A few years later, back in the United States, I sent Dr.
Frankel-Teitz a copy of Woman Hating and a let er thanking
her for her help and kindness. She replied with a fairly cranky
letter saying that she didn’t see what the big deal was; she had
only said and done the obvious. The obvious had included
get ing me medicine I couldn’t afford. I thought that she was
the most remarkable person I had ever met. “That’s hor ible. ”
Can saving someone really be that simple? “That’s hor ible. ”
Horrible, that’s hor ible. What does it take? What’s so hard
about it? How can the women who don’t say those words live
with themselves? How can the women who do say those
words now, thirty years later, worry more about how they
dress and which parties they go to? In between the early days
and now someone must have meant what she said enough so
that it could not be erased. How much can it cost? Horrible,
that’s hor ible.
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The Vow
It was a tender conversation. The woman who had helped me
most in Amsterdam, Ricki Abrams, sat with me and we held
hands. I was going to go back to New York. I talked with
Ricki about how she had saved my life; I thanked her. I talked
with Ricki about having prostituted and having been homeles . Back then I never talked about these parts of my own life.
I talked with her about bringing what I had learned into the
fight for women’s freedom. I talked with her about my fierce
commitment to the women’s movement and feminism. I
talked to her about how grateful I was to the women’s movement - to the women who had been organizing and talking and shouting and writing, making women both visible and
loved by each other. I talked with her about the book she and
I had started together and that I was going to finish alone,
Woman Hating. We had shown a draft of the chapter on Suck,
a counterculture pornography magazine, to those who ran the
magazine, ex-pats like ourselves, from the same generation,
with the same commitment to civil rights and, we thought,
human dignity. They cut us cold. Ricki could not stand it. I
could. There’s one thing about surviving prostitution - it takes
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The Vow
a hell of a lot to scare you. My husband was a hel of a lot, and
he taught me real fear; the idiots at Suck were not much of
anything. Writing had become more important to me than the
ir itability of wannabe pimps.
Sit ing with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her:
that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women’s movement stronger and bet er; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement.
I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women,
to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to
live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some
thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.
I took two laundry bags fil ed with manuscripts, books, and
some clothes, the Afghan sheepskin coat I had as a legacy
from my marriage, an airplane ticket given me by a junkie,
and some money I had stolen, and I went back to New York
City. Living hand to mouth, sleeping on floors or in closetsized rooms, I began working on Woman Hating. I had up to four jobs at a time. Every other day I would take $7 out of
a checking account. I ate at happy hours in bars. Any money
I had I would first tithe to the Black Panther Party in Oakland,
California. Huey Newton sent me his poems before he shot
and killed a teenage prostitute, the event that caused him to
flee the United States. Since I didn’t believe that the police
had framed him, one might say that a rift had opened
between him and me. But I still kept sending money for
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Heartbreak
the breakfast and literacy programs sponsored by the Black
Panthers.
I went to demonstrations as often as I could. The Three
Marias of Portugal had written a feminist book that got them
jailed. I demonstrated in their behalf. I went to prolesbian and
antiapartheid demonstrations.
One of my part-time jobs was organizing against the
Vietnam War, the backdrop to most of my life as a young
adult. In Amsterdam my husband and I had helped deserters
from the U. S. military hide on their way to Sweden. Vietnam
had been shaping my life since I was eighteen and was sent to
the Women’s House of Detention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser,
who also worked against the war, hired me as her assistant.
Muriel had a long and distinguished life of rebellion, including the birth of a son out of wedlock in an age darker than any I had experienced. He was now a draft resister in Canada.
With another woman, Garland Har is, I organized a conference that brought together artists and intellectuals against the war. Robert Lifton, Susan Sontag, and Daniel Ellsberg
participated. With director Andre Gregory I helped organize
a special night on which al the theaters and theater companies
in Manhattan would donate their money to help rebuild a
hospital in North Vietnam that U. S. bombs had leveled. I was
not real y able to face the chasm between the left and feminism even though I gloried in the essays in Sisterhood Is Powerful that exposed the sexism of the left. I couldn’t stop
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The Vow
working against the war or, for instance, apartheid just because
the men on the left: were pigs. I became part of a consciousness-
raising group, but even that had its roots in the Speaking
Bitterness sessions in communist China. I worked hard. One
of my mentors, the writer Grace Paley, who had helped me
when I got out of the Women’s House of Detention, helped
me again - this time to get an apartment. It was on the Lower
East Side, in an old tenement building. The toilet was in the
hall and the bathtub was in the kitchen. I had a desk, a chair,
and a $12 foam-rubber mattress. I bought one fork, one spoon,
one knife, one plate, one bowl. I was determined to learn to
live without men.
99
My Last Leftist
Meeting
There were only seven of us. I was the menial, a part-time
of ice worker. The movie director Emile D’Antonio seemed to
lead the meeting by sheer force of personality. There were
three women, including myself. That translated into six
eminents, two of whom were women. Our goal was to find
the next project for celebrities organized against the war in a
group cal ed Redress. The idea of the group was 100 percent
Amerikan: famous people organized to fight the war, their
names having more pull than those of professional politicians
or ordinary citizens. It was a time when fame was not dissociated from accomplishment: most of our members had earned through achievement whatever fame they had. But the