The World Split Open (73 page)

10
. Barbara Berg,
The Crisis of the Working Mother
(New York: Summit, 1986), 40.

11
. Dorothy Thompson, “It's All the Fault of Women,”
Ladies' Home Journal
, May 1960, 11.

12
. Lynn White,
Educating Our Daughters
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 77–78, 82, 85, 91. Mary Bunting, “The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study,” in American Council on Education,
The Educational Record
, October 1961, 19; Adlai Stevenson, “Commencement Address,” reprinted in
Woman's Home Companion
, September 1955, 29–31; Robert Coughlan, “Changing Roles in Modern Marriage,”
Life
, December 24, 1956, 110–12.

13
.
New York Times
, June 7, 1945, 1. Quoted in Eugenia Kaledin,
Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s
(Boston: Twayne, 1984), 44; Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
, 145.

14
. Letter to Betty Friedan from Ruth Kelso from Guilford, Connecticut, March 4, 1963, Friedan Papers; Letter to Betty Friedan, September 19, 1964, Friedan Papers; Kaledin, 58;
Social Indicators
, 90.

15
. Kaledin, 34. See Elizabeth Stone, “Mothers and Daughters,”
New York Times Magazine
, May 13, 1979, 91.

16
. George Gallup and Evan Hill, “The American Woman,”
Saturday Evening Post
, December 22, 1962. Letters dated May 17, 1963, from Irvine, Texas, and March 13, 1963, from Ridgewood, New Jersey, Betty Friedan Papers, SL.

17
. Wini Breines's study of girls in the fifties also documents this profound undercurrent of ambivalence, especially through fiction and popular culture. Wini Breines,
Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). Here I draw upon interviews with women who became leaders of the younger branch of the women's movement. Also see Kathleen Gerson,
Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career and Motherhood
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 55.

18
. Assata Shakur,
Assata
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 37.

19
. Alix Kates Shulman,
Burning Questions
(New York: Bantam, 1978), 3.

20
. These observations are made by Wini Breines in
Young
, p. 79, who quotes from Barbara Raskin,
Hot Flashes
, Lynn Lauber,
White Girls
, and Annie Dillard, 237.

21
. See Robyn Rowland,
Women Who Do and Women Who Don't Join the Women's Movement
(London: Routledge, 1984). The author is an Australian who sought to find differences and commonality between feminists and antifeminists in five countries.

22
. See David McClelland,
Follow-up Patterns of Childrearing Subjects
, 1978, of thirty-eight middle-class daughters of mothers interviewed in 1951 and 1952. These mothers' interviews appeared in Robert Sears, Eleanor Maccoby, and Harry Levin,
Patterns of Child Rearing
(New York: Harper and Row, 1957). Also see Diane Franklin, “Correlates of Participation and Nonparticipation in the Women's Liberation Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975). For a scholarly discussion of these studies, see Breines, 71, 225. For a variety of different explanations, see Robyn Rowland. This part of the study is based particularly on interviews with Naomi Weisstein, Alix Kates Shulman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Charlotte Bunch, Susan Griffin, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Barbara Haber, Valerie Miner, and Irene Peslikis.

23
. Author's interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, New York City, April 6, 1987.

24
. Phyllis Chesler,
Letters
, 22; author's interview with Irene Peslikis in New York City, April 4, 1987.

25
. More than half of the women in my consciousness-raising group in 1967, for example, came from working-class homes, but through university experiences, seemed middle-class in appearance and in speech. Author's interview with Anne Scholfield, Berkeley, California, April 1986; also Mary Waters, Valerie Miner, Pat Cody. Author's interviews with Ellen Willis and Ti-Grace Atkinson, in New York City, April 16, 1987. Writings by Molly Haskell and several dozen other interviews confirm this fear of replicating one's mother's life.

26
. This is revealed in the memoirs of at least two major New Left leaders, but it is also evident in the position papers of SDS writers in general. See Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam, 1987), and Tom Hayden,
Reunion: A Memoir
(New York: Random House, 1988). In the field of history, for example, “consensus” was celebrated and “conflict” was diminished; in sociology, functionalism helped rationalize the status quo.

27
. Marilyn Coffey, “Those Beats,” in
Sixties Without Apology
, Sonya Sayres, Anders Stephenson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Frederic Jameson, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 238–40.

28
. Author's interviews with Barbara Ehrenreich and Susan Griffin. For a description of young women's forays into bohemian culture as part of their search for something “real,” see Breines; also Ellen Maslow, “Storybook Lives,” in
Liberation Now
, Deborah Babcox and Madeleine Belkin, eds. (New York: Dell, 1971), 175.

29
. Joyce Johnson,
Minor Characters
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 56.

30
. Johnson, 151, 171, 207, 260.

31
. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs,
Re-Making Love.

32
. Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the Single Girl
(New York: Pocket Books, 1962), 206.

33
. Cynthia Gorney,
Article of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 23. Also see Leslie Reagan,
When Abortion Was a Crime
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Carol Joffe,
Doctor of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade
(Boston: Beacon, 1995); and Rickie Solinger,
The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law
(New York: Free Press, 1994).

34
. These stories are from women whom I have interviewed but who did not want their names made public, even now. For a scholarly treatment of the long century in which abortion was illegal, see Reagan, 225.

35
. Gorney, 31–32.

36
. Part of this line of reasoning is persuasively argued in Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs,
Re-Making Love;
Harvey,
The Fifties
, 15.

37
. For an analysis of how different generations of women responded to de Beauvoir's classic work, see Judith Okely,
Simone de Beauvoir
(New York: Pantheon, 1986). Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
(New York: Harmondsworth, 1953), 295.

38
. Alice Schwarzer,
After the Second Sex: Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir
(New York: Pantheon, 1984), 13, quoted in Okely,
Simone de Beauvoir
, 2. See also the description by Judith Okely, a British biographer of de Beauvoir, of her fascination with this bohemian life and critique of family and motherhood. Rachel Brownstein, an American literary critic, was similarly influenced by de Beauvoir. See Brownstein,
Becoming a Heroine
(New York: Harmondsworth, 1984), 18. King,
Freedom Song
, 76.

39
. Susan Griffin, “Eco-Feminism,” talk at a panel on feminism and ecology, San Francisco, April 10, 1988.

40
. It is worth noting that the translation that was published in the United States omitted her discussion of women in history, but her view of woman as “other” still did not provide a way of grasping women's agency in history.

41
. One recent work that provides a good overview of her life is Deirdre Bair's
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
(New York: Summit, 1990). A film titled
Daughters of de Beauvoir
, directed by Imogen Sutton, explores her influence on the women's movement. A brilliant essay by Mary Felstiner early assessed Second Wave feminism's relationship to de Beauvoir. See Felstiner, “Seeing the Second Sex through the Second Wave,”
Feminist Studies
6 (Winter 1986): 247–76.

42
. For a detailed discussion of the male version of generational divide, see Gitlin,
The Sixties
, 230.

43
. See Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,”
Feminist Studies
2 (Fall 1987): 493–521; and “Pure Milk, Not Poison: Women Strike for Peace and the Test Ban Treaty of 1963,” paper presented at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, June 1988.

1
. Robert Arthur, “No!,”
Esquire
, July 1962, 32 ff.

2
.
Washington Post
, “JFK Seeks Equal Job Status for Women,” December 15, 1961, C1;
New York Times
, “President Names Panel on Women,” December 15, 1961, 15.

3
. Sidney Shalett, “Is There a Woman's Vote?”
Saturday Evening Post
, September 1960, 31, 79, 80.

4
. Shalett, 31, 80.

5
. Shalett, 80.

6
.
New York Post
, December 1960, clipping in Folder “1960,” Box 1, of India Edwards Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Texas. Cited in Cynthia Harrison,
On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968
(Berkeley: University of Calif. Press, 1988), 261. Other than my own interviews and archival research, I have relied heavily on Cynthia Harrison's splendid political history here.

7
. Letter from Emma Guffey Miller to John F. Kennedy, February 1961, quoted in Harrison, 76.

8
. Harrison, 79.

9
. Pauli Murray Papers, “Speech about President's Commission,” SL.

10
. Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
, “Epilogue,” 368.

11
. U.S. President's Commission on the Status of Women,
American Women
(Washington, D.C., 1963), 70.

12
. Loreta Korns, “Treatment by Seven Newspapers of the Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women,” December 9, 1963, in General Correspondence folder, PCSW, January 1964, PCSW Papers, Washington, D.C.

13
. Abbott L. Ferriss,
Indicators of Trends in the Status of American Women
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), 21, 63, 85, 209ff.

14
. Klein,
Gender Politics
, 22. These cases are known as
Griswold v. State of Connecticut
in 1965 and
White v. Crook
in 1966. Klein, 23. See Jo Freeman,
The Politics of Women's Liberation
(New York: McKay, 1975), 177. In addition to Harrison, I have also heavily relied on Freeman's early and insightful work as well as one of the first histories of the movement, Judith Hole and Ellen Levine,
Rebirth of Feminism
(New York: Quadrangle, 1971), 29; also see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare,
Equal Pay Act of 1963, Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare
in S. 882 and S. 910, 88th Congress, 1st sess., 1963.

15
. See Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan,” and the “The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,”
American Quarterly
(March 1996): 1–31. There is now an extensive literature that details the continuities between labor union and Left activists of the forties and fifties and the origins of American feminism in the 1960s. See, for example, Kathleen A. Weigand, “Vanguards,” and Gerda Lerner, “Midwestern Leaders of the Modern Women's Movement: An Oral History Project,”
Wisconsin Academy Review
(Winter 1994–95): 11–15; Nancy Gabin,
Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1925–1975
(Ithaca: Cornell, 1990); Susan Lynn,
Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace and Feminism, 1945–1960's
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Most of the articles collected for
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960
, Joanne Meyerowitz, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), also point to the continuities between radical movements of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s feminism. Also see Joyce Antler, “Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs and the Promulgation of Women's History, 1944–1989,” and Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women,” in
U.S. History As Women's History.

16
. Pauli Murray Papers, speech, SL.

17
. Gabin,
Women and the United Auto Workers
, links feminism to labor; of the twenty-two women interviewed for this Midwest leaders oral history project at the WHS, seven were trade unionists and workers, and four were African Americans.

18
. Author's interview with Kay Clarenbach, Mildred Jeffrey, and a circle of other women at a postconference group interview, November 22, 1992. “Documents of the Midwestern Origins of the Twentieth Century Women's Movement.” Tapes and transcripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

19
. Clarenbach Papers, WHS, Box 2, Folder 11.

20
. See “Resolution Adopted Unanimously by the National Council of the National Woman's Party—Regarding the Proposed Civil Rights Bill (H.R. 7152),” December 16, 1963, Reel 108, National Woman's Party papers, on microfilm.

21
. Harrison, 178. Much of my discussion on the PCSW is grounded in Harrison's meticulous work.