American Experiment (366 page)

A woman’s control of her body encountered its most shocking and horrifying violation in the assault called rape. Wrote Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson: “Rape is all the hatred, contempt, and oppression of women in this society concentrated in one act.” Feminist thinkers like Susan Griffin and Susan Brownmiller developed broad analyses of rape that placed it on a continuum of male aggression and power rather than seeing it as a deviation or the result of uncontrolled “passion.” Brown-miller examined the “masculine ideology of rape” that made it the ultimate expression of male domination and possession of women.

With reported rapes having doubled in half a decade, in part because women were gaining the boldness to report them, feminists undertook to educate the public and aid the victims. Early in 1971,the New York Radical Feminists organized the first rape “speak-outs,” in which survivors talked openly about their ordeals, in the process “making rape a
speakable
crime, not a matter of shame.” Soon women across the country were setting up hundreds of rape crisis centers offering emergency support services, especially phone “hot lines” womanned around the clock to counsel sisters in need. Feminists in NOW and other groups set up local and national task forces to lobby for such reforms as prohibiting court testimony about a victim’s sexual history, for laws against marital rape, and for the creation of a national center for the prevention and control of rape.

As usual the younger branch took the lead in organizing creative direct action, from women’s “anti-rape squads” that patrolled streets and pursued suspects to candlelit “take back the night” marches, born in Italy and Germany, that protested all violence against women. The growing public enlightenment about rape encouraged more and more women to break their silence about violence in the home, resulting in the formation of crisis centers and shelters for battered wives and children. Later in the decade many radicals zeroed in on purveyors of pornography, accusing them of dehumanizing women and promoting a cultural temper of hostility toward them. This led to vigorous debate within the women’s movement pitting the evils of pornography against the evils of censorship and what could seem like a conservative moralist attack on sexual liberty.

During these days of intensive consciousness-raising, debate, and confrontation, two groups were watching and participating in the progress of
the movement but not without reservations, at one in their mutual isolation but not always agreeing. These were lesbians and black women.

“What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society … cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with herself.” So began a bold manifesto—“The Woman Identified Woman”—struck off by the Radicalesbians.

The issue of lesbianism in the women’s movement steamed up as a vital, much-publicized controversy in both branches. Though a minority, lesbians from the start had made vital contributions to NOW as well as to radical groups—“carried the women’s movement on their backs,” said Millett—but by and large they had kept their sexual identity hidden. A police raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in June 1969 and the violent resistance by gay men led to an upwelling of “gay pride” and helped to inspire male homosexuals and lesbians to conquer their fears and “come out.” Lesbians, demanding the elimination of heterosexual dominance and homosexual stigmas, moved far beyond older groups like Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, which had focused on civil rights and personal adjustment.

Lesbians felt doubly oppressed on the basis of their sexuality, “doubly outcast.” They also believed that they met the feminist movement’s own criteria for defining the liberated woman—“economic independence, sexual self-determination, that is, control over their own bodies and lifestyles.” Thus it was fair and fitting that they be at the forefront of feminism, its “natural leaders.” But many “straight” feminists in both branches feared the “lavender menace,” as Betty Friedan called it, on the ground that their enemies would pounce on this Achilles’ heel, equating feminism with lesbianism.

The issue was fought out in meeting after meeting over several years. At the second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 the lights suddenly went out on the first night; when they came back on moments later, women in lavender T-shirts paraded in front, claimed the microphone, and denounced the feminist movement for its heterosexism. Pro-lesbian resolutions passed at workshops over the weekend. The tide seemed to be turning when the president of New York NOW, to Friedan’s consternation, encouraged the wearing of lavender armbands on a Manhattan march. The 1971 national NOW convention unequivocally resolved in support of lesbians’
right to define their own sexuality and lifestyle and acknowledged “the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.”

By now lesbian activism had a momentum of its own. Some lesbian leaders had higher aspirations than for mere acceptance. They wanted the movement to adopt “lesbian-feminism” as its political creed, defined by their journal
The Furies
as a “critique of the institution and ideology of heterosexuality as a primary cornerstone of male supremacy.” They called for complete separation from men and even from heterosexual feminists who were not “woman-identified.” Feminists on the other side charged them with “vanguardism” and dogmatic moralism. Still, most feminists continued to work together across the sexual divide. The great promise of lesbian-feminism—its compelling vision of an autonomous women’s culture flowering in many hues—lived on in such profound contributions to sisterhood as the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, or the women’s music of Meg Christian, Margie Adam, Kris Williamson, Holly Near. “Free spaces”—coffeehouses, music festivals, cultural happenings—proliferated, places where self-defining women could explore their commonalities as well as their differences.

This was not the world of black women, most of whom were poor or jobless or underemployed. Black feminist leaders were determined to make feminism a movement for all women and to establish themselves as a visible presence in its midst. With an equal stake in women’s liberation and black freedom, they were central figures at the confluence of the two movements. Both to forge links between the movements and to “organize around those things which affect us most,” black feminists formed their own groups, the most prominent being the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973 by a diverse assemblage.

“We were married. We were on welfare. We were lesbians. We were students. We were hungry. We were well fed. We were single. We were old. We were young. Most of us were feminists. We were beautiful black women.” So the NBFO members identified themselves. The statement of purpose proclaimed that the “distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women.”

On a smaller scale were groups like the Combahee River Collective in Boston, named after an 1863 guerrilla action in South Carolina, led by Harriet Tubman, that freed hundreds of slaves; they were “committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression,” struggles against forced sterilization, rape, and domestic violence and for abortion and child care. Such concerns, they argued, united all women.

Other women of color, especially Latinas, overcame cultural barriers and divided loyalties to take part in the feminist movement. Chicana and Puerto Rican women formed autonomous organizations such as the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional in the Southwest, the Mexican-American Women’s Association, and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. Chicana activists were the backbone of the United Farm Workers’ strikes and boycotts.

The trend in the feminist movement toward harnessing its breadth and diversity through coalition building culminated at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Established and financed by legislation pushed by Bella Abzug, who chaired the International Women’s Year Commission that coordinated it, the conference met to propose measures to achieve full equality, which had been discussed earlier in public meetings involving over 100,000 women. The Houston delegates ranged from progressive church women, trade unionists, and community activists across a wide spectrum to the hard core of conservative “antis,” sporting yellow “Majority” ribbons and seeking in vain to block resolutions in support of ERA and abortion rights. With middle-class whites
under
represented, it may have been one of the most all-embracing political conventions in American history.

It did not lack in theater. At the start of the proceedings, a multiracial team of relay runners carried into the convention center a flaming torch from Seneca Falls, New York, site of the first women’s convention in 1848. During heated debate over a National Plan of Action a woman rose in the rear of the hall and said dramatically, “My name is Susan B. Anthony”; at the end of her remarks the grandniece of the revered leader joined others in chanting, “Failure Is Impossible!”—the elder Anthony’s final public words. The climax of the gathering was the near-unanimous passage of a minority women’s resolution, drafted by a joint caucus of blacks, Latinas, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, that called for recognition and alleviation of their “double discrimination.” Among many conservatives who stood up to vote for it were two white Mississippians, a man and a woman who reached across the seated disapproving members of their delegation to grasp each other’s hand. The coliseum swayed with “We Shall Overcome.”

Aside from such peak moments, the movement as it matured came to feel less like a nurturing family, a “room of its own,” and more like what it really was—a massive and complex coalition of women with much in common but many differences. Women of color who were vitally attuned to the “simultaneity of oppressions” felt the strongest need for linking issues and took the lead in building bridges of interdependence. The
progress that had been made toward sisterhood did not blind feminist delegates to the big obstacles to unity that remained—above all, the many women they had not yet reached, represented by the “antis” at Houston. “Change means growth, and growth can be painful,” said the black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. Her remark summed up the intellectual and political struggles of the whole decade.

How did “the movement” get started? How fully did it reach its goals? Years later veterans of the women’s movement, like old campaigners re-fighting the battles of yore, were still debating how a movement that appeared to have lost most of its fire and focus after winning the vote in 1920 suddenly flamed up into a force that transformed the ideas and behavior of both women and men, at least in the upper and middle classes. Historians were already examining the origins of the movement, its linkages with the black and student revolts, its durability, the “real change” it produced in terms of its own aspirations, and the historians were discarding almost as many explanations as they found useful.

The movement emerged from volcanic economic and social changes in the years following World War II, according to one theory. The percentage of women in the total civilian work force rose from 28 in 1947 to 37 in 1968, bringing a huge increase of women who were exposed to both the temptations and the frustrations of the job mart and who shared with one another financial and occupational concerns. At the same time women’s
relative
deprivation mounted as their share of “both quantitative and qualitative occupational rewards,” in Jo Freeman’s analysis, dwindled. This seeming paradox produced a volatile mixture—aroused hopes and crushed expectations.

Other explanations were that World War II had served as the catalyst of increased employment among women, producing a change in self-image as well as expectations that were rudely shattered after the war, as men took back the better jobs; and/or that social and class forces involved in urbanization and suburbanization, and the relatively greater deprivation of middle-class women, fostered a desire for reform; and/or that psychologically, the more women operated in the male sphere, the more they had to assert their identity as female. Having earlier possessed a self-identity, a fixed societal position, or at least a nurturing leadership role in the family, many women now operated in a twilight zone between low-paid jobs and family responsibilities. Wanting a life outside the home, yet feeling guilty about their husbands’ unmet needs, they were driven by guilt and
emptiness to smother their children with care, to treat them as though they “were hot-house plants psychologically.” This “Rage of Women,” as a
Look
article called it, was that identity crisis dramatized by Friedan as “the problem that has no name.”

To be trapped between domestic demands and the need for “something more” was an old story for many American women, but powerful intellectual and ideological forces were sweeping the West during the 1960s. These were years of turbulence in Europe as well as the United States. Simone de Beauvoir, the novelist Doris Lessing, and others across the Atlantic had challenged the dominant image of woman’s subordinate position. In the United States the black and student revolts lifted the banners of liberty and equality even as they fought with others and among themselves about the meaning and application of these values.

In proclaiming liberty, equality, and sisterhood, women too broke up into rival ideological camps. Feminists of the NOW camp typically held that women were equal to men but had been kept subordinate to them, that the goal was integration on an equal basis, through political action. Women’s liberationists of the younger branch protested that they were treated as sex objects or as mere property, that they must act through psychological or social “woman power.” Liberal feminists defined liberty as the absence of legal constraints on women and equality as equal opportunity to attain their goals. Marxist feminists saw themselves as victims of the capitalist system, liberty as protection against the coercion of economic necessity, and equality as the equal satisfaction of material needs. All this was aside from “sexual conservatives” who saw men and women as inherently unequal in abilities and held that unequals should be treated unequally.