The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  49. Judith G. Coffin, “Historicizing the Second Sex,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25 (Winter 2007), pp. 123–48.

  50. Trade unionists, social feminists, and civil rights activists—the entire spectrum of American reformers—saw the NWP as something close to a collection of monomaniacs, “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” in Pauli Murray’s words. Pauli Murray transcript, Leila Rupp–Verta Taylor interviews, p. 9, Schlesinger Library.

  51. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, p. 184.

  52. Peterson, “The Kennedy Commission,” in Women in Washington: Advocates for Public Policy, ed. Irene Tinker (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1983), p. 29. She added that the 1950s courts were hostile to any labor legislation, so labor leaders and women’s advocates believed it was important to keep in place what standards already existed.

  53. Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, p. 62. On McCarthyism, redbaiting, anti-Semitism, and calculated racism, see chapter 7; Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 139.

  54. Peterson sums up the case against the NWP in “The Kennedy Commission,” in Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, pp. 21–34.

  55. Peterson, in Jo Freeman, “How ‘Sex’ Got into Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy,” adapted from Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 9 (March 1991), p. 4, available at www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/titlevii.htm.

  56. Peterson, “The Kennedy Commission,” in Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, p. 21.

  57. See Alice Kessler-Harris’s careful account of the commission in In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York, 2001), pp. 213–26.

  58. Hartmann, American Women in the 1940s, pp. 154–55.

  59. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, pp. 54–55, 171.

  60. Murray Transcript, Rupp-Taylor Interviews, p. 20. Murray was one of three African-American women to serve on the PCSW. The others were Dorothy Height, an appointed member of the commission, and Addie Wyatt, in one of the working groups.

  61. Ibid., p. 18. Murray’s extensive early history as a political activist is detailed in Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights (New York, 2007), pp. 250–55 and passim.

  62. Murray transcript, Rupp-Taylor interviews, p. 20.

  63. Stanton, Eighty Years and More, p. 148.

  64. The photo is reproduced in Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, p. 169.

  65. American Women: Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women 1963 (Washington, D.C., 1963).

  66. Winifred D. Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s (New York, 1988), p. 17; Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, p. 169. The interest in continuing education is evidence of the presence of Mary Bunting, who, when she was president of Douglass College at Rutgers, instituted continuing education there.

  67. Serena Mayeri, “Constitutional Choices: Legal Feminism and the Historical Dynamics of Change,” California Law Review 92 (May 2004), p. 768; American Women, p. 30. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, pp. 170–71, summarizes the recommendations. For a critical analysis of the commission, see Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, pp. 213–34.

  68. American Women, pp. 42, 47.

  69. Ibid., p. 2.

  70. Ibid., p. 19.

  71. See the union leader Kitty [Katherine] Ellickson on this point, quoted in Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, p. 160.

  72. Ibid.; American Women, p. 22.

  73. Kessler-Harris provides an account of the behind-the-scenes discussions, based on detailed archival research. In Pursuit of Equity, p. 213–38; Neuberger and Cohen, in ibid., p. 218.

  74. Peterson, “The Kennedy Commission,” Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, p. 29.

  75. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America (New York, 2000), p. 67.

  76. Eddy, “On Being Female,” New York Times, August 1, 1965.

  77. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963), p. 364.

  78. Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst, Mass., 1998).

  79. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 252, 256.

  80. Kenon Breazeale sees Friedan drawing on the popular magazine Esquire’s mockery of the pill-popping housewife. “In Spite of Women: ‘Esquire’ Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer,” Signs 20 (Autumn 1994), pp. 1–22.

  81. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 349–50.

  82. Ibid., p. 382. This is the “Epilogue,” added in a later edition.

  83. Donald Allen Robinson, “Two Movements in Pursuit of Equal Employment Opportunity,” Signs 4 (Spring 1979), pp. 414–16; Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New York, 1991), p. 44.

  84. House Congressional Record 110, February 8, 1964, p. 2577.

  85. Ibid., pp. 2578–80; Carl M. Brauer, “Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of Southern History 49 (February 1983), pp. 37–56; Freeman, “How ‘Sex’ Got into Title VII,” pp. 163–84; Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, p. 160.

  86. Robinson, “Two Movements in Pursuit of Equal Employment Opportunity.”

  87. Mayeri, “Constitutional Choices,” p. 775; Heller, in ibid., p. 773.

  88. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 123, 125, 127; Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 22–23. Confronted with complaints from the airline stewardesses (given the same job as stewards, but with a different title and at lower pay, and fired when they married or turned thirty-two), one commissioner stated that he was certain Congress never intended the EEOC to abolish distinctions between the sexes.

  On Hernandez see Marjie Driscoll, “Another Minority Group—Women,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1969; “In a Fair First: Old Stereotypes Are Her Target,” Washington Post, May 25, 1965, p. D1; Maggie Savoy, “NOW Lib Group Leader Too Busy to Be Angry,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1970, p. E1.

  89. “De-Sexing the Job Market,” New York Times, August 21, 1965, p. 20.

  90. “Letters to the Editor,” ibid., September 3, 1965.

  91. “Mockery of Law Seen,” Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 1966, p. 5.

  92. Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 45–47.

  93. Richard K. Berg, deputy counsel to EEOC, quoted in John Herbers, “For Instance, Can She Pitch for the Mets?,” New York Times, August 20, 1965, p. 1.

  94. “A Pillow, Please, Miss … Er, Mister: Unions Say Men Should Be Cabin Attendants on Planes,” New York Times, May 29, 1966, p. S20.

  95. “Pandora’s Box,” Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1965.

  96. “Protest Proposed on Women’s Jobs,” New York Times, October 13, 1965.

  97. Judith Paterson, Be Somebody: A Biography of Marguerite Rawalt (Austin, Texas, 1986), p. 123.

  98. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 57.

  99. http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/partyDiv.html; www.senate.gov/pagelayout/

  history/one_item_and_teasers/partydiv.htm.

  100. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, pp. 184–85; Murray and Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” George Washington Law Review 34 (December 1965), pp. 232–56.

  101. Kay Clarenbach Oral History, Midwestern Origins of the Women’s Movement Project, Typescript, Schlesinger Library; NOW list of charter members, September 1966, NOW Papers, ibid., Box 1, Folder 29. Pauli Murray describes Dorothy Haener’s provision of UAW support in a letter to Clarenbach, November 21, 1967, Murray Papers.

  102. Clarenbach Oral History, Midwestern Origins of the Women’s Movement, p. 274.

  103. Ibid., p. 278.

  104. Charter of the National Organization for Women, http://feminist.org/research/chronicles/early1.html.

  105. List of charter members, NOW Papers.

 
106. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 57.

  107. Ibid., p. 63; Pittsburgh Press Company v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, 413 U.S. 376 (1973).

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE REVOLT OF THE DAUGHTERS

  1. Ellen Maslow, “I Dreamed I Took Myself Seriously,” Up from Under 1 (May–June 1970), p. 22.

  2. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), p. 297; see also p. 367 for Baker’s protofeminism. See also Anne Standley, “The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers & Torchbearers 1941–1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Wood (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), pp. 183–202. The prevalence of local women also contributed to a sense of women’s importance. Fannie Lou Hamer is the best-known grassroots organizer, but there were others from the rural South who came to the fore. Chana Kai Lee notes that Hamer “did not regard herself as a feminist, not by anybody’s definition.” Yet “she was a ‘nonfeminist’ whose life and powerful presence had undeniably feminist consequences. In this sense, she was like many other black women of her generation and of other historical periods and places.” For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, Ill., 1999), p. 172.

  3. The writers were Mary King and Casey Hayden, respected white members of SNCC. There is speculation that African-American women were also involved, but that King and Hayden were the only writers willing (eventually) to come forth. See “SNCC Position Paper,” reprinted in Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1987), pp. 567–69. King’s account of the episode is ibid., chapter 12.

  4. Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Boston, 2006), pp. 23–40; King, Freedom Song; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979), pp. 85–87; Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York, 2001), pp. 332–36.

  5. Exhibit on 1965–66 voter registration drive, Claiborne County, Mississippi, courthouse, August 2007.

  6. Wini Breines relates the furious retrospective debates among former SNCC workers when Sara Evans’s account of SNCC appeared in Personal Politics. The Trouble Between Us, chapter 1; Washington, in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis, 1989), p. 32; Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, p. 309. See Freedom’s Daughters, p. 309, and Echols, Daring to Be Bad, pp. 29–34, for nuanced accounts of the tensions. Many participants, including King and Hayden themselves, insisted that Evans overstated the women’s criticisms.

  7. Unidentified staffer, in Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, p. 309.

  8. “A Kind of Memo from Casey Hayden and Mary King to a Number of Women in Other Freedom Movements,” reprinted in King, Freedom Song, pp. 571–74. It reached women in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) right before the big SDS “rethinking” conference at the University of Illinois in December 1965: Todd Gitlin, personal communication. Liberation, a leading New Left magazine at the time, reprinted the memo in April 1966.

  9. Rosalyn Baxandall traces one thread of African-American activity in “Re-Visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists,” Feminist Studies 27 (Spring 2001), pp. 225–45.

  10. Years later, a few black women voiced second thoughts. See Cynthia Washington and Faye Bellamy, in Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, pp. 335–36.

  11. McEldowney, in Rosen, World Split Open, p. 119; more of the passage is in Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987; 1993), p. 368.

  12. SDS Women, “To the Women of the Left” (1967), in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York, 2000), p. 28.

  13. There are so many stories that the event is legendary. For a good first-person account, see Carol Hanisch, “Two Letters from the Women’s Liberation Movement,” in The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New York, 1998), pp. 197–202.

  14. Including Boston and Washington, D.C.; Chicago and Minneapolis; San Francisco and Seattle.

  15. Snitow, in Rosen, World Split Open, pp. 200–201.

  16. Karla Jay’s memory of a statement that began a meeting with Redstockings. Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York, 1999), p. 53. The phrasing replicates a point in the Redstockings Manifesto, reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York, 1970), p. 533.

  17. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’ ” pp. 131–58; Meredith Tax, “Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life,” pamphlet in Nancy Grey Osterud Collection, Schlesinger Library; New York Radical Women, “Principles,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, p. 520; Amy Kesselman, with Heather Booth, Vivian Rothstein, and Naomi Weisstein, “Our Gang of Four: Friendship and Women’s Liberation,” in The Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 44.

  18. The one available book on the history of feminism was Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle (1959). Everywhere that one finds accounts of the history of women’s rights in these years, there are traces of the Flexner volume. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, called upon it in her summary of the history of women’s rights in her brief for Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), the groundbreaking Supreme Court case on sex discrimination.

  19. Quoted in Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p. 120.

  20. Willis, in ibid.

  21. Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 3.

  22. Guillermoprieto, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (New York, 2005), p. 38; Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation (New York, 1970), p. 140.

  23. Marilyn Bender, “Women’s Lib Headquarters,” New York Times, July 1, 1970.

  24. Kathy Davis, The Making of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Durham, N.C., 2007), pp. 20–23.

  25. Davidson, “An ‘Oppressed Majority’ Demands Its Rights,” Life, December 12, 1970, pp. 66–78.

  26. For example, “The analogy is racism, where the white racist compensates his feeling of unworthiness by creating an image of the black man … which is inferior to him.” See Anne Koedt, “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” pamphlet, Schlesinger Library. There are several versions of the Koedt essay.

  27. No More Fun and Games, no. 3 (November 1969), p. 60.

  28. Belkin, “Scarlett O’Hara and Me,” Up from Under 1 (January–February 1971), p. 18; Doris Conklin, “Investigating Nancy Drew,” ibid., pp. 22–23.

  29. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c.1974 (New York, 1998), chapter 13. In Germany, where radical feminism emerged a few years later, the pitch of anger was closer to the Americans’, driven by fervent need to repudiate the sins of the fathers in fascism. See Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J., 2005), chapter 4.

  30. Densmore, “A Year of Living Dangerously: 1968,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 72.

  31. O’Reilly, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” New York, December 20, 1971; the article was reprinted in the spring 1972 issue of Ms. See Amy Erdman Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), pp. 161–62, 222.

  32. Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, writing at the time, allude to the obvious fact of women radicals’ indifference to formal politics. See Hole and Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York, 1971), pp. 91–92.

  33. Susan Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’: A Member of the Women’s Liberation Movement Explains What It’s All About,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1970, p. 129.


  34. This is another oft-recounted event. Densmore gives her account from the Cell 16 end in “Year of Living Dangerously,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 85.

  35. Jane Kramer, “Founding Cadre,” New Yorker, November 28, 1970, p. 54; Tax, in Rosen, World Split Open, p. 84; Murray to Aileen Hernandez, September 18, 1969, Folder 1895, Box 105, Murray Papers; to Al Reitman, November 24, 1971, Box 2, Folder 30, Murray Papers.

  36. Dell’Olio, “Home Before Sundown,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 157.

  37. At Newsweek in 1970, when female employees filed a grievance with the EEOC, 34 of the 35 researchers were female and 1 of 52 reporters was a woman. See Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 110–11; Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 185.

  38. See Nan Robertson, The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times (New York, 1992), for an overview of the situation of women. There was a high-profile exception to the rule in broadcasting—Barbara Walters, whom NBC promoted in 1965 to a leading spot on the Today show. Walters’s ascendancy prompted Gloria Steinem, then a journalist, to take notice, and concoct a list of how-tos about how to replicate “the patterns of the few who have made it.” See Steinem, “Nylons in the Newsroom,” New York Times, November 7, 1965.

  39. Wade interview, Washington Press Club Foundation, Women in Journalism Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, p. 133.

  40. Ibid., p. 68.

  41. Phone interview with Lindsay Van Gelder, April 8, 2005.

  42. Wade interview, Women in Journalism Oral History Project, p. 142. For a description of how these charges could fly at even a distinguished veteran, see Eileen Shanahan interview 9, ibid., p. 177.

  43. Sophy Burnham, “Women’s Lib: The Idea You Can’t Ignore,” Redbook, September 1970, p. 191. A famous reversal occurred in 1970 at Newsweek, where a feature writer—one of the few women on staff—wrote an article on feminism the editors rejected as biased. They then brought in from the outside a writer with no experience covering politics—but married to an editor—to rewrite it. She, too, confounded the editors by producing an approving piece, capped with an announcement that she was now a feminist. See Helen Dudar, “Women’s Lib: The War on ‘Sexism,’ ” Newsweek, March 23, 1970. Flora Davis recounts the episode in Moving the Mountain, pp. 110–11.