F I V E

NOW, Sex, and Women’s Liberation

On a warm day in New York City on August 26, 1970, Betty Dodson joined fifty thousand women marching through the streets in the Women’s Strike for Equality. Organized by National Organization for Women (NOW) founder and Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, the Women’s Strike for Equality had three main goals on its agenda: to legalize abortion, to make childcare more affordable, and to give women equal opportunities in education and employment. It was supposed to be a work strike for women, with women forgoing cooking and cleaning for a day, to show men what life was like without women’s unpaid labor. Friedan believed that the only way to change women’s place in society was from the top down, by changing the law. Dodson, who had recently shorn her hair bald, “was marching for women’s freedom to choose how [women] wanted to have sex,” which wasn’t exactly the official goal of the march.²²⁸

As Dodson marched, another woman stared longingly out the window of the Hodes Advertising at the mass of protesters on Fifth Avenue. Dell Williams didn’t know that Dodson was about to change her life. Williams went to the water cooler to get a drink, and as she did, the agency’s copywriter sidled up to her. “Oh, look the women are marching outside, the women libbers,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll join them,” she replied.

“Guess they don’t have anything better to do,” he scoffed.

Williams was taken aback. “Was I just the house broad then? The career gal making good in a man’s world and not making a fuss about who really ran the place?” she remembers thinking.229 She liked this copywriter, and she had thought of him as a sweet man. How could he be so dismissive of the women’s movement? “Now I know I’m going to march,” she told him.

She stormed out of the office, made her way to the line on Fifth Avenue, and began marching. She was handed a poster that read “Women Unite,” which she proudly carried. As she marched and met other women who told her about the feminist movement, she “had a metamorphosis and thought, ‘That’s why they are always pinching my ass.’”²³⁰ Suddenly it all came together: that she’d been treated differently than men, that her husband had expected her to support his career, that so many men had wanted sex in exchange for a job. That day she wrote that she “had been called by some power greater than my own to some higher purpose.”²³¹

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Born in 1922 in Manhattan as Dell Zetlin, Williams barely made it through childhood. At age three, after suffering with an illness for days, doctors declared her dead. Then suddenly her mother heard Williams squirming and making noise. She was alive. “I like to think of it as the first time I defied established authority,” she later wrote.²³²

Williams was raised by two activist parents and was purportedly named after the socialist journalist Floyd Dell, who was a champion of Margaret Sanger. Williams’s parents were both Russian Jews who were subjected to pogroms and fled first to Paris and then to America at the turn of the century to escape.²³³ Her father, Isaac Zetlin, was a successful women’s clothing designer who sold his creations to Bergdorf Goodman’s. Williams’s mother, born Sarah Bronstein, was a dressmaker. Life wasn’t easy for them. During the Depression, Isaac Zetlin lost his job, and the family was evicted from three different homes. After the third eviction, he disappeared for five years, an abandonment that devastated Williams and ended up shaping her life.

Williams’s mother was politically progressive, and Williams learned from her that making the world a better place was possible. A serious tennis player, her mother sought change on the court. Her tennis league was sex-segregated, but she got the league to incorporate mixed doubles by challenging a male player to a match, which she won. She also successfully integrated the league in the 1920s by convincing the league to allow black players in it.234

From an early age, Williams was bisexual, though she wouldn’t have called herself that at the time. She knew how she felt, yet she was entirely ignorant about sex itself, lacking even basic information. During the 1930s, when she was a teenager, most schools didn’t teach sex education. Although a school board member tried to implement a sex education program in New York City high schools in the late 1930s, it was too controversial and it failed.²³⁵ And Williams’s parents were no help either. She made it all the way through high school thinking that babies emerged from the anus. It wasn’t until she turned eighteen, and her boyfriend taught her about her clitoris, that she started masturbating.

While in high school, Williams had dreamed of becoming an actress and singer, and she performed at her synagogue. Then at age twenty, during World War II, she unexpectedly got pregnant with her boyfriend Peter’s baby. Because she wanted to continue following her dreams of stardom and she knew she simply wasn’t ready to have a baby, she decided to have an abortion. Not only were abortions illegal, but they were also exorbitantly expensive. Peter’s parents paid $500 for the abortion, which is the equivalent to about $6,000 today.²³⁶ Even though a doctor performed her abortion, it was still extremely painful for her. The doctor refused to use anesthesia because anesthesia was more likely to cause complications; complications meant that Williams would have to be admitted to a hospital, and the doctor’s illegal abortion could be found out, which could have potentially caused him to be stripped of his license.

Shortly after her abortion, Williams joined up with the Bronx Variety Players, a group that specialized in political satire. Its leader, Madeline Lee, was a communist, and she encouraged Williams to join the party. Three years later, in 1945, Williams became a member of the Women’s Army Corps, where she did clerical jobs in addition to being an “entertainment specialist,” a gig in which she traveled to Army bases in the United States performing a show penned by a female lieutenant, entitled Call Me Mrs.

Within a few years, Williams decided to follow her dream to become a Hollywood star. She was accepted at the prestigious Actors’ Laboratory Theater, which Marilyn Monroe attended. Williams landed some theater roles, but what she really wanted to do was work in film. Yet every time that somebody offered her an opportunity, there was always a quid pro quo—the old story of the casting couch. Williams refused to trade sex for film roles.

Meanwhile, Williams kept busy as an artists’ model and secretary during the day and having affairs with married men at night. One of her paramours was the famed avant-garde composer George Anthiel, who was married and nearly triple her age; he was happy to have the dalliance but declared that he would never leave his wife, so Williams moved on. The next affair was with her singing instructor, who was separated and kept telling her he would get a divorce. He even bought an apartment where they lived together for a while. When he went to Las Vegas to get a divorce, he came back two weeks early and empty handed; he wasn’t getting a divorce, he told her. He was getting back together with his wife.

It wasn’t until 1949, when she was twenty-seven years old, that Williams began to think about sex more deeply. Williams was walking by a bookstore when she saw a book with “orgasm” in the title. The very fact that such a book existed was incredible to her. She bought Wilhelm Reich’s Function of the Orgasm immediately and took to Reich’s philosophy that orgasm was the epitome of life and was intimately tied into natural processes like ocean waves.237

In 1951, with her Hollywood dreams dashed, Williams returned to New York City and landed a job at the United Nations as a secretary, which was the best position a woman could get at the UN at the time. To get the job, she had to sign a “Loyalty Oath” saying that she had never been a communist. So she lied. She hadn’t given up on acting, however. She enrolled in another famous acting academy, Paul Mann Actors Workshop. There she met and partied on the weekends with people like Buddy Hackett, Ted Marche’s friend who’d been particularly fond of Marche’s penis pencil toppers. She even went on a date with the actor and producer Mel Brooks, who she thought was crazy.²³⁸

A few months later, Williams received a notice to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was at the height of Cold War communist paranoia. The government had discovered that Williams had spent time at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a socialist camp, and that she had volunteered with a committee to help the Hollywood Ten. When she told one of her coworkers of the investigation, the woman shared her own experience of being the subject of such a probe. “Dell, it was a harrowing experience, don’t go through it,” the woman told her. So Williams resigned instead of being subjected to it.²³⁹

Even after graduating from Paul Mann Actors Workshop, Williams didn’t seriously pursue acting. She was deeply insecure and afraid that she wasn’t talented enough. So instead of acting, she ended up working at an ad agency that specialized in real estate advertising. Then, in the early 1960s, when she was in her late thirties, she decided to try her hand at something significantly more traditional than she’d ever done before: She got married.

Her marriage wasn’t conventional, however. The man she married was a photographer named Ted Willms, and he was fifteen years younger than her. Like a good wife was supposed to, Williams quit her job and devoted herself to helping his career while they tried to start a family. The road was rocky, however, as Ted’s career went downhill and Williams found herself unable to get pregnant.

One night in 1962 while a group of her husband’s friends were visiting, Williams discovered that they were producing a short movie called The Cliff Dwellers, about a young Texas man living in New York City who is unable to find a woman willing to date him. Williams asked if she could be in the movie. They said there was a part for a middle-aged waitress who the man tries to woo; the waitress is shocked when she learns that this younger man is interested in her. It was a small part, but Williams leapt at the chance.240 The movie went on to be nominated for an Academy Award in 1963 for Short Subject (Live Action). A small part of her dream had finally come true.²⁴¹

Williams’s relationship, however, didn’t work. She separated and had the marriage annulled. She did leave with one consolation prize: a new last name. When she returned to her job at the ad agency, they suggested that she keep because it was “more common . . . and more memorable” than Zetlin. She wasn’t happy with keeping her former husband’s name of Willms, so she changed it to Williams, a name that was hers alone.

Williams soon realized that she didn’t really want her old job back. She wanted a better job. She wanted to be an advertising executive. It was 1962, and the advertising industry was one of the few professions that placed women in higher-ranked positions. Still, even in ad agencies, the prospects for women were fairly dismal. The agency with the best record for women was McCann-Erickson, which had six female vice presidents out of one hundred total.²⁴² To find a job, Williams had to scan the male jobs section of the classified ads and apply for jobs hoping that they would be willing to hire a woman. This was a ballsy move that few women would have done, but it paid off. She got a job.

In 1970, the year she joined the Women’s March, she was forty-eight years old and working as a vice president for Hodes Advertising.243 The feminist movement was just really beginning to get national publicity, but she hadn’t gotten involved in a major way quite yet. Williams had “heard about Women’s Liberation,” she says. “But I didn’t take it too seriously because I figured I’m liberated and I’m doing what I want to do because I owned a house at Fire Island.”²⁴⁴ Once she went to the march, she had a change of heart, as did Dodson.

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Although Dodson had already become inspired to become a feminist from reading Betty Friedan years earlier, she didn’t attend her first NOW meeting until after the march. But the minute she entered the room where the New York City chapter meeting was held, Dodson felt alienated from the conservatively dressed, upper-class women who were more interested in discussing sexual discrimination than sexual pleasure. Their lack of interest in sex came as a surprise to Dodson, as she felt that it was all part of the same puzzle.

Feminists were divided about the importance of sex to women’s liberation. NOW feminists were cultural feminists, who were usually more traditional, in that they celebrated gender differences between men and women and believed in gaining women’s rights through political channels. Sex wasn’t high on their agenda. As historian Carolyn Bronstein pointed out, “NOW tried to advance equal rights for women without challenging the basic structures of American society.” Dodson was too avant-garde to fully commit herself to such a group. She abandoned NOW soon after attending her first meeting, but she didn’t want to abandon the women’s movement. She just needed to find a different side of it.²⁴⁵

Fortunately for Dodson, New York was the epicenter of radical feminism at the time. Dodson attended a meeting for the New York Radical Women (NYRW), a group formed in 1967. Less conservative than the NOW feminists, radical feminists were interested in fundamentally changing gender norms within society and demolishing the patriarchy. Radical feminists “argued that all forms of social domination, including the oppression of women, originated from male supremacy.” To radical feminists, male domination of women was woven into the fabric of women’s lives so tightly that they might not even recognize it. “Men exploited and victimized women, primarily exerting their power through sexuality, through the heterosexual institutions of romantic love, marriage, the family, sexual violence, and through the sexual objectification of women in mass media,” Bronstein wrote.246 The only way to stop such exploitation and change the situation was not through official political channels but at the home, on an individual level, hence Carol Hanisch’s 1969 catchphrase: “The personal is political.”²⁴⁷

Radical feminists believed that the best way to take down the patriarchy was to share stories of exploitation with other women in a safe, female-only space via consciousness-raising (CR) groups. These groups involved women gathering in one another’s homes to discuss women’s health and social status, including taboo topics like abortion, reproduction, incest, or genital anatomy. Women in CR groups believed that sharing their experiences with other women and normalizing them was the starting ground for women to cope with a misogynistic world.²⁴⁸

Dodson was very much on board with this idea, so when she visited a New York women’s center, she was disappointed to find that they weren’t currently putting on any consciousness-raising groups at the time. The center’s organizers suggested that Dodson form her own. “But I have no experience,” she said. The organizer told Dodson that her experience of being a woman more than qualified her. “Just get the women together, and let it happen,” she said.²⁴⁹ Dodson took the advice and called two of her friends to help her put together a group. In time, they had gathered about a dozen people at weekly meetings. They talked about their personal experiences but pretty much avoided discussions of sex.

That group didn’t last long, disbanding after a short stint, but then Dodson joined a new CR group, mainly populated by single women. One day she decided to share some of her personal sexual experiences with the group. She told the group of women what she had witnessed at sex parties she’d attended: that while the men were having orgasms, the women were faking them because it’s what they thought their partners wanted. How could a woman “love herself if her sex life was based on pretending?” Dodson wanted to know. She then opened up about the fact that she was having sex with both men and women and that she called herself a heterosexual bisexual lesbian. After sharing her heartfelt confessions, she was met with silence. “I was shocked to discover that the personal wasn’t political, at least when it came to sex,” she wrote.250

Although that was Dodson’s experience, it wasn’t necessarily true across the board. In fact, Betty Friedan—Dodson’s inspiration—believed radical feminists were too focused on “orgasm politics.” Change should happen in “City Hall not the bedroom,” Friedan argued.²⁵¹ Some CR groups did discuss sexual pleasure and the importance of the clitoris, but few were devoted solely to the subject. Radical feminist groups such as the Redstockings believed that women’s sexuality should be used to transform traditional marriage. As founding member Shulamith Firestone memorably said, “A revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo.”²⁵² But not everybody in the Redstockings agreed with this view. Some members left in protest to found a rival group that believed that “heterosexual desire was nothing more than a male fabrication designed to keep women enslaved to men.” Other radical feminist groups, such as Cell 16, thought that sexual liberation should mean a “liberation from sexuality” entirely by becoming celibate. One of its leaders, Dana Densmore, argued that most women didn’t find sex enjoyable because they “don’t have orgasms.”253 Because orgasm was considered masculine by many radical feminists, groups asserted that women’s sexuality was based not on sex but on “belonging and social bonding.”²⁵⁴

In the 1960s, abortion and other reproductive rights issues were more prominent topics of discussion than orgasm in most feminist circles, since abortion was still illegal in most of the country. Yet Dodson had assumed that because most of the women in her group were high-powered, single, creative women that they would be more “sexually open-minded.” To her dismay, she discovered the opposite: that “job insecurities and financial problems still made finding the right man the emotional bedrock of security.”²⁵⁵

The radical feminists who did think female orgasm was important had very particular ideas about how those orgasms should be obtained. Anne Koedt, a founding member of New York Radical Feminists and demolisher of the “myth of the vaginal orgasm,” helped to empower some women to have sexual pleasure. Other feminists argued that re-centering the “location . . . of the female orgasm” to the clitoris was problematic, because it denied women “the ability to define and control sexual experiences for themselves,” according to scholars Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson.²⁵⁶ While Koedt advocated clitoral orgasms through both heterosexual sex and masturbation, the other group she founded, the Feminists, which was separate from the New York Radical Feminists, argued that women should avoid sex with men altogether in favor of masturbation.²⁵⁷ This was the male fear of female masturbation made concrete: that women would stop having sex with men once they could satisfy themselves.

Even though she had her differences, Dodson didn’t abandon her CR group. Instead after learning that “many of the women knew very little about sexual pleasure, and several admitted they’d never had an orgasm,” she decided to become a sexual mentor. She taught women how to be more assertive with men, suggesting that they touch their clitorises during sex or that they ask men out. Masturbation was an activity they should all be doing, Dodson told them. After she discussed her own masturbation, many of the women opened up about their experiences. It turned out that many of them had had similar experiences to Dodson’s: orgasms during masturbation but not during sex with their male partners.258

Dodson then shared information about a new device she had discovered: the vibrator. She brought in a box of electric vibrators. These weren’t the hard plastic, battery-powered types of vibrators that Marche or Malorrus sold. These were high-powered vibrators built by respected American and Japanese companies like General Electric and Panasonic. They weren’t marketed as sex toys. They were sold as back massagers. As Dodson passed the vibrators out, she persuaded the women that “a sexually turned-on woman was a joy for a man, not a threat.”²⁵⁹

Not all men would agree with her.