Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (10 page)

Younger feminists’ critique of the family and of motherhood as an identity—and the demographic reality that their generation was delaying childbirth and curtailing fertility to an astounding degree—meshed with the weariness of older feminists whose child care needs were behind them.
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Florence Falk-Dickler, then head of the National NOW Task Force on Child Care, complained that women in her own NOW chapter were more interested in employment issues than in child care. Betty Friedan recalled that although there was a national task force on day care she was unable to develop a strong constituency on this issue in
any way comparable to the energy that emerged on such issues as abortion or employment discrimination. “… [T]he women who started NOW had had their fill of child care, or they were young professional women who had no children.”
¹¹²

The few who did pursue the issue at a policy level, however, discovered that child care was an issue that touched a deep public anxiety about the changing roles of women. Activists in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Action Committee for Decent Child Care were shocked by the depth of resistance and hostility they met in the community when they tried to organize around the issue. Project organizer Day Piercy recalled that she had “never been in a situation where people started with an issue and then went for the entire person. It made the women I was working with really feel as though they were bad mothers and there was something seriously wrong with them.”
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When Congress passed a landmark day care funding bill in 1971, it was vetoed by President Nixon on the grounds that it “would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing [instead of] the family-centered approach.”
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Instead of legislative solutions, concerns about “sex role socialization” led to the creation of dozens of “liberated” day care centers and a variety of other projects designed to intervene in the socialization of girls and young women. For example, Group 22 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, read the existing sociological literature on sex roles and decided to create a child care center and to write and publish children’s books—hence the birth of the Children’s School for People Under Six and Lollipop Power. The book publishing group forming Lollipop Power learned through the feminist grapevine that there were others with similar ideas. At a meeting in 1970, the founders of Lollipop Power and the founders of the Feminist Press decided to avoid duplication of labor in the publication of books for children. Lollipop Power would produce preschool picture books and the Feminist Press would publish books for young readers.
¹¹⁵

A different approach, pioneered by a group in Minnesota, illustrated the blending of NOW liberalism with women’s liberation-radicalism. Cheri Register of Twin Cities Female Liberation and Gerri Helterline
of NOW met in a crush of demonstrators outside the men-only Oak Grill on the twelfth floor of Dayton’s Department Store in Minneapolis on August 26, 1970. Frustrated that: they would probably never be able to get inside, Register and Helterline, with several others, decided to head over to Powers Department Store (which had a similar males-only dining room) and “desexegrate” that one. Register had thought of NOW women as somewhat suspect, not really radical, but she was surprised to discover in the course of the day that “Gerri was just like me.” Both of them had from time to time spoken to high school classes—Helterline as a member of the NOW speaker’s bureau, Register as a representative of Female Liberation—and both were feeling frustrated. Piecemeal efforts were not enough. “We were not sure how to make contacts, but we wanted an onslaught in the schools.”
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116

So, they each brought a couple of like-minded friends from their respective associations and constituted themselves as the Emma Willard Task Force, named for an early nineteenth century pioneer in women’s education. As word of their availability spread, invitations to speak in classrooms snowballed, and that, too, began to be frustrating. It was time consuming, repetitive, unpaid work; they worried that they were just “the freak of the week” or the “Friday Special.” In talking to teachers they also began to learn more about the obstacles teachers faced even when they wanted to change the curriculum. “We needed to move up in the hierarchy. Not knowing what to do—we just went right to the top, to the Commissioner of Education.” They sent a letter to the Commissioner in April 1971 demanding a meeting.
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Over the next few months Emma Willard Task Force members met frequently with an official in the Department of Education, Don Hatfield, and became regular participants in a network of human relations training programs mandated by the state. “Our name was on the wire as people who could be called in to talk about sexism. It was a kind of ‘advanced freak of the week’: the black person, the Indian, the Chicano, and then us.” They also put together a packet of curriculum materials, later a book that sold many thousands of copies through the workshops they conducted over several years. Emma Willard burned out after a few years, however. They did this work for little or no money, setting
aside their own career goals (Register’s dissertation, for example, was delayed by more than a year) and realizing only late in the day that there was a whole industry of consultants on race and human relations who were well paid for similar work.
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Nonetheless, Emma Willard left a mark on the schools of Minnesota, which today require that all districts offer “multicultural, gender-fair” curricula. The work of the Emma Willard Task Force paralleled the efforts of other feminist investigations into educational practices, books, and textbooks.
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Near the end of the Emma Willard Task Force Packet from 1972 was a two-page mimeographed paper entitled “High School Women: The Suburban Scene.” One of the readings for a ninth grade “Women’s Liberation Mini Course” offered in Bloomington, Minnesota, offers evidence of the rapid spread of ideas and action as well as a glimpse of how personal politics spread beyond the boundaries of the organized movement.

The paper was by eighth grader Connie Dvorkin, who described herself as “a pacifist and a vegetarian since October 1968.” She had learned of the women’s liberation movement on radio station WBAI while at home in a conservative New York suburb. She wrote off for information and immersed herself in the literature that arrived.

Ironically the very night I was reading it I was baby-sitting and watching TV. The show, “I Love Lucy,” was an episode where the two women were to be equal to the men for one night … and they couldn’t do it. They had to depend on their husbands…. The kids I was sitting for laughed their asses off, and I realized that I would have, too, five months earlier.

Now, with awakened eyes, I could see all the brainwashing of my sisters that goes on at school.

Hearing that a court had struck down dress codes that required skirts for girls, she began to wear pants and found that she felt “more equal with boys.” Then, with her mother’s support, she waged a successful fight to take shop instead of home economics.
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Hundreds of schools faced similarly rebellious young women, frequently
backed by supportive parents and the organized force of local feminists. Radio shows similar to WBAI’s had sprung up across the country. Whereas talk shows welcomed the controversy surrounding women’s liberation but were not necessarily sympathetic forums, alternative radio stations, many based on campuses, provided opportunities for feminists to create their own radio shows.
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Girls like Connie Dvorkin were listening, and the networks (and mimeograph machines) were in place to spread responses like hers quickly.

C
ONSCIOUSNESS
-
RAISING
presaged a broader societal trend toward the personal in the 1970s. Its success rested at least in part on its congruence with an emerging national mood. The “human potential movement” encompassing transcendental meditation, “T-groups,” and encounter groups brought therapeutic activities into many public settings in the late sixties. Educational institutions at all levels, as well as business and civic organizations throughout the country, used “encounter groups” to build morale and increase productivity. The emphasis on emotional openness and honesty—even among total strangers—could be unsettling. A
Time
reporter who attended a seminar at Esalen Institute said, “Every aspect of so-called proper behavior is discarded. Every emotion is out in the open—everybody’s property,” Nudity was not uncommon—for example at the hot sulfur springs at Esalen—as participants sought to remove public personae and “strip down” to some personal essence.
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In contrast to the inward turn of the human potential movement, however, the energy released in this early phase of the Second Wave drew on a fusion of private life and political action that allowed women to make
public
claims based on personal experience, to challenge the “naturalness” of women’s secondary status in public settings, and to point out that power operates even at the most intimate levels, that the personal is political. This assault on the status quo was coupled with a utopian optimism about future possibilities. Nothing would be taken for granted. Perfection was possible. The critical guide to the diagnosis of problems and to proposing changes was personal experience. This was both the brilliance and the deepest flaw of women’s liberation.

For several years, however, personal politics unleashed a phenomenally diverse burst of creativity. It created a political agenda and a political constituency, and it fostered myriad institutional innovations as women sought to create new avenues for action on issues previously considered private. Ultimately it reshaped the political terrain of the United States as a whole.

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See the extended discussion of socialist feminism in Chapter 5.

CHAPTER 3
The Golden Years

We intend to settle for nothing less than equal representation in all levels of political power
.

—CONGRESSWOMAN BELLA ABZUG, JULY 1971

I
T WAS AN
“odd-lot coalition of activists from Congress and the women’s liberation movement” from the outset,
¹
but when 300 women gathered in Washington, D.C. in July 1971 to form the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), they heralded a new force on the national political landscape. The speakers were nationally prominent political activists whose lineages linked the new feminism to other struggles for justice, past and present: Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi civil rights leader, knew firsthand the importance of electoral politics, having endured eviction and severe physical brutality for insisting on her right to vote; Bella Abzug, an activist from the forties and fifties, a member of Women’s Strike for Peace, a Congresswoman from 1970 to 1976, known for her loud, brassy, and eccentric ways, Bella’s trademark big-brim hats could be spotted at a distance; Gloria Steinern, professional journalist, founder of
Ms
. magazine; Betty Friedan, labor activist in the fifties, journalist, and founder of NOW; and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress. The Caucus leadership was middle-class and well-connected, but they had recruited to this meeting younger activists of many races, creating a mix that was, in the words of
Newsweek
’s reporter, “rowdy” and “kinetic as group therapy.” Reportedly, accounts and photographs of the meeting reached President Nixon at his home in San demente where he and his aides bantered
about how it looked “like a burlesque.” “Obviously,” retorted Bella Abzug, “the president and his advisers are accustomed to viewing women only in terms of flesh shows.” Despite their characteristic unruliness and wrangling, the newly formed NWPC set strategic goals to increase women’s representation in the political parties and in Congress, and they pledged to end “racism, sexism, institutional violence and poverty through the election and appointment of women to public office, party reform, and the support of women’s issues and feminist candidates across party lines.”
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Organizations and projects proliferated after 1970 as the dynamism of the movement spread to different constituencies—political insiders and outsiders, civil rights groups, working women, professional and academic disciplines, publishing …. The founding meeting of NWPC is a microcosm of the unruliness, creativity, and power unleashed by feminism. Each time women acted collectively, in turn, offers a glimpse of stirrings at the grass roots, where debates on “woman’s place” had become the stuff of everyday life, and women suddenly found themselves empowered to challenge and change situations as small as a word or as large as the structure of their lives. The success of so many organized efforts, indeed, rested on the coiled energy of individual women, newly aware of previously unspoken injustices and ready to spring into action (or at least to speak loudly) on the issues that touched them most. It took some time for the backlash they provoked to gather support, so for a few years, wherever they could sustain a focus on shared goals, it seemed that nothing could stop this wave of change.

Washington insiders named the early years of the Second Wave the “golden years” because they achieved an unprecedented amount of legislation designed to correct gender inequities. Feminism emerged at the same time that women (in 1968) voted in equal numbers with men for the first time. In recent decades, women had not been perceived to be a coherent interest group. Suddenly they were a potential majority with a mind of its own. With feminist radicalism in the background, challenging gender roles across the board and politicizing disturbing new issues about the body and the family, issues framed as “equal opportunity” seemed simple, obvious, and mild.
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So, for a few years, from about 1968
to 1975, the U.S. Congress seemed hell-bent on figuring out just what women wanted and giving it to them. Hearings, votes, and legislative victories came with breathtaking speed, and Congress passed more legislation in behalf of women’s rights than it had considered seriously for decades. Courts, too, responded to the changed environment and the meticulously argued briefs of feminist lawyers, issuing a string of rulings that enlarged women’s rights and opportunities.