Here is another excerpt in the serialization of Parts One and Two of the memoir Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert, this time chapter 12 and 13, distributed in this 40th year since the New Left and May 68. This is a bit more personal, but as it conveys ideas and feelings of the 60’s period, or emergent then, it seems to fit the serialization mailings…

 

 

Chapter 12 

Bread and Roses 

 

 

Dirty Stories 

 

It starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in his sink. 

—Author Unknown 

 

Being in the movement doesn’t eliminate typical day-to-day concerns. For one thing, gender dynamics are often personal—ranging from divisions of household labor and attitudes, through daily tasks, on to assumptions and methods of interpersonal behavior—as well as being about institutional patriarchy and collective feminist action. 

 

I never got even an inkling of an inclination from my upbringing that I ought to clean anything, and I have always been, as a result, both a slob and disinclined to do anything about it. Obviously, being a slob isn’t even a significant portion of what it means to be male chauvinist, but it is often part of the picture. I am not sure if my slovenliness is my father reborn in me, or is due to a household that required no chores of me, or both. Dad was even more hopeless than I am in a kitchen or facing a pile of dirt. My mother, on the other hand, was close to nutty about cleanliness. Our living room has been, in all her homes, more like a museum than a place lived in, which didn’t crowd out living, but did sequester it into other spaces. 

 

My allergy to cleaning is a constant bane for my partner Lydia, who, as a result, spends more than her fair share of time reminding and battling with me to do my share. But I have seen worse days than my current incarnation. Much worse. It isn’t that I self-consciously rely on others to clean up for me. I am bad, but not that bad. Mostly, I just don’t give a damn about cleanliness or even notice dirtiness unless it interferes with my productivity. My desks tend to be quite neat. 

 

Surely the worst messes I have created, by far, have been while living alone, and have oppressed only me, except that I rarely if ever noticed there was something there to be oppressed about. Of course, for Lydia, and for feminists generally for that matter, cleanliness isn’t actually about clean things. It is about gender roles. To be left with the cleaning task is to be left with a role that in a sexist world is deemed to be women’s labor. My aversion to cleaning is no doubt a product of the sexual division of labor manifested in me, via my mom and dad and TV-defined youth, and transported through millennia. But it isn’t me wanting to preserve male dominance, a sexist division of labor, I tell myself, or of course that would manifest in my attitudes in other dimensions of life too, and it doesn’t. Uncleanliness is a cruddy imposition from the past, hard for me to escape, or even to want to escape. 

 

The most extreme instance was an apartment I had in

Harvard Square

in Cambridge. In that second-story apartment, there was a refrigerator. At some point I put stuff in it and left it for a time. It began to smell so that opening the refrigerator door was unpleasant. My solution, not really a conscious plan but just what I did, was simple. I didn’t open the door again. I just forgot the rotting stuff was there and carried on without ever reopening the refrigerator. 

 

I left the apartment to a friend, months later, who moved in when I was off on a cross-country journey. Later I heard that he and a bunch of other friends had to clean the refrigerator. It had become a bacteria-ridden jungle. The stench was incredible. It was one of the more onerous tasks a human being had ever undertaken, at least in their eyes, they later told me. 

 

Another time, I lived off campus with Jeffery Mermelstein, a political friend from MIT, who later became a psychologist. Jeff was a bit like me on the cleanliness axis, and we allotted one room of our shared apartment to house garbage. We would just open the door and throw garbage in, close the door and go on about our business. It was highly efficient. Unsurprisingly, I don’t remember what became of that room. 

 

When my father was alive and we would argue and I would urge him in this or that new direction, he would often say that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I would get furious. I thought it was a pathetic excuse for stasis. When Dylan sang “he not busy being born is busy dying” it resonated greatly with me and seemed a far more cogent and exemplary maxim to live by than “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Be born over and over. Don’t snooze like a schnauzer. Well it turns out that it is very hard, and perhaps even impossible, to be changing every facet of one’s life, in every single year of one’s life. In fact, far-reaching self-change can be great but it can also be a fool’s errand. It can swamp doing very important tasks that are far more manageable. Even just being born in enough facets to be not overall dying is a tiring task that we all, eventually, let’s face it, finally lose. Or maybe that is just my pathetic excuse for not doing better on the cleanliness axis. Either way, I have more sympathy for my father’s doggie claim as I get older. Nowadays, I like snoozing like a schnauzer every now and then. 

 

Partly my not cleaning is a matter of my just being a lazy old exploitative dog taking advantage of millennia of sexism. Just ask Lydia. Partly it is a matter of picking where to rebuild myself given the prospects of even minimal success. Just ask me. Of course, in the end Lydia wins this argument because she needs only to point out the larger implications of unchanging role definitions to retain high ground no matter what machinations I toss up. But, even if only to understand the abstract point, consider another domain. 

 

Consider eating cows or chickens or what have you. I do it. Lydia does it too. Others, generally much younger, especially a few years back, used to tell us, clean up your act. They said eating meat is a vile behavior pattern induced historically, not biologically, and that it is morally reprehensible (which is what is analogous to what feminists rightly say about sexism, which is that it is induced historically and is morally reprehensible). Are the veggies and vegans like the abolitionists once were, or like feminists now are, urging on us a stance that will in the future be second-nature and morally utterly undeniable? And are we who eat meat hanging onto habitual behavior that will one day be considered subhuman, like lazy dogs who are not being born but are dying, because while we fight for justice for women, minorities, workers, and citizens of weak countries, we do not fight for chickens and cows? 

 

Don’t misread the above. I see no comparison in importance between seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of sexism, and seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of violence against animals. I see no comparison in importance between how chickens are treated and how women or any humans are treated. In fact, for me the animal rights agenda resonates barely at all, and the antisexism agenda is part of my life. The message of the little story is, instead, that life is not always easy or optimal. We have to pick and choose our battles, sometimes even setting aside parts of a whole that are worth affecting, but, at least for a time, are beyond our means. It is better to be somewhat sloppy while otherwise respecting women’s full and equal rights and responsibilities than it is to focus on a minimal personal lifestyle innovation while violating women’s larger rights. 

 

 

 

Women in the Movement 

 

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. 

 

—Adrienne Rich 

 

Every day in the sixties, before the women’s movement cleaned the movement house—at least somewhat—there were big gold men, big silver men, big steel men, and big lead men, and then there were little tin women. That was about the size of it. Women were pedestaled or damned. Women did tons of onerous work without which nothing useful would have happened. Women spoke but weren’t heard. Women created, amazingly, given their exclusion from most centers of dispute and debate, but weren’t respected. Women were seen but not seen. Of course nothing is universal, but this almost was. 

 

But starting in 1967, groups of newly politicized women in Boston began to discuss women’s issues. Within two years they organized a conference at Emmanuel College. Partly, women had been inspired by the civil rights struggles at the beginning of the decade. Partly, participating in those struggles and in antiwar movements, women had been forced to ward off sexism in the movement. The energy of over 500 attendees birthed new women’s organizations in Boston, including Bread and Roses, which was one of the first New Left-style feminist women’s organizations in the post-World War II United States. Bread and Roses addressed reproductive rights, child care, equal employment, gender discrimination, and violence against women. The organization seized an unoccupied building owned by Harvard University in 1971 and held it for ten days. At their building they offered free classes and childcare. Bread and Roses later bought a house in Cambridge and opened a women’s center in 1972, now the longest-running women’s center in the United States. 

 

As the women’s center advertised, “The struggle to gain control of all aspects of our lives—our bodies, our jobs, our social roles, and our creativity—is the struggle of every woman.” The center provided reproductive counseling and housed groups fighting against rape or violence against women, discussion groups for lesbians and others for women dealing with incest, and informational resources for welfare, career placement, and women’s issues. Diverse other projects followed in later years. 

 

The women of Bread and Roses were committed to fighting all manifestations of sexism, both personal and institutional. They were militant and angry and often saw instances of sexism where others tended to see only commonplace circumstances. For this they were regularly called “hysterical,” “knee-jerk,” “frigid,” and “maniacal,” not only by the media, but by many leftist men. An irony of such criticism was that it was sometimes self-fulfilling. Call someone nasty names long enough and they sometimes began to act in the manner they were labeled. The condemner then took pride in being able to offer evidence of being right. This was a sad victory. Relatedly, sometimes women hid behind accusations of sexism, as blacks sometimes hid behind accusations of racism, pursuing not feminism or national liberation but personal advance or just vengeance. This did happen; to say it didn’t would be silly. But such ills were a minor sidebar to resisting ubiquitous oppressive dynamics. 

 

Another problem in all kinds of political struggle, but particularly where such intimate features were involved, was the possibility of taking rightful insights into wrongful postures. From rightfully rejecting subordination one could move toward rejectionist behavior that contradicted movement building. Bread and Roses as an organization was autonomous but not separatist. In other words, it did not argue that women should ignore issues men related to. It did not argue that women should avoid working with men. It did not avoid struggles along with men or refuse male support. But it did argue that Bread and Roses itself was a space for women to operate free of the need to constantly deal with male sexist attitudes. 

 

But, despite Bread and Roses’ influence, in Boston, women with consciousness were sometimes hostile toward women without consciousness and lesbians were sometimes hostile to straight women as if being ignorant were a sin and as if having sex with men was itself part of the problem. The upside of this news is that if Bread and Roses and all other organizations of the sixties and early seventies were without flaws, we would have very bad prospects for future victory. After all, all these movements fell way short of achieving their aspirations and the world we live in still needs a gigantic revolutionary overhaul. That the movements of the sixties and early seventies were fraught with problems is good news in that it says we can do better and gives insight into how to do so. 

 

Mostly, however, I remember good things such as how Bread and Roses would confront institutions and movements demanding that men “respect women and incorporate women at every level of leadership and participation and eliminate gender hierarchy, or we will disrupt your operations until you do.” Bread and Roses confronted local radio stations, entertainment clubs, and cultural institutions, as well as groups in the New Left. They were ecumenical in choosing targets. “Women are everywhere. They are affected by everything. Therefore no institution, no project, and no person is exempt from the demand to respect women.” To call “shit-work” “women’s work” does not make it conceptual, adventuresome, or engaging, nor does it justify men not doing it or women doing nothing else. To portray women in a derogatory, sexist manner was to invite unremitting criticism. To ignore women’s opinions, relegate women to lowly tasks, or visually or verbally objectify women was to invite harsh censure and disruption of operations. To structure gender inequality into organizations was to invite militant critique. 

 

Marriage was called into question as a patriarchal institution. The basic structure of the family was called into question. Roles associated with dating were called into question. Macho posturing, male competitiveness, and sexual objectification were called into question. Opposition to pornography (with no accompanying censoring mind-set) was part and parcel of opposition to anything that manipulated, maligned, or mistreated women’s minds or bodies or that perpetuated male behaviors that oppressed women. Child care was no longer seen as “women’s work,” and mothering and fathering were replaced, at least in some people’s hopes and sometimes in some people’s lives, with parenting. What was good in familiar male and female roles was merged to become part of women’s and men’s joint agendas. What was bad was rejected. Actions were direct and clear. 

 

Bread and Roses was a local organization, but even in Boston its outreach was limited. It was far from the only militant feminist organization in the U.S., but others like it also had limited resources and range. The National Organization for Women (NOW), a much wealthier project, never became a larger example of this sort of committed, militant, multi-focused women’s organization. NOW had its virtues, but it was far less politically promising even in its best moments than Bread and Roses was at its worst. Nor has any other national women’s movement achieved such insight as Bread and Roses since then, I think. This absence may help explain why many women are once again emotionally and intellectually isolated from one another and why many accept that the pains they suffer arise from personal inadequacy or biological inevitability rather than from sexism. It may explain why, despite all of feminism’s gains, we are currently, it seems, not only stalled in going forward after those many major gains, but perhaps even beginning to creep backward. 

 

 

 

Women Readjust the Left 

 

History is the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. 

 

—Jane Austen 

 

The antiwar movement of the sixties had the same modus operandi as the later anticorporate globalization movement. We held large open meetings to make plans for major events. At one particular meeting I happened to be chairing, about 200 people were planning an antiwar rally and march. I was at the front of the room when suddenly the door opened, a bit to my rear and right—yes, this detail I remember—and in marched about thirty women. They spread out across the front of the room and told me to sit down. I sat. The interlopers announced to the room that henceforth the movement in Boston was going to be antisexist or it wasn’t going to be anything at all. If we didn’t comply with their demands they would boycott our antiwar efforts and soon other women would, too. It was right to meet their demands, they said, and in any event, to do otherwise would be disastrous. 

 

The demands were straightforward and immensely important. All decision-making bodies in the Boston movement would henceforth be comprised of at least fifty percent women. All meetings would have women chairs, or cochairs, or rotating chairs with women half the time. Whenever movement members went out to give talks or make presentations, women would fill at least fifty percent of the visible and empowering positions. Finally, in all public statements and political presentations, feminist content would be included at the core. This would not be done mechanically, but with thoughtful, caring precision. 

 

Most men in the room felt that a major antiwar session was no place for women to exert feminist pressure, since opposition to the war was too important to interrupt. Others felt there was nowhere this should be done; the demands were nonsense. Some of us were, however, prodded to realize that there would be no successful opposition to the war, much less to sexism, unless women were respected and won their equal place. But before praising male supporters of Bread and Roses for holding this worthy view, it is critical to understand that the men who realized the importance and legitimacy of Bread and Roses’ demands did so because we were forced to. Our awareness didn’t come spontaneously. Carrying through the demands was far from easy and never perfect, for that matter. 

 

Bread and Roses told those listening that they intended to form local and regional women’s movements that would pressure all kinds of institutions by threatening to disrupt their operations unless they incorporated respect for the rights and capacities of women. Bread and Roses wanted a national women’s movement that was militant, aggressive, multifocused, and sensitive to feminist concerns. They wanted feminists playing leading roles around matters of race, class, foreign policy, government policy, and ecological preservation. Bread and Roses sought all this, and made considerable gains on many fronts in subsequent years, sometimes against staunch male resistance, more often against recalcitrant habits and expectations. 

 

At the time, movement men realized that we obviously had no right telling women what they should be doing about sexism, but we did have a responsibility to address other men and male-dominated institutions. We had to make known our desire to support militant feminism. Even more important, we had to compel the still male-dominated institutions we were part of to incorporate at least an equal share of women’s leadership and to offer both material and organizational support for national and local women’s organizing. This was never easy. Whatever other impediments obstructed the re-emergence of militant feminism on a national scale, surely the biggest obstacle was the continuing intransigence and outright sexism of men. 

 

For example, to choose women ahead of men who were by appearance more confident, better trained, more knowledgeable, more skilled at their tasks, and, were mostly just implicitly assumed superior required a broader understanding of what it meant to make progress. A guy didn’t have to say women belong under his thumb to oppose change. He could just say, “Tom would be a better speaker, leader, chair, decision maker, than Mary. Keep Tom. Mary can wait.” To defeat the less-obnoxious claims, you had to bring up the big picture of attaining gender balance, not just the narrow immediate productivity that Tom might, in fact, enlarge more than Mary. 

 

More, even regarding immediate competence, we had to realize as well that the highly trained and confident and often in many ways capable men such as Tom had some horrible baggage that often compromised our seeming competency, while the less trained and confident women such as Mary brought insights and commitments about a wider range of issues that augmented their competency. 

 

Bread and Roses was a women’s organization for women’s rights and justice more broadly. It was a powerful product of the initiative of women seeking to overcome the sexist behavior of the New Left and society. To try and explain how much was accomplished, I often suggest that if you took a young woman from Boston in 2006 and sent her in a time machine back to 1960 or even 1965 or 1968, the day-to-day experience from that time would be unbearable for her. Literally, I think young women today would be unable to bear for hours, much less for lifetimes, conditions that existed then. To have eliminated that much rot marks great progress. At the same time, the sixties rarely institutionalized its feminist gains in new modes of child rearing, family structure, and schooling, and never really had that as a prime priority. As a result, from the close of the sixties, let’s say 1975, to now, the right wing in the United States and around the world, fueled and abetted by persisting underlying patriarchal institutions, have been fighting a multi-front battle to put women back in the home, back under male thumbs. 

 

 

 

Curious Courtship 

 

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances. 

—Albert Einstein 

 

One day a controversial and important book came to South End Press, by a writer named Batya Weinbaum, titled The Curious Courtship of Women’s Liberation and Socialism. Curious Courtship and Weinbaum’s other SEP book, Pictures of Patriarchy, offered an original thesis. They argued that if you look at workplaces and at the economy more generally you can see the imprint of gender dynamics in its defining structural relations. Weinbaum looked into factories and saw there the imprint and even replication of the roles typical of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. Similarly, she looked into families and saw in them not only kin and gender relations, but also class dynamics.  

 

The overarching idea that I took from publishing Batya’s work matched and propelled where my own thoughts were going. I thought Marxism had many useful insights, but, among other damning problems, it was too economics focused. Marxism asserted, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by how its practitioners approached reality, that a society’s economy emanated a field of force that critically imprinted how things occurred not only in workplaces but in households, churches, and schools. 

 

This seemed obviously true, but reciprocally, it also seemed to me that what I called the kinship sphere of social life, and the cultural sphere, and the political sphere, likewise emanated fields of force that also percolated into all sides of life, including the economy. Batya Weinbaum made a specific case about kinship affecting economy, and I found it very convincing and still refer to it when making related claims. 

 

 

 

Women and Revolution 

 

In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: 

either she’s a feminist or a masochist. 

—Gloria Steinem 

 

About ten years after the heyday of Bread and Roses, Lydia Sargent, then at South End Press, edited another centrally important South End Press book about feminism titled Women and Revolution. Lydia invited the participants, prodded their submissions, and did the introduction and editing. In the book, a controversial essay by Heidi Hartman titled “The Unhappy Marriage of Women’s Liberation and Socialism” was the centerpiece, followed by reactions from various respondents and concluding with Hartman’s reply.  Women and Revolution explored the centrality of gender for social change, arguing the need to transcend struggle that highlighted only economics and class. 

 

For the most part its insights have successfully become part of Left consciousness in the years since its publication, but the battle against sexism and patriarchy is a long way from won. We are certainly far advanced from where we were thirty or forty years ago, but if you look at popular culture, ads, and patterns of increasing objectification in 2006, not to mention possible assaults on past gains like Roe v. Wade, it is clear that a great deal that the women’s movement has won, in social organization, in laws, and even in the ideas and aspirations that reside inside people’s minds, is now under attack. 

 

Experience has taught me that gender hierarchies have to literally be extirpated to disappear. If they persist even a little, they attempt to reinvigorate themselves at the expense of women. Part of moving forward from the present is curtailing a sexist resurgence, enlarging feminist gains, and ultimately making the world a truly feminist place to live.

 

 

 

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Chapter 13 

 

Lydia and Life 

 

Dates and Lovers 

 

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote 

so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. 

—Virginia Woolf 

 

In fifth and sixth grade, people’s birthday parties often included dancing. I hated these parties. I vaguely remember dancing very poorly. I remember dancing with girls a foot taller than me who were my age, but were easily a year or two more mature than me. I took no joy in that. These parties were, however, how boys, or at least many boys, were personally introduced to girls. It didn’t do much for future respect. The fact that we more familiarly met girls much earlier in our homes, in daily life, and through the media, always in patterns enforcing degradation rather than mutual respect, was an even larger problem. 

 

Girls didn’t do what we did. We didn’t do what girls did. What boys did mattered. What girls did didn’t matter. I don’t remember the details, but they are well known from diverse accounts. I was a little boy, not a little girl. Different play, different talk, different clothes, different expectations—everything different—with every little thing stamped with a social imprint that was designed to produce men and women, two socially separated species with the former dominating the latter. That’s it. That’s young people’s gender relations in the fifties—and for many men and women even now. 

 

Matthew was one of my best friends from grade school through high school. He was a tall, broad, handsome guy, who looked way beyond his years. He would tell me, in junior high school, of his assignations at beach clubs with married women. Matthew was a fount of gender knowledge. In high school he had a girlfriend, actually quite a few, but he and this particular one broke up after a time, and later I wanted to go out with her. Matt helped set it up. 

 

She was a year younger than Matt and I, and was a bit beyond her years physically, emotionally, and no doubt sexually, not least from having gone out with Matt. With me sixteen or maybe seventeen, and her I guess fifteen or sixteen, she turned me down after going out once and told me why. She liked me fine and thought I was a nice, smart fellow, but I didn’t get excited enough about day-to-day life to sustain her interest. 

 

I was surprised, but I remembered this years later and decided she was right. I don’t get excited about most things other people find engaging. My small talk is unanimated. I am boring, at many times, in many places, for many people. I am far from being the life of a party, unless it is a political party, sometimes. This young woman wasn’t interested in my interest in science, and I had only tangential interest in the day-to-day world that excited her. Right up to the present, while I can be animated about intellectual matters and issues of social change, I often have little patience for talking about the rest of daily life. I am not an optimal social package, or an optimal boyfriend or life-mate package, either. 

 

What about sex? I remember in fifth grade, maybe fourth, Donald and I, he being my then-best friend, would be playing war or cowboys and Indians, or whatever. In the throes of creeping around, or making believe we were in quicksand, I would rub against the floor, a lot. I never thought about what I was doing. I just did it, for a while, and then didn’t do it—that way—anymore. I remember, for that matter, no talks with anyone older about sex. I don’t remember learning about it, so I have no idea how learning occurred, except by social osmosis, I guess, from friends, and practice. 

 

Sex was everywhere in media and in life, but almost nowhere in conscious discussion. It was not noted, admitted, or openly explored, at least in my circles. This was not universal for high school, but typical for my friends. From Matthew I heard lurid stories of lonely older women. But this was not typical talk. I had no conscious calculated understanding of any of it, or of anything broader regarding gender or sex roles. 

 

Nancy Shapiro was my first love. What picked her out for me or picked me out for her, I don’t know. It happened, that’s all. I suspect when people explain such things they just pick attributes to apply so the stories are more or less applicable. I don’t know what the conclusion of our relationship was, either. I don’t remember breaking up. My guess is it went on for one too many mornings and she went her way and I went mine. 

 

If you go back and listen to the music of the times or view the movies or TV or read the books, you will know that we all then inhabited a world of much greater hurt for women than the one we inhabit now, which is certainly still piss-poor on that account. I have no doubt that I contributed to the injustices Nancy had to endure, and I am sorry for that, though I also know that I was never one of the boys who denigrated or tried to trick and exploit and later dump women. In fact, I tended to get into fights about such behavior. My sins w

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