44. Jill Johnston, in Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York, 1999), p. 179; Anselma Dell’Olio, “Home Before Sundown,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 158; Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, pp. 133–35; Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 45.
45. Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful,’ ” p. 27 and passim; Alix Kates Shulman, “A Marriage Disagreement, or Marriage by Other Means,” pp. 285–86, and Dell’Olio, “Home Before Sundown,” p. 160, in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, on the media attention in New York. I myself, an ingenue from Ohio, was interviewed by the CBS Evening News when I came to Princeton University in fall 1969 as one of the first “coeds” on that historically all-male campus. The next year, with nothing remarkable in hand except admission to Princeton, I was invited to chat about feminism on a New York talk show, along with the brilliant New York feminist Catharine Stimpson, then a Barnard professor, and Celestine Ware, the author that year of a pathbreaking book on black women and feminism.
46. Post and Siegel, “Legislative Constitutionalism and Section Five Power,” p. 1998.
47. Time, September 7, 1970, pp. 16–23; New Yorker, September 5, 1970; Life, September 4, 1970; Judy Klemesrud, “Coming Wednesday: A Herstory-Making Event,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1970. Klemesrud tried in a half-humorous way to quell the rumors: “Although some of the feminists have vowed to withhold sex from their men on Wednesday, most regard abstention as an unimportant part of the day’s activities.” Klemesrud died in 1985 at the age of forty-six. At her funeral, Friedan said, “We were hers and she was ours.” Friedan, Life So Far: A Memoir (New York, 2000), p. 241.
48. On Brown, see Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 71. Karla Jay describes Brown as the Jay Gatsby of the movement, a personality ever transforming her biography and origins. Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, pp. 47–48. Brownmiller has her born in rural Pennsylvania, but in 2006 Rita Mae Brown alluded to patrician origins on her website, mentioning the foxhunting country of Virginia. On Kennedy, see Flo Kennedy, Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times (New York, 1976).
Diane Gerrity provides a view of Cell 16’s martial arts training in “Miss Superfist,” Atlantic Monthly 225 (March 1970), pp. 91–93. For sheer sensation, however, no one topped Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, a former prostitute and borderline personality turned performance artist who was a hanger-on in the avant-garde circle around Andy Warhol and followed up on the SCUM Manifesto’s agenda (“SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM”) by shooting Warhol and a male associate in a showdown intended to eliminate several of the avant-garde men who had badly used her. It was a crime committed by a disturbed woman against misogynist men, and in its melodrama it was a deeply New York episode, but for a time Solanas was a feminist heroine, and important figures like Flo Kennedy rose to her defense.
49. “Woman’s Place,” Atlantic Monthly 225 (March 1970), pp. 18–126; Bowen, “… We’ve Never Asked a Woman Before,” ibid.; for the middle-of-the-road positions see Elizabeth Janeway, “Happiness and the Right to Choose,” pp. 118–19; Anne Bernays, “What Are You Supposed to Do if You Like Children?,” pp. 107–9.
50. “Women on the March,” Time, September 7, 1970.
51. Marlene Sanders Collection, Folder 5194, Schlesinger Library.
52. Shanahan Interview 6, Women in Journalism Oral History Project, p. 108. Top editors of both sexes at Harper’s, a monthly journal of opinion, walked out in protest over the exclusion of women from an important meeting. See New York Times, June 4, 1970, p. 47; Newsweek action described in Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 110–11. For a summary of the important media protests in 1970 see Hole and Levine, Rebirth of Feminism, pp. 252–70.
53. Ladies’ Home Journal Writers’ Collective, “Inside Ladies’ Home Journal,” newsreel at Schlesinger Library. See Jay’s recollections of the event in Lavender Menace, pp. 113–20; Brownmiller, In Our Time, pp. 84–92. What stands out for Jay and Brownmiller is the moment Shulamith Firestone jumped on Carter’s desk. Whether this was before or after the newsreel was shot is unclear. See also Echols, Daring to Be Bad, pp. 195–96.
54. Rosen, World Split Open, p. 212; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p. 83.
55. “Redstockings Manifesto,” reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, p. 535.
56. Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful,’ ” p. 230; Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 5; Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, p. 51. Jay’s account avoids the idealizations of most remembrances and combines sympathy with an acute awareness of the groups’ callowness and clumsiness with many of the difficult confessions that participants made and the mental health issues they raised.
57. Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, p. 53. Jay had the good fortune to join a group overseen by the novelist Alix Kates Shulman, then a prominent member of New York Redstockings, whose curiosity and kindness helped the women open up to one another. See also Nora Ephron’s funny essay on her New York group in Crazy Salad (New York, 1975), pp. 69–75.
58. Lauren Berlant chronicles and analyzes the expression of this age-old practice in depoliticized form in the early twenty-first century in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C., 2008).
59. Letters to the Editor, Off Our Backs, October 25, 1970.
60. Cronan, “Marriage,” Notes from the Third Year (New York, 1971), p. 65; interviewee, in Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful,’ ” p. 136.
61. Maslow, “I Dreamed I Took Myself Seriously,” p. 22; Judy Syfers, “Why I Want a Wife,” Notes from the Third Year, p. 13, reprinted in Ms. (December 1971); “Putting Hubby Through,” Off Our Backs, November 1972; No More Fun and Games 4, p. 34. For a fascinating reconsideration of the essay from a lesbian whose spouse is a stay-at-home partner, see Sara Sarasohn, “Once Political, Now Just Practical,” New York Times, August 30, 2009, Style section, p. 8.
62. Friday Night Study Group Excerpts, April 3, 1970, No More Fun and Games 4, April 1970, p. 109; Kempton, “Cutting Loose,” Esquire, July 1970, p. 57; Shulamith Firestone, “Women Rap About Sex,” Notes from the First Year, ed. New York Radical Women (New York, 1968), pp. 8–10.
63. Redstockings Manifesto, Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, p. 534.
64. The exception was Virginia Woolf, who wrote movingly about charwomen sinking their souls into their own kitchens in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Alison Light points out that the domestic servant was the New Woman’s invisible twin in the 1910s and examines Woolf’s ambivalence. See Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (New York, 2008).
65. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 342, 348.
66. Redstockings [Patricia Mainardi], “The Politics of Housework,” in Liberation Now! Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Deborah Babcox and Madeline Belkin (New York, 1971), pp. 110–13.
67. Maslow, “I Dreamed I Took Myself Seriously,” p. 22; Shulman, “A Marriage Agreement,” Up from Under 1 (August/September 1970), pp. 5–8.
68. “The Marriage Experiment,” Life, April 28, 1972; Susan Edmiston, “How to Write Your Own Marriage Contract,” New York, December 20, 1971; Ms., Spring 1972. See Shulman, “A Marriage Disagreement, or Marriage by Other Means,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, pp. 284–303; she sums up the publication history on p. 294; “A Challenge to Every Marriage,” Redbook, September 1972, pp. 89 ff. Shulman identified the extremes as “Hallelujah!” on the one one hand; “revolting” and “against God and Nature” on the other. Most letters came from thoughtful readers who “seemed to be testing it against the circumstances of their own lives to see whether it [the Agreement] might make any sense for them.” Whether or not they thought it was a good idea, most—far more than Shulman expected—thought equality was necessary between spouses. The public response reiterated the companionate ideal; the question was how to achieve it.
69. Marie Robinso
n, The Power of Sexual Surrender (1959), in Off Our Backs, March 1972, p. 9.
70. Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” reprinted in Radical Feminism, ed. Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York, 1973), pp. 198–207. See also Susan Lydon, “The Politics of Orgasm,” reprinted from Ramparts as a mimeographed pamplet c. 1971, Schlesinger Library, and in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, pp. 197–205. Judy Davis’s bleak first-person account from 1972, reprinted in Dear Reader, ed. Baxandall and Gordon, pp. 155–57, describes the act of faking an orgasm.
71. Friedan, Life So Far, pp. 223, 249.
72. Susan Brownmiller mentioned that “Have you ever lied about an orgasm?” became a popular question in consciousness-raising groups. “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful,’ ” p. 134.
73. The haircutting incident is reported in many places. See Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 63; see also Friedan, Life So Far, p. 220.
74. Ladies’ Home Journal Collective, Newsreel. The pernicious influence of women’s magazines was a common topic in the feminist press, stemming from their omnipresence in middle-class homes as well as Friedan’s emphasis on their role in upholding the Feminine Mystique. For a typical women’s liberation critique, see “Women’s Magazines and Womanhood, 1969,” No More Fun and Games 3 (November 1969), pp. 30–31; no. 4 (April 1970), pp. 34–42.
75. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 44; Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, p. 56.
76. Weisstein, in Kesselman, “Our Gang of Four,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 40.
77. Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 138, 249–50; “Leading Feminist Puts Hairdo Before Strike,” New York Times, August 27, 1970, p. 30.
78. See, for instance, Lucy Komisar, The New Feminism (New York, 1972), p. 21, a major summary of liberal feminism that stresses how oppressive sex roles can be for men and discusses the “sensitivity” of teenage boys. “Optimistic and consensual” is Linda Kerber’s description of Pauli Murray’s writing in the early and mid-1960s. No Constitutional Right, p. 193.
79. In Kramer, “Founding Cadre,” p. 85; a description of rapists in a special “Rape!” section, Off Our Backs (March 1972), pp. 8–9.
80. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, pp. 172–73. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first use of “sexism” to Caroline Bird, in a speech she gave before the Episcopal Church Executive Council in Greenwich, Connecticut, on September 25, 1968. The first Library of Congress entry using the word in its title, a U.S. Senate study on women’s employment in Congress called Sexism on Capitol Hill, appeared two years later. A LOC search reveals that between 1973 and 1983 there were roughly three to four books published each year whose titles contained the word; the first book to be placed under the subject heading “sexism” in the LOC catalog was Vivian Gornick’s Women in Sexist Society (1971).
81. On marriage and heterosexual relations, Ellen Willis commented to Alice Echols that “there was this rebellion and resentment against the lives that in many ways we were, in fact, living.” In Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p. 146. In the 1970s, the dogma that men were enemies reached its reductio ad absurdum on the fringe, when organizers of a feminist countercultural music festival debated whether to ban boy children (including babies and toddlers) and ended up confining them and their mothers at night to a campsite fourteen miles away from the festival grounds. See Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York, 2003), p. 153.
82. No More Fun and Games 6 (May 1973), p. 140. See Alice Wolfson’s comments on this tendency in “Clenched Fist, Open Heart,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, pp. 277, 281.
83. Rita Mae Brown, “Living with Other Women,” Radical Therapist (1971), quoted in Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 103.
84. See Brown’s bemused reminiscences of NOW’s homophobia in Rita Will, p. 228. The fullest account is in Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 264–67. Susan Brownmiller thought NOW’s fear of lesbians was overblown, although she showed her own disparaging attitudes in disputing it: “A lavender herring, perhaps, but surely no clear and present danger.” See Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful.’ ”
85. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996), p. 165; Echols analyzes the implications of the shift in Daring to Be Bad, pp. 214–18; Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in Liberation Now!, ed. Babcox and Belkin, pp. 287–93.
86. Koedt, “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” mimeographed pamphlet in my possession. Interestingly, this wording was toned down in the published versions, with “extinction of the male organ” removed. See “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in Liberation Now!, ed. Babcox and Belkin, pp. 287–92; “The Soul Selects: A Separate Way,” Off Our Backs (January 1972), p. 7.
87. Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, p. 141. “Political lesbians,” one angry group of “real lesbians” charged, were uninterested in actually having sex. “Anonymous Realesbians, Politicalesbians and the Women’s Liberation Movement,” in Dear Sisters, pp. 109–10.
88. Judith Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland (Columbus, Ohio, 2002), p. 53; Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, pp. 141–42.
89. Nestle, “A Fem’s Feminist History,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 340; “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” A Restricted Country (1987; New York, 2003), pp. 95–99.
90. Miller, “Public Statements, Private Lives: Academic Memoirs of the Nineties,” Signs 22 (Winter 1997), p. 999.
91. Willis, in M. Rivka Polatnick, “Diversity in Women’s Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood,” Signs 21 (Spring 1996), p. 691; Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (London, 2007).
92. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York, 1970), chapter 4, pp. 226–29; “Day Care Centers,” No More Fun and Games 3, p. 105; Polatnick, “Women’s Liberation Ideology,” p. 692; Vicki Cohn Pollard, “The Five of Us (With a Little Help from Our Friends),” in Dear Sisters, ed. Baxandall and Gordon, pp. 222–24. See also Dana Densmore’s candid comments on the antimother views of Cell 16, which published No More Fun and Games. “A Year of Living Dangerously,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, p. 87.
93. Betty Rollin, “Motherhood: Who Needs It?,” Look, September 22, 1970. The article took off from feminist sociologist Jessie Bernard’s research that fathers could be just as good as mothers at mothering; a child could prosper with multiple caretakers; and maternal instinct was a myth.
94. Baxandall, “Catching the Fire,” in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow p. 219; Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York, 1996), pp. 34–38; Lucy Komisar, The New Feminism, p. 59. For two different views of the importance of child care and respect for mothers, see Barbara Winslow’s recollections of Seattle and Alice Wolfson’s of Washington, D.C., in Feminist Memoir Project, ed. DuPlessis and Snitow, pp. 271, 278.
95. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, p. 233; Louise Gross and Phyllis Taube Greenleaf, “Why Day Care?,” in Dear Sisters, ed. Baxandall and Gordon, pp. 234–36. Baxandall argues that child care and motherhood were much more important than has been allowed, and stresses the efforts of early black women’s rights groups around children and child care. “Re-Visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative,” p. 234; also Baxandall, in Hole and Levine, Rebirth of Feminism, p. 312. Evans describes centers that focused on sex role socialization in Tidal Wave, p. 56.
96. Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976; New York, 1995), p. 36. Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1989) movingly explores these intellectual patterns and the psychic undertow. See especially chapters 4 and 5 on the “feminist family romance.”
97. Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 21. On the tragic view of motherhood more generally in feminist literature of the period see Nan
cy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York, 1982).
98. Kramer, “Founding Cadre,” p. 72; Griffin, “Feminism and Motherhood,” in Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, ed. Moira Davey (New York, 2001), p. 33. The evolution of feminist writing on mothers can be seen in this collection, which ends in 2000. See also Rosen, World Split Open, pp. 36–40.
99. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker (New York, 1983), pp. 231–43. See also Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers & Daughters, ed. Patricia Bell-Scott et al. (Boston, 1991). For scholarly expressions of the viewpoint, see Gloria J. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Functions in American Society,” and Jill Lewis, “Mothers, Daughters, and Feminism,” both in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black & White Feminist Perspectives (Boston, 1981), pp. 75–150.
100. Moraga, “Preface,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass., 1981), p. xviii.
101. One opposing intellectual current was the discourse of militant black manhood. See Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J., 2003), p. 173. See also the rejoinder of Floyd McKissick, from CORE, to Pauli Murray, in Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 195.
102. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Woman’s Lib,” p. 43. The median wage for white men was about $9,000, for minority males, $6,600, for white women, $5,500, and for minority women, $4,600. A summary of the labor force statistics is Aileen Hernandez, “Small Change for Black Women,” Ms., August 1974, pp. 16–18.
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