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PARTISAN REVIEW
such a devastating picture of the California NOW, I would like to
know whom Hawkes is quoting in her portrait of behind-the-scenes
savage politicking and "trashing" of women by rivals.
In order to save her skin in Louisiana, and to give her col–
leagues in NOW a chance to defend her (the women were split: one
group wanted nothing to do with Foat, others defended her), Ginny
Foat came up with a new version of herself: she became the symbol
of the "battered wife" syndrome. In the version she presented of her–
self to the court, while married to Jack Sidote she had been a passive
wife who felt obliged to follow the commands of her brutal, domi–
neering second husband. Ginny Foat's tactic worked and she finally
was acquitted.
But the real thrust of Hawkes's account, and in this, she more
than amply proves her point, isn't whether or not Ginny Foat com–
mitted murder: Ellen Hawkes is a native Californian, and what she
considers lethal is the
combination
of Los Angeles rootlessness, lack of
history, and the quick, easy optimism of the feminist movement on
the West Coast. One of the most amazing incidents in the book is
that Ginny Foat, quite a while before being extradited to Louisiana,
apparently mentioned to her NOW sisters during dinner at a Los
Angeles restaurant that she had been accused by her exhusband,
Jack Sidote, in Nevada, of being his accomplice in several car
murders. She told the women that her only involvement in the crime
had been helping Sidote clean up pools of blood in their car. In her
version she had spent an hour cleaning up the mysterious bloody
mess because she had been a meek, subservient wife who had no mind
or thoughts of her own - not even enough imagination to inquire
of him: was this roast beef, a run-down dog, or a corpse? What is
so extraordinary is that her NOW companions also treated her story
as an unreal dream-like event that had no relevance to their own
dreams and ambitions, and to their agenda for NOW. Hawkes feels
it is a cop-out for feminists to hide behind a rhetoric that relieves
them from assuming responsibility for their past choices.
If
Foat had
been an exwaitress and go-go girl who had then made a serious com–
mitment to another way of life, and had given real time to becoming
educated, of course, she could have gone on to NOW leadership.
What made her such a bizarre choice for state president of NOW -
(and until the murder charges against her were revealed she had in–
tended to run for national president) - was that she never went
through any educative process which would have given her even the
slightest qualifications as an enlightened leader of women. All of
