The World Split Open (25 page)

Hayden and King sent their three-page document to forty women active in the civil rights, student, and peace movements sometime after November 18, 1965. It reached an even wider readership when the magazine
Liberation
reprinted it in April 1966. “From our black women friends,” recalled King, “to whom we had sent the missive . . . we heard nothing. Not one responded.” The problems Hayden had identified addressed the stereotype of white women's learned helplessness, not the racism that forced black women to support themselves, their families, and their communities. And as more black women embraced black separatist politics, they also viewed “women's issues” as divisive.
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White women activists responded with greater enthusiasm. “I was very turned on by the memo and wanted to do some kind of exposé on male leadership of the ILGWU [International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union],” the labor activist Jan Goodman wrote Hayden. A former editor of the
Nation
, Elizabeth Sutherland, offered to rewrite the memo to submit to mainstream magazines. Years later, Barbara Raskin, an activist attached to the leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told Mary King that she would never forget the day the letter arrived in the mail:

It was stunning in its effect on me. I read it and reread it, and shared it with all my friends. Eventually we started a group in Washington and met on a regular basis to discuss the issues you and Casey raised. From reading and rereading it, the letter became creased and dirtied. Finally, I could hardly read it anymore but by then I knew it by heart.
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Like Betty Friedan's discovery of housewives' nameless problems, “A Kind of Memo” captured the unarticulated simmering resentments of young activist women and sparked serious soul-searching among them. The “women's issue” surfaced just as SDS's fragile unity faced dramatic expansion in the face of growing protests against the war in Vietnam and increasing political divisions.

The small, face-to-face community of SDS had been overwhelmed by the growing student and antiwar movements. Inspired by the Free Speech Movement that erupted in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, students across the country had begun to question the relevance of their education and the authority of their professors. In August 1964, Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, confirming the fact that the United States was embroiled in a major war in Vietnam. When the president ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965, SDS, a visible dissident student organization, found itself cast as the leadership responsible for organizing an antiwar movement.

Across the country, students organized “teach-ins,” marathon events in which educators and experts taught a generation of students, many of whom would have been hard-pressed to find Vietnam on a map, the history of America's ongoing intervention in Southeast Asia. In April 1965, SDS drew some twenty-five thousand people to the nation's capital for the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War. By the spring of 1965, in response to the accelerating war in Vietnam, SDS had ballooned into a national organization of some forty chapters with over two thousand paid members.

Many women participated in SDS, as well as in the student and antiwar movements. What historian Sara Evans has described as SDS's “competitive intellectual mode” intimidated many female (as well as male) members. Early SDS attracted an exceptional core of young men who “were diligent readers, active thinkers and talkers, and as the later literature lists of SDS will show, prodigious writers.”
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If they had wanted, these young men could have achieved early success—and economic security—in any number of careers. Instead, they rebelled against conventional definitions of male success.

As the organization grew, alienation escalated. Among the alienated were SDS women who were at least as remarkable as their male
counterparts, arguably more so. A number of them had mothers who viewed themselves as feminists; a few had parents who, as Communists or former Communists, had taught their daughters about the “woman question.” Others came to an understanding of women's oppression through their own personal and political experience.

Vivian Rothstein was typical of the women who became part of the SDS inner circle. Raised in Los Angeles, Rothstein went to Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1963 and soon joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrations against the discriminatory employment practices of Lucky Foods and the Sheraton Plaza Hotel. Along with five hundred other demonstrators, she was arrested for civil disobedience in an action against auto dealerships that refused to hire black salespeople, and spent the summer of 1964 in group trials in San Francisco. She participated in the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and in the summer of 1965 went to Jackson, Mississippi, as part of the second Mississippi Freedom Summer project. In Jackson, police arrested her in a mass action challenging local restrictions on political demonstrations. After ten days in a Jackson jail, she was assigned to a rural Mississippi county to work on voter registration, school integration, and the development of a local Freedom School.

Rothstein took seriously blacks' admonition to organize other whites. She returned to Berkeley, where she joined a fledgling SDS ERAP project in Oakland, California. When that project failed, she moved East to join the SDS JOIN project, which was organizing poor white southern Appalachian migrants in Chicago. It was in Chicago that she became involved with the leadership core of SDS. Like many women in that initial group, Vivian's admission to the inner circle was facilitated by her subsequent marriage to an early SDS leader.

Many women in the New Left—not only in SDS—felt intimidated by the movement world in which they lived but rarely starred. In contrast, early male SDS leaders boldly expressed a sense of entitlement that had been part of their upbringing. They expected to be heard, even in Washington. During the Cuban missile crisis, Elinor Langer, married to the founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, remembered that “the women, come to think of it, were making coffee and setting the table while the men were trying to figure out by what chain of who-knows-who they could reach the higher authorities with their proposals and demands.” Looking back, Sue Thrasher, the first executive secretary of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, recalled, “The officers in
SSOC were all men except me. It became clear to me that I was doing all the shit work, holding the office together, keeping the mailing and stuff like that going on.” But like many young women in such situations, she repressed any sense of resentment. She simply loved being in the movement. “A lot of my anger about the position of women came later.”
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Unlike the Old Left, which at least recognized “the woman question,” SDS did not even address the issue. Barbara Epstein, whose activism spanned both the Old and New Left, found SDS astonishingly ignorant of what the Communist Party had called “male chauvinism.” In “the Old Left,” she noted, “one could at least bring up the issue, even if Communists regarded it as a ‘bourgeois matter' to be solved ‘after the revolution.'” . . . “Inside SDS,” explained Epstein, “you see, it was laughed at. I tried to bring this up in SDS and it was impossible.”

Power came and went depending on a woman's relationship to men in the inner circle. Barbara Haber, one of the founding members of SDS, recognized that as the wife of the group's first president, she had special status, but not necessarily more credibility. “I was the wife of a ‘heavy' [movement shorthand for an important leader who wielded influence]. It was a double-edged status. It certainly did not mean that I was seen as a person in my own right and treated with respect.”

Such daughters of the fifties, well educated and brimming with intellectual curiosity, had little inclination to write theoretical papers on the nature of the university or the military-industrial complex. Casey Hayden felt that “SDS shaped my politics, but SNCC had my heart.”
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They were accustomed to using their intelligence for organizing and solving concrete problems. Little in their background or education had encouraged them to theorize about corporate America or to analyze the nation's foreign policy with a voice of authority—in fact, to do anything with the kind of authority that seemed to come so naturally to their male peers. Raised to be polite, some waited patiently for men to stop speaking, but as one former SDS woman complained, “The men, they never finished.”

At large national council meetings women felt especially intimidated by the long speeches and the intellectual competition among male leaders. And when they did speak, they were often ignored. Nanci Hollander, an SDS activist then married to Todd Gitlin, president of SDS in 1963, noticed that whenever a woman began to speak, “the men suddenly stretched, and chattered among themselves.” Women got the message: what they had to say was, by definition, of
so
little importance that it could be ignored. The issues women most wanted to discuss—how to
organize more effectively, how to improve the group process, or how to address the problems of community women—were discredited as “soft subjects,” certainly less important than an analysis of corporate liberalism or American foreign policy.

It was the same wherever the New Left met. Anne Weills, then married to Robert Scheer, the editor of the leftist magazine
Ramparts
, also felt invisible at Bay Area movement meetings. “Even if you said it well,” she recalled,

half the time people would ignore you. I'd think, “I'm not saying it well. I'm not saying it loud enough.” Finally, I'd get to say something. Complete Silence. A few minutes later, a man would get up and say the same thing. Suddenly the room became electrified. Invisibility. That's what was so painful.

Parliamentary rules, wielded as weapons by men on a podium, made Marilyn Webb, an SDS activist, “afraid to say anything. . . . There was no feeling women were encouraged, and parliamentary rules, often byzantine, seemed so alienating.”
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“The SDS Old Guard,” Todd Gitlin later conceded, “was essentially a young boys' network. . . . Men sought [women] out, recruited them, took them seriously, honored their intelligence—then subtly demoted them to girlfriends, wives, note-takers, coffee makers. . . . Ambition, expected in a man, looked suspiciously like ball-busting to the male eye. An aggressive style, which might pass as acceptably virile in a man, sounded ‘bitchy' in a woman.”
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The historian Maurice Isserman has suggested that life at the national office—“with its pressure-cooker atmosphere and the premium placed within it on forceful public speaking as the mark of leadership”—may have been less hospitable than in SDS local chapters. But at the national level, women felt overshadowed and often suffered from debilitating self-doubt. Carol McEldowney, a respected and talented organizer who had helped turn Cleveland's ERAP project into a welfare rights movement, confided her own disabling insecurity in a private letter to a trusted SDS friend in 1964: “You know, or maybe you don't, that I've endured many feelings of insecurity and inferiority lately in the intellectual realm, and for a long time I've felt dwarfed being around the intellectual elite.”

McEldowney was well aware that most SDS male leaders valued
intellectual theory more than organizing skills. “I often find myself frustrated and hamstrung by my own inadequacy, which is not a happy situation. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that I often . . . lose my tongue when in a conversational situation with those of that superior ilk.”
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Such paralyzing self-doubt prevented McEldowney from accepting the reins of national leadership. During the summer of 1965, a group of SDS friends tried to persuade her to become the national secretary of the organization. Overwhelmed, she wrote to friends, “Me. Nat'l Sec'y. A joke.” She refused, explaining that the very idea terrified her. After a recent meeting, she had left feeling “like crawling into a hole. My lack of information of American foreign policy, coupled with my shyness in such a situation and fear of saying something that would be rebuffed. . . . I have trouble saying this to people because the standard response is, ‘oh, stop being silly,' which does nothing, absolutely nothing, to reassure me. . . . The damn thing of it is that I'm sure many other people in SDS feel as I do.”
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They did, but at the time, each woman assumed that her alienation and lack of confidence was her own private problem. At an SDS reunion in New York in August 1988, the women decided to reconsider their own history in SDS. By 1969, when SDS had splintered into warring factions, these women no longer lived in the same community. They told other women their stories, but not the women with whom they had worked and shared their lives in SDS in the early sixties.

Now they told each other how they felt in SDS. Several women described the terror of talking at national meetings. “But I thought you were so strong and articulate,” own woman commented to another. “I thought I was the only one who felt that way.” “Every time I spoke, I trembled,” said another former member. Another woman added almost in a whisper, “Many of us left meetings and quietly cried alone.”
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“Why did we feel so devalued?” someone then asked. Betty Garman, a member of the first SDS Executive Council, suggested one answer. “What seemed important to men never seemed all that important to me. I wanted to organize, not engage in verbal debate.” Sharon Jeffrey added that “SDS revered the mind, but ignored feelings. Perception, not intuition, was honored.”

Each story tapped into some wellspring of sadness. Tears flowed—for doubting their intellectual talents, for accepting men's definition of the world. Sala Steinbach said softly, “SDS was the center of my life.” Another woman added, “And we have to admit that SDS was extraordinary
precisely because of those brilliant men. Many of us were seduced by their great minds and ambitious visions. And yet that very same talent was what intimidated us.” A brief period of silence followed. “We are angry at ourselves,” one former SDSer said quietly. “How could those men be so smart and still so sexist?” wondered another woman, half-laughing and half-crying.