... Because he was black and I was white: six young women discuss their various experiences in the civil-rights movement (1967).

Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland

It is no news by now that an era of the '60s has drawn to a close--that period which saw a small but significant number of young white men and women work alongside black Americans in their struggle for freedom. Many liberal whites see this passing as a sad thing, and regret the replacement of "black and white together, we shall overcome" by calls for blacks to organize in the Negro community, whites in the white community. Many are just plain frightened when they begin to see, often for the first time, the depth of Negro resentment and hostility; when they find their "good intentions" questioned and a stern finger pointed at their collective guilt.

But this new period might also prove to be the beginning of personal honesty in race relations. It is a time of self-confrontation and profound questioning among both black and white. White America is grappling with the destructive effects of racism upon its own psyche; so is black America, in a different way. Many young women involved in The Movement have experienced that kind of self-confrontation. Moreover, their observations go far beyond the subject of race or the experience of being a woman in The Movement. As one of them said, "You can't talk about race without talking about sex. You can't talk about the position of women without talking about men. And you can't talk about any of these things without looking at the whole society."

This feeling was almost universal among a number of young women who were asked to discuss their experiences in The Movement in a series of small get-togethers--all white, all black, black and white, and some individual interviews. Most of them had worked for two years or more in either the North or South. Some had been volunteers in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. All except two are in their early or mid-20s. Mostly of middle-class backgrounds, from both North and South, they have all attended or graduated from college. Terry, Sheila, and Kathleen are whites; Cora, Linda, and Helen are Negroes. Here, in a composite of various dialogues, is what they had to say:

Terry: I'd much rather talk about fashion. Aren't clothes great?

Kathleen: Alter all that time grubbing along in one denim dress and one pair of sandals--wow, yes. You start thinking of yourself again, you know ... doing good for yourself. You've just got to do this after a while.

Terry: A lot of people felt really paranoid after a year or two in the South-they left convinced that all blacks hated them.

Sheila: It left me paranoid, too. But I wasn't as frightened down there as when I got back North; and even now somebody walking behind me on the street, or a sudden sound, makes me nervous. I was really happy in the South, but I did feel restricted. You couldn't be straight with people. If a black worker said something dumb, I couldn't just say, "That's dumb," the way I would to a white guy. Because he was black and I was white.

Terry: I felt stunted--I mean, in relationships. There was no privacy, no room of your own, you couldn't have a personal life. The Movement is like a small town. You just couldn't grow on some levels.

Kathleen: There was the danger, too--the just plain terror. And then the terrible eating and sleeping conditions. One wrecked your mental health and the other messed up your physical health.

Sheila: People who are used to a speeded-up urban life or a campus atmosphere can't take it for long in the rural South. That's why people are always driving somewhere for no particular reason. Traveling is the drug of The Movement.

Kathleen: I always felt very frightened of people, and inadequate. I was very aware of my image as a white, northern, city girl. I was afraid of Negro men--particularly the southern field staff. You know, I grew up in an Irish household, and it was a big liberation for me just to get to know Jews in school. I hadn't known any Negroes. I didn't know how to deal with guys who made passes at me. It was all too much, so I would just lose myself in my work routines, get away from all my confusion and fear by picking up the telephone.

Linda: I had the same kind of problem, because I was an office worker, too. I was constantly asking to be sent out into the field, and people would say, "Are you crazy?" I was the brisk, Skidmore girl secretary; I could run all those machines. They baited me, but of course I didn't have the disadvantage of their being able to call me "white bitch."

Sheila: It's northern Negroes who say "white bitch"--southern Negroes rarely do. That difference between northern and southern is almost as big as color. There was a lot of conflict between southern blacks and northern blacks, because of class and educational differences.

Cora: I never had a hard time relating to you, Kathleen; you were always very pleasant.... But I had a hard time with you, Sheila. Even though you're half-Indian, I think of you as white because you're aggressive. What might have seemed like just a personality trait in a Negro was hard to take in a non-Negro, because it got mixed up with the fact that whites have often been aggressive in a very negative way. They have a tendency to take over.

Kathleen: I remember a Negro girl in the office who once said, "I just don't like white authority."

Cora: But I have known Negro women whose aggressiveness bothered me, too--they obviously couldn't work with a group of other Negro women, because they would run the whole show ... be "spokesmen" for the others.

Sheila: Cora, I was always awed by you because you were a myth to me--the fantastic southern organizer. I didn't feel at all aggressive, just the opposite.

Cora: Well, I guess each of us has an image of herself that is different from the image others have of us. People tend to act like I'm Mother, and I don't feel maternal toward them at all!

Terry: The hostility toward whites in The Movement isn't new; it was there almost from the beginning [1963], but different--maybe because there were so few of us. At the same time, there's been a decline in emphasis on the spirit of nonviolence and love. People just don't accept the idea any more that you must somehow love the guy who's beating you.

Sheila: That's probably just as well--the psychic damage done by all the repressed anger, the not striking back, has been tremendous. But I think the reason for the increase in hostility wasn't just the increase in whites after 1964, it was a whole lot of political developments, too. People learned that they couldn't change the society by appeals to the white conscience, that black people needed a whole new image of themselves as being able to make decisions on their own and run their own movements.

Cora: There was a lot of opposition to whites coming into Mississippi in 1964. And they never said whites, but "all those white girls." That was mainly because the white woman is a real symbol of fear to the Negro community. You know, even in the North when I see a white girl and a Negro man together, one image comes into my head: lynching. I am just terror-struck, knowing what that image has meant for so long.

Terry: Another reason for the opposition, I think, was the fact that there were already white chicks like me acting as assistants to executives. This meant that people related to some higher-up through a white girl, and they resented it. Also, some black women were beginning to move into positions of authority and young black guys felt threatened by that. They were striking back at their own woman-dominated culture.

Cora: The whites had skills; they knew how to write a press release. All that efficiency was very threatening. They were the least prepared to lead because they didn't understand the problems of southern Negroes, but they made themselves leaders.

Linda: When I went to work in the Greenwood (Miss.) office in '64 with a lot of white people, and we displaced the local people, it caused real resentment--especially because the office then got an air-conditioner! Sometimes I felt hostile toward the whites, too--their paternalism, their motivation. But I never felt that way about Bob Zellner [one of the few white southern SNCC workers] and neither did the community people. He has a way of relating, maybe because he's southern--and because he never tried to assert leadership.

Terry: I remember Bob Moses [director of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project] once saying to a group of whites, "You go into a Movement office and you see a Negro girl pecking away slowly at the typewriter. Then a white girl comes along and takes over, because she can do it faster--well, that stops something from growing. That keeps the lid on people."

Cora: There were just so many forms of resentment. Perhaps the biggest was because of all the attention the country paid to the white workers after ignoring the black workers for years. During the summer of 1964, the press was watching every college student in Mississippi. But nobody had paid any attention to the hundreds of beatings, the hundreds of days in jail, and the murders that had gone before--because the victims were black. That meant just one thing to us: a black life isn't worth as much.

Kathleen: I had a problem with the older people in the Negro community that was almost the opposite of resentment. They kept saying, "Miss Kathleen, you're so wonderful to come down here and help us." They catered to me and fussed over me. I guess some of the white girls loved it; Poussaint (Dr. Alvin Poussaint, one of several psychiatrists who have studied civil rights workers] said we had a "White-African-Queen complex"--the brave, beautiful white woman leading the poor downtrodden blacks to freedom. But to me it was awful--that unreal deference, that status--sometimes this was harder to deal with than the open hostility.

Terry: And, of course, that deference increased the hostility of the black workers! You know, all the resentment that has piled up over the years comes out in a lot of weird but understandable ways. That's what racism does to people, and it works in all kinds of ways. I once knew a black guy at college who made a point of making the faculty wives--he was messed up by the taboo on white women and how it has been used to destroy Negroes. There is a desire to get back at society by sort of enslaving or making a Tom out of whites. And guilt feelings make whites fall right into it. If they don't, they're called "uppity." Racism has messed up both sides.

Kathleen: In Mississippi, two Negroes made passes at me--such hostile passes that they had to be rejected. At the same time, I've certainly seen white women hang around the office mainly to make black guys.

Terry: I've heard white girls say, "I just don't like white bodies." But sometimes the girls who say that are using black guys to work off their own hostilities to white men.

Sheila: Black cats say, "You won't go to bed with me because I'm black." I just refuse to be put into that bag. They don't do it out of direct hostility toward a particular person, but because they begin to dig that they can exercise a certain power--and that means something, because they've never had any.

Terry: That's what we used to call "the commando complex." Black guys did it, and also the white guy who became some black guy's sidekick--"his white boy." He put himself under the black guy's protection and then tried to imitate him.

Cora: White women will really take it from black men, out of guilt and masochism. I heard a story recently--well, this may break up the discussion--about a Negro man and a girl who went out on a date. They weren't Movement people. The man escorted the girl into his car and then walked around to the driver's side. The girl leaned over and pulled up the lock for him. He got in and said, "Hmm--you act like a white girl." Later, he asked her to go to bed and she refused. He was mad and said, "Huh-you Negro women just aren't ready. A white girl would have come along, cleared up the place afterward, and said thank you to boot."

Kathleen: It's true that guilt and masochism have been big factors among white workers, especially girls. If they hadn't felt guilty about their society, they wouldn't have gone south in the first place. But is that sick? I think they were motivated by guilt, but they also had what I call an underdog personality. They were antisuccess addicts; they rejected the standard collegiate value system. For instance, we found that half of the volunteers on my project in Mississippi were left-handed--that' s a fantastic percentage--and almost all of them were Dodger fans!

Terry: There is a real difference between white men and black men. The middle-class white girl is brought up not to believe in the exploitative male. She goes to college and all that. Yet she may go to bed with a black guy who is clearly just out for sex, instead of a nice, considerate white guy. The real reason is that the white guy wasn't as aggressive. At this level of relating--the mechanics of establishing whether there will be sex or not--the black guy is better and whites seem weak, uncertain.

Sheila: I don't want to make it with black guys--it's just too difficult. A white woman can't be real lovers with a black guy.

Terry: That's true--black men are better at those mechanics, but you don't get the feeling of just the two of you, the secrecy. They are so sexually "healthy," at least with a white woman, that I can't get into the fantasy thing with them.

Sheila: A lot of that guilt business operates between white and black women, too. I've seen white girls who just couldn't say to a black girl, "Hey, that's my blouse--give it back." I refused to be that way. I chased all the way up to Batesville [Miss.] to get my sandals back from Myra Jones. It was like declaring war. Hell, I didn't mind her taking my blouse and skirt--but I had only one pair of shoes.

Cora: Well, here we come back to resentment and the problem of white women tending to take over because of their skills. When a white girl tells me about being hurt by antiwhite sentiment, I can listen because I don't feel threatened. But others can't, because they do. And of course there's also that competition for men hanging in the air, which is intensified by the special status attached to white womanhood.

Sheila: I got along pretty well with black girls who were similar to me, and with southern black chicks there was almost no tension. We used to do all that dressing and making-up business together. Yet I often felt some restraint, especially with the northern girls, and I did see some people change. Like the last time I saw Joan--she started to smile a big welcome, and then you could see her stop herself. It was antiwhite pressure from others, I think.

Terry: Sometimes people do the same things for different reasons; one may be demonstrating a real revolution that's going in inside herself, while the next person may act the same way because she feels obliged to fit into some current ideas of revolutionary behavior.

Cora: It's terrible the way racism makes people into objects so they can't relate on a deep personal level. I know of couple who divorced recently--a Negro girl, who had grown up trying to be as white as possible, and a white man who wanted some kind of Sapphire in bed, the image of the black woman as a zoftik sexpot--which she just wasn't. For her, that marriage was the ultimate in achieving acceptability. He also wanted to shock his parents. By marrying, each was exploiting the other's race. I wonder, where is health?

Just about nowhere seemed to be the answer. But as Charles Sherrod, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, once said: "We've got to understand that we're all oppressed, we're all caught up in racism, and it affects the way we relate to each other. It doesn't help to repress feelings, whether it's black hostility or white superiority. You have to let them come out and then we can all try to deal with them together.

Many of the young women had also struggled with the equally complex question of how to be both a woman and a person. That problem existed for both races--but had special implications for Negro women.

Terry: We used to talk a lot about the fact that, in many ways, the position of American women in relation to men is similar to that of Negroes in relation to whites. There's an informal sexual caste system that puts women in a position of inequality in work and personal relations. The racial caste system does it to Negroes.

Of course, there are differences: for one thing, the sexual caste system is no longer formally institutionalized by law in this country--although it still is indirectly. Women can vote, even if they can't decide for themselves whether or not to have an abortion. Also, biological differences are involved in the sexual caste system--but most people don't stop to consider how future technology may diminish the significance of those differences.

Anyway, it seems that the freedom movement has often done the same things to women that the unfree society does to them. There are many examples: the lack of women in leadership; the fact that men are usually considered more suitable as spokesmen for an organization; the kinds of work women are expected to do. Men decide everything from who goes to the White House to who sweeps the Freedom House. Many people who were very hip to the implications of the racial caste system didn't seem to see the sexual caste system. They would say, "That's the way it's supposed to be, there are biological differences"--which sounded to us a lot like a white segregationist defending his system.

Kathleen: Women tend to define themselves in terms of men and the male society, the way Negroes define themselves in terms of whites and the dominant white society. So they think there is something wrong with them if they don't like washing dishes. They feel incapable of certain things. In Mississippi, the guys were always agreeing that a girl couldn't do certain things--she would panic or something.

Helen: I can't remember guys saying, "No women," in a certain situation, but I do remember that whole business of guys protecting women in demonstrations. In Montgomery, the fellows put all the women on the inside of a circle when we were about to be attacked by the cops, and 1 wondered why we shouldn't be on the outside along with everybody else. And take driving--even if a woman might know the way better, a guy had to drive. Also, it was practically impossible for a woman, even if she was doing the same work as a man, to get a car assigned to her.

Cora: Cars have always been status symbols in The Movement--there are so few, and they're so needed. They represent authority and skill: they're big symbols of masculinity.

Sheila: People were constantly acting out a romantic vision of The Movement. SNCC guys drive as though they rushing to a rendezvous in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel, when they're only going to the corner for beer.

Cora: Part of the problem is that whole southern psychosis about women being ladies who have to be protected. The strange thing is, it's white women who always have the strongest faces of race hatred. But I think a lot depends on how a man asserts himself. If he isn't arrogant, if he doesn't act as though he's proceeding in some notion of female inferiority, it's acceptable.

Linda: I had some Nationalist ["Black Nationalist"] guys help me move recently, and they really laid it on--wouldn't even let me open the door for them when they were lugging furniture. I understand the reason for this new cult of masculinity--but sometimes it seems to take superficial forms. It's hard for Movement women to relate to guys who treat you with conventional manners. When somebody calls me for a date, I say briskly, "O.K., where shall I meet you?" I forget that it's normal for guys to pick a girl up at her home!

Cora: The Nationalists are trying to overcome--perhaps on a superficial level--what society has done to the Negro male. It's always easier for a Negro girl to make it; she is less threatening to white society. Negro families talk first about putting the girls through school, because the one thing they don't want is for her to scrub white kitchens.

Helen: That's right. And that's one of the several places where the Moynihan report was all wrong. It called that attitude "favoritism" for girls, when it's just societal.

Cora: So when Negro men can't get jobs, they can't support their families. Then they leave home--sometime just so the women can qualify for welfare--and you have that whole pattern of emasculation. You have the Negro matriarchy in a society dominated by the white patriarchy--or rather, the myth of patriarchy. I will never forget the pathos of that in Mississippi, where it's the women who are Movement leaders. Time and again, when I was out canvassing, I'd go into a house and it would be the woman who did all the talking--she was the militant one. The man would just sit there and maybe say, "I ain't having nothing to do with that mess." He would be physically strong, but a shell of a man--and sometimes an alcoholic as a result.

Kathleen: It was different where I worked in Mississippi. Panola County is a real patriarchy: at meetings, the men sit in one part of the room and the women in another. Men aren't plantation workers: they have small farms of their own and a lot of financial independence.

Cora: That's true. Yet even in the middle class, there are sorts of forces to emasculate a man. My husband is a teacher, and we live in an apartment building in a white suburb. When people see him coming home, they sometimes assume he's a delivery "boy" and tell him where the service elevator is. When salesmen come to my door during the day, they inevitably ask me, "Is the lady of the house in?" I'm black, so I must be the maid, and there's nothing my husband can do to protect me from that. Incidentally, those are some of the traumas of "integration" that nobody talks about.

Linda: There's a lot of resentment in black guys against women--it's a very mixed-up thing. I remember a girl in the office with me who handled money. Sometimes she would O.K. a guy's request, even though she knew she shouldn't--and she wouldn't have for a girl--just because she didn't want to get into a hassle and have him holler about "goddamn women" and "being castrated." At the same time, the fellows in that office refused to take responsibility for financial decisions. They might "coordinate" or "direct," but they didn't want the nitty-gritty of deciding who gets money and who doesn't. So the women had to. And then the guys would scream, "Who made that decision?"

Kathleen: I don't know. It seems to me Negro men are more sensitive than white men to the whole problem of being a woman--childbearing and all the drudgery. I remember one Sunday in Mississippi at the Miles's [a Negro family]. We were just about to sit down to Sunday dinner when Stokely [Stokely Carmichael, chairman of SNCC] and his entourage came bombing in. Twelve of us, including four females, were eating a tremendous chicken dinner. At the end, Stokely gets up and says, "I'll wash the dishes"--and proceeds to do it!

Terry: Huh, I know fellows who will do that as long as it's somebody else's house, but in their own home, they let the woman cook dinner and wash the dishes. It's a matter of what they think is expected, or proper.

Cora: Being pro-woman depends on how you do it. I'm disturbed by a lot of Negro career women who seem to think they have to be artificial men. They have these charming exteriors and very cutting insides. I think Negro women need to support their men. Some women in The Movement and elsewhere are beginning to see that it's not a matter of being submissive but supportive, because your men have been, and still are, constantly under attack. You reach a more mature understanding of relations between black men and women, both of whom have been subjugated. You get a historical perspective on those relations, and on the 300-year heritage of a racism that has meant rape of the female and castration of the male. Then you can begin to achieve wholeness--which means that you can really relate to a man and be a support. As somebody said, when we get our men together, we will all make it.

Helen: I don't think Negro women can stand being supportive for very long! I wonder, where does the quest for independence stop, and the search for a kind of giving begin?

Terry: Women who really want to write or paint or whatever just haven't found a way to marry that won't interfere....

Helen: In a white world, marriage is always billed as "the end"--like in a Hollywood movie. I don't go for that. I can't imagine myself promising my whole lifetime away. I might want to get married now, but how about next year? That's not disrespect for the institution, but the deepest respect. In The Movement, you need to have a feeling for the temporary--of making something as good as you can, while it lasts. In conventional relationships, time is a prison.

Kathleen: But most women don't feel that way. They dream of a diamond ring and a beautiful home. Sometimes they feel stranded by having left that dream of suburban security behind. My mother would love me to be like that, but I just can't be any more.

Cora: I always used to think of marriage as surrender--and I'm not one to surrender! I resented the social pressure to marry. I thought marriage was often a thing in which women live vicariously, through their husbands, and never live themselves. I wasn't sure you could mix marriage with doing things you think are important in terms of the world around you. But I got engaged--and was away in the South for the next three years. Those were crucial years; I was struggling for myself. The Movement developed my sense of self; I have an awareness of myself now as an individual. My husband has made me feel not threatened, in terms of developing that self. And so there are things I can give.

As they talked on, the young women attempted to further define how being in The Movement had affected their ideas--not only about black and white, men and women, but also about the entire society.

Helen: Experience in The Movement affects all your social ideas. A Movement woman--and by Movement woman, I don't just mean a full-time worker, but somebody concerned with issues--isn't going to expect as much in certain areas, but will expect more in others. Less artifacts, more honesty and opportunity to be her own creative self.

Terry: In a culture like ours, few experiences that people can have will write them out of their habitual thought-patterns. We just happened to come along when The Movement was doing that for people. It's a jarring thing that changes your perception of reality, makes you able to see new possibilities. You realize that your identity can relate to your actions, you can be authentic. You see people around you--not civil rights workers, but the community people--who are living in a way that really expresses their desire to see the world changed. But it's very hard for a white person to participate in that, because these people are culturally so different. So you ask yourself, what is real for me to do?

Cora: One thing you learn from The Movement is that strength doesn't mean force, but the ability to endure. The ability of black people to endure is just fantastic, and a whole culture has been built out of that survival. It's a precious culture. It's all the color and life that you find in Harlem, along with the drugs and poverty. The mores are superior and more humane in many ways. For instance, there is no concept of illegitimacy in the Negro home: a child is a child and has a right to live. The family doesn't close its doors and cringe. A child can be illegal but not "illegitimate." There just isn't that hang-up with the middle-class, white Protestant ethic.

Helen: That's right, force is not strength. That's why I think we need a new definition of "emasculation." It's not an accurate term. It means that Negro men don't live up to the mainstream--the white--definition of manhood. But maybe that definition isn't so good. Maybe aggressiveness and competitiveness, which seem to be part of the definition, aren't so desirable.

Kathleen: The men in my office are real mainstream types, I guess. All the women are bright, but the men have no respect for them, except for one who is an executive assistant. Their comments on women are entirely sexual and physical--"that's a cute one" or "what terrible legs."

Terry: Well, I think underneath people are always having sexual responses to each other, and you can't ignore it. It's like race relations--there's so much going on below the surface.

Kathleen: But women just aren't people to those men. If a woman is attractive, that's something; if not, she's just a machine.

Terry: That's part of the whole relationship of people to work in our culture. To their bosses, men are work machines, too, or maybe a threat--but nothing human. We're all shaped to get things done, to accomplish. In college, I would achieve in order to get appreciation--or love. Later, it's money. Why should women have to strive to fit into activity patterns and roles that are based on a Western image of "progressing"?

Kathleen: I don't agree that the society wants women to accomplish things--it wants you to sit back and be dumb. I remember in college that a "peace" delegation we were putting together to see a Congressman was to be all male, because women supposedly can't express themselves as well. And a lot of the women went along with that.

Cora: It's true. A great many women feel that way. If I go down into the laundry room of my building and talk about anything beyond my kid's tricks or the price of meat, I get either blank stares or hostility. And if I attend an out-of-town conference, some women will always ask, "How can you go away and leave your child?"

Terry: But you know, women probably aren't as good as men at expressing themselves in abstract terms. And that's good! They are better at talking high food prices or war toys--real things that affect what they really want. But most of the forms of social intercourse--ways the culture functions-were developed by men. And those forms say that women aren't qualified.

Kathleen: Like Negroes and the poor and the uneducated.

Cora: I think we just don't trust "The People" enough, in general. Why do we teach kids to love the flag and hate "Commies"? Because we don't trust them to grow up and make their own decisions about what's best.

Terry: We used to talk in The Movement about trying to build a society that would shape institutions to meet human needs, rather than shaping people to fit institutions or to meet the needs of those with power. Somehow, we have to extend that to areas such as finding one's sexual identity. Women don't like their situation: they've just given up. I don't know any women from my background and culture who have worked out a way to live that would express the way they want the world to be. There's no movement for us. And people get very lonely. That's why women gossip about what John said that hurt their feelings or how the kids are messed up. That's how they keep going--gossip is a sort of underground prop for the culture.

Sheila: In The Movement, I lived on $10 to $20 a week and worked 20 hours a day. Then suddenly, after I left the South, I was making $90 a week. It was a good job, but I spent all my time making money and then spending that money--I was just administering a life. I decided the only way to free myself was to force myself back onto that poverty level. So I quit. My attitude is basically political. I want to survive outside society, on part-time work such as I'm doing now, or welfare, or whatever. Nothing could ever make me work nine to five again; anybody who does become middle class in outlook. I guess that feeling is a carry-over from The Movement. It's a matter of caring about distinctions in the quality of life. College can do that for you, too: it frees you from the rat race temporarily, whether you follow through on that freedom or not.

Terry: I know a girl who says that as long as you haven't given up on the idea of a home and kids, you are stuck with nine-to-five men. And the standard of "a good husband" then becomes a man who supports the family and shows up more or less regularly. On the other hand, the nine-to-five man is also historically trapped. So he turns to fantasy, or maybe a call girl on a business trip. That's his accepted adjustment. Sometimes I dream about a community where people can live together and bring up kids and not be forced into the nine-to-five pattern. There must be some kind of communal solution.

Cora: The problem now is that most men just don't have a sense of themselves as playing a real role in the society. That's one reason they either laugh or get very defensive--even hostile--when they hear about discussions like this. You've got to be sure of yourself as an individual--man or woman, black or white--before you can relate to anybody else. You have to have self-confrontation before communication. You have to be a whole person, and that depends a lot on what the society does to people.

Terry: Men react negatively to the idea of discussions like this because they have put up a front and must sustain it. If women start talking about different roles, men think: "Wow, what will that do to me?" It's female nationalism, and it scares them the way black nationalism scares whites. But there's another reason, which is simply that very few men are accustomed to thinking of any kind of radical change. One thing that happened in The Movement was that people became capable of conceptualizing alternative life patterns for themselves. That's very radical, and the society is very tight. I don't know how far we can go from there--I'm just groping now. Cora: You know, the only answer seems to be: Keep making new definitions. I find myself looking less and less for the answers. The important thing is to keep raising the issues, to live the questions.

* Elizabeth thought it was important for left activists to reach mainstream audiences. In this groundbreaking piece for Mademoiselle (April 1967), she explores issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the civil rights movement. Copyright [c] 1967 Conde Nast. All rights reserved. Originally published in Mademoiselle (April 1967, pp. 224-25, 242-45). Reprinted by permission.