The World Split Open (74 page)

22
. Probably the best account of the history behind this so-called “fluke” is Jo Freeman's “How ‘Sex' Got into Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy,”
Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 9
(March 1991): 163–84, reprinted on the H-Net for Women's History. Freeman demonstrates how a small group of women took advantage of a long-standing desire to legislate against sex discrimination. The debate on Smith's amendment can be found in the
Congressional Record
, 88th Congress, 2nd sess., February 8, 1964, 2577–84; EEOC,
Legislative History of Titles VII and XI of Civil Rights Act of 1964
, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, n.d., 3312–28; Caroline Bird,
Born Female
(New York: Pocket Books, 1971), chapter 1; Harrison, chapter 9.

23
. Martha Griffiths' speech, U.S. Congress, House, 89th Congress, June 20, 1966,
Congressional Record
112: 13689–94.
Washington Post
, November 23, 1965, in Folder “Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1963, Legislation 1964–65.” National Business and Professional Women's Clubs (BPW) Archives cited in Harrison, 187.
New York Times
, July 3, 1964.

24
.
New York Times
editorial, August 21, 1965, 37.

25
.
New Republic
, September 4, 1965, 3;
Wall Street Journal
, June 22, 1965.

26
. A good source for Title VII is Donald Allen Robinson,
Signs
4 (Spring 1979): 411–34, and “Development in the Law: Employment Discrimination and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,”
Harvard Law Review
84 (March 1971).

27
. Martha Griffiths, statement on floor of Congress, June 20, 1966,
Congressional Record
, 13054.

28
. Betty Friedan,
It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement
(New York: Random House, 1976), 80.

29
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 80.

30
. Friedan, 80, 82.

31
. Friedan, 83.

32
. Kay Clarenbach Papers, Box 2, Folder 9, WHS.

33
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 83.

34
. Marya Mannes, “Female Intelligence: Who Wants It?”
New York Times Magazine
, January 3, 1960; Mary Freeman, “The Marginal Sex: America's Alienated Woman,”
Commonweal
75:19 (February 2, 1962); “The American Female: A Special Supplement,”
Harper's
, October 1963, 225. The best description of these representations can be found in Cynthia Harrison, “Women and the New Frontier,” master's thesis, Columbia University, 1975.

35
. Alice Rossi, “Equality Between the Sexes,”
Daedalus
(1964): 608. Later, she changed her position: Alice Rossi, “A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting,”
Daedalus
(Spring 1977): 1–31. Also see the following critique of Rossi's new views in Wini Breines, Margaret Cerullo, and Judith Stacy, “Social Biology, Family Studies, and Antifeminist Backlash,”
Feminist Studies
4 (February 1978): 43–67.

36
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 84.

37
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 87, “Statement of Purpose.” For much of the
history of NOW, I have used the late Frances Kolb's uncompleted manuscript, “The National Organization for Women: A History of the First Ten Years,” which she generously shared with me before her death. Unpublished ms., chapter 1, APA.

38
. U.S. Department of the Census: “Money Income of Families and Persons in the United States,”
Current Population Reports, 1957 to 1975
, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Handbook of Labor Statistics
, 1975, cited in
The Earnings Gap Between Women and Men
, U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration, Women's Bureau, 1976; and U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, “Background Facts on Women Workers in the United States,” January 1962, Document VI-39, PCSW papers, Washington, D.C., cited in Harrison, 90; Women's Bureau, “Fact Sheet on the Earnings Gap” (Washington, D.C., 1970); Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 89.

39
. Friedan, 90, 89.

40
. Friedan, “Statement,” 89ff.

41
.
New York Times
, November 22, 1966, 44:1;
Washington Post
, November 23, 1966, n.p.

42
. NOW mimeographed pamphlet,
Special Edition #2: NOW vs. Segregated Help-Wanted Ads.
Unpaginated. 1965, APA. See Hole and Levine,
Rebirth
, for a full description.

43
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 94.

44
. Freeman, 83.

45
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 105.

46
. Interview, February 1971; Hole and Levine, 96, 97.

47
. Freeman, 99.

48
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 108.

49
. Friedan, 108.

50
. Author's interview with Meredith Tax, December 1983, New York City.

51
.
New York Times Magazine
, March 10, 1968, 24.

52
. Hole and Levine, 91.

53
.
Report
, Congress to Unite Women, New York City, November 21–23, 1970, 3, Women's Liberation Vertical File, SL; Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 387.

54
.
It Changed My Life
, 138. Among many topics I pursued when I interviewed Betty Friedan in Southern California, May 1986, was this generational split. At that time, she still harbored many antipathies toward the women's liberation movement, in part because her more recent book
The Second Stage
, which called for feminists to value families and to create goals that supported them, was being attacked by some young radical feminists.

55
. Clarenbach interview, WHS, Tape 57.

56
. Joseph Rheingold,
The Fear of Being a Woman
(New York: Crune and Stratton, 1964), 714.

57
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 258.

58
. Harrison, ix.

59
. See Flora Davis,
Moving the Mountain
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 282 ff. for a fuller description of child care legislation.

60
. See Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, eds.,
Feminist Chronicles
, 1953–1992, (Los Angeles: Women's Graphics, 1993) for these simultaneous events and movements.

61
. To be sure, these three demands excluded a much longer list of demands made by both branches of the movement. But they also implicitly acknowledged NOW's acceptance of the bases of political liberalism, for they embraced equality of opportunity, not equality of result.

62
. Clipping,
Chicago Daily News
, August 20, 1970, 5. Vertical File Clippings on March, SL. Clipping,
Evening Star
, Washington, D.C., August 20, 1970, Women's Liberation Papers, Folder Four, SL. As with all movement marches, figures differed greatly. The
New York Times
described the march as having ten thousand in the parade, but organizers argued that fifty thousand women were present at the rally. Whatever the actual number, most observers seemed to think the numbers were staggering. The marchers spilled off the sidewalks into the streets. See
New York Times
coverage, August 27, 1970, 30.

63
. “Women March Down Fifth in Equality Drive,”
New York Times
, August 27, 1970, 1, 23. For other media accounts, some of which were very balanced, some of which ridiculed everything, see
Newsweek
, “Women Rally to Publicize Grievances,” August 5, 1970; Myra MacPherson, “Battle of the Sexes Becomes a Word War,”
New York Times
Style section, C1; “Women's Lib Asks Boycott of 4 Products,”
Washington Post
, August 27, 1970; “For Most Women, ‘Strike Day' Was Just a Topic of Conversation,”
New York Times
, August 27, 1970, 1—which is right next to the article “Newsweek Agrees to Speed Promotion of Women”; “The Feminine Protest,”
New York Times
, August 28, 1970, 20; “‘Equal Rights Now,' Exhort Women Protesters,”
Washington Post
, August 27, 1970, 1. Hole and Levine, 269. The poll was conducted September 4–5, 1970.

64
. Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, 154.

1
.
The Daily Californian
, May 14, 1964; January 5, 1970.

2
. There is now an enormous bibliography on histories and memoirs from the New Left. Some of the important works that trace the development of the New Left and its formative ideas are in the Bibliography.

3
. As Belinda Robnett has argued in her book,
How Long? How Long? African American Women and the Struggle for Freedom and Justice
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), historians have focused too much on white activists at the expense of black activists, and especially black civil rights grassroots activists in the South. And yet I can't ignore the fact that the story of white women's liberation begins in the integration movement of SNCC, in which black influences gave rise to the consciousness and ideas that would affect every movement that came after it. See Bibliography for other important works.

4
. King,
Freedom Song
, 37.

5
. Author's interview with Dorothy Burlage, May 11, 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.

6
. King, 40.

7
. Casey Hayden, “Women's Consciousness and the Nonviolent Movement Against Segregation, 1960–1965: A Personal History,” 1989, 2, 3. Given to author, APA.

8
. Author's interview with Dorothy Burlage, October 12, 1990, Boston, Massachusetts.

9
. King, 5.

10
. King, 9.

11
. King, 8.

12
. King, 116; Casey Hayden, “A Nurturing Movement: Nonviolence, SNCC, and Feminism,”
Southern Exposure
(Summer 1988): 51.

13
. King, 141. Kay Mills,
This Little Light of Mine
(New York: Dutton, 1993), which is a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, has greater detail.

14
. Author's notes, 1988 SDS reunion at Poughkeepsie, New York. Evans,
Personal Politics
, 53.

15
. King, 404; Casey Hayden, quoting Stembridge in “Women's Consciousness,” 9.

16
. Author's interview with Dorothy Burlage, 1990. See Clayborne Carson,
In Struggle
, for a fuller description of the trajectory of SNCC.

17
. Author's interviews with Casey Hayden, Dorothy Burlage, Betty Garman, Elaine Delott Bakers, Leni Wildflower, Honey Williams, Dorothy Burlage, Mickey Flacks, Helen Garvey, and others at the SDS reunion in 1988, including the former Weatherwomen Bernadine Dohrn, Cathy Wilkerson, and others. Interviews also with Rennie Davis and Dick Flacks.

18
. Author's interviews with Casey Hayden and Dorothy Burlage.

19
. King, 404.

20
. Evans, 79; author's interview with “Anonymous,” May 8, 1989, a white northern woman who participated in SNCC's Freedom Summer, 1964.

21
. King, 464.

22
. Doug McAdam,
Freedom Summer
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108, 106. On sexual exploitation of white volunteers by black men during Mississippi Freedom Summer, see Mary Aiken Rothschild, “White Women Volunteers in the Freedom Summers, Their Life and Work in a Movement for Social Change,”
Feminist Studies
, 5:3 (Fall 1979), 466–95; and Mary Rothschild,
A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964–1965
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

23
. McAdam, 109.

24
. McAdam, 107.

25
. McAdam, 107, 110.

26
. Author's interview with Dorothy Burlage, 1990; McAdam, 106; King, 465.

27
. King, 15.

28
. Cynthia Washington, “We Started from Different Ends of the Spectrum,”
Southern Exposure
, 4:4 (1977), 14.

29
. Doug McAdam, “Freedom Summer,” paper presented at Stanford Conference, April 1990.

30
. Hayden, “Women's Consciousness,” 12.

31
. Author's telephone interview with Casey Hayden, May 6, 1989.

32
. King, 443, 445, 569. For a long time, many white female liberationists thought that the paper was written by a black woman, Ruby Doris Smith, because Robin Morgan erroneously described her as the author in her introduction to
Sisterhood is Powerful.
Ruby Doris Smith died of cancer in 1967. Hayden, “Women's Consciousness,” 14.

33
. King, 450; author's interview with Casey Hayden at SDS reunion, and telephone, May 6, 1989.

34
. King, 451–52; author's telephone interview with “Anonymous,” August 9, 1995, and again, on November 24, 1997.

35
. Evans, 239; Fraser et al.,
1968
, 342.

36
. See Evans, 129, for a good history of money and support of ERAP projects; Kopkind quoted in Evans, 130; author's 1988 SDS reunion notes.

37
. King, 456.

38
. King, 456.

39
. Author's telephone interview, Casey Hayden, 1989; Hayden, “Women's Consciousness,” 18.

40
. Burlage 1990 interview.

41
. Michael Honey, “The Legacy of SNCC,” in
OAH (Organization of American Historians) Newsletter
, February 1989, and Joanne Grant, “Sexual Politics and Civil Rights,”
New Directions for Women
, January/February 1989, 4.