Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (19 page)

In this broader political and economic context, the women’s movement was part of the final devolution of the New Left on the one hand into highly authoritarian, sectarian Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups and on the other into a utopian and radically personalized, antiauthoritarian counterculture. Both sectarianism and the counterculture reached an apex in the mid-1970s. Feminist radicals exhibited much of the rhetorical style of the Left, but at the same time, the decentralization of the women’s movement and its hostility to structures left it extremely vulnerable in the face of efforts by leftist sectarians to infiltrate and take over. Marxist-Leninist sects that lacked any substantial base of their own often tried to take over groups they believed to be strategically located or were seen as likely recruiting grounds. Early efforts on the part of the Socialist Workers Party to take over NOW ultimately failed, but in subsequent years most socialist-feminist groups were weakened or destroyed by similar efforts on the part of several sectarian groups. The Coalition of Labor Union Women, never structureless or leaderless, nevertheless faced a strong internal challenge, which had the effect of making it a tighter, more hierarchical and bureaucratic organization.
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Women’s liberation groups believed themselves to be fundamentally different from one another, signaled by such labels as radical feminist, socialist feminist, or lesbian feminist, but they struggled with the dynamics of personal politics in markedly similar ways. The personal search for authenticity that had flourished in the student movements of the sixties remained a powerful force within women’s liberation.
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Similarly, the hostility to hierarchy (presumed to be male) and ingrained suspicion of leaders, which led to structurelessness in more radical groups, was also a powerful and disruptive force in many mainstream organizations. As a result, from the beginning and in evolving ways over subsequent decades they clashed over a series of identifiable issues all linked to the pursuit of that illusive ideal in which the personal becomes fully politicized. These issues were the intersection of race and sex, the quest for ideological purity, lifestyles and sexual identities, and the ongoing problem of organizational structure and leadership.

R
ACE AND
S
EX

P
ERSONAL POLITICS
was a variant on the emerging identity politics of the late sixties, and it was shaped by the racially polarized context of those years. Nationalism, emphasizing racial solidarity, identity, and separatism, was the dominant language among militants in the black community and increasingly within other minority groups as well. This was the era in which the Black Panther Party advocated violent resistance and other black nationalists sought African roots; Chicanos reclaimed their Aztec heritage, and American Indians forged a militant pan-Indian organization, the American Indian Movement (AIM). Within such movements the narratives of racial oppression frequently revolved around the loss of manhood. Women didn’t easily fit in and sometimes became targets of attack. By the late sixties strong black women had become the scapegoats for angry nationalists who charged that they had emasculated black men.
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Minority women faced sexism inside as well as outside their own communities. Feminism, however, especially in its radical varieties, posed serious problems even for sympathetic minority women. Many of their grievances as women were rooted in race. Black women, for example, were acutely and angrily aware that American popular culture had never deemed them “feminine” and that their job prospects were far more restricted than those of whites even within a sex-segregated labor force. Most minority and working-class women had not been in a position to invest their entire identities in the roles of housewife and mother. Indeed, to be a housewife was a luxury that they simultaneously envied and held in contempt. Their work experiences, on the other hand, provided plentiful evidence of discrimination on the grounds of both race and sex as well as an underlying sense of independence and self-respect. Given their own images of white women—“Miss Ann who can’t even clean her own house or care for her own children even though she appears to have little else to do”—they found it difficult to identify with the struggles of white women for identity, autonomy, and self-respect.
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Hence the ambivalence that characterized black women’s responses to the reemergence of feminism.

The leadership of minority women in NOW and NWPC contrasts with the near absence of women of color in early meetings of women’s liberation. In Washington, D.C., women’s liberation made a conscious effort to reach out, forming a “women and racism” group “which had some good dialogue with local black women, but did not succeed in involving black women or in challenging the racism in the movement.” In a collectively written history of the DC Women’s Liberation Movement in 1971 they acknowledged, “While trying to reach out to women different than ourselves, we still did not basically change the nature of our group. Instead, we required that they become more like us to participate. Some did, but others found this impossible.”
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The result was that their evolving theories consistently failed to incorporate more than a narrow range of women’s realities.

Younger black women who joined the feminist movement found themselves on the margins of both the women’s movement and the black movement. Frances M. Beal’s experiences as founder of the SNCC Women’s Liberation Committee in 1968 were typical of the few who spoke out. Rarely did she receive public support from other black women. Behind the scenes, however, there were words of encouragement that “… showed us that in speaking up for women’s liberation, we were speaking for many more who were not ready to speak for themselves.”
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Indeed, polls showed that black women approved of the women’s movement in substantially greater numbers than white women, yet those who joined were continually charged with betrayal of their racial community. The publisher of the
Black Scholar
wrote an editorial in 1971 entitled “Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up”:

This is the day of the black male, when we must take up with ever more resolve the role of liberator…. [B]ecause it is the era of liberation the black man will be able to bring the woman along in our common struggle so that we will not need a black women’s liberation movement…. The black woman is, can be, the black man’s helper, an undying collaborator, standing up with him, beside her man.

Feminism, in this view, was a white women’s issue being foisted divisively upon the black community.
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Toni Cade edited a collection published in 1970 entitled,
The Black Woman: An Anthology
, in which author after author described the dilemma:

… the black movement is primarily concerned with the liberation of blacks as a class and does not promote women’s liberation as a priority. Indeed, the movement is for the most part spearheaded by males. The feminist movement, on the other hand, is concerned with the oppression of women as a class, but is almost totally composed of white females. Thus the black woman finds herself on the outside of both political entities, in spite of the fact that she is the object of both forms of oppression.
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Comparable rhetoric can be found among Asian-American, Latina, and American Indian women activists. In every group, some women picked up on the issue of women’s rights very quickly and ran headlong into charges that to do so was divisive. At the same time, their experiences with white feminists proved disappointing.
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Sometimes white feminists responded angrily when assumptions about women’s oppression, based on their own experiences, were challenged. More often they simply did not understand, and insofar as their fervor was rooted in their own personal lives, they could be downright uninterested. Chicanas, for example, resented the antifamily and antireligious rhetoric of many feminists, and those women, consumed with analyzing old wounds linked to family and church, had a very hard time listening to such a different point of view.
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Among minority women in policy-oriented women’s groups who had begun to build caucuses, militants felt themselves to be tokens. Paula Giddings argues that feminism within the black community has historically gathered strength as nationalism ebbs.
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Certainly this was the case in the 1970s.

When Barbara Smith graduated from college around 1970, “… I had thought that I would never be involved in political work after I graduated from college because that was the height of black nationalism
and I felt like I just wasn’t permitted to be the kind of person I was in that context…. [M]y job was to have babies for the nation and to walk seven paces behind a man and basically be a maid/servant. I didn’t get involved in the women’s movement for a few years after it became very visible because my perception was that it was entirely white.”
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Smith attended the founding meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) and helped to organize a Boston chapter in 1974, but she did not feel politically “at home” even so. After participating in the Yellow Springs Socialist Feminist Conference in 1975, Smith returned to Boston fired with a new vision. Her chapter decided to break away from the NBFO and form the Combahee River Collective, a nonhierarchical, socialist, African-American feminist group. It was a small and relatively short-lived group, but because they articulated a belief that feminism was an essential element of the struggle against both racial and economic injustice, their statement provided many women of color with a way to express their feminist commitment without ambivalence and white women with a useful starting point for theory that explored differences as well as similarities among women. As Smith explained,

Combahee was really so wonderful because it was the first time that I could be all of who I was in the same place. That I didn’t have to leave my feminism outside the door to be accepted as I would in a conservative black political context. I didn’t have to leave my lesbianism outside. I didn’t have to leave my race outside, as I might in an all white women’s context where they didn’t want to know all of that. So it was just really wonderful to be able to be our whole selves and to be accepted in that way.
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Smith also pointed out that minority women who were also lesbians experienced a painful silencing within their own communities. “In the early 1970s … I didn’t see any way that I could be black and a feminist and a lesbian. I wasn’t thinking so much about being a feminist. I was just thinking about how could I add lesbian to being a black woman. It was just like no place for us.”
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As lesbian feminism emerged in the predominantly white movement, minority lesbians understood deeply that
they had a powerful stake in the success of a feminism in which their lesbianism was welcome. As a result, women like Barbara Smith, Margaret Sloan, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Betty Powell, and Paula Gunn Allen became critical links between movements, articulating the perspectives of one group to the other. Until they could find a “home base” like the Combahee River Collective, however, they also experienced ongoing fragmentation of a highly personal sort.

Nevertheless, the continuing assumption that the women’s movement in the 1970s was by and large a middle-class white phenomenon falls short. By the mid-1970s, minority women’s literary voices were among the most powerful expressions of Second Wave feminism, and most of them continued to speak through subsequent decades. The novels of writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston were widely read across racial lines, as was the poetry of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paula Gunn Allen. By the late seventies they were joined by a series of theoretical and polemical challenges to the underlying “whiteness” of most feminist theorizing. The radical women’s liberation movement, however, was no longer available as an arena in which to debate the challenges of feminists like Bell Hooks, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, and Cherrie Moraga.
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By the late seventies and early eighties the problem of difference would rapidly become an acknowledged dilemma within feminist theory, but the contexts had changed.

I
DEAS AND
I
DEOLOGIES

I
DEAS WERE CENTRALLY
important to feminists with roots in the New Left in a way that they were not for the older, more structured branch of the Second Wave. The older generation was focused on results. They did not contemplate overthrowing capitalism or the family. They simply wanted equality between the sexes and concrete changes that make women’s lives better. Over the long haul, the radicals achieved a dramatic intellectual ferment in virtually all of the basic academic disciplines
of the arts and sciences. Some of their ideas even found their way into public policy proposals. In the beginning, however, the clash of ideas was a source of continual fragmentation.

In the context of a liberal interest group there were numerous models: Women could be an interest/pressure group like the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, or even chambers of commerce. For women’s liberation, politics itself had become a kind of identity (“radical”) built around a critique of inequalities in American society and a commitment to change. Arguments often took the form of demonstrating that one was “more radical” than others by showing that one had identified the root cause of inequality (and was therefore the group best positioned to challenge it). By the late sixties, for example, as black nationalists claimed primacy for race, and therefore themselves as a vanguard, radical whites who did not accept this view (as most, in fact, did) countered by arguing for the primacy of “youth” (Yippies and Weatherman), students (a “new class”), or the working class (various groups of Marxists and Maoists). The form of this argument echoed a century of Marxist debate over the place of workers, peasants, women, and intellectuals in the “revolutionary process.” Every new group had to contend with the traditional Marxist assertion that the class struggle was the “primary contradiction” and that only the victory of the working class would allow secondary forms of oppression (such as sex) to be overcome.