Chapter 1: New Feminist Eyes 1 NEW FEMINIST EYES
JUNE 4–6, 1968

Another man was explaining the revolution to Roxanne Dunbar. Sitting in a tile-covered eighteenth-century palace turned café at the heart of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, she tried to focus on the centuries of history that surrounded her. Pancho Villa and the Zapatistas had once occupied the palace during the Mexican Revolution; now, on an afternoon in early June 1968, they gazed at her from old photos lining the café’s walls. It was all so beautiful and inspiring, she thought. She could not say the same for the conversation.

Nearly two months into her stay in Mexico, Dunbar was feeling restless. She was supposed to have been in Cuba by now. That, at least, had been the plan when she and her boyfriend, Jean-Louis, left Berkeley, California, to stay with his family in Mexico while making the necessary travel arrangements. Like many young radicals in America, they wanted to help build a truly socialist society on the island so that one day, they would know how to do the same in the United States. The couple were both graduate students, she in history and he in French, but Dunbar mainly thought of herself as an activist, while Louis, as she called him, had grown more enmeshed in the counterculture. The difference in perspective—making a revolution versus rejecting mainstream society in pursuit of new ways of being and expression—had troubled their already stormy relationship. While Jean-Louis had grown up in Mexico, he and his family were French; nationals from both countries were free to travel to Cuba uninhibited. As an American, Dunbar’s trip to the communist nation had been more difficult to arrange. Cuba had been under embargo since 1962 and was effectively closed to U.S. citizens. Passage through Mexico was the best option, but it wasn’t an easy or fast one. Hoping to speed things along with a new passport, Dunbar had married Jean-Louis in Mexico City, a decision she soon regretted as she watched him slide so easily into the comforts and racial hierarchies of his family’s wealth and status in Mexico. So much for radicalism, she thought. When he had announced a new plan to move to France, Dunbar had been more angry than surprised. He was free to go, she had said, but she was moving to Cuba—as soon as her papers came through.

Now, Jean-Louis sat beside her in the café, arm draped around her shoulders in a maddening if mundane assertion of possession. The man across from them continued talking, drumming a rolled-up newspaper against the palm of his hand for emphasis. It was only when he paused to unfurl the paper and jab at an article to prove some point that she saw it: “Super Woman-Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol.”

She grabbed the paper and devoured the slim facts of the story. The artist and another man had been shot the day before in New York City, and the woman who shot them, Valerie Solanas, had surrendered to police a few hours later. Both men had survived, but Warhol remained in critical condition. Solanas, according to the report, was the author of a manifesto for a group called the Society for Cutting Up Men, or SCUM.

Super Woman-Power Advocate.

Woman Power.

Dunbar gripped the paper, oblivious to the world around her and hungry for more information. Could it be true that women were finally rising up?

What if she stuck to her plan of going to Cuba to learn from their revolution and missed her own at home?

Solanas had changed everything; Roxanne Dunbar would not be going to Cuba after all.

Two thousand miles away, Andy Warhol’s condition at a Manhattan hospital was still critical when Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, shortly after winning the California Democratic presidential primary. The next morning, June 6, Bobby Kennedy was declared dead.

Upon hearing the news, Bev Grant, an activist, musician, and photographer, walked out of her apartment with her camera and into the early summer air on New York City’s Lower East Side. She set out on a familiar path uptown, past favorite diners and university buildings along NYU’s creeping eastern border. A sickening feeling of déjà vu had fallen over Grant—she had been twenty-one when the country was plunged into horrified mourning over the death of Robert Kennedy’s brother five years earlier; more recently, a woman had interrupted an activist meeting she’d been attending with the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in Memphis. As she weaved her way through familiar streets, Grant took in her adopted city as it took in the news of Kennedy’s death. Everyone looked as stunned as she felt. She headed toward Union Square and the small stretch of Broadway between 14th and 17th Streets that had become so much a part of her daily routine. There, she hopped on an uptown subway to 42nd Street and Times Square, where she found the headline zipper at One Times Square had not been updated: “KENNEDY STILL UNCONSCIOUS” ran in all-capital letters around the low belly of the building.

Originally from Oregon, Grant had married young and moved to New York so her husband could pursue his career as a jazz musician. The couple divorced not long after, but as one relationship ended, another blossomed. New York City was Grant’s new love, encouraging her evolution as an artist and activist. In 1964, she read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, an experience that stuck with her less for the text and more for the fact her boyfriend at the time had grabbed the book and thrown it out when she tried to discuss it with him. Three years later, while attending a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) meeting at Princeton University in New Jersey, she saw a notice for a lunchtime workshop for women organized by Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen. “It was a life-changing experience for me,” Grant explained later. “I began to understand that my life was an example of a social problem shared by women, something we were capable of changing.”

Bev Grant wasn’t the only woman to leave that workshop transformed and eager to make change. Several of the women in attendance, including Grant, formed the original core of New York’s first women’s liberation group that would in 1967 become New York Radical Women (NYRW). It had been during one of the group’s weekly Thursday meetings that she and the others first learned of King’s assassination. Now, two months later, another Thursday brought yet another assassination, and the women would be meeting that night.

Temperatures in the city climbed as that sad, strange Thursday wore on, making it feel more like August than early June. New York was enveloped in a heat wave thanks to Hurricane Abby, which was making a slow churn up the coast. The first officially dangerous storm of the season had a woman’s name, as always, taken from the alphabetical list of all-female-coded names published annually by the National Hurricane Center. Abby would be followed by Brenda and Candy.

It was a blessing that attendance was smaller than usual for a NYRW meeting. The roughly twenty women didn’t have to sit shoulder to hot, clammy shoulder on the low-slung couch, in the limited chairs, on tops of desks, or on the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor. It also meant that late arrivals weren’t stuck in the alcove near the door, which always made them feel a little out of the action and more like spectators. The space belonged to Carol Hanisch’s employer, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a civil rights organization run by married activist legends Anne and Carl Braden, in Kentucky. For the last two years, she’d managed their New York office; for the last several months, the Bradens had allowed Hanisch to use the space after hours for women’s liberation meetings.

SCEF, as the women called it (pronounced “Skeff”), was on the fourth floor of a nineteenth-century building on Broadway, at the corner of 11th Street. Shadowed by the Gothic Revival grandeur of Grace Church, across the street, it had been designed as a hotel by the same architect to complement the historic religious institution. The St. Denis Hotel became host to the likes of Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, and Ulysses S. Grant; in 1877, Alexander Graham Bell chose it for the first public demonstration in New York of his latest invention, the telephone. After changing hands in the early twentieth century and failing under the new owners, it had been stripped of its ornamentation and eventually converted to an unremarkable six-story office building.

With its assortment of mismatched furniture and propped-up bulletin boards covered in schedules and flyers, room 412 appeared the epitome of an activist organization office put together on the cheap, just like many others on the fourth floor and scattered throughout the building. Wide metal bookshelves designed to be sturdy and useful rather than decorative were pushed up against one wall, housing a hodgepodge of messy stacks of paper, coffee mugs, boxes of printed materials, and a bottle of dish soap, while several metal filing cabinets lined another wall. The space wasn’t large, but it was a much better option than rotating among the organizers’ cramped tenement apartments as word spread and more women showed up each week.

Hanisch wasn’t surprised by the low turnout for the meeting that night. Rosalyn Baxandall was on Cape Cod with her husband and young toddler; Shulamith Firestone and “the Annes” (Anne Forer and Anne Koedt) were all in France. Kathie AmatniekI—probably the person Hanisch missed the most—was in San Francisco trying to make it work with her boyfriend while bringing NYRW’s methods of consciousness raising (CR) to the two women’s liberation groups she’d found out there. Hanisch would be leaving soon herself to join other regional SCEF representatives for several weeks of work with the Bradens in Louisville, Kentucky.

Like Amatniek, Hanisch believed CR was the key to making women’s liberation a mass movement—that bringing women together to share individual experiences of the same situations would allow them to see that the problems and limitations they faced were common ones, not just isolated personal issues or cases of maladjustment. The sessions bonded the women while making them aware of their collective structural oppression—raising their consciousness—and thus creating the basis for organizing and change. Amatniek had always been the more assertive of the pair. If she had been there that night, rather than in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Ted, they might be starting the CR session Hanisch had wanted.

Instead, a woman lugged in a 16-mm film projector and the group prepared to watch an avant-garde film Hanisch had never heard of. Given the office’s spare furnishings and minimal decoration, the setup was easy. When someone hit the lights, the projector’s beam caught the cigarette smoke that hung thickly in the still, hot air. Its mechanical whir blended with the sounds of Broadway’s traffic coming through the open windows from four stories below.

Dracula music—Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, for organ—sliced through the noise as the black-and-white film began. It cut from jumpy shots of a wooded landscape to a woman’s silhouetted head and shoulders, as thin swirls of paint came together to make the film’s title: Schmeerguntz.

The ominous, if somewhat ridiculous, music continued over a new image of what appeared to be flesh, soon revealed to be an extreme close-up of an enormously pregnant stomach, skin straining, belly button popped out. A small figure cut from a magazine moved around the stomach like a little astronaut in jittery orbit. Then the stomach became the moon and more little astronauts skittered into and then out of the scene.

Hanisch had been irritated already, and nothing about this film was changing her mood. What is the point of this, she thought, as the jumpy cuts and collaged images continued—magazine advertisements and fashion shoots featuring pretty young white women; makeup, shampoos, trendy clothes, toothy smiles, and pouting lips interspersed with scenes of the pregnant woman in various rooms of a cluttered house. In one, she soaked in a shallow tub, soap suds bobbing around her painfully large belly, breasts, and knees that poked high above the waterline; in another, she rested on an unmade bed; she folded laundry; she shaved her armpit; she considered a sink full of dirty dishes; she vomited into an already filthy-looking toilet basin; she got dressed while awkwardly negotiating her own body. At one point, Bach’s organ piece was replaced by a series of audio clips of disembodied male voices narrating snippets of romantic scenes, including the moment in the film Sleeping Beauty when the princess is finally awakened by the prince’s kiss. Jangling calliope music played over a manipulated photo of a group of nineteenth-century European theology students, all men, ice skating and frolicking like boys; next appeared a Clorox advertisement featuring a group of women of various ages in smocks and maid’s uniforms.

Hanisch stewed as the vomit swirling around a flushed toilet dissipated into women gliding around a roller rink as a man sang a song about the USA and apple pie. Then, the scene turned to a long shot of a beauty queen’s crown and scepter resting on a plush, tufted pillow. The pageant theme song continued, and the film cut back to the roller derby. Women in skates and knee pads hit and jostled for supremacy while the crowd cheered and male referees jumped in to break it up. The scene shifted again to historic beauty pageant footage before cutting to recent pageant telecast footage. Miss Illinois and Miss Georgia introduced themselves.

And then it happened.

Hanisch watched as beauty contestants paraded across a stage in swimsuits, heels, and sashes. With smiles plastered across their faces and hair teased and sprayed into immobility, the women presented themselves for judgment by those on the scene and to viewers at home. The shot included the edge of the television screen being filmed—a reminder of the cameras, ever-expectant audiences, and the film viewer’s own spectatorship.II

The images transported Hanisch back to the living room of her childhood home in Havelock, Iowa, where her family had gathered every year to watch the Miss America Pageant. She thought about that scene replicated in the homes of her neighbors and schoolmates, how she and her friends had celebrated each new Miss Iowa, identified with them, and fantasized about one day being crowned Miss America.

Now, seeing the pageant with what she called her “new feminist eyes,” Hanisch was rocked by the monstrous, oppressive spectacle of it all. Oh my God, she thought, staring at the women. There was no glamour here, nothing to celebrate— just fake smiles, empty accolades, and coercive beauty standards.

Later that night, Hanisch moved around the SCEF office performing her Thursday night ritual search for forgotten cups turned makeshift ashtrays; if New York women’s liberation had a signature scent, it was the stale smell of cigarettes and old coffee. She returned chairs to their desks, swept the floor, and closed the windows, all the while still thinking about the pageant. She hadn’t said anything to the others, but now that she had seen Miss America with new eyes, Carol Hanisch couldn’t let it go; or, Miss America wouldn’t let go of her.

1. I. In the summer of 1968, Kathie Amatniek had not yet changed her name to Kathie Sarachild.
2. II. Everyone from the filmmakers and members of NYRW to later historians has misidentified these clips as depicting the 1965 Miss America Pageant. They appear to come from its competitor, the Miss USA Pageant, which was nationally televised from California for the first time that year. Notably, a Black contestant appears briefly in the swimsuit competition; no Black finalist would walk the Miss America stage until 1970.