Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (3 page)

Some of these questions prompted action related to what quickly became a central theme of the group: how do we create new ways to raise children, for ourselves and for society? Three of us, who were pregnant when we met in the fall of 1968, planned and executed a child care cooperative in which six parents, mothers and fathers alike, took turns caring for three infants between 8:30 and 5:30 every weekday. It lasted only 1 year, but that cooperative made it: possible for me to begin graduate school in the fall of 1969. Several younger women split off to form their own CR group because they found our focus on childhood socialization not “relevant” to their immediate interests. For Group 22, however, partly because most of us had, or were about to have, children, and partly because we had a high concentration of sociologists, the ways that children “learn” to be female or male became the focus. In many other consciousness-raising groups, women talked about and thought through their own socializations. Instead, we were determined to find ways to
do
it differently and to make it possible to liberate children from the constraints of cultural prescription. Ultimately, the need to turn that concern into action led to the creation of Lollipop Power.

Before the first meeting, all of us had already embarked on life choices very different from those of our mothers’ generation. Yet more than 20 years later, participants remembered feeling that they were clueless about how to
live
those lives and how to deal with the internal and external criticism that seemed ubiquitous. Several described walking into their first meeting and feeling “at home” immediately. They talked about relief at experiencing social support for their efforts to combine mothering with careers. Even more important, I suspect, was that their strong-minded, outspoken, quirky individualism received affirmation in Group 22 rather than placing them on the margins. Two women, both already mothers, immediately changed their married names back to their birth names. The rest of us did not, but we cheered Linda when she created quite a fuss by refusing to register at the Chapel Hill hospital where she had gone for surgery until they agreed to list her records under her own name rather than her husband’s.
⁷

Group 22 was downright evangelical. Eager to spread the movement, we helped organize new groups, organized a newsletter so that multiplying groups could stay in touch, and participated in regional gatherings and workshops. We wanted answers (imagining naively that they existed), and we plugged through a mixture of turgid sociological “sex role” literature and angry mimeographed pamphlets that circulated from group to group around the country. In the days before the internet, the inexpensive mimeograph made it easy to disseminate ideas and essays. When we read them, we joined a national conversation about just what this movement was, what kind of change it should advocate, and possible strategies for getting there. Like our sisters across the country, we wanted to change things both in our own lives (renegotiating housework and child care with male partners was a big item) and in the world. In true countercultural style, we looked for gaps where we could create counterinstitutions. Disappointed with the children’s literature we knew, we started Lollipop Power and set out to write, edit, and publish our own. Three of us wrote the first three books, and we all vividly remembered that late night at the University of North Carolina campus Y when we and many friends and supporters printed, collated, and stapled our first book. The next year we waged a campaign to force the University of North Carolina to provide day care for employees and students. When that failed (despite a “baby-in” in the administration building), we founded the Community School for People Under Six, still in operation after three decades.

A look at the subjects of the first three Lollipop Power books reveals that our feminism was not markedly different from that of any liberal feminist group, though most of us thought of ourselves as radicals.
⁸
In simple picture-book stories, we scrambled sex roles—female heroines, moms who study, fathers who nurture—and conveyed a broad sense that girls (and boys) could do anything they choose.
Jenny’s Secret Place
, which I wrote, featured a 5-year-old girl who used her mother’s study desk as a secret place to dream about freedom, whose father baked her birthday cake, and who shared her secret with her little brother once she fulfilled her dream of learning to ride a two-wheel bicycle.
Did You Ever
showed, in rhymed couplets, that whether you were a girl or a boy
“you can do everything.”
Martins Father
described a single-parent family: a boy whose dad cooks, tucks him into bed, and takes him to day care. At first we had no prescriptions beyond our opposition to traditional sex roles.

We also knew that our experiences were not the same as those of all women, though we inevitably fell into language that presumed such commonality. Probably our greatest intolerance was toward the women we felt most judged by, those in earlier generations who, we believed, would accuse us of maternal failure for not choosing a life of total devotion to husband and children. Class difference was a major topic of discussion. We read Lee Rainwater and Mirra Komarovsky on the plight of poor and working-class housewives and told each other stories from our own backgrounds (which were considerably more varied than our current statuses, ranging from working-class ethnic immigrant to professional middle class).
⁹
There were many perspectives, in fact, that we had few ways to imagine.
¹⁰
When the Community School for People Under Six opened its doors in the fall of 1970 in the basement of a black church, the issue of race also became increasingly salient, though, to be honest, in those Black Power years we were mostly waiting for black women to tell us what to think about them. Not surprisingly, by the second or third year, Lollipop Power stories had begun deliberately to challenge the stereotypes of race and class.

Group 22 left a mark on the lives of all of its members. One founded the women’s caucus of the American Statistical Association and co-founded the women’s caucus of the American Public Health Association; another is a leading feminist scholar and activist in Canada; a third went on to direct the women’s studies program at Oberlin and moved from there into collegiate administration; a fourth built her career founding and running day care centers. Several find little direct linkage between their feminism and their current work lives except that they treasure their own independence and believe in their right to meaningful work. Some later came out as lesbians (a topic Group 22 never got around to discussing, although its successor groups certainly did).

In our group, those of us with children thought long and hard about how to raise a new, and different, generation. We realized we were doing
this without a compass. Sharing our stories two decades later, we acknowledged that we had all been humbled by the overwhelming power of culture. We asked each other sheepishly, Did your daughters get into Barbies? Did your sons play with guns? How did you get through the teen years? The answers were all over the map. It isn’t that we thought we’d be doing this in a vacuum but that we simply had no inkling about how to think. Frankly, the stories we told were not so different from stories about anybody else’s kids raised with a strong emphasis on tolerance and respect for others. With a sobered recognition of the role of sheer good luck, we took pleasure in describing the good people our kids have become and comfort in sharing the hard bumps along the way.

At least one member of Group 2 2 spoke with some bitterness about the impact of feminism on her life. She plunged into professional school, convinced that she could “do anything,” but the professional path she tried did not work out successfully. She finds herself now doing work that she does not love and finding pleasure in the details of private life. Our naive search for perfection became, for her, not only “you can” but “you should” and set a standard of expectation that was, finally, undermining. For most of us, however, the legacy of this group, as of thousands of others, is one of greater freedom and new possibility.

For me, the experience in Chicago followed by Group 22 and its successor groups became a springboard into my career as a historian. The questions raised in women’s groups about the origins of female subordination and the links between women’s liberation and other social movements around labor, peace, and civil rights led me to challenge the knowledge I had received as an undergraduate history major and a graduate student in political science. I recalled the single class in which women were acknowledged to have some historical agency: Anne Firor Scott drew on her research on southern white women to tell us about the importance of women in Progressive Era politics and their utter invisibility in existing historical accounts. At the time I had been too busy fighting other battles to think much about the implications, but several years later that experience endowed me with an unshakable belief that we could recover the stories of women in the past. Although there were no women teaching American history at the University of North Carolina
in 1969 and no courses on women’s history, several other students arrived with similar questions and we discovered that self-education was entirely possible simply by writing papers on women in connection with virtually any course. Little did we know that we were part of a cohort of several thousand across the country, collectively inventing women’s history as a major field of historical inquiry and women’s studies as a discipline. The first Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1972 drew 800 participants, to the astonishment of its organizers; 2 years later more than 1,500 scholars showed up for a second Berkshire Conference.

Having worked briefly as an organizer, and inspired by the organizers I had known in Chicago, my driving questions had to do with the origins and nature of collective action for change. How is it, I wondered, that those with less power find it possible to initiate change and to act together? How do women come to see themselves as a group with the capacity to make history? I looked at bread riots and strikes, but I also studied women in the Socialist Party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a rather transparent search for foremothers of the movement with which I identified. That led me to the subject of the dissertation I eventually wrote,
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left.
¹¹
By the time I embarked on that project in 1972, the women’s movement had become a massive and highly complex phenomenon. Its history, however, was already being told in ways I knew to be incorrect. The founding of the National Organization for Women could be recounted with ease, but the origins of the groups that called themselves women’s liberation were little understood and frequently described as something like an offshoot of NOW. Among feminist radicals, anger at men on the left framed a story in which women in the student movements of the sixties were so victimized that they were virtually driven to form a separate movement.
¹²
I knew that women’s liberation was not an offshoot of NOW, and from my Chicago and North Carolina experiences I knew that most early feminist activists saw women’s liberation as deeply rooted in their experiences in the civil rights movement and the New Left.

In
Personal Politics
I argued that parts of the southern civil rights
movement (especially the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC) and the community organizing projects of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) provided unique opportunities for young women to learn the skills of movement building as well as a set of democratic ideas and ideals (the “beloved community” in the civil rights movement; “participatory democracy” in SDS) that enabled them to challenge the sexism they experienced in the movement and in society. Those movements, in the early years at least, were certainly less sexist than American society as a whole. And the leadership of black women in the southern movement, women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and many others, provided white women reared in the domestic culture of the fifties with powerful role models. By the late sixties, however, both the civil rights and antiwar movements had adopted strongly masculine, even militaristic, language and methods of mass protest that eclipsed existing female leadership. The stage was set. Armed with hard-won skills, self-confidence, and the ideals acquired in civil rights work, groups of women began to turn these assets to their own use, frequently in response to those sparking moments when male arrogance tried to put them in their place. The parallels to the role of the abolition movement as a training ground for the first women’s rights movement in the United States were extremely strong. In both cases, also, despite the intimate link between the movements for racial justice and for women’s rights, the issues affecting women of color were treated as anomalies and frequently ignored. As feminism evolved in the late twentieth century, this would become both a central dilemma and a powerful theoretical concern.

Tidal Wave
is in some sense a sequel to
Personal Politics
, although the scope is substantially different. The first book analyzed the origins of one branch of the feminist movement that exploded into being in the late 1960s; this one traces the trajectory of that broader movement across the succeeding decades with an eye to understanding the shared dynamics that underlay its immense and complex diversity. The journey toward this book has been by turns inspiring and painful. It is a history that I, and many of my readers, have lived, yet from any particular vantage point the larger picture is difficult if not impossible to imagine. My
hope is to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the meanings of that larger picture,
¹³
as well as to affirm for future generations that they do indeed have a history, by turns glorious and distressing, on which they can build. With this heritage, there is no question that the women’s movement will continue to reinvent itself. History cannot predict when, or where, or how. It is simply a legacy, prickly and uneven and only partially understood, but nonetheless proof that women have already changed the world and that they will continue to do so.