The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  A thousand times a day our contracts come up for renewal. No wonder our nerves are shot.36

  Readers proudly reported every new step they took, which, in turn, inspired other readers. “Thanks to Ms. Magazine’s reporting women’s accomplishments, I decided to try a man’s task myself,” wrote Pat Luiz in 1974 from Oakland, California. “I and two friends broke up a sidewalk to make room for an . . . above-ground swimming pool we are assembling.” As growing numbers of women entered the labor force, readers began to share the changes they were making in their families. From Jane Wright, in Dover, Delaware, came this missive.

  The day our twelve-year-old son stomped up the stairs—leaving behind the mud that had collected on his sneakers—took a shower, came back downstairs barefoot, and complained about the dirt on the stairs, was the day Mom and Dad decided we were going to raise the consciousness of our nine-, ten-, and twelve-year-olds. A family conference resulted in a family cleaning night on Friday night.

  Ms. magazine also covered every injury and injustice that feminists excavated during the 1970s, usually with a cover story. In this way, the magazine educated women about the hidden injuries of sex. Readers wrote revealing letters, in which they described, often for the first time, the devastating experiences that they had undergone in the recent or distant past. An anonymous writer wrote in 1975:

  Last year I was terrorized and raped and the Philadelphia Center for Rape conducted several interviews with me to see how my personality, attitudes, sex life, and relationships had changed. The major change was in my response to street insults. I, too, had ignored them, “like a good girl,” but I found myself seething at them. I started to hurl my own choice comments and give the insulter the finger in retaliation. The topper came the day when a straight-looking man in a business suit and attache case walked up next to me while I was going to work and asked me if I wanted to fuck. I was carrying a hardback copy of the The Gulag Archipelago in my handbag at the time and I belted him with it. The look of fear and surprise on his face was delicious. I felt wonderful.

  A story on street harassment drew numerous responses from women who resented men invading their space and demanding that they smile. Mary Louise Ho, from York, England, complained, “Men find unsmiling women threatening because we don’t fit their image of the subordinate, placating, feminine female.”

  They are compelled to bully us into that role because it makes them feel more secure and powerful. No doubt, to the individual man, he thinks he is being friendly and that we should appreciate his attention. It’s time he learned otherwise. The next time a man says, “I hate to see a lady so serious,” tell him, “That’s your problem.”

  To which Naomi Weisstein, in New York City, offered another possible retort: “How about (preferably snarling), ‘Say something funny.’”

  Readers didn’t hesitate to celebrate—or criticize—anything that appeared in “their” magazine. In response to a Ms. cover on “The Truth About Battered Wives,” in 1976, Nancy King from Baltimore, Maryland, wrote, “Ms., I congratulate you on your August cover, a new low in judgment. The battered wife as fashion model—bruised, maybe, but ever young and lovely, and with her eye makeup still intact. Click, indeed!” In response to another cover that featured Lillian Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s mother, Ruth Schissler from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, applauded. “I give Ms. a lot of credit for putting a sweet, wrinkled old woman on the cover. It was good to see a real person for a change, instead of perfect, youthful-looking models. Keep up the good work in breaking precedents.” But another woman wrote a scathing letter in which she denounced the Ms. editors. “I am not sure that I shall ever forgive you for the picture of Lillian Carter on the October cover. It is one of the most unkind photographs I have seen. If Ms. is Lillian Carter’s friend, she certainly does not need enemies.”

  The magazine couldn’t win. When Ms. presented a special issue in 1976, “Why Women Don’t Like Their Bodies,” Robin McKiel from Alexandria, Virginia, protested:

  I was shocked that you would publish an issue probing into the reasons women don’t like their bodies and then feature a skinny white woman on the cover. That’s why women don’t like their bodies—because we’ve been told we should look like the woman on the cover when most of us don’t!

  The editor later explained the challenge they faced. “We first tried a heavier woman . . . but that conveyed a different, old-fashioned idea: that only fat women have a body-image problem. We also tried a darker-skinned woman, but that conveyed a limited or racist message for the same reason.”

  Some letters came from young women who had just had some experience that had resulted in a “click.” In 1977, an anonymous writer wrote:

  After talking with my man friend and housemate of six months about my doing most of the housework, I finally presented him with a bill today for “domestic services,” approximately four hours a week at three dollars and fifty cents an hour. This so-called liberated male (he talks a good line) thought about this for two minutes, then drew up his own bill. “Sexual services”: approximately four hours a week at five dollars an hour. He even thinks his sexual services are worth more than mine! Click.37

  But many more letters were written by women who had just divorced and found themselves without resources or employment. In their letters, they described the exhaustion and self-doubt they experienced as they tried to cobble together new lives for themselves. One mother of five, for example, began college at age thirty-nine and was trying to finish her dissertation in a state of poverty. Her former husband gave her small amounts of child support; her father pitched in with modest help “because it’s not right.” After describing the enormous stress of her new life, she conceded, “I find myself so angry now. It has been so hard. I’ve been on welfare and food stamps; I’ve run up twenty-eight thousand dollars in student loans and cannot borrow any more because I’m over the limit.”

  Ms. also spurred one of the most dramatic changes in the English language: the use of Ms. to replace Mrs. or Miss. Language usually changes rather slowly. Yet, by mid-decade, Ms. had already begun to appear on most business mail and applications. Like the title Mr., Ms. covered all possibilities, and included all women, regardless of their marital status.

  Ms. never pleased everyone and, as the premier, best-known feminist magazine, found itself under constant attack. Radical and socialist feminists distrusted the slick mainstream magazine, denounced its acceptance of advertisements that depicted thin, rich women, and dismissed the Ms. staff as sellouts; Carol Hanisch, Ellen Willis, and many other radical activists wrote articles condemning “The Liberal Takeover of Women’s Liberation” and “The Conservatism of Ms.” The growing New Right, for its part, would condemn the magazine as an antifamily publication that contributed to the destruction of American traditional values.38

  For some readers, the magazine focused too much on lesbians; others felt it concentrated too little on the lives of minority and poor women. Some feminists enjoyed the inspirational stories of women who had faced enormous obstacles and attained great recognition and success. But others thought the magazine subtly contributed to the idea that women could have it all, if they just willed it, and did it all. The fact is, the magazine broadcast more than one message. While it urged women to turn their world upside down, Ms. also tried to teach women how to cope with the world they had inherited.39

  What the magazine did contribute, however, was incalculable. After 1972, women who had begun questioning their lives found in Ms. a guide for understanding women’s subordination, stories of reinvented lives, and articles and letters that reassured them that they definitely were not alone. The cumulative and visible impact of the women’s movement thrilled many readers. At the end of the seventies, Jill Wood, from Toronto, Canada, wrote:

  One day last week, I pulled up to a four-way stop in my taxi. At one of the stop signs sat a police officer in a chase cruiser, and at the third, a telephone installer in a van. What made the occasion memorable was the fact t
hat all three of us were women. We celebrated with much joyful laughter.

  One year later, Dr. Martha Hurley wrote from Kansas City, Missouri:

  In the middle of an operation today, I looked around the room—to the first assistant, my scrub nurse, and circulating nurse, the anesthesia doctor, nurse anesthetist, and the patient—and suddenly realized that we were performing major surgery and there was not a man in the room!40

  Steinem’s bold move to create a new magazine catapulted her to celebrity status in the media, even as it created distrust and jealousy among other women activists. Some younger feminists wondered about her “belated” conversion (in 1969) from a high-powered journalist into a media-anointed, telegenic leader of the movement. They resented her beauty and glamour, and distrusted her ability to represent them when she took feminist campaigns to editors, politicians, even to the White House. Some members of Redstockings even regarded Steinem and various lesbians as “co-conspirators in a plot to eliminate radical feminism.”

  Betty Friedan, who viewed her as a rival, testily compared Steinem’s role as a “missionary, a public relations person,” with her own role as “the founder.” Friedan was partly right. Steinem did make a perfect movement public-relations representative to a nation already primed by all sorts of media images to fear the very idea of a feminist. For this, Steinem was an unmitigated asset. A beautiful and intelligent woman, she reassured the unconverted that feminists were not, after all, hairy, ugly, man-hating shrews. Having enjoyed a series of serious relationships with men, or “little marriages,” as she called them, she was an advertisement for the fact that feminism did not require a loveless or a manless life. A good journalist as well as an engaging speaker who remained calm and collected under fire, Steinem countered the media’s stereotype of shrill “libbers” and proved that feminists came in many sizes, enjoyed different styles of life, and embraced a wide range of political views.

  Attacked from so many sides, it is amazing that Steinem never responded in kind. The product of a working-class home, she made special efforts to enlist the privileged to assist poor and minority women. She defended lesbians and worked to create coalitions with women of color. She traveled the country with Flo Kennedy, the irreverent African-American who made bigoted white men tremble, speaking to all kinds of groups about the need for a new women’s movement. For decades, she dedicated herself to a movement that did not always appreciate her generosity of spirit or her ecumenical inclusiveness. But by creating Ms., Steinem left a legacy for which she would be rightfully remembered: she helped educate millions of women to see the world through their own eyes.

  CREATING CULTURE

  One of the ways the movement spread was through the creation of a vibrant women’s culture, which invented new traditions and constructed a usable history that would help activists bring the past to bear on the present. This women’s culture offered feminists a safe refuge from which to express new artistic visions, compose new styles of music, explore new literary themes, and develop a feminist sense of humor. At its worst, it sometimes became an end in itself that led toward a hermetically sealed separatism that nurtured converts and excluded ordinary women from participation.41

  During the first heady years of the movement, cultural events were often electrifying experiences. Imagine the following scene. It’s 1970 in Berkeley, California. Several hundred women have squeezed into a stifling room for a feminist poetry reading. The poets take off their shirts, some to cool off, some to protest a law that prohibits breast-feeding in public, and some because it feels deliciously sexual. “Baring your breast,” recalled Susan Griffin, “was like saying this is not something evil, I claim this. This is me, and that was enormously powerful.”

  Griffin never forgot “those amazing poetry readings. Each person would go up and read and the audience would go wild, laugh, and scream and yell.” Provocative, sensual, thoughtful, serious, angry, snide, funny, a new poetic sensibility was emerging. Susan Griffin re-memberered moving to a podium, bare-breasted, to read, “An Answer to a Man’s Question, ‘What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?’” The crowd greeted the title with howls of laughter and the poem itself brought down the house.42

  An Answer to a Man’s Question, “What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”

  Wear a dress.

  Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a dress store.

  Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic, around your hips, and underneath your nipples.

  Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary napkin.

  Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.

  Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin underneath, and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down Telegraph Avenue.

  Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run.

  Find a man.

  Find a nice man who you would like to ask you for a date.

  Find a nice man who will ask you for a date.

  Keep your dress on.

  Ask the nice man who asks you for a date to come to dinner.

  Cook the nice man a nice dinner so the dinner is ready before he comes and your dress is nice and clean and wear a smile.

  Tell the nice man you’re a virgin, or you don’t have birth control, or you would like to get to know him better.

  Keep your dress on.

  Go to the movies by yourself.

  Find a job.

  Iron your dress.

  Wear your ironed dress and promise the boss you won’t get pregnant (which in your case is predictable) and that you like to type, and be sincere and wear your smile.

  Find a job or get on welfare.

  Borrow a child and get on welfare.

  Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child, or go to the public park with the child, and take the child to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and be humble and wear your dress and your smile and don’t talk back, keep your dress on, cook more nice dinners, stay away from Telegraph Avenue and still, you won’t know the half of it, not in a million years.43

  In “that chick is SO REVOLUTIONARY,” the Berkeley poet Alta, who also founded the Shameless Hussy Press in order to publish women’s poetry, satirized middle-class feminists who could not begin to grasp the realities of her life as a mother alone caring for two children, in a working-class suburban tract home:

  Poem

  that chick is SO REVOLUTIONARY

  she dresses poor on purpose.

  She eschews the boozhwa comforts like

  washing machines, male lovers, &

  flush toilets. I mean she is

  EVERY KIND of revolutionary!

  She’d bum off her friends before she’d work

  in a counter-revolutionary government job!

  (How come she can afford to be so revolutionary?)

  I mean, this chick is SO REVOLUTIONARY,

  she laughs at housewives, agrees that

  we’re an inferior breed.

  She would never have a kid if she could have

  an abortion instead. Get it? This chick is

  SELF FULFILLED!

  super chick ta daa!

  Even her period glows in the dark.44

  Admittedly, feminists were not known for their humor. Although the media invariably depicted them as dour and humorless women, I am hardly alone in my memories of meetings filled with uproarious laughter and aching belly laughs. The reason for the discrepancy is that American feminists were rather humorless—in public. Fighting for institutional and cultural change required determination; excavating sexual crimes called for convincing debate; ignoring gratuitous insults required the patience of a saint. Rape and domestic violence weren’t funny, nor was sexual harassment. Male jokes about feminist goals only deepened activists’ anger.

  Within the movement, though, feminists were refreshingly goofy, silly, witty, and sarcastic, reframing the normal as bizarre, playing wi
th role reversal, satire, and parody. As the poet Maya Angelou quipped, “There are those moments when the ‘new woman’ confronts the ‘old man’ and the result can be as comic as Charlie Chaplin on the run or Lucille Ball on the loose.”45 In fact, much of humor appeared as sardonic commentary and functioned as consciousness-raising.46

  Parody was often the humor of choice. For the August 26, 1970, national “strike,” the New York chapter of NOW published a mock version of the New York Times. On the first page appeared a new feminist motto: “All the News That Would Give the Times Fits.” A front-page article described a protest led by 500,000 radical masculinists protesting “female chauvinism” in the nation’s capital. The piece lampooned the male lament that they, too, were oppressed by sex roles. “While we almost monopolize the top employment levels and earn far more money as a group than women,” one masculinist complained, “we control less than a third of the nation’s buying power. We are the castrated consumers of America.”

  The parody issue also included an outlandish fashion satire, “Men in a Tizzy over Cuff Length,” and a wicked spoof on the Times’s typical marriage announcement, “Sec’y of State Weds James R. Buckingham.” “Mr. and Mrs. Theresa Buckingham,” it began,

  announce the marriage of their son, James Leslie, to Anne Strongen Sharpe, the Secretary of State. Mr. Sharpe’s mother is the well-known heart surgeon and his grandmother, Della Buckingham, ran for the Presidency in 1920, but did not live to see the election. Mr. Sharpe, a graduate of the Deadbriar Finishing School, made his debut in 1965 at the Honeysuckle Cotillion. He attended Yale, Harvard, Radcliffe, and participated in the Junior Year Aboard program in Liechtenstein, where he learned to make dumplings.