had framed him, one might say that a rift had opened
between him and me. But I still kept sending money for
the breakfast and literacy programs sponsored by the Black
Panthers.
I went to demonstrations as often as I could. The Three
Marias of Portugal had written a feminist book that got them
jailed. I demonstrated in their behalf. I went to prolesbian and
antiapartheid demonstrations.
One of my part-time jobs was organizing against the
Vietnam War, the backdrop to most of my life as a young
adult. In Amsterdam my husband and I had helped deserters
from the U. S. military hide on their way to Sweden. Vietnam
had been shaping my life since I was eighteen and was sent to
the Women’s House of Detention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser,
who also worked against the war, hired me as her assistant.
Muriel had a long and distinguished life of rebellion, including the birth of a son out of wedlock in an age darker than any I had experienced. He was now a draft resister in Canada.
With another woman, Garland Har is, I organized a conference that brought together artists and intellectuals against the war. Robert Lifton, Susan Sontag, and Daniel Ellsberg
participated. With director Andre Gregory I helped organize
a special night on which al the theaters and theater companies
in Manhattan would donate their money to help rebuild a
hospital in North Vietnam that U. S. bombs had leveled. I was
not real y able to face the chasm between the left and feminism even though I gloried in the essays in
working against the war or, for instance, apartheid just because
the men on the left: were pigs. I became part of a consciousness-
raising group, but even that had its roots in the Speaking
Bitterness sessions in communist China. I worked hard. One
of my mentors, the writer Grace Paley, who had helped me
when I got out of the Women’s House of Detention, helped
me again - this time to get an apartment. It was on the Lower
East Side, in an old tenement building. The toilet was in the
hall and the bathtub was in the kitchen. I had a desk, a chair,
and a $12 foam-rubber mattress. I bought one fork, one spoon,
one knife, one plate, one bowl. I was determined to learn to
live without men.
My Last Leftist
Meeting
