Woman; 435; A Conversation with Robin Morgan

Why one day. Good evening. Tonight I'll be talking with Robin warden Robin

compiled an edited sisterhood is powerful. The first anthology of writings from the feminist movement. Robin is also the author of two well-known books of poetry monster and most recently lady of the bee. Her most recent book is going too far a personal chronicle of a feminist. Robin welcome to woman. I'm delighted to be here. Is sisterhood still powerful. Yes I think it is. I think it's more complicated now. Ah perhaps it always was but we couldn't afford. In the early days to pay that much attention to the complexities because the initial grappling with the enormity of the problem was so pressing. But I think I think that sisterhood if anything is deeper trickier. And more costly but also more global in a way. How more costly. Well I

think it's less dramatic. I think if. It means a long haul or is beginning to I think that we're we're growing up a lot of us as as individual women and as a movement. And what that means is a realisation that it's not going to happen overnight which our rhetoric may have you know recognized earlier on but I think at least in my gut I never recognized the rhetoric early on mine have been a little misleading too. I think so. I think we may have implied that it was going to happen a lot faster. Well I think we also believe that and I think it was a it was a passionately well-meant error. If if there is such a thing in that the crushing intensity of those first realisations and the the seeming vacuum to which those cries were being addressed when the patriarchy at large was still sort of going around saying What is it you people

want or just finding the whole issue you know whole areas and the competition with which. Women found ourselves in with other oppressed peoples as if there were only one crime and it had to be divided up. I mean it attacks from every conceivable front with almost no one taking us seriously meant that that that the pain was so intolerable if one couldn't envisage a feminist revolution within 24 hours. You didn't you didn't see how you could survive the 25th hour. And I think what we're beginning to realize is that not only have we survived it but there's going to be a long time before that kind. Profound changes that feminism implies we'll begin to really happen which is not to say that we haven't covered a lot of ground already I think that the things have improved It's just that if we settle for that in another hundred years there will have to be a whole bunch of women starting afresh on

earthing their herstory which would by that time will be us and we pass a flaming match stick on you know then talk to other feminists before we get too heavily into the current situation. And the book which is wonderful and open and honest and I really enjoyed it a lot. I think most people know you from sisterhood is powerful which was really a very beginning book in lots and lots of ways. And I'm curious to know what raised your consciousness. Why did sisterhood is powerful happen. What made it happen. Well I I was a. Young housewife writer in the late 50s and early 60s I married in the early 60s but I was a writer already in the late 50s and I then became involved in in the lift. So I was within a fairly short period of time given the intensity of the 60s radicalized and a militant leftist through the civil rights movement the

anti-war movement etc. and when feminism first came into my life I I had defenses a mile high. I was an exceptional woman I was a revolutionary I was a writer I was this or that. And yet it it struck me like the great flood in my solar plexus from which I never quite recovered. And I think that the 60s were largely a period of beginning to recognize the depth and the the earth shaking potentialities of them and just in my own life never even mind the world. And I think the putting together of that and thought you was one of the things that pushed me over the brink from being a women's liberationist that is from seeing women's oppression as one part of the male left a valid part but in this play into becoming a feminist and seeing everything in some way as stemming from the primary contradiction as it were the subjugation of women more than

half the species. And so what began as an attempt to relate oppression of other peoples to myself and see how I was oppressed and how that might make me a better fighter in the revolution of the 60s became something that was suddenly very concrete very personal very real it was in the bedroom it was in the struggle with my husband it was in the way in which I gave birth to my child it was in the way dishes got washed and floors got scrubbed and the words got used and poems became transformed and it was multifarious and multiform and staggering. We would just say the personal became political I would say that Sandra. Yes indeed. At at not just one level but every every level that I could have possibly conceived and a million others

I never could have foreseen. And. And I'm not recovered I mean I don't think there ever comes a point at which one. Has achieved some mythical level of high consciousness because no matter how how angry you think you become something always happens to. Pull the carpet out from under you and and the rhetoric disappears the the jargon is meaningless the words which have come to be important for for if for no other reason than than verbal shorthand way words like sexism like male supremacy begin to even fade away into some kind of meaningless and meaninglessness and what one is left with is still the reality of pain and of unfair this is unfair. We are people we live. We bleed we breathe. This is not necessary that that whole experience of coming from the left is so foreign I think to most women who

consider themselves part of the women's movement. It's such a special experience to have had in a sense and I wonder if there's a way to convey that experience to describe it or to at least describe the transition. Well mostly I think when I think of my years in the left and the transition particularly when I think of it in terms of a comparison with women who came to feminism from other areas the kitchen the suburban ghetto. Whatever other areas mostly I I tend to be ashamed. Not because of the idealism that sent me and a great many other women of my immediate generation into the left but because of the enormous arrogance that we carried along with that vision.

Would you say intolerance. I would say intolerance. It's funny it's a it's a very basic contradiction because the original vision was quite beautiful. I mean it it for me is summed up in the early civil rights days. When at one point I think it was in Mississippi. One of the worst of the southern sheriffs was in the hospital with some kind of stomach trouble Kalina So something and a group of little black children all around ages 4 and 5 and 6 went spontaneously and stood in the rain outside his hospital and sang and prayed for him to get better. And it wasn't just a tactic. I think of moments like that when I think of the best of the left. He got better of course and came after them with fire hoses. But there was a spirit of idealism and real vision that I affirm and always will affirm that it degenerated into largely. Certainly in the

the new left the white male dominated left. Rhetoric and one upmanship and gratuitous John Wayne shootout at the OK Corral violence it was a great tragedy perhaps a uniquely American tragedy I don't know but I certainly do know that those were male defined tactics and that what happened is that at some point not coincidental with the flowering of feminist consciousness a whole lot of us from the left finally got it through our heads that this was not our style of making change and we should stop apologizing for the fact that we were women. What was this and began to talk to each other as women. And in fact began to learn a lot of things about ourselves as women that housewives and women in other areas of the women's movement that we had previously sneered at civil rights feminists and reformed feminist that those women had been doing for a long time so that there was a for me at least

a process. Salutary humbling. When I'm enormously right think one of the things that I liked about the book was the fact that you you were very upfront about that you're very upfront about some of the mistakes that you made and some of the mistakes that you think that the movement made early on. And talk a little bit about the book because probably by the time the show is on the air the book will be just coming out and very few people will have read it. Well the book and the book excites me and and scares me tremendously because I have been vulnerable in going too far the way I have been nowhere else at least not in prose in my poems there's always a seventh veil that is. Ripped away. But poetry is his own. I guess for a lot of people mistake I don't think it should be and I think the Renascence in feminist poetry is helping.

In fact a lot of people to relate to poetry in a very real and accessible way and I think that's all to the good. This still is something about prose that people feel less afraid to grapple with and I'm being. I'm ripping apart that veil in prose in this book the way I've never done before so that there are there are sections for example B.C. before consciousness that include a series of letters that I wrote to my husband who is a poet Kenneth Pitchford. And this was before feminism or any tools had made themselves available for struggle with the man one loves. They were not letters written from a distance they were letters in fact written within the same apartment except I couldn't say these things aloud. And I think that despite all my faults of being an exception at the time as a writer and revolutionary they are they are the classic housewife complaints.

There are diary entries and journal in Heaven intended him to see the letters which I think I had dreamed that at some point I would be able to show them to him. But that said I have to not think of publishing you know. Oh no and I didn't I mean I didn't even show them to him for about what do they do that well in one of those letters. I think they're mainly a cry for common language because there was even at that time no question but what I had I loved him and in fact that I knew he loved me. We're still together in fact 15 years later. But at that point there was no way in which the different languages that we as a woman and the men were speaking about sexuality about housework or about the ways in which we related to our writing and each other's writing. There was no way really which of those two languages could be translated and the translator came about in the if one is to personify it with feminist politics.

It gave a tool for saying this is not just my whim my craziness my idiosyncrasy in fact this is not just me this is political this is I am not alone. And to this day. When for example I get nervous and embarrassed about thinking about the private things that that are put forth in that book not only in the letters but you know the journal entries diary entries things about my son Blake the I the all I think or I'm going to really be very vulnerable and I what I must remind myself of is that every time I've I've taken a step that I have felt others might think was going too far as if one never could. There has always been the feminist miracle which is that somehow somewhere there have been women who have who have said Hugh to isn't that funny. I thought that that and and the connections have been made again and one discovers a new. And then one is not alone and if someone says it aloud. There are there's a

chorus and that that's your intention for this book. Yes that is my intention. To to hear. I hope from from those other mothers and wives and women who have loved beauty and art and maybe been afraid to say so in a political context. And women who have wanted to love whomever a woman a man a child themselves and been through this you know this is not a new tolerance the new tolerant Robin Morgan right. Well it's always been there it's just been in the closet. I think it. Was sad. I have always felt I think I was drawn to feminism because I I think it has always been a politics profoundly about love. Well one of the things though about the movement that is is often been voiced as a criticism and I think in part valid is that ard a def our definitions of what's permissible are very narrow. And you're now you have now written a book and

you're speaking to mothers in wives. And it seems to me that this is not been a pervasive voice in the movement. No it hasn't I mean I have been I've been in the movement and I've been active and I have have sort of tried to not hide these things away because I mean when you're nursing a child it's very hard to say well this is just a bundle I happen to have attached to my breasts. But but I have downplayed those things and. I so I am coming out as it is not just trying to reach of those women out there I mean as I'm one of them. And I think we've all been afraid of being incorrect. That's that's a kind of left over from male politics as if there were one route to the kind of that asked complex and profound changes we're really talking about. Do you do you think to sort of get away from that for a minute. Do you think the women's movement has a radical voices at this point that is as strong and as healthy as it was at one point. I think so. But I think it's where perhaps one would least

expect it. We don't I don't know that it's important to even name it as a radical voice. If one goes back to the definition and I'm logically a radical it's a that is something that goes to the root of radish. The really the core meaning the essence then it leaves behind all sorts of jargon of of radical running off at the mouth and you begin to think OK well then the root the heart of women's oppression. It does boil down very much to something that has occurred between the sexes. That means that. There is a cut nexus between women and men. And with all respect for and support lesbian feminism. Separatist feminism etc that still means that the problem is going to be engaged struggled over and perhaps solved or not on the basis of that nexus. And that also involves love. Because we do give birth

some of the time to male children. And let's talk about that. Let's do that. Talk about the fact that you have a son and what problems that used to pose for you. Well I think the most painful problems that it posed were from other feminists. Blake is a very nice person and somebody that I will always want to know. And it was hard enough imagining the difficulty that he would be getting from the outside world the patriarchy saying oh you're a little boy come along and get the privileges we can give you for putting down little girls for putting down women for. Becoming a massage honest as his own little peers were already becoming but that somehow we could fight all of this kind of Blakeney together. I think what what is soul destroying is when one finds that one sister is for the most justifiable reasons. I feel that

a child is already hopeless because he was born male that seems somehow self-defeating unless one solution is anger side. And all the Lord said are a wonderful thing. At one point about having a male child about a number of other things in which she found she was told she was in correct but particular about having a male child she said yes I have a male child and it keeps me honest and I think it's a word to live by. I could have perhaps fallen. I fell into an upper rhetoric as it was and still have to watch myself. But I think I could have perhaps fallen into that set of rhetoric too about male children being the enemy. If if if I didn't know how to play. And and the reality of that that flesh and and that voice and that love and that struggle and those tears. When you come home from the playground and. You are called a sissy and you are trying to really believe that

sissy is an honorable word and you want to fight the bad man and you want to help women and you like the stories about Emily Pankhurst and you want to support them but it hurts when your best friend says I can't know you anymore because you sit at the girl stand. See now he's seven and a half now. And I know your sons are older does it get worst if you can have it gets better it gets better. Thank you Senator. So good to see her. Robin what do you see as your role now in the women's movement. I don't honestly know. There you are. I took it with that's that's a new step taken for the. OK I'm going to show that I don't know I haven't a clue I know I want to write poems. I'll do that till I die. And I wonder are you less activist than you used to be. Well it depends on how you define activist I mean you're having me down the streets lately have you. No I haven't been out in the streets in the way I used to be on the streets. I've been at my typewriter a

lot which for me I think maybe it's certainly the most deeply threatening activism because it's the most vulnerable if I'm going to really do it well and I found it reaches more women than a thousand leaflets on my street corner well maybe that's that's where it will be that's that's where I I feel the pinch most and where I can be most honest so I hope I can be of some use to other women there. But one of the things the women's movement has also taught me is that I have rights too. As an artist as that mother as a wife as an individual you mean you don't have to write things and not sign your name. That's part of it. That's right. I cannot believe. But with there it is I mean we did it it's it's talked about in the book that there was a period when after women having been anonymous for thousands of years having written you know men's works and never been having had our name signed to it that one of the first things that happen when we get politicized at least in the left was that you immediately had to drop your name off things because it was elitist to sign it. I think

there's a real moral cowardice involved there too. And I want to talk about the state of the movement at the moment but before that. I want to talk about something that really bothers me a lot and that is that women who came out of the left being terribly intolerant of women who didn't and you know laying the most incredible kind of guilt trips. And I just think that you know it has to stop. I think it's true I'd credentials are fine but oh I do thank you. If we take in the Middle East really too far we on credentials I'd I don't know what they mean anyway. I really don't. One could say that that I mean who knows more about being anyone that I don't know what it is like to be you or vice versa and we can only that ultimately go on trust and what was magical about the early consciousness raising groups was that we looked for the similarities. We knew there were differences we were emphasizing the differences. We were looking for the shared things and the glue and we were not interested in putting each other

down for the differences and at some point I certainly as much as anyone else began to get off on the differences. Maybe the pervasiveness of patriarchy ranking I don't know but I think that women who still do and I do it is I do think and I think it's absurd I think it should stop now. What it's got to stop. It's self-indulgent and it is a form of tyranny. You know it's just sex and we don't have a lot more time. Are things as bad as some people say they are with the women's movement at the moment. I mean is it going to survive those those kinds of questions. I think it's going to survive I think that the most exciting thing at least to me that has happened recently I guess you could say is twofold. One is that domestically the women's movement is less narrow in definition things like the housewives boycott the meat boycott a few years ago to me is a feminist organic action because women are doing it and it's over women's rights in some way.

It's connected. And the other thing is is it is becoming global. And that will change all our consciousnesses and all our issues and all our embassies. And I don't just mean in a formal way like International Women's Year I mean that I'm regularly now inorganically in contact with women in Thailand in New Zealand and we send books in articles and clippings back and forth. And there really begins to be something like a women's world community in the potential of that. I don't know the brain boggles that but you do agree that we have to work at it. That it's not. Oh no just the God that is not going to drop it from heaven if we run around and make a little ridge is not going to sustain itself because it's in our hearts and minds. You know it's there's a there's a quote from Chapman that Kenneth and I loved for a long time it says and where love's form is love is love is form. And so if we want it to happen the will has to be transformed into matter. I think we are uniquely capable of doing that. But then we've got to do it.

Robin would you read one of your poems. I'm not sure exactly how much time we have left but I think we have time enough. Wow. This is why don't you. We have one minute. Think we can get it and it's called the beggar woman fact scums a mirage upon my retina an after image a negative apparition. Some nights I sit cross-legged in the driveway burnoose wrapped a live pyramid as if this Ice Cube's transporation behind glass were real. As if that beetle could be hesitating on the wall. Some nights the driver runs me over or worse leaves gravel in the cup instead of coins as if I could still choose dawn after city dawn I tense horizontal as spend terrain some nights the child waits with me ribs stretching its lurid hollow skin a silent drum on my lap as if this hunger could be fed

as if your love could fill me. Some nights the Angel of Death rides by ignoring us reading the book of life inside his limousines Black Temple as if my own hand were not fused to the hilt of this dagger as if the blade were not separated by my will. Some nights I think they leave circle and return only to be sure I think they do. As if I could still hesitate as if that ice of me could melt to rain. Some night the wheels will slow the door will open if they can be convinced that I am harmless. As if I could not steal my life inward toward the act the way a stone poised before the avalanche. On one hand.

Robin thank you for being here. We're out of time. Thank you for watching and good night. This program was produced by W. which is solely responsible for its content. Make your funding was provided by public television station additional support provided by unrestricted general program grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation.