“Why define yourself by what your husband does?” Wilma asked. Then, as everybody looked at her, the chunky manicurist blushed. “I’m Wilma,” she said hurriedly. “I’m twenty-two. I work in a beauty parlor. I’m not married. Maybe that’s why I made that crack. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Dearie. Maybe you hit the nail on the old head.” The speaker was a blowsy girl with a brassy bleach job. She was dressed loudly, overly made-up, and carried ten pounds of overweight, all in her behind. “Call me Gertie. I’m twenty-eight. I should be thirty-two, but I was out sick a few years. I’m a housewife too. My lord-and-master’s a garbage-man. Hah!”
“Why are you self-conscious about your age?” Barbara asked.
“So who’s self-conscious? What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Shave a year here, a year there, you live twice as long.”
“By ‘they,’ you mean men,” Barbara said. “That kind of thing is just why we’re here. Let’s get back to it. . . . Your turn.” She smiled at the tall, slender black woman seated next to Gertie.
“Ellen. That’s my name. I’m thirty-two, married, two kids. I’ve got a Master’s in Industrial Engineering. I work by the day as a domestic.”
“You’re at the wrong meeting,” Wilma told her. “A black engineer doing somebody else’s housework! You should join the Panthers!”
“Not really. If I was a black man with my qualifications, even as bad as things are in engineering today, I might get hired over a white man. But a black woman? Forget it!”
“Say, honey,” Gertie seized the opportunity, “would you maybe have a free cleaning day Thursdays?”
“Gertie!” Barbara exclaimed.
“State of Maine to you,” Ellen replied sweetly.
“Huh?”
“Upper U. S.!” Ellen mimicked a thick Italian accent.
For some reason this roused Mrs. Iuliano, who had been dozing. Now she sat up straight in her rocking-chair and spoke. “My name is Mrs. Juliano—” she began.
“First names, Grandma,” Barbara told her.
“Mrs. Juliano!” the old lady insisted. “I’m ninety-two years old and I’m a retired housewife. Mrs. Juliano!” She glared at them and then subsided, closing her eyes, humming to herself as she rocked.
“Dear?” Barbara’s husband loomed muscularly in the doorway to the kitchen. His eyes focused on Regina Blue and then he looked away demurely. His hand automatically went to his crewcut and patted it into place. “What time would you like me to serve the coffee?” he asked his wife. “I have to know so I can put the brownies in early enough so they won’t get cold.”
“I’ll let you know in time,” Barbara told him.
“All right.” He stole one more furtive look at Regina, giggled nervously, and went back to the kitchen.
It was Regina’s turn to introduce herself. She told them her name, and that she was twenty-four years old, and then took a deep breath. “I’m a whore,” she announced.
“I know just what you mean.” Gertie broke the startled silence. “Sometimes I hold out on Stanley, my husband, to get what I want. Then when I get it, I feel like I’m being paid for putting out. All wives are whores!”
“I’m not married,” Regina replied.
“You don’t have to be married to be a whore.” Wilma was bitter. “I’m single. Lots of times I lay down just so some guy will ask me out again. Most single girls figure sex is what you give for what you get-— dinner, a movie, you know.”
“We seem to be saying we all feel like whores,” Barbara pointed out. “One way or another, we all sell ourselves to men. Do you suppose all women feel like that?”
“Not me!” Mrs. Juliano suddenly cackled. “I’m a widow. Husband’s been dead thirty years. Left me a bundle.”
“But when he was alive, he exploited you, Grandma,” Barbara said.
“Hogwash! I exploited him! Saw to it that he’d work himself to death and leave me well-fixed. And he did!”
“That only shows men are the victims as well as the exploiters, Grandma. But before we can help them, we have to help ourselves. Women have to get their heads together. They have to recognize the ways in which men exploit them.”
Regina thought of her plush apartment, her Mercedes, her trips abroad. “I don’t feel exploited,” she said doubtfully.
“You think it’s right to sell your body?” Gertie snarled.
“Do you? The only difference between us is that I'm better paid. You said yourself you have sex so your husband will give you things. I just have more variety. And I’ll bet I enjoy it more, too!”
“You must know Stanley!” Gertie was suspicious.
“I don’t remember any garbagemen among my clients.” Regina was haughty. “Besides, a prostitute is bound to silence—like a priest.”
“Let’s not go at each other,” Barbara chided them. “We have to join forces, support one another, forget our differences. We are all exploited.”
“Right on!” Ellen tossed her Afro. “Look—-” She turned earnestly to Regina. “It’s like one cat’s exploited as an advertising copywriter at twenty-five thousand a year, and another’s exploited as the office janitor for fifty bucks a week. Now the copywriter— that’s you—he’s pretty damn comfortable being exploited. But if he didn’t let himself be used, then the janitor couldn’t be exploited either. What I’m saying is that superior ability—or looks—is no excuse. And the fact that you’re well paid for degrading your-self is no excuse either. It just encourages other women to sell themselves -- one way or another. I don’t want to insult you, but actually you’re sort of a sexist version of an Uncle Tom. When you sell out, you sell us all out.”
The point hit Regina Blue hard. She recognized that she had everything she needed and that there was no good reason for her to go on prostituting herself. She could give up “The Life”; she could find some other career to pursue; she could and she should! But would she?
“You haven’t said anything.” Barbara tried to draw out the last girl, the blonde in the wool jumper with the faraway expression on her thin, intense face. “What do you think of the sexual role of women in our society?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Faith Venable answered. “I’m a virgin.”
They stared at her.
Gertie was the first to recover. “A whore I’ll buy," she said. “But a virgin-?!” Gertie snorted loudly.
“Tell us about yourself,” Barbara suggested.
“My name is Faith. I’m twenty-four years old. I’m-”
“Stop right there!” Ellen held up a firm ebony hand. “You’re twenty-four years old and you’re still a virgin?”
“Yes.”
“In New York City?” Wilma was disbelieving.
“That’s right.”
“A spinster?” Mrs. Juliano came to life. “In this day and age?”
“Who says amateurs are ruining the business?” Regina murmured.
“Honey—” Sallow-faced, square-built Wilma took Faith’s hand and automatically examined the fingernails. “Honey, you’re just not trying!”
“I have no desire to try. I don’t miss sex.”
Barbara quieted the hubbub which greeted this. “Maybe Faith has the right idea,” she said. “Maybe not having sex with men is best.”
“Right on!” Mrs. Juliano cackled. “Sex is piffle!” In the kitchen there was an angry rattle of pots and pans.
“If no sex is the price of being a liberated woman,” Gertie protested, “then I’ll take the shackles!”
“Hear me out,” Barbara continued. “Let’s be honest. Most men don’t satisfy a woman anyway. All they know how to do is—pardon the expression-—-hop on and off. Half the time they get their jollies and leave the woman hung up.”