EARLY IN NOVEMBER 1962, as the glowing colors along the Hudson were turning to autumn sere, Eleanor Roosevelt died in her cottage in the hills above the river. Until the final weeks of pain and confinement she had carried on her private responsibilities, keeping in touch with her five offspring and myriad grandchildren and in-laws and ex-laws, serving hot dogs to youngsters from a school for troubled children, trudging through shops for the right presents at Christmastime, helping a black poet find a publisher, faithfully attending church, where she paid pew rent and put two dollars into the plate on Sunday mornings. Occasionally she faced small moral dilemmas. Offered $35,000 to do a margarine commercial, she struggled with her conscience overnight and in the morning decided she would do it. “For that amount of money,” she said, “I can save 6,000 lives”—through CARE packages.
She labored under her more public responsibilities as well, lecturing at Brandeis, pressuring John Kennedy about more appointments for women, publicizing the lot of migratory workers, writing her column—now taken by about forty newspapers after all the controversies. She remained as conventional about personal behavior as she was progressive about social responsibility; thus she was visibly annoyed when a granddaughter failed to return from a party by midnight. Her energy and prestige remained so high in her late seventies that Kennedy recruited her to chair his Commission on the Status of Women; from this position she peppered him and others in authority with letters of warm encouragement or gentle reproach on women’s issues and much else.
The long trajectory of Eleanor Roosevelt’s public life had spanned six decades of women’s evolving needs and interests. Opposed in her early years even to woman suffrage, she had expanded her own consciousness as she moved through the world of women’s clubs, the League of Women Voters, reform groups seeking to protect working women, the Democratic party anterooms to which women were relegated, barred from the chambers of power. By the 1960s she had seen it all: the pervasive discrimination against women in education and employment, the crucial role they could play in grass-roots politics, their inability often to perpetuate and institutionalize their gains, their need to establish a base in the political parties—especially her party, of course—rather than wasting their energies on third-party forays. Originally opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment for fear it would jeopardize hard-won legal protection for women, she was open-minded enough later to reverse her position. And she learned that a President’s widow could be voted America’s “Most Admired Woman” sixteen years after her husband’s death and still crave the warmth of intimate human love.
Always a social reformer rather than a militant feminist, she died on the eve of a profound transformation in the consciousness, behavior, and status of American women. The people she had worked with—Frances Perkins, Molly Dewson, the much-admired black leader Mary McLeod Bethune—had been primarily concerned with women’s pay, living conditions, education for jobs, relegation to the lowest rung of the opportunity ladder. This deep-biting economic inequality was thoroughly documented in the report of the commission transmitted to President Kennedy on the first anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s death and two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Most of the economic problems facing women were centuries old; in the 1960s progress was still coming by inches. While blacks and students and antiwar protesters were seizing the headlines, women on the whole appeared inactive except to the degree they were involved in black and antiwar movements led largely by men.
Women lacked the kind of event—economic collapse, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam—that was needed to electrify the people and jolt the government out of its semi-paralysis. Their crisis was still an invisible one—a crisis of frustration and desperation. It was a “problem that has no name.”
Diary of four hours in the life of Marion Hudson, wife of Henry, mother of two, maker of a home of seven rooms, university student, part-time employee.
5.30 Henry wakes up to go to work. “Trucking” by Marvin Gay can be heard all over the house at full volume. I’m awake. 5.35 Henry turns down the radio just a little. 5.40 Bathroom light is on. Kitchen light is on. Hallway light is on.
(Why can’t he turn off these lights when he’s finished in a particular room!) 6.00 Monique and Tracey are awake. (Who isn’t after the troops have just been called out—meaning Henry.)
6.05 Gave Monique a bottle and changed her diaper.
6.06 Told Tracey he could not have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at this ghastly hour. (Didn’t say ghastly.)
6.15 Henry is off to the post office.
6.16 Get up to cut off the lights.
6.17 Settle down for some sleep.
6.30 Tracey is up—walking around in the house—scares me half to death.
6.31 Tracey starts pounding me on my back to wake up. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. His pajamas are wet.
6.32 I tell Tracey I am going to beat him half to death if he doesn’t change those pajamas.
6.33 Tracey gets in my bed.
6.40 We both finally doze off.
6.41 Tracey is awake again. He wants some Bosco.
6.42 I threaten him with a severe beating.
7.00 Thoroughly exhausted from scolding Tracey, I get up and make him some delicious Bosco. (Actually I feel like dumping the whole glass on top of him.) 7.05 It’s no use. I can’t get back to sleep. Tell Tracey to go upstairs and play with his trucks. Nothing else to do but daydream and think of what I have to do and wear.
7.25 Tracey wants a piece of pie.
7.30 I get up and turn on Tracey’s TV so he can watch Little Rascals.
8.00 Monique wants to get out of her crib. I let her yell till 8:30.
8.30 I’m up and ready. The wheels begin to move into motion.
8.45 Wash Monique and Tracey. Get them dressed. Fuss with Tracey about what shoes he is going to wear. He wants to wear his cowboy boots instead of the black ones. 9.00 Feed them breakfast. Eggs, Spam and toast. Turn on Sesame Street. Tracey doesn’t want his eggs. More confrontation.
9.05 Pack the kids tote bag to take over to Grandma’s. Tell Tracey he cannot take his new trucks. “Yes, I have to go to school today.” Clean off kitchen table and stove after Henry and myself.
9.10 Get dressed. Make up Tracey’s and Monique’s beds. Go into my room and make up the bed.
9.20 Pack my schoolbooks and coat. Gather Monique’s and Tracey’s coats and hats.
9.25 Start towards door. Run to freezer—take something out for dinner.
9.30 Monique just messed in her pants. Back to the bedroom. Change her. Put her coat back on. Meanwhile Tracey is hollering—he wants to go.
9.40 Get in car—head for Grandma’s.…
During the “conformist fifties” Betty Friedan, a young Smith College alumna, had been writing and editing articles with titles like “Millionaire’s Wife” and “I Was Afraid to Have a Baby” for popular magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle. She had also been reading works by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who contended that educated women reached their highest self-realization not through husband and children but through themselves, through their recognition of their own needs and capacities, through “self-actualization.” She had been reading surveys by Dr. Alfred Kinsey which indicated that as American women advanced in education and jobs, as they made “progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society,” they enjoyed higher degrees of sexual fulfillment. In 1963 Friedan achieved her own self-actualization with a book, The Feminine Mystique, that struck thousands of American women like a thunderclap.
With unflinching certitude Friedan’s book traced the web of myths and illusions that bound middle-class women to the one-dimensional role of housewife and mother—and the social forces that created and bolstered them. After World War II, she contended, educators, social scientists, the mass media, corporate advertising, and Freudian theories of female sexuality treated as “scientific religion” had together instilled in talented women the belief that their only sources of fulfillment were sex, home, and family. The well-educated and affluent suburban housewives she interviewed lived lives of quiet desperation, feeling inadequate, anxious, and depressed in existences ruled by the feminine mystique. The core of the modern woman’s problem, she concluded, was not sex but identity. Just as the Victorian culture barred women from gratifying their sexual needs, “our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.”
Though Friedan demonstrated that “the problem that has no name” was social and structural, not personal, her remedy was the reverse: that women exercise individual will and choice, that they find their identity by making their own life plans for meaningful work outside the home. She tacitly assumed that, at least for white middle-class women, institutions did not have to change substantially. Friedan ended her book with no call to collective action, no appeal to politics. But politics would not leave her alone.
Her start as a political activist was triggered by that act “conceived out of wedlock”—Chairman Howard Smith’s failed effort to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by adding “sex” to the title outlawing discrimination in employment. The word “sex” stayed and the measure was enacted, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, evidently considering its addition a fluke and lacking effective enforcement powers, took little or no action on thousands of complaints filed by women. At a June 1966 conference in Washington of state commissions on the status of women— bodies spawned by Kennedy’s original commission that were now a “seething underground of women”—activist women urged passage of a resolution that the EEOC carry out the ban against sexual discrimination in employment. Stunned when the proposal could not even reach the floor—at a conference entitled “Targets for Action”—the activists turned to Friedan, who was attending the conclave to get material for her next book. She had already been urged by women in the underground—especially in the press, government, and unions—to start a movement modeled on the blacks’ successful effort.
Now the moment had arrived. During the final plenary session two dozen women from government, state commissions, and unions hastily gathered to lay plans. Friedan would later wonder whether the cabinet members and other high officials “who talked down to us at lunch knew that those two front tables, so rudely, agitatedly whispering to one another and passing around notes written on paper napkins, were under their very noses organizing NOW, the National Organization for Women, the first and major structure of the modern women’s movement.”
When it was formally established in October 1966, NOW had about three hundred charter members, a few of whom were men. The delegates elected Friedan president. Despite the leadership role of Aileen Hernandez, a black and a disaffected EEOC commissioner, who later would succeed Friedan as president, NOW activists were mainly white middle-class professionals in their mid-twenties to mid-forties.
“We, men and women,” NOW’s statement of purpose began, “… believe that the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders.” NOW would “break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women in government, industry, the professions, the churches, the political parties, the judiciary, the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law, religion and every other field of importance in American society.” NOW would “not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other.” The document set forth a formidable agenda of reform.
NOW began as a hierarchically structured body that made up for its lack of a mass base by expert use of the media. Her celebrity status, organizational skill, and boundless energy put Friedan in a central leadership role; she served as president until 1970. From the start, Friedan recounted, NOW members were reluctant “to hand over their individual autonomy and decision-making power to any body of leaders.” They hoped that the local and individual participation built into the structure would encourage leadership among women at the grass roots. But a balance between hierarchy and autonomy was hard to attain. Even while they encouraged local initiative, national leaders usually ran the show and took the limelight, leading to conflicts between local chapters and the central body that were typically expressed in terms of feminist ideals. Elitist leadership, local activists said, was a value of the male world. The higher circles saw themselves as pressure-group activists, not mere servants of the locals’ needs.
Inevitably. NOW sharpened a set of issues that had divided women for generations, between such reformers as members of the League of Women Voters who believed in pressing women’s issues one by one through lobbying and other interest-group tactics, and “transformers” in the old National Women’s Party who campaigned for the total equality of women through militant political action. This conflict had erupted during the Kennedy Administration in a dispute between women leaders centered in the Women’s Bureau and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women under Eleanor Roosevelt, on the one hand, and feminists from the Women’s Party now allied with movement activists, on the other. The former favored “specific bills for specific ills,” which would be upheld by the courts under the Fourteenth Amendment, while the latter sought such fundamental changes as the Equal Rights Amendment to give broad constitutional support to equality. Both sides talked grandly of liberty and equality but defined these values differently: the reformers fought for the removal of injustices especially in the workplace, while feminists in the Women’s Party tradition “placed special emphasis on personal freedom and accomplishment,” on liberating the whole woman.
Early on, when NOW drew up a Bill of Rights for Women, labor delegates threatened to pull out because their unions opposed ERA, fearing it might nullify laws protecting working women. Then a group of members walked out in protest against NOW’s support of reproductive freedom and repeal of abortion laws—probably the first time that “control of one’s body” had been formally articulated as a woman’s right. The dissidents formed the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), which concentrated on fighting discrimination in education and employment and later joined hands with NOW on these issues and ERA.
Such differences hardly slowed NOW’s momentum. Dividing up into myriad task forces on such issues as discrimination in employment and education, NOW activists showed their mettle in changing government policy, though the battle for enforcement often took years. NOW helped win from the Johnson White House an executive order barring sexual discrimination in federal contracts, including those with academic institutions. As the self-appointed watchdog of the EEOC, NOW successfully filed suit against the agency’s upholding of sex-segregated want ads— “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.” Activists dumped piles of newspapers at EEOC offices and followed with a national day of picketing. NOW ranged through the business world too, gaining a historic settlement with AT&T, which even the EEOC had singled out as the largest oppressor of women workers, and compelling the airlines to end the involuntary retirement of flight attendants when they married or turned thirty-two.
NOW was especially effective on Capitol Hill. Its representatives lobbied hard for the 1972 act that strengthened the EEOC’s enforcement powers and expanded its jurisdiction. Its greatest success followed, as it spearheaded congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972— the prize winner of the bumper crop of women’s rights legislation pushed through the 92nd Congress. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, prohibiting credit discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status, was the fruit of intensive lobbying efforts by a coalition of women’s groups, including NOW, WEAL, and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Leaders in these efforts were Friedan, New York congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of the new mass-circulation feminist magazine, Ms.
Working with black women was a quite different proposition. Probably the most oppressed large group in America, black women had the unique experience of being stigmatized both for their sex and for their color. During the 1940s, they made more gains in occupational status, education, and income than in the previous three decades. While still far behind in absolute terms, they surpassed not only white women but black men in relative gains. But though black women might earn more than before in better jobs, they still found the doors of real opportunity sealed shut against them. Their economic improvement quickened hopes and expectations that their cultural and political environment crushed. No wonder that, according to a Louis Harris poll for Virginia Slims, 62 percent of black women in 1972 favored efforts to strengthen women’s status in society, compared with only 45 percent of white women. The different situations of black and white women caused many black women leaders to keep their distance from such white-dominated organizations as NOW and even to refer to the “white” women’s liberation movement.
The more NOW expanded, the more it came to embrace women of differing interests and loyalties, such as trade unionists, blacks, professionals, housewives. A dramatic display of unity was needed, and a fine occasion was at hand—the fiftieth anniversary of the winning of female suffrage. Sensing that something grander than the usual demonstration was in order, Friedan conceived of a “Women’s Strike for Equality” as a way to channel the energy of the burgeoning movement toward concrete political goals; it would show women, the media, the government “how powerful we were.” When she proposed the idea during her farewell speech as head of NOW in March 1970, some delegates cheered, but others groaned, wondering how ridiculous they might appear if most American women did not strike. Hernandez and other leaders feared squandering resources on a crazy plan that was likely to fail.
Undaunted, Friedan and hundreds of NOW activists pulled out all the stops to bring together a wide national coalition of women’s groups, including many younger and more militant participants, working out differences along the way. As a down payment toward equality the strike called for abortion on demand, twenty-four-hour child-care services, and equal opportunity in jobs and schooling. To enable women to participate in the strike privately in their homes and offices if they did not want to take to the streets, planners presented the strike as an opportunity “to do your own thing.”
Locking arms with Judge Dorothy Kenyon, an eighty-two-year-old suffrage veteran, and with a young radical in blue jeans, Friedan on August 26, 1970, led a huge march of women—and some men—down Fifth Avenue. Defying police orders to stay on the sidewalks, they spilled into the street, holding banners high and calling out, “Come join us, sisters,” to women waving from curbs and office windows. Women marched for equality in every other large city that day and in many smaller ones. It was the first nationwide mobilization of women for women since the direct action by suffragists, and the first time the movement was covered seriously by the media. Suddenly famous, NOW found its membership swelling. Most of the new recruits were homemakers and clerical workers rather than professional women.
“This is not a bedroom war,” Friedan proclaimed that evening at a rally next to the New York Public Library, where she had written her pathbreaking book. “This is a political movement.”
Friedan was not speaking for all women, not even all embattled women. Marion Hudson’s was a bedroom war—a kitchen war—a war over children. Whether she realized it or not, Marion Hudson was a guerrilla in her own home, embattled with husband and children, mired in her “rat race” of an existence. She shared this kind of life with millions of other housewives— mothers—workers. Some liked it. Others accepted it because it was the way things were supposed to be—they read in Life about the “Busy Wife’s Achievements” as “home manager, mother, hostess, and useful civic worker.” Still others felt, as one “homemaker” told Friedan, that “by noon I’m ready for a padded cell.”
During the sixties countless wives began rebelling against the “Busy Wife’s” life, in part because the flammable writings of Friedan and others were coming into their homes via radio, television, and the popular press. Exposed to feminist arguments during the day, “trapped housewives” were now intellectually armed to confront their husbands at six. “By the time my husband walked in the door all hell would break loose,” a woman said. “He was responsible for all the evils of the world and especially responsible for keeping me trapped.”
Freed of the trap, what then? Some women became active in NOW or other women’s political organizations. Some struck out for careers of their own, despite the impediments and difficulties. Some returned to college or university. Some did all these things. But numerous women—especially younger women, many of them veterans of the black freedom movement or the New Left—were not content with the means and ends of NOW. Political action, progress in education, even successful careers often appeared to them like tokenism. And because they insisted on going to what they called the “heart of the problem,” they helped create a fundamental dualism in the women’s movement between what came to be called the younger and older branches.
The heart of the problem, as the younger branch saw it, was the subjugation of women in personal relationships with men and in their domestic roles. What they scornfully called “careerism” was no solution, for it did not challenge the domestic division of labor and was open to only a minority. They demanded not equality of sex roles—which they likened to the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal”—but their elimination. Theirs was a search for identity, self-expression, self-fulfillment.
They were emerging from the womb of conflict. Just as the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement had grown out of the participation of black and white women in the crusade to abolish slavery—and the awareness of their second-class status in that movement—so the younger branch of the new feminist movement originated in the southern freedom struggle of the 1960s. That women passionately engaged in social activism would precipitate a revolt centering on ostensibly personal matters appeared ironic only to those who could not see that to these women the personal was the political, that women’s inequality in the public world was on a continuum with inequality in private life.
That conservatives and “male chauvinists” would seek to put them down, protesting women expected. That their fellow rebels and radicals treated them almost as badly as the establishment did make them indignant. At a SNCC retreat late in 1964, Casey Hayden, an activist in both SDS and SNCC, and Mary King drafted a position paper protesting that assumptions of male superiority were “as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.” Why was it, they asked, that competent and experienced women in SNCC were almost automatically relegated to the “female” kinds of jobs—typing, desk work, filing, cooking, and the like— and rarely elevated to the “executive” kind? Stokely Carmichael’s rebuttal to Hayden and King: “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.” Though it might have been made in jest, the remark “generated feminist echoes throughout the country.”
A year later, after little progress, Hayden and King took a tougher stance at an SDS “rethinking conference.” SDS women were now beginning to organize and meet separately and to exclude men. They reacted eagerly to Hayden and King’s strictures on the peace and freedom movements’ own “sex-caste system.” Three activists protested that they were “still the movement secretaries and the shit-workers,” preparing the mailings and serving the food. Even more, they were “the free movement ‘chicks’—free to screw any man who demanded it, or if we chose not to—free to be called hung-up, middle class and up-tight.”
As women continued to be barred from decision-making, their anger and determination deepened. At the June 1967 SDS convention in Ann Arbor, the “Women’s Liberation Workshop” offered a bold resolution not open to debate, declaring that women were “in a colonial relationship to men” and had to fight for their independence. The resolution demanded that “our brothers recognize that they must deal with their own problems of male chauvinism in their personal, social, and political relationships,” and it insisted on full participation, especially in leadership roles. The resolution passed, despite a “constant hubbub” of catcalls and invective— the first time the New Left took a public stand against sexism.
Having begun to win a battle they had never wanted to fight, younger-branch activists were ready to organize on their own. The spark that ignited independent action was struck off in Chicago in September 1967 at the National Conference for a New Politics, an abortive effort to forge a militant alliance of blacks and whites. When in a condescending manner the NCNP leadership blocked Shulamith Firestone and other women from reading a radical resolution drafted by the women’s caucus, on the ground that women’s oppression was insignificant compared with racism, they had had enough. Firestone, Jo Freeman, and others formed the first autonomous women’s liberation group in Chicago. Later that fall Firestone and Pamela Allen started New York Radical Women, which shortly organized a counter-demonstration to a Washington antiwar protest led by a coalition of mainstream women’s peace groups. With a torchlight parade at Arlington Cemetery symbolizing “The Burial of Traditional Womanhood,” Radical Women argued that “we cannot hope to move toward a better world or even a more democratic society at home until we begin to solve our own problems.” Women left for home fired up to form their own collectives.
Why did these younger-branch feminist leaders not join NOW, which had formed in response to women’s plight in the home as well as on the job? The activist women on all sides shared common values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood but they had major differences. NOW was relatively centralized in organization, hierarchical in power arrangements, focused on political organization and action, oriented toward Washington and state capitals. The women now springing into action were concerned less with policy goals than with self-consciousness, self-realization, self-identity; they wanted to reach the Marion Hudsons. Opposed to formal leadership, structure, and elitism, they urged networking and decentralization down to the smallest local gatherings. NOW abounded with stars; the new groups were hostile to celebrities and skeptical of “expert authority.” NOW included men and worked with them. Many of the younger branch not only were critical of men for all the usual reasons but viewed them as the class enemy.
Such considerations prompted Firestone and Ellen Willis in early 1969 to establish Redstockings, which proclaimed that relationships between men and women were a conflict-ridden class relationship and could be resolved only by collective political action. About the same time radical dissidents in the New York NOW chapter tried to change the chapter bylaws to abolish hierarchy. When the chapter majority voted down a proposal by its flamboyant president, Ti-Grace Atkinson, either to abolish offices or to spread them around, she resigned in protest, telling the press that the division lay between “those who want women to have the opportunity to be oppressors, too, and those who want to destroy oppression itself.”
Atkinson and other NOW insurgents joined former members of Radical Women to form a new group called the Feminists, whose founding principle was equal participation. To prevent the quick and the vocal from dominating meetings they set up an ingenious Lot and Disc system: all tasks were assigned by lot, and all members were given the same number of discs, one of which had to be spent for each utterance. Legend in the women’s movement has it that at the first meeting the members used up their discs in fifteen minutes, and at the next meeting they hoarded them and said little. In other ways too the Feminists were different. They ruled that no more than one-third of their members could be living with men. They discouraged “star making” by choosing their media spokespersons by lot. Despite—or because of—this gallant effort to structure participatory democracy, and perhaps also because of its moral absolutism, the organization withered and died.
Radical feminist groups were now sprouting at an astounding rate, and were depleting New Left ranks, as word spread through networks. Starting them up had never been so easy or exciting, an organizer recalled. Binding together the radical feminists was a shared view of their plight as women. Leading off from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that the world treats man as subject, woman as object, as Other, radical feminists were coming to see themselves as constituting an oppressed class, even a caste. The male-female division was the “primary class system” underlying all other class distinctions. Proclaimed the Redstockings Manifesto:
“Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented.”
While male and female are biological, Kate Milieu contended, gender, masculine or feminine, is cultural and thus learned; anatomy is not destiny. Women—and men—would be truly liberated when they could free themselves from “the tyranny of sexual-social category and conformity to sexual stereotype,” as well as from racial caste and economic class. The goal of expunging oppressive sex roles was the touchstone of radical feminism. Many agreed that this required the abolition of marriage and the traditional family, but some went further to demand an end to heterosexuality. In her book The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone called for a full-fledged feminist revolution, made possible by technological advances, enabling women to seize control of reproduction and make childbearing and child-raising the responsibility of society rather than solely of individual women.
The heart of liberation was the consciousness-raising group. For radical feminists the CR group was at once a recruitment device, a process for shaping politics and ideology, and a microcosm of an egalitarian community that prefigured a feminist society. The participants, usually a group of from six to twenty, met in a safe, nurturing atmosphere to share their most intimate feelings and questions. Some groups followed a four-stage process: opening up, sharing, analyzing, abstracting—the last meaning to fit a resultant understanding “into an overview of our potential as human beings and the reality of our society, i.e., of developing an ideology.” Some groups concentrated on sharing experiences: what it was like for a woman to sit passively in a car while a man walked around it to open the door—to fake an orgasm to protect both her own pride and her partner’s—to try to maintain a dignified silence in the street when men hooted or stared at her—to wait on a husband who would not lift a hand in the kitchen.
Mainly these “rap groups” shared questions. Why should a woman spend so much time and money to “go unnatural” in order to attract a man? Should women be willing to sacrifice more than men do for the sake of marriage or companionship? How could they persuade the men they lived with to share housekeeping chores? In the warmth and intimacy of the rap sessions they talked about loving men and other women and the meaning of mutuality, about sexual violence in the bedroom and rape in marriage.
Raising consciousness was a first step to political action. Late in 1968 about two hundred women descended on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the Miss America Pageant as “patently degrading to women,” according to a key organizer, “in propagating the Mindless Sex Object Image.” The pageant had always been a lily-white, racist contest with never a black finalist; the winner toured Vietnam, “entertaining the troops as a Murder mascot”; the whole million-dollar affair was a “commercial shill-game” to sell the sponsors’ products. Where else, the protesters demanded, could one find such a perfect combination of false American values—racism, militarism, capitalism, all packaged in the “‘ideal’ symbol,” a woman? The feminists picketed and performed guerrilla theater, auctioned off a dummy Miss America, crowned a live sheep as their winner, and tossed dishcloths, steno pads, women’s magazines, girdles, bras, high heels, and “other instruments of torture to women” into a Freedom Trash Can.
As liberation groups and activities proliferated, a radicalization occurred typical of social movements, to the point of self-parody. On Halloween 1968 a coven from WITCH, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, surfaced on Wall Street “to pit their ancient magic against the evil powers of the Financial District—the center of the Imperialistic Phallic Society.” After plastering WITCH stickers onto the George Washington statue, the masked, wand-wielding witches danced around the big banks, chanting curses, and invaded the Stock Exchange to hex men of finance. The money changers stood in awe but unhexed. Soon the witches’ covens and their offspring broadened out, casting their spells at bridal fairs, AT&T, the United Fruit Company, a marriage license bureau. Among the most imaginative was the nonviolent storming of a Boston radio station by women angered over an announcement that “chicks” were wanted as typists; the station manager was handed an offering of eight baby chicks.
Stunts and self-parody were tempting for their appeal to the media, which “discovered” feminism in the “grand press blitz” of 1970. Though often portrayed mockingly or trivialized as a fad, radical feminism found its coverage soar in major newspapers and magazines as well as on TV. And the feminists used Big Media’s devouring appetite to score points against it. Organizers of the first Miss America protest made a decision that became movement policy—to speak only to female reporters. They were not “so naive as to think that women journalists would automatically give us more sympathetic coverage,” Robin Morgan explained, but they wanted to make “a political statement consistent with our beliefs.”
If the media influenced the women’s movement to be bolder and more theatrical, the movement affected the media as well. Refusing to talk to male reporters helped generate more meaningful assignments for female journalists, freeing them from the “ghetto” of the woman’s page. At Newsweek, after months of agitation and a complaint to the EEOC, female employees reached an accord with management to accelerate the hiring and promotion of women. Some radicals engaged in militant direct action, notably an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal to try to liberate it. They won the right to produce a special supplement on feminism. Employees seized and barricaded the avant-garde Grove Press to protest discrimination, the firing of women for organizing a union, and the publishing of erotica they felt degraded women—and were charged with resisting arrest when they demanded female cops.
More venturesome still for activists was to put out their own publications. The first feminist newspaper, off our backs, published in Washington, was followed by an effusion of journals and magazines—over one hundred by 1971. Notable were Women: A Journal of Liberation, Quest, Signs, and the glossy popular magazine Ms., which reached a circulation of half a million. Closely linked to the alternative periodicals were feminist collectives that churned out everything from literary and political anthologies to nonsexist, nonracist children’s books.
The younger branch became a great teaching movement. To learn more about what de Beauvoir called the “second sex,” and to instruct young women in how to reclaim their past, feminist scholars initiated women’s studies courses and programs on hundreds of campuses. Radical feminists who felt demeaned or mistreated by the male medical establishment, particularly with respect to birth control and pregnancy, organized self-help classes to enable women to know and care for their bodies and to conduct self-examinations. A group of Boston women taught a course on women’s health that resulted in a collectively written handbook, Our Bodies, Ourselves. First printed by the New England Free Press in 1973, it became the most widely read of all feminist publications, translated into eleven languages and growing thicker with each edition—the bible of the women’s health movement. Alternative clinics for women sprang up, specializing in pregnancy and abortion, along with a resurgence of natural childbirth, home birth, and midwifery.
The determination to control their own bodies helped empower especially the younger branch during the 1970s. Abortion, often self-induced, had been a common though risky practice for centuries; it did not become generally illegal in the United States until the medical elite campaigned against it after the Civil War. During the 1960s coalitions of professional men and women in some states gained modification of anti-abortion laws that permitted abortion by a physician under certain conditions but still left the decision to the doctor, usually male. Then the rising feminist movement turned the debate upside down, proclaiming that abortion was a woman’s basic right, that the decision was hers alone, and that abortion laws must be repealed, not reformed.
“When we talk about women’s rights,” said one activist, “we can get all the rights in the world—the right to vote, the right to go to school—and none of them means a doggone thing if we don’t own the flesh we stand in, if we can’t control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force.”
Although initially even some feminists did not consider it a feminist issue, NOW leaders and others formed in 1969 the National Abortion Rights Action League, which along with other “pro-choice” groups mobilized for legislative and judicial changes. Radical feminists, who demanded not only abortion on demand but an end to coerced sterilization of poor, largely nonwhite women, joined with moderates to organize abortion teach-ins and testify at legislative hearings; characteristically, NOW activists gave legal testimony while radicals talked graphically about their own abortions and sometimes disrupted the formal proceeding with speech-making and guerrilla theater.
These pressures, combined with other developments—the passage of liberalization laws in some states during the 1960s, rising concern for pregnant women’s physical and psychological safety, and concern over population growth symbolized by the co-chairing of Planned Parenthood-World Population by ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower in 1965— helped produce the biggest pro-abortion rights victory of all from the all-male Supreme Court of the United States. In 1973, following extensive litigation, the Court in Roe v. Wade ruled that restrictions on abortion during the first trimester violated the constitutional right to privacy; abortion could be regulated in the second trimester only for the protection of a woman’s well-being, and must be permitted even in the final three months if her health and survival should be at stake. Though Roe did not grant women an unconditional right to abortion, it came close enough since most abortions took place in the first trimester.
But even as feminists rejoiced, a passionate movement erupted against abortion, with Roe as the hate object. Led by conservative women, fundamentalist preachers, Catholic clergy, and leaders of the New Right, the “right-to-lifers” succeeded in persuading national, state, and local governments to whittle down the practical promise of Roe—in particular, to bar public funding of abortions, which mainly affected poor women. Anti-abortion women activists organized their own demonstrations and street protests. This fierce counterattack made abortion the social issue of the 1970s. The struggle was less about the right of the fetus, the sociologist Kristin Luker concluded, than about the role of women and “the place and meaning of motherhood.” Many women, especially those deeply religious and of low-income backgrounds, perceived the feminist vision of self-empowerment as a serious threat.
A woman’s control of her body encountered its most shocking and horrifying violation in the assault called rape. Wrote Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson: “Rape is all the hatred, contempt, and oppression of women in this society concentrated in one act.” Feminist thinkers like Susan Griffin and Susan Brownmiller developed broad analyses of rape that placed it on a continuum of male aggression and power rather than seeing it as a deviation or the result of uncontrolled “passion.” Brown-miller examined the “masculine ideology of rape” that made it the ultimate expression of male domination and possession of women.
With reported rapes having doubled in half a decade, in part because women were gaining the boldness to report them, feminists undertook to educate the public and aid the victims. Early in 1971,the New York Radical Feminists organized the first rape “speak-outs,” in which survivors talked openly about their ordeals, in the process “making rape a speakable crime, not a matter of shame.” Soon women across the country were setting up hundreds of rape crisis centers offering emergency support services, especially phone “hot lines” womanned around the clock to counsel sisters in need. Feminists in NOW and other groups set up local and national task forces to lobby for such reforms as prohibiting court testimony about a victim’s sexual history, for laws against marital rape, and for the creation of a national center for the prevention and control of rape.
As usual the younger branch took the lead in organizing creative direct action, from women’s “anti-rape squads” that patrolled streets and pursued suspects to candlelit “take back the night” marches, born in Italy and Germany, that protested all violence against women. The growing public enlightenment about rape encouraged more and more women to break their silence about violence in the home, resulting in the formation of crisis centers and shelters for battered wives and children. Later in the decade many radicals zeroed in on purveyors of pornography, accusing them of dehumanizing women and promoting a cultural temper of hostility toward them. This led to vigorous debate within the women’s movement pitting the evils of pornography against the evils of censorship and what could seem like a conservative moralist attack on sexual liberty.
During these days of intensive consciousness-raising, debate, and confrontation, two groups were watching and participating in the progress of the movement but not without reservations, at one in their mutual isolation but not always agreeing. These were lesbians and black women.
“What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society … cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with herself.” So began a bold manifesto—“The Woman Identified Woman”—struck off by the Radicalesbians.
The issue of lesbianism in the women’s movement steamed up as a vital, much-publicized controversy in both branches. Though a minority, lesbians from the start had made vital contributions to NOW as well as to radical groups—“carried the women’s movement on their backs,” said Millett—but by and large they had kept their sexual identity hidden. A police raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in June 1969 and the violent resistance by gay men led to an upwelling of “gay pride” and helped to inspire male homosexuals and lesbians to conquer their fears and “come out.” Lesbians, demanding the elimination of heterosexual dominance and homosexual stigmas, moved far beyond older groups like Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, which had focused on civil rights and personal adjustment.
Lesbians felt doubly oppressed on the basis of their sexuality, “doubly outcast.” They also believed that they met the feminist movement’s own criteria for defining the liberated woman—“economic independence, sexual self-determination, that is, control over their own bodies and lifestyles.” Thus it was fair and fitting that they be at the forefront of feminism, its “natural leaders.” But many “straight” feminists in both branches feared the “lavender menace,” as Betty Friedan called it, on the ground that their enemies would pounce on this Achilles’ heel, equating feminism with lesbianism.
The issue was fought out in meeting after meeting over several years. At the second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 the lights suddenly went out on the first night; when they came back on moments later, women in lavender T-shirts paraded in front, claimed the microphone, and denounced the feminist movement for its heterosexism. Pro-lesbian resolutions passed at workshops over the weekend. The tide seemed to be turning when the president of New York NOW, to Friedan’s consternation, encouraged the wearing of lavender armbands on a Manhattan march. The 1971 national NOW convention unequivocally resolved in support of lesbians’ right to define their own sexuality and lifestyle and acknowledged “the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.”
By now lesbian activism had a momentum of its own. Some lesbian leaders had higher aspirations than for mere acceptance. They wanted the movement to adopt “lesbian-feminism” as its political creed, defined by their journal The Furies as a “critique of the institution and ideology of heterosexuality as a primary cornerstone of male supremacy.” They called for complete separation from men and even from heterosexual feminists who were not “woman-identified.” Feminists on the other side charged them with “vanguardism” and dogmatic moralism. Still, most feminists continued to work together across the sexual divide. The great promise of lesbian-feminism—its compelling vision of an autonomous women’s culture flowering in many hues—lived on in such profound contributions to sisterhood as the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, or the women’s music of Meg Christian, Margie Adam, Kris Williamson, Holly Near. “Free spaces”—coffeehouses, music festivals, cultural happenings—proliferated, places where self-defining women could explore their commonalities as well as their differences.
This was not the world of black women, most of whom were poor or jobless or underemployed. Black feminist leaders were determined to make feminism a movement for all women and to establish themselves as a visible presence in its midst. With an equal stake in women’s liberation and black freedom, they were central figures at the confluence of the two movements. Both to forge links between the movements and to “organize around those things which affect us most,” black feminists formed their own groups, the most prominent being the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973 by a diverse assemblage.
“We were married. We were on welfare. We were lesbians. We were students. We were hungry. We were well fed. We were single. We were old. We were young. Most of us were feminists. We were beautiful black women.” So the NBFO members identified themselves. The statement of purpose proclaimed that the “distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women.”
On a smaller scale were groups like the Combahee River Collective in Boston, named after an 1863 guerrilla action in South Carolina, led by Harriet Tubman, that freed hundreds of slaves; they were “committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression,” struggles against forced sterilization, rape, and domestic violence and for abortion and child care. Such concerns, they argued, united all women.
Other women of color, especially Latinas, overcame cultural barriers and divided loyalties to take part in the feminist movement. Chicana and Puerto Rican women formed autonomous organizations such as the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional in the Southwest, the Mexican-American Women’s Association, and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. Chicana activists were the backbone of the United Farm Workers’ strikes and boycotts.
The trend in the feminist movement toward harnessing its breadth and diversity through coalition building culminated at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Established and financed by legislation pushed by Bella Abzug, who chaired the International Women’s Year Commission that coordinated it, the conference met to propose measures to achieve full equality, which had been discussed earlier in public meetings involving over 100,000 women. The Houston delegates ranged from progressive church women, trade unionists, and community activists across a wide spectrum to the hard core of conservative “antis,” sporting yellow “Majority” ribbons and seeking in vain to block resolutions in support of ERA and abortion rights. With middle-class whites underrepresented, it may have been one of the most all-embracing political conventions in American history.
It did not lack in theater. At the start of the proceedings, a multiracial team of relay runners carried into the convention center a flaming torch from Seneca Falls, New York, site of the first women’s convention in 1848. During heated debate over a National Plan of Action a woman rose in the rear of the hall and said dramatically, “My name is Susan B. Anthony”; at the end of her remarks the grandniece of the revered leader joined others in chanting, “Failure Is Impossible!”—the elder Anthony’s final public words. The climax of the gathering was the near-unanimous passage of a minority women’s resolution, drafted by a joint caucus of blacks, Latinas, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, that called for recognition and alleviation of their “double discrimination.” Among many conservatives who stood up to vote for it were two white Mississippians, a man and a woman who reached across the seated disapproving members of their delegation to grasp each other’s hand. The coliseum swayed with “We Shall Overcome.”
Aside from such peak moments, the movement as it matured came to feel less like a nurturing family, a “room of its own,” and more like what it really was—a massive and complex coalition of women with much in common but many differences. Women of color who were vitally attuned to the “simultaneity of oppressions” felt the strongest need for linking issues and took the lead in building bridges of interdependence. The progress that had been made toward sisterhood did not blind feminist delegates to the big obstacles to unity that remained—above all, the many women they had not yet reached, represented by the “antis” at Houston. “Change means growth, and growth can be painful,” said the black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. Her remark summed up the intellectual and political struggles of the whole decade.
How did “the movement” get started? How fully did it reach its goals? Years later veterans of the women’s movement, like old campaigners re-fighting the battles of yore, were still debating how a movement that appeared to have lost most of its fire and focus after winning the vote in 1920 suddenly flamed up into a force that transformed the ideas and behavior of both women and men, at least in the upper and middle classes. Historians were already examining the origins of the movement, its linkages with the black and student revolts, its durability, the “real change” it produced in terms of its own aspirations, and the historians were discarding almost as many explanations as they found useful.
The movement emerged from volcanic economic and social changes in the years following World War II, according to one theory. The percentage of women in the total civilian work force rose from 28 in 1947 to 37 in 1968, bringing a huge increase of women who were exposed to both the temptations and the frustrations of the job mart and who shared with one another financial and occupational concerns. At the same time women’s relative deprivation mounted as their share of “both quantitative and qualitative occupational rewards,” in Jo Freeman’s analysis, dwindled. This seeming paradox produced a volatile mixture—aroused hopes and crushed expectations.
Other explanations were that World War II had served as the catalyst of increased employment among women, producing a change in self-image as well as expectations that were rudely shattered after the war, as men took back the better jobs; and/or that social and class forces involved in urbanization and suburbanization, and the relatively greater deprivation of middle-class women, fostered a desire for reform; and/or that psychologically, the more women operated in the male sphere, the more they had to assert their identity as female. Having earlier possessed a self-identity, a fixed societal position, or at least a nurturing leadership role in the family, many women now operated in a twilight zone between low-paid jobs and family responsibilities. Wanting a life outside the home, yet feeling guilty about their husbands’ unmet needs, they were driven by guilt and emptiness to smother their children with care, to treat them as though they “were hot-house plants psychologically.” This “Rage of Women,” as a Look article called it, was that identity crisis dramatized by Friedan as “the problem that has no name.”
To be trapped between domestic demands and the need for “something more” was an old story for many American women, but powerful intellectual and ideological forces were sweeping the West during the 1960s. These were years of turbulence in Europe as well as the United States. Simone de Beauvoir, the novelist Doris Lessing, and others across the Atlantic had challenged the dominant image of woman’s subordinate position. In the United States the black and student revolts lifted the banners of liberty and equality even as they fought with others and among themselves about the meaning and application of these values.
In proclaiming liberty, equality, and sisterhood, women too broke up into rival ideological camps. Feminists of the NOW camp typically held that women were equal to men but had been kept subordinate to them, that the goal was integration on an equal basis, through political action. Women’s liberationists of the younger branch protested that they were treated as sex objects or as mere property, that they must act through psychological or social “woman power.” Liberal feminists defined liberty as the absence of legal constraints on women and equality as equal opportunity to attain their goals. Marxist feminists saw themselves as victims of the capitalist system, liberty as protection against the coercion of economic necessity, and equality as the equal satisfaction of material needs. All this was aside from “sexual conservatives” who saw men and women as inherently unequal in abilities and held that unequals should be treated unequally.
Sisterhood was powerful enough to keep these differing values from tearing the women’s movement apart. Indeed, conflicts over goals doubtless sharpened the impact of consciousness-raising. Borrowing from blacks’ examples of standing up in meetings and testifying about their treatment by “the Man,” borrowing even from Mao’s way of criticism of oneself and others, “Speak pain to recall pain,” consciousness-raising intensified as women in small groups spoke to one another about any and all of their “personal problems,” including husbands, housework, making office coffee, shopping, curtailed ambitions, child care, male bosses, sexual relationships. The heart of these meetings was the probing by women of themselves and others about problems as they defined them.
The genius of these meetings lay in a leadership that was as potent as it was inconspicuous. It was a leadership of women by women, as experiences were exchanged, feelings evoked, attitudes articulated. Women exchanged leadership positions as the “rapping” moved from problem to problem. The effect was much in accord with the teachings of psychologists like Maslow whom Friedan and others had read—the raising of persons to higher levels of self-awareness, self-identity, self-protection, self-expression, and ultimately to creative self-fulfillment. The rap groups discussed the writings of leading thinkers in the women’s movement too, and as they did so it became more and more evident that their personal problems were in many respects political problems, involving millions of women, widespread customs and attitudes, laws and judicial findings, governmental institutions and power.
At first cool to these “bitch sessions” as providing young women with a crutch that would divert them from political action, NOW came to see them as means of enlarging the mass base of the organization and at the same time meeting women’s needs. NOW expanded from 14 chapters in 1967 to around 700 seven years later, while membership rose from 1,000 to perhaps 40,000. Yet NOW did not appear to grow proportionately in electoral strength, despite its emphasis on practical political action. Part of the problem was that its organizational structure failed to keep pace with the growth in membership.
But the main problem was the anti-leadership and anti-organization ideology and ethic in the women’s movement. These tendencies existed in NOW to some degree but were offset by vigorous leadership at the top. The movement’s younger branch was determined, on the other hand, as both the means and the end of social change, to replace the “masculine” principle of hierarchy with the ideology and practice of collective sisterhood. Less ambivalent than the New Left or NOW, radical feminists rejected hierarchical leadership altogether. This was partly a reaction to the seeming hypocrisy of movement groups that kicked hierarchy out the front door only to sneak it in through the back. But it was the result even more of the feminist notion that power meant “possession of the self rather than manipulation of other people—hence women had to shun leadership of and by others in order to cultivate the strength to lead their own lives.
“Because so many of our struggles necessarily had to be carried on in isolation, in one-to-one relationships with men,” an activist of the younger branch observed later, “it was imperative for women, as individuals, to gain the confidence to act autonomously, to lead oneself. So the moral distaste for leadership by others became an intensely practical tactic, completely appropriate to the tasks to be performed.”
The absence of recognized leadership, however, did not prevent the rise of leaders who were more skillful verbally and in other ways. Describing what she called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” Freeman—known in the movement by her nom de guerre, Joreen—noted that every group had a structure and that covert structures generated covert elites. Lack of formal structure thus became a way of masking power, which then became “capricious.” Groups could not hold de facto leaders accountable; indeed, the covert elite’s existence could hardly be conceded. The unhappy consequence was difficulty in charting a clear direction for individual groups and the whole movement, leading in turn to diminished effectiveness. Sharing these concerns as the “euphoric period of consciousness-raising” ebbed, a number of activists began to put a higher priority first on lobbying and other pressure-group tactics and later on party and electoral action to uproot sexism.
This shift fostered more emphasis on political leadership, while “structurelessness” tended ironically to exacerbate the celebrity syndrome. One of radical feminism’s loudest grievances was the male “star system” of the New Left, but the women had their own celebrities. And when the movement shunned the idea of official leaders or spokespersons, the media appointed their own whether or not they were truly representative. Not only did the grass-roots collectives, then, have little control over feminist stars, but resentments festered and eventually erupted in open denunciations of the stars as “elitist”—which pushed them even further away, sometimes to the movement’s outer edges. Celebrity Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics was a best-seller, said that she was made to feel a traitor to the whole movement.
“All the while,” Milieu wrote, “the movement is sending double signals: you absolutely must preach at our panel, star at our conference—implying, fink if you don’t… and at the same time laying down a wonderfully uptight line about elitism.” Millett had been anointed as a star by Time magazine, which put her on its cover in August 1970. When a few months later she publicly declared her bisexuality at a feminist conference, Time dethroned her, ruling that she had lost her credibility as the movement’s “high priestess.”
If the personal was the political, to what degree must the women’s movement turn to political action? And what kind of political action? Women’s differences on these questions deepened. Some women adamantly opposed a party and electoral strategy because it meant entering a male-dominated world and seeking to influence male-made and male-controlled institutions. They argued for individual and group face-to-face persuasion and confrontation in universities, corporations, law offices, hospitals, government agencies—and in the streets. The great potential of the women’s movement, they contended, was not primarily in its electoral power but rather in its moral power—its capacity to appeal to the conscience of the American people on issues of simple decency, justice, equality. And that appeal had to be dramatic, passionate, militant, uncompromising, as black leaders had demonstrated in the previous decade.
Beware of a party and electoral strategy for two further reasons, these women argued. To be effective in parties and elections required endless compromises on moral principles as issues and policies were bargained out amid many contending groups. And even if women helped win elections, they would have to try to carry out their policies in a fragmented governmental system that required still further bargaining and sacrifice of principle. In the end women would become just one more pressure group and lobbying organization, their moral appeal muted.
This view tended to dominate thinking among the younger branch. While women were not neatly divided on the basis of competing strategies, most feminists in the older branch came to believe that party participation and electioneering were vitally necessary.
The older-branch leaders were confident they commanded the intellectual and political organization and strength necessary for a major electoral and lobbying effort. The National Women’s Political Caucus under Abzug and Chisholm, now claiming hundreds of participating state and local units, laid groundwork. With NOW and other allies, it threw its weight into the internal struggles of groups with which the women’s movement intended to work in electoral politics.
Organized labor was a prime target. Across the nation working women had been fighting a long battle to persuade male-dominated trade unions to pay more attention to their grievances about sexism and job discrimination and the paucity of women among the top leadership. With crucial help from NOW, women trade unionists convinced the AFL-CIO finally to abandon its opposition to ERA. Women also launched their own unions. Probably the greatest gains were made by groups like “9 to 5,” which began to organize women office workers in Boston in 1973.
Professional women organized too, especially in academia, through autonomous caucuses and associations. Notable for their militance, caucuses within scholarly organizations like the American Political Science Association raised hell at annual conventions on a host of problems plaguing women scholars. Nowhere did feminists mount a more daring assault on tradition than in churches and synagogues, as women fought for the ordination of female clergy, the degendering of sacred texts and even of God, and the creation of a nonpatriarchal feminist theology. The National Coalition of American Nuns protested domination by priests “no matter what their hierarchical status.”
Still, the acid test of institutional power, in the American governmental system, was electing a President and winning majorities in Congress. The older branch was far better prepared for the 1972 elections than it had been for 1968—in part because of the rules adopted after the 1968 Democratic convention for broader representation of women in the party’s governing councils. These rules changes and a concentrated drive by NWPC paid off: women made up 40 percent of the delegates attending the 1972 convention compared with 13 percent four years earlier.
Thoroughly coached by the NWPC in the complex and often bizarre and ferocious processes of delegate selection, platform drafting, and credentials battles, women at the 1972 convention in Miami had a major role in convention decisions—above all in the nomination of George McGovern. Women had the heady experience of taking part in the inner strategy councils, helping to choose the running mate, and seeing one of their number, Jean Westwood, selected as the new chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. For their part, blacks doubled their percentage of delegates at the convention over 1968.
Sharing in the exercise of power, Democratic women encountered its disappointments as well. One of these was McGovern’s sacrifice of a number of women delegates, whose seating he had promised to support, to the exigencies of convention politics. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Abzug and other women’s rights leaders complained that they were deserted on key platform planks, especially abortion rights. Women had a minor role in McGovern’s choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, but virtually none in the selection of Sargent Shriver as Eagleton’s replacement following a press flap over revelations that Eagleton years before had been hospitalized a few times for psychiatric disorders.
A more surprising and severe failure for the women’s movement lay ahead. ERA had passed both houses of Congress early in 1972 with such heavy majorities, and with such enthusiastic support from Nixon as well as the Democratic candidates, that women expected the proposed constitutional amendment to gain swift passage through the required thirty-eight state legislatures. Within a year, thirty states had ratified ERA. But then its progress began to stall, under the pressure of a powerful “STOP ERA” coalition directed by a resourceful right-wing leader, Phyllis Schlafly, and composed of diverse antifeminist, radical right-wing, and business groups and of an unlikely alliance of Protestant fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and Catholics. State legislatures started to repeal their ratifications of the amendment, as STOP ERA played upon the fears of millions of American women and men who felt threatened by the women’s movement or who believed that it had gone far enough. ERA, its opponents charged, would lead to the drafting of women and the denial to mothers of the custody of their children, to single-sex toilets and homosexual marriages. They linked the amendment to “forced busing, forced mixing, forced housing,” as one ERA foe wrote to her senator. “Now forced women! No thank you!”
Its political setbacks were doubly unfortunate for the women’s movement, for they tended to obscure the astonishing transformation in everyday attitudes and behavior that both the older and the younger branch had helped bring about. At least within the middle- and upper-income classes, sexual stereotyping of women in businesses, college faculties, hospitals, on athletic fields and military installations had markedly lessened. Equally notable were changes in speech, dress, deportment, parenting, housekeeping. Gentlemen who had grown up in an earlier school had to learn to refrain from opening doors for women and offering to carry their packages and walking between them and the curb, from referring to young women as “girls” or older women as “ladies”—even from standing up when a woman approached their restaurant table.
In this sense the personal was not so much the political as the psychological, the attitudinal, and the behavioral. Few of these changes had been caused or even affected by laws, nor were they sustained by them. The changes had emerged from women’s aching needs for recognition, identity, self-assertion, self-fulfillment. They were enforced by no cops or prosecuting attorneys but by a kind of instinctive conspiracy among women to shame or cast down or freeze out the incautious or insensitive husband, teacher, store clerk, coach, bureaucrat. They had sprung not from a few protest meetings or public defiances but rather from thousands and thousands of tiny confrontations, inside and outside the home, as women looked up from their reading or returned from their rap session to conduct their own face-to-face insurrections.
At last women were bringing to bear on their own lives the values that men had been preaching for decades, for centuries. In this respect their activism was ideological, reflecting the values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood. But to define these values and their linkages, to array them in a hierarchy of priorities, to make the crucial connection between these values and the everyday lives and aspirations of women—and to envision the political strategies and organizations necessary to operationalize these values—this was a task of intellectual leadership. It was the availability of such leadership to the women’s movement at every level that made the most critical difference in the complex forces leading to the transformation of women’s lives.
For many women it was difficult to move from “personal” politics into the public arena. Women who were most experienced in movement politics and organization often had the most difficulty in the transition, because party and electoral politics had their own organizational imperatives, sacred turfs, lines of influence, points of access, rules, and taboos. Women’s organizations had not been built as electoral machines; they were not easily convertible. Some women, on the other hand, feared that feminists would be too successful in invading big political institutions—they feared the kind of co-optation that would blunt their organizations’ image and thrust, compromise their specific goals, and yet not have any lasting reform impact on the broader political system.
Election year 1972. For many leaders in the older branch of women activists and in the black and peace movements who had staked their political futures on working within the two-party system, 1972 beckoned as a test of this strategy. For many in the younger branch, and for many of their “aging the system” counterparts in the other movements, 1972 loomed as one more series of concessions and “sellouts” by left-liberal forces to a major party and its candidate, who would abandon the left if they won and blame the left if they lost. For historians then and later, 1972 was the culmination of one of the most turbulent decades in American history, from the nationwide mobilization of black protesters early in the 1960s to the fiery protests of student, anti-Vietnam, and women’s forces later in the decade; from the first involvement of “advisers” in Indochina to the massive intervention of the late 1960s; from the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 to the killing of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy five years later to the near-murder and political disabling of George Wallace in May 1972 after his impressive showings in several northern Democratic primaries.
If the 1972 presidential election outcome was a fair test of the strategy of older-branch leaders committed to the Democratic party, they failed. Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, after a generally negative campaign interspersed with calls for “Peace with Honor,” swept the nation, aside from Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The Republicans won the largest popular vote margin in history, 47.2 to 29.2 million. And at last, with Wallace out of the game, Nixon carried the whole of the Solid South, which even Ike had failed to do. Older-branch leaders took solace in the high participation rate of women—especially blue-collar women, liberal and young women—in the campaign and their increased voting turnout, and in the continuing Democratic majorities in Congress despite the Nixon sweep. But it was small comfort after such high hopes.
If 1972 was a litmus test for women’s political leadership and activism, it was even more so for the two other great movements of the 1960s. Blacks had developed such strength politically in numbers and organization by 1972 as to protect most of their gains; they could chalk 1972 defeats off as temporary setbacks. The anti-Vietnam activists suffered the worst defeat. The campaign was fought out largely on terms that they had set— Vietnam, arms reduction, the draft—and Nixon would have appeared to have won a mandate against them had he not pirouetted around both or all sides of the peace issue during the campaign.
So 1972 was a setback, but there would be other elections. To some women in both branches a more important long-run question was the quality of the established leadership and of the next generation of leaders, male or female. The 1960s—the fateful decade—had produced a burst of political talent: John Kennedy, who by 1963 was positioning himself to provide strong détente and civil rights leadership; Lyndon Johnson, who brought thirty years of New Deal, Fair Deal, and New Frontier promises to culmination; Martin Luther King, who taught blacks and whites how to be both militant and nonviolent; Robert Kennedy, probably the only leader of his generation who had the potential to have firmly united the black, peace, and women’s movements with the Democratic party. Three of these leaders were killed; the other was politically disabled. Who would—who could—take their place?
With McGovern and Shriver decisively defeated and Humphrey and Muskie vanquished four years earlier, no potential successor was visible among the Democratic party leaders of either gender. Both the party and its allied movements, however, were rich in second-cadre leaders in Washington, the state capitals, and the myriad movement headquarters. Many of these men and women were talented speakers, negotiators, legislators, administrators, spokespersons for their causes. Was there a Martin Luther King among them? The more one studied King’s life, the more one was impressed not simply by his obvious political skills but even more by his intellectual qualities. His life was a reminder that transforming leadership is a product of formal learning molded and burnished by combat and controversy. In theological school King had steeped himself in the writings of Gandhi and social theorist and activist Walter Rauschenbusch, of Niebuhr and R. H. Tawney, of Marx and Hegel. Hence he was able then and later to define and sort out his values, shape ways and means to achieve those values, and devise day-to-day political strategies and street tactics necessary to achieve the changes he sought. And he was a focus of conflict—in the black movement and organizations, with other black leaders such as Malcolm X, with white critics ranging from J. Edgar Hoover to benign but hostile editors and fellow ministers.
Much of the force of the 1960s movements lay in their intellectual strengths—in the kind of prolonged debate and analysis that went into the Port Huron Statement, the remarkable teaching of women by women that backed up their philosophy and strategy, the street seminars and walking debates of King and his co-leaders. For many, movement life had been a special form of higher education. But street skills and intellectual leadership were not enough. Also indispensable for effectiveness in American politics was individual and organizational persistence, sheer staying power—both as an expression of confidence and determination and as a warning to political friend and foe that you will be around for a long time and must be reckoned with. A century earlier the business leaders of the North, by moving into the top councils of the Republican party, and by staying with the GOP through thick and thin, had dominated the federal government for decades. In the 1930s the liberal-labor-left forces of the nation, by moving into the top councils of the Democratic party, and by staying with the Democracy through depression and war and cold war, through election triumphs and defeats, had put their stamp on federal and state policy-making. The insurrectionists of the 1960s left an array of groups and organizations devotedly carrying on their causes. But they neither maintained their influence in the Democratic party nor created a party of their own—they had not achieved staying power.
Paradoxically, even as the strength of the left was waning after its relative high point early in 1972, conservative movements were rising that within a decade would accomplish essentially what the left had not—would find their unifying and transforming leader, who in turn would seize control of a major political party after initial setbacks, would lead that party to victory, and then would firmly seize the reins of office and power.
All this lay in the future. At the moment—election night, November 7, 1972—Richard Nixon, strangely morose and withdrawn after his big win, contemplated four more years in the White House.