Enter Helen (30 page)

“
The feminist movement was so joyous. Even with the shit we went through, nothing compares to the joy that we felt.”

—Jacqui Ceballos, strike organizer

H
ardly a day passed when someone didn't ask Helen about the women's liberation movement. Was it a real movement or just a passing fad? What did she make of all those man-hating militant feminists? And where did the
Cosmo
Girl fit into all of it? Was she pro–women's lib or against it?

“
Like many other women, I've come to respect it late in the day, thinking at first it was just an attack by a few hostile nut-burgers who were giving
all
women a bad name,” Helen confided in her readers in her June 1970 editor's letter. True, women's libbers could be absurd in their attitudes toward men, but thanks to them, thousands of people were thinking differently about all kinds of issues. Why, for instance, was it assumed that a woman should do all the housework, even if she worked, too? When women made up nearly a third of the workforce, why were so many stuck with menial jobs like cleaning and clerking? And speaking of double standards, she continued, “
Why does a man usually instigate sex when, where, and the way
he
likes it?”

In her own way, Helen challenged the same system that she had learned how to manipulate long before the women's
liberation movement existed. She asked many of the same questions asked by the leaders of the women's movement, including Betty Friedan. Not that Friedan would have known. She had been boycotting
Cosmo
for years, and soon she would ask the rest of the country to follow suit.

In the spring of 1970, Friedan announced that she was retiring as the president of NOW, the organization she founded in 1966, and she intended to go out with a bang. The previous year, she divorced her husband, Carl Friedan, after years of his cheating and violence destroyed their marriage and, as she saw it, undermined her authority as a leader of the women's movement. “
I was finally too embarrassed,” Friedan later wrote in
My Life So Far
. “How could I reconcile putting up with being knocked around by my husband while calling on women to rise up against their oppressors?”

In her farewell address, Betty called for a national demonstration and twenty-four-hour strike for equality on August 26—marking the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage. From New York City to San Francisco, she envisioned women taking to the streets to demand equal opportunities for themselves in jobs and education; free twenty-four-hour child care; free abortion on demand; and the end to forced sterilization. (In states around the country, poor women of color were being sterilized without giving consent, often while in hospitals or clinics for otherwise routine procedures; many were minors and deemed to be mentally incompetent or otherwise “unfit” as parents.)

“
I propose that women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, that the telephone operators unplug their switchboards, the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning, and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more—stop—and
every women pegged forever as assistant, doing jobs for which men get the credit—stop,” she told a cheering crowd at the NOW convention. “And by the time those twenty-four hours are ended, our revolution will be a fact.”

There were just a few crimps in the plan.
They didn't have the tens of thousands of demonstrators that NOW promised to reporters, but New York members soon found ways to raise awareness around the march and larger movement.
In early August, when Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill barring sexual discrimination in public places, NOW's vice president for public relations, Lucy Komisar, pushed her way to the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House, an East Village pub that had been serving only men for 116 years. Later that evening, a group of about one hundred libbers including Kate Millett and an eighty-two-year-old former suffragette took over the Statue of Liberty, unfurling a forty-foot banner on the pedestal below her feet:
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE
!

Seizing the Statue of Liberty was as good a publicity stunt as any, but there was still no guarantee that people would show up for the march and strike in just over two weeks. The day before the march, Betty Friedan held a news conference in New York. Backed by the National Women's Strike Coalition, she once again urged women to strike.
The coalition also called for women across the country to ban four products that degraded women: Silva Thins cigarettes, Ivory Liquid detergent, Pristeen feminine deodorant, and
Cosmopolitan
, which they said exploited women and made young girls feel like failures if they didn't look like the models in the magazine.

“
I can't believe they've been reading
Cosmopolitan
,” Helen told a reporter when she was asked for a comment. The magazine was “very pro lib.” Perhaps the coalition was objecting to the idea of women as sexual objects and nothing more, Helen added: “I think
it's wonderful that a woman is sexually desirable, and I agree that it would be wrong to suggest that that's her
only
attraction.”

A
LL OVER
N
EW
York, women organized actions to bring attention to the cause. Many of the activists remained nameless in the press, lumped into the labels “women's libbers” or “militant feminists,” but a few names stood out: Gloria Steinem. Ti-Grace Atkinson. Kate Millett.

In August,
Time
anointed Millett as “
the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation.” Before, much of the movement's literature consisted of mimeographed manifestos, but her book
Sexual Politics
—which grew out of a doctoral thesis she had written at Columbia University—reached the masses. Until this year,
“the movement had no coherent theory to buttress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assault on patriarchy,”
Time
proclaimed. “Kate Millett, 35, a sometime sculptor and longtime brilliant misfit in a man's world, has filled the role through
Sexual Politics
.” Drawing examples from literature and psychology, she theorized that women were often helpless and compliant because men controlled society. There was only one way to change the power structure: Women had to destroy the patriarchal system that kept them down. It wasn't enough for women to make it in a man's world; they had to claim the world for themselves. “
Whatever the ‘real' differences between the sexes may be,” Millett wrote, “we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.”

Scaling to the top of bestseller lists,
Sexual Politics
was the surprise hit of the summer. In Alice Neel's oil portrait on the cover of
Time
, Millett was the face of resistance with her set jaw, heavy brows, and long, wild dark hair.

Although Millett was a reluctant star of the feminist
movement, she received attention wherever she went, and around the same time her sisters invaded the
Ladies' Home Journal
, Millett and another group of feminists took their fight to
Cosmopolitan
's editorial offices.

“
[They] backed me up against a radiator in COSMO's reception room and demanded that I turn over part of the book to them,” Helen later recalled. “I said nobody occupied any editorial space in COSMO unless she could write well, and I would have to be the judge of that—we were already a feminist book.”

A women's lib group did send in a couple of articles, but nothing really came of them. Unlike John Mack Carter, Helen had no intention of letting an unedited manifesto slip into her magazine, but in the November 1970 issue—three years before the Supreme Court decided that abortion was a legal right in the landmark case
Roe v. Wade
—Helen published an article on one of the movement's key issues, which happened to be one of hers: abortion. Written by Dr. Selig Neubardt, a New York–based obstetrician and gynecologist with a history of arguing for abortion reform, “All You Need to Know About Pregnancy and Abortion” surely shocked many readers, and helped many more, dispensing the facts about a procedure long considered to be a crime.

In the same issue, Helen ran an excerpt from
Sexual Politics
, along with a personal endorsement of the women's liberation movement. “
It's hard for me to understand how
any
self-loving, man-loving woman could really be
against
what the movement is
for
: the realization of woman's full potential as an achiever and the end of the patriarchal system whereby men have most of the power,” Helen wrote in her editor's letter. Kate Millett was one of the movement's most eloquent members, she continued, and readers could find an excerpt from her brilliant book in this issue. “Miss Millett's book isn't easy reading, but it's well worth it.”

It was a peace offering but not an apology—and Helen's refusal to dismantle the cleavage-baring, makeup-wearing, man-crazy
Cosmo
Girl would inspire other protests over the years. There was, for example, the time a group of about twenty women marched into the General Motors Building with plans to invade
Cosmopolitan
. Security blocked them from entering the editorial offices, so they set up shop in the lobby, where they demanded an end to sexist articles and advertising, as well as $15,000
“in reparation” for damages already done.

Another time, Helen came into the office to find a long, beautifully wrapped box, the kind flowers come in, but when she untied the ribbon and opened the box, she recoiled. “
I don't know who sent it because it wasn't signed,” Walter Meade says, “but it was filled with dead, long-stemmed roses that were spray-painted black. That really hurt her because she understood that people were wishing her harm. They were wishing her hurt in the worst possible way.”

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C., Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, local feminist groups planned their own marches and strikes and made their own Freedom Trash Cans. But the world would be watching New York, and despite what NOW told the press, they still didn't have tens of thousands of demonstrators.
They didn't even have permission to use Fifth Avenue. Friedan hadn't been able to convince Mayor Lindsay to clear the whole street for a women's march, especially one starting in the midst of rush hour. They could have the sidewalk—hardly enough room for a revolution.

Despite some initial resistance from many feminist leaders, Friedan and her strike committee found powerful support.
Among their ranks: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; congressional candidate Bella Abzug; Kate Millett; Gloria Steinem; Flo Kennedy;
Eleanor Holmes Norton, head of New York City's Human Rights Commission; and celebrities like Joan Rivers and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. At least for one day, various feminist groups were willing to put aside their differences.

In the days leading up to the event, countless volunteers passed out flyers:

The plan was to assemble at 5:30 p.m. at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, where they would march seventeen blocks down to Bryant Park for the rally.

On the morning of the strike, New York's NOW strike coordinator, Jacqui Ceballos, handed out copies of the
Now York Times
—a fake feminist edition with the headline “Women's Strike Emasculates a Stunned Nation”—to reporters and editors at the actual
New York Times
, then raced around the city as various events unfolded. Demonstrating the need for free child care, mothers turned City Hall Park into an impromptu day care center, letting their kids take over the grounds.
Other women liberated the men's bar in the Biltmore Hotel, confronted the director of Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School about training secretaries to be office wives, and passed out pamphlets titled “You and Your Marriage” to brides and grooms about to tie the knot at the marriage-license bureau. What exactly
were
the legal rights and responsibilities of each partner—did anyone really know? To get the point across, the page titled “Wife's Responsibilities” was blank except for a giant question mark.

“
By five o'clock I was exhausted. I remember walking to join the march, so scared—I was so afraid that I would only see a handful of women,” Ceballos says. “I'll never forget it, getting to Fifty-Ninth Street: You couldn't see the end of the line.”

Everywhere she looked, there were women—thousands and thousands. Some walked holding hands, others raised bullhorns and banners, such as
OPPRESSED WOMEN: DON'T COOK DINNER! STARVE A RAT TODAY!! END HUMAN SACRIFICE
! Another read,
DON'T GET MARRIED!! WASHING DIAPERS IS NOT FULFILLING
!

They walked with their mothers and the ghosts of their grandmothers. Some marchers had planned to be there. Some stopped whatever they were doing to join in from the sidewalk. Many were young, white, and college educated, but they were joined by their black, Asian, and Latina sisters. Some were nurses in white uniforms and nuns in black habits. Others wore peasant blouses and bell-bottoms, or midis and heels. Many women carried their babies on their backs or in their arms.

The Socialist Workers Party led the march, followed by the demonstrators who had taken over the Statue of Liberty, holding their banner high: “Women of the World Unite!” The police tried corralling the marchers, but they refused to be contained on the sidewalk. From the first row, the socialists issued instructions: “
When the cops blow the whistle, take over the whole avenue.”