At first we believed that we were involved in the struggle to build a new society, and the depressing realization was slowly dawning on us that we were doing the same work and playing the same roles in the movement as out of it; typing the speeches that men delivered, making coffee but not policy, being accessories to the men whose politics would supposedly replace the old order. The women’s suffrage movement grew out of the drive to abolish slavery, and the current women’s movement was begun largely, although not completely, by women who had been active in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, in student movements and in the left generally. Many women’s groups already existed, but the feminist revolution went public in a certain way in Atlantic City and hasn’t stopped ever since.
Credit 17.3
Bras were discarded (but not burned) along with household cleaners and cosmetics in the Freedom Trash Can at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City, September 7, 1968, in one of the first acts of second-wave feminist guerrilla theater.
TOM HAYDEN
There was that Atlantic City controversy over whether the bras were burned or not in the trash can in ’68. That was one of those symbolic incidents that serve to signal the coming of a new movement. It’s kind of distorted and weird, but that’s the way the media is. After that, in ’69, ’70, ’71, women’s consciousness became extremely extreme.
VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN
In 1967, right after I got back from a trip to Vietnam with Tom Hayden and a group of peace activists, a small group of women, including Heather Booth, Naomi Weisstein, and Amy Kesselman and I, started organizing the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, CWLU. It was one of the first women’s organizations. There were little collectives in New York, like the Redstockings, at the time. But because we were organizers in Chicago, and we were in a much more hostile political environment, we wanted to build a mass movement. We started bringing together women from all different backgrounds—academics, organizers, antiwar people. The idea was that it was a union of a bunch of different interests, and it didn’t have to adhere to one etiology. We brought in the woman who was working in women’s graphics, women working in women’s health, women who were interested in antiwar activism, and we had chapters and so you could federate into a women’s union. It wasn’t like we had one idea, one analysis, and one solution. We really wanted to be diverse, moralistic, that was the term we used. We were criticized by the New York people for not being feminist enough, but we felt that they were elitist intellectuals—they were in a bubble of middle-class intellectuals.
It was a pretty neat organization, because there were all these projects: We had a newspaper, we had a graphics collective, we had an action committee for decent childcare. I ran this liberation school for women where we taught everything. For example, we took women who didn’t know how to drive and taught them to drive in our clunky old cars. We also taught women’s history, economics, an introduction to Marxism, how to fix your VW, and Our Bodies, Ourselves classes. We would come up with classes, put the word out, and we would get hundreds of women. We had no idea who they were. There were hundreds of women wanting to connect with the women’s movement. I’ve never been involved in a movement like that where you turn around and there are thousands of people wanting to get involved. It was just amazing.
JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)
I don’t remember where on the tour across country I was when I called a woman friend of mine in New York and she said, “It’s so great, there are five thousand women in the streets, protesting in favor of pro-choice.” And I wrote in my journal that night, “This whole women’s movement thing is such a diversion from what’s really important.” When I read that in my journal years later, I thought, Oh my God! I had forgotten that I felt that way then.
Credit 17.4
More than twenty-five thousand women marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue in the Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage and demand legal abortion and equal opportunity in jobs and education. Some women held signs that read, “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot” and “End Human Sacrifice—Don’t Get Married.”
HEATHER BOOTH
After the ’65 SDS meeting, a friend came to me saying that his sister, who was also at the University of Chicago, was pregnant and was not ready to have a child. She was nearly suicidal, and was looking for an abortion. I hadn’t really thought about it ever before. I’d never had to face the issue myself, and didn’t know very much about it, but I searched through the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was the medical arm of the civil rights movement, and found a doctor. It turned out that the doctor was T.R.M. Howard, who’s an extraordinary person. He had been a physician in Mississippi, and had been a real activist, and had to leave the state when his name showed up on a Ku Klux Klan death list.
I was such a law-abiding person—I didn’t litter, I crossed at the green light, I tried to follow the rules—but in the civil rights movement I had been picked up. I had also been arrested in an anti–Vietnam War induction. There was an understanding that when there’s an unjust law, you have to challenge those laws and you can break the law if it’s unjust. I viewed this more as a good deed, as a charitable act, not a political one. Later I found out how illegal it was: Three people talking about performing an abortion was considered conspiracy to commit felony murder, which I didn’t quite focus on at the time, but I knew it wasn’t legal.
Then a few months later someone else called. At that point I realized, Oh, this is a real issue. I started to learn about abortion, and the women’s movement promoted some of the stories of botched abortions. There was a famous picture of a woman who died while trying to give herself an abortion. When I started to get more and more calls I realized we really better make a system out of this, and we called it Jane.
MARGERY TABANKIN
(University of Wisconsin student activist)
Abortion was not legal. I completely believed, whether you thought it was right or wrong, that it was a woman’s choice. It was always clear to me that abortion is a person’s most private decision, which they make with their family, their doctor, their boyfriend or husband, etc. It should not be public policy. I felt really strongly about it. So, to the extent that the women’s movement touched me on an issue, it was over abortion.
Years later I did have an abortion, but not at that time. I had just made an intellectual commitment to it and was in the movement. But I was dealing with really frightened young people at school who had gotten pregnant and either weren’t really in love or didn’t want the baby because they were career driven and it was going to ruin their lives. There was an underground network of people in the Midwest who helped women find real doctors who agreed to do safe abortions. The Jane underground made this happen by raising the money to help women get where they were going, for instance if they needed to take the bus from Madison to Chicago. We would send someone to the bus station to wait for you. They would take you where you needed to go to the doctor’s. You were taken care of. There were tons of women having abortions outside of the network and that’s where you heard all of the horror stories of back alley abortions, coat hangers, and people bleeding out and almost dying. Many, many young women were never able to have children as a result of a botched procedure. People who were not MDs, like the woman down the street, were performing abortions to make some extra bucks. It was really horrible. Since this network existed, I was determined to be in the Madison–Chicago nexus. And so I did that for several years.*9
It was amazing the way that the underground functioned, such that when people needed to know about it, they’d hear about it. Enough people knew that I was the person to talk to in Madison that people who I didn’t even know would come out of the blue and say, “Can you help me?” I probably worked with Jane for about a year and I would say that seven or eight women came through me in that time.
HEATHER BOOTH
By the late sixties, Jane was providi
ng over a hundred abortions a week. So many women were coming in that the doctor who was performing the procedures couldn’t just do it himself. The women were watching the procedures, seeing everything; they knew what was involved. So he trained the women in how to perform the procedure; and by the end the women were doing the procedures themselves and had set up a front operation, which was someone’s house that was ready to take the women in, often with kids. They’d wait there. They’d go to another house, and that second house would always shift where that was. Between ’65, when I first started to do it, and when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land [in 1973], the women in Jane believe they performed eleven thousand abortions.
VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN
I was the first staff member for the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and I’d say 60 percent of our calls were for Jane. So we became a big referral service. But I wasn’t part of the collective. We tried not to know too many details. The whole issue of legalization of abortion was a big deal. New York legalized it in July 1970.*10 But on May 4, 1972, seven women in Jane were charged with murder in Chicago.*11 The charges against them were dropped, but they all could have gone to prison. So they took enormous risks. Enormous.
JANE FONDA
I was in Killeen, Texas, at the Oleo Strut GI coffeehouse. I was there for two or three nights, and they had various speakers, and they had a feminist talk about the women’s movement. I remember her saying, “You may think that we’re talking about asking men to give up a share of their pie. But that’s not what it’s about. We’re talking about expanding the pie, so that all of us can have a share.” That was the very first time that I thought, Oh, so it’s not anti-men. It’s about sharing power. It’s not about matriarchy. That was the first time that I started paying attention, and listening differently.
Feminists had been aggressive with me, in the beginning, because of Barbarella. “Aren’t you ashamed that you made that sexist movie?” And I would say nobody forced me. But I started to become ashamed for the first time, and I stayed ashamed for a few decades, until I saw it again recently, and I thought that it was kind of camp and charming. There’s nothing wrong with it. Barbarella is running the fucking spaceship! It just barely misses being a feminist movie, for heaven’s sake, and I’d love to do a remake of it, as a feminist movie. But I wasn’t sophisticated enough in 1969 to be able to think in those terms, or talk in those terms.
Credit 17.5
Feminists considered Barbarella a sexist film and criticized Jane Fonda for acting in the star role as a scantily clad science fiction action character. The 1968 film was based on a French comic strip and directed by Fonda’s then husband, Roger Vadim.
ROBIN MORGAN
Very soon after writing “Goodbye to All That,” I was still calling myself a women’s liberationist, not a feminist. But the minute I got out of New York and hit Oklahoma, Kansas, California, Minnesota, Georgia, whatever, and saw all these women who didn’t call themselves radicals, quietly going about their lives and working with women in prison, working with neighborhood women, creating the first battered women’s shelters, just doing, I fell in love with them. I thought, Oh my God, this is feminism. It was low on rhetoric and high on action and it was not about posturing and it was less concerned with leadership than with everybody pulling an oar. It was very practical. And I came back and I quit the Rat collective and started calling myself a feminist.
By then I had already begun assembling Sisterhood Is Powerful, which I’d started back in ’67 and ’68 because our various CR groups would take trips to campuses, and hand out these mimeographed papers that people were writing, like “The Politics of Housework,” and “Resistances to Consciousness,” and other early papers. We were getting bursitis from lugging around these goddamn heavy shopping bags. I was working as an editor at Grove Press and was already a published poet, so I thought in terms of books: I thought the movement needs a cheap, easily available book that anybody can pick up at an airport, that can be in newsstands as well as bookstores, so that we don’t have to lug around these piles of mimeographed papers. Also, books go where organizers can’t. So I tromped into my little CR group and I said, “I think we need a book, and I can assemble a book, and I want your piece in it, and your piece in it, and your piece.”
Doubleday assigned me a male editor, but I wouldn’t work with him. So I said, “You have to find me women.” So his secretary and two junior copy editors were the women that I actually worked with, although it is true that whenever we needed some clout, we had to go to John Simon. I insisted that it be published simultaneously in hard- and paperback, which you simply didn’t do then. I wanted the paperback to be short and fittable in a pocket even though it was so chunky. I was also rather proud of myself that the book had “daughters”; for example, Kate Millett—who then was an academic at Columbia—was doing a dissertation, and I asked to see it and I printed a part of it. Out of that, she got a contract for what became Sexual Politics.*12
EMILY GOODMAN (feminist lawyer, judge)
“Sisterhood is powerful” became the slogan. Everybody had pins and trappings with the logo from the cover of the book of the red fist—it was on posters everywhere. It really represented the movement, and the movement was the way it was really referred to. I mean nobody said “the sisterhood.” It was the movement.
Now, to other people, the movement might mean the civil rights movement or the antiwar movement, but for me, the movement is the women’s movement, and I have to say it did change my life. I was already a lawyer, so I had made that step, but almost everything that flowed after that was attributable to the women’s movement.
TOM HAYDEN
At the Red Family commune, my girlfriend wanted me to leave because her emergence as a full leader was blocked by my being a famous person. I think it was nothing more complicated than that. The group fell apart after that. It had served its purpose. I think she needed to be an independent spirit, because she had been in an early conventional marriage and had missed the wildness of the early sixties and mid-sixties. There are a lot of women like that, who got married early, had a traditional marriage, had kids, and missed the sixties. Then suddenly, in a big rupture, they left their marriages and caught up with the sixties in a hurry. Then having seen it all, they settled into a more committed relationship later on. I’ve met a lot of women like that. You have to break up everything to put the pieces of your life back on the table.
ROBIN MORGAN
We were a whole generation that, for the first time, said No to a war that the country had declared or found itself mired in and then began saying No to other things, and did so awkwardly at times and with bombast and rhetoric and prick waving but that at least was questioning the death grip of the 1950s, which was a stultification of passion and sanity and the genius of the human spirit. It had been a clampdown on the way life was lived in this country.
I grew up in the fifties. I had a freer, in many ways, growing up because I was a working kid in the theater. But if you had a real average middle-of-the-country growing up, god help you. And this burst through all of that with Day-Glo colors like in The Wizard of Oz when it goes from black and white into color. That was from the fifties into the sixties and then when people say “the sixties” they really mean the late sixties into the 1970s. Everything suddenly was Technicolor and there was hope!
* * *
*1 Rat Subterranean News was one of New York’s most popular underground newspapers, along with The East Village Other and The Rag. A colorful, tabloid-size paper, Rat began publishing in March 1968 and gained early notoriety for its coverage of the Columbia student uprising.
*2 At the 1966 SDS national convention in Chicago, a group of women presented a position paper on the role of women in SDS arguing that there was a gender disparity in leadership roles. The women were booed off the stage. This led many SDS women to leave the organization and join women’s liberation groups.
*3 The Black Panther was published weekly, and from 1968 to 1970 it was
the number one black weekly newspaper in the country, with a circulation of over 300,000. People sold it on street corners nationwide for twenty-five cents.
*4 The Congress of Racial Equality was a civil rights organization founded in Chicago in 1942. It was one of the “big four” civil rights organizations, along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
*5 Alpert was the lover of and fellow bomber with Sam Melville, whose New York collective detonated ten dynamite bombs in New York City corporate and government buildings between August and November of 1969. Melville and Alpert were turned in by an FBI informant, and Melville was sentenced to thirteen years in prison, while Alpert (who later had a romantic friendship with Robin Morgan) went underground. Although Melville was not a member of the Weathermen, his method of bombing symbolic buildings with the intention of destroying property, not people, and then issuing a communiqué taking credit for the bombing, would later become a model for the Weather Underground in the 1970s. Sam Melville was killed in the Attica prison riots in September 1971.
*6 As a child television actor, Morgan was best known for her role as Dagmar Hansen in the popular 1950s series Mama, a role she started playing at age seven, based on the 1948 feature film I Remember Mama.
Witness to the Revolution Page 37