“No, I’m not,” I said neutrally. “I have a B.A. from here, pretty old degree at this point. I was down here the other day talking to Harold Weinstein and ran into Gail.”
“Weinstein,” another one snorted. “Thinks he’s a radical because he wears work shirts and curses capitalism.”
“Yeah,” another agreed. “I was in his class on ‘Big Business and Big Labor.’ He felt the major battle against oppression had been won when Ford lost the battle with the UAW in the forties. If you tried to talk about how women have been excluded not just from big business but from the unions as well, he said that didn’t indicate oppression, merely a reflection of the current social mores.”
“That argument justifies all oppression,” a plump woman with short curling hair put in. “Hell, the Stalin labor camps reflected Soviet mores of the 1930s. Not to mention Scheransky’s exile with hard labor.”
Thin, dark Mary, the older woman who’d been with Gail at the coffee shop on Friday, tried to call the group to order. “We don’t have a program tonight,” she said. “In the summer our attendance is too low to justify a speaker. But why don’t we get in a circle on the floor so that we can have a group discussion.” She was smoking, sucking in her cheeks with her intense inhaling. I had a feeling she was eyeing me suspiciously, but that may have just been my own nerves.
I obediently took a spot on the floor, drawing my legs up in front of me. My calf muscles were sensitive. The other women straggled over, getting cups of evil-looking coffee as they came. I’d taken one look at the overboiled brew on my way in and decided it wasn’t necessary to drink it to prove I was one of the group.
When all but two were seated, Mary suggested we go around the circle and introduce ourselves. “There are a couple of new people here tonight,” she said. “I’m Mary Annasdaughter.” She turned to the woman on her right, the one who’d protested women’s exclusion from big unions. When they got to me, I said, “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Most people call me Vic.”
When they’d finished, one said curiously, “Do you go by your initials or is Vic your real name?”
“It’s a nickname,” I said. “I usually use my initials. I started out my working life as a lawyer, and I found it was harder for male colleagues and opponents to patronize me if they didn’t know my first name.”
“Good point,” Mary said, taking the meeting back. “Tonight I’d like to see what we can do to support the ERA booth at the Illinois State Fair. The state NOW group usually has a booth where they distribute literature. This year they want to do something more elaborate, have a slide show, and they need more people. Someone who can go down to Springfield for one or more days the week of August fourth to tenth to staff the booth and the slide show.”
“Are they sending a car down?” the plump, curly-haired one asked.
“I expect the transportation will depend on how many people volunteer. I thought I might go. If some of the rest of you want to, we could all take the bus together—it’s not that long a ride.”
“Where would we stay?” someone wanted to know.
“I plan to camp out,” Mary said. “But you can probably find some NOW people to share a hotel room with. I can check back at the headquarters.”
“I kind of hate doing anything with NOW,” a rosy-cheeked woman with waist-long hair said. She was wearing a T-shirt and bib overalls; she had the face of a peaceful Victorian matron.
“Why, Annette?” Gail asked.
“They ignore the real issues—women’s social position, inequities of marriage, divorce, child care—and go screwing around supporting establishment politicians. They’ll support a candidate who does one measly little thing for child care, and overlook the fact that he doesn’t have any women on his staff, and that his wife is a plastic mannequin sitting at home supporting his career.”
“Well, you’re never going to have social justice until you get some basic political and economic inequalities solved,” a stocky woman, whose name I thought was Ruth, said. “And political problems can be grappled with. You can’t go around trying to uproot the fundamental oppression between men and women without some tool to dig with: laws represent that tool.”
This was an old argument; it went back to the start of radical feminism in the late sixties: Do you concentrate on equal pay and equal legal rights, or do you go off and try to convert the whole society to a new set of sexual values? Mary let the tide roll in for ten minutes. Then she rapped the floor with her knuckles.
“I’m not asking for a consensus on NOW, or even on the ERA,” she said. “I just want a head count of those who’d like to go to Springfield.”
Gail volunteered first, predictably, and Ruth. The two who’d been dissecting Weinstein’s politics also agreed to go.
“What about you, Vic?” Mary said.