Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (5 page)

E
QUALITY
…

W
HEN THE FOUNDERS
of NOW huddled over lunch at the closing session of a Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women in 1966, they determined to found a grassroots civil rights lobby for women whose goal would be “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”
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The NOW statement represented in some ways a modernized version of the first declaration of women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 by reclaiming for women the republican ideals of equal participation and individual rights. The founders of NOW included author Betty Friedan, Dr. Kathryn Clarenbach, head of the Wisconsin Status of Women Commission, Caroline Davis and Dorothy
Haener from the Women’s Department of the United Auto Workers (UAW), and African-American lawyer Pauli Murray, coauthor of a landmark article on legal discrimination, “Jane Crow and the Law.” Mary Eastwood, Murray’s coauthor, and Catherine East were critical players behind the scenes who had linked Betty Friedan with key people across the country and pressed her to assume public leadership of what would become NOW. These women’s experiences on both state and national commissions had made them experts on legal obstacles and other forms of public discrimination against women. Soon NOW mounted campaigns for strengthening and enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws: picketing against the continued existence of sex-segregated want ads; pressuring the administration to include sex on the list of discriminations prohibited for federal contractors and for enforcement of Executive Order 11375; and insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, religion, and national origin.
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Despite this shared agenda, there were differences of emphasis among early NOW members. When NOW endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in November 1967, founding members from the United Auto Workers had to resign and withdraw the use of union offices and mailing facilities until they could successfully change their union’s anti-ERA position (which they did in 1970). Another group left in 1968 when NOW formally endorsed legalized abortion, fearing such a position would interfere with their primary interest in employment and education discrimination. That group founded the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). NOW leaders worried that the two organizations would compete, but one of the founders of WEAL, attorney Elizabeth Boyer, assured NOW that her organization would not compete for members but would draw in new, somewhat more conservative constituencies so that the two organizations could continue to work as allies.
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The spreading networks of overlapping memberships, which sustained NOW, WEAL, and in 1971 the National Women’s Political Caucus, included from the outset a significant number of African-American
women in leadership positions. These were professional women who had long worked with white women on such issues as civil rights, poverty, and labor union activism. They could rely on the mutual respect that grew from shared work. Aileen Hernandez, for example, was the only woman appointed to the first Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to handle complaints of discrimination), where she became convinced that the Commission could not enforce the law against sex discrimination without pressure from the grass roots. She was elected president of NOW in 1970. An even more flamboyant figure was Florence (Flo) Kennedy, who had been a feminist at least since Columbia Law School rejected her application in the late 1940s on the grounds of sex. She gained admission by threatening to sue on the grounds of racial discrimination using what she referred to as the “testicular approach,” applying “the right kind of pressure to the appropriate sensitive area.”
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Active in NOW and then in more radical groups and a founder of the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973, Flo Kennedy was beloved by the movement and the media for her colorful and outspoken feminism.

These African-American women and others, such as Pauli Murray, Elizabeth Koonz, Director of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor in the Nixon Administration, Addie Wyatt of the Amalgamated Meatcutters Union, Ruth Weyand, Associate Counsel of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), and Dorothy Nevels, a founder of Federally Employed Women in 1968, had come of age in the 1940s and 1950s when professional women of any race were highly unusual. They had batded first for access to credentials and again for the most minimal forms of opportunity and recognition. They knew firsthand the realities of both racial and sexual discrimination, and it does not appear to have occurred to them that they should choose one over the other to fight.

…
AND
L
IBERATION

I
N CONTRAST TO
the NOW and WEAL focus on equality in public life, the radical branch of the women’s movement placed private life at
the center. The women’s liberation movement, as it quickly became known, had little use for formal politics or detailed policy discussions in the first year or two. Its founders saw themselves as revolutionaries. Their model was black separatism, and their driving passion was fury at cultural definitions of women as secondary, inferior sexual objects. Like the feminist foremothers in the 1910s, they mounted a sweeping challenge to cultural definitions of womanhood and femininity. Their first skirmish, in fact, was with an older generation of activists in Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP), who opposed war in the name of motherhood.

WSP had represented a revival of the maternal feminism of the suffrage generation and a link to progressive activism from the thirties and forties. An organization of middle-class housewives with progressive, activist leanings, Women’s Strike for Peace was founded in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. Proclaiming their concern for peace in the name of mother love, their actions were harbingers of women’s reentry into political action in the name of womanhood, but their categories clashed headlong with the passionate proclamations of younger activists. In January 1968, under the banner of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, named in honor of the first woman in Congress and the only Congressperson to vote against American entry into both world wars, WSP organized an antiwar demonstration of several thousand women in Washington, D.C.
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“Radical women,” the term “women’s liberation” would soon follow, began to meet in small groups in Chicago and New York in the fall of 1967. At a planning meeting for the Brigade held in Chicago by WSP, members of the newly formed West Side Group showed up to express their disagreement with any claim that women’s authority derived from their roles as “wives and mothers.” The president of WSP, Dagmar Wilson, was on the whole very supportive of the new feminism and hoped that the younger radicals would join their march. The gulf in rhetoric was insurmountable, however. Longtime peace activists simply could not understand the fierceness of women’s liberation’s rejection of traditional roles. Younger women were utterly unmoved by their point of view, considering it merely another capitulation to societally designated roles. The only self-respecting position from which one could oppose
the war, they insisted, was that of citizen or person.
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The Chicago and New York groups decided to attend the Jeanette Rankin Brigade demonstration to proclaim their opposition to any representation of women that depended on their relations with men and to invite other radical women to join them in their new endeavor. New York women came with props (a coffin and banners) to announce the “burial of traditional womanhood.” Kathie Sarachild (note the newly created matrilineal name) offered an oration in which she argued that it was necessary to bury the traditional woman because

… [W]e cannot hope to move toward a better world or even a truly democratic society at home until we begin to solve our own problems….

Yes, sisters, we have a problem as women alright, a problem which renders us powerless and ineffective over the issues of war and peace, as well as over our own lives. And although our problem is Traditional Manhood as much as Traditional Womanhood, we women must begin on the solution.

We must see that we can only solve our problem together, that we cannot solve it individually as earlier Feminist generations attempted to do.
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A contingent of about 500 then broke away from the march to discuss this new movement and immediately fell into harsh debate, a harbinger of discord that marked one facet of this turbulent movement from the outset.
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In the places where New Left activism remained strong, radical women clashed over their yet undefined goals and methods. Were radical women organizing themselves within a broader coalition of students and antiwar activists, or were they in the process of breaking away to create something utterly separate? Who would be their primary constituency? At what level did they expect changes to occur, and how would they bring these about? The bitter arguments that raged into the early seventies reflected the pain many felt as they faced open hostility and ridicule from men they had associated with, as well as well as growing desperation and internal self-destruction of the New Left itself.
Some women felt they had little to lose in breaking away. Others believed that their identities (as well as personal relationships) were at stake. Ellen Willis put it bitterly: “We were laughed at, patronized, called frigid, emotionally disturbed man-haters and—worst of all on the left!—apolitical.”
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Those who were clearest about breaking completely with what they called the “male-dominated left” called themselves radical feminists and labeled their opponents “politicos.” The latter was an unfair designation and the “politico-feminist split” was less a split than a debate in most places. A different theoretical and organizing perspective ultimately evolved from the politico side of this discussion, calling itself socialist feminism.
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The growth of the women’s movement thus depended less on specific ideas than on the ability of women to tell each other their own stories, to claim them as the basis of political action. By 1968 the women’s liberation movement was clearly separate from the antiwar movement and such discussions had been named “consciousness-raising.” They began as a spontaneous occurrence among activists with experience in either civil rights or the student New Left. Women with roots in those movements understood that to act politically against injustice involved personal transformation, and they believed that any movement for change should exemplify the values it sought to bring to the society as a whole. In civil rights this vision was embodied in the idea of “the beloved community” of black and white together; in Students for a Democratic Society it was the ideal of “participatory democracy” and, finally, in the rebellious counterculture, the goal devolved into a more anarchistic response to the impositions of societal authorities: “do your own thing.”

Women who met initially to discuss the problems they were having as women within the student movement poured out their own stories and listened in amazement as others described the same patterns. The anger and energy this storytelling unleashed created an opportunity to redefine the world using their own lives as a template. Pam Allen, a member of an early San Francisco group, described women’s liberation
groups as a “free space” where women could “think independently of male-supremacist values.” Early members of New York Radical Women (Kathy Sarachild, Anne Forer, Carol Hanisch, Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, and Rosalyn Baxandall) christened the procedure “consciousness-raising.” True to their New Left heritage, they were inspired by stories of women in the Chinese Revolution who “spoke bitterness” to develop collective support for change.
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As one radical feminist group (Redstockings) put it in their manifesto,

We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis of an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.

Our chief task at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions.
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Remarkably similar processes can be found in groups that were less eager than Redstockings to discard
all
received wisdom, seeing themselves rather in the context of a broader left and drawing on the Marxist-feminist theories then emerging in Europe. In Bread and Roses, for example, a Boston women’s liberation group that formed in 1969 (about the same time as Redstockings in New York), founders recalled,

When our group started, … it was a wonderful time to be in the women’s movement. It may have been a unique moment. It felt then almost as though whatever stood in our way would be swept away overnight, with the power of our ideas, our simplicity, our unanswerable truth.
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Consciousness-raising was an intense form of collective self-education. “It seems impossible that adults have ever learned so much so fast as we did then. We taught each other sexual politics, emotional politics, the politics of the family, the politics of the SDS meeting.”
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Another
Bread and Roses member, Jane Mansbridge, said: “We had the feeling that we were, like Columbus, sailing at the edge of the world. Everything was new and intense.”
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