“In 1968,” the poet-novelist Erica Jong recalls, “there was a great feeling of hope that things might change, that women might . . . find . . . economic parity with their brothers and fathers. Not to mention their husbands.” By 1968, the members of a Chicago underground dedicated to assisting women in need of illegal abortions had fixed on the plain name “Jane” to protect their identities, though Jane did not acquire a last name, “Howe,” until the next year. “It seemed appropriate: Jane could tell you how.” In the fall of 1968, Shirley Chisholm celebrated a historic election to the House of Representatives, but thirty-five years later she recalled facing “far more discrimination being a woman than being black” in the political arena. By Christmas, Audre Lorde—arriving at the home of Diane di Prima to serve as the midwife of another baby—knew that she would be leaving her husband and taking her daughter and son with her to start an openly lesbian existence.80
The WITCHy guerrilla theater, like SCUM’s rhetoric, can be read as a retort to the violent side of the sexual revolution: drug trips gone wrong and accounts of widespread sexual predation at be-ins and rock concerts, on the streets of neighborhoods where long-haired boys and girls in unisex costumes found rape “as common as bullshit.” After the countercultural Jerry Rubin visited the acidhead murderer Charles Manson—in jail with his harem for the horrific killings of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others—the self-proclaimed Yippie wrote that he had fallen in love with the killer when he first saw him on national TV.81
But the feminist protests can also be viewed as a reaction to the misogyny of some of the leaders of the Black power movement. Back in the mid-sixties, Mary King and Casey Hayden had circulated a protest against the secondary roles assigned women in the civil rights struggle: “Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”82 The word sexism, which had surfaced in the thirties to describe prejudice against women, began to circulate as an analogue to the word racism. Soon resolutions on “the liberation of women” were being discussed at resistance conventions, albeit amid hoots and catcalls, for women continued to confront the sexism of the men with whom they were aligned in fighting racism.
In Soul on Ice (1968), for example, Eldridge Cleaver described how he “started out practicing” rape on “black girls in the ghetto” until he considered himself “smooth enough” to cross over the tracks and prey on white women: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”83 Cleaver claimed to be acting on behalf of Black women raped by white men, but his period of “practicing” belies that claim. The same misogynistic rage fueled a poem by LeRoi Jones, now renamed Amiri Baraka. In “Babylon Revisited” (1969), Diane di Prima’s ex-lover curses a white woman “and her sisters, all of them,” who should receive his words
in all their orifices like lye mixed with
cocola and alaga syrup
feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your
hysteric laughs
while your flesh burns and your eyes peel to red mud.84
According to one director of a freedom school program, “every black SNCC worker . . . counted it a notch on his gun to have slept with a white woman—as many as possible.” It must have been “traumatic for the women,” who “hadn’t thought that was what going south was about.”85 Kathleen Cleaver admitted that she had to “genuflect” to the men in the Black Panther Party; and about the everyday sexism in SNCC, Frances Beale, one of its few prominent Black women, pointed out that “when it comes to women,” “the black militant male” who sets out to upend white values “seems to take his guidelines from the pages of Ladies Home Journal.”86
Sexism in the Free Speech, New Left, and antiwar movements also raised the consciousness of female activists. Left-wing women were beginning to realize that they were “typing the speeches the men delivered, making the coffee but not policy, being accessories to the men whose politics would supposedly replace the Old Order.”87 While both the men of Columbia and the women of Barnard braved police brutality at the 1968 Columbia University uprising, only the women cooked “in a kitchen the size of a telephone booth”; and later that summer the dissidents’ spokesman, Mark Rudd, “advised his girlfriend that she could go to ‘chicklib’ class while he was busy with other things.”88
As New Left organizations splintered, Chicago’s feminist group started issuing the newsletter Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement; on the East Coast, female liberationists mimeographed the first feminist journal, Notes from the First Year, in 1968. Anne Koedt, an associate editor, had heard Valerie Solanas speak about SCUM at the Free University and wondered at the performance: “What do you do with that rage? Some of it must have been founded in truth, but where do you direct it?”89 Koedt directed it into her widely read essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Teasing out the implications of Masters and Johnson’s findings, Koedt judged men’s fear that “they will become sexually expendable” to be perfectly valid, since “lesbian sexuality could make an excellent case, based upon anatomical data, for the extinction of the male organ”: the clitoral orgasm threatens “the intersexual institution.”90
The editor of Notes from the Second Year, Shulamith Firestone, included a boxed notice of the “Aunt Tom of the Month” in its back pages; within it was the name of Helen Gurley Brown. On the concluding page, readers were informed that additional copies of Notes could be ordered from Redstockings: 50 cents for women, $1 for men. The group’s name came from the eighteenth-century “bluestockings”: the female intellectuals of the past had been turned red by revolutionary fervor. At a Redstockings speak-out on abortion in 1969, Gloria Steinem experienced a moment of illumination—what would soon become famous as a “click.”91 “Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew”: “If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should each of us be made to feel criminal and alone?”92 She sat down to write “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” (which contained no mention of her abortion).
As Stonewall erupted, as the first pamphlet version of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” surfaced, as Chicana student activists in Long Beach, California, formed their first organization and (male) students at Boston College challenged the firing of Mary Daly, whose The Church and the Second Sex had alienated Jesuit administrators, Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Damn” lambasted the leaders of the New Left: “Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of what passes for common practice” in left-wing circles: men have “created in the Movement a microcosm of . . . oppression and are proud of it.”93
In “Goodbye to All That,” circulated in the first month of 1970, Robin Morgan—who had played the tomboy Dagmar in the popular TV series Mama and been named “The Ideal American Girl”—said goodbye to “the male-dominated Left” with its “Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice of sex on demand for males” and to “Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves.” Casting aside the Robin Morgan doll that had been manufactured as a collector’s item and the Dagmar doll named for the TV character she played, Morgan adopted a new image: “We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening. . . . We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive.”94
Unlike the sixties, the seventies arrived right on time with an explosion of incendiary feminist publications.
SECTION III
AWAKENINGS IN THE SEVENTIES
5
Protesting Patriarchy
IN THE SUMMER OF 1970, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, some 20,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in the l
argest demonstration yet of the Women’s Strike for Equality. As if to reflect the intellectual intensity of the movement, the cover of Time magazine featured a portrait of the feminist thinker Kate Millett produced by the painter Alice Neel.1 The core demands of the marchers: equal opportunity in education and employment, the right to abortion, and child care. The core argument of Kate Millett’s best-selling Sexual Politics (1970): relationships between men and women are shaped by a patriarchal ideology that subordinates the female of the species.
By October 1971, activists and theorists alike were elated that the House of Representatives had passed the Equal Rights Amendment after only a short debate. Surely, most believed, the ERA would quickly become the law of the land, for it was a simple affirmation: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”2 It would extend Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. In 1972 and 1973, such optimism found confirmation first in Title IX of the Education Amendment Act, outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, and then in the 7–2 decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, which based the nationwide legalization of abortion on the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The article accompanying the 1970 Time cover described Millett as “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation” while explaining that she had struggled in childhood with a truculent father who beat her and her sisters before abandoning them, and with a mother whose college degree initially earned her a job demonstrating a potato peeler in a department store.3 Like Millett, some of the women marching in New York had first seen the painful effects of female subordination in the frustration of their own mothers, though others may have been inspired because their mothers went to work during or after the Second World War. The generation that would trigger a revolution in sexual politics determined to break from the claustrophobic domesticity that hindered the lives of many female relatives, while carrying out what might have been their mothers’ thwarted projects.
Both the origin and the personal consequences of Millett’s landmark book speak to the nature of seventies feminism. That Sexual Politics started as a protest speech at Cornell University and evolved into a doctoral thesis at Columbia University reflects the synergy of activism and the academic humanities at a moment when women for the first time began studying—and teaching—their own histories, as we did at Indiana University. After the publication of Sexual Politics caused a firestorm of publicity and Millett was singled out as a leader, she and many of her compatriots were angered by the notion that any one person could represent a movement dedicated to the communitarian ideal that, as Robin Morgan’s 1970 book title put it, Sisterhood Is Powerful.
Since the publicity resulted in Millett’s being outed first as bisexual, then as lesbian, she grappled not only with a media circus but also with hostility from her feminist compatriots and her family. At the height of seventies feminism, the differences between women—ostensible leaders and supposed followers, radicals and liberals, lesbians and heterosexuals, and women of color and white women—would produce passionate, sometimes wounding conversations addressing multiple forms of subjugation. The sexual liberationists’ struggle on behalf of woman in the sixties became the feminists’ fights for women by the end of the seventies and thereafter.
At the start of this tumultuous decade, amid distress at the carnage of the Vietnam War, the bombings of Cambodia, and the killings of student protesters at Kent State, many women shared painful stories in consciousness-raising groups. The phrase male chauvinist clung to the noun pig. The personal was becoming political. A number of lesbian organizations emerged, one of the most famous being the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based coalition of Black lesbians named after the river on whose banks Harriet Tubman led a Union raid that freed hundreds of slaves.4 Women were learning “that politics was not something ‘out there’ but something ‘in here’ and of the essence of my condition.” These words—appearing in Adrienne Rich’s landmark essay “When We Dead Awaken”—capture the heady insights of the seventies: “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.”5
The metaphors of feminism—of awakening, enlightenment, illumination, epiphany, conversion, revival—sound spiritual, and the movement did exert a force not unlike that of religion. In addition, the language of first and second “waves” expresses the oceanic urges associated with diving into darkness and surfacing toward light. “The women’s liberation movement,” recalled Rich, “embodied for a while the kind of creative space a liberatory political movement can make possible: ‘a visionary relation to reality.’ Why this happens has something to do with the sheer power of a collective imagining of change and a sense of collective hope.”6
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a poet and feminist critic who was a graduate student at Columbia in the late sixties and early seventies, is one of many who glowingly describes her experience of what Elaine Showalter called “a Great Awakening”: “The experience was powerful, energizing, defining, the birth of commitment and conviction.”7 Thinking back on the years between 1969 and 1979, the activist Ann Snitow also recalled a common feeling in feminist groups—“a mixture of outrage and hope hard to recapture now. . . . [W]e expected everything was going to change.”8 On a more material plane, during the seventies “a visionary relation to reality” produced women’s health initiatives, political caucuses, childcare centers, battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, affirmative action policies, feminist art collectives, bookstores and presses, women’s studies programs, and countless journals.9 Affecting the lives of millions of women, this great awakening generated all the feminisms that continue to shape our lives.
Especially energized were the literary women who gave the movement words. While such polemicists as Kate Millett and Susan Sontag deconstructed the family romance, novelists from Toni Morrison and Erica Jong to Rita Mae Brown and Marilyn French analyzed debilitating feminine roles—as Sylvia Plath had in the legacy she bequeathed to her readers. All of us asked, To what were we awakening? Quite a few woke in shock at the oppression that had led to a state of female paralysis or nullification.
KATE MILLETT’S TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Many readers were surprised that Kate Millett began Sexual Politics by discussing pornographic passages penned by Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Millett wrote the book with its “ ‘to hell with it’ first chapter” because her participation in the 1968 Columbia University strike led to her getting fired from her Barnard teaching job.10 A $4,000 advance from Doubleday supported her while she produced one of the first works of feminist literary criticism. In it, she pioneered many of the approaches later scholars would use: the critique of masculinist texts, the recovery of female-authored and proto-feminist works, and theoretical speculations on the evolution of patriarchal institutions.
In the opening chapter of Sexual Politics, Millett investigates misogynist representations of “intercourse in the service of power”:11 Henry Miller’s and Norman Mailer’s raunchy depictions of phallic dominance over outlandishly appreciative or flaccid female bodies. The exalted potency of Miller’s and Mailer’s male surrogates reduces female characters to helpless carnality. Millett counters her discussions of Miller’s and Mailer’s triumphal fantasies with readings of works by Jean Genet, who “writes about gay men’s mimicry of heterosexuality”: “the only model they have is the dominant heterosexual paradigm and by parodying it they reveal it as the farce that it is.”12 By drawing on Genet, she implicitly demonstrates that all bodies can be masculinized or feminized. Taken together, the male-authored texts persuade Millett of the need to eliminate “the most pernicious of our systems of oppression”: the “delirium of power and violence” inherent in sexual politics.13
At the heart of her book, Millett emphas
izes the universality of a system that subjects women to men’s monopolies of the military, industry, technology, higher education, science, politics, and finance. According to Millett, the family is the institution that creates the (aggressive or sadistic) masculine and the (passive or masochistic) feminine traits needed for the maintenance of this structure. In effect, the family manufactures psychological gender roles distinct from anatomical sex. Women, dependent for their survival on those who support them, are set against each other. Patriarchy, with God the paradigmatic Father on its side, exploits foundational myths—of Pandora or Eve bringing evil into the world—to blame the ills of the human condition on unruly women who must be made to submit to male control. Submission is achieved through “the interiorization of patriarchal ideology” that leads women to acquiesce in their own subordination.14
The rest of Sexual Politics outlines the history of ideas about sexuality from 1830 to 1960 and analyzes literary texts by returning to Millett’s earlier trio of Miller, Mailer, and Genet but this time prefaced by D. H. Lawrence. Despite the long history of misogyny, her conclusion seems more optimistic than Shulamith Firestone’s in The Dialectic of Sex, another feminist classic published the same year. Agreeing with Millett that the family generates the masochistically feminine and sadistically masculine roles necessary for the continuity of patriarchy, Firestone can envision liberation only in a future era when technology frees women from pregnancy. Millett, however, welcomes the social changes promised by the women’s movement: “it may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination.”15
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