July 2, 2020 • 41 mins
In 1969, radical feminists known as the Redstockings gathered in a church in Greenwich Village, and spoke about their experiences with abortion. They called this ‘consciousness-raising’ or ‘speaking bitterness,’ and it changed the history of women’s rights, all the way down to the 1977 National Women’s Convention and, really, down to the present day. The idea of ‘speaking bitterness’ came from a Maoist practice, and is a foundation to both the #MeToo movement and the conservative Victim’s Rights movement. But at what cost?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. A quarter of the mind, lined with shelves,
cluttered with proof, A purple cowboy hat. Oh, someone's put
up here on the wall poster, it says, the personal
(00:36):
is political. I love those day glow flowers. This place,
this warehouse, stores the facts that matter, and matters of fact,
the evidence of the past. It's all that stands between
a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies
in a time between now and then. The sign on
(00:59):
the door reads the last Archive. Step out that door
to Greenwich Village, across the passage of time to a
Friday night, March twenty first, nineteen sixty nine. Walk down
West fourth Street and up the steps to the Washington
(01:19):
Square Methodist Church, a cathedral. It'll cost you two dollars
to get in a donation to the Red Stockings radical feminists,
best known for staging a protest at the Miss America pageant.
There are three hundred people seated in the church, mostly women.
It's a handful of men here too. Oh and lucky
(01:41):
for us, there's a tape recorder up there on the altar.
All of us are members of the Women's Liberation Group
of New York City, and we discovered that by just
talking about our own experience, about our own lives, that
by talking about this altogether in our group, that we
(02:02):
were able to find out a lot more about reality
than by talking about all those objects. The thing we
would talk about our own abortion, and that was like
our plans for the satire. So much of how people
think about truth today comes from this one meeting. Like
water down a waterfall, twelve women got up to speak,
(02:26):
one by one. They passed a microphone. They testified for
more than three hours. They were mad as hell. A
month earlier, a committee of the New York Legislature had
considered whether or not to make abortion legal in the state.
The committee brought in experts to testify. Fourteen men and
one woman. Anne the Red Stockings and other activists had
(02:50):
stormed the committee meeting. They were camouflaged in dresses and stockings,
they said, and they'd shouted, let's hear from the real experts. Women.
They tried to tell their stories without much success. So
now they were here in this church in Greenwich Village
to actually have their say. The tape it's kind of
crazy to listen to the man is the one that
(03:13):
scrowls you and then when you turn to him and say, hey, look, sweetheart,
I'm pregnant. How do you know it was me? You
neverics love with anyone else. One of the things I
love about this tape is that it's not like women
crying in front of Oprah or something. It's more like
stand up comedy, but confrontational, courageous. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce
(03:36):
Awry second all the sand. It's just what am I
gonna do? What I is he going to do? What
am I going to do? These are the experts, the
people that are sitting here, the people that are in
the audience who have had the abortion. But no one
wants to listen to us. I mean, you know, we
(04:04):
are the only expert. They spoke out that night and
nighteen sixty nine because they wanted to change the law.
They'd also decided to talk publicly about their abortions because
some of them had been reading the writings of the
communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. Maoists believed in the practice of
speaking bitterness, describing your oppression, and blaming your oppressor. That's
(04:29):
what those women were doing in that church. They were
speaking bitterness. They called it consciousness raising. They also called
it rapping or a speak out. I'm sure that there
are many many women in this audience that have had
the same experience. So I know, you know, freak or
that it just happened to me, it's happened. Who can
eat everybody? You know? So if I get up and
(04:51):
I say it, you know, maybe everybody can get up
and say it, and we all get up and say it,
you know, maybe they'll do something about changing the situously.
Welcome to the last archive, the show about how we
know what we know, how we used to know things,
and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
(05:14):
trying to solve a Who've done it? Who killed truth?
In this episode, I want to try to find a
way to reckon with the consequences of a whole theory
of knowledge. Speak your truth, radical feminist said in the
Village in nineteen sixty nine, Speak your truth. Sure, it
sounds good, it sounds great, until you start to ask,
(05:37):
what if someone else's truth is different than yours. No
legislature would recognize my right to speak as an expert,
because it happened right in my body. Where a child grows,
it happens in my body later on, that I don't
want that child, and that I have to go through
a period of time in which I have no function
(05:59):
in this society. I've been talking all season about the
end of the age of mystery and the rise and
fall of the age of the fact. For a very
long time, conception was a mystery, the mystery, the mystery
of life. In ancient Greece, Aristotle dissected chicken eggs, which
came first, the chicken or the egg was an actual experiment.
(06:22):
Not until the middle of the seventeenth century did anyone
figure out that people come from eggs too. When the
United States was founded, there were no laws against abortion
before quickening about when a mother can feel the baby kicking.
Somewhere around four months or so later, conception was no
longer a mystery and became known as the facts of life.
Physicians began replacing midwives, and legislatures began making laws that
(06:46):
made the intentional end of a pregnancy a crime. By
nineteen sixty nine, in New York, the only way a
woman could end a pregnancy legally was to have something
called a therapeutic abortion. Mainly she had to convince a
doctor that she was crazy. If you don't give me,
if you don't tell me, I'm g having abortion right now.
But it's go out and jump off the Ronald Bridge.
(07:09):
Well whatever. When I hope that therapeutic abortion, it quots
me more. But the therapy answered the therapeutic abortion than before.
Since this speak out took place, Americans have talked about
(07:30):
abortion a lot for or against, but usually in the
language of rights, the right to choose, or the right
to life. But I've always found that this debate is
also about knowledge. I still care about the questions the
Red Stockings asked. Who can know things? Who's an expert
whose knowledge matters? I decided to go talk to some
(07:52):
of the women who'd been part of that meeting in
nineteen sixty nine to hear them have their say in
the spirit of speaking out way, do you a lot
of water? So my producer Ben and I and one
of our researchers, Olivia Oldham, went to New York to
the apartment of Susan Brown Miller, a feminist best known
for a book about rape called Against Our Will. What
(08:13):
was the question? Brown Miller had first spoken out about
abortion at an earlier meeting. Her friend told her to go.
At first, it was awkward. Then one woman got up.
She said, we've been over this before, and you know,
god damn well that I couldn't find an abortionist and
(08:36):
I had to carry the baby to term and it
was a beautiful boy, but I had to give it away.
So when she said that, the floodgates opened and people
started to go around the room and they were talking
(09:00):
about being led blindfolded to a place in New Jersey
for a mafia protected abortion. They were talking about things
like that, and they were slowly inching up on me.
So I said, well, I've had three abortions, all outside
(09:22):
the continental United States, and my last one was about
six months ago. And when I said that, I really
started to cry because to me, this was the you know,
the first time that abortion was spoken about as a real,
(09:46):
as a real woman's issue, and the problem was not
getting pregnant or not having the protection. Why did you
get pregnant? You know, it was about what we had
to do to secure a safe abortion. As I knew
they were out there somehow, you know, I knew they
were out there. They were out there, safe places to
(10:08):
have abortions, but they were hard to find. They were underground.
But what if they came out above ground? When brown
Miller went to the Red Stockings wrap in the village
in nineteen sixty nine, it was as a reporter and
you said you were asked to speak to testify. Yeah,
and I felt that Well, first of all, I didn't
(10:33):
like it, you know, it was too confessional for me,
you know. But second of all, I felt I could
do us all a bigger favor by writing about it
for the Village Voice, which I did. All the stocking
and writing led to a landmark legal case, which is
where Nancy Stearns came in. She met us Susan Brown
Miller's apartment. She's a lawyer. She'd come out of the
(10:55):
civil rights movement. I mean, challenging the law was the
basis of it and was fundamental, but I didn't know
whether we'd win. At that point, I thought we should win.
Just months after the Red Stockings held that first abortion
speak out in Greenwich Village, Nancy Stearns got involved in
trying to file a lawsuit called Abrahmowitz versus Lefkowitz. The
(11:15):
leading plaintiff was doctor Helen Abrahmowitz, and in the case,
Stearns wanted to sue the state of New York, arguing
that it's ban on abortion depride women of their right
to possess their own persons. She was also making an
argument though, about knowledge that women know. The crucial idea
from the litigation perspective was not necessarily having women as experts,
(11:38):
but having women as plaintiffs, the people who were challenging
the law, not just being sort of passive or we
happened to be there. Stearns wrote the briefs in the case,
but she was young and a little inexperienced, and she
wanted someone on her team who was older and who
could kick ass, So she brought in Florence Kennedy. Flow.
(12:01):
People magazine once called Kennedy the biggest, loudest and indisputably
the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and
radical politics join. Okay, everybody, while my chorus gets together.
Hurry up, chorus, get over here, y'all, hurry up. Flow.
Kennedy died twenty years ago, so we couldn't talk to her,
(12:22):
but for a long time in the nineteen eighties, She
had her own television show on Manhattan Community Access Picture
between two ferns. I swear there are ferns more than
two though the Flow Kennedy Show. Hi, y'all Flow Kennedy here,
and my guest has written she wore a cowboy hat,
(12:44):
a big ten gallon one, groovy jewelry, traumatic eyewear, eccentric, unmistakable.
She was unforgettable. I remember her hats. Yeah, the hats,
coy Yeah, wonderful, cowboy original, no doubt about it. Yes,
I was lucky in a lot of ways. My parents
(13:05):
thought we were absolutely perfect. I'm the opposite of Marilyn Monroe,
who was this golden goddess who thought that she was
a piece of ship, whereas I was a piece of shit,
and I thought I was this bronze mahogany statue. Florence
Kennedy born in Kansas City, graduated from Columbia Law School
in nineteen fifty one. She opened a law firm in
(13:27):
New York. For a long time, she specialized in defending
black artists like Billy Holliday. She also got involved in
the Black Power movement. She defended black panthers, including Hrapp Brown.
She loved to speak in metaphors. In terms of politics,
I am what I would call a generalist, general practitioner.
See when people say, oh, I can work on race stuff,
(13:49):
but I don't want to have anything to do with
the homosexuality. I don't want to deal with prostitution. I
don't want to deal with abortion. My theory is the
way I looked at the pathology of our society and
the pathology of oppression, is that you don't regard yourself
as keeping a clean house if you just make up
the bad don't do anything in the sink anyway. In
(14:11):
nineteen sixty nine, Flow Kennedy, Nancy Stearns and their legal team,
we're preparing that lawsuit against the state of New York
over its ban on abortion. They had to look for
plaintiffs before they could file, so they thought of some
of the women who'd spoken up that night in the
village in nineteen sixty nine, the red stockings wrapped. I
know from my own experience that I had luckily sent
(14:33):
enough to see that a seventeen year old girl who
gets herself pregnant by mistakes because she has not been
avail of birth control information. It's not in a responsible
position to take care of the children. When I listened
to that, I have to work a little bit because
it can be a little hard these days to remember
(14:55):
how new this was, how new this kind of talk was.
Then it's beyond novel. People did not talk about abortion publicly.
That's Nancy Stearns Again. We all knew generally whether we
had illegal abortion are not. We all knew generally what
it was all about. But hearing the details of it,
and particularly I think listening to the women who went
(15:21):
through pregnancy and gave their children their baby up for adoption,
it all just made me angry or in truth. Starns
held meetings all over the city gathering plaintiffs. Amazingly, women
turned up, women stood up, They told their stories, and
they agreed to be deposed on the record. Flow Kennedy
(15:43):
took Susan Brown Miller's deposition. Kennedy and Stearns and the
rest of their team wanted the women to testify in court,
in open court, but the judges, a three judge panel
of men, they didn't want life testimony in their courtrooms
about abortions. They probably thought, well, there's going to be
lots and lots of lots of testimony. You know, we
(16:04):
don't have the time for that, We don't want to
do it. You do it out there and then you
give us paper. But I think they didn't want to
hear from a lot of emotional women speaking out was
something new. But it's important to remember too that so
was the lawsuit itself. Women were not part of the picture,
and nobody was interested in women other than stopping us
from getting abortions. But the court would never decide on
(16:27):
the case because in the spring of nineteen seventy the
New York State Senate legalized abortion. Overnight, New York became
something of an abortion capital. The CDC reported that by
nineteen seventy two, New York City had nearly twice as
many abortions as live births because the legislature made abortion legal.
The courts declared Abrahmwitz versus Lefkowitz moot. The case was
(16:51):
basically thrown out. Florence Kennedy had hoped that the case
would go all the way to the Supreme Court and
change US laws on abortion nationwide. That didn't happen. Instead,
a case out of Texas Rovie Wade got to the
Supreme Court and it would be argued on very different
grounds a right to privacy. But the Red Stockings and
radical feminism left a profound legacy behind consciousness raising and
(17:16):
speaking bitterness. And in the very moment that legacy was
being founded, you could already see too how all this
could backfire if everyone's speaking bitterness. Does everything come down
to a duel of personal stories, one grief pitted against another,
(17:36):
suffering versus suffering. Could it be that this, this endless
duel of bitterness? Could it be that this is what
killed truth? In nineteen sixty nine, radical feminists had argued
(18:02):
that women are the experts about their own bodies. They'd
also written a manifesto. It said, we regard our personal
experience and our feelings about that experience as the basis
for an analysis of our common situation. Another group of
women liked this approach to liberal feminists. Liberal feminists wanted
to get elected to political office and pass new laws
(18:24):
about women based on what women know from their personal experiences.
Laws about abortion, laws about rape, laws about discrimination and
employment and education. They also wanted to amend the Constitution.
In nineteen seventy two, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment
and said to the states for ratification. It's amazing when
(18:47):
you think about it, that it wasn't already law. But
all the IRI really says is that you can't discriminate
on the basis of sex. It had first been introduced
to Congress in nineteen twenty three, and by the middle
of the nineteen seventies it still hadn't been ratified, but
it looked like it was just about to become law.
It had been ratified by thirty five states, only three
short of the number needed. Meanwhile, liberal feminists had gotten
(19:11):
really ambitious. They decided to hold a national meeting, a
giant speak out. The point of the conference was to
adopt a national plan of action. The National Women's Conference
opened in November nineteen seventy seven in the Houston Coliseum.
(19:33):
Think of it as a second Constitutional Convention, except much
bigger and with women. It was a grand and glorious
right accompanying the torch on its long journey. Weeks earlier,
a torch had been lit in Seneca Falls, New York,
the state of the first Women's Rights Convention that had
(19:53):
been held in eighteen forty eight. Then a relay of
more than two thousand female athletes from Lean and lanky
marathon runners to brawny field hockey players carried that torch
twenty six hundred miles to Houston. It was meant to
change history. Two thousand delegates from fifty states gathered in Houston,
along with twenty thousand attendees, including Susan Brownmiller and Florence Kennedy.
(20:16):
Maya Angelou gave the convocation, we American women view our
history with equanimity. We allow the positive achievement to inspire
us and the negative omissions to teach us. We recognize
the accomplishments of our sisters, those famous and hallowed women
(20:36):
of history, and those unknown and unsung women whose strength
have given birth to our strength. Three First Ladies were
there too, Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and the current
First Lady, Rosalind Carter. Jimmy sorry that he couldn't be
here today, and I wanted to come and be with here.
(21:04):
In fact, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. And
and I trust that you are not going to say
he said a woman to do a man's job. Members
of Congress turned up to Bella Abzug and Barbara Jordan.
She was the keynote speaker and There were celebrities, Margaret Mead,
(21:27):
the anthropologist, Billy Jean King, the tennis player, and Jean Stapleton,
she'd played Edith on all in the family. Gloria Steinham,
a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, was there,
and so was the president of the Girl Scouts of America,
who called the meeting to order using a gavel once
used by Susan B. Anthony, and I rise to advance
(21:49):
this body in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. A
lot of the women at that conference were there to celebrate,
including Anne Richards, later the Governor of Texas. One of
her daughters, then just a little girl, would one day
serve as president of Planned Parenthood. On behalf amound matters.
(22:10):
Who cannot find women in the history texts of this
country in the elementary skills, I gotta say, you still
can't find many women in those books today, and you
also really can't find much about the National Women's Convention.
There were huge tensions in that cavernous hall in Houston.
(22:30):
Madam chair pro family, pro life delegates are being denied
points of privilege. I asked, moment, please, justin, momma, please
the parliamentary and instructed the chair. The chair had to
pound that gavel a lot just for starters. Think about this.
One out of every five elected delegates to the Convention
(22:52):
opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. There were huge debates on
the floor about a resolution supporting lesbian and gay rights.
This was a movement founded on the idea of women's
common knowledge, their common personal experiences, but it had a
fatal weakness because one experience for all women. There wasn't
one experience. Black feminists and Latina feminists in particular, rejected
(23:14):
that premise. At the conference, women of color formed a
minority caucus. Some of their thinking was informed by black
feminists from Boston who would offered a theory of what
would come to be called intersectionality. They said, we have
in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we
are dealing with the implications of race and class as
well as sex. That week in Houston, a lot of
(23:36):
that nuance got lost and there was a lot of fighting.
One resolution in particular rent the hall asunder Resolution twenty one.
Next item on the agenda is the Resolution on Reproductive Freedom.
It included a call for sex education and insurance coverage
of both contraception and abortion, and an endorsement of the
(23:57):
Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. The first speakers
rose in support. Then the conservative delegates spoke out, and
I rise in opposition to this resolution. If the American
women do not drive out this flaw in the philosophy
of what is called a feminist movement, drive out of
(24:17):
flaws suggesting that they can kill people that are less
powerful than them than they have become much worse oppressors
than any of the men that they accuse of oppressing them.
Please come to order, Please come to order. It took
a while to quiet down the crowd long enough to
call the roll, but the chairmanaged it encounter the votes.
(24:40):
The resolution on reproductive freedom is adopted. Please come to
(25:02):
order and be seated. A group of pro life women
rush the stage carrying a giant photograph of a fe
Other women fell to their knees weeping, and that singing
they're singing. All we are saying is give life a chance.
Fifteen hundred reporters attended the conference, but strangely, the whole
(25:24):
thing seems to have been swallowed up by the earth itself.
I ask you, have you ever heard of the nineteen
seventy seven National Women's Conference. I'm guessing not reporters covered it,
but given the ambition of the thing, the coverage was scant.
NBC News included a report in its News Hour, a
conference's stand on the Equal Rights Amendment will be incorporated
(25:45):
into a national plan of Acting, a set of legislative
proposals to be sent to the President and Congress. The
question now is how seriously will all those men take
the suggestions made by all these women. It would turn
out not very seriously. But Houston wasn't about men versus women?
Who was about women versus women? Mainly because conservative women
(26:09):
organized a counter conference across town in the Astrodome. The
organizers described their assembly as a pro God, pro life,
pro family rally. The leader of this gathering was Phylish Slaughly,
a mother of six from Missouri with a perfect blonde
buffant who very often dressed impeccably in a pink suit
(26:29):
and pumps. Slaughly was a political genius, and she devoted
all of her talents to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.
She founded a national organization called Stop ear. She told
her followers era means abortion. She also rallied women to
her movement by tying the era to rights for gay
men and lesbians. In Houston, she claimed she'd been banned
(26:51):
by the National Women's Convention, and on its third day
she held a press conference to say the conservative women
hadn't had the chance to speak their truth. If you
were at the convention last night, I think you also
must have been impressed with the fact that there really
isn't any debate on the equal rights. Most of the
(27:12):
speakers at the pro life, pro family counter conference spoke
the language of radical feminism, the language they'd adopted, a
language that by now had suffused the culture and altered
the nature of political conflict. We are busy engaging raising
the consciousness of the fabric all over America, and we
are in the business of raising the consciousness of our
(27:34):
ray makers in Roshington, and when Philish Slaughly took the stage,
this crowd went wild. Many had been to the other conference,
the National Women's Convention, but now they were home with family.
There are many differences between this meeting and the one
in that other hall today. I'm very proud that they
(27:56):
excluded me from that convention. The whole thing was designed
as a media event, a charade to go through the
motions of these funny state conferences and national conferences in
order to pass resolutions that were pre written and prepackaged
a year and a half ago, to tell league Congress
(28:19):
and the state legislatures that this is what American women want.
By coming here today, you have shown that that is
not what American women want. The women in the astrodom
waved bibles, they wept, and they spoke out, and they
endorsed their own resolutions, including their own version of an
(28:42):
Equal Rights Amendment, Equal Rights for Fetuses. Therefore, be it
resolved that the Congress enact and the States ratify a
mandatory Human Life Amendment to the Constitution to protect all
persons born and unborn. Some concession, it resolved that we
oppose the modification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
(29:05):
All in favors say I all right. Therefore, be it
resolved that homosexuality, lesbianism, or prostitution shall not be taught, rarified,
or otherwise promoted as acceptable through the laws of society
through the adoption of children are within the institutions such
(29:27):
as our stools. All in favor SII. By rallying conservative
women against the Equal Rights Amendment, largely on the back
of arguments about abortion and homosexuality, shlaughly managed to turn
the tide against the ear a ding Dong the Witches
Dead Erie, opponents saying when word came of its defeat
(29:47):
five years later in nineteen eighty two, the National Women's
Convention had failed and was soon forgotten. In the nineteen sixties,
radical feminists argued that the personal is political, that live
(30:09):
experience the speaking of bitterness counts as evidence. In the
nineteen seventies, liberal white feminists embraced this idea too, and
so did African American feminists, and so too, in the
end did conservative women, who very soon would help elect
a conservative to the White House. It's morning again in America. Today,
(30:31):
more men and women will go to work than ever
before in our country's history. In nineteen eighty, three, years
after the dueling women's conferences in Houston, Ronald Reagan was
elected president. Earlier, as governor of California, he'd signed a
bill liberalizing abortion laws, but he'd since become a staunch
ally of Philish Lafley's. In nineteen eighty he ran on
a GOP platform that included a plank dedicating the party
(30:54):
to the right to life for unborn children. This nation
cannot continue turning a blind eye and a deaf ear
to the taking of some four thousand unborn children's lives
every day. That's one every one second. One person who
was really affected by that speech of Reagan's was a
(31:15):
doctor named Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson had for a long time
conducted abortions, but he changed his mind about abortion, he said,
after the development of ultrasound. Reagan's speech convinced him to
make a film released in nineteen eighty five. It was
another kind of consciousness raising. Now, for the first time,
(31:36):
we have the technology to see abortion from the victim's
vantage point. The film is called The Silent Scream, and
so for the first time, we are going to watch
a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed and destroyed
(32:04):
by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist. Nathanson was
a doctor, but he narrates the film as if he
is a lawyer eliciting testimony from the fetus its personal experience.
He's a ventriloquist speaking out the fetus's truth. Once again,
we see the child's mouth wide open, in a silent scream.
(32:28):
In this particular freeze frame, this is the silent scream
of a child threatened him imminently with extinction. Prominent physicians,
obstetricians and gynecologists criticized the film as misleading and inaccurate.
Said that the cortex of a fetus of this age
(32:49):
wasn't developed enough for the fetus to feel pain, and
of course the film simply erases the body of the woman.
Most of the film involves Nathanson showing plastic models or
ultrasound film from inside the uterus, Lots of models of fetuses,
lots of fetuses inside uteruses, but not really inside women's bodies.
Barely see any women, and none of them speak. They're
(33:12):
utterly silent. Reagan saw the film and talked about how
much it had affected him. He said he wished every
member of Congress would watch it. Silent Scream aired, among
other places, on Jerry Falwell's TV show, and it was
also widely shown at high schools across the country. But
pretty often the broader public just argued over what they'd seen.
(33:34):
They didn't really disagree. They argued absolutely abortion had become
either all one thing, a brutal murder or all another thing,
just another medical procedure. This had become a debate about
moral absolutes, about who is good and who was evil.
(33:54):
It had also got bound together with another movement, the
victims rights movement. Well lot a victim to testify a
criminal may go free. The victim's rights movement began in
nineteen seventy five with the publication of a book called
The Victims by a law and order conservative from the
Heritage Foundation named Frank Carrington. He wanted laws that would
(34:17):
be tougher on criminal defendants and harsher punishments for the convicted.
He and other conservatives were waging what's known as the
War on Crime. A lot of feminists joined that war.
They wanted more aggressive prosecutions and stricter sentences for violent
crimes against women and children. Believe the women, they said,
listen to their testimony, not just about abortion, but about
(34:41):
rape and domestic violence, and child abuse and more. And
then in asking for harsher punishments for men, they made
common cause with conservatives. The innocent victims of crime have
frequently been overlooked by our criminal justice system, and their
pleas for justice have gone unheated and their wounds, personal, emotional,
(35:02):
and financial, have gone unattended. This is Ronald Reagan speaking
in the Rose Garden, April nineteen eighty two. So I
am signing today an executive order establishing the President's Task
Force on Victims of Crime. Reagan's task Force recommended that
victims of crime be allowed to speak during sentencing hearings
to explain the nature the scale of their suffering. This
(35:23):
kind of statement came to be called victim impact evidence.
As a matter of intellectual genealogy, it comes from consciousness,
raising from speaking, bitterness from speaking your truth. Let the
victims speak. The Me Too movement is founded on the
evidentiary principles of the victim's rights movement. Believe the women
(35:46):
speak your truth. In twenty eighteen, Larry Nasser, an Olympic
gymnastics coach, was convicted of sexual assault the abuse of children.
His sentencing hearing in a Michigan courtroom was broadcast on
live television. Something that doesn't happen very often, and something
that really doesn't happen very often. The judge allowed one
(36:07):
hundred and fifty six women to deliver victim impact statements.
Thank you, what would you like me to know? For
the last year I have lived behind the shadows of
the name Jane Doe. I was afraid to be identified
as myself and didn't want to accept this as my story.
(36:27):
But I can't push it off anymore. This happened to me,
and I have a name. My name is Jassie Powell. Here, honor.
If it's okay with you, I'll be addressing the dependent
directly for a lot of this statement. You may I
still remember the first time I ever saw you. Larry
March twenty sixth twenty Their statements are harrowing. They're hard
(36:54):
to listen to the courage it took to say those things,
but the whole thing is also weird. More than one
hundred and fifty women delivered impact statements in court. Nasa
had been charged with sexual assaulting only ten of them.
By this point, he had also already pled guilty, and
he'd already been sentenced to sixty years in prison on
(37:16):
child pornography charges. So what were all those statements? That
is sentencing hearing about in a courtroom cluttered with cameras.
One hundred and fifty six women spoke of the harm
Nasser had done to them, But these were crimes for
which he had not been tried. On Twitter, using the
hashtag me too, people expressed relief and excitement and gratitude
(37:39):
to the judge. They thought she was a hero. But
a lot of legal scholars were shocked at the way
the judge handled her courtroom, and at how watching the
sentencing hearing on television felt something like watching a daytime
talk show. It's not that those legal scholars questioned the
suffering of the women who spoke that day, or the
truth of what they had to say, or even that
(38:01):
they needed to say. It is that they questioned the
place of those statements in this courtroom. Saying this out
loud to you is extremely uncomfortable for me, and I'm
sure for everyone who is listening it is supposed to
be uncomfortable. I would be doing myself and the other
(38:26):
brave women here a great disservice by shying away from
what is now my truth. The Me Too movement is
both lifted and burdened by the history that came before it,
a history that carries this idea. Everything I say is true,
(38:46):
everything you say is a lie. To question me is
to do me harm if we disagree. Whichever of us
has suffered more wins. Fighting child abuse and sexual assault
is crucial. No question those movements have done great good,
but that doesn't mean they haven't also contributed to an
(39:07):
epistemological chaos seized by absolutism. Proceed, please, my name is
Christine Blasi Ford. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for
Brett Kavanaugh, people wore buttons that read I believe Christine
blasi Ford. I tried to yell for help. When I did,
(39:30):
Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me
from yelling. It was hard for me to breathe, and
I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.
She spoke her truth, and then he spoke his. I
was not at the party described by doctor Ford. People tweeted,
(39:51):
I believe Brett Kavanaugh. I'm here today to tell the truth.
I've never sexually assaulted anyone. What was the truth? Honestly,
it was hard to say for the record. I believed her.
I believed her because of my personal experiences. I believed
(40:13):
her because my experiences of being a person in the
world are a lot more like her experiences than like his.
But is that enough? I don't think that's enough. People
keep on speaking bitterness with absolutism of the abortion debate.
This divide though it isn't about abortion. Actually it's not
(40:36):
even a divide, because here's the thing everyone seems to
agree on. Speak your truth. So who killed truth? Maybe? Everyone?
(41:02):
The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabbin and
Bennette of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
exact producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez
are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music
by Mattheist Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Simfinett. Many
of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior on
the Star Genette Foundation. Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson,
(41:26):
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis
and Maurice Emmanuel Parrott. The Last Archive is brought to
you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
the American Repertory Theater, the Slesaner Library, the Flow Kennedy
Show produced by Don Lynn, the Internet Archive, Alex Allenson
and the Bridge Sound in Stage, and to Simon leek Head.
(41:47):
Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Cane and Carl mcgliori,
Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants
are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henriet O'Reilly, Oliver Riskin Cutz
and Emily Spector. I'm Jilliport
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go. A quarter of the mind, lined with shelves,
cluttered with proof, A purple cowboy hat. Oh, someone's put
up here on the wall poster, it says, the personal
(00:36):
is political. I love those day glow flowers. This place,
this warehouse, stores the facts that matter, and matters of fact,
the evidence of the past. It's all that stands between
a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies
in a time between now and then. The sign on
(00:59):
the door reads the last Archive. Step out that door
to Greenwich Village, across the passage of time to a
Friday night, March twenty first, nineteen sixty nine. Walk down
West fourth Street and up the steps to the Washington
(01:19):
Square Methodist Church, a cathedral. It'll cost you two dollars
to get in a donation to the Red Stockings radical feminists,
best known for staging a protest at the Miss America pageant.
There are three hundred people seated in the church, mostly women.
It's a handful of men here too. Oh and lucky
(01:41):
for us, there's a tape recorder up there on the altar.
All of us are members of the Women's Liberation Group
of New York City, and we discovered that by just
talking about our own experience, about our own lives, that
by talking about this altogether in our group, that we
(02:02):
were able to find out a lot more about reality
than by talking about all those objects. The thing we
would talk about our own abortion, and that was like
our plans for the satire. So much of how people
think about truth today comes from this one meeting. Like
water down a waterfall, twelve women got up to speak,
(02:26):
one by one. They passed a microphone. They testified for
more than three hours. They were mad as hell. A
month earlier, a committee of the New York Legislature had
considered whether or not to make abortion legal in the state.
The committee brought in experts to testify. Fourteen men and
one woman. Anne the Red Stockings and other activists had
(02:50):
stormed the committee meeting. They were camouflaged in dresses and stockings,
they said, and they'd shouted, let's hear from the real experts. Women.
They tried to tell their stories without much success. So
now they were here in this church in Greenwich Village
to actually have their say. The tape it's kind of
crazy to listen to the man is the one that
(03:13):
scrowls you and then when you turn to him and say, hey, look, sweetheart,
I'm pregnant. How do you know it was me? You
neverics love with anyone else. One of the things I
love about this tape is that it's not like women
crying in front of Oprah or something. It's more like
stand up comedy, but confrontational, courageous. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce
(03:36):
Awry second all the sand. It's just what am I
gonna do? What I is he going to do? What
am I going to do? These are the experts, the
people that are sitting here, the people that are in
the audience who have had the abortion. But no one
wants to listen to us. I mean, you know, we
(04:04):
are the only expert. They spoke out that night and
nighteen sixty nine because they wanted to change the law.
They'd also decided to talk publicly about their abortions because
some of them had been reading the writings of the
communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. Maoists believed in the practice of
speaking bitterness, describing your oppression, and blaming your oppressor. That's
(04:29):
what those women were doing in that church. They were
speaking bitterness. They called it consciousness raising. They also called
it rapping or a speak out. I'm sure that there
are many many women in this audience that have had
the same experience. So I know, you know, freak or
that it just happened to me, it's happened. Who can
eat everybody? You know? So if I get up and
(04:51):
I say it, you know, maybe everybody can get up
and say it, and we all get up and say it,
you know, maybe they'll do something about changing the situously.
Welcome to the last archive, the show about how we
know what we know, how we used to know things,
and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
(05:14):
trying to solve a Who've done it? Who killed truth?
In this episode, I want to try to find a
way to reckon with the consequences of a whole theory
of knowledge. Speak your truth, radical feminist said in the
Village in nineteen sixty nine, Speak your truth. Sure, it
sounds good, it sounds great, until you start to ask,
(05:37):
what if someone else's truth is different than yours. No
legislature would recognize my right to speak as an expert,
because it happened right in my body. Where a child grows,
it happens in my body later on, that I don't
want that child, and that I have to go through
a period of time in which I have no function
(05:59):
in this society. I've been talking all season about the
end of the age of mystery and the rise and
fall of the age of the fact. For a very
long time, conception was a mystery, the mystery, the mystery
of life. In ancient Greece, Aristotle dissected chicken eggs, which
came first, the chicken or the egg was an actual experiment.
(06:22):
Not until the middle of the seventeenth century did anyone
figure out that people come from eggs too. When the
United States was founded, there were no laws against abortion
before quickening about when a mother can feel the baby kicking.
Somewhere around four months or so later, conception was no
longer a mystery and became known as the facts of life.
Physicians began replacing midwives, and legislatures began making laws that
(06:46):
made the intentional end of a pregnancy a crime. By
nineteen sixty nine, in New York, the only way a
woman could end a pregnancy legally was to have something
called a therapeutic abortion. Mainly she had to convince a
doctor that she was crazy. If you don't give me,
if you don't tell me, I'm g having abortion right now.
But it's go out and jump off the Ronald Bridge.
(07:09):
Well whatever. When I hope that therapeutic abortion, it quots
me more. But the therapy answered the therapeutic abortion than before.
Since this speak out took place, Americans have talked about
(07:30):
abortion a lot for or against, but usually in the
language of rights, the right to choose, or the right
to life. But I've always found that this debate is
also about knowledge. I still care about the questions the
Red Stockings asked. Who can know things? Who's an expert
whose knowledge matters? I decided to go talk to some
(07:52):
of the women who'd been part of that meeting in
nineteen sixty nine to hear them have their say in
the spirit of speaking out way, do you a lot
of water? So my producer Ben and I and one
of our researchers, Olivia Oldham, went to New York to
the apartment of Susan Brown Miller, a feminist best known
for a book about rape called Against Our Will. What
(08:13):
was the question? Brown Miller had first spoken out about
abortion at an earlier meeting. Her friend told her to go.
At first, it was awkward. Then one woman got up.
She said, we've been over this before, and you know,
god damn well that I couldn't find an abortionist and
(08:36):
I had to carry the baby to term and it
was a beautiful boy, but I had to give it away.
So when she said that, the floodgates opened and people
started to go around the room and they were talking
(09:00):
about being led blindfolded to a place in New Jersey
for a mafia protected abortion. They were talking about things
like that, and they were slowly inching up on me.
So I said, well, I've had three abortions, all outside
(09:22):
the continental United States, and my last one was about
six months ago. And when I said that, I really
started to cry because to me, this was the you know,
the first time that abortion was spoken about as a real,
(09:46):
as a real woman's issue, and the problem was not
getting pregnant or not having the protection. Why did you
get pregnant? You know, it was about what we had
to do to secure a safe abortion. As I knew
they were out there somehow, you know, I knew they
were out there. They were out there, safe places to
(10:08):
have abortions, but they were hard to find. They were underground.
But what if they came out above ground? When brown
Miller went to the Red Stockings wrap in the village
in nineteen sixty nine, it was as a reporter and
you said you were asked to speak to testify. Yeah,
and I felt that Well, first of all, I didn't
(10:33):
like it, you know, it was too confessional for me,
you know. But second of all, I felt I could
do us all a bigger favor by writing about it
for the Village Voice, which I did. All the stocking
and writing led to a landmark legal case, which is
where Nancy Stearns came in. She met us Susan Brown
Miller's apartment. She's a lawyer. She'd come out of the
(10:55):
civil rights movement. I mean, challenging the law was the
basis of it and was fundamental, but I didn't know
whether we'd win. At that point, I thought we should win.
Just months after the Red Stockings held that first abortion
speak out in Greenwich Village, Nancy Stearns got involved in
trying to file a lawsuit called Abrahmowitz versus Lefkowitz. The
(11:15):
leading plaintiff was doctor Helen Abrahmowitz, and in the case,
Stearns wanted to sue the state of New York, arguing
that it's ban on abortion depride women of their right
to possess their own persons. She was also making an
argument though, about knowledge that women know. The crucial idea
from the litigation perspective was not necessarily having women as experts,
(11:38):
but having women as plaintiffs, the people who were challenging
the law, not just being sort of passive or we
happened to be there. Stearns wrote the briefs in the case,
but she was young and a little inexperienced, and she
wanted someone on her team who was older and who
could kick ass, So she brought in Florence Kennedy. Flow.
(12:01):
People magazine once called Kennedy the biggest, loudest and indisputably
the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and
radical politics join. Okay, everybody, while my chorus gets together.
Hurry up, chorus, get over here, y'all, hurry up. Flow.
Kennedy died twenty years ago, so we couldn't talk to her,
(12:22):
but for a long time in the nineteen eighties, She
had her own television show on Manhattan Community Access Picture
between two ferns. I swear there are ferns more than
two though the Flow Kennedy Show. Hi, y'all Flow Kennedy here,
and my guest has written she wore a cowboy hat,
(12:44):
a big ten gallon one, groovy jewelry, traumatic eyewear, eccentric, unmistakable.
She was unforgettable. I remember her hats. Yeah, the hats,
coy Yeah, wonderful, cowboy original, no doubt about it. Yes,
I was lucky in a lot of ways. My parents
(13:05):
thought we were absolutely perfect. I'm the opposite of Marilyn Monroe,
who was this golden goddess who thought that she was
a piece of ship, whereas I was a piece of shit,
and I thought I was this bronze mahogany statue. Florence
Kennedy born in Kansas City, graduated from Columbia Law School
in nineteen fifty one. She opened a law firm in
(13:27):
New York. For a long time, she specialized in defending
black artists like Billy Holliday. She also got involved in
the Black Power movement. She defended black panthers, including Hrapp Brown.
She loved to speak in metaphors. In terms of politics,
I am what I would call a generalist, general practitioner.
See when people say, oh, I can work on race stuff,
(13:49):
but I don't want to have anything to do with
the homosexuality. I don't want to deal with prostitution. I
don't want to deal with abortion. My theory is the
way I looked at the pathology of our society and
the pathology of oppression, is that you don't regard yourself
as keeping a clean house if you just make up
the bad don't do anything in the sink anyway. In
(14:11):
nineteen sixty nine, Flow Kennedy, Nancy Stearns and their legal team,
we're preparing that lawsuit against the state of New York
over its ban on abortion. They had to look for
plaintiffs before they could file, so they thought of some
of the women who'd spoken up that night in the
village in nineteen sixty nine, the red stockings wrapped. I
know from my own experience that I had luckily sent
(14:33):
enough to see that a seventeen year old girl who
gets herself pregnant by mistakes because she has not been
avail of birth control information. It's not in a responsible
position to take care of the children. When I listened
to that, I have to work a little bit because
it can be a little hard these days to remember
(14:55):
how new this was, how new this kind of talk was.
Then it's beyond novel. People did not talk about abortion publicly.
That's Nancy Stearns Again. We all knew generally whether we
had illegal abortion are not. We all knew generally what
it was all about. But hearing the details of it,
and particularly I think listening to the women who went
(15:21):
through pregnancy and gave their children their baby up for adoption,
it all just made me angry or in truth. Starns
held meetings all over the city gathering plaintiffs. Amazingly, women
turned up, women stood up, They told their stories, and
they agreed to be deposed on the record. Flow Kennedy
(15:43):
took Susan Brown Miller's deposition. Kennedy and Stearns and the
rest of their team wanted the women to testify in court,
in open court, but the judges, a three judge panel
of men, they didn't want life testimony in their courtrooms
about abortions. They probably thought, well, there's going to be
lots and lots of lots of testimony. You know, we
(16:04):
don't have the time for that, We don't want to
do it. You do it out there and then you
give us paper. But I think they didn't want to
hear from a lot of emotional women speaking out was
something new. But it's important to remember too that so
was the lawsuit itself. Women were not part of the picture,
and nobody was interested in women other than stopping us
from getting abortions. But the court would never decide on
(16:27):
the case because in the spring of nineteen seventy the
New York State Senate legalized abortion. Overnight, New York became
something of an abortion capital. The CDC reported that by
nineteen seventy two, New York City had nearly twice as
many abortions as live births because the legislature made abortion legal.
The courts declared Abrahmwitz versus Lefkowitz moot. The case was
(16:51):
basically thrown out. Florence Kennedy had hoped that the case
would go all the way to the Supreme Court and
change US laws on abortion nationwide. That didn't happen. Instead,
a case out of Texas Rovie Wade got to the
Supreme Court and it would be argued on very different
grounds a right to privacy. But the Red Stockings and
radical feminism left a profound legacy behind consciousness raising and
(17:16):
speaking bitterness. And in the very moment that legacy was
being founded, you could already see too how all this
could backfire if everyone's speaking bitterness. Does everything come down
to a duel of personal stories, one grief pitted against another,
(17:36):
suffering versus suffering. Could it be that this, this endless
duel of bitterness? Could it be that this is what
killed truth? In nineteen sixty nine, radical feminists had argued
(18:02):
that women are the experts about their own bodies. They'd
also written a manifesto. It said, we regard our personal
experience and our feelings about that experience as the basis
for an analysis of our common situation. Another group of
women liked this approach to liberal feminists. Liberal feminists wanted
to get elected to political office and pass new laws
(18:24):
about women based on what women know from their personal experiences.
Laws about abortion, laws about rape, laws about discrimination and
employment and education. They also wanted to amend the Constitution.
In nineteen seventy two, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment
and said to the states for ratification. It's amazing when
(18:47):
you think about it, that it wasn't already law. But
all the IRI really says is that you can't discriminate
on the basis of sex. It had first been introduced
to Congress in nineteen twenty three, and by the middle
of the nineteen seventies it still hadn't been ratified, but
it looked like it was just about to become law.
It had been ratified by thirty five states, only three
short of the number needed. Meanwhile, liberal feminists had gotten
(19:11):
really ambitious. They decided to hold a national meeting, a
giant speak out. The point of the conference was to
adopt a national plan of action. The National Women's Conference
opened in November nineteen seventy seven in the Houston Coliseum.
(19:33):
Think of it as a second Constitutional Convention, except much
bigger and with women. It was a grand and glorious
right accompanying the torch on its long journey. Weeks earlier,
a torch had been lit in Seneca Falls, New York,
the state of the first Women's Rights Convention that had
(19:53):
been held in eighteen forty eight. Then a relay of
more than two thousand female athletes from Lean and lanky
marathon runners to brawny field hockey players carried that torch
twenty six hundred miles to Houston. It was meant to
change history. Two thousand delegates from fifty states gathered in Houston,
along with twenty thousand attendees, including Susan Brownmiller and Florence Kennedy.
(20:16):
Maya Angelou gave the convocation, we American women view our
history with equanimity. We allow the positive achievement to inspire
us and the negative omissions to teach us. We recognize
the accomplishments of our sisters, those famous and hallowed women
(20:36):
of history, and those unknown and unsung women whose strength
have given birth to our strength. Three First Ladies were
there too, Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and the current
First Lady, Rosalind Carter. Jimmy sorry that he couldn't be
here today, and I wanted to come and be with here.
(21:04):
In fact, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. And
and I trust that you are not going to say
he said a woman to do a man's job. Members
of Congress turned up to Bella Abzug and Barbara Jordan.
She was the keynote speaker and There were celebrities, Margaret Mead,
(21:27):
the anthropologist, Billy Jean King, the tennis player, and Jean Stapleton,
she'd played Edith on all in the family. Gloria Steinham,
a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, was there,
and so was the president of the Girl Scouts of America,
who called the meeting to order using a gavel once
used by Susan B. Anthony, and I rise to advance
(21:49):
this body in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. A
lot of the women at that conference were there to celebrate,
including Anne Richards, later the Governor of Texas. One of
her daughters, then just a little girl, would one day
serve as president of Planned Parenthood. On behalf amound matters.
(22:10):
Who cannot find women in the history texts of this
country in the elementary skills, I gotta say, you still
can't find many women in those books today, and you
also really can't find much about the National Women's Convention.
There were huge tensions in that cavernous hall in Houston.
(22:30):
Madam chair pro family, pro life delegates are being denied
points of privilege. I asked, moment, please, justin, momma, please
the parliamentary and instructed the chair. The chair had to
pound that gavel a lot just for starters. Think about this.
One out of every five elected delegates to the Convention
(22:52):
opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. There were huge debates on
the floor about a resolution supporting lesbian and gay rights.
This was a movement founded on the idea of women's
common knowledge, their common personal experiences, but it had a
fatal weakness because one experience for all women. There wasn't
one experience. Black feminists and Latina feminists in particular, rejected
(23:14):
that premise. At the conference, women of color formed a
minority caucus. Some of their thinking was informed by black
feminists from Boston who would offered a theory of what
would come to be called intersectionality. They said, we have
in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we
are dealing with the implications of race and class as
well as sex. That week in Houston, a lot of
(23:36):
that nuance got lost and there was a lot of fighting.
One resolution in particular rent the hall asunder Resolution twenty one.
Next item on the agenda is the Resolution on Reproductive Freedom.
It included a call for sex education and insurance coverage
of both contraception and abortion, and an endorsement of the
(23:57):
Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. The first speakers
rose in support. Then the conservative delegates spoke out, and
I rise in opposition to this resolution. If the American
women do not drive out this flaw in the philosophy
of what is called a feminist movement, drive out of
(24:17):
flaws suggesting that they can kill people that are less
powerful than them than they have become much worse oppressors
than any of the men that they accuse of oppressing them.
Please come to order, Please come to order. It took
a while to quiet down the crowd long enough to
call the roll, but the chairmanaged it encounter the votes.
(24:40):
The resolution on reproductive freedom is adopted. Please come to
(25:02):
order and be seated. A group of pro life women
rush the stage carrying a giant photograph of a fe
Other women fell to their knees weeping, and that singing
they're singing. All we are saying is give life a chance.
Fifteen hundred reporters attended the conference, but strangely, the whole
(25:24):
thing seems to have been swallowed up by the earth itself.
I ask you, have you ever heard of the nineteen
seventy seven National Women's Conference. I'm guessing not reporters covered it,
but given the ambition of the thing, the coverage was scant.
NBC News included a report in its News Hour, a
conference's stand on the Equal Rights Amendment will be incorporated
(25:45):
into a national plan of Acting, a set of legislative
proposals to be sent to the President and Congress. The
question now is how seriously will all those men take
the suggestions made by all these women. It would turn
out not very seriously. But Houston wasn't about men versus women?
Who was about women versus women? Mainly because conservative women
(26:09):
organized a counter conference across town in the Astrodome. The
organizers described their assembly as a pro God, pro life,
pro family rally. The leader of this gathering was Phylish Slaughly,
a mother of six from Missouri with a perfect blonde
buffant who very often dressed impeccably in a pink suit
(26:29):
and pumps. Slaughly was a political genius, and she devoted
all of her talents to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.
She founded a national organization called Stop ear. She told
her followers era means abortion. She also rallied women to
her movement by tying the era to rights for gay
men and lesbians. In Houston, she claimed she'd been banned
(26:51):
by the National Women's Convention, and on its third day
she held a press conference to say the conservative women
hadn't had the chance to speak their truth. If you
were at the convention last night, I think you also
must have been impressed with the fact that there really
isn't any debate on the equal rights. Most of the
(27:12):
speakers at the pro life, pro family counter conference spoke
the language of radical feminism, the language they'd adopted, a
language that by now had suffused the culture and altered
the nature of political conflict. We are busy engaging raising
the consciousness of the fabric all over America, and we
are in the business of raising the consciousness of our
(27:34):
ray makers in Roshington, and when Philish Slaughly took the stage,
this crowd went wild. Many had been to the other conference,
the National Women's Convention, but now they were home with family.
There are many differences between this meeting and the one
in that other hall today. I'm very proud that they
(27:56):
excluded me from that convention. The whole thing was designed
as a media event, a charade to go through the
motions of these funny state conferences and national conferences in
order to pass resolutions that were pre written and prepackaged
a year and a half ago, to tell league Congress
(28:19):
and the state legislatures that this is what American women want.
By coming here today, you have shown that that is
not what American women want. The women in the astrodom
waved bibles, they wept, and they spoke out, and they
endorsed their own resolutions, including their own version of an
(28:42):
Equal Rights Amendment, Equal Rights for Fetuses. Therefore, be it
resolved that the Congress enact and the States ratify a
mandatory Human Life Amendment to the Constitution to protect all
persons born and unborn. Some concession, it resolved that we
oppose the modification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
(29:05):
All in favors say I all right. Therefore, be it
resolved that homosexuality, lesbianism, or prostitution shall not be taught, rarified,
or otherwise promoted as acceptable through the laws of society
through the adoption of children are within the institutions such
(29:27):
as our stools. All in favor SII. By rallying conservative
women against the Equal Rights Amendment, largely on the back
of arguments about abortion and homosexuality, shlaughly managed to turn
the tide against the ear a ding Dong the Witches
Dead Erie, opponents saying when word came of its defeat
(29:47):
five years later in nineteen eighty two, the National Women's
Convention had failed and was soon forgotten. In the nineteen sixties,
radical feminists argued that the personal is political, that live
(30:09):
experience the speaking of bitterness counts as evidence. In the
nineteen seventies, liberal white feminists embraced this idea too, and
so did African American feminists, and so too, in the
end did conservative women, who very soon would help elect
a conservative to the White House. It's morning again in America. Today,
(30:31):
more men and women will go to work than ever
before in our country's history. In nineteen eighty, three, years
after the dueling women's conferences in Houston, Ronald Reagan was
elected president. Earlier, as governor of California, he'd signed a
bill liberalizing abortion laws, but he'd since become a staunch
ally of Philish Lafley's. In nineteen eighty he ran on
a GOP platform that included a plank dedicating the party
(30:54):
to the right to life for unborn children. This nation
cannot continue turning a blind eye and a deaf ear
to the taking of some four thousand unborn children's lives
every day. That's one every one second. One person who
was really affected by that speech of Reagan's was a
(31:15):
doctor named Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson had for a long time
conducted abortions, but he changed his mind about abortion, he said,
after the development of ultrasound. Reagan's speech convinced him to
make a film released in nineteen eighty five. It was
another kind of consciousness raising. Now, for the first time,
(31:36):
we have the technology to see abortion from the victim's
vantage point. The film is called The Silent Scream, and
so for the first time, we are going to watch
a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed and destroyed
(32:04):
by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist. Nathanson was
a doctor, but he narrates the film as if he
is a lawyer eliciting testimony from the fetus its personal experience.
He's a ventriloquist speaking out the fetus's truth. Once again,
we see the child's mouth wide open, in a silent scream.
(32:28):
In this particular freeze frame, this is the silent scream
of a child threatened him imminently with extinction. Prominent physicians,
obstetricians and gynecologists criticized the film as misleading and inaccurate.
Said that the cortex of a fetus of this age
(32:49):
wasn't developed enough for the fetus to feel pain, and
of course the film simply erases the body of the woman.
Most of the film involves Nathanson showing plastic models or
ultrasound film from inside the uterus, Lots of models of fetuses,
lots of fetuses inside uteruses, but not really inside women's bodies.
Barely see any women, and none of them speak. They're
(33:12):
utterly silent. Reagan saw the film and talked about how
much it had affected him. He said he wished every
member of Congress would watch it. Silent Scream aired, among
other places, on Jerry Falwell's TV show, and it was
also widely shown at high schools across the country. But
pretty often the broader public just argued over what they'd seen.
(33:34):
They didn't really disagree. They argued absolutely abortion had become
either all one thing, a brutal murder or all another thing,
just another medical procedure. This had become a debate about
moral absolutes, about who is good and who was evil.
(33:54):
It had also got bound together with another movement, the
victims rights movement. Well lot a victim to testify a
criminal may go free. The victim's rights movement began in
nineteen seventy five with the publication of a book called
The Victims by a law and order conservative from the
Heritage Foundation named Frank Carrington. He wanted laws that would
(34:17):
be tougher on criminal defendants and harsher punishments for the convicted.
He and other conservatives were waging what's known as the
War on Crime. A lot of feminists joined that war.
They wanted more aggressive prosecutions and stricter sentences for violent
crimes against women and children. Believe the women, they said,
listen to their testimony, not just about abortion, but about
(34:41):
rape and domestic violence, and child abuse and more. And
then in asking for harsher punishments for men, they made
common cause with conservatives. The innocent victims of crime have
frequently been overlooked by our criminal justice system, and their
pleas for justice have gone unheated and their wounds, personal, emotional,
(35:02):
and financial, have gone unattended. This is Ronald Reagan speaking
in the Rose Garden, April nineteen eighty two. So I
am signing today an executive order establishing the President's Task
Force on Victims of Crime. Reagan's task Force recommended that
victims of crime be allowed to speak during sentencing hearings
to explain the nature the scale of their suffering. This
(35:23):
kind of statement came to be called victim impact evidence.
As a matter of intellectual genealogy, it comes from consciousness,
raising from speaking, bitterness from speaking your truth. Let the
victims speak. The Me Too movement is founded on the
evidentiary principles of the victim's rights movement. Believe the women
(35:46):
speak your truth. In twenty eighteen, Larry Nasser, an Olympic
gymnastics coach, was convicted of sexual assault the abuse of children.
His sentencing hearing in a Michigan courtroom was broadcast on
live television. Something that doesn't happen very often, and something
that really doesn't happen very often. The judge allowed one
(36:07):
hundred and fifty six women to deliver victim impact statements.
Thank you, what would you like me to know? For
the last year I have lived behind the shadows of
the name Jane Doe. I was afraid to be identified
as myself and didn't want to accept this as my story.
(36:27):
But I can't push it off anymore. This happened to me,
and I have a name. My name is Jassie Powell. Here, honor.
If it's okay with you, I'll be addressing the dependent
directly for a lot of this statement. You may I
still remember the first time I ever saw you. Larry
March twenty sixth twenty Their statements are harrowing. They're hard
(36:54):
to listen to the courage it took to say those things,
but the whole thing is also weird. More than one
hundred and fifty women delivered impact statements in court. Nasa
had been charged with sexual assaulting only ten of them.
By this point, he had also already pled guilty, and
he'd already been sentenced to sixty years in prison on
(37:16):
child pornography charges. So what were all those statements? That
is sentencing hearing about in a courtroom cluttered with cameras.
One hundred and fifty six women spoke of the harm
Nasser had done to them, But these were crimes for
which he had not been tried. On Twitter, using the
hashtag me too, people expressed relief and excitement and gratitude
(37:39):
to the judge. They thought she was a hero. But
a lot of legal scholars were shocked at the way
the judge handled her courtroom, and at how watching the
sentencing hearing on television felt something like watching a daytime
talk show. It's not that those legal scholars questioned the
suffering of the women who spoke that day, or the
truth of what they had to say, or even that
(38:01):
they needed to say. It is that they questioned the
place of those statements in this courtroom. Saying this out
loud to you is extremely uncomfortable for me, and I'm
sure for everyone who is listening it is supposed to
be uncomfortable. I would be doing myself and the other
(38:26):
brave women here a great disservice by shying away from
what is now my truth. The Me Too movement is
both lifted and burdened by the history that came before it,
a history that carries this idea. Everything I say is true,
(38:46):
everything you say is a lie. To question me is
to do me harm if we disagree. Whichever of us
has suffered more wins. Fighting child abuse and sexual assault
is crucial. No question those movements have done great good,
but that doesn't mean they haven't also contributed to an
(39:07):
epistemological chaos seized by absolutism. Proceed, please, my name is
Christine Blasi Ford. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for
Brett Kavanaugh, people wore buttons that read I believe Christine
blasi Ford. I tried to yell for help. When I did,
(39:30):
Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me
from yelling. It was hard for me to breathe, and
I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.
She spoke her truth, and then he spoke his. I
was not at the party described by doctor Ford. People tweeted,
(39:51):
I believe Brett Kavanaugh. I'm here today to tell the truth.
I've never sexually assaulted anyone. What was the truth? Honestly,
it was hard to say for the record. I believed her.
I believed her because of my personal experiences. I believed
(40:13):
her because my experiences of being a person in the
world are a lot more like her experiences than like his.
But is that enough? I don't think that's enough. People
keep on speaking bitterness with absolutism of the abortion debate.
This divide though it isn't about abortion. Actually it's not
(40:36):
even a divide, because here's the thing everyone seems to
agree on. Speak your truth. So who killed truth? Maybe? Everyone?
(41:02):
The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabbin and
Bennette of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
exact producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez
are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music
by Mattheist Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Simfinett. Many
of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior on
the Star Genette Foundation. Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson,
(41:26):
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis
and Maurice Emmanuel Parrott. The Last Archive is brought to
you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
the American Repertory Theater, the Slesaner Library, the Flow Kennedy
Show produced by Don Lynn, the Internet Archive, Alex Allenson
and the Bridge Sound in Stage, and to Simon leek Head.
(41:47):
Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Cane and Carl mcgliori,
Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants
are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henriet O'Reilly, Oliver Riskin Cutz
and Emily Spector. I'm Jilliport
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