My Life on the Road (18 page)

If I’d followed my instincts, I would have stopped volunteering for McCarthy the moment I met him. As soon as Bobby Kennedy declared, I would have worked for him instead of just escaping to California. Fear of conflict with those who supported McCarthy so fiercely had kept me from trusting what I knew.

S
INCE
D
EMOCRATS OWNED THE
Vietnam War, might a Republican president be able to end it sooner? Addressing this question was my
New York
assignment on a next long journal-keeping trip on the campaign plane of Richard Nixon. It had taken three murders—Martin Luther King, Jr., and two Kennedys—to leave the country with this choice between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Neither one spoke for the national majority that was now against the war in Vietnam. This choice marked the low point in my campaigning life until then.

After an eight-day cross-continental campaign trip, our planeload of journalists and campaign staff ended up in Tampa, where Florida governor Claude Kirk had filled an auditorium with patriotic banners and bleachers full of chanting Nixon supporters. Even sitting in the elevated press section overlooking the floor, we could barely see each other above the balloons and banners and choreographed enthusiasm. Resuming a game that the press corps had invented to stay attentive while Nixon gave The Speech, Max Frankel of
The New York Times
tossed us a note: “$1 reward still available for the first black face.” It was a tough dollar to win.

Behind us, a choir began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Its lyrics by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe celebrated an end to war and “the grapes of wrath” if one listened carefully—which no one did. The familiar music didn’t quite sink in for a moment, but when it did, some of the armor of objectivity began to crack in the male reporters around me. “They shouldn’t sing Bobby’s favorite hymn,” said a reporter softly. “It doesn’t belong to them.”

Suddenly I felt tears welling up. It was as if we were surrounded by resentful, neighbor-fearing people—or rather by good people whose neighbor-fearing instincts were being played upon—and these ungenerous ones were going to win, and not just this election but the power to impose themselves, here and in many other countries, for a long dark time to come. I had got through funerals, the brutal streets of Chicago in 1968, and much personal sadness dry-eyed, but this ridiculous rally in Tampa was too much. It wasn’t the victory of one man or even the death of another. It was the resentment of those who feared the new majority that the civil rights and antiwar movements and rebellious women were creating. As I wrote then:
We might be rather old before the conservers left and compassionate men came back.

A
S
I
WOULD LEARN
in the years to follow, I hadn’t guessed the half of it. Then, even Nixon supported the Equal Rights Amendment and allowed his Justice Department to support civil rights, much as Goldwater and later the first President Bush did. But by the time of Bush II, none of those earlier candidates could have made it past Republican primaries inundated with busloads of voters from about thirty thousand fundamentalist churches plus other white ultraconservatives, many of whom had been Democrats before that party got “too inclusive” of black, brown, and female human beings. Nor could any remaining liberal or centrist Republicans run on a right-wing national platform shaped by the likes of Senator Jesse Helms, the famously racist and formerly Democratic senator from North Carolina, who long opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa. He had been among the first to abandon the Democratic Party and become a Republican, out of anger at the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Certainly, President Eisenhower, who had warned against the military-industrial complex, would have had no place in the party anymore.

Slowly, control of the Republican platform and most primaries was taken over by economic and religious interests that opposed efforts to increase equality by race, sex, class, or sexuality.
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They would become more entrenched in opposition to the Clinton era, and more still in the Obama one. A right-wing and supposedly populist group called the Tea Party—supported by such rich hyperconservatives as the Koch brothers—would make the Republican Party so extreme that much of its platform wouldn’t have been supported in public opinion polls by most Republicans. This in turn encouraged some Democrats to become more money-hungry and cautious in the name of winning.

I would watch as Republican women especially—who once could say that their party was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and was as good or better on equality than the Democrats—swelled the ranks of independents, or quit politics, or were turned off by Democratic women who condemned them for ever having been Republicans.

When I was campaigning on the road and meeting with Republican or independent women, what I tried to say was:
You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.

If I was already hooked on politics and campaigning before Bella Abzug’s 1970 campaign for Congress, I was mainlining after it. Bella was the first woman I campaigned for. Smart, brave, and larger than life, a one-woman movement, she dared to run for Congress from Manhattan at a time when many feminists were still demonstrating against Congress.

We had first met in the mid-1960s at an anti–Vietnam War demonstration outside the Pentagon, and I had been put off by her brashness. I’d never seen a female human so free of any need to be ladylike. Then, when we were both volunteering in the 1965 New York mayoralty campaign of John Lindsay, I saw her warmth, kindness, and political skill. Gradually, it dawned on me that my first response had been my problem, not hers.

As I got to know Bella, I learned that as a young lawyer she had taken a civil rights case so unpopular that she had been forced to sleep in bus stations in Mississippi. No hotel would give her shelter, and black families, while grateful for her intervention on behalf of Willie McGee, a black man accused of raping a white woman, would have been endangered. An all-white jury had sentenced him to death after deliberating two and a half minutes, and Bella pursued an appeal that delayed the death penalty. Yet after eight years in jail, he would be executed, still protesting his innocence.

She was also a pioneer activist against nuclear testing, and a leader in the global women’s peace movement. Ironically, Bella was once rejected as a spokeswoman for Women Strike for Peace. Despite being happily married and the mother of two daughters, her image wasn’t “motherly” enough.

Altogether she was a great example of expanding beyond the usual candidate supply lines, and into social justice movements. She didn’t just respond to public opinion; she changed it. She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.

She also had an ego as big as her heart, and believed, as did her husband, Martin Abzug, that she should be president. Yet she had a sense of humor about herself. When I was organizing fund-raisers for her in the same liberal suburbs that had supported Gene McCarthy, I had to tell her that her candidacy wasn’t being well received there. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m everything they moved to the suburbs to escape.” As the daughter of an immigrant Jewish butcher from the Bronx, she explained, she was a class step down, but McCarthy, a very un-Jewish silver-haired poet from Minnesota, was a class step up. She said this as cheerfully as she talked about beating boys at street marbles, or going to college on the subway with a liverwurst sandwich prepared by her mother for lunch, or loving the name of her father’s store, the Live and Let Live Butcher Shop.

It was great to work with Bella. For one thing, I no longer had to give my suggestions to the man sitting next to me in order to have them taken seriously. For another, I wasn’t banished from strategy meetings by someone saying, “No broads.” Even walking in the street with her was an education. Truck drivers leaned out of their cabs to yell, “Give ’em hell, Bella!” Women stopped to say she made them feel proud. Neighbors asked if she could help them with a harassing landlord or a new child care center. In a very New York way, she reminded me of the Gandhians walking through villages.

In that first congressional race, her opponent was Barry Farber, a conservative radio talk show host whose main asset was his ability to talk endlessly about anything.
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She beat him by going to supermarkets and subway stops, and listening as well as talking. She was elected to Congress in 1970, as a war raged in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon was in the White House. It was hard to imagine any two people more different than Bella and Nixon. Indeed, after the Watergate scandal broke, she would become one of the first members of Congress to call for his impeachment.

A
YEAR AFTER HER ELECTION,
Bella, Shirley Chisholm, and their sister congresswoman, Patsy Mink from Hawaii, decided to hurry history along. Though this new wave of feminism had many groups working on issues, there was no nationwide organization to advance them all by getting more pro-equality women into elected and appointed office. It was clear that neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party would do this on its own. Indeed, both parties doubted there were women who could win elections or be “qualified” for appointments.

When Bella, Shirley, and Patsy called a dozen or so of us into a congressional meeting room to talk about founding a new national organization, I felt as if we were already breaking barriers just by being there. It was the first of many such meetings. Our job was to research a few hundred names for a founding meeting that would include women from new feminist groups as well as such established ones as the YWCA, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Council of Jewish Women. All this needed to be done yesterday if we were to form a national group that could have an impact on the upcoming 1972 elections.

Washington can be so hot that the British Embassy once gave its workers extra pay for working in a tropical climate. It was that kind of July in 1971, when 320 diverse women began arriving for three days of big meetings and nights of caucuses. I’m not sure any of us ever left the hotel to see the light of day. We were saved from chaos by the creative chairing of Aileen Hernandez, a labor organizer who had been the first African American and first woman on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and also the first African American president of NOW. We voted to call ourselves the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC); to have a structure that included state, city, and local caucuses; to be multipartisan; and to adopt a statement of purpose that opposed sexism, racism, institutional violence, and poverty through the election and appointment of pro-equality women to political office.

I was elected to a temporary twenty-four-member policy council along with Bella, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Beulah Sanders from the National Welfare Rights Organization, Native American leader LaDonna Harris, and many more. Our job was to initiate state and city caucuses and to meet with those already forming by contagion just from reading news reports of the NWPC. I traveled to a dozen states, from familiar California to unfamiliar Tennessee. All this happened so fast that once, I was plucked off a train from New York to Philadelphia at the wrong stop by a group that thought it should be the NWPC affiliate, not the one meeting me at the next stop. Fortunately, the two groups later merged.

At home, I went to the founding of the Manhattan Women’s Political Caucus, where at least six hundred women showed up for a daylong meeting chaired by Eleanor Holmes Norton, then the head of New York City’s commission on human rights. At least a third of those attending were black, Latina, Asian, and more. It was the only meeting I’d ever seen in Manhattan that looked like Manhattan.

Once chapters were established and a structure was in place, NWPC’s goal was to increase the number and diversity of women delegates to both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions of 1972, and to get the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive freedom, and other basic issues of equality written into both parties’ platforms. It was a task worthy of years. By the time all the state chapters of the NWPC were up and running, the first convention was less than two months away.

At that Democratic Convention held in July in Miami, political women were in the national spotlight for the first time since suffrage. All of us were some mixture of excited and scared. Conventions then were still working meetings at which critical decisions were made, not just televised political showcases. We needed places where hundreds of women delegates could gather each morning to make such tactical decisions as whether to challenge the seating of unrepresentative delegations, plus fighting for minority platform planks, answering media queries, and other daily dilemmas on which our fates might rest. In addition to Bella, Shirley, and other leaders, the NWPC had elected one spokeswoman for each party’s convention so the press and other outsiders would know who to go to.

That job sounded like the last thing I wanted to do, so I had asked not to be nominated and stayed away from an earlier NWPC meeting where those elections were to happen. Unfortunately, as I learned, a reluctant spokeswoman was considered more likely to represent the group, while an eager one might seek the spotlight. Betty Friedan was at the meeting and among those campaigning to be elected, but I was elected in absentia. As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.

And conflict there was. I’d seen Friedan only in group meetings. Contrary to myth, all feminists don’t know each other, and we were differnt ages and from different parts of a diverse movement. I understood that running for spokeswoman and losing would be painful for anyone, but especially for Friedan. Having written
The Feminine Mystique,
a sanity-saving book for millions of college-educated homemakers in the suburbs who were feeling,
There must be more to life than this,
she had been crowned “the Mother Superior to Women’s Lib” by
The New York Times.
Earlier that summer, when she hadn’t been reelected to an NWPC position, she had threatened to sue and sent a lawyer to examine the ballots; but no irregularities were found.

She also took it personally when Bella Abzug said she didn’t want to replace “a white, male, middle-class elite with a white, female, middle-class elite.” I agreed with Bella and thought it was okay to say since that description fit us, too. We were explaining we wanted to transform the system, not imitate it. Still, Betty yelled at Bella for being anti-elite, and yelled at me for inviting my speaking partner, Flo Kennedy, to the founding meeting of the NWPC. She feared that Flo would “mau-mau” the meeting, though actually Flo set a unifying tone. Also, Friedan had made clear in the media for several years that she thought Bella, Kate Millett, I, and others were damaging the movement by supporting the issues of lesbians, welfare mothers, and others she regarded as outside the mainstream. As Betty wrote in
The New York Times,
“The disrupters of the women’s movement were the ones continually trying to push lesbianism or hatred of men, even though many weren’t lesbians themselves and didn’t act privately as if they hated men.” Together with Flo Kennedy, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, and others, I was named one of the disrupters.
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Betty’s antipathy to Bella, me, and others would persist for years to come. For instance, all of us who started
Ms.
magazine were fine with the financial sacrifice and fund-raising that required, but we were shocked to find ourselves accused by Friedan of “profiteering off the movement.” Most painful to me, Friedan refused to shake my mother’s hand when Millie Jeffrey, a leader of labor union women, tried to introduce them. Bella and I each handled this hostility in our own way. Bella once literally damaged her vocal cords by shouting back at Betty, and as a result Friedan attacked her less. I never responded in person or print, on the grounds that it would only feed the stereotype that women couldn’t get along, so Friedan wasn’t afraid of me and attacked more. Truthfully and in retrospect, I was avoiding conflict. I was being my mother’s daughter. I needed a teacher in surviving conflict, and Friedan was definitely it.

When the Democratic convention was about to meet in Miami, I was worried about private tensions turning public, not only with Bella and me, but with such rising stars as Sissy Farenthold, a Texas legislator who was among Friedan’s rivals for the leadership of the NWPC. This tension was symbolized by the distance between the posh oceanfront hotel where many Democratic officials, media people, and Friedan were staying, and the tacky motel where NWPC headquarters were located and where most of us slept. As Nora Ephron would report, “Every day, Friedan would call N.W.P.C. headquarters at the dingy Betsy Ross Hotel downtown and threaten to call a press conference to expose the caucus; every day…movement leaders would watch with a kind of horrified fascination to see what Betty Friedan would do next.”

But women’s new presence and activism in and around that convention created enough good news to make up for all the worry. More than a third of the delegates were women—up from 13 percent four years earlier—surpassing even Eleanor Roosevelt’s record of 15 percent in 1936; not her (or our) goal of 50/50, but a record. There was a strong women’s plank in the platform, where four years ago there had been none. Our only serious failure was our inability to get a plank supporting reproductive freedom included—because Senator George McGovern, the probable nominee, feared running on it. Still, it was the first time this human right had been raised as an issue and voted on by a major party.

We also saw our NWPC co-founder Shirley Chisholm receive a roll call vote of 151 delegates for her symbolic run for political equality and against the Vietnam War, which she had opposed in her first speech in Congress.
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Shirley’s mere presence in the race brought the NWPC goals to national attention, and although her total campaign budget was probably what other presidential campaigns spent on take-out food, she had just kept going. Indeed, she might have received more delegate votes if McGovern hadn’t passed the victory point before the roll call was completed.

Even Theodore White, a chronicler of presidential campaigns who was rarely interested in the nonpowerful, reported that the NWPC had put women on the political map. About our impoverished headquarters at what he called the “derelict” Betsy Ross Hotel, he wrote: “One might be amused by the high-octave span of women’s voices gathered together, or the rooms with the unmade beds, half-unpacked suitcases, yogurt cartons, chests covered with blue jeans and bras—but only briefly. The Betsy Ross Hotel was a power center. Mimeograph and Xerox machines spewed out leaflets…the switchboard jammed; fuses blew; and each night, after dark, couriers boarded buses to travel north on Collins Avenue and persuade night clerks of the forty or more major hotels to stuff mailboxes or let them slip leaflets under delegates’ doors….When the convention broke up, women power 1972 was real.”