The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  64. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 154.

  Chapter Four: Leaving the Left

  1. The Daily Californian, May 14, 1964; January 5, 1970.

  2. There is now an enormous bibliography on histories and memoirs from the New Left. Some of the important works that trace the development of the New Left and its formative ideas are in the Bibliography.

  3. As Belinda Robnett has argued in her book, How Long? How Long? African American Women and the Struggle for Freedom and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), historians have focused too much on white activists at the expense of black activists, and especially black civil rights grassroots activists in the South. And yet I can’t ignore the fact that the story of white women’s liberation begins in the integration movement of SNCC, in which black influences gave rise to the consciousness and ideas that would affect every movement that came after it. See Bibliography for other important works.

  4. King, Freedom Song, 37.

  5. Author’s interview with Dorothy Burlage, May 11, 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.

  6. King, 40.

  7. Casey Hayden, “Women’s Consciousness and the Nonviolent Movement Against Segregation, 1960–1965: A Personal History,” 1989, 2, 3. Given to author, APA.

  8. Author’s interview with Dorothy Burlage, October 12, 1990, Boston, Massachusetts.

  9. King, 5.

  10. King, 9.

  11. King, 8.

  12. King, 116; Casey Hayden, “A Nurturing Movement: Nonviolence, SNCC, and Feminism,” Southern Exposure (Summer 1988): 51.

  13. King, 141. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine (New York: Dutton, 1993), which is a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, has greater detail.

  14. Author’s notes, 1988 SDS reunion at Poughkeepsie, New York. Evans, Personal Politics, 53.

  15. King, 404; Casey Hayden, quoting Stembridge in “Women’s Consciousness,” 9.

  16. Author’s interview with Dorothy Burlage, 1990. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, for a fuller description of the trajectory of SNCC.

  17. Author’s interviews with Casey Hayden, Dorothy Burlage, Betty Garman, Elaine Delott Bakers, Leni Wildflower, Honey Williams, Dorothy Burlage, Mickey Flacks, Helen Garvey, and others at the SDS reunion in 1988, including the former Weatherwomen Bernadine Dohrn, Cathy Wilkerson, and others. Interviews also with Rennie Davis and Dick Flacks.

  18. Author’s interviews with Casey Hayden and Dorothy Burlage.

  19. King, 404.

  20. Evans, 79; author’s interview with “Anonymous,” May 8, 1989, a white northern woman who participated in SNCC’s Freedom Summer, 1964.

  21. King, 464.

  22. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108, 106. On sexual exploitation of white volunteers by black men during Mississippi Freedom Summer, see Mary Aiken Rothschild, “White Women Volunteers in the Freedom Summers, Their Life and Work in a Movement for Social Change,” Feminist Studies, 5:3 (Fall 1979), 466–95; and Mary Rothschild, A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964–1965 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

  23. McAdam, 109.

  24. McAdam, 107.

  25. McAdam, 107, 110.

  26. Author’s interview with Dorothy Burlage, 1990; McAdam, 106; King, 465.

  27. King, 15.

  28. Cynthia Washington, “We Started from Different Ends of the Spectrum,” Southern Exposure, 4:4 (1977), 14.

  29. Doug McAdam, “Freedom Summer,” paper presented at Stanford Conference, April 1990.

  30. Hayden, “Women’s Consciousness,” 12.

  31. Author’s telephone interview with Casey Hayden, May 6, 1989.

  32. King, 443, 445, 569. For a long time, many white female liberationists thought that the paper was written by a black woman, Ruby Doris Smith, because Robin Morgan erroneously described her as the author in her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful. Ruby Doris Smith died of cancer in 1967. Hayden, “Women’s Consciousness,” 14.

  33. King, 450; author’s interview with Casey Hayden at SDS reunion, and telephone, May 6, 1989.

  34. King, 451–52; author’s telephone interview with “Anonymous,” August 9, 1995, and again, on November 24, 1997.

  35. Evans, 239; Fraser et al., 1968, 342.

  36. See Evans, 129, for a good history of money and support of ERAP projects; Kopkind quoted in Evans, 130; author’s 1988 SDS reunion notes.

  37. King, 456.

  38. King, 456.

  39. Author’s telephone interview, Casey Hayden, 1989; Hayden, “Women’s Consciousness,” 18.

  40. Burlage 1990 interview.

  41. Michael Honey, “The Legacy of SNCC,” in OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter, February 1989, and Joanne Grant, “Sexual Politics and Civil Rights,” New Directions for Women, January/February 1989, 4.

  42. King, 466, 467. Also see Clay Carson’s attribution, In Struggle.

  43. Evans, 110. As former students or political leaders, they had already demonstrated formidable intellectual and organizing talents. Tom Hayden had edited the Michigan Daily and founded the VOICE political party; Robb Burlage edited the Daily Texan; Paul Potter was vice president of the National Student Association (NSA); and Todd Gitlin had been president of Tocsin, a campus peace group at Harvard University. At the University of Michigan, Al Haber, the first president of SDS, was a student leader. Dick Flacks, already a young professor, had been a political activist and strategist since adolescence.

  44. New Left Notes, 1967, 59; Fraser, 340.

  45. Evans, 119; author’s interviews with Casey Hayden, Arizona.

  46. Author’s interview with Susan Griffin, Marilyn Webb; Anne Weills at a panel on women’s liberation at FSM reunion, 1984, U.C. Berkeley.

  47. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, 357, 367 (paperback ed.). Also see Todd Gitlin, “Notes on the Pathology of the N.C.,” New Left Notes, 1:3 (February 4, 1966), 4, for an insightful description of the politics of the National Council.

  48. Letter from Carol McEldowney to Todd Gitlin, November 18, 1964, TGPA.

  49. Letter from Carol McEldowney to Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, August 31, 1965, TGPA.

  50. Author’s interviews with Sharon Jeffrey and Betty Garman, SDS reunion, 1988.

  51. Author’s interview with Casey Hayden, Betty Garman, Dorothy Burlage, Sharon Jeffrey, and about ten other women at 1988 SDS reunion in Poughkeepsie, New York. Author’s telephone interview with Betty Garman, July 13, 1989.

  52. The concept of status deprivation was used by U.S. historians like Richard Hofstadter to explain why a group feels resentment when they have been deprived of the status they believe they should have. It also appears in some histories of the movement. Maren Carden, The New Feminist Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974), and Jo Freeman in all her various works on the women’s movement: See The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to Policy (New York: McKay, 1975); The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Aims, Structures, and Ideas (Pittsburgh: KNOW, 1971); and Women, A Feminist Perspective, Jo Freeman, ed. (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing, 1975).

  53. Author’s interview with Vivian Rothstein, June 26, 1989, Santa Monica, California; author’s notes from Sharon Jeffrey interview, SDS 1988 reunion.

  54. Author’s interview with Barbara Haber, at SDS 1988 reunion.

  55. Author’s interview with Barbara Haber, June 27, 1989, Berkeley, California.

  56. Sharon Jeffrey and Carol McEldowney, typewritten notes mailed out to membership. 1965. VRPA.

  57. Evans, 167; author’s telephone interview with Nanci Hollander, August 24, 1989, Texas.

  58. Some men responded favorably to the women’s workshop in 1965. Jonathan Steinberg, “Comments,” New Left Notes, 1:9 (March 18, 1966); New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 4. Author’s telephone interview with Nanci Hollander, August 24, 1989; author’s interview with Burlage, 1990.

  59. Fraser, 1968, 116.

  60. Fraser, 1
17.

  61. Fraser, 118.

  62. “Liberation of Women,” in New Left Notes (July 10, 1967). Evans, 191–92.

  63. Author’s interview with Naomi Weisstein, October 9, 1997, New York.

  64. Author’s interview with Jo Freeman, August 28, 1990, in Berkeley, California.

  65. Evans, 199.

  66. All this information comes from Evans, chapter 8, “The Dam Breaks.”

  67. Author’s interview with Marilyn Webb; Evans, 210, quoting letter from Marilyn Webb to Heather Booth, November 21, 1968, in author’s file.

  68. Author’s interview with Anne Weills, August 1, 1998, Berkeley, California.

  69. Weills interview.

  70. There are now a number of local studies available. See the Bibliography.

  71. Evans, 301.

  72. Warren Hinkle and Marianne Hinkle, “Woman Power,” 22–43, Ramparts, February 1968.

  73. Author’s interview with Anne Weills.

  74. “Woman Power,” Ramparts (February 1968): 22–43. Responses to the issue came from Lynn Flartyney, “A Letter to the Editor of Ramparts Magazine,” Notes from the First Year, and Anne Koedt, “Women and the Radical Movement,” No More Fun and Games, 1968. APA. Author’s interview with Susan Griffin; Kate Coleman, interviewed in Berkeley Monthly, April 1987; Author’s interview with Judith Coburn.

  75. In “Seize the Press Sister,” Off Our Backs, 4 (1968). Marilyn Webb advocated that radical women should create communications for a new movement. Jo Freeman, “Editorial,” Voice of Women’s Liberation (VOWL), 1:1 (March 1968), 5.

  76. For a longer list of periodicals available in 1970, see Leslie Tanner, Voices of Women’s Liberation (New York: New American Library, 1970), 444.

  77. See for example, VOWL, no. 5, Marilyn Webb, “We Are Victims,” 1967; Clara Fraser, “Which Road Toward Women’s Liberation?” in Women: A Journal of Liberation, 2:1, (1970); Sue Baker, interview, Off Our Backs (April 1970). Deirdre Baire, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Summit, 1990), 535; Gitlin, The Sixties, chapter 14; Ain’t I a Woman, no. 7; unsigned “Panther Constitutional Convention,” Rat, no. 1; Marlene Elkind, “On the Man’s Convention,” Rat, 14; Leslie Tanner, “Venceremos Brigade: An Elitist Authoritarian Organization,” in Rat, 21, clippings, APA; and The Fourth World Manifesto.

  78. Author’s interview with Marilyn Webb in New York City, April 16, 1986; Gitlin, 273–74; author’s interview with Irene Peslikis, New York; author’s interview with Ellen Willis, New York, April 16, 1986. Also see Ellen Willis, “Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal,” 1969, 114, for a more detailed account of the event, APA. Other accounts include Bobbie Spalter-Roth, “January 20: A Sad Celebration,” Off Our Backs (March 1973): 14–16; and for consequences, “1 Ain’t Fighting in No Man’s War,” Off Our Backs (May 1970). I. F. Stone’s Weekly, January 27, 1969, UWA.

  79. Author’s interviews with Judy Coburn, Ros Baxandall, Ellen Willis. Texts of speeches by Firestone and Webb in “Factionalism Lives,” in Voice of Women’s Liberation Movement, 6 (February 1969), author’s files; and Ellen Willis, “Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal,” 114. Other responses include “New Mobe” Off Our Backs 1:2 (March 19, 1970); “I Ain’t Fightin in No Man’s War” Off Our Backs 1:5 (May 16, 1970).

  80. Author’s interview with Marilyn Webb; author’s interview with Ellen Willis; Gitlin, The Sixties, 372–375. Author’s interview with Marilyn Webb; Shulamith Firestone, “Women,” Guardian, February 1, 1960, UWA.

  81. “A Declaration of Independence,” in the Voice of Women’s Liberation Movement, no. 6, UWA; Carol Hanisch, “Hard Knocks,” Notes from the Second Year, UWA.

  82. See Meredith Tax and Cynthia Michel, “An Open Letter to the Boston Movement,” mimeo, quoted and cited in Ann Popkin, 191; also see Ellen Dubois and Suzanne Gordon, “The National Action: A Women’s Perspective,” in Women: A Journal of Liberation, vol. 1, no. 1; author’s interview with Barbara Epstein, November 8, 1997, Berkeley, California.

  83. Author’s interview with Robin Morgan, April 17, 1986.

  84. See their early articles in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage, 1970). The poet and novelist Ana Castillo called for Xicanisma (Chicanisma), a kind of Chicano womanism, which could bridge antiracist and antisexist struggles. Also see the wonderful collection that Toni Cade published in 1970, The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970).

  85. Canada Conference, April 6, 1971, cosponsored by Canada WLM and Women Strike for Peace; WLM FBI Files, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; Judith Ezekiel, “Une contribution à l’histoire du mouvement feministe americain,” 154. I was one of the supervisors of this dissertation. “OPEN LETTER FROM WOMANPOWER TO YOU,” April 1969, Oakland, California; also see Rita Mae Brown, “Commentary: Hanoi to Hoboken, a Round Trip Ticket,” in Off Our Backs (March 25, 1971): 4–5, in which she argues that women should form their own anti-imperialist groups. For an example of the romanticization of the Vietnamese women, see Bernadine Dohrn, “The Liberation of Vietnamese Women,” Liberation News Service, 115 (November 1, 1968), Social Protest Collection, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley.

  86. Three hundred women from the western United States and Canada and Vietnam met in Canada on July 11 and 12, 1969. They demanded complete U.S. withdrawal and self-determination for Vietnam. Social Protest Files, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley. Also see “Projected Conference in North America with Indochinese Women,” Position Papers Vertical File, SL; phone and e-mail interview with Vivian Rothstein, July 7, 1998.

  87. Frances Beale, “Speaking Up When Others Can’t”; Elizabeth Martinez, “A Call for Chicanisma”; and Roxanne Dunbar (Ortiz), “Back to My Roots in Radical Feminism,” part of “Sisterhood Is Still Powerful” in Crossroads (March 1993): 4–9; Robin Morgan, The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968–1992 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Margaret Randall, Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutionaries to Develop a Feminist Agenda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992); and Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

  88. Author’s interview with Jane and Wendel Brunner, August 1988, Oakland, California. Also see leaflet, “Women Unite Against the War,” announcing a women’s contingent at the April 24, 1971, March against the War in San Francisco. Women’s Liberation Files, Social Protest Collection, Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley. To gain a sense of the logic for a caucus, rather than creating a separate group, see “The Relationship of Women’s Liberation to the Total Movement,” two-page flyer, circa 1969, MWA.

  89. Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Rat (January 19, 1969). Also see “A Letter to the Editor of Ramparts Magazine,” Notes from the First Year: Women’s Liberation, June 1969, unpaginated, APA, and Rita Mae Brown, “Say It Isn’t So,” Rat (March 7–21, 1970): 18.

  90. Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn,” Leviathan, November 1969, reprinted as a pamphlet by New England Free Press, in APA. Also reprinted in Morgan, Sisterhood, 473–92. In The Fourth World Manifesto, which appeared in Notes from the Third Year, the authors, veterans of the Left movement, argued that the male Left was beyond redemption and proposed the controversial theory that women, as a group, constituted a new Fourth World that could be organized on the basis of their sex. Also see VOWL, no. 5, and Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn,” in Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful, 473–92, and Ellen Willis, “Declaration of Independence,” VOWL, 6, 1969. Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Vintage, 1978), 131, also reprinted in Tanner, Voices, 268–77.

  91. Naomi Weisstein, self-interview for Peg Strobel, 21; Gitlin, The Sixties, 373.

  Chapter Five: Hidden Injuries of Sex

  1. This vote took place in the fall of 1963 at the University of Rochester, New York.

  2. Two of the earliest examples of these media pronouncements were the cover stories, “Sex in the U.S.: Mores and Morality,” Time, January 24, 1964, and “Morals on Campus,” Newsweek, A
pril 6, 1964. The question whether the sexual revolution was really that new has been asked by many scholars and journalists. Suffice it to say, to the young women growing up in the fifties, the loosening of sexual mores seemed quite different. See Richard L. Worsnop, “Sexual Revolution: Myth or Reality,” in Editorial Research Reports, 1 (1970): 241–57.

  3. I have adapted the title of this chapter from Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s important study, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).

  4. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 107.

  5. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, 373, 368.

  6. See, for example, Marilyn Salzman Webb, “Woman as Secretary, Sex-pot, Spender, Sow, Civic Actor, Sickie,” Liberation News Service (May 10, 1969): 10; author’s interview with Barbara Haber, Berkeley, California, June 27, 1987.

  7. Interviews with women of SNCC and SDS at a variety of places and times, but especially with Dorothy Burlage, in Boston in 1990; Casey Hayden, Leni Wildflower, Kathy Wilkerson at an SDS reunion in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1988; author’s interview with Barbara Haber, and author’s interview with Mickey Flacks, Santa Barbara, 1985, 1987, 1988.

  8. Karen Lindsey, “The Sexual Revolution Is No Joke for Women,” three-page essay, Rainbow and Lightning Collection, n.d., SL Women’s Liberation Vertical Files; Fraser, 342; Liberation News Service, n.d., UWA.

  9. Author’s interview with Sarah Stage, February 4, 1991, at UCLA. She used this term because she felt pressured by GIs to say “yes to men who say no.”

  10. Quotes are from Rivka Polatnick’s “Diversity in Women’s Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood,” Signs 21 (Spring 1996): 679, and from Black Women’s Liberation Group, Mount Vernon, New York, Statement on Birth Control, in Morgan, Sisterhood, 404. For a variety of views, see “Birth Control Pill and Black Children, a statement by the Black Unity Party,” Peekskill, N.Y.; “A Response” by black sisters, and “Poor Black Women,” by Patricia Robinson, in the pamphlet Poor Black Women, published by New England Free Press, Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1968, MWA.