history

CHAPTER 11

Modern Feminism and American Society

1965–1980

IN 1966, A GROUP OF SIXTEEN WOMEN MET IN WASHINGTON, D.C., to create the National Organization for Women (NOW) to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society.” Two years later, Alice Peurala, who worked for U.S. Steel in Chicago, was denied a higher-paying job in the mill; after her boss told her, “We don’t want any women on these jobs,” she filed an antidiscrimination suit with a government agency, a case she won in 1974.1 In 1968, members of a guerrilla street group staged a dramatic protest at the Miss America pageant, in which they crowned a live sheep and tossed symbols of women’s oppression — curlers, bras, and makeup — into a “freedom trash can.” That same year, African American women formed the Black Women’s Liberation Committee. In 1970, Chicana activists created the Comisión Femenil Mexicana with the purpose of “organizing women to assume leadership positions within the Chicano movement and in community life.”2

These disparate events highlight the emergence of a multifaceted feminism that flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s. The feminism of women associated with NOW took inspiration from the civil rights movement and was rooted in the early 1960s activism that had focused on women’s employment rights. Different visions of feminism stemmed from the protest movements of the 1960s in which young men and women took to the streets to demand an end to the war in Vietnam while others demanded racial justice through a variety of nationalist power movements. Exhilarated to be part of the ambitious activism of the period but frustrated by their exclusion from its leadership, women had begun by 1968 to insist that equality and liberation should characterize the relations between the sexes, as well as among races and nations. As African American writer and activist Toni Cade (later Bambara) put it, “mutinous cadres of women” in all sorts of protest organizations were “getting salty about having to . . . fix the coffee while the men wrote the position papers and decided on policy.”3

Out of this combination of excitement and frustration came “women’s liberation,” a new kind of feminism rooted in 1960s experiences and perspectives. Initially concentrated on gaining equality for women within the protest movements of Black Power, Chicanismo, and the New Left, women’s liberation soon challenged the condition of women in the larger society. In conjunction with NOW, women’s liberation made feminism into a mass movement. Sometimes called the “second wave” (the “first wave” having been the feminism associated with the woman suffrage movement of the Progressive era — see pp. 440–44), this modern feminism outlived its 1960s origins to become one of the most important social and political forces of the late twentieth century.

1960

Birth control pill introduced

1965

Immigration and Nationality Act passed

1965

Federal government issues Moynihan Report

1966

National Organization for Women founded

1966

Transgender people lead anti-police protest at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco

1966

Black Panthers founded in Oakland, California

1966

National Welfare Rights Organization founded

1968

Women march for peace in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, Washington, D.C.

1968

Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated

1968

Richard Nixon elected president

1968

Women’s Liberation activists demonstrate at Miss America pageant

1968

Black Women’s Liberation Committee formed

1968

Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) founded

1969

Gay rights movement spurred on by the Stonewall Riot

1970

Lesbian activists challenge the Congress to Unite Women

1970

NOW sponsors Women’s Strike for Equality

1970

Chicana activists found Comisión Femenil Mexicana

1970

Kate Millett publishes Sexual Politics

1970

Mary Tyler Moore Show debuts

1971

First National Chicana Conference held in Houston

1971

Supreme Court declares in Reed v. Reed that Fourteenth Amendment covers sex discrimination

1971

First federal affirmative action guidelines issued

1972

Congress passes Equal Rights Amendment; Phyllis Schlafly founds STOP-ERA

1972

Title IX of Education Amendments Act bans sex discrimination in federally funded education

1972

Shirley Chisholm seeks Democratic Party nomination for president

1972

Sally Preisand becomes first woman rabbi

1972

Stewardesses for Women’s Rights founded

1973

Supreme Court rules in Roe v. Wade that women’s right to abortion constitutionally protected

1973

Paris Peace Accords end U.S. participation in war in Vietnam

1973

OPEC oil embargo leads to economic recession

1974

Watergate scandal forces Nixon’s resignation

1974

Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) founded

1975

United Nations sponsors first International Women’s Conference in Mexico City

1976

Jimmy Carter elected president

1977

Eleanor Holmes Norton appointed to head Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

1977

National Women’s Conference held in Houston

1978

Mexican American women lose the forced sterilization lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan against California hospitals

ROOTS OF SIXTIES FEMINISM

In 1960, “feminism” was often a term of derision or contempt, if it was used at all. By decade’s end, Americans were hearing a great deal about it. A diverse group of women — young and old, working class and privileged, heterosexual and lesbian, white and of color — all contributed to a resurgent feminism. Rooted in the social upheavals surrounding the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture, the new feminism that emerged in the second half of the 1960s signaled the beginning of a transformative era in women’s history.

The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

The revival of feminism in the 1960s first emerged clearly among a group of women associated with the National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in 1966. This version of feminism owed much to the civil rights movement and a dramatic legislative milestone: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pressure from the civil rights movement had led to a call for an omnibus federal act forbidding discrimination on the grounds of race. While Congress was debating the legislation, members of the National Woman’s Party encouraged U.S. Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to propose an amendment to the bill that would extend federal civil rights protection to women. Smith did so, in large measure because as a white southerner he opposed the Civil Rights Act and thought the inclusion of sex would undermine support for the legislation. Once the bill was introduced in the House, however, the few women congressional representatives, notably Martha Griffiths of Michigan, backed it, with support from many women activists such as African American lawyer Pauli Murray, who saw the amendment as a way of fighting both “Jim Crow” and “Jane Crow.”

The Women’s Bureau staff, led by Esther Peterson (see pp. 585–88), initially withheld support for the amendment not only because they worried that if the Civil Rights Act applied to women it would undermine state protective legislation, but also because they feared damage to the African American cause, which the bureau viewed as the more serious form of discrimination. Once the measure went to the Senate, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson backed the amendment to assure the entire bill’s swift passage, and Peterson and Women’s Bureau allies came on board. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, or religion, became law.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency established to implement Title VII, estimated that in the first year of its operation, grievances about sex discrimination constituted an unexpected 37 percent of its complaints. Women, many of them rank-and-file union members, complained about unequal benefits and pay, discrimination in hiring and firing, restrictive state protective legislation, and separate union seniority lists. The commission, however, concentrated on racial discrimination and gave little priority to women’s complaints, making the EEOC an ineffective tool to counter sexual discrimination in the workplace.

NOW and Liberal Feminism

Discontent with the failures of the EEOC erupted in the 1966 Third Annual Conference on the Status of Women. By then, a groundswell of women, whose growth began among the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and the state commissions and was reinforced by labor union and civil rights activists, had emerged to insist on women’s equal rights. Their consciousness had also been raised by the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (see pp. 557–58). As a result, sixteen women held an impromptu meeting to create an outside pressure group; thus the National Organization for Women was founded with Friedan as its first president. Although NOW is often described as a white middle-class organization, African Americans, such as Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez (who was NOW’s second president), participated from the very beginning. In addition, labor union members such as Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers were crucial to the organization’s success (see Reading into the Past: “Women’s Bill of Rights”).

The creation of NOW put women’s civil rights on the political map. Consciously modeling their organization after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the founders expected NOW to act primarily as a lobbying and litigating group to promote women’s political and economic rights, but its goals gradually expanded. In 1967, for example, the organization endorsed women’s right to reproductive freedom. The breadth of NOW’s agenda was symbolized by its national Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage, the strike focused on drawing attention to abortion rights, child care, and equal educational and economic opportunity. By 1974, NOW boasted seven hundred chapters, forty thousand members, and an annual budget of $300,000. Especially outside of large cities and college towns, women — inspired by the growing media visibility of women’s liberation in the early 1970s — turned to the only organization they could find, NOW, and in the process broadened it from a lobbying group to a mass membership organization.

Other liberal organizations were also important in spreading the feminist message. In 1968, women who described themselves as “less radical” than the feminists in NOW — primarily because of their unwillingness to support abortion rights — created the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). WEAL focused on discrimination in education and the workforce and lobbied extensively in Washington, D.C. Dozens of older women’s organizations, such as the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Council of Negro Women, and the American Association of University Women, also supported specific legislative campaigns. Women in labor unions continued their commitment forged in the postwar years to improving working-class women’s job opportunities. Many were active in NOW and, in 1974, they founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) to bring women’s issues to the forefront of the labor movement. A host of mixed-sex organizations, with a strong interest in social justice causes, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the National Council of Churches, also helped bring feminism to the mainstream.

Historians often describe NOW and groups that supported much of its agenda as representing “liberal” feminism because it focused on bringing about women’s formal equality through legal and political means, a process that paralleled other twentieth-century liberal reform movements. These groups continued many of the issues and approaches that previous phases of feminism had begun, and many of their members had been working on women’s issues for decades. By contrast, the feminism known as “women’s liberation” drew on a younger generation and considered itself revolutionary, seeking changes that went beyond civil rights and formal equality to cultural transformation.

READING INTO THE PAST

NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN

Women’s Bill of Rights

At its 1967 convention, a year after its founding, NOW issued its “Women’s Bill of Rights in 1968.”

Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment

Enforce Law Banning Sex Discrimination in Employment

Maternity Leave Rights in Employment and in Social Security Benefits

Tax Deduction for Home and Child Care Expenses for Working Parents

Child Day Care Centers

Equal and Unsegregated Education

Equal Job Training Opportunities and Allowances for Women in Poverty

The Right of Women to Control Their Reproductive Lives

We Demand:

That the United States Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and that such then be immediately ratified by the several States.

That equal employment opportunity be guaranteed to all women, as well as men by insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforce the prohibitions against sex discrimination in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the same vigor as it enforces the prohibitions against racial discrimination.

That women be protected by law to insure their rights to return to their jobs within a reasonable time after childbirth without loss of seniority or other accrued benefits and be paid maternity leave as a form of social security and/or employee benefit.

Immediate revision of tax laws to permit the deduction of home and child care expenses for working parents.

That child care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools adequate to the needs of children, from the pre-school years through adolescence, as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.

That the right of women to be educated to their full potential equally with men be secured by Federal and State legislation, eliminating all discrimination and segregation by sex, written and unwritten, at all levels of education including college, graduate and professional schools, loans and fellowships and Federal and State training programs, such as the job Corps.

The right of women in poverty to secure job training, housing and family allowances on equal terms with men, but without prejudice to a parent’s right to remain at home to care for his or her children; revision of welfare legislation and poverty programs which deny women dignity, privacy and self respect.

The right of women to control their own reproductive lives by removing from penal codes the laws limiting access to contraceptive information and devices and laws governing abortion.

SOURCE: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/N.O.W._Bill_of_Rights (accessed August 20, 2017).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What does the statement reveal about the impediments facing women’s equality, and how does it propose to address them?

What is the significance of terming the statement a “bill of rights”?

WOMEN’S LIBERATION AND THE SIXTIES REVOLUTIONS

All of the upheavals collectively known as the “sixties revolutions” played a role in the emergence of women’s liberation. The counterculture of youthful radicals who defied conventional norms of sexual behavior and criticized both the nuclear family and the middle-class ethos of success helped to fuel feminist critiques of the subordinate status of women within the family and their call for a feminist sexual revolution. At the same time, the political ferment ignited by Black Power advocates and other groups that promoted nationalist movements in opposition to the white-dominated power structure of American life offered women’s liberationists a model for challenging male power. Finally, the antiwar movement directed against U.S. involvement in Vietnam mobilized tens of thousands of Americans to challenge the federal government and gave impetus to radical feminists’ calls for taking on another kind of authority by dismantling patriarchy.

Sexual Revolution and Counterculture

The introduction in 1960 of the birth control pill, along with the confidence that modern medicine could cure any sexually transmitted disease (proved tragically wrong by the AIDS epidemic that began two decades later), forged a conviction that sexual relations no longer had unwanted consequences and could be indulged in casually and freely. The sixties atmosphere of sexual liberation pushed women past the expectations of earlier generations that marriage and motherhood were both their goal and their fate. But the ethic of sexual liberation set different sorts of restraints on women. What sexual liberation meant before women’s liberation is captured in images of women in miniskirts and go-go boots, with exaggerated eye makeup and long straight hair, signaling their availability to men. Women were not supposed to be sexual adventurers themselves so much as rewards for the men who crashed through the barricades of respectability.

By the late 1960s, young people had expanded sexual liberation into a broader challenge to the very foundations of their parents’ way of life. The “counterculture,” as this diffuse phenomenon was known, went beyond the “hippie” lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll to experiment with new forms of living. Instead of following in the path of the idealized, hardworking, male-headed, nuclear family of the 1950s, the counterculture encouraged the creation of “communes,” groups determined to find different forms of intimacy and interdependence. These deliberately created communities (latter-day versions of the utopian communities of the 1830s and 1840s — see pp. 238–40) retained more of the gender divisions of the larger society than they cared to admit. Nonetheless, the countercultural ambition to replace the traditional middle-class family with a radically different alternative set the stage for an explicitly feminist revolt against expected norms of domesticity and motherhood.

Black Power and SNCC

Changes in the civil rights movement also had an impact on the emergence of women’s liberation. African Americans, deeply frustrated by the slow federal response to their demands, were further dispirited by a wave of black ghetto riots in the summer of 1965. Then, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, the nonviolent phase of the modern civil rights movement died with him. The assassination in June that year of Robert Kennedy, whose campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination championed African American and Chicano civil rights, also traumatized black leaders, many of whom now turned away from the goal of racial integration and concentrated instead on cultivating black leadership, sensibility, and mass empowerment. Their spirit of militant collective antiracism spread to other communities of color. Young Mexican American civil rights advocates created the era of Chicano nationalism. Mostly urban Native Americans formed the American Indian Movement in 1969, and Asian Americans established a Pan Asian movement. Coming together under the term “third world” — borrowed from the term for developing countries outside the Cold War orbits of the first world (highly developed industrialized Western nations) and the second world (the Soviet Union and other Communist nations) — these radical activists saw themselves as part of a larger uprising against America’s traditions of white supremacy.

Of all these forms of militant antiracism, the most influential was Black Power. In contrast to earlier, southern-based civil rights activism, the Black Power movement thrived in northern cities. Black Power advocates adopted a black nationalist philosophy, which, although it did not call for an independent state, did seek to consolidate a sense of peoplehood among African Americans. A major inspiration for Black Power was the philosophy of Malcolm X, a renegade leader of the Nation of Islam (whose members were commonly known as Black Muslims) who challenged the goal of integration and the message of black inferiority it subtly conveyed. He was assassinated in 1965. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became a Black Power organization, voting to expel its white members and embracing the goal of black self-determination. That same year, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, and quickly became known for insisting on the right to community self-defense, with weapons if necessary, against police abuse.

The impact of the Black Power movement on the emergence of women’s liberation was complex. Black Power had a decidedly masculine cast, in contrast to the earlier phases of civil rights activism, in which African American women had been prominent as local leaders (see pp. 573–75). Black nationalism tended to cast women as mothers of a new peoplehood rather than as political actors themselves. Black men were to lead and defend their people; black women were to give birth to and nurture them. Nonetheless, there were significant female figures in the Black Power era, notably Angela Davis, a philosophy professor who went underground to escape FBI charges that she had aided a black prisoner revolt in Marin County, California. Yet Black Power’s emphasis on self-determination rather than integration, on the group rather than the individual, provided the model for the emerging women’s liberation movement. Black Power ideas inspired women’s liberation by insisting that true freedom could be won only when the oppressed and the activist were one and the same, when subordinate people sought to liberate themselves rather than look to powerful saviors.

Angela Davis

The face of Angela Davis, framed by the halo of her natural Afro hairstyle, is one of the signature female images of the era. Her early engagement in the Black Power movement led to a lifelong commitment to challenging what she called the prison industrial complex in the United States. Here, she speaks at a rally against the death penalty at the state capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina, in July 1974.

The War in Vietnam and SDS

Even more than sexual liberation and Black Power, however, the U.S. war in Vietnam provided the immediate context for the appearance of the women’s liberation movement. The presence of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam began to escalate in 1961, as part of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to intervene in the civil war there between a Communist government in the north and an anti-Communist regime in the south. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began sending ever-larger numbers of combat troops and ordered the bombing of Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam. By the time U.S. forces withdrew in 1973, approximately 2.8 million Americans had served in Vietnam. Of these, an estimated seven thousand were women. Among the approximately sixty thousand Americans who died in Vietnam were eight military nurses and fifty-six women working with organizations ranging from the Red Cross to the CIA.

In general, however, the Vietnam War — fighting in it or fighting against it — was an intensely male experience. The U.S. armed forces had been deliberately “remasculinized” after World War II. At the time of the Vietnam War, the military was operating under a gender quota allowing only 2 percent of active-duty personnel to be female.4 By the mid-1960s, the possibility of being called up through the draft hung like a cloud over the lives of nearly all young men in the United States. As opposition against the war grew, men could pursue alternative forms of heroism: by refusing to be drafted, by publicly burning their draft cards, or by leaving the United States. Women who opposed the war were their supporters. “Hell no, we won’t go” was the slogan of men in the draft resistance movement. “Girls say yes to guys who say no” was the female equivalent. In the many giant demonstrations against the Vietnam War, women were fully half of the rank and file.

The major organization behind the antiwar protests was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Formed in 1962 by forty college students meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, SDS protested against America’s hypocritical claim to be the bastion of democracy. Impatient with what they regarded as the outdated, class-based politics of the previous generation of left-wing activists (the “Old Left”), SDS activists declared themselves the “New Left.” After white students left SNCC, many joined SDS.

Even more than SNCC, SDS tended strongly to reserve leadership roles for men. By 1967, largely in response to SDS men’s hostility to women’s issues, SDS women began to meet separately from men, following the model of the Black Power movement. “Women must not make the same mistake that blacks did at first of allowing others . . . to define our issues, methods and goals,” an anonymous group of women SDSers announced. “The time has come for us to take the initiative in organizing ourselves for our own liberation.”5

By 1969, an estimated 2 million Americans, women and men, had taken to the streets in cities all over the country to protest the war. In the spring of 1970, antiwar demonstrations closed down many college campuses. Tragically, in May 1970 National Guard troops killed four students, two of whom were women, and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio; later that month, two young men at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by local police. Rebellion at home combined with mounting American casualties in Vietnam to increase the pressure on President Richard Nixon to find some way out of what now appeared to be an unwinnable war, although the United States would not withdraw from Vietnam until 1973.

Significantly, the first national political event at which the radical women’s liberation movement made its appearance was a women’s antiwar demonstration, organized in January 1968 by Women Strike for Peace (WSP). Named the “Jeannette Rankin Brigade” in honor of the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, who had cast her vote against both world wars, the Washington, D.C., demonstration drew five thousand women, including eighty-seven-year-old Rankin. A group of younger women, determined to leave behind older traditions of female activism, organized a protest within the protest. They criticized the WSP for the link between pacifism and motherhood on which it relied. “You have resisted our roles of supportive girlfriends and tearful widows,” read the leaflet they distributed. “Now you must resist approaching Congress playing these same roles that are synonymous with powerlessness.”6

Women against War

Although the most common images of antiwar protesters in the Vietnam era focus on college students, Americans of all sorts protested the war in Indochina. Among the first were members of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), a group that had taken up the antinuclear cause in the 1950s (see pp. 570–72). This photograph of an April 1972 “die-in” in New York City captures the dramatic techniques prevalent in antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, WSP women are protesting President Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia while specifically targeting International Telephone & Telegraph because of its defense contracts with the military.

IDEAS AND PRACTICES OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION

Women’s liberationists approached the challenge of greater freedom for women in a manner radically different from that which NOW had laid out two years before. Well educated, confident of an affluent future, politically alienated, and disdainful of sexual restraints, many young people in the 1960s had no faith in the older generation’s ability to create a better world. “We want something more, much more, than the same gray, meaningless, alienating jobs that men are forced to sacrifice their lives to,” wrote Robin Morgan in criticism of NOW’s goal of integrating women into the American mainstream.7 The young women who had come through the movements of the sixties envisioned a different kind of emancipatory politics for their sex, and they offered new theories and new approaches to that emancipation. Their goal — and in many ways their achievement — was to revolutionize consciousness and culture, not to reform law and public policy. Determined to bring about a dramatic shift in the fabric of history, they did not form a single overarching organization but rather declared themselves a “movement.”

Consciousness-Raising

These new activists wanted to transform consciousness, and they did so even with the term “feminism.” Viewing it as too old-fashioned and circumscribed to describe their movement, they adopted a term of their own making: “women’s liberation.” This term pointed to freedom for women without limits and without pragmatic considerations of what was politically feasible. Small women’s liberation groups surfaced in 1968 and 1969 in many places throughout the country. Much has been written about New York City, but early and influential groups emerged as well in smaller (often college) towns such as Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Iowa City; and Gainesville, Florida. Women’s liberation periodicals published in Seattle and Baltimore were read in Los Angeles and Boston. Spontaneity and the lack of centralized direction or national organization were hallmarks of women’s liberation.

A key component of women’s liberation was a practice called consciousness-raising, which consisted of small groups of women — perhaps a dozen women meeting weekly — sharing personal and private aspects of their lives in order to understand female subordination. Accumulating their personal experiences into collective truths could free women from the belief that their lives were abnormal or that they were to blame personally for their alienation from norms of femininity. Ultimately, consciousness-raising rested on the conviction that “the personal is political,” that the massive power inequities from which women suffered could be found in the tiniest details of daily existence. No longer was it trivial that husbands refused to change the baby’s diapers, that construction workers harassed women on the streets, or that women felt inhibited from telling their boyfriends what they wanted sexually.

Groups of women’s liberationists also worked to raise consciousness among a larger female public through dramatic public actions. They picketed and sat in at magazines from Playboy to Ladies’ Home Journal in protest of their perpetuation of degrading stereotypes of women. The most famous such protest took place in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the 1968 Miss America pageant, the site of a notorious “bra-burning” episode that has come down through history as a symbol for women’s liberation. In reality, no bras were actually burned at the demonstration.

Women Are Not Chicks

Founded in 1970, the Women’s Graphic Collective, part of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, created compelling, witty feminist posters that graced the walls of many a liberated woman’s home or apartment. This widely distributed poster depicted a key issue of concern to feminists — sexism in everyday language. Women are not chicks (or any other kind of animal), this consciousness-raising poster made clear. The images were not signed because anonymity reinforced the sense of the collective feminist identity of the artists. Now the term “chick” referring to women and girls is commonly used in popular culture, with such phrases as “chick lit” or “chick flick” part of the language. Should today’s women take offense?

Lesbianism And Sexual Politics

Of all the changes in women’s lives that came out of these consciousness-raising efforts, perhaps the most pervasive was the revisioning of sexuality from a thoroughly female point of view. No longer were feminist women willing to regard their own sexuality solely in terms of how sexy they appeared to men. Instead they concentrated on exploring their own desires. They suggested that intercourse might not be as good a way for women to experience sexual pleasure as it was for men. Rejecting widespread diagnoses of female frigidity, women’s liberation celebrated the possibilities of the clitoris. “What we must do is redefine our sexuality,” wrote Anne Koedt in her widely read article “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”8 (see pp. 682–83). Masturbation, long a favorite topic among young men, now became a subject of experimentation and discussion among women.

The most radical change in sexual thinking and behavior centered on lesbianism. The powerful new assertion of women’s sexual desires, coupled with the exploration of the richness of women’s relationships, encouraged many women’s liberationists to pursue sexual relations with each other. “We were putting our energy into each other and slowly falling in love with each other,” explained Marilyn Webb of Washington, D.C.9 At the 1970 Congress to Unite Women in New York City, a group of lesbians took over the meeting, proudly declared themselves the “Lavender Menace” feminists had warned against, and challenged the women in the audience to acknowledge, accept, and even explore same-sex love. The legitimization of lesbianism within women’s liberation was facilitated by the argument that loving women was as much a political identity as a sexual one. “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice,” declared New Yorker Ti-Grace Atkinson.10

These feminist-inspired developments coincided with changes in lesbian communities (see pp. 552–57). A gay power movement exploded on the scene alongside women’s liberation. Instead of acquiescence to a police raid on a New York City working-class gay bar, the Stonewall, on June 27, 1969, men and a small number of women fought back with beer cans and bottles. During the subsequent two days of demonstrations, the protesters chanted “gay power,” a slogan modeled after “Black Power.” The results were electrifying. The gay liberation movement spread quickly throughout the nation’s cities; public demonstrations were often held in conjunction with protests against the Vietnam War.

In the early 1970s, many young lesbians worked from within the feminist movement, arguing that the root of discrimination against lesbians could be found in the oppression of women, and that an ideological commitment to women loving women was the only way to quash patriarchal power and achieve female liberation. Novelist Rita Mae Brown expressed this view powerfully: “I became a lesbian because the culture that I live in is violently anti-woman. How could I, a woman, participate in a culture that denies my humanity? . . . To give a man support and love before giving it to a sister is to support that culture, that power system.”11 With their passionate commitment to creating a “lesbian nation,” these radicals advocated lesbianism on the basis of political ideology. This ideology, which reflected the growth of a style of politics based on group identity, sometimes led to conflict between heterosexual and lesbian feminists, even as it strengthened lesbian communities. Lesbians and gay men were also sometimes wary of each other and organized separately until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s led to a new era of collaboration.

Lesbian separatism manifested itself in women-only community institutions, small businesses, public spaces, and collective living environments. In cities from Dayton to Washington, D.C., women who wished to live, love, work, and play separately from men founded lesbian-oriented bookstores, cafés, women’s softball leagues, and community centers. A thriving women’s music scene generated a national recording company and annual summer festivals that drew thousands of women (the preferred term, eliminating the incorporation of “men,” was “womyn”), creating the context for later artists.

The feminism of the 1970s was critical of the “butch” and “femme” roles lesbians had assumed in earlier times. It was also not particularly tolerant of transgender people and saw those who wanted to live their lives as and change their bodies to the other sex as embracing the very gender stereotypes that their movement opposed. And yet some transgender people understood themselves to be following the logic of women’s and gay liberation — that gender is a social construction and that society should not dictate sexual expression — to its ultimate conclusion. Reconciliation between the lesbian movement and transgender people began to take place decades later, in the 1990s.

Transgender people participated in the early events of the gay liberation movement. In 1966, at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, they led a fight back against police harassment that was much like the Stonewall event three years later. Transgender people were also affected by new medical procedures that were becoming available in the 1960s to allow for what was then called “sex reassignment surgery.” While these could and were applied to infants with “ambiguous genitals” who were in no position to make decisions for themselves, they were also welcomed by adults who longed for ways to transition to the gender they understood themselves to be.

By the end of the 1970s, “out of the closet” lesbians were proceeding in two simultaneous directions: seeking to enter the mainstream and reasserting their radicalism. Local efforts to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual preference produced political attacks from the right (most famously in Florida, led by former beauty queen Anita Bryant, in 1977). These attacks in turn inspired gay and lesbian people to pursue political office. In Massachusetts in 1975, Elaine Noble became the first openly gay person elected to a state legislature. At the same time, gay men and lesbians transformed words, symbols, and behaviors once associated with contempt and shame into assertions of pride and confidence. Corps of lesbians on motorcycles, proudly styling themselves “dykes on bikes,” led Gay Pride parades in San Francisco, New York City, and elsewhere. By the end of the decade, “queer” no longer signaled homosexual inferiority or self-hate; as a publicly claimed term of pride, it signaled the embrace of an ever-wider range of sexual identity and behavior.

Although the link between women’s liberation and lesbianism is strong in popular memory, most women’s liberationists remained heterosexual. Indeed, women’s liberation encouraged utopian ambitions for revolutionizing intimate relations so that men and women could be genuine and full partners. One goal was that women would no longer need to choose between their own needs and ambitions and their love of men. Some marriages were shattered by the rise of women’s liberation, but others were initiated or remade on an explicit basis of equality and mutuality. The women’s liberation practice of women not taking their husband’s names upon marriage began to spread among women in general.

Radical Feminist Theory

As women attempted to put into practice the ideas that emerged from consciousness-raising, feminists devised radical liberation theories. The central project was to understand the structures of universal male dominance. “Our society, like all other historical civilizations, is a patriarchy,” declared feminist writer Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970).12 One of the boldest statements came from Shulamith Firestone, a twenty-four-year-old whose book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) became an international best-seller. Like many radical feminists, Firestone worked from a left-wing framework garnered from her background as a student radical. Marxist theorists spoke of the dialectic, or contradiction, of class; Firestone wrote of the “dialectic of sex.” The most basic human conflict was not economic but sexual, she contended, and its roots were nothing less than the biological distinction between the sexes.

Other theorists took the opposite tack, challenging the idea that differences between men and women were rooted in nature and thus fundamentally unchangeable. They documented the different ways that various societies formulated this distinction and how vigorously our own society worked to teach young children to be appropriately masculine or feminine. Part of the problem, they observed, lay with the word “sex” itself. Because it referred both to the biological capacity for human reproduction and the behavioral and psychological differences of men and women, it confused what was anatomical and what was social. To distinguish the two, women’s liberation writers revived the obscure grammatical term “gender” for what anthropologist Gayle Rubin described in 1975 as “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention.”13

DIVERSITY, RACE, AND FEMINISM

Concerns with racial and ethnic diversity also reflected the influence of the civil rights movement on the first generation of women’s liberation activists. Early anthologies such as Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970) included selections from African American, Latina/Chicana, and Asian American women to substantiate the claim that sisterhood was all-inclusive. Nonetheless, there was little cross-racial organizing within women’s liberation. While white women withdrew from New Left groups to form their own all-female collectives, women of color tended to remain within mixed-sex (but racially separatist) organizations, unwilling to give up personal and political alliances with besieged male allies. As historians have begun to explore the feminism of other women of color more deeply, it is clear that Latinas, Asian American women, and Native American women, as well as black women, challenged sexism within their own organizations and promoted issues of particular concern to women, especially reproductive rights and access to community welfare services. Although many women of color associated with predominantly white organizations, those associated with racial nationalist groups felt ambivalent about allying with mainstream feminist women.

African American Women

For African American women, the concentration on male-female unity was especially strong in response to the 1965 publication of a federal report, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Labor. The Moynihan Report characterized the competence and power of African American women, in their families and in their communities, as “pathological,” a holdover from slavery still affecting black Americans. The report was intended to aid in the advancement of African Americans, but written as it was before the emergence of women’s liberation, it did so by blaming black women for single-parent households and rising male unemployment. Here was a federally authorized report calling for greater male authority in the black community as a way to bring it into line with the larger society.

But the Moynihan Report alone would not have had such a powerful impact if it had not been for long-standing strains of racial antagonism within the history of American feminism, reaching back through the white-dominated women’s movement of the early twentieth century to the Reconstruction-era split over black suffrage (see pp. 436–37 and 292–94). Further exacerbating relations with white women was black women’s resentment at sexual relations between black men and white women in the civil rights movement. Put simply, many African American women did not trust white advocates of women’s liberation to be truly inclusive in their struggle for freedom for women. One of the major challenges confronting the revived feminist movement was to face this history, overcome this distrust, and create a more inclusive, diverse women’s freedom movement.

Despite their mistrust of white women’s liberationists, women of color shared an interest in many feminist issues. Within the women’s caucuses that they formed in their mixed-sex groups, they discussed and wrote about male chauvinism, reproductive freedom, and sexual exploitation. Simmering resentments about the treatment of women within SNCC led to the formation of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in 1968. “We can’t talk about freedom and liberation,” explained one of the committee’s founders, Frances Beal, “and talk about putting women down.”14 The group later expanded to include Puerto Rican and Asian American women and renamed itself the Third World Women’s Alliance.

One of African American women’s most distinctive contributions to the activism of the period focused on the struggle for welfare rights. State welfare recipients had risen significantly in the postwar era, and most states, fueled by racially charged (and false) stereotypes that most women receiving Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) were black single mothers of illegitimate children, had cut benefits and tried to force women into the labor force (48 percent of ADC recipients in 1961 were African American).15 In many places local agencies instituted humiliating home visits and “morals” tests. In protest against poverty and the indignities of public assistance, women, the majority of whom were African American, created local welfare rights organizations such as Los Angeles Aid to Needy Children (ANC), Mothers Anonymous, and Milwaukee’s Welfare Rights Organization. In 1966, the same year NOW was founded, these groups staged protests in twenty-five cities (including Chicago, Newark, Los Angeles, Louisville, New York, and Columbus, Ohio), and later that year were brought together as the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which had both male and female leadership. Eventually women in the NWRO, spurred on by sexism within the organization and a desire to give poor working women more voice, became explicitly more defined as feminist.

Latina Activism

When Chicanas began to explore feminist ideas, they felt unwelcome in white-dominated women’s groups but were charged by male comrades with being vendidas (traitorous sellouts) for allegedly following Anglo ideas. Chicanas particularly resented the argument that the truly authentic and politically devoted Mexican American woman was one who remained focused on her family and also complained about sexual harassment from their male colleagues. Many criticized what they saw as the Chicano movement’s emphasis on machismo, arguing that it undermined women’s ability to participate in the struggle for racial pride and justice. As Leticia Hernández explained it, “The men felt that they should be the ones to make the statements and they should be the ones to write the papers and that the women should be the ones to type the papers and women should be the ones who serve the coffee on the side and make everything nice and comfy for them when they come home from the ‘war.’ ”16

To draw attention to women’s issues, Anna NietoGomez and other Chicanas, including Hernández, at California State University at Long Beach founded the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (Daughters of Cuauhtémoc, an Aztec emperor) in 1971, named after a 1911 Mexican women’s rights group that the Cal State students rediscovered. Later that year the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc and six hundred other Chicanas from all over the country gathered in Houston for the first National Chicana Conference, crowding into workshops with titles such as “Sex and the Chicana” and “Marriage Chicana Style.” Although productive, the conference also highlighted the tensions surrounding Chicana feminism: a significant number of delegates walked out, claiming that the organizers were too closely allied with white feminists. This tension was never really resolved for Chicana activists. Writing in 1973, NietoGomez commented on the intimidation faced by “people who define themselves as Chicana feminists.” They were frustrated by the belief that “if you’re a Chicana you’re on one side, if you’re a feminist, you must be on the other side. They say you can’t stand on both sides.”17 Not surprisingly, most Chicanas worked from within the larger Chicano movement in organizations such as the paramilitary Brown Berets and the student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) on behalf of welfare rights, reproductive freedom, and community control of social services.

Anna NietoGomez

Anna NietoGomez, shown here at a conference in 1973, emerged as a Chicana leader at California State University at Long Beach. In 1969, she was elected to the presidency of the campus’s MEChA. She persisted despite hostility from some of the male members, including an incident where she was hanged in effigy. In response to their frustration with sexism within the Chicano movement, Long Beach women, led by NietoGomez, founded Hijas de Cuauhtémoc in 1971, the Long Beach, California, Chicana feminist organization. In the 1970s, as a professor at California State University at Northridge, NietoGomez pioneered a Chicana Studies curriculum. Although she was denied academic tenure in a controversial decision, her contributions to the field were long-lasting.

Women in the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party had an agenda similar to that of other Latina activists and were unusually successful in pressuring their organization to take their concerns seriously. Anger over sexism in the movement in 1970 prompted them to make the personal political by calling for a “no-sex strike” against male leaders with whom they had personal relations until their demands were met. The result was that the Young Lords’ central committee passed a resolution that explicitly endorsed women’s rights.18 In 1971, the following statement appeared in a Young Lords’ publication: “Third World women have an integral role to play in the liberation of all oppressed people. In the struggle for national liberation they must press for the equality of women. The woman’s struggle is the revolution within the revolution.”19

Asian American Women

Asian American women’s activism was forged in Asian American groups that emerged in the 1960s around the issues of racial pride, identity, and particularly the Vietnam War. Women formed a number of local organizations, especially in Los Angeles and the San Francisco area, but mostly worked from within the broader Asian American movement. They were especially adamant about challenging insidious stereotypes of Asian women. The first issue of Gidra, a Los Angeles Asian American movement newspaper, featured an article by Dinora Gil in which she insisted, “It is not enough that we must ‘kow tow’ to the Yellow male ego, but we must do this by aping the Madison Avenue and Hollywood version of White femininity. All the peroxide, foam rubber, and scotch tape will not transform you into what you are not. . . . Whether this is a conditioned desire to be white, or a desperate attempt to attain male approval, it is nothing more than Yellow Prostitution.”20

Native American Women

Native American women participated extensively in the militant activism of their people in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, a group of Native Americans began a two-year occupation of an abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to protest the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to draw attention to the historic oppression of Native Americans. One of the main leaders to emerge was LaNada Means, a Shoshone-Bannock, who had also been active in antiwar demonstrations in Berkeley. Wilma Mankiller, who later became the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, initially became involved in the Native American movement during the occupation of the island. Then, in 1973, reservation-based activists at the Pine Ridge Reservation, supported by the urban-based American Indian Movement (AIM), organized against local corruption. Women were particularly prominent. Ellen Moves Camp, a local activist, asked, “Where are our Men? Where are our defenders?”21 Within days, they had occupied the Wounded Knee Trading Post, at the site of a devastating massacre in 1890, remaining for seventy-one days; however, the activities of women tended to be obscured by high-profile male AIM leaders.

Some women activists did speak out against the sexism they encountered within groups such as AIM, but others emphasized men and women working together within the movement against white oppression. Although most remained aloof from the women’s movement, many Native American women were active in the 1977 National Women’s Conference (see pp. 656–58). In the South, for example, Native women participated extensively in the state conferences that preceded the national meeting. In Texas, Choctaw Owanah Anderson chaired that state’s executive committee, and in Louisiana, Native women called for an end to “coerced sterilization, hysterectomy, and other experimental practices on the bodies of women, especially poor, minority, and Third World women.”22 (See Reading into the Past: “Forced Sterilization.”) Only 17 of the 2,916 delegates at the national meeting were Native Americans, but they nonetheless influenced a reproductive rights plank that condemned compulsory sterilization and others that called for federal policies to ensure tribal rights and sovereignty and to improve Native American health and education. They brought an emphasis on spirituality to the feminist movement by invoking the traditional power of “American-Indian and Alaskan Native women,” pointing out that they “have a relationship to the Earth Mother and the Great Spirit as well as a heritage based on the sovereignty of Indian peoples.”23 (See pp. 649–52.)

READING INTO THE PAST

Forced Sterilization

By the late 1970s, resistance to the coercive sterilization of poor women became part of the larger feminist agenda of reproductive rights. This extract is from an article by Jean Horan that appeared in the radical feminist periodical Off Our Backs in 1977. Drawing on materials from CESA (Committee to End Sterilization Abuse), Horan summarizes several court cases involving blacks, Native Americans, and Chicanas.

Norma Jean [a Native American woman who was sterilized without her knowledge and who lost custody of her children because she was living with a black man] is bringing to trial a women’s right to control her own body, to live with whom she chooses, and to raise her own children. She is fighting the power of racist welfare bureaucracies who control the lives of welfare recipients. Norma Jean is not an isolated case. There are numerous other cases of sterilization abuses:

Rosalind Johnson, a 20-year-old black prisoner sterilized without her consent in New York City. “They told me that it was a temporary form of birth control which could be undone. . . . At no time was I told that if I had either a tubal ligation or any sort of hysterectomy I would never be able to become pregnant again. . . . I try not to think about the fact that I've been sterilized but every once in a while it hits me. . . . [T]hen I get very upset.”

Eleven Chicana women have filed a class action suit against hospital and state health officials charging that they were either coerced or deceived into being sterilized. Some of the women were presented with consent forms while in labor. Others never signed forms at all, learning later that they had been sterilized. One woman wore an IUD unnecessarily for two years because she had not been told that she had been sterilized.

Two black sisters in Alabama, aged 12 and 14, were sterilized in 1973 in a federally funded family planning program. Consent was given by their mother by making an X on a form she could not read.

Norma Jean’s suit is important for many reasons, but underlying it is the fundamental and elementary principle that, as women, we have the right to control our own destiny.

SOURCE: Jean Horan, “Condition: Socio-Economic — Treatment: Sterilization,” Off Our Backs 6 (January 1977): 6.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How does Horan’s use of stories of specific individuals strengthen the impact of her argument?

How does she link the sterilization issue to the broader themes of feminism?

How does this excerpt review the influence of women of color feminism on agendas for reproductive rights?

Women of Color

Walking a careful line between embracing and challenging the premises of women’s liberation, between promoting and criticizing their own communities and cultures, women of color raised fundamental issues. They asked in what way white women wanted to be equal, and to whom. The Third World Women’s Alliance posed the following question: “Equal to white men in their power and ability to oppress Third World people?”24 While women’s liberation theory emphasized the overwhelming role of patriarchal power in the subordination of women, women of color insisted that the reality of inequality was more complex and that their lives were shaped by the intersections of race, class, and sex. This idea later gave rise to the term “intersectionality,” first coined by civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989.

The feminism of women of color took a major step toward articulating this notion of intersectionality with the publication in 1977 of “A Black Feminist Statement,” authored by the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based group of African Americans, many of them lesbians. They insisted that their “sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique.”25 They named their approach, which focused on their own oppression rather than the suffering of others, “identity politics.” Their formulation encouraged a multiplicity of feminist voices, reflecting a diversity of women’s experiences, rather than the unitary statement of a single, common “women’s oppression” that had characterized the early white-dominated women’s liberation years. Over time, these new, diverse approaches to women’s lives and demands helped to shift the center of feminist energy and authority away from the white middle-class women with whom it had begun.

“We Cannot Live without Our Lives,” Combahee River Collective Members

This April 1979 photograph includes three founding members of the Combahee River Collective — Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier — participating in the Coalition for Women’s Safety Protest, which protested the murders of six (later twelve) black women in Boston and what they viewed as police indifference to the crimes. In a widely distributed pamphlet, collective members also criticized black men for addressing the crimes in terms of only race. The women insisted, too, that women should work collectively to protect themselves and not rely on men or the state for their safety. In words that clearly reflected the Combahee River Collective Statement, the pamphlet insisted that “As Black women who are feminists we are struggling against all racist, sexist, heterosexist and class oppression. We know that we have no hopes of ending this particular crisis and violence against women in our community until we identify all of its causes, including sexual oppression.”26

THE IMPACT OF FEMINISM

As the ideas and experiences of women of color suggest, there were multiple forms of feminism and tensions among women activists over race, class, sexual orientation, and ideology. None of these tensions were ever completely resolved, but by the early 1970s at least women’s liberation and NOW had moved closer to form a common feminist movement, with the former contributing the issues and the militant stance and the latter the organizational structure and focus on institutional and legislative change. By the end of the decade, feminists could point to significant improvements in women’s lives, especially in their economic and educational opportunities and their ability to exercise more control over their bodies and reproductivity.

Challenging Discrimination in the Workplace

Feminist lobbying resulted in a raft of important federal actions on women’s rights issues in the early 1970s, including legislation clarifying the inclusion of women in earlier civil rights legislation such as the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which had created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). An important piece of economic legislation was the 1974 law that “prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status during credit transactions.”27 And in 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which recognized the increased participation of mothers in the workforce and gave pregnant women explicit protection against workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Another valuable tool in the fight for equality emerged in 1971 when the Republican administration of President Nixon issued guidelines for federally contracted employment that went beyond banning discrimination by race and gender to authorize “affirmative action” in hiring. This process of expanding women’s rights received crucial reinforcement when the Supreme Court began to rule that legal discrimination by gender was unconstitutional, including in cases where the law favored women over men. The first of these cases, Reed v. Reed (1971), involved an Idaho state law that gave fathers preference over mothers in control over the estate of a deceased child. The court found this discrimination by gender irrelevant to the purposes of the law and ruled it unconstitutional. (See the Appendix, pp. A-11 to A-12.)

With the Civil Rights Act’s inclusion of discrimination against women clarified by further legislation, NOW, WEAL, and feminist lawyers both inside and outside of government increased their pressure on the EEOC. NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund assisted women in bringing lawsuits against their employers. Women were also helped by the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, cofounded by future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The most notable successes included challenges to the steel and airline industries, to AT&T, and to Sears, Roebuck, and Company, where the focus was primarily on overturning patterns of sex-segregated labor that kept women clustered in low-paying jobs. (See Primary Sources: “Feminism and the Drive for Equality in the Workplace,” pp. 660–71.)

Symbolic of the change in attitude of the EEOC was the appointment in 1977 of Eleanor Holmes Norton to head the commission. Norton, an African American attorney who was a protégée of Pauli Murray (see pp. 587–88) and a seasoned activist in the civil rights and feminist movements, pushed the EEOC to even greater efforts on behalf of minorities and white women. She was responsible for establishing guidelines against sexual harassment in the workplace so that finally in 1985 the Supreme Court agreed that harassment violated women’s civil rights. One historian summed up her accomplishments as follows: “By the time Norton left the EEOC, American workplaces looked and felt very different than they had in 1964 when Title VII passed.”28

As significant as national efforts were, local activists were central to the campaign against discrimination: they organized demonstrations against companies, picketed newspapers that ran sex-segregated help-wanted ads, and staffed telephone hotlines to offer advice about workplace discrimination. Some of these activities were sponsored by women’s liberation groups. For example, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union sponsored both the Action Committee for Day Care to promote public support for child care for working women and Women Employed to help clerical workers organize for better pay, wider job opportunities, and general respect as workers.

Activism also emerged in the workplace when women coworkers came together to share grievances. This consciousness-raising led them to demand change, ranging from the right to wear pants to work to an end to what became known as the “glass ceiling” against advancement. As one historian has put it, “Women were organizing in steel plants and auto factories, in banks and large corporations, in federal and university employment, in trade unions and professional associations, and in newspaper offices and television networks.”29 Among the most highly publicized activist groups was the New York Times Women’s Caucus, started in 1972. Not only did the women employees draw up a list of grievances concerning discrimination in pay, promotion, and opportunities, but they also challenged the sexist language in the newspaper. Eventually the Times agreed to establish an affirmative action program and to compensate women workers for past pay inequities. Similar grassroots organizing allowed women to break ground in other white-collar professions, as well as in skilled blue-collar jobs. (See Primary Sources: “Feminism and the Drive for Equality in the Workplace,” pp. 660–71.)

Another approach to challenging workplace discrimination sought to address the concerns of poor women that had been raised by the national welfare rights organizations. In cities throughout the United States, women established organizations such as Wider Opportunities for Women (Washington, D.C.) and Advocates for Women (San Francisco) to help poor women break into the male domain of construction work by taking advantage of federal funds for job-training programs. Women of color provided leadership as well as the clientele for many of these organizations. In 1979, over ninety of these employment centers came together to create the Women’s Force Network, which in turn established the Construction Compliance Task Force.

The gains for working women were nonetheless not as dramatic as the lawsuits, agitation, and organizations fighting against discrimination might suggest. Although sex segregation in the labor force declined and newspapers stopped running ads for sex-segregated jobs, patterns of sex segregation, especially in low-paying service and clerical work, did not disappear, and women at the lowest rungs of clerical work saw fewer of the gains. Women made inroads into skilled blue-collar work in the 1970s and even more in the 1980s. Despite some incursions into fields such as mining, firefighting, and construction work, however, many jobs traditionally associated with masculinity nonetheless remained resistant to women’s employment. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Liberation,” pp. 672–85.) Elite professionals experienced the most improvement in the 1970s: the number of female lawyers more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1980, while the number of physicians and surgeons more than doubled. Women also significantly improved their representation in middle-class professional and managerial positions.

Ironically, as some women achieved success in employment, women as a whole were worse off financially in the 1970s, primarily because of a worsening economic climate. After decades of prosperity and international dominance, the U.S. economy faltered in the 1970s, because of the high cost of the Vietnam War as well as rising competition from Japan and Europe. An energy crisis, prompted by the 1973 Middle East embargo on oil imports to nations that supported Israel, further eroded the economy, bringing in its wake high inflation and repercussions for automakers and related industries. As jobs disappeared, heavy industry regions, especially in the Midwest, began a process that scholars term “deindustrialization.” The inflationary crisis, accompanied by increased unemployment (which reached 9 percent in 1975), led to hard times for many American families and was a crucial factor in bringing more working wives and mothers into the workforce (see the Appendix, Table 1, p. A-18).

Another factor that profoundly affected women economically was the rise in the percentage of female-headed households, which was in turn a reflection of higher divorce rates and an increase in the numbers of single mothers. Because of long-standing patterns of workplace discrimination, women heads of households generally had far fewer economic resources and options than men: “In 1976, one out of every three families headed by women was living below the officially defined poverty level, compared with only one of eighteen husband-wife families.”30 The position of African American women who headed households was far worse than white women’s. In 1981, 52.9 percent of black women lived in poverty, while 27.4 percent of white women’s households did. Dubbed the “feminization of poverty” in the 1970s, this reality indicated the difficulties feminists faced in addressing the deep structural and institutional problems that kept women unequal in the economy.31

Equality in Education

One way to promote long-term economic benefits for women was to improve their educational opportunities. In 1972, feminists succeeded in introducing Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs. Title IX passed with very little fanfare and took several years to become effective, but eventually led to a revolution in education, especially in high school and college athletics, by requiring that women’s sports be funded at equivalent levels to men’s sports. Title IX, as well as pressure placed on institutions of higher learning to adopt affirmative action policies, also brought tangible results in graduate programs. Between 1972 and 1980, the proportion of women among students who earned PhDs expanded from 16 to 30 percent, while the percentages of women in medical school and law schools grew, respectively, from 10 to 34 percent and from 11 to 26 percent (see the Appendix, Table 3, p. A-20).32

Women College Athletes

This 2016 photograph shows Autumne Franklin of Harvard at the NCAA championship preliminary event for the women’s 400 meter hurdles. The passage in 1972 of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded programs, transformed the world of female athletics. In 1972, only one in twenty-seven girls participated in high school athletics, but by 2012 two in five high school girls were athletes. In universities and colleges, women’s team participation increased sixfold. Despite these developments, women’s programs still lag behind men’s: a 2012 study indicated that women’s athletic programs at NCAA Division I institutions received only 39 percent of the school’s athletic budgets even though women represented close to half of the schools’ student athletes.

But equally important as challenges to discrimination in the schools, the content of education reflected the impact of feminism, especially the women’s liberation movement. Charging that the standard college curriculum ignored women’s presence, women faculty and students laid the basis for a different sort of education. Time-honored generalizations were reexamined for their applicability to women. “Did women have a Renaissance?” asked historian Joan Kelley Gadol. (The answer was no.) Examination of entire disciplines revealed hidden assumptions about the gendered nature of reason and intellectual authority. The natural and physical sciences were found to be particularly unfriendly to women. To challenge the existing canon of appropriate topics for study, in the early 1970s graduate students began writing doctoral dissertations on the history of women, comparative anthropology of sex roles, and forgotten women writers and artists. Simultaneously, Title IX of the federal Education Amendments Act increased pressure on university administrations to hire women to remedy the colossal gender inequity in faculty staffing. Women’s studies programs were established, initially on the very margins of legitimate academic study. The first such programs were founded in 1969 at Cornell University and San Diego State University. By 1973, there were over eighty programs and one thousand courses around the country.

Women’s Autonomy over Their Bodies

The feminist movement also significantly transformed women’s ability to exercise control over their own bodies. Determined to implement fundamental changes in gender relations, women’s liberation groups sought to address the long-standing but unacknowledged oppression of women in their relationships with men and in the family. They particularly addressed women’s health and reproductivity as well as the issues of abuse and violence.

One major concern was to bring rape and other sorts of violence against women dramatically into public light. Before women’s liberation, rape victims were often suspected of dressing or behaving in provocative ways, and their testimony was distrusted by police and courts. Husbands were legally sheltered from rape prosecution on the grounds that sexual service was a wife’s conjugal obligation. As women broke the silence around rape, it soon became clear how many sexual assaults went unreported. Women’s liberationists held “speak-outs,” in which they went public with their own experience as rape victims, and established crisis centers to help other women find support. They undertook state-by-state campaigns to make sexual assault within marriage a crime. They established shelters for wives who were battered and exposed the common police practice of keeping the lid on domestic violence.

Another indication of women’s determination to uproot patriarchy emerged in their protest against the medical system’s treatment of women. The authority of physicians, roughly 90 percent of whom were male, routinely went unchallenged, and women’s complaints were often treated as psychological rather than physical. Focusing less on women becoming doctors and more on wresting the control of women’s health from the hands of professionals altogether, some women’s liberationists learned the skills of midwifery and encouraged women to give birth at home, not in obstetrical wards. Carol Downer of Los Angeles specialized in teaching women how to do safe self-abortions at early stages of pregnancy. The Boston Women’s Health Collective, none of whose members were doctors, became expert on the topics of women’s bodies and needs and produced a short book, Women and Their Bodies (1970), which eventually became the large, multiedition Our Bodies, Ourselves. Its foundational belief was that “women's experiences not clinical research by physicians represented the most empowering, most liberating source of knowledge.”33 The approach proved so successful that the book outgrew the resources of the original collective and was turned over to a commercial publisher for broader distribution. Now in its fourth edition, it is still in print.

The campaign to give women more control over their bodies also focused on the newest dimension of feminism, women’s quest for sexual self-determination and in particular its relationship to abortion. Since no form of contraception was 100 percent reliable (the birth control pill came close, but the side effects posed significant complications), legal and safe access to abortion was important to heterosexually active women who wanted to have full control over whether, when, and how often they became pregnant. Although many states allowed doctors to perform what were called “therapeutic” abortions, in the postwar years access to these procedures had become increasingly cumbersome and expensive. By 1970, when it was estimated that 1 million American women a year had illegal abortions, an abortion reform movement surfaced that sought to widen the legal loophole that allowed doctors to perform medically necessary abortions.34 The feminist movement aimed to go further, insisting that abortion was not a matter of medical practice or criminal law but a highly personal decision that belonged only to the woman who was pregnant. The movement to reform abortion laws was thus transformed by the rising tide of feminism into the movement to repeal them.

Starting in 1967 in Colorado, some states began to liberalize their abortion laws, and in 1971, New York State completely decriminalized abortion in the first six months of pregnancy. But as the majority of state legislatures resisted these changes, abortion activists turned to the federal courts to challenge abortion laws. Norma McCorvey, a young, single pregnant mother, was willing to be the plaintiff in such a case, even though it meant she would have to carry her pregnancy to term. She took the pseudonym “Jane Roe” and with her lawyers challenged the highly restrictive abortion laws of Texas. They won at the lower level, but the State of Texas appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled seven to two in favor of Jane Roe (see the Appendix, pp. A-12 to A-13). Roe v. Wade was the most important Supreme Court case concerning women’s rights since Minor v. Happersett, a century before (see the Appendix, p. A-6). The decision effectively threw out as unconstitutional all state laws making abortion a crime. But the decision was not without its troubling aspects and effectively invited the states to rewrite their laws to restrict abortion more narrowly after the first trimester of pregnancy. With this inviting loophole, the battle for abortion rights began in earnest (see pp. 690–95).

Meanwhile, women of color were beginning to draw attention to another aspect of the problem of reproductive freedom. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, many poor women, especially those dependent on government aid, were subject to tremendous pressure from physicians and social workers to allow themselves to be sterilized by tubal ligation, often while lying on the delivery table in the midst of labor. The procedures were usually funded by Medicaid, a federal program for health services for the poor and were a source of profits for doctors and hospitals. Among women on welfare, on Native American reservations, and in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico, sterilization statistics reached as high as one-third of women of childbearing age, a figure that activists equated to racial genocide.

The issue came to public attention in a series of lawsuits brought against hospitals that routinely sterilized poor women. In California, a group of Mexican American women sued University of Southern California/Los Angeles County General for nonconsensual sterilizations in the 1978 case Madrigal v. Quilligan. A doctor who testified on behalf of the women claimed that in the period 1968–70, elective hysterectomies at the hospital had increased by 742 percent, and tubal ligations by 470 percent. A medical student also supported the women’s claim, describing, “an entrenched system of forced sterilization based on stereotypes of Mexicans as hyperbreeders and Mexican women as welfare mothers in waiting.”35 Although the women lost their case, their suit, as well as others brought by African American and Native American women, fueled the efforts of activists in groups like NWRO, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, and Women of All Red Nations. Pointing out the irony that many states were willing to fund sterilization of poor women but were not willing to provide crucial health care for their families, activists linked the issue to their broader demands for community control of social services, including health, welfare, and education.

Fighting for Reproductive Rights

By the mid-1970s, feminists’ understanding of reproductive rights had moved beyond access to contraception and abortion to encompass the campaign against coercive sterilization, an abuse with its origins in public health officials’ desire to control the childbearing of women in the welfare system. As this poster suggests, unwanted sterilization especially affected women of color: Native Americans, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanas. Because of the efforts of groups like the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created guidelines that eventually halted these practices.

In response to the groundswell of complaints about coerced sterilization, in 1974 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued guidelines requiring a three-day waiting period between granting consent and getting the operation. Even so, a great deal of patient advocacy at the local level was necessary to ensure that women understood the situation and had granted truly informed consent. The fight against sterilization abuse was important in clarifying that women must be able to make their own choices about their reproductive lives rather than have decisions forced on them by public regulations, institutional policy, or economic exigency. The campaign enlarged the abortion repeal movement into something larger and more basic, a movement for comprehensive reproductive rights for all women. Despite the early successes of this campaign, a drive to reverse the movement toward reproductive freedom began almost immediately and would fuel the rise of conservative politics in the late 1970s and 1980s (see pp. 702–3).

CHANGING PUBLIC POLICY AND PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS

Just as feminism helped to improve women’s opportunities and secure their rights to reproductive control and self-determination, it also made its mark on American politics and on public consciousness. In their drive to change public policy, feminists engaged as political actors in lobbying, demonstrations, and lawsuits, but they also sought more explicit influence in national party politics and mounted a massive campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. At the same time, both in the patterns of daily life and in the content of popular culture, we can track the ways in which feminism entered the mainstream of American society in the 1970s.

Women in Party Politics

Women’s political activism in the 1970s needs to be understood in the context of the tumultuous national politics of the era. Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1968 (and reelected in 1972) by promising to achieve “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Nixon simultaneously negotiated with and bombed the North Vietnamese, but his actions only deepened protests at home. In 1973, the troops began to come home through a negotiated cease-fire with the North Vietnamese. Nixon had also won support by playing upon the resentment that many white middle Americans — a group he called the “silent majority” — harbored toward the disruptions of the 1960s. A potent backlash was forming against youth radicalism, antiwar protest, the counterculture, and racial nationalism. Many voters north and south resented programs like affirmative action and busing to end segregated schooling. Still others balked at the monetary cost of the “Great Society” social welfare programs established by President Johnson. At the same time, Americans were coping with the failure in Vietnam, the energy crisis, and economic decline.

Despite being a candidate who promoted “law and order,” Nixon contributed to a sense of disorder by plunging the country into a constitutional crisis. In 1972, Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (known by the acronym CREEP) arranged for a covert break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. The Watergate burglars were arrested, and, when they went on trial, evidence of high-level involvement in the episode, as well as a host of political “dirty tricks,” began to accumulate. Despite the administration’s cover-up efforts, in the summer of 1974 Congress began to draw up articles of impeachment. To avoid this fate, Richard Nixon resigned, becoming the only American president to do so during his term in office.

The lasting legacies of the Watergate scandal were profound, including both widespread public distrust of government and recognition of the political power wielded by the news media. Thus the women’s movement of the 1970s bucked a trend of conservatism and pessimism. It was remarkable for its successes and for its optimism about the possibilities for social change, even as its successes helped fuel backlash politics.

To facilitate women’s more equal participation in the political process, in 1971 a diverse group of women, including NOW stalwarts such as Betty Friedan, congressional representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (see p. 577), came together to create the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Its purpose was the election of women to political office and the use of political influence to affect public policy. Its ambitious goals were to eliminate “racism, sexism, institutional violence and poverty through the election and appointment of women to public office, party reform, and the support of women’s issues and feminist candidates across party lines.”36 The caucus attracted a diverse group of women, including African Americans, Chicanas, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans, and although they were not always in accord on specific agenda items, the group was responsible for significant gains in women’s representation.

Pressured by the NWPC, the 1972 Democratic National Convention had three times as many women delegates as in 1968 and included numerous women’s demands in its platforms, including support for the ERA and national funding for child care. Women Republicans to a lesser extent also saw their influence increase within their party. The NWPC chose to support liberal Democrat George McGovern in the hope that his successful candidacy would result in significant gains for women. They also vigorously backed an impressive but unsuccessful effort to give Texan Frances “Sissy” Farenthold the vice presidential nomination. The NWPC, however, lost an opportunity to make a dramatic statement in support of women officeholders when it failed to back New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, who had been elected in 1968 as the first African American woman representative to the U.S. Congress and now mounted a serious campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, the first woman and the first African American to do so. On the national level, the NWPC helped to increase women’s influence in both political parties, especially the Democratic National Committee, but met with little immediate success in terms of electing women to public office.

The Reemergence of the ERA

Among the most potent political issues for feminists in the 1970s were the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and reproductive rights. The ERA, which sought to amend the Constitution to prohibit the denial of legal equality on the basis of gender discrimination, had first been proposed in 1923 (see pp. 484–89). Organized labor had long opposed the ERA for endangering protective labor legislation, but in the wake of the feminist upheaval of the sixties, the composition of the forces for and against the ERA changed dramatically. In 1973, urged on by female labor activists, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) formally switched its position to support the ERA. In the wake of this change, working women became a mainstay of the pro-ERA movement.

This switch in labor’s attitude toward the ERA flowed directly from profound changes in the place and prospects of women in the labor force. (See Primary Sources: “Feminism and the Drive for Equality in the Workplace,” pp. 660–71.) Equal access to all occupations and equal pay for equal work were the most widely supported elements of the feminist agenda, and the ERA appeared to be just the tool to ensure economic justice for women. In 1972, the ERA easily passed both houses of Congress, and within a year thirty of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified the amendment. As victory seemed imminent, few could foresee the long and protracted battle over the ERA and how it would lead to the emergence of an antifeminist movement (see pp. 689–90).

Feminism Enters the Mainstream

Although we may chart concrete developments spurred on by the feminist movement — especially those related to public policy — evaluating changes in women’s consciousness, women’s private lives, and public opinion is far more difficult. Nonetheless, demographic changes for the 1970s are striking. In contrast to the trend of the 1950s, women in the 1970s married later and had children later. Divorce rates rose dramatically in this era (from 2.2 per thousand marriages in 1960 to 4.8 per thousand in 1975).37 The number of children born to single women increased significantly (for the period 1960–1964 premarital first-child births constituted 10.3 percent of all first births, while for the period 1975–1979 the figure was more than double, at 25.7 percent), and the number of couples cohabitating outside of marriage more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1984.38 Survey data also suggest a rise in premarital sex, as well as an expanded repertoire of sexual behavior. At the same time as these changes in family structure emerged, women’s participation in the workforce continued its twentieth-century upward trajectory, growing in the decade of the 1970s from 43.5 to 51.1 percent. Even more striking was the increase in the percentage of mothers in the workforce (40.8 to 50.1 percent).39

But to what extent may these changes be credited to feminism? Most scholars argue that the rise in women’s participation in the workforce was prompted in part by the nation’s economic decline of the era. Divorce increases may have been promoted by the feminist ideological critique of the family but were also influenced by many women’s increased wage-earning capacity and to liberalization in state divorce laws. Similarly, changes in sexuality must be understood in part as a result of the technology of the birth control pill as well as the related sexual revolution.

Nonetheless, feminism undoubtedly sparked many changes in personal life. In 1972, Life magazine featured a cover story on feminist Alix Kate Shulman’s marriage contract, in which she and her husband agreed, among other things, that both “had an equal right to his/her own time, work, values, and choices.” The article was later reprinted in Redbook, and by 1978, according to one historian, “even Glamour magazine was explaining how to write your own marriage contract.”40 Opinion polls conducted during the 1970s and early 1980s also suggested that many Americans had changed their views on working mothers and embraced more egalitarian notions of household responsibilities. Moreover, by 1970, 40 percent of American women were willing to say to pollsters that they favored “efforts to change and strengthen women’s status in society.”41 Working women particularly favored changes, and African American women were twice as likely as white women to be supportive.

What two scholars have termed the epoch’s “cultural validation of erotic pleasure”42 may well have spread to women in general through feminist arguments about sexual double standards and women’s sexual empowerment. As one young woman said, “I may have had an unusual upbringing, but . . . I have the same needs and moods as a man, and I am not going to let some chauvinist pig stifle them.”43 One measure of this legitimation of women’s sexuality was the popularity of fiction that presented women’s erotic lives in explicit language from a decidedly feminist point of view. Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying (1973) featured a woman’s “uninhibited odyssey,” which one critic characterized as a “decidedly new way of thinking about women.”44 The feminist and gay power movements also were instrumental in the decisions of homosexual couples to live openly together and to begin the campaign for legal access to civil union and gay marriage.

Another way of gauging feminism’s impact is to examine its permeation of mainstream popular culture. One major breakthrough was the emergence of Ms., a glossy, mainstream national feminist magazine that began publication in 1972. The term “Ms.” was revived by feminists in the 1970s so that women would no longer need to advertise their marital status by having to choose between the appellations “Miss” and “Mrs.” and was itself a reflection of the way in which feminism would help to challenge unnecessarily gendered language. Under the editorship of journalist Gloria Steinem, Ms. magazine matured to feature high production values and commercial advertisements carefully chosen for their nonexploitive portrayal of women.

Elsewhere in the media, early feminist agitation often met with condescending coverage with women’s liberation activists’ more radical critiques of patriarchy sensationalized or trivialized. Yet there were sympathetic treatments of the movement, especially concerning liberal feminists’ attention to economic discrimination. In 1970, an eleven-hour sit-in at the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal forced that magazine to run an eight-page spread on the movement, with articles written by feminists themselves. Later in the 1970s, McCall’s featured a column titled “Betty Friedan’s Notebook” as well as a regular series titled “The Working Woman.” However, critics have noted that even sympathetic treatments of feminist issues in the mainstream magazines tended to dilute the feminist message by stressing women’s need to change from within rather than to focus on challenging patriarchy or changing society.

A similar process may be seen in television. Sitcoms of the 1950s primarily featured white middle-class families and the happy (usually) homemaker. In the 1970s, those shows’ characters were still largely white and middle class but offered broader possibilities in their representations of women that reflected the influence of contemporary feminist issues. In Maude (1972–1978), Bea Arthur played a middle-aged feminist who in many ways was a caricature that antifeminists loved to hate: loud, domineering, and opinionated. However, the most controversial episode, aired in the 1972–73 season, featured a sympathetic portrayal of Maude’s decision to get an abortion. By far the most popular “new woman” on television in the 1970s was Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977). Richards was a single thirty-ish career woman who settled in Minneapolis, determined, as the show’s theme song put it, to “make it on her own.” One of the series’ writers described the writers’ assumption that Mary “represented a new attitude, that you could be single and still be a whole person, that you didn’t need to be married to have a complete life.”45 The show explicitly touched on feminist themes, including the centrality of Mary’s friendship with her neighbor, Rhoda, and Mary’s chagrin that, although she got the job as associate producer of a TV news program, her pay was less than the man who preceded her. Despite this sympathetic treatment, it is easy to overstate the feminist sensibilities of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Although Mary didn’t have a husband or children, she was consistently nurturing and other-directed in her relationships with her coworkers. The show’s modern approach to the single career woman allowed the producers (and advertisers) to tap into a young, sophisticated viewing audience without seriously challenging traditional notions of womanly virtues. Shows like Mary Tyler Moore thus reflected aspects of feminism but also co-opted its more radical potential. Despite these limits, the media reflects the way in which modern feminism became increasingly mainstream in the 1970s.

The growing influence of feminism in the mainstream was also evident in the National Women’s Conference held in Houston in 1977. The meeting, a follow-up to the first International Women’s Conference held in Mexico City in 1975, received funding from the federal government, and two former First Ladies, Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford, as well as then First Lady Rosalynn Carter, presided over the opening services. Gloria Scott, national president of the Girl Scouts of America, also made opening remarks. African American congressional representative Barbara Jordan’s keynote address similarly reflected feminism’s incorporation into the mainstream. Jordan noted, “None of the goals stated in this conference are incompatible with the goals of America. The goals of this conference, as a matter of fact, sound like stanzas to ‘America the Beautiful.’ ”46

National Women’s Conference in Houston

In 1977, the U.S. government authorized funds for a National Women’s Conference, which was held in Houston the same year. The conference brought together a diverse range of participants: one-third were women of color, and one-fifth were conservative women. The conference passed the comprehensive National Women’s Agenda calling for ratification of the ERA, reproductive freedom, lesbian rights, support for the rights of women of color, and action against violence and rape. Here U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan, of Houston, gives the keynote address. From left to right, the other women in the front row on the platform are former U.S. Representative Bella Abzug, then First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and former First Ladies Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson. A noted orator, Jordan was active in the civil rights movement and in 1996 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Jordan overstated the case. Many of the ideas presented at the conference were still radical to many, if not most, Americans. An important event in the development of American feminism, the conference brought together a diverse range of attendees: one-third were women of color. The high point of the meeting was the approval of the comprehensive National Women’s Agenda, which called for action against domestic violence and rape, ratification of the ERA, reproductive freedom and lesbian rights, and a unified statement of the importance of rights for women of color. Coretta Scott King offered a hopeful vision of the future, declaring, “Let the message go forth from Houston . . . 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.”47

But even as feminists celebrated, they recognized that the Houston meeting also exposed a growing threat to feminist goals. As the various states elected representatives to the conference, conservative forces, including anti-abortion and anti-ERA activists, had mobilized and managed to secure about 20 percent of the delegates. At the same time, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, who in 1972 had founded the group STOP-ERA (see pp. 689–90), organized a counterconvention in Houston and founded a new conservative coalition she dubbed the “Pro-Family movement.” The counterconvention at Houston did not disrupt the National Women’s Conference, but its attendees’ activities were a harbinger of a resurgent conservatism that would transform the American political climate in the next two decades.

CONCLUSION: Feminism’s Legacy

The 1960s and 1970s proved an era of extraordinary ferment for women. Politically and culturally, the radical movements of the sixties and early seventies — from Black Power, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement to Chicano, Native American, and Asian American nationalism — were fundamental to women’s history, reigniting a long-dormant feminist tradition and encouraging a new generation to rethink the meaning of freedom for women. Despite divisions and disappointments, the various strands of feminist activism led to improvements in many women’s economic and political equality and changed the consciousness of millions who in turn challenged conventional notions about women’s role in the home, family, and workplace. It might seem that feminism caused the deep economic and social changes in American women’s lives, but it is more accurate to say that it resulted from them. Feminism gave millions of women a framework for interpreting their lives and served as a catalyst for mobilizing women for social and political change. Above all, from the special perspective of this book — revisioning American history through women’s eyes — the modern feminist revival marked a tremendous increase in women’s determination to take an active, conscious role in the shaping of American society.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Feminism and the Drive for Equality in the Workplace

DURING WORLD WAR II, ALTHOUGH WOMEN entered the workforce in large numbers and took on high-skilled blue-collar jobs that had formerly been closed to them, no feminist movement existed to rally women in sustaining their gains or in defense of their economic rights. When increasing numbers of women, including mothers of young children, continued their march into the workforce in the postwar years, sex-segregated labor patterns returned and women’s work continued to be devalued. In the 1960s, however, the liberal women’s movement associated with NOW and WEAL became a crucial engine for challenging deeply rooted discriminatory patterns, especially sex segregation, in the workplace. Women did not benefit equally or at the same rate of change, but legal challenges as well as consciousness-raising about women’s rights and capabilities produced a dramatic expansion of their employment opportunities. As witness to these changes, photographs abounded in the 1970s that graphically documented the transformation in women’s work. This essay explores a selection of these images. They record areas in which women achieved significant success as well as those in which change came far more slowly.

One of the most powerful tools for women seeking equal rights as paid laborers was Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (see pp. 645–47), but it was of little use until feminists put pressure on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to take seriously the constant stream of complaints women began filing as soon as the commission was established. Among the early challengers were flight attendants who faced demeaning circumstances in which they were treated as servants. But bread-and-butter issues tied to sex segregation in what one critic called a “pink-collar ghetto” were the most potent concerns. Airlines hired women exclusively and placed strict limits on weight, appearance, and age. They also refused to hire women of color and married women. Discontented flight attendants recognized that employment practices that defined a job as appropriate only to young, unmarried women devalued their work and provided justification for poor wages and disrespectful treatment. In 1968, the EEOC finally ruled in favor of an attendant who had filed suit against American Airlines for mandatory retirement. Other discriminatory practices were also disallowed over a period of years, and finally, in 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that “female-only” hiring practices of the airlines were discriminatory.

Although these legal successes changed the face of the flight attendant workforce dramatically in the 1970s, opening up the career to women of color and to men, the profession still suffered from low wages, long hours, and recalcitrant airlines, problems that increased flight attendants’ union activism and helped spur the growth of pink-collar unions in this era. Flight attendants also continued their complaints about airlines’ advertising campaigns that sexualized them. A National Airlines series enticed passengers with the slogan “I’m Debbie [or Susan or Betty], Fly Me.” (National also required attendants to wear buttons that said “Fly Me.”) Even worse, Continental Airlines ads featured stewardesses who promised that “we really move our tail for you.”48 Frustration with this sexual objectification led to the creation of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights (SFWR) in 1972. Reflecting the influence of women’s liberation, the group announced that it hoped to “raise the consciousness of stewardesses” to their “ ‘slut-in-service-to-America’ status.” They vowed “to fight the demeaning treatment to which 35,000 stewardesses are subjected by airlines, crews, and male passengers[;] . . . to enforce airline compliance with Federal affirmative action guidelines[;] . . . to improve the economic status of stewardesses[;] . . . [and] to increase the promotional opportunities for stewardesses.”49

The two images in Figure 11.1 are from Newsweek’s 1974 article on SFWR, which focuses on the organization’s campaign to draw attention to health problems faced by flight attendants, including excessive fatigue and exposure to hazardous cargo. The image on the left shows members of SFWR, and the one on the right shows “Stews on the Job.” What might have been Newsweek’s goal in juxtaposing these images? What does the photograph on the left suggest about the breadth of the influence of feminism in the early 1970s?

Figure 11.1 Flight Attendants Protest Discriminatory Practices (1974)

Other major targets of discrimination suits were the nation’s phone companies. The major focus of complaint was sex-segregated labor policies that excluded women from highly skilled and better-paid jobs and funneled them into poorly rewarded positions, such as operators and clerks. Lorena Weeks, a working mother and a nineteen-year veteran telephone operator employed at Southern Bell in Georgia, was refused her 1966 request to be transferred to a better job as a “switch-man”: she filed a complaint with the EEOC. In court, when the company claimed that state law barred women and minors from lifting more than thirty pounds, “Weeks pointed out that her typewriter, which supervisors made her move, weighed more than that.”50 She won the case in 1971, when the U.S. Court of Appeals observed that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits such “stereotyped characterization” and “rejects just this type of romantic paternalism as unduly Victorian and instead vests individual women with the power to decide whether or not to take on unromantic tasks.”51

Especially far-reaching was the success of women who challenged the behemoth AT&T, which employed more women than any other company in the country. A twenty-five-thousand-page government study concluded that the Bell system was “without a doubt, the largest oppressor of women workers in the United States.”52 By 1973, the company had agreed to significant restitution ($38 million to thirteen thousand women of all races and to two thousand minority men) and had transformed its hiring policies. Even before the settlement was finalized, AT&T embarked on an advertising campaign that emphasized affirmative action. Consider the 1972 advertisements in Figures 11.2 and 11.3. The first one explains that AT&T wants to hire male operators and the second shows a woman in a job formerly reserved for men. What clues do the images provide to indicate the kind of employment climate the company wishes to project? At the time, both of these ads would have been startling to many viewers. Do they have any shock value today? Does one seem more jarring than the other? If so, why do you think that is?

Figure 11.2 AT&T Advertises for Telephone Operators

Figure 11.3 AT&T Promotes Women Installers

Other women challenged the sex segregation of one of the most dangerous fields of employment — mining. In the seventeenth century, Virginia slave women apparently engaged in some mine work, and labor shortages during the Great Depression and World War II gave some women opportunities in Appalachian coalfields. But in general, mining was historically one of the most jealously protected male occupations. Many states had laws prohibiting women’s work as miners, and unions, employers, and male miners all resisted women’s entrance into this male-dominated job category. In addition, notions of women’s proper place in the home were particularly rigid in Appalachian community culture, where mining was a significant part of the economy. Beginning in the early 1970s, some individual women successfully challenged companies that refused to hire them. Then, in 1978, a group of Tennessee women created the Coal Employment Project and, working with NOW, won a massive class action suit against the coal operators for sex discrimination. As a result, individual women received financial compensation and over 830 women were hired in the mines. By 1980, there were 3,871 women miners, but this number represented only 3 percent of the total miners in the nation.

Although the numbers were small, these women provide insights into the experiences of women who sought to break down employment barriers in this era. Because working-class women were excluded from the only significant skilled-labor job in the Appalachian coal-mining areas, they had few job options beyond domestic work or low-paid service employment. Many poor women were on welfare. Most of the women who bucked community disapproval to become miners did so because the job paid the best wages available in their region, and they recognized that the sex-segregation patterns of the mining industry limited their ability to earn a living wage. Even though mining jobs brought in more income, women who did become employed in the mines faced hostility and sexual harassment underground. They also found themselves relegated to low-level work that offered few options for advancement. Although many women worked well together and created bonds of friendship, sometimes across racial lines, their limited numbers and the nature of their jobs made it difficult to create women’s work communities that could mitigate some of the hardships of their labor.

The photograph in Figure 11.4 was taken by labor photographer Earl Dotter in 1976 in Vansant, Virginia. Many of Dotter’s images emphasize the hardship and danger of coal work, but this one strikes a different tone. What do the women’s expressions and bearing suggest concerning their feelings about their work? Does the photograph give any clues as to why it was so difficult for women to challenge the sex segregation of coal mining? How might their reactions have been different if there had only been one of them?

Figure 11.4 Women in the Coal Mines

Firefighting, a job as arduous and dangerous as mining, also saw small but symbolically significant challenges to male monopoly in the 1970s. Some women served as firefighters in the face of severe labor shortages during World War II, but for several decades after the war fire departments did not employ women as career personnel. According to one account, Arlington County, Virginia, hired the first woman career firefighter, Judith Livers, in 1974. The following year, a handful of cities followed suit and small numbers of women found jobs as firefighters throughout the country.

Figure 11.5 features the first women to graduate from the New York City Fire Department Training Academy. (They are, top row from left: Eileen F. Gregan, Catherine A. Riordan, Lorraine Cziko, Judith Murphy, Marianne McCormack, Janet M. Horan, and Maureen T. Harnett. Front row, from left: Brenda Berkman, Patricia A. Fitzpatrick, Zaida Gonzalez, and JoAnn Jacobs.) The city, as well as the all-male Uniformed Firefighters Association, had resisted hiring women. In 1977, Berkman and five hundred other women passed the written test of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), but afterwards the FDNY instituted new requirements for the physical part of the exam. Berkman, an attorney, filed a complaint, and a New York District Court ruled that the FDNY policy discriminated against women and violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

After the court ruling, new physical tests were put in place, and forty-one women, eleven of whom were African American, qualified for a position in the FDNY in 1982. JoAnn Jacobs was the first black women firefighter in New York City. Unlike many of her female colleagues, Jacobs had a supportive chief in her first assignment and also benefited from the mentoring offered her by the Vulcan Society, an organization of black firefighters. Jacobs was particularly conscious of her status as a role model for young black women. She commented that her job “brought me a lot of respect. I loved wearing my uniform, especially as a black woman. You know? I’d walk down the street in my uniform and feel really special. Otherwise, you know—you know—they think you’re a maid or a nanny or—you know because of the perceptions in this city and this society. . . . I felt that it was a higher calling in terms of letting young girls, especially, see me in uniform.”53

After joining the department, Berkman founded the United Women Firefighters, an organization that mentored women in the city’s firehouses, and she continued to be a leader in the fight against gender discrimination in firefighting. Although she had a successful career, eventually achieving the high rank of captain, Berkman faced continual hostility from male firefighters.

Tensions over women firefighters continued to disrupt engine companies across the nation into the twenty-first century. The employment barriers remain high to this day, and women still constitute a tiny percentage of professional firefighters (3.7 percent in 2013). Does the photograph offer any indication of how these pioneering New York women felt about becoming firefighters?

Figure 11.5 New York City Firefighters

For many women in white-collar work, the struggle to break down sex-segregated labor patterns was just as difficult as that undertaken by blue-collar workers. Women were traditionally shunted into low-level office work, while men monopolized management positions. In many instances in the 1970s, office workers met with significant success in unionizing to gain some power in negotiations with employers and in their struggle to open up managerial positions to women. One of the most intransigent sectors, however, proved to be the banking industry, which became the site of one of the most publicized strikes mounted by women during the 1970s.

Like other banks throughout the nation, Citizens National Bank of Willmar, Minnesota, routinely kept women out of high-status and well-paid work in the bank: only one woman was a bank officer (and she made $4,000 less annually than the men she supervised), while no men were tellers or clerks. In 1977, when the bank passed over its experienced women workers to hire a man with no training at a salary higher than all but one of the women employees, the women protested to their employers, to no avail. Like countless other women workers, they filed a complaint with the EEOC and sought the assistance of the local NOW chapter. At the same time, they created their own union, the first bank employees’ union in the state. The bank, however, was adamant in its refusal to engage in collective bargaining or address the women’s concerns. In response, eight women employees went out on strike and organized a picket line in the freezing Minnesota winter. Their strike garnered publicity from all over the world, and they received letters from other women who pleaded, “You can’t stop, you can’t stop. Please understand you’re doing this for all of us.” As one striker, Ter Wisscha, proudly recalled, “It wasn’t very long before it wasn’t our strike anymore.”54

In the end, after two long years, the strike failed. As a result of the EEOC’s recommendation, the women received a small economic settlement in return for an agreement not to sue, but the National Labor Relations Board did not endorse the strikers’ demand for reinstatement of their jobs. The bank rehired only one of the strikers at a job that paid less than the one she had left. Nor did the strike or subsequent unionizing efforts elsewhere make significant progress for women in banking or undercut the industry’s sex-segregation patterns. Today, women represent 75 percent of the banking industry, but only 10 percent of all banking officers. Yet the strike, which became the subject of a moving documentary, The Willmar Eight, is viewed as important in part for its demonstration of the broad impact of feminism in the 1970s, even among women who did not call themselves feminists. Does Figure 11.6 offer any clues as to why the strike became so well-known? How does this picket line of white-collar workers compare to the striking textile workers depicted on page 463? Do their picket signs offer us any sense of how they view themselves as workers?

Figure 11.6 The Willmar Eight

During the first decade of the feminist movement, women workers made perhaps the most significant gains when they broke down barriers that had largely excluded them from professional occupations such as law and medicine. Less numerous but nonetheless noteworthy pioneer professionals were women who became ordained as rabbis or ministers in this era. As the seventeenth-century story of Anne Hutchinson indicates (see pp. 64–67), women have been spiritual leaders throughout American history, but rarely have they become leaders in organized religion. During the 1970s, feminist theologian Mary Daly urged women to leave their patriarchal churches and create new communities of religious women. But most women sought change from within. Black and white women were active within the National Council of Churches of Christ and its allied group Church Women United, which agitated for more women leaders and attention to women’s issues within the churches. The struggle to gain acceptance for female clerics met with mixed success. Catholic women failed in their 1975 call (and subsequent calls) for women’s acceptance into the priesthood. However, as early as 1970, some Lutheran denominations ordained women, and in 1976 the Episcopalian church bowed to pressure and agreed to women’s ordination.

Jewish women as a group were highly attracted to the feminist movement, and it is not surprising that they would exert pressure for change within Judaism. Especially among Reform and Conservative congregations, the two largest wings of American Judaism, and in the smaller group of Reconstructionists, feminists succeeded in bringing women’s issues into their congregations and religious practices. Conservative women established Ezrat Nashim in 1972 to press for equality in Jewish religious observance, but it was not until 1985 that Conservatives began to ordain women. The movement for female ordination had to counter a three-thousand-year-old tradition of male leadership in which the rabbi was revered above all for his great learning. In 1972, Sally Preisand, a Reform Jew who studied at Hebrew Union College in Ohio, became the first American woman to be ordained as a rabbi. Preisand did not start her quest for ordination from an explicitly feminist perspective, but she became a central figure among Jewish feminists who sought equality within the Jewish faith.

Figure 11.7 is a photograph of Preisand in 1972. The power of this photograph might not be immediately evident to anyone not familiar with Judaism. It shows Preisand with the central ritual object of Jewish practice, the first five books of the Old Testament, handwritten on a parchment scroll. The rabbi’s job is to teach the contents of the Torah and the long interpretive tradition that accompanies it. Why might some religions have been easier to integrate at the clerical level than others? Is the image of a woman presiding over public religious practice still somewhat shocking?

Figure 11.7 Rabbi Sally Preisand

Everywhere Americans turned in the 1970s, they saw images that challenged conventional notions of women’s proper place, especially women’s proper place in the workforce. A final example of this challenge comes from NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDEF), which in the early 1970s mounted an advertising campaign to raise public consciousness about the employment discrimination women faced. With the help of free creative services from J. Walter Thompson and other advertising agencies, in 1973 the LDEF ran a series of print ads that appeared in mainstream magazines such as Time, Saturday Review, and BusinessWeek, as well as thirty-second television commercials. In both cases the advertisements appeared as free-of-charge public service ads. Midge Kovacs, head of the Image Committee of NOW, was responsible for the campaign; she commented, “We hope it will make all Americans aware of the limited aspirations of girls and the limited opportunities for women, and that they will act to do something about both.”55

The two print ads reproduced in Figures 11.8 and 11.9 take two different approaches. What point is being stressed in “Hire him. He’s got great legs”? How is that point different from the one stressed in the ad featuring the baby? In what ways and for whom would the two ads have been effective? Kovacs later commented that she regretted that the initial ad series contained no images of women of color. Several years later, the LDEF ran the advertisement in Figure 11.10. Besides the race of the two children, what are the differences in the ways in which Figures 11.9 and 11.10 attempt to convey their messages? One of the rationales behind the LDEF campaign was to counter the pervasive sexism in advertising, including those that devalued women’s work. How successful do you think these advertisements were in meeting this challenge?

Figure 11.8 “Hire him. He’s got great legs.”

Figure 11.9 “This healthy, normal baby has a handicap. She was born female.”

Figure 11.10 “When I grow up, I’m going to be a judge, or a senator or maybe president.”

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How do these images convey the changing nature of women’s work in the 1970s?

To what extent do these images reflect the impact of feminism?

This essay has emphasized change. Taking into account the chapter’s analysis of women’s work in this period, what other sorts of images would be necessary to convey the broad contours of women’s paid labor, especially in those areas where change was less dramatic?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Women’s Liberation

WOMEN’S LIBERATION ACTIVISM produced an immense amount of feminist literature, most of which was published in organizational journals and newsletters. The late 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of these periodicals, with eighty-five debuting in 1970 alone. Many of these were modeled after the underground newspapers that had been the staple of the New Left and were the result of New Left women’s frustration over the control and content of these newspapers. One of the most famous of the early feminist salvos, Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That,” grew out of this anger. Morgan detailed how women engineered the takeover of the New York newspaper Rat, whose sometimes pornographic articles, graphics, and advertising were demeaning to women. She explained, “No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more co-optation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same: one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all.”56

These alternative periodicals spread feminist ideology, with its commitment to collective rather than individual identity and to the elimination of hierarchical structures. As one scholar has noted, the writers “were not communicating about something outside themselves, as mass media journalists might. They were communicating about their own ideas, activities, and the growing movement among women.”57 Fortunately, much of the early, ephemeral women’s liberation literature survives in major archives with online access. These archives include Duke University’s Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Herstory Project. Their survival is in part a result of feminists’ recognition that they were making history, a point evident in the comments of the editors of Notes from the First Year, a publication of New York Radical Women: “We needed a movement periodical which would expand with the movement,” and “reflect its growth accurately, and in time become a historical record, functioning politically as much as did Stanton’s and Anthony’s Revolution exactly a century ago.”58

The documents excerpted here demonstrate some key themes of the early women’s liberation movement: its roots in New Left politics and racial and ethnic nationalist movements, the critique of patriarchy, the ambivalence of women of color toward white feminists, the ideology of political lesbianism, the call for women to exert control over their sexuality, the technique of consciousness-raising, and the recognition that the “personal is political.” Women’s liberationists are often termed “radical feminists,” in part to distinguish them from the liberals associated with NOW. As you read these documents, all written between 1969 and 1971, consider why they might have been considered radical when they were published. Do they still seem radical today? Why or why not?

WOMEN BEGAN TO ABANDON THE New Left in early 1969, frustrated with male leaders’ unwillingness to take gender issues and sexism seriously. Scores of organizations sprang up, from the Redstockings in New York City to the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union to Gainesville Women’s Liberation in Florida. In theorizing about feminism, women’s liberationists articulated a feminist ideology that reflected both their socialist roots and their innovative critique of patriarchy. This selection by Jo Freeman, from the first issue of Chicago’s newsletter Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, explicitly challenges men in the New Left (referred to as “the Movement”). What are her criticisms of male leaders of the left? Why does she think women need to organize?

JO FREEMAN

What in the Hell Is Women’s Liberation Anyway? (1968)

To list all the ways in which our society exploits women would be overwhelming and unnecessary. There are so many, and they are so endemic to our social organization, that women can be liberated only with a total restructuring of this society. Likewise, because this exploitation is so intrinsic, restructuring of society can be significant only in so far as it incorporates the changes necessary for women to be liberated.

Women’s liberation does not mean equality with men. Mere equality is not enough. Equality in an unjust society is meaningless. Inequality in a just society is a contradiction in terms. We want equality in a just society. And this means the encouragement and opportunity of all individuals to be fully themselves to explore, express and develop their human potentials to the greatest extent possible unconfined by the narrow bounds of societal stereotypes. . . .

Altho women in the Movement have long been aware of their secondery [sic] status within and without the movement it is only recently that they have begun to do something about it. Since a small group of women began their first searching meetings last fall the movement for women’s liberation has grown to a nationwide network of women who recognize the interdependence of radical change and women’s liberation.

Our political awareness of these twin concerns has developed as we sought to apply the principles of justice, equality, mutual respect and dignity which we learned from the movement to the lives we lived as part of the movement only to come up against the solid wall of male chauvinism.

It is time that Movement men realized that they cannot speak the languages of freedom while treating women in the same dehumanizing manner as their establishment peers. It is time Movement women realized this is a social problem of national significance not at all confined to our struggle for personal liberation within the Movement and that, as such, must be approached politically.

The time has come for us to take the initiative in organizing ourselves for our liberation, and in organizing all women, around issues which directly affect their lives, to see the need for fundamental social change.

As women radicals we are involved with political issues because we realize that we cannot be free until all people are free. But as radical women we are not interested in forming a women’s auxiliary to the Movement. Our interest is in thoroughly integrating that movement particularly its leadership and policymaking positions. To this end we feel it is necessary to create women’s groups to organize other women into the Movement and to organize ourselves to take power.

SOURCE: Jo Freeman, “What in the Hell Is Women’s Liberation Anyway?” Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, March 1968, 1, 4, The CWLU Herstory Website Archive, https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/voice.html (accessed March 17, 2015).

THE THIRD WORLD WOMEN’S ALLIANCE emerged from an earlier organization, the Black Women’s Alliance, founded by Frances Beal and other women in SNCC (see pp. 575–76). The term “third world” was drawn from the language of geopolitics to characterize underdeveloped nations and peoples who were outside the “first world / second world” antagonisms of the Cold War. As the following statement indicates, the group changed its title and broadened its focus when Puerto Rican and Asian women joined. The organization, probably numbering about two hundred, had members in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City and lasted through the 1970s. Like later organizations founded by women of color, it emphasized the intersection of race, class, and gender in understanding the oppression they experienced. Why does the statement stress the myth of the black matriarchy (see pp. 637–39)? What criticisms does it make of white feminists? What premises do the statement’s authors share with white feminists?

THIRD WORLD WOMEN’S ALLIANCE

Statement (1971)

The Third World Women’s Alliance started about December, 1968. Within SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) a Black women’s liberation committee was established and a number of women who had been meeting over a period of a few months decided that we would be drawing in women from other organizations, and that we would be attracting welfare mothers, community workers, and campus radicals — so we decided to change the name to the Black Women’s Alliance. As of now, the organization is independent of SNCC and at the same time SNCC has decided to retain its women’s caucus.

We decided to form a Black women’s organization for many reasons. One was and still is, the widespread myth and concept in the Black community of the matriarchy. We stated that the concept of the matriarchy was a myth and that it has never existed. Our position would be to expose this myth. There was also the widespread concept that by some miracle the oppression of slavery for the Black woman was not as degrading, not as horrifying, not as barbaric [as for men]. However, we state that in any society where men are not yet free, women are less free because we are further enslaved by our sex.

Now we noticed another interesting thing. And that is, that with the rise of Black nationalism and the rejection of white middle class norms and values, that this rejection of whiteness — white cultures, white norms and values — took a different turn when it came to the Black woman. That is, Black men defined the role of black women in the movement. They stated that our role was a supportive one; others stated that we must become breeders and provide an army; still others stated that we had kotex power or pussy power. We opposed these concepts also stating that a true revolutionary movement enhances the status of women.

Now one of the changes that have taken place in the organization, is that we recognize the need for Third World solidarity. That is, we could not express support for Asia, Africa and Latin America and at the same time, ignore non-Black Third World sisters in this country. We found that we would be much more effective and unified by becoming a Third World Women’s organization. So our group is opened to all Third World sisters because our oppression is basically caused by the same factors and our enemy is the same. The name of the organization has been changed to reflect this new awareness and composition of the group — THIRD WORLD WOMEN’S ALLIANCE.

Some women in the movement cannot understand why we exclude whites from our meetings and programs. The argument that we are all equally oppressed as women and should unite as one big family to confront the system is as artificial as the argument that Third World women should be fighting on only one front.

And to the white women’s liberation groups we say . . . until you can deal with your own racism and until you can deal with your OWN poor white sisters, you will never be a liberation movement and you cannot expect to unite with Third World peoples in common struggle.

Most white women involved in liberation groups come from a middle-class and a student thing. They don’t address themselves to the problem of poor and working class women, so there is no way in the world they would be speaking for Third World women. There are serious questions that white women must address themselves to. They call for equality. We answer, equal to what? Equal to white men in their power and ability to oppress Third World people?

It is difficult for Third World women to address themselves to the petty problems of who is going to take out the garbage, when there isn’t enough food in the house for anything to be thrown away. Fighting for the day-to-day existence of a family and as humans is the struggle of the Third World woman. We are speaking of oppression, we don’t need reforms that will put white women into a position to oppress women of color or OUR MEN in much the same way as white men have been doing for centuries. We need changes in the system and attitudes of people that will guarantee the right to live free from hunger, poverty, and racism. Revolution and not reform is the answer.

SOURCE: Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 65.

TO SOME EXTENT, CHICANAS’ FEMINISM was similar to that of African Americans in that it was rooted in the nationalist movement of Chicanos and Chicanas that flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s. Here, too, women were leery of associating with white feminists yet felt frustrated by the sexism they experienced from Chicano men. In 1969, at a women’s workshop at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Colorado, Chicanas issued a statement, saying, “It was the consensus of the group that the Chicano woman does not want to be liberated.” Although subsequent scholarship has suggested that these women were primarily concerned with indicating that they did not want to identify with white feminism, the statement proved highly controversial among Chicanas and helped to generate an upsurge in Chicana feminism. Two years later in Houston, at the first national conference of Chicanas, the tone had changed dramatically. In the following selection, Mirta Vidal, an Argentinean-born socialist, describes the issues raised at the Houston conference. “La Raza,” which literally means “the race,” is the term militant Chicanos and Chicanas invoked to describe the unity of people of Mexican descent. How did Chicanas describe the nature of the oppression they experienced? How did they get beyond the charge that women’s liberation was a “white woman’s thing”?

MITRA VIDAL

New Voice of La Raza: Chicanas Speak Out (1971)

At the end of May 1971, more than 600 Chicanas met in Houston, Texas, to hold the first national conference of Raza women. For those of us who were there it was clear that this conference was not just another national gathering of the Chicano movement.

Chicanas came from all parts of the country inspired by the prospect of discussing issues that have long been on their minds and which they now see not as individual problems but as an important and integral part of a movement for liberation.

The resolutions coming out of the two largest workshops, “Sex and the Chicana” and “Marriage — Chicana Style,” called for “free, legal abortions and birth control for the Chicano community, controlled by Chicanas.” As Chicanas, the resolution stated, “we have a right to control our own bodies.” The resolutions also called for “24-hour child-care centers in Chicano communities” and explained that there is a critical need for these since “Chicana motherhood should not preclude educational, political, social and economic advancement.”

While these resolutions articulated the most pressing needs of Chicanas today, the conference as a whole reflected a rising consciousness of the Chicana about her special oppression in this society. . . .

In part, this awakening of Chicana consciousness has been prompted by the “machismo” she encounters in the movement. . . .

This behavior, typical of Chicano men, is a serious obstacle to women anxious to play a role in the struggle for Chicano liberation. The oppression suffered by Chicanas is different from that suffered by most women in this country. Because Chicanas are part of an oppressed nation if they are subjected to the racism practiced against La Raza. Since the overwhelming majority of Chicanos are workers, Chicanas are also victims of the exploitation of the working class. But in addition, Chicanas, along with the rest of women, are relegated to an inferior position because of their sex. Thus, Raza women suffer a triple form of oppression: as members of an oppressed nationality, as workers, and as women. Chicanas have no trouble understanding this. At the Houston Conference 84 percent of the women surveyed felt that “there is a distinction between the problems of the Chicana and those of other women.”

On the other hand, they also understand that the struggle now unfolding against the oppression of women is not only relevant to them, but is their struggle. Because sexism and male chauvinism are so deeply rooted in this society, there is a strong tendency, even within the Chicano movement, to deny the basic right of Chicanas to organize around their own concrete issues. Instead they are told to stay away from the women’s liberation movement because it is an “Anglo thing.”

We need only analyze the origin of male supremacy to expose this false position. The inferior role of women in society does not date back to the beginning of time. In fact, before the Europeans came to this part of the world women enjoyed a position of equality with men. The submission of women, along with institutions such as the church and the patriarchy, was imported by the European colonizers, and remains to this day part of Anglo society. Machismo — in English, “male chauvinism” — is the one thing, if any, that should be labeled an “Anglo thing.”

When Chicano men oppose the efforts of women to move against their oppression, they are actually opposing the struggle of every woman in this country aimed at changing a society in which Chicanos themselves are oppressed. They are saying to 51 percent of this country’s population that they have no right to fight for their liberation.

SOURCE: Alma M. Garcia, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (New York: Routledge, 1997), 21–24.

ALTHOUGH WOMEN IN RADICAL MOVEMENTS often challenged men for the sexism evident in the movements they led, much feminist literature was meant for women and was specifically designed to raise their consciousness concerning sexism. Bread and Roses, a socialist feminist group founded primarily by white women in Boston in 1969, was one of the earliest women’s liberation organizations. The name refers to the history of working women’s struggles in the United States and highlights the historical consciousness that accompanied the growth of women’s liberation (see pp. 633–37). The following document is a leaflet distributed at a pro–child care demonstration in Boston in 1970. Bread and Roses women supported community child care, so how do you explain their critique of the demonstration? What do the words they offer as starting points for discussions with friends suggest about their perspectives?

BREAD AND ROSES

Outreach Leaflet (1970)

Sisters

We are living in a world that is not ours — “it’s a man’s world.” We feel our lives being shaped by someone or something outside ourselves; because we are females we are expected to act in certain ways and do certain things whether or not it feels right to us. We have had to teach ourselves to run off our real feelings and real desires — to be “realistic” — in other words, to accept the place we have been given in the world of men.

But it’s no good — deep in our guts we know this. Cooking and cleaning and children have not given us the fulfillment the ladies’ magazines promise even after we’ve followed all their recipes. Our most honest selves know there is more to it than being hung-up when our emotions fight against a [male partner’s] casual sexual affair. Why have we always assumed it was our fault if the “new morality” wasn’t satisfying us? What does it mean when men whistle at us on the street?

We are waking up angry and shocked, amazed that we didn’t realize before. Women begin to name enemies: men, capitalism, families, neurosis, technology, etc. And in various ways we start trying to make changes. Some women — such as those who have expressed themselves in the platform of this march — look to the state and federal legislation to give us the unrestricted humanity which has been denied us for so long. They have decided to “work within the system.” In other words, they say, “Let us into the world you men live in. Give us your education and your jobs and your public positions. Free us with childcare programs designed in your offices.” Is this really what we want? How about female generals in Vietnam?

DO WE WANT EQUALITY IN THE MAN’S WORLD, OR DO WE WANT TO MAKE IT IN A NEW WORLD?

Women being ourselves and believing in ourselves, women finding the strength to live how we feel, powerful women, can lead the way to create a new kind of politics, a new life.

To join the Women’s Liberation Movement, begin by talking with friends. Here are some words which might help to get started:

date-bait community-controlled childcare centers fathers my boss castrating woman Playboy rape fashions marriage high school abortions doctors pretending orgasms masculinity self-reliance

SOURCE: Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, 35.

FOR MANY FEMINIST THEORISTS, one persistent problem was how to analyze the oppression of women in a way that clarified that the problem was not individual men, but rather the larger structure of patriarchy. In this abridgment of an article published in 1970, Boston activist Dana Densmore takes on the simplistic critique that feminists are men-haters who think that men are the enemy. If men are not the enemy, who or what is? What is your analysis of her advice to women for overcoming their oppression?

DANA DENSMORE

Who Is Saying Men Are the Enemy? (1970)

The question “Are men the enemy?” has always struck me as a curious one.

If enemies are perceived as that force against which one does battle and against whom (having killed off sufficient numbers) one wins, the concept is obviously inappropriate.

It is clear to me that in its form “I object to your attitude that men are the enemy” the issue is a dishonest one: it is an attempted smear or a defensive counterattack against the force of our analysis. . . .

It makes it appear that if we do anything but embrace all men, whatever their individual attitude, as our friends and allies, treating them as allies however they treat us, if we so much as speak of men generally as “our oppressors,” then it must be that we regard them as “enemies” in the sense of an opponent so all-powerful and implacable that he must be killed in order to be neutralized.

Of course we couldn’t kill off all men if we wanted to, but the point is that it isn’t necessary and we know it. It is the situation men and women find themselves in, the structures of society and the attitudes of women, that make it possible for men to oppress.

Given power and privileges, told by society that these are not only legitimate but the essence of his manhood, it is not surprising that a man should accept an oppressor’s role. But if women refused to cooperate, and if they demanded changes in the structures, institutions and attitudes of society, then men, whatever their desires, could not and therefore would not oppress women. . . .

The distinction is often made in the female liberation movement between an “enemy” and an “oppressor.” The real enemy, I think we all agree, is sexism and male supremacy; a set of attitudes held by men and women and institutionalized in our society (and in all societies throughout history). . . .

If the minds of the women are freed from these chains, no man will be able to oppress any woman. No man can, even now, in an individual relationship; all the woman has to do is walk out on him. And ironically enough, that is exactly what would force the men to shape up fastest. Not very many men could tolerate being deserted, especially over a political issue. And all that’s needed is for the woman to learn enough respect for herself to be unwilling to live with a man who treats her with contempt.

Men are not our “enemies” and we should refuse to play “enemy” games with them. If they ridicule us or try to smear us or isolate us, we must laugh and walk out. “Winning rounds” with individual men will not bring our final victory closer and cannot change contempt and terror into a generous respect. Challenges by individual women to individual men have always been met the same way: threats, ridicule, smears, repression. These are the prescribed ways for men to defend their “manhood” against “castrating females.”

SOURCE: Dana Densmore, “Who Is Saying Men Are the Enemy?” excerpt from A Journal of Female Liberation, issue 4, April 1970.

ALTHOUGH MANY LESBIANS PARTICIPATED in the gay liberation front spearheaded by the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, many lesbian activists worked within the women’s liberation movement. In articulating an ideology of lesbian feminism, they not only shaped lesbians’ feminism but contributed to heterosexual feminists’ critique of patriarchal power and to the notion that the bonds of sisterhood link women together. Radicalesbians evolved from a group calling itself Lavender Menace, in reference to the disparaging term used by NOW leader Betty Friedan in 1970. Later that year the group electrified the Second Congress to United Women by taking over open microphones, removing their shirts to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with “Lavender Menace,” and distributing their manifesto, “The Woman Identified Woman.” The document makes few references to sexual intimacy between women and instead emphasizes “political lesbianism” (see pp. 634–36). How does the document explain lesbianism as a political choice? Why do Radicalesbians consider the woman identified woman essential to feminism?

RADICALESBIANS

The Woman Identified Woman (1970)

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society — perhaps then, but certainly later — cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society — the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her — in which case she cannot accept herself — and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women — because we are all women.

It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behavior possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanize women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. Homosexuality is a by-product of a particular way of setting up roles (or approved patterns of behavior) on the basis of sex; as such it is an inauthentic (not consonant with “reality”) category. In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.

But lesbianism is also different from male homosexuality, and serves a different function in the society. “Dyke” is a different kind of put-down from “faggot,” although both imply you are not playing your socially assigned sex role . . . are not therefore a “real woman” or a “real man.” The grudging admiration felt for the tomboy, and the queasiness felt around a sissy boy point to the same thing: the contempt in which women — or those who play a female role — are held. And the investment in keeping women in that contemptuous role is very great. Lesbian is a word, the label, the condition that holds women in line. When a woman hears this word tossed her way, she knows she is stepping out of line. She knows that she has crossed the terrible boundary of her sex role. She recoils, she protests, she reshapes her actions to gain approval. Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal, who dares to challenge his prerogatives (including that of all women as part of the exchange medium among men), who dares to assert the primacy of her own needs. To have the label applied to people active in women’s liberation is just the most recent instance of a long history; older women will recall that not so long ago, any woman who was successful, independent, not orienting her whole life about a man, would hear this word. For in this sexist society, for a woman to be independent means she can’t be a woman — she must be a dyke. That in itself should tell us where women are at. It says as clearly as can be said: women and person are contradictory terms. For a lesbian is not considered a “real woman.” And yet, in popular thinking, there is really only one essential difference between a lesbian and other women: that of sexual orientation — which is to say, when you strip off all the packaging, you must finally realize that the essence of being a “woman” is to get fucked by men. . . .

Women in the movement have in most cases gone to great lengths to avoid discussion and confrontation with the issue of lesbianism. It puts people up-tight. They are hostile, evasive, or try to incorporate it into some “broader issue.” They would rather not talk about it. If they have to, they try to dismiss it as a “lavender herring.” But it is no side issue. It is absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women’s liberation movement that this issue be dealt with. As long as the label “dyke” can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family — then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture. Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status. As long as male acceptability is primary — both to individual women and to the movement as a whole — the term lesbian will be used effectively against women. Insofar as women want only more privileges within the system, they do not want to antagonize male power. They instead seek acceptability for women’s liberation, and the most crucial aspect of the acceptability is to deny lesbianism — i.e., to deny any fundamental challenge to the basis of the female. It should also be said that some younger, more radical women have honestly begun to discuss lesbianism, but so far it has been primarily as a sexual “alternative” to men. This, however, is still giving primacy to men, both because the idea of relating more completely to women occurs as a negative reaction to men, and because the lesbian relationship is being characterized simply by sex, which is divisive and sexist. On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives. On a different political/psychological level, it must be understood that what is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns. In the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the core. For irrespective of where our love and sexual energies flow, if we are male-identified in our heads, we cannot realize our autonomy as human beings. . . .

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that struggling, incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

SOURCE: Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman,” http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/womid (accessed July 31, 2017).

ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING IDEAS to emerge from women’s liberation was the notion that the “personal is political.” Nowhere was this more explicit than with respect to women’s sexuality. In consciousness-raising groups, women exchanged intimate details and recounted daily experiences, in the hopes of realizing that many of the experiences that women thought were unique to them (and about which they may have been embarrassed or ashamed) were actually part of a larger pattern of intimate sexism. By assessing the ways in which societal pressures shaped sexual behavior and reinforced male domination over women, women’s liberationists situated the private world of sexuality in the political context of male/female inequalities. At the same time, they encouraged women to move beyond a mentality of victimization and to empower themselves sexually and otherwise.

Anne Koedt, a member of New York Radical Women, published “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” in 1970. Freudian psychology had long insisted that women’s orgasms were either good — to the degree that they were the direct result of intercourse — or bad — because they came from clitoral stimulation. Scientific studies of the way that women actually achieve orgasms challenged the idea of two different female orgasms, one generated in the vagina and the other in the clitoris. Koedt drew on this research in the essay excerpted here. How did the physiological experience of women’s sexual climax fit with the women’s liberation agenda? How did it coincide with growing interest in lesbianism? Why do you think this article made such a powerful impression when it was published?

ANNE KOEDT

The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970)

Whenever female orgasm and frigidity are discussed, a false distinction is made between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis.

I think this explains a great many things: First of all, the fact that the so-called frigidity rate among women is phenomenally high. Rather than tracing female frigidity to the false assumptions about female anatomy, our “experts” have declared frigidity a psychological problem of women. Those women who complained about it were recommended psychiatrists, so that they might discover their “problem” — diagnosed generally as a failure to adjust to their role as women.

The facts of female anatomy and sexual response tell a different story. Although there are many areas for sexual arousal, there is only one area for sexual climax; that area is the clitoris. All orgasms are extensions of sensation from this area. Since the clitoris is not necessarily stimulated sufficiently in the conventional sexual positions, we are left “frigid.”

Aside from physical stimulation, which is the common cause of orgasm for most people, there is also stimulation through primarily mental processes. Some women, for example, may achieve orgasm through sexual fantasies, or through fetishes. However, while the stimulation may be psychological, the orgasm manifests itself physically. Thus, while the cause is psychological, the effect is still physical, and the orgasm necessarily takes place in the sexual organ equipped for sexual climax, the clitoris. The orgasm experience may also differ in degree of intensity — some more localized, and some more diffuse and sensitive. But they are all clitoral orgasms.

All this leads to some interesting questions about conventional sex and our role in it. Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does. Women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analyzed. Instead, we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm — an orgasm which in fact does not exist.

What we must do is redefine our sexuality. We must discard the “normal” concepts of sex and create new guidelines which take into account mutual sexual enjoyment. While the idea of mutual enjoyment is liberally applauded in marriage manuals, it is not followed to its logical conclusion. We must begin to demand that if certain sexual positions now defined as “standard” are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they no longer be defined as standard. New techniques must be used or devised which transform this particular aspect of our current sexual exploitation.

SOURCE: Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” in Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, 158.

CALLING ATTENTION TO WOMEN’S ROLE in the family, and especially their responsibility for child care and housework, was another compelling way in which feminists demonstrated that the personal is political and brought their critique of patriarchy close to home. Pat Mainardi penned a witty critique of male privilege in the home for the journal Redstockings in 1970. How did she combine down-to-earth advice to women in their daily struggles over who would wash the dishes or change the diapers with an analysis of the power struggles between women and men? Do you think her critique is still valid today? Why or why not?

PAT MAINARDI

The Politics of Housework (1970)

Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude; at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of the lords, but only of their tyranny.

— JOHN STUART MILL,On the Subjection of Women

Liberated women — very different from Women’s Liberation! The first signals all kinds of goodies, to warm the hearts (not to mention other parts) of the most radical men. The other signals — HOUSEWORK. The first brings sex without marriage, sex before marriage, cozy housekeeping arrangements (“I’m living with this chick”) and the self-content of knowing that you’re not the kind of man who wants a doormat instead of a woman. That will come later. After all, who wants that old commodity anymore, the Standard American Housewife, all husband, home and kids? The New Commodity, the Liberated Woman, has sex a lot and has a Career, preferably something that can be fitted in with the household chores — like dancing, pottery, or painting.

On the other hand is Women’s Liberation —  and housework. What? You say this is all trivial? Wonderful! That’s what I thought. It seemed perfectly reasonable. We both had careers, both had to work a couple of days a week to earn enough to live on, so why shouldn’t we share the housework? So I suggested it to my mate and he agreed — most men are too hip to turn you down flat. You’re right, he said. It’s only fair. Then an interesting thing happened. I can only explain it by stating that we women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine, [p]robably too many years of seeing television women in ecstasy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognize the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks.

Here’s my list of dirty chores: buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry; digging out the place when things get out of control; washing floors. The list could go on but the sheer necessities are bad enough. All of us have to do these things, or get someone else to do them for us. The longer my husband contemplated these chores, the more repulsed he became, and so proceeded the change from the normally sweet, considerate Dr. Jekyll into the crafty Mr. Hyde who would stop at nothing to avoid the horrors of housework. As he felt himself backed into a corner laden with dirty dishes, brooms, mops and reeking garbage, his front teeth grew longer and pointier, his fingernails haggled and his eyes grew wild. Housework trivial? Not on your life! Just try to share the burden.

So ensued a dialogue that’s been going on for several years. Here are some of the high points: “I don’t mind sharing the housework, but I don’t do it very well. We should each do the things we’re best at.” MEANING: Unfortunately I’m no good at things like washing dishes or cooking. What I do best is a little light carpentry, changing light bulbs, moving furniture (how often do you move furniture?). ALSO MEANING: Historically the lower classes (black men and us) have had hundreds of years experience doing menial jobs. It would be a waste of manpower to train someone else to do them now. ALSO MEANING: I don’t like the dull, stupid, boring jobs, so you should do them.

“I don’t mind sharing the work, but you’ll have to show me how to do it.” MEANING: I ask a lot of questions and you’ll have to show me everything every time I do it because I don’t remember so good. Also don’t try to sit down and read while I’M doing my jobs because I’m going to annoy hell out of you until it’s easier to do them yourself.”

“We used to be so happy!” (Said whenever it was his turn to do something.) MEANING: I used to be so happy. MEANING: Life without housework is bliss. No quarrel here. Perfect Agreement. . . .

“Housework is too trivial to even talk about.” MEANING: It’s even more trivial to do. Housework is beneath my status. My purpose in life is to deal with matters of significance. Yours is to deal with matters of insignificance. You should do the housework.

“This problem of housework is not a man-woman problem. In any relationship between two people one is going to have a stronger personality and dominate.” MEANING: That stronger personality had better be me.

“In animal societies, wolves, for example, the top animal is usually a male even where he is not chosen for brute strength but on the basis of cunning and intelligence. Isn’t that interesting?” MEANING: I have historical, psychological, anthropological and biological justification for keeping you down. How can you ask the top wolf to be equal?

“Women’s liberation isn’t really a political movement.” MEANING: The revolution is coming too close to home. ALSO MEANING: I am only interested in how I am oppressed, not how I oppress others. Therefore the war, the draft and the university are political. Women’s liberation is not.

“Man’s accomplishments have always depended on getting help from other people, mostly women. What great man would have accomplished what he did if he had to do his own housework?” MEANING: Oppression is built into the system and I, as the white American male, receive the benefits of this system. I don’t want to give them up.

Participatory democracy begins at home. If you are planning to implement your politics, there are certain things to remember.

He is feeling it more than you. He’s losing some leisure and you’re gaining it. The measure of your oppression is his resistance.

A great many American men are not accustomed to doing monotonous, repetitive work which never issues in any lasting, let alone important, achievement. This is why they would rather repair a cabinet than wash dishes. If human endeavors are like a pyramid with man’s highest achievements at the top, then keeping oneself alive is at the bottom. Men have always had servants (us) to take care of this bottom stratum of life while they have confined their efforts to the rarefied upper regions. It is thus ironic when they ask of women — Where are your great painters, statesmen, etc.? Mme. Matisse ran a military shop so he could paint. Mrs. Martin Luther King kept his house and raised his babies.

It is a traumatizing experience for someone who has always thought of himself as being against any oppression or exploitation of one human being by another to realize that in his daily life he has been accepting and implementing (and benefiting from) this exploitation; that his rationalization is little different from that of the racist who says, “Black people don’t feel pain” (women don’t mind doing the shitwork); and that the oldest form of oppression in history has been the oppression of 50 percent of the population by the other 50 percent.

Arm yourself with some knowledge of the psychology of oppressed peoples everywhere, and a few facts about the animal kingdom. I admit playing top wolf or who runs the gorillas is silly but as a last resort men bring it up all the time. Talk about bees. If you feel really hostile bring up the sex life of spiders. They have sex. She bites off his head. The psychology of oppressed peoples is not silly. Jews, immigrants, black men and all women have employed the same psychological mechanisms to survive; admiring the oppressor, glorifying the oppressor, wanting to be like the oppressor, wanting the oppressor to like them, mostly because the oppressor held all the power. . . .

Beware of the double whammy. He won’t do the little things he always did because you’re now a “Liberated Woman,” right? Of course he won’t do anything else either. . . .

I was just finishing this when my husband came in and asked what I was doing. Writing a paper on housework. Housework? he said. Housework? Oh my god how trivial can you get? A paper on housework.

SOURCE: Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” CWLU Herstory Project, https://www.cwluherstory.org/classic-feminist-writings-articles/the-politics-of-housework (accessed July 30, 2017).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

In what ways do these documents suggest the diverging concerns of white feminist women and feminist women of color? What similarities do they indicate?

Women’s liberation pioneered the concept of consciousness-raising for feminists. What do these documents suggest about the themes addressed in consciousness-raising?

Compare the writings of these feminists to those of the early twentieth century on pages 475–79. To what extent are they similar, and in what ways do they differ?