This savagery seemed to slip into her home life. Carter resented being saddled with the domestic work in her marriage. “It never ends, the buggering about with dirty dishes, coal pails, ash bins, shitbins, hot water, detergent,” she complained. She was an indifferent housekeeper (at one point, the dust in the kitchen was so thick guests could write their names in it), but she taught herself to cook and made ratatouille and coq au vin for the endless stream of folk musicians who passed through the house—doing “the earth mother bit,” as she later called it. But this wasn’t enough for Paul, who became quietly furious when she didn’t do the dishes and who tried to discourage her literary ambitions. (After Shadow Dance was published, he didn’t talk to her for three weeks.)
First and Second Wave feminism was fuelled by the shoddy treatment of leftist women by leftist men:
“Thank God you showed up. Go type up my manifesto and make some coffee.”
Stokely Carmichael ‘s famous “The position of women in SNCC is prone” is just the most memorable evidence collected in Susan Brownmiller’s notorious document.
Another memoir.
Here’s “Justifying Sexism in Students for a Democratic Society.”
You can just google “how women were treated in the New Left.”
Dinah, who was born in the early ‘90s, isn’t the first young woman I’ve known to be raped, abused, or harassed by a male compatriot in an ostensibly progressive organization. What all groups that have tolerated this kind of behavior have in common is an ideological conviction that women’s liberation needs to take a back seat to something “more important.” It doesn’t matter whether that “more important” thing is fighting for farm workers, or stopping the war in Afghanistan, or liberating lab animals. In each instance, young women activists are warned that reporting sexually abusive behavior by a male fellow activist jeopardizes the movement and does irreparable harm to the cause — a cause, that the young victimized woman is always reminded, is so much bigger than her.
