The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  16. George Gallup and Evan Hill, “The American Woman,” Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1962. Letters dated May 17, 1963, from Irvine, Texas, and March 13, 1963, from Ridgewood, New Jersey, Betty Friedan Papers, SL.

  17. Wini Breines’s study of girls in the fifties also documents this profound undercurrent of ambivalence, especially through fiction and popular culture. Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). Here I draw upon interviews with women who became leaders of the younger branch of the women’s movement. Also see Kathleen Gerson, Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career and Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 55.

  18. Assata Shakur, Assata (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 37.

  19. Alix Kates Shulman, Burning Questions (New York: Bantam, 1978), 3.

  20. These observations are made by Wini Breines in Young, p. 79, who quotes from Barbara Raskin, Hot Flashes, Lynn Lauber, White Girls, and Annie Dillard, 237.

  21. See Robyn Rowland, Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement (London: Routledge, 1984). The author is an Australian who sought to find differences and commonality between feminists and antifeminists in five countries.

  22. See David McClelland, Follow-up Patterns of Childrearing Subjects, 1978, of thirty-eight middle-class daughters of mothers interviewed in 1951 and 1952. These mothers’ interviews appeared in Robert Sears, Eleanor Maccoby, and Harry Levin, Patterns of Child Rearing (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). Also see Diane Franklin, “Correlates of Participation and Nonparticipation in the Women’s Liberation Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975). For a scholarly discussion of these studies, see Breines, 71, 225. For a variety of different explanations, see Robyn Rowland. This part of the study is based particularly on interviews with Naomi Weisstein, Alix Kates Shulman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Charlotte Bunch, Susan Griffin, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Barbara Haber, Valerie Miner, and Irene Peslikis.

  23. Author’s interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, New York City, April 6, 1987.

  24. Phyllis Chesler, Letters, 22; author’s interview with Irene Peslikis in New York City, April 4, 1987.

  25. More than half of the women in my consciousness-raising group in 1967, for example, came from working-class homes, but through university experiences, seemed middle-class in appearance and in speech. Author’s interview with Anne Scholfield, Berkeley, California, April 1986; also Mary Waters, Valerie Miner, Pat Cody. Author’s interviews with Ellen Willis and Ti-Grace Atkinson, in New York City, April 16, 1987. Writings by Molly Haskell and several dozen other interviews confirm this fear of replicating one’s mother’s life.

  26. This is revealed in the memoirs of at least two major New Left leaders, but it is also evident in the position papers of SDS writers in general. See Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), and Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988). In the field of history, for example, “consensus” was celebrated and “conflict” was diminished; in sociology, functionalism helped rationalize the status quo.

  27. Marilyn Coffey, “Those Beats,” in Sixties Without Apology, Sonya Sayres, Anders Stephenson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Frederic Jameson, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 238–40.

  28. Author’s interviews with Barbara Ehrenreich and Susan Griffin. For a description of young women’s forays into bohemian culture as part of their search for something “real,” see Breines; also Ellen Maslow, “Storybook Lives,” in Liberation Now, Deborah Babcox and Madeleine Belkin, eds. (New York: Dell, 1971), 175.

  29. Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 56.

  30. Johnson, 151, 171, 207, 260.

  31. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love.

  32. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Pocket Books, 1962), 206.

  33. Cynthia Gorney, Article of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 23. Also see Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Carol Joffe, Doctor of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade (Boston: Beacon, 1995); and Rickie Solinger, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  34. These stories are from women whom I have interviewed but who did not want their names made public, even now. For a scholarly treatment of the long century in which abortion was illegal, see Reagan, 225.

  35. Gorney, 31–32.

  36. Part of this line of reasoning is persuasively argued in Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, Re-Making Love; Harvey, The Fifties, 15.

  37. For an analysis of how different generations of women responded to de Beauvoir’s classic work, see Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Harmondsworth, 1953), 295.

  38. Alice Schwarzer, After the Second Sex: Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 13, quoted in Okely, Simone de Beauvoir, 2. See also the description by Judith Okely, a British biographer of de Beauvoir, of her fascination with this bohemian life and critique of family and motherhood. Rachel Brownstein, an American literary critic, was similarly influenced by de Beauvoir. See Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine (New York: Harmondsworth, 1984), 18. King, Freedom Song, 76.

  39. Susan Griffin, “Eco-Feminism,” talk at a panel on feminism and ecology, San Francisco, April 10, 1988.

  40. It is worth noting that the translation that was published in the United States omitted her discussion of women in history, but her view of woman as “other” still did not provide a way of grasping women’s agency in history.

  41. One recent work that provides a good overview of her life is Deirdre Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Summit, 1990). A film titled Daughters of de Beauvoir, directed by Imogen Sutton, explores her influence on the women’s movement. A brilliant essay by Mary Felstiner early assessed Second Wave feminism’s relationship to de Beauvoir. See Felstiner, “Seeing the Second Sex through the Second Wave,” Feminist Studies 6 (Winter 1986): 247–76.

  42. For a detailed discussion of the male version of generational divide, see Gitlin, The Sixties, 230.

  43. See Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,” Feminist Studies 2 (Fall 1987): 493–521; and “Pure Milk, Not Poison: Women Strike for Peace and the Test Ban Treaty of 1963,” paper presented at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, June 1988.

  Chapter Three: Limits of Liberalism

  1. Robert Arthur, “No!,” Esquire, July 1962, 32 ff.

  2. Washington Post, “JFK Seeks Equal Job Status for Women,” December 15, 1961, C1; New York Times, “President Names Panel on Women,” December 15, 1961, 15.

  3. Sidney Shalett, “Is There a Woman’s Vote?” Saturday Evening Post, September 1960, 31, 79, 80.

  4. Shalett, 31, 80.

  5. Shalett, 80.

  6. New York Post, December 1960, clipping in Folder “1960,” Box 1, of India Edwards Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Texas. Cited in Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of Calif. Press, 1988), 261. Other than my own interviews and archival research, I have relied heavily on Cynthia Harrison’s splendid political history here.

  7. Letter from Emma Guffey Miller to John F. Kennedy, February 1961, quoted in Harrison, 76.

  8. Harrison, 79.

  9. Pauli Murray Papers, “Speech about President’s Commission,” SL.

  10. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, “Epilogue,” 368.

  11. U.S. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, American Women (Washington, D.C., 1963), 70.

  12. Loreta Korns, “Treatment by Seven Newspapers of the Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women,” December 9, 1963, in General
Correspondence folder, PCSW, January 1964, PCSW Papers, Washington, D.C.

  13. Abbott L. Ferriss, Indicators of Trends in the Status of American Women (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), 21, 63, 85, 209ff.

  14. Klein, Gender Politics, 22. These cases are known as Griswold v. State of Connecticut in 1965 and White v. Crook in 1966. Klein, 23. See Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: McKay, 1975), 177. In addition to Harrison, I have also heavily relied on Freeman’s early and insightful work as well as one of the first histories of the movement, Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), 29; also see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Equal Pay Act of 1963, Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare in S. 882 and S. 910, 88th Congress, 1st sess., 1963.

  15. See Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan,” and the “The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” American Quarterly (March 1996): 1–31. There is now an extensive literature that details the continuities between labor union and Left activists of the forties and fifties and the origins of American feminism in the 1960s. See, for example, Kathleen A. Weigand, “Vanguards,” and Gerda Lerner, “Midwestern Leaders of the Modern Women’s Movement: An Oral History Project,” Wisconsin Academy Review (Winter 1994–95): 11–15; Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1925–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell, 1990); Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace and Feminism, 1945–1960’s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Most of the articles collected for Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, Joanne Meyerowitz, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), also point to the continuities between radical movements of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s feminism. Also see Joyce Antler, “Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944–1989,” and Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women,” in U.S. History As Women’s History.

  16. Pauli Murray Papers, speech, SL.

  17. Gabin, Women and the United Auto Workers, links feminism to labor; of the twenty-two women interviewed for this Midwest leaders oral history project at the WHS, seven were trade unionists and workers, and four were African Americans.

  18. Author’s interview with Kay Clarenbach, Mildred Jeffrey, and a circle of other women at a postconference group interview, November 22, 1992. “Documents of the Midwestern Origins of the Twentieth Century Women’s Movement.” Tapes and transcripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

  19. Clarenbach Papers, WHS, Box 2, Folder 11.

  20. See “Resolution Adopted Unanimously by the National Council of the National Woman’s Party—Regarding the Proposed Civil Rights Bill (H.R. 7152),” December 16, 1963, Reel 108, National Woman’s Party papers, on microfilm.

  21. Harrison, 178. Much of my discussion on the PCSW is grounded in Harrison’s meticulous work.

  22. Probably the best account of the history behind this so-called “fluke” is Jo Freeman’s “How ‘Sex’ Got into Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 9 (March 1991): 163–84, reprinted on the H-Net for Women’s History. Freeman demonstrates how a small group of women took advantage of a long-standing desire to legislate against sex discrimination. The debate on Smith’s amendment can be found in the Congressional Record, 88th Congress, 2nd sess., February 8, 1964, 2577–84; EEOC, Legislative History of Titles VII and XI of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, n.d., 3312–28; Caroline Bird, Born Female (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), chapter 1; Harrison, chapter 9.

  23. Martha Griffiths’ speech, U.S. Congress, House, 89th Congress, June 20, 1966, Congressional Record 112: 13689–94. Washington Post, November 23, 1965, in Folder “Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1963, Legislation 1964–65.” National Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW) Archives cited in Harrison, 187. New York Times, July 3, 1964.

  24. New York Times editorial, August 21, 1965, 37.

  25. New Republic, September 4, 1965, 3; Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1965.

  26. A good source for Title VII is Donald Allen Robinson, Signs 4 (Spring 1979): 411–34, and “Development in the Law: Employment Discrimination and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Harvard Law Review 84 (March 1971).

  27. Martha Griffiths, statement on floor of Congress, June 20, 1966, Congressional Record, 13054.

  28. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Random House, 1976), 80.

  29. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 80.

  30. Friedan, 80, 82.

  31. Friedan, 83.

  32. Kay Clarenbach Papers, Box 2, Folder 9, WHS.

  33. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 83.

  34. Marya Mannes, “Female Intelligence: Who Wants It?” New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1960; Mary Freeman, “The Marginal Sex: America’s Alienated Woman,” Commonweal 75:19 (February 2, 1962); “The American Female: A Special Supplement,” Harper’s, October 1963, 225. The best description of these representations can be found in Cynthia Harrison, “Women and the New Frontier,” master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1975.

  35. Alice Rossi, “Equality Between the Sexes,” Daedalus (1964): 608. Later, she changed her position: Alice Rossi, “A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting,” Daedalus (Spring 1977): 1–31. Also see the following critique of Rossi’s new views in Wini Breines, Margaret Cerullo, and Judith Stacy, “Social Biology, Family Studies, and Antifeminist Backlash,” Feminist Studies 4 (February 1978): 43–67.

  36. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 84.

  37. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 87, “Statement of Purpose.” For much of the history of NOW, I have used the late Frances Kolb’s uncompleted manuscript, “The National Organization for Women: A History of the First Ten Years,” which she generously shared with me before her death. Unpublished ms., chapter 1, APA.

  38. U.S. Department of the Census: “Money Income of Families and Persons in the United States,” Current Population Reports, 1957 to 1975, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1975, cited in The Earnings Gap Between Women and Men, U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration, Women’s Bureau, 1976; and U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, “Background Facts on Women Workers in the United States,” January 1962, Document VI-39, PCSW papers, Washington, D.C., cited in Harrison, 90; Women’s Bureau, “Fact Sheet on the Earnings Gap” (Washington, D.C., 1970); Friedan, It Changed My Life, 89.

  39. Friedan, 90, 89.

  40. Friedan, “Statement,” 89ff.

  41. New York Times, November 22, 1966, 44:1; Washington Post, November 23, 1966, n.p.

  42. NOW mimeographed pamphlet, Special Edition #2: NOW vs. Segregated Help-Wanted Ads. Unpaginated. 1965, APA. See Hole and Levine, Rebirth, for a full description.

  43. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 94.

  44. Freeman, 83.

  45. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 105.

  46. Interview, February 1971; Hole and Levine, 96, 97.

  47. Freeman, 99.

  48. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 108.

  49. Friedan, 108.

  50. Author’s interview with Meredith Tax, December 1983, New York City.

  51. New York Times Magazine, March 10, 1968, 24.

  52. Hole and Levine, 91.

  53. Report, Congress to Unite Women, New York City, November 21–23, 1970, 3, Women’s Liberation Vertical File, SL; Friedan, It Changed My Life, 387.

  54. It Changed My Life, 138. Among many topics I pursued when I interviewed Betty Friedan in Southern California, May 1986, was this generational split. At that time, she still harbored many antipathies toward the women’s liberation movement, in part because her more recent book The Second Stage, which called for feminists to value familie
s and to create goals that supported them, was being attacked by some young radical feminists.

  55. Clarenbach interview, WHS, Tape 57.

  56. Joseph Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman (New York: Crune and Stratton, 1964), 714.

  57. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 258.

  58. Harrison, ix.

  59. See Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 282 ff. for a fuller description of child care legislation.

  60. See Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, eds., Feminist Chronicles, 1953–1992, (Los Angeles: Women’s Graphics, 1993) for these simultaneous events and movements.

  61. To be sure, these three demands excluded a much longer list of demands made by both branches of the movement. But they also implicitly acknowledged NOW’s acceptance of the bases of political liberalism, for they embraced equality of opportunity, not equality of result.

  62. Clipping, Chicago Daily News, August 20, 1970, 5. Vertical File Clippings on March, SL. Clipping, Evening Star, Washington, D.C., August 20, 1970, Women’s Liberation Papers, Folder Four, SL. As with all movement marches, figures differed greatly. The New York Times described the march as having ten thousand in the parade, but organizers argued that fifty thousand women were present at the rally. Whatever the actual number, most observers seemed to think the numbers were staggering. The marchers spilled off the sidewalks into the streets. See New York Times coverage, August 27, 1970, 30.

  63. “Women March Down Fifth in Equality Drive,” New York Times, August 27, 1970, 1, 23. For other media accounts, some of which were very balanced, some of which ridiculed everything, see Newsweek, “Women Rally to Publicize Grievances,” August 5, 1970; Myra MacPherson, “Battle of the Sexes Becomes a Word War,” New York Times Style section, C1; “Women’s Lib Asks Boycott of 4 Products,” Washington Post, August 27, 1970; “For Most Women, ‘Strike Day’ Was Just a Topic of Conversation,” New York Times, August 27, 1970, 1—which is right next to the article “Newsweek Agrees to Speed Promotion of Women”; “The Feminine Protest,” New York Times, August 28, 1970, 20; “‘Equal Rights Now,’ Exhort Women Protesters,” Washington Post, August 27, 1970, 1. Hole and Levine, 269. The poll was conducted September 4–5, 1970.