The female activist, 1972
She went where the action was, union organizing drives and various left-wing protests that survived the volatile sixties. She carried just three books from her home library with her when she went on the road: “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky, “In Dubious Battle” by John Steinbeck and one other, which she kept private because it mirrored her secret soul.
She underwent all the interminable waiting between actions that soldiers and activists know, and acted briskly and with purpose when it was time to act. She became recognized as a force, and given the times it was relatively easy to sleep with several of the stronger men in the movement without commitment or recrimination.
She became pregnant and told no one. She drove off by herself on a lonely road trip, in which she parked on a ridge overlooking the city to which the man who she was sure was the father had returned.
She thought about her life and then drove away and calmly went about the business of finding a doctor to abort the birth. He used fibroids as a cover story, because abortion was still against the law in the early 1970s. She was a good Roman Catholic when she entered her activist phase and still believed herself to be one. But certain dogmas no longer fit. She recovered from her fibroid surgery and returned to her career in activism and kept any secret sorrow entirely to herself.
This reads like something Camus would have written in his Cahiers, possibly as grist for a story later on about life’s absurdity. But it is a story I heard, and beyond my power to write.
