Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (23 page)

The Houston conference, consisting of about 2,000 delegates and 18,000 additional observers, made clear that the women’s movement had spread well beyond its original white, middle-class base: 35 percent of the delegates were nonwhite and nearly one in five was low-income. Protestants represented 42 percent of the delegates, Catholics 26 percent, and Jews 8 percent.33 Those who had organized the conference and developed the proposed plan came together in the conference as a “Pro-Plan Caucus” pledged to work to see that their agenda was endorsed. The gathering was unruly, however, and delegates could not be simply told what to do. There were active caucuses for minority women,
lesbians, and numerous others, and the process of passing the plan became yet another exercise in coalition building. When the conference adopted, by significant majorities, the Plan for Action, with the ERA as its centerpiece and major planks on reproductive freedom and minority and lesbian rights, the delegates were elated. Abzug recalled,

One of the high moments of the conference came when a group of women—Maxine Waters, a young black assemblywoman from California; Billie Nave Masters, a Native American teacher; Mariko Tse, a Japanese-American; Sandy Serrano Sewell, President of the Commission Feminil Mexicana; and Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr.—took turns reading sections of a revised plank on minority women that they, with Gloria Steinem of the resolutions committee, had worked on for two days. It was another expression of the remarkable unity … that made the conference unique. ‘Let the message go forth from Houston,’ Coretta King said, ‘and spread all over this land. There is a new force, a new understanding, a new sisterhood against all injustice that has been born here. We will not be divided and defeated again.’
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Two key behind the scenes figures at the Houston convention were Gloria Steinem, who quietly mediated the relationships among the various minority caucuses and the convention leadership, and Charlotte Bunch, who had long since left separatism behind to work on building broad-based coalitions.
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The Plan of Action itself made it clear that any sharp division between liberals and radicals no longer made any sense: radicals had brought many of their agendas into mainstream feminist venues, although the planks on abortion and lesbianism in particular provoked intense divisions even as they were adopted. The contacts and conflicts among differing groups of women made for a powerful experience that crossed many of the earlier divisions. One small state delegation of 12, including three Native American women, “developed a deep level of intimacy … as the hours went on.” One of the whites in the group recalled that “we grew to respect each other’s opinions and ended
up influencing the delegation on issues, such as reproductive freedom and lesbianism, which the Native Americans had previously been against. When the Minorities resolution passed, we all danced in the aisle and cried tears of joy.” Other delegates reported stereotype-shattering conversations on coffee breaks.
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One Republican feminist recalled, “Inside the cocoon of those four days of Houston, we women found sisterhood—that universal sense of being together honorably for a great cause. Even now, nearly twenty years later, women who don’t know each other will find themselves reminiscing about Houston in the same way war veterans, strangers on sight, quickly become close as they talk about Normandy, Inchon, or Hue.”
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As the conference had approached, however, opposition grew. The Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America insisted that a Klan presence was necessary “to protect our women from all those militant lesbians who are going to be there.” Phyllis Schlafley’s Eagle Forum organized a rally “for the family” of 11,000 men, women, and children on the other side of town during the opening session of the IWY conference. In his keynote address, California Congressman Robert Dornan called the IWY delegates “sick, anti-God, pro-lesbian and unpatriotic.”
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Conference leaders and participants alike went home thrilled by the power of their experience but sobered by the recognition that a counterforce of opposition was also growing.

A N
EW
G
ENERATION OF
F
EMINIST
R
ADICALISMS

E
VEN AS FEMINISM
radicalized the mainstream and the early women’s liberation groups seemed to disintegrate, a new generation of highly influential Utopian visions evolved out of women’s liberation. By 1975, both “cultural feminism” and “socialist feminism” were in full sway. Historian Alice Echols has lamented what she sees as cultural feminism’s eclipse of the radical feminism epitomized by the early women’s liberation groups that sought to create a women’s “class consciousness” for the eradication of sex roles. There were two succeeding visions, however, not one, and they were equally rooted in the earliest years of
women’s liberation. Socialist feminism struggled to build a multicultural feminism that embraced a broad vision of economic equality. Early women’s liberation groups self-destructed rather quickly, having fixed an enormous range of issues indelibly on the public consciousness with their rape speak-outs, Miss America demonstrations, and WITCH actions, but socialist feminism grew more slowly, with more focus on organizing than on ideological purity (at least at first), and only later succumbed to very similar internal combustion. Cultural feminism focused on creating a “women’s culture” including art, music, and a variety of woman-run institutions. Given its primary emphasis on lifestyle, cultural feminism drew much of its energy from the emergence of a lesbian community, now visible to itself and open to the world for the first time. This evolution of the sexual revolution was only an aspect of cultural feminism, but its influence grew very quickly because the environments called “women’s culture,” whether living collectives or music festivals, were for lesbians in particular an utterly new kind of public space. At the same time, each of those environments could also be a stage for the many conflicts that haunted feminism in its Utopian forms.

To understand how socialist and cultural feminism came to the fore by the mid-1970s, it helps to see their roots in the youth movements that originally gave birth to women’s liberation and then trace their evolution from the early women’s groups. Cultural feminists drew from the cultural experimentation of the “hippie” counterculture that proposed new, supposedly more “natural” lifestyles with an emphasis on environmental consciousness, on pleasure and self-expression through sex and drugs, on communal lifestyles, and on individual, frequently artistic creativity. Socialist feminists, on the other hand, were the direct heirs of the New Left critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and racism.

The impulses that drove cultural feminism were separatist (women are a people whose liberation will consist in building strong, self-sufficient communities), essentialist (women are different from men by nature—nurturing, earth-loving, cooperative, and peaceful), and esthetic (women’s ways of being and expressing themselves in music, art, poetry, literature, and ritual are unique; freeing these capacities will allow the creation of an affirming women’s culture, which has been suppressed
under eons of patriarchy). In many ways, cultural feminism drew on the common sense of most cultures that assumes a fundamental difference between women and men, except they turned negative stereotypes of women as “weak” and “emotional” on their head to celebrate women as “nurturing” and “relationship-oriented.” Cultural feminism’s goal was to revalue and reaffirm the female, in contrast to the earliest expressions of women’s liberation that rejected the idea that there was anything “essential” about being a woman.

Cultural feminism found expression in an enormous range of alternative service institutions, women’s businesses, and cultural events. Its assumptions also found their way into liberal feminist organizations and mainstream institutions far from the feminist counterculture. It did not so much spring up as an alternative to other feminist visions as it evolved out of them. Certainly cultural feminist ideas appeared in women’s liberation gatherings as early as 1968. Beverly Jones, at Sandy Springs in the summer of 1968, talked about facing a problem” … analogous to black people deciding whether they want a separate state, a separate community.”
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Her colleague Judy Brown asserted that the democratic nature of women’s liberation groups “ … is a much more female type of thing.”
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No one strongly advocated an essential difference between women and men, but many who insisted that men were “the enemy” also maintained that “cultural oppression” was more fundamental than economic oppression. “The idea is to talk about cultural demands politically.”
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As in the black separatist movement, there was a fuzzy line between those who advocated separatism on purely political, strategic grounds to create solidarity and collective power (e.g. the Black Panthers) and those whose separatist vision embraced a cultural sense of “peoplehood” expressed in history, religion and ritual, and artistic expression (music, art, and theater). Those who called themselves radical feminists ultimately were hostile to the latter view, but in the first years, the differences were not so clear.

At the conference in November 1968 at Lake Villa, Illinois, alongside debates over the “correct” method of consciousness-raising
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and how to go about organizing women across class lines, were workshops on “Sex,” “Alternative Life Styles,” and “Human Expression—Play.”
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The alternative lifestyles workshop wrestled with the problem of “what it means to be ‘new women’” and tried to imagine communities that “can enable people to live such radical new styles.” Participants asked, “Can there exist within a total society, a subculture which would act as a support group to allow individuals to choose from a variety of life styles …?”
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On the last night of the conference, “almost spontaneously we came together feeling the freedom to move, shout, and respond to each other collectively…. Gradually game after game came to us collectively. We went around in circles singing poems about ourselves and expressing them physically. Somehow during this period we began to be more in touch with ourselves, [i]n touch with that gready stifled creativity which dwells in each of us.”
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Initially the debate over the “cultural oppression” of women centered on the ways women internalized negative images of themselves. By contrast, the discovery of female strength and creativity was exhilarating. Cultural themes emerged very quickly. In May 1969, the Female Liberation Conference in Boston offered workshops on karate, sex, women and the movement, women and their bodies, working women, high school women, the history and practice of witchcraft, and family, children, and communal living. Planners expected 200 attendees: 500 showed up.
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Many artists who began to explore feminist images and possibilities for the self believed they were creating a women’s culture. They wanted alternative ways to show as well as to produce their work, and they envisioned their audience primarily as other women. Those, like Judy Chicago, who claimed that female artists expressed uniquely female experiences posed a controversial but thrilling possibility for advocates of the new women’s culture. They posited the existence of “ … a different, women’s metaphysics and esthetics. No longer pale echoes of men, women [could be] seen to be generating from the deepest levels of the unconscious, a different universe.”
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The practice of living in communes led to the formation of all-woman “living collectives” even before the Furies initiated their explosive experiment. A participant in one such group in Iowa City recalled the summer of 1970 as the beginnings of “a female subculture” in a
house filled with discussions of women-identified women, “the constant playing of music sung by female singers, and being excited every time we discover[ed] another record by a woman.” Other women dropped by frequently, sparking spontaneous dances. Writing in 1971, the author said that while the collective had broken up over issues of “separatism, gayness, and feminism v. humanism…. The female sub-culture which has developed and grown here in Iowa City around the living collective during the past year will continue to grow mainly among those of us who are women-identified women.”
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In 1971 “The Fourth World Manifesto,” by a group of Detroit women, argued vigorously that “Although the concept of the ‘feminine’ was imposed upon women, we have, through the centuries, developed and created within the confines of the feminine, a female culture.”
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Careful not to suggest a biological basis for women’s difference, they built their argument on the claim that male dominance over women serves as the archetype for all other forms of domination. “We are proud of the female culture of emotion, intuition, love, personal relationships, etc. as the most essential human characteristics. It is our male colonizers—it is the male culture—who have defined essential humanity out of their identity who are ‘culturally deprived.’ … T
HE FEMALE CULTURE IS THE FOURTH WORLD
.”
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The Fourth World Manifesto was a harbinger of the shifts toward cultural feminism, full-blown.
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Soon, writers like Adrienne Rich were even going so far as to say that “feminism must imply an imaginative identification with all women …” and that male civilization, patriarchy, threatened life itself. “[W]e have come to an edge of history when men—insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea—have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included.”
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Elizabeth Gould Davis’s
The First Sex
provided grist for such imagining by arguing that there had been a matriarchal “Golden Age” destroyed by the rise of patriarchy.
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Rich celebrated the fact that Davis offered “ … a historical alternative to a society characterized by dominant, aggressive men and passive, victimized, acquiescent women.”
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Her own poems from 1971 to 1972, published as
Diving into the Wreck
, explored the suppression of the feminine (understood as the
principle of nurturance and empathy embodied in mothering) as well as more overt forms of discrimination. Women, still linked to that suppressed culture (“… an underground river/ forcing its way between deformed cliffs/ an acute angle of understanding/ moving itself like a locus of the sun/ into this condemned scenery”) hold the key to the vision of a redemptive future.
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