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Authors: Susan Brownmiller

Tags: #Autobiography & Memoirs, #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory

In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution

BOOK: In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
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IN OUR TIME
SUSAN BROWNMILLER

“[A] riveting chronicle of the women’s movement … lively and informative.”

Newsday
“Fascinating … theory, events, personalities, publications, media response, power struggles, and more in an orderly and chronological narrative.”

The Boston Globe
“Reminds us of how far we’ve come … [A] lively, comprehensive history of feminism from the 1960s to the present.… Informative and insightful.”
—Francine Prose,
Elle
“Rich in anecdotes, Brownmiller helps readers recall (or see for the first time) the sweat-equity and the fragility of women’s liberation.… It’s a worthy reminder of the fight.”

The Washington Post Book World
“Rich with first-person recollection and interviews. Brownmiller evokes the excitement, the sense of newness, the alternately serious and crazy tenor of the times.”

The Seattle Times
“A vivid mosaic that captures the spirit of this revolution. Likely to arouse nostalgic feelings in those who remember the movement, and reveal a new world to those too young to remember ‘back-alley’ abortions and commonplace sexual harassment.”
—Associated Press
“Brownmiller shares her insider knowledge of the trenchant early years of the women’s liberation movement with candor and verve.… A riveting blend of eyewitness accounts and keen analysis, this is history at its most vital and a stirring testament to our ability to come together to combat social injustice, no matter how deeply entrenched it has become.”
—Booklist
“A cogent, vivid view that conveys the drama and urgency of the women’s liberation movement … meetings, debates, demonstrations, church speak-outs, living-room confessions—all come passionately to life in this memoir.”

Kirkus Reviews

A Delta Book
Published by Dell Publishing
A division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Brownmiller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

For information, address Dell Publishing, New York, New York.

Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon isa trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-8041-5198-6

Reprinted by arrangement with The Dial Press

Published simultaneously in Canada

v3.1

Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE
THE FOUNDERS
AN INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT
WHICH WAY IS UTOPIA?
CONFRONTATION
“ABORTION IS A WOMAN’S RIGHT”
ENTER THE MEDIA
FULL MOON RISING
“RAPE IS A POLITICAL CRIME AGAINST WOMEN”
INTERNAL COMBUSTION
FEMINIST AUTHOR
“NO MAN IS WORTH DYING FOR”
ITS NAME IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT
THE PORNOGRAPHY WARS
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCE NOTES

PROLOGUE

I was not there at the beginning. Few people were. And although I can speak with confidence of a beginning, of certain documented rebellions sparked by a handful of visionaries with stubborn courage, there were antecedents to those rebellions, and antecedents to the antecedents. This is how things happen in movements for social change, in revolutions. They start small and curiously, an unexpected flutter that is not without precedence, a barely observable ripple that heralds a return to the unfinished business of prior generations. If conditions are right, if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation. So it was with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

As I said, I arrived a bit late. On a Thursday evening in September 1968, I walked with my friend Jan Goodman to a decrepit office building on Broadway and East Eleventh Street, in Manhattan, and took the creaking elevator to Room 412, a tiny suite that belonged during the day to the Southern Conference Education Fund.

Jan had been telling me, “They’re talking about women,” but I hadn’t wanted to believe her, hoping that my activist days were behind me. In the four years since the two of us had gone to Mississippi to join the civil rights movement as summer volunteers, I’d redirected my energy into building my career. I was thirty-three, a reporter for
The Village Voice
, a freelance contributor to the best glossy magazines, and a full-time network newswriter at ABC-TV, where I grappled in quiet frustration with my outsider status. I was militantly against the war in Vietnam, an unpopular stance in broadcast news, where journalists in those years seldom questioned their government’s actions, but my political opinions weren’t the problem. I was a woman in a defiantly male preserve of clacking typewriters and cranking moviolas, and some of my colleagues had made it plain from the outset that they didn’t think I belonged there. In an antediluvian age before the routine deployment of female anchors and foreign correspondents, there was an abiding feeling that women didn’t have a feel for hard news and breaking stories. They couldn’t be trusted to handle a stopwatch or make a cool judgment. I was stealing the bread off the table of some decent, deserving guy trying to support his wife and kids. Not all my coworkers shared these prejudiced views, but even the friendly ones liked to remind me how lucky I was to be holding “a man’s job.”

Caroline Bird had coined a phrase for women like me that year in
Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down
. She called us “loophole women,” the few exceptions in any field that men let in to prove they weren’t barring everyone else. Loophole women inhabited a lonely niche and usually felt like oddballs. Even if we resisted the Freudian dictum that our career aspirations were unfeminine and unnatural, we bowed to the general assumption that the impulse to succeed at “a man’s job” was a peculiar quirk in our individual psyches.

Imagine a world—or summon it back into memory—in which the Help Wanted columns were divided into Male for the jobs with a future, and Female for the dead-end positions; in which young, pretty, unmarried women with a taste for adventure were aggressively recruited to put on a uniform and trundle a meal cart down the aisle of an airplane (“Fly Me! I’m Carol!”) but weren’t allowed to train as pilots (or bus drivers, or railway conductors, or mechanics, or firefighters); in which a male-only admissions policy or infinitesimal quotas excluded the brightest and most talented female students from the finest law, medical, engineering, architecture, and veterinary schools in the nation; and where a teaching certificate or a nursing degree was “something to fall back on” if, heaven forfend, you didn’t get
married and have children. Imagine a time—or summon it back into memory—when a husband was required to countersign a wife’s application for a credit card, a bank loan, or automobile insurance, when psychiatrists routinely located the cause of an unsatisfactory sex life in the frigid, castrating, ballbreaking female partner, when abortion was an illegal, back-alley procedure, when rape was the woman’s fault, when nobody dared talk about the battery that went on behind closed doors, or could file a complaint about sexual harassment. And remember the hostile humor that reinforced the times: the endless supply of mother-in-law jokes, the farmer’s daughter, the little old lady in tennis shoes, the bored receptionist filing her nails, the dumb blond stenographer perched on her boss’s lap, the lecherous tycoon chasing his buxom secretary around the desk.

A revolution was brewing, but it took a visionary to notice. Betty Friedan had published
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963, defining the “problem that has no name.” I’d read it in paperback a year later, around the time I went to Mississippi, and although Friedan had defined the problem largely in terms of bored, depressed, middle-class suburban housewives who downed too many pills and weren’t making use of their excellent educations, I’d seen myself on every page.
The Feminine Mystique
changed my life.

A book by itself does not make a movement, as Friedan, an old warrior in progressive causes, knew full well. Demonstrating what we all came to respect as her uncanny prescience, Friedan founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. My Greenwich Village neighbor Jane Jacobs, author of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, a book of tremendous import, was on the list of prominent women she hoped to snare as charter members. Jacobs was involved with other concerns that season, but she showed her invitation to Jan and me. We immediately wrote to Friedan, proudly detailing our civil rights credentials and asking to join, but even prescience has blind spots. Her reply informed us that NOW was not soliciting general members; NOW was to be a select committee of professional women who would lobby Congress.

A year or so later NOW was ready to open its doors to a general dues-paying membership and local chapters. My colleague Marlene
Sanders, ABC’s sole woman correspondent, was an early NOW recruit though a quiet one, muffled by the objectivity that newspeople are supposed to live by. She tried several times to enlist me, dropping flyers on my desk, but Friedan’s earlier rebuff and my radical leanings made me think that NOW would be too clubwomanish for my taste.

Crisp and efficient, Marlene had worked her way up from local radio to anchor a five-minute broadcast at noon.
News with the Woman’s Touch
, sponsored by Sweetheart Soap, was considered the pinnacle of success for a female. If Marlene were a man, the men used to joke, she’d be running the news division. I longed to be a correspondent, but “we already had a woman”—Marlene. I seethed in silence. So did others. The young men in the office, the ones holding entry-level jobs, had begun to let their hair grow long. One day a copy assistant came into work carrying a Dylan album and a bag of pot. Another lent me his dog-eared copy of
Peoples War, Peoples Army
by the North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap. A third young man wriggled out of the draft and moved in with me. I wore a “
GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT
” button on my coat, journalist’s neutrality be damned, and marched down Fifth Avenue against the war.

Still, I believed I could make a go of it as an upwardly mobile female middle-class striver. Sensing the winds of change, the fashion trendsetters from Courrèges to Carnaby Street were making it easier to be a woman. Lipstick color had lightened to a mere touch of gloss. Thanks to the wonders of Lycra, pantyhose and a bra slip had replaced wires, garters, and girdles, allowing me to breathe normally for the first time since high school. Wobbly heels, the bane of my existence, were “out” and flats were “in.” Nails were permitted to be short and unpolished, hair didn’t need to be teased and lacquered, the pantsuit had come into vogue, and skirts were completing their startling climb from below the knee to mid-thigh. I Pucci’d and Gucci’d and hung on the words of Eugenia Sheppard, the
Herald Tribune
fashion columnist intelligent women read daily for guidance, and kept hoping the camouflage would let me fit in.

With this background, and that wardrobe, I walked into Room 412, where a clutch of civil rights veterans and antiwar activists were talking about the universal oppression of women. The name of the group was
New York Radical Women. Two weeks earlier they’d staged the Miss America Protest, their first national action, unfurling a banner inside Convention Hall at Atlantic City that read
WOMEN

S LIBERATION
.

My old daybed had preceded me into the office suite. The year before I’d passed it on to Carol Hanisch, a young civil rights worker I’d gotten to know when she’d relocated to the city. When the women’s talkfest had grown to the astonishing number of thirty, Carol had dragged the rickety Swedish modern sofa from her apartment to Room 412, where it gave me an instant sense of belonging as I entered the sea of blue jeans, long hair, and lipstick-free faces. Slightly put off by my careerist incarnation, Carol hadn’t been sure that I’d get the idea of women’s oppression. I got it smack in the face that very first night. Perhaps the revelation was not as great as the vision that struck Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, but it was close.

BOOK: In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
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