by Ruth Rosen
Young black women, in contrast, were more likely to feel empathy for their mothers, whom they admired as the foundation of their families and communities, and viewed as models for their future lives. But they sometimes wanted their mothers’ lives to conform to what they saw on television. As a girl, Assata Shakur wished her mother were more “normal.”
Why didn’t my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school? Why didn’t we live in a house with a backyard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. “How disgusting,” I would think. Why didn’t she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on television?18
Alix Kates Shulman’s popular novel Burning Questions, published in 1978, created an unforgettable portrait of a future middle-class white feminist. Born before World War II, Zane, the heroine of the novel, grows up in Babylon, Indiana, where she restlessly passes her childhood digging holes to China in her backyard. In adolescence, she chafes at the shallow conformity and empty materialism of her middle-class suburban family. A misfit who devours biographies of revolutionaries and plays chess, Zane eventually escapes in the late fifties to MacDougal Street, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where she throws herself into the underground Beat culture. Soon disillusioned, Zane marries, bears three children, and rapidly descends into domestic drudgery. From the window of her Washington Square apartment, an envious Zane watches a slightly younger generation march for civil rights, demonstrate against the Vietnam War, and float to a new consciousness on the drugs and sex of an exuberant counterculture. At novel’s end, Zane joins a women’s group, where, for the first time, she feels free to explore the “burning questions” of a lifetime.19
As sociologist Wini Breines has observed, “coming of age” novels written by such women often turned on fears of replicating the lives of their mothers. In Barbara Raskin’s Hot Flashes, one character says, “None of us wanted to do any of the things our mothers did—nor the way they did it—during the postwar years.” In Lynn Lauber’s White Girls, the heroine portrays her mother as a frustrated and disgruntled woman. Observing the wealthy WASP women of her childhood, the writer Annie Dillard wrote, “They coped: They sighed, they permitted themselves a remark or two, they lived essentially alone. They reared their children with their own two hands, and did all their own cooking and driving.” In each case, the writer focuses on some aspect of her mother’s life that she vows not to repeat.20
Every generation of daughters is finely attuned to the source of their mothers’ unhappiness. Daughters of the fifties instinctively blamed the feminine mystique for their mothers’ compromises and disappointments. But not all young women felt a need to declare a generational war on adult women. Most daughters quietly embraced new opportunities in higher education, pursued jobs or careers, married, juggled work and children, or decided to forgo marriage and children altogether. But the young women who created the women’s liberation movement both politicized and publicized their rejection of the feminine mystique.
Those who became feminists had learned to politicize what they observed. Some “Red-diaper babies” (children of Old Left parents) grew up learning the language of social and economic justice. Others, who grew up in conservative homes, often absorbed that language when they befriended young radicals in the civil rights or antiwar movements. Most importantly, a critical number of young women learned, through their experiences in other political movements, how to identify and politicize a personal sense of social and economic injustice.21
Those who become leaders, activists, or writers in the women’s liberation movement early had observed the lives of their mothers or of other adult women, and, even when they admired their political visions or commitments, knew they didn’t want an exclusively domestic life. Naomi Weisstein, a major theorist and activist in the movement, described herself as a “polka dot diaper” baby, the daughter of a mother who “had grown up in a Bolshevik family and had become the kind of feminist you could be in the 1920s, not sufficient to pursue her career [as well as] have kids.” Before having children, Weisstein’s mother had been a concert pianist. With children, her career ended. As a teenager, Weisstein “vowed that I would never get married and that I would never have kids. I was sure it ruined her life. And I still think so.”22 Perhaps it is not surprising that Weisstein, a well-known physiological psychologist, later founded the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock and Roll Band.
Barbara Ehrenreich, too, remembered how “you had to steel yourself as a girl if you didn’t want to follow a prescribed role.” Her mother’s expectations ran low. “Even at a young age, I could understand that the only good thing you could do as a woman was to be a housewife, but you would never have any respect that way. Because I don’t think my father respected my mother. She was a full-time housewife, and that’s what I did not want to be.”23
Middle-class girls were not alone in rejecting the feminine mystique. Phyllis Chesler, a product of a working-class home and author of Women and Madness, later wrote, “If I had wanted to be anything other than a wife and mother, perhaps an actress, I had absolutely no female role model or mentor. I knew nothing about my feminist history. My generation would not discover our feminist legacy until we were in our twenties, thirties, even forties.” Irene Peslikis, a feminist activist and artist, grew up in a Greek working-class family in Queens, New York. Her mother worked outside the home—as a hatcheck girl or as a factory hand—to help the family stay afloat. Still, by the time she reached adolescence, Peslikis had decided “I wasn’t going to be a housewife. . . . I didn’t think too much about marriage, and when I did I would cringe at the very idea.”24
Many young feminists grew up in such working-class homes. In fact, a disproportionate number of leaders and activists came from secular, working-class Jewish activist families. Later, the media would describe all feminists as white middle-class women, but appearances often deceive. The movement naturally grew from an educated and relatively privileged constituency, but many young women who joined the early women’s liberation movement were raised by blue collar parents who wanted their daughters to be the first in their family to attend college. Higher education is what transformed these working-class adolescents into middle-class women. As they mingled with other students, they acquired the social confidence, verbal skills, and appearance that would mask their working-class backgrounds. By the late sixties, many feminists, including Gloria Steinem, Ellen Willis, Marge Piercy, Phyllis Chesler, Susan Griffin, Alta, and Alix Kates Shulman, to name but a few of the better-known activists, spoke, wrote, dressed, and otherwise acted like middle-class women. But they first crossed class lines, gained a sense of middle-class entitlement from their education, and only then turned their attention to the “woman question.”25
Fearful and confused, these college-aged women—like their male counterparts—sought intellectual, cultural, and political mentors in books or in life to help them understand their alienation. But most of what they found was written by, for, and about men. Authors like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, or Samuel Beckett explored the existential and absurd dilemmas of men’s lives. Iconoclastic scholars and critics like C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, William Whyte, Paul Goodman, and Lewis Mumford dissected male conformity, analyzed power relations between men, exposed racial injustice, and condemned the corporate male drone and the bland boredom of his suburban life. But little of this social criticism seemed to directly address young women’s lives.26
Popular culture even beat the Beats to the punch in publicizing a male desire to flee domesticity. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy came to life in 1953, encouraging bachelors—for the first time in American history—to enjoy a satisfying sexual life without feeling the slightest guilt for not supporting a wife, children, and home. For the upscale single man, an elaborately appointed apartment—complete with revolving bed, rotating lovers, and reflecting mirrors—offered all
the pleasures of sex without the burdens of family. For the first time, your disposable income was yours alone, to spend on anything your heart desired, from stereo to sailboat.
In short, for young men determined to avoid the world of their fathers, freedom meant cutting loose from women and children—hardly a new theme in American culture. Only a tiny number of men, of course, followed the Beats into coffeehouses or onto the road, and even fewer had the guts or money to imitate Hefner’s sybaritic bachelor lifestyle. Still, one could always dream. As the alienated sons of the fifties entered a new decade, they had models of revolt, intellectual analyses of their alienation, prophetic mentors, and fantasies of escape, if only they dared.
Their female counterparts had few women mentors. Like educated women before them, these alienated women lived in a dual culture, experiencing life as women, but learning to interpret the world as men. They absorbed critiques of materialism and conformity through men’s eyes, learned to view society’s failures through men’s needs, and convinced themselves to reject the commitment and security that free-spirited men condemned. In the short run, the male literary and cultural tradition of dissent inspired dreams of freedom, unleashed a critical distrust of authority, and encouraged a taste for the unconventional—all of which created a solid foundation for a feminism that would question all received wisdom. In the meantime, young women learned to see freedom through men’s eyes, and when it didn’t exactly fit, they blamed themselves for insufficient daring, insufficient learning, and insufficient radicalism.
THE BEATS
For a small number of future feminists, the Beats—though mostly men—offered a seductive escape from a conventional life. Allen Ginsberg’s shrieking incantation against the madness of modern life and Kerouac’s tales of life on the road inspired young women as well as men. The Beats provided no map to transcendent experience; but they did romanticize spontaneous unpredictability. Here, at last, was an appealing alternative to life with an apron or, for that matter, an attaché case.
In 1959, Marilyn Coffey, twenty-two years old, was an aspiring writer juggling headlines for the society page of the Evening Journal in Lincoln, Nebraska, a city she regarded as “the epitome of hypocrisy and sterile living. I was a member of the so-called Silent Generation and silent many of us were, back in the fifties, in the aftermath of Joe McCarthy and the Korean War. Speechless. A strange condition for a woman who aspired to be a writer.” Then, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road fell into her hands:
I didn’t understand half what I was reading, but something of the life being described was comprehensive to me, foreign as it was to the young woman who’d been born and bred in the conservative Midwest. . . . The words shot through me like a fusillade of bullets. I was undone, a changed person. I bought myself a straw-covered bottle of Chianti, a candle, and a pad of paper . . . began to write by candlelight, scribbling words onto paper as fast as my hand could compose, following instinctively Kerouac’s model of Spontaneous Prose. . . . The novel liberated me as it did many others of my generation. There was that instantaneous recognition of self. For the first time since I began writing . . . I felt free to say anything I wanted. . . . For I, in those blissfully naive pre-feminist days, felt the equal of any man.
Coffey fled to Denver, “where, in the Greyhound Bus Depot, I twirled a girlfriend, eyes closed, arm extended, in front of a gigantic map of the United States. She pointed and we set off.”27
From the late fifties on, thousands of high-school and college-aged young women dressed in black descended upon New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach in search of poetry, folk music, art, and sexual adventures. Bohemian life offered an opportunity to recast oneself as a misfit, to revel in social disapproval, to elevate an iconoclastic subculture over the dominant culture—all of which would later prove invaluable experiences to female activists. As one feminist later wrote, “Our adult lives began born out of these fragments of stolen consciousness. The basic awareness grew that truth, whatever it was, was something we had all our lives been protected from. Reality had been kept in quarantine so we could not become contaminated.” By experimenting with a bohemian existence, some daughters of the fifties, hungry for spontaneity, transcendence, and adventure, chose to end that quarantine.28
In her Memoirs of a Beatnik, the poet Diane Di Prima, who enjoyed sexual relations with both men and women, described how bohemian life meant “one’s blood running strong and red in one’s own veins.” Di Prima spent “long afternoons” in coffeeshops on MacDougal Street, reading and meeting fellow bohemians and artists, “nursing twenty-five-cent cups of espresso for hours, and drawing pictures on paper napkins.” Annie Dillard looked for “life” beyond her sheltered life not just in books, but in “experience.” “I myself was getting wild; I wanted wild-ness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties.” After college, Susan Griffin melted into the Beat scene in San Francisco, where for the first time she realized she was a writer.
While many young women sought to simulate the Beat sensibility, only a few actually broke into the inner sacred circle. In a vivid memoir of her experience as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend, Joyce Johnson described herself and other female Beats as “minor characters” on a stage reserved mainly for men. Already, at age sixteen, the talented and intellectually ambitious Johnson observed that “just as girls guarded their virginity, the boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves. They seemed to believe they had a mission in life, from which they could easily be deflected by being exposed to too much emotion.”29
After she became Jack Kerouac’s lover, Johnson again noted this pattern among Kerouac and his pals. Soon she realized that she represented the “anchorage” he needed, when he wanted it, but with no strings attached. Kerouac, whose life alternated between the open road and his mother’s home, dropped in on Johnson for “short reunions.” She rarely demanded more; hip culture ridiculed the desire for commitment as “uncool.” Men defined the nature of freedom and women were required to drop their “bourgeois hang-ups” and accept it. Between their adventures, the men survived by “scuffling”—living off others—and working only when absolutely necessary. Their great accomplishment, Johnson decided,
was to avoid actual employment for as long as possible and by whatever means. But it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The women didn’t mind, or, if they did, they never said—not until years later.
Still, what attracted Johnson to Kerouac and his friends were their spiritual adventures—“some pursuit of the heightened moment, intensity for its own sake.” This, she disappointingly learned, was “something they apparently find only when they’re with each other.”
Of the men who created the world of the Beats, Johnson decided, “I think it was about the right to remain children.”30 True enough, but Johnson also recounts the many freedoms that “minor characters” could enjoy as well. The absence of male economic and emotional commitment freed women from daily subordination to male authority. While the men “scuffled,” women like Johnson early on achieved a certain degree of social and economic independence. Female Beats also gained partial entry into an intellectual world previously reserved for men. No other cultural niche permitted a woman to enjoy such a combination of unconventional intellectual, sexual, and economic experiences: academic women were supposed to look asexual; Hollywood sex symbols were required to act dumb. Within the limits of a male-defined aesthetic of freedom, women like Joyce Johnson lived a bohemian ideal of female independence.
SWINGING SINGLES
Few college women ever took up the unconventional life of the Beats; they mostly married. But a significant minority of young women carved out a less exotic alternative lifestyle as “swinging singles” in large cities. By the late fifties, a growing number of college-educated women began migrating to large urban areas, lured by the promise of adventure and excitement. They took jobs as
airline stewardesses, teachers, social workers, editorial assistants, or office workers, filling the thousands of new clerical and secretarial jobs created by expanding corporate and state bureaucracies. After a few years of adventure, most of them undoubtedly expected to marry. In the meantime, they shared apartments with other single women and socialized in a singles subculture that their very numbers created.
What distinguished these young women from their predecessors was that they lived neither at home nor in supervised boardinghouses, and that they made the rules by which they lived. Some moved casually from one sexual encounter to another, without anyone’s disapproval; indeed, often without anyone’s knowledge. As Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in Re-Making Love, “For young, single, heterosexual women in the fifties and sixties, the city held forth an entirely new vision of female sexual possibility—and the first setting for a sexual revolution.”31
Unlike the exotic enclaves of the Beats, the embryonic “swinging singles” subculture remained hidden from public view until the publication in 1962 of Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl. Brown gave Americans their first peek inside the swinging singles culture and her lighthearted advocacy of the single life became a national best-seller. By the time that Betty Friedan encouraged married women to combine motherhood with a career in 1963, Brown had already gone on record urging single women to postpone or skip marriage and simply enjoy a fulfilling sexual life.