Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (6 page)

Throughout 1968 and 1969 the women’s liberation movement grew at an accelerating rate. The belief among movement founders that they were starting a revolutionary process was confirmed by the overwhelming response they met at every turn. It was not necessary to have well-developed organizing skills: just to say the words “women’s liberation” seemed to be enough. No one was keeping a list—and many groups existed without the knowledge of others nearby—but the experience in city after city was that groups would form and multiply almost effortlessly. In some places, like New York City, where the movement tended to be highly ideological, multiplication often looked like sectarian hairsplitting. Alice Echols and others have described how New York Radical Women spawned WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Redstockings, which in turn spawned the Feminists. What was really “radical?” Were women’s rights, outside a broader left coalition, necessarily “bourgeois” and “reformist?” Or was the left itself a captive of patriarchal thinking? If “women’s liberation” was the only truly revolutionary movement, what defined its radicalism? How could it escape hierarchy? Were sexual relationships with men a form of consorting with the enemy? The solutions were not clear, but it was the energy of the debate and the passion with which participants engaged these new ideas that spilled out into dozens of mimeographed articles, manifestos, newsletters, and, by 1970, journals, including Notes from the
First Year
(New York),
Up from Under
(New York),
No More Fun and Games
(Boston),
Women: A Journal of Liberation
(Baltimore),
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
(Chicago),
Ain’t I a Woman?
(Iowa City),
The Voice of the Women’s Liberation Front
(Chicago), It
Ain’t Me Babe
(Berkeley) and its spin-off paper,
The Women’s Page, Everywoman
(Los Angeles),
Tooth and Nail
(Bay Area),
Sister
(Los Angeles), and
And Ain’t I a Woman?
(Seattle).

From the outset, this movement: was led by young women in their twenties, veterans of sixties activism. Women’s liberation groups appeared on virtually every large campus, to be sure, but they were equally
represented off campus. Numbers are difficult to come by, but without question by 1970, women’s liberation was on the tip of everyone’s tongue and the initiators were in a mad struggle to find the head of the parade!

At this explosive stage, however, cracks appeared between radical activists of color and white activists. Many women’s liberation groups, for example, emulated the rhetoric of black nationalism, a politics of identity that emphasized separatism, familial analogies (“sisterhood”), personal storytelling, and sameness. They were oblivious to what Shirley Lim calls their “social capital,” the shared networks, language, and experience that made calling a meeting easy and intimacy among strangers almost immediate.
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They also believed, with some reason, that militant black women were not interested. Like others in the white New Left, many women’s liberation groups supported the Black Panther Party, oblivious to its virulent sexism, which was only recently described by women in the party, such as Elaine Brown and Kathleen Cleaver.
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Thus it is ironic, but not really surprising, that radical feminist groups were overwhelmingly white—even more so than their liberal counterparts.

In the summer of 1968, when radical women met to plan a national gathering for the fall, they debated a proposal to invite the participation of black women by contacting Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party. Yet, one participant argued successfully against such an overture by drawing on her own experience in welfare organizations, where militant black women “set the tone and they manage to completely cow white women…. I understand the problem. But they hold the cards on oppression … and they let white women know it. I don’t want to go to a conference and hear a black militant woman tell me she is more oppressed and what am I going to do about it.”
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In fact, radical white women could not imagine a way to reach out to feminists in racial minority groups because of their own definitions of “militancy” and the authority they accorded separatist black leaders. They were oblivious to the existence, for example, of a group of black women in Mount Vernon and New Rochelle, New York, who by 1969 were actively engaged in an analysis of the problems facing black women in the economy, in the family, and in the movement. In a series of passionate papers they announced
that “It is time for the black woman to take a look at herself, not just individually and collectively, but historically,” rejecting their “black brothers[’] … continual cautioning that we must not move on our own or we will divide the movement…. [B]lack revolutionary women are going to be able to smash the last myths and illusions on which all the jive-male oppressive power depends.”
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Most militant black women were also oblivious to the existence of black women’s liberation groups, and they quickly perceived the women’s liberation movement as white. Fearing co-optation, subordination of the goals of black liberation, and division between women and men in the black movement, many black women expressed disdain: “I don’t think any of them are real people involved in anything real…. God only knows what their goals are. To me, maybe a lot of publicity for White women to say aren’t we great.” That many militant black women also expressed a level of empathy, identification, and support for the specific goals of economic equity and elimination of sex discrimination in employment was obscured, however, by their overwhelming emphasis on racial solidarity.
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Indeed, given the strong focus on racial group identity in the late sixties and early seventies, it is not surprising that activist women of color began to challenge the men in their organizations at about this same time, but their organizing rarely reached across racial lines, even to other women of color. Within the Chicano movement, for example, women began to hold workshops at least by 1969, but feminists were immediately stigmatized. “Women’s lib” and “women’s libbers” became epithets used to characterize Chicana feministas “as man-haters, frustrated women, and ‘aggringadas,’ Anglo-cized.”
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In 1969 at a Chicano Youth Conference in Denver, the workshop on women reported its consensus that “the Chicana does not want to be liberated.” Nonetheless, pressure to address women’s issues continued to grow. In 1970, a women’s workshop at the Mexican American National Issues Conference in Sacramento voted to create the Comision Feminil Mexicana, an independent organization. Their founding resolution stated that “the effort of Chicana/Mexican women in the Chicano movement is generally obscured because women are not accepted as community leaders either
by the Chicano movement or by the Anglo establishment.“
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They immediately set out to work on such issues as child care (both legislation and establishing centers), abortion, establishing communication with government agencies to give voice to Chicana concerns, and setting up opportunities for leadership training. Like other small groups, “it has also infused more humor into [members’] work. Now, they can laugh as well as cry about personal problems. A means to discuss anxieties, fears, ask questions that could never be asked of others is available through members of the organization.”
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Through 1970, Chicanas organized women’s workshops and caucuses at numerous conferences and Chicano journals planned special issues on women, despite continuing criticism.
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When Jennie Chavez wrote an article about Mexican-American women’s liberation in the University of New Mexico student newspaper, she “caught more shit than I knew existed from both males and females in the movement.” Nevertheless, she organized a women’s group, Las Chicanas, that grew strong despite ridicule.
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This ferment culminated at the first national conference of Chicana activists in Houston, May 1971, when 600 women gathered, eager to discuss their roles in the movement and to create an agenda for Latinas. About a third of those attending, however, defined themselves as “loyalists” not “feminists.” One participant recalled that “… the fears of being associated with non-movement activities hung over the conference like a confusing and disorganizing paranoia” until the loyalists finally walked out, protesting a resolution declaring that “traditional roles are, for Chicanas, no longer acceptable or applicable.”
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Similarly Asian-American women and American Indian women began to analyze the problems facing women in their own groups and to organize despite accusations that to do so was divisive. Asian-American students who met in an Asian studies seminar at Berkeley started a group “to critically examine and discuss our roles as Asian women. Significantly, our efforts have been met with enthusiasm, hostility, curiosity, understanding, caution, relief, anger, joy and always—controversy.” Out of their discussions came a journal,
Asian Women
.
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Specific historical realities, however, made it difficult to identify broadly with all
women. Not only were most minority women attuned to racial solidarity, but also their responses to specific issues, such as the family or abortion, had a different resonance in each group. The writings of Asian-American feminists, for example, articulate the difficulty they faced in overcoming their own socialization in a culture that overtly devalued women and inculcated values of obedience and filial piety. The daughters and granddaughters of immigrants whose parents remembered internment camps during World War II and lives of harsh and menial labor, they also resented the economic privileges of most women.
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Native American women, by contrast, spoke about their heritage of ancient traditions of female power, which had been eroded by the imposition of white forms of government; families that had never been small and nuclear; and issues regarding land, education, health, and sheer survival. Their women’s organizations in the 1970s defined their mission in relation to the Indian community as a whole.
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Thus, although within 2-3 years there were women’s caucuses, workshops, journals, and/or organizations in virtually every racially identified group, the women’s liberation movement continued to be perceived as predominantly white. In contrast to racial minorities, white women, as members of a racial majority, were the norm, rarely thinking of themselves in racial terms, and they felt no pressure to sustain a political connection based on shared oppression with white men. As a result they found it easy to identify themselves with “all women” and to assume that their analyses and ideas could and should apply to all. “Intimacy and mutuality,” as Shirley Lim has pointed out, was premised on “exclusivity.”
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In such a situation the difficulties facing any interracial coalition of women were profound, and they shaped the subsequent evolution of the women’s movement. Those who made a serious effort to work on issues of common concern usually stumbled.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison described an attempt to work across racial lines among parents at a school in Brooklyn in 1971, who organized a “sex roles” committee to press for curricular change: “When black women attended Sex Roles Committee meetings, those meetings were occasions for bewilderment, acrimony, anger, and pain. We wanted a feeling of solidarity with black women, both because it was an emotional
necessity for us, and because we deemed it a tactical necessity to present a united front to the school. But the differences between black women and white women were so profound that goodwill, kindness, and intelligence were not always enough.” White women idealized black women, imagining them to be united and strong. Black women were not really all that united, but they did share a deep anger toward white women, whose solicitude seemed condescending and who didn’t really see racism as the most important issue. Interactions were difficult. In the face of black women’s anger, white women remained silent, acquiescent. Vulnerable to the criticism that the women’s movement was white and middle class, “we needed the black women … to assuage our guilt and to disarm our critics.”
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When Harrison interviewed several black women at length, she discovered some of the issues and realities that undergirded their anger: “My mother took care of rich white kids.” “I didn’t think they were oppressed; I thought they were cowards.”
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Another woman pointed out that white women’s capitulation was part of a useless rhetorical dance: “… you people got sucked in every time. Why did you fall all over yourselves when guilt was laid on you? … When black women are doing their thing by showing off and whites do their thing by accepting guilt, we’re nowhere.”
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Feminists of color had to wage a lonely struggle to find a feminist voice of their own in these first years. Fran Beal founded the Women’s Liberation Committee of SNCC in 1968. She recalled shivering in a Harlem doorway in the winter of 1970, gathering courage to give an invited speech to “… a group of nationalists who preached that the demand for women’s rights was a white plot to divide the black Liberation Movement, that abortion was genocide, and that women should be supporting the men’s new-found ‘manhood’ by walking ten steps behind. I was the designated hitter and felt as if I was about to become the main attraction at a metaphorical lynching party.” She gave her talk, and “[w]hile no one called for my head, no one stood and supported our views. As I exited the room, however, two young women whispered to me, ‘Right on, sister.’ I never forgot those quiet expressions of support….”
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