have given women a basic right to equality. There was a lot
of of icial (national) NOW literature on the Equal Rights
Amendment that I saw for the first time in D. C. I couldn’t
understand why reading it made me question the ERA - a
question I had only on contact with national NOW, its literature and its spokespeople. But of course, I did understand - I just wasn’t schooled yet in the ways of this duplicitous feminist organization. The literature was al about how the ERA would benefit men. Guts were sorely lacking even back then.
A decade later, the organization was torn over pornography.
The big girls in the big of ice didn’t want to get their hands
dirty - the issue demanded at least an imagined descent down
the social ladder. Lots of local NOW activists were fully
engaged in the fight against pornography and brought those
politics to the convention. Then there were what I take to be
honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined
group, who thought that equality meant women using
pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a
resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.
We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.
NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,
which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know
whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow
poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now
articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I
dreamt about those posters for months.
A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.
The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of
addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to
which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in
the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More
free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the
juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following
orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules
for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.
Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite
in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people
could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves
who we were and what we believed.
I was approached by a black woman who worked in the
hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street
with the workers in the hotel and the local chapter of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN) to protest the pornography and prostitution so
