Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (9 page)

Susan Griffin took this a step further in a pathbreaking article on rape in 1971: “
I HAVE NEVER BEEN FREE OF THE FEAR OF RAPE
,” she wrote. “
RAPE IS AN ACT OF AGGRESSION
in which the victim is denied her self-determination. It is an act of violence, which … always carries with it the threat of death. And finally, rape is a form of mass terrorism….”
⁸⁸

The first rape crisis hot line was established in Washington, D.C. in 1972, and rape crisis centers quickly emerged across the country, founded by women’s liberation groups and NOW chapters alike. By the mid-1970s, NOW chapters had formed more than 300 local and state rape task forces. Rape crisis centers provided counsel and advice to rape victims, assisted them in dealing with police and medical personnel, set up speaker’s bureaus, offered self-defense courses and training for health care professionals and police, and created support groups for victims.
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The movement to create shelters for battered women grew from a similar impulse. The first such shelter, Women’s Advocates in St. Paul, Minnesota, grew from a consciousness-raising group in 1971. They soon wrote a handbook on divorce and set up a telephone service to provide legal information. In response they were flooded with requests for emergency housing. They collected pledges to support the rent on a small apartment and a telephone answering service in 1973, but the demand was so great that members began taking women into their own homes. By 1974, when Women’s Advocates opened the first shelter, the collective already had 18 months experience working with battered women. Other shelters grew out of rape crisis hot lines and coalitions between battered women and feminist activists.
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T
HUS
,
CONSCIOUSNESS
-
RAISING
groups were the seedbeds for what grew into diverse movements around women’s health, abortion, and violence against women. Sexual politics took a different direction, however, when an overtly lesbian feminism was articulated in the late sixties
and early seventies. Anne Koedt’s pathbreaking article, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”—passed from hand to hand throughout the country before publication in
Notes from the First Year
—was a rousing call to sexual autonomy for women. She challenged the subordination of women’s desire to a model of sexuality codified in Freud’s assertion that there were two kinds of female orgasms, the immature “clitoral” orgasm and the mature “vaginal” orgasm. Koedt cited recent research by sexologists Masters and Johnson proving that all female orgasms were centered in the clitoris, which has many times more nerve endings than the relatively insensitive vagina.
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For heterosexuals, this suggested that women learn more about their own bodies, perhaps by reading
Our Bodies, Ourselves
or discussing orgasm and techniques of masturbation in a CR group and using that information to claim an equal right to sexual pleasure in relations with men. On the other hand, Koedt’s suggestion that the penis was irrelevant to female sexual response led some to advocate celibacy and others to argue the superiority of lesbian relations.

Lesbianism, however, was still a strong social taboo. The many lesbians active in the various branches of the emerging women’s movement were generally silent about their own sexuality. The personal bent of feminist discourse made that silence increasingly painful and rankling, as did the emergence of gay liberation in late 1969. Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love described their experience this way:

For lesbians, Women’s Liberation is not an intellectual or emotional luxury but a personal imperative…. In the beginning, the highest aspiration of most lesbians in the women’s movement was just that—to be included. For the first two years of the second wave of feminism, this desire to be included was the perspective from which lesbians viewed the women’s movement. In the midst of gathering for Women’s Liberation, they continued to submit to oppression by hiding so that they could be included, or worse, defensively trying to prove the obvious—that they were also “real” women.

Then came Gay Liberation.
⁹²

Soon, sharp debates and confrontations broke out across the country as lesbians announced their presence and demanded attention, validation, and action based on
their
experience.

In NOW chapters the debates were more structural: they had to do with who elected officers were and what issues could be the focus of task forces. The New York chapter underwent at least two “purges,” which removed vociferous lesbian leaders such as Rita Mae Brown from offices and positions of authority.
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Betty Friedan steadfastly opposed what she saw as a diversion into “sexual politics” that would alienate most American women. Her fears of the “lavender herring” were partially allayed, however, as she came to realize how many feminist veterans whose commitment had been the backbone of the movement in the early, lean years were, in fact, lesbians.
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After 3 years of conflict, in the fall of 1971 the national NOW convention finally passed a resolution ending

BE IT RESOLVED THAT N.O.W. RECOGNIZES THE DOUBLE OPPRESSION OF LESBIANS;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO HER OWN PERSON INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO DEFINE AND EXPRESS HER OWN SEXUALITY AND TO CHOOSE HER OWN LIFE-STYLE AND

BE IT RESOLVED THAT N.O.W. ACKNOWLEDGES THE OPPRESSION OF LESBIANS AS A LEGITIMATE CONCERN OF FEMINISM.
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At least within NOW, the issue ceased to be a source of extreme division from that point on.

Among younger women in a generation marked by sexual experimentation and challenges to traditional sexual mores, the issue of lesbianism erupted as yet another form of personal politics. At the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, a meeting of a wide spectrum of feminist groups initially called by NOW, a group wearing “Lavender Menace” T-shirts and calling themselves Radicalesbians disrupted the proceedings on opening night to challenge the movement’s prejudices by reading a paper entitled “The Woman-Identified Woman.”

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion…. Lesbian is the word, the label, the condition that holds women in line…. Lesbian is a label invented by the man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal…. Affixing the label lesbian not only to a woman who aspires to be a person but also to any situation of real love, real solidarity, real primacy among women is a primary form of divisiveness among women.”
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By the time Radicalesbians staged this protest, the gay liberation movement was already more than a year old. Many lesbians found themselves caught between the male-dominated gay rights movement (in which people like Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown, based on their own experience in Redstockings, fought for the creation of lesbian consciousness-raising groups) and the homophobia of the women’s movement. For Jay, “the Lavendar Menace zap action … remains … the single most important action organized by lesbians who wanted the women’s movement to acknowledge our presence and our needs.”
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Throughout the country the intense experiences of consciousness-raising groups evoked sexual tensions. The intimacy of such groups, the emotions they unleashed, felt to many like a kind of falling in love. A member of Bread and Roses described how

much of the energy that had heretofore gone into sexual relationships and especially couples was now being directed towards women friends and the women’s community in general. This accounted for much of the strength and intensity of these new ties. Even women who remained in traditional heterosexual couples report ‘getting high’ from the energy level.
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Since most participants were, and remained, heterosexual, when some of this energy was expressed in directly sexual terms many responded with fear and anxiety. A letter read aloud at a 1970 Bread and Roses Retreat, and later widely published, challenged “my sisters” not to “… see me with strange eyes.” “Why when I love my sisters wholly
do I make you uneasy? Why, if I talk of my feelings, do you look away? … The irony of it all is that I probably would never have discovered my homosexuality without women’s liberation.”
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Susan Griffin realized in retrospect that she had been a lesbian before she was married and that she had slipped into a kind of “numbness, a loss of an old self…. All it took was a weekend away from home at a women’s conference and the experience of a few moments of what it is like to be supported by and to support other women, and I began to come alive again.”
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The hostile labeling of all feminists as lesbians was a common experience. It reached the national media in December 1970, when
Time
exposed Kate Millett’s bisexuality with the comment that “her disclosure is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories and reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.”
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By that time, whatever divisions existed over the political meanings of lesbianism, both gay and straight feminists understood that such a charge could not be allowed to stand. A group of highly visible feminist leaders in New York (including journalists Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller, African-American lawyer Flo Kennedy, and founder of the Feminists Ti-Grace Atkinson) called a press conference to assert the common ground between women’s liberation and gay liberation. They read statements of support from Aileen Hernandez and Wilma Scott Heide, national leaders of NOW, and from Congresswoman Bella Abzug and appear to have diffused the issue at least in the national press.
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The issues that had been raised, however, continued to be a focal point for divisions within the women’s movement, and as in the case of abortion, they evolved from a forbidden and private matter into one of the most prominent and divisive topics in mainstream politics.

T
HE
P
OLITICS OF THE
F
AMILY

Most consciousness-raising groups probably talked as much or more about the politics of the family as they did about the rape, abortion, or health issues. From the first report of the Presidential Commission on
the Status of Women in 1973, issues of family policy would take a prominent place (at least rhetorically) on the agenda of policy-oriented activists. Consciousness-raising groups, however, came to the question of family first as a result of their quest for the origins of women’s oppression and their reexamination of the workings of power in intimate relations. Both groups relied heavily on “sex role socialization” theory to explain how women internalized traditional passive definitions of femininity.
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Pat Mainardi’s early paper, “The Politics of Housework,” was a particularly effective consciousness-raising tool. Reading it produced that familiar “click” of recognition. In it she explained the texts and subtexts of household arguments trotted out by men:

“I’ve got nothing against sharing the housework, but you can’t make me do it on your schedule.” MEANING: Passive resistance. I’ll do it when I damned well please, if at all….

“I hate it more than you. You don’t mind it so much.” MEANING: Housework is garbage work. It’s the worst crap I’ve ever done. It’s degrading and humiliating for someone of my intelligence to do it. But for someone of your intelligence….

“Women’s liberation isn’t really a political movement.” MEANING: The Revolution is coming too close to home.
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When Anita Shreve interviewed women about their experiences in consciousness-raising groups, she found that women, incensed at the inequities of household labor, would storm home from their women’s liberation meetings to demand “that their husbands or lovers participate in shit-work [housework].” They would return with tales “of subterfuge in the most willing of husbands.”
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Across the country, similar interactions recurred thousands and thousands of times.

Meanwhile feminists also hotly debated the links between women’s oppression and the nuclear family. In this instance, the drive for theoretical explanation ultimately reflected the very specific experiences of young, white, mostly unmarried women and built real barriers to the very women they hoped to reach. Although younger feminist radicals
were divided on the issue of marriage, most indicted it and the nuclear family as key sources of women’s oppression, claiming that women were “kept in their place” and prevented from developing autonomous identities through their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters. Historian and Bread and Roses member Anne Popkin argued that this analysis led to “a vehement (though in retrospect not well thought out) rhetorical crusade against the nuclear family.”
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Young women in consciousness-raising groups across the country critiqued their own upbringing and their mothers’ restricted roles. The vast majority of them were well-educated and white.
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Their conversations were, as Popkin notes, “highly charged” by the fact that they themselves were at or approaching “the age when they were ‘expected’ to start families of their own, yet the prospect made them anxious.”
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Single mother Alice Kessler-Harris recalled that her group was notably unsympathetic to her dilemmas as a working mother. In fact, they refused to meet at her home on the grounds that she needed to be “separated” from her daughter.
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Some groups went so far as to restrict the numbers of married women who could belong in the belief that their perspective would be biased by their commitment. The most famous and influential example of this was the Feminists, founded by Ti-Grace Atkinson in a break from the New York City chapter of NOW, which announced that no more than one-third of its voting members could be “in either a formal (with legal contract) or informal (e.g., living with a man) instance of the institution of marriage” on the grounds that “the identification of each woman’s interests with those of a man prevents her from uniting with other women and seeing herself as a member of the class of women.”
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