The Feminine Mystique (54 page)

I couldn’t define “liberation” for women in terms that denied the sexual and human reality of our need to love, and even sometimes to depend upon, a man. What had to be changed was the obsolete feminine and masculine sex roles that dehumanized sex, making it almost impossible for women and men to make love, not war. How could we ever really know or love each other as long as we played those roles that kept us from knowing or being ourselves? Weren’t men as well as women still locked in lonely isolation, alienation, no matter how many sexual acrobatics they put their bodies through? Weren’t men dying too young, suppressing fears and tears and their own tenderness? It seemed to me that men weren’t really the enemy—they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

In these past years of action, I have seen myself and other women becoming both stronger and more gentle, taking ourselves more seriously, yet beginning to really have fun as we stopped playing the old roles. We discovered we could trust each other. I love the women with whom I took the adventurous and joyous actions of these years. No one realized how pitifully few we were in the beginning, how little money we had, how little experience.

What gave us the strength and the nerve to do what we did, in the name of American women, of women of the world? It was, of course, because we were doing it for ourselves. It was not charity for poor others; we, the middle-class women who started this, were all poor, in a sense that goes beyond dollars. It was hard even for housewives whose husbands weren’t poor to get money to fly to board meetings of NOW. It was hard for women who worked to get time off from their jobs, or take precious weekend time from their families. I have never worked so hard for money, gone so many hours with so little sleep or time off to eat or even go to the toilet, as in these first years of the women’s movement.

I was subpoenaed on Christmas Eve, 1966, to testify before a judge in Foley Square, because the airlines were outraged at our insistence that they were guilty of sex discrimination by forcing stewardesses to resign at age thirty or upon their marriage. (Why, I had wondered, are they going to such lengths? Surely they don’t think men ride the airlines because stewardesses are nubile. And then I realized how much money the airlines saved by firing those pretty stewardesses before they had time to accumulate pay increases, vacation time, and pension rights. And how I love it now when stewardesses hug me on an airplane and tell me they are not only married and over thirty, but can even have children and keep flying!)

I felt a certain urgency of history, that we would be failing the generation coming up if we evaded the question of abortion now. I also felt we had to get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the Constitution despite the claim of union leaders that it would end “protective” laws for women. We had to take the torch of equality from the lonely, bitter old women who had been fighting all alone for the amendment, which had been bottled up in Congress for nearly fifty years since women had chained themselves to the White House fence to get the vote.

On our first picket line at the White House fence (“Rights Not Roses”) on Mother’s Day in 1967, we threw away chains of aprons, flowers, and mock typewriters. We dumped bundles of newspapers onto the floor of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in protest against its refusal to enforce the Civil Rights law against sex-segregated “Help Wanted: Male” ads (for the good jobs) and “Help Wanted: Female” ads (for gal Friday-type jobs). This was supposed to be just as illegal now as ads reading “Help Wanted: White” and “Help Wanted: Colored.” We announced we were going to sue the federal government for not enforcing the law equally on behalf of women (and then called members of our underground in the Justice Department to see if one could do that)—and we did.

I gave lectures in Southern finishing schools and commencement addresses at out-of-the-way colleges of home economics—as well as at Yale, UCLA, and Harvard—to pay my way in organizing NOW chapters (we never did have money for an organizing staff ). Our only real office in those years was my apartment. It wasn’t possible to keep up with the mail. But when women like Wilma Heide from Pittsburgh, or Karen De Crow in Syracuse, Eliza Paschall in Atlanta, Jacqui Ceballos—so many others—were so determined to have NOW chapters that they called long distance when we didn’t answer their letters, the only thing to do was to have them become local NOW organizers.

I remember so many way stations: Going to lunch at the for-men-only Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel with fifty NOW women and demanding to be served…Testifying before the Senate against the nomination to the Supreme Court of a sexist judge named Carswell who refused to hear a case of a woman who was fired because she had preschool children…Seeing the first sign of a woman’s underground in the student movement, when I was asked to lead a rap session at the National Student Congress in College Park, Maryland, in 1968…After a resolution for the liberation of women from the mimeograph machines was laughed down at the SDS convention, hearing the young radical women telling me they had to have a separate women’s-lib group—because if they really spoke out at SDS meetings, they might not get married…Helping Sheila Tobias plan the Cornell intersession on women in 1968, which started the first women’s-studies programs (how many universities have them now!)…Persuading the NOW board that we should hold a Congress to Unite Women with the young radicals despite differences in ideology and style…So many way stations.

I admired the flair of the young radicals when they got off the rhetoric of sex/class warfare and conducted actions like picketing the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City. But the media began to publicize, in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children. Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
was hailed as the ideology of sex/class warfare by those who claimed to be the radicals of the women’s movement. After the man-hating faction broke up the second Congress to Unite Women with hate talk, and even violence, I heard a young radical say, “If I were an agent of the CIA and wanted to disrupt this movement, that’s just what I would do.”

By 1970, it was beginning to be clear that the women’s movement was more than a temporary fad, it was the fastest-growing movement for basic social and political change of the decade. The black movement had been taken over by extremists; the student movement was immobilized by its fetish for leaderless structure and by the growing alienation from extremist hate rhetoric. Someone was trying to take over our movement, too—or to stop it, immobilize it, splinter it—under the guise of radical rhetoric and a similar fetish against leadership and structure. “It’s fruitless to speculate whether they are CIA agents, or sick, or on a private power trip, or just plain stupid,” a black leader warned me. “If they continually disrupt, you simply have to fight them.”

It seemed to me the women’s movement had to get out of sexual politics. I thought it was a joke at first—those strangely humorless papers about clitoral orgasms that would liberate women from sexual dependence on a man’s penis, and the “consciousness-raising” talk that women should insist now on being on top in bed with men. Then I realized, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, that these women were in part acting out sexually their rebellion and resentment at being “underneath” in society generally, being dependent on men for their personal definition. But their resentment was being manipulated into an orgy of sex hatred that would vitiate the power they now had to change the conditions they resented. I’m not sure what motivates those who viciously promulgate, or manipulate, man hate in the women’s movement. Some of the disrupters seemed to come from extreme left groups, some seemed to be using the women’s movement to proselytize lesbianism, others seemed to be honestly articulating the legitimate and too-long-buried rage of women into a rhetoric of sex/class warfare, which I consider to be based on a false analogy with obsolete or irrelevant ideologies of class warfare or race separatism. The man-haters were given publicity far out of proportion to their numbers in the movement because of the media’s hunger for sensationalism. Many women in the movement go through a temporary period of great hostility to men when they first become conscious of their situation; when they start acting to change their situation, they outgrow what I call pseudo-radical infantilism. But that man-hating rhetoric increasingly disturbs most women in the movement, in addition to keeping many women out of the movement.

On the plane to Chicago, preparing to bow out as president of NOW, feeling powerless to fight the man-haters openly and refusing to front for them, I suddenly knew what had to be done. A woman from Florida had written to remind me that August 26, 1970, was the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the vote. We needed to call a national action—a strike of women to call attention to the unfinished business of equality: equal opportunity for jobs and education, the right to abortion and child-care centers, the right to our own share of political power. It would unite women again in serious action—women who had never been near a “women’s lib” group. (NOW, the largest such group, and the only one with a national structure, had only 3,000 members in thirty cities in 1970.) I remember that, to transmit this new vision to the NOW convention in Chicago, warning of the dangers of aborting the women’s movement, I spoke for nearly two hours and got a standing ovation. The grass-roots strength of NOW went into organizing the August 26 strike. In New York, women filled the temporary headquarters volunteering to do anything and everything; they hardly went home at night.

Mayor Lindsay wouldn’t close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen’s horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers’ heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try. It was, as they say, the first great nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about the “bra-burners” wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day.

On August 26, it suddenly became both political and glamorous to be a feminist. At first, politics had seemed to be something altogether separate from what we were doing in the women’s movement. The regular politicians—right, left, center; Republican, Democrat, splinter—certainly weren’t interested in women. In 1968, I had testified in vain at the conventions of both political parties, trying to get a single word about women in either the Republican or Democratic platform. When Eugene McCarthy, the chief sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, announced that he was going to run for president to end the Vietnam war, I began to connect my own politics, at least, to the women’s drive for equality. I called Bella Abzug and asked how I could work for McCarthy. But not even the other women working for him thought women’s issues were relevant politically, and many NOW members were critical of me for campaigning openly for McCarthy.

At the 1970 NOW convention in Chicago, I said we had a human responsibility as women to end the Vietnam war. Neither men nor women should be drafted to fight an obscene, immoral war like the one in Vietnam, but we had to take equal responsibility for ending it. Two years earlier, in 1968, standing outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, I had watched helmeted troopers clubbing down the long-haired young, my own son among them. I began to see that these young men, saying they didn’t have to napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove they were men, were defying the masculine mystique as we had defied the feminine one. Those young men, and their elders like them, were the other half of what we were doing.

And during that summer of 1970, I started trying to organize a women’s political caucus; later, it stuck together enough to get Bella Abzug elected to Congress. She and Gloria Steinem joined me as conveners of our August 26 Women’s Strike for Equality march. So many women who had been afraid before joined our march that day; we, and the world, suddenly realized the possibilities of women’s political power. This power was first tested in the summer of 1972 in Miami when, for the first time, women played a major role in the political conventions. Although inexperienced caucus leaders may have been too easily co-opted by Nixon or McGovern, or infiltrated by Watergate agents, they brought change to the political arena. They won commitments from both parties on child-care, preschool, and after-school programs. And Shirley Chisholm stayed in the Democratic race right to the end. By 1976, I predict, even the Republicans will have a woman running seriously for vice-president, if not for president.

And so most of the agenda of Stage 1 of the sex-role revolution—which is how I now see the women’s movement for equality—have been accomplished, or are in the process of being resolved. The Equal Rights Amendment was approved by Congress with hardly a murmur in either house after we organized the National Women’s Political Caucus. The amendment’s main opponent, Emanuel Celler, has been retired from Congress by one of the many new young women who, these days, are running for office instead of looking up Zip Codes. The Supreme Court has ruled that no state can deny a woman her right to choose childbirth or abortion. Over 1,000 lawsuits have been filed forcing universities and corporations to take affirmative action to end sex discrimination and the other conditions that keep women from getting top jobs. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company has been ordered to pay $15 million in reparations to women who didn’t even apply for jobs better than telephone operator before because such jobs weren’t open to women. Every professional association, newspaper office, television station, church, company, hospital, and school in almost every city has a women’s caucus or a group taking action on the concrete conditions that keep women down.