The World Split Open (54 page)

Nevertheless, as historian Vicki Ruiz has written, “at times biting their lips, most Chicana feminists chose to remain involved in the movimiento.”
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In May 1971, six hundred Chicanas met in Houston, Texas, to hold the First National Conference of Chicanas. Just two years after the Denver conference, Chicanas now met alone to define their own lives as
women
and
Chicanas. Some of the workshops—“Sex and the Chicanas” and “Marriage, Chicana Style”—reflected a new view of themselves as more than future mothers or activists in the Chicano movement. Risking condemnation from their families, their men, and their community, the women called for free, legal abortion and birth control, controlled by Chicanas. “We have a right to control our own bodies,” their resolution read. They also called for “24 hour child-care centers in Chicano communities” and announced that “Chicana motherhood should not preclude educational, political, social and economic advancement.” At the Texas conference, Elma Barrera, a Chicana activist, addressed the thorny issue of Chicano unity versus women's liberation:

I have been told that the Chicana's struggle is not the same as the white women's struggle. I've been told that our problems are different and that . . . the Chicana's energies are needed in the barrio and that being a feminist and fighting for our rights as women and as humans is being anti-Chicano and anti-male. But let me tell you what being Chicana means in Houston, Texas. It means learning how to please the men in the church, and the men at home, not in that order.
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Of the many controversial resolutions passed at that conference—including recognizing the Catholic Church as an oppressive institution—the women also declared that “the Chicana should not be a scapegoat for the man's frustration” and that “with involvement in the movement, marriage must change. Traditional roles for Chicanas are not acceptable or applicable.”
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So radical were these resolutions that half of the participants walked out of the conference.

Some of their male comrades, to put it mildly, were not pleased. But Chicanas fully embraced the credo of the Chicano movement—“Go back to the community with your education”—and concentrated on Mexican-American women's needs. They defended the rights of welfare mothers and lobbied for job training for women. The Chicana Action Service Center in Los Angeles, as Vicki Ruiz has noted, “helped thousands of women secure jobs and pioneered the development of placement mentors with corporations and nonprofit agencies.” Chicana activists also established health care centers and helped community organizing, including providing contraception and abortions. In the 1970s, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) became
central to organizing the Mexican-American community in San Antonio. Later, the Mothers of East Los Angeles (1984) would take up the battle to fight for decent housing, create community patrols, and fight for gun control and safe neighborhoods. By the 1980s and 1990s, Mexican-American female community activists, drawing on decades of community activism, would be instrumental in organizing the growing environmental justice movement, which refused to allow either the government or corporations to dump toxic wastes in their communities.
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No matter where they directed their activism, some Chicanas still felt the pain of their invisibility—to both their Chicano
compañeros
and to white middle-class feminists. In the anthology
This Bridge Called My Back
, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, Chicana activists voiced the frustration and anger they experienced as they tried to navigate through both the feminist and Chicano movements. Chicana lesbian feminists, including the writers Cherrie Moraga, Emma Perez, Ana Castillo, Carla Trujillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Gloria Anzaldua, experienced even greater alienation. Often, as Gloria Anzaldua wrote, they felt that they belonged nowhere: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (‘As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.')”
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Mexican-American women also formed their own national organization. In 1974, the Mexican-American Women's National Association (MANA) embraced many feminist goals, but also emphasized the need to protect the family. By 1990, MANA had chapters in sixteen states. Although most members were Catholic, MANA nevertheless embraced a pro-choice position, along with a program to protect women from forced sterilization. Concerned about providing leadership for the Mexican-American community, MANA launched an impressive project called Hermanitas, through which members became mentors to young girls.

Women from Asia and the Pacific islands, from the Philippines, from Puerto Rico, and from indigenous Indian and Alaskan tribes, similarly organized at both the local and national levels during the seventies. Women in Indian and Native Alaskan tribes, who constituted a very small minority—1 percent of the U.S. population in 1980—and spoke hundreds of different languages in hundreds of different tribes, participated in the Native American liberation movement that took great pride
in indigenous culture, but also ignored many of women's needs. The women felt the heavy burden of the past, which, in this case, included the history of genocide and the intentional destruction of tribal cultures. To preserve tradition was to resist the dominant culture. But tradition also limited women's opportunities to live more independent lives. Yet, at stake was not only a culture, but also the very physical survival of a people.
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Since half of their constituency remained on reservations, many American Indian women activists chose to organize at the local level. For them, “women's issues” translated into getting much-needed social services from the government, dealing with domestic violence, alcoholism, and child abuse, providing for health care and employment needs of tribal members, and the nonnegotiable demand that their children be educated in their own language, with their own traditions.

Each group of minority women tried to explode negative stereotypes of its women. Native American feminists sought to counter cinematic images of themselves as dirty squaws (a word that originally meant, simply, “woman”), nubile naked savages, and, as the activist and writer Shirley Hill Witt put it, “a brown lump of a drudge, chewing buffalo hide, putting that tipi up and down again and again, carrying heavy burdens along with dogs while the tribe moves ever onward, away from the pursuing cavalry.”
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Asian women fought against images of themselves as dragon ladies, deferential brides, and seductive geisha entertainers.

Each group linked women's issues to larger political issues—the survival of indigenous peoples, the independence of Puerto Rico, and racism toward Asian Americans. Each group also understood that different histories had created a unique women's agenda. Though many refused to call themselves feminists, the very existence of a women's movement ignited great activity among women of racial minorities, who began to identify, name, publicize, and fight for what they decided needed to be changed.

In the middle of this extraordinary explosion of feminist activity, the United Nations declared 1975 International Women's Year (IWY). Congresswomen Bella Abzug, Patsy Mink, and Margaret Heckler seized the opportunity to introduce legislation to honor IWY by funding a
national women's conference, to “promote equality between men and women.” Congress passed the bill, allocating $5 million to fund a conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977.

The process of selecting state delegations to the conference turned out to be a competitive, brutal, but invigorating experiment in American democracy. More than two thousand women, elected at special community meetings, represented various constituencies at the conference. Members of racial and ethnic groups ended up attending in proportions greater than their percentage in the general population. Every profession, every occupation, every age, and every racial and ethnic group were represented. The result was a cross-section of American women, including a number of antifeminists who controlled several state delegations.

Some skeptical feminists had greeted the announcement of a congressionally-sponsored conference with a yawn. Who needed one more conference, more data on discrimination, more useless guidelines that no one would consult, more co-optation by a government that seemed increasingly less concerned with women's lives?
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But to almost everyone's surprise, the conference turned out to be an historic moment for American women. As one skeptical feminist later admitted:

Little did we realize that what we saw, at best, as a well-intentioned, moderate, outreach program would ultimately be seized on by the right-wing as the first serious offensive in what they perceived as the cleverly plotted Amazon attack on God, home, and the American family—or that their attempts to stop the Women's Movement cold would provide us with one of the best testing grounds for grassroots feminism that we've had in many years. . . . What angered the Right was that tax dollars were being used for a national representative meeting with a legislatively stated feminist purpose: to promote equality.
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A highly publicized torch relay, which became a national media event, led up to the upcoming conference. Two thousand women and girls each carried a lighted torch part of the way—twenty-six hundred miles in all—from Seneca Falls, New York (the site of the first women's rights convention in 1848), to Houston, Texas. The national news tracked the progress of the runners and local television stations featured the women as they waved at onlookers along the way. Cheered by
supporters, jeered by hecklers, the women ran on, braving rain, hail, and fog.

Fifty-one days later, the last relay runners reached Houston. For the very last mile, one thousand women accompanied three young athletes who carried the torch through a steady rain. When a waiting crowd of delegates first glimpsed the torch's arrival, they roared their delight and began chanting for the passage of the ERA. The poet Maya Angelou read a stirring rendition of a new “Declaration of Sentiments” (named after the document passed at Seneca Falls in 1848), which she had written for the occasion, called, “. . . To Form a More Perfect Union.” Included in the poem was the solemn recognition that “we recognize that no nation can boast of balance until each member of that nation is equally employed and equally rewarded” and the promise that “Because we are women, we make these promises.”
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The torch was then passed to Billie Jean King, the great athlete who had successfully turned women's tennis into a much-watched and highly paid sport. She then handed it to Susan B. Anthony, the grandniece of the famous suffragist. When Anthony repeated her great-aunt's famous phrase, “Failure is impossible,” the crowd thundered its approval. The next morning, organizers presented the torch and Maya Angelou's new “Declaration of Sentiments”—signed by members of the conference—to the three First Ladies, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford, and Lady Bird Johnson, who presided over the opening ceremonies.

Sensing an early battle in what would later be called the culture wars, the media had predicted that a “cat fight” would break out between the representatives to the National Women's Conference and the fifteen thousand right-wing women who had announced a rival gathering across town. As the conference drew nearer, suspense began to build. Would feminists and right-wing women really end up fighting in the streets? Although the followers of Phyllis Schlafly, the leader of Stop ERA, encamped across town and denounced the IWY conference and the ERA as “sick,” “immoral,” “ungodly,” “unpatriotic,” and “antifamily,” no fight ever materialized.

Few right-wing women (with the exception of the Utah delegation) had been elected to the National Conference. But that didn't mean that no conflicts erupted at the conference. Still, what impressed most participants was how well these delegates managed to forge “The National Plan of Action,” the document that addressed the overlapping yet different needs of such diverse women. This twenty-six-plank agenda affirmed support for the ERA, and addressed the needs of battered,
disabled, minority, rural, poor, young, and older women. Women of color mostly felt relieved by their unusually strong representation, but also realized that their marginalization in the women's movement had not ended.
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But it was the plank that affirmed lesbian rights that created the greatest drama. To everyone's surprise, Betty Friedan unexpectedly lent her support to the resolution to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation and preference. When the plank passed, lesbian activists shouted, “Thank you, sisters,” and released hundreds of pink and yellow balloons into the air. On the balloons were printed the words, “We Are Everywhere.” As ecstatic supporters snake-danced across the front of the arena, delegates from Mississippi turned their backs, bent their heads in prayer, and hoisted signs that begged, “Keep them in the closet.”
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Soon after the conference, President Carter sent legislative recommendations to Congress and issued an executive order to establish a standing National Advisory Committee for women. But the recommendations were never implemented. By then, the New Right had created cultural and political gridlock. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, memories of Houston would quickly come to seem like a dream from a distant past.