to work full-time for the company’s success. I imagined what June had given up; what I imagined her giving up was what I would have spent a fortune on if I’d had one: Europe, with special attention to Italy and France. My eyes glazed over with hero worship. When people started complaining to me that June tried to ram her politics down their throats and slapped them upside the head, in a manner of down-south speaking, when they failed to swallow her very hard line, I would try to explain away their indignation by urging them to look, June could be whiling away pleasant hours in Paris right now, or soaking her tootsies in the Bay of Naples, or lounging in a gondola—but instead … so the least we can do is be tolerant. Nobody swallowed my line either.
After I gave June and Parke Lover, I gradually handed over most of my life to them and to Daughters. I justified my self-abandon by maintaining that I was merging my personal with my political in an area (writing and publishing) for which I was most suited. I thought how lucky I was that they wanted me.
Since 1972, I’d had full-time employment at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where I taught in the Women’s Studies program. I had other serious, time-consuming responsibilites, both professional and personal, as well. I had been, except emotionally, a self-sustaining adult since I was sixteen. But in 1976, shortly after Lover was published, June asked me to take on all her editorial work so that she could write full-time. Without pausing to consider when, with both a full- and a parttime job—and a life—I would find time to write myself, I accepted. My mother’s chief contribution to my upbringing had been to beat my legs and back with a walking cane every time she thought that I was, in her words, “showing off” or giving the appearance of believing that I was “better than other people.” By the time I met June and Parke, I had become so adept at self-effacement that I could make myself disappear at will. My mother told me that because of me, she’d been cheated of everything she ever wanted. I am, to this day, very careful never to compete with other women; I will go to any amount of trouble to help a woman get what she says she wants; if I must sacrifice something I want in the process, so much the better. Sometimes this behavior is mistaken for feminism; it is penance.
I understood immediately that it was more important for June to write than for me to write. June, I would eventually realize, also thought that it was more important for her to write, so much more so, in fact, she would have preferred that I stop writing altogether.
After a while, Parke and June began pressuring me to resign from my assistant professorship at Richmond College and work exclusively for Daughters. Neither offered me an ordinary reason to do so, such as a salary equal to what the City University paid me, health insurance, a pension—nor even an extraordinary reason. I was supposed to do it simply because they wanted me to do it. No mundane consideration prevented me from giving them what they wanted, it was rather a fear of being eaten alive combined with the twitchings of some half-paralyzed adult instinct for survival that kept me full-time at Richmond until 1976. But I wondered why they wanted me around full-time, and for what? Daughters simply didn’t have enough work to justify my full-time employment unless I added most of Parke’s work—bookkeeping, mailings, dealing with the printers, etc.—to my editorial duties, and this was clearly impossible. As we all knew, I was inept with money and the arithmetic that handling money demands; Parke, furthermore, would never have put the secrets of the company’s account books into my hands.
But in 1974, when they were leaning heavily on me to say it out loud—I am thine! —I was, in any event, nearly always on duty at Daughters in one way or another when I wasn’t teaching. Parke was running the ordinary day-today business of publishing with intelligence and keen competence; distribution, however, was an on-going problem for her, fraught with stress and anxiety. Except for gay and women’s bookshops (and there were then relatively few), other, general-subject book dealers and their customers were still wary of taking a chance on such unfamiliar, sometimes openly lesbian, writing. The grand design for Daughters that June and Parke had conceived—beating Random House at its own game—was being continually frustrated in the marketplace.
Nor were women, movement women, living up to the partners’ expectations as book buyers. I think now that it’s possible that neither Parke nor June, sheltered as they were from the exigencies of ordinary women’s lives, ever fully understood that, for most, buying books was an unconsidered luxury; although both June and Parke knew the facts of life—that women were (and still are) paid considerably less for work than men, and that most women who were single mothers led—and still do lead—lives devoted to acquiring the bare necessities—neither had directly experienced those disquieting conditions: so they resisted and ignored them. As well, it bewildered, and often downright aggravated them, to see women who had some discretionery money spending it on a night out, in company, instead of on Daughters’ books. They also avoided looking at the bottom line: that most people, men as well as women, would rather do nearly anything than read unless the book is “useful” nonfiction or escapist fiction; and it’s cookbooks and children’s books that are the entirely dependable sellers. The war against Random House was being constantly lost.
Given their temperaments—Parke and June were highly competitive, ambitious, and proud; they were quick to take offense, they often perceived offense where none was intended; and they did not easily tolerate frustration or disappointment—it isn’t surprising that the partners were frequently in a state of emotional turmoil which too often was directed at outsiders in the form of insults and hostile confrontations. Many of those outsiders were people who could have done Daughters and its authors considerable good.
Part-time editorial work, for which I was fairly paid, soon began to include unpaid labor: witnessing the often violent personal fights between June and Parke; monitoring their often combative meetings with writers; trying to con people whom the partners had insulted into believing that they hadn’t really been insulted; and consulting with the partners over their growing enemies list. The “enemies” I knew of were those who had disappointed or frustrated the partners by not buying June’s lesbian-feminist party line—and then, having been offended by the partners, offended them in return.
By the time the partners dissolved Daughters, the enemies list included all of mainstream and women’s publishing, the entire membership of the women’s movement, and last but not least, the only good Indian, me.
Almost from the beginning of our association, every move I made away from June and Parke, no matter how slight or temporary, met with their displeasure, then with suspicion (consorting with the enemies), and with charges of “disloyalty.” My heros, friends, publishers, and employers were underneath it all a creature known as folie à deux, which consciously, and conscientiously, never stopped trying to turn itself into an à trois. It’s hard to find good help: but Batman, perforce, needs his Robin, the Lone Ranger his Tonto, and even seething paranoids crave someone to lean on.
Soon I was seeing my friends on the sly; after a while, I woke up one morning and realized that I never saw my old friends any longer—and that I didn’t know how to see them without Parke and June finding out. I couldn’t understand why I was afraid of their finding out, nor did I yet understand why it was so crucial to them for me to know only the two of them. They once berated me for inviting the eminent scholar and critic Catharine R. Stimpson over for a drink without first asking for their approval, and for not asking them over as well. I waffled. By “berated,” I mean the sort of loud, infuriated name-calling and sin-listing inquisitorial attack known as verbal abuse. I was afraid that Parke was going to hit me; more often than not, when words failed to score the point she wanted to make, Parke used her fists.
The truth was that I didn’t want them to become acquainted with my friends any more than they wanted me to have any friends other than the two of them. I was afraid that one, or both, would lash out at people I cherished. I had learned my lesson early on when I invited June to meet my dearest friend, the painter Louise Fishman. I don’t recall the preliminaries but in short order after the introductions, June was, unprovoked, raging at Louise, insulting her life, her work,
