The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  Unlike the Old Left, which at least recognized “the woman question,” SDS did not even address the issue. Barbara Epstein, whose activism spanned both the Old and New Left, found SDS astonishingly ignorant of what the Communist Party had called “male chauvinism.” In “the Old Left,” she noted, “one could at least bring up the issue, even if Communists regarded it as a ‘bourgeois matter’ to be solved ‘after the revolution.’” . . . “Inside SDS,” explained Epstein, “you see, it was laughed at. I tried to bring this up in SDS and it was impossible.”

  Power came and went depending on a woman’s relationship to men in the inner circle. Barbara Haber, one of the founding members of SDS, recognized that as the wife of the group’s first president, she had special status, but not necessarily more credibility. “I was the wife of a ‘heavy’ [movement shorthand for an important leader who wielded influence]. It was a double-edged status. It certainly did not mean that I was seen as a person in my own right and treated with respect.”

  Such daughters of the fifties, well educated and brimming with intellectual curiosity, had little inclination to write theoretical papers on the nature of the university or the military-industrial complex. Casey Hayden felt that “SDS shaped my politics, but SNCC had my heart.”45 They were accustomed to using their intelligence for organizing and solving concrete problems. Little in their background or education had encouraged them to theorize about corporate America or to analyze the nation’s foreign policy with a voice of authority—in fact, to do anything with the kind of authority that seemed to come so naturally to their male peers. Raised to be polite, some waited patiently for men to stop speaking, but as one former SDS woman complained, “The men, they never finished.”

  At large national council meetings women felt especially intimidated by the long speeches and the intellectual competition among male leaders. And when they did speak, they were often ignored. Nanci Hollander, an SDS activist then married to Todd Gitlin, president of SDS in 1963, noticed that whenever a woman began to speak, “the men suddenly stretched, and chattered among themselves.” Women got the message: what they had to say was, by definition, of so little importance that it could be ignored. The issues women most wanted to discuss—how to organize more effectively, how to improve the group process, or how to address the problems of community women—were discredited as “soft subjects,” certainly less important than an analysis of corporate liberalism or American foreign policy.

  It was the same wherever the New Left met. Anne Weills, then married to Robert Scheer, the editor of the leftist magazine Ramparts, also felt invisible at Bay Area movement meetings. “Even if you said it well,” she recalled,

  half the time people would ignore you. I’d think, “I’m not saying it well. I’m not saying it loud enough.” Finally, I’d get to say something. Complete Silence. A few minutes later, a man would get up and say the same thing. Suddenly the room became electrified. Invisibility. That’s what was so painful.

  Parliamentary rules, wielded as weapons by men on a podium, made Marilyn Webb, an SDS activist, “afraid to say anything. . . . There was no feeling women were encouraged, and parliamentary rules, often byzantine, seemed so alienating.”46

  “The SDS Old Guard,” Todd Gitlin later conceded, “was essentially a young boys’ network. . . . Men sought [women] out, recruited them, took them seriously, honored their intelligence—then subtly demoted them to girlfriends, wives, note-takers, coffee makers. . . . Ambition, expected in a man, looked suspiciously like ball-busting to the male eye. An aggressive style, which might pass as acceptably virile in a man, sounded ‘bitchy’ in a woman.”47

  The historian Maurice Isserman has suggested that life at the national office—“with its pressure-cooker atmosphere and the premium placed within it on forceful public speaking as the mark of leadership”—may have been less hospitable than in SDS local chapters. But at the national level, women felt overshadowed and often suffered from debilitating self-doubt. Carol McEldowney, a respected and talented organizer who had helped turn Cleveland’s ERAP project into a welfare rights movement, confided her own disabling insecurity in a private letter to a trusted SDS friend in 1964: “You know, or maybe you don’t, that I’ve endured many feelings of insecurity and inferiority lately in the intellectual realm, and for a long time I’ve felt dwarfed being around the intellectual elite.”

  McEldowney was well aware that most SDS male leaders valued intellectual theory more than organizing skills. “I often find myself frustrated and hamstrung by my own inadequacy, which is not a happy situation. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that I often . . . lose my tongue when in a conversational situation with those of that superior ilk.”48 Such paralyzing self-doubt prevented McEldowney from accepting the reins of national leadership. During the summer of 1965, a group of SDS friends tried to persuade her to become the national secretary of the organization. Overwhelmed, she wrote to friends, “Me. Nat’l Sec’y. A joke.” She refused, explaining that the very idea terrified her. After a recent meeting, she had left feeling “like crawling into a hole. My lack of information of American foreign policy, coupled with my shyness in such a situation and fear of saying something that would be rebuffed. . . . I have trouble saying this to people because the standard response is, ‘oh, stop being silly,’ which does nothing, absolutely nothing, to reassure me. . . . The damn thing of it is that I’m sure many other people in SDS feel as I do.”49

  They did, but at the time, each woman assumed that her alienation and lack of confidence was her own private problem. At an SDS reunion in New York in August 1988, the women decided to reconsider their own history in SDS. By 1969, when SDS had splintered into warring factions, these women no longer lived in the same community. They told other women their stories, but not the women with whom they had worked and shared their lives in SDS in the early sixties.

  Now they told each other how they felt in SDS. Several women described the terror of talking at national meetings. “But I thought you were so strong and articulate,” own woman commented to another. “I thought I was the only one who felt that way.” “Every time I spoke, I trembled,” said another former member. Another woman added almost in a whisper, “Many of us left meetings and quietly cried alone.”50 “Why did we feel so devalued?” someone then asked. Betty Garman, a member of the first SDS Executive Council, suggested one answer. “What seemed important to men never seemed all that important to me. I wanted to organize, not engage in verbal debate.” Sharon Jeffrey added that “SDS revered the mind, but ignored feelings. Perception, not intuition, was honored.”

  Each story tapped into some wellspring of sadness. Tears flowed—for doubting their intellectual talents, for accepting men’s definition of the world. Sala Steinbach said softly, “SDS was the center of my life.” Another woman added, “And we have to admit that SDS was extraordinary precisely because of those brilliant men. Many of us were seduced by their great minds and ambitious visions. And yet that very same talent was what intimidated us.” A brief period of silence followed. “We are angry at ourselves,” one former SDSer said quietly. “How could those men be so smart and still so sexist?” wondered another woman, half-laughing and half-crying.

  Dorothy Burlage, one of the Old Guard, highlighted the difference between her generation and the younger women who followed: “The opportunity for exploitation grew because the institution of marriage was breaking down within the movement, many of us were getting divorced, and women were becoming more vulnerable and alone.” Another woman added that “the high drama of personal relations became part of political culture.” “We began to live as though we had already created a new society, but we certainly weren’t ready for it!” “And nothing was ever wholly private,” Dorothy Burlage added. When Tom and Casey Hayden divorced, an SDS memo documented the split.

  One of the women who entered SDS after 1965 pointed out that by then, the change in sexual mores and lifestyles had transformed the culture of SDS. “To men, especially th
e Old Guard, the story is one of political decline and disintegration.” But women, she argued, experienced more continuity:

  All of us, one way or another, achieved our status through our connection to a man. No matter what year you entered SDS, that was the truth. The big difference—for us—is that as the movement grew, and the sexual revolution and drugs changed our lives, we no longer gained status as wives, but as lovers of important men. So we became more vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

  She hit a raw nerve. A number of women nodded in agreement. “The only way to gain any authority,” as one woman put it, “was to be with a man in the Old Guard.” Sometimes, added Marilyn Webb, “men used younger women to threaten and control older women.” To which a former SDSer added, “Yes, and women rose or fell depending on a man’s sexual interests. When an affair ended, we could be thrown out of the inner circle. We didn’t want—or have—the marriages that would have offered some security.” Sarah Murphy, who first joined SDS at fourteen, described how she avoided sexual liaisons by allowing herself to be cast as a “mascot.” “I think it was a strategy that worked, but at a very high cost to me personally.”51

  In December 1965, one month after “A Kind of Memo” reached movement women, Students for a Democratic Society convened what organizers dubbed a “rethinking” conference in Champaign-Urbana. As with SNCC at Waveland, the conference represented the group’s attempt, in a period of enormous growth in membership, to recapture the soul of its original vision. At the conference, many SDS women experienced the kind of intimidation or exploitation they later described in 1988, but they didn’t know how to talk about it. Men set the political agenda because, well, they knew about politics. Women did the mimeographing and coffee-making because, well, women always did such things. “We just didn’t think it could be different at that time,” one former activist remembered. “In many ways, the movement was so much better than ordinary life, who would have thought of complaining?” The movement, after all, gave them great freedom to explore their ideas and values. They also learned how to organize, write press releases, run mimeograph machines, and mediate conflicts. Intimidating, not to say tedious, as the verbal debates and position papers might have been, they were teaching a critical mass of young women how to think strategically and theoretically.

  Still, feelings of status deprivation ran deep. Gaining skills and confidence, but not recognition, provided some of the fuel for women’s dissatisfaction.52 As Barbara Haber pointed out, “It is precisely because the early years so closely matched my ideal of a dream life that the disappointments felt so enormous.” Ambitions ran high. They were going to overthrow the world of their parents. They were in the process of redefining “obscenity” as war, racism, and poverty. They wanted to be viewed as serious people, not simply as the playmates or housewives of movement men. The difficulty men had in recognizing this budding sense of self-confidence set the stage for a painful collision.

  In the wake of the conference, most SDS activists agreed that the “rethinking” had been a dismal failure. The organization had neither recaptured its earlier spirit nor discovered a new vision. While some men would view that failure as the beginning of the end of the New Left, some women would later regard it as the beginning of the women’s movement.

  Hayden’s “Memo” dominated the conference. Discussions trailed into the early hours of the morning. Some remember an all-men’s group forming briefly. Just who was where, and who met with whom, is now impossible to reconstruct. When someone finally announced a workshop to discuss women’s problems in the movement, most of the Old Guard men and women immediately joined right in.53

  At first, the discussion turned on whether or not women constituted an oppressed group within SDS. Most women said they did; many of the men denied it. The fact that the debate began—and foundered—at such an elementary level so angered some of the women that they decided to meet by themselves in another room. In the mixed group that met outdoors, the members began to debate whether there was any problem at all and whether “sex roles” were natural or not.

  Martha Zweig, an SDS activist, shocked Barbara Haber by insisting that the sexual division of labor—in society as well as in SDS—was both natural and essential to maintain, rooted as it was in women’s sexual and emotional passivity. Haber, who had avoided joining the all-women’s group—out of loyalty to her husband, Al—became indignant. She argued with Zweig, saying that she didn’t experience herself as a passive sexual being. As her irritation grew, Haber found herself regretting that she had not joined the women’s group. In front of the approximately twenty or so men and remaining women, she heard herself defending women’s right to equality with men. “At that moment,” she recalled, “I knew I had become a feminist.”54

  As the evening grew chilly, Haber suggested that the group move inside. No one noticed; no one moved. She made the same suggestion several more times; no one paid any attention. “Watch this,” her husband Al Haber sympathetically whispered. He repeated her suggestion. Everyone picked up their chairs and withdrew from the nippy night air.55

  Meanwhile, the all-women’s group listened as someone read the “Memo” out loud. When a few men asked to join, the women made a historic decision to meet alone. They began by asking questions. What were legitimate “women’s” issues as opposed to individual problems? What aspects of sex roles were, in fact, natural? Where was the vocabulary to discuss any of this? The word “sexism” did not yet exist. If some daughters of the Old Left were familiar with the terms “male supremacy” and the “woman question” in the winter of 1965, there were still precious few ways to talk about and explore such matters.

  Shortly afterward, Sharon Jeffrey and Carol McEldowney mailed out typewritten notes based on the workshop. In a preface, they expressed their anxiety that “their notes might not capture the excitement and emotion, and real seriousness with which these questions were pursued at the conference.”56 What made the moment historic, Heather Booth later recalled, was not that women discussed their grievances with men’s behavior and attitudes in their absence, but that they also explored their own dreams and aspirations.

  In those brief few hours alone for the first time, they addressed many of the issues that feminists would debate for the next three decades. Are women essentially different from men or socially constructed as different creatures? What, if any, male qualities should women seek to embrace? Is there a female way of knowing and doing? Who would care for the children if women entered the labor force? How can a woman be a sexual person and still be treated as a serious person? What kind of equality would also recognize and honor the differences between men and women?

  The issue of “identity” surfaced again and again. Men, they pointed out, gained their identity through work, income, and public activity. How could women achieve their own independent identities and still maintain love for and a connection with men and children? As a start, suggested these activists, “We should develop our own personal identity and accept our limitations, abilities and needs, as WE define them, and not as men define them. . . . When a woman tries to prove herself, it should be to herself and not to a man, or men, or society.” Like Betty Friedan, they also advocated work as the solution to women’s inequality, but as radical activists, they favored work that fostered social change.

  These women felt little desire to imitate men. Even in 1965, the group already recognized that they needed to transcend conventional male and female social identities and career paths. How to do that, they could not yet imagine. Although few SDS women had children, most realized that childbearing complicated any discussion of changing the future for the benefit of women. Given the organization of society, children were bound to deepen the inequality between movement men and women. The most striking statement—years ahead of its time—came from Nanci Hollander, who said, “Instead of the women assuming the major responsibility for raising the children, the man and woman should assume and share in the task equally. In order for this to work, howev
er, society would first have to re-arrange work and make it more flexible.”57

  Responses to the workshop varied considerably. Some men viewed the women’s criticism as a way to restore community and civility in SDS. Some of the married women felt apprehensive about recognizing the subordinate nature of their situations. They feared the struggles and ruptures that lay ahead. But everyone agreed that what had seemed like personal dilemmas suddenly had taken on a new significance when amplified by a group of women. Some women felt the full weight of the moment. Nanci Hollander remembered thinking, “We’ve just started a women’s movement.”58

  AS THE WORLD TURNED

  It would take another two years before significant numbers of New Left women began leaving what many would call “the mixed Left” or the “the male Left.” Meanwhile, activists were swept up in a dizzying swirl of events. The emergence of black power had ended an era in which white women could participate in an interracial civil rights movement. Students demonstrated against the draft, held gigantic antiwar marches, and when neither ended what seemed like an interminable war in Vietnam, some activists moved from protest to what they called “resistance” in a militant effort to “shut down” the system.