DEPTH-SOUNDING I
IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT and feminist surge of the early 1970s, Bella Abzug is elected to Congress. She advances the issues of women and other powerless groups, is the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of President Nixon, becomes respected for her lawyerly skill in writing legislation and researching little-used shortcuts in congressional procedure, and is elected by her peers, after only two terms in the House of Representatives, as one of its three “most influential” members. In 1976, she dares to become the first woman to run for the U.S. Senate from New York, loses by a very small margin, and the following year, becomes the first woman to run on a major party ticket for mayor of New York City.
Is she commended for the courage it takes to leave a safe seat in Congress and be a “first” in tough races? Is she praised for having raised more political money—largely through small donations at that—than any other woman (and many men) in American history? Does she at least get sympathy for expending all that life energy, and then losing? Definitely not. She is condemned by supposedly profeminist liberals as being “too aggressive” or “abrasive,” and by a rightwing media campaign that labels her “antifamily,” “pro-Communist,” and “Queen of the Perverts.” As a result, even her effort to regain a House seat is destroyed: a white, male, Republican millionaire is elected in her stead. In the press, and even in a few parts of the women’s movement, her defeat is humiliatingly diagnosed as “her own fault.”
DEPTH-SOUNDING II
The Equal Rights Amendment earns majority support from Americans, both women and men, in nationwide public-opinion polls, and is ratified by thirty-five states in which most Americans live. Nonetheless, a handful of firmly entrenched, white male legislators control enough votes in the remaining few states to keep its victory just three states away. Are those local legislators blamed for not responding to a national consensus? Do reporters, or Americans in general, demand to know what special interests are controlling state legislatures? No, the most popular question seems to be, “Why are women against the ERA?” The second most popular query not only blames the victims, but introduces some wishful thinking besides. You know, the one that goes, “Why is the women’s movement dying?”
DEPTH-SOUNDING III
In 1973, after a long feminist campaign to galvanize America’s pro-choice majority, the Supreme Court rules that the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy protects a woman’s right to choose abortion. Though the health and lives of countless women are saved by the availability of legal abortion, both candidates in the 1976 presidential campaign personally oppose abortion, thus legitimizing the view of the anti-choice minority. By 1977, most welfare recipients, the least politically powerful among women, have been deprived of public funding for abortion. Compulsory motherhood and butchery or death from self-induced and illegal operations are the inevitable results. Meanwhile, the vociferous, anti-choice lobby accelerates its campaign to further restrict and eventually outlaw abortion, and begins to harass patients as well. Clinics are picketed, blockaded by demonstrators, and even set on fire. Several are invaded by anti-choice gangs while women are on the operating table. Most of this is done in the name of a religious belief that, even when phrased in the most rational way by public-opinion polls, isn’t supported by a majority of anybody, including members Of the major religions supposed to hold that belief. Indeed, anti-choice activists in the Catholic hierarchy may be endangering their own women especially, since Catholic women’s more limited access to contraception means that they tend to have more abortions, proportionate to their numbers in the population, than do their sisters in other religions.
Are these anti-choice forces seen as a tyrannical minority; one whose power jeopardizes individual rights, as well as the separation of church and state? Does a casual newspaper reader get the impression that some 60 to 70 percent of Americans support the right to choose—as the polls reflect? On the contrary, anti-abortion groups are often credited with being part of a “turn to the right” by the “majority of Americans.” And advocates of violence are seriously, constantly referred to as “pro-life.”
DEPTH-SOUNDING IV
For five million dollars, less than a quarter of the government contribution to one presidential candidate, women work nationwide for two years, hold fifty-six state and territorial conferences, and a meeting of twenty thousand observers and delegates known as the National Conference in Houston. It is probably the most representative, democratic, biggest, and cheapest meeting of elected national representatives in history.
Is everybody congratulated for hard work, frugality, and democratic process? Does Congress give some commendation to one of the few federally funded projects ever to fulfill its mandate without coming back for more cash? Not at all. On the contrary, rightwing groups charge that tax dollars were “wasted,” and their allegations are printed with little investigation by many reporters and believed with little justification by many congressmen. So are some accusations that the 1977 National Women’s Conference tax dollars were used to pay for “pornography” and “a national scandal.” Material that has nothing to do with the conference is displayed to congressmen and state legislators and tours many state capitals.
So much mud is flung that some of it sticks. Though a post-Houston opinion poll conducted by Louis Harris shows that a majority or plurality of Americans actually supports each of the main resolutions passed by conference delegates, the conference itself isn’t viewed with the same approval: 29 percent disapprove of it altogether; 52 percent aren’t sure how they feel; and only 19 percent approve. It is a partial but disturbing victory for easy media image over hard-won realities.
Those few stories only symbolize the emotional, complex events that keep us swimming through a river of change whose tributaries are hope, revelation, tiredness, and rage. And of course, besides those public soundings, there are private ones. How many of us have had our dreams set free, but still can’t budge everyday realities? How many of us went courageously back to school, for instance, only to find ourselves among the female unemployed who grow better educated every year? Or with one full-time job outside the home and one in it? How many of us are trying to help children become free, individual people, but face a whole culture devoted to mass-producing them as roles? How many of us try to keep love and mutual support flowing between equals, only to find it dammed up by some imbalance of self-confidence or power?
This seems to be where we are, after the first full decade of the second wave of feminism: Raised hopes, a hunger for change, and years of hard work are running head-on into a frustrating realization that each battle must be fought over and over again. One inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.
Perhaps that’s the first Survival Lesson we need to remember if we are to keep going: serious opposition is a measure of success. Women have been trained to measure our effectiveness in love and approval, not conflict and resistance. That makes it tough to be personally independent, or to advocate basic change. But the truth is that there was no major organized backlash against us when we were still paying for women’s conferences out of our own pockets and living-room benefits. That happened only after we got strong enough to direct a few of our own tax dollars where we thought they should go. Traditional churches and fundamentalist leaders didn’t organize against feminists politically until the contagion of justice was causing nuns to question the authority of priests, Mormon women to chafe at the sex-race restrictions by which that well-to-do establishment is run, Jewish and Protestant women to become rabbis and ministers, and the very personification of God as the Father to be questioned.
As for the principle of equal pay for comparable work, you will remember that this demand was once known as “the-part-I-agree-with.” Sometimes, it still is. But that easy agreement usually preceded the realization of how many women are doing comparable work without comparable pay, or how many more women would like to join their sisters who already make up a huge percentage of the salaried labor force, or what massive redistribution of wealth could result if women as a group were no longer available as a cheap, unorganized, surplus labor force.
In other words, if even the work we are now doing were paid according to its logical, comparable value in “men’s work,” we would cause a major redistribution of wealth. Which is exactly why we should keep forcing this demand. A system that rests on cheap labor and allows unearned wealth to accumulate deserves to be transformed by pressures of the many on the few.
The realization of the populist, radical potential of “equal pay” is now beginning to dawn on everybody—those with profits to lose as well as those with equality to gain. The logical results are both deeper resistance and broader support. It depends, of course, on whether someone benefits from women’s cheap labor (as an employer, investor, stockholder, or even a husband may do); or whether someone is a salaried woman herself, depends on a woman’s wage-earning power, or is just a person who happens to believe that society would be improved for everyone in the long run by rewarding merit and restricting unearned wealth.
We weren’t culturally prepared as women for meeting such resistance, and we were rarely prepared as students or citizens either. Wasn’t equal opportunity one of the rocks on which America was built? Why should we have to fight for, or expect resistance to, something we thought we already had?
In fact, experience has been our school and textbook. We might have started by discovering that women who answered phones in city hall got $170 a week, while policemen who answered phones in police precincts earned $306. Or that “maintenance men” got $185 a week for the upkeep of office buildings in the daytime, while “scrubwomen” got $170 for doing comparable work at night. Or that a registered nurse got paid less than the garbagemen who served the same hospital, and much less than a pharmacist who had equal training but belonged to a mostly male profession. Sometimes, we complained and got some financial relief from employers. More often, we realized the necessity of much longer and more massive pressure. Always, we learned lessons in how to organize. But we frequently got some version of the same reply: “This could break every city government and hospital in the country.” Or from very frank private employers: “We only hire women here because they’re cheaper than men.”
Each of us could supply many more examples. But it’s important to remember the real economic consequences of equality, as we ourselves can see and assess them, if we are to understand both the logic and the tribute of the stiff opposition we continue to get.
Ironically, even those of us who studied other economic revolutions weren’t necessarily better prepared for this resistance than those of us who were acting on a general faith in fair play. Political theorists usually presented women’s inequality as an incidental byproduct of other “larger” economic questions. Their supposition was that change must start at the top, and the top doesn’t include women.
Those nonfeminist theorists might or might not be right about a particular revolution, but there is more than one way to create change. So we started where it was possible for us to start—at the bottom. Since we weren’t undertaking armed rebellion, nationalization, or worker takeover of the factories, we had few models of what tactics to use, or what resistance to expect.
In the 1960s and early 1970s many of us had spurned such legislative measures as the Equal Rights Amendment precisely because they didn’t sound radical enough. We had all the doubts of the sixties about making any change through the electoral system, or any effort that appeared to depend on infiltrating the Establishment, one feminist at a time. Both politics and temperament put me in that skeptical camp. I didn’t love structure of any kind (no doubt a trait of freelance writers), and besides, the ERA seemed like a leftover from a time when our once-radical foremothers had been persuaded to put too much faith in the vote.
In the past few years, however, the slowly revealed potential of mass-movement pressure has made a lot of us change our minds. So has the rightwing backlash and its implicit testimony to the importance of a constitutional principle of equality.
But, as some smart person once said, the absence of surprise is a measure of intelligence. If we ourselves had figured out the economic impact of the ERA sooner, we might have worked harder to get the necessary ratifications earlier, while the right wing was still dozing at its legislative command posts. We might, have educated the media better on the where and why of the opposition, so that fewer reporters would now be accepting the legislators’ false arguments that “my women constituents are against it,” or that the problem is the mythical specter of coed bathrooms.
In the absence of real economic analysis, however, we tended to present the ERA as sweet reason; without adding that equity, when introduced to systems that depend on inequity (in the workplace and at home) can turn out to be very radical indeed.
Of course, no degree of preparedness might have increased the present pace of change. As women, we have to be careful not to succumb to our social disease of terminal guilt: States’ rights and local legislative control have always been code words for racial bias and economic conservatism; it’s just that the ERA experience has engraved that truth on our skins. In some parts of the country, we were faced with having to transform legislatures that have been the Catch-22 of democracy since the Civil War. North Carolina, for example, only ratified the amendment giving women the vote in 1976, and Mississippi is still holding out.1 Kentucky didn’t ratify the anti-slavery amendment until 1976.
In Nevada, eleven legislators who had pledged to support the ERA, and who had been supported by pro-equality groups because of that public promise, voted against it once they were in office. Why? Because the rightwing leadership of the legislature made it clear that they would have little chance, of chairing committees, or otherwise having a political future, unless they voted no. In Virginia, women performed the impossible feat of electing a pro-ERA Republican in the Democratic district of an anti-ERA Democratic leader of the legislature. But, as one feminist put it, “That only made them mad. Now, the other legislators want to punish us even more.”
It may be good for the country in the long run that the ERA has exposed the lack of democracy in many state legislatures, but it sometimes feels as if we have to reconstruct a nationwide phone system just to make one phone call.
For the future, however, we should understand that this process of democratizing a state legislative system takes time. Changing a few faces is not enough, just as earning majority support of a legislator’s constituents doesn’t help if he has been put there by special interests. You have to be around long enough to out-organize the special interests, and change the legislature’s leadership.
When the ERA is finally part of the Constitution (as it eventually will be) and historians look back at our journey, they may count acceptance of the initial seven-year ratification deadline as the greatest single error. Most constitutional amendments have had no deadlines at all. The first suggested one for the ERA was thirty-five years. When Alice Paul, the suffragist who wrote and introduced the ERA, heard that its congressional sponsors had accepted seven years, she despaired of success. After all, if it took a Civil War plus nearly a century to get racial equality into the Constitution, why should we be surprised that legal equality for half the population would take a long and sustained effort?2
It also takes a while for a critical mass of any movement to learn that the paths to change prescribed in our civics texts are just not enough. Working inside political parties, explaining problems to leaders, electing or dis-electing, gaining the support of the majority—all these make sense. Occasionally they even work. But our textbooks didn’t prepare us for the fact that some power considerations have nothing to do with majorities (for instance, which special interests make the biggest political contributions, who appoints committee chairs, who can quash some legislator’s ethics rap, and which legislators just are not going to vote for equality because “God didn’t intend women to be equal”); or that majority support can exist for years on some issues (like gun control, full employment, or getting out of Vietnam) without giving them the power to win.
Those of us who came of political age in the masculine-style left also had textbooks. They said you couldn’t win by the ballot, lobbying, getting majority support, or anything less than revolt. You had to adopt such “outside-the-system” methods as street demonstrations, passive (or maybe violent) resistance to the system, and a desertion of allegiances to people who didn’t agree with all of the above.
In practice and under the right conditions, both “inside” and “outside” strategies worked—but both also tended to fizzle out. The reformers or “inside” people often got absorbed or immobilized. The revolutionaries or “outside” people often got so fixed on immediate impact that they became isolated or demoralized when major change wasn’t evident right away (or at least, before they reached the age of thirty).
Consciously and otherwise, we carried versions of these polarized, prefeminist styles with us into the women’s movement. In the 1960s and early 1970s, we divided into “reformist” or “liberal” feminists (sometimes including the more hesitant category of “I’m not a feminist but …”) and “socialist” or “radical” feminists (often used synonymously, though the first tend to think that class is more important than caste, while the second group believes the reverse). Even after most of us had identified with the women’s movement as a first priority, some mutations of these divisions still turned up. For instance, there was (and still is) a distinction between “political feminists” (who have an impulse toward economic actions or analyses and coalitions with the nonfeminist Left) and “cultural feminists” (who are more into anthropology, self-transformation, and building a woman’s culture).
In real life, however, the same individual or group might feel attracted to both of these worthwhile goals, and combine them in imaginative ways. The tragedy was that an artificial choice was often imposed anyway. We weren’t supposed to be working both “inside” and “outside” the system. We risked being accused of hypocrisy if we tried to earn academic credentials and to challenge the system that required them.
It was as if feminism had pointed out the injustice of dividing human nature into the false polarities of “feminine” or “masculine,” but hadn’t yet become strong enough to get us past other bipartite either/or divisions that imitated them.
The worst penalty was the deadening of our perceptions. In reality, most situations turn out to contain varieties of actions and ideas that number a dozen, fourteen, a hundred, or just one. To polarize everything into opposing pairs was to deprive ourselves of accuracy, subtlety, invention, and growth. It kept us from seeing the total spectrum of actions from which we could choose.
In a male-supremacist culture, a vital function of polarization is to set up a win-lose situation. Women are supposed to be on the giving or losing side: that’s the way we achieve virtue, sympathy, and society’s support. Even among feminists, moral purity and lightness often retains this association with failure, a notion that can cause us to reward weakness in each other and to punish strength.
One recent example is the division of feminists into the “moderate” or even “conservative” majority versus the “radical” or “pure” few. In this version of polarization, any group or person who has succeeded, or even survived, is supposed to be in the sellout category, and anyone who is isolated and embittered is probably in the camp of the pure. Thus, one may read in some parts of the press (though not those controlled by the right wing, which knows better) that the “conservatives” or “moderates” have taken over the women’s movement from the “true feminist” few.3
One giveaway of this division’s purpose is the imbalance between its two groups. You can be sure that the majority of feminists will be on the condemned side, since only a tiny minority can be “pure.” Sometimes, this is a paternalistic way that political observers outside the movement try to define it out of existence. Often, it’s the self-defeating way that a very few women choose to declare their moral superiority and ownership of feminism.
In either case, it’s important to ignore labels and look at the record of issues and actions. They often disclose something quite different. The majority group may well have survived and grown precisely because it was feminist and therefore radical enough to attack fundamental, shared problems and to make women of different experiences and backgrounds feel welcome. The “pure” and embittered few, on the other hand, may have become isolated precisely because they were feminist in rhetoric, but exclusive or authoritarian in behavior and style. Whether they came from the Right or the Left, they tend to carve out some territory, claim ownership or other unique authority, and demand perpetual homage to that claim.
In fact, however, the most recognizable characteristic of feminists and feminist acts is their effort to be inclusive. The radical vision of feminism depends on its possibility of transforming the status of all women, not just a correct few.
This is not to say that internal distinctions and criticisms can’t be constructive. They can, providing that they describe authentic differences and don’t push us unnecessarily far apart.4 In the label department, for instance, I would prefer to be called simply “a feminist.” After all, the belief in the full humanity of women leads to the necessity of transforming male-supremacist structures and, thus removing the model for other systems of birth-determined privilege. That should be radical enough. However, because there are feminists who believe that women can integrate or imitate existing structures (or conversely, that we must wait until class structures are eliminated, whereupon women’s subordinate position will change automatically), I feel I should identify myself as a “radical feminist.” “Radical” means “going to the root,” and I think that the sexual caste system is the root. Whether or not it developed as the chronologically first dominance model in prehistory, it is clear right now that women’s freedom is most restricted in societies that are also devoted to keeping some race or class groups “pure” by birth in order to perpetuate their power.
Because I do believe that the sexual caste system is this kind of crucial, anthropological root cause, I also think that all effective actions taken against it will contribute to society’s radical transformation. This will happen whether the acts are taken by radical feminists or by someone who says uncertainly, “I’m not a feminist, but… .” Therefore, I feel fine about supporting and working with women who don’t share my chosen label. Yes, we may disagree on analyses in the long run: I don’t think feminism can just be imitative or integrationist. By definition, it must transform. But in the short run, there are goals we agree on. And it’s in the short run that we must act.
Most feminists have begun to see varied, orchestrated tactics and styles as an asset. We’ve learned something from the experience of working across differences of race, age, class, and sexuality. We’ve learned from examples like the women’s health movement or changing rape laws or starting battered women’s shelters, all of which benefited from diverse approaches: not just “inside” or “outside” tactics, but creating alternative feminist structures and translating as many of their lessons as possible into the dominant system itself.
Each issue goes through a similar ontogeny: naming the problem; speaking out, consciousness-raising, and researching; creating alternate structures to deal with it; and beginning to create or change society’s laws and structures to solve the problem for the majority. Perhaps that is the second Survival Lesson: we have to push ourselves far beyond prefeminist, either/or, polarized thinking, and use a whole spectrum of talents and tactics. We must surround our goals.
We have often said that diversity would be a hallmark of a hoped-for feminist future. But we’re just beginning to understand it as a tactical advantage right now. We’re also gaining enough confidence to dispense with the idea that everyone who doesn’t choose our particular style is rejecting or criticizing us. This frees us to use diverse means, and to see that, in the organic integrity that feminism demands, the means are the ends. We won’t have diversity at the end unless we nurture it along the way.
In the history of this wave of feminism, the campaign for the ERA may appear as the first massive, shared experience that blasted a critical mass of the women’s movement out of its inside-the-system/outside-the-system rut. The next struggle is much less likely to find radicals ignoring the power of the electoral system, or reformers insisting that all will be well if we just act ladylike, wear skirts, and avoid controversy.
But we are only a decade or so into this current wave of the longest revolution. The last wave endured for more than a century, and there will be others created by our sisters to come. It’s important to extract lessons for future action.
Take the loss of Bella Abzug at the polls. If we had not left her out there on the cutting edge, with no visible movement in the streets, no sit-ins, or door-to-door organizing to make clear that she had a fearsome constituency, she might not have been so easily cut down as the farthest-out voice within earshot of the politicians or the press. As it was, a lot of us succumbed to the polarized argument that we were (or she was) inside the system, and that the street days of the early 1970s were over. Some of us even agreed that her aggressive wave-making had invited defeat. But wasn’t Bella’s style a lot like that of Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s most beloved mayor?
Perhaps we would have been stronger in pressing from outside the political structure, and honoring Bella’s style, if we had read more statements like this:
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
That was Susan B. Anthony in 1873. Without the knowledge of quotes like these, we sometimes think of the first-wave activists as tame. But how many of their tactics can we match for variety or force?
Even the later suffragists, the ones who are most often labeled reformist because of their concentration on the vote, used radical tactics. Yes, they lobbied politely, and took tea with their friends in Congress, but they also picketed the White House and engaged in the civil disobedience that those same congressmen abhorred. Wives of well-known men, preferably personal friends of President Wilson, were arrested (very dramatic for the press), and labor-union women riding in bunting-trimmed cars down main streets were a decorous surprise—not the stereotype of “immoral” working girls and immigrants at all. Suffragists wore cloth banners folded under their clothes so they could smuggle them into meetings or well-guarded picket lines. When one set of banners had been seized by police, a dozen others could take its place. Our foremothers had a great gift for pageantry: everybody marching in the same capes, carrying the same color flowers, presenting a three-mile-long petition, or (when they thought more toughness was in order) burning the president’s speeches in the streets of Washington, D.C., to embarrass him internationally. They also had a disciplined precomputer lobbying system in which letters, cables, and phone calls could be sent out by national signal, plus a fine sense of timing. Suffragist meetings were often scheduled on the eve of some Establishment event—say, a national political convention—to take advantage of the gathering of bored, news-hungry reporters.
Chaining themselves to the White House fence, going to jail, declaring a hunger strike, being force-fed: those events are now famous. But their range of tactics included humor, theatrics, passive resistance, persuasion, and, whenever possible, the subversion of Establishment contacts and wives.
The antiwoman backlash of their day also accused them of being free-love advocates, antifamily, anti-God, masculine, and unnatural women. Sound familiar?
Ideas for actions, conflict resolution, and a reminder of similar hostility in the past—all these are practical reasons for Survival Lesson number three: we need to know the history of our sisters—both for inspiration and for accumulating a full arsenal of ideas—and adopt what translates into the present. Very few tactics are either completely new, or completely out-of-date. Even after we as individuals have exhausted our ability to make them fresh, other feminists can repeat, enlarge, and change them.
We are all organizers, and no organizer should ever end a meeting or a book or an article without ideas for practical action. After all, a movement is only people moving. What are we going to do differently when we get up tomorrow?
The great strength of feminism—like that of the black movement here, the Gandhian movement in India, and all the organic struggles for self-rule and simple justice—has always been the encouragement for each of us to act, without waiting and theorizing about some future takeover at the top. It’s no accident that, when some small group does accomplish a momentous top-down revolution, the change seems to benefit only those who made it. Even with the best intentions of giving “power to the people,” the revolution is betrayed.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
So we ask ourselves: What might a spectrum of diverse, mutually supportive tactics really look like for us as individuals, for family and community groups, for men who care about equality, for children, and for political movements as a whole? Some actions will always be unique to particular situations and thus unforeseeable. Others will be suited to times of great energy in our lives, and still others will make sense for those who are burnt out and need to know that a time of contemplation and assessment is okay. But here are some that may inspire action, if only to say, “No, that’s not right. This is what I choose to do instead.”
As Individuals
In the early 1970s when I was traveling and lecturing with feminist lawyer and black activist Florynce Kennedy, one of her many epigrams went like this: “Unity in a movement situation is overrated. If you were the Establishment, which would you rather see coming in the door, five hundred mice or one lion?”
Mindful of her teaching, I now often end lectures with an organizer’s deal. If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day, she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn’t matter whether the act is as small as saying, “Pick it up yourself” (a major step for those of us who have been the servants in our own families) or as large as organizing a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won’t be quite the same. Second, we will have such a good time that we will never again get up in the morning saying, “Will I do anything outrageous?” but only “What outrageous act will I do today?”
Here are some samples of outrageous acts that I’ve watched individuals perform in real life:
• Announced a permanent refusal to contribute more money to a church or synagogue until women can become priests, ministers, and rabbis.
• Asked for a long-deserved raise, or, in the case of men and/or white folks, refused an undeserved one that was being given over the heads of others because of their race or sex.
• Written a well-reasoned critique of a sexist or racist textbook and passed it out on campus.
• Challenged some woman-hating joke or imagery with the seriousness more often reserved for slurs based on religion or race.
• Shared with colleagues the knowledge of each other’s salaries so that unfairnesses can be calculated. (It’s interesting that employers try to keep us from telling the one fact we know.)
• Cared for a child or children so that an overworked mother could have a day that is her own. (This is especially revolutionary when done by a man.)
• Returned to a birth name or, in the case of a man, suggest his children bear both parents’ names.
• Left home for a week so that the father of a young child could learn to be a parent. (As one woman later reported calmly, “When I came home, my husband and the baby had bonded, just the way women and babies do.”)
• Petitioned for a Women’s Studies section in a local library or bookstore.
• Checked a corporate employer’s giving programs, figured out if they are really inclusive by benefiting women with at least half of their dollars, and made suggestions if not.
• Personally talked to a politician who needed persuasion to support, or reward for helping, issues of equality.
• Redivided a conventional house so that each person has a space for which he or she is solely responsible, with turns taken caring for kitchen, bathroom, and other shared rooms.
• Got married to an equal, or divorced from an unequal.
• Left a violent lover or husband.
• Led a walkout from a movie that presents rape scenes or other violence as titillating.
• Made a formal complaint about working (or living) in a white ghetto. White people are also being culturally deprived.
• Told the truth to a child, or a parent.
• Said proudly, “I am a feminist.” (Because this word means a believer in equality, it’s especially helpful when said by a man.)
• Organized a block, county, apartment house, or dormitory to register and vote.
• Personally picketed and/or sued a bigoted employer/teacher/athletic coach/foreman/union boss.
In addition to such one-time outrageous acts, there are also regular ones that should be the bottom line for each of us. For instance: writing five letters a week to lobby, criticize, or praise anything from TV shows to a senator; giving 10 percent of our incomes to social justice; going to one demonstration a month or one consciousness-raising group a week just to keep support and energy up; and figuring out how to lead our daily lives in a way that reflects what we believe. People who actually incorporate such day-by-day changes report that it isn’t difficult: five lobbying letters can be written while watching The Late Show, giving 10 percent of their incomes often turns out to be the best investment they ever made; meetings create a free space, friends, and an antidote to isolation; and trying to transform a job or a family or a lifestyle in order to reflect beliefs, instead of the other way around, gives a satisfying sense of affecting the world.
If each of us only reached out and changed five other people in our lifetimes, the spiral of revolution would widen enormously.
In Groups
Some of the most effective group actions are the simplest:
• Dividing membership lists according to political district, from precinct level up, so we can inform and get out the pro-equality vote.
• Asking each organization we belong to, whether community or professional, union or religious, to support issues of equality in their formal agendas.
• Making sure that the nonfeminist groups we’re supporting don’t have mostly women doing the work, and mostly men on their boards.
• Making feminist groups feminist; that is, relevant to women of the widest diversity of age, race, economics, lifestyles, abilities, and political labels practical for the work at hand—which may require feminist men, too. (An inclusiveness that’s best begun among the founders. It’s much tougher to start any group and only later reach out to “others.”)
• Offering support where it’s needed without being asked—for instance, to the school librarian who’s fighting right-wing censorship of feminist and other books; or to the new family feeling racially isolated in the neighborhood. (Would you want to have to ask people to help you?)
• Identifying groups for coalitions, and allies for issues.
• Streamlining communications. If there were an emergency next week—a victim of discrimination who needed defending, a piece of sinister legislation gliding through city council or Congress—could your membership be alerted?
• Putting the group’s money where its heart is, and not where it isn’t. That may mean contributing to the local battered women’s shelter and protesting a community fund that gives far more to Boy Scouts than to Girl Scouts; or publishing a directory of women-owned businesses; or withholding student-activity fees from a campus program that invites mostly white male speakers. (Be sure and let the other side know how much money they’re missing. To be more forceful, put your contributions in an escrow account, with payment contingent on a specific improvement.)
• Organizing speak-outs and press conferences. There’s nothing like personal testimonies from the people who have experienced a problem firsthand.
• Giving public awards and dinners to women (and men) who’ve made a positive difference.
• Bringing in speakers or Women’s Studies courses to inform your members; running speakers’ bureaus so your group’s message gets out to the community.
• Making sure new members feel invited and welcome once they arrive, with old members assigned to brief them and transfer group knowledge.
• Connecting with other groups like yours regionally or nationally for shared experience, actions, and some insurance against reinventing the wheel.
Obviously, we must be able to choose the appropriate action from a full vocabulary of tactics, from voting to civil disobedience, from supporting women in the trades to economic boycotts and tax revolts, from congressional hearings to zap actions with humor and an eye to the evening news.
Given the feminization of poverty, however, groups are also assuming another importance. Since women are an underdeveloped, undercapitalized labor force with an unequal knowledge of technology—in other words, a “Third World” country wherever we are—we’re beginning to realize that the Horatio Alger model of individualistic economic progress doesn’t work very well for us. Probably we have more to learn about economic development from our sisters in countries recognized as underdeveloped. Cooperative ownership forms and communal capital formation may be as important to our future as concepts of equal pay.
So far, these cooperative experiments have started small: three single mothers who combine children and resources to buy a house not one of them could afford alone; two women who buy a truck for long-distance hauling jobs; a dozen women who pool their savings to start a bakery or a housecleaning service; or single mothers and feminist architects who transform old buildings into new homes.
But we’re beginning to look at Third World examples that inspire bigger efforts. If the poorest women in rural Kenya can pool their savings for years, buy a bus, make money from passengers, and build a cooperative store, why can’t we with our greater resources help each other to undertake the equivalent in our own lives? If illiterate women in India can found and run their own credit cooperative, thus giving them low-interest loans for the goods they sell in the streets, how dare American women be immobilized by a poor economy? It’s also a healthy reversal of the usual flow of expertise from developed to underdeveloped country, and may help feminists build bridges across national chasms of condescension and mistrust. Groups and organizations have been the base of our issue-oriented, electoral, consciousness-raising, and direct-action progress. In the future, they may be our economic base as well.
As Strategists
We’ve spent the first decade or so of the second wave of feminism on the riverbank, rescuing each other from drowning. In the survival areas of rape, battery, and other terrorist violence against women, for instance, we’ve begun to organize help through shelters, hot lines, pressure on police to provide protection, reforms in social services and legislation, and an insistence that society stop blaming the victim.
Now, some of us must go to the head of the river and figure out why women are falling in.
For instance, we can pursue new strategies that have proved effective in treating wife batterers and other violent men. Such strategies have been successful precisely because they came from experiences and feminist insight: violence is an addiction that a male-dominant society creates by teaching that “real men” must dominate and control the world in general and women in particular. When some men inevitably become addicted to violence as a proof of masculinity, conventional Freudian-style treatment has only said: “Yes, men are natural aggressors, but you must learn to control the degree.” That’s like telling a drug addict that he can have just a little heroin.
Treatment based on experience, not Freud, says: “No, men are not natural aggressors; you must unhook your sense of identity and masculinity from violence, and lack the habit completely.”
The few such programs that exist have been helpful to batterers, rapists, and other violent men, criminals and dangerous citizens who had been judged untreatable precisely because they saw themselves as normal men. This fundamental challenge to cultural ideas of masculinity also holds hope for less violent ways of solving conflicts on this fragile planet.
There are many other strategies centered around our four great goals: reproductive freedom; redefining work; democratic families; and depoliticized culture.
Clearly, these goals are a long distance in the future. We are very far from the opposite shore.
But the image of crossing a river may be too simple to describe the reality we experience. In fact, we repeat similar struggles that seem cyclical and discouraging in the short run, yet each one takes place on slightly changed territory. One full revolution is not complete until it has passed through the superficiality of novelty and even law to become an accepted part of the culture. Only when we look back over a long passage of time do we see that each of these cycles has been moving in a direction. We see the spiral of history.
In my first days of activism, I thought I would do this (“this” being feminism) for a few years, and then return to my real life (what my “real life” might be, I did not know). Partly, this was a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured. Partly, it was a simple lack of courage.
But like so many others, now and in movements past, I’ve learned we are in this for life—and for our lives. Not even the spiral of history is needed to show the distance traveled. We have only to look back at the less complete people we ourselves used to be.
And that is the last Survival Lesson: we look at how far we’ve come, and then we know—there can be no turning back.
—1978, 1982
1. Mississippi finally ratified the amendment giving women the vote in 1982.
2. The Equal Rights Amendment was reintroduced in Congress immediately after its failure to be ratified by the July 1982 deadline. By the November elections of the same year, pro-equality voters had changed enough legislators in Florida and Illinois—two of the key states in stopping the ERA—so that those legislatures could now pass it. Nonetheless, if the same ratification process is followed, most estimates say that ten years is a minimum.
3. Relative to other movements and interest groups, the women’s movement is measurably more radical; that is, much more interested in fundamental change. A 1976 Harvard University Center for International Affairs/Washington Post survey of leadership groups in the United States (youth groups, the black movement, and many more) found that feminists were consistently more willing to address questions of basic change (for instance, public ownership of utilities and oil firms, redistribution of income) than any other group. The majority questioned were members of NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus, the very groups often cited as “conservative” feminists.
4. For a description of groups and trends inside the feminist movement, in both the first and second waves, see Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 15–40.
If the struggle of the last decades was against the colonialism that allowed one nation to rule another, the current and future struggle will, be about the internal colonialism that allows one race or one sex to dominate another.
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
—Franklin Thomas
The Liberty of the Citizen