DIY History | Transcribe | Campus Culture | Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

1970-11-20 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 6

GRINNELL WLF CONFERENCE
     We arrived at Grinnell on Friday night just as the first snowflakes of the season began to fall. Grinnell is an elite school, of those "excellent" undergraduate college that none of the women I went with could afforded to go to. It's a 60 mile drive along the interstate, the same distance from Iowa City as the Quad-cities area, only in the opposite direction. I've never been to Grinnell for a women's liberation meeting, but I have gone the other way, to Davenport to picket with Chicano women and men who were demanding jobs.
     Women who go to Grinnell usually end up in the League of Women Voters, wives of businessmen and college professors-- inveterate liberals. They can usually afford to be.
     The main thing we have in common with the women there is our needs as women and a commitment to or interest in Women's Liberation.
     When we go to the auditorium the meeting had already started. We came in just as a woman from Twin Oaks, a commune in Virginia, was stalking about their commune-- how they live, what they see as necessary for survival and growth, and those things she was experiencing. Not much about women, but our meetings last year when she was in high school in Iowa City. I was proud of what she was doing, and struck by her appearance of agelessness. And I wondered about all the women in her high school class who, unlike her, never had the choice of rejecting the university and its way of life. But I did not blame her for their plight. I think that's something I've learned from women's liberations.
     Then Marlene Dixon cam on -- not as string as I've heard her before, and not as soft either. More controlled, more burned out. She was talking about why she was getting out of Women's Liberation. it is a middle class, white organization, she said, and she went on to detail actions about the Equal Rights amendment, blasting women for supporting it. She went into great detail to explain how women should have been supporting extension of protective laws for men instead, and I thought, "I've seen this movie before." But we do it in small groups and we don't confuse our sisters with the women Marlene is accusing us of being. I thought, she spends too much time debating with NOW, & I've heard that debate & we've all taken part in it so many times & who the hell is she talking to? She belittled those projects we've worked on-- but they didn't sound like our projects-- they all sounded like pretty high class, frivolous things.
     Then came the clincher--a woman asked whether any effective work would be done about racism, imperialism, capitalism while you remained in college, whether maybe you didn't have to give that up-- Marlene replied that there were SOME colleges and universities where you could do effective work. Wow, I thought, OUT OF THE DAY CARE CENTERS & INTO THE COLLEGES. I've been through this movie before. Lay on a middle-class guilt trip but leave room for yourself.
     Nothing that happened after changed my impression of what Marlene was saying. The most important things to fight are capitalism, imperialism and racism, she said. How to do that except through Women's Liberation she was asked in four different ways. What movement will you go to? A lot of us wanted, and needed, an answer to that. Every time she responded with a recitation of the horrors of capitalism, racism and imperialism. I've known about those horrors for a long time, nothing she said added any dimensions to them, but I have hopes that we can work to end them through women's liberation. i don't see any other way.
     Marlene lashed out at other women for their liberal campaigns to change laws. I think she knew that we had spent a lot of time talking with women about that amendment. She talked down to all of us who have struggled daily to get that message across and now she was using it against us. marlene had kind words for everyone but women: the youth culture had potential id it became political and it would become political as soon as the repression came down on it, which was inevitable, she said. The Black Panthers were the leading edge of revolution and not to be criticized-- although Marlene seems to have forgotten that she was involved in quite a brouhaha at a Black Panther conference herself when she was the one "chosen: to represent women. So Marlene said she was getting out. Where would she go? I'm still wondering.
     I was really proud of the three sisters from our collective who made the only point relevant to me all night. I'm still wondering about those points.
     Marlene mentioned being at Sky River rock festival, the fundraising event sponsored by the Seattle Liberation Front, and she expressed disappointment that the event was non-political. i thought of our sisters in Fanshen and the Anna Louise Strong Brigade and their struggles within and without the Seattle Liberation Front and I though about how beautiful those sister must be. but Marlene didn't mention those sisters, she talked about how when the repression starts to come down on the,, the youth culture will get political, so it's all for the good. Later, a woman from our collective got up and elaborated on what happened to women at Sky River and how three women were raped and a fourth rape was prevented by a female chauvin patrol. Only then did Marlene respond with any knowledge of how women were treated at Sky River. Somehow she didn't make nay connection with what she'd said earlier. I thought, my god, she's had a frontal lobotomy, can't she see any connection with her statement about the youth culture? If she knew about it, why didn't she talk abbot it? If we can't prevent rapes of Vietnamese women? If we're invisible to a women who's been working in women's liberation since 1966, when will we ever be seen? To be a woman is to fight always on two fronts, and it's not getting any easier. I deeply resented Marlene for that. I questioned her honesty, something I'd never done before.
     Some women announced the organization of an anti-imperialist women's movement to sign a declaration of independence from American foreign policy. Women against the war? The Women's International League for Peace & Freedom did that in 1915 and they're still proclaiming their freedom from it. They're working against the draft and for a mercenary army. Some step forward. A woman from our collective, a woman who went to jail over the war four years ago, got up and expressed our feeling that this was a rip-off of the women's movement, expressed our sense of futility over such actions, over the takeover of the women's movement, and our refusal to be coopted by any elitist movement directed by the eastern very old left.
     Marlene's reaction was to ridicule the phrase male-identified women, a term she doesn't use along with sexism or sisterhood.
     A third woman told Marlene that she was simply wrong when she stated we weren't around during the invasion of Cambodia. We were indeed there, 24 hours a day at times-- some of us walked off jobs, some went to jail. But mostly we spent so much time fighting for out single demand, an end to sexism, that we had little time to do anything else. Our demand was always the first one to be compromised so we had to fight twice as hard as anyone else. The sister asked, why didn't you see us, Marlene? (People who do warch, did-- one campus equivalent of J. Edgar decided the WL people were the most dangerous on campus.) I thought of women all over th ecountry who were told by the suddenly conscience-stricken liberals to take their "piddling  provocations" elsewhere, that WE had to end the war. 
No response by Marlene.
In it she lays down a beautiful rap on women. In it she also  raises the question of leadership [underlined] in women's movement. This was surely the invisible Issue,  the unspoken question at the Grinnell Conference. Marlene never mentioned the issue of leadership, because in her terms nothing but NOW exists. She put everything in terms of a class issue. In Marlene's terms we don;t exist because we never solved the issue of leadership. All the groups that work as we do--as collectives that refuse to be experts and specialists-- that question directions from any centralized group-- we're all invisible. Her arguments are all addressed to the leadership of NOW.
     Too bad. Something behind what Marlene says might be right. It might be impossible to create a non-racist women's movement. That worries me deeply because I will not take part in a racist one for any amount of freedom.
     I don't know if Marlene even cared about what she was saying. She seemed to think it great fun when a dude went running out shouting his joy at the first snowfall and many of the people in the audience jumped up and left, the most exciting thing to happen to them all evening. Maybe when she cares about what she's saying, she goes to other places to say it.
     I still don't know any answers to the important questions of how to end imperialism, racism, capitalism and sexism (yes, sexism, Marlene) but I know we won't get them at panels at elite colleges. Maybe we'll work them out together. 
     How can we fight for the needs of women and create a non-racist, non-exploitative society? Nothing that happened at Grinnell convinces me we don't need a women's movement. I can see that some women won't take part, and I guess I'm sorry that Marlene is one of them.

Page 6 Volume 1 No 9 Ain't I

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GRINNELL WLF CONFERENCE We arrived at Grinnell on Friday night just as the first snowflakes of the season began to fall. Grinnell is an elite school, of those "excellent" undergraduate college that none of the women I went with could afforded to go to. It's a 60 mile drive along the interstate, the same distance from Iowa City as the Quad-cities area, only in the opposite direction. I've never been to Grinnell for a women's liberation meeting, but I have gone the other way, to Davenport to picket with Chicano women and men who were demanding jobs. Women who go to Grinnell usually end up in the League of Women Voters, wives of businessmen and college professors-- inveterate liberals. They can usually afford to be. The main thing we have in common with the women there is our needs as women and a commitment to or interest in Women's Liberation. When we go to the auditorium the meeting had already started. We came in just as a woman from Twin Oaks, a commune in Virginia, was stalking about their commune-- how they live, what they see as necessary for survival and growth, and those things she was experiencing. Not much about women, but our meetings last year when she was in high school in Iowa City. I was proud of what she was doing, and struck by her appearance of agelessness. And I wondered about all the women in her high school class who, unlike her, never had the choice of rejecting the university and its way of life. But I did not blame her for their plight. I think that's something I've learned from women's liberations. Then Marlene Dixon cam on -- not as string as I've heard her before, and not as soft either. More controlled, more burned out. She was talking about why she was getting out of Women's Liberation. it is a middle class, white organization, she said, and she went on to detail actions about the Equal Rights amendment, blasting women for supporting it. She went into great detail to explain how women should have been supporting extension of protective laws for men instead, and I thought, "I've seen this movie before." But we do it in small groups and we don't confuse our sisters with the women Marlene is accusing us of being. I thought, she spends too much time debating with NOW, & I've heard that debate & we've all taken part in it so many times & who the hell is she talking to? She belittled those projects we've worked on-- but they didn't sound like our projects-- they all sounded like pretty high class, frivolous things. Then came the clincher--a woman asked whether any effective work would be done about racism, imperialism, capitalism while you remained in college, whether maybe you didn't have to give that up-- Marlene replied that there were SOME colleges and universities where you could do effective work. Wow, I thought, OUT OF THE DAY CARE CENTERS & INTO THE COLLEGES. I've been through this movie before. Lay on a middle-class guilt trip but leave room for yourself. Nothing that happened after changed my impression of what Marlene was saying. The most important things to fight are capitalism, imperialism and racism, she said. How to do that except through Women's Liberation she was asked in four different ways. What movement will you go to? A lot of us wanted, and needed, an answer to that. Every time she responded with a recitation of the horrors of capitalism, racism and imperialism. I've known about those horrors for a long time, nothing she said added any dimensions to them, but I have hopes that we can work to end them through women's liberation. i don't see any other way. Marlene lashed out at other women for their liberal campaigns to change laws. I think she knew that we had spent a lot of time talking with women about that amendment. She talked down to all of us who have struggled daily to get that message across and now she was using it against us. marlene had kind words for everyone but women: the youth culture had potential id it became political and it would become political as soon as the repression came down on it, which was inevitable, she said. The Black Panthers were the leading edge of revolution and not to be criticized-- although Marlene seems to have forgotten that she was involved in quite a brouhaha at a Black Panther conference herself when she was the one "chosen: to represent women. So Marlene said she was getting out. Where would she go? I'm still wondering. I was really proud of the three sisters from our collective who made the only point relevant to me all night. I'm still wondering about those points. Marlene mentioned being at Sky River rock festival, the fundraising event sponsored by the Seattle Liberation Front, and she expressed disappointment that the event was non-political. i thought of our sisters in Fanshen and the Anna Louise Strong Brigade and their struggles within and without the Seattle Liberation Front and I though about how beautiful those sister must be. but Marlene didn't mention those sisters, she talked about how when the repression starts to come down on the,, the youth culture will get political, so it's all for the good. Later, a woman from our collective got up and elaborated on what happened to women at Sky River and how three women were raped and a fourth rape was prevented by a female chauvin patrol. Only then did Marlene respond with any knowledge of how women were treated at Sky River. Somehow she didn't make nay connection with what she'd said earlier. I thought, my god, she's had a frontal lobotomy, can't she see any connection with her statement about the youth culture? If she knew about it, why didn't she talk abbot it? If we can't prevent rapes of Vietnamese women? If we're invisible to a women who's been working in women's liberation since 1966, when will we ever be seen? To be a woman is to fight always on two fronts, and it's not getting any easier. I deeply resented Marlene for that. I questioned her honesty, something I'd never done before. Some women announced the organization of an anti-imperialist women's movement to sign a declaration of independence from American foreign policy. Women against the war? The Women's International League for Peace & Freedom did that in 1915 and they're still proclaiming their freedom from it. They're working against the draft and for a mercenary army. Some step forward. A woman from our collective, a woman who went to jail over the war four years ago, got up and expressed our feeling that this was a rip-off of the women's movement, expressed our sense of futility over such actions, over the takeover of the women's movement, and our refusal to be coopted by any elitist movement directed by the eastern very old left. Marlene's reaction was to ridicule the phrase male-identified women, a term she doesn't use along with sexism or sisterhood. A third woman told Marlene that she was simply wrong when she stated we weren't around during the invasion of Cambodia. We were indeed there, 24 hours a day at times-- some of us walked off jobs, some went to jail. But mostly we spent so much time fighting for out single demand, an end to sexism, that we had little time to do anything else. Our demand was always the first one to be compromised so we had to fight twice as hard as anyone else. The sister asked, why didn't you see us, Marlene? (People who do warch, did-- one campus equivalent of J. Edgar decided the WL people were the most dangerous on campus.) I thought of women all over th ecountry who were told by the suddenly conscience-stricken liberals to take their "piddling provocations" elsewhere, that WE had to end the war. No response by Marlene. In it she lays down a beautiful rap on women. In it she also raises the question of leadership [underlined] in women's movement. This was surely the invisible Issue, the unspoken question at the Grinnell Conference. Marlene never mentioned the issue of leadership, because in her terms nothing but NOW exists. She put everything in terms of a class issue. In Marlene's terms we don;t exist because we never solved the issue of leadership. All the groups that work as we do--as collectives that refuse to be experts and specialists-- that question directions from any centralized group-- we're all invisible. Her arguments are all addressed to the leadership of NOW. Too bad. Something behind what Marlene says might be right. It might be impossible to create a non-racist women's movement. That worries me deeply because I will not take part in a racist one for any amount of freedom. I don't know if Marlene even cared about what she was saying. She seemed to think it great fun when a dude went running out shouting his joy at the first snowfall and many of the people in the audience jumped up and left, the most exciting thing to happen to them all evening. Maybe when she cares about what she's saying, she goes to other places to say it. I still don't know any answers to the important questions of how to end imperialism, racism, capitalism and sexism (yes, sexism, Marlene) but I know we won't get them at panels at elite colleges. Maybe we'll work them out together. How can we fight for the needs of women and create a non-racist, non-exploitative society? Nothing that happened at Grinnell convinces me we don't need a women's movement. I can see that some women won't take part, and I guess I'm sorry that Marlene is one of them. Page 6 Volume 1 No 9 Ain't I