The World Split Open (40 page)

The trains and buses returning the JRB women to New York hummed, not with the usual reports from the congressmen visited, but with heated debates about traditional sex roles, the meaning of woman power and women's liberation, and whether or not affluent young radical women had the right to push their demands forward when our sisters were dying in Vietnam.
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The media, for its part, either trivialized or ignored the Jeanette Rankin Brigade protest. Still, the impact on the women's liberation movement was even more momentous. It was there that many young activists realized how broadly their movement had spread. It was there that a new generation of female peace activists refused to use the moral rhetoric of traditional motherhood and instead demanded to protest as citizens. (Significantly, by the early 1980s, during a resurrected anti-nuclear peace movement, when many of these young women had become mothers, they once again celebrated women's traditional peacefulness.)
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In January 1968, the Burial of Traditional Womanhood protest had rejected the feminine mystique; in September, the Miss America Pageant protest condemned society's evaluation of women by their appearance. In the years that followed, inventive feminist protests
proliferated with stunning speed. For instance, a group of feminists who called themselves “BITCH” held an “Ogle-In” on June 9, 1970. The purpose of the street protest, as one newspaper put it, “was to make men understand how degrading their flattery is.” The women whistled at men's “tight buns,” loudly admired young men's bulging arm muscles, and heckled construction workers with shouts and whistles.
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Corporations quickly became a popular feminist target. At an annual meeting of CBS shareholders in San Francisco, ten women suddenly appeared at the front of the small auditorium, shouting, “We won't be slaves.” They then denounced CBS for its “mindless-coddling and dull programming,” including its characterization of women, and for its excessive profits. In New York City, a group called Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) decided to deploy their magical powers by hexing Wall Street. The stock market inexplicably declined.
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A distaste for the institution of marriage showed up in a variety of protests. Ti-Grace Atkinson and her group, The Feminists, plastered the New York subway system with “Fuck Marriage, Not Men” stickers. In one of her most widely publicized actions, Atkinson also led a protest at the Marriage License Bureau. “We wanted to raise women's consciousness about marriage and a state contract,” Atkinson explained. “So we drafted something like ‘legal charges against the Marriage License Bureau of New York City,' accusing them of committing fraud with malicious intent on the women of New York.”

Bridal fairs, which literally “sold marriage”—or at least the products and services that went with it—became a favorite target of the women's movement. In Columbus, Ohio, feminists argued that bridal fairs “add to the sales itch for crystal and furniture and the bride, herself, becomes a commodity.” In San Diego, the Women's Liberation Front and the San Diego State Guerrilla Theater invaded a bridal fair and handed out leaflets condemning consumerism, and denounced the profits that manufacturers of household goods accumulated from the “selling” of marriage.

On February 15, 1969, women's liberation groups on both coasts disrupted gigantic bridal fairs. Targeting the marketers of gowns, wedding pictures, caterers, furniture, appliances, and honeymoon trips, the protesters condemned “consumer culture” for turning marriage into an excuse for conspicuous consumption. Did a new bride really need to have “sixteen appliances and a matching bedroom set”? In San Francisco,
feminist activists picketed a bridal fair, handing out leaflets to new brides-to-be that denounced the “mass media [for its] images of the pretty, sexy, passive, childlike vacuous woman.”
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In New York, on the same day, members of WITCH, after plastering the city with ten thousand stickers urging other women to join them, led a protest against a bridal fair held at Madison Square Garden. They chanted, “Confront the Whoremakers,” cast a “hex” on the “manipulator-exhibitors,” sang “Here Comes the Slave, Off to Her Grave,” and distributed free “shop-lifting bags” (which the prospective brides evidently eagerly grabbed up). Their signs declared, “Always a Bride, Never a Person,” “Here Comes the Bribe,” and “Ask Not for Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls.” In response to the fact that feminists had just disrupted bridal fairs on each coast on the same day, Robin Morgan quipped, “Yes, Betty Crocker, a conspiracy (or at least synchronicity)
does exist
.”
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Anything that seemed degrading to women, especially advertising, became a target for feminist protesters. In Indiana, NOW launched a national boycott against Canada Dry for its ad “A Good Club Soda Is Like a Good Woman; It Won't Quit on You.” In both San Francisco and Boston, women liberationists invaded radio stations for playing rock music they felt degraded women. NOW also picketed National Airlines' headquarters in New York City for an outrageous campaign that used photos of come-hither smiling flight attendants, who urged businessmen to “Fly me.”
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The San Francisco Bay Area—ground zero of the student movement—quite naturally became a hub of university and community feminist activism. It didn't take long, for instance, for women students at U.C. Berkeley to protest the “patriarchal” nature of their educations and the fact that they had learned nothing about women's history, literature, or work. All over the country, students and faculty began demanding and creating new courses. In 1969, for instance, a group of U.C. Berkeley undergraduate students held a rally at which they issued a leaflet declaring, “We've been burned. We thought we were free human beings.” Now they viewed themselves as brainwashed victims, trapped in an educational institution that refused to allow them to challenge the basis of knowledge. They then demanded that the ROTC building be converted into a space for women's studies, that the university provide child care, and that funds used for “war-related and counter-insurgency research” be converted into stipends to support women's education. As
the television cameras whirred, a group of women graduate students and young assistant professors gathered in a circle and burned their master's and doctorate degrees.
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Some protests and marches grew out of a passion for discovering the previously hidden history of women. Laura X, Phyllis Mandel, and other members of Berkeley Women's Liberation, for instance, resurrected International Women's Day, a holiday that actually had its roots in American labor history, but was only celebrated in Communist countries. On March 8, 1911, American working women had celebrated the First International Women's Day with parades and demonstrations. The ritual quickly spread to other countries. Due to its radical and socialist origins, Americans had long ago stopped commemorating the event. On International Women's Day, in 1969, about fifty women, dressed in turn-of-the-century costumes, marched through the city of Berkeley. The following year, thirty other American towns and cities celebrated the day. By the end of the seventies, nearly all schools and cities commemorated it.

Furious that the University of California refused to provide women with facilities for weight-training and courses in self-defense, members of the Women's Liberation Front invaded the men's gym. Banging pots and pans, chanting “Self-defense for women now,” about fifty women charged into the men's locker room, surprising a group of half-dressed men. Afterward, they marched to the chancellor's house, where they presented demands for free child care for all students and employees, new courses in the history of women, the hiring of more women professors, the granting of maternity and paternity leave for both students and employees, an end to all-women dormitories, the distribution of free birth control devices, and the availability of abortion at the campus hospital.
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Feminists also targeted media organizations all over the country. Tired of being trivialized or ignored by the
San Francisco Chronicle
, seventy-five members of Berkeley Women's Liberation crossed the Bay Bridge and invaded its editorial offices in 1969. When the phone rang, one activist simply picked it up, declared “The paper's closed down,” and slammed down the receiver. The group demanded 50 percent women employees in all departments, a revision of its women's pages, and an end to the acceptance of any advertising that exploited women.
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After months of negotiation, KPFA, the local listener-sponsored radio station in Berkeley, continued to stonewall requests for programs by and about women. One warm evening in the summer of 1970, five women in
my small group decided to invade its offices. Here is a peek behind a feminist guerrilla action. Sitting in Susan Griffin's living room, members of our small group strategized about how to influence the radio station. At about 11:00 P.M., we concocted a plan. Susan Griffin called the KPFA office, which was always locked at night, and said she had left her purse there earlier that day. The night manager said, “Come on by and I'll unlock the door.” We piled into a car and drove to KPFA. Susan announced herself on the security phone, the door automatically unlocked, and we charged in. After an unsuccessful effort to grab the microphone, we identified ourselves to the startled skeletal night staff as Radio Free Women dedicated “to giving women at home, isolated from society, knowledge and contact with their sisters.” We left a list of our “demands” and signed them with our noms de guerre: Rosa Luxemburg, Sarah Grimké, Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman, all well-known activists from the past. The media picked up the story the next day. Shortly afterward, KPFA began producing programs on women's history, poetry, literature, music, news, and public affairs. The name “Radio Free Women” never appeared again. In the spirit of guerrilla actions, we simply melted back into polite and respectable womanhood. No one knew who had invaded the radio station.
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Everywhere, the media proved terrific targets for women intent on publicizing the movement (and changing the world). During the first media blitz about the women's liberation movement in 1970, feminists all over the country, but especially in New York City, launched sustained campaigns against the various media. Forty-six women employees of
Newsweek
magazine, for example, filed a complaint charging the magazine with systematic discrimination against women. In Hollywood, women members of the Screen Actors Guild charged that the television and movie industries discriminated against women; women in the American Newspaper Guild insisted that female writers be permitted to report on any subject, not just—as was so often the case—society news.
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There were thousands of protests, rallies, and marches. All over the country, feminists invaded and “occupied” all-male bars and clubs. There was, for instance, “Lysistrata Day” on March 14, 1970. To protest men's control over abortion laws, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws asked women to abstain for a day “from the joys of love.” There is no way of knowing how many women withheld sex that day, but as “Count Marco,” the nom de plume of a contemptuous San Francisco male columnist, pointed out, “With 27 million unattached
women in this country, NO MAN is likely to go more than a few hours without finding some other woman breathing heavily into his ear with her offerings. Most of them have never heard of Lysistrata, and if they had, they figured she was some kind of a nut.”
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Sadly, he was right. One dilemma for heterosexual feminists was that if a woman demanded too much, acted too uppity, or became too independent, a man could simply replace her with another woman, a younger wife, or, in the feminist language of the time, a “scab.” With so many single young women, scabs would inevitably cross the invisible feminist picket line. In the rhetoric of the day, “A man could always find another slave.”

One of the least dramatic but persistent protests was the constant demand for child care. Hundreds of activists, like myself, sat for years on committees that never seemed to convince universities that women students, staff, and faculty required child care. So many women fought for child care, but most of these failed efforts are simply too boring to recount. But I will never forget when one of my closest friends, Mary Felstiner, received her Ph.D. degree at Stanford University in June 1972. With her husband out of town and no available baby-sitter, she had no choice but to hold her infant child while she waited to receive her degree. To calm her daughter's cries, she fed her small pieces of chocolate, which, under a hot California sky, soon melted all over the baby's body and clothes. Then, she heard her name called, and she climbed up to the podium, carrying her baby in her arms. On her daughter's back hung a sign, “Why Doesn't Stanford Have Child Care?” The crowd roared its approval. Somehow, she managed to shake hands and receive her degree. But as she descended the stairs, she left the president wondering about the nature of the gooey brown stuff that stuck to his hands.
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Not all feminists experienced their conversion in small groups. Women like Gloria Steinem, who were older and already in the work world, also experienced a sense of conversion, but without a small group to fall back on. During the 1960s, Steinem worked as a journalist, protested against the Vietnam War, and supported “La Causa” (The Struggle) of Cesar Chavez to organize a union of farmworkers in California. Like many female journalists, Steinem's first experience of the women's
movement occurred when she was assigned to cover a feminist event. For Steinem, it was a New York abortion speak-out organized by Redstockings in 1969. The New York group Redstockings had tried to speak at a February 1969 legislative hearing on abortion law reform. But the fourteen men and one nun on the panel had hastily adjourned the hearing.