American Experiment (365 page)

Why did these younger-branch feminist leaders not join NOW, which had formed in response to women’s plight in the home as well as on the job? The activist women on all sides shared common values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood but they had major differences. NOW was relatively centralized in organization, hierarchical in power arrangements, focused on political organization and action, oriented toward Washington and state capitals. The women now springing into action were concerned less with policy goals than with self-consciousness, self-realization, self-identity; they wanted to reach the Marion Hudsons. Opposed to formal leadership, structure, and elitism, they urged networking and decentralization down to the smallest local gatherings. NOW abounded with stars; the new groups were hostile to celebrities and skeptical of “expert authority.” NOW included men and worked with them. Many of the younger branch not only were critical of men for all the usual reasons but viewed them as the class enemy.

Such considerations prompted Firestone and Ellen Willis in early 1969 to establish Redstockings, which proclaimed that relationships between men and women were a conflict-ridden class relationship and could be resolved only by collective political action. About the same time radical dissidents in the New York NOW chapter tried to change the chapter bylaws to abolish hierarchy. When the chapter majority voted down a proposal by its flamboyant president, Ti-Grace Atkinson, either to abolish offices or to spread them around, she resigned in protest, telling the press that the division lay between “those who want women to have the opportunity to be oppressors, too, and those who want to destroy oppression itself.”

Atkinson and other NOW insurgents joined former members of Radical Women to form a new group called the Feminists, whose founding principle was equal participation. To prevent the quick and the vocal from dominating meetings they set up an ingenious Lot and Disc system: all tasks were assigned by lot, and all members were given the same number of discs, one of which had to be spent for each utterance. Legend in the women’s movement has it that at the first meeting the members used up their discs in fifteen minutes, and at the next meeting they hoarded them and said little. In other ways too the Feminists were different. They ruled that no more than one-third of their members could be living with men. They discouraged “star making” by choosing their media spokespersons by lot. Despite—or because of—this gallant effort to structure participatory democracy, and perhaps also because of its moral absolutism, the organization withered and died.

Radical feminist groups were now sprouting at an astounding rate, and were depleting New Left ranks, as word spread through networks. Starting them up had never been so easy or exciting, an organizer recalled. Binding together the radical feminists was a shared view of their plight as women. Leading off from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that the world treats man as subject, woman as object, as Other, radical feminists were coming to see themselves as constituting an oppressed class, even a caste. The male-female division was the “primary class system” underlying all other class distinctions. Proclaimed the Redstockings Manifesto:

“Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented.”

While male and female are biological, Kate Milieu contended, gender,
masculine or feminine, is cultural and thus learned; anatomy is
not
destiny. Women—and men—would be truly liberated when they could free themselves from “the tyranny of sexual-social category and conformity to sexual stereotype,” as well as from racial caste and economic class. The goal of expunging oppressive sex roles was the touchstone of radical feminism. Many agreed that this required the abolition of marriage and the traditional family, but some went further to demand an end to heterosexuality. In her book
The Dialectic of Sex,
Firestone called for a full-fledged feminist revolution, made possible by technological advances, enabling women to seize control of reproduction and make childbearing and child-raising the responsibility of society rather than solely of individual women.

The heart of liberation was the consciousness-raising group. For radical feminists the CR group was at once a recruitment device, a process for shaping politics and ideology, and a microcosm of an egalitarian community that prefigured a feminist society. The participants, usually a group of from six to twenty, met in a safe, nurturing atmosphere to share their most intimate feelings and questions. Some groups followed a four-stage process: opening up, sharing, analyzing, abstracting—the last meaning to fit a resultant understanding “into an overview of our potential as human beings and the reality of our society, i.e., of developing an ideology.” Some groups concentrated on sharing experiences: what it was like for a woman to sit passively in a car while a man walked around it to open the door—to fake an orgasm to protect both her own pride and her partner’s—to try to maintain a dignified silence in the street when men hooted or stared at her—to wait on a husband who would not lift a hand in the kitchen.

Mainly these “rap groups” shared questions. Why should a woman spend so much time and money to “go unnatural” in order to attract a man? Should women be willing to sacrifice more than men do for the sake of marriage or companionship? How could they persuade the men they lived with to share housekeeping chores? In the warmth and intimacy of the rap sessions they talked about loving men and other women and the meaning of mutuality, about sexual violence in the bedroom and rape in marriage.

Raising consciousness was a first step to political action. Late in 1968 about two hundred women descended on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the Miss America Pageant as “patently degrading to women,” according to a key organizer, “in propagating the Mindless Sex Object Image.” The pageant had always been a lily-white, racist contest with never a black finalist; the winner toured Vietnam, “entertaining the troops as a Murder mascot”; the whole million-dollar affair was a “commercial shill-game” to sell the sponsors’ products. Where else, the protesters
demanded, could one find such a perfect combination of false American values—racism, militarism, capitalism, all packaged in the “ ‘ideal’ symbol,” a woman? The feminists picketed and performed guerrilla theater, auctioned off a dummy Miss America, crowned a live sheep as their winner, and tossed dishcloths, steno pads, women’s magazines, girdles, bras, high heels, and “other instruments of torture to women” into a Freedom Trash Can.

As liberation groups and activities proliferated, a radicalization occurred typical of social movements, to the point of self-parody. On Halloween 1968 a coven from WITCH, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, surfaced on Wall Street “to pit their ancient magic against the evil powers of the Financial District—the center of the Imperialistic Phallic Society.” After plastering WITCH stickers onto the George Washington statue, the masked, wand-wielding witches danced around the big banks, chanting curses, and invaded the Stock Exchange to hex men of finance. The money changers stood in awe but unhexed. Soon the witches’ covens and their offspring broadened out, casting their spells at bridal fairs, AT&T, the United Fruit Company, a marriage license bureau. Among the most imaginative was the nonviolent storming of a Boston radio station by women angered over an announcement that “chicks” were wanted as typists; the station manager was handed an offering of eight baby chicks.

Stunts and self-parody were tempting for their appeal to the media, which “discovered” feminism in the “grand press blitz” of 1970. Though often portrayed mockingly or trivialized as a fad, radical feminism found its coverage soar in major newspapers and magazines as well as on TV. And the feminists used Big Media’s devouring appetite to score points against it. Organizers of the first Miss America protest made a decision that became movement policy—to speak only to female reporters. They were not “so naive as to think that women journalists would automatically give us more sympathetic coverage,” Robin Morgan explained, but they wanted to make “a political statement consistent with our beliefs.”

If the media influenced the women’s movement to be bolder and more theatrical, the movement affected the media as well. Refusing to talk to male reporters helped generate more meaningful assignments for female journalists, freeing them from the “ghetto” of the woman’s page. At
Newsweek,
after months of agitation and a complaint to the EEOC, female employees reached an accord with management to accelerate the hiring and promotion of women. Some radicals engaged in militant direct action,
notably an eleven-hour sit-in at the
Ladies’ Home Journal
to try to liberate it. They won the right to produce a special supplement on feminism. Employees seized and barricaded the avant-garde Grove Press to protest discrimination, the firing of women for organizing a union, and the publishing of erotica they felt degraded women—and were charged with resisting arrest when they demanded female cops.

More venturesome still for activists was to put out their own publications. The first feminist newspaper,
off our backs,
published in Washington, was followed by an effusion of journals and magazines—over one hundred by 1971. Notable were
Women: A Journal of Liberation, Quest, Signs,
and the glossy popular magazine
Ms.,
which reached a circulation of half a million. Closely linked to the alternative periodicals were feminist collectives that churned out everything from literary and political anthologies to nonsexist, nonracist children’s books.

The younger branch became a great teaching movement. To learn more about what de Beauvoir called the “second sex,” and to instruct young women in how to reclaim their past, feminist scholars initiated women’s studies courses and programs on hundreds of campuses. Radical feminists who felt demeaned or mistreated by the male medical establishment, particularly with respect to birth control and pregnancy, organized self-help classes to enable women to know and care for their bodies and to conduct self-examinations. A group of Boston women taught a course on women’s health that resulted in a collectively written handbook,
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
First printed by the New England Free Press in 1973, it became the most widely read of all feminist publications, translated into eleven languages and growing thicker with each edition—the bible of the women’s health movement. Alternative clinics for women sprang up, specializing in pregnancy and abortion, along with a resurgence of natural childbirth, home birth, and midwifery.

The determination to control their own bodies helped empower especially the younger branch during the 1970s. Abortion, often self-induced, had been a common though risky practice for centuries; it did not become generally illegal in the United States until the medical elite campaigned against it after the Civil War. During the 1960s coalitions of professional men and women in some states gained modification of anti-abortion laws that permitted abortion by a physician under certain conditions but still left the decision to the doctor, usually male. Then the rising feminist movement turned the debate upside down, proclaiming that abortion was a woman’s basic right, that the decision was hers alone, and that abortion laws must be repealed, not reformed.

“When we talk about women’s rights,” said one activist, “we can get all
the rights in the world—the right to vote, the right to go to school—and none of them means a doggone thing if we don’t own the flesh we stand in, if we can’t control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force.”

Although initially even some feminists did not consider it a feminist issue, NOW leaders and others formed in 1969 the National Abortion Rights Action League, which along with other “pro-choice” groups mobilized for legislative and judicial changes. Radical feminists, who demanded not only abortion on demand but an end to coerced sterilization of poor, largely nonwhite women, joined with moderates to organize abortion teach-ins and testify at legislative hearings; characteristically, NOW activists gave legal testimony while radicals talked graphically about their own abortions and sometimes disrupted the formal proceeding with speech-making and guerrilla theater.

These pressures, combined with other developments—the passage of liberalization laws in some states during the 1960s, rising concern for pregnant women’s physical and psychological safety, and concern over population growth symbolized by the co-chairing of Planned Parenthood-World Population by ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower in 1965— helped produce the biggest pro-abortion rights victory of all from the all-male Supreme Court of the United States. In 1973, following extensive litigation, the Court in
Roe
v.
Wade
ruled that restrictions on abortion during the first trimester violated the constitutional right to privacy; abortion could be regulated in the second trimester only for the protection of a woman’s well-being, and must be permitted even in the final three months if her health and survival should be at stake. Though
Roe
did not grant women an unconditional right to abortion, it came close enough since most abortions took place in the first trimester.

But even as feminists rejoiced, a passionate movement erupted against abortion, with
Roe
as the hate object. Led by conservative women, fundamentalist preachers, Catholic clergy, and leaders of the New Right, the “right-to-lifers” succeeded in persuading national, state, and local governments to whittle down the practical promise of
Roe
—in particular, to bar public funding of abortions, which mainly affected poor women. Anti-abortion women activists organized their own demonstrations and street protests. This fierce counterattack made abortion
the
social issue of the 1970s. The struggle was less about the right of the fetus, the sociologist Kristin Luker concluded, than about the role of women and “
the place and meaning of motherhood.
” Many women, especially those deeply religious and
of low-income backgrounds, perceived the feminist vision of self-empowerment as a serious threat.