Rebels in White Gloves (16 page)

The third version is Dorothy’s. Early on, she says, she felt a mounting sense of aimlessness in her new life with Dan. She did not have a job or a burning sense of mission of her own, and her attempts at traditional wifeliness fit only awkwardly into the collective’s structure. For the second time, therefore, she left home to experiment with a new kind of family. Without Dan, and with about two hundred fellow travelers, she joined the Venceremos Brigade, violating U.S. law by traveling to Cuba. Though she now calls the Brigade “a propaganda thing” by Castro, she also recalls her months working in the cane fields alongside Cuban comrades as a time of “more energy and sense of direction than I’d ever had.” She was impressed by the free clinics and schools and loved the physical labor and wholesome life. The revolution was like a generous and protective father: “They clothed me and fed me, and insisted we not use drugs.” Castro himself, who visited the Brigade on Christmas Day, seemed “charismatic and kind,” with none of her own father’s tyrannical will. “Fidel doesn’t sit in Batista’s palace and issue decrees,” she told the
Providence Journal
. “The people have to want a certain thing to happen, then Fidel asks that it happen, and it happens.” Describing the absence of violent crime, she added: “Why should you steal anything? All the essentials are free. Police are not needed. The populace will pursue a thief, because anything he steals belongs to everyone.”

Dorothy’s parents had not spoken to their daughter in almost a year when the FBI showed up at their door to tell them that she was “Fidel Castro’s guest” and being taught to make explosives. She returned home from Cuba soon thereafter, and though just eleven weeks had passed, she found nearly everything changed. Dan had been evicted from their old apartment for political activities, and though he had found them another place to live, he had let their houseplants die and had not unpacked a single box. He was waiting for Dorothy to do it when she got home. “I walked in the door, and here was this big radical leader acting utterly dependent on me. I guess you could say we were starting to have problems with our roles.”

Women throughout the New Left were by this time growing impatient with their men; many, like the thwarted abolitionists who became suffragists a century earlier, would become key figures in feminism. Why
is it, wondered Mary King of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “that men in communes still gather around five to ask, ‘When’s supper going to be ready?’ ” At meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society, women who demanded to speak were often greeted with ridicule. A June 1967 plea “for our brothers in SDS to root out the male chauvinism within themselves” ended with, “We love you!” It was reprinted in the official SDS newsletter accompanied by a derisive drawing of a young woman wearing a polka-dot baby-doll dress and matching panties. Dan Gilbarg looks back with regret on the movement’s failure to confront its sexism. “There was a lot of macho stuff, and nobody ever bothered to ask why women weren’t in leadership positions. It was also sexist that I set the agenda in our marriage, that I didn’t encourage Dorothy to find a project or job of her own.”

There was more change awaiting Dorothy when she got home. In her absence, Dan had become involved with another woman—though she was a lesbian, he said, and he had waited to ask his wife’s permission before having sex with her. (He felt licensed to ask, Dan says, when Dorothy told him she’d had an affair of her own in Cuba.) Dorothy wasn’t much surprised. “The collective did not value fidelity or have any regard for marriage,” she says.

In fact, the experiments in collective living in the late sixties were to a great degree a reaction against traditional marriage and an attempt to craft alternatives that might be less unequal and inhibited and isolating. Many of Hillary’s classmates would spend months or years after Wellesley participating in such experiments, pursuing an ideal first described by Plato in
The Republic
. Families, Plato wrote, should “live in common houses and meet at common meals. None of them will have anything specially his or her own, [thus ending] the tearing of the city in pieces by differing about mine and not mine.… All will be affected … by the same pleasures and pains … and all tend towards a common end.” Plato’s vision included free love: “They will all be together … and so they will be drawn by a necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each other.” He also championed a radical kind of collective parenting, in which “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.” In 1948, B. F. Skinner had resurrected those ideas in
Walden II;
in 1961,
Stranger in a Strange Land
gave the theme a sci-fi spin, and in 1966 the best-selling
Harrad Experiment
transplanted the idea into
Wellesley’s backyard at a fictional New England college (Harvard-Radcliffe). All explored the central question: where the boundary should be between public and private life.

In Dorothy’s version, her collective viewed marriage as a capitalist effort by one human to own another; fidelity was repressive, and those who insisted on it were uptight. “The Weather Collective actively busted up couples, made them break up and go out with somebody else. Some collectives got rid of individual bedrooms entirely and everyone slept together on a mat on a floor. We all smoked lots of marijuana, which was definitely a sex aid. But I felt completely alienated from Dan, and when he told me he wanted to sleep with the lesbian, I said, ‘I don’t care what you do.’ By that time we’d moved into the collective house on New Boston Road. We lived in separate rooms, and he had a series of affairs. I understood that at that moment I’d lost all my protection. Another big honcho in the movement came to me and said, ‘I’m delighted you’re not into monogamy,’ and I just burst into tears.”

Do It!
, Jerry Rubin titled his 1969 Yippie polemic. “Puritanism leads us to Vietnam. Sexual insecurity results in a supermasculinity trip called imperialism. America has a frustrated penis trying to drive itself in Vietnam’s tiny slit to prove it is the man.” For all the heedlessness with which many of the Wellesley women were then leaping into numerous beds, sex was a heavily laden thing in the early 1970s. It was no longer private, a sacred covenant between man and wife, or solely procreative. But it was far more than a recreation to pass the time in hot tubs: With drugs and rock ’n’ roll, it was the path to liberation. Men were sick, said Wilhelm Reich and Norman Mailer and Woody Allen, because they did not have enough or good enough orgasms. Sex was personally liberating: primitive, consciousness-expanding, transcendent. Sex was also politically liberating: transgressive, the last wild freedom in the prison of repressed industrialized society, a tool for world peace (“Make love, not war”). That sexual liberation was politically subversive was a view shared by the establishment: In 1967, J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to publicize the “depraved nature and moral looseness of the New Left,” and the deviant sexual behavior at RAG’s collectives described by investigators seemed to Strom Thurmond solid evidence of sedition.

As an act of social rebellion, the sexual revolution was far more important for women than for men: The public policing of sexual behavior had never been very much focused on men. If loosening their corsets had been for women an act of political defiance, unbuttoning their Levi’s was much more so. Women would claim control of their own bodies—especially their sexual, reproductive bodies. They would demand their freedom to feel pleasure like men. Germaine Greer preached that the denial of female sexuality was “the chief instrument in the deflection of female energy” and urged women to put away their makeup and engagement rings and underpants and “celebrate Cunt.” Nancy Friday cataloged female sexual fantasies in
A Secret Garden
. For a century, female lust had been dirty, perverse; now young Wellesley alumnae studied
The Joy of Sex and The Sensuous Woman
by “J” (who called herself “a lady in the living room and a bitch in bed”), committing to memory such techniques as “the butterfly flick” and “the hoover” and the “whipped cream wiggle.” Sweeten and apply, the best-seller instructed, “then lap it all up with your tongue. He’ll wriggle with delight and you’ll have all the fun of an extra dessert. If you have a weight problem, use one of the new artificial whipped creams in an aerosol can. And avoid gnawing.”

In the consciousness-raising group Cherry Watts, ’69, joined right after Wellesley, she recalls, they talked about little except sex, “about what gave us pleasure, about orgasms and the best way to have one and how it was your right to have one and if he couldn’t pleasure you that you should take matters into your own hands, literally.” Feminist presses churned out papers, rigorously arguing that women should insist on being on top, or championing clitoral orgasms as a means to liberate women from their dependence on the penis.

The sexual revolution was unquestionably liberating for a woman like Dorothy, who had been made a “ruined woman” and an unwilling bride by the repressive morality it sought to overthrow. Many of her classmates recall fondly those days of what Chris Osborne, ’69, describes as “fucking like bunnies”; they are not anything like the sex-hating banshees of antifeminist lore. But the revolution was also a mixed blessing: Girls raised like hothouse orchids
had
grown up, often, to be fragile flowers, woefully unprepared for the flood of sex let loose upon the land. “It was the first time we felt we had the right to feel good,” says Dorothy Devine. “We didn’t have to ask, ‘What’s his portfolio?’ or, ‘Does he want
the same number of kids?’ At the same time, the idea that a man would invite you out simply for the pleasure of your company was made, overnight, obsolete.”

While women were struggling to escape the ideology that their biology rendered them bundles of natural feeling unfit for the hardheaded world, the focus on sex reduced them once again, before all else, to their anatomy. Moreover, the revolution was incomplete: Women were still more object than subject, “the sought, rather than the seekers,” as the Wellesley guidebook had said. Outside of the truly radical voices like Greer’s, most of the new sex gurus were still teaching young women how to arouse male desire, not how to awaken their own. The 1969 best-seller
Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress
(reissued in 1995) suggested that female sexual liberation meant the freedom to shed passivity for the tricks of the courtesan’s trade. “We were designed to delight, excite and satisfy the male species,” wrote “J.”

There were other complexities for women in the sexual revolution, many of which are still being sorted out. The social surveillance of women’s sex lives had afforded a kind of protection, which was now suddenly gone. “I was really buxom as a college student, and got lots of attention,” says Dorothy. “It felt icky, invasive. Men felt this new kind of permission. They would reach out of a crowd and grab my breast.” As Gloria Steinem had predicted in
Esquire
in 1962, “Betty Coed” was now “morally disarmed.” The old social code had given way to a new one: Dorothy felt unable either to demand fidelity or to refuse the demands of other men for sex without being deemed “uptight.”

The recognition of that new intrusion on their sexual autonomy led some feminists to shift focus away from the politics of pleasure and toward sexual coercion and the nature of consent. “The sexual revolution is a reinstitution of oppression.” So Robin Morgan, editor of
Sisterhood Is Powerful
and, later, Ms. magazine, concluded in her “Farewell to the New Left,” published in
Rat
, a radical underground newspaper, just weeks before Dorothy’s return from Cuba. “Goodbye to the Weather Vain with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males.… Abbie Hoffman dumping his first wife and kids when he’s Making it; Paul Krassner reeling off in alphabetical order the names of people in the women’s movement he’s fucked, as proof he’s no sexist oppressor.” In 1970, Kate Millett introduced
in
Sexual Politics
what remains the single most controversial polemic in feminism: that sexual intercourse itself is political, an expression of male power. Her analyses of the novels of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer found their heroes pursuing sex not for love or even desire but as a means to master and humiliate women.

That sex could be brutal and frightening had for Dorothy become clear at an early age. As a six-year-old, Dorothy was raped by a teenage baby-sitter, a story she volunteers. “My parents got me away from him and said, ‘We’re going to put him in jail.’ They did the best they could with it, had me checked medically, then tried not to make a big deal out of it, thinking it would only be worse for me. But it left me panicked and angry and terribly shy. Sexuality is a precious thing. And women take the brunt of promiscuity: They’re so much more vulnerable to disease and pregnancy and violence if they’re out there looking for Mr. Good-bar. When I split from my husband in the collective, I was afraid. I didn’t want to be preyed on sexually.”

Dorothy’s new sense of vulnerability away from the protection of her husband’s bed was only heightened by what she saw as her collective’s recent turn toward violence. She describes the events of November 1969 much as the police had: Members of her collective, she says, had gone into New Bedford with Molotov cocktails to inflame a smoldering racial conflict; their intention, she says, was to demonstrate to America that even in seemingly conservative neighborhoods dissent was brewing. The group was busted, and then defended by William Kunstler. (They got off, says Dan, suggesting that the charges were unfounded.)

Dorothy had also developed a distaste for what she calls “the swagger” of the Weather Underground, whom she’d encountered in New Brunswick; delayed by U.S. authorities en route home from Cuba, she’d spent several nights in a barn with fellow Brigadiers. “Mark Rudd [who as a junior at Columbia had led the 1968 occupation of university buildings and was by then a leader of the Weathermen] came and instructed us to go underground.” Fearing the spreading net of FBI surveillance and arrest, “a lot of people obeyed his orders and disappeared. But the Weather People had offended me. ‘We’re going to make a revolution in America,’ they’d brag to the Cubans. ‘We’ll go back and tell the truth.’ These kids from Columbia University were trying to out-revolutionary Castro.”