The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  A few younger feminists turned Solanas into a cause célèbre; others viewed her as a disturbed woman in need of sisterly assistance. When Ti-Grace Atkinson, the president of New York NOW, publicly appeared at Solanas’s trial, some NOW members worried about being identified with “man-hating” women. NOW’s board consisted of university professors and administrators, state and national labor union officers, local and federal government officials, business executives, physicians, and members of religious orders, all of whom were dedicated to preserving NOW’s public reputation and credibility. Atkinson, already dissatisfied with what she considered NOW’s “elitist” structure, then resigned to form her own organization, the October 17th Movement (named after the day she left), later renamed “The Feminists.”52

  Collisions between the women’s liberation movement and NOW were frequent and probably inevitable. In November 1969, a year not remembered for youthful deference, NOW attempted to gather disparate groups from the mushrooming women’s movement at a Congress to Unite Women in New York City. For three days, over five hundred women from a wide range of groups and organizations debated feminist issues, but it was clear that the young women dominated the agenda and that their rebellious spirit ruled the meeting. Betty Friedan, for instance, would never have convened a workshop to discuss “whether women’s liberation would end sex or make it better.” As she later wrote:

  I didn’t think a thousand vibrators would make much difference—or that it mattered who was in the missionary position—if unequal power positions in real life weren’t changed. . . . It was the economic imbalance, the power imbalance in the world that subverted sex, or made sex itself into a power game where no one could win. . . . I feel like a grim spoilsport sometimes, always insisting to my sisters in the movement on that dull economic basis that had to change for any woman to be able to enjoy her own sexuality, or to truly love anyone. . . . It was so much easier and more fun just to talk about sex, vibrators, women, men, underneath or on top. But to extrapolate sexual joylessness and lonely need, masochism or cruelty as the permanent condition of women is in my opinion to give up the battle. This is the sexual pathology bred by our inequality and the reaction to it.53

  On the first evening, a group of women from Boston’s Female Liberation took the stage and formed a semicircle around one woman who proceeded to cut off the luxurious long hair of another. Wearing short hair, the women explained to the audience, was a rejection of the conventional feminine image cultivated by society. The audience was electrified. Some women shouted that they shouldn’t cut their hair, that long hair was lovely and countercultural. Other women denounced the image of the long-haired, hip, radical, movement “chick.”

  Betty Friedan looked on with horror. To her, the hair-cutting demonstration perfectly captured the differences that separated NOW from the women’s liberation movement. To Friedan, as to most other NOW members, the highest priority was to change social policy and to eliminate legal sex discrimination. After women gained economic independence, NOW members reasoned, they would have the power to make changes in their private lives as well.

  To older women, transforming oneself was not, by itself, a political act. Friedan loathed “the abusive language and style of some of the women, their sexual shock tactics and [their] man-hating, down-with-motherhood stance.” Their message, she argued, “was to make yourself ugly, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop wearing makeup or pretty dresses—any skirts at all.” Whether liberals or Marxists, older women viewed politics as a disciplined activity; one changed the system from within in order to give women choices about how to live their lives.54

  Despite NOW’s determination to maintain its respectability, the women’s liberation movement continually nudged the organization in new directions. Initially, NOW scorned the idea of consciousness-raising, arguing that feminism was about action, not talking. But as new women entered the organization, unfamiliar with politics of any sort, let alone feminism, older members discovered that “rap groups” helped such novices “catch up” on movement issues.

  The truth is, both branches of the movement were essential. NOW activists promoted leadership and the organizing skills that made them effective lobbyists, organizers, and strategists. They also provided the modern women’s movement with the staying power it needed to withstand backlash after backlash. Although they didn’t always agree—Kay Clarenbach, for instance, recalled that at early NOW meetings, the “decibel level in sessions became unbelievable”—they somehow figured out how to keep NOW alive as a national feminist organization.55 Some younger liberationists characterized NOW as “liberal” or “reformist,” an organization that merely wanted a piece of the pie, rather than entirely new ingredients. But it is much too simple to categorize these two branches of the new women’s movement as liberal versus radical, or legislative versus revolutionary. NOW’s struggle for equal opportunity, especially in employment and education, required a collective solution to individual women’s problems. Nor could all members of the organized women’s rights movement be described as simply “liberals.” Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Pauli Murray, Gerda Lerner, Addie Wyatt, and Esther Peterson, for example, were among those whose activism in the labor and civil rights movements brought a working-class and race-conscious perspective to the women’s movement.

  Young feminists contributed something equally important—a radical critique of patriarchal culture, visions of alternative lifestyles, and the unmasking of the hidden injuries women had suffered. Although they generally chose to work outside established institutions, they created a network of alternative, grassroots, self-help, nonprofit services—rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, for example—that eventually became established institutions themselves. Sometimes the injuries these younger women unmasked changed laws; sometimes NOW’s legislative efforts altered the nation’s consciousness. In many ways, the differences were really about the targets and the style in which the struggle was waged. At times, ideological or generational differences bitterly divided feminists, but neither branch of the movement, by itself, could have brought about the staggering changes that swept through American culture during the remaining decades of the twentieth century.56

  To impatient young women, NOW members often seemed stuffy and stolid. They voted; they elected leaders; they even paid dues. Rather than staying up all night seeking consensus, they relied on Robert’s Rules of Order. But young women weren’t the only ones who knew how to have fun. In her memoir, It Changed My Life, Betty Friedan described a gala celebration in 1973 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique.

  A dramatic celebration of our herstory closed with the song “I Am Woman”; suddenly women got out of their seats and started dancing around the hotel ballroom, joining hands in a circle that got larger and larger until maybe a thousand of us were dancing and singing: “There is nothing I can’t do. . . . No price too great to pay . . . I am strong . . . I am invincible. . . . I am woman.” It was a spontaneous, beautiful expression of the exhilaration we all felt in those years, women really moving as women.57

  By the mid-1970s, the challenge to traditional liberalism, waged by attorneys and activists through commissions, class action suits, hearings, and protests, had achieved a stunning series of successes. As the scholar and activist Cynthia Harrison observed:

  They had produced legislation mandating equal treatment for women in education and in credit, eliminating criminal penalties for abortion, changing prejudicial rape laws, banning discrimination against pregnant women, equalizing property distribution at divorce, and offering tax credits for childcare.58

  The momentum of the women’s movement seemed unstoppable. Exploiting its conservative image, WEAL waged an aggressive campaign against American university policies in 1969. Within a year, WEAL filed complaints against more than three hundred colleges and universities, including every medical school in the nation. In 1970, NOW filed a blanket complaint against thirteen hundred corporati
ons that received federal funds, forcing them to give back pay to hundreds of women workers. In the same year, NOW documented Judge Harold Carswell’s record of discrimination and helped to derail his nomination to the Supreme Court. In 1971, over three hundred women met in Washington, D.C., to found the National Women’s Political Caucus, whose goal was “to awaken, organize and assert the vast political power represented by women.” Early members included Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Liz Carpenter, and Gloria Steinem. Within a few years, the NWPC had active local caucuses in every state and began fielding female candidates for political office.

  In 1972, Congress quickly passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for what many assumed would be a quick ratification. In the same year, Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which denied funds for men’s sports unless an equal amount were provided for girls’ and women’s sports, a piece of legislation that instantly altered women’s relationship to athletics and sports. In the same year, Ms. magazine made its debut; women for the first time became floor reporters at political conventions; the Equal Pay Act was extended to cover administrative, executive, and professional personnel; NOW and the Urban League filed a class action suit against General Mills for sex and race discrimination; NOW initiated action against sexism in elementary-school textbooks with Dick and Jane as Victims; and women theologians called for the “castration of sexist religions” at the largest and most prestigious gathering of biblical scholars in history.

  One year later, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was constitutionally protected by a woman’s right to privacy; Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a much-hyped “Battle of the Sexes” tennis game; AT&T signed the largest job sex discrimination settlement—$38 million—in the nation’s history; the U.S. Printing Office agreed to accept “Ms.” as an optional title for women; the Bank of California settled a lawsuit by NOW and minority groups who had charged sex and race discrimination; NOW organized an International Feminist Planning Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which three hundred women from twenty-seven countries attended; a New Jersey court ruled that the state Little League must admit girls; and Helen Reddy won a Grammy Award for the hit record “I Am Woman,” an explicitly feminist song that became the unofficial anthem of the women’s movement.

  In 1974, approximately one thousand colleges and universities offered women’s studies courses; the steel industry settled a sex discrimination suit that gave $56 million in back pay and wage adjustments to 386,000 women workers; Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed married women, for the first time, to obtain credit in their own names, and the Educational Equity Act, designed to eliminate sexist curricula and achieve equity for all students regardless of sex; and Helen Thomas, after covering Washington for thirty years, became the first woman to be named a White House reporter.

  So many successes in so few years. Yet, the speed of change masked a strong strain of resistance that grew alongside the women’s movement. Signs of an instant backlash appeared everywhere. After the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, legal challenges met stiffer resistance from a Republican administration. It was not until 1970, for example, that the Justice Department actually pressed its first sex discrimination case. In 1970, former vice president Hubert Humphrey’s personal physician, Dr. Edgar Berman, sparked a fierce national debate when he announced that women were unfit for the presidency because they might be “subject to curious mental aberrations.” In the same year, the Catholic Church established the National Right to Life Committee to block liberalization of abortion laws; Billy Graham called feminism “an echo of our overall philosophy of permissiveness”; a group of women in Kingman, Arizona, organized Happiness of Womanhood (HOW), which soon affiliated with the League of Housewives.

  The next year, the women’s movement suffered one of its most significant defeats. A coalition of feminists and child care advocates had lobbied and nurtured the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have provided child care for all women. Feminists wept with joy when the legislation survived both houses of Congress and was finally passed. But their victory was short-lived. President Richard Nixon vetoed the act and Congress, heavily lobbied by right-wing opponents, failed to override the veto. In his veto message, written by Pat Buchanan, Nixon described it as “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the 93rd Congress,” and said it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing” and “would lead to the Sovietization of American children.” It would take years before politicians dared touch the issue of child care again.59

  In 1972, Phyllis Schlafly attacked the ERA and formed a new organization, Stop ERA; Midge Decter, a neoconservative and wife of conservative Norman Podhoretz, published a diatribe against the feminist movement in a book entitled The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation; and North Carolina voters sent conservative Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. By 1973, the EEOC had a backlog of sixty-five thousand uninvestigated complaints; the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment had begun to lobby for a law that would overturn Roe v. Wade; the Society for a Christian Commonwealth, a conservative Catholic lay group, called for the excommunication of Justice William Brennan, Jr., for his pro-choice view in the Supreme Court decision; Joseph Coors, looking for a way to fund his conservative political agenda, established the Heritage Foundation, which would become the “think tank” of the Reagan administration—and funded a legal network for the radical Right to protect business and industry from what they termed costly government regulations, such as affirmative action; eighty-six hundred delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming male superiority; Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that prohibited the use of funds for abortion services or research and for abortifacient drugs and devices, which unanimously passed in a Senate that had no female members; and George Gilder published Sexual Suicide, a sustained argument against the women’s movement.

  In 1974, the first “March for Life” took place; Coors funded Paul Weyrich to organize the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and Richard Viguerie became the organization’s direct mail fund-raiser; militant antifeminists stormed the Michigan House demanding that they rescind the ERA; and the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which became the Right’s major tool to oppose feminism, was established and headed by John T. Dolan, a former member of the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom. The next year, Phyllis Schlafly organized the Eagle Forum as “the alternative to women’s lib.” The race had begun; the antifeminist backlash had as much momentum as the women’s movement. Who would emerge the victor was not at all certain.60

  WOMEN’S STRIKE FOR EQUALITY

  For some of that backlash, Betty Friedan believed, the media was responsible. Journalists of all sorts were “still treating the women’s movement as a joke.” As a result, “Women feared identifying themselves as feminists or with the movement at all. We needed an action to show them—and ourselves—how powerful we were. I sensed that the women ‘out there’ were ready to move in far greater numbers than even we realized.”

  To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment (August 26, 1920), Friedan called for a national “Women’s Strike for Equality.” Although she hoped that women would abstain from their usual work, Friedan viewed the strike as a symbolic gesture. Word went out that local chapters should decide how to participate in the “strike.” After considerable squabbling, feminists finally agreed upon three central demands: the right to abortion, the right to child care, and equal opportunity in employment and education. (Radical feminists, however, carried banners demanding “free abortion on demand and 24-hour child care centers.”)

  Here, then, were the core demands of the feminist revolution in 1970.61 Riding high on a string of legal victories and
widely publicized demonstrations, for twenty-four hours feminists laid aside their factional differences and mounted the largest women’s demonstrations held since the suffrage movement. In cities and towns across the country, women marched, picketed, protested, held teach-ins and rallies, and produced skits and plays. Some women actually refused to work. A common poster urged, “Don’t Cook Dinner—Starve a Rat Today.” Another reminded women, “Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot.”

  On Boston Commons, some feminists distributed contraceptive foam and whistled at and taunted construction workers. At the Washington Post, women held a teach-in; in Rochester, New York, feminists smashed teacups to protest a lack of female participation in government; in Dayton, Ohio, two hundred women listened to talks by welfare women and hospital union members; in New York City, women built a makeshift child care center on the grounds of City Hall, draped an enormous banner “Women of the World Unite” over the Statue of Liberty, and invaded advertising agencies with medals inscribed, “This ad insults women.”

  It was an unforgettable day. One twenty-four-year-old woman who didn’t consider herself a feminist brought her child to work and was promptly fired. She called NOW and one hundred women marched and picketed until her company rehired her. A female reporter decided to wear a brown and white button that simply read, “Women-Strike, Aug. 26th.” After waiters refused to serve her, she ended her newspaper story with these words: “I’ll tell you, wearing this little button really has been an eye-opener.” The media mostly highlighted the march and rally held in New York City. Linking arms, a huge crowd of women (anywhere from ten thousand to fifty thousand, depending on whether your source was the police, the New York Times, or rally organizers) marched down Fifth Avenue, banners and posters bobbing above radiant faces. Radical feminists, high-school girls, mothers with strollers, suburban matrons, domestics, and office workers joined elderly suffragists dressed in traditional white to follow the same route taken by first-wave feminists over half a century earlier.62