Read In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution for Free Online Page B

Dolores Alexander, who had quit her job as a reporter for Newsday to become NOW’s first executive secretary.
    “I was torn,” admits Jacqui Ceballos, a Friedan loyalist who had left her husband after reading The Feminine Mystique . “I told Ti-Grace I’d vote for her resolution, but I would not leave NOW if she lost.”
    She lost. Atkinson walked out of NOW and announced she was forming a new organization.

    Roxanne Dunbar, a doctoral student at UCLA, was among those who were very taken with Valerie Solanas. She was honeymooning in Mexico City when a small squib, “Superwoman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol,” appeared in an English-language paper. “I took it as a sign,” Dunbar reminisces, “a mystical symbol that women were rising up in the United States.”
    Named Roxie by her father, a truck driver and tenant farmer, Dunbar had fled the rural poverty of western Oklahoma and settled in California with her husband and daughter. By 1968 she and her husband were divorced and he had remarried, taking custody of their child. “Those were confusing, volatile times,” she relates. “The war was driving me crazy, the Panthers were getting killed in Berkeley, people were talking about Free Love. Now that sounded like a man’s idea!” On impulse Dunbar had driven to Mexico with her current lover, found a justiceof the peace to marry them, and was making plans for a honeymoon in Cuba.
    “It was May,” she recalls. “Students were rioting in Paris, and Mexico City was afire with demonstrators protesting the Olympics. Then, after a few weeks, comes this little story about Solanas. I imagined I had an obligation to start a movement for women. Boston had been a center for abolitionists and suffragists in the nineteenth century, so the idea came over me, “I will go to Boston.’ ”
    A stranger to the city and completely alone (her new husband had been left behind), Dunbar placed an ad for a women-only meeting in Resist , a publication of the New England draft resistance and sanctuary movement. It drew one response.Dana Densmore had been searching for like-minded souls.
    Densmore, a volunteer draft counselor, was a second-generation radical. Her mother was the indomitable Donna Allen, a founder of Women Strike for Peace. “That January, I’d gotten a phone call from my mother,” Densmore relates. “She’d uttered the magical words ‘Women’s Liberation. For us! It’s begun.’ In her usual enthusiasm Donna was skipping over the hard part, but the powerful conjuration just sizzled.” Donna Allen and Dana Densmore were the first of several mother-daughter pairs to cast their lot with the new movement.
    Roxanne and Dana composed a second ad and placed it in the Avatar , a countercultural paper run by Mel Lyman, a local guru with a large following in Boston. “Women!” the copy read. “Come and join us if you need to breathe.”
    Betsy Marple Mahoney, a white working-class mother from the South End, answered the call. Betsy had quit high school at seventeen to get married and have a child. Seven years later, when her husband began beating her, she’d gotten a divorce. The shy, stubborn, introspective young woman hung out at a leftist bookstore, reading whatever she could get her hands on, and flirted briefly with the Communist Party. “I was always analyzing things in my own head,” she says, “and I didn’t trust the left’s attitude toward women. So I joined this new group, and we called ourselves the Female Liberation Front. Our second name, Cell 16, came later. We knew we were flyingin the face of all leftist conventions, committing blasphemy of the first order.” When Roxanne Dunbar proposed that their little group start putting their thoughts down on paper, Betsy named herself Betsy Luthuli, in honor of the famed African chieftan, for her first piece of writing. But quite soon she renamed herselfBetsy Warrior, and Warrior she has remained ever since.

    Although the war in Vietnam was still