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REVOLUTIONIZE IDENTITY
Disaster makes us seek out self-preservation. When threats to our identity loom large, we make concessions to protect ourselves. When we feel unsafe, it’s easier to stay hidden in the shadows, to temporarily withdraw so we can regroup. This, in fact, is what conservatives desire. Consider how immediately after the #MeToo movement in 2017 placed a glaring spotlight on women’s experience of sexual violence and harassment in the workplace, there was a swift backlash. Employers retaliated by firing survivors who spoke up about assault in the hospitality and service industry where wages are low. Being vocal has enormous costs. Some of the women who weren’t silent were blacklisted from industries in which they’d worked for decades. Others had their cases summarily dismissed in court by judges citing insufficient evidence.1
Surveying the dramatic rise of retaliation claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a year after #MeToo came to national prominence, a Vox article declared, “Whether or not the past year has led to cultural change, one thing hasn’t changed: For working-class people, speaking out still means risking their job.”2 But there’s a way to resist. Forge a new identity. Make society into what you want it to be, rather than what it wants you to be. Advocate for revolutionary transformation when you’re told to be quiet. This gives you a sense of power that anything’s possible. Be vocal about what you won’t tolerate. This creates a new vocabulary of justice in which silence doesn’t rule. You’re not conforming to rules that you reject. You’re asserting your own.
This is the lesson of feminists excluded from the prevailing view of women’s liberation. The flurry of reforms in the 1970s heartened second-wave white middle-class feminists like Betty Friedan, who wrote the best-selling The Feminine Mystique (1963) and cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments barred federal funding to colleges that discriminated against women. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for banks to deny mortgages to women. Throughout the late 1960s, divorce laws in states became less draconian, and the wage gap between men and women was not as wide as before.
But sometimes reforms conceal more than they fix. They patch up a broken system by giving it the veneer of progress. Take for example the state law passed in Colorado in 1967 that made abortion legal but created a set of onerous conditions that proved hard to meet for many women wishing to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The new rule was especially devastating for the poor. Women were required to provide written consent from two doctors and a hospital committee, and they needed to ensure that the low-risk procedure would be performed in a costly inpatient hospital setting.
When the New York State Legislative Committee on Public Health was debating its own abortion reform proposal on February 13, 1969, before a room of fifteen expert witnesses—fourteen men and one nun—they expected to be praised. But they were wrong. The cofounder of the radical feminist outfit Redstockings, a Village Voice essayist, and the first pop music critic for the New Yorker, Ellen Willis, the daughter of a New York City Police Department lieutenant, along with several others, broke away from the NOW members picketing outside the statehouse. They stormed the chamber, stood up, without sanction, and began to shout, “Let’s hear from the real experts—women!”3
New York legislators begged them to “act like ladies,” but to no avail. The next day, the New York tabloid the Daily News ran a front-page headline saying, “Gals KO Abortion Hearing.” Remember: those whose freedoms are at stake in any policy must be heard. And to be heard, you sometimes have no choice but to smash institutions that prevent you from speaking, even if these institutions are rooted in society and won’t go quietly into the night. This is why another Redstockings cofounder, the Canadian-born, St. Louis-raised twenty-five-year-old no-nonsense Shulamith Firestone, argued in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) that women shouldn’t have children. Women’s domestic caregiving allows men to work outside the home and capitalism to function freely, Firestone writes.
Two years earlier, Firestone organized New York Radical Women (NYRW). She had just moved to the city after completing her degree in painting from the Art Institute of Chicago. NYRW and Firestone made art into politics on September 7, 1968, when she, along with more than four hundred NYRW members, traveling from as far as Boston and Florida, staged a protest of the forty-second Miss America Pageant on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. They threw into the trash all kinds of things—mops, heels, makeup, old copies of Cosmopolitan forced upon them by their husbands and sons. These common household objects and beauty supplies they called “instruments of feminine torture.”
Queer feminists, however, had to fight on two fronts: against die-hard misogynists and against liberals concerned with making feminism socially palatable. Betty Friedan called lesbians within the movement the “lavender menace.” The professional guidebook for psychiatry, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), labeled homosexuality a mental illness until 1973, when it was changed to a “sexual orientation disturbance,” though it did not remove homosexuality as a disorder until 1987. But queer feminists wouldn’t allow homophobia to define who they were and what they did. Karla Jay, the Brooklyn-born, conservative-Jewish-raised feminist, abandoned her insulated and traditional upbringing when she came out as a lesbian and become involved with Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University, where she completed her undergraduate degree in French in 1968. Eventually, Jay soured on the New Left’s male leaders, whose latent authoritarianism stood in stark contrast to the egalitarian consciousness-raising group associated with Redstockings, which she joined in 1969.
That same year, Jay was galvanized by the six days of defiant clashes between hundreds of Greenwich Village’s gay community and the NYPD along Christopher Street after cops raided a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, beginning in the early morning hours of June 28. The militant organization that Jay cofounded in the aftermath, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), was done playing nice. “Do you think homosexuals are revolting?” GLF flyers, posted across the East Village’s community centers and clubs, asked rhetorically. “You bet your sweet ass we are.”4 The GLF renounced assimilationism, which involved normalizing gay people as good neighbors and productive coworkers.
The battle, Jay believed, needed to be taken to one’s allies. That’s why she, along with several others, hijacked the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, in New York. Dressed in lavender shirts, they cut the lights, seized the microphones, and stormed the stage with signs that said “Take a lesbian to lunch” and “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.” The satire, playing on homophobic fears, and calling into question the farce of women’s unity, was at its heart an act of coming out. Coming out is about forming a public identity not governed by the master’s rules. That’s how shame is erased. And distinctions between what is normal and what isn’t are exploded.
Both Redstockings and the GLF expressed solidarity with the Black freedom struggle, although few of its members were women of color. Unlike white women activists, Black women had a history of strategizing against both racism and sexism. Twenty miles north of Manhattan, in Mount Vernon, the Black Women’s Liberation Movement, composed of working women of color, issued a widely circulated document, “Statement on Birth Control” (1968). The statement connected reproductive rights to welfare, housing, and education rights.
But reproductive freedom, for Black feminists, was also a struggle against something that affluent white women rarely faced: forced sterilization. In the 1970s, compulsory sterilization was a common occurrence for Black women across the United States. Moreover, the measure was being embraced for punitive purposes in the state capitols of Louisiana, Maryland, California, Connecticut, Delaware, and Virginia. In 1971, for instance, a Republican state legislator in South Carolina, Lucius Porth, endorsed a law that made welfare recipients with two children choose between renouncing public assistance or being forcibly sterilized.5
This horrific decision, however, wasn’t given to a twelve-year-old Black child, Minnie Lee Relf. Deemed mentally incompetent by Alabama caseworkers in 1973, Relf underwent tubal ligation without her family’s consent at a federally funded family planning clinic in the birthplace of the civil rights movement: Montgomery, Alabama.6 The fight for abortion is also a fight against sterilization, so said the statement of the Third World Women’s Workshop held in Michigan in 1971, “because the lack of legal abortion has been used for years to force women to undergo sterilization.”7
This feminist legacy lives on. Conservatives may be emboldened by Trump’s appointment of activist judges handpicked by the Federalist Society, like Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court. Now they have a 6–3 supermajority, but young activists aren’t backing down. Instead of staying silent, they’re turning the tables on the enemies of freedom. Without question, women’s reproductive rights, and especially Roe v. Wade, are in serious doubt. But rather than concede ground to the right—and say, for instance, that abortion should only be the last means available to address unwanted pregnancies—reproductive justice activists insist that a women’s right to choose is a matter of both racial and economic justice.
Similarly, as some moderates try to preserve the right to gay marriage affirmed by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), LGBTQ activists question whether marriage is a just institution, and whether as a society, this should be the family structure we endorse. These activists transform their identities into revolutionary forces. It’s not just for them, but for all of us. If patriarchy is destroyed, we can be freer than we imagined.