The World Split Open (2 page)

One day, in the early 1980s, I was standing at the front of a cavernous hall that passes for a classroom at the Davis campus of the University of California. I gazed out over hundreds of my students, many of whom were no older than I'd been in 1967. I was just about to give a lecture on the roots and impact of the contemporary women's movement. On an impulse, I began by asking the class what they knew of the world of women before the movement had taken off, the era of their parents. And what issues, I also asked, had the women's movement redefined?

Eyes glazed over. Their main political memories focused on cars waiting in long lines for gas, and helicopters fetching a disgraced president into retirement or lifting Americans out of Saigon. What in the world was I talking about? What issues? I stood there listening to the silence and then spontaneously began to sketch out that world. I began to cover the blackboard with short catchphrases that reflected some of the ordinary but invariably painful female experiences that the women's movement had excavated and exposed to public view. Then, noting their growing amazement, I paused, took a deep breath, and stared at my own sprawling list.

Every life, I suppose, is allowed at least one epiphany. I could have been depressed by how little they knew. Instead, I felt a strange sense of elation. It wasn't just the enormity of all that women had challenged that still seemed breathtaking. What stunned me was that the changes in women's lives had been so deep, so wide-ranging, so transformative. I realized that the women's movement could not be erased, that it had brought about changes that these young people now took for granted.

That realization led, through many unexpected twists and turns, to years of archival research, interviewing, and analysis for a book on the origins and impact of the contemporary women's movement. I wanted to
evoke the remarkable passion and accomplishments of that powerful moment in our history—and perhaps the future history of women worldwide—without romanticizing it, or ignoring the many mistakes, squandered opportunities, and failures of imagination that are part of every life and every movement.

Research for this book proved to be a pleasure, as well as an exercise in frustration. Sometimes, I sat at clean desks with a pencil in tidy, well-organized archives. Often, I sat on dusty floors, in attics or in library stacks, examining cartons filled with uncatalogued documents, yellowed letters, and undated flyers. I interviewed people who lived in penthouses with wrap-around terraces, in suburban homes with decks and pools, and in sixth-floor walk-up apartments, where bathtubs sat in the middle of kitchens, surrounded by armies of roaches.

This is not a book just about an isolated section of society. Dissident movements provide a microcosmic view of the dominant culture's values, assumptions, and social structure. American political culture shaped contemporary feminism, and the women's movement, in its turn, has transformed that political culture. Many readers, I suspect, probably know that American feminism was shaped by the political culture of the fifties and sixties. But it also developed out of much longer and deeper political traditions—such as the disestablishment of religion as a state force and a profound distrust of centralized government; the celebration of individual enterprise and initiative; a class politics expressed mostly through race and gender; a long evangelical tradition that has existed outside political parties and government; and a deep and abiding belief that in America, one can always reinvent oneself.

Since this book covers the entire second half of the twentieth century, I knew my first task was to explain how Cold War culture and its ideas about gender patrolled the boundaries between men and women, gay and straight, patriotic and subversive. For those who weren't there, it's necessary to grasp how much the immediate postwar era suppressed dissent, glorified motherhood, celebrated women's biological difference, and sanctified the nuclear family, all of which led to a revolt against that decade's cultural icon of motherhood.

But movements are made by people, not simply by ideas. The more I interviewed women, the more I understood that the movement arose from two generations of women who recognized, with considerable anguish
and anger, that neither traditional liberalism nor the politics of the New Left was addressing what equality could mean for modern working women. And this was just the beginning. As these women activists learned to see the world through their own eyes, the feminist movement fragmented, and new populations of women—trade unionists, the old, the young, racial and ethnic minorities, some of whom had initially spurned feminism—began to assert different priorities. With that broadening constituency, many different feminisms began permeating American society.

Such a threatening movement spread to the general public through familiar sources of media and popular culture. Feminism became palatable to American mainstream culture by addressing the individual woman, rather than women as a group. What I began to call “consumer feminism” and “therapeutic feminism” had enabled a small political movement to enter daily life. Eventually, the idea of “sisterhood” gave way to the image of the Superwoman, who, with her hair swept back, briefcase in one hand, baby in the other, tried to have it all, by doing it all.

A backlash was inevitable, though few anticipated its religious and political ferocity. With its rallying cry of “family values” in the 1980s, the Republican Right successfully tied up the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in state legislatures and took the first steps to curtail the right to an abortion. So many hard-won gains of the women's movement seemed under siege. But the backlash, I eventually realized, masked another reality. By the end of the twentieth century, feminist ideas had burrowed too deeply into our culture for any resistance or politics to root them out. Meanwhile, women in other parts of the globe, fueled by international conferences, began challenging different forms of patriarchal authority and inventing feminism all over again.

The women's movement changed lives in ways that are rare in the history of social movements. Living life as a feminist was—and is—an intensely personal and dramatic experience. Naturally, there will be some people who will be disappointed not to find their particular memories and experiences in this book. All of us experienced the women's movement from our own perspectives, at different distances, and at varied ages. Some of us never experienced it at all. There were many stories; there are many memories. I hope there will be many more histories.

I did not write this book only for my generation, those of us raised
to live as traditional women, whose lives were dramatically disrupted and transformed by the power of feminist insights. Although I believe present and former activists need to rethink the past, to know where we have been and how we arrived there, I have always kept a much broader audience in mind. This book is also written for those women and men who did not participate in the women's movement, who were too busy trying to survive, who felt excluded or estranged, who were too scared, were too old or too young, were not yet born, are still not born.

Ruth Rosen

Berkeley, California

(Signs of backlash in heavier type)

1848  Married women allowed to own property.

The First Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, produces the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman” and the demand for women's suffrage.

1872  Victoria Woodhull is the first woman to run for president, even though she cannot vote and is in prison for violating the famous Comstock Law by sending obscene literature through the mail, in this case, about free love.

1893  Colorado is the first state to allow women's suffrage.

1919  Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment, called “The Susan B. Anthony Amendment.”

Three-fourths of the states ratify it on August 26, 1920.

1923  The Equal Rights Amendment is first introduced in Congress.

1953  The National Weather Service begins naming hurricanes after women.

1954  In
Brown v. Board of Education
, the Supreme Court declares that separate but equal facilities for the races are not constitutional.

1955  The first lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, is founded. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man, igniting the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Daisy Lee Bates, President of Arkansas NAACP, leads nine African-American teenagers to integrate Little Rock High School.

1957  The Soviet Union launches the first space satellite, Sputnik, spurring a demand to train women in math and science.

1959  Barbie doll is introduced to girls.

1960  John F. Kennedy is elected president.

Four young men sit-in at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter after they are refused service. Their action ignites youthful civil rights activists all over the South.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded.

Young Americans for Freedom founded.

1961  President Kennedy appoints Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of the first President's Commission on the Status of Women and Esther Peterson, who had a long history of improving working women's lives, as head of the Women's Bureau, making her the assistant secretary of the Department of Labor.

Fifty thousand women in sixty cities, mobilized by Women Strike for Peace, protest aboveground testing of nuclear bombs and tainted milk.

Birth control pills approved in 1960 and made available in 1961. Patricia McGinnis and Lana Phelan start the Society for Humane Abortion in California to demand access to abortion as a woman's right. In 1966 McGinnis sets up the Association to Repeal Abortion Law in California, which provides lists of abortion doctors and offers free classes in self-abortion.

1962  Helen Gurley Brown publishes
Sex and the Single Girl
, which gives single women permission to enjoy sex outside of marriage.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) launches the student protest movement with “The Port Huron Statement,” a critique of American domestic and foreign policy that also decries the powerlessness of ordinary people.

Rachel Carson publishes
Silent Spring
, which attacks the reckless use of toxins and pesticides.

Dolores Fernandez Huerta helps Cesar Chavez start the Farm Workers' Association (Later the United Farm Workers). The Union's first woman organizing in the field is Jesse Lopez de la Cruz.

1963  The report from the President's Commission on the Status of Women,
The American Woman
, is published.

Some 200,000 people rally in Washington, D.C., and hear Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech.

Betty Friedan publishes
The Feminine Mystique.

Congress passes the Equal Pay Act.

1964  Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, including Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment—not only on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin, but also on sex. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is created to enforce Title VII, but women's complaints are ignored and ridiculed.

Freedom Summer: One thousand northern students join SNCC workers in the South on voter registration and Freedom School projects.

Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allows funding for the Vietnam War.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tries, but fails, to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Disillusionment within the civil rights movement deepens.

Casey Hayden and Mary King circulate a memo about sexual inequality within the civil rights movement.

The Beatles take the U.S. by storm on their first tour of the country.

1965  Executive Order 11246 is signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, requiring companies doing business with the government to undertake affirmative action in hiring minorities.

Casey Hayden and Mary King send “A Kind of Memo” to fifty women in the antiwar and student movements. At an SDS conference in 1965, the first group of women meet alone in order to discuss the “Memo.”

In
Griswold v. Connecticut
, the Supreme Court declares that married couples have a right to birth control based on their “right to privacy.”

Dorothy Height leads the National Council of Negro Women to address problems of women.

1966  At the Third Annual Conference on the Status of Women in Washington, women realize that the EEOC will not enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and discover that their attempts to pass resolutions are foiled. The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded.

NOW petitions the EEOC to end the sexual segregation of classified advertisements for employment.

The call for Black Power begins.

1967  At a press conference, Betty Friedan, president of NOW, announces that federally funded child care centers for working mothers and a full income-tax deduction for child care costs are central to NOW's goals.