The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution

Author(s): Marianne Weems, Jessica Chalmers, Andrea Fraser, Martha Baer and Erin
Cramer
Source: October, Vol. 71, feminist issueS (Winter, 1995), pp. 120-140
Published by: The MIT Press
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THE V-GIRLS
From left to right: Andrea Fraser,

Jessica Chalmers, Marianne

Weems, Erin Cramer, and
Martha Baer.

* This is a work-in-progress script developed from transcripts of consciousness-raising sessions

that the group conducted. The piece was performed at the Manhattan Theater Club in March 1993
and at the Drawing Center in June 1994. Subsequent versions of the script were performed at Duke
University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.

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Daughters of the ReVolution*

':

I::

::: :

Marianne: This is from The Handbook of Women's Liberation, by Joan Robbins (1970):

Consciousness-raising, in which you will talk about personal

experiences without broad analysis, will accomplish the

following:

1. Clean out your head.

2. Uncork and redirect your anger.

3. Teach you to understand other women.

4. Discover that your personal problem is not only yours.

OK, here are the topics:

Discuss your relationships with other women. Have you ever felt
competition for men? [ Go around circle, answering yes or no.]

Discuss your relationships with men as they evolved. Have you noticed
any recurring patterns? [Go around circle, answering yes or no.]

Have you ever felt men pressured you into having sexual relationships?
Have you ever lied about orgasm? [ Go around circle, answering yes or no.]

Discuss your parents and their relationship to each other and to you.
OCTOBER 71, Winter 1995, pp. 121-40. ? 1995 The V-Girls.

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122

OCTOBER

All: No.

Jessica: Five women, sitting in semicircular formation, attempting in their own way
to relive the glory days of early seventies feminism. Martha, Erin, Marianne,

Jessica, Andrea. Five girls, V-girls, nice girls, white girls, not boys. They sit
before you as daughters, staking a claim to a revolution they only barely
remember from childhood, from photos, or from books. Of course, they
retain certain fragments of the feminist past: a certain vocabulary of consciousness (false or true), of male supremacy, the dialectics of sex, abortion
on demand. Freedom now! Sisterhood is powerful! Women of the world
unite!

They retain, as well, memories of mothers and friends in floppy hats,

the ironed hair, the hair cropped short, the hairy legs, the braless boobs, the

embroidered jackets, the granny glasses, the men's pants, those jean skirts
made from pants with triangles in the middle, those stretch socks with eyes
printed on them...
Andrea: Well, Jess, that list doesn't really represent my vision of the early seventies.
Marianne: I don't think feminists wore those triangle skirts.

Martha: My mother only wore these little Jackie Kennedy dresses.

Jessica: But what they don't retain of the past, they are attempting to reconstruct.

You see them here, sitting before you sincerely, in homage, trying their
hand at consciousness-raising. With their CR guidebook in hand, with their
practice also humbly in question, what they are hoping is that, somehow,
they, too, might achieve what was so feelingly called "Liberation."

Like so many other women before us, we were drawn to come together
as a group. We were attracted by the idea of a collective empowerment, to
the idea that speaking together about our experience might provide the

basis for radical critique. Envious, we read about the good times, hard

times, and political frenzy of groups that began in the late sixties or early

seventies: Cell 16, The Feminists, The Furies, Redstockings, New York

Radical Feminists, WITCH. We, too, would like to join a struggle, to strug-

gle, to backstab, to schism, to compose a manifesto, to question the

composing of a manifesto, and ultimately, if at all possible, to overcome. In
spite of the eighties. In spite of our compulsion to problematize. In spite of

our charming skepticism, our reluctance to attend demonstrations-or,

well, if we attend them, our reluctance to join right in, the way we stand off

a little, a reluctance to meld our individual identities with the mass.

Martha: OK, let's go around the circle.

Erin: What's left on the list of topics?
Marianne: Well, there's "Could you really stand to live in a commune?"
Jessica: Why don't we talk about our past experiences with groups of women instead?

Marianne: That's a good idea, Jess! Groups of women. Our experiences.

Martha: I don't want to do that one.

Erin: Whyyy?!

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Daughters of the ReVolution 123

Martha: I don't know. Ijust don't.

Andrea: Whyyy?

Martha: We've already talked about that sort of thing endlessly and haven't
produced anything. I don't see it informing us strategically; it's facile and
ineffectual and above all self-absorbed, and I know it won't move the more

important political discussion forward. There's a political discussion in here,

somewhere. I say we either vote on supporting Kathleen Brown, nominate
Marianne to run for comptroller, or discuss how to organize our audience.
Short of those alternatives, I favor silence.

Marianne: I agree.
Erin: Why do you agree??!

Marianne: I do agree.
Erin: I can't believe you agree.
Andrea: I don't agree.
Erin: No, I don't agree either.
Martha: Well, I agree.
Erin: Look, this is not about personalities and alliances.
Andrea: I agree.
Erin: It's about agreement.
Jessica: Yes, we are deeply committed to "something," have put our faith, sincerely,
in "something." And so you find us here this evening, semicircular in the
attempt to raise this "something," a ghost from the past, that obscure object,
the thing called "consciousness."
Unfortunately, it will not be possible to conduct a live consciousnessraising session in front of you this evening. In fact, we're reading from
scripts.
Marianne: The Origins of Radical Feminism. Some of you are familiar with the stories

of how the northern workers for the civil rights movement were organized,
how the female volunteers, black and white, were assigned the typing, the
cooking, and the cleaning of the "freedom houses." And some of you may
have heard the stories about how this kind of "organization" continued into
the student movement and led many (primarily white) women to begin to
perceive themselves as an oppressed class. The movement's egalitarian ideology only emphasized the growing oppression women experienced within it.

Taking literally the admonition to "look to your own oppression,"

women in the student movement began to organize themselves. In Chicago,
in 1967, Jo Freeman, Shulamith Firestone, and others wrote an early manifesto called "To the Women of the Left." While the analogy they drew has
since been called into question, they modeled their politics deliberately on
black power, cautioning new left women to avoid the mistakes of the early
civil rights movement: "Women must not make the same mistakes that the
blacks did at first of allowing others (whites in their case, men in ours) to
define our issues, methods, and goals."

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124

OCTOBER

Central to the women's movement was a program for liberation based

on the concrete realities of everyday life. Adapting the Maoist practice of
"speaking pains to recall pains," consciousness-raising developed in small
groups and became both a method for developing feminist theory and a
strategy for building up the new movement. Charlotte Bunch set the stage
with her much-cited line: "There is no private domain of a person's life that
is not political and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal.
The old barriers have fallen down."

Erin: This is from "Towards a Women's Revolutionary Manifesto" by the Women's

Liberation Collective, Palo Alto (1969):
Let us join together in groups (fifteen or less) to discuss all

aspects of womanhood. To understand the nature and

extent of our oppression, we must discuss everything from
diapers to orgasms, from political economy to the woman's
page, from the desire to have children to the desire to be

married to the desire to own a home. We must analyze

everything we talk about. We must encourage women from

various classes and minorities to meet in groups and talk
about our real problems on an honest basis, to interchange
ideas involved in all groups and learn from each other.
Marianne: So, experiences with groups of women.
Andrea: OK. I don't have any except this one.
Erin: Well, what about your sisters?

Marianne: Oh my god.
Andrea: Oh, that's right. Does that count?
Marianne: That was one intense statement. Yes, that counts.

Andrea: It counts? That's right. I spent most of my childhood in an all-women

household.

Marianne: That was so good. I don't have any; this is the only one: I grew up
entirely with men until I met the V-Girls.
Andrea: No, I've never felt that I belonged in any group.
My false consciousness is revealing itself. OK. I have a big family. I have

two brothers, two sisters, three mothers. But whenever we got together I
always had the feeling that someone was missing. Then I realized that it was
me. I was missing.

And outside of my family, well ... we were completely isolated where I

grew up. We were ridiculed at school because we had long hair and funny

clothes. The neighbors shot our monkey and impounded our dogs and

threatened to firebomb our house.

I remember going to a Vietnam Moratorium march with my family, and

in the seventies in San Francisco, I always marched with my mother in Gay

Pride. Now big demonstrations make me cry. I feel so safe in those enor-

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Daughters of the ReVolution 125

mous crowds, and I find it unbearable. I know that within those political
groups bound by a purpose are all of these psychological groups bound in
identification. In those groups I can never feel safe.
But this isn't about women, is it? I'm supposed to be talking about
groups of women, right? I guess I have to think about it some more.
Martha: Do you want us to come back to you, Andrea?
Andrea: Yeah.

Marianne: Erin, it's your turn.

Erin: Groups, women... I only had female dolls in my dollhouse.

All: Wow!

Erin: The mother was this Martha Washington doll I had, so the father was
obviously going to be George Washington, but I didn't have a George
Washington doll, so the father was always away at the war. It was an entire
family of women-five daughters and a mother/daughter/servant team who
were made out of corn husks and attached to each other with a paper clip. I
did have one male doll, but he was so tall he could only fit in the bottom part
of the house, so he was this perpetual suitor, always in the living room, a per-

manent visitor.
All: Wow.

Erin: When I was in high school, I had this really intense group of female friends,
and a lot of us went to summer camp together. There were about ten of us in
the middle of the woods, and we had our own octagonal yurt, and it was so
fabulous running around with this band of girls.
Martha: At this point in our conversation, Erin points to an experience most of us
have had, but one that we have never fully understood. It is this experience
of being in a "band" of girls. Erin's choice of words-"band" as opposed to
the more generic "group"-is an apt one. But why? What is a "band"? Why
did so many of us join them?

Perhaps the omission of these questions, the refusal to know more

about the nature of these groups, can be ascribed to an unconscious fear
that is socially reinforced. That which made us into a "band" we feared, we
repressed. We feared our own roving prowess, the collecting together of a
diffuse violence, a gathering of wishes; we feared the potential gnawing and
gnashing of beastly teeth, of wild and eternal transience. A pack, a band: this

is at once what we lusted for and what we feared.

Erin: People would say that we were going to be lesbians. You know, like boys say
when they're really jealous that you don't need them.

Andrea: Lezzie. Like that.

Erin: Yes.

Martha: Lezzies, lezzies. Animals. Packs. As is clear from the responses of others,
the fear of our banding together was not produced single-handedly. It was
circulated by others generously. For us, however, there was a wish to protect
the secret, the secret of our desire. We never spoke a word of it.

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126

OCTOBER

Erin: I'd like to say that when I got to college, Jessica was the person who convinced

me to be a Women's Studies major.

Jessica: I did?

Erin: I was very caught up in feeling inferior about the status of women in the
university. I took it very personally. I think that Women's Studies balanced
out all the feelings that I was having about the theory that I was reading-I
think I felt sort of disabled by it on a certain level, so the department became

this empowering space where I could be with other women. I wanted to be

gay and to be with a group of women permanently, but it didn't work out.
Like I never found a girlfriend. And I always seemed to have boyfriends.
Martha: Well, that could put a damper on your plan.
Andrea: Excuse me-I'm sorry to interrupt. [Addressing audience] I would like all
of you to refer to the sheet you were given as you came in, "Consciousness-

Raising Rules and Topics." Bottom page under "Rules," first line: "In
questioning a speaker, you are not to judge." [Pointing into the audience] That

man in the third row from the front, sixth from the left-that man is judging me. The one with the blue shirt on.
Marianne: I noticed him, too. And there's a man in the back row who's been judging Erin ever since we sat down.
Erin: Where?

Jessica: But I feel like they're being really supportive, you guys.

Andrea: According to Radicalesbians:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women

creating a new consciousness of and with each other which

is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the

cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and

validate our authentic selves. As we do this ... we find reced-

ing the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind

a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is
inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with
ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we

begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive

identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in
human expression.
Martha: Can Ijust add that I feel so conscious already it's making me a little nauseous.

I mean, I have so much on my mind. You guys, I really can't stomach any
more awareness-all these "social constructions," all these "paradigms." And
with that huge bowl of tomato soup we had for-I'm afraid if I think about
how I'm oppressed as a woman in my daily life even the least little bit more
I'm going to throw up.
Erin: What are we doing here? Are we acting out some kinky fantasy of wholeness?

Do we really believe that consciousness-raising will restore us to some

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Daughters of the ReVolution 127

authentic self? All right, before we go any further, I want to ask you guys
something: Does anybody here actually believe in the self?
[Nobody raises her hand; finally Martha's hand goes up timidly.]
Martha: Uh, I do. Not my self. But I believe in some of yours.

Erin: Let's say for argument's sake that I did believe in the self-I mean, I do sign
my name to checks, but that's just a formality, a social convention, really, and

I only have a bank account because everyone else does. I mean, why make
your life difficult just for your principles? I have noticed that someone wears
my clothes every day and gets them dirty, which leads me to conclude that
even if I don't have a self I do at least have a body.
I guess the problem I'm having is, if you don't accept the idea of a fixed
self, how do you even begin to think about a liberated self? What would that

be? Every time I start to think about it, all I can come up with is Julia
Kristeva singing "Free to Be You and Me." I can't figure it out.
Marianne: Let's recuperate Kristeva's statement that "on a deeper level, a woman
cannot 'be'; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being.
In 'woman' I see something that cannot be represented, something that is
not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies."
Andrea: I don't understand. I don't know why we're making all of these academic
references. We didn't do that in our CR. Is this what we think our audience

knows? Or is this what we want them to know? Do we really think they need
this background in order to be part of the group?

Martha: I think it's what we think the audience wants us to know. For instance, we

could just tell them: "We know, we know all about it-Kristeva, history-all

of it. Promise."

Marianne: I think it's because we're very, very smart.

Jessica: But consciousness-raising isn't an attempt to fix identification, Erin (if you
will allow me to speak to you in this tone, the tone of one who knows better).
It isn't a "kinky fantasy of wholeness," as you so, er, nicely put it. No. It's
more like this: I come to the group, they are welcoming; I'm crying, they
understand; I tell my story, they listen. Consciousness-raising is about let-

ting go of oppressive identifications. It's about putting the self into a

narrative of transformation. Liberation isn't kinky, Erin. It's textual.

Erin: Thank you.

Jessica: You're welcome.
Erin: I feel much better now.

Martha: Wow. I feel really good too.

Maria,1,:.- Hey! What about a song? This is a little something called "Both Sides
Now." Can I borrow that guitar?
All: "I've looked at love from both sides now
From in and out

And still somehow

It's love's illusion I recall

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128

OCTOBER

I really don't know love at all."

Erin: Marianne next.

Marianne: My experiences with groups of women. Well, I've always run with girl
gangs, and I'm certain that I picked up a strong sense at a very young age
that men were, well, had some kind of...

Erin: Cooties.

Marianne: Instability associated with them. You know, always flying off the handle,
scaring little girls. In high school I had a very strong group of girlfriends. We

all had boyfriends, but they were sort of secondary characters, you know,
awkwardly encountered but handy socially, in a lopey, fun lovin' way. But I
guess underneath I was mystified by them, and actually I resented them
because they seemed to come equipped with regulations and judgments that
I had no relationship to-and I still don't.
Jessica: One wonders how many sophisticated feminist theorizations in support of
separatism derive from what every ten-year-old girl knows: that boys are
gross. This knowledge, usually repressed during the critical adolescent years,
returns to haunt women with a vengeance only much later in life, when they

once again come into violent conflict with the opposite sex. During a
divorce, or faced with the opposition of an all-male tenure committee, or
washing the dirty dishes a man has left in her sink, a woman will suddenly
remember her earlier attitude. Little boys, she remembers, grab and break
things. They eat their own snot. Bigger boys are the same. They look at dirty
magazines. They are quick to smell a fart and eager to discuss it.

Marianne: My protection has always been to have a group of women-strength in

numbers, I suppose, or sharing a sensibility that doesn't allow for that kind
of entry. And now it's interesting living with a man, not having a group of

women as my primary source of protection. He's doing a pretty good

impersonation though, what with his apron, his knitting, his anxiety, his
abdominal cramps, his hysterical pregnancies ...
Anyway, after high school I traveled around for a while, and in college
I hooked up with a new group of women. We started a kind of feminist collective and ... look. Nothing's happening for me. They look bored, and I've
heard all of this before. What kind of performance strategy is this?

Martha:Just go ahead.
Jessica: Do it.
Marianne: Well, what I haven't revealed is that for the first fifteen years of my life, I
was raised entirely by a pack of wolves.
Erin: Really.
All: Wow.

Marianne: Until I was adopted by Gloria Steinem in 1969. Gloria and I became
very tight, good friends, really, until the split around Ms. in 1975. At that

time, I tried to defend her, you know, against the accusations of CIA

involvement, etc. But in the end we drifted away from each other.

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Daughters of the ReVolution 129

Jessica: Listen, I don't want you to get the wrong idea from what I said before. I
mean, I really do like men. I like their... I like their sideburns ... I like the
way they imitate Beavis and Butthead.
Marianne: Well, I guess I like the way they eat so much.
Jessica: Yeah, I like the way they can control everything when they want to.
Marianne: I like the way their butts are so ... tiny.

Jessica: [A la Beavis and Butthead] Heh heh heh heh. But, you know, actually I feel
kind of mad. There's such a lot of pressure on someone who is an advocate
of gender equality or transformation to make a statement like that one, to
disavow anger. Nowadays, in an atmosphere of "backlash," of what you might

also call "feminist chic." It's a nonconfrontational, even nonoppositional

brand of feminism that we're seeing touted in the media.
Erin: Lesbians are pretty! Feminists are funny! They wear little skirts!
Marianne: Me too!

Jessica: [Attempting unsuccessfully to light a bra on fire] Yeah, but so much of that is

about marketing to a demand. What we are seeing is the diffusion of

political questions. And the mass media is fashioning in their place a benign
figure-the yes-woman, a femmy-feminism. They call it a "do-me" feminism.
Really it's about availability. It's a "do-me-and-then-do-her-and-then-her"

feminism.

Erin: You guys, you're never going to believe this, but I met the two men who
single-handedly provoked the second wave of feminism!
Martha: You did? Where?

Erin: At work! At first they just seemed like ordinary middle-aged men, but then I
started to put two and two together.
Marianne: What happened?

Erin: They seemed to feel there was a need for a documentary about feminism
told by and for white men-so they staffed it with four white men between
the ages of 45 and 75, and me. And little by little, I started to realize who
these guys were. I was at a script meeting with the producers and we got to a
line in the script that said, "Well, we've all come a long way since the first
tentative protests of the women's libbers." I said, "Do we have to use the
word 'tentative?"' And my executive producer looks at me, and he says,
"You're too young to remember, but they were tentative. I remember CBS
put out a memo saying that women had to wear skirts. And one day, all the
women changed into pants before lunch and went to the cafeteria. And
right after lunch they changed back into their skirts. They were tentative.
You just don't remember because you're too young.
Andrea: So what did you do?

Erin: I shot him.

Jessica: Did he live?

Erin: Unfortunately, yes.

Marianne: Can I go on with my CR, please? Before I took off with Neil for the

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130

OCTOBER

Apollo 11 landing in '69, I dropped in on the Miss America Pageant in

Atlantic City. Actually, I was the one who helped Peggy Dobbins spray Toni
hair spray all around the auditorium. (Toni was one of the sponsors of the
pageant.) Later we were arrested and charged with "emanating a noxious
odor."

And I'll never forget the time I was Norman Mailer. Town Hall, 1972.
There I was, stuck on stage with Jill Johnston. She brought her girlfriend up
and started making out with her. Tried to pass it off as some kind of political
action. I told her to stop it and act like a lady.

Jessica: Should I go now? [Shuffling papers] Well, I've prepared three versions, and
I'm not sure which one I should read.

Erin: You rewrote yours?

Martha: Why don't you just read the one you think best represents how you feel.

Jessica: Well, I'm not really sure which one that would be. The first one I wrote is
too ... intellectual. I don't really like it. It's full of references. It's written in
French. Another one is written in, well, baby talk. The last one, though, is
very clean, totally error-free.
Martha: Read the first one.
Andrea: Read the last one.
Marianne: Read the last one.

Jessica: Ah. OK. "My mommy was my vewy first girl gwoup."
Oh, sorry. That was the wrong one. OK.
There was a sense in which my mother was my first girl group. We have

been very close. But when I became a feminist, when I took that politics to
heart, I needed her to do it too. She just couldn't. She said, "What do you
want? Do you want me to leave your father?" And with that I felt like I really
started to lose her.

Barnard College. As I found it on campus, feminism and the women

involved in it seemed glamorous. This was during the 1980s, and the intellectual gains of early seventies feminism were in the academy at that time,
being processed through Women's Studies programs. I studied with Ti-Grace
Atkinson, one of the great charismatic feminist leaders of the seventies. Nancy
Miller introduced me to questions of the gender of the text, etc.

Martha: The narrative. Beautiful. What would we do without it? With impressive
focus, Jessica arranges the memories of her life. Rummaging through the
material of her past, she plots a series of developments that, she hopes, will
culminate in transformation, a reinscription of who she is and a catalyst for
some unpredictable change.
Jessica: It was at an anti-rape rally anti-rape rally on Barnard's front lawn that I first bonded with

Marianne. There we were, about twelve women at the most, wearing this red

face paint, you know, to signify blood, I guess, and chanting in unison about
a woman who was gang raped in New London on a pool table. We were these

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Daughters of the ReVolution 131

serious young girls, weaving around with our painted faces; we called it
"keening."
I also started a group called the Feminist Union, which was really a
consciousness-raising group. There was an incredible sense that our private
experience suddenly had, you know, authority. And there were the parties,
the mutual back rubs; there was the kicking the men out, the formation of
the men's feminist union, the intense controversies over race and sex. In

some sense the V-Girls also stem from that period at Barnard. Erin was a
member, and so was Marianne, who became my girlfriend. And there was
Martha, who...

Andrea: But, but! You say all this knowing I wasn't there. You're talking about all
the fun, but you know I wasn't part of it. You think that just because I, you
think I didn't go to an Ivy League school, a Seven Sisters, you think that just
because I ... You all get together when I'm not around! You say things I don't
understand. You have a secret! You go on trips.
Jessica: No, no, that's not true, Andrea.

Erin: There are no secret trips.

Andrea: Sorry, just a little outburst.

Jessica: The Feminist Union ended in chaos. I think we were repeating the
upheavals of the second wave of feminism without really being conscious of it.

It was considered unfair that I was the leader by some, well, by Jane, yes, by
that girl Jane. I brought it to the group for a vote: Do you want me? I asked. I

was crying. I said, "Either we move now to a more consensus-oriented process

or retain the democratic hierarchical model."

Erin: [Raises hand] I want to be a leader. I want to wield influence, redirect strategy,
fulfill fantasy. I want to be effective, competent, persuasive, seductive. I want

to voice what is best and most hopeful and feel an entire room assent. My
personality would be my politics: witty, empathetic, stirring. I would have a
stringent critique. I would win every argument. I would never feel frustrated
or eclipsed.
Many women's groups disbanded around the frustrations of women who

thought the movement promised the chance to become leaders but who
found themselves unable to seize the opportunity. Women tried to circumvent
the emergence of leaders, usually unsuccessfully. Dissatisfactions boiled over
about who spoke, when, how much, and for whom, especially when the media

was involved.

I remember sitting in WAC meetings wanting desperately to speak but

knowing that I couldn't, that my words would fail me. And I felt envious of

all the women who could. I would compare myself to them-things like,
"Well, she's a good speaker, but she doesn't get this part of the issue." Since I
never felt I could speak for myself, I was always in the frustrating position of

wanting another woman to be my proxy, the idealized version of me. So

instead of providing a space for empowerment, the group became the space

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where I interrogated my deficiencies. Why can't I speak in front of a group of

people? What am I afraid of?

Martha: Thank you, Erin, that's very good. I particularly like what you had to say
about your insecurity. But I would add to what you've said that, in terms of
this group, I'm the leader. I'm the spokeswoman, and I have the last word.
While this wasn't determined by vote, I think it's emerged as quite obvious.
The consensus in this case has been, well, intuited; we've all felt it's been

appropriate, that it-how shall I say it-works best. Which is not to say that
the rest of you can't participate freely when I open the floor to discussion.
Jessica? Do you want to continue?
Andrea: [Reading from Robert's Rules of Order] "Paragraph 34. Debate. When a
motion is made and seconded, it shall be stated by the chairman before
being debated. When a member is about to speak in debate he shall rise and
respectfully address himself to 'Mr. Chairman.' ('Mr. President' is used when
that is the designated title of the presiding officer. 'Mr. Moderator' is more
common in religious meetings.)"
Um ... [flipping desperately through book] Mr. Chairman ... [raises hand] I

object.
Martha: Andrea, you can't object. No motion has been put forward.
Andrea: Well, I motion to disband.

Marianne: I object to considering the motion.

Martha: Will the assembly consider the question?
All others: Nay!

Martha: Objection carried.

Jessica: So after Barnard, my relationship to feminism and groups of women
changed. It was all about the excitement of going out to the bars. Martha
and I were ... buddies. We had this special thing together, cruising. Martha
was totallyjoyous and cute. And we would have all these astonishingly serious
conversations while we were dancing. She would tell me, "OK, now you have
to go up to someone in the crowd and ask them to dance." She would set me
the task.

Martha: The task-the task tonight is to eye someone, to pick her out of the
crowd, run your eyes down her neck, and then, by apologizing for nothing
and seizing upon every impression of sexual demand you've collected from
your littlest childhood through all your thirty-odd years, to go after her, grab
her wrist till it hurts, and take her home.

When I go to the women's bars, it's like that, demanding and fierce ...
and entirely luxurious. It's like walking into some vibrant, high-pitched
movie without for even a beat interrupting the flow of the dialogue. And not
only that, but it's the right movie, precisely the one I'm supposed to be mak-

ing-obeying-the one about sociobiological need, aggression and

domination, nightlife, seduction, and the incredible desirability of girls. It's

just the story they assigned you, only you can't be sure how you'll perform.

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Daughters of the ReVolution 133

And it's private, it's ours, queers only. Just us dykes are allowed in this
selective, edgy, dangerous world that's perfectly sealed. I walk into these
steamy, seedy rooms that no one else would go to, and I look at these girls
filling up the dark, and the fun they're having is rare and uncontestableand completely earned. I can pick a shy one, all furtive, doing her boyness
like it was a thing she'd just stolen, snuck in here ingeniously and at her
peril. Or I could get a dark one, older, who teases me all night in just that
way that anybody else would call ungiving and mean. It's not. She doesn't say
a thing, and she doesn't crack a smile at me; she stares me down, and the
cruel expression on her face is completely intoxicating because I know that
what it means is: It's bad, get ready.

Jessica: I remember once when Martha went around and asked every single
woman in the bar whether she had read Jane Bowles's novel Two Serious

Ladies. I mean, I think we had this fantasy-remember that?-I think we

had this fantasy...

Martha: That we were in this feminist heaven.

Erin: What bar was that, Jessica?

Jessica: Girlbar.
Martha: The Duchess.

Jessica: Girlbar.

Martha: The Cubbyhole.

Jessica: No, it was Girlbar, Martha.
Marianne: You really went around to every woman?
Martha: I don't remember that.

Erin: And what kind of answers did you get?

Martha: I don't have any recollection.

Jessica: I do. They said no.
Martha: They said no?
Jessica: Everybody said no.
Marianne: Right, and that's like a great lesson.
Jessica: Right. It's horrible.
Marianne: But the illusion of it.

Jessica: The illusion is great.

Andrea: I've read Two Serious Ladies.

Martha: I should hope so.

Andrea: OK, I'll admit it. I'm afraid of groups. First there's the problem of envy.

According to Freud, "group feeling" among children is only a reactionformation to envy. Identification only occurs as a result of the fear of being
left out entirely and getting nothing at all. The golden rule is that everyone
must have the same and be the same. Identification demands equivalence.
Out of this rule a group culture emerges in which individual qualities, attributes, differences are reduced to quantities of capital that circulate in the
market the group becomes.

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Martha: Each V-Girl should possess:

Four pairs of shoes
Thirteen pairs of underwear
Pants not pleated or ribbed, tight-fitting, very loose, or
somewhat tailored

A comprehensive collection of books covering not only key

areas of contemporary art theory and philosophy but also
including an eclectic selection of rare volumes usually
covering some camp aspect of popular culture or weird
how-to's

Two black bags

Six tones of lipstick

Magazine subscriptions
Electronic equipment
Cable TV

And knowledge--knowledge of current films, films of the

forties, film noir, and commercial action films

Knowledge of politics, American and European, the history

of war, key figures of the House and Senate, and all members of the Cabinet
A sense of humor

Experiences traveling
And memory, recollections of childhood, the invasion of
Grenada, the details, the complexities, the failures and
illusions of the things you've thought before.

Andrea: In every group I experience a fundamentally fascist horde. Groups,

writes Freud, have a "passion for authority," a "thirst for obedience."
Groups wish to be governed, if not by a leader embodying a group ideal,
then by a set of ideal attributes embodied in a group culture. Submission
to the group ideal is the essential condition for membership, and, having
submitted, every member becomes its soldier, missionary, or police.
Diverging from the group ideal can only be a failure or a threat, and usually
results in expulsion.
The violence of every individual's narcissism is multiplied in groups
by their number. Groups are xenophobic. Groups are intolerant ...
Marianne: But I still believe in Jane Bowles's work! When I read it, I'm seduced by
her sexual, quirky, feminine voice. I want to live there!

Jessica: The fantasy was that 'Jane Bowles" could name what the words "feminist"
or even "lesbian" or "woman" had not been able to: a communality between
us. We thought we could live in an outrageous world, one in which the ladies
are drunk and their desire excessive. We wanted Morocco to reflect back to

us our own strangeness.

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Daughters of the ReVolution 135

But this fantasy of a group life was also exactly that shift to aesthetics
that marked the ascendancy of cultural feminism in the mid-seventies. In
some sense we actually believed that dancing like that and looking at other
women was equivalent to the political work we'd been doing before with the
Feminist Union.

Martha:Jess, have you finished with your CR?

Jessica: No, I'm filibustering tonight ... But as for the future of our politics, the
hope is that consciousness-raising could lead us back to a more meaningful
feminist politics. So let's, you know, rap. Let's make the world a safer place
for, well ... for me, I guess. Girls, could we all hold hands for a minute?

All: Group hug!

Martha: If just one person leaves this room this evening with a greater understanding of herself, this performance will have been worthwhile.

Erin: That's beautiful, Martha. I hope that this performance will bring people
together in one big powerful movement because together we can change the
world. And I hope you all feel that. I'm feeling a lot of love up here, and I'd
like to find a way to give it back. I just hope that every woman in this room
will look inside herself and realize she's a groovy person. I hope every man

will look inside himself and realize that at least he knows some groovy
women. Through our performance, I hope we become better listeners, and
that we've learned something about sharing. That we do have selves and that
they can be liberated like beautiful banners unfurling in the wind. That
being in a group is tough because you can get hurt, and some people speak
more than they should and have opinions that they pointlessly reiterate,
again and again, but it's worth it in the end because together we know more
than we do apart. Sisterhood is Powerful!
Andrea: Right on!

Marianne: Lucy Lippard said in a conversation with Suzanne Lacy in Heresies:

"The personal is political" and "the political is personal" was

one great insight of the feminist movement. I think for a lot

of people it stopped at a certain point, maybe in the midseventies, when they said, "Now everything that I do is politi-

cal, so all my art will automatically be political, so I never

have to do anything politically."

Erin: Speaking of politics, many of you may be wondering if we have any. It's
complicated. I've marched. I was arrested once; I've done clinic escorts. And
I've gone to a lot of meetings. I believe in political activism. So there is something problematic to me about our reaching back into feminist history and
only recuperating the part about subjectivity, where we just change ourselves

and defer social inequity to some other agenda. Some people, who've
accused the women's movement of being white and middle class, would

think this fitting. Why didn't we just organize? There are material conditions

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OCTOBER

out there or, for that matter, in here. For example, women are nine times
more likely than men to quit jobs because of sexual harassment and three
times more likely to lose theirjobs. In the United States, it's estimated that a
woman is raped every 1.3 minutes. Do you think this performance is some
kind of substitute? We don't. OK? We don't.

Andrea: This is from the Redstockings manifesto; I think it was '69:

We identify with all women. We define our best interest as

that of the poorest, most brutally exploited woman.

We repudiate all economic, racial, educational, or status

privileges that divide us from other women. We are determined to recognize and eliminate any prejudices we may
hold against other women.
We are committed to achieving internal democracy.

This, for me, is the greatest promise of the women's movement. It's the

promise of unconditional acceptance. It's the dream of a collectivity

beyond the markets in social, educational, and cultural-as well as economic-capital in which bodies and labor and lives are valued and
devalued. It calls on us to divest ourselves of the legitimacy these markets
offer, not as a gesture of charity, but to refuse to provide for the structures
from which we suffer, to refuse to reproduce them.

Internal democracy is the condition of external democracy. How can we

expect to transform society if we can't transform our own collective relations?

Jessica: But we have not yet answered the question, are we really oppressed? As
women? I, for one, have always found it kind of flattering when guys on the
street make that slurping noise, that slow slurp, when they say "hot tits," or
grab their crotch, or mine, or follow me down the street, or complain when I

don't respond, or stand in my way, or ask me "Baby, don't you like men?" I
mean, so what?

Martha: I also wanted to mention something I've noticed during my heterosexual

activity--hey, who wrote this? This is not my line.

Erin: I'll take it! I also wanted to mention something I've noticed during my heterosexual activity: what I've encountered with every man I've dated is that
they're looking for an ideal.
Marianne: Yeah, and so they compare you to other women.
Andrea: I mean, I compare men to other men. I mean, I would compare Don, well,
let's call him "John" to protect his anonymity. I compared Jim, OK, OK, I
mean ... Jack, to other men. And even Charles, alias Charlie, alias Chuck,
alias Chuckie. But I would never articulate it as a demand. I would never say
that, I mean, not in public.
Jessica: And who doesn't compare men? Which one of us doesn't? I want the best
man. I make choices. For example, I don't want a "sensitive man," some guy

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Daughters of the ReVolution 137

with big weepy eyes. I don't want an ecoterrorist, or a hippie-well maybe a

technohippie-I don't want a thirty-something, a theorist. Well maybe a
theorist. But not a Deleuzian, one of those guys who just wants a different
girl on every Plateau.
Erin: This is from Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto:

SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: "I am a
turd, a lowly, abject turd," then proceed to list all the ways in

which he is. His reward for so doing will be the opportunity

to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with

the SCUM who will be present.

All: [Except Martha] "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect
of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded,
responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male
sex.

Martha: Look, I'm finding this a little insulting, actually. I can't quite believe you
are all chanting like this without any regard to how I might feel about it, as if

I would feel attacked or ganged up on or left out. I'm a man, and I don't
think I fall so simply into this "them" category. Just because I have a penis,

even two or three penises, depending on how you define them, just

shouldn't automatically reduce me to a nonparticipant in this discussion.

Jessica: You are a turd, Martha, a lowly, abject turd ... or turds. In a survey of girls
between the ages of three and twelve, several refused all labels, including the
label "feminist" and even "female," preferring instead to refer to themselves
as "little men," after Freud, or "that person." The remaining girls preferred

various labels: feminists (19 percent), "riot girls" (12 percent), "The
Unrepresentable" (68 percent), and V-Girls (88 percent).

Marianne: In a survey, 78 out of 100 women described themselves as extremely inse-

cure when having to speak in public, somewhat insecure when speaking in

private, and homicidal when cornered at a party by a man who won't shut up.

Jessica: In a survey, four out of five women who were asked to choose between
being (a) a brilliant woman who will always think she is stupid and (b) a stupid
man whom everyone thinks is brilliant, preferred death.
Marianne: I went to visit some friends of mine who have a five-year-old daughter,

Isabella. They have been determined to raise her outside of the typical
boundaries of girlhood. You know, no television, providing her with nongendered toys, no dolls, no "Suzy Q" ovens. I walked by her room one day and
saw her playing with a toolbox. She had a screwdriver in one hand and a
hammer in the other, and she made the screwdriver say, "Do you want to go
out to dinner tonight? And the hammer answered, "No, not tonight, I'm
busy."

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OCTOBER

Andrea: Is it Martha's turn now?

Jessica: Uh, would this be an OK time for me to say about how I ordered a push-up
bra recently from Victoria's Secret?
Andrea: I think it's Martha's turn.

Jessica: I never thought before, you know, that I wanted to be, you know, "pushed
up.

Andrea:Jessica! It's Martha's turn.

Jessica: But I just wanted to say something about the catalogue. I mean, there I was,

looking kind of furtively at one of those incredible models, Victoria it must

have been. But something was unclear. Did I want to buy her? Be her? Do
her? I felt such doubt. Did I really want? Or did I, wanting, only want what
others wanted me to want? Once again, gender threw a wrench into my
subjectivity... Sorry, Martha. "Sister."

Martha: OK, so should I talk about my experiences with groups of women? I'm
very resistant to this topic, I have to say. I don't want to talk about it. But...
Marianne: Why not?
Martha: Well, I was thinking about my family, definitely in my family, the women's
space was really privileged. My mother, it was always-to me it was always the

best thing, to be with my mother, and her sister, or my mother and my

grandmother and her sister or, you know, any of these, or my mother and
her friends or my mother and the woman who ran the drugstore, or just the

woman who ran the drugstore, or the teenage girl from Haiti who came to
live with us, or the woman from the drugstore and the teenage girl from
Haiti or, eventually, any woman in any drugstore. I was conscious, I think,
really young, that there was some cachet, there was some special status
attached to being with just women. Well, if you look at my father-if you
knew my father. The opposition was established right away. You know the old

binaries: male/female, bad/good.

All: Oh.

Martha: I don't know what else to say about it. I'm just very resistant to this topic. I
basically don't want to address this question. Is that a breach of V-Girl trust?
Andrea: It would be if this were a real consciousness-raising group.
Marianne: Right. We would beat it out of you.

Jessica: I don't think you have to talk about things that you don't want to talk
about.

Marianne: But, Martha, if there's really this thing that you don't want to share ...
Erin: Maybe we could just narrow it down a little.
Jessica: Is it something from your past or something current?
Andrea: Is it about us? I mean, if it's about us, I think you should really try to talk
about it.

Marianne: No, it's probably about her family. Isn't it about your family?

Jessica: You had such a sad childhood.

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Daughters of the ReVolution 139

Andrea: Why don't you just talk a little about why you don't want to talk about it,
and then maybe that'll loosen you up.
Erin: I know, Martha, it's all those people out there, isn't it? It's all those people
out there, listening?

Martha: Them? Oh no, I don't feel as if they're just listening. They're participating. They're going through all this with us, you know.

Marianne: Wait! All of a sudden I am ready to say something personal! I feel it; I
can do it! I am not afraid! A real turning point in my feminist education was
the "Take Back the Night" march in 1986. I really felt that I was taking part
in a historic process, a brave moment, as we marched down Forty-second
Street past the curious crowds lined up on the sidewalks. But then at the
rally behind the Forty-second Street library, the head of Women Against
Pornography began her speech by admonishing us to remember that "all
men are rapists; all men are the enemy; and if you're not with us, you're

against us." I headed toward the microphone, determined to object.

Unfortunately, one of her female bodyguards dragged me off to the side and
started to pummel me. The woman finished her speech, and I ended up with
a bloody nose.
Erin: Andrea? It's your turn.

Andrea: OK. Well, I started out by saying that I haven't had experiences with
groups of women other than the V-Girls. Why did I say that? I'll think.

Martha: Andrea is thoughtful. She can feel the interest and support of the
group. The group remains silent, in the hope that Andrea's unconscious
experiences of her feminine past will surface.
Andrea: I didn't think my family counted because -why?-because gender wasn't
constituted in my family in a very clear way. I tell people, "Well, I grew up in

a lesbian feminist household." That's true. That's something that I say; that's
a way I represent my childhood, but then at the same time I can say, "But
that didn't constitute a group of women." It's a very odd thing.

Martha: The issues are coming into focus. The group is really behind her.
Andrea: When Ellen came into my life as my mother's lover, she was taking my
father's place. She was going to be the good father. So I guess it was a matter
of position more than gender...
Martha: Yes. Ellen's gender was not merely biological. It was positional.
Andrea: She was going to be the good father. And there were some ways in which
she was different from my mother that perhaps ... I don't know if you can say

really coincide with gender differences, but she was a more public person;
she was less private; she was less domestic. She was not a mother. So I don't
know... That hasn't gotten me very far, has it? I've been speaking for a long
time, but it hasn't gotten me anywhere.

Martha: An unnecessary retraction. It's a hard road to self-understanding. Can she

overcome the anxiety?
Andrea: My mother'and her lover were feminists; they were very open about their

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OCTOBER

sexuality, and all of their friends were lesbians, but it wasn't a problem. And

there were no ... it wasn't about secondary characteristics, about how you
dress or how you talk. It never seemed to be in opposition to anything. It

wasn't about identification.

Martha: But she's reaching. She's building to something critical-the Woman

category is contingent upon oppositions.
Andrea: I mean I had my stepmother. My stepmother was very feminine. For me
she wasn't a model, but I would go and look through her fashion magazines
and think, "Oh, this is how it's done-how does one do this?" You know, I

was twenty-two or twenty-three before I even bought a bra.

Martha: That's so intimate. That's so revealing.

Andrea: I couldn't do it, you know. And for a long time I went back and forth ...
Should I wear makeup? Should I shave?
Martha: Those are such insidious questions.
Andrea: And why? The motive for me was less being attractive to men than being
able to see myself as acceptable within a community of women.
Martha: I wanted that too.

Andrea: And I was sort of thinking, how do I manage to identify with those things?

Martha: How did we all? We had to identify, in order to be. There we all were, a
million young girls, falling into formation.

Andrea: It was odd how that could happen so late and in such a self-conscious
way. And even with this group, too-if you think of a group as a space of
identification or of where an identity as a woman is constituted. I looked at
all of you and tried to figure out how it's done, how these things are done.
Martha: And how is it? How is it done?

Andrea: You know, figuring out how to be a woman.

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