The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  Extensive media coverage informed a nation still reeling from black power, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement that the fledgling movement for women’s rights and women’s liberation was not a passing fad. (The media also felt compelled to report that Betty Friedan arrived late, after having her hair “done.”) In the aftermath of the march, a CBS News poll found that four out of five people over eighteen had read or heard about women’s liberation.63

  The 1970 Women’s Strike was a stunning success. In the months to come, NOW’s ranks swelled by 50 percent. Many feminists remembered the day as a peak experience in their lives. Across the nation, feminists in coastal cities, as well as those in the heartland, no longer felt isolated. Unity, if only achieved for a day, filled participants with exhilaration. For a brief moment, the banners “Sisterhood Is Powerful” and “Women of the World Unite” seemed to describe the future. At the end of the day’s whirlwind events, Betty Friedan’s keynote speech solemnly expressed the spiritual transformation many women experienced that day:

  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.”64

  *WATS telephone lines allowed either free or deeply discounted calls from institutions like unions and universities. Without them, national organization was far more difficult. All social movements at the time depended upon the use of WATS lines to do what e-mail would do in the 1990s.

  Chapter Four

  LEAVING THE LEFT

  In May 1964, the Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley published the exciting news that “Energetic Women Discuss the Role of Educated Wives.” Less than six years later, in January 1970, the same newspaper reported a campus-wide women’s liberation conference titled “Women to Break Shackles.” Accompanying the announcement was a photograph of a woman on her knees, her mouth open in a silent scream.1

  In the intervening years, some young women felt as if they had lived several lifetimes. Outward appearance told part of the story. They had replaced matronly shirtwaists, tight undergarments, teased and sprayed hair, and heavily made up faces with miniskirts, bell-bottom pants, granny glasses, long, dangling earrings, unshaved bodies, long, straight hair, little or no underwear, and faces without makeup. Their thinking had changed even more dramatically as their sense of entitlement had grown. By 1965, the Zeitgeist, that indescribable but palpable spirit of the times, was affecting much of college youth. Each year, college-educated young women—as well as the larger public—began to take seriously what was still referred to as the “modern woman’s dilemma,” shorthand for the debate over women’s proper role in modern society.

  During the same years that an older generation of women bumped up against the limits of liberalism, a younger generation of women was emerging from the 1950s, shaking off the dust and detritus of that decade, and beginning to question all kinds of received wisdom. They soon began to enter the political, social, and cultural movements then sprouting on college campuses. “The movement,” as it came to be called, not only included the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, but also a network of friendships, sexual partners, spouses, and communal living arrangements in which the alienated daughters of the fifties had taken refuge. For many young women, it would be an agonizing decision to leave this political community. It meant rupturing years of personal ties to a subculture that, at its most idealistic moments, saw itself as the redeemer of a nation poisoned by racism, materialism, and imperialism. What fueled their exodus was the ridicule and humiliation they experienced from men in the civil rights movement and then in the New Left and antiwar movements who could not—or would not—understand that the women’s liberation movement would expand the very definition of democracy. What made it possible was that many of these movements had already begun a downward spiral into self-destruction.

  THE END OF THE AGE OF COMPLACENCY

  It’s difficult to understand the origins and culture of the women’s liberation movement without grasping something of the history and character of the New Left. In the post-World War II era, any independent radical critique of American society could be—and regularly was—discredited by being associated with Communism, and with the Soviet Union in particular. In such a chilling political atmosphere, cultural and social critics of all sorts risked stigma, as well as unemployment. The death of Joseph Stalin and the censure of the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy opened up space for new kinds of critical thought. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 of Stalin’s monstrous crimes hastened the collapse of the Old Left, as many of the faithful deserted the American Communist Party. In England and the United States, small groups of intellectuals began in the late 1950s creating a “New” Left, dedicated organizationally to avoiding the hierarchical, centralized leadership promoted by the Communist Party and ideologically to sustaining a democratic and egalitarian socialist movement.

  This generation of young people, who had grown up under the nuclear terror of the Cold War, dreamed of creating a different kind of dissident political culture. In a prescient 1960 essay, “The New Left,” the iconoclastic sociologist C. Wright Mills caught their mood when he declared “the age of complacency is ending.” In 1962, the leftist activist and author Michael Harrington, in his book The Other America, reminded a generation reared in relative prosperity of the hidden poverty that still crippled the lives of many Americans. World events also inspired New Leftists: Mahatma Gandhi’s powerful use of nonviolence in India’s struggle to overthrow its English rulers, the newly won independence of African nations from colonial rule, the drama of the Cuban revolution, and the rise of Third World liberation movements. The election of a youthful John F. Kennedy, who urged young Americans in his inaugural speech “to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” helped spur a sense that a new era of social change and “participatory democracy” had begun.2

  From Kennedy’s election in 1960 to the end of the decade, young activists went on a wild political and cultural roller-coaster ride that left many of them with serious cases of vertigo. As the decade began, young southern civil rights workers founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”), whose goal was to create a “beloved community” while working to end segregation through nonviolence. Two years later, New Left activists on college campuses launched Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), committing themselves, in their founding statement, to persuading their country to live up to its democratic ideals.

  Yet, by 1969, the New Left was in tatters. Black-power separatists and young black armed revolutionaries had replaced SNCC’s integrationist nonviolent idealists. SDS had splintered into warring Marxist and Maoist factions, each infatuated with its own idealized image of Third World movements, and in the case of the Weather Underground, dedicated to armed struggle. The counterculture and the sexual revolution, which had loosened the fifties’ hold on American culture with the promise of, as the catchphrase then went, “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” had degenerated into an urban culture of homeless runaways, pornographic underground newspapers, drug abuse, sexual exploitation, and a crass commercialism that rivaled anything mainstream society was capable of producing. To many activists, “the movement” seemed dead.

  The origins of the women’s liberation movement are tightly woven into this tumultuous decade.3 Its story begins in the segregated South, where young white women absorbed ideals, values, and strategies that would eventually shape the women’s liberation movement. The initial goal of SNCC was to organize the growing number of students streaming into the civil rights movement after four black college men in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in when they were refused service at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Within two months of thei
r sit-in, thirty thousand students followed their example. By the end of 1960, seventy thousand students had invented kneel-ins and prayer-ins all over the South, and thirty-six hundred young people had been arrested, jailed, and, in some cases, beaten. Ella Baker, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a civil rights group led by ministers and parent organization to SNCC, decided to call an organizing conference for student sit-in leaders. She soon became known as SNCC’s unofficial mother.

  SNCC exuded a youthful, chaotic, morally earnest spirit. A young white volunteer described her first impression as she entered one of its offices.

  Papers were strewn across the desk with unstudied abandon. Telephones were ringing, wastebaskets bulged with trash, and file-cabinet drawers gaped open. A mimeograph machine monotonously whooshed paper through its roller in the background, and a radio somewhere thumped a heavy beat. The floors looked as if they had not been scrubbed since installation, and the windows were opaque with dust. I did not see anyone who was white there among the young black people rushing around that day.4

  SNCC’s determination to organize at the grass roots, to develop local leadership, “to let the people decide,” and to refuse bail when arrested, clashed with the more conservative church leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who preached patience as they tried to preserve their fragile alliances with liberals, politicians, and labor leaders. SNCC’s evolving movement culture profoundly influenced every other youthful movement that surfaced in its wake. Through their emphasis on direct action, SNCC activists taught other young people “to put their bodies on the line.” By seeking to organize—and live among—the poorest of the poor in states like Mississippi, they lived, rather than preached, a millenarian dream of creating a redemptive and “beloved community.” By “telling it like it is,” they integrated personal revelation into group politics. By making all decisions through consensus, they gave birth to the exhausting but democratic experience of participatory democracy, which would be most commonly experienced as all-night meetings.

  SNCC’s redemptive vision was interracial in practice and spirit, even if its members were largely black. The young organization soon attracted strikingly talented and dedicated young southern and northern blacks and whites. During its early years, only a handful of its regular staff members were white women. These women, already committed to changing race relations, arrived fresh from southern church-sponsored civil rights work or from the YWCA, where they had participated in projects to desegregate southern universities and communities. Others had discovered civil rights work through the National Student Association, an organization of college student leaders and peace activists. After 1962, some civil rights workers came from the campus-based Students for a Democratic Society.5

  Two white women in their twenties, Mary King and Sandra “Casey” Cason (known after her marriage in 1962 to SDS founder and activist Tom Hayden as Casey Hayden), joined SNCC without ever imagining the impact this experience would have on their lives. Like so many young people who would become involved in sixties movements, Mary King came from “a home of high purpose,” the daughter of a Virginia minister in a family with five generations of ministers to its name. The influence of her family’s tradition led her to work first in the YWCA and then in SNCC. “There was little rebellion in my decision to work in the YWCA and then in SNCC. I was in fact being a dutiful daughter.”6

  Sandra “Casey” Cason was born in 1939 in Austin, Texas. The daughter of the only divorced, self-supporting mother in a small coastal Texas town, Cason grew up in modest surroundings and early “developed a bias against the rich, of whom there were many in this oil rich country.” In 1957, she entered the University of Texas, “liberal leaning, slightly alienated,” but without a language to express her alienation. By 1960, she, too, had gravitated to the local YWCA chapter, which was trying to desegregate public facilities, and took up residence in the only integrated housing on campus, the Christian Faith and Life Community. Through the YWCA, she also had her first experience with “consensus-forming, non-hierarchical, egalitarian small-groups.”7 In Atlanta, she began working with Ella Baker on a YWCA project to create “race relations workshops” across the South.

  One of the important friends she made was Dorothy Dawson, a southerner who had been her roommate at the University of Texas. Born in 1937, Dawson grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in a conservative family that emphasized humanistic values. The constant presence of a black servant made her uncomfortable; the early death of her father forced her mother to provide for her family. As an adolescent, Dawson observed her mother’s vulnerability, privately vowing that she would somehow achieve economic independence as an adult.

  As a freshman, Dawson wrote a term paper on racism and met Robb Burlage, the editor of the student newspaper, an SDS intellectual and activist whom she married in 1963. With Casey Hayden and Robb Burlage, Dorothy Dawson worked to desegregate social life at the university. She, too, went to Atlanta to set up projects that would prepare students for desegregation on southern campuses.8

  Through her husband, Tom Hayden, Casey Hayden also met members of the northern student movement who had a penchant for writing position papers. Later, Hayden credited SDS with having “a large influence in the decision to put forward position papers about women” that would be crucial to the formation of the women’s liberation movement in the mid-sixties. On a trip North in 1961, Casey Hayden also met members of Women Strike for Peace, who were organizing a massive housewives’ strike against aboveground nuclear testing. These women made a lasting impression on her. “In its simplicity and Quaker-like speaking from the heart, this group was much like SNCC or the Y. It was also devoted to direct action, speaking truth to power. It seemed everyone was on the same track, and in the same rhythm.”9

  All these disparate experiences seemed to come together in SNCC. They saw grinding poverty close up, but also the rich culture of black community life. They witnessed the despair of the poor, but also the courage of local black leaders. They felt powerlessness, but also learned the strength of hope. Perhaps most important, they felt like integral members of an interracial group whose immodest goal was the redemption of a racist America through love. “We were the beloved community,” recalled Casey Hayden twenty-five years later, “harassed, happy, and poor. And in those little, hot, black, rural churches, we went into the music, into the sound, and everyone was welcome inside this perfect place. We simply dropped race.”10

  SNCC’s concern for the poorest of the poor deeply affected both King and Hayden. “We loved the untouchables,” remembered Hayden. “We believed the last should be first and not only should be first, but in fact were first in our value system. The movement in its early days had a grandeur that feared no rebuke and assumed no false attitudes. It was a holy time.”11

  During these years, white women in SNCC would violate nearly every racial and sexual convention of southern culture. SNCC also granted them extraordinary work opportunities not then open to most women. Within a short time of joining, Mary King became communications assistant to SNCC leader Julian Bond. Armed with a precious WATS line, King briefed the press on pending civil rights activities, reported on police brutality, pushed a recalcitrant FBI to act on threats to organizers’ lives, and helped coordinate northern groups of Friends of SNCC to pressure the federal government. Casey Hayden became one of SNCC’s most effective staff and project organizers, a legend to younger members.

  Constant danger and an atmosphere of terror threw both women, barely out of college, into a combat-zone-like situation. Beatings, jailings, and fire bombings taught them to cope with always-imminent danger. Night riders trailed activists’ cars or shot up the “freedom houses” in which organizers lived. The real possibility of vaginal searches and jail rapes during imprisonments tested their commitment and endurance in the face of state-sanctioned violence. Stories of jailers pouring acid on women’s genital tissue—which happened after arrests during the Freedom Rides—brough
t home their double jeopardy as civil rights activists and women. And, yet, as Casey Hayden observed, whatever the dangers, “nonviolent direct action was a transforming experience—a new self was created.”12

  By 1964, SNCC leaders realized that the savage violence used against black civil rights workers had still not ignited the nation’s indignation. One year earlier, the black civil rights worker Medgar Evers had been assassinated, mourned by blacks across the country, but his untimely death had done nothing to increase government protection of black civil rights activists in the South. White lives, as SNCC leader Bob Moses reluctantly admitted, were far more valued. So SNCC recruited approximately one thousand northern students to help with voter registration and education in Mississippi and other southern states for what was dubbed “Freedom Summer.” These young men and women, recruited from elite colleges, had parents and families who were well-placed to pressure the government to protect their children’s lives. The immediate disappearance of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights activists, underscored the dangers these volunteers faced. By the end of the summer, their beaten and mutilated bodies were discovered, reminding volunteers that civil rights work would sometimes require the sacrifice of lives.