The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  40. Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, “The Mexican American Woman,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, 378–79.

  41. See editors, “Introduction to Encuentro Femenil,” 113–17; Francisco Flores, “Comisión Femenil Mexicana,” 150; Alicia Sandoval, “Chicana Liberation,” 204, all in Garcia, Chicana Feminist Thought.

  42. Nancy Nieto, “Macho Attitudes,” Hija de Cuauhtemoc, vol. 1, no. 1, (1971). Also see Mirta Vidal, “Women: New Voice of La Raza,” (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), reprinted in Chicanas Speak Out, DU.

  43. Ruiz, 112.

  44. “Statement by Elma Barrera,” DU.

  45. “Workshop Resolutions for the First National Chicana Conference,” DU.

  46. See Beatrice M. Pesquera and Denise A. Segura, “There Is No Going Back: Chicanas and Feminism,” and Pesquera and Segura, “Talk on Chicana Feminism,” April 30, 1990, Tape, U.C. Davis, 1990, APA; Segura and Pesquera, “Beyond Indifference and Antipathy: The Chicana Movement and Chicana Feminist Discourse,” Aztlan (Fall 1988): 69–82. Also see Adalijiza Sosa Riddell, “Chicanas and El Movimiento,” Aztlan 5:1 (1974), 155–65; Mary Pardo, MELA (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

  47. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinster/Aunt Lute, 1987), 80.

  48. Much of the writing on Native Americans is from the 1980s. But see Elsie Allen, Pomo Basketmaking: A Supreme Art for the Weaver, Vinson Brown, ed. (Happy Camp, California: Naturegraph Publishers, 1972), and the Bibliography.

  49. Shirley Hill Witt, “Native Women Today: Sexism and the Indian Woman,” Civil Rights Digest (Spring 1974).

  50. Ms., November 1977, 60.

  51. Ms., 60.

  52. Maya Angelou, “To Form a More Perfect Union,” reprinted in National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, The Spirit of Houston: An Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States (Washington, D.C., March 1978); The Spirit of Houston, 195.

  53. The Spirit of Houston, 129; “The Torch Relay,” 193; “Billie Jean King Statement,” 202; “What the Press Said,” 205; “Houston Day by Day,” 119; “Feminism Now,” New York Times, December 30, 1974, xii, 7; Also see the briefing paper prepared by the IWY Secretariat, “Women’s Movement in the U.S. 1960–1975: Government’s Role in the Women’s Movement,” Vertical File, “Women’s Liberation,” SL; National Commission on the Observation of International Women’s Year, Declaration of American Women (Washington, D.C.: IWY Commission, 1977). Also see Cecelia P. Burciaga, “The 1977 National Women’s Conference,” 182–83, in Garcia, Chicana Feminist Thought.

  54. The Spirit of Houston, 166; Also see Kay Clarenbach Oral History, Box 2, Folder 15, for more detailed stories about Houston, WHS.

  Chapter Nine: Sisterhood to Superwoman

  1. To the best of my knowledge, I have coined the terms “consumer feminism” and “therapeutic feminism” for this book. Others have described similar phenomena as “lifestyle feminism.”

  2. Quoted in Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (Random House: New York, 1994), 163–64. I also viewed these clips at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Vassar, 1990.

  3. See, for example, the script of CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, March 9, 1970, in Marlene Sanders Collection, Folder 2, SL, which, although relatively tame, bears the patronizing distant language of “others” who see women as “insisting” or “claiming.” For greater analysis of news coverage, see Douglas, Where, chapters 8, 9, and 10, 164.

  4. Northern Virginia Chapter, National Organization for Women, “Newspaper Monitoring Project,” 1973, APA, 1–12. Some of the problems in reporting the women’s movement are discussed in Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).

  5. CBS Evening News, March 9, 1970; Ti-Grace Atkinson interviewed by David Culhane, script p. 14, Marlene Sanders Collection.

  6. Sandy North, in “Reporting the Movement,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1970, 105–6, describes how reporters had to buck activists as well as hostile editors.

  7. Newsweek, March 26, 1970, 78.

  8. ABC Production, “Women’s Liberation,” script 29, from series called American Adventure, Folder 1, Marlene Sanders Collection.

  9. Letter from Mrs. Patricia Sohacki, Muncie, Indiana, May 25, 1970, to Marlene Sanders, Folder 3, Marlene Sanders Collection.

  10. “Hello to Our Sisters,” no date, press release to other feminist groups, two-page explanation, UWA.

  11. Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1970, complete insert, UWA.

  12. Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1970, 63–71; November 1970, 69, 74.

  13. For information on feminist protests against the erotic and pornographic books published by Grove Press, see Publisher’s Weekly, April 20, 1970, 38; for legal suit against Time, see New York Times, May 4, 1970, 11. There is a huge file in the WHA at Wyoming on media protests. Some of the more important sources I used include: “The Advertising Council Endorses NOW Public Service Ad Campaign,” 1973, NOW Newsletter, North Virginia; “Feminists Protest Policy of the Times,” New York Times, March 4, 1974 (about not using Ms.); “Sexism on the Boob Tube,” WABC TV, in “The Changing Woman,” September 1, 1972; “What Women Want to Read,” Newsweek, 1987; Valerie Miner, “Sisterhood Is Variable,” New Statesman, January 17, 1975; Judith Coburn, “Women Take the New York Times to Court,” New Times, 2 (1978); “Radical Women Hold Successful Media Parley,” Militant (May 1970); “Women’s Words Fly Like Bricks” (women breaking windows of San Francisco Chronicle and sending letter of protest); “On the Newsweek Strike,” Female Liberation (April 2, 1970); Molly Ivins, “Report on the Women’s Caucus at the National Meeting of Dissident Overground Journalists,” August 12, 1970, Minnesota; Lilla Lyon, “The March of Time’s Women,” New York magazine, no date; “Women Attack Press Club,” Daily Californian, April 27, 1972, clipping; “Sex in the Wire Room,” from Media Report to Women, vol. 2, no. 4 (August 1972), reprinted in YWCA series “The Image of Women,” clipping; “NOW Executive Charges TV Denigrated American Women By Way of ‘Simplistic and Insulting Image,’” New York Times, June 21, 1970, II, 17:8.

  14. Anne Koedt, a major women’s liberationist writer during the late sixties, wrote “Cocktales”—a takeoff on how the women’s movement was trivialized by the media. Marlene Sanders Collection, A5194 Folder 2, SL.

  15. Meredith Freedman, “The Day Billie-Jean King Beat Bobby Riggs,” Ms., November 1983, 101. Riggs had beaten Margaret Court the year before on Mother’s Day. So when Bobby Riggs challenged King, she simply felt she had to do it.

  16. Dibgy Dihol, San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1971, Protest Files, UWA; Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: Primus, 1985), 57.

  17. Daniel Einstein, Special Edition, A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special Reports, 1955–1979 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 326. See, for example, “The Rage of Women,” Look, December 16, 1969; Lucy Commissar, “The New Feminism,” Saturday Review, February 21, 1970; Sara Davidson, “Militants for Women’s Rights,” “Gloria Steinem,” Newsweek, August 16, 1971; Susan Brownmiller, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1970; “The Politics of Sex,” Time, August 31, 1970, “The New Woman,” Time, March 1972.

  18. An analysis of these changes and recommendations for the future appears in “Women’s Pages,” in NOW/Newspaper Monitoring Project, Northern Virginia Chapter, NOW, March 1973, 6. APA.

  19. A content analysis of ten years of a local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle (SFC) and a national paper, the New York Times (NYT) was conducted by myself and my research assistant Terri Strathman. In the San Francisco Chronicle Index 1970–1980, we discovered that in 1970, there were four stories, which rose to eighteen in 1976, and then began to decline in the late seventies until there was only one story in 1978. San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1970 and December 12, 1975.

  20. San Francisco Chronicle, March
2, 1973.

  21. When Californians voted for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, in 1996, pundits routinely noted that white women had voted as though affirmative action had been only about programs for minorities. In fact, it was white, educated, middle-class women who gained the most from affirmative action, primarily because they were best positioned and best prepared to take advantage of new opportunities made possible by affirmative action. See Ellis Cose, “After Affirmative Action,” Newsweek, November 11, 1996, 43.

  22. New York Times, February 14, 1973, 43.

  23. New York Times, April 1973, 49; San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1971, 2; April 11, 1974; New York Times, June 5, 1973, 4.

  24. San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 1972, 1, 28.

  25. San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1975, 9; San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1974; March 10, 1978, 13.

  26. See chapter 2, “Female Generation Gap” for a discussion of young feminists’ fears of turning into imprisoned housewives and mothers; New York Times, July 4, 1971, 41.

  27. New York Times, May 14, 1974, 21.

  28. San Francisco Chronicle, September 1971, 3; note that most of this coverage, though not all, appeared in the “family, fashions, food, and furnishings” section of the New York Times; New York Times, January 5, 1975, III, 1; New York Times, May 18, 1974, 6; New York Times, August 28, 1973, 74; New York Times, April 30, 1974, 37; New York Times, November 22, 1972, 1; New York Times, April 26, 1971, 44; New York Times, December 28, 1969, section 3, 1; New York Times, December 30, 1975; May 18, 1974, 6.

  29. Author’s interview with Judy Coburn in April 1987 and again in August 1996 in Berkeley.

  30. Ladies’ Home Journal issues from November 1979 to August 7, 1979; Marnie Ellingson, “Women’s Lib, the Tooth Fairy, and other Myths,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1971, 116, 184–87.

  31. These generalizations are from a decade of Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Redbook, 1960–1970.

  32. “Feminists vs. the Media,” New York Times, March 14, 1972, Media Protest Files, UWA. This clipping describes a number of eventually aborted television magazine programs aimed at translating feminism to women.

  33. Interview with Barbara Shields, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. Interviewed by the author in a suburb in the state of Connecticut, in May 1988, and again in October 1998.

  34. Lee Walker, “Can We Live with Women’s Liberation?” speech to Association of Industrial Advertisers, June 22, 1971, Protest Files, UWA. Also see Elisabeth Cagan, “The Selling of the Women’s Movement,” Social Policy (May/June 1978); Scot Winoker, “Freud and Fashion; Tobacco Firms’ Seduction of Women,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1983, 6; “Brooke Shields Takes a Stand Against Smoking But the Government Didn’t Want Her Message,” American Lung Association Bulletin (June/July 1981); Lawrence Wallack, “Mass Media Campaigns in a Hostile Environment: Advertising as Anti-health Education,” paper for Health Education and Media International Conference, March 24, 1981, Edinburgh, Scotland.

  35. New Woman, May/June 1976, 76; Douglas, 12.

  36. For a description of the new magazines, see Linda Charlton, “Feminist vs. the Me,” New York Times, “family, food, fashion, and furnishings,” section, March 14, 1972, 7, Media Protest Files, UWA.

  37. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Combat in the Media Zone,” Seven Days, 2 (March 10, 1978), 14.

  38. “To Gain Power in the Office—Wear a Jacket,” New Woman, May/June 1976, 93.

  39. For a discussion of how suits created an abstract vision of male authority and attractiveness, see Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Kodansha Books, 1994); New Woman, May/June 1976, 93.

  40. See, for example, the well-know BEM scale that was developed during the 1970s. Sandra Bern, Homogenizing the American Woman (Pittsburgh: Know, 1972); also see Carolyn Heilbrun’s classic text from that era, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973); “New Relationship with Fashion for Many Women,” New York Times, August 5, 1996, 1, C9.

  41. See, for example, Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  42. See Peter Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, which was prescient in its awareness of what had truly changed and what was media hype.

  43. Quoted by Ellen Goodman, Close to Home (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 32.

  44. See Monterey Peninsula Guide, which describes Huxley’s lecture to the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center in 1960 (Carmel, California: Somerset Publications, 1997).

  45. See, for example, Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (New York: Brunner, 1973); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, Mermaids and Minotaurs: Sexual Arrangement and Human Malaise (New York: Harper, 1977).

  46. Carol Tavris, “Women and Man,” Psychology Today, March 1972, 57, 58, 61. For a more detailed discussion of the print media and the women’s movement, see Theresa Kaminski, “These Chicks Are Our Natural Enemy: Women’s Liberation Rhetoric and the Print Media,” unpublished chapter of dissertation, paper presented at 1993 Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Vassar; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  47. Sondra Ray, “Affirmations That Can Change Your Life,” New Woman, January/February 1976, 75.

  48. Dorothy Tennov, Super Self: A Woman’s Guide to Self-Management (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1977). Dorothy Jongeward and Dru Scott, Women as Winners: Transactional Analysis for Personal Growth (Reading, Mass.; Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1976). Stanlee Phelps and Nancy Austin, The Assertive Woman (San Luis Obispo: Impact, 1975). See especially chapter 5, “From Apology to Power.”

  49. “Assertiveness—Learning a Kind of Honesty,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1975. Phelps and Austin, The Assertive Woman, 3.

  50. Jean Baer, How to Be an Assertive (Not Aggressive) Woman in Life, in Love and on the Job: A Total Guide to Self-Assertiveness (New York: Rawson Associates Publishers, 1976); Ehrenreich, 14.

  51. Reprinted from Publisher’s Weekly, February 3, 1975, in Reference and Directory Information, 417.

  52. Claire Safran, “The Total Woman: Is She Happy?” New Woman, 1977, 40, reprinted from Redbook, February 1976. Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), 45.

  53. Morgan, 36, 61, 82, 97.

  54. David Reuben, Any Woman Can! Love and Sexual Fulfillment for the Single, Widowed, Divorced, and Married (New York: D. McKay, 1971). For information on how bestsellers changed during the seventies, see The Bowker Annual Book Trade Statistics, based on actual sales reports of bookstores, p. 118 and p. 136.

  55. Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (New York, Pocket Books, 1982), 2.

  56. Brown, 66.

  57. Ella Taylor, Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See especially chapters 4 and 5. For a good analysis of the production of prime-time television during the seventies, see Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), especially chapter 10, “The Turn Toward ‘Relevance.’”

  58. Chapter 10, Gitlin, Inside, explains how television producers tried to have it both ways, thus appealing to the largest possible audience during the 1970s, 213.

  59. Gitlin, Inside, 158.

  60. For a good appraisal of Moore’s popularity see Tracy Johnston, “Why 30 Millions Are Mad about Mary,” New York Times Magazine, April 7, 1974, 30; 100.

  61. There is an enormous literature on this debate, in particular, Judy Stone, “She Gave Archie His First Comeuppance,” New York Times, November 19, 1972, 17; “300 Anti-Abortionists March on CBS in Maude Protest,” New York Times, August 22, 1973, 75; “5 Diverse Groups Urge Action to Counter Censorship of TV,” August 30, 1973, 67; “Program Press
ure,” New York Times Editorial, August 24, 1973, 32; “TV: Pressure Tactics Testing Network’s Mettle,” New York Times, August 21, 1973, 67; “28 CBS Affiliates Won’t Show Maude Episodes on Abortion,” New York Times, August 14, 1973, 63; Aljean Harmetz, “Maude Didn’t Leave ‘em All Laughing,” New York Times, December 10, 1972, II, 3; Albin Krebs, “Maude Sponsorship Decline Laid to Abortion Foes,” New York Times, August 10, 1973, 61.

  62. Ironically, these work families prefigured Arlie Hochschild’s informants in The Time Bind who reported that they increasingly regarded work as a refuge and home as too much work. Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind (New York: Viking, 1997).

  63. Goodman, 137.

  64. “Female Friendship films” is how columnist Ellen Goodman dubbed films that explored female friendship and the competition between women who chose a career and those who lived a domestic life. Goodman, 122, 139.

  65. See Judith Maybe’s discussion of Kramer vs. Kramer in “The Woman at the Keyhole: Women’s Cinema and Feminist Film Criticism,” in Mary Anne Doane et al., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984), 61–62. For a popular view of how the film mirrored growing uncertainties about changing gender roles, see Time, December 3, 1979, 74; Vincent Canby, “Screen: Kramer vs. Kramer” New York Times, December 19, 1979, C23; Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Seeing,” Ms., January 1980; “Custody: Kramer vs. Reality,” Time, February 4, 1980, 77; Gene Lichtenstein, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” Atlantic, March 1980.

  66. Atlantic, May 1976, 180.

  67. Goodman, 84.

  68. Ehrenreich, 13; See note no. I about the terms “consumer feminism” and “therapeutic feminism.”

  69. See chapters 7 to 11 in Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are. For a good description and analysis of the postmodern self, see Robert J. Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993), and Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York, Basic Books, 1991). The Rise of Selfishness in America (New York: Oxford, 1991), by James Lincoln Collier, also argues that the 1970s witnessed an accelerated move into a hyperconsumer and therapeutic culture. Warren Susman in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1973) provides an historical framework.