The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I

was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it

myself.

In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T- shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.

I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my

fingers.

Even during the early years, I got letters from women

telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge

me the $60. It wasn’t personal. It was just that any money I

earned came from someone else who also didn’t have enough

money for a T-shirt. Or did she? I guess I’l never know. I

couldn’t embrace being a capitalist pig; I couldn’t accept the

fact - and it was a fact - that the more money I was paid, the

nicer people were. I couldn’t even accept the good fallout -

that charging a fee for a lecture enabled me to do benefits as

110

Capitalist Pig

wel . After a while I got the hang of it and when work fel of ,

when the speaking events dried up, when someone was nasty

to me, I just raised my price. It was bad for the karma but

good for this life.

I remember that saying I was poor got me contempt, not

empathy or a few more dol ars. I remember that begging

for money especially brought out the cruelty in people. I

remember that trying to talk about poverty - you show me

yours and I'l show you mine - never brought forth anything

other than insult. Competitive poverty was the lowest negotiation, a fight to the moral death.

In hindsight it is clear to me that I never would have been

able to put in more than a quarter of a century on the road

had I not figured out what I needed. Everyone doesn’t need

what I need, but I do need what I need. Money is a hard

discipline, not easy to learn, especially for the lumpen like me.

111

One Woman

I was walking down the street on a bright, sunny day in New

York City sometime in 1975. A woman almost as bright and

sunny was walking toward me. I recognized her, an acquaintance in the world of books. She had been up at my Woodstock speech, which had been about rape. I had started writing out

my speeches because of my frustration at not being able to

find venues for publication. This was cal ed “The Rape Atrocity

and the Boy Next Door, ” subsequently published in 1976 in

a collection of speeches called Our Blood: Prophecies and

Discourses on Sexual Politics. We greeted each other, and then

she started talking: she had been raped on a particular night

in a particular city years before. She had left the window open