The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  In New York, on the same day, members of WITCH, after plastering the city with ten thousand stickers urging other women to join them, led a protest against a bridal fair held at Madison Square Garden. They chanted, “Confront the Whoremakers,” cast a “hex” on the “manipulator-exhibitors,” sang “Here Comes the Slave, Off to Her Grave,” and distributed free “shop-lifting bags” (which the prospective brides evidently eagerly grabbed up). Their signs declared, “Always a Bride, Never a Person,” “Here Comes the Bribe,” and “Ask Not for Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls.” In response to the fact that feminists had just disrupted bridal fairs on each coast on the same day, Robin Morgan quipped, “Yes, Betty Crocker, a conspiracy (or at least synchronicity) does exist.”21

  Anything that seemed degrading to women, especially advertising, became a target for feminist protesters. In Indiana, NOW launched a national boycott against Canada Dry for its ad “A Good Club Soda Is Like a Good Woman; It Won’t Quit on You.” In both San Francisco and Boston, women liberationists invaded radio stations for playing rock music they felt degraded women. NOW also picketed National Airlines’ headquarters in New York City for an outrageous campaign that used photos of come-hither smiling flight attendants, who urged businessmen to “Fly me.”22

  The San Francisco Bay Area—ground zero of the student movement—quite naturally became a hub of university and community feminist activism. It didn’t take long, for instance, for women students at U.C. Berkeley to protest the “patriarchal” nature of their educations and the fact that they had learned nothing about women’s history, literature, or work. All over the country, students and faculty began demanding and creating new courses. In 1969, for instance, a group of U.C. Berkeley undergraduate students held a rally at which they issued a leaflet declaring, “We’ve been burned. We thought we were free human beings.” Now they viewed themselves as brainwashed victims, trapped in an educational institution that refused to allow them to challenge the basis of knowledge. They then demanded that the ROTC building be converted into a space for women’s studies, that the university provide child care, and that funds used for “war-related and counter-insurgency research” be converted into stipends to support women’s education. As the television cameras whirred, a group of women graduate students and young assistant professors gathered in a circle and burned their master’s and doctorate degrees.23

  Some protests and marches grew out of a passion for discovering the previously hidden history of women. Laura X, Phyllis Mandel, and other members of Berkeley Women’s Liberation, for instance, resurrected International Women’s Day, a holiday that actually had its roots in American labor history, but was only celebrated in Communist countries. On March 8, 1911, American working women had celebrated the First International Women’s Day with parades and demonstrations. The ritual quickly spread to other countries. Due to its radical and socialist origins, Americans had long ago stopped commemorating the event. On International Women’s Day, in 1969, about fifty women, dressed in turn-of-the-century costumes, marched through the city of Berkeley. The following year, thirty other American towns and cities celebrated the day. By the end of the seventies, nearly all schools and cities commemorated it.

  Furious that the University of California refused to provide women with facilities for weight-training and courses in self-defense, members of the Women’s Liberation Front invaded the men’s gym. Banging pots and pans, chanting “Self-defense for women now,” about fifty women charged into the men’s locker room, surprising a group of half-dressed men. Afterward, they marched to the chancellor’s house, where they presented demands for free child care for all students and employees, new courses in the history of women, the hiring of more women professors, the granting of maternity and paternity leave for both students and employees, an end to all-women dormitories, the distribution of free birth control devices, and the availability of abortion at the campus hospital.24

  Feminists also targeted media organizations all over the country. Tired of being trivialized or ignored by the San Francisco Chronicle, seventy-five members of Berkeley Women’s Liberation crossed the Bay Bridge and invaded its editorial offices in 1969. When the phone rang, one activist simply picked it up, declared “The paper’s closed down,” and slammed down the receiver. The group demanded 50 percent women employees in all departments, a revision of its women’s pages, and an end to the acceptance of any advertising that exploited women.25

  After months of negotiation, KPFA, the local listener-sponsored radio station in Berkeley, continued to stonewall requests for programs by and about women. One warm evening in the summer of 1970, five women in my small group decided to invade its offices. Here is a peek behind a feminist guerrilla action. Sitting in Susan Griffin’s living room, members of our small group strategized about how to influence the radio station. At about 11:00 P.M., we concocted a plan. Susan Griffin called the KPFA office, which was always locked at night, and said she had left her purse there earlier that day. The night manager said, “Come on by and I’ll unlock the door.” We piled into a car and drove to KPFA. Susan announced herself on the security phone, the door automatically unlocked, and we charged in. After an unsuccessful effort to grab the microphone, we identified ourselves to the startled skeletal night staff as Radio Free Women dedicated “to giving women at home, isolated from society, knowledge and contact with their sisters.” We left a list of our “demands” and signed them with our noms de guerre: Rosa Luxemburg, Sarah Grimké, Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman, all well-known activists from the past. The media picked up the story the next day. Shortly afterward, KPFA began producing programs on women’s history, poetry, literature, music, news, and public affairs. The name “Radio Free Women” never appeared again. In the spirit of guerrilla actions, we simply melted back into polite and respectable womanhood. No one knew who had invaded the radio station.26

  Everywhere, the media proved terrific targets for women intent on publicizing the movement (and changing the world). During the first media blitz about the women’s liberation movement in 1970, feminists all over the country, but especially in New York City, launched sustained campaigns against the various media. Forty-six women employees of Newsweek magazine, for example, filed a complaint charging the magazine with systematic discrimination against women. In Hollywood, women members of the Screen Actors Guild charged that the television and movie industries discriminated against women; women in the American Newspaper Guild insisted that female writers be permitted to report on any subject, not just—as was so often the case—society news.27

  There were thousands of protests, rallies, and marches. All over the country, feminists invaded and “occupied” all-male bars and clubs. There was, for instance, “Lysistrata Day” on March 14, 1970. To protest men’s control over abortion laws, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws asked women to abstain for a day “from the joys of love.” There is no way of knowing how many women withheld sex that day, but as “Count Marco,” the nom de plume of a contemptuous San Francisco male columnist, pointed out, “With 27 million unattached women in this country, NO MAN is likely to go more than a few hours without finding some other woman breathing heavily into his ear with her offerings. Most of them have never heard of Lysistrata, and if they had, they figured she was some kind of a nut.”28

  Sadly, he was right. One dilemma for heterosexual feminists was that if a woman demanded too much, acted too uppity, or became too independent, a man could simply replace her with another woman, a younger wife, or, in the feminist language of the time, a “scab.” With so many single young women, scabs would inevitably cross the invisible feminist picket line. In the rhetoric of the day, “A man could always find another slave.”

  One of the least dramatic but persistent protests was the constant demand for child care. Hundreds of activists, like myself, sat for years on committees that never seemed to convince universities that women students, staff, and faculty required child care. So many women fought for child care, but mos
t of these failed efforts are simply too boring to recount. But I will never forget when one of my closest friends, Mary Felstiner, received her Ph.D. degree at Stanford University in June 1972. With her husband out of town and no available baby-sitter, she had no choice but to hold her infant child while she waited to receive her degree. To calm her daughter’s cries, she fed her small pieces of chocolate, which, under a hot California sky, soon melted all over the baby’s body and clothes. Then, she heard her name called, and she climbed up to the podium, carrying her baby in her arms. On her daughter’s back hung a sign, “Why Doesn’t Stanford Have Child Care?” The crowd roared its approval. Somehow, she managed to shake hands and receive her degree. But as she descended the stairs, she left the president wondering about the nature of the gooey brown stuff that stuck to his hands.29

  CLICK! MS. PUBLICIZES THE PERSONAL

  Not all feminists experienced their conversion in small groups. Women like Gloria Steinem, who were older and already in the work world, also experienced a sense of conversion, but without a small group to fall back on. During the 1960s, Steinem worked as a journalist, protested against the Vietnam War, and supported “La Causa” (The Struggle) of Cesar Chavez to organize a union of farmworkers in California. Like many female journalists, Steinem’s first experience of the women’s movement occurred when she was assigned to cover a feminist event. For Steinem, it was a New York abortion speak-out organized by Redstockings in 1969. The New York group Redstockings had tried to speak at a February 1969 legislative hearing on abortion law reform. But the fourteen men and one nun on the panel had hastily adjourned the hearing.

  One month later, the Redstockings held a speak-out at which twelve women testified about their abortions before an audience of some three hundred persons. As she listened to the women speakers—movingly, with grief and pain, relating tales of their illegal abortions—Steinem suddenly felt as though a “great blinding lightbulb” had just been turned on. In that instant, she knew she was a feminist. “It wasn’t until I went to cover a local abortion hearing for New York that the politics of my own life began to explain my interests. . . . Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew.” As her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun has noted, “All the humiliation of being a woman, from political assignments lost to less-experienced male writers to a lifetime of journalists’ jokes about frigid wives, dumb blonds and farmers’ daughters” suddenly made sense to Steinem. She, who had kept her own abortion a secret, now realized she was not alone.30

  Like many other feminists, Steinem was furious with herself, for her “capitulation to the small humiliations, and my own refusal to trust an emotional understanding of what was going on, or even to trust my own experience. For instance, I had believed that women couldn’t get along with one another, even while my own most trusted friends were women.”

  I had agreed that women were more “conservative” even while I identified emotionally with every discriminated-against group. I had assumed that women were sexually “masochistic” even though I knew that trust and kindness were indispensable parts of my sexual attraction to any man. It is truly amazing how long we can go on accepting myths that oppose our own lives, assuming instead that we are the odd exceptions. But once the light began to dawn, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured out any of this before.31

  Steinem’s conversion in 1969 irreversibly altered the direction of her life. She spent the next three decades traveling, lecturing, writing, editing, publishing, and campaigning for women’s liberation. In 1971, she began to think about publishing a mainstream magazine that might reach women who didn’t—and perhaps never would—read movement newsletters and newspapers. Clay Felker, editor of New York magazine, offered to finance a special one-time preview issue of Ms. The cover of the December 20, 1971, issue of New York showed two hands holding the new preview issue. The cover of Ms. featured a surreal image of a woman with eight arms, grasping a frying pan, a clock, a feather duster, a typewriter, a steering wheel, an iron, a telephone, and a mirror. Exhausted, the woman is weeping and visibly pregnant. The cover advertised such stories as “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” by Jane O’Reilly, “Sisterhood” by Gloria Steinem, “Raising Kids without Sex Roles” by Letty Pogrebin, and “Women Tell the Truth about Their Abortions” by Barbaralee Diamonstein. Inside was Johnnie Tilman’s consciousness-raising article “Welfare Is a Woman’s Issue,” which asked readers, “Stop for a minute and think what would happen to you and your kids if you suddenly had no husband and no savings.” Another essay, Judy Syfers’s “Why I Want a Wife,” would soon become a feminist classic. With wry wit, Syfers reminded readers what wives did, what they made possible, and the fact that a wife permitted all kinds of options that most women didn’t have. As Carolyn Heilbrun would later comment, “That subjects such as these, still viable and debated today, appeared in this new feminist magazine is certainly astonishing.”

  For women throughout the country, it was mind-blowing. Here was, written down, what they had not yet admitted they felt, had always feared to say out loud, and could not believe was now before their eyes, in public, for all to read.32

  The preview issue sold out so quickly that Steinem was able to publish another issue three months later. Though discouraged by other publishers and journalists, she took the plunge. The July 1972 issue sold out as soon as it hit the stands. That night, Ms. held a celebratory party at the New York Public Library. According to Cathy Black, an early member of the magazine’s staff, the event seemed like a microcosm of the many constituencies Ms. would have to please.

  I can honestly remember walking into the party thinking Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into. . . . There was a traditional group of women who looked like I did . . . blond hair and a ready smile. There was certainly a much more radical looking group of feminists that night. There was a wild all-women’s band, and there were some advertisers who looked like they had wandered from Mars into this group.33

  Like the sociologist who had warned there was not enough to teach about women, the late journalist Harry Reasoner predicted, “I’ll give [Ms.] six months before they run out of things to say.” (Years later, he graciously took it back.) But Ms. never ran out of things to say. All the first issues sold out and the magazine became one of the most important sources of consciousness-raising in the country.34

  From the beginning, Ms. faced the double task of speaking to the converted and recruiting new readers. Ms. covered grassroots organizing activities of feminist activists as well as the different problems faced by minority and poor women. But more often the magazine focused on the problems encountered by its largely middle-class audience of white women.

  Still, the magazine had an astonishing reach. Many ordinary housewives and working women seemed to find in its pages a reflection of their own lives and problems. Thousands of women wrote passionate letters to the magazine. When read together, they constitute a rare archive of the difficult, brave, and sometimes clumsy efforts of women to embrace the new opportunities and shoulder the new burdens that the movement had created.

  Like an early electronic bulletin board, the letters section of Ms. functioned as a national consciousness-raising group. Here was the high drama of personal life; here was where women learned they were not alone; here was where a reader learned that however much feminism had raised expectations, daily life had a way of dampening them; here were stories of women creating new lives, only to watch them fall apart under the weight of too much responsibility, coupled with too little support from their families.

  Many of the letters were filled with gratitude expressed by women whose previous idea of a women’s group had been the local PTA. Such women read every issue, wrote letters to the editors, and passed Ms. on to friends and to daughters, with a proselytizing zeal. Their voluminous letters to the editors, whether furious or grateful, document the tremendous impact Ms. had on the lives of its readers.35

  Hardly a topic went undiscussed. Women wrote about their diss
atisfaction with their husbands and the traditional marriages they had entered years ago. They wrote about their fantasies of a future egalitarian family. They wrote about problems at work and with their health. They wrote of the newly discovered pleasure of other women’s company. They wrote about mistakes they made, about dreams lost and found, of opportunities squandered and possibilities lost. Often, they described the famous “click” that Ms. had popularized, the exact moment when a woman realizes her problem is not hers alone, but the result of living in a patriarchal society in which many assumptions remained unquestioned.

  Conventional wisdom held that housewives didn’t care about feminism, but letters poured into Ms. from homemakers who were beginning to view their lives through different eyes. One woman, for example, liked the feminist proposition that child-rearing and housework constituted a full-time job for which women should receive financial compensation and which should be included in the GNP. Of her “job,” she wrote:

  I thought that most of my clicks were behind me, but tonight, as I cleared the table, I had a new one. I was complimenting myself (since no one else had) on a meal I’d gone to some trouble to prepare. I began to wonder why so many of us wait trembling for “the verdict” at every meal; why my mother and so many others risk antagonizing their families by having the gall to ask outright if everything is okay.

  I decided it’s not just neurosis. We really know they’re judging even when they don’t say so. House wifing is an occupation in which every single waking act is judged by the persons who mean the most to you in the world. Is the house clean? Is the food good? Was it too expensive? Are the children well behaved?