The women’s rights revolution in New Haven was a five-year frenzy of sisterhood and schism, vision and pragmatism, public protest and private strain. Then the group splintered. Fifty years later, a writer brings the women back together.
I.
On a summer day in 1972, about eighty of New Haven’s most ardent feminists thronged into the poster-plastered New Haven Women’s Center. Threading through the pack, sister Rhea Hirshman saw “a crowd of women hanging over the furniture.” This was the home base of the city’s women’s liberation movement. “It was a real hub of activity,” Hirshman said. “There were meetings there all the time.” But this wasn’t a routine meeting of the sisterhood. An existential crisis was growing.
Some sisters were lesbian, some were straight, and some were “choosing.” Each contingent had a different vision for the group, and gay-straight relations were fraying. They called a meeting. Was the movement too fractured? What was their message? Should women just “leave all men and become lesbians,” as sister Kit McClure put it?
The movement began four years earlier, when a group of women steeped in the lively New York feminist scene hosted a meeting in New Haven—then another, and another. The women came to New Haven for a variety of reasons: studying at Yale, working local jobs, following boyfriends. Initially the group spanned races and economic classes, but it shifted away from this inclusiveness in the 1970s. With a few exceptions, the women in the movement were largely white, college-educated, and in their twenties or early thirties. Around fifteen women in the first co-ed class of Yale College formed a campus-based sisterhood that operated separately from the New Haven movement, but activities and participants often overlapped.
They banned men. These meetings were sanctuaries where women could speak unguardedly, often for the first time in their lives. “We said it’s because they were so horrible. It’s actually that we couldn’t deal with them and hold our own. We had been so trained to be pleasing,” Harriet Fraad, one of the founders of the women’s liberation movement, told me. They debated intellectual questions: Is the cause of society’s problems the divide between men and women? How much should women continue to engage with men in their lives? They shared personal experiences, domestic and professional and sexual. They read and discussed books like Our Bodies, Ourselves.
It was the early 1970s. Crowds encircled the New Haven courthouse where the Black Panthers were on trial. The American Independent Movement handed out newsletters emblazoned with bright red text decrying the Vietnam war.
The city stirred as left-wing activism swept across the nation. But its political groups were male-dominated and didn’t incorporate feminist causes, and some women found it hard to speak up, members would tell me half a century later. At the time, women couldn’t open their own bank accounts. Abortion was illegal and birth control was hard to access. Some public spaces were male-only, and harassment was rampant. “We grew up in the repressive fifties,” said Judy Berkan ’71, a women’s rights activist in the first co-ed Yale graduating class. Women were taught to “button up, don’t show any skin, don’t dare touch anybody.” Members of women’s activist groups began to wonder if they needed a revolution for themselves. Soon, the New Haven women’s liberation movement’s mailing list reached over three hundred women.
One member was Rika Alper. An adventurous young activist, Alper first settled in New Haven in 1968 and opened a coffee house, Bread and Roses, as a “third place” for young people in the city to gather. In the winter of 1970, she moved to Cuba to cut sugarcane as part of an American solidarity movement supporting the Cuban Revolution. There she met “militant” feminists for the first time. But she brushed off their lifestyle. She felt independent enough already.
When she returned to New Haven in the spring, Alper found the city awash in the activism of the 1970s. She took a job as a secretary in the OB-GYN department at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she answered phones for a doctor who was “known throughout Connecticut through the underground illegal abortion pipeline,” she told me. “Ten or twelve women a day were calling, and instead of getting him, they got me.”
Women often cried on the other end of the phone, and Alper listened to their stories. She remembered counseling a fourteen-year-old who showed up four months pregnant (“he said he wasn’t doing anything,” the girl told Alper), and an Italian Catholic mother of eighteen who couldn’t handle caring for another child. “That was an eye-opener for me. It was incredible to hear, all day long, the stories of these women.”
Alper found the women’s movement when McClure, a Yale freshman, cold-called her to speak at a feminist conference. “What the hell, why not,” Alper thought, and gave the speech in the work boots and khakis she’d worn in Cuba. Her time in the movement really began when she heard McClure was starting an all-woman rock band and auditioned. “They were like, ‘Well, this woman can’t really play, but we don’t have anybody else.’”
At the height of the movement’s work, a young graduate student named Christine Pattee—a short-haired lesbian at Yale’s School of Public Health—began taking notes. She called herself “the list keeper.” Her documentation habit started when she was too shy to approach her fifth-grade crushes, so she’d invite the girls to her parents’ basement photography dark room and take their portraits. Her grandmother had written an autobiography, so recording everything “just seemed the most natural thing in the world” to Pattee.
Her notes are raw, intimate transcriptions of the movement’s discussions, scrawled in real time. The women shared heady visions of liberation, and their relationships with each other were intense, Pattee would tell me many years later. She hoped to capture their spirit while she could.
She documented meetings, conducted interviews, and wrote timelines of the movement. At some point, those records came to rest in prim beige folders in Yale’s archives. That’s where I found them.
The second-wave feminist movement always existed in my imagination as a spot in time when women presented a united front and won real rights. But in Pattee’s archives of the New Haven alliance, I read records of fights and division and deep uncertainty in the years leading up to the group’s split. What happened, I wondered? Was the movement not as influential as I thought? Were the women not as bonded as it seemed? What became of them? They seemed to have just faded away.
I kept reading. The archives document a period of intense activity. “The personal is political” was a popular refrain of second-wave feminism, and the women acted on it. They hosted a “child-in” on the New Haven Green, bringing their children with them to protest childcare inequities. They threw “Season of the Witch” dances. They gave presentations on women’s health using their own bodies for live demonstrations. “I was giving talks on pelvic self-examination, getting up on tables in front of groups of women I had never met before and sticking a plastic speculum up my vagina and inviting everybody to look at my cervix,” Alper recalled. Around the room, each woman had a mirror to look at her own vagina, too.
The women also knit themselves into other social movements of the crusading seventies. One night they staked out New Haven’s now-demolished WNHC radio station—a squat building that once stood next to the Yale Repertory Theater—demanding air time to protest the Vietnam War. They rallied for the Black Panthers and joined boycotts against soaring meat prices. “It was such a time of upheaval,” Alper said.
But the women’s feverish work stirred upheaval within the group as well.
II.
Four years after the formation of the New Haven women’s liberation movement, the motley crew of necktie-wearing lesbians and apron-shedding wives thrived as a self-sustaining biosphere. It seemed that none could function without the others. Women left their boyfriends and husbands and moved into group houses. Alper recalled that in her consciousness-raising group of about twenty-five women, only one remained married. They sacrificed conventional lifestyles and societal approval, trusting the movement to fill the gaps. On the surface, unity propelled the sisterhood.
But an issue had become too contentious to ignore. Across the country, women’s liberation movements began to splinter over the question of sexuality. Lesbian and straight contingents began to emerge. “Women were making out with each other at the meetings,” Fraad said. “It was a little bit of a turnoff for some heterosexual women.” Some members thought of lesbianism as a political choice instead of a sexual one, believing that true feminism meant a total rejection of men. They urged the whole sisterhood to adopt that lifestyle.
The lesbians said they faced social ostracization the non-lesbians couldn’t understand. The non-lesbians thought the lesbians made it hard for the movement to gain traction. The lesbians thought they needed space from the non-lesbians’ non-understanding of lesbian struggles. And so on, until the whole tangled thing made the women wonder whether relations were too fractured to survive.
Yet, as groups across the country fractured over this divide, the New Haven movement fought to remain a united group. They decided to hold “gay-straight dialogues” where women could express their feelings to the group and forge a path forward.
It wasn’t an issue of support for gay women, Berkan said, but rather a strategic question of how to present the movement. “It’s a different kind of analysis, and today it would be inconceivable to me as a feminist-slash-activist to not support gay rights.”
That summer day in 1972—when eighty-some women gathered in the Women’s Center—marked the first gay-straight dialogue. Had the group splintered too deeply to repair? The painful question bubbled under the surface as the conversation began.
A chorus of voices and personalities filled the room. Twenty-five of the eighty present women lodged complaints, according to a record of the dialogue Pattee transcribed in real time. She cloaked some of the women in anonymity in her transcript, or perhaps she scrawled their words too frantically to even look up.
McClure, a maverick saxophonist with an explosion of red curls, spoke first. I used to be straight and made a conscious decision to change my sexuality two and a half years ago, she proclaimed. Puffed-up Yale men and male musicians disillusioned her, she explained, and any lingering fantasies about men were obstacles to overcome. I feel like all women should leave all men and become lesbians.
Barbara Deinhardt, who felt that lesbian women (as she defined herself at the time) should separate from the sisterhood, spoke after McClure.
When thinking of a split of the gay community, it’s important to realize that gay women need support from gay sisters, Deinhardt reasoned. This will mean hurt to some women but at this time it is necessary.
Someone countered: Gay women should understand how overwhelming it would be for straight women to leave men. I am all too aware of the contradictions of living with a man, and knowing that you compromise yourself everyday would be intolerable if we didn’t feel we were getting some support from it.
Another person cut in: The prospect of being a freak among freaks terrifies me. It’s because of the movement that I’m [gay] and I want the movement to relate to that. I want straight women to pretend to be lesbians for our sake.
A fourth voice: I feel very close to the women’s movement but I relate to a man whom I love and we have a child. I’ve always tried to support and reach out to women, although I don’t always know how to show my support without offending.
Someone else: Most of us live in the real world and gay women face a lot of shit all the time. I also feel oppressed by lesbian equaling SEX and by being defined sexually.
Did the dialogue successfully reconcile the group? Hirshman wrote in a 1980 article in the New Haven Advocate that it led to an “agreement among many women to disagree.” The discussion did kick off weekly general group meetings, according to the archives. And there was a second gay-straight dialogue, a week after the first. But there wasn’t a third.
Ultimately, most straight women left, other members told me. The movement started to splinter. The dissolution became especially pronounced after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, which brought backlash against the social justice movements of the past two decades.
In New Haven, Fraad was among the women who found the gay-straight dynamic too difficult and left for alternative activist groups. Today, many of the women who “became lesbian” in the 1970s have husbands.
Audacious women’s movements formed and dissolved across the country, not just in New Haven. They were energetic and innovative, and because the members were so close, also fraught and taxing. Policy-focused women’s rights groups pushed legislation: Title IX in 1972. The Equal Pay Act of 1963. Roe v. Wade in 1973. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Sisterhoods like New Haven’s aimed to fundamentally change American culture.
III.
Not long after the gay-straight dialogue, many of the women lost track of each other. I wondered where they went, if they were out there somewhere still living in women-only communes. Armed with the names in Pattee’s archive and Google, I discovered that they all seemed to be living very conventional lives. Many became lawyers or psychologists. Their LinkedIn bios weren’t exactly anti-men manifestos.
I found Pattee, now 84, in a testimony she gave opposing a Connecticut zoning bill a few years ago. I dialed the listed number; three days later I headed upstate to rural Coventry.
The main attractions on the town’s Main Street are two antique stores, positioned directly across the road from each other. As I pulled up in front of Pattee’s paneled blue house, she shuffled onto her lawn, squinting at me. Her sweatpants were bunched up inside tall white socks. “So tell me,” she said. “What do you want me to talk about?”
We talked in her kitchen, among bobbleheads of female basketball players and printout pictures of “women connecting,” as Pattee put it. Pattee is retired and spends her time in Coventry advocating for senior and affordable housing in rural Connecticut. She told me she’d fallen out of touch with her sisters from the 1970s.
I contacted some of the others. Almost all were excited to talk about their memories. We met over Zoom. Most of them, it turned out, had also drifted apart. So the split had lasted. I asked the women: would they like to speak to each other again?
The resulting group call of six former members was an hour of overlapping voices and zigzagging topics. McClure darted around her living room as someone vacuumed. Berkan, in fiery red glasses and stacks of silver rings, looked every bit the indie Brooklyn dweller despite joining from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Deinhardt watched reservedly from a wood-paneled room.
I asked for a lightning round of introductions and soon realized I would not be in control of this Zoom. Pattee wanted to share her archival photos; a few minutes into Fraad’s detailed introduction, Berkan unmuted and said: “I don’t want to interrupt, but I thought we were going around?” Maybe this was a doomed effort on my part.
Then, without my prompting, the women started talking about the sexuality question that had hounded the movement.
Pattee began: “Whatever your sexual orientation or preference is now, back then, a lot of you on this screen identified as lesbians. 50 years later, I still identify as lesbian. But I even more strongly identify as feminist, and it’s important to me now that you be who you are. Some of you—and I won’t, at this point, name names—told me that they were such fierce lesbians in their youth because they were, in fact, in their heads, heterosexual.”
Alper responded: “I mean, beyond the question of who you had sex with was the question of your relationship to your own body. We were dealing with a reality of deep shame and inferiority and self-hatred as women. When Chris gave that first talk in the first ‘Women and Our Bodies’ series, she said the word vagina. It was the first time I heard the word spoken out loud in my life. She talked about orgasm, something I had never even heard of, and the word clitoris. I went with [a friend] and after this talk we were so completely mind blown. We talked until one o’clock in the morning in the car.”
Then Deinhardt: “Looking back on it, I think one reason for what may have been a political choice to relate to women rather than men was that it was a very safe place to be. Being at Yale was very alienating. Being around those men was very alienating. Being with women was community and was solidarity and was feeling known and appreciated and seen. At the time and for a while after, to me it translated into identifying as a lesbian and relating primarily to women. Since then, I’ve been married to a man for 45 years, but I don’t think it depreciates who I was or what I was feeling at the time. You know, I read back in these transcripts and there is a certain level of naivete and presumptuousness of saying at age 20 or whatever, this great immutable truth about the world, about me, about my life, about what my life is going to be. But it was absolutely sincere and passionately felt and was what I needed to do and what I wanted to do at the time. And I respect that.”
Most of the movement alumnae told me they joined the meeting out of curiosity. They wanted to know what had happened to the other women. I asked them about this—what’s changed over the years, and what legacy the movement left for women in New Haven and at Yale.
“I actually can’t stay for that big of a question,” Fraad said, and logged off.
Deinhardt bit: “Once we experienced this connection and this community, and learned about all the different ways in which women are oppressed in the world, and once we learned about our bodies and once we knew all that, there’s a certain way in which you can’t ever go back. Having that source of this core of sisterhood, I think stays with you for the rest of your life. In my relationships with people, with my friends, with my family, with my husband, with my children, I like to think that I model and demand equality and respect and autonomy.”
Pattee: “I was watching your face, Rika, and you were reacting so strongly. Please answer Josie’s question.”
Alper: “My face is hopeless. I’m so sorry.”
Pattee: “It’s also very photogenic, but we’ll put that off to later.”
Alper: “Anyway, I’m sorry. I don’t know. That’s a really, really hard question because it’s so global. And it’s a hard question to answer right now when it feels like stuff that we thought was solved fifty years ago is taking a leap back. We thought we had really made abortion legal with all that implies about women’s choice, and now we’re fighting this fight again.”
As the call wound down, Pattee beamed at the group and asked the others to raise their hands if they’d like to meet again. The Zoom was silent for the first time in an hour. “You don’t? Some of you don’t? Then we won’t,” she said with a frown, “but it would be a shame to have you not participate.” Alper slowly lifted her hand, then McClure, reluctant. “Barbara, what about you? Don’t feel pressured for anything.” Deinhardt said maybe.
After the call, I sat puzzling over my notes for a while. These women hadn’t seen each other in fifty years, but they were back to their old ways of fighting. And they hadn’t really wanted to talk about being a woman today. These women, who had started rock bands and demonstrated vaginal healthcare on themselves and read feminist theory for fun.
I video-called Alper again to ask directly: Why didn’t anyone want to give me advice? She laughed and sunk her head in her hands. “Oh god, I mean, ugh,” she groaned. “It’s such a different time that it almost seems like anything we could think [of] is inapplicable,” she said.
The most emotional change for Alper, after counseling all those women seeking abortions, was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I think [I’m] personally still reeling from that,” she said. “So it’s like, how do you give advice? We thought we had done something huge. And it turns out it could be undone fifty years later. Like, you’ve been trying to make social change, and an absolutely capstone success can be trashed after a half a century. It’s a little bit staggering.”
Her change in attitude isn’t just the result of demoralization. Internal fracture also led to the movement’s decline. “I feel like we messed some things up so badly,” she said. In retrospect, she thought the provocative opinions of some members in the group seemed like a play for attention. People felt alienated by this all-or-nothing militancy, she thought. “There was quite a bit of showmanship and grandstanding and glamor associated with extremism. If you could take some fire-throwing position, it was cool…If we agree about everything, why can’t we get along for five minutes?”
Today, Alper also thinks the women had unrealistic expectations. They foresaw immediate change, and made decisions assuming the demise of capitalism and patriarchy was imminent. “You know, it’s like, OK, this is it. This is happening. And that was a rather consequential misjudgment.”
I’m struck by Alper’s self-consciousness when she talks about the movement. She isn’t sure how their politics and activism are interpreted today. But this doubt doesn’t cloud the immense pride with which she speaks about the movement’s achievements.
The week before we talked, Alper’s college roommate wrote to her asking if she wanted to see the Broadway play Liberation. The two weren’t friends after college, but they had recently reconnected at their fiftieth reunion. Alper said yes.
In the play, it is 1970 and six members of the women’s liberation movement convene in a consciousness-raising gathering. Alper watched as the actors rehashed familiar dialogues on race, class, motherhood, leaving their husbands, their careers, lesbianism. It was the most accurate and vivid depiction of the movement’s energy she’d ever seen. The play is set in Ohio, she said, “but it could’ve been New Haven.”
In the play, fifty years after the movement’s heyday, the daughter of a liberation member tries to understand where things fell apart. Her fundamental question was the same as mine, Alper tells me: What came out of this?
To Alper, Liberation has an answer. “These women supported each other through a very significant time in their lives and [each] came out of it with different careers and different choices,” she said.
But Alper thought Liberation got one thing wrong: she and her peers fought a lot more. Still—or perhaps because of this conflict—she can’t remember the last time she felt the spirit of revolution that intensely.
“The force of the cultural, political change and tumult that was happening then was so powerful,” Alper said. “That’s not happening now. I don’t know if, in my lifetime, that has happened since. So I guess it was kind of intoxicating, in a way. And also deceptive.” ∎
Josie Reich is a senior in Davenport and a senior editor for The New Journal.
