The World Split Open (32 page)

Through Isabel's musings, Jong captured an entire generation's confusion about its sexuality. As Isabel says to herself, “Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. . . . Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley's and wondered what was
wrong
with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?”
³³

In 1979,
Playgirl
magazine—that odd mixture of hedonism and feminism—published an article titled “Sex in the ‘70s: A Wrap-Up of the Decadent Decade.” The article rightly emphasized the commercialization of what passed for sexual liberation in the larger society, including sex toys, lingerie, and endless shelves of self-help books—such as Alex Comfort's
The Joy of Sex
(1972) or Xaviera Hollander's
The Happy Hooker
(1972).
Playgirl
also emphasized the significance of
The Hite Report
(1976), the first survey of American women's sexual experience since Kinsey's studies in the 1950s. Ten years after women liberationists first exposed the ubiquity of “the faked orgasm,” Shere Hite's survey of three thousand women revealed that 95 percent of them claimed to always reach orgasm through masturbation, while only 30 percent claimed to do so exclusively through intercourse. One woman, who answered a Hite question about the faked orgasm, replied, “I never need to fake—no man noticed I didn't come.” But perhaps Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich, two well-known feminist intellectuals and activists, gave the decade its definitive feminist spin with the title of an essay they jointly wrote: “Sexual Liberation: The Shortest Revolution.”
³⁴

One reason that the sexual revolution proved to be so short was that without access to legal abortion, this revolution had caused more, not fewer, illegal abortions. Despite the presence of the Pill, many women had to use—for all kinds of medical reasons—other contraceptive devices that were not nearly as effective.

The movement for abortion reform actually began long before the women's movement. Abortion had been illegal for nearly a century when, in 1959, the American Law Institute recommended that abortion should be available when either the mother or child might suffer from continuation of the pregnancy. Throughout the sixties, a variety of activists—including many male doctors who sacrificed their medical careers, population control advocates, welfare rights groups, and lawyers—joined the reform movement.
³⁶

Despite their persistence, abortion activists made very little progress until the women's movement added its voice to the call for abortion reform. During the sixties, hospitals still admitted thousands of women
whose wombs were forever scarred by botched abortions. The real question was not whether women would have abortions, but if they would be safe and affordable. Cindy Cisler, a tireless advocate for legalized abortion, along with the determined Bill Baird, spoke for many when she argued that “without the full capacity to limit her own reproduction, a woman's other ‘freedoms' are tantalizing mockeries that cannot be exercised.”
³⁷

By the early seventies, eleven states, including New York and California, had liberalized their abortion laws, allowing the procedure under particular conditions. But feminists soon complained that liberalized laws simply put them at the mercy of the medical establishment instead of the legislature. In California, a woman had to undergo the humiliation of two psychiatric evaluations that testified to her mental incapacity to bear a child. In New York, where the availability of abortion drew women from all over the country, prices for abortion skyrocketed.
³⁸

When the women's liberation movement joined the abortion rights campaign in the late sixties, feminists rejected the more politically acceptable call for the “reform” of abortion laws and insisted upon the “repeal” of
all
laws that limited a woman's right to abortion. All over the country, the growing women's movement intensified the struggle to repeal laws that prohibited or limited abortion. In New York, feminists testified before the legislature and passed out copies of their model abortion law—a blank piece of paper. Through public “speak-outs,” feminists admitted to illegal abortions and explained why they had made this choice. “The speak-out,” explained one New York activist, was “unbelievably successful and it turned out to be an incredible organizing tool. It brought abortion out of the closet where it had been hidden in secrecy and shame. It informed the public that most women were having abortions anyway. People spoke from their hearts. It was heart-rending.”
³⁹

On January 22, 1973, a day women of a certain age will never forget, the Supreme Court handed down the
Roe v. Wade
decision. “We recognize the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” With those few words, the controversial decision struck down state laws that prohibited abortion and permitted a woman and her doctor to make all decisions about reproduction during the first six months of a pregnancy.
⁴⁰

Many sighed with relief, hoping that not one more woman would ever have to go through the nightmare of an illegal abortion. But no real national consensus had been reached. Congress had not legislated a woman's right to abortion. What the Court gave, Congress could take away. Without the extended national debate that usually preceded legislation, the right to a legal abortion was fragile and precarious.

Almost as soon as abortion became legal in 1973, a variety of religious and antiabortion groups began building what would become a powerful movement to repeal
Roe v. Wade.
At first, feminists did not recognize its growing strength and commitment. Yet, by 1977, the antiabortion movement had lobbied Congress successfully to pass the Hyde Amendment, which prevented government funding of abortions for poor women.
⁴¹
During the 1980 presidential campaign, abortion would become a litmus test for those seeking local as well as national office. By then, the country would be deeply polarized by “pro-life” activists who wanted to abolish abortion and “pro-choice” partisans who were equally committed to preserving a woman's right to make her own choice.

Young women sometimes ask, “Why were feminists in 1968 so angry at beauty pageants?” The Miss America Pageant seemed to sum up everything these women rejected: woman as spectacle, woman as object, woman as consumer, woman as artificial image. What they wanted was to be taken seriously, not to be judged by their appearance. Why, they asked, couldn't women look just ordinary and why couldn't a woman be a subject, instead of an object?

In the days preceding the pageant, members of the group New York Radical Women publicized their intention to “protest . . . an image that has oppressed women,” the ideal of the svelte beauty queen. Most of the organizers had been activists in the civil rights, student, or New Left movements, but according to Robin Morgan, “none of us had ever organized a demonstration on her own before.” “I can still remember,” she wrote,

the feverish excitement I felt: dickering with the company that chartered buses, wrangling a permit from the mayor of Atlantic City, sleeping about three hours a night for days
preceding the demonstration, borrowing a bullhorn for our marshals to use. The acid taste of coffee from paper containers and the cigarettes from crumpled packs was in my mouth; my eyes were bloodshot and my glasses kept slipping down my nose; my feet hurt and neck ached and my voice had gone hoarse—and I was deliriously happy.
⁴²

On September 7, 1968, the protest began. Inside the hall at Atlantic City, as the winner paraded onstage, a group of activists stood up and unfurled a women's liberation banner and chanted a few slogans. Their protest barely made a ripple within the hall, but network television did broadcast the protest to viewers all across the country. Outside, some two hundred women were picketing the pageant. One group trotted out a sheep, which they then crowned as Miss America in their own mock minipageant. In a pamphlet, protesters denounced the fact that “women in our society find themselves forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty' standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.” Into a large “Freedom Trash Can,” they threw “instruments of torture”—girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, cosmetics of all kinds, wigs, issues of both
Cosmopolitan
and
Playboy
, and, yes, bras. Although the plan was to light a fire in the can, they decided to comply with the Atlantic City police's request not to endanger the wooden boardwalk. Asked by a reporter why the city had objected to the protest, Robin Morgan replied that the mayor had been concerned about fire safety. Perhaps trying to provoke some media interest, she added, “We told him we wouldn't do anything dangerous—just a symbolic bra-burning.” The
New York Times
correctly reported that no fire had been lit that day. But by September 28, the
Times
referred to “bra-burnings” as though they had actually happened. By then, the media, all by itself, had ignited what would prove to be the most tenacious media myth about the women's movement—that women “libbers” burned their bras as a way of protesting their status in American society.
⁴³

Actually, at that moment, bras held little symbolic meaning for feminists. Many had stopped wearing them years before. Aprons were a much more powerful symbol to these young women. But bras seemed to mean a great deal to those journalists who couldn't tell the difference between the sexual revolution and women's liberation. And so the myth spread that women's liberationists burned bras as an act of defiance. A sexy trope, the media used it to sell papers. In a breast-obsessed society, “bra-burning”
became a symbolic way of sexualizing—and thereby trivializing—women's struggle for emancipation.
⁴⁴

After the Miss America Pageant, some of the organizers criticized themselves for their lack of sensitivity. Carol Hanisch observed that the action appeared to be against the contestants, instead of against the pageant itself. “Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of as our sisters who suffer with us.” Although organizers had banned antiwoman signs, some women waved them anyway, proclaiming, “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie.” “Ironically enough,” Hanisch observed, “what the Left/Underground press seemed to like best about our action was what we realized was our worst mistake—our antiwoman signs.”
⁴⁵

Those who had left the Left had brought heavy cultural baggage to the new movement. New rituals and new language would take time to develop. Hanisch, in particular, worried about the “revolutionary language” that might repel otherwise potentially sympathetic women. “Stop using the ‘in-talk' of the New Left/Hippie movement (Yes, even the work FUCK!!),” she warned. “We can use simple (
real
) language that everyone from Queens to Iowa will understand and not misunderstand.” Robin Morgan also criticized herself for her use of movement language. “I pepper my language with -isms and -ations . . . this is still the style coming out of the New Left. I began to realize . . . I'm not reaching these women, these women are reaching me, and that's wonderful, these women in their little Iowa dresses. . . . And I cleaned up my act, my language.”
⁴⁶
But Morgan, like many other New Left women, had not yet recognized her unexamined contempt for those women in their “little Iowa dresses.”

The political culture of the New Left/hippie movement clung to the women's movement like barnacles to a ship's bottom. The early women's liberation movement appropriated “zap actions,” in-your-face street guerrilla theater tactics, and posters like “FUCK HOUSEWORK” that were meant to be aggressively offensive without realizing that they might alienate rather than reach ordinary women. Some of the protesters at the Miss America Pageant, for instance, sang a “Miss America song,” to the tune of “Ain't She Sweet”: “Ain't she cute, standing in her bathing suit, selling products for the corporations, now ain't she cute.”
⁴⁷

Feminist attacks on consumer culture proliferated. The advertising industry had already used images of female bodies to sell cars,
hacksaws, and even electric drills. Some activists retaliated by plastering stickers that declared, “This is only one example of the many ways in which society uses and degrades women” all over such ads and billboards. After 1972, when journalist Gloria Steinem founded
Ms.
magazine, the editors institutionalized a page called “No Comment.” Readers simply sent in advertisements that degraded women. The magazine reprinted them without comment. The ads, in the context of a national feminist magazine, spoke for themselves and the language they spoke was a new and startling one.

Within a year of the first Miss America protest, activists began targeting other “sex crimes.” On September 21, 1969, five members of a group called Bay Area Women's Militia discovered that the men who were starting
Dock of the Bay
, a new alternative newspaper, planned to finance their project by publishing a pornographic magazine titled
The San Francisco Review of Sex.
After they gained the support of the
Dock's
women staffers, the Militia sabotaged the plates from which the
Review
was to be printed. Proudly, they reported their success in a local women's liberation paper,
Tooth and Nail. The Dock of the Bay
soon folded. Financing “the revolution” on the backs of half of the population would no longer be possible. One year later, in April 1970, the Bread and Roses collective in Boston protested the showing of a “skin flick” at the Orson Welles art film cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few months later, San Francisco liberationists claimed responsibility for an act of sabotage against the offices of the
Berkeley Barb
, an underground newspaper that partially financed itself with pornographic ads.