Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (18 page)

But those who broke away from the male Left under the banner of “radical feminism” found that division was far from over. Alice Echols has traced in some detail the schisms among radical feminists and their strenuous efforts to get it right: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, the Feminists, and Cell 16.
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Several of these groups were utopian and sometimes authoritarian experiments organized around a charismatic leader (Roxanne Dunbar dominated the early months of Cell 16;
Kathy Amatniek, Redstockings; Ti-Grace Atkinson, the Feminists). Efforts to realize ideals rapidly evolved into rules. In many cities, popular leaders and public speakers were ordered not to accept invitations lest they become “heavies.” Radical feminism as “the advocacy of the total elimination of sex roles” was a powerful vision but a quixotic one that led to excesses. While the pioneering groups splintered, their patterns of experimentation, rigid rule making, and sectarian division echoed across the country, although often with less intensity.

When Robin Morgan set out to promote
Sisterhood Is Powerful
in 1970, she was astonished to discover that the exhausting debates that consumed her in New York were fundamentally irrelevant to most of the groups springing up across the country.
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Indeed, in most cities the decentralized nature of women’s liberation groups meant that schism was avoided for several years. By the early seventies, though, women’s liberation organizations across the country were wracked with tension over seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.

After only 6 or 7 years, the women’s liberation movement had splintered. Naomi Weisstein lamented the dissolution of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band in 1973, which “… broke up in an agony of hatred and hidden agendas…. The band was a microcosm of what was happening all over the country: we were losing our women’s movement and there was no one to tell us how to stop the dissolution.”
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It was not a simple story of decline, however, but rather one of change and transformation. For some, this meant a turn toward other forms of activism in socialist feminist groups, in labor organizing, in academia; others could only see loss and disintegration. In 1975, Robin Morgan circulated an essay, “Rights of Passage,” to other editors of Ms., in which she optimistically described her own emergence into a broader vision of feminist radicalism, including activism on the part of the “reformist wing” she previously reviled. Ellen Willis fired back an angry memo challenging Morgan’s optimistic rendition of the state of the movement: “The movement is fragmented, confused, torn by major political splits, dominated by its most conservative elements…. I would say the movement is
in crisis
—and what, we need is to analyze the real situation, not pour honey all over it.”
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The crisis splashed across the Family/Style section of the
New York Times
after reporter Lucinda Franks visited Sagaris, a feminist summer institute in rural Vermont in August 1975. A few months before, some of the founders of Redstockings had circulated an attack on Gloria Steinern alleging that “Gloria Steinern has a ten-year association with the CIA stretching from 1959 to 1969 which she has misrepresented and covered up. Further, we have become convinced that
Ms.
magazine, founded and edited by her, is hurting the women’s liberation movement.”
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When Steinern did not dignify the charges with an immediate response, many longtime activists gave them credence because of their own experience with government surveillance and sabotage. Indeed, as historian Ruth Rosen has demonstrated conclusively, during this time the FBI infiltrated many women’s groups, and it seems likely that agent provocateurs exacerbated some internal divisions.
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At Sagaris, a battle erupted when participants learned of a new (and much needed) grant from the
Ms.
Foundation. Ti-Grace Atkinson charged, “You can’t take that money. The Redstockings have just accused Gloria Steinern of being a CIA agent. The money is tainted, that money is suspect, and you’re going to pollute Sagaris with it.”
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Soon after, a third of the faculty and students walked out to set up an alterative institute, and the
New York Times
reporter arrived to find, as her article headlined, “Dissention Among Feminists.”
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Competition for ownership of the movement had reached a fever pitch across the political spectrum. Betty Friedan, never subtle about her irritation at the attention paid to Gloria Steinern, fed the speculation about Steinern. Through news reporters, she demanded a response and wondered aloud whether the CIA was behind a “paralysis of leadership.”
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For the original founders of the Second Wave across the political spectrum, the fact was that the movement had grown beyond their control, and they found themselves in the position of hearing words and slogans they had coined coming from groups with whom they disagreed. Envy and loss expressed themselves with the traditional arsenal of left-wing paranoia (indeed, a strange parody of McCarthyism).
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Inside NOW, the struggle for leadership was less personalized but equally fractious. In its first contested election, the 1974 NOW convention
selected New York lawyer Karen DeCrow as president; supporters of her opponent, Mary Jean Collins-Robson from Chicago, dominated the Board as well as the Chicago office staff. Ostensibly the conflict had to do with whether NOW should continue as a mass-based, grass-roots organization or shift to a more streamlined structure emphasizing the catalytic importance of leadership on a more radicalized set of issues. DeCrow’s slogan, “Out of the Mainstream and into the Revolution,” signaled the influence of women’s liberation, as she called for a greater emphasis on lesbian rights, racial minorities, and working-class women. Her opponents’ anxieties about the emergence of lesbians as a political force in the movement were expressed in a strategic complaint: “NOW is concentrating unduly on lesbians … and that’s not where the mainstream is.”
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Collins-Robson and many of her supporters had been trained at the Midwest Academy founded by Heather Booth and Day Piercy. Their Alinsky-style organizing approach, emphasizing local mobilizations around concrete issues like pay equity, affirmative action, and daycare never had an opportunity to flourish.

By the end of 1974, 12 board members had joined DeCrow in calling for structural change, filing a lawsuit (alleging violations of the by-laws), and placing their dues in escrow. Calling themselves the Majority Caucus, they waged a tightly organized campaign at the 1975 convention at which the American Arbitration Association had been contracted to oversee the election (for $100,000). There were in fact no deep ideological differences between the two factions, each of which agreed that the continuing existence of a national organization was paramount. The Majority Caucus’s narrow victory paved the way for a streamlined organization that, under the subsequent leadership of Eleanor Smeal, turned in a more focused political direction. Rather than “do everything,” they built a disciplined and massive campaign in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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Conflicts in liberal organizations, however fierce, were less likely to be waged in the press because they had, through the process of elections, a more direct method of contesting for power. Furthermore, as long as all sides agreed that the continuing existence of the organization was important, it was essential to keep the infighting behind the scenes as much
as possible. The result was something more like the “machine politics” in NOW, where behind the scenes machinations and coalition building only occasionally erupted into public view. In a number of other organizations, those with a different agenda would quietly withdraw and go off to create new mechanisms to carry out their work. For example, while the NWPC created a lively grassroots organization, it was not an easy vehicle for the kind of disciplined political training some of those most closely involved in party politics thought was needed. So Arvonne Fraser, Frances Farenthold (a political activist in Texas), Millie Jeffrey from the UAW and the Michigan Women’s Commission, Rosalie Whelan (partner in a Democratic political consulting firm), and others created the National Women’s Education fund, a nonprofit corporation, “to draw women into leadership in public and political life … by training them in the techniques of political action—organizing, lobbying, and elective politics.”
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H
OW DO WE EXPLAIN
the fragmentation of women’s liberation and the continuing internal conflicts in more liberal groups? On one level this can be understood historically by placing it within the tumultuous political and economic context of the time. An economy that had been driven from expansion to inflation by the war in Vietnam, slowed and then shifted in the early 1970s. The dual shocks of an oil embargo in 1973, which doubled the price of gasoline and oil, and military demobilization meant that the previously expanding “pie” had begun to shrink. As rampant inflation diminished wages, the nation finally felt, full force, the decline in basic industries and the shift to a service economy that had been underway since World War II. Unemployment rose from 4.9 percent in December 1973 to 8.2 percent by June of 1975.
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In such a setting, redistributive social movements seeking a more equitable share of jobs, wages, services, and other social goods found many previous supporters becoming cautious or even hostile. Affirmative action, once generally understood as a policy designed to give minorities and women a fair chance to overcome long histories of injustice became “reverse discrimination” as dominant groups faced a tightening job market.
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Even the “friendly” Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter,
elected in 1976, which appointed Sarah Weddington to a key White House post and Bella Abzug to head the 1977 international Women’s Year celebration, could deliver very little in the way of dramatic victories for women.

Economic stagnation interacted with the cynicism resulting from the Watergate scandal that forced President Nixon into a humiliating resignation and with the national disillusionment with the war in Vietnam. In one sense, the antiwar movement triumphed when the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, but the war, and efforts to stop it, had been waged for more than a decade. Only near the end did most Americans realize that for years their government had falsely, and knowingly, assured them that victory was in sight. The denouement represented a kind of national humiliation: the first war that the United States had lost and an utterly unnecessary one at that. Anger and sorrow at the loss of 58,000 American lives cast a long shadow over American politics and foreign policy for decades to come.
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Conservatives, upset with the loss in Vietnam, angered by policies like affirmative action designed to give minorities and women greater access to job opportunities, and alarmed by the rise of feminism, sought new constituencies. The New Right that coalesced in the mid-1970s appealed to traditional values on such cultural issues as abortion, the ERA affirmative action, and school prayer in place of the Old Right’s emphasis on laissez-faire economics and anticommunism. Thus, feminist gains and goals became contested everywhere, from national political parties to local school boards. In 1975 voters in both New Jersey and New York defeated equal rights amendments in statewide referenda. Feminists became defensive. Abortion rights activists had thought most of their work was accomplished after
Roe v. Wade
. The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, founded in 1969, changed its name in 1973 to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) but it had litde left on its agenda. The emergence of a vehement antiabortion movement describing itself as “prolife” reinvigorated NARAL, however, and led its leaders to coin the label “prochoice.”
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Roe v. Wade
, it turned out, had not resolved the issue at all. Instead that decision became a rallying point for an emerging New Right coalition that would continue to gain momentum through the 1970s and into the
1980s. Similarly, the easy ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by 30 states in the first year could not be replicated for the remaining nine needed states. In 1972 Phyllis Schlafley formed a new association, STOP ERA, built on anticommunist networks forged in the Cold War. She reached out to vulnerable women and played brilliantly on cultural anxieties.
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Faced with a spreading backlash after 1974 that focused on abortion, ERA, and women’s athletics (like
Roe
, Title IX didn’t solve things either), and with a declining economy that made women and minorities easy scapegoats, policy-oriented feminists shifted gradually from offensive to defensive, from ebullient optimism to tenacious persistence. Feminists could no longer successfully frame the changes they advocated in terms of simple fairness and equal opportunity. They faced opponents who appealed to fears about the dissolution of all traditional and communal institutions, redirecting many women’s anxieties (especially the growing sense of vulnerability and marginalization among housewives) into opposition to “equal rights.” Opponents suggested, for instance, that an ERA would allow men to abandon all responsibility for their families and further diminish the grounds for female distinctiveness and respect.
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Ironically, while the Right gained strength by reacting against the victories of the Left (blaming the loss of Vietnam on the antiwar movement, blaming the rise of divorce rates on feminism, and blaming affirmative action for the loss of jobs), the Left fragmented in frustration over its
lack
of total victory. Talk of revolution drew on the disillusionment and despair about a seemingly endless war and the violent racial polarization of the late sixties. Many New Left activists came to believe that American society was not salvageable and required a total transformation. The most influential organization on the Left in the late sixties and early seventies was the Black Panther Party, which envisioned itself as a paramilitary, revolutionary movement.
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Their example shaped the offshoots of white student movements, such as the Weatherman faction of SDS, which briefly became a terrorist underground until several members blew themselves up while making bombs. As it became clear that the tiny communist-led country of Vietnam could not be defeated
by massive American firepower, many activists were drawn to the revolutionary certitudes of Marxist-Leninism.