their message. I was twelve at the time.
“I can’t believe I knew nothing about this march until recently,” I admitted. “Tell me about it.”
He remembered it well, he said. “My wife was one of the organizers. She and the other organizers were totally consumed by it. Us men, we got nervous. We weren’t sure they realized how dangerous it could be. We wanted to provide security. But when I asked her what we could do to help, you know what she told me?” An annoyed edge crept into his voice. “She told me that if the men wanted to help we could look after the children!” Fifteen years later the memory still rankled. Then repeating the ANC line, he added, “Women’s equality is of course important. But first we have to overthrow apartheid so that it is not divisive. Then we can work toward equality for all.”
How different an approach from Cabral’s insistence that PAIGC involve women as equals in the struggle from the very beginning. After leaving Jen’s apartment, a group of us crammed into the backseat of a friend’s car and drove through the cold and snowy streets of New York City. The car buzzed with exhilaration as we recapped the evening.
“We must admit he is a good politician,” a voice, tinged with skepticism, pronounced from the front seat. “He said just what we wanted to hear about women! No doubt he knows that this is a big issue in America at the moment.” Her tone made it clear that she, at least, had not been fooled. I didn’t doubt what he was saying. The question for me was how? How to achieve what we in the United States were only beginning to challenge. Her comment irked me for the rest of the ride home.
I regarded myself as both a feminist and a socialist. While I adopted the term “Marxist,” I would have had a problem offering a sound Marxist analysis of the world around me. The principles, though, made sense. I was attracted by the notion that workers should own the means of production and benefit from their labor, rather than all the wealth go to their employers, the corporations, the capitalists. Since leaving South Africa I had tried to place the question of justice at the center of my choices and actions, and Marxist principles embodied justice. It extended to my feminism that was becoming an intrinsic part of my worldview. It was not about piecemeal change but about changing the whole political, economic, and social system which was threaded with gender inequality and discrimination.
My new awareness seemed to constantly place me on the edge of fury. My body would stiffen when men hissed or shouted comments as I walked past; I would shout back or give them the middle finger and walk on. Walking the streets of Manhattan could feel like running a gauntlet of male invective and aggressive invasions of my space, my body: The man who jammed himself up against me in the crowded subway, so that even when I realized it wasn’t his umbrella against my thigh, I was unable to move. The young man showing off to a handful of ten- and eleven-year-old boys in his charge, who came up behind me and pushed up against me. I shouted at him to get away while the kids laughed, and one of them retorted: “It was only through your coat!”
Walking near Columbia University in a Latino neighborhood where a group of young men hung out in front of a bodega, I felt the usual sense of invasion when offensive mouth-sucking noises and comments followed me. One of the young men called out in a more inquiring tone: “Why are you so unfriendly to us?” I snarled back, “I’ll be friendly when you don’t single women out and treat us like sex objects.” I looked back at him. His face fell as if I had slapped it. What I hadn’t noticed was that he was in a wheelchair. I walked on mortified, tears in my eyes, feeling as if I had overstepped a mark although not clear about what that mark was. I began to wonder about the patriarchy that gives rise to machismo. Something more was needed than shouting back. It would take some years for feminists to integrate the new concept of gender into our thinking. We needed gender equality, and to get it, men had to be included in the equation and take on the responsibility of identifying and challenging a culture that gave rise not just to their machismo but to violence against women and girls.
IT IS THE SPRING OF 1972 and I am on my lunch break, sitting with Suzette Abbott on a grassy verge near Columbia University. Suzette is South African; she has been in the United States for about six months. She came to New York as part of the same two-year Frontier Internship program that sent Gail and Don to South Africa. Later I would learn that she had grown up in a family that resolutely bought the apartheid line, but through her own innate sense of injustice began to see the reality of South Africa. One of the moments that changed her life was a talk she attended by the Reverend Beyers Naudé, an Afrikaner cleric and theologian renowned for his strong anti-apartheid views and activism. She felt challenged to reconcile two incompatible interpretations of apartheid and, as a result, began to reject the warped version of South Africa that had been her reality since childhood. She was horrified by the truth and became radicalized. Hers was a different path than mine to anti-apartheid activism, one that required the courage to denounce all that she had been taught to believe and risk alienation from her family and isolation from the only community she had known. When we met soon after she arrived in New York I instantly felt that tingle of connection I often had with women I sensed were like-minded.
Now, warmed by the sun, we talked about the women’s movement. “It’s the first time as a white South African that I feel I can legitimately be part of a movement that is important to me,” she said.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
