American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “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 ins
titution 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.”