by Ruth Rosen
Invariably, consciousness-raising dredged up personal revelations. Suddenly, “one got it.” This isn’t just my problem; millions of other women have shared this experience. What had until that moment seemed so “normal” suddenly appeared artificial, not to say coercive. This is what consciousness-raising meant—looking at your life through your own eyes, reflecting on the choices you had made, realizing who had encouraged and discouraged your decisions, and recognizing the many obstacles and constraints that had little to do with individual temperament or talent.
When enough women had told their stories, enough such meetings had taken place, the “personal” no longer seemed a purely individual problem, but the result of deep cultural, social, and economic forces and assumptions. Having learned to see the world through men’s eyes, one suddenly began to view life through the eyes of a woman, and that woman was you.
Consciousness-raising took place everywhere, not only in small groups. Novels, position papers, essays, and new forms of artistic expression also raised a woman’s consciousness. Anyone who read Naomi Weisstein’s essay “Psychology Constructs the Female” would never forget how society created the compliant woman. Anyone who read Pat Mainardi’s “The Politics of Housework” would forever recognize the socially acceptable excuses men used to avoid doing housework. Anyone who read Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” would never again trust male sexual experts. Anyone who read Our Bodies, Ourselves would never again feel so alienated from her body.2
Not surprisingly, consciousness-raising ended up fueling a good deal of anger. Foreigners frequently have asked why American feminists seemed so much angrier than their European counterparts. American women had believed they were among the most emancipated women in the world. But now they realized that most European countries had already instituted nationwide systems of child care and paid maternity leave. Now they understood that the hyperindividualism of American political culture framed juggling work and family life as an individual problem. Discovering their subordinate status suddenly threw everything in doubt.
It was a time of discovery, and insults stoked simmering fires. The more feminists learned, the more sinister the world seemed. Everything sounded and looked different. Advertisements that used women’s bodies to sell things now seemed like public insults. Media jokes about “women’s libbers” felt like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. Men who belittled feminism suddenly took on the appearance of “pigs” groveling in their hovels. It didn’t last that long, this initial period of rage, but it did make life quite miserable for feminists and for those around them.
Every woman had a story to tell. In 1969, for instance, sociologist Pauline Bart, then a visiting assistant professor at Berkeley, introduced a new course on women. A prominent male leftist sociologist warned her, “There simply isn’t enough to teach.” Laura X, whose home was fast turning into a national archive, mobilized her friends to help Bart. A few weeks later, the sociologist arrived at his office and there, tacked onto his door, was a list of one thousand women’s names, culled from various historical documents.3
“For the first time we were talking pain,” recalled Naomi Weisstein. “We were discovering our own righteous anger, and for the first time we had become truly authentic actors in a movement with real revolutionary implications.” The writer Karen Durbin later realized that she always said “everything was fine” out of fear that her anger might turn into a flood she could not control. “I felt that if I tapped the anger in me, I would up and destroy the world. And I was so mad, I couldn’t see straight.”4
In the suburbs, as well as in large cities, the small group often turned depression into anger. In the first years of the movement, the writer Vivian Gornick visited a consciousness-raising group in suburban Westchester County in which most of the members were housewives. “They were talking about marriage . . . we went around the room twice and not once was the word love mentioned. They were all really in a rage by then.” Observing the mounting anger, Gornick pointed out that “many women are acting ugly now because they feel ugly.”
For a long time these women acted sweet when they didn’t necessarily feel sweet. They did so because deep in their being, in a place they believed their lives depended upon their being sweet. Now, when they think of that time, of all that life spent on their knees, they feel green bile spreading through them and they feel that their lives now depend upon calling men “male chauvinist pigs.”5
At the same time, an unexpected sense of exhilaration sent many feminists into a drugless euphoria. Suddenly, you knew that other women shared your grievances, that cultural and institutional discrimination could explain what had previously seemed like personal inadequacy. This intoxication reminded some women of falling in love. They felt deeply seen and understood. Vivian Gornick even compared such intoxication to the experience of religious or intellectual conversion.6
For the feminist it is exactly the same. . . . The excitement, the energy, the sheer voluptuous sweep of the feminist ideology is almost erotic in its power to sway me. Feminism has within it the seed of a genuine world view. Like every real system of thought it is able to refer itself to everything in our lives.
Intoxication took many forms. For women who had been activists in the New Left, the women’s movement offered a renewed sense of community. “What I was impressed with,” reported Ellen Willis, “was that people were talking about substantive things; it wasn’t like the usual political meeting. And I also felt immediately accepted. If I made a comment, people listened to it, as if I were really in the group, which I wasn’t used to in New Left groups. I was used to feeling like an outsider.”7 Once you stopped viewing women through male eyes, they often became interesting, even fascinating people. Susan Griffin recalled that before the women’s movement, at parties hosted by the Left magazine Ramparts, where she then worked, “Various women associated with the movement would be there, but they were people’s wives. And I was not interested in them. I talked to the men. I made the assumption, particularly if they came as somebody’s wife, that they were going to be boring.”8 The sheer intellectual excitement of reexamining all received wisdom created an ongoing euphoric expectation. In Susan Brownmiller’s memory, “It was intellectually the most stimulating experience of my life. I miss that more than anything.” Becoming an agent of historical change inspired great personal commitment. Irene Peslikis, a New York feminist and artist who had written about women’s resistance to consciousness-raising, described those early days as “totally electric. . . . I knew I was a part of making history. . . . It gave you a real high, because you knew real things could come out of it.” At the first National Women in Print Conference, recalled Charlotte Bunch, “We argued over how to relate to the mainstream media . . . debates were fierce, but the energy of over one hundred women engaged in feminist publishing was intoxicating.”
Within small groups, women learned they could reinvent themselves. At her very first meeting, historian Carol Groneman, then a graduate student, watched herself take back her own name. “As people went around the room introducing themselves, I was thinking to myself, ‘What am I going to say? My husband’s name? I don’t want to have whatever I do here identified with my husband. I don’t want to taint him.’ But I really think there was something else going on. Groneman was my name and I decided I was taking it back.”9
Pat Cody, in a small group of middle-aged Berkeley mothers, recalled how each of them gradually rediscovered the value of her experience, energy, and talent.
I’ll never forget one night, this marvelous woman. She was very blunt, very outspoken; she was talking about how while she grew up, she wasn’t the stereotypical feminine type, and how this caused her a lot of grief. Then she said, “I realized that it was ok to be a strong woman.” Suddenly there was complete silence, followed by shouts of agreement. It was a very exciting moment. People were getting it, right there, in that meeting.
Vivian Gornick was right; sometimes it felt like falling in love. Flo
Kennedy, an activist and lawyer who had dedicated her life to social change, particularly in the civil rights movement, viewed the women’s movement as the apex of her political life. Suddenly, she understood what had been incomprehensible. “Everything that happened was exciting. It’s just like when you’re in love.”10 Ann Snitow recalled that her first meeting permanently ended her hatred of being a woman. “I felt the passion. It was like paradise. It was so exciting, you could die for this. I had waited for this moment all my life.”11
TAKING TO THE STREETS
Actions do speak louder than words. Political actions, in particular, not only reveal the passions felt by protesters, but also those targets they view as symbolic of their inequality. It didn’t take long for feminists to move from living rooms to the streets. Within a few months, a small group might begin thinking about how to raise the consciousness of the public. The protests, “zap actions,” “invasions,” marches, and “guerrilla actions” organized by the women’s movement ranged from the zany to the sublime. Cumulatively, they brought consciousness-raising out of the living room and into the public arena.
One of the most important but least-remembered demonstrations took place on January 15, 1968, six months before the protest against the Miss America Pageant. Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which had long protested nuclear testing and development, organized an all-women antiwar protest against the Vietnam War. In honor of the congresswoman who had voted against America’s entry into both world wars, they called themselves the Jeanette Rankin Brigade. Their goal was to recruit huge numbers of American women to protest the war in Vietnam. To Congress, they brought a petition that demanded an immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the younger New York Radical Feminists decided to join in and, quite predictably, gave the protest a generational spin. They would protest the war, they announced, not as peaceful mothers, but as active feminists. As they later explained in the Voices of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the early Chicago newsletter, their goal was to “prevent the kind of ineffective protest the Jeanette Rankin Brigade represented.” Clearly, the female generation gap still haunted them, shaping their words as well as their acts.12
To publicize their views and gain media attention, they planned a purposefully outrageous bit of guerrilla theater, the sort of gesture that would announce a new style of activism no longer based on their potential motherhood, but on their rights as citizens. For weeks, they threw themselves into building a larger-than-life dummy installed on top of a bier, “complete with feminine getup, blank face, blonde curls, and candles. Hanging from the bier were such disposable items as S&H Green Stamps, curlers, garters, and hair spray. They carried large banners that declared ‘DON’T CRY; RESIST!’”13
They planned an elaborate farewell to Traditional Womanhood. The funeral entourage sang songs especially composed for the occasion, accompanied by a drum corps and a kazoo. A long funeral dirge, written by Peggy Dobbins, lamented “woman’s traditional role which encourages men to develop aggression and militarism to prove their masculinity.” Kathie Amatniek wrote and planned to deliver a “Funeral Oration for the Burial of Traditional Womanhood” at Arlington Cemetery. It began with a critique of the feminine mystique, and ended with a plea for a new woman: “And that is why we must bury this lady in Arlington Cemetery tonight, why we must bury Submission alongside Aggression. And that is why we ask you to join us. It is only a symbolic happening, of course, and we have a lot of real work to do. We have new men as well as a new society to build.”14
To the rest of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, the young women issued black-bordered invitations, “joyfully” urging them to join a torchlight Burial of Traditional Womanhood, “who passed with a sigh to her Great Reward this year of the Lord, 1968, after 3000 years of bolstering the ego of War makers and aiding the cause of war.” Many of the older activists, mothers and veterans of decades of political work, snubbed their invitation. They felt insulted and outraged by these radical young feminists who seemed like so many undisciplined hippies. In the middle of a shooting war, how dare they promote their trivial feminist complaints? Who were these young women to condemn my life as a mother and activist? Wait till they have children!15
Interestingly, none of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade speeches at the Washington rally contained even the slightest whiff of such maternal language, although Women Strike for Peace activists had often used such rhetoric to condemn war and to reach other mothers. Nonetheless, this formidable and effective political group remained a “straw woman” for young women trying to find an identity beyond that of a mother and wife. As a result, at the congress that the Jeanette Rankin Brigade convened in Washington, the young women insisted on carrying the dummy across the stage and announcing that their Burial of Traditional Womanhood would take place that evening at Arlington Cemetery. They then issued a call for a counter-congress for “all radical women.”
Amy Swerdlow, a WSP activist (and historian of the organization), decided to go, assuming she would hear “more radical and militant strategies for ending the war.” Instead, she listened to what struck her as an incoherent rant against WSP and, more generally, women of her generation. “We had come as mourners and supplicants,” she reported them as saying. “We had failed to challenge the power of men and the seeming weakness of women, and, if we didn’t change our ways, women would remain powerless and wars would go on forever.” According to Swerdlow, other WSP women who attended the counter-congress, many of whom “had always thought of themselves as radical in terms of left-right politics, came away more confused than enlightened, but definitely shaken.” What they had heard seemed bizarre, insulting, threatening, and strangely unsettling.
Although many WSP members seemed to have paid little attention to this generational collision, the young women nonetheless ended up having an impact on some of the older women. According to Swerdlow, “It left many of us with a great deal to think about.”
The trains and buses returning the JRB women to New York hummed, not with the usual reports from the congressmen visited, but with heated debates about traditional sex roles, the meaning of woman power and women’s liberation, and whether or not affluent young radical women had the right to push their demands forward when our sisters were dying in Vietnam.16
The media, for its part, either trivialized or ignored the Jeanette Rankin Brigade protest. Still, the impact on the women’s liberation movement was even more momentous. It was there that many young activists realized how broadly their movement had spread. It was there that a new generation of female peace activists refused to use the moral rhetoric of traditional motherhood and instead demanded to protest as citizens. (Significantly, by the early 1980s, during a resurrected anti-nuclear peace movement, when many of these young women had become mothers, they once again celebrated women’s traditional peacefulness.)17
In January 1968, the Burial of Traditional Womanhood protest had rejected the feminine mystique; in September, the Miss America Pageant protest condemned society’s evaluation of women by their appearance. In the years that followed, inventive feminist protests proliferated with stunning speed. For instance, a group of feminists who called themselves “BITCH” held an “Ogle-In” on June 9, 1970. The purpose of the street protest, as one newspaper put it, “was to make men understand how degrading their flattery is.” The women whistled at men’s “tight buns,” loudly admired young men’s bulging arm muscles, and heckled construction workers with shouts and whistles.18
Corporations quickly became a popular feminist target. At an annual meeting of CBS shareholders in San Francisco, ten women suddenly appeared at the front of the small auditorium, shouting, “We won’t be slaves.” They then denounced CBS for its “mindless-coddling and dull programming,” including its characterization of women, and for its excessive profits. In New York City, a group called Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) decided to deploy their magical powers by hexing Wall Street. The stock marke
t inexplicably declined.19
A distaste for the institution of marriage showed up in a variety of protests. Ti-Grace Atkinson and her group, The Feminists, plastered the New York subway system with “Fuck Marriage, Not Men” stickers. In one of her most widely publicized actions, Atkinson also led a protest at the Marriage License Bureau. “We wanted to raise women’s consciousness about marriage and a state contract,” Atkinson explained. “So we drafted something like ‘legal charges against the Marriage License Bureau of New York City,’ accusing them of committing fraud with malicious intent on the women of New York.”
Bridal fairs, which literally “sold marriage”—or at least the products and services that went with it—became a favorite target of the women’s movement. In Columbus, Ohio, feminists argued that bridal fairs “add to the sales itch for crystal and furniture and the bride, herself, becomes a commodity.” In San Diego, the Women’s Liberation Front and the San Diego State Guerrilla Theater invaded a bridal fair and handed out leaflets condemning consumerism, and denounced the profits that manufacturers of household goods accumulated from the “selling” of marriage.
On February 15, 1969, women’s liberation groups on both coasts disrupted gigantic bridal fairs. Targeting the marketers of gowns, wedding pictures, caterers, furniture, appliances, and honeymoon trips, the protesters condemned “consumer culture” for turning marriage into an excuse for conspicuous consumption. Did a new bride really need to have “sixteen appliances and a matching bedroom set”? In San Francisco, feminist activists picketed a bridal fair, handing out leaflets to new brides-to-be that denounced the “mass media [for its] images of the pretty, sexy, passive, childlike vacuous woman.”20