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Many of the new feminists are surprisingly violent in mood, and seem to be trying, in fact, to repel other women rather than attract them. Hundreds of young girls are learning karate, tossing oft furious statements about "male chauvinists," distributing threatening handouts ("Watch out! You may meet a real castrating female!"), and even citing with approval the dictum of the late revolutionary Frantz Fanon: An oppressed individual cannot feel liberated until he kills one of the oppressors. This is all borrowed, of course, from the fiery rhetoric of today's militant black and student movements, but a deep feminine resentment is there nevertheless. "In almost any woman you can unearth an incredible fury," declares one of the women organizers of S.D.S. "And it's an anger that can be a powerful radicalizing force."
A few of the militants are talking about complete segregation, even to the exclusion of sex. For one thing, as an unhappy young demonstrator explained,
"All there is to fall in love with is sexual racists." But most of the sexual segregationists have sterner reasons. Their chastity is not so much a Lysistrata tactic, it seems, as a self-disciplinary measure. "Love between a man and a woman is debilitating and counter-revolutionary," argues Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, daughter of David of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a member of Women's Liberation hard-core Cell 16 in Boston. Declares Boston's Roxanne
Dunbar, one of the movement's few acknowledged leaders: "Sex is just a commodity."
Sexual freedom has never been the primary concern of women's movements —indeed, the English suffragettes even opposed birth control on the ground that it encouraged lust. Nor are the feminists of the Pill generation particularly partisans of the sexual revolution. "In a way, the relaxation of sexual mores just makes a woman's life more difficult," contends Ellen Willis, rock music critic for The New Yorker and militant feminist. "If she is not cautious about sex, she is likely to get hurt; if she is too cautious, she will lose her man to more obliging women. Either way, her decision is based partly on fear and calculation, not on her spontaneous needs and desires."
Paradoxically perhaps, it was the male chauvinism of their fellow radicals that sparked the militant women to organize for themselves. The girls who worked for S.N.C.C. in the early '60s, and later seized Columbia's Library or were arrested last year in Chicago, did a slow burn when they realized that in the Movement as well as outside it, they were regarded simply as chicks to type and make the coffee rather than write the manifestoes. Mark Rudd was possibly less interested in women's rights than is Richard Nixon. The girls were also regarded as a sex pool. Stokely Carmichael long ago said it plainly: "The only position for women in S.N.C.C. is prone."