The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  By the early seventies, eleven states, including New York and California, had liberalized their abortion laws, allowing the procedure under particular conditions. But feminists soon complained that liberalized laws simply put them at the mercy of the medical establishment instead of the legislature. In California, a woman had to undergo the humiliation of two psychiatric evaluations that testified to her mental incapacity to bear a child. In New York, where the availability of abortion drew women from all over the country, prices for abortion skyrocketed.38

  When the women’s liberation movement joined the abortion rights campaign in the late sixties, feminists rejected the more politically acceptable call for the “reform” of abortion laws and insisted upon the “repeal” of all laws that limited a woman’s right to abortion. All over the country, the growing women’s movement intensified the struggle to repeal laws that prohibited or limited abortion. In New York, feminists testified before the legislature and passed out copies of their model abortion law—a blank piece of paper. Through public “speak-outs,” feminists admitted to illegal abortions and explained why they had made this choice. “The speak-out,” explained one New York activist, was “unbelievably successful and it turned out to be an incredible organizing tool. It brought abortion out of the closet where it had been hidden in secrecy and shame. It informed the public that most women were having abortions anyway. People spoke from their hearts. It was heart-rending.”39

  On January 22, 1973, a day women of a certain age will never forget, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. “We recognize the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” With those few words, the controversial decision struck down state laws that prohibited abortion and permitted a woman and her doctor to make all decisions about reproduction during the first six months of a pregnancy.40

  Many sighed with relief, hoping that not one more woman would ever have to go through the nightmare of an illegal abortion. But no real national consensus had been reached. Congress had not legislated a woman’s right to abortion. What the Court gave, Congress could take away. Without the extended national debate that usually preceded legislation, the right to a legal abortion was fragile and precarious.

  Almost as soon as abortion became legal in 1973, a variety of religious and antiabortion groups began building what would become a powerful movement to repeal Roe v. Wade. At first, feminists did not recognize its growing strength and commitment. Yet, by 1977, the antiabortion movement had lobbied Congress successfully to pass the Hyde Amendment, which prevented government funding of abortions for poor women.41 During the 1980 presidential campaign, abortion would become a litmus test for those seeking local as well as national office. By then, the country would be deeply polarized by “pro-life” activists who wanted to abolish abortion and “pro-choice” partisans who were equally committed to preserving a woman’s right to make her own choice.

  THERE SHE IS, MISS AMERICA

  Young women sometimes ask, “Why were feminists in 1968 so angry at beauty pageants?” The Miss America Pageant seemed to sum up everything these women rejected: woman as spectacle, woman as object, woman as consumer, woman as artificial image. What they wanted was to be taken seriously, not to be judged by their appearance. Why, they asked, couldn’t women look just ordinary and why couldn’t a woman be a subject, instead of an object?

  In the days preceding the pageant, members of the group New York Radical Women publicized their intention to “protest . . . an image that has oppressed women,” the ideal of the svelte beauty queen. Most of the organizers had been activists in the civil rights, student, or New Left movements, but according to Robin Morgan, “none of us had ever organized a demonstration on her own before.” “I can still remember,” she wrote,

  the feverish excitement I felt: dickering with the company that chartered buses, wrangling a permit from the mayor of Atlantic City, sleeping about three hours a night for days preceding the demonstration, borrowing a bullhorn for our marshals to use. The acid taste of coffee from paper containers and the cigarettes from crumpled packs was in my mouth; my eyes were bloodshot and my glasses kept slipping down my nose; my feet hurt and neck ached and my voice had gone hoarse—and I was deliriously happy.42

  On September 7, 1968, the protest began. Inside the hall at Atlantic City, as the winner paraded onstage, a group of activists stood up and unfurled a women’s liberation banner and chanted a few slogans. Their protest barely made a ripple within the hall, but network television did broadcast the protest to viewers all across the country. Outside, some two hundred women were picketing the pageant. One group trotted out a sheep, which they then crowned as Miss America in their own mock minipageant. In a pamphlet, protesters denounced the fact that “women in our society find themselves forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.” Into a large “Freedom Trash Can,” they threw “instruments of torture”—girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, cosmetics of all kinds, wigs, issues of both Cosmopolitan and Playboy, and, yes, bras. Although the plan was to light a fire in the can, they decided to comply with the Atlantic City police’s request not to endanger the wooden boardwalk. Asked by a reporter why the city had objected to the protest, Robin Morgan replied that the mayor had been concerned about fire safety. Perhaps trying to provoke some media interest, she added, “We told him we wouldn’t do anything dangerous—just a symbolic bra-burning.” The New York Times correctly reported that no fire had been lit that day. But by September 28, the Times referred to “bra-burnings” as though they had actually happened. By then, the media, all by itself, had ignited what would prove to be the most tenacious media myth about the women’s movement—that women “libbers” burned their bras as a way of protesting their status in American society.43

  Actually, at that moment, bras held little symbolic meaning for feminists. Many had stopped wearing them years before. Aprons were a much more powerful symbol to these young women. But bras seemed to mean a great deal to those journalists who couldn’t tell the difference between the sexual revolution and women’s liberation. And so the myth spread that women’s liberationists burned bras as an act of defiance. A sexy trope, the media used it to sell papers. In a breast-obsessed society, “bra-burning” became a symbolic way of sexualizing—and thereby trivializing—women’s struggle for emancipation.44

  After the Miss America Pageant, some of the organizers criticized themselves for their lack of sensitivity. Carol Hanisch observed that the action appeared to be against the contestants, instead of against the pageant itself. “Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of as our sisters who suffer with us.” Although organizers had banned antiwoman signs, some women waved them anyway, proclaiming, “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie.” “Ironically enough,” Hanisch observed, “what the Left/Underground press seemed to like best about our action was what we realized was our worst mistake—our antiwoman signs.”45

  Those who had left the Left had brought heavy cultural baggage to the new movement. New rituals and new language would take time to develop. Hanisch, in particular, worried about the “revolutionary language” that might repel otherwise potentially sympathetic women. “Stop using the ‘in-talk’ of the New Left/Hippie movement (Yes, even the work FUCK!!),” she warned. “We can use simple (real) language that everyone from Queens to Iowa will understand and not misunderstand.” Robin Morgan also criticized herself for her use of movement language. “I pepper my language with -isms and -ations . . . this is still the style coming out of the New Left. I began to realize . . . I’m not reaching these women, these women are reaching me, and that’s wonderful, these women in their little Iowa dresses. . . . And I cleaned up my act, my language.”46 But Morgan
, like many other New Left women, had not yet recognized her unexamined contempt for those women in their “little Iowa dresses.”

  The political culture of the New Left/hippie movement clung to the women’s movement like barnacles to a ship’s bottom. The early women’s liberation movement appropriated “zap actions,” in-your-face street guerrilla theater tactics, and posters like “FUCK HOUSEWORK” that were meant to be aggressively offensive without realizing that they might alienate rather than reach ordinary women. Some of the protesters at the Miss America Pageant, for instance, sang a “Miss America song,” to the tune of “Ain’t She Sweet”: “Ain’t she cute, standing in her bathing suit, selling products for the corporations, now ain’t she cute.”47

  Feminist attacks on consumer culture proliferated. The advertising industry had already used images of female bodies to sell cars, hacksaws, and even electric drills. Some activists retaliated by plastering stickers that declared, “This is only one example of the many ways in which society uses and degrades women” all over such ads and billboards. After 1972, when journalist Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine, the editors institutionalized a page called “No Comment.” Readers simply sent in advertisements that degraded women. The magazine reprinted them without comment. The ads, in the context of a national feminist magazine, spoke for themselves and the language they spoke was a new and startling one.

  Within a year of the first Miss America protest, activists began targeting other “sex crimes.” On September 21, 1969, five members of a group called Bay Area Women’s Militia discovered that the men who were starting Dock of the Bay, a new alternative newspaper, planned to finance their project by publishing a pornographic magazine titled The San Francisco Review of Sex. After they gained the support of the Dock’s women staffers, the Militia sabotaged the plates from which the Review was to be printed. Proudly, they reported their success in a local women’s liberation paper, Tooth and Nail. The Dock of the Bay soon folded. Financing “the revolution” on the backs of half of the population would no longer be possible. One year later, in April 1970, the Bread and Roses collective in Boston protested the showing of a “skin flick” at the Orson Welles art film cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few months later, San Francisco liberationists claimed responsibility for an act of sabotage against the offices of the Berkeley Barb, an underground newspaper that partially financed itself with pornographic ads.

  Feminists also began targeting Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine. On April 15, 1970, Hefner hosted a benefit party at his Chicago mansion for the local antiwar movement. As one feminist explained, “[We] were anxious to expose the hypocrisy of Hefner’s opposition to the Vietnam War while profiting from his own exploitation of women at home. . . . The Playboy Empire is built on the concept that a woman is a mindless big-boobed cunt; another accessory to a playboy’s total wardrobe.” But since these women also supported the antiwar movement, they asked that guests sign their checks outside the mansion, but not attend the party inside.48

  At Grinnell College in Iowa, women’s liberationists gave Bruce Draper, a recruiter of “beautiful babes for Playboy,” an unforgettable welcome. Ten members of the local women’s liberation movement met him stark naked to protest Playboy’s exploitation of the female body. “Playboy magazine,” their leaflet declared, “is a money-changer in the temple of the body.” In a speech delivered on the spot, one woman explained,

  Pretending to appreciate and respect the beauty of the naked human form, Playboy is actually stereotyping the body and commercializes it. Playboy substitutes fetishism for honest appreciation of the endless variety of human forms. We protest Playboy’s images of lapdog female playthings with idealized proportions. . . . The Playboy bunnies are an affront to human sexual dignity.49

  Soon protesters began to picket Playboy Clubs around the country. In Chicago, the Women’s Liberation Union decided to wage war on Hefner. “Our first action,” recalled Naomi Weisstein, “was gluing together Playboy magazines. . . . We had code names and wore sunglasses and disguises. What we did was to go into every magazine store and deface and pour glue on Playboys.”50

  Despite such protests, which only multiplied, most young feminists never felt they had gained the right to look “ordinary.” True, some women cut their long hair, stopped shaving hair off their bodies, ceased to use makeup, gave up high heels, and began wearing comfortable clothes. But this was a luxury of the young or the independently wealthy who did not have to keep jobs. As young feminists entered male-dominated professions and occupations, they experienced great pressure to conform to strict corporate and professional dress codes that implicitly stated what it meant to be a woman. In the late seventies, a New York City judge, for instance, ordered a female attorney, dressed in a tailored, designer pants suit and silk blouse, to leave his courtroom and not to return until she wore a skirted suit that demonstrated proper respect for the court. Dressing for success sometimes meant survival in a career or job, which feminists had no power to change.51

  In the midst of their battle against artificial female beauty, few young feminists seemed to realize that many of their sisters—both in and out of the movement—had never viewed themselves as anything but “ordinary.” Older women experienced themselves as invisible. No one whistled at them on the street; no one insisted they smile to keep their jobs.52 Embarrassed to talk about their invisibility as aging women, they tended to keep their sense of humiliation to themselves. While attractive budding feminists worried whether movement men took their ideas seriously and denounced the exploitation of the female body they saw everywhere, other movement women, wishing they were more attractive to men, found it difficult to relate to the “problem” of being treated as a sex object. Later, some of them spoke of the resentment they felt when movement men listened to their ideas, but never approached them as desirable lovers. One woman, who had long felt excluded as a possible lover, confided, “[The men] had all the power. They could affirm your beauty and choose you as a lover and ignore your ideas. Or they could turn you into an asexual comrade, who by definition, did not qualify to be a lover.”53

  In a culture that idealized blond, blue-eyed, slim white women, African-American, Mexican-American, Filipina, Native American, and other minority women knew that being a sex object was certainly not their greatest problem. Their color was too dark, their hair was the wrong texture, and their bodies didn’t conform to the Anglo-Saxon societal ideal. In the view of black activist Frances Beale, a black woman was the “slave of a slave.” Not only had she been raped and beaten by white slave owners, but her beauty had been ignored by black men who viewed her through the lens of a white-dominated culture. When “they told us that we were black, ugly, evil bitches and whores,” complained a group of black women, these men demonstrated their preference for the white cultural ideal. The black nationalist slogan “Black is Beautiful” attempted to reinstate black features, bodies, hair, and movements as attractive, sexy, and desirable. But it would take several more years until most minority women gained the freedom to see their beauty through their own eyes.54

  COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY

  The women’s movement helped liberate two generations of women from the loneliness and isolation they suffered as they hid in closets or cruised bars. To older lesbians, the movement offered an opportunity to embrace the identity of lesbian with pride and, if possible, to “come out” to friends and family. For younger women, feminism and the sexual revolution provided a safe space in which to explore a different sexual preference.

  Born before World War II, Julia Penelope Stanley already “felt different” at an early age. “My first conscious expression of my Lesbianism,” she recalled,

  occurred when there was a song about “the girl that I marry.” I was standing on our front porch, singing the song to myself when I turned to my mother and said, “I want to marry a girl just like you.” She said, “You can’t marry a girl. Girls can’t marry girls. Only boys can marry girls. You’ll have to marry a boy
.” I decided never to marry because I had no intention of marrying a boy. If I couldn’t have what I wanted, I would have nothing.

  By the sixth grade her “crushes” began. “I mooned, courted, wrote poems and followed numerous girls around.” By 1957, she had begun to discover the gay bars that flourished in Miami.

  I had a new word for myself, “gay.” I wasn’t “homosexual” or “queer,” I was “gay.” It’s hard to explain now the tremendous freedom that word bestowed in those years. More than anything, I now knew for sure I was not alone, that I wasn’t the only “one” in the world.55

  According to another woman, named Merill, Miami Beach was a gay paradise during the fifties. “Countless gay bars entertained suntanned, white-ducked Lesbians and homosexuals all year round. Always there were parties, cliquey, of course, but there were so many lesbians that it didn’t matter.” Like many other lesbians of the time, Merill and her friends chose either butch or femme roles.

  In general butches looked and acted more-or-less like men, wore ducktail haircuts and men’s clothing, were aggressive, drank, swore, led when a couple danced, held the door open for the femme, lit the femme’s cigaret etc. . . . There was a great deal of public embarrassment and ridicule of a butch who “went femme,” and often the derision was enough to prevent many butches from allowing their lovers to touch their bodies in lovemaking.

  “I practiced developing masculine movements,” Merill remembered, “aping and emulating the men we professed to despise. To be a man meant to be strong and to have power. The best we could do as wimmin was to be like men, since we had not yet learned of wimminstrength and wimmin power.”56