by Barbara Deming

Jane Alpert went underground in may 1970, after she had been charged - with Sam Melville, David Hughey and Pat Swinton (Shoshana) - with conspiring to bomb government property. Melville had first confessed to carrying out the anti-war actions by himself. . . . but she and Hughey were told that if they pleaded guilty to conspiracy, Melville's sentence could be reduced from a probably life sentence to thirteen to eighteen years; she and Hughey would get four to six years. So she and Hughey also pleaded guilty. Shoshana had avoided arrest by going underground. Alpert now jumped bail and went underground too. The men went to prison. Hughey was paroled after two and a half years. Melville died in the september 1971 attica prison uprising.

During this time, Jane Alpert became a radical feminist and could not wage that struggle freely enough while underground. The New York Times quoted the government as saying she was "cooperating fully." Alpert herself in an interview published in the March 1975 Big Mama Rag and in the May-June Off Our Backs declared she was giving not information that could endanger anyone. On January 13, 1975 she was sentenced to twenty-seven months.

Published in WIN, May 22, 1975 and in Off Our Backs, May-June 1975. Susan Sherman is a poet and playwright. From 1965-69 she edited Ikon, a radical magazine of the arts.

Dear Susan -

Several days ago a sister wrote to tell me that she was signing a statement denouncing Jane Alpert - and throwing her out of the women's movement. Now I have read the statement that you signed, denouncing her, too, and in effect throwing her out of the human race.

I ask and ask myself what deep fear Jane Alpert has stirred in you both to move you to words so harsh and so unrealistic. Is it realistic to throw anyone out of the human race? We are all in it, like it or not. Is it realistic to throw anyone out of the feminist movement? At this point of history, I would say, every one of us is caught up in this movement - whether willingly or unwillingly. And every one of us is being changed by it. Those of use who have chosen to be in it are being changed unutterably. The old advice, "judge not", is now especially pertinent. A woman we may judge one day, met a few months later, can be a quite different woman.

This is of course just what Jane Alpert has been saying: I am not the woman I was when you last thought you knew who I was. She has said to the state: I am not the same woman , so please judge me accordingly.

The statement my other sister signed denounced alpert as an informer. The statement you signed (with Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, and Joan Hamilton) does not make this charge, and I am glad. Women close to her insist that she has taken scrupulous care to say nothing that could be used against anyone. Other women, who do not charge he consciously informing, complain that she has been reckless unwittingly and, by talking as much as she has to government officials, risked giving them information they could use. Here is a question that deserves much discussion: just what does play into government hands? But it is not the question that you raise. You raise questions about the change as a person that she has undergone. You see that change as one that betrays us - betrays feminism. It's about this that I write to you.

Alpert has said in court - and in her letter from underground - that she is no longer the woman she was in 1970 when she was convicted with Sam Melville and Dave Hughey of conspiracy to bomb government property. She says that she is now her own woman - whereas back then she let herself be pressured by Sam Melville into playing the role that she did - in the group he "half-led half-dragged along with him" - pressured in ways "peculiar and common to male-female relationships."

When the police mass murder of the Attica rebels took Melville's life and his letters from Attica were published, Alpert wrote from underground a profile of him that served as an introduction to the book. She was already a feminist when she wrote it and was amazingly honest about his treatment of her. (She writes, for example, that he indulged in comic fantasies about her being raped.) But it remains an appreciation of him - "the most dynamic human [she'd] ever met." And she mourns him very explicitly. The piece ends, "he died for things in which his belief had never altered, an end to racism and liberation from senseless authoritarianism. I find some solace in knowing that." She writes, "the lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet keep recurring to me:

say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

If I could come out of hiding. . . . I would engrave those lines on his stone."

Her letter from Underground, however, ends with the jolting words, "And so, my sisters in Weathermen, you fast and organize and demonstrate for Attica. Don't send me news clippings about it, don't tell me how those deaths move you. I will not mourn the loss of 42 male supremacists no long."

The statement you signed is a clear retort to those words. You declare, "We are more than what we are as individuals. We are what we identify with. And our identification must be with all oppressed peoples. We do not ïsupport' or ïnot support' the bothers of Attica. We are Attica. We are Attica or we are nothing. Not feminists, not women, not human beings."

"Our identification must be with all oppressed peoples" - I think you must know that I say yes to this. And yet - Susan, isn't the complicating truth that confronts us the truth that women for centuries and centuries have been allowed to by only what we identified with, acknowledged as human being (the kind called "real women') only in so far as we identified with other (quite specifically, with men)? We have for so long been very much less than what we could be as individuals. As Ti-Grace Atkinson puts it in Amazon Odyssey, "A woman by definition has no life, no destiny, no identity"; "by class definition, women are not individuals, or free but rather extensions of other human beings." So when you write, "We are what we identify with," when you write, "We are Attica or we are nothing", part of me assents, but I also can't help exclaiming to you: Wait, wait! I fear those words. When I have heard them before, so many times before, they have been used to keep me in my so-called place.

After I had read your statement, I looked on my table for your book of poems With Anger/With Love and I turned to the wonderfully beautiful poem "Lilith of the Wildwood, of the Fair Places." A poem about Lilith, about her.

refusing anything but her own place
a place apart from any other
                              her own.

It begins:

And Lilith left Adam and went to seek her own place
and the gates were closed behind her and her name
was stricken from the Book of Life.

I stared at these words, and stared again at the statement you have signed. Can you really be striking Jane Alpert's name from the Book of Life? You write of Lilith,

She is here       inside me
I reach to touch her.

You write,

To fear you    is to fear myself
To hate you    is to hate myself

And I write to ask you, isn't Jane Alpert, too, there inside you, inside all of us? Can't you reach to touch her? When you fear her, don't you fear yourself? When you hate her, don't you hate yourself?

You ask in the poem, for Lilith, "And how does one begin again?" And yes - how does one begin again? How as Jane Alpert to begin again? She writes in Letter from Underground, "I am not asking you . . . to break all personal and emotional ties with the men who are important to you. I know that those ties are never broken out of a simplistic political decision but only when and if consciousness of oppression makes them so inconsistent with self-respect that they can no longer be borne. Even then it is with enormous pain and grief and in spite of an ever reluctant part of ourselves."

Yes, how was she to begin again? Atkinson writes in Amazon Odyssey, "those individuals who are today defined as women must eradicate their own definition. Women must, in a sense, commit suicide. . . . We must create, as no other group in history has been forced to do, from the very beginning." She write, "The male class is the oppressor class of the female class. Or, in political terms, men oppress women. That means all women. Is that point clear?"; "A woman can unite with a man as long as she is a woman, i.e., subordinate, and no longer. There's no such thing as a ïloving' way out of the feminist dilemma: that it is as a woman that women are oppressed"; "The proof of class consciousness will be when we separate off from men".

Atkinson writes, "The journey from womanhood to a society of individuals is hazardous". She writes, "one must begin by jumping off one cliff after another". Yes, the journey is hazardous. Isn't one of the hazards precisely that we have to make demands of ourselves that are at first glance contradictory? We say, "our identification must be with all oppressed peoples". And we also say, "we must separate off from men". But many oppressed people happen to be men. Which is to say, many oppressed people happen to be our oppressors. So how are we to act? How are we to begin?

As you probably know, I was in an automobile accident several years ago. For almost two years after the accident, until I had an operation that largely corrected it, I suffered from double vision: friends had two heads, four eyes, two noses, etc. etc. It was hard to live with. Feminists, it seems to me, for a certain period of time now must expect to have to live with what amounts to political double vision. When we look at any man who would classically be termed oppressed, we are now going to have to see two men: one an oppressed person, and so a comrade, but the other a person who oppresses us. More grotesquely still, if we are, as I am, white and from the middle class, we are going to se: one person who oppresses me, another who sees me as his oppressor.

This is hard to live with. Double vision produces vertigo. But in this case we should not take it to mean that something is wrong with our eyes. We are not seeing truly at last - seeing patriarchy truly. For it is patriarchy that is wildly askew - splits each one of us, away from each other and away from our true selves. We are daring to look at this now. It is not comfortable to do this.

Atkinson writes, "We are still imprisoned by Marx". I agree. And isn't one of his concepts that imprisons us - makes our new vision especially uncomfortable - the concept that we must name "they enemy"? In classical Marxism, if I understand it, the enemy is the enemy - period. One it may be necessary to destroy. The enemy cannot possibly be at the same time a comrade. You say in your statement, "It is the essence of oppression to set us against other oppressed peoples . . . . It is not war that destroys us, but betrayal". But when you think of Jane Alpert as a traitor, don't you assume that in naming the Attica rebels oppressors she does so in the simplistic Marxist sense - names them "they enemy"? She will mourn them no longer, she says. That is hardly to say that she is glad they are dead. She has mourned them, after all. She wrote to her sisters in the Weather Underground, "Believe me, I understand your side of it. I've been on that side - I've practically drowned on that side". (Must one call her a traitor because she doesn't want to go down for the third time?)

The feminist vision, I have said, entails a kind of double vision, which produces vertigo. This vertigo I'm afraid will end only when we end patriarchy. Unless we choose to end it by retreating from feminism. I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision without be scared into wanting to retreat is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive, naming abuse of power, that is held unfairly and must be destroyed, but naming no person one whom we are willing to destroy. If we can destroy a man's power to tyrannize, there is not need, of course, to destroy the man himself. And if the same man who behaves in one sense as a tyrant is in another sense our comrade, there is no need to feel that we have lost our political minds (or souls) when we treat him as a person divided from us (and from himself) in just this way.

I should acknowledge quickly that Atkinson in Amazon Odyssey does make precisely the distinction I am arguing for. She writes, "I always understood that it was male behavior that was the enemy". It is difficult, however - for any of us - to hold with confidence to this distinction - the distinction between male behavior that is the enemy and males themselves - because patriarchy does its best to teach us that no such distinction is possible. It teaches us that if we identify with a man we identify with him - period. Or we are nothing. It teaches us, as Atkinson has said, to think of ourselves as "extensions of other human beings" (men). There is not one of us who has shaken quite free of that teaching yet. . . .

I began by addressing this letter to you, Susan, but now I seem to be speaking more and more to Ti-Grace Atkinson as well. I address it to you both. I find Amazon Odyssey a book full of deep truths. But there are a few passages in it which bewilder me. One is that in which she says that "Women's identity must be sought in the eyes of the Oppressor". I think that is the one place where we cannot find it - as the oppressors cannot bear yet to see us as distinct from them. She says, "To turn to other women for ego support is like trying to catch a reflection of herself in a darkened mirror". I think "darkened mirrors" is a beautiful and accurate description of us in our present condition. But I also think that it is precisely in those mirrors, if we look patiently, waiting for them to lighten, that we will find ourselves.

What we first see there of course will be disturbing. For it will be faces contorted with anger. Anger at men - for treating us as mere extensions of themselves. Anger at ourselves - for allowing them to do this. While we are in the throes of our anger, we will often seem to be beside ourselves. But it is the only way that we can begin again. WE have been in the possession of others. This is the only way that we can burst ourselves out of that condition. Jane Alpert has been in those throes. Not everything that she has said has been perfectly balanced. Not everything that any one of us will say will be. If we are afraid of Jane Alpert, aren't we afraid of ourselves?

Don't forget, Susan, what you have written about Lilith - "cursed of God" the Father. You do not name her a betrayer of men. You name her "Mother of us all". Once we have dared to shake from us in anger the lie that we are the creatures of men, we and they can be comrades. Once we have dared to remember - and to hold in remembrance - the truth that we were born of the flesh of our mothers; and dared to affirm that we were born (all of us alike) to seek a communion with one another that can be learned (and learned without need of words) from that bond that existed with our mothers - once we have angrily dared all this, we will be able to pass beyond our anger. But not until then. And so in this letter I plead with you . . . not to be afraid of us, and of yourself, as we try - in the not always "becoming" throes of our anger - to "begin again".