The World Split Open (56 page)

Curious about their readers' responses to their bold move,
LHJ
took a readers' survey, the results of which they published in November 1970. Asked their opinions about the women's movement, 46 percent of readers described themselves as “con,” 34 percent as “pro,” and 20 percent expressed mixed feelings, cheering women's support of equal pay for equal work, but expressing distaste for “stridency.”
¹²
But the most important vote was the one held by magazine readers. Circulation rose dramatically. Other women's magazines quickly followed
LHJ
's example.
McCall's
, for example, produced an insert called “Right Now,” a digest of feminist causes and news.

In less than a year, the media realized that the women's movement was not only an exciting story, but a profitable one as well. Feminists gained also, attracting more national attention than they had ever expected. Monitoring the media became one of the movement's consuming passions. Throughout the decade, various chapters of NOW and other local groups put tremendous pressure on magazines, television stations, and newspapers to stop portraying women in stereotypical ways.
¹³

Still, the stubborn images of the “bra burner” as well as “the women's libber” left many women feeling that they wanted to distance themselves from such a movement. The media also legitimated some “players,” like the lovely Gloria Steinem, while demonizing other activists, like the openly bisexual Kate Millett. They largely discredited the anger of young feminists toward marriage, motherhood, the commercial exploitation of women's bodies, and the inequalities that the sexual revolution had brought with it, even as they promoted women's demands for equal pay for equal work, for legal abortion, and for child care facilities.
¹⁴

News of the movement also spread because of several media-generated spectacles. On September 20, 1973, Billie Jean King, a twenty-nine-year-old feminist tennis star who had campaigned for equal prize money for women athletes, beat Bobby Riggs, a fifty-nine-year-old former tennis champion, in what was hyped as the “Battle of the Sexes.” A wave of pregame publicity sparked widespread national interest. Riggs entered in a ricksha drawn by his famed “bosoms,” the two women who brought him onto the court. Billie Jean King arrived on an Egyptian litter carried by a troupe of bare-chested musclemen. They
even exchanged gifts. Riggs gave King a huge Sugar Daddy. She gave him a live baby pig. King won.
¹⁵

Among the many events that publicized feminist ideas was Norman Mailer's publication of “Prisoner of Sex,” a fifty-five-thousand-word article published in
Harper's
magazine in 1971. Having been crowned Chief Male Chauvinist by Kate Millett and others, Mailer now responded with a robust, even self-mocking, tongue-lashing polemic that spread feminists' ideas to an even greater audience. Some feminists were more interested in demonizing Mailer than in reading “Prisoner of Sex,” which actually revealed personal ambivalence and vulnerability, as well as fear and anxiety.

Describing himself as the Prisoner of Sex, Mailer poked, jabbed, ridiculed, and essentially used the subject of women's liberation as an opportunity to explore his own need for women, his contempt for political cant, and his horror of the technological fix. Still smarting from Kate Millett's attack on his novels' negative images of women, he now fought back, describing Millett's writing style as “suggestive of a night-school lawyer who sips Metrecal to keep his figure,
^*
and thereby is so full of isolated proteins, factory vitamins, reconstituted cyclamates, and artificial flavors that one has to pore over the passages like a business contract.” Mailer's notorious 1973 debate with Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of
The Female Eunuch
, created yet another explosion of media hype, and helped vault the debate about sex and sexism to the top of the cultural agenda.
¹⁶

By the end of 1971, few literate Americans could ignore the emergence of the women's movement.
Time, Newsweek
, the
Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, Look, Life
, the
New York Times Magazine
, had all run cover stories on the new movement. Television, moreover, had begun broadcasting a long list of documentaries on the new female rebellion. In the process, the media turned the phrase “women's lib”—as they so chummily dubbed it—into a household phrase.
¹⁷

Pressured by feminists, a wave of newspapers began to replace their “women's pages” with newly redesigned sections called View, Style, Lifestyle, or, in the case of the
New York Times
, “the family, food, fashions and furnishings” section. By shrinking the number of inches allotted to the former “club-wedding-parties format,” editors created more room for feature stories, particularly about women entering male professions and occupations.
¹⁸
Such stories also appeared in special issues of news magazines. The March 1972 issue of
Time
magazine, for instance, profiled an airport attendant, a radio disk jockey, a computer engineer, a telephone installer, a stockbroker, and an auto mechanic, all of whom were identified as the “first woman” to be employed in these occupations.

After Congress passed Title IX in 1972, all schools receiving federal funds had to provide equal resources for women's sports. These were the first girls to play in Little League. (Hoboken, New Jersey)
Photo by Bettye Lane

In the aftermath of Title IX, girls and women began training for and winning Olympic medals. In 1999, the U. S. women's soccer team mesmerized the nation when they captured the World Cup. (Relay Hand Off, Hayward, California, 1973)
Photo by Cathy Cade

Billie Jean King was indefatigable in her successful campaign to transform women's tennis into a highly paid and popular sport by creating a separate women's tennis tour. (Wimbledon, 1975)
Corbis

As women started to see each other through their own eyes, rather than through the distorted lens of their culture, they began to respect and love each other. (Country Women's Festival, Mendocino, California, 1987)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival turned into an annual celebration of the growing women's culture and featured some of the movement's most talented musicians and singers. (1977)
Photo by JEB

Margie Adams, along with Holly Near, Chris Williams, and Sweet Honey and the Rock, were among some of the most talented new musicians who played at women's concerts and dances during the 1970s. (Los Angeles, 1973)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

At a Forum for the Future held in New York City to create a feminist agenda for the 1980s, four of the movement's prominent early leaders posed for photographers: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millet.
Photo by Bettye Lane