The World Split Open (36 page)

Instead of focusing narrowly on the right of women to have abortions, these women tried to educate the public about the broader issue of “reproductive rights.” At a socialist-feminist conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1975, Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a health activist, addressed the sterilization abuse of poor women, which inspired the formation of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, the Reproductive Rights National Network, and other groups around the country.

Together, these activists helped make visible what an indifferent white middle-class population refused to see—the fact that poor women on welfare were often pressured to be sterilized if they wanted government-paid abortions. Reproductive rights meant that women not only had the right to abortion, but also the right to have children. The pioneering work of these groups eventually created a constituency for and shaped the agenda of the National Women's Health Network, formed in 1975, a national organization dedicated to advancing the health of women of all classes and races. The Health Network flourished and, by the nineties, became a highly respected and authoritative watchdog organization, evaluating treatments, research trials, and government health policies.

The impact of the women's health movement is hard to exaggerate. Two examples will perhaps offer some idea of its global reach. In 1986, I met with a small group of women in a barrio located on the outskirts of Managua in Nicaragua. With great pride, they showed me their single tattered copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, translated into Spanish. I asked how the book had affected their lives. “We know what to ask from our doctors and our husbands,” one woman responded with a mischievous grin. Another
woman said she now understood her own anatomy, as well as what to expect during childbirth and lactation. Eventually,
Our Bodies, Ourselves
appeared in dozens of languages, providing reproductive, contraceptive, sexual, and medical information to women all over the globe.
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That same year, American women health activists began creating advocacy groups for women with breast cancer. Besides forming support groups, they also offered patients social services and research information on new treatments. By the early 1990s, they successfully lobbied Congress to provide more funds for breast cancer research.

Unsurprisingly, the women who politicized breast cancer were middle-aged women, veteran feminists of the women's movement who had embraced, two decades earlier, the political dimensions of “private” health matters. They showed how few resources were spent on breast cancer research; they lobbied for preventive care, as well as new treatments, and, in the process, turned a shameful taboo into a highly politicized disease. In 1988, I discovered this just-emerging movement when I had a biopsy for a suspicious breast lump. In a journal, I recorded my experience:

As I slowly climb out of the fog of anesthesia, I see my surgeon's face, grief-stricken and sorrowful. He grips my hand tightly, tells me he's sorry, it is malignant. Everything goes out of focus. Through a fog of confusion, I feel the firm grip of a nurse's hand. She gently whispers, “You'll get through this, but make sure you join a women's support group.” She has no idea who I am. She doesn't know how central feminism is to my life. She doesn't know that I have spent two decades active in the women's movement. She doesn't know that I have devoted my career to writing and teaching women's history. What I helped create now returns to comfort me in my moment of greatest need. The circle remains unbroken. Amazingly, a surge of pleasure softens my anguish.
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Before the women's movement, rape—like breast cancer—had been a shameful secret. Conventional wisdom held that a raped woman had invariably “asked for it.” In “Rape: The All-American Crime,” a groundbreaking essay published in
Ramparts
magazine in 1971, Susan Griffin
argued that rape was not an act of lust but an assaultive act of power in which a man attempted to gain complete control over a woman. Rape, she pointed out, not only occurred all the time but targeted females of all ages, from small girls to women in their nineties. Griffin was the first person to make clear how “just one rapist” could keep all women off the street at night, keep women from taking night classes, prevent women from taking night jobs. The streets and the night belonged to men, even to men who wished it weren't so.
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At the time, rape was dealt with as a rare occurrence—partly because so few women dared report it. To publicize the high incidence of rape, the New York Radical Feminists held a public “speak-out” on rape in January 1971. Soon, feminists began to criticize the treatment of rape victims. Why did police and hospital personnel treat rape victims like perpetrators or sinners? Why did New York require two witnesses for a woman to be credible? Why did a woman have to prove that she resisted in order to be believed? Why could a defense attorney use a woman's sexual history to discredit her accusation? Who, they asked, was on trial, the raped woman or her assailant?

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller's groundbreaking book
Against Our Will
revealed the universality of rape—of women, children, and prisoners in war, in peace, at home, on the streets, in the country, in the city, in every part of the world, in all periods of history. Brownmiller's exhaustive book put rape onto the political agenda. During the next few years, networks of rape-crisis centers and antirape advocacy organizations sprang up across the country. Prodded by feminists, police departments began to teach officers to treat traumatized raped women with greater sensitivity. Hospitals began to teach doctors and nurses to regard raped women as traumatized patients, not female sinners. Many states altered their rules of evidence, making a rape victim's sexual past inadmissible in court. All of these changes, which took less than two decades to accomplish, encouraged more women to report rape to the police.
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As is often the case in modern American culture, a criminal trial helped publicize the seriousness of rape. In 1974, two men raped thirty-year-old Inez Garcia. Married at fifteen, she had lived in Miami until authorities sent her husband to a California prison. With her eleven-year-old son, Garcia moved to California in order to work in the fruit fields near the prison. After being raped, she took a rifle and went out looking for her two assailants. When she found the men, one drew a knife. She fired the gun several times, killing the man who had held her
down during the rape. Charged with homicide, Inez Garcia found herself a cause célèbre among feminists and radical sympathizers. Defended by Charles Garry, an attorney for the Black Panthers and other movement groups, Garcia argued that she had “a right to protect her integrity when violated.” While out on bail, she briefly joined a feminist commune that had supported her, but felt manipulated and used by feminists, radical groups, and the media. In the end, the jury found her guilty. Two years later, however, she was acquitted and released. The case caused considerable debate among feminists and the public in general. Did a woman have the right to self-defense hours after she was raped?
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One year later, in 1975, the nation witnessed yet another rape-murder trial. Joanne Little, an African-American prisoner in a North Carolina jail, stabbed to death Clarence Alligood, a white county guard who attempted to rape her. The trial of Little became another cause célèbre. Both feminists and black activists argued that white men would always be acquitted for raping a black woman. William Kunstler, another well-known movement lawyer, defended Little and reframed the case as a trial of “the Southern justice system.” A jury of six blacks and six whites took exactly seventy-eight minutes to acquit Little of second-degree murder. Like the Inez Garcia case, the Little acquittal ignited fierce public debate. Widely covered by the national media, these two cases not only helped publicize the ubiquity of rape, especially among minority women, but also raised the question whether a woman had a right to kill her assailant after she was raped, in some cases, hours or days after the event took place.
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Inevitably, feminists discovered that sexual violence did not occur only between strangers. Husbands raped their wives, but the law, as well as conventional wisdom, held that a man could rape neither a wife nor a prostitute—in essence, they belonged to him.
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As Bob Wilson, then chair of the Judiciary Committee of the California Senate, joked, “If you can't rape your wife, then who can you rape?”
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Diana Russell, whose pioneering book
The Politics of Rape
reached a wide audience in 1975, should be credited as the major archaeologist who unearthed the secret of marital rape. Russell was a friend of Laura X, the founder of the Berkeley Women's History Library. After learning from Russell that several foreign countries had outlawed marital rape, Laura X launched a campaign to redefine marital rape as a sexual crime. In 1979, she organized the National Clearinghouse on
Marital Rape in Berkeley and then spent the next two decades speaking at college campuses and at professional associations, and lobbying state legislatures to reclassify marital rape as a crime.

Once again, an important trial helped publicize the crime of marital rape. In 1978, a jury in Salem, Oregon, acquitted John Rideout of beating and raping his wife. At the time, Oregon was one of three states that actually classified marital rape as a crime. During the trial, the national media parachuted into tiny Salem, riveting the nation's attention with the details of the legal proceedings. For the first time, many Americans heard about “marital rape” in a context that criminalized it, and people began to debate whether such a crime actually existed.

By “naming” such hidden crimes, feminists generated the kind of debate that could turn a “custom” into a crime. Less than two decades after Laura X launched her campaign, the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995 passed a resolution recognizing marital rape as a violation of women's rights. By 1997, all fifty states in the United States had criminalized marital rape. Laura X could look back at a campaign that had successfully provided married women with greater protection from male violence.

Whenever Laura X lectured at colleges, she immediately noticed that women students naturally showed far more interest in rape on campus than in marital rape. Rape by a date, like that by a husband, proved difficult to corroborate. The “his” and “her” versions never matched and there were rarely witnesses. A college woman went out, got drunk, landed in a bedroom, perhaps with the desire to engage in some sexual activity, but not intercourse. If she suddenly refused, the young man often interpreted her refusal as a tease or as an “old-fashioned” way of saying yes. No one was sure how to describe, let alone prove, the existence of what was then called “stranger rape.” But these men were not, in fact, strangers. In her 1987 book
Real Rape
, law professor Susan Estrich created quite a stir when she introduced the phrases “date rape” and “acquaintance rape.” During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, campuses all over the country held debates on date rape, teaching young women to be clear about their intentions and instructing young men to seek consent.
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To publicize violence against women, feminists also invented new rituals. “Take Back the Night,” for instance, became an annual symbolic march, held after dark, to protest women's fear of male violence at night. In March 1982, three hundred undergraduates at the University of California, Davis, participated in the annual “Take Back the Night” march.
When they passed “fraternity row,” they encountered a shocking display of gross hostility. While one young man backed a car straight into the crowd, another urinated on the marchers; several “mooned” the women; some men threatened to rape them later; still others hung out of windows shouting obscenities. Though the university disciplined them, such incidents reminded women that even at a liberal research university, a peaceful march for a rape-free society still threatened some men.
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For black women, the subject of rape brought up similar, but also different, injuries. White planters had raped black women for their own pleasure, as well as to reproduce a slave class. White men had lynched black men, ostensibly for their violation of white women's purity, but actually for sport and to prop up white supremacy. During the last century, more black women had experienced rape—by relatives, white masters, and black men—than white women could ever imagine. For black women, rape was not only a sexual violation, it was also a symbol of white power and their double subordination as black women.
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Yet, the rape of black women remained invisible to an indifferent white majority. What stayed in the American imagination was black male attacks against white women, the exact opposite of historical reality.

Nor did most white—or black—Americans ever discuss the incest that had scarred the lives of so many young girls. Sandra Butler, the author of
The Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest
(1978), helped end the silence that surrounded the subject of incest. Behind the doors of both affluent and impoverished homes, fathers, brothers, and other relatives sexually abused young girls with remarkable frequency. Sworn to silence, many of these victims of incest grew up guilty, confused, traumatized, fearing men or compulsively searching for sex as a sign of love. Many women functioned only by repressing their memories of these incidents. Later, as adults, some recovered these painful memories and faced the ordeal of integrating them into their adult lives.
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What had been unspeakable, unthinkable, and unimaginable became, by the nineties, the subject of popular memoirs and a staple on talk shows. Before the women's movement, few Americans had realized how many relatives sexually violated young girls. Afterward, it would become the stuff of controversy as the public questioned whether memories were, in fact, recalled or “induced” by overly eager therapists.