3 See Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010).
4 On the “little marriages,” see Carolyn Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (Ballantine Books, 1996), pp. 112, 115.
5 Gloria Steinem, “Introduction: Life between the Lines,” in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), pp. 1–26, at 16.
6 Gloria Steinem, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” in ibid., pp. 29–69, at 30, 35. The piece was originally published in Show magazine in two parts, under the title “A Bunny’s Tale.”
7 Hugh Hefner’s 1967 interview is quoted in Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, and Other Mixed Messages (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), p. 6.
8 Ibid., p. 5.
9 Steinem, “Introduction: Life between the Lines,” p. 16.
10 Steinem, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” p. 69.
11 Steinem, “Introduction: Life between the Lines,” p. 16.
12 Gloria Steinem, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” Esquire, Sept. 1962, pp. 97–157, at 97, 153, 154. Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (1963) discusses many of these same issues raised by contraception.
13 Steinem, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” pp. 155, 156.
14 Ibid., pp. 156, 157.
15 Ibid., p. 157.
16 Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (Bernard Geis, 1962), p. 4.
17 This was famously her “favorite motto,” according to Judith Thurman, “Owning Your Desire: Remembering Helen Gurley Brown,” New Yorker, 15 Aug. 2012, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/owning-your-desire-remembering-helen-gurley-brown.
18 Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, pp. 24, 65, 76, 78.
19 Ibid., pp. 111, 120, 222, 252, 267.
20 Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 101.
21 William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 21, 67, 45.
22 Mary Ann Sherfey’s was the first major response to Masters and Johnson: “The Evolution and Nature of Female Sexuality in Relation to Psychoanalytic Theory,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 14, no. 1 (1966): 28–128 (quotation at 123).
23 Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, pp. 65, 131, 285, 314.
24 Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (Picador, 2009), pp. 213, 220.
25 Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (HarperCollins, 2019), p. 90.
26 Sontag, Reborn, p. 73.
27 Moser, Sontag, p. 116.
28 Sontag, Reborn, p. 196.
29 Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books, 17 Mar. 2005, pp. 17–20, at 17.
30 Daniel Stern, “Life Becomes a Dream,” New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 1963.
31 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, “Speaking of Susan Sontag,” New York Times Book Review, 27 Aug. 1967.
32 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, ed. David Rieff (Library of America, 2013), pp. 259–74, at 263.
33 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1952; repr., Vintage, 1989), p. 267.
34 In Sontag’s vision of “camp” culture, pronounced Simon with distaste, the “outre and the inverted become the quotidian”; for his part, Howe bizarrely (and misogynistically) dismissed Sontag as a “brilliant publicist who makes brilliant quilts from Grandmother’s patches.” Both are quoted in James Penner, “Gendering Susan Sontag’s Criticism in the 1960s: The New York Intellectuals, the Counter Culture, and the Kulturkampf over ‘the New Sensibility,’ ” Women’s Studies 37, no. 8 (2008): 921–41, at 935, 926.
35 See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (University of California Press, 1969). For a similar argument, see also Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (Random House, 1970).
36 Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” in Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, pp. 452–61, at 452, 453, 460.
37 Ibid., pp. 457–58, 459.
38 Joan Didion, “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Saturday Evening Post, 14 Aug. 1965, pp. 76–79.
39 Joan Didion, “A Preface,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. xi–xiv, at xi.
40 Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in ibid., pp. 84–128, at 84–85.
41 Ibid., p. 85.
42 Ibid., p. 93.
43 Ibid., pp. 88, 92, 97.
44 Ibid., p. 101.
45 Ibid., pp. 95, 127.
46 The Centre Will Not Hold, dir. Griffin Dunne (Netflix, 2017).
47 All quoted material in this paragraph is drawn from Michael J. Kramer, “Summer of Love, Summer of War,” New York Times, 15 Aug. 2017.
48 Susan Sontag, quoted in Ellen Hopkins, “Susan Sontag Lightens Up,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 1992.
49 Alice Herz, quoted in Jon Coburn, “ ‘I Have Chosen the Flaming Death’: The Forgotten Self-Immolation of Alice Herz,” Peace & Change 43, no. 1 (2018): 32–60 (quotation at 32).
50 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1989; repr., Bantam, 1993), p. 265.
51 Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 59.
52 See also such figures as Barbara Deming, “Southern Peace Walk: Two Issues or One?” (1962), and Angela Davis, “The Liberation of Our People” (1969), in War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald (Library of America, 2016), pp. 348–61, 507–13.
53 Denise Levertov, interview with William Packard, “Craft Interview with Denise Levertov” (1971), in Conversations with Denise Levertov, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 50. Denise Levertov is talking about the post-1966 movement.
54 Denise Levertov, “Life at War,” in Poems 1968–1972 (New Directions, 1987), pp. 121–22, at 121, 122.
55 Denise Levertov, “Advent 1966,” in ibid., p. 124.
56 Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” (1968), in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 430.
57 Mary McCarthy, Vietnam (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 33.
58 Mary McCarthy, Hanoi (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 123.
59 Mary McCarthy, letter quoted in Michelle Dean, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Press, 2018), p. 165.
60 McCarthy, Hanoi, p. 127.
61 Susan Sontag, “Trip to Hanoi,” in Styles of Radical Will (Picador, 1969), pp. 205–74, at 223, 263.
62 Grace Paley, “Report from North Vietnam” (1969), in A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry, ed. Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), pp. 263–69, at 265, 267.
63 Robert Duncan, quoted in Donna Krolik Hollenberg, A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov (University of California Press, 2013), p. 240; Denise Levertov, “Part IV: Daily Life,” in Poems 1968–1972, p. 188.
64 Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, letters quoted in Hollenberg, A Poet’s Revolution, p. 284.
65 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 188.
66 Quoted in ibid., p. 188. In 1967, a “Women’s Manifesto” by the Women’s Liberation Workshop at a national conference of the Students for a Democratic Society compared women’s status with the colonized and demanded that their “brothers” deal with their “male chauvinism.” See Gayle Graham Yates, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement (Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 7–8.
67 Shulamith Firestone, “The Jeannette Rankin Brigade: Woman Power?” in Notes from the First Year, by New York Radical Women (New York Radical Women, 1968),
pp. 18–19. The pamphlet is available online at library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc_wlmms01037/.
68 Ibid., pp. 19, 18 (quoting Kathie Amatniek).
69 Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” talk at the First National Conference of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, 12 Mar. 1973, New York City; see www.organizingforwomensliberation.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/consciousness-raising-a-radical-weapon/. Also see Rosen, The World Split Open, p. 197.
70 Ramparts, quoted in Rosen, The World Split Open, p. 131.
71 See Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (Feminist Press, 2014). There is an excellent account of the Warhol shooting in Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016), pp. 77–93.
72 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967; repr., AK Press, 1997), pp. 1, 4, 26, 39, 37.
73 Ti-Grace Atkinson believed that “Solanas has brought feminism up-to-date for the first time in history” (quoted in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, p. 174).
74 Robin Morgan, Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 315.
75 Kate Millett, quoted in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, p. 164.
76 Morgan, Saturday’s Child, p. 315.
77 Gail Collins, America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (HarperCollins, 2003), p. 440; Kathie Sarachild, quoted in Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Knopf, 1979), p. 203.
78 See Susan Brownmiller, In Our Times: Memoir of a Revolution (Dial Press, 199), pp. 36–40.
79 See Rosen, The World Split Open, p. 205; Gloria Steinem, quoted in Joy Press, “The Life and Death of a Radical Sisterhood,” New York: The Cut, [Nov. 2017], www.thecut.com/2017/11/an-oral-history-of-feminist-group-new-york-radical-women.html.
80 Erica Jong, “Don’t Forget the F-Word,” The Guardian, 11 Apr. 2008, www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview11; Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (1995; repr., University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp. 27, 47; Shirley Chisholm, recorded in Walter Ray Watson, “A Look Back on Shirley Chisholm’s Historic 1968 House Victory,” Morning Edition, NPR, 6 Nov. 2018, www.npr.org/2018/11/06/664617076/a-look-back-on-shirley-chisholm-s-historic-1968-house-victory; Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 105.
81 Jerry Rubin, quoted in Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (Bantam Books, 1993), pp. 219, 404.
82 Mary King and Casey Hayden, quoted in Susan Brownmiller, In Our Times: Memoir of a Revolution (Dial Press, 1999), p. 14. See also Winifred Breines, The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 26. On the parallels between the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century feminist movements’ outgrowth from protests against racial injustice, see Elaine Showalter, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory,” in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (Routledge, 1989), pp. 347–69.
83 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968; repr., Delta, 1999), p. 33.
84 Amiri Baraka, “Babylon Revisited,” in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (William Morrow, 1979), p. 119.
85 Quoted in Evans, Personal Politics, p. 80.
86 Kathleen Cleaver and Frances Beale, quoted in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (1989; repr., University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 107.
87 Robin Morgan, “Introduction: The Women’s Revolution,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writing from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Morgan (Vintage Books, 1970), pp. xiii–xl, at xx.
88 Evans, Personal Politics, p. 201.
89 Anne Koedt, quoted in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, p. 84.
90 Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (Radical Feminism, 1970), pp. 37–41, at 41. A shorter version of this essay originally appeared in 1968 in Notes from the First Year.
91 Jane O’Reilly’s 1971 Ms. essay “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” popularized the click of recognition of sexism. For a more recent treatment of the idea, see Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan, eds., Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists (Seal Press, 2010).
92 Steinem, “Introduction: Life between the Lines,” pp. 17–18.
93 Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” in Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful, pp. 421–38, at 430, 438. The Chicana students formed Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc in Long Beach 1969: see Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138.
94 Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (Basic Books, 2000), pp. 53–57, at 53, 54, 57; for the dolls, see Morgan, Saturday’s Child, p. 30. Ellen Willis, one of the founders of the Redstockings, had already announced the emergence of “women’s liberation as an independent revolutionary movement, potentially representing half the population. We intend to make our own analysis of the system and put our interests first, whether or not it is convenient for the (male-dominated) Left” (Willis, “Women and the Left” [1969], in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow [New York University Press, 2000], pp. 513–15, at 513).
CHAPTER 5: PROTESTING PATRIARCHY
1 Time used the Alice Neel portrait for the cover of its 31 Aug. 1970 issue because Millett refused to sit for a photo shoot.
2 Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, H. J. Res. 208, 92nd Cong. (1972), www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-86/pdf/STATUTE-86-Pg1523.pdf.
3 “Who’s Come a Long Way, Baby?,” Time, 31 Aug. 1970, p. 16.
4 In 1969 Carol Hanisch wrote an essay titled “The Personal Is Political” when it was published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (Radical Feminism, 1970), pp. 76–78, but no feminist claims authorship of the phrase since it quickly became ubiquitous.
5 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken” (1971), in Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. 3–19, at 13, 3.
6 Adrienne Rich, “Arts of the Possible” (1997), in ibid., pp. 326–44, at 332.
7 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006), p. 22. Elaine Showalter used the phrase “a Great Awakening” in “Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3, no. 1/2 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 29–43, at 34.
8 Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary (Duke University Press, 2015), p. 71.
9 On the emergence of all these groups, see Winifred D. Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s (Twayne, 1988).
10 Kate Millett, “Introduction to the Touchstone Paperback,” in Sexual Politics (1969; repr., Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. xxv–xxviii, at xxv.
11 Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 5.
12 Cherryblossomlife, “Sexual Politics Part III: Jean Genet,” Radfem Hub: A Radical Feminist Collective Blog, 30 Jan. 2012, radicalhubarchives.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/sexual-politics-part-iii-jean-genet/.
13 Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 22.
14 Ibid., p. 54.
15 Ibid., p. 363.
16 Kate Millett, Flying (1974; repr., University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 23, 403, 502, 505.
17 Ibid., p. 15.
18 Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), in Women’s Rights in the United States: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Issues, Events, and People, ed. Tiffany K. Wayne and Louis Banner, 4 vol
s. (ABC-CLIO, 2015), 3:358–61, at 358. Also see Karla Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Story of Liberation (Basic Books, 1999).
19 Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 179.
20 Ti-Grace Atkinson, quoted in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (1989; repr., University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 238; Johnston, Lesbian Nation, p. 166.
21 Millett, Flying, pp. 328, 433.
22 Ibid., p. 357.
23 Ibid., pp. 357, 358, 359.
24 Town Bloody Hall, dir. Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker (Pennebaker Hegadus Films, 1979).
25 Ibid.
26 Irving Howe, “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett,” Harper’s, Dec. 1970, pp. 110–29, at 118, 110, 124.
27 Gore Vidal, “In Another Country,” New York Review of Books, 22 July 1971, pp. 8–10.
28 Town Bloody Hall.
29 Kate Millett, The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (Simon and Schuster, 1979).
30 Joyce Carol Oates, “To Be Female Is to Die,” New York Times, 9 Sept. 1979.
31 Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, ed. David Rieff (Library of America, 2013), pp. 320–52, at 337.
32 Ibid.
33 Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature (Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 227–28.
34 Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging” (1972), in Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, pp. 745–68, at 766, 754, 755.
35 Susan Sontag, “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” (1975), in ibid., pp. 803–5, at 804, 805.
36 Susan Sontag, “The Third World of Women” (1973), in ibid., pp. 769–99, at 782.
37 Ibid., pp. 792, 772, 776.
38 Ibid., pp. 793, 779.
39 Ibid., p. 783.
40 Ibid., p. 788.
41 Ibid., p. 797.
42 But on Sontag’s implicit feminism in the sixties, and her forthright feminism in the early seventies, as well as the hostility she evoked from Old Left members of the Partisan Review “family,” see James Penner, “Gendering Susan Sontag’s Criticism in the 1960s: The New York Intellectuals, the Counter Culture, and the Kulturkampf over ‘the New Sensibility,’ ” Women’s Studies 37, no. 8 (2008): 921–41.
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