American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  On a smaller scale were groups like the Combahee River Collective in Boston, named after an 1863 guerrilla action in South Carolina, led by Harriet Tubman, that freed hundreds of slaves; they were “committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression,” struggles against forced sterilization, rape, and domestic violence and for abortion and child care. Such concerns, they argued, united all women.

  Other women of color, especially Latinas, overcame cultural barriers and divided loyalties to take part in the feminist movement. Chicana and Puerto Rican women formed autonomous organizations such as the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional in the Southwest, the Mexican-American Women’s Association, and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. Chicana activists were the backbone of the United Farm Workers’ strikes and boycotts.

  The trend in the feminist movement toward harnessing its breadth and diversity through coalition building culminated at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Established and financed by legislation pushed by Bella Abzug, who chaired the International Women’s Year Commission that coordinated it, the conference met to propose measures to achieve full equality, which had been discussed earlier in public meetings involving over 100,000 women. The Houston delegates ranged from progressive church women, trade unionists, and community activists across a wide spectrum to the hard core of conservative “antis,” sporting yellow “Majority” ribbons and seeking in vain to block resolutions in support of ERA and abortion rights. With middle-class whites underrepresented, it may have been one of the most all-embracing political conventions in American history.

  It did not lack in theater. At the start of the proceedings, a multiracial team of relay runners carried into the convention center a flaming torch from Seneca Falls, New York, site of the first women’s convention in 1848. During heated debate over a National Plan of Action a woman rose in the rear of the hall and said dramatically, “My name is Susan B. Anthony”; at the end of her remarks the grandniece of the revered leader joined others in chanting, “Failure Is Impossible!”—the elder Anthony’s final public words. The climax of the gathering was the near-unanimous passage of a minority women’s resolution, drafted by a joint caucus of blacks, Latinas, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, that called for recognition and alleviation of their “double discrimination.” Among many conservatives who stood up to vote for it were two white Mississippians, a man and a woman who reached across the seated disapproving members of their delegation to grasp each other’s hand. The coliseum swayed with “We Shall Overcome.”

  Aside from such peak moments, the movement as it matured came to feel less like a nurturing family, a “room of its own,” and more like what it really was—a massive and complex coalition of women with much in common but many differences. Women of color who were vitally attuned to the “simultaneity of oppressions” felt the strongest need for linking issues and took the lead in building bridges of interdependence. The progress that had been made toward sisterhood did not blind feminist delegates to the big obstacles to unity that remained—above all, the many women they had not yet reached, represented by the “antis” at Houston. “Change means growth, and growth can be painful,” said the black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. Her remark summed up the intellectual and political struggles of the whole decade.

  The Personal Is Political

  How did “the movement” get started? How fully did it reach its goals? Years later veterans of the women’s movement, like old campaigners re-fighting the battles of yore, were still debating how a movement that appeared to have lost most of its fire and focus after winning the vote in 1920 suddenly flamed up into a force that transformed the ideas and behavior of both women and men, at least in the upper and middle classes. Historians were already examining the origins of the movement, its linkages with the black and student revolts, its durability, the “real change” it produced in terms of its own aspirations, and the historians were discarding almost as many explanations as they found useful.

  The movement emerged from volcanic economic and social changes in the years following World War II, according to one theory. The percentage of women in the total civilian work force rose from 28 in 1947 to 37 in 1968, bringing a huge increase of women who were exposed to both the temptations and the frustrations of the job mart and who shared with one another financial and occupational concerns. At the same time women’s relative deprivation mounted as their share of “both quantitative and qualitative occupational rewards,” in Jo Freeman’s analysis, dwindled. This seeming paradox produced a volatile mixture—aroused hopes and crushed expectations.

  Other explanations were that World War II had served as the catalyst of increased employment among women, producing a change in self-image as well as expectations that were rudely shattered after the war, as men took back the better jobs; and/or that social and class forces involved in urbanization and suburbanization, and the relatively greater deprivation of middle-class women, fostered a desire for reform; and/or that psychologically, the more women operated in the male sphere, the more they had to assert their identity as female. Having earlier possessed a self-identity, a fixed societal position, or at least a nurturing leadership role in the family, many women now operated in a twilight zone between low-paid jobs and family responsibilities. Wanting a life outside the home, yet feeling guilty about their husbands’ unmet needs, they were driven by guilt and emptiness to smother their children with care, to treat them as though they “were hot-house plants psychologically.” This “Rage of Women,” as a Look article called it, was that identity crisis dramatized by Friedan as “the problem that has no name.”

  To be trapped between domestic demands and the need for “something more” was an old story for many American women, but powerful intellectual and ideological forces were sweeping the West during the 1960s. These were years of turbulence in Europe as well as the United States. Simone de Beauvoir, the novelist Doris Lessing, and others across the Atlantic had challenged the dominant image of woman’s subordinate position. In the United States the black and student revolts lifted the banners of liberty and equality even as they fought with others and among themselves about the meaning and application of these values.

  In proclaiming liberty, equality, and sisterhood, women too broke up into rival ideological camps. Feminists of the NOW camp typically held that women were equal to men but had been kept subordinate to them, that the goal was integration on an equal basis, through political action. Women’s liberationists of the younger branch protested that they were treated as sex objects or as mere property, that they must act through psychological or social “woman power.” Liberal feminists defined liberty as the absence of legal constraints on women and equality as equal opportunity to attain their goals. Marxist feminists saw themselves as victims of the capitalist system, liberty as protection against the coercion of economic necessity, and equality as the equal satisfaction of material needs. All this was aside from “sexual conservatives” who saw men and women as inherently unequal in abilities and held that unequals should be treated unequally.

  Sisterhood was powerful enough to keep these differing values from tearing the women’s movement apart. Indeed, conflicts over goals doubtless sharpened the impact of consciousness-raising. Borrowing from blacks’ examples of standing up in meetings and testifying about their treatment by “the Man,” borrowing even from Mao’s way of criticism of oneself and others, “Speak pain to recall pain,” consciousness-raising intensified as women in small groups spoke to one another about any and all of their “personal problems,” including husbands, housework, making office coffee, shopping, curtailed ambitions, child care, male bosses, sexual relationships. The heart of these meetings was the probing by women of themselves and others about problems as they defined them.

  The genius of these meetings lay in a leadership that was as potent as it was inconspicuous. It was a leadership of women by women, as experiences were exchanged, feel
ings evoked, attitudes articulated. Women exchanged leadership positions as the “rapping” moved from problem to problem. The effect was much in accord with the teachings of psychologists like Maslow whom Friedan and others had read—the raising of persons to higher levels of self-awareness, self-identity, self-protection, self-expression, and ultimately to creative self-fulfillment. The rap groups discussed the writings of leading thinkers in the women’s movement too, and as they did so it became more and more evident that their personal problems were in many respects political problems, involving millions of women, widespread customs and attitudes, laws and judicial findings, governmental institutions and power.

  At first cool to these “bitch sessions” as providing young women with a crutch that would divert them from political action, NOW came to see them as means of enlarging the mass base of the organization and at the same time meeting women’s needs. NOW expanded from 14 chapters in 1967 to around 700 seven years later, while membership rose from 1,000 to perhaps 40,000. Yet NOW did not appear to grow proportionately in electoral strength, despite its emphasis on practical political action. Part of the problem was that its organizational structure failed to keep pace with the growth in membership.

  But the main problem was the anti-leadership and anti-organization ideology and ethic in the women’s movement. These tendencies existed in NOW to some degree but were offset by vigorous leadership at the top. The movement’s younger branch was determined, on the other hand, as both the means and the end of social change, to replace the “masculine” principle of hierarchy with the ideology and practice of collective sisterhood. Less ambivalent than the New Left or NOW, radical feminists rejected hierarchical leadership altogether. This was partly a reaction to the seeming hypocrisy of movement groups that kicked hierarchy out the front door only to sneak it in through the back. But it was the result even more of the feminist notion that power meant “possession of the self rather than manipulation of other people—hence women had to shun leadership of and by others in order to cultivate the strength to lead their own lives.

  “Because so many of our struggles necessarily had to be carried on in isolation, in one-to-one relationships with men,” an activist of the younger branch observed later, “it was imperative for women, as individuals, to gain the confidence to act autonomously, to lead oneself. So the moral distaste for leadership by others became an intensely practical tactic, completely appropriate to the tasks to be performed.”

  The absence of recognized leadership, however, did not prevent the rise of leaders who were more skillful verbally and in other ways. Describing what she called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” Freeman—known in the movement by her nom de guerre, Joreen—noted that every group had a structure and that covert structures generated covert elites. Lack of formal structure thus became a way of masking power, which then became “capricious.” Groups could not hold de facto leaders accountable; indeed, the covert elite’s existence could hardly be conceded. The unhappy consequence was difficulty in charting a clear direction for individual groups and the whole movement, leading in turn to diminished effectiveness. Sharing these concerns as the “euphoric period of consciousness-raising” ebbed, a number of activists began to put a higher priority first on lobbying and other pressure-group tactics and later on party and electoral action to uproot sexism.

  This shift fostered more emphasis on political leadership, while “structurelessness” tended ironically to exacerbate the celebrity syndrome. One of radical feminism’s loudest grievances was the male “star system” of the New Left, but the women had their own celebrities. And when the movement shunned the idea of official leaders or spokespersons, the media appointed their own whether or not they were truly representative. Not only did the grass-roots collectives, then, have little control over feminist stars, but resentments festered and eventually erupted in open denunciations of the stars as “elitist”—which pushed them even further away, sometimes to the movement’s outer edges. Celebrity Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics was a best-seller, said that she was made to feel a traitor to the whole movement.

  “All the while,” Milieu wrote, “the movement is sending double signals: you absolutely must preach at our panel, star at our conference—implying, fink if you don’t… and at the same time laying down a wonderfully uptight line about elitism.” Millett had been anointed as a star by Time magazine, which put her on its cover in August 1970. When a few months later she publicly declared her bisexuality at a feminist conference, Time dethroned her, ruling that she had lost her credibility as the movement’s “high priestess.”

  If the personal was the political, to what degree must the women’s movement turn to political action? And what kind of political action? Women’s differences on these questions deepened. Some women adamantly opposed a party and electoral strategy because it meant entering a male-dominated world and seeking to influence male-made and male-controlled institutions. They argued for individual and group face-to-face persuasion and confrontation in universities, corporations, law offices, hospitals, government agencies—and in the streets. The great potential of the women’s movement, they contended, was not primarily in its electoral power but rather in its moral power—its capacity to appeal to the conscience of the American people on issues of simple decency, justice, equality. And that appeal had to be dramatic, passionate, militant, uncompromising, as black leaders had demonstrated in the previous decade.

  Beware of a party and electoral strategy for two further reasons, these women argued. To be effective in parties and elections required endless compromises on moral principles as issues and policies were bargained out amid many contending groups. And even if women helped win elections, they would have to try to carry out their policies in a fragmented governmental system that required still further bargaining and sacrifice of principle. In the end women would become just one more pressure group and lobbying organization, their moral appeal muted.

  This view tended to dominate thinking among the younger branch. While women were not neatly divided on the basis of competing strategies, most feminists in the older branch came to believe that party participation and electioneering were vitally necessary.

  The older-branch leaders were confident they commanded the intellectual and political organization and strength necessary for a major electoral and lobbying effort. The National Women’s Political Caucus under Abzug and Chisholm, now claiming hundreds of participating state and local units, laid groundwork. With NOW and other allies, it threw its weight into the internal struggles of groups with which the women’s movement intended to work in electoral politics.

  Organized labor was a prime target. Across the nation working women had been fighting a long battle to persuade male-dominated trade unions to pay more attention to their grievances about sexism and job discrimination and the paucity of women among the top leadership. With crucial help from NOW, women trade unionists convinced the AFL-CIO finally to abandon its opposition to ERA. Women also launched their own unions. Probably the greatest gains were made by groups like “9 to 5,” which began to organize women office workers in Boston in 1973.

  Professional women organized too, especially in academia, through autonomous caucuses and associations. Notable for their militance, caucuses within scholarly organizations like the American Political Science Association raised hell at annual conventions on a host of problems plaguing women scholars. Nowhere did feminists mount a more daring assault on tradition than in churches and synagogues, as women fought for the ordination of female clergy, the degendering of sacred texts and even of God, and the creation of a nonpatriarchal feminist theology. The National Coalition of American Nuns protested domination by priests “no matter what their hierarchical status.”

  Still, the acid test of institutional power, in the American governmental system, was electing a President and winning majorities in Congress. The older branch was far better prepared for the 1972 elections than it had been for 1968—in part because of the rules
adopted after the 1968 Democratic convention for broader representation of women in the party’s governing councils. These rules changes and a concentrated drive by NWPC paid off: women made up 40 percent of the delegates attending the 1972 convention compared with 13 percent four years earlier.

  Thoroughly coached by the NWPC in the complex and often bizarre and ferocious processes of delegate selection, platform drafting, and credentials battles, women at the 1972 convention in Miami had a major role in convention decisions—above all in the nomination of George McGovern. Women had the heady experience of taking part in the inner strategy councils, helping to choose the running mate, and seeing one of their number, Jean Westwood, selected as the new chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. For their part, blacks doubled their percentage of delegates at the convention over 1968.

  Sharing in the exercise of power, Democratic women encountered its disappointments as well. One of these was McGovern’s sacrifice of a number of women delegates, whose seating he had promised to support, to the exigencies of convention politics. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Abzug and other women’s rights leaders complained that they were deserted on key platform planks, especially abortion rights. Women had a minor role in McGovern’s choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, but virtually none in the selection of Sargent Shriver as Eagleton’s replacement following a press flap over revelations that Eagleton years before had been hospitalized a few times for psychiatric disorders.

  A more surprising and severe failure for the women’s movement lay ahead. ERA had passed both houses of Congress early in 1972 with such heavy majorities, and with such enthusiastic support from Nixon as well as the Democratic candidates, that women expected the proposed constitutional amendment to gain swift passage through the required thirty-eight state legislatures. Within a year, thirty states had ratified ERA. But then its progress began to stall, under the pressure of a powerful “STOP ERA” coalition directed by a resourceful right-wing leader, Phyllis Schlafly, and composed of diverse antifeminist, radical right-wing, and business groups and of an unlikely alliance of Protestant fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and Catholics. State legislatures started to repeal their ratifications of the amendment, as STOP ERA played upon the fears of millions of American women and men who felt threatened by the women’s movement or who believed that it had gone far enough. ERA, its opponents charged, would lead to the drafting of women and the denial to mothers of the custody of their children, to single-sex toilets and homosexual marriages. They linked the amendment to “forced busing, forced mixing, forced housing,” as one ERA foe wrote to her senator. “Now forced women! No thank you!”