by Ruth Rosen
The announcement ended with a description of the bridegroom’s attire—“a simple black Cardin suit with an Edwardian shirt of Alençon lace dotted with seed pearls”—followed by the statement that “it was Ms. Sharpe’s draft of the Vietnam Peace Treaty that was finally accepted.” A picture of a smiling, somewhat daft bridegroom, identified as “Mr. Anne Strongen Sharpe, the former James Leslie Buckingham,” accompanied the announcement.
Other articles in the issue described feminist successes in redrawing society’s priorities, a kind of feminist wish list: The Senate had just passed a National Priorities Bill, providing $300 billion for U.S. domestic programs; city “unplanners” won the struggle to redesign the skyline and create a more beautiful environment; a court ruling had just decriminalized prostitution; the new universal day care centers produced happier and healthier children; the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Diana Ross, had crucified the KKK; and, finally, the chiefs of state (all women) of various nations meeting in Paris had settled, in one hour, the terms of the peace treaties for the Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli conflicts.47
Similarly, the first issue of Ms. magazine featured Judy Syfers’s “Why I Want a Wife,” which began with this plea:
I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, does the necessary grocery shopping, prepares the meals, serves them pleasantly, and then does the cleaning up while I do my studying . . .
and ended with these words: “My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?”48 An instant classic, “Why I Want a Wife,” created a sensation when first published; it encouraged women to grasp the injustice of anyone working as an unpaid servant for another person.
In “The Politics of Housework,” Pat Mainardi used humor to analyze one of the most private forms of exploitation, the excuses men habitually used to avoid housework. Mainardi offered translations for some of these familiar excuses. For example, when a man said, “I don’t mind sharing the work, but you 11 have to show me how to do it,” Mainardi offered this translation: “I ask a lot of questions and you’ll have to show me everything I do because I don’t remember so good. Also don’t try to sit down and read while I’m doing my jobs because I’m going to annoy the hell out of you until it’s easier to do them yourself”49
In her well-known essay “If Men Could Menstruate,” Gloria Steinem offered a send-up of men’s sense of entitlement and privilege. “What would happen,” she coyly asked, “if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?”
Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.
To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea. Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men were hormonally protected, but everything about cramps.
Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. . . .
Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”). . . .
Street guys would invent slang (“He’s a three-pad man”) and “give fives” on the corner with some exchange like, “Man, you looking good!” “Yea, man, I’m on the rag!” . . .
Menopause would be celebrated as a positive event, the symbol that men had accumulated enough years of cyclical wisdom.
Men would convince women that it was More pleasurable at “that time of the month.”. . . .50
Not surprisingly, given that rock ‘n’ roll had set a generation in motion (even when written, played, and sung largely by men), and that folk and gospel had given expression to every aspect of the civil rights and antiwar movements, music also drew feminists together. At first, some women simply wrote new lyrics to old movement and folk melodies. Laura X even published an early Women’s Songbook. But soon women were dancing, marching, relaxing to music, bands, lyrics that were purely from women.
In Chicago, for instance, Naomi Weisstein decided to start a Women’s Liberation rock band:
I was lying on the sofa listening to the radio—a rare bit of free time in those early hectic days of the women’s movement. . . . Mick Jagger crowed that his once feisty girlfriend was now “under his thumb.” Then Janis Joplin moaned with the thrilled resignation that love was like “a ball and chain.” I somersaulted off the sofa, leapt into the air, and came down howling at the radio. Rock is considered the insurgent culture of the era. How criminal to make the subjugation and slugging of women so sexy! We’ve got to do something about this! We’ll organize our own rock band.51
Whenever the Women’s Liberation Rock and Roll Band played, as Weisstein recalled, “women’s response to the music was to take off their shirts and dance bare-breasted. . . . One of the things that it made me realize is the restraint of our bodies and repression of our sexuality—the rebellion against this was a very deep aspect of our movement.”52
By the mid-seventies, Holly Near, Chris Williams, Margie Adams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and dozens of other talented singers and musical groups had created a new genre of “women’s music” that accompanied every women’s dance, rally, and party. In the privacy of living rooms, groups of women—sometimes gay and straight together—swayed or rocked to this music. The words mattered. At large concerts, when Holly Near performed, thousands of women would sing along, the lyrics second nature to them. Near, an activist with the kind of powerful, clear voice often heard in American musicals, initially wrote songs that protested the Vietnam War, the torture of Latin American activists, or celebrated her childhood in rural Northern California. In the late seventies, she “came out” with an album whose title, Imagine My Surprise, expressed her astonishment at falling in love with a woman. Sweet Honey in the Rock, a group started by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a former civil rights activist in SNCC, combined the magisterial power of gospel with the edgy beat of rock. It didn’t take long before they became the most popular and successful group on the women’s music scene.
No aspect of culture remained untouched by feminist perspectives and challenges. By the 1970s, feminist fine artists began to knock on the doors of museums that had previously excluded them and guerrilla arts groups launched imaginative acts of protest against the male art scene. At the same time, feminist art historians began to discover talented painters and sculptors who had long been ignored or forgotten. Not surprisingly, feminists disagreed over what constituted “women’s art.” Should women artists struggle to be integrated into the mainstream culture or ought they to have their own shows? Did something called “women’s art” really exist? In the end, it probably didn’t matter. The energy lay in the arguments, not in the answers.53
Imagine, if you can, a Sunday-morning brunch held in the living room of a modest home in Berkeley in 1971. The featured guests are Judy Chicago, the auteur of the Dinner Party (an elaborate artistic installation that featured a long dinner table, exquisitely hand-sewn linens, and handcrafted sexualized ceramic dinner settings that honored individual women from the past), and Anaïs Nin (the writer whose intimate diaries about her bohemian life in the 1920s captured the imagination of a generation of women). Chicago proudly shows her newest work, a print of a woman pulling a used Tampax out of her vagina. Nin is appalled. Wrapped in an elegant black cape and dress, she recoils from what she describes as “vulgar art.” Soon they retreat to the kitchen, shouting and arguing, while the guests take up the debate in the living room
. Do women, should women, choose different themes than men? Not surprisingly—and to the relief of many—the assembled group can reach no consensus. The truth is, none of them wants a minister of culture who will dictate the acceptable parameters of women’s art.54
If women were finally breaking the high arts barriers, no area of graphic expression proved livelier than poster art. Though white middle-class writers filled their novels with the travail of women like themselves, poster artists, many of whom were from the same background, seemed unwilling to portray themselves at all. A famed exception was the “Fuck Housework” poster, in which a white woman, dressed like a witch, breaking a broom in half, stared out at the viewer with a sly Mona Lisa smile.
What then did feminist poster art convey? Emerging from poster collectives in the late 1960s, feminist poster art initially focused almost exclusively on the oppression of minority women or working-class women. Much of the initial burst of poster art in the women’s movement grew out of poster collectives that supported campus strikes for black or Third World studies departments or Third World liberation movements. Eager to combine their Left and feminist commitments, women graphic artists rarely if ever depicted white women. In this way, they could maintain their political credibility and legitimacy as leftists, while publicizing the particular problems faced by women.55 As Jane Norling, a talented muralist and poster artist, later explained:
We wanted to identify as women, but not as white women, and were drawn to create images of women in Vietnam, Africa, Latin America. I was moved by images of working-class women such as textile workers, women of mining families, or agricultural workers. Middle- and upper-middle-class women didn’t look like they needed “change.” Who wanted to identify oneself with that? We were thrilled at the images of Vietnamese women fighting in the trenches. The images of third world women were more glamorous in their “otherness.” . . . Art for social change MEANT picturing nonwhite people.56
The movement needed heroines and a usable history and posters could provide both, and depict white women, as long as they belonged safely to the past. One early poster simply declared, “Our History has been Stolen from US.” The past conferred legitimacy on the present. Posters of bold and courageous women—Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, the Pankhurst sisters, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Luxemburg, Lucy Stone, Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, Agnes Smedley, and Eleanor Roosevelt—introduced feminists to forgotten activists and rebels. One of the more popular posters featured a portrait of the suffragist Lucy Stone, along with her famous words: “In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer” (1855).57
Feminist poster artists routinely recycled images from the past in order to inspire action in the present. On one poster, an image from 1907 showed an exhausted woman worker bent over a sewing machine, her baby at her breast. Next to it was a picture of a modern poor and harried mother in 1976. Underneath, the caption read: “$acred Motherhood.” Another poster reproduced a picture of striking women at the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. Underneath this image were the words “8 hours a day, abolish child labor.” Next to it was a photograph of working women in 1972, with the caption “Free Abortion, child care, equal pay.” The message couldn’t be clearer; if they could win their goals, so could we.
From the late seventies on, some feminist poster artists began replacing figurative or photographic images of heroines and Third World women with a new celebratory style that drew on mythic images to promote the developing world of feminist cultural activities—art shows, music festivals, dances, and summer camps. Posters still promoted the needs of women of color, and advertised social services like rape or battered women’s hot lines. But the trend was not to dwell on obstacles, but rather to celebrate female strength and spirituality. In one poster, “Woman is Rising,” a stylized female figure typically emerged from the luminous edge of a moon. In another, women’s bodies merged with ancient Celtic designs from an era when, it was believed, women had greater influence in society.
By the end of the 1980s, you couldn’t go into a college, to a health clinic, or to a federal building without seeing posters that educated, cajoled, and challenged women’s unexamined assumptions about what they deserved. Posters advertised International Women’s Day; taught women that sexual harassment was illegal; helped legitimize lesbian relationships; and publicized the courage and strength of women from the past. Posters could be didactic, rageful, hilarious, zany, sarcastic, or celebratory. But like the women’s movement itself, they revealed rather than obscured, and honored rather than ridiculed, the reality and diversity of women’s lives.
Chapter Seven
THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA
In 1976, Jean Curtis wrote a provocative article in the New York Times Magazine, titled “When Sisterhood Turns Sour.” Curtis admitted that she felt great Schadenfreude—joy at another person’s unhappiness—when other women fell on their faces. “When a woman has written a bad book and gotten panned for it, I’m delighted. I’m almost as pleased when a woman has written a stupid review and is certain to be criticized for it.” For her, she admitted, the early camaraderie of the women’s movement was gone and older feelings of competition were returning.1
Beneath the proclamation of sisterhood, women injured one another deeply. In movement circles, some called it “trashing” or even “psychological terrorism.” No one has ever described or explained this destructive behavior better than Jo Freeman, who during the first years of the movement wrote under the name Joreen. In a classic essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Freeman observed how the movement’s unwillingness to elect officials, and its tendency to reject emerging talented writers and orators, gave the media complete freedom to anoint their own “leaders.” It also created a vacuum in which any woman could promote herself as a leader. Such women were accountable to no one except themselves. Fearful of structure and formal officials, the movement ended up with “leaders” who had the loudest voice, the flashiest public style, or the most time to stay at meetings. “Contrary to what we would like to believe,” she wrote,
there is no such thing as a structureless group. . . . For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized.2
Freeman described “trashing” as
a particularly vicious form of character assassination. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally distinguished by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreement or to resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.
Feminists used trashing to punish women who seemed too concerned with individual achievement, or too eager to grab the spotlight. The punishment was heavy criticism, even ostracism. Accusations and rejection might be based on political differences or personality clashes. But some activists felt such intense jealousy and competition that these feelings could only be assuaged by tearing apart another woman’s credibility. As Vivian Rothstein, an early founder of Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, put it, “Many of us were damaged people. How could we not have created a damaged movement?”3
Whenever I asked former activists about their darkest moments in the women’s movement, tears often preceded words. The wounds had never healed; the scars had never disappeared. Only through the language of romance is it possible to describe how trashing devastated feminists. Talented women fell in love with a movement that seemed to grant them a legitimacy they had never felt, gave them a voice, and welcomed their presence. Then, as one feminist put it, “like a lover who abruptly walks out on you and never tells you why, the movement rejected your talents, orde
red you to cease speaking, told you to stop writing and to become invisible again.”4 The women who experienced such rejection often compared it to the searing pain of unrequited love.
Trashing emerged within a particular historical context. For sixties activists, the idea of elections or of hierarchies of any kind smacked of “reformist” organizations, not a movement set on turning society upside down and inside out. Having roundly criticized the elitist leadership of New Left men, these women had vowed to act differently. They were going to create a truly democratic, egalitarian, and participatory movement. Distrust of expertise and talent—a central tenet of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, then little understood but much admired by some young feminist activists—deepened an existing rejection of authority and leadership. If Chinese professors could clean university toilets (widely publicized at the time), then feminist leaders, too, could do their share of what was commonly called “the shit work.”
Fear of leadership and of hierarchy—that is, fear of domination and subjugation—sometimes produced political paralysis. Meredith Tax recalled that when her Boston group began mushrooming into Bread and Roses, “All we did was argue about whether or not we should have an organization. People were so frightened of taking any leadership role and of being trashed for being elitist.” Some of the women felt, to her surprise, that the group should not be open to new women. They feared that “we would become leaders and we would be bound to oppress other women. And I said, ‘How would we be oppressing women if we decided to have a women’s movement?’”
We had no strategy. Our feminist political culture got us into a box we couldn’t think ourselves out of. . . . We said revolution meant the transfer of power . . . but we were terrified of power. To us power meant oppression; we knew what it felt like to be the object of other people’s power and we couldn’t stand the thought of acting like bosses or fathers and being hated. . . . Our organizations lasted five minutes. We didn’t know how to keep them going, partly because no one would take long-term responsibility to keep things together. People fought to avoid power, not to get it. They didn’t have the time or money to be leaders, or the social support. Or maybe the guts. It’s not easy to be a leader in a movement that hates leaders.5