I’ve kept all of my date books since I started using one in
1963. So while I remember this meeting and the change it made in me, I wouldn’t
have remembered the exact date or what else I was doing around the same time
without this one.
Fifty years
ago tonight, I went to my first women’s liberation meeting. It was at the
apartment of a reporter for the New York Post, where my
husband worked, and if I hadn’t been there recently for a party I think I wouldn’t
have had the courage to go to this meeting where I knew practically no one.
The meeting
was of the “women’s caucus” of the New York Media Project, a group of media
professionals who were against the war in Vietnam. In 1969 “women’s caucuses”
were cropping up in many groups like this. I had been working for a book
publisher, as a secretary, for just a month, and had heard of the Media
Project, but wasn’t yet part of it. But in my work at the publisher, I had just
finished reading a “manuscript” (a box of ephemera: leaflets, flyers, papers)
of Women’s Liberation Movement documents, and felt what journalist Jane
O’Reilly later called, in the first issue of Ms. magazine, “the click
experience,” when myriad inchoate feelings and thoughts about my life as a
female all clicked into place.
I asked my
husband (yes, my husband!) if he knew anyone at the Post who was involved in
this WLM, and he told me about Lindsy Van Gelder and Bryna Taubman. And he
added that they were having a meeting on September 24.
Reader, I
went. And in a roomful of mostly strangers, I spoke up during the discussion. I
had never done that. But these were all women, and women who were encouraging
each other.
Up to this moment I had always felt
that men were absolutely sure of what they thought, and because I was rarely
absolutely sure of what I thought, I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear of
being shot down. But these women were saying some things I agreed with, and
some I didn’t. It felt possible to speak up in support of one side or another
without having to prove I was 100% right.
That was
the beginning of my leap into women’s liberation and feminism, and I have never
looked back. It has saved my sanity.
(And the
one bittersweet thought now is that my husband isn’t here to have several long
discussions about those early days, and how we rockily yet successfully navigated
our life together as many other relationships failed to do.)
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I knew Bob only four months. When I interviewed with him for the job
as his secretary, I noticed that one of his books had been written by Milton
Kotler, who was married to my college friend Janet. He was friends with Robin
Morgan, who came by the office shortly before she went off to the women’s
liberation demonstration against the Miss America contest in early September. I
don’t know whether he’d already been diagnosed with leukemia when I started working for him or that only
happened in those four months. He was working almost until the day he died.
Only later did I learn that he was one of the founder of the Yippies. 
