by Ruth Rosen
alternate feminist institutions all over the country, from Feminist Credit Unions to Women’s Law Centers, from feminist presses to Women’s Health Centers. [There is the] birth of a genuine feminist metaphysics, Mary Daly, Goddess spirituality. Today the National Black Feminist Organization—to name only one group—has chapters all over the country; Native American feminist groups are forming in the southwest, Chicana, Puerto Rican and Asian women are publicly affirming the feminist consciousness they had all along. Grandmothers and grammar school feminists are organizing, in every town from OWL [Older Women’s League] to Little League. . . . The Coalition of Labor Union Women [CLUW] is making waves within the male-controlled labor movement; and domestic workers, secretaries, hospital employees, welfare mothers, waitresses and hundreds of thousands of others . . . are fighting for their/our rights.14
Morgan’s snapshot of the movement captured the dizzying diffusion of feminism during the 1970s. In 1973, at age fifty-seven, Tish Sommers, a longtime civil rights activist, and for twenty-three years a mother and housewife, ended her marriage. Newly won no-fault divorce law reforms left many a long-married but suddenly divorced homemaker like Sommers without any means of support. Her response was to found a NOW Task Force called Older Women’s Liberation (OWL), then defined, tellingly, as women over thirty. Without the existence of a women’s movement, Sommers might not have acted, but with its support, she became the first activist to link issues of aging with feminism. Sommers also coined the term “displaced homemakers” to dignify the lives of women who unexpectedly found themselves on their own, with few marketable skills, and little self-confidence. In 1975, activist lawyer Barbara Dudley drafted a bill to provide displaced homemakers with job training and counseling in California. When the governor opposed the proposed legislation, Sommers threatened to stage a sit-in with hundreds of elderly feminists. The state legislature passed the bill, providing funds for a pilot project, housed at Mills College in Oakland. Other colleges and universities soon created their own centers, welcoming these displaced homemakers because they were mature, experienced, and brought much-needed revenue to educational institutions.
In many ways, OWL could be viewed as a quintessential American feminist organization. Like other feminists, Sommers considered her own experience, judged it to be unfair, grasped the politics of the problem, found a way for people to discuss it, and began to challenge the public policies that affected older women. Fueled by grassroots activists, the movement rapidly swept across the nation. By 1977, twelve states had passed legislation to help displaced homemakers. In 1980, Sommers founded the Older Women’s League (also called OWL), which by 1982 had its national headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Sommers’s friendship with Laurie Shields, a recent widow, speeded up this process. They became the closest of partners and together put OWL’s issues on the national agenda. As Sommers’s health began to fail, Laurie Shields, her partner, companion, housemate, and caregiver, crisscrossed the country publicizing the problems faced by older women. By the mid-1980s, over one thousand centers had joined the Displaced Homemaker Network that Sommers and Shields had founded. Within a decade, the discrimination and invisibility faced by abandoned older wives, their need for support, job training, education, and for planning for “a good death,” had all been redefined as feminist issues.
The extraordinary friendship that grew up between Sommers and Shields reminded some feminists of the energetic partnership that had fueled the suffragists Susan B. Anthony, the tireless organizer and orator, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the homebound visionary, writer, and theorist in the nineteenth century. Sommers, a tall, slim, and graceful woman, was the visionary who came up with ideas for job training, counseling, older women’s co-housing, living wills, and hospice care. Her fierce sense of injustice struck a resonant chord. Her motto, inspired by the labor activist Joe Hill’s famous last words, “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” was “Don’t Agonize, Organize.” Sommers knew how to change older women’s consciousness. A typical OWL poster announced, “For men, they created retirement plans, medical benefits, profit sharing and gold watches. For women, they created Mother’s Day.”
Shields, shorter and stouter, was an exceptional organizer, blessed with an ability to reach out to people, and with the endless energy to travel and speak all over the country. Some people wondered if they were lovers. But one friend of Shields commented that “Laurie was so homophobic it was amazing,” and pointed out that “Laurie Shields had always worried that others would think they were more than partners and companions.” Sommers perhaps had a more tolerant view of the same-sex world in which she lived her later years. In a letter written to a close friend, she confided, “I have always felt closer to women. Despite close relationships with men, there is always a seventh (and maybe a sixth) veil. But you and I had a type of intimacy that went deeper. . . . Is that homo-sexuality? I don’t think so—I think it is closer akin to soul—a shared ‘oppression.’”15
Whatever the nature of their relationship, it was, by all accounts, emotionally intimate and mutually supportive. Together, they reached women who would never have imagined themselves participating in the women’s movement. In 1976, for instance, I received an extraordinary letter from my mother, who had steadily voiced her strong objections to my activism in the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements. The divorce she now faced in her early sixties had left her shaken and depressed; she realized that even those marketable skills she had, left over from working as an executive secretary during the 1930s, had become outdated. “I have just gone to an OWL meeting,” she wrote me. “I have to admit, if I were your age, I think I would be an activist in the women’s movement too. I’m just beginning to see how older women are treated in the courts, by lawyers, by everyone. We’re dispensable. We’re invisible. It’s terribly shocking.”16
In the late 1970s, younger women, for their part, felt conflicted and ambivalent about feminism. The young women of the postsuffrage generation had similarly harbored reservations about former suffragists, whom they viewed as dowdy women who wore sensible shoes. Instead of creating settlement houses or fighting for protective legislation, the most privileged of these young women spent the 1920s flouting Victorian propriety by dancing wildly, driving recklessly, and smoking heavily. Freedom meant shortening your hair and your skirts and enjoying premarital sex. They didn’t demand anything; they simply did what they wanted; and their eagerness to embrace personal freedom changed the social and sexual mores of American women.17
The young women who grew up in the wake of the Second Wave of feminism also took much for granted. They would become the first generation, without the support of a movement, who tried to have it all—sexual freedom, career, marriage, and motherhood—without realizing that feminists had never wanted women to do it all. Increasingly reluctant to call themselves “feminists,” they nonetheless embraced many of the movement’s goals. By the early 1980s, the media labeled them the “Post-Feminist Generation.” Had feminism been so successful that it was no longer needed? Many older and experienced feminists, then in their thirties and forties, didn’t think so. Suddenly, postcards that announced “I’ll be post-feminist in post-patriarchy” began sprouting on bulletin boards and refrigerators. In a signed editorial in the New York Times, Geneva Overholser spoke for many experienced activists when she denounced “post-feminism” as a way to “give sexism a subtler name.”18
Here, in a nutshell, was another paradox of feminism. As the movement split into hundreds of causes and organizations, gender consciousness increased, but growing numbers of young women rejected the label “feminist.” Yet, their own attitudes toward work were irreversible, in part because women’s participation in the labor force grew year by year. The so-called postfeminist generation, in fact, embraced the movement’s goal of equal pay for equal work. They simply took for granted their equal competence with men, their place in the workforce, and their right to a livelihood.19
But, for many, “feminism” ha
d already turned into a dirty word. For some daughters of feminists, the women’s movement triggered painful childhood memories. They had watched their mothers disintegrate after divorce, stumble into new jobs, or burn out from reinventing themselves over and over again. No great surprise; we had done the same. We had fled the domesticity of our mothers’ lives, mistakenly concluded that it offered no satisfaction, just relentless misery, without realizing how many of our mothers’ hopes and secret dreams we took with us.20
Most Americans first encountered the term “post-feminist generation” in an article written by Susan Bolotin for the New York Times Magazine in 1982. Titled “Voices of the Post-Feminist Generation,” Bolotin reported what she had learned from interviewing women in their twenties. Although most of the women declined to identify themselves as feminists, they believed in gender equality and aspired to combine a career with a family life. But their images of feminists left a lot to be desired. Feminists were “icy monsters who have let themselves go physically.” The F word conjured up images of exhausted superwomen, or unkempt, hairy, man-hating lesbians. Some of the women Bolotin interviewed rejected the bitterness they had witnessed in their mothers’ lives. “My feelings about feminism,” explained one young woman,
are at least partially a reaction to my mother. . . . My abandonment of feminism was a process of intellect. It was also a process of observation. Look around and you’ll see some happy women; and then you’ll see these bitter, bitter, women. The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism. Feminists are really tortured people.
Some of the young women argued that the language of feminism was irrelevant to their lives. A 1982 graduate of the University of Vermont explained that “for most people, feminism means having a strong sense of yourself as an individual, independent female.” Since she believed that women could achieve this confidence as individuals, she saw no need for a movement.
A few of the women in Bolotin’s article did, in fact, embrace some aspects of the women’s movement. Among them was Mindy Werner, a twenty-four-year-old assistant editor at a publishing company. Unlike most of the other young women, Werner described herself as a feminist who was wary of the tyrannical scrutiny with which feminists judged other women. She had been “around too many feminists for whom going to the bathroom is a political issue.”21
The first “postfeminist” generation also included its share of committed young feminists, some of whom were daughters of well-known movement activists. Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker), Rosa Ehrenreich (Barbara Ehrenreich), Chloe Levy (Susan Griffin), and Abigail Pogrebin (Letty Pogrebin), to name just a few, proudly carried their mothers’ torches and fought for or wrote about feminist causes. Nor were they alone. On most college campuses throughout the 1980s, small groups of young feminists organized “Take Back the Night Marches” and held symposia on date rape, pornography, and sexual harassment.22
These young activists helped sustain the movement by reinventing feminism for themselves. In 1983, Naomi Wolf, a writer of that younger generation, explained, “Like any real heirloom, feminism is not of our making and needs reconstruction to serve our time; and like any real treasure, it will last us forever.” As a result of their writing and activities, they intensified the public’s awareness of gender injustice. The Women’s Action Coalition in New York (WAC), for instance, engaged in all kinds of inventive zap actions and guerrilla theater, and helped raise the public’s consciousness about the backlash against feminism. In 1993, Rebecca Walker founded The Third Wave, a multi-issue activist group whose average age was twenty-five. They circulated a position paper titled, “Continuing the Women’s Movement: The Third Wave.” Four years later, young women born between 1963 and 1974 published a collection of essays called The Third Wave Agenda. To distinguish themselves from Second Wave feminists, one author explained that the strength of “third wave feminism is in its emphasis on making room for contradictions.” For her, it was the instability of identity, as well as the search for contradictions, that created her generation’s distinctive perspective.23
REINVENTING FEMINISM
One of the more pernicious consequences of the term “postfeminism” was that it completely ignored the vibrant feminist sensibility that had emerged and was still growing among racial minorities in the United States. Although the second wave of feminism initially grew out of problems encountered and addressed mainly by white women who had achieved middle-class status, it didn’t take long for women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds to reinvent feminism for themselves. Nor did it take them long to realize that their historical burden and their culture had created different problems, obligations, and needs that partly overlapped with those of white women, but mostly did not.
The awakening consciousnesses of minority women, at least on the surface, appeared to have much in common. Women in nearly every racial group—including African-Americans, Chicanas, Filipinas, Asian Americans, American and Alaskan indigenous tribes, and Puerto Ricans—first discovered, much as had white women, that their status in New Left or liberation or independence movements was one of subordination. Since the men in these groups already felt emasculated by the economic discrimination they encountered in a white-dominated culture, the women hesitated to further threaten their sense of manhood. But they were also not willing to turn themselves into mere followers. Creating and sustaining egalitarian relationships in these movements proved extremely difficult. Wanting to support their men, but unwilling to defer to them, the women faced a dilemma. Their most common solution was to work with poor women and children among their people and to publicize what they most needed. In this way, they could combine their loyalty to their movement, directly help other women, and still retain their independence as organizers and leaders.
But first they needed to know their history, so they could understand how they came to be in these situations. Ever since slavery, for instance, black women had borne the burden of working to support their families, often with husbands who could not find jobs or training in white America. Black women often dreamed of spending more time, not less, with their families. Learned helplessness was not the problem of women who had spent the last century holding together families, churches, and communities. And the work for which they received wages—taking in laundry or cleaning white women’s homes—was hardly glamorous or self-fulfilling. To black women, as historian Paula Giddings put it, Friedan’s advice to find a meaningful career “seemed to come from another planet.” The novelist Toni Morrison succinctly summarized the differences separating the lives of white and black women.
Aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women. Black women seem able to combine the nest and the adventure. They don’t see conflict in certain areas as do white women. They are both safe harbor and ship, they are both inn and trail. We, black women, do both. We don’t find these places, these roles, mutually exclusive. That’s one of the differences. White women often find if they leave their husband and go out into the world, it’s an extraordinary event. If they’ve settled for the benefits of housewifery that precludes a career, then it’s marriage or a career for them, not both, not And.24
As early as 1970, quite a few African-American activists were already considering whether feminism had anything to contribute to their lives. The poet and writer Nikki Giovanni was typical in rejecting the women’s movement, saying that she didn’t want to get involved in the “white family quarrel.” Other writers and activists—like Frances Beale, Linda La Rue, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Celestine Ware, Angela Davis, Toni Cade (later Bambara), Charlayne Hunter, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Williams, among many others—took up the challenge of exploring and articulating the “double jeopardy” of black women’s lives. In their view, pervasive racism was their greatest problem. This is what kept them and their men from learning the skills, joining unions, and earning the salaries that could improve the lives of their families and communities.
Black women cannot—must not—avoid the truth about their special subservience. They are women with all that implies. If some have been forced into roles as providers or, out of insecurity associated with being a black woman alone, have dared not develop independence, the result is not that black women are today liberated women. For they have been “liberated” only from love, from family life, from meaningful work, and just as often from the basic comforts and necessities of an ordinary existence. There is neither power nor satisfaction in such a “matriarchy.” There is only the bitter knowledge that one is a victim.
She also urged African-Americans to “remake the family unity, not imitate it. Indeed, this task is central to black liberation.” But many African-American women were still outraged at the government’s publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Concerned about rising unemployment and crime among blacks, Moynihan located the problems of African-American life not in racism or in discrimination, but inside the black family, and blamed black matriarchs for dominating their families ever since the end of slavery: “The Negro family has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.” In response, angry black women refuted the accusation that they had “castrated” black men and exposed what they called “the myth of black matriarchy.” As the writer and activist Maxine Williams wrote, black women “had gotten authority in the family by default,” because black men could rarely find jobs in white America. But this hardly constituted real power. When some black men also blamed them for their domination of the family, women activists grew even angrier. In 1970, the writer Linda La Rue argued that to confront racism and capitalism, black men would have to cease stereotyping black women as either “a matriarchal villain or a step stool baby-maker.”25