Kolkata: When Hettie Jones, Beat writer and publisher, died in 2024, her obituary in The New York Times carried the headline, “Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90.” As with most women in the beat circle, she “nurtured”, while the men “worked”.Born into a Jewish family in New York, Hettie Jones was a prominent figure in the Beat Generation, a literary counterculture movement that began in the United States in the 1950s and whose influence continues to be felt across the world. Hettie devoted her life to the anti-establishment cause, writing 23 books and publishing Beat writers in the Totem Press with her husband LeRoi Jones.Many of her achievements were overshadowed by her husband’s adventures. Poet LeRoi Jones was to leave his wife and kids, adopt Islam, join the Black Panthers and change his name to Amiri Baraka, remaining suitably celebrated. Hettie, on the other hand, lived on the peripheries of his fame, carrying her “wife of…” status to the end.Speaking in 1996, Hettie Jones had nearly foreseen the NYT’s 2024 headline when she said, “I don’t think women are ever going to be identified as the Beats.”The Beat Generation took off at a time when the United States, in the post-World War II scenario, was going through a lot of turmoil, including issues like inflation, unemployment, materialist fatigue and Cold War tension with the communist camp.Leon Horton, a United Kingdom-based Beat scholar and author, sets the scene. “A man, an ordinary man, back from the killing fields of Europe and Asia, could have it all. From the ad-land of Madison Avenue came the promised land of the perfect life in a perfect neighbourhood with the perfect wife, the perfect children – just don’t rock the boat,” he tells me.Also read: Miyah Poets in a Destitute TimeIt was against this climate that the Beat Generation burst onto the scene. As Allen Ginsberg famously howled in 1955: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at/dawn looking for an angry fix…”On October 7, 1955, at the Sixth Gallery in San Francisco, the Beats held their first public reading. This was also where Ginsberg first read from his magnum opus, Howl and Other Poems, 1956. Ginsberg became an instant sensation. The City Lights Publishing, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, started operations the same year. Jack Kerouac soon shot to fame with his 1957 novel, On the Road.Things changed forever.Close on their heels came the revelation of William S. Burroughs with his groundbreaking novel Naked Lunch and Gregory Corso, known for his raw and intense poetry. Other important members included Gary Snyder, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Kerouac’s male muse – Neal Cassady.Seventy years hence, as I sift through some atypical male beat literature, the sexism stands out starkly. In Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, we encounter sentences like these:At one place, Dean Moriarty (modelled after Cassady) says, “…so long’s that li’l old gal with that li’l sumpin down there tween her legs, boy’ – we can eat, son y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, yet’s eat right now!”And here’s more: “Dean was making love to two girls at the same time, they being Marylou, his first wife, who waited for him in a hotel room, and Camille, a new girl, who waited for him in a hotel room.”In the book, Dharma Bums, Kerouac continues his sexist remarks.At one place, he says, “Pretty girls make graves.”Among the countless girls that Kerouac used and spit out was Joyce Johnson, with whom he had an affair between 1957 and 1959, leaving her with a broken heart. Johnson, a Beat novelist and essayist, observes in her memoir, Minor Characters, “Could he ever include a woman in his journeys? I didn’t altogether see why not. Whenever I tried to raise the question, he’d stop me by saying that what I really wanted were babies. That was what all women wanted and what I wanted too, even though I said I didn’t.”According to Johnson, “The whole Beat scene had very little to do with the participation of women as artists themselves. The real communication was going on between the men, and the women were there as onlookers… You kept your mouth shut, and if you were intelligent and interested in things, you might pick up what you could. It was a very masculine aesthetic.”Carolyn Cassady was another of Kerouac’s conquests. Wife of Neal Cassady, a rootless American youth continuously stealing cars and changing girls. Kerouac’s obsession with Cassady ultimately led to a three-way relationship between Neal, Jack and Carolyn that quickly deteriorated into complexities. A free spirit and ally of the Beat Generation poets, Carolyn’s name makes it to the annals of history only as “Neal’s wife” and not as an active facilitator in the movement, keeping house and providing space for Neal and Jack’s night-long literary adventures.Among the trophy wives of Beat writers was the brilliant figure, Joan Vollmer. Like Carolyn Cassady, Joan had a huge intellectual impact on the Beats, providing them stability in chaos. Despite not having a body of work of her own, she was respected as an equal and eventually married Burroughs. A close friend of Johnson’s, Vollmer ended up a Benzedrine addict and died in a shooting accident by Burroughs at a party.Also read: Allen Ginsberg, a Calcutta StoryEven as Burroughs carried the guilt from the accident, his attitude towards women remained concerning. In The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, he tells Daniel Odier his opinion on women: “I think that they were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.” He adds, “American women are possibly one of the worst expressions of the female sex because they’ve been allowed to go further,” and “It’s a matriarchal, white supremacist country. There seems to be a very definite link between matriarchy and white supremacy.”Ginsberg’s story was a little more layered. He was gay, and there are indications that he considered gays intellectually superior. However, his stance was softer than Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s. Bob Rosenthal, Ginsberg’s secretary for two decades, writes about Allen’s support for equality of sexes. In his book Straight Around Allen he calls Allen a “benign sexist” – without the sharp edges of misogyny but with subtle signs of bias. Even as Allen’s poetry continues to liberate sexuality for young people, in a 2007 issue of the New Yorker he is quoted as saying, “The social organisation which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang.”Ginsberg said of poet Diane di Prima, “Where there was a strong writer who could hold her own, like Diane Di Prima, we would certainly work with her and recognise her. She was a genius.” The statement, though exclusionary, pays suitable tribute to one of the most important female Beat writers of the generation – a rare one he could regard as equal to the men in intellect and talent.Diane’s explosive prose came at a time when America was encountering a sexual revolution. In the 1960s, America was a boiling pot of rebellion, with shifting social norms and refreshed expectations. It seemed the women’s liberation movement had come a long way, but old habits die hard. Ryan Mathews, an author, artist, poet and regular contributor to Beatdom, tells me, “It was a stereotype many strong, independent and creative women sought to escape; a mass-marketed misogyny that drove them running into the arms of a counterculture which, ironically, turned out to be just as misogynistic.”A photo of ‘Miss Beatnik’ contestants from 1959, in Venice, USA, August 27, 1959. Photo licensed under CC by 4.0 Source: L.A. Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Digital Library.Like Allen, Gregory Corso was another frontline Beat poet with a good reputation among women. It has been noted that he treated women equally and even helped with housework. However, in the Beat Generation, every knight had a chink in his armour.While staying at the Beat Hotel in 1957, along with Allen and his lover Peter Orlovsky, Corso did something that is cruel even by modern standards. As Barry Miles reports in his book, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris 1957-1963, Corso wrote to Kerouac in America and lured him with the offer of his then-girlfriend Joy Ungurer, whom he would trade in return for Kerouac joining them in Paris.Speaking of the hardships women faced, the story of ruth weiss stands out as one of great spirit and endurance. ruth was born in Germany and fled the Nazis to come to San Francisco in the late 1930s. One of her poems was made into a film called The Brink. Her Desert Journal encompasses her most important work, which she herself called “a masterpiece”. In the 1960s, ruth started writing her name in lowercase letters, defying the German style of capitalisation. Despite her influence and contribution, ruth remains one of the less explored Beat poets.In 1974, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University. Honouring Kerouac, who died in 1969, the school was part of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s vision to fuse contemplative practice with experimental poetics and literature. Born in 1945, Waldman was too young when the Beat movement took off, but soon came into her own with visceral poetry that challenged and rewrote the male narrative in Midwest America. In her own words, she attempted “… to speak against, about, around and through the all-pervasive forces of Western patriarchy and its many manifestations.”Also read: Can Women Afford To Be Degenerate?The School of Disembodied Poetics had a stellar faculty panel, including Corso, Ginsberg, Waldman, di Prima and many others. This is also where Lorna Smedman taught much later.Smedman remembers she was regularly infuriated by the blatant, pervasive sexism there. One such unforgettable experience was of Ginsberg rushing in to inform that Ken Kesey had driven into town, was downstairs in a blue Cadillac convertible with three other guys, and had asked Ginsberg “to get them four chicks to ball”. Smedman tells me that she told Ginsberg, “Just because I love his writing doesn’t mean I want to fuck him.” Ginsberg, surprised, replied, “But if I were a girl, I’d want to fuck Ken Kesey.”One of the founding members of the school, Joanne Kyger, was introduced to the Beat circuit by Richard Brautigan in 1957. In 1958, she met Gary Snyder and spent the next phase of her life writing twenty books of poetry. They married in 1960 and divorced in 1964, during which time she had travelled with him in Japan and East Asia, and studied Zen Buddhism.Kyger defined the “beat chick” stereotype in explicit terms – the “emancipated” hippie woman who in practice stayed in the kitchen, wore skirts, did things for the boys, and went to bed with them easily. When she died, the New York Times was a little kinder than it was to Hettie Jones, and headlined: “Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, Dies at 82.”The bias that women allies and poets faced in the Beat Generation remained a constant to their graves. Kerouac died unhappy, but a phenomenon. Ginsberg and Burroughs lived long, revered lives, whereas the women were forgotten, abandoned by peers, scholars and the media.Seventy years since the Beat literary movement took off, the uncomfortable question of sexism hangs over the most celebrated figures and their works. If a counterculture movement as disruptive and rebellious as the Beats could not pry itself out from patriarchy’s claws, what hope do we have for the future of other anti-establishment youth movements?Sreemanti Sengupta is a poet and freelance writer based in Kolkata.