Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (2 page)

The origins of this deep contradiction can be located historically in the nature of women’s subordination in the United States after World War II and in the political context of racial conflict and identity politics at the time of the feminist rebirth in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The creative side of the movement has flourished despite political repression, and indeed often in response to it. Fragmentation and self-destruction have also been driven at different times by economic downturns and government surveillance and infiltration and in the 1980s by a governmentally sanctioned backlash. Yet feminism is still alive and well at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Having accomplished, at least partially, many of its goals, there are many aspects of feminism that have become so much part of the mainstream (language, laws, labor force, and
access to professional education) we take them for granted. In addition, current forms of feminist activism are not particularly oriented toward visibility in the sense of large public demonstrations. It is less discernible than it has been in recent decades. Such an eclipse is dangerous, however, as the history of feminist activism represents a heritage new generations need if they are to re-create it yet again.

One of the motives behind the writing of this book is my own awareness that the loss of historical memory would have far-reaching consequences. It would force future generations to invent feminism as if they had no shoulders on which to stand, repeating the unfortunate experience of many in the 1960s. It took some time for the emerging feminist movement to recover its own roots and realize that this was not the first time such issues had been raised and fought for. For example, the so-called “first wave,” the fight for woman suffrage, had waxed and waned over the course of a century and in the 1910s it had blossomed into a many-sided movement that mobilized the energies of hundreds of thousands of women. In those years, women’s rights gave birth to feminism’s rebellious cultural criticism, although it never responded to the demands of African-American women for full inclusion. By the end of the 1930s, however, “feminism” had been marginalized into a narrow, single-issue movement for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
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In the 1950s, as the generation that would initiate the “second wave” was coming of age, feminism, as either a set of ideas or a social movement, was virtually invisible. Perhaps this explains why such a large number of activists became professional historians. Certainly I am not the only historian who wishes to spare the next generation the rage we experienced about having been cut off from our own history in all its complexity.

The loss of historical memory between the great suffrage victory in 1920 and the post-World War II era has sobering parallels to the late twentieth century. The 1920s, like the late 1980s and 1990s, were a time when individualism flowered among women. In both these eras of flashy wealth, blotting out the continuing reality of desperate poverty, middle-class women gained new access to education and to a broader range of paid jobs and young women engaged in sexual experimentation and lifestyles that offered consumption as a primary form of self-expression.
Women’s battles, they believed, had been won. “Feminism” was a label that restricted their individuality when all they had to do was go ahead and live out their equality. As Dorothy Dunbar Bromley wrote in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1927:

“Feminism” has become a term of opprobrium to the modern young woman. For the word suggests either the old school of fighting feminists who wore flat heels and had very little feminine charm, or the current species who antagonize men with their constant clamor about maiden names, equal rights, woman’s place in the world, and many another cause … ad infinitum.
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In the 1920s, the white women’s movement split in two. It was rent by the conflicting goals of social reformers, on the one hand, for whom women’s suffrage was part of a broader agenda that ultimately shaped key aspects of the New Deal and the emerging welfare state, and the National Women’s Party, on the other, which focused single-mindedly on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to complete the process of establishing legal, constitutional equality for women. As that battle erupted again and again in the 1920s, 1930s, and into the 1940s, “women’s rights” and “feminism” took on increasingly narrow and distant connotations, feeding popular images of feminists as shrill, elitist, “mannish,” and antifamily. Younger women were not recruited, and by the 1950s feminism was so thoroughly marginalized that most young women were entirely unaware of it.

There are significant differences between the interwar era (1920-1940) and the last 20 years, but the similarities are striking nonetheless. The conservative attack on the women’s movement has trumpeted the same themes for more than a century, warning against “mannish” women and the endangered patriarchal family. In the 1970s, aroused conservatives like Phyllis Schlafley attacked feminists as “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.” She went on to characterize the new journal,
Ms
., as “a series of sharptongued, high-pitched, whining complaints by unmarried women. They view the home as a prison, and the wife and mother as a slave.”
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The Republican ascendancy led by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s endowed antifeminists like Schlafley with intellectual authority and placed people who agreed with her in major administrative posts. Writers like George Gilder, who had insisted since the early 1970s that “women’s place is in the home,” became intellectual insiders, blaming feminists (most of whom in his view were single mothers, lesbians, or simply unmarried) for destroying the moral fabric of America with demands for day care.
⁴
Despite the Republican embrace of the traditional patriarchal family, the 1980s were also an era of rampant individualism and high consumption. Like the twenties, they were a time when educated women could experiment with newly available opportunities—for careers as well as sexual encounters. As early as 1982, Susan Bolotin wrote in the
New York Times
that women then in their twenties were a “post-feminist” generation. Typically they told her, “I don’t label myself a feminist. Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I’m a lesbian and that I hate men.” A conservative young woman, Rachel Flick, contended feminism had become “an exclusively radical, separatist, bitter movement.” Young women just out of college, confident in their ability to find well-paying jobs and to make it on their own, saw feminists as shrill, bitter, ugly, and lacking a “sense of style.”
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By 1991, Paula Kammen lamented the resulting loss to her generation, which came of age in the 1980s when “young feminists didn’t seem to exist.” With no access to consciousness-raising experiences or other links to prior generations, they were defenseless against the stigma of feminism. All they knew were the stereotypes: “The twisted, all-too-common logic about feminists goes like this: If you stand up for women, you must hate men. Therefore, you must be angry. Thus, you must be ugly and can’t get a man anyway. Hence, you must be a dyke.”
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The attacks on feminism, however, were far more intense in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1920s and 1930s. Radio talk shows, for example, fill the airwaves with venomous attacks on “femininazis” (a term coined by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh) and use feminism as a foil for expressions of discontent about an enormous range of issues. As an indicator of the major difference between these eras, this suggests that feminism in the late twentieth century, in contrast to the
1920s and 1930s, had continued to be a powerful and ever-changing force in American life, generating new organizations, new issues, and new ideas. It would be a mistake, then, to take the critics at face value. Rather, one must read their venom as a response to something they perceive to be very powerful, and there lies a clue to the story that must now be told.

In this chapter, I describe the necessity of this history, my own argument about the nature and the trajectory of the movement from the mid-1960s to today, and my relationship to the project as both participant and historian. Chapter 2 summarizes the origins of the Second Wave, the dual vision of founders from two generations focused respectively on equality and liberation and the new political terrain created by the process of consciousness-raising. Chapter 3 explores the creative innovations of the “golden years” during which this new movement generated massive changes in laws, revived the battle for the ERA, and founded a vast array of new organizations and institutions. Chapter 4 wrestles with the realities of internal conflict and fragmentation that coexisted with the generative excitement of those early years. It argues that there are historically specific reasons that conflict intensified in the middle 1970s. Chapter 5 analyzes new aspects of the movement in the middle to late 1970s, often emerging out of conflict. The paradox of feminism becomes clearer as we analyze its continuing process of transformation and rebirth. The demise of early women’s liberation produced socialist and cultural feminism and a multitude of new institutions ranging from health clinics and shelters to women’s studies programs and journals. At the same time, activists in the policy arena consolidated many gains with their connections to the Carter administration (1967-1980) and shared the international ferment generated by the United Nations International Women’s Year conferences. Chapter 6 challenges the story of decline in the 1980s, recognizing on the one hand the reality of backlash but on the other the revival of feminism in new forms (e.g., Emily’s list) and within mainstream institutions, such as schools and churches. Chapter 7 finds feminism in the early 1990s becoming stronger as a new generation rearticulates the necessity of feminism in a world already fundamentally changed by the women’s
movement. Backlash against feminism, framed as an attack on “political correctness,” had become an obsession for political conservatives. Feminism grew stronger in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, however, and it also drew strength from the massive growth of global women’s rights activism in the developing world.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1992 at a cabin on a small lake in Ontario, I joined five other women for the second reunion of a women’s liberation group that had met between 1968 and 1970 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had just begun to think about the project: that evolved into this book, so I asked permission to tape a discussion about the meaning of our shared experience both at the time and in our subsequent lives. Very quickly it became clear that Group 22 (as we called ourselves back then) had been a transforming experience even for those who participated only for a year. The spirit of Group 22 captures some of the excitement of the feminist revival in the late 1960s and was typical of many others. We believed we were changing the world and that what we did could make a difference. The group offered a new freedom from marginalization for women with aspirations for both meaningful work and motherhood. We experimented and created institutions, read about and corresponded with other groups, and in many ways changed our lives permanently.

Group 22 convened in the summer of 1968 when Paula Goldsmid and I both moved to North Carolina from Chicago, where we had met in another consciousness-raising group. I was returning to North Carolina after 9 months of immersion in the newborn women’s liberation movement. Previously, as an undergraduate at Duke, I had been active in civil rights, union support, and antiwar work. It was sheer luck that I happened to be in Chicago in 1967-1968, where I stumbled into one of the founding women’s liberation groups known as the West Side Group. A neophyte in these national movement networks, I remember myself as one of the silent ones in a group of powerful, brilliant women. I was a sponge, thrilled by the effortless way the movement seemed to grow as group members reported new start-ups every month and travelers from New York, Washington, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Seattle, Berkeley, and Los Angeles came through town with tales of newly forming
women’s liberation groups. That year in Chicago I must have joined four or five different groups as they emerged, each of which dove into the debates: Just what was the problem for women? Why were they subordinate? What kinds of activism should we initiate to bring about change? While we talked about grand strategies, we experimented with tactics: skits in laundromats and at subway stops (known as guerrilla theater), leaflets, caucuses within community organizations and unions, and special women’s workshops at meetings related to the antiwar movement or civil rights. For the moment it seemed that everything worked. The response was electric. As it dawned on us that a new movement was coming into being, we had a thrilling sense that we could, in fact, make history. Women’s liberation provided a space where our yen to make the world a better place felt like it had no bounds. I returned to North Carolina in the summer of 1968 with missionary fervor to build the movement. As soon as Paula arrived, we called a meeting.

When Group 22 sputtered into being in 1968, it was the first women’s liberation group in North Carolina. We had no name at first, but as new groups quickly spun off or formed independently, such labels as the “single women’s group” or the “older women’s group” seemed clumsy. So we decided to number ourselves—not hierarchically but randomly, choosing numbers that pleased us: 22 was Paula’s favorite number. By early 1970 Group 22 had transformed itself into a children’s book writing and publishing collective called Lollipop Power. As Lollipop Power, Inc., it persisted until the mid-1980s, long after most originators moved away.

The early members of Group 22 were in many ways homogeneous, brought together through friendship, school, and work networks: white, college-educated, some of us veterans of the civil rights and student movements. During 1968-1969, many came only once or twice. Those of us who stayed found something there that changed our lives in ways we had been yearning for. Like my Chicago groups, and every other consciousness-raising (CR) group around the country, we searched for ways to ask, and answer, the “big questions.” Why are women’s choices so limited? How do they internalize a stereotyped view of themselves? Is it biology? How can we raise children without imposing
limiting stereotypes? Is it possible to redefine relationships between women and men—marriage, sexuality, parenthood?