The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  Brown’s ideas mirrored Hugh Hefner’s “playboy philosophy.” Few single women in the early sixties expected their swinging life to last indefinitely. But while they waited for “Mr. Right,” they had Brown’s permission to enjoy themselves. In large cities, she insisted, “there is something else a girl can say and frequently does when a man ‘insists’ and that is ‘yes.’ . . . Nice girls do have affairs, and they do not necessarily die of them.” Married couples could keep their diapers, crabgrass, and suburban homes. For the single man or woman, Hefner and Brown now offered an alternative hedonistic lifestyle.32

  Like the women attached to the Beats, single women soon discovered the fundamental inequality that shadowed their sexually liberated lives. Affairs with married men often brought loneliness and disappointment. Since they earned less than men, they had trouble supporting their lifestyle. In addition, the “value” of an unmarried woman, unlike an unmarried man, depreciated with time. If she waited too long, she risked ending up with no husband at all and bumping up against a biological clock. “Spontaneous” sexual pleasures could also be very dangerous. Without perfect contraception or legal abortions, women literally risked their lives if they became pregnant. Fear of pregnancy—or of an illegal abortion—also dampened many a young woman’s enthusiasm for the pleasure of sex. The Pill, which would be approved in 1960, was not yet on the horizon.

  It is difficult to even imagine what life was like for adventurous young women at a time when abortion remained illegal. A simple mistake, the unwillingness of a young man to use a condom or his inability to use it effectively, the failure of a diaphragm, a vague comprehension of the ovulation cycle, or the belief in coitus interruptus as a failproof method of contraception could, in an instant, change the course of your life. Some women, of course, hastily married, leaving behind their youth and the dream of an education. Others, fearing the loss of their dreams, landed on some quack’s kitchen table. If all went well, a young woman returned to her life, perhaps fearful of repeating the experience. If things went badly, a woman found herself in an emergency room, interrogated by hospital personnel, explaining that she had suffered a miscarriage, at the mercy of antibiotics that couldn’t always cure an advancing infection. All too often the infection spread, the woman began to bleed profusely, and she died. Advocates of abortion reform estimated that close to one million women had illegal abortions annually before the procedure became legal in 1973, and they attributed some five thousand deaths directly to illegal abortions. The most common kind of illegal abortion was self-induced. Women desperate to end a pregnancy tried an astonishing array of abortifacients. Doctors who examined infected wombs or who performed autopsies became all too familiar with signs of self-induced abortion:

  Air pumped into the uterus left the large blood vessels distended. Turpentine, when ingested or introduced by douche, gave the urine an odor reminiscent of violets; lower abdominal tenderness was a sign that soap or detergent might have been forced up the cervix. Potassium permanganate tablets, pushed into the vagina to stimulate bleeding that emergency-room doctors might then see as a miscarriage already underway, left craters of corroded tissue along the vaginal walls, so that suturing them was like trying to put fine surgical stitches into a softened stick of butter.33

  Large numbers of women knew someone who had gone through the ordeal of having an illegal abortion. First came the agonizing wait for the result of a pregnancy test. Then the search for a doctor. Word of mouth spread the names of “abortionists.” But how could you be sure that the “doctor” would use sterile instruments and knew how to perform an abortion safely? In the dark and dangerous world of illegal abortions, you simply had to take what was available. Women also had to raise enough cash, because most abortionists demanded their fee before starting the procedure. Since the fees were often exorbitant, that meant borrowing from many friends who together put up the money for the abortion.

  “Rebecca Thatcher” became pregnant when she was a sophomore at college. She came home and told her parents, who then begged their family physician to perform an abortion. Having known the family for decades, he complied. Such arrangements, hidden from public view, usually took place in the doctor’s office. Rebecca’s doctor gave her local anesthesia and antibiotics in case of infection. Five years later, she married and had two sons. “Iris Manning,” also a college student, went through a horrible ordeal. Estranged from her parents, she raised enough money to pay a “back alley” abortionist. After she handed over the money, she was told to strip and to lie down on a dirty kitchen table. A friend held her hand. Without anesthesia, she screamed in pain as a leering sadist shoved a rubber hose inside her womb. A decade later, she raised a daughter and son with great satisfaction. But she never forgot the desperation, the humiliation, or the pain.

  By the sixties, an underground network of ministers, women activists, and doctors were skirting the law and directing pregnant women to competent physicians who had been certified by former patients. “Phyllis Sanders” became pregnant in 1968, her second year in graduate school. Aware of an underground group in San Francisco that provided women with lists of competent doctors, she went to one of those clandestine meetings. There, Patricia McGinnis, a longtime advocate of legal abortion, and founder of the Society for Humane Abortion (SHA), gave her the name of the doctor who performed abortions on the various girlfriends of the chief of police in Mexico City. After raising the money, she and her companion flew to Mexico City and took a taxi to the clinic. There, a nurse fed them and left them alone to sleep in a comfortable room. The next morning, the doctor gave her a thorough medical checkup, and then general anesthesia. When she awoke, her four-week pregnancy had ended. The nurse insisted she rest for a day and gave her antibiotics when she left, just in case an infection developed. The couple spent the next two days engrossed in the archaeology and art museums. She returned to her graduate studies healthy and unscarred. But her enthusiasm for sex, she admitted, had certainly diminished.34

  By 1969, McGinnis reported that her group had sent twelve thousand women outside of the country for an abortion. Each woman, in turn, had to write an appraisal of the provider and write a letter to her state legislators demanding legal abortion. But Patricia McGinnis was hardly alone in challenging the law. In 1965, Heather Booth, a veteran activist of the civil rights and New Left movements, discovered a doctor in Chicago who would perform abortions for pregnant young women. In 1967, a group of women took over the work and called it first “The Service” and then “Jane.” In addition to providing names of abortion providers, they also arranged for “scholarships” and counseling. In some cases, members of Jane did the abortions themselves. Between 1969 and 1973, Jane had arranged for eleven thousand illegal abortions.

  The non-Catholic clergy also played an important role in these underground networks. As journalist Cynthia Gorney has documented, there were close to one thousand ministers participating in this illegal and secretive work:

  At the University of Chicago, a Baptist minister named E. Spencer Parson had been sending pregnant students for illegal abortions since 1965. In East Rutherford, New Jersey, an answering machine in a United Methodist parsonage took messages from women who wanted the name of a competent abortionist. . . . In Wisconsin, during the late 1960s, a pregnant woman could walk into the office of certain Baptist or Methodist or United Church of Christ ministers and walk out an hour later with the name of an illegal abortion provider in Chicago or Juarez. In Pennsylvania, a call to a certain telephone number rang an answering machine in a Baptist nursery school in the town of Wayne; the recorded message left instructions on finding the nearest minister who could provide “counseling” on abortion—and, it was understood, a referral to an abortionist.

  If discovered, all these doctors and ministers faced arrest for aiding an illegal abortion. Nonetheless, a group of fifty California ministers and rabbis, committed to helping women find safe abortions, shared this August 16, 1968, memorandum with one another:

  Dr.
Madrid is on again. He and his assistants moved all equipment from Juarez to Nogales, Sonora, since we last communicated with you. The new arrangement is as follows: Fly to Tucson, Ariz. Take bus to Nogales Ariz, a 1 hr. 10 min. ride. From the U.S. side of Nogales call 21-70-5 on the Mexican side. Say “this is Mary” and receive the reply “this is Pete,” as before. An English-speaking man will be on duty from 9AM to 7PM daily. He will instruct the caller as to meeting place, the driver will identify himself with the green card with our stamp on it, as usual. New prices: $250 to 8 wks. $350 8-13 wks.35

  In 1960, when the federal government approved the use of the birth control pill, the incipient sexual revolution shifted into higher gear. Growing numbers of unmarried women began to stake out their right to enjoy sex for pleasure rather than for procreation. Those who rebelled eagerly embraced their sexual freedom, happy to explore the pleasures of the body, and seduced by the hope that “free love” would lead to a fulfilling life. But sexual freedom did not directly challenge or redefine either marriage or motherhood. The feminine mystique still seemed to rule life after marriage. After having sex with her boyfriend, one woman recalled, “I started dressing in black and acting more like a Bohemian. But you know, for all this socialism and Bohemianism, I still had this idea that I’d get married and some man would support me and that I ought to get a teaching degree so that I’d have ‘something to fall back on.’”36

  THE SECOND SEX

  Young women in the early sixties still lacked a language with which to express their inchoate yearnings and fears. Nowhere in American culture was there an analytic framework or vocabulary suitable for an emancipated woman except in Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. Published in France in 1948, it made its way across the Atlantic in 1953 and quickly gained national attention. As Jean-Paul Sartre’s lifelong unmarried companion, de Beauvoir was already notorious for the café-bohemian life she and Sartre popularized in postwar Paris and for her refusal to marry and her decision to remain childless.

  Her book was astonishingly subversive. “One is not born, but rather one becomes a woman: no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society.” With these few words, de Beauvoir challenged contemporary views of women’s “nature” and began exposing the artificiality of common ideas about gender. Without apology, she attacked the myth of blissful domesticity, describing marriage as servitude and housework as unrelenting drudgery “comparable to the punishment of Sisyphus.” Demolishing the cult of sentimental motherhood, de Beauvoir wrote that pregnancy and maternity enslaved as much as they enriched. Maternal devotion, she declared, was only rarely a fulfilling life for most women.37

  “In the darkness of the Fifties and Sixties before the new women’s movement dawned,” one feminist later wrote, “The Second Sex was like a secret code that we emerging women used to send messages to each other.” Quite a few future leaders of the women’s liberation movement read it in college or discovered it in the “movement.” A professor of philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University introduced Mary King, a future civil rights activist and feminist, to de Beauvoir’s thought. In 1963, she and Casey Hayden, then prominent white women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were working as activists and organizers in southwestern Atlanta. They spent their evenings reading and discussing de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, as well as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a powerful novel about women and independence, published the year before. In a memoir, Mary King recalled, “Casey and I had an insatiable appetite for these two authors and especially for de Beauvoir’s global perspective.” What especially influenced them, she wrote, was the “fundamental existential belief that the human race is responsible for its own destiny,” an idea that deepened and reinforced their tireless efforts for civil rights. But de Beauvoir’s influence went deeper. From her existentialist philosophy, Hayden and King—central figures in starting the women’s movement—absorbed startling revelations about their position as women. “Our copy of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” wrote King, “was underlined, creased, marked up, and finally coverless from our study of it.” Eager to spread the message, they began circulating the exhilarating idea that women could define themselves.38

  When The Second Sex was published in the United States in 1953, it entered a culture deeply antagonistic to feminism. Nevertheless, educated women discovered the book and passed it on to friends. Gradually, de Beauvoir’s ideas trickled into the margins of American intellectual life. For some women, her work represented pure heresy, properly banned by papal authority. But dedicated thousands felt that on meeting de Beauvoir on the page, they had been struck by the truth and date their transformed consciousness to the discovery of this one book. As feminist writer Susan Griffin explained, “I read de Beauvoir in 1961 and was never the same. Every time I think we have discovered some new idea, I go back and find that de Beauvoir saw it first, that we often are reinventing what she first revealed.”39

  De Beauvoir was not the first person to write of women’s subordination. But she was the first to address women’s modern dilemma—the fact that they possessed basic political rights yet suffered from extreme cultural, social, and economic marginality. Nor was her work without flaws. She made universal claims based on the experience of French (and some American) girls and women. Ignorant of women’s history, de Beauvoir omitted women’s historic efforts to transcend their condition, as well as the world around them. Her emphasis on individual choice ignored a movement’s need for solidarity and her wistful prediction that socialism would end female oppression underestimated the powerful constraints of class and race, as well as those of religion and global politics.40

  Still, her brilliant and daring analysis of women’s condition encouraged her readers to see themselves and their world through their own eyes. By her own example (even if she did understate the inequalities in her alliance with Sartre), she made personal life the setting for high drama and combined a bohemian sexual freedom with serious intellectual commitment. Through her novels and autobiographical works, she taught a generation of young admirers the political implications of seemingly private matters. Though she offered inadequate answers, she asked brilliant questions, creating a formidable intellectual agenda for a new generation of feminists.41

  CULTURAL MATRIPHOBIA

  Daughters of the fifties had grown up in a highly politicized era, one that celebrated capitalism, vilified Communism, and idealized the feminine mystique. As children of the Cold War, they had learned to contain Communism by assuming their patriotic role as wives and mothers. Permissive parents and higher education had raised young women’s expectations, but the feminine mystique blurred any new vision of the future.

  Still young at the dawn of a new decade, the daughters of the fifties entered college, bohemian adventures, love affairs, marriage, the civil rights movement, antiwar activities, and the New Left with unarticulated fears of replicating the world of their mothers. In cities, bohemian enclaves and the culture of singles permitted intellectual and sexual adventures, but sexual liberation did not address their fears of traditional marriage. Haunted by their own private demons, they lived a second parallel generational gap, which, until the mid-sixties, remained invisibly subsumed by the entire generation’s quest for a different adult future.

  At the same time, they drew inspiration from movements for social change that rapidly challenged the nation. As liberal Americans began addressing problems neglected for more than a decade, they inflated the idealistic expectations of these young women, who were just coming of age. The resurrection of a peace movement, the moral drama of the civil rights movement, the rediscovery of poverty, and the exposure of environmental pollution gave new legitimacy to questioning and challenging adults’ interpretation of the world.

  Interestingly, it was American women activists—white women marching for peace and nuclear safety, black women fighting segregation—who first inspired young women to see the power of female protest.
As they matured, elders of the baby boom began to make peace a pressing issue. For many parents, the atomic bomb had mercifully ended a ghastly war. To their children, it had ushered in the threat of planetary annihilation. The bomb became a symbol of the generational divide. Raised in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the postwar generation had grown up in the shadow of a mushroom cloud that threatened to end, in a blinding instant, their lives and their world.42

  Many “war babies” clearly recall when adult women began protesting American and Soviet aboveground testing of nuclear weapons. In 1961, as a radioactive cloud from a Russian nuclear test hung over the United States, fear of nuclear fallout sparked demands for the two superpowers to sign a test-ban treaty. Women activists argued that strontium 90—a by-product of nuclear testing—was poisoning their children’s milk. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an estimated fifty thousand women in over sixty cities walked out of their homes in an unprecedented one-day housewives’ “strike” on November 1, 1961.

  Five women who had met while working with the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) organized the November protest. Weary of SANE’s ineffective bureaucratic and lobbying tactics, they had pledged to take direct action against the nuclear threat and called themselves Women Strike for Peace. Former members of CAW and other Left and peace organizations, they organized the strike out of their address books and from their Christmas-card lists. For the first time since the 1920s, women emerged not as part of a mass movement, but as that movement, ready to take up the political activism that McCarthyism had interrupted.43

  But nothing was more inspiring to young women just coming of age than the civil rights movement. Television broadcast into their homes the Montgomery boycott; the violent battles over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and at the University of Mississippi; the sit-ins at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Freedom Rides into the Deep South; the march to Selma, Alabama, and other civil rights struggles. Television also showed stark scenes of racial hatred even as it publicized the bravery of children and adults, black and white, who dared the nation to live up to its ideals. The civil rights movement taught a generation of indoctrinated youthful Cold Warriors that America was hardly a perfect democracy. And it sent a clear message to those restless daughters of the fifties who were heading into college, determined not to become prisoners of the kitchen and nursery. If collective action could destroy racial segregation, which was based on the belief in white superiority, why couldn’t women challenge ideas about female inferiority?