WERE OUR STATE A pure democracy there would still be excluded from our deliberations women who, to prevent deprivation of morals and ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of men.
—Thomas Jefferson
In 1972 the United Nations declared 1975 to be the official International Year of the Woman. Among the world’s women themselves, reaction was not all good. Was this like the International Year of the Handicapped? Or was it an admission that everything else was the Year of the Man?
Nonetheless, most governments began to collect statistics to present at the International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, and that was a worthwhile result in itself. In some countries, this was the first time that research had been focused on the status of females. Many individual women and their organizations decided to use this world spotlight as an opportunity to meet each other and to further the cause of equality in any way they could. In this country, President Ford appointed an International Women’s Year Commission of thirty-nine members to round up statistics and recommendations, and to travel to Mexico City as delegates. Thousands of individual American women also went there to take part in the unofficial events that often outnumbered and overshadowed the official ones. By the end of those few days, at least one other world conference had been called for, and Women’s Year had become Women’s Decade.
For most official and unofficial Americans, this was the first, mind-expanding experience of a massive multicultural women’s meeting. It was also a source of learning. The range of women’s concerns was both culturally diverse and amazingly similar on the basic problems of women in male-dominant societies. The nationalist divisions among women who otherwise agreed on those basics were destructive and embittering. And, like the women of most countries, the female half of the United States was represented by a delegation and an official national agenda that might or might not be what we had in mind. Despite many presidential commissions and other goodwill efforts to “study” American women, no one had ever asked us.
It was this desire to work out women’s own agenda of issues, goals, and timetables that had motivated Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink earlier in 1975 when they drafted and got support from other congresswomen for Public Law 94–167—a proposal for a public, government-funded conference in every state and territory that would identify issues and elect delegates to a U.S. National Women’s Conference. As a kind of Constitutional Convention for women—a remedy for the founding fathers who had excluded all women from the first one—this national elected body would then recommend to Congress and the president those changes in laws, government procedures, and the Constitution itself that would remove barriers to women’s equality.
After Mexico City, there was enough enthusiasm and international publicity to lobby this bill through. Of course, Congress didn’t pass and fund it until after the 1976 bicentennial year in which the conference was supposed to happen, and its modest requested appropriation often million dollars was cut to five million dollars: less than the cost of sending one postcard to every adult woman in the country. Nonetheless, a new International Women’s Year Commission was appointed by President Carter, this time for the purpose of carrying out the complex process of convening a representative conference in every state and territory and electing delegates proportionate to their populations.
Thanks to the enthusiasm, energy, and sacrifice of women who responded and spent months on outreach and organizing within their own states, some of those fifty-six, two-day conferences were attended by as many as twenty thousand women and interested men. They were the biggest and most economically and racially representative statewide political meetings ever held. The result was not only the identification of barriers to equality in twenty-six areas, from arts and humanities to welfare, but the election of two thousand delegates who were the first (and still the only) national political representatives in which family incomes of less than twenty thousand dollars a year, racial minorities, and all ages over eighteen were represented in proportion to their real presence in the population.
Once in Houston where the First National Women’s Conference was held in November 1977, fifteen thousand participants, including observers from other countries, joined the two thousand voting delegates. A careful debate and balloting procedure allowed four days of discussion and voting on each of the twenty-six areas recommended by state conferences.1 Though anti-equality women and men also rallied in protest in another part of Houston, led by rightwing Congressman Robert Dornan and anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, their views were fairly, perhaps disproportionately, represented among the voting delegates themselves. In some states, calculated and disproportionate flooding of the conferences by such groups as Mormons, fundamentalist Baptists, and, in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan had produced elected delegates whose positions did not match their states’ majority opinions in elections and public opinion polls. Nonetheless, resolutions were passed that were pro-equality and, according to post-Houston national opinion polls, did have the majority support of Americans, women and men.
As journalist Lindsy Van Gelder reported from Houston, “It was like a supermarket check-out line from Anywhere, U.S.A. transposed to the political arena: homemakers and nuns, teenagers and senior citizens, secretaries and farmers and lawyers, mahogany skins and white and café au lait. We were an all-woman Carl Sandburg poem come to life.”
Certainly the Houston conference itself was far more representative by race, class, and age than the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, and more democratic in its procedures—from allowing floor debate, amendments, and substitute motions to encouraging voting by individual conscience rather than by geographical blocks or for political reward—than the national presidential conventions that were its closest model. The long and complex process leading up to Houston was often frustrating and never perfect, but its impressive results surprised many Americans, including some of the women who had worked hardest to make it happen.
If this mammoth project begins to sound unprecedented, there are many factual ways in which that is true. But comparable events have happened in the past. Women have taken action against the political systems of male dominance for as many centuries as they have existed. Some of those actions have been at least as impressive and, in their own contexts, more courageous. If we are to preserve the spirit of Houston, we should be aware that similar changeful, challenging, women-run events have been unrecorded, suppressed, ridiculed, or treated with violence in the past.
As a student learning U.S. history from the textbooks of the 1950s, I read that white and black women had been “given” the vote in 1920, an unexplained fifty years after black men had been “given” the vote as a result of a civil war fought on their behalf. I learned little about the many black people who had risen up in revolt and fought for their own freedom, and nothing about the more than one hundred years of struggle by nationwide networks of white and black women who organized and lectured around the country for Negro and women’s suffrage at a time when they were not even supposed to speak in public. They lobbied their all-male, all-white legislatures, demonstrated in the streets, went on hunger strikes and to jail, and opposed this country’s right to “fight for democracy” in World War I when the female half of it had no political rights at all. In short, I did not learn that several generations of our foremothers had nearly brought the country to a halt in order to win a legal identity as human beings for women of all races.
At least the right to vote was cited in history books as one that American women had not always enjoyed. Other parts of that legal identity—the goal of this country’s long, first wave of feminism—were not mentioned. How many of us were taught what it meant, for instance, for females to be the human property of husbands and fathers, and to die a “civil death” under the marriage laws? It was a status as chattel so clear that the first seventeenth-century American slaveholders simply adopted it, as Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, as the “nearest and most natural analogy” for the legal status of slaves.2 As students, how many of us learned that the right of an adult American female to own property, sue in court, or sign a will, keep a salary she earned instead of turning it over to a husband or father who “owned” her, go to school, have legal custody of her own children, leave her husband’s home without danger of being forcibly and legally returned, escape a husband’s right to physically discipline her, challenge the social prison of being a lifelong minor if she remained unmarried or a legal nonperson if she did marry—that all these rights had been won through generations of effort by an independent and courageous women’s movement?
When we studied American progress toward religious freedom, did we read about the many nineteenth-century feminists who challenged the patriarchal structure of the church, who dared question such scriptural rhetoric as the injunction of the Apostle Paul, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord”? Were we given a book called The Woman’s Bible, a scholarly and very courageous revision of the scriptures undertaken by Elizabeth Cady Stanton?
If we read about religious and political persecution in America, did we learn that the frenzy of the New England witch trials, tortures, and burnings were largely the persecutions of independent or knowledgeable women, of midwives who performed abortions and taught contraception, of women who challenged the masculine power structure in many ways?
When we heard about courageous people who harbored runaway slaves, did they include women like Susan B. Anthony, who scandalized and alienated abolitionist allies by helping not only black slaves, but runaway wives and children who were escaping the brutality of the white husbands and fathers who “owned” them?
Of course, to record the fact that both blacks and women were legal chattel, or that their parallel myths of “natural” inferiority were (and sometimes still are) used to turn both into a source of cheap labor, is not to be confused with equating these two groups. Black women and men usually suffered more awful restrictions on their freedom, a more overt cruelty and violence, and their lives were put at greater risk. To teach a white girl child to read might be condemned as dangerous and even sinful, but it was not against the law, as it was for blacks in many slave states of the South. White women were far less likely than black slaves to risk their lives or be separated from their children, and particularly less so than black women who were forced to be breeders of more slaves. Angelina Grimke, one of the courageous white southern feminists who worked against both race and sex slavery, always pointed out, “We have not felt the slaveholder’s lash … we have not had our hands manacled.”3
Nonetheless, white women were sometimes brutalized or killed in “justified” domestic beatings, and sold as indentured workers as a punishment for poverty, or for a liaison with a black man, or for breaking a law of obedience. Hard work combined with the years of coerced childbearing designed to populate this new land may have made white women’s life expectancy as low as half that of white men. Early American graveyards full of young women who died in childbirth testify to the desperation with which many women sought out midwives for contraception or abortion. The most typical white female punishments were humiliation, the loss of freedom and identity, and to have her health and spirit broken. As Angelina Grimke explained, “I rejoice exceedingly that our resolution should combine us with the Negro. I feel that we have been with him; that the iron has entered into our souls … our hearts have been crushed.”4
But why did so many of my history books assume that white women and blacks could have no issues in common, so much so that they failed to report on the coalitions against slavery and for universal suffrage? Historians seem to pay little attention to movements among the powerless. Perhaps the intimate, majority challenge presented by women of all races and men of color was (and still is) less threatening if it is simply ignored.
Certainly, the lessons of history were not ignored because they were invisible at the time. Much of the long struggle for black and female personhood had been spent as a functioning, conscious coalition. (“Resolved. There never can be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established.”5 That statement was made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and passed at a New York convention in 1863.) Like most early feminists, Stanton believed that sex and race prejudice had to be fought together; that both were “produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro’s skin and the woman’s sex are both [used as] prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.”6 Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave who became a national leader of the movement to abolish slavery and to establish the personhood of all females, assumed in his autobiography, “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly women’s cause.”7 When Douglass died, newspapers reported the mourning for him as a “friend of women” as well as an abolitionist pioneer. And there were many more such obvious coalitions.
If more of us had learned the parallel origins of the abolitionist and suffragist movements, there might have been less surprise when a new movement called “women’s liberation” grew out of the politicization of white and black women in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Certainly, a familiarity with the words of Frederick Douglass might have prevented some of the white and black men in both the civil rights and peace movements from feeling that their power depended on women’s second-class role, or from seeing that they themselves were sometimes waging a sexual war against women, in Vietnam villages and at home. If women had been taught that feelings of emotional connection to other powerless groups were logical—that women also lacked power as a caste, and might feel understandably supportive when peace or civil rights sit-ins rejected violence as a proof of manhood—certainly I and many other women of my generation would have wasted less time being mystified by our unexpected and intense sense of identification with all the “wrong” groups: the black movement, migrant workers, and male contemporaries who were defying the “masculine” role by refusing to fight in Vietnam.
As it was, however, suffragists were often portrayed as boring, ludicrous bluestockings when they were in history books at all: certainly no heroines you would need in modern America where women were, as male authorities kept telling us resentfully, “the most privileged in the world.” Some of us were further discouraged from exploring our human strengths by accusations of Freudian penis envy, the dominating-mother syndrome, careerism, a black matriarchy that was (according to some white sociologists) more dangerous to black men than white racism, plus other punishable offenses. Men often emerged from World War II, Freudian analysis, and locker rooms with vague threats to replace any uppity woman with a more subservient one—an Asian or European war bride instead of a “spoiled” American, for instance, or a “feminine” white woman to replace a black “matriarch,” or just some worshipful young “other woman” to replace an uppity wife.
There were many painful years of reinventing the wheel before we relearned the lessons that our foremothers could have taught us: that a mythology of inferiority based on sex and race was being used to turn both groups into a giant support system. Limited intellectual ability, childlike natures, special job skills (always the poorly paid ones), greater emotionalism and closeness to nature, an inability to get along with our own group, chronic lateness and irresponsibility, happiness with our “natural” place—all these parallel myths were used in some degree against women of every race and men of color.
“The parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs.”8 That was Gunnar Myrdal writing in 1944 in a rather obscure appendix to his landmark study on racism, An American Dilemma. Even in the sixties when I discovered those words (and wished devoutly that I had read them years before), I still did not know that Susan B. Anthony had put the issue even more . succinctly almost a century before Myrdal. “Woman,” she said, “has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.”9
The current movements toward racial and sexual justice have had some success in pressuring for courses in women’s history, black history, the study of Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and many others, but these subjects still tend to be special studies taken only by those with the most interest and the least need. They are rarely an integrated, inescapable part of American history texts that are read by all students.
If the recent past of our own country is still incomplete for many of us, how much less do we learn about other countries and more distant times?
What do we know about the African warrior queens of Dahomey who led their armies against colonial invaders? Or the market women of modern West Africa who run the daily business of their countries? If we know little about the relationship of the witch hunts of New England to patriarchal politics, how much less do we know about the more than eight million women who were burned at the stake in medieval Europe as an effort to wipe out a pre-Christian religion that honored the power of women and nature? If we know not even Stanton’s Woman’s Bible of the nineteenth century, what about the first-century texts of the Bible itself that show a much less patriarchal version of Jesus’ teachings? If the exceptional American women who were explorers, outlaws, ranchers, pirates, publishers, soldiers, and inventors are only just being rediscovered, what about those Native American nations and tribes that balanced male and female authority far more than the “advanced” European cultures that invaded their shores?
How are we to interpret the discovery that many of the “pagan idols,” “false gods,” and “pagan temples” so despised by Judeo-Christian tradition and the current Bible were representations of a female power: a god with a womb and breasts? How will our vision of prehistory change now that archaeologists have discovered that some skeletons long assumed to be male—because of their large-boned strength and the weapons and scholarly scrolls they were buried with—are really females after all? (Here, the famous archaeological find described as the Minnesota Man has recently been redesignated the Minnesota Woman. In Europe, the graves of young warriors killed by battle wounds have turned out to contain the skeletons of females.) Now that we are beginning to rediscover the interdependency of sexual and racial caste systems in our own nation’s history, and the parallels with modern forms of job discrimination, will political-science courses begin to explain that a power structure dependent on race or class “purity”—whether it is whites in the American South and South Africa or Aryans in Nazi Germany—must place greater restrictions on the freedom of women in order to maintain “purity” in future generations? Will we finally be allowed to confront these caste systems together, and therefore successfully in the long run, instead of facing constant divide-and-conquer tactics in the short run?
Such revolts against birth-based caste systems have always been international—and contagious. Anticolonial movements against external dominations of one race by another have deepened into movements against internal dominations of one race or sex by another. Together, they are the most profound and vital movements of this century. They are changing both our hopes for the future, and our assumptions about the past.
But some revelations can be both rewarding and angering. It seems that our ancestors knew so much that we should never have had to relearn.
Among the resolutions in the National Plan of Action adopted at Houston, for instance, there were many echoes of the first wave of American feminism. The high incidence of battered women, the inadequacy of laws to protect them, and the reluctance of police to interfere—all those facts struck many Americans as shocking new discoveries. If we had known more about the history of a husband’s legal right to “own” his wife, and therefore to “discipline” her physically with the explicit permission of the law, we could have uncovered this major form of violence much sooner. A wife’s loss of her own name, legal residence, credit rating, and many other civil rights might have seemed less inevitable as a part of marriage if we had known that our laws were rooted in the common-law precedent (“husband and wife are one person in law … that of the husband”)10 that nineteenth-century English and American women had struggled so hard to reform. We might have been better prepared for arguments that the Equal Rights Amendment would “destroy the family” or make women “like men” if we had known that the same accusations, almost word for word, had been leveled against the suffrage movement. (The possibility of two political opinions in one family was said to be a sure way to destroy it. Our own foremothers were called “unsexed women,” “entirely devoid of personal attraction,” who had only been “disappointed in their endeavors to appropriate breeches,” all because they wanted to vote and own property.) Even the charge that the ERA would undermine states’ rights and constitute a “federal power grab” is a repeat of the argument that a citizen’s right to vote should be left entirely up to the states; a stumbling block that caused suffragists to proceed state by state, and to delay focusing on a Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, for many years.
In a way, the unity represented by the minority women’s resolution—perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of the Houston Conference, because it brought together Americans of color for the first time, from Asian to Puerto Rican—was also the greatest example of the high price of lost history. After all, black women had been the flesh-and-blood links between abolition and suffrage because they suffered from double discrimination and invisibility. (“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights,” warned Sojourner Truth, the great black feminist and antislavery leader, “but not a word about colored women.”)11 When American male political leaders destroyed the coalition for universal adult suffrage by offering the vote to its smallest segment—that is, to black males—but refusing the half of the country that was female, black women were forced to painfully and artificially slice up their identities. They could either support their brothers in, as the slogan of the era put it, “the Negroes’ hour,” even though no black woman was included; or, like Sojourner Truth, they could advocate “keeping the thing going … because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get things going again.”12 Once it was clear that black men were going to get the vote first, no matter what any woman said, black women were further isolated by some white suffragists who, embittered by the desertion of both white and black male allies, began to use the racist argument that the white female “educated” vote was necessary to outweigh the black male “uneducated” vote. Divisions deepened. Sojourner Truth’s prediction that it would “take a great while to get things going again” if the two great parallel causes were divided turned out to be true. It wasn’t until a half century later, many years after Sojourner Truth’s death, that women of all races won the vote.
Many scars of the rift between white and black women remain. So does the cruel and false argument that black women must suppress their own talents on behalf of black men, thus weakening the black community by half. White male “liberals” had tried a divide-and-conquer tactic by separating out black men, and, in many sad ways, they won.
When the first reformist prelude to feminism started up again in the early and mid sixties, it was largely a protest of middle-class white housewives against the “feminine mystique” that kept them trapped in the suburbs. For black women who usually had no choice but to be in the labor force, that was a lifestyle that some envied and few could afford. Only after the civil rights movement and feminism’s emergence again in the later sixties—with its analysis of all women as a caste, not just as a privileged and integrationist few—did the organic ties between the movements against racial and sexual caste begin to grow again. In spite of enduring racism in society, in spite of an economic and social structure that exploits racial divisions among women and also manufactures social and economic tensions between black women and men, the women’s movement has become the most racially and economically integrated movement in the country—which is not to say it is diverse enough. Despite the enduring argument that male supremacy is a social norm to which all should aspire, the black movement and its political leaders now include more women than do their white counterparts—but even so, there is far from a balance.
For this wave of feminism, Houston was the first public landmark in a long, suspicion-filled journey across racial barriers. At last, there were enough women of color (more than a third of all delegates and thus a greater proportion than the population) to have a strong voice: not only African American women, but Hispanic women (from Chicana to Puerto Rican, Latina to Cuban) as the second largest American minority, Asian Pacific women, Alaskan Native, and American Indian women from many different nations, who themselves were meeting for the first time. But how much less perilous this journey would have been if we had maintained the bridges of the past, and had not had to build new roads to coalitions through what seemed to us an uncharted wilderness.
For myself, Houston and all the events surrounding it have become a landmark in personal history, the sort of milestone that divides our sense of time. Figuring out the date of any other event now means remembering: Was it before or after Houston?
The reason has a lot to do with learning. In retrospect, I realize that I had been skeptical about the time and effort spent on this First National Women’s Conference. Could a government-sponsored conference really be populist and inclusive? Even after the state conferences made clear that the combination of public and private outreach was working, I still feared the culmination in Houston as if it were an approaching trial. Would this enormous meeting attract national and international attention, only to highlight disorder? Would the noisy anti-equality counterconference of the right wing be taken as proof that “women can’t get along”? I had worked throughout that year of state conferences and preparation, but as Houston came closer, I still would have given anything to stop worrying, avoid conflict, stay home, or just indefinitely delay this event about which I cared too much.
I thought my fears were rational and objective. They were not.
Yes, I had learned, finally, that individual women could be competent, courageous, and loyal to each other. Despite growing up with no experience of women in positions of worldly authority, I had learned that much. But I still wasn’t sure that women as a group could be competent, courageous, and loyal to each other. I didn’t believe that we could conduct large, complex events, in all our diversity, and make a history that was our own.
But we can. Houston taught us that. The question is: Will this lesson be lost again?
—1979
1. For a full text of this National Plan of Action, see Caroline Bird, What Women Want: The National Women’s Conference (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 1073.
3. Angelina Grimke, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (Rochester: Charles Mann, 1899).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 469.
8. Myrdal, 1077.
9. Susan B. Anthony, in Stanton, vol. I.
10. Blackstone, Commentaries.
11. Sojourner Truth, in Stanton, vol. 2, 193.
12. Ibid.