by Ruth Rosen
Others, too, sensed the change. In 1975, Harper’s Bazaar asked seven prominent feminists to assess the status of the movement. Susan Braudy, an editor and writer, replied, “We’re in a period of transition.” Erica Jong responded that the question itself was a predictable media trope: “First we discover a fad, then we say that it has run out of steam.” Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman noted that the ERA was in trouble. Betty Friedan replied that “goals get higher with greater success.” Cynthia Glacken, a member of the board of directors of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, answered, “As each group of women organize, they will see how the movement applies to them and it won’t be a theory anymore.”2
Time seemed to have taken a toll, noted Charlotte Bunch, commenting on the striking numbers of burned-out women “among long-time activists who had been involved in building feminist institutions.” The initial euphoria was long gone; consciousness-raising groups had all but disappeared; feminists felt more isolated; and many movement institutions and collectives had collapsed. Differences, not solidarity, now seemed more compelling to some activists; straight, white women had, in some cases, replaced men as the new enemy. At the same time, a growing anti-abortion movement had launched a fierce campaign to repeal legalized abortion and the ERA had stalled at the state level. By 1982, it would be dead.
CHALLENGING RELIGION AND EDUCATION
Fragmented and wounded, the movement remained immensely alive. In religion, for instance, women scholars in theological schools and seminaries challenged orthodoxy, reexamined translations, and reinterpreted religious texts. Some women in established religions began designing their own services, writing their own prayers, and inventing rituals that honored women and their experiences. The first time one feminist heard a woman cantor’s voice soar through a Jewish synagogue, she wept. “Why haven’t women been singing Hebrew for the last five thousand years?” she asked. Upon hearing a sermon given by an ordained female Methodist minister, another feminist felt, for the very first time, that she had come home, that she belonged.3
Catholic women and nuns faced a more complicated dilemma. Although the Catholic Church’s attitudes toward contraception and abortion remained unchanged, when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962 (the first was held in 1869), calling for radical reforms and a renewal of the Church, he opened the cloistered world of silence, shaved heads, and self-flagellation of nuns. In No Turning Back, a memoir written in 1990 by two former nuns, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey recounted the electrifying experience of those years and the impact of Vatican II’s new liberalism on their religious order and their lives. As both women became increasingly involved in the struggle for women’s right to choose to have an abortion, Ferraro, Hussey, and other activist nuns waged a war with the Vatican that they could not win. Soon they left the Catholic Church to set up their own lay communities. Though it was not their intention, their story made a strong case for the early emergence of a feminist sensibility among Catholic nuns.4
Meanwhile, feminists challenged all kinds of religious orthodoxy. The scholar Mary Daly, a member of NOW’s task force on women and religion, launched what would soon become a widespread assault on the identity of God “as an old man with a beard.” Merlin Stone imagined life “When God Was a Woman”; Rosemary Radford Ruether, a longtime activist and well-respected theological scholar, critiqued the Judeo-Christian duality between mind and body and its ecological impact on humans and the planet; and Judith Plaskow resurrected the feisty Lilith, whose insubordinate behavior had resulted in God’s creation of the more deferential Eve. Carol Christ extolled the psychic importance of rediscovering prehistoric female goddesses, and Marija Gimbutas excavated goddess cultures of the ancient world. Charlene Spretnak analyzed the politics of women’s spirituality, Paula Gunn Allen explored the place of the spiritual in Native American cultures, Delores S. Williams, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker explored what kind of “womanist theology” would nourish African-American women; and Gloria Anzaldua examined the impact of Catholicism on the lives of Chicanas.
Together, these scholars, intellectuals, and activists began to envision a different relationship to divinity, spirituality, and the religious experience. Many feminists, spiritually starved by patriarchal religions and rituals, eagerly explored new ways of living a spiritual life. Such women chose many different paths, including paganism, goddess worship, Buddhism, and witchcraft. As a result of this feminist assault on patriarchal religions, women in some Christian and Jewish congregations became ordained rabbis and ministers, some of whom carried on the feminist tradition of searching for a new language and new rituals that would integrate women into the religious experience.5
At the same time, in the field of education, feminists fundamentally altered the curricula of America’s schools, colleges, and universities, so that from first grade on, no child would ever again imagine that women had not worked, raised families, written, loved, fought, protested, and organized in the past. Between 1970 and 1990, a revolution in knowledge occurred in American institutions of higher learning. Once the category of gender entered a discipline, the questions changed, as did the answers. Feminist scholars began challenging the established lists—“canons”—of literature, art, and music, while publishers like the Feminist Press played a vital role in reprinting neglected—or even lost—books, written by women in the past.
Soon feminist scholarship challenged the very assumptions of every discipline. How do we know what we think we know? they asked. Feminist scholars found bias wherever they looked. No field of research, they discovered, had integrated women into its basic assumptions about the human condition. Even clinical medical research, it turned out, had only used men in trials and then extrapolated those findings to women. Science now found itself assaulted by feminist scholars who questioned what assumptions were embedded in the questions scientists and medical researchers asked.
The cumulative impact of this body of scholarship was breathtaking. Together, this new army of feminist scholars not only questioned the content of modern knowledge, but also the assumptions on which that knowledge was based. “When women asked the questions,” as historian Marilyn Boxer noted, “their answers were not only different, but downright threatening, even subversive, and they and their work became lightning rods in the academic cultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s.” But to feminists, their influence seemed like the natural fruition of thousands of women working in the academic fields, dedicated to asking new questions, revisiting old ones, and turning a critical eye toward all claims of truth.6
Consider the field of women’s history, which profoundly challenged the writing of the past. Historians of women, who were already well organized by the early seventies, questioned the conventional wisdom that professional historians taught and that textbooks repeated. Most women did not even know very much about the first wave of feminism, which had lasted for seventy years. Ellen DuBois retrieved that important history, as thousands of other historians, almost all feminist activists, began the painstaking work of making women’s work, movements, families, and loves visible to an indifferent present.
By the end of the 1980s, all schoolchildren would honor National Women’s History Month. How this came about is a good example of the confluence between various feminist institutions. Molly MacGregor worked on the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, a local California organization that grew out of the 1961 Kennedy Commission on the Status of Women. Neither a professional historian nor an academic, MacGregor had been pondering how to promote a week that honored women’s history. Three thousand miles away, professors Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly, two of the earliest pioneers in the field of women’s history, had created a graduate program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College in 1972. Five years later, Gerda Lerner organized a Summer Institute on Women’s History for Leaders of Women’s Organizations. A consummate activist and educator, Lerner brought together “forty-five women representing the leadership of thirty-seven national women
’s organizations. They lived and worked together for seventeen days at Sarah Lawrence College.” Molly MacGregor who had already initiated the celebration of Women’s History Week in Sonoma Country for the last two years, arrived at the Institute hoping to persuade other attendees to embrace the idea as well. According to Lerner, the students “adopted as their class project the idea of turning Women’s History Week into an annual national event.” President Carter had already proclaimed the event, but only for one year. To turn it into an annual event, they would need a joint resolution passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.7
And they got it. Inspired by Gerda Lerner, MacGregor returned to California, where she and other activists formed the National Women’s History Project (NWHP). By 1981, the national women’s history network successfully lobbied Congress to recognize National Women’s History Week. By 1987, they had pressured Congress into expanding the week into a month. Eventually, the NWHP circulated women’s history curricula to millions of children, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Supported by scores of activist scholars, these determined women created a real revolution in the American history curriculum.8
MEANWHILE, IN THE HEARTLAND
As ideas from the women’s movement began spreading into mainstream culture, making it a part of the everyday lives of American readers, viewers, listeners, and even couch potatoes, so the movement itself was spreading through the country. A Fort Wayne, Indiana, feminist recalled how her community became engrossed in the hectic activism of the 1970s:
We organized Take Back the Night marches, and Rape Crisis Hotlines; we lobbied for a battered women’s shelter and a displaced homemaker program, and began two family businesses—a bookstore and a coffeehouse. Spontaneous task forces were created as needed. There was the Unity Coalition to lobby for the ERA, and the Justice Coalition campaign to impeach a sexist judge. And when the Women’s Health Organization was being harassed by city officials, local newspapers received letters signed by Catholic Grandmothers for Abortion.9
And her description might easily have held for many small cities and towns across the American heartland where women staked out new agendas alongside those that had originated in the biggest cities.
Take Dayton, Ohio, a city often compared to Muncie, Indiana, as the archetypal “average” American city. It witnessed a similar explosion of feminist activities. Feminists first formed three small consciousness-raising groups in 1969. The members tended to be white, liberal Democrats who were college-educated, married, and middle-class. As in other cities, these small groups eventually began to create institutions and reach out to the wider community. By the mid-1970s, the movement flourished under the umbrella of Dayton Women’s Liberation, which now boasted a phone bank, a speakers’ bureau, a city-funded Women’s Center that offered self-help classes, a walk-in informational center, a meeting place, an advocacy and referral service, political and personal counseling, a lending library, an extensive education program, and child care facilities.
During the second half of the decade, a critical mass of Dayton’s feminists began to focus their attention on the problems of working women. Some of these activists, self-described socialist-feminists, had met in 1975, when over two thousand socialist-feminists attended a national conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Despite all the usual factions and splits, the conference had brought together feminists who discovered how many of them were working with trade union women or clerical workers. As early as 1971, for instance, a group of San Francisco Bay Area feminists and trade union women founded Union WAGE (Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality), an organization dedicated to creating union democracy, organizing women workers into unions, and ensuring that both unions and employers took women workers’ needs—maternity, health care, and child care—seriously. By 1975, the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) had begun to recast feminist demands as the end of sexual discrimination in hiring and promotion, the abolition of sexual harassment, the training of women for skilled work, on-site child care, and flexible hours and work schedules. In Boston, a group called Nine to Five, founded by Karen Nussbaum, tried to improve the status of women office workers. Among their “Bill of Rights for Women Office Workers” was the right to respect as a woman, the right to maternity benefits, and the right to equal access to promotion opportunities and on-the-job training programs. Though the work was slow and difficult, Nussbaum watched as one woman worker after another changed before her eyes:
Traudi says that she used to cry at her desk when her boss would yell at her. Now she is a leader of her union group, and when her boss tried to harass her out of her job, she said, “No!” Her boss brought her in to have a personal meeting in which he intended to get rid of her, and she said, “I insist on having a witness.” She did not lose her job; she got promoted.
What groups like Union WAGE and Nine to Five set out to do was to transform working women’s view of themselves and to learn, with them, how to organize other workers. “It’s partly a question of skills,” Nussbaum explained. “Nobody ever taught us how to hold a meeting or to plan a series of actions that would win your demands from your boss.”
And then, through being in a group you can see things happen around you. You can see yourself be part of an organization that has an impact—that can eventually make big changes for working women. It’s really seeing yourself as part of history.10
Dayton activists soon took an even more active role in that history. The typical worker in Dayton was not a unionized male autoworker, but a female bank teller. Frustrated by male leftists who trivialized the significance of organizing clerical women, one activist, Sherrie Holmes, established the first NOW chapter in Dayton, out of which emerged Dayton Women Working (DWW), an organization dedicated to improving women’s working conditions, and which linked up with the National Women’s Employment Project (NWEP), a consortium of six working women’s organizations. The NWEP launched a national investigation of the working conditions of bank clerical workers. Dayton’s local “banking study” exposed the industry’s widespread discrimination against minorities and women. Forced to investigate, the federal government fined one bank for a pattern of discrimination and assessed nearly $1 million in back pay for 110 employees.11
The banking study was perhaps Dayton’s greatest success. Like hundreds of other communities, Dayton’s women’s movement found itself factionalized and underfunded at the end of the decade. None of its major feminist organizations lasted past the 1970s. The Women’s Center, led by a rotating leadership, split between women closely connected to the Left, and those activists who insisted upon an autonomous women’s movement. By the mid-seventies, Dayton’s feminist organizations, like their counterparts around the country, had come to depend on funds provided by the federal government or by private philanthropies. By the end of the decade, these funds began drying up.12
By the late 1970s, Dayton, like so many other cities and small towns, began to suffer from a growing backlash against feminism. Many feminists had burned out. Those who had created or staffed feminist institutions now had additional responsibilities, jobs, and/or families. Still, as feminist-created institutions collapsed, they often resurfaced as “mainstream” services. After the 1970s, for instance, the city of Dayton, the YWCA, churches, and universities began to fund and staff a rape crisis hotline, a battered women’s shelter, a women’s health clinic, and a women’s studies program.13
In Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio (as well as in larger cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston), local women’s movements took a similar trajectory. The initial movement fragmented; burnout was rampant; but self-help services founded and staffed by activists eventually turned into mainstream services funded by cities, universities, and religious organizations. Some feminists grieved that they had lost “their” institutions to the social service system. But other activists made careers out of directing and funding them. Karen Nussbaum, for example, became the head of the Women’s Labor Bureau under the Cl
inton administration. Elaine Zimmerman, who had helped found the women’s center in Berkeley, California, became a national expert on family and child care policy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist attorney who had challenged the patriarchal bias of the law, became the second woman on the Supreme Court. Barbara Ehrenreich, an early socialist-feminist activist in health care, became a widely respected writer and public intellectual. These were women who had merged their commitment to other women, as well as to economic and social justice, with their passion for a particular field of interest. In some cases, that also resulted in a satisfying career.
DISPLACED HOMEMAKERS AND POSTFEMINISTS
Older women, younger women, minority women, trade union women, women in the heartland—groups previously considered beyond the reach of the women’s movement—were also busy reinventing feminism for themselves. But the diffusion of feminism did not mean that a single movement, led by middle-class white women, spread to other groups who then added or subtracted particular issues. On the contrary, different groups of women spread completely new conceptions of “women’s issues” throughout the country. In a space of time so short as to be stunning—a few years at the most—and in areas of the country where feminism had been unknown, then a joke, then a danger, new kinds of feminist sensibilities began to appear. Fragmentation, as troubling and confusing as it was, also made feminism accessible to new groups of women. Despite her concerns about the splintering of the women’s movement, Robin Morgan optimistically observed that, with all its factions, the movement had expanded in all kinds of positive directions by 1975. “There are,” she wrote,