I eventually married said that he envisaged social change as circles on a canvas; the idea was to destabilize the circles by adding

ones that didn’t fit - the canvas would inevitably lose its

integrity and some circles would fal off, a paradigm for social

chaos that would topple social hierarchies.

What I found infinitely more valuable, however, were three

books: Sexual Politics by Kate Millet ; The Dialectic of Sex by

Shulamith Firestone; and Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology

edited by Robin Morgan. These were the classic, basic texts of

radical feminism; what happened when women moved to the

left of the left. I was hardheaded though; I defended Norman

Mailer even though his attacks on Mil et were philistine; I

stil liked D. H. Lawrence, though now I find him unbearable

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