Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (16 page)

Just as the civil rights movement had stimulated a demand for black history and African-American studies, the women’s liberation movement posed questions that challenged the standard content of traditional courses in history, literature, and social sciences. Feminists who were already in positions of academic leadership played critical roles in launching women’s studies. Sheila Tobias, Associate Provost at Wesleyan University, teamed up with Betty Friedan as visiting professors at Cornell in January 1969 to teach what may have been the first women’s studies course for credit,
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Gerda Lerner taught a women’s history course at Sarah Lawrence, and courses on “Women in History, “Women in Literature,” “The Politics of Male-Female Relationships,” and “The Evolution of Female Personality” appeared in college catalogues from Cornell to San Diego State and from the College of St. Catherine to Princeton, in 1969-1970. In 1970, Tobias put together a
collection of 17 syllabi and bibliographies. The Commission on the Status of Women of the Modern Language Association 2 years later compiled 66 syllabi from about 40 different schools for the publication of
Female Studies II
. Nearly half the courses concerned women and literature or cultural criticism—understandable because of the networks closest to the compilers—but they also gathered descriptions of 9 history courses (several on women’s social roles, 2 specifically on the history of women’s rights movements), 15 social science courses (e.g., “Sex and Politics,” “Linguistic Behavior of Male and Female,” “Psychology of Women,” and “Women in the U.S. Economy”), and 11 interdisciplinary courses (e.g., “Philosophical and Psychological Aspects of Women’s Roles,” “Women as a Minority Group,” “Biology and Society,” and “Sex Roles in American Society and Politics”).
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Word about women’s studies spread through movement channels as well as academic ones. At many universities, students were the first to demand a women’s studies course and they frequently participated in teaching experimental and interdisciplinary offerings. At Old Westbury Community College on Long Island, students and faculty jointly taught a course attended by students, secretaries, and even the wife of the college president.
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Karen McTighe Musil remembered that those early courses were interdisciplinary and closely connected to students’ lives. She had taken her first teaching job in 1971 at LaSallee College just as the college went coed. Eager to offer the women students a course about women, she teamed up with Judy Newton, who arrived the next year, and together they taught the first women’s studies course in 1973. Female students flocked to them, acutely aware of the differential treatment of male and female students. “It was heady times. The students fired us up.”
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The handful of scholars already studying women, people like Alice Rossi, Jesse Bernard, Gerda Lerner, and Anne Firor Scott, suddenly found an audience and an intellectual community. A generation of young professors with activist leanings but trained in traditional disciplines suddenly changed course. They left behind standard dissertations framed in the traditions of their disciplines and moved quickly into the forefront of the new feminist scholarship and the creation of women’s
studies programs.
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Kate Millett, galvanized by her participation in New York Radical Women, wrote a dissertation entided
Sexual Politics
that broke open the field of feminist literary criticism and feminist theory when it was published in 1970.
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A total of 150 women’s studies programs were established between 1970 and 1975, offering everything from a small cluster of courses to full-blown undergraduate majors. By 1980 there were 300.
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W
ITH THE ISSUE
of women’s equality a matter of continuing public debate, on September 20, 1973, 48 million Americans were glued to their television sets, watching “The Battle of the Sexes,” a tennis match between tennis pro Billie Jean King and a former male tennis star, Bobby Riggs. King was at the top of her form in 1973. For several years she had used her prominence to publicize the inequities faced by professional women tennis players and to build a grassroots movement of female athletes. In 1970 she was the first professional woman tennis player to earn more than $100,000 in a single year, yet the top male player earned three times as much for winning only one-third as many tournaments. King organized a boycott in protest of the pro tennis tour because of the income differences between women and men. Subsequently she played a prominent role in the new all-women’s pro circuit (the Virginia Slims Tour); forced the U.S. Open to equalize prize money for women and men; and organized the Women’s Tennis Association. For many women, and especially budding young female athletes, Billie Jean King symbolized their hopes.
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Billie Jean had no need to defend her skill against the taunts of a 55-year-old hustler and former tennis star, Bobby Riggs. Proclaiming himself a “male chauvinist pig,” Riggs needled, “You insist that top women players provide a brand of tennis comparable to men’s. I challenge you to prove it. I contend that you not only cannot beat a top male player, but that you can’t beat me, a tired old man.” When he goaded the second-ranked player, Margaret Court, into a match—for which she did not train or prepare—and won, King accepted the challenge, because she understood the power of a symbol. She trained hard and joined in the hype. At the Houston Astrodome, the two contestants met at center
court. Riggs entered the arena in a ricksha pulled by “Bobby’s bosom buddies,” five young women in skimpy attire. King appeared on a brilliant red divan borne by four men in Roman slave costume. Riggs’ hustle worked. Las Vegas bookies set the odds at 5 to 2 in his favor, but King won the three sets with ease 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.
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Shouts of jubilation echoed in homes and bars across the country. For a moment, at least, it seemed that nothing could hold women back. From the protests of a few militants the Second Wave had swept to the forefront of American society, changing everything from language, to etiquette, to who cooks dinner and who can be a sports star.

The national organizations, campaigns, and institutions feminists built in the golden years only hint at the massive upsurge in state and local activism. Yet it is too easy to tell the story as if the movement was invincible and internally consistent. Within the growing surge of the feminist tidal wave the undertow of internal strife always coexisted with innovation and creativity.

CHAPTER 4
Undertow

E
VEN AS THE MOVEMENT
gathered strength, as Billie Jean King whipped Bobby Riggs (1973) and women’s groups pushed the ERA through Congress (1972), there were signs of trouble for anyone who was looking for them. The paucity of memoirs from the first years of the Second Wave until recently indicates that in these years intense pain and ecstasy, utopian expectation and despair, were sides of the same coin. Dana Densmore recalled with some puzzlement that her Boston group (later Cell 16) published a journal in August 1968 with no name and no date. “Looking back as editor and publisher of some of the later six issues, it seems strange that it never occurred to us to date the first issue, but it accurately reflected our state of mind then. We didn’t foresee an orderly future that would in turn become history and require documentation. Instead, we saw ourselves on the verge of a great upheaval. Perhaps it was like the anticipation of the end of the world for early Christians.”
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Like the nineteenth century American apocalyptic believers, these activists were destined to suffer great disappointment. The undertow of division and internal conflict, however, was part and parcel of feminism’s creative power. Conflict and creativity alike flowed from utopian hopes in a turbulent historical context, and each flourished on the boundary between public and private, political and personal.

Feminist radicals were hardly the only apocalyptic activists in the late sixties and early seventies. Violence was ubiquitous—in Vietnam, in urban riots, on campuses like Kent State and Jackson State where the National Guard killed demonstrating students, in a few acts and a lot of talk of political terrorism (banks bombed and robbed, a campus building
blown up), and in widespread talk of “revolution,” whatever that meant. It was an era of immense countercultural experimentation with new ways of living—from diet to work to sexuality to family formations. It was also a time of high hopes in which change increased at an exponential rate, leaving people dizzy and breathless, whether with exhilaration, dread, or despair. By the middle seventies, as if in reaction, the country seemed to have retreated into the imagined safety of private life, earning the (mis)nomer “the me decade.”

Challenging old rules, activists analyzed the many ways that traditional hierarchical structures enforced the subordination of women. While looking for ways not to replicate the evils they wished to overthrow, they sometimes made new rules as rigid as the old. Wave after wave of division swept around the country, wracking some groups with conflict, touching others only slightly, leaving some individuals too wounded to continue while others found new and more effective ways to carry on. Many of the battles in retrospect seem as difficult to grasp as ancient debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but they were immensely real to participants, and they set up a dynamic that persisted for decades. It may help to imagine this process of internal disintegration and re-creation to look at one example, in this case the history of the women’s liberation movement in Washington, D.C. between 1968 and 1971. It was born, grew large and complex, and then imploded over one of the many “splits” that occurred around the country, in this case the “gay-straight” split. The group that forced this explosion called themselves “the Furies.” They did not last long, but their ideas remained influential, appearing and reappearing in other contexts for years to come. Having explored this case study, we can look at the broader pattern it exemplifies and reflect on the historical reasons and the dynamics within the movement that made these creative years simultaneously so divisive, fusing political innovation with personal and ideological discord.

W
OMEN
’
S LIBERATION
in the District grew from the New Left in 1968. With leadership from Charlotte Bunch and Marilyn Webb based at the Institute for Policy Studies, D.C. Women’s Liberation grew rapidly but
was plagued by persistent self-criticism. How could radicals be sure they were revolutionary rather than merely Band-Aid reformists? In the summer of 1969, one subgroup issued a paper complaining that “Washington Women’s Liberation is presently without energy or passion, amorphous with respect to priorities, … undefined with respect to strategy and organizationally uncoordinated.” A second group responded that this approached the problem backward, that it was useless to create a structure before reaching political agreement. Liberation, in the latter view, was “not possible given a system of capitalism; it is only possible to think about after that system is destroyed.”
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Given the high polemical pitch of the remnants of the New Left around them, most of the women involved shrank from the debate itself, choosing instead to continue working in a variety of projects on the assumption that a common political analysis would emerge from this practice.

So the women in the District worked, and their projects proliferated. The “do-everything” ethos of early women’s liberation was as exhilarating in D.C. as everywhere else. Playgroups led to the creation of a day care center. Proliferating invitations to speak to high school classes inspired an education project. Discussions of physical vulnerability produced self-defense classes. Participation in environmental activities (the first Earth Day was April 22, 1970) prompted a women and ecology study group and a paper on the link between sexism and environmental destruction, long before anyone had heard of eco-feminism. Activists freely, and playfully, conducted WITCH actions, among them hexing the Justice Department as a bastion of male supremacy.

But their longing for fundamental change could make it difficult to carry through on more short-term activist successes. For example, health care activists worried that abortion counseling was insufficiently radical, and yet as elsewhere the demand for it would not abate. They formed a brief alliance with a welfare rights group to explore the links between racism and women’s health issues. Later they disrupted congressional hearings on the pill to demand attention to the risks to women from the new medication that had not been widely tested (indeed, early hormone doses in the pill were very high). Out of this came national attention, a national survey, and a sit-in at the office of HEW
Secretary Finch when he failed to carry out a promise to include warnings in every package of birth control pills. Yet in each case success and self-criticism went hand in hand. In retrospect this intervention had a long-term impact, but its initiators floundered strategically, unclear how to link a specific issue to their broader vision. Thus, health care activists concluded in 1971 that “we were not successful, however, in making this a useful local organizing project; only a few women were continuously and actively involved after the Finch sit-in; we were unsure where to move next with the issue.”
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D.C. Women’s Liberation rented an apartment, set up an office and a coordinating committee called Magic Quilt [designed to discourage takeover efforts by the Socialist Workers’ Party], offered courses, sponsored projects, saw the movement grow in Washington suburbs, and began to spin off “collectives” that hoped to avoid the stifling slowness of consensus-based decision making.
Off our backs
was one of the first collectives and it grew rapidly into one of the most important national feminist newspapers. Playfully named groups like Daughters of Lilith and Coral Conspiracy and an experimental women’s commune all set out to figure out what to do in the stage beyond initial consciousness-raising. Each in turn was charged with elitism.
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