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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1970-10-09 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 2
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Women Inspired We received the following letter and statement from women in Seattle and we thank them for sharing their experience with us. We love them for their strength and beauty in working as women to build a revolutionary movement that speaks to all the people, for refusing to shut up and "wait unti1 after the Revolution,” for reminding us again that any male-dominated revolution would simply reinstitute oppression under another name. So long as men deplore the "rape of Vietnam" and create conditions that encourage the rape of women (the objective fact, not just the glorious rhetoric used ·to gain power over other people,) we can only see such men as degenerate forms of all they claim to be attacking. We know from our own lives how little we have to lose because women have so little. We know how the desperation of women is played on by so-called "professional revolutionaries." All women who think of themselves as revolutionaries, and all men who claim to be struggling with their "male chauvinism" should read this and support our sisters in Seattle. Dear Sisters, We are sending you this statement hoping that you will be able to use it in sharing our experiences with other women. We acted to strip seven male leaders of their political power and stop them from acting as the spokes_men_ of the Left. It is our sisters all over the country, who by beginning to build a movement based on our own experiences and coming out of our love for each other have given us the strength and power to fight for our real, not pseudo, liberation. Please do not excerpt any parts of this article; taken out of context it doesn't mean as much and it might damage the conspiracy case. A lawyer on the defense has read the article and finds nothing incriminating in it. GANG RAPE IN SEATTLE The Seattle Liberation Front sponsored the Sky River Rock Festival. Three women were gang raped. One woman was stabbed attempting to escape. A fourth rape was prevented by a female "chauvin patrol." Two days after Sky River, women from the women's liberation movement intruded upon an SLF general meeting. We denounced seven men who had fucked us over, used and destroyed people, and created a white, male supremacist movement in Seattle. The movement in Seattle is, in many ways, a microcosm of the Movement across the country. The men we denounced are not unusually evil, brilliantly manipulative, or exceptional leaders in any sense. Al1 over the country men have defined the Revolution. People who want to act have had to exist in the context these men set up. We feel a responsibility to sisters across the country to explain our action and the history behind it. It began, in Seattle, with the arrival of Michael Lerner from Berkeley. He set up shop as Radical Marxist Professor at the University of Washington, and used his classes to inject politics and liberal guilt into his students. But he was not content with the notoreity his yippie-style histrionics and flamboyant hairiness won him. Lerner used his voyeuristic Berkeley experience to give him credence, his former roommate Jerry Rubin to give him glamour and access to the media. The Berkeley Liberation Program (with a section on the workers tacked on) was bait for the "groovy people" he wanted to use as organizers. It worked. A collective was formed, composed mainly of Lerner's students. Then, on the 19th of January, a meeting was called, the program was read·, and two more collectives began to pull together. A lot of us hadn't been in the movement before. We had looked into existing organizations and dismissed them. SDS was WeatherMAN controlled. The only alternative to SDS, Radical Organizing Committee, spent its time in sterile debates over meaningless agendas. We thought that SLF would give us a chance to connect; that the collective structure would allow us autonomy, creativity, and self-respect. We might have harmed ourselves less and recognized sooner the impossibility of achieving anything good in that context if the Sundance gang hadn't arrived. Chip Marshall, Bobby Oram, Jeff Dowd, and Michael Abeles, fresh from Cornell SDS, arrived ready to take over the Seattle movement. (Joe Kelly was to arrive soon after). Sundance spotted Lerner as a man they could use when he spoke with Rubin at a rally, three days before the first SLF meeting. They contacted him the same day and began their alliance. Lerner provided the "base on campus". Sundance provided revolutionary models for hero worship, objects for media infatuation, and much of the energy and direction of SLF. We found our energies absorbed into a whirlwind of "organizing" defined and directed. by the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of the Sundance center. There was no time for us to find and defend what was important to us. The Chicago conspiracy trial was ending; we felt we had to respond. TDA came and went as a window-smashing melee. We got our riot credentials running through the streets breaking bank windows, pushing people out of the way of the rocks falling around them, while the well-disciplined tac squad arrested 75 people. The demonstration got Lerner and Sundance the publicity they wanted so much. They were made SLF by the media, and they were SLF to the people who poured into the organization afterwards. Sundance had injected some youth culture hype into the program and they became the center of the Seattle movement social scene by arranging huge parties with lots of beer, dope, wine, and girls. By procuring money for expensive, multi-colored leaflets and programs, they made an immediate impact on a movement so impoverished that the acquisition of mimeo paper was a hassle. Many established groups, who at first refused to incorporate themselves as SLF collectives, began to succumb to what was happening. And SLF was what was happening. People were afraid to be left out of the Revolution. To the burgeoning and freaked-out SLF, the Sundance "command collective made clear the only thing to do was become a professional revolutionary. So people quit their jobs, dropped out of school, grew their hair, smoked lots of dope, and hung out with the people at the Century Tavern. The mass dropout in the spring made no sense unless we believed in a teenage revolution - people had none of the skills necessary to survive. But it did provide Lerner and Sundance with a large pool of unskilled labor to use as shitworkers, and people who depended on them completely for direction to their lives. And the ethic Sundance lived by was not anti-materialistic. The ethic was to rip off. Bobby Oram showed us the way, spending hundreds of dollars hard-pressed collectives had earned for an SLF office, on Sundance rent and beer. "Living communism" was exemplified by Sundance, who declared everything most people have to do to survive "bourgeois", while exploiting people who had money or worked (mainly women) to support their incredibly expensive life style. We had wanted to exceed ourselves, to transform ourselves. Instead we found ourselves striving for collective salvation by individual suicide. There was no questioning of methods, no discussion of strategy, no confrontation of leadership. In our frenzied state of mind, any confusion, any hesitation would hold back the Revolution. We had developed too much guilt and, as professional revolutionaries, too much contempt for the people we were trying to reach to actually build anything. So we tried to lose ourselves in frenetic activity. Chip Marshall laid it down for all of us: "I don't care what the form is, as long as we keep the motion going." A woman who used to be in Sundance described their style well: "Despite our naive intentions to build ourselves into new men and women, we found our lives falsely divided into daytime political organizing and night-time attempts to escape the unthinking robots we had become. After evangelistic meetings to organize dormies, after chaotic meetings full of shoutdowns and bullshit, after scary and whirlpool demonstrations the pattern was the same: go home and get drunk, get stoned, get fucked; but by all means forget. Don't discuss the day's activities, how you felt or what you learned. Escape it, release your tensions. Be prepared for tomorrow's repeat performance." It was only later that we realized how desperate we had been, and how that desperation had been used; only later that we realized how afraid and unable we were to face ourselves, what we were and what we had to become; only later that we realized that SLF had brought into being a way of life designed to keep us from anger, from love, from strength, from freedom, from all but the illusions of those things: all of us bound together by weakness, hysteria, and desperate need. But we realized these things pretty late in the game. Sundance had already abrogated to themselves the right to define our lives and the category of "revolutionary." Their white male arrogance assured them of their perfect right to do so. And they were rich in capital: mastery of the jargon, access to money, media and movement contacts. Still, it was not until the Roach Tavern incident that we fully realized what it meant to be a woman living and working in a male-created, male-defined movement. The Roach Tavern was a bar popular with Seattle bikers and the Sundance crew; a "movement bar" which held SLF benefits and proudly displayed a sign reading: "This is a man's bar. Women will be tolerated only if they refrain from excessive talking." When a small group of independents, Radical Women, were threatened and assualted after tearing down this sign, they took their complaints about SLF's patronage of the bar to the only people who had the power to do anything about it: Sundance. The Sundance men deplored Radical Women's tactics. "After all, fascism is going to come down soon," Joe Kelly philosophized while writing off half the human race, "We can't afford to alienate the bikers."· We stayed in SLF, but we began trying very hard to develop an alternative. Talking with other women, we agreed that the probtem was not merely that women did the organizing while men made the speeches. Our humanity was denied to us. Michael Lerner could talk about the availability of a woman for his bed and joke, "Well, boys, I guess it'll take gang rape for this one." (Hey, Mike, heard any good nigger-lynching jokes lately?) The "woman question" became a topic of conversation for the men, but with the carefully drawn distinction between women's liberation - liberals and manhaters - and truly revolutionary Page 2 Vol. 1, No. 7 Ain't I
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Women Inspired We received the following letter and statement from women in Seattle and we thank them for sharing their experience with us. We love them for their strength and beauty in working as women to build a revolutionary movement that speaks to all the people, for refusing to shut up and "wait unti1 after the Revolution,” for reminding us again that any male-dominated revolution would simply reinstitute oppression under another name. So long as men deplore the "rape of Vietnam" and create conditions that encourage the rape of women (the objective fact, not just the glorious rhetoric used ·to gain power over other people,) we can only see such men as degenerate forms of all they claim to be attacking. We know from our own lives how little we have to lose because women have so little. We know how the desperation of women is played on by so-called "professional revolutionaries." All women who think of themselves as revolutionaries, and all men who claim to be struggling with their "male chauvinism" should read this and support our sisters in Seattle. Dear Sisters, We are sending you this statement hoping that you will be able to use it in sharing our experiences with other women. We acted to strip seven male leaders of their political power and stop them from acting as the spokes_men_ of the Left. It is our sisters all over the country, who by beginning to build a movement based on our own experiences and coming out of our love for each other have given us the strength and power to fight for our real, not pseudo, liberation. Please do not excerpt any parts of this article; taken out of context it doesn't mean as much and it might damage the conspiracy case. A lawyer on the defense has read the article and finds nothing incriminating in it. GANG RAPE IN SEATTLE The Seattle Liberation Front sponsored the Sky River Rock Festival. Three women were gang raped. One woman was stabbed attempting to escape. A fourth rape was prevented by a female "chauvin patrol." Two days after Sky River, women from the women's liberation movement intruded upon an SLF general meeting. We denounced seven men who had fucked us over, used and destroyed people, and created a white, male supremacist movement in Seattle. The movement in Seattle is, in many ways, a microcosm of the Movement across the country. The men we denounced are not unusually evil, brilliantly manipulative, or exceptional leaders in any sense. Al1 over the country men have defined the Revolution. People who want to act have had to exist in the context these men set up. We feel a responsibility to sisters across the country to explain our action and the history behind it. It began, in Seattle, with the arrival of Michael Lerner from Berkeley. He set up shop as Radical Marxist Professor at the University of Washington, and used his classes to inject politics and liberal guilt into his students. But he was not content with the notoreity his yippie-style histrionics and flamboyant hairiness won him. Lerner used his voyeuristic Berkeley experience to give him credence, his former roommate Jerry Rubin to give him glamour and access to the media. The Berkeley Liberation Program (with a section on the workers tacked on) was bait for the "groovy people" he wanted to use as organizers. It worked. A collective was formed, composed mainly of Lerner's students. Then, on the 19th of January, a meeting was called, the program was read·, and two more collectives began to pull together. A lot of us hadn't been in the movement before. We had looked into existing organizations and dismissed them. SDS was WeatherMAN controlled. The only alternative to SDS, Radical Organizing Committee, spent its time in sterile debates over meaningless agendas. We thought that SLF would give us a chance to connect; that the collective structure would allow us autonomy, creativity, and self-respect. We might have harmed ourselves less and recognized sooner the impossibility of achieving anything good in that context if the Sundance gang hadn't arrived. Chip Marshall, Bobby Oram, Jeff Dowd, and Michael Abeles, fresh from Cornell SDS, arrived ready to take over the Seattle movement. (Joe Kelly was to arrive soon after). Sundance spotted Lerner as a man they could use when he spoke with Rubin at a rally, three days before the first SLF meeting. They contacted him the same day and began their alliance. Lerner provided the "base on campus". Sundance provided revolutionary models for hero worship, objects for media infatuation, and much of the energy and direction of SLF. We found our energies absorbed into a whirlwind of "organizing" defined and directed. by the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of the Sundance center. There was no time for us to find and defend what was important to us. The Chicago conspiracy trial was ending; we felt we had to respond. TDA came and went as a window-smashing melee. We got our riot credentials running through the streets breaking bank windows, pushing people out of the way of the rocks falling around them, while the well-disciplined tac squad arrested 75 people. The demonstration got Lerner and Sundance the publicity they wanted so much. They were made SLF by the media, and they were SLF to the people who poured into the organization afterwards. Sundance had injected some youth culture hype into the program and they became the center of the Seattle movement social scene by arranging huge parties with lots of beer, dope, wine, and girls. By procuring money for expensive, multi-colored leaflets and programs, they made an immediate impact on a movement so impoverished that the acquisition of mimeo paper was a hassle. Many established groups, who at first refused to incorporate themselves as SLF collectives, began to succumb to what was happening. And SLF was what was happening. People were afraid to be left out of the Revolution. To the burgeoning and freaked-out SLF, the Sundance "command collective made clear the only thing to do was become a professional revolutionary. So people quit their jobs, dropped out of school, grew their hair, smoked lots of dope, and hung out with the people at the Century Tavern. The mass dropout in the spring made no sense unless we believed in a teenage revolution - people had none of the skills necessary to survive. But it did provide Lerner and Sundance with a large pool of unskilled labor to use as shitworkers, and people who depended on them completely for direction to their lives. And the ethic Sundance lived by was not anti-materialistic. The ethic was to rip off. Bobby Oram showed us the way, spending hundreds of dollars hard-pressed collectives had earned for an SLF office, on Sundance rent and beer. "Living communism" was exemplified by Sundance, who declared everything most people have to do to survive "bourgeois", while exploiting people who had money or worked (mainly women) to support their incredibly expensive life style. We had wanted to exceed ourselves, to transform ourselves. Instead we found ourselves striving for collective salvation by individual suicide. There was no questioning of methods, no discussion of strategy, no confrontation of leadership. In our frenzied state of mind, any confusion, any hesitation would hold back the Revolution. We had developed too much guilt and, as professional revolutionaries, too much contempt for the people we were trying to reach to actually build anything. So we tried to lose ourselves in frenetic activity. Chip Marshall laid it down for all of us: "I don't care what the form is, as long as we keep the motion going." A woman who used to be in Sundance described their style well: "Despite our naive intentions to build ourselves into new men and women, we found our lives falsely divided into daytime political organizing and night-time attempts to escape the unthinking robots we had become. After evangelistic meetings to organize dormies, after chaotic meetings full of shoutdowns and bullshit, after scary and whirlpool demonstrations the pattern was the same: go home and get drunk, get stoned, get fucked; but by all means forget. Don't discuss the day's activities, how you felt or what you learned. Escape it, release your tensions. Be prepared for tomorrow's repeat performance." It was only later that we realized how desperate we had been, and how that desperation had been used; only later that we realized how afraid and unable we were to face ourselves, what we were and what we had to become; only later that we realized that SLF had brought into being a way of life designed to keep us from anger, from love, from strength, from freedom, from all but the illusions of those things: all of us bound together by weakness, hysteria, and desperate need. But we realized these things pretty late in the game. Sundance had already abrogated to themselves the right to define our lives and the category of "revolutionary." Their white male arrogance assured them of their perfect right to do so. And they were rich in capital: mastery of the jargon, access to money, media and movement contacts. Still, it was not until the Roach Tavern incident that we fully realized what it meant to be a woman living and working in a male-created, male-defined movement. The Roach Tavern was a bar popular with Seattle bikers and the Sundance crew; a "movement bar" which held SLF benefits and proudly displayed a sign reading: "This is a man's bar. Women will be tolerated only if they refrain from excessive talking." When a small group of independents, Radical Women, were threatened and assualted after tearing down this sign, they took their complaints about SLF's patronage of the bar to the only people who had the power to do anything about it: Sundance. The Sundance men deplored Radical Women's tactics. "After all, fascism is going to come down soon," Joe Kelly philosophized while writing off half the human race, "We can't afford to alienate the bikers."· We stayed in SLF, but we began trying very hard to develop an alternative. Talking with other women, we agreed that the probtem was not merely that women did the organizing while men made the speeches. Our humanity was denied to us. Michael Lerner could talk about the availability of a woman for his bed and joke, "Well, boys, I guess it'll take gang rape for this one." (Hey, Mike, heard any good nigger-lynching jokes lately?) The "woman question" became a topic of conversation for the men, but with the carefully drawn distinction between women's liberation - liberals and manhaters - and truly revolutionary Page 2 Vol. 1, No. 7 Ain't I
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