The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  In 1968, history seemed to speed up. Many American activists, as well as ordinary citizens, began to wonder whether the nation, if not the world, was unraveling. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the election of Richard Nixon, and the collapse of international youth activism and rebellions from Mexico to France moved New Leftists from hope to despair. During the month of August 1968 alone, police beat activists outside the Democratic National Convention and Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to stop the democratic flowering of “Prague Spring.”

  In the midst of these tumultuous events arose another kind of dissidence—a new hippie culture or “counterculture,” strongly linked to the Beats, that encouraged the young to “drop out” of schools and jobs, “to do your own thing,” and to live as if the revolution had already happened. Appearing just as the women’s movement took off, the hippie counterculture also challenged conventional ideas of appropriate gender roles. Both men and women grew their hair long, dressed in loose, flowing garments, and adorned themselves with jewelry from various folk and Indian traditions. “Be-ins” and “happenings” created cultural solidarity among these alienated youths. Dancers, high on psychedelic drugs, freed of clothes, let their bodies and minds float toward an altered state of consciousness. Excess became common as a new language reflected that things were “far out,” “out of sight,” beyond normal comprehension.

  In the spring of 1965, at the first antiwar march in Washington, D.C., young men had dressed in suits and ties and worn their hair short. Their female companions had worn neat shirtwaists, nylons, and flats. Only a scattering of demonstrators had long hair and wore sandals—even though they were the ones who always appeared on the evening news. Two years later, in 1967, San Francisco’s burgeoning hippie counterculture had completely transformed the look of demonstrations. The immense antiwar marches in San Francisco combined political protest with celebrations of love. People danced in the street to rock bands perched on flatbed trucks. Stoned on marijuana or psychedelic drugs, young marchers protested not only the war, but also the “straight” society that “made war, not love.”

  At first, “politicos” and hippies seemed to have nothing in common. As one hippie admitted, “We weren’t interested in taking over administration buildings. We were interested in blowing people’s minds, basically. Making them confront the idea that there was an alternative to the straight way of life.”59 And a few staunch politicos never touched any drugs or danced all night to psychedelic music. But between 1965 and 1967, these worlds began to overlap. “There was a continuum between politics and culture at every school,” explained former student activist Paul Buhle.

  At one end there were these tight-assed people whom you suspected of being close to the Communist Party. At the other end you had a lot of burn-outs. Radical political publications soon appeared at “head shops” along with underground comics—or comix as they were relabelled—incense, posters and drug paraphernalia. At a hippie grocery store you could see a poster with the headline “Fight Imperialism! Eat Organic Food!” It was something you couldn’t believe in unless you were nineteen years old.60

  The blurring of the radical political and countercultural worlds also accelerated all sorts of social relationships. “You became intimate with people very easily,” recalled Devra Weber, then a Los Angeles student.

  You were with large groups of people your own age, mostly single, who were all involved in intellectual work, and that was exciting all by itself. The attempt to be direct, where politeness was not the big issue, really getting at the truth behind the matter, this basically made people close. And there was the music. The nights staying up and playing Bob Dylan, smoking pot, red lights on the lamps, and lots of people over talking, everyone sitting comfortably on a mattress because that’s the one piece of furniture in the room except for a chair.61

  From such cultural and political gatherings did new friendships and sexual relationships flow.

  But the counterculture also left an ambiguous legacy for young feminists. On the one hand, it legitimized all kinds of informal and unconventional behavior. It offered young women a sense of liberation, much of which revolved around drugs and sex. At the same time, the hippie culture tended to glorify women as barefoot and pregnant; many young women rejected suburban materialism, grew and prepared their own food, sewed their own clothes, and lived off the land. Hippie women were not concerned about discrimination; they didn’t want jobs. But to politically engaged women, who were just carving out a new identity, what did it mean to “turn on, tune in, drop out”? They had just begun to drop in and take themselves seriously. They had little inclination to drop out.

  Although it seemed like “women’s issues” had been left to simmer on the back burner, young women, in fits and starts, were creating the momentum to build a new women’s movement. Cathy Barrett, Cathy Cade, and Peggy Dobbins, for instance, initiated a groundbreaking course on the sociology of women in the summer of 1966 at a “free school” in New Orleans. In 1966, Heather Booth tried to organize a “women’s” workshop at an antiwar “We Won’t Go” conference at the University of Chicago, but many women activists thought the draft was more urgent. The 1966 SDS National Convention managed to ignore women’s issues, but for the first time provided child care.

  In 1967 SDS women once again brought up their grievances, this time issuing a resolution calling for “the liberation of women.” Given the Third World—oriented revolutionary rhetoric of the time, they described themselves as having a “colonial” relationship to men. They called for the creation of a new society that protected women’s reproductive rights, supported communal child care centers staffed by men and women, and required housework to be shared until “technology and automation would eliminate work which is necessary for the maintenance of the home.” The resolution also called for all SDS chapters to cultivate female leadership, solicit articles written by women, and create bibliographies and pamphlets on women’s issues. It ended with what was probably the last conciliatory and loving statement New Left women would make to their male compatriots:

  We seek the liberation of all human beings. The struggle for liberation of women must be part of the larger fight for human freedom. We recognize the difficulty our brothers will have in dealing with male chauvinism and we will assume our full responsibility in helping to resolve the contradiction. Freedom now! We love you!

  New Left Notes published the resolution, but its accompanying illustration carried a different message: a cartoon of a young girl, wearing long earrings and matching polka-dot minidress and panties, carrying a placard that read: “We Want Our Rights and We Want Them Now.” The ridicule incited indignation. As Sara Evans later observed, “SDS had blown its last chance.”62

  In 1967, during the Vietnam Summer Project, Marilyn Webb and Sue Thrasher found themselves talking about women’s roles as they worked to end the war. Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth convened a summer course on women at the Center for Radical Research in Chicago. “We spent a long time,” recalled Weisstein, “trying to consider alternatives to wife and mother [and asking] why women were not in positions of power.”63 At the national SDS office, Jane Adams, a prominent SDS activist, called together women for a similar discussion. Jo Freeman, a veteran of the civil rights and Free Speech movements, began to recruit women in Chicago to use an upcoming meeting, the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) in late August 1967, as a way of raising women’s issues. She convened a meeting of women, largely composed of SDS women, but not all of them supported the idea. In fact, few agreed how to proceed.

  LAST STRAWS

  The NCNP proved to be a last-ditch effort to unify the New Left. The ostensible purpose was to nominate a presidential ticket for 1968 that would be headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician and antiwar activist. Clearly, the impulse to heal movement wounds was widespread, for some two thousand activists from over two hundred organizations poured into Chicago that
Labor Day weekend. But the search for unity failed. Angry black activists from northern cities lashed out at white hypocrisy, while middle-class whites seemed desperate to gain legitimacy from them. Some black delegates screamed, “Kill Whitey”; others demanded that they should receive half the votes at the conference and 50 percent of all committee slots, though they made up only one-sixth of the conference participants.

  When a women’s caucus met, they hammered out a resolution. But on learning of it, the chairman of the conference warned, “We don’t have time for a resolution about women.” Drawing on her years of experience in the Democratic Party, Jo Freeman threatened to use parliamentary delaying tactics to tie up the proceedings for hours. The chairman backed down, partway, agreeing to bring up their resolution, but only after the conference had voted upon ten other resolutions.

  Working through the night, Jo Freeman and Shulamith Firestone, another longtime activist, wrote a new version of the resolution, demanding that women receive 51 percent of the convention votes and committee slots. It was a move designed to appeal to white men’s guilt. The problem was, they had misjudged their audience; most of these men did not feel any guilt about white women.

  The next day, they patiently waited while the conference debated the first ten resolutions. When the time came for the women’s resolution, a man simply read it aloud in a monotone, the audience greeted their ideas with derision and ridicule, and a voice vote quickly approved it. This was hardly what Freeman and Firestone had in mind. They had wanted to discuss the problems behind the resolution, not to be dismissed out of hand by a “positive” vote.64 In response, the women threatened to seize the microphones.

  Jo Freeman never forgot how the affair ended: “Suddenly, a rather short and younger man rushed in front of me to the microphone, raised his hand, was recognized and began speaking: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to speak to you today about the most forgotten American group in America.’” Before he finished his sentence, Freeman felt a sudden moment of elation, certain he was about to support their resolution. Instead, he finished his sentence with “the American Indian.” A number of women, including Shulie Firestone, “were ready to pull the place apart.” Then, according to Jo Freeman, “William Pepper patted Shulie on the head and said, ‘Move on little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.’ That was the genesis. We had a meeting the next week with women in Chicago.”65

  This first Chicago group decided to draft a letter titled, “To the Women of the Left,” to be published in New Left media, as well as in mimeographed form. Separatism and self-determination would now saturate movement culture and women would accelerate that process. Influenced by black successes at the conference, they declared their independence from the male Left.

  AN EPIDEMIC OF ENTHUSIASM

  A good epidemiologist could have traced the rapid transmission of the infectious enthusiasm for women’s liberation that swept the country. Networks of New Left women, accustomed to traveling to national conferences and organizing local and national meetings, became the carriers of that enthusiasm. Pam Allen, a former SNCC organizer, for example, heard about women’s liberation from Sue Munaker, already active in Chicago Women’s Liberation. Pam Allen then moved to New York, where she and Shulamith Firestone began organizing the first women’s liberation groups in New York. Allen then moved to San Francisco, where she wrote her famous pamphlet about the “free space” that women needed to rethink their lives, and helped organize Sudsafloppen, a San Francisco group. Kathie Sarachild, already active in New York, visited Boston and persuaded Nancy Hawley to join the movement. Hawley, an early SDS member, then began an informal women’s group, which later became part of the collective that wrote the famous women’s self-help health manual, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Roxanne Dunbar, who had been active on the West Coast, moved to Boston in the summer of 1968 and recruited women through an ad in an underground newspaper and started Cell 16. Carol Hanisch, who had worked in the South, now moved to New York and became a central organizer and writer in the new women’s liberation movement.66 And this was just the beginning.

  Through the civil rights, SDS, and antiwar movements, these highly mobile women had developed friendships and networks that now disseminated ideas of women’s liberation like grass seed blown by the wind. The movement had taught women how to organize, and this they now did with a vengeance. Between the fall of 1967 and the end of 1968, personal friendships, organized media events, and word of mouth, or some combination of all of them, led to the creation of women’s liberation groups in nearly every major American city. As one woman said, “I had never known anything as easy as organizing a women’s group—as easy and as exciting and as dramatic.”67

  Consider what happened when Marilyn Webb, married to SDS leader Lee Webb, visited Anne Scheer, wife of Robert Scheer, in Berkeley in 1967. According to Webb, “Anne had a small son and while the men talked politics downstairs, we discussed our grievances as women upstairs.” Anne had not yet wanted to become a mother, but her husband, approaching thirty, profoundly wanted a child. In 1967, Anne and he made a solemn agreement. She would get pregnant if he agreed to share the child care.

  Scheer did, in fact, take his parental responsibilities seriously. But as editor of Ramparts, he needed to travel, attend conferences, and launch fund-raising campaigns. Anne became filled with despair.

  At one point I complained about how hard it was to take care of another human being 24 hours a day, and he told me “to get a nurse.” I went into a rage, cried for days, and realized that it was over. I felt that he had broken a solemn contract. It was a real betrayal that went so deep I just knew it was the end.

  It was at this point that Marilyn Webb visited them, and then went home enlightened by Anne’s story.68

  One of the national events that helped bring all these women together was the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, an all-women antiwar demonstration that took place in January 1968. During the preceding year, Anne Scheer had been meeting with a group of younger women who were helping the Women Strike for Peace organize the event. “It was in that group,” Anne Weills (who had taken back her name) remembered, “that we began to discuss how much we felt like second-class citizens in the movement. We were sick and tired of playing an auxiliary role. We were never taken seriously.” Although Anne could not attend the Washington, D.C., event, she soon learned how many younger women—like herself and Marilyn Webb—came together and realized that they were indeed creating a women’s movement.69

  The angrier New Left women became, the greater their expectations. The higher their expectations, the more New Left men failed them.70 Rayna Rapp, who had joined SDS in 1964, later explained that once she “let feminism in, it reorganized everything [she] understood about the world.”

  That was my conversion experience—it was natural and it stuck. Afterwards, I was so angry about the number of mimeograph machines I had turned and the number of phone calls I had made, and the number of cups of coffee I had brought for other people. They had all this empathy for the Vietnamese, and for black Americans, but they didn’t have much empathy for the women in their lives; not the women they slept with, not the women they shared office space with, not the women they fought at demonstrations with. So our first anger and anguish and fury was directed against the men of the Left. [The men] should have known better, as far as we were concerned. And we should have known better, too. A lot of it was self-anger, that we had allowed ourselves to be put in such a secondary role.71

  Men in the New Left also helped spread word of women’s liberation, if only through repeated derision and ridicule. In February 1968, Ramparts magazine decided to “cover” the “sexy” story of the newly emerging movement. The resulting article, titled “Woman Power,” proved to be a condescending, snide appraisal of the new women’s movement.72 On the magazine’s cover appeared a voluptuous female torso with a button saying “Jeanette Rankin for President,” referring to the congresswoman who had voted against bo
th world wars. Inside the magazine, photographs of Anne Scheer and Marilyn Webb, in miniskirts, with long, gleaming hair, accompanied the text. The article ridiculed radical women as the “miniskirt caucus,” and fell back on the cliché of the Old Left that women would be liberated after the revolution.

  Ramparts’s cheeky coverage enraged many movement women, who denounced it as “a movement fashion report.” Some activists wondered why Anne and Marilyn, both well-respected activists, had posed in such sexy and provocative poses. Looking back, Anne Weills reflected:

  It was a really transitional period. We were still wearing miniskirts, we looked like these little chicks and we still sought male approval. At the same time, we felt exploited and ironically, we were a party to our own exploitation. The truth is, Marilyn and I were having fun. We didn’t resist or say, hey, let’s put on jeans and sweatshirts. We even considered wearing false eyelashes. We were enjoying being glamorous.73

  At the same time, women who worked at Ramparts, like Susan Griffin, later to become a well-known feminist writer, began to rebel against their subordinate status. “I went to work at Ramparts magazine,” recalled Griffin,

  and I loved working there and learned a great deal, but I learned something else besides journalism and muckraking and all about the nasty stuff the CIA does, and that was the nasty stuff my buddies, my brothers on the left were doing. They were getting twice my salary, they would ask me to rewrite their pieces and fully acknowledge that I wrote better than they did but no editorship, not a single woman was a full staff writer.74