My Life on the Road (8 page)

I know that some authors hate book tours—and maybe I would, too, if I had to keep repeating the plot of one novel—but I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn’t be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn’t know they had. Recently when a book of mine was published in India,
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I did a tour of bookstores from Jaipur and New Delhi to Kolkata. Those, too, range from big cheerful chains to small, discussion-filled, art-filled shops. Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

Every author also creates a world of her or his own. I watched Bette Midler signing every last book for her hundreds of fans lined up around the block, all while wearing a perky hat made to look like a piano. Oliver North of the Iran-Contra arms scandal had two guards carrying poorly concealed guns, took no questions, and signed copies of
Under Fire: An American Story—The Explosive Autobiography of Oliver North.
Ai-jen Poo, who won a MacArthur “genius” award for her organizing of domestic workers, turned book signings into rallies. No one left one of her events without knowing that living longer is not a crisis, it’s a blessing, that the twelve million Americans over eighty-five will double in number by 2035, that many more home care workers will be needed, and that these workers deserve the same legal rights as workers anywhere else.

Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there. Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

There are events that divide our lives into before and after. I notice that most people, when asked to name such an event, cite something that gave them a feeling of emotional connection, whether it was witnessing a birth, or walking New York streets after 9/11, or viewing a photo of our fragile planet from space.

Mine was an event you may never have heard of: the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. It may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about. In three days, plus the two years leading up to them, my life was changed by a new sense of connection—with issues, possibilities, and women I came to know in the trenches. The conference also brought a huge and diverse movement together around shared issues and values. You might say it was the ultimate talking circle.

I’m not alone in being a different person after Houston. In the years since then, I’ve met diverse women who were there, and every one has told me of some way in which she, too, was transformed; her hopes and ideas of what was possible—for the world, for women in general, and for herself. Because eighteen thousand observers came to Houston from fifty-six other countries, and because delegates were chosen to represent the makeup of each state and territory, it was probably the most geographically, racially, and economically representative body this nation has ever seen—much more so than Congress; not even close. Issues to be voted on in Houston also had been selected in every state and territory. It was a constitutional convention for the female half of the country. After all, we had been excluded from the first one.

If you wonder why you haven’t heard about this event—I’m glad. It all began in 1972, when the United Nations declared that 1975 would be International Women’s Year—right up there with the Year of the Child or the Year of the Family Farm. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed a thirty-nine-member delegation to represent U.S. women, and named a man from the State Department to head it.

But the one who took on this task of finding out what issues and hopes really
did
represent the female half of this country was Congresswoman Bella Abzug, a woman who never thought small. She enlisted Congresswoman Patsy Mink as coauthor and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as coconspirator in writing a revolutionary piece of legislation. It called for federal funding for fifty-six open, economically and racially representative conferences over two years, one in every state and territory. Delegates elected and issues selected at each meeting would then go to a national conference in Houston. There, a National Plan of Action would be voted on. The purpose was to represent U.S. women not only to the rest of the world, but also to our own leaders in Washington and in state legislatures. At last, there would be democratic answers to the classic question:
What do women want?

I couldn’t think of anyone but Bella who could dream up such a massive series of events, much less have the chutzpah to ask Congress to pay for them. Though I’d campaigned with her in a Manhattan that loved her, a Washington that feared her, and a women’s movement that depended on her, I’d never seen her try anything this huge. Women in every state and territory would be invited to debate and decide such contentious issues as reproductive freedom and abortion, welfare rights, lesbian rights, domestic violence, and the exclusion of domestic workers from labor laws. Her request for $10 million was actually a bargain at twenty-eight cents per adult American woman, but Congress went into shock. It delayed voting until a year after the first state conference was supposed to start; then it slashed the appropriation in half to $5 million. Still, money was approved, and the National Women’s Conference was scheduled for Houston in November 1977.

To organize this mammoth undertaking, President Jimmy Carter appointed a new group of IWY commissioners. I was one, which is why I and about three dozen other members of this new commission ended up spending two years crisscrossing the country to help organize fifty-six conferences of two days each.

I
CONFESS THAT
I
was as scared as I had ever been. This organizing challenge was a little like a presidential campaign, with a fraction of the resources. It meant helping to create a representative planning body in each state and territory, including groups that probably had never been together before. I would learn the big difference between protesting other people’s rules and making one’s own—between asking and doing.

Our election process for delegates was so open as to be terrifying. Anyone sixteen years old or over could be elected if the result, as a group, represented the state racially and economically.

Success can be as disastrous as failure—and it almost was. As if we had tapped some underground spring of desire, women came to conferences in such numbers that they overflowed the campuses and government buildings where our shoestring budget put them.

In Vermont, more than a thousand women slogged through ice and snow to create the biggest women’s conference ever seen there. If most hadn’t supplied their own brown-bag lunches and child care, our organizing goose would have been cooked at this first of all the state conferences.

In Alaska, an auditorium designed for six hundred had to make way for seven thousand. Fortunately, most of the women good-naturedly sat on the floor.

In Albany, the capital of New York State, more than eleven thousand women—four times more than we planned for—lined up outside government buildings in the sweltering July heat, then waited most of the night in an airless basement to cast ballots for delegates and issues. I’d stopped in Albany for the opening ceremony—and then I was going home to write and make a living, but I ended up staying for two days and two nights without bed or toothbrush, helping with the voting lines.

Events in some other states made us realize that we’d been living in a fool’s paradise. To represent majority views was definitely not everybody’s goal. For instance, only about 2 percent of the population of Washington state was Mormon, but nearly half the women attending that state’s conference were. Such disproportion also turned up in Michigan and Missouri, part of a massive Mormon effort to head off the Equal Rights Amendment, then in its ratification process and sure to be voted on in Houston.
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Though over 60 percent of Americans supported it, one Mormon woman was about to be excommunicated for campaigning for the ERA.
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Some said this opposition came from a fear that the ERA would take women out of a traditional role by offering them equality outside the home; others pointed out that Mormon-owned insurance companies would lose money if gender-rated actuarial tables were outlawed, as race-rated ones had been. (For instance, a woman who didn’t smoke often paid higher premiums than a man who did smoke. Why? Because on the average, women live longer.) Opposition literature also said the ERA could mean integrated restrooms, women in combat, husbands who no longer had to support wives, and more—none of which was accurate.

On the theory that exposure cures many ills, Bella called a press conference to disclose this attempt to overrepresent one religious group. Congress members from states where Mormons had political power accused Bella of religious bias, demanding she apologize in public—and she had to. It was the only time I ever saw her give in to power.

Some other religious groups were just as opposed to representative conferences. In Missouri, church buses brought five hundred or so Christian fundamentalist women and men to the state conference—in time to vote but not long enough to be tainted by open discussion. In many states, Catholic groups brought anti-abortion and anti-birth-control pamphlets and picket signs, even though—or perhaps because—Catholic women were at least as likely as non-Catholics to use both. In Oklahoma, Christian fundamentalists voted to call homemaking “the most vital and rewarding career for women” and then to end the meeting. I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.

In Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan grew so alarmed at a multiracial conference that its members called in reinforcements and elected an almost totally white delegation in a state that was at least a third African American.”
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Finally we ruled what we should have in the first place: registrants for the conferences had to sign up individually in advance, not at the door by the busload.

Koryne Horbal, a founder of the Feminist Caucus of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, saw that anti-equality groups were distributing lists of issues to oppose in Houston, but pro-equality groups were giving out no lists of what to support. She put all the pro-equality issues into one National Plan of Action, made buttons that said
I
’
M PRO
-
PLAN
, and spent weeks phoning delegates to explain why each issue was important. Once in Houston, her work in creating clarity would save the day.
I
’
M PRO
-
PLAN
buttons would help women to recognize allies they didn’t know, just as anti-equality delegates recognized each other by wearing red
STOP ERA
buttons.

T
HIS LONG, HARD, HUMOROUS,
educational, angering, unifying, improvised, and exhausting two-year process probably shortened all our lives.

But it was worth it. On a hot November day in 1977, two thousand elected delegates and about eighteen thousand observers began to fill the biggest arena in Houston. With issue areas from the arts to welfare, and three days to vote on them, there was a feeling of urgency, excitement, and even a little fear that we couldn’t pull it off. Also hundreds of anti-ERA, anti-abortion, and other pickets were marching outside the arena in the hope of making sure that we couldn’t. Across town, a right-wing and religious counterconference—led by Phyllis Schlafly—was getting equal media coverage for accusing the National Women’s Conference of being antifamily, anti-God, and otherwise unrepresentative; never mind that those counterconference participants had been elected by no one.

All I could hope was that Bella’s tactics—for instance, including every democratic symbol she could think of—would convey the difference. There were First Ladies, Girl Scout Color Guards, and even relay runners: women athletes who set out from Seneca Falls, New York, where the fight for suffrage began, carrying a lighted torch all the way. Right-wing radio hosts attacked the First Ladies for showing up at all, and Phyllis Schlafly’s supporters in Alabama persuaded local athletes to refuse to run a crucial stretch of highway on the way to Houston. Despite dangers, a young Houston woman had flown to Alabama to fill in.

As thousands of delegates-plus-alternates began to arrive, several business conventions were late in checking out of Houston hotels. Our delegates were lined up for hours waiting to check in.

I walked up and down the lobby lines, trying to be reassuring. Observers from faraway countries were camped out next to women who’d never left their states before; Title IX athletes shared water bottles with women disability advocates in wheelchairs; Native Hawaiians compared long flights with Native Alaskans; and high-powered women leaders in the corporate or political worlds stood in line like everybody else. Despite a few meltdowns, most women seemed to be getting to know each other in a kind of celebratory chaos. If I hadn’t been so anxious about the combination of counterdemonstrations and crucial goals, I would have felt celebratory, too. As it was, I just longed to go home, put my head under a pillow, and forget this event that I cared about too much—and feared would fail.

In the midst of this chaos, about twenty women delegates from Indian Country were taking matters into their own hands. They had found each other by putting a hand-lettered notice in the lobby. When no meeting room was available, they gathered for their own talking circle in a fancy anteroom of the ladies’ lounge. Rarely had these women from different and distant parts of Indian Country been able to meet together. When they told me this, I had my first flash of organizer’s pride:
If only this happens, it will be enough.

In the cavernous Coliseum, young women officials in red T-shirts began admitting delegates to the floor. Groups slowly filled up its acres of chairs arranged by states, as in a presidential convention. Outside, picketers were still chanting angry slogans, but they were soon drowned out by the buzz from the floor and from bleachers filling up with observers.

Up the center aisle, two young women runners brought the lighted torch from Seneca Falls, miraculously just in time for Maya Angelou to read the poem she had composed for the occasion. I watched from behind the big stage as two past First Ladies and the wife of the current president—Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter—greeted the delegates. The three women were applauded by activists who probably had demonstrated against all their husbands. Groups of observers holding signs from Mexico, India, and Japan cheered for a speech by Barbara Jordan, the African American congresswoman from Texas, as, in her elegant rhetoric, she called for “a domestic human rights program.” Later teenagers led a standing ovation for an antinuclear speech by anthropologist Margaret Mead, though I knew many had no idea who this feisty old lady was.

With twenty-six multi-issue planks that had emerged from the states on subjects from child care to foreign policy, there was both fervent debate and an undercurrent of worry about the time it would take to debate them all. As the hours went on, the chairs and parliamentarians rotated, each one looking like Toscanini conducting a huge and unruly orchestra. I listened to disputes over arcane points of order, and also to heartfelt speeches, demonstrations that interrupted everything, and much caucusing on the floor. I couldn’t believe that, somehow, process and a sense of humor were prevailing.

Despite fervent protests from all the women wearing anti-ERA buttons and American flags, the controversial “sexual preference” or sexual orientation plank passed. The conference had supported the right of lesbians to equal treatment in employment and child custody. Most surprising, Betty Friedan spoke from the floor in its support, marking the end of her decade-long stand that including lesbians—the “Lavender Menace,” in her famous phrase, which was then adopted with humor and defiance by lesbians themselves—would damage or doom the women’s movement. At last, a majority agreed that feminism meant all females as a caste, and that antilesbian bias could be used to stop any woman until it could stop no woman.