Fair Use Blog

Here’s the new rules:

1. At the top of the post, make a list of the books you’ve read all or part of, in print, over the course of the past week, at least as far as you can remember them. (These should be books that you’ve actually read as a part of your normal life, and not just something that you picked up to read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Pick one of those books from the list, and pick out a quote of one or more paragraphs, to post underneath the list.

3. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, which should be more a matter of context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than they are a matter of discussing the material.

4. Quoting a passage absolutely does not entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the books:

• Sonia Johnson (1989). Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution. (Albuquerque: Wildfire Books. I picked it up some time ago through BookMooch.)
• Richard Gombin (1975), The Origins of Modern Leftism. Translated from the French by Michael K. Perl. (Baltimore: Penguin. Picked up this very week for 49¢ from the Shaman Drum used books sale rack!)
• Fred Woodworth, The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). (Tucson: Fred Woodworth. PO Box 3012, Tucson, Arizona 85702. I picked my copy up last week from May Day Books in Minneapolis.)

And here’s the quote. This is taken from Fred Woodworth’s Evil Empire Notes, Issue No. 107 of The Match! (Summer 2009; also, incidentally, the 40^th anniversary issue of The Match!). This was airplane reading, taken in somewhere in the sky between Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

GIVEN all the millions of horrifying stories in the naked country, now and then it’s good to pluck out one to hear an authentic voice rather than a statistic. Amnesty International printed up this one, by Donald Boyd of Chicago:

I have been a victim of racial profiling since I was 17 years old. Once when I was walking to the cleaners, I stopped to talk with some young men…. When I walked away, the police just automatically accused me of purchasing drugs. Two officers jumped out of a car and kept asking What did they sell you? I repeatedly replied no one sold me anything. … They cuffed me and drove me to a police substation.

… The next morning they loaded 45 people into a van made for 32. The men were almost all black and Latino. When we arrived at the jail, sheriff’s deputies, dressed in riot gear, met us. They shouted obscenities and threats. The deputies assaulted several people, including me, for supposedly not complying with their every word.

At each step in the process—arrest, detention and bond hearing—we were lined up, and numbers were scribbled on our arms with black marking pens…. In court, you appear before a judge, but via a television screen. You don’t get to speak, and the judge never even looks you in the face…. They treat our communities with disdain and contempt. I had to hire a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars to get the charges dismissed….

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AS Law becomes increasingly complex, with hundreds of thousands and even millions of laws stacked on top of each other, almost no one can confront officialdom in any way without a lawyer. But what happens when your lawyer takes your money and does no work, don’t file basic motions or writs, and essentially shafts you? Not much. Bar associations have a cap of compensatory payments they sometimes make to incompetent or dishonest lawyers’ clients, but the amouts are often based on century-old, or even older, stated maximums. And it’s next to impossible to go after such a lawyer legally, because to do so you need… another lawyer.

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[…]

EIGHT COPS raided a home in Minneapolis in ‘08. They shot up the place, accidentally not killing anyone. Well, it was the wrong house (there is no right house for something like this). This is completely comparable to a surgeon amputating the wrong leg, but if the doctor who did this to you then got a commendation from the medical association, wouldn’t you feel absolutely floored? So did the family whose home was raided and shot up. All eight cops received medals.

Undoubtedly this sounds like hyperbole or mere rhetoric, but the simple fact is that there is no conceivable way anyone can interpret this but as an official statement of Good Work, Men to stupid, negligent, incompetent thugs for terrorizing and injuring innocent people.

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NOT SURPRISINGLY, when humanitarian spirit is dead in officialdom it’s not partly alive; it really is extinct and defunct. Also in Minnesota, a poor wild bear somehow got a plstic jar or bucket stuck on its head. Official solution: shoot the bear. No sympathy for an unfortunate creature; no imaginative or bold remedy. Just kill.

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AS REPORTED by the Washington Post, prison guards at Prince George’s County Jail in Maryland are apt to be the kind of guys the average person expects to hear of as BEHIND bars. An investigation by the paper found guards who’ve been charged with assault, theft, beating and threatening their wives with death, having sex with prisoners, robbery at gunpoint, and other crimes.

Among the nine officers was Mark R. Bradley, whose then-wife asked for a protective order in 1998, claiming he had threatened, taunted, punched and slapped her… When she reached for the phone, Bradley who had been on the force for almost four years, yanked it away… His wife recalled him saying: Call the police… Make me lose my job. I’ll kill you. Almost a decade later, he was still on the payroll at the jail, despite three protective orders issued against him in the late 1990s. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to assaulting another woman, whose rib was broken. The woman, who had been pregnant with his child, told police that after a beating days earlier, she had a miscarriage. A judge put Bradley on probation and ordered him to take an anger management class.

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AIRPORT FASCISM is being extended to railroads. Amtrak, the railroad passenger company, has brought in a SWAT-style phalanx of agents in full combat gear to sweep through train stations, randomly screening and searching passengers. The randomly chosen passengers will have to place their bags on a platform and be swabbed with chemicals that are claimed to react to traces of explosives. You can also be ratted out by dogs.

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ONE OF THE factors that propelled the United States as far along into the police state that it now is, was the Vietnam War. There’s plenty of evidence that soldiers in ALL wars become brutalized, but something extraordinary seems to have taken place in Vietnam. Whatever it was, American men who went there (and survived) tended to come back in a vicious state of mind. Ordinary people were their enemy. They made up stories (essentially none has ever been verified) of people spitting on them when they arrived at stateside airports; and they formed cliques of us-versus-them. Looking for work, a high proportion of them went into law enforcement, and there they reinforced and amplified the already-existing us versus them mentality, ratcheting the propensity toward police brutality to amazing heights.

Now the same thing is happening with Iraq. Our guess is that the psychological corruption happens when soldiers fight amid a culture and a language that has few points of contact with the west and with Indo-European languages. It is one thing to fight, say, Germans or Italians, whose general culture is largely familiar (same religions, for instance) and whose languages have a large percentage of words that are the same or nearly enough so to be comprehensible even to the monolingual standard American youth. But in Vietnam—and now in Iraq—these military people are surrounded by words and behaviors utterly alien to them. Our own idle theory, therefore, is that this operate on their minds in such a way that the enemy becomes completely dehumanized. This creates the us-versus-them, and when they return to the USA, they still have it.

Then they go into law enforcement.

Already we are beginning to read about cases in which police—now Iraq war veterans—are opening fire on people merely running away from them. And already, too, the convoluted excuses are starting to evolve: Re-experiencing a war zone is one of several classic signs of combat stress reaction, says the Department of Veterans Affairs. If persistent and untreated, the Department goes on, this can result in post traumatic stress disorder.

Whatever verbal gimmickery you haul out to gloss over the facts, the truth is that these men (generally they are men) have been ruined, corrupted fatally and irretrievably, by being sent out to murder masses of people for no good reason in a country where they ought never to have gone. Mostly it’s their own fault, too, since ultimately it was their own volition that was compliant in their going there.

The bottom line is that Bush’s freudian effort to surpass his father’s Panama coup by similarly taking Saddam Hussein, unresisted by the press and the American people at the outset, is now going to result in thirty or forty more years of ever-worsening police violence against the public here. With this on top of everything else—the overpopulation, insanely burgeoning law-pollution, disastrous shift to digital culture, etc.—America is rapidly turning into an unliveable hell. Then add global warming.

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IMMIGRATION PRISONS, where you’re sent for not having adequate proof of being a so-called citizen, are the new concentration camps of the Evil Empire. There are now a whole class of persons of various ethnicities who are afraid to travel outside of the towns or cities where they live, because of the possibility of being stopped by some profiling trick excused as a broken taillight, and then being sent sprawling into a cell at an immigration prison.

A recent well-publicized case in some of the larger newspapers (and excluded from the local dailies) concerned one Hiu Lui Ng, who’d come to the US from Hong Kong. Making the mistake of going to immigraiton headquarters in New York City to get a green card (legal authorization to live and work in this country), he was grabbed and put behind bars. There he developed cancer, was in severe pain, laughed at by the medical matrons, and eventually died from the rampaging and untreated disease.

[…] They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation. Instead, … guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, dragged him from his bed on July 30, craried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lock-up in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case. (New York Times.)

One out of hundreds of thousands.

—Fred Woodworth, Evil Empire Notes, in The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). 19–21.

See also:

• GT 2009-05-07: Occupying forces
• GT 2009-03-28: It doesn’t take much imagination.
• GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security (#3): The Disappeared.
• GT 2008-03-18: Death by Homeland Security (#2): Francisco Casteneda, of San Diego, California.

Prior to the 1980s, most social science research on rape was concentrated on stranger rape — in which a man assaults a woman who is unknown to him, who is targeted at random or opportunistically, in the midst of another crime (such as mugging or burglary). At the time, there little reliable research on date rape and other forms of acquaintance rape. Later research found that acquaintance rape was far more prevalent than previously realized, and far more common than stranger rape — that 90% or more of all rapes were committed by a date, an intimate partner, or another man known to the victim. This passage, from New York radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking 1975 study Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, summarizes the data that was available in the mid-1970s, and the limitations of that data, which feminists were beginning to investigate and reveal.

According to the task force of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, half of all rape victims (53 percent) were total strangers to their attackers; another 30 percent were slightly acquainted. Seven percent had a family relationship to their rapists (daughter, sister, niece or cousin) and 3 percent were not related but had a previous close association. (As with most percentage distributions concerning crime, there is always a category called unknown or other.) The task force concluded, If a woman is attacked, then, considerable justification does appear to exist for the fear that the offender will be a stranger.

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, The Police-Blotter Rapist, the statistical profile of rape falls midway between the profiles for assault and robbery. In keeping with this pattern, when interpersonal relationships in these three crimes of violence are compared side by side, we find that strangers commit 21 percent of all assaults, 53 percent of all rapes and 79 percent of all robberies.

Testimony: About five years ago when I lived in Chicago I awoke one night gagged with my hands pinned down by someone who was wearing leather gloves and holding a razor to my throat. I wasn’t quite sure I was awake. I thought I must be in the middle of a nightmare that seemed much more realistic than usual and I couldn’t break it up. I was trying to establish if there really was a person there. And then I did get my wrist cut slightly, so I realized it was real and that I was risking my life and that I’d better hold still and let the man have intercourse with me. He was very fast. He wasn’t wearing any clothes on the bottom half of his body and he ran out the window in that position, just like Romeo on the balcony, onto the fire escape and down.

I got up, turned on the lights and took a bath in alcohol. I was living alone. I had to get out of the apartment. I set off with my coat on and then I realized the man had gotten in my purse and left me without a penny. Apparently he had been in the apartment for some time before I woke up because I saw he had gagged me with my own dishtowel. It was then that I thought to call the police.

Stranger-rape has clearly been the preferred category from the point of view of the police precinct, the category most likely to win the determination of founded. When a woman is raped by a total stranger, her status as victim is clean and untranished in the station-house mentality. In Brenda Brown’s 1973 Memphis study, 73 percent of all founded rapes were committed by strangers, and Brown reported, The closeness of the relationship was a frequently used reason for categorizing cases as unfounded. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, unfounded cases are frequently complicated by a prior relationship between victim and offender.

For this reason it remains difficult to assess the true percentage of rapes committed by strangers. As the women’s movement continues to press a greater understanding of the crime of rape on the general public, women who have been assaulted by men they know will feel freer to report the crime and these reports will begin to be treated with the seriousness they deserve. At the present time, police precincts still operate from the assumption that a woman who has been raped by a man she knows is a woman who changed her mind afterwards.

Susan Brownmiller (1975), Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. 351–352.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rat, was one of the leading counterculture / New Left newspapers in New York City. In January 1970, a group of women who worked at Rat, fed up with the increasingly aggressive sexism of the paper’s content and internal hierarchies, took over the newspaper and, with the help of women from Women’s Liberation groups in New York, converted it into a feminist newspaper. In the first issue, Robin Morgan (then a member of W.I.T.C.H.) contributed Goodbye to All That. The article has since been reprinted widely in anthologies of radical feminist writing; this copy is based on the reprint that appears in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. A slightly different version appears, together with a long introduction and explanatory footnotes, in Morgan’s The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968–1992.

Goodbye to All That

So, Rat has been liberated, for this week, at least. Next week? If the men return to reinstate the porny photos, the sexist comic strips, the nude-chickie covers (along with their patronizing rhetoric about being in favor of women’s liberation)–if this happens, our alternatives are clear. Rat must be taken over permanently by women–or Rat must be destroyed. (¶ 1)

Why Rat? Why not EVO or even the obvious new pornzines (Mafia-distributed alongside the human pornography of prostitution)? First, they’ll get theirs–but it won’t be by a takeover, which is reserved for something at least worth taking over. Nor should they be censored. They should just be helped not to exist–by any means necessary. But Rat, which has always tried to be a really radical cum lifestyle paper, that’s another matter. It’s the liberal cooptative masks on the face of sexist hate and fear, worn by real nice guys we all know and like, right? We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous. What the hell, let the chicks do an issue; maybe it’ll satisfy ‘em for a while, it’s a good controversy, and it’ll maybe sell papers runs an unoverheard conversation that I’m sure took place at some point last week. (¶ 2)

And that’s what I wanted to write about–the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what Women’s Lib, as they so chummily call it, is all about–who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token pussy power or clit militancy articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more. (¶ 3)

Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It could just make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women–with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or coin as well). Goodbye to all that. (¶ 4)

Run it all the way down. (¶ 5)

Goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave can say with impunity to a woman on the staff of Liberation magazine, The trouble with you is you’re an aggressive woman. (¶ 6)

Goodbye to the straight male-dominated Left: to PL, who will allow that some workers are women, but won’t see all women (say, housewives) as workers (blind as the System itself); to all the old Left-over parties who offer their Women’s Liberation caucuses to us as if that were not a contradiction in terms; to the individual anti-leadership leaders who hand-pick certain women to be leaders and then relate only to them, either in the male Left or in Women’s Liberation—bringing their hang-ups about power dominance and manipulation to everything they touch. (¶ 7)

Goodbye to the Weather Vain, with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males. Left Out!—not Right On!—to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better—they know) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that the machismo style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by free choice, and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make her revolution…all the while, oh my sister, not meeting my eyes because Weathermen chose Charles Manson as their—and your—hero. (Honest, at least, since Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy, whether he is Dick Nixon or Mark Rudd: master of a harem, women to do all the shitwork, from raising babies and cooking and hustling to killing people on command.) Goodbye to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne which is the face of Beulah Saunders, which is the face of me which is the face of Pat Nixon which is the face of Pat Swinton. In the dark we are all the same–and you better believe it: we’re in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variations: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice–take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister—don’t you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea. (¶ 8)

Goodbye to RYM II, as well, and all the other RYMs—not that the sisters there didn’t pull a cool number by seizing control, but because they let the men back in after only a day or so of self-criticism on male chauvinism. (And goodbye to the inaccurate blanket use of that phrase, for that matter: male chauvinism is an attitude—male supremacy is the objective reality, the fact.) Goodbye to the Conspiracy, who, when lunching with fellow sexist bastards Norman Mailer and Terry Southern in a Bunny-type club in Chicago found Judge Hoffman at the neighboring table—no surprise: in the light they are all the same. (¶ 9)

Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituting oppression by another name. Goodbye to the assumption that Hugh Romney is safe in his cultural revolution, safe enough to refer to our women, who make all our clothes without somebody not forgiving that. Goodbye to the arrogance of power indeed that lets Czar Stan Freeman of the Electric Circus sleep without fear at night, or permits Tomi Ungerer to walk unafraid in the street after executing the drawings for the Circus advertising campaign against women. Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner is groovy ’cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Playboy Mansion—goodbye to Hefner’s dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs and all the boys in the front room—who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol’ Abbie is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you’re Making It. Goodbye to his hypocritical double standard that reeks through the tattered charm. Goodbye to lovely pro-Women’s Liberationist Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor on this issue and don’t laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his Instant Pussy aerosol-can poster, to his column for the woman-hating men’s magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators’ wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women’s movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition–as proof that he’s no sexist oppressor. (¶ 10)

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanisesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about. (¶ 11)

And let’s put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism—the lie that there can be such a thing as men’s liberation groups. Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group—skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed fucked up by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not oppressed. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism; the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight. In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men—but in the short term it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is not the fault of women—kill your fathers, not your mothers. (¶ 12)

Run it down. Goodbye to a beautiful new ecology movement that could fight to save us all if it would stop tripping off women as earthmother types or frontier chicks, if it would right now cede leadership to those who have not polluted the planet because that action implies power and women haven’t had any power in about 5,000 years, cede leadership to those whose brains are as tough and clear as any man’s but whose bodies are also unavoidably aware of the locked-in relationship between humans and their biosphere—the earth, the tides, the atmosphere, the moon. Ecology is no big shtick if you’re a woman—it’s always been there. (¶ 13)

Goodbye to the complicity inherent in the Berkeley Tribesmen being part publishers of Trashman Comics; goodbye, for that matter, to the reasoning that finds whoremaster Trashman a fitting model, however comic-strip far-out, for a revolutionary man—somehow related to the same Super-male reasoning that permits the first statement on Women’s Liberation and male chauvinism that came out of the Black Panther Party to be made by a man, talking a whole lot about how the sisters should speak up for themselves. Such ignorance and arrogance ill-befits a revolutionary. (¶ 14)

We know how racism is worked deep into the unconscious by the System–the same way sexism is, as it appears in the very name of The Young Lords. What are you if you’re a macho woman—a female Lord? Or, god forbid, a Young Lady? Change it, change it to the Young Gentry if you must, or never assume that the name itself is innocent of pain, of oppression. (¶ 15)

Theory and practice—and the light-years between them. Do it! says Jerry Rubin in Rat’s last issue—but he doesn’t or every Rat reader would have known the pictured face next to his article as well as they know his own much-photographed face: it was Nancy Kurshan, his woman, the power behind the clown. (¶ 16)

Goodbye to the New Nation and Earth People’s Park for that matter, conceived by men, announced by men, led by men—doomed before birth by the rotting seeds of male supremacy transplanted into fresh soil. Was it my brother who listed human beings among the objects that would be easily available after the Revolution: Free grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc.? Was it my brother who wrote Fuck your women till they can’t stand up and said that groupies were liberated chicks ’cause they dug a tit-shake instead of a handshake? The epitome of male exclusionism—men will make the Revolution—and make their chicks. Not my brother. No. Not my revolution. Not one breath of my support for the new counterfeit Christ—John Sinclair. Just one less to worry about for ten years. I do not choose my enemy for my brother. (¶ 17)

Goodbye, goodbye. To hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women–or nonwhite peoples–will come about zap! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-date capitalism and clearly have been able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism. Women were the first property when the Primary Contradiction occurred: when one-half of the human species decided to subjugate the other half, because it was different, alien, the Other. From there it was an easy enough step to extend the concept of Other to someone of different skin shade, different height or weight or language—or strength to resist. Goodbye to those simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good socialist brothers want us to believe. How merely liberal a politics that is! How much further we will have to go to create those profound changes that would give birth to a genderless society. Profound, Sister. Beyond what is male or female. Beyond standards we all adhere to now without daring to examine them as male-created, male-dominated, male-fucked-up, and in male self-interest. Beyond all known standards, especially those easily articulated revolutionary ones we all rhetorically invoke. Beyond—to a species with a new name, that would not dare define itself as Man. (¶ 18)

I once said, I’m a revolutionary, not just a woman, and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement’s eagerness to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterleft. But to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them)–or realize that you are one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting down the crazy feminists to make themselves look unthreatening to our mutual oppressors. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change each day of your life right now—not in talk, not in your head, and not only conveniently out there in the Third World (half of which are women) or the black or brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers. It hurts that Jane Alpert was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women’s Liberation. The backlash is upon us. (¶ 19)

They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and struggle, to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers–to show ‘em we’re just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever‐image‐they‐now‐want‐of‐us‐as‐once‐they‐wanted‐us‐to‐be‐feminine‐and‐keep‐up‐the‐home‐fire‐burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it’s being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of the respectable chain-swinging Motor City Nine. Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made—no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after. (¶ 20)

It is the job of revolutionary feminists to build an ever stronger independent Women’s Liberation Movement, so that the sisters in counterleft captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues, in their own style—whatever that may be. Not for us in Women’s Liberation to hassle them and confront them the way their men do, nor to blame them—or ourselves—for what any of us are: an oppressed people, but a people raising our consciousness toward something that is the other side of anger, something bright and smooth and cool, like action unlike anything yet contemplated or carried out. It is for us to survive (something the white male radical has the luxury of never really worrying about, what with all his options), to talk, to plan, to be patient, to welcome new fugitives from the counterfeit Left with no arrogance but only humility and delight, to push—to strike. (¶ 21)

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear—an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists somewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will reach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the peurile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years—due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that. (¶ 22)

Women are Something Else. This time, we’re going to kick out all the jams, and the boys will just have to hustle to keep up, or else drop out and openly join the power structure of which they are already the illegitimate sons. Any man who claims he is serious about wanting to divest himself of cock privilege should trip on this: all male leadership out of the Left is the only way; and it’s going to happen, whether through men stepping down or through women seizing the helm. It’s up to the brothers—after all, sexism is their concern, not ours; we’re too busy getting ourselves together to have to deal with their bigotry. So they’ll have to make up their own minds as to whether they will be divested of just cock privilege or—what the hell, why not say it, say it!—divested of cocks. How deep the fear of that loss must be, that it can be suppressed only by the building of empires and the waging of genocidal wars! (¶ 23)

Goodbye, goodbye forever, counterfeit Left, counterleft, male-dominated cracked-glass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every twenty-eight days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor; mourning for all each precious one of us might have been in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn’t have, or couldn’t not have, or didn’t want, or didn’t want yet, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or to none. All the way down, this time. (¶ 24)

Free Kathleen Cleaver!	Free Kim Agnew!
Free Anita Hoffman!	Free Holly Krassner!
Free Bernardine Dohrn!	Free Lois Hart!
Free Donna Malone!	Free Alice Embree!
Free Ruth Ann Miller!	Free Nancy Kurshan!
Free Leni Sinclar!	Free Dinky Forman!
Free Jane Alpert!	Free Dinky Forman!
Free Gumbo!	Free Sharon Krebs!
Free Bonnie Cohen!	Free Iris Luciano!
Free Judy Lampe!	Free Robin Morgan!
Free Valerie Solanis!
Free our sisters!	Free ourselves!

–Robin Morgan (January 1970)

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from The Power of History by Kathie Sarachild, the leading essay from Feminist Revolution, an insightful, indispensable, and sometimes infuriating anthology published in 1975 by the Redstockings; the essay is, among other things, a kind of memo on where the anthology as a whole is coming from and why the Redstockings thought it was so important to put it together:

The grass-roots appeal of feminism has been reflected in the composition of liberal feminist organizations like NOW as well as in the mass response to the radical ideas and agitation.

Yet the radical, feminist women faced opposition all the way, with constant advice from all sides that everything they were doing would have the opposite effect: that it would raise antagonism and bitterness, tat it was unrealistic and would get nowhere, that it wasn’t speaking to where women were at.

What lay behind the successful plans and strategies of the women’s liberation activists, what kindled the wonderful explosion, was simply their commitment to a radical understanding and approach to feminism, to discovering the common issues facing women and addressing them directly at their deepest level. They were not playing political games, trying to figure out whether women or men were ready for this or that, whether this or that would be understood or be popular.

This was going to be a movement in our own self-interest, as we said. This was going to be a fight for ourselves, for our own immediate lives, as well as for our dreams — a movement growing from our own experience, addressing the problems we ourselves had encountered. But a fundamental part of this effort to better understand our own situation was the radical understanding that the conditions in our own lives we wanted to change were essentially the common situation for women. This understanding of ourselves was going to be essential to the common fight because it was what put a person in touch with the common fight, connected a person directly to the common fight. We wanted to change the world out of our own self-interest, and because we had such a strong sense of this being in our interest, we felt sure we could convey this sense to all who shared the same interests.

With all our talk about self-interest, it was, of course, all along common interest that we were talking about, the common interest of women.

The intensity of our belief that our own personal interest arose out of the common situation was what made usknow that there would be no conflict between standing up for our own impulses and desires and analysis growing out of our own situation, and launching a mass movement. All the politicking, the guessing at the popularity of this or that, the feasibility of this or that with one group or another, would build nothing, really. It would fail to turn women on and maybe even turn them off. We knew this because we acknowledged our own most honest reaction.

The radical, feminist interest in developing and disseminating theory—in raising and spreading consciousness—was scorned, even attacked, by the liberal feminists and non-feminist left alike, who were always calling for action and for whom no amount of action we engaged in was ever even acknowledged. They were always posing it as analysis versus action, and priding themselves in being the activists, or the politicos, or the steady, on-going workers who accomplished tangible, concrete gains in the community, in the nation, for themselves, or what not. They always implied that the radical, theory people (as they would sometimes complain about us) didn’t take any action, didn’t produce any actual changes in the everyday lives of women.

Don’t agonize, organize was a favorite one liner. Of course, when stated as Don’t analyze, organize a lot of the punch goes out of it.

Oddly enough, there was also the totally contradictory charge, usually from the left, that the women’s liberation movement needed some theory, hadn’t produced any theory. Just as the actions of the radical feminists were not seen as actions—they were too petty, too sporadic, or what not—their analysis was not seen as analysis or theory.

What we were trying to do was to advance and develop both theory and action, and to unite them, putting theory into action and action into theory. It was this commitment to unity of the two, of course, which made us radicals, and which made us such a threat to liberals, right and left, who had a hard enough time recognizing and supporting feminism in either the realm of theory or action—and who apparently went blank or haywire when confronted with the combination.

Whatever we were doing just never seemed to fall within the range of the liberal left’s vision. But in the beginning it did fall within the range of the TV cameras and newspapers.

In fact, it was the public actions of the radicals, the consciousness-raising section of the movement, that put the WLM on the map. This was true of virtually every category of action you could name—from confrontation, consciousness-raising actions like the picketing and disruption of the Miss America Contest to developing techniques for mass organizing to producing journals, newspapers and books which were widely disseminated.

But the radical theory and strategy was not only the source of widespread mobilization, was not only what sparked the interest of the masses of women, it was also what produced the most in the way of concrete results, the most changes in women’s lives. This is another lesson of the past decade whose truth comes clear with access to an authentic history of the movement. The greatest achievements of the women’s liberation movement so far, those that have reached the masses of women as a whole—greater freedom in the area of birth control and abortion, greater freedom from oppressive dress codes, and the spread of feminist theory and consciousness—were all the arenas the radicals first addressed and in which they led.

It was in New York State, the area in which radical feminist analysis, action and organizing ideas were strongest and most advanced, that the first concrete breakthrough of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. was achieved—the abortion law reform which for a few years turned New York State into the abortion mill of the nation and upon which the U. S. Supreme Court modeled its guidelines a few years later. It was the radical strategies of 1) opposition to reform and demand for repeal, led by Lucinda Cisler 2) mass consciousness-raising on abortion with women testifying to their criminal acts in public and in court 3) the development of the feminist self-help clinic ideas and their promotion of simpler, new abortion techniques that led to the nationwide reform in five years time.

The area of employment, on the other hand, is one in which the liberal feminist groups have concentrated and so far have led, and in which there has been as yet very little progress—for most women anyway. (See New Ways of Keeping Women Out of Paid Labor in this book.)

Knowing these things provides information, support and strength for a continuing radical approach and further radical action. But virtually none of it is known.

As soon as the movement began and proved successful, a process set in of wresting control from the women who had started out. And as certain approaches in the movement proved to be popular and successful with other women, the process began of confusing who and what had produced those successful approaches, what thinking, what inds of people, and specifically which people. There was an assault on the history of the movement—to take it over, to lasso it for one’s private ends, to slow it down, to stop it.

Many of the simplest and most powerful elements of the movement’s history I listed earlier have disappeared from sight or the connections between them have been severed. Instead, an array of secondary versions, interpretations and revisions have effaced and replaced the original record.

There are now amazingly different stories of these events, with very different beginnings and very different conclusions. One version doesn’t even have women starting the movement but history and changing times starting it instead. If history or changing times isn’t behind the changes then technology is, or the economy.

The rise of the feminist movement reflected a certain historic context, but this context had to be unlocked by analysis in order to be opened up for attack and work.

The knowledge of who started the movement contains important political lessons for women as does the knowledge of what brought women their gains. That women started the movement and gave it its strength and momentum suggests that it was necessary for women to start the movement, that men would not start the movement, that men don’t lead women to their freedom. Women must rely on themselves for that—not because they should but because they have to.

—Kathie Sarachild, The Power of History, from Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings (1975/1979), pp. 18–21.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33
• GT 2004-10-29: These Old Stories
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape
• GT 2004-01-22: Happy Roe v. Wade Day!

You know the rules; here’s the quote. Lucky #13 was either airplane reading or bus reading; I don’t recall precisely what I was reading when. In either case, though, it’s from the Preface to Jill Lepore’s new book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. It’s the story of something that many of us know about, and some other things that almost all of us have forgotten, but need to remember. Thus:

This book tells the story of how one kind of slavery made another kind of liberty possible in eighteenth-century New York, a place whose past has long been buried. It was a beautiful city, a crisscross of crooked cobblestone streets boasting both grand and petty charms: a grassy park at the Bowling Green, the stone arches at City Hall, beech trees shading Broadway like so many parasols, and, off rocky beaches, the best oysters anywhere. I found it extremely pleasant to walk the town, one visitor wrote in 1748, for it seemed like a garden. But on this granite island poking out like a sharp tooth between the Hudson and East rivers, one in five inhabitants was enslaved, making Manhattan second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.

New York was a slave city. Its most infamous episode is hardly known today: over a few short weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across the city. Nearly two hundred slaves were suspected of conspiring to burn every building and murder every white. Tried and convicted before the colony’s Supreme court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake. Seventeen more were hanged, two of their dead bodies chained to posts not far from the Negroes Burial Ground, left to bloat and rot. One jailed man cut his own throat. Another eighty-four men and women were sold into yet more miserable, bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean. Two white men and two white women, the alleged ringleaders, were hanged, one of them in chains; seven more white men were pardoned on the condition that they never set foot in New York again.

What happened in New York in 1741 is so horrifying—Bonfires of the Negroes, one colonist called it—that it’s easy to be blinded by the brightness of the flames. But step back, let the fires flicker in the distance, and they cast their light not only on the 1741 slave conspiracy but on the American paradox, illuminating a far better known episode in New York’s past: the 1735 trial of the printer John Peter Zenger.

In 1732, a forty-two-year-old English gentleman named William Cosby arrived in New York, having been appointed governor by the king. New Yorkers soon learned, to their dismay, that their new governor ruled y a three-word philosophy: God damn ye. Rage at Cosby’s ill-considered appointment grew with his every abuse of the governorship. Determined to oust Cosby from power, James Alexander, a prominent lawyer, hired Zenger, a German immigrant, to publish an opposition newspaper. Alexander supplied scathing, unsigned editorials criticizing the governor’s administration; Zenger set the type. The first issue of Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal was printed in November 1733. Cosby could not, would not abide it. He assigned Daniel Horsmanden, an ambitious forty-year-old Englishman new to the city, to a committee, charged with pointing out the particular Seditious paragraphs in Zenger’s newspaper. The governor then ordered the incendiary issues of Zenger’s newspaper burned, and had Zenger arrested for libel.

Zenger was tried before the province’s Supreme Court in 1735. His attorney did not deny that Cosby was the object of the editorials in the New-York Weekly Journal. Instead, he argued, first, that Zenger was innocent because what he printed was true, and second, that freedom of the press was especially necessary in the colonies, where other checks against governors’ powers were weakened by their distance from England. It was an almost impossibly brilliant defense, which at once defied legal precedent—before the Zenger case, truth had never been a defense against libel—and had the effect of putting the governor on trial, just what Zenger’s attorney wanted, since William Cosby, God damn him, was a man no jury could love. Zenger was acquitted. The next year, James Alexander prepared and Zenger printed A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, which was soon after reprinted in Boston and London. It made Zenger famous.

But the trial of John Peter Zenger is merely the best-known episode in the political maelstrom that was early eighteenth-century New York. We are in the midst of Party flames, Daniel Horsmanden wrly observed in 1734, as Cosby’s high-handedness ignited the city. Horsmanden wrote in an age when political parties were considered sinister, invidious, and destructive of good government. As Alexander Pope put it in 1727, Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few. Or, as Viscount St. John Bolingbroke remarked in his 1733 Dissertation upon Parties: The spirit of party … inspires animosity and breeds rancour. Nor did the distaste for parties diminish over the course of the century. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote: If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Parties they may have despised, but, with William Cosby in the governor’s office, New Yorkers formed them, dividing themselves between the opposition Country Party and the Court Party, loyal to the governor. Even Cosby’s death in March 1736 failed to extinguish New York’s Party flames. Alexander and his allies challenged the authority of Cosby’s successor, George Clarke, and established a rival government. Warned of a plot to seize his person or kill him in the Attempt, Clarke retreated to Fort George, at the southern tip of Manhattan, & put the place in a posture of Defence. In the eyes of one New Yorker, we had all the appearance of a civil War.

And then: nothing. No shots were fired. Nor was any peace ever brokered: the crisis did no so much resolve as it dissipated. Soon after barricading himself in Fort George, Clarke received orders from London confirming his appointment. The rival government was disbanded. By the end of 1736, Daniel Horsmanden could boast, Zenger is perfectly silent as to polliticks. Meanwhile, Clarke rewarded party loyalists: in 1737 he appointed Horsmanden to a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. But Clarke proved a more moderate man than his predecessor. By 1739, under his stewardship, the colony quieted.

What happened in New York City in the 1730s was much more than a dispute over the freedom of the press. It was a dispute about the nature of political opposition, during which New Yorkers briefly entertained the heretical idea that parties were not only necessary in free Government, but of great Service to the Public. As even a supporter of Cosby wrote in 1734, Parties are a check upon one another, and by keeping the Ambition of one another within Bounds, serve to maintain the public Liberty. And it was, equally, a debate about the power of governors, the nature of empire, and the role of the law in defending Americans against arbitrary authority—the kind of authority that constituted tyranny, the kind of authority that made men slaves. James Alexander saw himself as a defender of the rule of law in a world that, because of its very great distance from England, had come to be ruled by men. His opposition was not so much a failure as a particularly spectacular stretch of road along a bumpy, crooked path full of detours that, over the course of the century, led to American independence. Because of it, New York became infamous for its unruly spirit of independency. Clarke, shocked, reported to his superiors in England that New Yorkers believe if a Governor misbehave himself they may depose him and set up an other. the leaders of the Country Party trod very near to what, in the 1730s, went by the name of treason. A generation later, their sons would call it revolution.

In early 1741, less than two years after Clarke calmed the province, ten fires swept through the city. Fort George was nearly destroyed; Clarke’s own mansion, inside the fort, burned to the ground. Daniel Horsmanden was convinced that the fires had been set on Foot by some villainous Confederacy of latent Enemies amongst us, a confederacy that sounded a good deal like a violent political party. But which enemies? No longer fearful that Country Party agitators were attempting to take his life, Clarke, at Horsmanden’s urging, turned his suspicion on the city’s slaves. With each new fire, panicked white New Yorkers cried from street corners, The Negroes are rising! Early evidence collected by a grand jury appointed by the Supreme Court hinted at a vast and elaborate conspiracy: on the outskirts of the city, in a tavern owned by a poor and obscure English cobbler named John Hughson, tens and possibly hundreds of black men had been meeting secretly, gathering weapons and plotting to burn the city, murder every white man, appoint Hughson their king, and elect a slave named Caesar governor.

This political opposition was far more dangerous than anything led by James Alexander. The slave plot to depose one governor and set up another—a black governor—involved not newspapers and petitions but arson and murder. It had to be stopped. In the spring and summer of 1741, New York magistrates arrested 20 whies and 152 blacks. To Horsmanden, it seemed very probable that most of the Negroes in Town were corrupted. Eighty black men and one black woman confessed and named names, sending still more to the gallows and the stake.

That summer, a New Englander wrote an anonymous letter to New York. I am a stranger to you & to New York, he began. But he had heard of the bloody Tragedy afflicting the city: the relentless cycle of arrests, accusations, hasty trials, executions, and more arrests. This puts me in mind of our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692, he remarked, Which if I dont mistake New York justly reproached us for, & mockt at our Credulity about.

Here was no idle observation. The 1741 New York conspiracy trials and the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials had much in common. Except that what happened in New York in 1741 was worse, and has been almost entirely forgotten. In Salem, twenty people were executed, compared to New York’s thirty-four, and none were burned at the stake. However much it looks like Salem in 1692, what happened in New York in 1741 had more to do with revolution than witchcraft. and it is inseparable from the wrenching crisis of the 1730s, not least because the fires in 1741 included attacks on property owned by key members of the Court Party; lawyers from both sides of the aisle in the legal battles of the 1730s joined together to prosecute slaves in 1741; and slaves owned by prominent members of the Country Party proved especially vulnerable to prosecution.

But the threads that tie together the crises of the 1730s and 1741 are longer than the list of participants. The 1741 conspiracy and the 1730s opposition party were two faces of the same coin. By the standards of the day, both faces were ugly, disfigured, deformed; they threatened the order of things. But one was very much more dangerous than the other: Alexander’s political party plotted to depose the governor; the city’s slaves, allegedly, plotted to kill him. The difference made Alexander’s opposition seem, relative to slave rebellion, harmless, and in doing so made the world safer for democracy, or at least, and less grandly, both more amenable to and more anxious about the gradual and halting rise of political parties.

Whether enslaved men and women actually conspired in New York in 1741 is a question whose answer lies buried deep in the evidence, if it survives at all. It is worth excavating carefully. But even the specter of a slave conspiracy cast a dark shadow across the political landscape. Slavery was, always and everywhere, a political issue, but what happened in New York suggests that it exerted a more powerful influence on political life: slaves suspected of conspiracy constituted both a phantom political party and an ever-threatening revolution. In the 1730s and ’40s, the American Revolution was years away and the real emergence of political parties in the new United States, a fitful process at best, would have to wait until the last decade of the eighteenth century. (Indeed, one reason that colonists only embraced revolution with ambivalence and accepted parties by fits and starts may be that slavery alternately ignited and extinguished party flames: the threat of black rebellion made white political opposition palatable, even as it established its limits and helped heal the divisions it created.) But during those fateful months in the spring and summer of 1741, New York’s Court Party, still reeling from the Country Party’s experiments in political opposition, attempted to douse party flames by burning black men at the stake. New York is not America, but what happened in that eighteenth-century slave city tells one story, and a profoundly troubling one, of how slavery destabilized—and created—American politics.

—Jill Lepore (2005), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (ISBN 1400040299). xii–xviii.