The World Split Open (14 page)

Fearful and confused, these college-aged women—like their male counterparts—sought intellectual, cultural, and political mentors in books or in life to help them understand their alienation. But most of what they found was written by, for, and about men. Authors like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, or Samuel Beckett explored the existential and absurd dilemmas of men's lives. Iconoclastic scholars and critics like C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, William Whyte, Paul Goodman, and Lewis Mumford dissected male conformity, analyzed power relations between men, exposed racial injustice, and condemned the corporate male drone and the bland boredom of his suburban life. But little of this social criticism seemed to directly address young women's lives.
²⁶

Popular culture even beat the Beats to the punch in publicizing a male desire to flee domesticity. Hugh Hefner's
Playboy
came to life in 1953, encouraging bachelors—for the first time in American history—to enjoy a satisfying sexual life without feeling the slightest guilt for not supporting a wife, children, and home. For the upscale single man, an elaborately appointed apartment—complete with revolving bed, rotating lovers, and reflecting mirrors—offered all the pleasures of sex without the burdens of family. For the first time, your disposable income was yours alone, to spend on anything your heart desired, from stereo to sailboat.

In short, for young men determined to avoid the world of their fathers, freedom meant cutting loose from women and children—hardly a new theme in American culture. Only a tiny number of men, of course, followed the Beats into coffeehouses or onto the road, and even fewer had the guts or money to imitate Hefner's sybaritic bachelor lifestyle. Still, one could always dream. As the alienated sons of the fifties entered a new decade, they had models of revolt, intellectual analyses of their alienation, prophetic mentors, and fantasies of escape, if only they dared.

Their female counterparts had few women mentors. Like educated women before them, these alienated women lived in a dual culture, experiencing life as women, but learning to interpret the world as men. They absorbed critiques of materialism and conformity through men's eyes, learned to view society's failures through men's needs, and convinced themselves to reject the commitment and security that
free-spirited men condemned. In the short run, the male literary and cultural tradition of dissent inspired dreams of freedom, unleashed a critical distrust of authority, and encouraged a taste for the unconventional—all of which created a solid foundation for a feminism that would question all received wisdom. In the meantime, young women learned to see freedom through men's eyes, and when it didn't exactly fit, they blamed themselves for insufficient daring, insufficient learning, and insufficient radicalism.

For a small number of future feminists, the Beats—though mostly men—offered a seductive escape from a conventional life. Allen Ginsberg's shrieking incantation against the madness of modern life and Kerouac's tales of life on the road inspired young women as well as men. The Beats provided no map to transcendent experience; but they did romanticize spontaneous unpredictability. Here, at last, was an appealing alternative to life with an apron or, for that matter, an attaché case.

In 1959, Marilyn Coffey, twenty-two years old, was an aspiring writer juggling headlines for the society page of the
Evening Journal
in Lincoln, Nebraska, a city she regarded as “the epitome of hypocrisy and sterile living. I was a member of the so-called Silent Generation and silent many of us were, back in the fifties, in the aftermath of Joe McCarthy and the Korean War. Speechless. A strange condition for a woman who aspired to be a writer.” Then, Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
fell into her hands:

I didn't understand half what I was reading, but something of the life being described was comprehensive to me, foreign as it was to the young woman who'd been born and bred in the conservative Midwest. . . . The words shot through me like a fusillade of bullets. I was undone, a changed person. I bought myself a straw-covered bottle of Chianti, a candle, and a pad of paper . . . began to write by candlelight, scribbling words onto paper as fast as my hand could compose, following instinctively Kerouac's model of Spontaneous Prose. . . . The novel liberated me as it did many others of my generation. There was that instantaneous recognition of self. For the first
time since I began writing . . . I felt free to say anything I wanted. . . . For I, in those blissfully naive pre-feminist days, felt the equal of any man.

Coffey fled to Denver, “where, in the Greyhound Bus Depot, I twirled a girlfriend, eyes closed, arm extended, in front of a gigantic map of the United States. She pointed and we set off.”
²⁷

From the late fifties on, thousands of high-school and college-aged young women dressed in black descended upon New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach in search of poetry, folk music, art, and sexual adventures. Bohemian life offered an opportunity to recast oneself as a misfit, to revel in social disapproval, to elevate an iconoclastic subculture over the dominant culture—all of which would later prove invaluable experiences to female activists. As one feminist later wrote, “Our adult lives began born out of these fragments of stolen consciousness. The basic awareness grew that truth, whatever it was, was something we had all our lives been protected from. Reality had been kept in quarantine so we could not become contaminated.” By experimenting with a bohemian existence, some daughters of the fifties, hungry for spontaneity, transcendence, and adventure, chose to end that quarantine.
²⁸

In her
Memoirs of a Beatnik
, the poet Diane Di Prima, who enjoyed sexual relations with both men and women, described how bohemian life meant “one's blood running strong and red in one's own veins.” Di Prima spent “long afternoons” in coffeeshops on MacDougal Street, reading and meeting fellow bohemians and artists, “nursing twenty-five-cent cups of espresso for hours, and drawing pictures on paper napkins.” Annie Dillard looked for “life” beyond her sheltered life not just in books, but in “experience.” “I myself was getting wild; I wanted wild-ness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties.” After college, Susan Griffin melted into the Beat scene in San Francisco, where for the first time she realized she was a writer.

While many young women sought to simulate the Beat sensibility, only a few actually broke into the inner sacred circle. In a vivid memoir of her experience as Jack Kerouac's girlfriend, Joyce Johnson described herself and other female Beats as “minor characters” on a stage reserved mainly for men. Already, at age sixteen, the talented and intellectually ambitious Johnson observed that “just as girls guarded their virginity, the boys guarded something less tangible which they called
Themselves. They seemed to believe they had a mission in life, from which they could easily be deflected by being exposed to too much emotion.”
²⁹

After she became Jack Kerouac's lover, Johnson again noted this pattern among Kerouac and his pals. Soon she realized that she represented the “anchorage” he needed, when he wanted it, but with no strings attached. Kerouac, whose life alternated between the open road and his mother's home, dropped in on Johnson for “short reunions.” She rarely demanded more; hip culture ridiculed the desire for commitment as “uncool.” Men defined the nature of freedom and women were required to drop their “bourgeois hang-ups” and accept it. Between their adventures, the men survived by “scuffling”—living off others—and working only when absolutely necessary. Their great accomplishment, Johnson decided,

was to avoid actual employment for as long as possible and by whatever means. But it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The women didn't mind, or, if they did, they never said—not until years later.

Still, what attracted Johnson to Kerouac and his friends were their spiritual adventures—“some pursuit of the heightened moment, intensity for its own sake.” This, she disappointingly learned, was “something they apparently find only when they're with each other.”

Of the men who created the world of the Beats, Johnson decided, “I think it was about the right to remain children.”
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True enough, but Johnson also recounts the many freedoms that “minor characters” could enjoy as well. The absence of male economic and emotional commitment freed women from daily subordination to male authority. While the men “scuffled,” women like Johnson early on achieved a certain degree of social and economic independence. Female Beats also gained partial entry into an intellectual world previously reserved for men. No other cultural niche permitted a woman to enjoy such a combination of unconventional intellectual, sexual, and economic experiences: academic women were supposed to look asexual; Hollywood sex symbols were required to act dumb. Within the limits of a male-defined aesthetic of freedom, women like Joyce Johnson lived a bohemian ideal of female independence.

Few college women ever took up the unconventional life of the Beats; they mostly married. But a significant minority of young women carved out a less exotic alternative lifestyle as “swinging singles” in large cities. By the late fifties, a growing number of college-educated women began migrating to large urban areas, lured by the promise of adventure and excitement. They took jobs as airline stewardesses, teachers, social workers, editorial assistants, or office workers, filling the thousands of new clerical and secretarial jobs created by expanding corporate and state bureaucracies. After a few years of adventure, most of them undoubtedly expected to marry. In the meantime, they shared apartments with other single women and socialized in a singles subculture that their very numbers created.

What distinguished these young women from their predecessors was that they lived neither at home nor in supervised boardinghouses, and that
they
made the rules by which they lived. Some moved casually from one sexual encounter to another, without anyone's disapproval; indeed, often without anyone's knowledge. As Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in
Re-Making Love
, “For young, single, heterosexual women in the fifties and sixties, the city held forth an entirely new vision of female sexual possibility—and the first setting for a sexual revolution.”
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Unlike the exotic enclaves of the Beats, the embryonic “swinging singles” subculture remained hidden from public view until the publication in 1962 of Helen Gurley Brown's book
Sex and the Single Girl.
Brown gave Americans their first peek inside the swinging singles culture and her lighthearted advocacy of the single life became a national best-seller. By the time that Betty Friedan encouraged married women to combine motherhood with a career in 1963, Brown had already gone on record urging single women to postpone or skip marriage and simply enjoy a fulfilling sexual life.

Brown's ideas mirrored Hugh Hefner's “playboy philosophy.” Few single women in the early sixties expected their swinging life to last indefinitely. But while they waited for “Mr. Right,” they had Brown's permission to enjoy themselves. In large cities, she insisted, “there is something else a girl can say and frequently does when a man ‘insists' and that is ‘yes.' . . . Nice girls
do
have affairs, and they do not necessarily die of them.” Married couples could keep their diapers, crabgrass, and suburban homes. For the single man or woman, Hefner and Brown now offered an alternative hedonistic lifestyle.
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Like the women attached to the Beats, single women soon discovered the fundamental inequality that shadowed their sexually liberated lives. Affairs with married men often brought loneliness and disappointment. Since they earned less than men, they had trouble supporting their lifestyle. In addition, the “value” of an unmarried woman, unlike an unmarried man, depreciated with time. If she waited too long, she risked ending up with no husband at all
and
bumping up against a biological clock. “Spontaneous” sexual pleasures could also be very dangerous. Without perfect contraception or legal abortions, women literally risked their lives if they became pregnant. Fear of pregnancy—or of an illegal abortion—also dampened many a young woman's enthusiasm for the pleasure of sex. The Pill, which would be approved in 1960, was not yet on the horizon.

It is difficult to even imagine what life was like for adventurous young women at a time when abortion remained illegal. A simple mistake, the unwillingness of a young man to use a condom or his inability to use it effectively, the failure of a diaphragm, a vague comprehension of the ovulation cycle, or the belief in coitus interruptus as a failproof method of contraception could, in an instant, change the course of your life. Some women, of course, hastily married, leaving behind their youth and the dream of an education. Others, fearing the loss of their dreams, landed on some quack's kitchen table. If all went well, a young woman returned to her life, perhaps fearful of repeating the experience. If things went badly, a woman found herself in an emergency room, interrogated by hospital personnel, explaining that she had suffered a miscarriage, at the mercy of antibiotics that couldn't always cure an advancing infection. All too often the infection spread, the woman began to bleed profusely, and she died. Advocates of abortion reform estimated that close to one million women had illegal abortions annually before the procedure became legal in 1973, and they attributed some five thousand deaths directly to illegal abortions. The most common kind of illegal abortion was self-induced. Women desperate to end a pregnancy tried an astonishing array of abortifacients. Doctors who examined infected wombs or who performed autopsies became all too familiar with signs of self-induced abortion: