“It does! I’m Faith, by the way.”
“Well, hello, Faith, I’m Evelyn. Listen, I’m getting together this weekend with some women, and we drink hard and let loose, and you will definitely get your say. You should come.”
So Faith went with Evelyn Pangborn to a long dark apartment in upper Manhattan, where a group of women sat around drinking and smoking, and when they weren’t being dead serious and full of rage, they were also very witty. They argued and plotted; a few of them said they were part of a group that was planning to disrupt the Miss America pageant in the fall. Several of them had already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience. Some were part of ad hoc radical groups that had splintered off from the antiwar groups. A black woman said, “I can’t tell you how often I go to a meeting and get treated with condescension and hostility.” There was a young suburban mother at the meeting who complained that her husband was indifferent to her exhaustion.
“I just feel that motherhood has me right where it wants me,” this woman said. “And then I hate myself for feeling so cold and angry and unmaternal.”
“Oh, I hate myself for feeling a thousand different ways,” said someone else. “I am a temple of self-hatred.”
“Why are we so hard on ourselves?” asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it’s not that I’m so hard on myself exactly, it’s that I’ve learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own. When Harry the trumpeter back in Vegas had told Faith that her nose was big, she’d taken in that opinion. When men filled a room with their voices and insisted to her that abortion was a middle-class, second-tier concern, she’d tried to defend her point, but had been overrun.
Faith began telling the women about accompanying her friend for an abortion in Las Vegas. “We had to wear blindfolds, and we drove around and around. And when she almost bled to death, one of the nurses treated her like a criminal. I think that as long as we keep our blindfolds on, you know, literally and figuratively, then we’re really—to use a word that’s relevant here—in trouble.”
“We can’t have men making our decisions anymore,” someone else said. “What I do with my body, and how I choose to spend my time—all of it is my decision. I get to decide.”
“That sounds like song lyrics,” said the woman whose apartment this was. “I . . . get . . . to . . . de-cide.”
“I . . . get . . . to . . . de-cide,” they all jokingly sang along with her, this diverse group of women with frizzed-out hair and sloganed T-shirts, or secretarial suits, or soft and durable housewife-wear, or expensive designer trappings. Faith thought that she didn’t have to like them all, but she also recognized that they were in it together—“it” being the way it was for them. For women. The way it had been for centuries. The stuck place. She sang along with them, her voice coming out in a loud quaver. But it didn’t matter that you quavered; it only mattered that you made yourself heard.
Afterward, out on the street heading for the train, the young mother said to Faith, “You’re a very good speaker! Very passionate in a quiet, appealing way. We all liked listening to you. You’re sort of hypnotic. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“No,” said Faith with a laugh. “I promise you, no one ever has. Nor will they ever again.” It was a compliment that both pleased and affected her, and suddenly she flickered on the image of herself standing onstage at the nightclub at the Sands. Standing still on that dark stage, imagining she was appearing in front of an enormous audience.
The woman was named Shirley Pepper, and she said that before her baby was born she had worked at Life magazine, and that she hoped to return to work as soon as she could get decent child care. “That’s another critical issue in this goddamn country,” said Shirley. “No access to cheap, good child care.” Later, Shirley Pepper, by then back in publishing, was the one to come up with the idea for Bloomer magazine. “There are things we can do that Ms. isn’t going to be interested in,” she said. “We can be a little rougher around the edges.” There had been small publications for women circulating for some time; there was a desire for more of this. The women’s movement had by then fully taken off, and Faith had gotten involved. Back in August of 1970 she had marched in an enormous crowd down Fifth Avenue. The three demands that day had been for free abortion on demand, 24-hour childcare, and equal opportunity in employment and education. Later, she couldn’t remember what was written on the sign she carried. One of those three things? All of them? She had felt the outrage, the thrill. It was in the air that day, and of course then it was everywhere. There was talk of misogyny. Patriarchy. The myth of the vaginal orgasm.
Shirley had gotten to know many women activists over the years, and she brought in some of them to help start the magazine. She indefatigably rounded up investors—an arduous and painstaking task—with the help of her willing husband, who worked for IBM. Faith was brought in to be part of the magazine because of her calmly pleasing speaking style, as well as her ability to listen and her willingness to work. But probably also because of that indescribable thing about Faith—how you didn’t really know her, but you just wanted to be around her.
The early days of Bloomer included wild-eyed all-nighters at the Houston Street offices, reached by the ominously slow and constantly breaking elevator, which had been inspected many times over by one Milton Santiago, who had signed off on its functionality again and again in the same familiar, slanted hand. “Milton Santiago, you are a disgrace to the elevator inspection industry,” the women said. “Milton Santiago, if you were Millie Santiago, this shit would get done!” They laughed and worked in the open space with the tall, dusty windows, secure in their mission, as well as in the inevitability of their plans and ideas. Frustration and rage at the injustice that women experienced all over America and the world lived side by side with bake-sale optimism about everything that could be done to wipe it out.
“I’ll be your Sherpa,” Faith had once told a cluster of other editors and young assistants as she led them down five flights of stairs in darkness after a late-night closing, the elevator once again predictably broken. “Come on, everyone!” she called, flicking open a Zippo lighter. That night the flame gave the women’s faces in those close quarters the stuttering light-and-dark appearance of people in a Flemish painting, all eye-gleam and contrapuntal shadow and rose cheek and curved hand—if, in fact, the Flemish artists had ever painted groups of women together without men.