Task 1. Read. 2. Write on the article as needed. Use pen, pencil, or highlighter. 3. Underline the question(s) posed. What’s the debate? 4. Find and define three new vocabulary words. 5. Compose an argument. What’s your opinion? 6. Overall, your writing should be 500 or more words. Notes Record important dates, locations, people, conflicts, questions, and settings. Write What’s the author’s opinion? At the beginning of the article, what does the author lead the reader to think? What conclusions are offered at the end of the article? Your Argument What’s your opinion and why? Vocabulary Write the definitions of three words used in the article
U.S. Government Surveillance and the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-1973: A Case Study
Salper, Roberta
Feminist Studies; Fall 2008; 34, 3; ProQuest
432 Roberta Sa/per
(NUC). The surveillance continued throughout the two years I lived in Pittsburgh (July 1968-July 1970) and the year I lived in San Diego, Cal ifornia (July 1970-July 1971). In both places I was affiliated with a university and active in NUC and in the women’s liberation movement. My file contains informants’ reports and copious press clippings about my partici pation in the women’s liberation movement from both Pittsburgh and San Diego. Recommendations to place me on the Security Index/ADEX because of “subversive” activities were sent to FBI headquarters, one from the Pittsburgh field office in late 1969 and one from San Diego in 1971.2
In 1969, in Pittsburgh, I was considered a “dangerous subversive” because “subject is a national coordinator for New University Conference (NUC), a new organization to promote revolutionary changes, not only in universities, but in the social system of the US [and because] Roberta Salper was one of 15 NUC members who traveled to Cuba during the period July 25-August 21, 1969.”3 No mention is made of the women’s movement in this recommendation to put me on the Security Index in 1969.
In 1971, the San Diego field office again recommended I be placed on the ADEX, judging me to be a danger to national security this time because of “subject’s membership in the New University Conference, her relationship with members of the Revolutionary Union, and her role as an active leader in the Women’s Liberation Movement.”1 (Emphasis added).
What had changed in the FBl’s vision of the women’s liberation move ment and my role in it between 1969 and 1971? Why had the FBI not considered the women’s liberation movement a threat to national secu rity in Pittsburgh in 1969, but did in 1971 in San Diego?
In light of recent discussions among feminists about the existence of
U.S. government surveillance of the women’s liberation movement in its early years, this essay is my attempt to figure that out. I discuss the process of obtaining my FBI file, its contents and my activities, particularly in Pittsburgh and San Diego, and then I focus on those parts of the dossier that deal with the women’s liberation movement. By analyzing these parts in the context of both the whole file and the historical moment, I offer some conclusions about the nature of FBI surveillance in the early years of the women’s liberation movement.
OBTAINING THE FILE: THE PROCESS
The process of obtaining my FBI file was agonizingly slow and arduous. Starting in July 1981, my friend, who subsequently became my official lawyer, initiated correspondence with the section of the FBI’s Records Management Division that deals with Freedom of Information issues. Dozens of letters were exchanged, and over the next several years the agency intermittently released 351 pages in bits and pieces. The FBI denied access to the rest, approximately one half of the total amount they said were on file. “Exemptions” were invoked-that is, access was denied-for one or more of six reasons dealing with the interest of national defense and foreign policy, materials related to the internal rules and practices of the FBI, various stipulations to protect FBI informants, and material reporting investigative efforts pertaining to the enforcement of criminal law.
The most frequently used exemption in my file is (6)(1), the “national security” exem ption.5 The FBI regularly uses (6)(1) to hide information that has no bearing on national defense or foreign relations; it is often used to shield evidence of the disruptive and frequently illegal activities and strategies taken by the FBI in its war against domestic advocates of political and social change. 6 Large portions of the records the FBI did release were blackened out for one or more of these same reasons. Ap parently, this is standard practice.
During the 1990s, several actions in the judicial and executive branches regarding national security and freedom of information access suggested it had become easier to retrieve more significant portions of one’s FBI file. Due to this apparent easing of restrictions, my lawyer again sent out “Freedom of Information Requests” to the same agencies that had acknowledged having files on me in our first inquiry almost twenty years ago. He asked for copies of the hundreds of pages that had been denied in the early 1980s, and he also sent requests for copies of files on me to the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. He made these requests in 1999; by 2001 an additional 37 pages were released. This brought the total retrieved to 388 out of the 646 the FBI Records Management Division had originally stated it had. It had taken twenty years of intermittent activity to get these 388 pages. All the material released was dated between October 1968 and May 1973. To this day, I have
434 Roberta Sa/per
no idea why the remaining 258 pages the FBI admitted having on “Subject” were not released to me.
By 2001, my lawyer believed we had gotten all the information we could without going to court, which we decided not to do. Although my lawyer requested a copy of everything in my file, all of our attempts had never yielded a single document from the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency nor any information concerning “Subject’s Activities” between 1973 and 1981.7 This is interesting in view of the fact that I left a tenured position at State University of New York (SUNY), Old Westbury, in 1974 to work as a resident fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C., between 1974 and 1979. I worked closely with the exiled Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and was sharing an office with him until shortly before he was assassinated in the streets of Washington in September 1976. The FBI interviewed me, along with many other of my colleagues at IPS, immediately after Letelier ‘s death, but no record of that interview was ever released to me.
THE PRACTICE OF “NATIONAL SECURITY” IN THE UNITED STATES
Before we examine the contents of my file, a brief introduction to the U.S.
government’s concept of “National Security” may be helpful. For over seventy-five years the FBI file, the dissenter’s dossier, has stood as a symbol of the vast, somewhat irresponsible surveillance the state has conducted on its most activist public. Paradoxically, it was during the administration of the New Deal that current practices of citizen surveillance were institu tionalized. Although before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, political repression was substantial, it usually took the form of physical
assaults, police beatings, lynchings, and even mu rders. 8 The New Deal
institutionalization that centralized bureaucratic management of U.S. life seemed to be a giant step forward for free expression, dissent, and political activism, just as it seemed to be for the economy itself; and indeed, in the wake of federally enforced rules of fair play, violent acts of repression decreased. What was really happening, however, was less an extension of liberty in the shape of due process than an expansion of surveillance and order in the name of efficiency and discipline. Having gained important
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The government’s database of subversives who were candidates for detention in a “national emergency” expanded from less than half a million in the 1920s to over 20 million in the 1980s because new categories of potential subversion were added. The COMINFIL (Communist Infil tration) program of the cold war added organizations suspected of com munist influence and covered practically the entire spectrum of the social reform and labor movements in the country. COMINFIL was joined by COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) in 1956 with twelve new categories, six of which have to do with “Domestic Subversives”: Com munist Party, Socialist Workers Party, white hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, black extremists, New Left groups, and militant Puerto Rican na tionalists. According to William Preston, writing in 1981 as professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, between 1960 and 1974 the FBI conducted over half a million separate domestic intelligence investiga tions on every list of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members and Black Student Union members and conducted a massive penetration of the women’s liberation movement. Field offices had to summarize, on a semi-monthly basis, the programs of all civil rights and black nationalist organizations; report the statements, writings, and activities of the New Left; and cover Vietnam demonstrations.11
WHAT ARE THE CONTENTS OF AN FBI FILE?
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bureau, bank account, and phone company checks; police department background checks; records of repeated attempts to determine my current address, education received, particular universities attended; places of employment; and information from faculty personnel records at University of Pittsburgh, San Diego State,12 and SUNY, Old Westbury.
The amount of repetition in the above materials is striking. The same information is often sent to FBI headquarters from each of the field offices involved in the investigation of an individual. In my case seven field offices sent in identical information concerning most of the above categories; for example, my file has fourteen photocopies of two passport photos, each stamped “Confidential,” and each one counting as one page of my file that has been released to me.
In addition to this type of pro forma record-searching, my file in cludes informants’ reports (sources always blackened out, as is most of material submitted by informants except for papers of public record from meetings and public or professional events), reports from Special Agents in Charge (SACs) from field offices, different types of logs of surveillance, memos for dissemination to other government agencies, various kinds of Administrative Pages that contain information on leads to be followed or other action to be taken, and most importantly, Security Index and ADEX memos about future action to be taken regarding “subject.”
The bureaucratic convolutions involved in recording the surveillance of a “subject” are mind-boggling and often require guidance to decipher. Of the over 300 pages released to me, about half were duplicates of each other or records of irrelevant searches for changes of address and new phone numbers. My file is also a chaotic repository of New Left political documents culled by informants at meetings where I was present or from the mainstream or movement press. In addition, I found journalistic pieces I wrote on the women’s movement and Caribbean culture and politics, minutes of meetings I attended, as well as organizational descrip tions of many New Left groups, press clippings about my activities in the women’s liberation movement in Pittsburgh and San Diego, and reports on the first year of the women’s studies program at San Diego State.
However, as I discuss below, certain parts of my file are revealing con cerning what the FBI considered dangerous to national security. First are
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the recommendations for my inclusion on the Security Index and ADEX and the reasons for these recommendations. Second, of interest also, are certain records of public (and semi-public) materials (newspapers, journals, minutes of meetings, posters, movement publications, university curricu lar proposals, and student publications) submitted by FBI informants.
PITTSBURGH
The NUC, formed in Chicago in spring 1968, was a “post-student progres sive organization”13 composed of young academics and graduate students who sought to have U.S. higher education use its resources to respond to social problems in the society at large. Chapters were formed at many universities throughout the country, with particularly active ones at the University of Chicago; several campuses of the University of California; the universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana; Columbia; Massa chusetts Institute of Technology; and Brown. Some NUC members had been members ofSDS, but the majority had not.14
Its founders envisioned NUC to be the academic arm of a broader based movement to work for socialism in the United States. The new organization would constitute the higher education section of a yet-to-be created socialist party. The FBI was immediately interested: “For the infor mation of offices not having received previous correspondence in this matter the following is noted concerning the NUC: The July 14, 1968, issue of the ‘Chicago Sunday Tribune’ carried on page 18 an article entitled “‘New Left” Forms Club to Encourage Student Rebellion.”‘ In the article Bob Ross, National Director of NUC described it as “An organization of radical scholars, students and intellectuals working to transform the universities and to use them in the movement for social change.” 15 As it turned out, NUC’s most significant work was with radicals in various academic discipli nes16 and the development of its Women’s Caucus.
Naomi Weisstein and Marlene Dixon conceived the Women’s Caucus at the NUC founding convention in spring 1968 when the issues of wom en’s liberation were new to most people.17 The idea of a Women’s Caucus floundered for over a year, and it was not until the June 1969 Iowa conven tion of NUC that the caucus took off. The caucus defined itself as a “national organization of women with socialist politics who do our political
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work in the area of ed ucat io n.” In fall 1970 another newsletter of the Women’s Caucus was begun under the direction of a collective of NUC women. 18 (Weisstein, Dixon, and Heather Tobis Booth were no longer pri marily working in NUC at that time.) Many NUC women wrote articles for the NUC Women’s Caucus Newsletter, as it was called starting with the second issue. A significant number would distinguish themselves in a plethora of ways in the years to come: Maurine Greenwald, Ann Kaplan, Ellen Bravo, Martha Vicinus, among others. I remained active in the Women’s Caucus and wrote a large part of the eighth issue of the newsletter.
The Women’s Caucus was never successfully integrated into NUC; the relationship between the Women’s Caucus and NUC in general was fraught with difficulties from the beginning, and the newsletter registered many of the early debates that eventually divided the women’s liberation movement into a socialist feminism and a radical feminism (although these binary categories simplify the debate). NUC disintegrated in 1972, but feminists from the caucus continued to be active throughout the women’s movement .
During the 1968-1969 academic year, I attended NUC conferences around the country and organized a chapter in Pittsburgh . In March 1969, I organized a large meeting of the NUC Interim Committee (national lead ership plus representatives from local chapters) in Pittsburgh. Apparently I served wine and cheese to an FBI informer: “[name of informant deleted] further advised that prior to the meeting of the NUC Interim Committee, a social affair was held at the home of Roberta Salper on February 28, 1969
… approximately 35-40 individuals were present at this meeting.” In summer 1969 I went to Cuba with fourteen other members of NUC , all young academics, on an invitation from the Universit y of Havana . The FBI didn’t miss a beat: “Subject traveled to Cuba during 7/25-8/21/69 to make plans for larger group of Americans to travel to Cuba to assist in harvesting of sugar cane.” 19 As the informant would have realized if she or he had accompanied us to Cuba, we did not cut sugar cane, nor did we plan for other Americans to do it. The purpose of the trip was to see the achieve ments of Cuba’s new socialism. We traveled throughout the country with Cuban academics and officials in our own little BuaBua (bus) and visited universities, schools, farms , dayca re centers, and new medical facilities.
In addition to my ongoing activist work with a national New Left organization, it is important to note that from fall 1968 to the end of the summer of 1970, I was the most visible woman in the women’s liberation movement in Pittsburgh. As one of the press accounts phrased it, “her name has become synonymous with Women’s Liberation.” 20 And yet the FBI did not consider me to be a national security threat because of my women’s liberation movement activities. In effect, the FBI failed to identify any link between the women’s movement and socialist activism during the time I was in Pittsburgh. Perhaps they believed we “silly women” did not pose a threat to national security because, in their view, women were not capable of bringing about significant political change.
During the 1968-1969 academic year, I had been instrumental in start
ing women’s liberation in Pittsburgh both within the university and in the community, along with a small group of three or four female faculty working with undergraduate and graduate students. The effort of con sciousness raising-speaking to as many women as possible in the univer sity and beyond about the oppression and second-class status of women in the United States-didn’t leave time for the discovery of potential political differences among us. This first year of the women’s liberation movement in Pittsburgh was a growing and unifying experience for all of us. The women’s movement came of age in the United States during 1969-1970, and on college campuses around the country the concept of women’s studies courses was gaining credence.
In fall 1969 a progressive dean interested in educational reform appointed me assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.21 As assistant dean, I was the only major woman administrator at the university and was often referred to in the press, with the unconscious sexism of the moment, as “the new look in Pitt adminis trators.” Under that banner, I was flooded with requests to speak about the new women’s movement. With feminist zeal I spoke in colleagues’ classes, in all-university forums, and to a plethora of civic and religious organizations throughout the greater Pittsburgh community. I spoke about the need for women to become first-class citizens, to have the power to control our bodies and pregnancies, to earn the same salaries as male counterparts. I also appeared frequently on television and radio-the
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Phil Donahue Show, then still based in Dayton, Ohio, even sent a little white helicopter to pick me up on the lawn in front of my office. And impor tantly, with the help of two graduate students, I successfully lobbied to create and teach the first women’s studies course to be offered at the university, starting in January 1970.
This new course, “The History and Social Role of Women in the U.S.,” received a lot of publicity, campus-wide and throughout the area. Originally the class limit was set at 60, but it was increased to just over 100 due to huge student demand. Ninety-eight women and two men en rolled. Revealingly, when the female students in the class were asked why they took the course, answers ran like “My father is the epitome of male chauvinism” and “I want revenge when men treat me like a simple sex object.” It was one of the two male undergraduates who said he was inter ested in women as an “untapped source of political power because wom en’s liberation is a growing part of the youth movement.” 22
On March 1, 1970, the PittsburBh Press (the region’s major paper) ran a full-page report and pictures of the class. In January 1970, this was one of the first deliberately interdisciplinary women’s studies courses to be offered in the country. The FBI never bothered to clip this article for my file; perhaps they just missed it, or perhaps they didn’t consider it a threat at the time.
From the beginning, I viewed courses on women in the university as opportunities to develop cross-disciplinary undertakings that would link universities to communities and fuse scholarly knowledge to social change. As I would explain in several articles the following year,23 I was interested in the opportunity to educate and train young women to pro mote social change. Women’s studies would be a site to create new knowl edge, to study across many academic disciplines the history of what was created both by the dominated and dominator to sustain or struggle against that domination.
At that time, I was torn between organizing a chapter of NUC in Pittsburgh, speaking to NUC women separately about joining the NUC Women’s Caucus (as Dixon had suggested), and getting other women (not just those interested in joining NUC) together for “consciousness raising” and “rap groups” to talk about the women’s liberation move-
ment. The simultaneous pull from different groups, at times overlapping, often separate, created a demanding, often tense, situation for me, as it did for hundreds of other women across the country who were active both in radical politics and in the rapidly growing women’s movement. Questions abounded: What about women who were not interested in NUC but were passionate about feminism-how do we relate to them? We all struggled against racism, but why weren ‘ t black women interested in our move ment, particularly in the socialist feminism those of us in NUC advocated? How much should men be involved in women ‘s liberation and in what ways? The pressure was particularly acute in smaller centers of radical activity like Pittsburgh, where unlike New York, Boston, and Chicago, everyone active in the New Left knew each other, and the options to join a group were limited.
When in September 1969, several weeks after assuming my new role as assistant dean, Wilma Scott Heide asked me to speak at the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Pittsburah Press covered the event and printed (albeit in the “Women’s Section”) a long article about the talk with a big picture of the “female dean.”21 This press clipping, as well as other media coverage of many of my feminist activities in Pittsburgh during 1969-1970 are included in my file, all marked “Confidential.” Excerpts from my NOW speech are typical of what I was saying in Pittsburgh at that time: “All women’s education is geared … to produce secretaries instead of professors, to give out programs at a symphony instead of playing the violin, to help Sen. Kennedy rather than to be a senator.” They also reported what I said about working to institute an interdisciplinary course on women in history, literature, and sociology in the university curriculum (“This is as important to women as black studies are to blacks-to give women a new concept of self-respect and knowledge”). I also talked about being active in the Women’s Caucus of the NUC: “It’s a group interested in university reform and changes in the basic structure of the university, and they have adopted women’s issues as a part of the national program.” My carefully crafted position regarding the women’s liberation movement was clear: “I feel very strongly that women’s rights can’t be separated from the whole social context. We have to be aware all the time that we’re members of a
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society and any female movement can’t be separated from it.” This talk, like most of my other public speaking that year, was about across-the political-spectrum female consciousness raising and was a call for gener ally moderate social reform. I was an academic administrator, and the envelope could be pushed just so far.
Throughout 1969, certain issues were becoming a central part of a broad women’s liberation movement nationally: the right to create and disseminate new knowledge about women-what would soon be known as women’s studies-accessible daycare, equal pay, and reproductive rights. The words “unwanted pregnancy” made everyone shudder. And although not many of us were mothers yet, in Pittsburgh we knew enough to fight for university-based daycare.
On December 12, 1969, as I was completing my first semester as assis tant dean, and three months after I had spoken to NOW, the SAC of the Pittsburgh field office sent memo 100-16075 to the director of the FBI: “Since subject is a professor, employed at the University of Pittsburgh, Bureau authority is requested to conduct an investigation to determine if subject should be placed on the Security In dex.”25 The reasons for wanting to place me on the Security Index are again repeated in a January 13, 1970, memo from the Pittsburgh SAC to Headquarters; this agent thought that the FBI surveillance of me to date had yielded enough to warrant a full scale “national security” investigation.
However, the director of the FBI did not grant the Pittsburgh field of fice permission to conduct an investigation of the “subject”: “A review … indicates that logical sources have been contacted and the appropriate credit and criminal checks have been made. It is not clear to the Bureau what additional investigation your office contemplates … accordingly, authority to conduct the requested investigation is being denied at this time.” In a memo dated March 3, 1970, to the FBI director, the Pittsburgh office concurred: “Subject is not in a leadership position in the NUC, and since NUC is not active in the Pittsburgh area at the present time, further investigation is not considered necessary, and this matter is being closed. Should the subject’s future activities indicate a need for further investiga tion, this matter will be reopened and the Bureau advised.”
At the end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970, the FBI considered me a security risk solely because of my activities in the NUC and because of my trip to Cuba. However, my high public profile as a “women’s libera tioni st,” my role in starting women’s consciousness raising rap groups, as well as the teaching of a new course about women in the university did not seem subversive to the FBI. No mention was made in the Pittsburgh based FBI analysis of my “security risk” due to activities in the women’s movement in Pittsburgh even though the y had collected ample press clip pings and reports about my feminist activities. Apparently, the FBI had concluded that nascent women’s studies and women’s liberation were not a threat to national security, even if their “subject” had a leadership role in the movement.
When I and other New Left feminists (some in NUC, others not) gained a public forum in 1970-1971 with the establishment of the country’s first women’s studies program in a state-run and publicly financed institu tion of higher education, San Diego State, the FBI was in terested again. Starting in mid-1 970, the FBI began to explore the link between the NUC’s Women’s Caucus and the broader, now nationwide women ‘s movement. From the case study of m y FBI file, it appears clear that to the extent that the early women’s liberation movement was linked to a national organi zation committed to working toward socialism in the United States, it was considered dangerous-a “Security Matter.” Interest in socialism- espe cially Cuba-immediately became a “Subversive Matter” in a way that organizing women in Pittsburgh in 1968-1969 did not.
As I discuss below, the first year of the women’s studies program at San Diego State was a laboratory for attempting a new experiment. I am not sure the FBI can be given credit for und erstanding this at the time, but there was a “socialist” vision to the program. We wanted a universi ty-based program, free of any corporate control, that could create links with other sectors of society, thereby helping to weaken, as I wrote at the time, “the traditional divisions-student vs. worker, black vs. white, man vs. woman used to maintain the American Way of Life.”26 The experiment did not come to fruition as originally planned, but the birth of women ‘s studies in the United States was a radical experiment that viewed institutions of higher learning as part of a larger complex of institutions that could be
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changed by progressive social activists. Was this a “Subversive Matter” that threatened national security? According to the FBI, in 1970 it was.
SAN DIEGO
On May 22, 1970, in San Diego, California, the faculty senate at San Diego State gave final approval to a formal proposal to create the first full fledged women’s studies program in the country. The persistent efforts of the Committee for Women’s Studies and Women’s Liberation (composed of students, faculty, women from the community, and staff) had guided the proposal through committee channels and won the approval. During this process the program was allocated a one-year full-time faculty posi tion for a “Distinguished Visiting Professor” and 1.5 instructional positions pending curricular appro va l.27 The San Diego Committee contacted Dixon, then based at the University of Chicago, for advice about selecting the Distinguished Visiting Professor. The West Coast women were looking for an activist in the women’s liberation movement with good academic credentials. Dixon recommended me. I immediately accepted their offer and negotiated a half-time position (out of the remaining 1.5 allocated positions in the program) for an NUC colleague, Barbara Kessel. In August, I picked up Kessel in Chicago, and we drove out to San Diego to begin a memorable year.
Just before I left Pittsburgh, I gave an interview, on July 30, 1970, to the student newspaper at the University of Pittsburgh. This article is also in my FBI file.28 I explained why I was leaving Pittsburgh to work with the newly created San Diego State program: “In addition to the opportunity to develop new courses in Women’s Studies, Roberta is attracted to San Diego … because the state school has initiated programs that are still in the maturation stage here. A client-controlled non-profit day care center, to be staffed by both men and women, is a staple of Women’s Studies. The school will also offer research, publications, and cultural centers for femi nist usage She hopes to reach women outside the university commu
nity, perhaps to work extensively with Chicanos.”
I was interested in experimenting with how to reconcile the academy’s objective of producing and inculcating scholarly knowledge with the movement’s objective of making social change. I wanted to work toward
bridging the academy/community divide, and so did the women in San Diego. From the beginning, the San Diego feminists agreed that the wom en’s studies program should not be limited to university women; it should meet the needs of nonacademic women in the surrounding community as well. This would be a first time experiment-a new kind of hybrid.29
The San Diego feminists considered themselves part of the New Left; they were anti-imperialists and antiracists and against traditional hierar chies in addition to being feminist. There was general agreement that capi talism, sexism, U.S. imperialism, and racism were mutually reinforcing and unjust. A commitment to this vision was the common denominator, an umbrella of understanding, that initially covered other differences among the group. This was, after all, 1970-1971-a euphoric moment. The women’s liberation movement was in the midst of consolidating itself into a creative, energetic, and assertive social movement. Although Betty Frie dan’s Feminine Mystique had registered the deep malaise of U.S. middle-class women in 1963, and Friedan and others had created NOW in 1966, it was only in the wake of the civil rights movement, in June 1968, when young female activists were hissed and thrown out of the SDS national conven tion by their male comrades for demanding that women’s liberation become part of the national platform, that New Left women mobilized.
Some of these New Left women advocated a radical feminist move
ment separate from any other political movement; others favored working within or with mixed (female/male) radical organizations. NUC and the NUC Women’s Caucus were deeply enmeshed in this debate. When I joined the San Diego State program, I thought of myself as both socialist and feminist and agreed with the vision spelled out in the NUC Women’s Caucus Newsletter:
As the independent women’s movement expands, women in NUC fidget uncomfortably at their commitment to a male dominated organization whose constituency is not specifically female Why are women inter
ested in working within a mixed organization at all? Clearly, we will not achieve our liberation alone; at some point we must unite with other struggles (e.g. third world and working class liberation struggles) and with men to make a socialist revolution Since women are interested
in working against the role which the educational system plays in main-
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taining capitalism (and thereb y women’s oppression) our working within a national organization put s us in a position of strength to fight on many fronts at once The women’ s caucus has the potential of creating the
women’s liberation experience for academic women, students, and others, as a step toward being part of the women’s revolutionary socialist move ment, ultimately transforming NUC. and by extension the movement.30
The above statement appeared in fall 1970, after the NUC Iowa convention in June of that year . I attended that convention and so did the FBI: ” Dur ing the conve ntion the subject was reported to have been pres ent at a meeting of the Wo men’s Caucus of the NUC held on June 15, 1970. During this meeting the subject made a statement to the effect she felt undergraduate women should also be organized and that NUC should not limit its recruitment to graduate students and teachers.”31
I arrived in San Diego late in August. The FBI was right there; perhaps they accompanied me, or perhaps they preceded me. A proposal for a “Center for Wo men ‘s Studies ,” dated July 7, 1970, was received at the San Diego field office on August 22, 1970. The three-page description of ” T he Women’s Studies Program. College of Arts and Lett e rs, San Diego State College” was included also. The document has backgro und information and a description of the program design and of the ten courses to be offered for upper division elective credit. Each page is stamped “Confidential.”
During the initial year of the women’s studies program , in addition to teaching, I was chairman (sic) of the Women’s Studies Board that repre sented the 300 members of the program-that is, the number of students enrolled in the classes. The board consisted of appro xim atel y twen ty students, community mem bers, staff, and faculty. This was the birth of a new “species” on a U.S. universit y cam pus: a resolut ely non-hierarchal board ( ult im ate ly responsible to the dean of the College of Arts and Letters) that was trying to transform movement change into an academic change project.
No one knew how to do it; where would we have learned? We did not have a strategic plan; in fact, most of us had never heard of strategic plan ning . No one had mapped out a future course; we were forging a new path daily, often with verbal machetes : contentious meetings, demonstra-
From the FBI file of Roberta Salper.
tions, and intense encounters with centers of power in the university. Tensions among the members of the Women’s Studies Board and between the program and university administration existed before Kessel and I arrived and continued throughout the year.
A great deal of my time was spent in meetings, mostly with women in the program, but on occasion with the Chicano studies program and local
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unions. I went to many demonstrations, some about women’s issues, some against the Vietnam War, some combating racism, and others supporting union causes. And I never missed a class. Because we wanted to share our experience with as many movement people as possible, I wrote several articles on the program, did a lot of public speaking, and in the second semester I put together an anthology, Female Liberation: History and Current Politics, based on needs that had emerged from my first semes ter’s teaching; it was published in 1972. As chair of the Women’s Studies Board, I was frequently interviewed-by, among others, the London Times, Los AnBeles Times, Chronicle of HiBher Education, Newsweek, and numerous times by the Daily Aztec, the San Diego State student newspaper. The Daily Aztec also reported on the “struggles” among the women in the program and the contentious relationship between the women’s studies program and the university administration.
These press clippings are in my file as are summaries prepared by the San Diego field office for FBI headquarters. They dutifully reported that
A two-part article entitled “The Woman Question” appeared in the “Daily Aztec” on February 18, 1971 and February 25, 1971. In the article SALPER outlined the history of the women’s liberation movement beginning with the women who were involved in Civil Rights activities in 1964. She stated that the Movement has two basic trends, one, a liberal women’s Civil Rights Movement and the other a political movement composed of radi cal or socialist-oriented feminist groups. She outlined the demands of the women’s liberation movement which include social justice and personal dignity for women by abolishing such institutions as “Playboy” magazine, which reduce women to objects of sexual fantasy and pleasure, and by offering women equal promotion, salary and other benefits in employ ment She described the Women’s Liberation Movement as one of the
most vital and important social movements in 20th Century America….
On March 19, 1971 the subject was described as one of the leading figures in the women’s liberation movement at San Diego State College.32
That same month, with the political acumen I had thirty-eight years ago, I told a reporter from the London Times, “I want to make sure that in
the move towards socialism in this country women don’t get left behind, either politically or personally. In the Soviet Union, legislation has
changed but personal relationships haven’t. Women work in th e factories and then go home to do the housework.”33
It was statements like the one I made in the London Times that led the FBI to intensify its surveillance of me in San Diego. Despite the fact that I was the focus of press attention in both Pittsburgh and San Diego, my public statements in Pittsburgh were more guarded-and thus less ” threat ening”-because of my administrative position at the University of Pitts burgh. In contrast, in San Diego I not only identified myself publicly with the Women’s Liberation Movement, I made clear that my visio n of women’s liberation could not be achieved without socialism . This was the vision, in accord with NUC’s definition, that guided some of us (Kessel, myself, and some, but not all, of the other women) at San Diego State during its first year. We sought to undermine on a local, state, and ulti mately national scale the corporate and political forces in the United States that repressed women’s voices and efforts to progress professio nally and personally. In the FBI’s view we posed a threat not only to male bureaucrac y, but also to the engines of capitalist society. My San Diego activi ties, along with my attem pts to give those activities media publicit y, threw the FBI into high gear; I was truly a “domestic subversive.”
A memo from the San Diego field office to FBI headquarters dated July 7, 1972, states that my file was being transferred to the New York field office because of my residence and work there (associate professor of humanities at SUNY, Old Westbury, starting fall 1971). “In view of sub ject’s membership in the New University Conference (NUC), her relation ship with members of the Revolutionar y Union, and her role as an active leader in the Women ‘ s Liberation Movement, it would appear that sh e should be included in the ADEX. However , inasmuch as her current activities are not known to the San Diego Divisio n, inclusion of the subject on the ADEX is being left to the discretion of the New York Division .” (Emphasis added.) After a circuitous route, the recommendation to include my name on the ADEX list was finally denied for insufficient evidence on April 12, 1973.
450 Roberta Salper
CONCLUSIONS: A “DOMESTIC SUBVERSIVE”?
For me, 1968-1973 were years of professional distinction. social activism, and deep commitment to the future of the United States. These were the years in which I shed the private cocoon and learned to operate in the
From the FBI file of Roberta Salper.
public sphere-a transformative experience. For the FBI, they were years in which I was under surveillance and investigated for being a subversive. Thousands of dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money were wasted in underwrit ing the bureaucratic incompetence of the FBI-the astounding repetition of documents and use of various agents to compile the same ultimately useless data is, I am sure, not confined to just my case. What did they prove about me in the almost 700 pages accumulated? That I was a danger to national security by dissenting from mainstream politics?
In 1970, I went to San Diego State to help create a new institutional framework where different kinds of women-many of them perhaps here tofore denied access to the academy-would learn to produce and incul cate scholarly knowledge and to make social change. Like the other members of NUC, I viewed institutions of higher learning as part of a larger complex of institutions that could be changed by progressive social activists. We called it working toward socialism and we meant it, even though no clear plan existed for what this socialism in the United States might look like. When I left San Diego in August 1971, I knew we had laid the groundwork for something important, but I was not sure of its future direction.34
Looking back, I am heartened that much of what we advocated has become standard fare: full-fledged women’s studies programs across the nation, university-based daycare, certain links to the community, impor tant pedagogical reforms. What didn’t endure, however, was the vision we had. We didn’t want just isolated (albeit important) reforms like equal pay for female faculty and access to administrative power. We wanted to change the structure in which education functioned, and for that we had to campaign against corporate control of higher education and, by exten sion, of other sectors of the country. The fight against corporate control was at the crux of the struggles that took place during the first year of the first women’s studies program.
That was the rub; we were anti-imperialists. Some of us liked the idea of experimenting with a new kind of U.S. socialism, and some of us had even visited Cuba (a major crime). “Socialism” and “Cuba” set off bells at the FBI. Between 1968 and 1973, the most powerful democracy in the world spent untold amounts of money trying to document that citizens like me
452 Roberta Sa/per
were “domestic subversiv es” because we dissented from mainstream politics as we helped shape the early yea rs of the women’s liberation movement. A study remains to be done to doc umen t other cases similar to mine.
The immense surveillance machine that had as its goal to control “subversive activity,” to stop people from dissenting, was-and continues to be-the real threat to democracy, not the dissenters themselves. This system of surveillance deceives, disseminates misinformation and fear , and often ruins lives of its citizens-all in the name of preventing the popula tio n from considering alternatives to the status quo.
This was a moment in which most of us in the New Left-female and male- believed that battles could be won against the expanding corporate control of the United States. The multinationals were just beginning their relentless forays into the Third World; we believed that if more people, in the university and beyo nd, understood the “imperial” nature of our democracy, it could be combated or at least mitigated. This was part of the vision that formed the backdrop for the formation of the first women’s studies program in the United States.
Our vision did not prevail. Was it worth the effort? Of course. Would I go through it all again?
Just tell me where and when.
N O T E S
I would like to thank my daught er Ana Simo ne Salper for her consistently int elligent edit ing at all stages of this arti cle. Thanks also t o Rosal yn Baxandall for her inci sive, informed reading of a final draft and to James Les ar of Washington, D.C., my FOlA att o rn ey.
$64.60 for the 646 page s. but has tened to add “your indicati o n of approval and consent to incur such fees will not necessarily result in the entire co ntents of our records being disclosed to you , since we are guided by the provi sio ns of the Freedom of Information Act (Title 5, United States Code, Section 552) and th e privacy Act of 1974 (Title 5, United States Code, Section 552a) in disclosin g mate rial from our reco rds. No fees will be assessed for documents not released .”
to which the name was changed in 1971). There have been a series of names the FBI has used for the Security Index, since the 1920s and the “Red Scares,” to mean the same thing: a list of persons whom the FBI thinks are potentially dangerous to the public safety or internal security of the United States and who should be interned in case of “national emergency.” ADEX was computerized in 1972 and discontinued, in this form, in January 1976.
FBI is incorrect; I was never “a national coordinator for New University Conference.”
Oct. 1971.
advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of over throwing the Government or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such an organization.” The Act is best known for its use against political organizations and indi\’iduals, mostly on the Left. Prosecutions continued until a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1957 threw out numerous convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional. The statute remains on the books, however.
Are You Now, xii.
University Conference: A Study of Former Members,” Critical Socwlo3y 15, no. I (1988):
454 Roberta Sa/per
145-47, about 50 percent of NUC faculty and student members had participated in New Left, civil rights, or antiwar activism before joining NUC, and 25 percent had belonged to SDS. In the same article, Pincus and Erlich also point out that at its height in 1970-1971, NUC had a paid membership of approximately 2,000 members on 60 campuses.
classification for “subversive” investigations.
622 Notes on Contributors
Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrosations, Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2005) (with Agatha Beins). She is also a scholar of lesbian and gay history and helped to pioneer the field with Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Penguin, 1994) (with Madeline Davis).
MARGE PIERCY is the author of seventeen poetry collections including
Colors Passins throush Us (2004), What Are Bis Girls Made op (1997), The Art of
Blessins the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1999), and most recently, The Crooked Inheritance (2006), all from Knopf. She has written seventeen novels, most recently Sex Wars.· A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (2005) with Morrow/Harper Collins, who published her memoir SleepinB with Cats (2002).
RoBERTA SALPER, resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, and author of one of the early women’s liberation anthologies, Female Liberation.· History and Current Politics (Alfred Knopf, 1972), is currently working on a historical memoir. Highlights of her academic appointments include dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University, director of Humanities and Social Sciences at Pennsylvania State, Erie, and resident fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. She has published gender studies of early-twentieth-century Spanish literature and Cuban literature as well as numerous articles about the beginning of women’s studies.
CHRISTINE STARK is a writer, visual artist, and public speaker of Anishi naabe, Cherokee, and European heritage. Her work has been published in a variety of periodicals and books, including the Florida Review, La Primavera, and Prostitution, TraffickinB, and Traumatic Stress. Along with Rebecca Whisnant, she edited the anthology Not for Sale. Feminists Resistins Prostitution and Pornosraphy (Spinifex Press, 2005). She teaches writing, humanities, and speech at a community college in Minnesota, and she is a member of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition.
JosEPHINE WITHERS is associate professor emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a former director of the women’s studies program there (1982-1984). She is the founder and principal of Dream
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