American Experiment (367 page)

Sisterhood was powerful enough to keep these differing values from tearing the women’s movement apart. Indeed, conflicts over goals doubtless sharpened the impact of consciousness-raising. Borrowing from blacks’ examples of standing up in meetings and testifying about their treatment by “the Man,” borrowing even from Mao’s way of criticism of oneself and others, “Speak pain to recall pain,” consciousness-raising intensified as women in small groups spoke to one another about any and all of their “personal problems,” including husbands, housework, making office coffee, shopping, curtailed ambitions, child care, male bosses, sexual relationships. The heart of these meetings was the probing by women of themselves and others about problems as
they
defined them.

The genius of these meetings lay in a leadership that was as potent as it was inconspicuous. It was a leadership of women by women, as experiences were exchanged, feelings evoked, attitudes articulated. Women
exchanged leadership positions as the “rapping” moved from problem to problem. The effect was much in accord with the teachings of psychologists like Maslow whom Friedan and others had read—the raising of persons to higher levels of self-awareness, self-identity, self-protection, self-expression, and ultimately to creative self-fulfillment. The rap groups discussed the writings of leading thinkers in the women’s movement too, and as they did so it became more and more evident that their personal problems were in many respects political problems, involving millions of women, widespread customs and attitudes, laws and judicial findings, governmental institutions and power.

At first cool to these “bitch sessions” as providing young women with a crutch that would divert them from political action, NOW came to see them as means of enlarging the mass base of the organization and at the same time meeting women’s needs. NOW expanded from 14 chapters in 1967 to around 700 seven years later, while membership rose from 1,000 to perhaps 40,000. Yet NOW did not appear to grow proportionately in electoral strength, despite its emphasis on practical political action. Part of the problem was that its organizational structure failed to keep pace with the growth in membership.

But the main problem was the anti-leadership and anti-organization ideology and ethic in the women’s movement. These tendencies existed in NOW to some degree but were offset by vigorous leadership at the top. The movement’s younger branch was determined, on the other hand, as both the means and the end of social change, to replace the “masculine” principle of hierarchy with the ideology and practice of collective sisterhood. Less ambivalent than the New Left or NOW, radical feminists rejected hierarchical leadership altogether. This was partly a reaction to the seeming hypocrisy of movement groups that kicked hierarchy out the front door only to sneak it in through the back. But it was the result even more of the feminist notion that power meant “possession of the self rather than manipulation of other people—hence women had to shun leadership of and by others in order to cultivate the strength to lead their own lives.

“Because so many of our struggles necessarily had to be carried on in isolation, in one-to-one relationships with men,” an activist of the younger branch observed later, “it was imperative for women, as individuals, to gain the confidence to act autonomously, to lead
oneself.
So the moral distaste for leadership
by others
became an intensely practical tactic, completely appropriate to the tasks to be performed.”

The absence of recognized leadership, however, did not prevent the rise of leaders who were more skillful verbally and in other ways. Describing what she called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” Freeman—known in
the movement by her nom de guerre, Joreen—noted that every group had a structure and that covert structures generated covert elites. Lack of formal structure thus became a way of masking power, which then became “capricious.” Groups could not hold de facto leaders accountable; indeed, the covert elite’s existence could hardly be conceded. The unhappy consequence was difficulty in charting a clear direction for individual groups and the whole movement, leading in turn to diminished effectiveness. Sharing these concerns as the “euphoric period of consciousness-raising” ebbed, a number of activists began to put a higher priority first on lobbying and other pressure-group tactics and later on party and electoral action to uproot sexism.

This shift fostered more emphasis on political leadership, while “structurelessness” tended ironically to exacerbate the celebrity syndrome. One of radical feminism’s loudest grievances was the male “star system” of the New Left, but the women had their own celebrities. And when the movement shunned the idea of official leaders or spokespersons, the media appointed their own whether or not they were truly representative. Not only did the grass-roots collectives, then, have little control over feminist stars, but resentments festered and eventually erupted in open denunciations of the stars as “elitist”—which pushed them even further away, sometimes to the movement’s outer edges. Celebrity Kate Millett, whose
Sexual Politics
was a best-seller, said that she was made to feel a traitor to the whole movement.

“All the while,” Milieu wrote, “the movement is sending double signals: you absolutely must preach at our panel, star at our conference—implying, fink if you don’t… and at the same time laying down a wonderfully uptight line about elitism.” Millett had been anointed as a star by
Time
magazine, which put her on its cover in August 1970. When a few months later she publicly declared her bisexuality at a feminist conference,
Time
dethroned her, ruling that she had lost her credibility as the movement’s “high priestess.”

If the personal was the political, to what degree must the women’s movement turn to political action? And what kind of political action? Women’s differences on these questions deepened. Some women adamantly opposed a party and electoral strategy because it meant entering a male-dominated world and seeking to influence male-made and male-controlled institutions. They argued for individual and group face-to-face persuasion and confrontation in universities, corporations, law offices,
hospitals, government agencies—and in the streets. The great potential of the women’s movement, they contended, was not primarily in its electoral power but rather in its
moral
power—its capacity to appeal to the conscience of the American people on issues of simple decency, justice, equality. And that appeal had to be dramatic, passionate, militant, uncompromising, as black leaders had demonstrated in the previous decade.

Beware of a party and electoral strategy for two further reasons, these women argued. To be effective in parties and elections required endless compromises on moral principles as issues and policies were bargained out amid many contending groups. And even if women helped win elections, they would have to try to carry out their policies in a fragmented governmental system that required still further bargaining and sacrifice of principle. In the end women would become just one more pressure group and lobbying organization, their moral appeal muted.

This view tended to dominate thinking among the younger branch. While women were not neatly divided on the basis of competing strategies, most feminists in the older branch came to believe that party participation and electioneering were vitally necessary.

The older-branch leaders were confident they commanded the intellectual and political organization and strength necessary for a major electoral and lobbying effort. The National Women’s Political Caucus under Abzug and Chisholm, now claiming hundreds of participating state and local units, laid groundwork. With NOW and other allies, it threw its weight into the internal struggles of groups with which the women’s movement intended to work in electoral politics.

Organized labor was a prime target. Across the nation working women had been fighting a long battle to persuade male-dominated trade unions to pay more attention to their grievances about sexism and job discrimination and the paucity of women among the top leadership. With crucial help from NOW, women trade unionists convinced the AFL-CIO finally to abandon its opposition to ERA. Women also launched their own unions. Probably the greatest gains were made by groups like “9 to 5,” which began to organize women office workers in Boston in 1973.

Professional women organized too, especially in academia, through autonomous caucuses and associations. Notable for their militance, caucuses within scholarly organizations like the American Political Science Association raised hell at annual conventions on a host of problems plaguing women scholars. Nowhere did feminists mount a more daring assault on tradition than in churches and synagogues, as women fought for the ordination of female clergy, the degendering of sacred texts and even of God,
and the creation of a nonpatriarchal feminist theology. The National Coalition of American Nuns protested domination by priests “no matter what their hierarchical status.”

Still, the acid test of institutional power, in the American governmental system, was electing a President and winning majorities in Congress. The older branch was far better prepared for the 1972 elections than it had been for 1968—in part because of the rules adopted after the 1968 Democratic convention for broader representation of women in the party’s governing councils. These rules changes and a concentrated drive by NWPC paid off: women made up 40 percent of the delegates attending the 1972 convention compared with 13 percent four years earlier.

Thoroughly coached by the NWPC in the complex and often bizarre and ferocious processes of delegate selection, platform drafting, and credentials battles, women at the 1972 convention in Miami had a major role in convention decisions—above all in the nomination of George McGovern. Women had the heady experience of taking part in the inner strategy councils, helping to choose the running mate, and seeing one of their number, Jean Westwood, selected as the new chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. For their part, blacks doubled their percentage of delegates at the convention over 1968.

Sharing in the exercise of power, Democratic women encountered its disappointments as well. One of these was McGovern’s sacrifice of a number of women delegates, whose seating he had promised to support, to the exigencies of convention politics. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Abzug and other women’s rights leaders complained that they were deserted on key platform planks, especially abortion rights. Women had a minor role in McGovern’s choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, but virtually none in the selection of Sargent Shriver as Eagleton’s replacement following a press flap over revelations that Eagleton years before had been hospitalized a few times for psychiatric disorders.

A more surprising and severe failure for the women’s movement lay ahead. ERA had passed both houses of Congress early in 1972 with such heavy majorities, and with such enthusiastic support from Nixon as well as the Democratic candidates, that women expected the proposed constitutional amendment to gain swift passage through the required thirty-eight state legislatures. Within a year, thirty states had ratified ERA. But then its progress began to stall, under the pressure of a powerful “STOP ERA” coalition directed by a resourceful right-wing leader, Phyllis Schlafly, and composed of diverse antifeminist, radical right-wing, and business groups and of an unlikely alliance of Protestant fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and Catholics. State legislatures started to repeal their
ratifications of the amendment, as STOP ERA played upon the fears of millions of American women and men who felt threatened by the women’s movement or who believed that it had gone far enough. ERA, its opponents charged, would lead to the drafting of women and the denial to mothers of the custody of their children, to single-sex toilets and homosexual marriages. They linked the amendment to “forced busing, forced mixing, forced housing,” as one ERA foe wrote to her senator. “Now forced women! No thank you!”

Its political setbacks were doubly unfortunate for the women’s movement, for they tended to obscure the astonishing transformation in everyday attitudes and behavior that both the older and the younger branch had helped bring about. At least within the middle- and upper-income classes, sexual stereotyping of women in businesses, college faculties, hospitals, on athletic fields and military installations had markedly lessened. Equally notable were changes in speech, dress, deportment, parenting, housekeeping. Gentlemen who had grown up in an earlier school had to learn to refrain from opening doors for women and offering to carry their packages and walking between them and the curb, from referring to young women as “girls” or older women as “ladies”—even from standing up when a woman approached their restaurant table.

In this sense the personal was not so much the political as the psychological, the attitudinal, and the behavioral. Few of these changes had been caused or even affected by laws, nor were they sustained by them. The changes had emerged from women’s aching needs for recognition, identity, self-assertion, self-fulfillment. They were enforced by no cops or prosecuting attorneys but by a kind of instinctive conspiracy among women to shame or cast down or freeze out the incautious or insensitive husband, teacher, store clerk, coach, bureaucrat. They had sprung not from a few protest meetings or public defiances but rather from thousands and thousands of tiny confrontations, inside and outside the home, as women looked up from their reading or returned from their rap session to conduct their own face-to-face insurrections.

At last women were bringing to bear on their own lives the values that men had been preaching for decades, for centuries. In this respect their activism was ideological, reflecting the values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood. But to define these values and their linkages, to array them in a hierarchy of priorities, to make the crucial connection between these values and the everyday lives and aspirations of women—and to envision the political strategies and organizations necessary to operationalize these values—this was a task of intellectual leadership. It was the availability of such leadership to the women’s movement at every level that made the
most critical difference in the complex forces leading to the transformation of women’s lives.