American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “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.

  THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

  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-Grac
e 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: