The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  he led slowly and then began to warm up. One humorous slap followed another. We became more and more relaxed. We stretched out on the pier, lying with our heads on each other’s abdomens. We were absorbed by the flow of his humor and our laughter. He reveled in our attention as we were illuminated by the moon. Stokely got more and more carried away. He stood up, slender and muscular, jabbed to make his points, his thoughts racing. . . . He started joking about black Mississippians. He made fun of everything that crossed his agile mind.

  Finally, he turned to the meeting under way and the position papers. He came to the no-longer-anonymous paper on women. Looking straight at me, he grinned broadly and shouted, “What is the position of women in SNCC?” Answering himself, he responded, “The position of women in SNCC is prone!” Stokely threw back his head and roared outrageously with laughter. We all collapsed with hilarity. His ribald comment was uproarious and wild. It drew us all close together, because, even in that moment, he was poking fun at his own attitudes.33

  His joke offended neither King nor Hayden, who, at the time, regarded Stokely Carmichael as one of the men most sympathetic to their position paper. But one northern white woman, who had just had a brief sexual encounter with Carmichael during the conference, overheard him say that “he’d rather masturbate than go to bed with a white woman.” To her, his joke did not seem humorous at all.34

  What began as a joke soon entered Carmichael’s repertoire of humor. Cynthia Washington heard Carmichael’s one-liner at a district meeting in Mississippi:

  I was standing next to Muriel Tillinghast, another project director, and we were not pleased. But our relative autonomy as project directors seemed to deny or only override his statement. We were proof that what he said wasn’t true—or so we thought. In fact, I’m certain that our single-minded focus on the issue of racial discrimination and the black struggle for equality blinded us to other issues.

  In England, Sheila Rowbotham, the British socialist-feminist and author, listened with shock as Carmichael spoke at a Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London in 1967. Asked about the role of women in the revolution, Carmichael uttered one word: “Prone.” “As a socialist,” Rowbotham recalled, “I obviously supported the black movement in America. Now here was the person I thought I was supporting sneering at [women].”35

  But it was not just Carmichael’s repetition of his crowd pleasing one-liner that amplified the impact of his words. Clearly, he had touched a very raw nerve. His joke captured the growing racial and sexual tensions within the movement, North as well as South. Raised to be “nice” girls, movement women generally welcomed sexual adventure, but as daughters of the fifties, they also feared sexual exploitation. They wanted respect—as political comrades and lovers. Carmichael’s joke reinforced their fears, legitimizing the need for an autonomous women’s movement.

  By 1965, those in SNCC who favored a more centralized structure and black separatism had triumphed, and whites were asked to leave the group and to organize poor whites. The interracial movement was over; in its place was the demand for black power and self-determination.

  A KIND OF MEMO

  Many former SNCC members naturally turned to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By 1965, both SDS and SNCC had cut loose from their parent organizations, severed their alliances with liberals, and embraced a generational politics that shut off input from elders. Like SNCC, early SDS had begun as a small community whose values and goals were cemented by personal friendships. But most of the group’s original members—the Old Guard—had already graduated from college and now worked in SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). A new generation of recruits, largely from the Midwest—dubbed “Prairie Power”—had taken over the leadership. Many younger recruits only knew the Old Guard men and women by reputation, if at all. As in SNCC, the older sense of community had vanished and it was unclear what would replace it.

  Unlike SNCC, with its emphasis on direct action, early SDS had been best known for its intellectual discourse and position papers. Its founding statement, drafted by Tom Hayden and others in 1962 in Port Huron, had proposed the immodest goal of ending racism and war, questioned America’s exploitative relations with the rest of the world, condemned the corporate control of economic life, denounced the materialism and anonymity of American life in general, and condemned the bureaucratic, profit-making, and dehumanizing aspects of American society. Through participatory democracy, people would make the decisions that affected their own lives. Rejecting the hierarchic, dogmatic, and centralized nature of the Old Left and the American Communist Party, SDS created a national office loosely tied to autonomous local campus chapters. Fearful of the tyranny of leadership, the organization rotated its leadership positions.

  In the spring of 1965, Casey Hayden went north to work with SDS’s organizing project in Chicago. ERAP projects, seeded in a number of cities from Newark to Cleveland, reflected SDS’s efforts to organize poor whites. To live with and organize the poor was meant to convey a powerful statement of revulsion with American materialism. The journalist Andrew Kopkind, who visited ERAP projects in various cities, thought its members lived in worse poverty than SNCC staffers in the South:

  They are part of the slums, a kind of lay-brotherhood, or worker-priests, except that they have no dogma to sell. They get no salary; they live on a subsistence allowance that the project as a whole uses for rent and food . . . they eat a spartan diet of one-and-a-half meals a day, consisting mainly of powdered milk and large quantities of peanut butter and jelly, which seems to be the SDS staple.

  In Chicago Casey Hayden watched SDS men try, but fail, to organize young men, some recently arrived from Appalachia, whose violent and retrograde attitudes toward women they accepted—and even imitated. Marilyn Webb, an early SDS activist, recalled that in the unsuccessful Chicago project to organize former hillbillies, “The [SDS] men seemed fascinated by the violence; they even tried to imitate the men’s swaggering and violent postures. Worst of all, some of the men tried to pressure SDS women into sleeping with community men.”36

  As it turned out, the major successes in urban organizing came thanks to women organizers. “Much of ERAP was a dismal failure,” one former SDSer now concedes, “but what we did in Cleveland and Boston later turned into a national welfare rights movement.” With pride, former SDS member Sharon Jeffrey recalls what she and Carol McEldowney accomplished in Cleveland. “We quickly realized that the most promising strategy was to organize women at the food stamp redemption center. The men tried to organize—and even imitate—ghetto men, but it never worked. While they hung around pool halls, trying to speak and act tough, we organized women on the food stamp lines.”

  “That’s where we learned that women really knit together a community,” observed a former ERAP organizer. “Standing up at city council meetings against landlords and welfare bureaucrats taught us to value our abilities and skills.” According to another, “Community women really taught us a great deal about solidarity and strength—something we would need later on in the women’s movement.” One woman, who worked in the Newark ERAP project, proudly recalled that some SDS women remained there long after SDS abandoned the project, and opened the first women’s center in the city.

  Women welfare recipients, like their black counterparts in the South, were the glue that held together the poor white community. Casey Hayden’s experience now taught her that organizing women was the key to social change. In the fall, feeling at loose ends, she headed for Mary King’s family cottage in the remote woods in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Together they holed up in the remote rural area, and Hayden wrote a manifesto about women’s position that would ignite the women’s liberation movement. “There, in the quiet isolation of a forest,” wrote King,

  and with wood smoke from the cottage fire scenting our walks, on November 18, 1965, Casey wrote the first draft and then together we polished our challenge to women who were involved across the spectrum of progressive organizing. This
call would go out to [forty] women in Students for a Democratic Society, the National Student Association, the Northern Student Movement, and the Student Peace Union as well as SNCC.37

  Hayden’s paper summed up what they had learned during their years in SNCC. King, for example, attributed many of her ideas to Ella Baker, who had taught young activists “that a fundamental purpose of the civil rights movement was to teach people to make their own decisions, to take responsibility for themselves, and to be ready to accept the consequences . . . you must let the oppressed themselves define their own freedom.” Reflecting on the origins of the women’s memo, King wrote, “Wasn’t that in fact what we were seeking to do, to define our own freedom?”38

  For Hayden—cut off from the movement that had sustained her for half a decade and recently divorced from Tom Hayden—the writing also represented an effort to create a new community. Blacks had decided that whites could no longer organize blacks. Men had begun organizing men against the Vietnam War. In part, the manifesto represented her effort to re-create SNCC’s beloved community: “It was a search for a home, a sisterhood, an attempt to create real discussion. The means and ends were one. . . . The paper was not a rebellion; it was an attempt to sustain.”39

  Hayden and King called the manifesto “A Kind of Memo,” a title whose modesty masked their actual ambition to mobilize women in the movement. In order to analyze women’s relations to men, they once again drew upon the language and world they knew best—that of race relations. Unlike the 1964 list of grievances, the “Memo” focused on the larger problems women were experiencing in the movement. Searching for a way to situate women as a group, Hayden settled on the concept of a “caste.” Unable to imagine a separatist women’s movement, she predicted that women would not withdraw from the situation “à la black nationalism.” “Objectively,” Hayden wrote confidently, “the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full time on problems such as war, poverty, race.” That settled, Hayden went on to question woman’s “natural” role in society, as well as a range of movement assumptions from “who cleans the freedom house, to who accepts a leadership position, to who does secretarial work, and to who acts as spokesman for groups.”

  In SNCC, women had enjoyed considerable freedom from hierarchy and learned to question the “natural order of things.” It was only logical to apply these ideas to the most intimate aspects of their lives. “The reason we want to try to open up dialogue,” the “Memo” explained, “is mostly subjective. Working in the movement often intensifies personal problems, especially if we start trying to apply things we’re learning there to our personal lives.” Years before feminists invoked the slogan “The personal is political,” Hayden had defined the political dimensions of personal relations.

  We’ve talked in the movement about trying to build a society which would see basic human problems (which are now seen as personal troubles) as public problems and which would try to shape institutions to meet human needs rather than shaping people to meet the needs of those with power. . . . [We’ve learned] to think radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before [and now] a lot of women in the movement had begun trying to apply those lessons to their own relations with men.

  Already, in 1965, Hayden was articulating what women’s liberationists would later call “consciousness-raising”—“trusting our inner feelings,” as she put it, “learning to see the world through women’s own experiences.” Hayden also realized that the ghost of the fifties haunted their highly politicized lives. Under the heading of institutions, Hayden underscored their growing rejection of the very institutions of traditional family life: “Nearly everyone has real questions about those institutions which shape the perspectives about men and women: marriage, child rearing patterns. . . . People are beginning to think about and even to experiment with new forms in these areas.”40

  Hayden and King sent their three-page document to forty women active in the civil rights, student, and peace movements sometime after November 18, 1965. It reached an even wider readership when the magazine Liberation reprinted it in April 1966. “From our black women friends,” recalled King, “to whom we had sent the missive . . . we heard nothing. Not one responded.” The problems Hayden had identified addressed the stereotype of white women’s learned helplessness, not the racism that forced black women to support themselves, their families, and their communities. And as more black women embraced black separatist politics, they also viewed “women’s issues” as divisive.41

  White women activists responded with greater enthusiasm. “I was very turned on by the memo and wanted to do some kind of exposé on male leadership of the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union],” the labor activist Jan Goodman wrote Hayden. A former editor of the Nation, Elizabeth Sutherland, offered to rewrite the memo to submit to mainstream magazines. Years later, Barbara Raskin, an activist attached to the leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told Mary King that she would never forget the day the letter arrived in the mail:

  It was stunning in its effect on me. I read it and reread it, and shared it with all my friends. Eventually we started a group in Washington and met on a regular basis to discuss the issues you and Casey raised. From reading and rereading it, the letter became creased and dirtied. Finally, I could hardly read it anymore but by then I knew it by heart.42

  INSIDE SDS

  Like Betty Friedan’s discovery of housewives’ nameless problems, “A Kind of Memo” captured the unarticulated simmering resentments of young activist women and sparked serious soul-searching among them. The “women’s issue” surfaced just as SDS’s fragile unity faced dramatic expansion in the face of growing protests against the war in Vietnam and increasing political divisions.

  The small, face-to-face community of SDS had been overwhelmed by the growing student and antiwar movements. Inspired by the Free Speech Movement that erupted in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, students across the country had begun to question the relevance of their education and the authority of their professors. In August 1964, Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, confirming the fact that the United States was embroiled in a major war in Vietnam. When the president ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965, SDS, a visible dissident student organization, found itself cast as the leadership responsible for organizing an antiwar movement.

  Across the country, students organized “teach-ins,” marathon events in which educators and experts taught a generation of students, many of whom would have been hard-pressed to find Vietnam on a map, the history of America’s ongoing intervention in Southeast Asia. In April 1965, SDS drew some twenty-five thousand people to the nation’s capital for the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War. By the spring of 1965, in response to the accelerating war in Vietnam, SDS had ballooned into a national organization of some forty chapters with over two thousand paid members.

  Many women participated in SDS, as well as in the student and antiwar movements. What historian Sara Evans has described as SDS’s “competitive intellectual mode” intimidated many female (as well as male) members. Early SDS attracted an exceptional core of young men who “were diligent readers, active thinkers and talkers, and as the later literature lists of SDS will show, prodigious writers.”43 If they had wanted, these young men could have achieved early success—and economic security—in any number of careers. Instead, they rebelled against conventional definitions of male success.

  As the organization grew, alienation escalated. Among the alienated were SDS women who were at least as remarkable as their male counterparts, arguably more so. A number of them had mothers who viewed themselves as feminists; a few had parents who, as Communists or former Communists, had taught their daughters about the “woman question.” Others came to a
n understanding of women’s oppression through their own personal and political experience.

  Vivian Rothstein was typical of the women who became part of the SDS inner circle. Raised in Los Angeles, Rothstein went to Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1963 and soon joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrations against the discriminatory employment practices of Lucky Foods and the Sheraton Plaza Hotel. Along with five hundred other demonstrators, she was arrested for civil disobedience in an action against auto dealerships that refused to hire black salespeople, and spent the summer of 1964 in group trials in San Francisco. She participated in the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and in the summer of 1965 went to Jackson, Mississippi, as part of the second Mississippi Freedom Summer project. In Jackson, police arrested her in a mass action challenging local restrictions on political demonstrations. After ten days in a Jackson jail, she was assigned to a rural Mississippi county to work on voter registration, school integration, and the development of a local Freedom School.

  Rothstein took seriously blacks’ admonition to organize other whites. She returned to Berkeley, where she joined a fledgling SDS ERAP project in Oakland, California. When that project failed, she moved East to join the SDS JOIN project, which was organizing poor white southern Appalachian migrants in Chicago. It was in Chicago that she became involved with the leadership core of SDS. Like many women in that initial group, Vivian’s admission to the inner circle was facilitated by her subsequent marriage to an early SDS leader.

  Many women in the New Left—not only in SDS—felt intimidated by the movement world in which they lived but rarely starred. In contrast, early male SDS leaders boldly expressed a sense of entitlement that had been part of their upbringing. They expected to be heard, even in Washington. During the Cuban missile crisis, Elinor Langer, married to the founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, remembered that “the women, come to think of it, were making coffee and setting the table while the men were trying to figure out by what chain of who-knows-who they could reach the higher authorities with their proposals and demands.” Looking back, Sue Thrasher, the first executive secretary of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, recalled, “The officers in SSOC were all men except me. It became clear to me that I was doing all the shit work, holding the office together, keeping the mailing and stuff like that going on.” But like many young women in such situations, she repressed any sense of resentment. She simply loved being in the movement. “A lot of my anger about the position of women came later.”44