The 1960s critique bypassed older condemnations of marriage’s legal and economic liabilities to stress the psychological infirmities that companionate marriage inflicted. Sardonic descriptions abounded of wives’ service to male egos and the decimation that marriage wreaked on woman’s sense of self. Habits of deference suffused middle-class marriages: “We stagger under the weight of cultural commandments. Thou Shalt Not Compete With Him, Thou Shalt Not be Aggressive, Thou Shalt Seek Fulfillment Through Your Womb Not Your Head,” wrote Ellen Maslow in a downtown New York journal. Given this state of things, anyone would want a wife, suggested Judy Syfers, herself married. And why not? She laid out the job requirements, putting herself in the place of a husband. “I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to school I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too.”61
Underlying the contempt for marriage was distrust of heterosexuality itself—or, more precisely, of the men who made up one half of the enterprise. In many ways—some women said in all ways—men were oppressors and exploiters. At the very least they were a lot of work, even if you weren’t married to one. “I realize now how completely you’re expected to give to them in order to have them talk to you,” reflected a woman in a consciousness-raising group. “You have to just lavish attention on them or else they just don’t come around.” The roundup of malefactors broke open the façade of family government and threw the spotlight on the men who headed the jurisdiction. Women learned to see their hopes for equality with boyfriends and husbands as inevitably self-deluding, luring them into amiable or, worse, tender and passionate relations with antagonists who disguised themselves as lovers. “It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head,” confessed Sally Kempton in Esquire about the contradiction she experienced between being a feminist and being married. “At the risk of sounding naïve…,” ventured a woman attending a 1968 consciousness-raising group, “I’ve been listening to this for an hour and no one has mentioned love.” A transcript of the conversation records that her question set off a wave of “ferocious laughter.”62
The bad habits of husbands and fathers, brothers and workmates, lovers and friends embodied personal failings magnified many times over in the failings of the entire sex. The left’s indictment of the “military-industrial complex” and American racism and imperialism set the pattern: Radical feminism attacked “male chauvinism,” which held women in line just as racism did blacks, imperialism did the Third World poor, and capitalism did workers. “All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy.” It was a scathing view of ordinary men’s stake in an oppressive system. “We identify the agents of our oppression as men.”63 No surprise, then, that “the man-who-would-understand” was a phantom, that the brother/twin was lost.
Every man was a boss. This was a core insight of a feminism that owed much to the Marxist theory of labor exploitation. A labor system gave structural coherence to male dominance in the family; and the name of that system was housework, or, in Marxist terminology, reproduction. The assumption that housework and full-time child care sucked up women’s time and turned them into drudges was an article of faith with feminists and had been since The Feminine Mystique. And historically, it was irrefutable that women always did the housework, men never did. Girls and women learned at home, as they had for centuries, that this was the way the world worked. From the 1920s on, modernity in the United States was always promising changes, not from men but from domestic technology, but the prospects for freedom vanished as standards of cleanliness rose with the new devices to keep things clean, and the bars for home decorating and cooking moved ever higher, actually increasing the time women spent in housework.
Since 1900, writers had lamented the encumbrances of domestic work, the magnitude and weight that kept women from taking a full part in the world—although it was seldom that they noticed that the working-class women who labored as their servants did most of it.64 But Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, Beauvoir, and Friedan, while they detested housework, never considered the possibility that men could be asked—no, required—to help. The assumption was that those servants would step in so that middle-class women of the future could come home and kick off their shoes like men.65 Now, for the first time, feminists questioned men’s ancient exemption. Surely domestic drudgery wasn’t a natural emanation of femininity. So why was it that only women did it?
The conclusion was obvious: The pretense that somehow housework was suitably female was a way men veiled the facts of exploitation. It was one of women’s liberation’s most potent ideas, with immediate consequences for gender relationships. There was a political economy to domestic labor, an organized system of power, not just a happenstance arrangement dictated by individuals’ different skills (“I never learned to use the washing machine and you did”). The insights produced a revelatory account of just how much housework handicapped women. In a heterosexual pair, men’s work always had more prestige and was more highly compensated, which meant that men’s earnings counted as their domestic contribution, while women’s lesser earnings—or lack of paid work altogether—landed them the job of caring for everyone and everything else.
Even the kindest of men in the 1960s seemed to feel in their very bones that women were born to do housework and they were not, that they, the men, had no reason to wipe off the stove; no know-how to wash dishes; no skill to diaper the baby properly or entertain fussy children. In the 1960s, a loving father who helped raise three children could proudly note to his daughter that he had never changed a diaper in his life: His freedom from what was literally shit work was, in his mind, a tribute to a smoothly functioning marriage. Young men justified the scummy bathtubs, sinks piled high with dirty dishes, and filthy kitchen floors with an antibourgeois ethic: They weren’t “uptight” about cleanliness, and if some woman wanted to clean the place up, well then, no one would stop her. It was startling to see that men’s feigned ignorance really masked their certainty that housework was beneath them, and that women, no matter how cherished, were made to muck around in the dirt and shit.
Perhaps it was a mental confrontation with the daily toll of living with men that only young women could have had, daughters who were new to this branch of the business, not yet socialized and thus incredulous about the double standard that their mothers tolerated. It was an area of crime in which the feminist third degree revealed a massive cover-up of men’s privileges. “The Politics of Housework,” a feminist parody widely circulated in the early 1970s, captures the cynical turn. A comic send-up of one ostensibly liberated man’s responses to his girlfriend’s pressure to share the housework, the piece proceeds as a point-counterpoint between his equivocations and her sardonic commentary. “ ‘I don’t mind sharing the housework’ [he says], ‘but I don’t do it very well. We should each do the things we’re best at.’ MEANING [she says]: ‘Unfortunately I’m no good at things like washing dishes or cooking.’ ” “ ‘I don’t mind sharing the work’ [he says], ‘but you’ll have to show me how to do it.’ MEANING [she says]: ‘I ask a lot of questions and you’ll have to show me everything every time I do it because I don’t remember so good.’ ”66
Alongside the literature of confrontation in the household was a small body of work on how actually to improve domestic life with men. A few minority voices counseled acts of resistance rather than following Ibsen’s Nora out the door. The assumption was that men—even men!—could learn a different way to be husbands and partners. But the process would bring discomfort and turmoil; it required a thick skin and a tough will. Don’t let yourself get interrupted so easily, one writer admonished in this vein. Take yourself seriously. The same hopeful impulse, edged with realism about family dynamics, glinted in Alix Kates Shulman’s notorious “Marriage Agreement.” Shulman, a novelist and member of New York Redstockings, was a rare married woman in the feminist avant-
garde, the mother of two small children, caring for them at home as she struggled to launch a writing career. In 1970, she published in a small feminist journal a contract she had drawn up with her husband, a successful businessman, to make their relationship and family life more equitable by dividing up housework.67
Shulman told a familiar tale, of a young couple who had some reciprocity at the beginning of their marriage that hardened, under the pressures of children and jobs, into a conventional and tiresome arrangement. Her husband’s job kept him out late and often out of town, while she sank into a bog of housework and child care. “If I suffered from too much domesticity, he suffered from too little.” When she came to see her situation from a feminist perspective, she realized that the only way the marriage could survive was “to throw out the old sex roles we had been living with and start again.”
The “agreement” was a marvelously detailed, dry enumeration of the routine jobs of keeping a family going—jobs that mysteriously turned into women’s jobs even in the best of marriages. The Job Breakdown was divided into two categories, Children and Housework. The jobs having to do with children included hallowed maternal tasks: “tucking them in and having night-talks; handling [them] if they wake and call in the night” and “answering questions, explaining things.” The Schedule divided everything strictly and efficiently, and the “Principles” declared that the work that brought in more money (that is, the husband’s) was not automatically more valuable and exempt from the claims of the family than the wife’s, and that “each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, value, choices.” Time was the currency of negotiation, as anyone knows who’s ever taken serious care of small children and a household. The partners could make deals and swap, but the principle had to hold fifty-fifty.
Redbook reprinted the article in 1971; glitzy New York magazine followed with a how-to piece; the newly founded feminist Ms. picked it up. In 1972, Alix Shulman published her first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, a runaway success, and the photo magazine Life ran a spread on the family with fetching photos of the lovely Alix (she really was an ex-prom queen), handsome husband, and beguiling children, captioned with apposite sections of the “Agreement” and enthusiastic testimonials from Martin Shulman and the children. “The Marriage Experiment,” Life proclaimed on the cover, and for the moment, feminists had charge of the experiment and it seemed to be going well. Shulman, having sorted through two thousand letters that inundated Redbook in response to the article, found grounds for optimism: While 50 percent opposed the marriage contract, more than a third praised it and thought their own marriages would be better for such an agreement. “I received the unmistakable impression that changes are in the air,” she concluded.68 Change was in the air, and for the moment there was a chance that feminism would help direct it.
But successful experiments in domestic equity never really gained ground. Housework was a burden that virtually every woman experienced. The housework issue cut to the bone of their dealings with the men they lived with. Predictably, it had mass appeal among women and none among men. In a period of steeply increasing female employment, the unequal division of domestic work became a flashpoint in millions of relationships. And to this day, housework and child-care arrangements remain a source of simmering antagonism between the sexes, hashed out in quarrels all the nastier in their pettiness. Reading the contract now, the division of parental tasks at first looks outrageous—how could someone want to get out of tucking a child in bed at night, or answering her calls in the night? That is, until you imagine a married gay couple implementing it, rather than a woman and a man: Then the agreement seems practical, an efficient and considerate division of labor rather than an abrogation of maternal nature.
As members of the first generation to come of sexual age with reliable contraception, young feminists were imbued with views of how emancipatory sex should be. But they also had a backlog of experience of its disappointments, a corpus of grievances about men’s erotic clumsiness and obtuseness. The mass confessions of consciousness-raising in 1968–70 stripped bare what seemed a common problem of male obliviousness to women’s desires.
Since the nineteenth century, women had alluded elliptically to unhappiness in heterosexual sex. But the taboo against respectable women speaking frankly was too strong to bring specifics into the open. When New Women in the 1910s referred to erotic pleasure, they did so in vague mystical language, without naming the female orgasm or clitoris, or indeed, specifying in the least what two people did together in bed. In the 1960s, however, advice columnists, physicians, and psychiatrists began to bruit about details and options of the bedroom that had always before been veiled. In their corner of this conversation, feminists discovered in consciousness-raising that the sexual revolution that supposedly encouraged female desire and pleasure was, in fact, dishing out assignments to service men in bed. Complaints merged around a dawning awareness of the politics of female orgasm.
In 1966, the Kinsey Institute, a world-famous center for sex research, published its definitive finding that the clitoris was the sole organ of female climax. Kinsey researchers found that the vaginal orgasm, heralded by 1950s psychiatrists as the zenith of mature female sexuality, was in fact a fiction. All female orgasms originated in the clitoris, whether directly (through manual stimulation) or indirectly, from penile friction. The Kinsey research, however, had little success winning hearts and minds; everywhere in the midst of the sexual revolution, the belief persisted that the vaginal orgasm was normal and the clitoris was an embarrassing little extra that could be ignored. A typical marriage manual articulated the dogma: “Clitoral orgasm is immature, evades true feminine sexuality, and is considered a form of frigidity.”69
In 1971, Anne Koedt, from New York Radical Feminists, revived the Kinsey research, disseminating her summary in a mimeographed pamphlet, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” It was an underground sensation, distributed through feminist newspapers and women’s centers. Koedt did Kinsey one better: She went beyond the physiological findings to discern what was at stake in keeping the myth going. Koedt maintained that men’s needs, not women’s, defined what was taken as normal heterosexual coitus. Men were oblivious to female physiology and pressured their lovers, who ended up pretending to have vaginal orgasms as a tribute to phallic prowess, deferring to “whatever model of their sexuality is offered by men.”70
The shift to this explicit discussion of erotic pleasure came as an embarrassment to liberals. Theirs was a cautious, reticent view of the trouble that erotic license could bring to women: a mother’s view. Friedan, president of NOW, was deeply uncomfortable with sexual issues. Fighting her way out of the pervasive sexualization of the 1950s and the eroticization of the languorous housewife, Friedan saw women’s desire as the residue of a humiliating feminine obsession best banished by useful work in the world. In The Feminine Mystique, sexual desire smacks of women’s shameful needs, miasmic lusts, and needy bodies—factors that threaten to confirm the misogynistic images Friedan was trying to beat back. “The women’s movement was not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs and all the rest of it,” Friedan insisted to the end of her life. “Sexual politics was bad business.”71 The imbroglio over gay rights—a “minority” issue that became a majority one—was one factor that led to her leaving the NOW presidency in 1970.
But sexual politics overran liberal distaste in the long run, sending enhanced norms of female pleasure into a culture already booming with erotic images, confessions, needs, and profit motives. Whatever the unexpected outcomes, the step toward sexual knowledge was a little-noted but laudable contribution of women’s liberation at its boldest. Radical feminism took a huge step in actually naming the source of female pleasure—a subject that had always been shrouded in euphemisms or hidden altogether. In a culture that was turning sexual satisfaction into a life goal, open discussion of women’s erotic requirements and criticisms of men’s sexual habits had influence well beyond the radicals
who first proposed that orgasms, too, had politics.72
Beginning with the 1968 protest at the Miss America pageant, women’s liberation held up the beauty industry as a major profiteer from women’s distress about their bodies. The culturally induced fixation was another facet of the business of men. The female body itself, far from being a natural expression of irreducible difference, was revealed to be the product of exploited labor. The New Left and counterculture had prepared the ground, making a return to the natural body, including rejecting cosmetics and fashion, a prerequisite for repudiating bourgeois society. Revolutionaries wore work shirts, blue jeans, and India print skirts, not pleated skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars. But feminism took the animus further, into an understanding of how beauty standards reinforced male domination. The labor of looking good came to seem a quintessential act of creating oneself as the other to the male subject, woman fashioning herself as object of man’s desire.
A puritanical ethos of anti-beauty sat heavily on radical feminism in these years: Liberation was defined as abandoning makeup, stylish clothes, nylon stockings, high heels, and bras, all deemed trappings of heterosexual oppression. The act of renouncing, say, miniskirts or long hair—as in the political hair-cutting demonstration—became almost a requirement of seriousness. They were capitulations to patriarchy, emblems of false consciousness.73
It was an obsession particular to a movement of young women, for whom the rejection of beauty standards was as much a passion as fidelity to them would be for young women in the twenty-first century. “What’s wrong with that one?” the bemused editor John Mack Carter asked with genuine puzzlement at the Ladies’ Home Journal protest when a spokeswoman confronted him with an article on makeup techniques. “What’s wrong with your natural face?” was the outraged rejoinder. Had he ever considered how useless and draining all that work was for ordinary women? She lectured him about the futility of it all: “You put on gook and make up and lipstick and eyeshadow” and all for naught. And “there isn’t the glamour to accommodate it,” she concluded tremulously.74
The Feminist Promise Page 32