The Female Persuasion

On a mild night in the fall of 2014, Faith Frank arrives at a Chinese massage parlor. Getting a “bracing, vigorous” massage always helps her to focus her thoughts, stay calm, and find the clarity to make good decisions. As she enters the parlor, her phone rings—it is her son, Lincoln. She answers the phone and tells Lincoln she is about to step in for a massage. He tells her to slow down, as travel is bad for her stiff neck and back. He has recently been on Loci’s website and has seen the many events and high-profile speakers coming up. Faith tells him that Emmett Shrader told them they needed to “go high-profile.” Loci’s summits now feature famous movie stars, hired psychics, complimentary manicures, and expensive food.

Faith finds the foundation’s “excesses” depressing. She believes, and has told Emmett repeatedly, that hosting rich women at conferences where they can get a mani-pedi doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Emmett, however, has told Faith that the organization needs to grow before it can engage with such issues. Faith tells Lincoln that she is occasionally allowed to take on a special project, such as a recent rescue mission to save Ecuadorian women from sex trafficking and set them up with mentors to help them rebuild their lives. Faith tells Lincoln that one of the rescued women, in fact, is going to be at the next Loci summit in Los Angeles, and that Faith is supposed to be the one to introduce her to the crowd. Lincoln advises Faith to take care of herself and not let herself get physically or emotionally exhausted.

Faith and Lincoln end their call, and Faith goes into the massage parlor and asks for a sixty-minute massage. The relaxing massage drops Faith “stupefied into a hole,” and she reflects on the path that has brought her to where she is today.

Faith was born in 1943—she and her twin brother, Philip, were born just six minutes apart. As they grew up in their tightknit Brooklyn neighborhood, Faith became studious and serious while Phillip got by on charm. The whole Frank gamily was very close, and Faith had a happy childhood—until one afternoon, when her parents pulled teenage Faith and her brother into the living room for a “family discussion.” Faith’s parents explained that though they are proud of their children, they worry about them. In particular, they expressed their reservations about sending Faith away to college. Faith, who had been dreaming of studying sociology or political science for years, begged her parents not to keep her at home, but they insisted that there are wonderful schools in Brooklyn. They still planned to send Faith’s twin away to school, because it would be “good for him.”

Faith begged her older brother to back her up, but he told Faith that he wanted to “stay out of it.” That night, Faith cried herself to sleep, and she and her brother were never close again. While her brother went off to school, Faith was forced to live at home while taking classes at Brooklyn College. She dated occasionally, but her parents, obsessed with making sure that Faith remained safe—and a virgin—would wait up for her every night, and once even came to collect her from a house party. Faith remained a virgin throughout college, feeling that there was “power” in walking away from sex.

As college ended, things began to shift for Faith. Kennedy was assassinated, and she and her friend from school, Annie, became more politically minded and desirous of independence. After graduation, Faith announced to her parents that she and Annie were moving to Las Vegas to get as far away from Brooklyn as possible. Though Faith’s parents threatened to cut her off if she went, they never followed through on those threats. Still, Faith did not ask her parents for any money or help as she and Annie made their way west to Las Vegas and secured jobs as cocktail waitresses at a hotel and casino.

Faith lost her virginity at twenty-two years old to a blackjack dealer and was completely underwhelmed by the act of sex. For years after, she was disgusted by men, until one night at the casino, when she met a slender, attractive man who worked as a “low-level executive in the field of cookies and crackers,” and flirted with him while he played blackjack. The man was with a woman, though, and once she reappeared at the table, Faith drifted away from the two of them. 

Over the next several months, Faith became involved with a trumpet player, and Annie took up with a comedian. One day, Annie missed her period and tearfully confided in Faith that she didn’t know what to do. The next day, Annie’s boyfriend drove her and Faith from doctor to doctor, searching for someone who would perform an abortion, but no one would. At last, Annie got the name of a secret practitioner from a friend, and Faith went with her to the prearranged meeting. The women were blindfolded, driven around, and eventually dropped off at a shady-looking building, where Annie was taken back to an exam room while Faith waited anxiously.

Later that night, Annie began bleeding heavily. Faith took her to the emergency room, where the nurses and doctors, realizing what was happening to Annie, shamed and criticized her, calling her a “harlot” and threatening to call the police on her. Two days later, after three blood transfusions, Annie was sent home with a warning from a male gynecologist who told her not to “give it up” so easily. After that incident, Annie begged Faith to return to Brooklyn, and so they did.

Now, in interviews, when Faith is asked if there was an “aha moment” that made her into the person she is today, she deflects and says there is not. However, she realizes that there have been a series of small realizations, and that Annie’s struggle to secure a safe abortion was one of them.

In 1966, Faith and Annie were sharing a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. They felt like two audience members who had arrived in the middle of a show. So much political protesting and social organizing was happening, and the two women had missed so much while in Las Vegas. Faith and Annie became politically involved almost right away.

Faith attended many antiwar meetings, and every time she spoke up, men interrupted her. She attempted to bring the issues she cared about—women’s liberation and abortion reform—to the forefront of these discussions, but men always silenced Faith and told her that women’s issues were not as important as the war in Vietnam. At the end of one meeting, a woman approached Faith and invited her to a women’s only meeting. Faith attended and found solace in a group of strong, beautiful, witty women who all had the same complaints about being silenced and underestimated that she herself did. As Faith shared her story—and Annie’s—with these women, they all rallied around the desire to stop letting men make their decisions. The women raised their voice in song together, celebrating that although they were in a “stuck place” a lot of the time, they were at least in it together.

After her first meeting with the women’s group, Faith returned home to her apartment and told Annie about the meeting. When Faith revealed that she had mentioned Annie’s abortion, Annie expressed her reluctance to talk about the incident and said that she never wanted to speak of it again. Though Faith and Annie remained roommates for several months after that evening, they grew apart considerably, as Faith threw herself into activism and Annie got swept up in a relationship with a law student. Eventually, Annie married the law student and moved out to the Midwest, while Faith doubled down on her presence in the women’s movement.

As Faith got more involved in the women’s movement, she began making valuable connections—one of her acquaintances, who had worked in publishing for a while, was planning on starting the magazine that would eventually become Bloomer. Faith was brought on board, and though the women struggled to secure funding and office space, they were “flushed with happiness” to be doing something so vital and full of potential.

As Faith and her fellow editors at Bloomer struggled to get their magazine off the ground, they realized that they were going to need to sell a considerable amount of ad space. One morning, Faith and her coworkers meet with three executives from Nabisco, attempting—and failing—to relay to the men why their huge corporation should advertise in their niche women’s magazine. The men end the meeting by telling the women they’d “think about it,” but on the way out of the meeting, one of the men stops Faith and tells her that he recognizes her. He asks if they had met long ago in Las Vegas, and Faith quickly realizes that he is the man she flirted with who worked in “cookies and crackers.”

The executive, Emmett Shrader, offers to take Faith out so that they can “explore the question of ad space” further—just the two of them, one-on-one. Though Faith can tell that there is a flirtatious tone to the invitation, and knows that the man wants to sleep with her, she accepts. She resolves not to sleep with him but to let him think that she might.

That night, Faith meets Emmett at a dim club in Greenwich village. They both order drinks with paper umbrellas in them, but Emmett takes the umbrella from his and pockets it. He asks Faith to tell him her story and the story of the magazine. Faith tells him everything and he hangs on her every word. At the end of her story, Emmett tells Faith that what she and the women at Bloomer are doing is “essential.” Emmett, however, advises Faith that when it comes to business meetings, she—not her colleagues—should be the one doing the talking.

Emmett takes her hand and begins stroking it. Faith has been preparing for this moment but is no longer resolute in her choice to turn Emmett down. She desires him in a way, and when he asks her to go to bed with him, she does not turn him down. Faith and Emmett go back to Faith’s apartment, undress, and get into bed. As they do, Faith realizes that just as badly as Emmett wants to be inside of her, she wants to be inside of him—or maybe even to be him, inhabit him, and walk through the world the way he does.

The two have passionate, athletic sex—when they are done, however, Emmett quickly begins to dress and prepares to leave though it is past two in the morning. It dawns on Faith that Emmett is married, and she wonders if his wife was the woman that was with him in the casino years earlier. Faith also realizes that Emmett must have a child—she recalls how he pocketed his paper umbrella earlier to bring it home as a gift. Faith wants to be furious at Emmett but cannot make herself, as she feels she intuited these things all evening long and simply shoved them out of her mind’s eye.

As Emmett dresses, he tells Faith that he feels something for her he has never felt before. He implies that he wants to continue seeing her, but Faith replies that she could never do that to her “sisters”—she does not betray other women. Emmett offers to call Faith tomorrow strictly about the ad space.

The next morning, however, when Emmett calls, he does not bring up the ad. Instead, he tells Faith that his wife confronted him when he returned home the previous night and asked him to tell her everything about the woman he had just been with. Emmett did, and now his wife wants to talk to Faith on the phone. Faith tells Emmett that he is “insane,” but soon she is on the phone with Emmett’s wife, who informs Faith that her husband is “not [hers] for the taking.” Faith hangs up, unable to bear hearing any more.

That afternoon at work, Faith tells her fellow editors that there is not going to be any ad money from Nabisco. The women tell her it’s not the end of the world, and that they have possibly secured an advertisement from Dr. Scholl’s. The magazine does well in the next several years, and Faith or her fellow editors frequently appear on late-night talk shows to promote their magazine and its mission. They are often ridiculed but know that it is important to get the word out about their work.

Faith outshines her fellow editors when it comes to public speaking—she is not necessarily an “ideas person,” but she has a certain unnamable magnetism that catapults her to fame. In 1975, Faith appears on a talk show opposite a famous and misogynistic novelist, who rails against “angry women’s libbers” for asking men to “pay for dinner” or “open this jar,” while claiming to want independence. When it is Faith’s turn to speak, she decides not to appear prim, or angry, or even to laugh along with the audience, who ate up the novelist’s misogynistic tirade. Instead, Faith retaliates, explaining that men are afraid to do women’s work, and this is the reason why they try to keep women from doing “men’s work.” The audience is hooked, and Faith comically announces that “from this day forward, [she] will never buy food in jars again.”

Faith’s gift for public speaking makes her into a public figure, and as she travels the country and meets with radical women, housewives, and students alike, she learns from women of all backgrounds. When a young interviewer asks Faith what she stands for, she answers simply, “I stand for women.” As Faith becomes increasingly famous, she writes bestselling books and appears on numerous television programs. Every now and again, she thinks of Emmett Shrader—he has started his own venture capital firm and is now a successful billionaire. Occasionally, Faith hears about a “shady project” Emmett gets involved in, but all of his mistakes appear to be “counterbalanced by good.”

Meanwhile, Annie now goes by Anne McCauley and has become an outspoken conservative political figure in Indiana. She wins a Senate seat on a staunch anti-abortion stance, and every time Faith sees her old friend on television, she wishes the world knew the truth about Annie’s story. Despite everything, however, Faith never tells anyone—it is not her story to share.

As Faith’s career continues, she becomes aware of her status as an inspirational figure to young women everywhere and makes it her goal to support everyone she can. However, when Bloomer folds in 2010, Faith feels dejected and useless—until Emmett Shrader calls and asks Faith to come to his office for a meeting. When Faith sees Emmett for the first time in years, she feels nostalgic for his lost younger self and for her own lost youth. During the meeting, Emmett tells Faith of his dreams for a women’s foundation—he wants to fund it and have Faith be its public face. Faith expresses concern that Emmett is taking some kind of “moral shortcut” to impress her. Emmett reassures Faith that he is not offering the foundation to her to beguile her—he just wants to do something good. Faith tells Emmett she’ll consider his proposition.

The next day, Faith calls Emmett and expresses her concerns that the foundation will become a high-end lecture bureau that doesn’t actually change the lives of women. She turns Emmett down, but after a long walk in the park, she decides to go to his office and continue the conversation. She tells him that if he wants her to come on board, the organization will have to have a component that allows her to “get out there and do something.” Emmett agrees to the proposition, and the two strike a deal.

Now, almost five years into Loci’s short life, Faith is finding it increasingly difficult to get her “special projects” off the ground. ShraderCapital is “stingy” with its funds, and additionally, Faith and the entire organization have been criticized and attacked for engaging in “#fingersandwichfeminism”—a hands-off kind of activism that doesn’t actually improve women’s lives. Faith understands the complaints against her, but she is heartened by how well the organization’s summits are doing—even if they have become a sort of who’s-who of the celebrity world and some frivolity has crept in.

Faith recalls a morning when she found Greer Kadetsky sleeping at her desk and asked her to come into her own office. Greer admitted that she missed writing speeches and the chance to actively engage with real-life women going through real-life struggles. Faith admitted to Greer that she felt in a rut, and Greer cautioned Faith against allowing the summits and events to take on an air of self-satisfaction. The following day, Faith held and office-wide meeting and offered her employees the chance to air their gripes about Loci and make suggestions for how to improve things.

Afterward, Faith approached Emmett with a new special project she had in mind—to rescue a number of women who were victims of sex trafficking in Ecuador. Faith wanted to connect the women, after their rescue, with mentors, and bring one of the young women to America to give a speech at one of Loci’s summits. Emmett promised to bring Faith’s idea up to his board upstairs.

In June of 2014, Faith was informed that her idea was actually going to come to fruition. She was thrilled—mentorship was “very popular” at the moment, and as all the gears began turning in support of Faith’s vision, she was praised by members of the team who’d be carrying the project out as a “force for good” and an inspiration. A woman named Alejandra Sosa was chosen to head the mentorship program, and after she was formally vetted and the rescue mission had been completed successfully, the women were provided with housing that would enable them to make a fresh start.

Now, lying on the massage table, Faith is struck by the idea to turn the keynote speech over to Greer Kadetsky—to let her write it and deliver it at the summit in Los Angeles. Faith wants to give Greer the chance to finally “become her own person,” and knows that giving her the chance to write two speeches—one for herself and one for the Ecuadorian woman Faith is planning to fly in for the summit—will be an incredible opportunity for Greer.

Faith recalls supporting Greer over the years, as Greer dealt with the emotional fallout of her boyfriend’s brother’s death. Greer bounced back, but now, after four years, Faith thinks that Greer needs a reminder of why she joined Loci in the first place. Plus, Lincoln has a point: Faith is not as young as she used to be, and she needs to be careful about overworking herself. Faith thinks back to her first meeting with Greer at Ryland. She remembers what Greer told her about her parents and reflects on how she and Greer were both disappointed and held back by their parents in similar ways. Faith is grateful she was able to overcome her parents’ having held her back and wants to encourage Greer to be able to do the same.