by Gail Collins
Steinem’s soothing aura may have been a product of a childhood taking care of her mentally ill mother. She spent an eighth-grade Thanksgiving vacation reading A Tale of Two Cities for school while she hung on to the hand of her delusional parent, who believed there was a war outside the house and had “plunged her hand through a window, badly cutting her arm in an effort to help us escape.” It was the kind of upbringing that kills you or makes you very strong, and Steinem became both strong and self-contained—a unique figure who could constantly support other women activists while remaining a little removed from any particular cadre or faction.
While Steinem was courted by the media, she was also battered by the kind of dismissive treatment that is often meted out to beautiful women who insist on being something more than decorative. “What Gloria needs is a man… ,” said talk-show host David Susskind. “The whole thing is so boring—and ridiculous. Gloria comes on with that flat Ohio accent and goes on and on about women’s oppression—you feel like either kissing her or hitting her. I can’t decide which.” And her extreme visibility poked at a particularly sensitive issue. The radical arm of the women’s liberation movement, which wanted to go far beyond reforming laws into the realm of changing the basic rules of human relationships, had a natural concern with the question of appearance. There was obviously nothing more unjust than the fact that the shape of a young woman’s nose, the size of her waist, and the thickness of her hair were the things on which so much happiness and fortune hinged. Some women’s groups tried to call a halt to unfair, superficial standards by rejecting the entire tool kit of the beauty industry. They banished makeup, wore formless clothes such as overalls and men’s shirts. They not only tossed out their uncomfortable high heels but rejected feminine footwear altogether, showing up for television interviews in work boots. J. Edgar Hoover to the contrary, they did not strive for fuzzy hair, but they avoided any style that required an effort beyond washing and combing.
The sense that feminists were all homely had dogged every struggle for women’s rights in American history. (In 1927 a Harper’s essay said the very word “feminist” suggested people “who wore flat heels and had very little feminine charm.”) Angelina Grimké, the early-nineteenth-century crusader, thrilled her supporters by marrying the dashing abolitionist Theodore Weld, thus demonstrating that it was possible to both be a feminist and land a husband. “I did not agree with the message some were trying to push—that to be a liberated woman you had to make yourself ugly, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop wearing makeup or pretty dresses or any skirts at all,” said Betty Friedan, who turned out to be the chief standard-bearer for the personal-appearance wing of the movement. She urged her followers to be “as pretty as we can. It’s good for our self-image and it’s good politics.” Roxanne Dunbar, a radical feminist from Boston, said that when she and Friedan were guests on a TV show, Friedan harangued her from the moment she refused to let the makeup woman apply powder and lipstick. “I was dressed in my very best army surplus white cotton sailor trousers and a white man’s shirt. She said that I and ‘scruffy feminists’ like me were giving the movement a bad name,” Dunbar said.
Steinem never got into the fight, and she seemed uncomfortable when the issue of appearance came up. She loved wearing miniskirts and high heels—the heels, she admitted, were indeed a bit like the old Chinese practice of foot binding, but she felt that if men could wear something as meaningless and uncomfortable as ties, women might be forgiven for enjoying the feeling they got from wearing sexy shoes. Still, she worried that she would not be taken seriously because of her appearance. (And traditional women, she feared, might dismiss her because she did not have a husband or children.) Trapped in an interview on a local television station in New York with a host who called her “an absolutely stunning sex object,” Steinem responded irritably, “Well, I should comment on your appearance, but I don’t have time.”
Like Angelina Grimké and her wedding, Steinem served as a symbol—whether she liked it or not—that women could be both militant and sexually appealing. Other movement leaders rolled their eyes when the media reported on her lifestyle—camping out in the Badlands of North Dakota, being photographed at an A-level movie screening in Manhattan, then sitting in a circle of sari-wearing peasant women at a conference in New Delhi. But it was exactly the way millions of young women around the country felt that they, too, would like to live: standing up for their sisters and fighting for equal rights in a manner that also involved having adventures in exotic places, plus dates with unusually smart football players and unusually attractive playwrights. “Every so often, someone suggests that Gloria Steinem is only into the women’s movement because it is currently the chic place to be,” wrote Nora Ephron. “It always makes me smile, because she is about the only remotely chic thing connected with the movement.”
“BLACKS ARE OPPRESSED… WHITE WOMEN ARE SUPPRESSED.”
The younger and more radical women dismissed NOW and the reformist generation as middle-aged, middle-class white people, out of touch with the needs of poor and minority women. (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s breakaway group from NOW described themselves as “the young, the black, and the beautiful.”) But in fact the older reform movement was far more integrated. It had focused on justice in the workplace—something black women cared very much about. The more complicated social and personal demands left many of them cold. “I’m not hung up on this thing about liberating myself from the black man,” said Fannie Lou Hamer. “I’m not going to try that thing. I got a black husband, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds with a fourteen shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated from.”
Black critics said the women’s movement was too focused on the problems of suburbs and college campuses rather than on the issues of poverty and exclusion. “Blacks are oppressed… white women are suppressed… and there is a difference,” said Linda La Rue, a black commentator. And the traditional black press stressed that the important thing was for women to shore up the men, not to compete against them. Essence magazine in 1970 told its readers that, once wed, “you have discarded your independence and you must rely on him. Even if you don’t feel that way in the beginning, show him that you do. Make him feel ten feet tall!” (A decade later, Essence apologized.)
As Ella Baker had predicted, once people started talking about black women’s need to defer to their men, the women soon became regarded as part of the problem. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future senator who was then a counselor to President Nixon, issued a report on “Black Families in Crisis” in which he blamed many of the economic and social problems of poor African-Americans on female-dominated families, where men were either absent or undermined. While Moynihan made it clear that he blamed the legacy of slavery, not the poor themselves, for their dire economic straits, a reader would have been hard-pressed not to conclude that he also blamed black women. “Both as a husband and as a father the Negro male is made to feel inadequate,” the report quoted the civil rights leader Whitney Young as saying. It expressed alarm over the fact that black girls were doing better in school than their male peers, and suggested that black mothers were favoring their daughters over their sons.
Meanwhile, the black power movement in some cities was veering into outright misogyny. Women were outraged and insulted, and they began to speak out about the sexism they encountered within their community. “As a black person I am no stranger to prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far more often discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black,” Shirley Chisholm said. “I knew I would encounter both anti-black and anti-feminist sentiments. What surprised me was the greater virulence of the sex discrimination.” Chisholm, who became the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968, ran in a district in Brooklyn where both the voters and the political power structure were black. Her opponent was James Farmer, the former Freedom Ride leader, who ran stressing the need for a “man’s voice” in Washington.
“THANK THEE, LORD, THAT I WAS BORN A WOMAN.”
In 1970 Betty Friedan stepped down as head of NOW. In her farewell speech—which her friends suspected she had never wanted to make—she surprised everyone by calling on “every American woman” to stop working for men and take to the streets on August 26, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. “I propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, the telephone operators unplug their switchboards… and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more—stop. Every woman pegged forever as an assistant, doing jobs for which men get credit—stop,” she orated. While it was impossible to say how many women would join in “our day of abstention,” Friedan said confidently, “I expect it will be millions.”
Almost no one imagined that women would really risk losing their jobs in a mass walkout or that even if they were willing, such an event could be organized fast enough. But the strike morphed into an anything-goes “action” in which women in every city and town were encouraged to do what they felt best to mark the moment. On Strike Day itself, Friedan recounted over and over in later years, she was almost late to the Central Park start-off point of the New York City march because the traffic was unexpectedly heavy. Then, as she rounded the last corner, she saw “not hundreds but thousands of women and men and babies and grandmothers beginning to mass.” The marchers had been ordered to stay on the sidewalks, but when Friedan saw how many there were, “there was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little, thin line. I waved my arm over my head and yelled, ‘Take to the streets!’ What a moment that was.”
Later, at the postmarch rally, Friedan told the crowd, “In the religion of my ancestors, there was a prayer that Jewish men said every morning. They prayed, ‘Thank thee, Lord, that I was not born a woman.’ Today I feel, feel for the first time, feel absolutely sure, that all women are going to be able to say, as I say tonight, ‘Thank thee, Lord, that I was born a woman for this day.’ ”
The strike for equality, which was marked by parades and demonstrations in cities around the country, drew the kind of bemused tone of superiority from male commentators that the women had come to expect. A West Virginia senator got massive coverage for his description of the marchers as “a small band of braless bubbleheads.” On ABC, Howard K. Smith quoted an old saw about three things that were difficult to tame: the ocean, fools, and women (“We may soon be able to tame the ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer”). Nevertheless, it had been a glorious day, and it marked something important. American women understood that a seismic shift in understanding was taking place. Things they had always done in emergencies—such as working in defense factories during the war—and things that only a few unusual “women lawyers” or “women engineers” had done, were now going to be recognized as part of the normal deal. The world had turned, and the conviction that what women needed most was protection had given way to a call for an equal playing field. Relations between men and women were changing in thousands of major and minor ways. The household chores, if not divided, had at least been brought up for discussion. The idea that the most desirable girl was a demure thing who always lost at chess or tennis was slipping away. Young women plotting their futures were not feeling compelled to go for the least-adventurous option. Some people, of course, balked at the swiftness of the change, and others preferred not to pay attention. (“It’s the funniest thing. I don’t feel there’s any discrimination. I know my husband feels that way,” said Pat Nixon when NOW began picketing the White House in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.) But the nation’s consciousness was quickly, and sometimes painfully, evolving.
“WHO’D BE AGAINST EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN?”
In 1970 Jo Freeman had to fly from Chicago to Washington, with a choice between a puddle jumper that made several stops along the way and a direct flight with United. She chose the puddle jumper and later wrote United a letter, saying she had picked the less-convenient flight because she was boycotting the airline that ran those men-only “executive flights” between New York and Chicago.
“A year later they changed the policy,” Freeman recalled. “And they sent me a telegram.”
Politicians, keenly aware that the new special-interest group they were courting represented half the population, rolled out reforms. In the early 1970s, Congress passed a bill equalizing benefits for married employees, an Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the famous Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in federally aided education programs. “We put sex discrimination provisions into everything,” said Representative Bella Abzug. “There was no opposition. Who’d be against equal rights for women?” Meanwhile, Attorney General John Mitchell sued to end discrimination against women in large corporations, and the Nixon administration forced two thousand colleges to submit to an investigation of whether they were discriminating against women in hiring and salaries.
The states followed suit. Roxanne Conlin, who was assistant attorney general in Iowa, wrote a bill eliminating all references in Iowa law to man, woman, girl, boy, lady, gentleman, etc. The massive reform of the state code produced a huge protest from… barbers. Ever watchful of their perquisites in every part of the country, the Iowa barbers staged a huge fight against allowing men to have their hair cut in beauty parlors. That was fine by Conlin, “because nobody noticed the rest of it, such as equalization of pensions.”
In 1972 the members of the National Woman’s Party walked out of their headquarters and up Capitol Hill to watch the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. At 85, Alice Paul was still in Washington, trying to orchestrate everything. Amelia Fry, a historian who had volunteered to assist with the lobbying, felt Paul’s intensity like “a single beam of strong light.” When an exhausted Fry finally escaped for a lunch where some topic other than the ERA might be discussed, she was conscious that “a mile away was Alice in the one hundred eightieth day of the forty-ninth year of telephoning, assigning tasks, getting advocate statements written, and running her small army.”
The Equal Rights Amendment had become increasingly more popular as legislatures and courts abolished the discriminatory practices the amendment was meant to reverse. By the early 1970s, its passage in Congress was being held up by only a few very powerful and determined committee chairmen. Martha Griffiths took the unusual—and extremely difficult—route of getting a majority of House members to force the bill to the floor through petition. The signatures came with a great deal of help from Marguerite Rawalt, who was attending a convention of the Business and Professional Women in Hawaii. Every night, Griffiths would phone to tell Rawalt which representative needed pressure, and Rawalt would pass on the message to the delegates, every one a woman used to a great deal of letter writing.
Once the bill was released, it passed 352 to 15 after only an hour of debate—the first time the House had acted on it since its introduction in 1923. The Senate held out for another two years, thanks to Sam Ervin of North Carolina. (“Keep the law responsible where the good Lord put it—on the man to bear the burdens of support and the women to bear the children.”) But in 1972 resistance gave way and the bill passed quickly. The Hawaii legislature, waiting expectantly, became the first state to ratify the amendment minutes later. At the same time, Marguerite Rawalt walked into the Capitol lobby, where a bust of William Blackstone, the famous legal scholar who once described women as “chattel,” stands. Rawalt approached the stony Mr. Blackstone and draped her black scarf over him.
PART III
FOLLOWING THROUGH
9. Backlash
“… EXCEEDS WHAT I DARED HOPE FOR.”
In 1977 Alice Paul was living in a small Quaker nursing home in New Jersey, having suffered a stroke that left her confined to a wheelchair. “She’s 92. She ought to have her amendment before she dies,” said the coordinator of an Alice Paul birthday salute. Paul was very frail, and her caregivers talked about her as a sweet old lady who loved lavender wate
r and who would occasionally ask to hold the many medals she had been given over her long and extraordinary career. But when a delegation from the local YWCA’s Center for Women came to deliver a birthday proclamation from the town council, the old Alice Paul popped right back up. “I read the proclamation I had painstakingly written,” recalled Janet Tegley. “When I finished, Miss Paul immediately said, ‘That’s not right! You have the chronology wrong!’ ”
In a birthday interview, Paul told a reporter that while suffrage had been the great victory of her life so far, the Equal Rights Amendment would be the next. The women were bound to get the last four states they needed to ratify, she said, “because the volume of support exceeds what I dared hope for.” Asked what she would do if she had time for yet another campaign, Paul told the reporter to read the short, succinct text of the ERA, which was dubbed the “Alice Paul Amendment” when it was rewritten from her original version in 1943: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.