1969–1970
“One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”
—Carol Hanisch, in her 1970 essay, “The Personal Is Political”
On March 21, 1969, nearly three hundred people filled the basement of Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church to witness an unforgettable event. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the church was known for its radical politics, and for sheltering deserters throughout the Vietnam War. On this particular evening, it gave refuge to another maligned group—women who had gotten abortions, many illegally, making them criminals in the eyes of the law. The event was organized by Redstockings, a radical women’s group cofounded by Shulamith Firestone and the writer Ellen Willis. The previous month, Red-stocking members had infiltrated a New York State legislative hearing on abortion law reform, hoping to be heard as “the real experts on abortion,” but the committee rebuked them, depending instead on the testimonies of its own members: fourteen men and one nun. (Ultimately, three women were allowed to address the committee that day, but the protestors were not satisfied with the token coda granted to them.)
Shut out, Redstockings decided to host their own hearing instead. “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is” was billed as a one-act play that would be followed by personal testimonies. For the first time in public, women would tell the truth about their unplanned pregnancies and illegal abortions—about the borders crossed, the surgeries botched, the fears of being found out and judged.
That March evening in the church basement, the crowd listened to twelve women share their stories over the course of three hours. One woman told how, after a desperate search, she found a hospital that would give her a therapeutic abortion, but only if she agreed to be sterilized at the age of twenty. Another woman had to pretend she was mentally unstable before being granted an abortion—and confessed that going through with it was the sanest thing she’d ever done. At one point a Redstocking commented, “I bet every woman here has had an abortion.”
Many women in the audience had endured abortions themselves, but chose not to step up to the microphone, not yet. “I was one of those who kept quiet,” Susan Brownmiller later wrote in her memoir, In Our Time. “I chose an easier path and played Village Voice reporter.” Another journalist was there, too. Sitting on a windowsill, wearing aviator glasses and a miniskirt, Gloria Steinem was covering the speakout for her “City Politic” column in New York.
Gloria had gotten an abortion in London after graduating from Smith. Like Brownmiller, she wasn’t ready to talk about it, but as she listened to the testimonies, she realized that her story fit into a much larger one that hadn’t been voiced, until now. After the event, she typed up her article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” a witty, well-reported survey of feminist groups and actions around the city, including the abortion speakout hosted by Redstockings. Aiming for objectivity, Gloria left her own emotions, and her own abortion, out of the article—but despite her impersonal tone, this story was very personal. Years later she would look back on that evening in the church basement as a crucial moment in her feminist awakening.
“Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem later wrote in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. “If one in three or four adult women shared this experience, why were each of us made to feel criminal and alone? How much power could we ever have if we had no power over the fate of our own bodies?”
A FEW DAYS after the speakout, the Village Voice published Brownmiller’s article, “Everywoman’s Abortions: ‘The Oppressor Is Man.’” The piece included definitions of new terms for the unenlightened reader. One of those terms was oppressor—another word for man. Brownmiller also gave a quick primer on consciousness-raising circles, the leaderless, free-form support groups that encouraged members to tell the truth about their lives—their inner lives, especially—in the company of other women. By the early Seventies, “c.r. groups” and “rap groups” were popping up around the city, in borrowed office spaces downtown, apartments on the Upper West Side, and Brooklyn brownstones. In groups both large and small (but preferably small to create intimacy), women talked about their childhoods, marriages, and sex lives—airing their deepest secrets and insecurities.
It was at her weekly consciousness-raising meeting that Judy Gingold, a Marshall scholar working as a researcher at Newsweek, had an epiphany that eventually sparked a revolt. Her group of eight included an assistant at NBC, who voiced her feeling that she could get ahead in her career if only she were better at it. “Everyone was saying the same thing—‘if I were better, I would get ahead.’ All of us in that room felt inadequate,” Gingold later recalled in Lynn Povich’s book The Good Girls Revolt. “And that’s when I thought, wait a minute, that’s not right. It’s not because we’re undeserving or not talented enough that we aren’t getting ahead, it’s how the world is run. It made me see that the problem wasn’t our fault—it was systemic.”
At Newsweek, Gingold was one of many highly educated women assigned to low-prestige and low-paying jobs. They compiled newspaper clippings, fact-checked articles, sorted mail, fetched coffee, and answered to “sweetheart” and “dolly.” Many had ambitions far beyond the research department, but they kept them in check. After all, the writing and editing jobs they coveted weren’t available to them—they were given to men. In the fall of 1969, a lawyer friend told Gingold that what Newsweek was doing was illegal—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited segregating jobs by gender. Over the next few months, Gingold discreetly spread the message to her female coworkers around the office, recruiting allies as they passed her desk or reapplied their lipstick in the ladies’ room. Soon they had a lawyer—a pregnant civil rights activist named Eleanor Holmes Norton, then assistant legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union—and a solid case. In 1970 there were more than fifty men writing for Newsweek, but there was only one woman.
On March 16 of that year, forty-six female employees held a news conference to announce that they were suing Newsweek for sexual discrimination, after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would take two years and another lawsuit before the case was settled in their favor.
THE SAME DAY that the lawsuit was announced, the new issue of Newsweek hit stands. The eye-catching red-yellow-and-blue cover featured an illustration of a naked woman bursting through the female gender symbol R and the headline “Women In Revolt.” The former “dollies” who brought the suit against Newsweek cleverly timed their press conference to coincide with the release of the magazine’s first major article about the burgeoning women’s movement—but they were hardly the only women in revolt. Two days after their press conference, Susan Brownmiller (a former Newsweek researcher) led another group of women who were ready to confront their oppressors. On March 18, around two hundred women invaded the Hearst offices of Ladies’ Home Journal, cornering the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, at his desk.
The Journal’s slogan was “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman,” and yet month after month, the articles and advertisements that typically ran in the magazine underestimated both the power and the intelligence of women readers. Seven years had passed since Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, and magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal still presumed that women had nothing better to do with their time than clean the house, pretty themselves up, and have dinner and a fresh martini waiting when their husbands got home.
It was time to put an end to celebrity profiles like “Joanne Woodward: The Care and Feeding of Paul Newman” and fashion features like “Dressing for the Men in Your Life.” It was time to stop assigning disingenuous self-help articles that were really thinly veiled ads for whatever was the new-and-improved freezer or pantyhose or hair dye of the month. Most important, it was time to hire a staff of women, including nonwhite women, and let them determine what kind of stories were important. The protestors were fed up with the image of silly, childish wives depicted in the Journal’s recurring column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” when what women really needed to know was how to get a divorce. Or an abortion. Or how to have an orgasm.
“We demand that the Ladies’ Home Journal hire a woman editor-in-chief who is in touch with women’s real problems and needs,” Brownmiller began.
One by one, she and another organizer read off the rest of their demands in front of a crowd that included reporters as well as members of Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists (a successor of New York Radical Women), and the National Organization for Women (NOW).
“The Women’s Liberation Movement represents the feelings of a large and growing mass of women throughout the country,” she continued. “Therefore we demand that as an act of faith toward women in this country, the Ladies’ Home Journal turn over to the Women’s Liberation Movement the editorial content of one issue of the magazine, to be named the Women’s Liberated Journal.”
In the days leading up to the event, Brownmiller and the rest of her sit-in steering committee alerted members of the press about their plans and even cased the Journal’s offices. Even if he had caught wind of the plan, Carter, a soft-spoken southern man in his early forties, couldn’t have anticipated that he would be spending the next eleven hours in a room with dozens of angry women who had been planning his exit with military precision.
But as they talked, he listened, and his office began to feel more like a giant living room. Clusters of women snacked sitting on the floor and picked through Carter’s box of cigars. They also grabbed their fifteen minutes of fame, hanging a “Women’s Liberated Journal” banner outside a window and airing their grievances to reporters they had invited from outlets like CBS, NBC, and the Washington Post.
Gradually, individual demonstrators spoke up. They talked about their own lives and their mothers’ unfulfilled ambitions. At one point, Carter, dressed in a suit, got up to sit on his desk, where he could see the women’s faces more clearly.
Everything was going according to plan until Shulamith Firestone and another radical, Ti-Grace Atkinson, barreled toward Carter, shouting that they were going to push him out of the window. “We can do it—he’s small,” Firestone said, seconds before leaping at his desk. Reacting swiftly, a Redstocking trained in judo intercepted her before she could hurt him. “He was a quiet little man—and he just sat there,” says Jacqui Ceballos, a NOW member and mother of four who watched the scene in awe. “They were moving towards him, and Susan and the others pushed them back. They didn’t go there to throw him out of the window—they went there to change the magazine and get their articles printed.”
Despite their best attempts, they didn’t get Carter to resign. But by 6 p.m., the editors of the Journal agreed to look into hiring more women. (Three years later, the Journal’s managing editor, Lenore Hershey, became its editor-in-chief.) They also agreed to give members of the women’s liberation movement eight pages of the August issue and $10,000 to fill it as they pleased. As promised, the summer issue included a special insert—unedited—written by thirty of the protestors, who covered subjects including divorce, childbirth, and consciousness-raising.
Plans were already in the works for a new column, “The Working Woman,” by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who left Bernard Geis Associates after nearly a decade to write her own book, How to Make It in a Man’s World. (Doubleday published it in 1970, the same year as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. As it happened, Pogrebin and Millett shared an editor, Betty Prashker.)
A mother of three, Letty eventually used her national platform to challenge the idea that a working woman should have to adapt herself to a man’s world—on the contrary, the world should adapt itself to working women who needed affordable child care, among other considerations—but when she first signed on to write for the Journal, she says, she was still just “a baby feminist” with a lot of growing to do.
“My editor at Doubleday warned me that I was going to be attacked by women’s libbers and I asked, ‘Who are they?’ I was oblivious,” Letty says. “She gave me Kate Millett’s manuscript. . . . I was just learning. I was just opening my eyes.” By the time her byline started appearing in the Journal, “I was an absolute rabid feminist,” she says. “I insisted on being free to say anything I wanted in my column. I wrote it for ten years.”
The demonstrators had wanted to target a women’s magazine with a man at the helm, and Carter had been an obvious choice, but they threw out other names early on. At one point, someone suggested Helen Gurley Brown.
“I think we passed over it very quickly because we could not say she was the enemy,” Brownmiller says. “Cosmopolitan was so much one woman’s brainchild. She had a successful formula. The circulation statistics were her biggest buttress. Why should she change it?”