Intimate Wars

Table of Contents

 

 

 

In loving memory of
Ruth Dubow Hoffman,
Jack Hoffman,
Martin Gold,
Mahin Hassibi.

 

For my daughter,
Sasharina Kate Hoffman,
in gratitude and joy.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

 

 

 

 

 

T
wenty years ago I attended a party at which a numerologist offered to analyze my name. After performing what appeared to be complicated mathematical computations she told me my number was eleven—a “power number”—then looked at me quizzically.

“How strange,” she said. “This is the first time I have ever seen this.”

“What is it?” I asked, genuinely concerned.

“Your numbers tell me that you make money from war.”

I met her gaze steadily as I replied, “I do.”

 

 

AS AN ONLY CHILD growing up in 1950s Philadelphia, I occupied myself with warrior fantasies. My imagination soared with visions of knights, kings, and queens who populated the English history books I would get from the library. The dramatic tales of battles driven by focused energy and heightened danger excited me. It wasn't conquest I was after; it was
the warriors' extraordinary sense of mission. I was moved by an empathic connection with the vulnerable and oppressed. I wanted to challenge a great evil power, to lead troops into battle for the most noble of causes.

Unfortunately, the world in which I was living allowed for few grand heroics. Rather than a battleground, it was a special kind of wasteland. I grew up at a time when one's worth and acceptance as a female were measured by the width of a crinoline skirt, when French kissing branded you a sexual outlaw, and when little girls' dreams revolved around their weddings and lessons learned from watching
Queen for a Day
's ritual of “improving” one's life with domestic conveniences. It was a vast wilderness of mothers, teachers, and friends encircling me in traditional femininity, creating a suffocating loneliness that I could not name or understand.

I felt powerless to change my fate until Queen Elizabeth I, whose story I discovered at age ten, finally broke that silence. Her survival skills were legendary: her mother was beheaded when she was three and her stepmother executed when she was nine; she was sexually molested at fifteen; and she spent two months imprisoned in the tower, a hair's breadth away from execution herself. She learned to carefully scan the political and emotional landscape for signs of potential danger.

She ruled sixteenth-century England by herself, refusing to marry or to bear children. The androgynous strategies of this woman who wanted to be “both king and queen of England” were unheard of for a female monarch of her time.

I kept the lessons I learned from Elizabeth close to my heart and my head when I broke free from Philadelphia and came of age in New York City in the 1960s. The time was ripe to pick up her gauntlet and challenge women's traditional roles. I became a child of one of the greatest social
revolutions in history, at a time when it became politically possible for women to legally gain and exercise reproductive choice—the power of life and death. A time when the right to choose became the fundamental premise of the movement for women's liberation, and when the expression of that truth was every woman's entitlement. After years spent feeling I should have been born in some earlier, more romantic age, I have come to realize that my life's work would not have been possible in any other era but this one.

In 1971, two years before
Roe v. Wade
, I opened one of the first legal abortion clinics in the country and thrust myself into a world that came with battles to fight (replete with invasions, death threats, and killings), opportunities for courage and heroism, and the necessity for bold leadership, strategic thinking, philosophical debate, and entrepreneurial skill. There were barbarians at the gate, self-identified as Right to Lifers (anti-choicers, or “antis,” as I call them throughout this book), waving pictures of bloody fetuses and sometimes hiding bombs or guns under their coats. My sword was a six-foot coat hanger held high over my head as I declared my sisters would never return to back-alley butchery. I raised a bullhorn to rally fellow soldiers, decrying the clinic violence that swept the nation. This was my historic stage. It was a war, and I finally felt I was living my destiny.

 

I HELPED MIDWIFE an era in which women came closer to sexual autonomy and freedom than ever before in history. The very idea that women could rise up and act in their own best interest electrified men and women alike during those years, and the foundational works of second-wave feminists inspired millions of my peers. But my feminism didn't come from books or theoretical discussions. It came in the shape of individual women presenting themselves for services each
day. I began to understand the core principle of feminism as I held the hands of thousands of women during their most powerful and vulnerable moment: their abortions.

I wasn't immune to the physicality of abortion, the blood, tissue, and observable body parts. My political and moral judgments on the nature of abortion evolved throughout the years, but I quickly came to realize that those who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives, but also the power—and the responsibility—of taking life in order to do that. Indeed, acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women's reproductive freedom.

 

MY STORY IS THE STORY of women's struggle for freedom and equality in the twentieth century, but it is also a personal story of obstacles, survival, and triumphs. Like Elizabeth, I did not want to give birth to my successor. I never dreamed of being a mother, nursing a child, shaping a young life. I wanted—
needed
—to give birth to myself. And, in the arms of the women's movement, my delivery was aggressive, even violent, with pressures pushing down on me from every direction at times, crushing and battering me as I reached for the freedom to become. Most painful of all were my terrifying glimpses of the all-encompassing sense of being alone. Whatever one can say glowingly about the women's liberation movement and our “collective problems requiring collective solutions,” this fact cannot be denied: becoming is nothing if not a solo journey. Yet my singular voyage has been enriched with allies, friends, lovers, and family, unexpected intimacies that bear meaning, depth, purpose, and joy.

Thomas Merton taught that there were three vocations:
one to the active life, one to the contemplative, and a third to the mixture of both. This book is the story of my mixed life. I am an activist, a philosopher, a transgressor of boundaries. I strive to live in truth—or, perhaps, truths. I have not escaped this war unscathed; like all women who have gone into battle, I am scarred. But perhaps that is the definition of wisdom. Perhaps our wounds, the crevasses and cracks in our innocence of perception that come as the price of experience, are our marks of understanding.

—ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, “THE SOLITUDE OF SELF”

 

 

 

 

 

I
have always loved the smell of lilacs. They make me think of love and revolution.

I was six years old when my parents took me on the Staten Island Ferry to meet my aunt Natasha and uncle Vuluga.

We stayed for lunch, and as my parents sat smoking and talking with Vuluga, Natasha took me conspiratorially out into her small garden. She was quite old, with silver hair and light blue eyes. The soft edges of her accent caressed me as she proudly showed me the lilac trees in her garden, telling me she'd had them as a child in Russia.

Even then I was transfixed by the story of her life. In the late eighteen hundreds Natasha and Vuluga were part of the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), best known for multiple attempts and ultimately the successful assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. They were caught, tried for treason, and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for life. Somehow, they managed to escape. They made their way across miles of snow-covered Siberian steppes, crossing
Eastern and Western Europe and finally the ocean to settle in Staten Island, New York. The family talked about Natasha and Vuluga in hushed tones of respect and awe. Audacious and courageous, they had put their lives on the line for their ideals.

Before we left, Natasha gave me a sprig of purple flowers from her tree. I clutched it in my small hands on the way home, desperately trying to pick up its magical scent through the overpowering smell of the Hudson River. Natasha and Vuluga remained fixed in my memory.

My relatives were warriors for a cause, but they also fought their own intimate war against cultural expectations. Never married, they lived together by choice at a time when alliances such as those were considered far outside the pale. And in confronting a common enemy, their love was strengthened and deepened.

 

MY MOTHER'S PARENTS were first cousins. They came from a long line of Russian radicals, musicians, and rabbis. The knowledge of their consanguinity was a cherished family albatross around all of our necks. Explaining to others and to ourselves why so many of us were extraordinarily talented, we would laughingly point to our “incestuous grandparents” as the organizing principle. The uniqueness of my mother's family was a standard of being for me. Iconoclastic, intellectual, artistic, and temperamental, their lives put most other people's in soft focus.

My paternal relatives were no less romantic. It was 1879 when my nineteen-year-old great-grandmother Blume Hoffman plucked up her courage, left her abusive husband in Lithuania, and with three children in tow, moved to London. Her siblings went further, emigrating to the United States to join an uncle who was well established in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Blume's brother Dave struck gold in Alaska and begged her to come to the United States, but she had used up her courage and was terrified of crossing the Atlantic. Her son, my grandfather Sam, decided that he would try his luck, and in his early teens he worked his way onto a steamer to the United States, eventually making his fortune in industry.

Wearing diamond studs and cuff links, Sam courted my grandmother Kate, rewarding her beauty by throwing bags of money onto her kitchen table. But I never knew my grandfather when he had money—only after he'd lost it, playing the horses. His nickname for me was “Citation,” after the famous Triple Crown winner, because I was always running about. He would sit at home, bitter and depressed, refusing to work because he considered paid employment beneath him. He is unsmiling and uncomfortable in the photos I have kept, like a deposed king mourning his lost empires.