What to make of feminine beauty and fashion has always been a stumbling block for feminists. Since Mary Wollstonecraft, women’s rights thinkers have had difficulty considering the desire to look good. Wollstonecraft was a lovely and sensual young woman, and surely a sight to behold when she was in the full flush of love. But she understood—as did many who came later—that beauty had its hidden, grim visage. Even for the blessed, it was only full-blown for a short time; and for the rest of womankind, the masses of ordinary-looking women, it was a mask that must be artfully prepared, because women’s marriage prospects and thus their entire well-being depended on attracting men. Wollstonecraft, with her years spent at the edges of rich women’s lives watching the marriage market grind on, learned to despise the artful getup of femininity as debased labor, and the “weak woman of fashion” as the lowest of the sex. “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison.” Sarah Grimké, too, child of the South Carolina aristocracy, had only disparaging words for the “butterflies of the fashionable world” of the kind she would have known in planter society. “They are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction; hence to attract the notice and win the attention of men, by their external charms, is the chief business of fashionable girls.”75
Could women look good for any reason other than to please and attract men? In the 1960s, the answer was no. Did sexy clothes necessarily make you a slave to male fantasy? That women might want to attract other women was only barely considered, and then the assumption was that lesbians had no need to look sexy. Naomi Weisstein, showy, fearless, and funny keyboard player for the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band (and a Harvard Ph.D. to boot), looked back on the anti-beauty ethos of woman’s liberation as marvelous. “It was no longer an imperative of nature that we paint our faces and squeeze our breasts into little cones.”76 No more hours in front of the mirror; no more worries about breasts that were too big or too small.
But the problem was that too many women fell out of feminist calculations because they wore lipstick and high heels. Certainly the dogma that no feminist should shave her legs had limited appeal. It was another divide between moderates and radicals, a tension between those who put on nylons, suits, and prim pumps as body armor and those who threw themselves into battle in jeans and peasant blouses, long hair flying, their contempt for looking good an advertisement for blazing noncompliance. Friedan, belligerently outspoken, sounded like a nagging mother when she put into words the disapproval that others of her generation felt, deploring the imperative “to make yourself ugly, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop wearing makeup or pretty dresses—any skirts at all.” On the morning of the Women’s Strike for Equality, an amused journalist reported that Friedan was late for her interview because she was held up at the hairdresser’s. “I don’t want people to think Women’s Lib girls don’t care about how they look,” Friedan prissily informed The New York Times. “We should try to be as pretty as we can. It’s good for our self-image and it’s good politics.”77 Anti-beauty would always aggravate Friedan, who thought it a diversion from more important challenges the movement faced. She was not wrong. To shave your legs or not was the least of women’s problems post-1968.
Yet the idea was powerful. In revealing how much labor went into looking naturally feminine, anti-beauty showed that the female body as women knew it was bound up with male power. The radicals were onto something, at Ladies’ Home Journal and in general: The beauty industry makes fools of women, takes their money, and leaves them with last year’s clothes and half-used jars of face cream, sooner or later “without the glamour to accommodate it.”
The bald proposition that “men oppress women” contained the unspoken corollary that all men oppress all women. Never in feminism’s long history had advocates given so little room to the prospects for working with some men for change. The early-twentieth-century idea of the human sex, the vibrant connection between New Women and New Men, was gone. Rather, women’s liberation cast relationships with men as an unfortunate habit to be kicked. In contrast, liberals shied away from the purge mentality. They preferred to temper their criticisms of men with the language of roles, since role theory implied that both sexes were trapped in dysfunctional behavior and both sexes could change. NOW’s position on including men as fellow fighters for equal rights remained strenuously “optimistic and consensual,” writes Linda Kerber.78
For women’s liberation, though, there was no debating the matter. The faith that it was just a matter of men relearning roles was pallid beside the dramaturgy of perfidious male chauvinism. Radical texts rebuked men for their loutish behavior in bed, their laziness when it came to housework, their cluelessness with children, their egotism, woeful characters, and selfish ways—in short, their characters and their persons. “Actually, being oppressive seems to be their natural state,” agreed the middle-class college graduates featured in a New Yorker investigation of women’s liberation. The worst men—wife beaters, rapists, misogynists—were in some sense Representative Men, “different in degree but not in kind from the behavior of most men.”79
The exposé of “the masculine mystique,” as Dorothy Sue Cobble calls it, was a breakthrough that promised more thoroughgoing change than when the burden was on women. The critique of masculinity gave emotional focus to an unstructured movement by creating a multitude of battlefields with easily identifiable antagonists. There was no “problem without a name,” as Friedan had diagnosed the situation. The problem’s name was sexism—the word first cropped up in 1968—and the men who profited from it.80
But in the short run, the ideology hardened into judgments that had little relation to women’s actual lives, gay or straight. Men were the enemy, yet women continued to live with men in parallel time, constructing lives with fathers and brothers, male friends straight and gay, husbands, ex-husbands, co-parents, lovers, workmates, and co-conspirators. Virtually all women were connected to men in important ways. Yet feminism only acknowledged those valences that were negative and ignored women’s investment in a better future. Lesbians remained marginally more open about relationships with men: The gay liberation movement was the one place on the left where feminists could acknowledge imagined brothers. Women’s liberation exempted African-American men, too, from the general indictment. White feminists paid obeisance to the strength and importance of black men’s and women’s ties, but at the risk of constructing a spurious common cause with black men, whom they assumed to be exempt from male privilege, an idea that was highly irritating to black women.81
Modernity had long assigned a central role to the mixing of the sexes. Radical feminism’s contribution was to show that the collaboration was so asymmetrical that it was impossible to square with equality. But the inability to come to terms with heterosexual love and heterosocial friendship and kinship created a blind spot, which blocked a full and more complete vision of what feminist relations between the sexes might be in this world, not a distant utopia. Radicals were unable to create a language that looked to a life that women could honorably live with men—sexually, collegially, familially, parentally, and fraternally. Life and love with men, gay and straight alike, proceeded as underground activity, the yearning, amity, and—yes—tenderness across the sex line skirted in consciousness-raising circles, untheorized by the exciting ideas of the times.
Betty Friedan was aware of the tendency, having already been branded a sellout and homophobe for her friendly comments about heterosexuality. She tried to keep the lines open, assuring her public in 1973 that feminism “will make it possible in this world for men and women to make love, not war.” Boston’s ascetic Cell 16 reprinted Friedan’s comment and contemptuously tagged it, as if with a graffiti smear, “NOW LESS THAN EVER!”82
In itself, the female separatism of women’s liberation was unremarkable. What was distinct was the relegation of men to a useless, in fac
t an invidious, position. Earlier feminists were vague about the role individual men played in the institutions that oppressed them, preferring to protest the power of anonymous patriarchs rather than snoop around too much in any particular family jurisdiction. They generally treated husbands, brothers, and male friends as invited guests to a better world.
But could that world be composed of women alone? Of course not, which leads to the question: What were radical feminists thinking? Some of the extreme language was tongue-in-cheek. “Women of the World Unite—We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Men!” “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Were men going to wither away, as the state was supposed to do after the proletarian revolution? Not really, although brash young women fed off one another’s audacity to induce mass hallucination about what the future was going to look like.
Black power authorized the sardonic tone, because this was the attitude militants took at the moment toward whites, including liberal civil rights supporters. As the rage of black power shattered the beloved community, the rage of women’s liberation separated the sheep from the goats, real feminists from the trimmers and weak sisters who put their priorities with women second. The stress on omnipresent racism and sexism forced attention on how deep both ran. But in terms of the alliances, compromises, and practical goals that propel liberal democratic politics, the attachment to denunciation and black-and-white moralizing was costly.
In this feminist family quarrel, sisterhood became the one metaphorical bond free of the taint of patriarchy. The title of Sisterhod Is Powerful (1970), Robin Morgan’s bestselling anthology of women’s liberation texts, gives a sense of the investment, ties between women accorded solidarity and strength nonpareil. For a short time in the headiest days, it seemed as though sisters born again in the grace of feminism could live in Herland, laying the foundations for a redeemed society to which others, once cleansed of false consciousness, could immigrate.
As sisterhood took on added meaning, lesbianism turned into a political statement—a tactic—for heterosexual refuseniks. “We must move out of our old living patterns and into new ones,” announced The Furies, a lesbian-feminist vanguard group. “Monogamy can be cast aside; no one will ‘belong’ to one another.”83 Self-consciously political lesbianism overlapped with “woman-defined” ways of living and the promotion of the “woman-identified woman” as an ideal. Political lesbianism, however, was oddly detached from and at times even antagonistic to longtime lesbians.
In the first years of the women’s movement, lesbian identity was muted, sometimes choked. With so much interest in male shortcomings, lesbians’ grievances didn’t count for much—after all, they were not living in the “belly of the beast.” NOW gained a reputation as hostile to gay women, whose open presence threatened to compromise its respectability: Friedan would not even list the Daughters of Bilitis, a staid lesbian rights organization in existence since 1955, among the sponsors of a 1969 event in New York; she supposedly invoked a “lavender menace” that would ruin NOW. Gay radicals turned Friedan’s lavender menace remark into a token of everything that was repressed and repressive about liberals.84
Once the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion launched gay liberation, though, lesbians took on a different role, as a heroic force for sexual liberation. Last of the radical movements to surface, gay liberation sent off fireworks of self-discovery, rapturous declarations, and bacchanalia. “It was a movement for the right to love,” the critic Paul Berman admiringly observes. “The gay movement was the most romantic political campaign that ever existed.” In the exhilarating atmosphere, lesbian lives seemed exalted: exclusively female and wonderfully sensuous and egalitarian, free of deadly phalluses and the sexists who sported them. Lesbian life blossomed outside the customary settings of gay bars and private parties in the more open air of a political subculture: Semi-political parties and dances, renowned for their sexy atmosphere, great dancing, and general good times, attracted gays, straights, and bisexuals. Knots of zealots—many of them new to lesbian life—promulgated the dictate that every woman could be a lesbian if she broke the chains of self-hatred forged in living with the oppressor. “It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other which is at the heart of women’s liberation,” rhapsodized Radicalesbians.85
After 1969, lesbianism changed from a minority identity to be tolerated to an ideal and, among insiders, the one route for the truly committed. Anne Koedt advised in “The Politics of Orgasm” that if women understood that they didn’t need penises to have pleasure, they might consider men expendable. “Lesbian sexuality, in rubbing one clitoris against another,” Koedt expounded in her dry, clinical way, “could make an excellent case … for the extinction of the male organ.” What Koedt phrased tentatively turned into the belief that lesbianism was the revolutionary choice, “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion,” exhorted the manifesto “The Woman-Identified Woman.” The spirit was evangelical, promising the grace of a woman-centered world. “Devote all your energies to women, in an extreme form, to lesbians alone. Radicalesbians hope to persuade ‘straight’ women to become lesbians and lesbians to a radical political position.”86
And what of women who already were lesbians? Ironically, lesbian-feminism was less sympathetic to those who saw sexual desire for other women, rather than political conviction, as the core of their identity. By watering down lesbian sex to sensuous feelings rather than acknowledging a distinctive genital eros, the figure of the woman-identified woman masked a wariness of “dykes,” as women with lesbian histories differentiated themselves from the politicals. Karla Jay, a Redstockings member who helped found the Gay Liberation Front, saw the apotheosis of the woman-identified woman as daring in some respects, but damaging in others. The idealization disguised, she believed, a discomfort with women having sex with women, eliding sexual pleasure with tender touching, and demoting genital pleasure as something male. Lesbians went along with the ideology because, Jay remembers, “our primary goal was to make a political point, and back then the vision of a lesbian in bed conjured up an image of perversion, not radicalism.” Some politicals suggested that lesbianism itself might wither away in the coming revolution: When patriarchal constructs were gone, gay sex, too, would disappear and everyone could have sex with everyone else.87
In places where there was no critical mass of longtime lesbians, the self-styled woman-identified revolutionaries looked on older lesbians who frequented gay bars as perverted. In Dayton, Ohio, for example, feminists spurned the one lesbian bar as seamy, even as they heralded woman-centered sexuality. “Those lesbians weren’t conscious lesbians,” scoffed a woman who had discovered she was one. “They were old-world dykes—hard-drinking, hard people… [who] didn’t give a hoot about feminism.” Jay remembers her uneasiness with the disguised assumption that, in the absence of a penis, women lovers really “didn’t do too much,” and that any woman whose consciousness had been raised could become a lesbian, because feminism held that “our definition did not depend on sexual acts.”88
Older lesbians had something to gain from women’s liberation, although they could be uneasy with the brash style and habits of confrontation. But they bridled at the barely muted contempt for lesbian history and lives, especially for butch/femme women, judged to be trapped in patriarchal roles. “I had behind me a decade of lesbian living and loving that formed a complex sense of self—criminal, erotic, independent, exiled,” wrote Joan Nestle, describing her discomfort with newly minted lesbian-feminists in New York in the late 1960s.89 Nestle took exception to the 1970s idea—which persisted well into the next decade—that butch and femme identities were oppressive sex roles that older lesbians fell into because of false consciousness. The idea that lesbianism was a choice and a kinder, gentler form of eros was at first bothersome, then offensive, to those who had spent years protecting their intimate lives from humiliating and dangerous exposure and treasuring the desire that defined who they
were. So was the idea that feminism was “the validating starting point of healthy lesbian culture” and that all that came before was vaguely twisted. It was an odd replication of mainstream homophobia in the name of a purified sisterhood.
The romance of the woman-identified woman stopped short of mothers. To a generation of daughters bent on resisting the housewife’s degradation and the wife’s ignoble compromises, it was difficult to see traditional motherhood as anything but a life sentence to patriarchy. The compulsion was to dissolve motherhood’s centrality to feminine identity, to make it count less in time, emotional energy, and bodily wear and tear. Motherhood seemed to be about concessions to others, not revolution. It was most certainly the state that feminists wanted to escape, not that which they wanted to become. The tension runs deep in the tradition, but it was acute in the face-off between the generation of women who lived out the feminine mystique and their willful, wayward daughters. “The mother is the one … through or against whom we figure out what we might have become,” writes literary critic Nancy Miller.90
It was not that women’s liberation was anti-mother, or that there were no actual mothers involved, but rather that motherhood seemed a state that was irrelevant, perhaps inimical, to sisterhood. “There was an under-the-surface condescension toward mothers,” acknowledged Ellen Willis. “On some level was the … feeling that women who were breaking with traditional roles were the ones who would be your real allies.” Women’s liberation perpetuated daughters in revolt, not mothers in thrall. “I saw having children as the great trap that completely took away your freedom,” she added. The intensity differed across the country and the ocean—Lynne Segal, for example, writes of the importance of mothers in London women’s liberation at the time. In the United States, some groups were more interested and sympathetic than others. But however protagonists assessed the feeling, it is undeniable that overall, discussion was indifferent or antipathetic. The Newest of New Women was unfettered, free of family obligations, endowed with the revolutionary fervor of picking and choosing and able to follow the dictates of raised consciousness wherever they might take her.91
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