though she nearly choked on the words. I was devastated.
I got up to go to the front to speak. I was not on the agenda.
Cora motioned me back to my seat and said in a loud whisper
that there wasn’t time for anyone else to say anything. She
gestured in a way that implied she couldn’t be more sor y.
I forced myself through the ropes that marked the speaking
area and kept it sacrosanct. I turned to face the audience of
mourners. Here were men I had known since I was eighteen
- from my earliest days in fighting against the war in Vietnam.
I couldn’t believe that nothing had changed - peace, peace,
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peace, love, love, love; they did not understand nor would
they even consider that a man had murdered a woman.
I said that while Petra’s life had been extraordinary her
death was not; it was an ordinary death for a woman. Petra
had been kil ed by her lover, her intimate, her mate. She was
kil ed in her bed wearing a nightgown. (I knew but didn’t say
that Petra would never commit suicide by any means while
unclothed or even partly exposed - the pornography of it
would have been repellent to her. She also would never have
used a gun or allowed its use. ) She had probably been asleep.
Nothing could be more commonplace or cowardly. The audience of pacifists started hissing and some started shouting.
I said that there was probably no conspiracy and certainly no
acquiescence on the part of Petra; everything in her life and
politics argued against any such complicity. It had to be faced,
I said, that pacifists had not taken a stand against violence
against women; it was stil invisible to them, even when the
woman was Petra Kel y, a world-class activist. I said that the
male’s life meant more to them than hers did. By this time the
pacifists were in various stages of rage.
No pacifist woman stood up to support me, though Petra
would have. I said that, hard as it was, one had to understand
that Petra had died like millions of other women around the
world: prematurely, violently, and at the hands of someone
who was presumed to love her. I said that nonviolence was
not possible if the ordinary, violent deaths of women went
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unremarked, unnoticed. However extraordinary Petra had been
in her life, I repeated, her death could not have been more
commonplace.
The mourners were angry Some were shouting nasty names
at me. I said that I had to speak because not to do so would
be to betray Petra’s work and the work we had done together,
in concert. I ran from the room. One woman grabbed my arm
on my way out. “Thank you, ” she said. That’s enough; it has
to be enough - one on-site person during a conflict showing
respect.
I felt that I had stood up for Petra. I knew she would have
stood up for me.
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I started speaking and lecturing as a feminist because I had a
lot of trouble getting my work published. I spoke on violence
against women. In the early years of the women’s movement,
this subject was marginal, violence itself considered an anomaly,
not intrinsic to the low status of women. I accepted that
valuation; I just thought that this was work I could do and
therefore had to do. When something’s got your name on it,
you’re the one responsible for finding a way to create an
awareness, a stand, a set of strategies. It’s yours to do. There
can be 100, 000 others with their names on it, too, but that
doesn’t get you off the hook.
I spoke in small rooms fil ed with women, and afterward
someone would pass a hat. I remember a crowd of about fifty
in Woodstock, New York, that chipped in about $60. I slept
on the floor of whoever had asked me or organized the event,
and I ate whatever I was given - bad tabbouleh stands out
in my mind. I needed money to live on but didn’t believe in
asking for it from women, because women were poor. Women’s
centers in towns and on college campuses were poor.
Sometimes a woman would pass me a note that had a check
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in it for $25 or some such sum; the highest I remember was
$150, and that was a fortune in my eyes.
I had to travel to wherever the speech was in the hope that
I'd be able to collect enough money to pay for my expenses.
Flo Kennedy often talked about how if you did not demand
money people would treat you badly. I did not believe that
could be true, but for the most part it was. I can remember
the gut-wrenching decision to ask for a fee up front, first $200,
then $500. A few years later I got a speaking agent, Phyllis
Langer, who had been an editor at Ms. She took a 25 percent
commission, whereas most speaking or lecture agents took a
full 33 percent. By the time I hired her, I was making in the
$ l, 500-$3, 000 range. She made sure that I got paid, that the
event was handled okay, with publicity, and that expenses were
reimbursed. She was kind and also provided perspective.
When she went to work at an agency that I didn’t particularly like, I decided to represent myself. By this time my nervousness about money had disappeared, a Darwinian adaptation, although my stage fright - which has run me ragged over the
years - never did.
I would cal whoever wanted me to speak on the phone. I'd
get an idea of how much money they could raise. I stil wanted
them to be comfortable, and it was a horror to me that anyone
would think I was ripping them off. By the time I took over
making al the ar angements myself, I had developed a fixed
set of necessities: a good hotel room in a good hotel, enough
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money for meals and ground transportation (taxis, not buses
or subways). Eventually I graduated to the best hotel I could
find, and I'd also buy myself a first-class ticket.
Representing myself, I would fold an estimate of expenses
into a fee so that the sponsor had to pay me only one amount,
after I spoke on the night that I spoke. I had developed an
aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I
was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it
myself.
In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T-shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.
I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my
fingers.
Even during the early years, I got letters from women
telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge