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Vaginal Orgasm.”
    In thislandmark essay Koedt struck at the heart of young women’s disappointments in the midst of a media-celebrated sexual revolution. The dread charge “frigidity” that psychoanalysts had thundered from the Freudian pulpit in the forties and fifties had destroyed the potential for sexual happiness of their mothers’ generation, sending countless healthy, normal women to the analyst’s couch. Determined not to suffer the same fate, the daughters had thrown themselves joyfully into sexual activity, claiming new freedoms promised by the Pill. But the Freudian dictum that “a mature climax” was achieved only through vaginal intercourse still ruled the day. Cowed by male authority as their mothers had been, the daughters had viewed their failure to reach vaginal orgasm as their own sorry fault. Even worse, they’d accepted the judgment that clitoral orgasms were “immature.”
    And here was Anne Koedt, synthesizing the newest scientific information in simple language, claiming there was only one kind of orgasmno matter how it was achieved, taking apart the old myths within a political framework of male sexual exploitation and female oppression. “ ‘Myth’ threw peopleinto a tizzy,” Koedt recalls. “It never occurred to me that would happen. At the time I thought that sex was a less important concern than getting the left off our backs so we could have some space to do our own thinking.”
    Notes from the First Year was ready for distribution in June. Cindy Cisler designed the cover. Shulie rode herd on the job because she was leaving for Paris and wanted to take a copy to Simone de Beauvoir. The hoped-for meeting did not take place. Beauvoir had left Paris for her summer vacation, Anne Koedt recalls—“But shesent us a nice note later.”
    ( Notes from the First Year would be followed by Notes from the Second Year , a thick, substantial newsprint edition. The third year’s Notes was the last of the ambitious, historic project. By then a sea-swell of movement theorists had contracts with commercial publishers, and many of the Notes contributors were working on full-length books.)

    A few days before Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, an unstable hanger-on in Andy Warhol’s circle had barged into the pop artist’s New York loft and shot him in the stomach, claiming he had reneged on his promise to make her an underground star. Warhol was hospitalized in intensive care while the gunwoman, Valerie Solanas, was trundled to Bellevue for psychiatric observation.
    A would-be writer and artist, Solanas had chosen extreme means to fulfill Warhol’s assertion that everybody should have fifteen minutes of fame. Prior to the shooting she had been a familiar figure on downtown street corners, peddling a manifesto for her one-woman organization, the Society for Cutting Up Men. TheSCUM Manifesto was the fulmination of a sadly disturbed woman who had somehow arrived at the truth that men held all of society’s power. Solanas had written with chilling insanity, “A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”
    Solanas was represented at her pretrial hearing by FlorynceKennedy, an irrepressible, eccentric, black activist lawyer who handled the Billie Holiday estate and lent herself freely to a rainbow of causes, from Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, to NOW. Flo Kennedy was not the only NOW member to latch on to Solanas as a vivid symbol of woman’s oppression.Ti-Grace Atkinson, Betty Friedan’s slim and elegant choice for president of the New York chapter, summarily announced to the press that she would monitor the Solanas trial on NOW’s behalf. NOW’s membership immediately voted that she retract herstatement.
    Several months later Atkinson would cause another ruckus when she demanded that NOW revise its by-laws to have rotating leaders chosen by lot.
    “She wanted chaos,” explodes