Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (20 page)

In this vein, “radical women,” “radical feminists,” and “radicalesbians” all fought to prove they were
radical
. The first clear position to be staked out in this way came to be known as radical feminism. Its many versions held in common the assertion that women constituted a “class,” that gender rather than race or class was the “primary contradiction,” and that all other forms of subordination could be traced to the original domination of women by men.
⁵⁷
As position papers proliferated and groups divided and subdivided, a number of more fully argued explanations were offered. Women’s liberation groups eagerly read and debated each new mimeographed paper as it circulated throughout the country. In an intense search for the certainty of an ultimate truth, some groups would seize on a particular position and then exclude all but the “true believers.” As a consequence, from time to time the development of new
ideas stalled as positions froze, cutting off genuine deliberation.

For example, the “politico-feminist debate,” which dominated the first 2 years, was often referred to not as a debate but as a split. Those on the feminist side, especially in New York, not only advocated the creation of an autonomous women’s movement but also feared contamination if there were any association between this new movement and other forms of radical activism whether civil rights, antiwar, or labor related. Politicos on the other hand, were likely to be active in such organizations and to have intimate ties with male activists as well. The middle ground in this split was occupied by groups that provided the rootstock for what came to be called socialist feminism, an extremely influential branch of the women’s movement. Bread and Roses, for example, the Boston group that formed partly in reaction to the separatist radical feminists in Cell 16, tried to remain linked to the Left but discovered with considerable pain that they were not welcome. Their initial response was intense anger at the male friends and comrades from whom they had expected support, not ridicule, and soon they were furious with men in general.

Gradually “male supremacy, the system, replaced male chauvinism, the attitude, as the target in the struggle.”
⁵⁸
Nonetheless, although Bread and Roses came to a conclusion similar to that of radical feminists, they did not accept the radical feminist assertion of the absolute primacy of gender. As socialist feminists they blamed both capitalism and male supremacy, concluding that the structural foundation of male supremacy was the subordination of women within the bourgeois family.
⁵⁹

L
IFESTYLES AND
I
DENTITIES

T
HE DEBATES WERE
as much about identities as they were about ideas.
⁶⁰
If women needed a separate movement, what was it separate from? The Left? Society? All men? Should participants reject not only the “male movement” but also all “male thinkers” (e.g., Marx)? Few writers offered much clarity. Hundreds of groups disbanded after the initial consciousness-raising phase, having facilitated personal decisions regarding
career and marriage. The groups that continued either fixed on a specific project (a day care center or a battered women’s shelter) or found themselves floundering, wrestling with the problem of what to do next.

What frequently filled that gap were debates over lifestyle. If feminism had become an identity, how was one to live it? If marriage and the family, for example, were sites of female oppression, then perhaps individuals who were married were consorting with the enemy and not to be trusted. Feminists partook of the late sixties radical youth culture, which emphasized resistance to authority and convention, sexual expressiveness, and experimentation. A feminist “style” of dress and demeanor developed rapidly, eschewing makeup, high heels, and other fashions designed to contort (and reveal) the female body. It even became a uniform of sorts. When the founders of 9 to 5 in Boston wanted to broaden their membership, Ellen Cassedy described the response to their first newsletter with revealing irony: “We started attracting people who were
more real
[emphasis added]. I remember one woman came in with make-up.”
⁶¹

Lifestyle debates reached their apex in the aftermath of Lavender Menace and the Furies as the “gay-straight split” wracked the women’s liberation movement for about 3 years. With lifestyle and sexual experimentation widespread in American culture, the confluence of cultural revolutions where women’s liberation converged with gay liberation engendered the vigorous emergence of lesbian feminism. Lesbian feminist leaders argued that “Women who love women are lesbians…. It is a life determined by a woman for her own benefit and the benefit of other women. It is a life that draws its strength, support, and direction from women.”
⁶²
If lesbians were the only women truly independent of men, and independence (emotional as well as political) were a prerequisite of feminism, then it made sense according to Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love to argue (in their book
Sappho Was a Right-on Woman
) that “Lesbians provide an example of Feminist theory in action … for lesbians live what Feminists theorize about; they embody Feminism.”
⁶³

Lesbians in women’s liberation heard or read such words with great emotion. The polarized forms of early debates and the anxieties and resistance of heterosexual feminists caused numerous women’s liberation
groups to rupture. These included Boston’s Bread and Roses, Minnesota’s Twin Cities Female Liberation, and most spectacularly D.C. Women’s Liberation. For a while, just as granola was correct food, lesbianism was correct sex, and a middle ground in which differences could easily and respectfully coexist was hard to find. Yet those ruptures also signaled the emergence of a self-defined community against some of the most powerful taboos in the culture. The intellectual and psychological energy generated by their collective coming out could only have been explosive.

S
TRUCTURELESSNESS AND
L
EADERSHIP

A
FINAL SOURCE
of fragmentation generated by the intense personalism of the early women’s liberation movement was its deep opposition to hierarchical structures and to leadership of any kind. Early groups were explicit about their intention to be structureless, leaderless, and radically egalitarian, a deliberate antithesis to what they had experienced as a male-dominant, ego-strutting, macho New Left. Reflecting on that experience and adding to it stories of the ways women’s potentials had been crushed in schools, by parents and husbands, and in legal and religious structures and systems, they came to the conclusion that hierarchy itself was a male phenomenon. Formal leaders in positions of structural authority, it seemed, would almost by definition behave oppressively to their “followers.” Their alternative models, however, had deep roots in the student movements of the sixties. They drew on memories of endless meetings in SNCC, where the ideal of the “beloved community” made every decision subject to discussion until consensus could be reached and similar meetings in SDS under the banner of “participatory democracy.” At the time of their formation, the anti-authoritarian anarchism of the counterculture’s “do your own thing” flourished all around them, making the idea of structureless, leaderless collectivity seem eminently reasonable.

Yet structurelessness became its own form of tyranny, no less striking than highly authoritarian organizations like the Weather Underground or the Black Panther Party. Women’s liberation groups sought absolute
democracy and remnants of the New Left conceptualized themselves as revolutionaries, but both deliberately erased the boundaries between public and private, inventing a personalized political world that consumed every aspect of participants’ lives. Within the women’s movement the critique of all structures, divisions of labor, and processes of accountability represented a top-to-bottom rejection of life as most people lived it. As a consequence, they often failed to perceive their own public impact and they eschewed the very tools they would have needed to build upon it.

Radical egalitarianism was subverted in the women’s liberation movement, as it had been in the New Left, by the undemocratic potentials inherent in “structurelessness.” As Jo Freeman explained in a classic article in 1973, leaderlessness generally meant that leaders were unnamed and unaccountable, not that they did not exist. Freeman charged that “the inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends” dominated groups that lacked formal structures of responsibility and accountability.
⁶⁴
Having defined ambition as “male,” a group of extremely ambitious women, many asserting themselves for the first time, self-consciously squelched themselves. Some did it by “trashing” others (no one should have more visibility or power than I have), only to find themselves trashed in turn. In many cities, for example, as founding groups grew large and began to spin off additional groups, the originators came to be seen as elitist insiders. Individuals who were assertive and articulate found themselves accused of egotism, hogging the limelight, and hampering the opportunities for other women to play leading roles.
⁶⁵
In the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in Chicago, Naomi Weisstein discovered her own oratorical powers. As she put it, “I could speak to 3,000 Loyola Catholics, insult their favorite priest, and get a standing ovation nevertheless.” She loved speaking, and audiences loved her. When others criticized her, however, she agreed to stop accepting speaking engagements and instead to run training workshops to teach other women. No one at the time knew how much it hurt that the movement that gave her a voice then took it away.
⁶⁶

Such attacks were extremely painful. Their effectiveness depended
on a value system shared by both attackers and their targets. In Naomi Weisstein’s description, “Utopianism morphed into cannibalism, and the movement ate its leaders in city after city, they went down.”
⁶⁷
This may explain why in the radical branch so many women withdrew, causing a major loss of leadership. Vivian Rothstein wrote in 1973 to friends from the West Side Group, “It is so hard—when we once felt we were making history and the lives of hundreds of people were dependent on our actions—to resolve ourselves to less significant and far less ambitious work. I feel that shift tremendously. Now that I don’t feel I’m making history, I don’t know exactly what to do with my life.”
⁶⁸
In policy-oriented organizations, perhaps because leadership, though contested, was never totally devalued, and perhaps also because support networks were more focused on practical results than ideological purity, leaders who were attacked were far less likely to feel driven out of the movement.

T
HE POLITICIZATION
of private life in a search for political purity characterized the Furies as well as other small groups on the Left, but within the broader women’s movement the scrambling of public and private introduced what quickly became a “therapeutic” language into public settings. “I feel” became a “point of order,” trumping any other priority. The originators of consciousness-raising were extremely upset by this therapeutic turn away from politics, but in retrospect it seems inevitable. The very capacity to speak from feelings unleashed a river of need that flooded everything else for a time and continually, in one setting after another, welled up and took over. It became a power resource, adeptly used by those who could link “feelings” to “victimization,” thereby claiming a moral high ground.

The therapeutic turn emphasized the power of confession. Elinor Langer described a public setting in which Kate Millett responded, with real discomfort, to highly personal questions about her lesbianism. She drew a contrast between the women’s movement and other public settings in which leaders (politicians and artists) refuse to answer questions or decline to perform an encore: “The rituals of these occupations permit it: leader and led: star and audience. But the ritual of the women’s
movement is different. It is disclosure; in fact, confession. Accepting leadership in an anti-elitist movement is asking for trouble. You become both show-off and cop-out.”
⁶⁹

In the context of consciousness-raising, however, confession could be empowering. The migration from politics to therapy lay in the fact that this empowerment was experienced by many as a new sense of control over their individual lives: to marry or refuse marriage, to claim a lesbian identity despite social taboos, to have children or not to have children, to pursue a career. As one woman described her experience in a CR group, “I realized for the first time in my life that I had choices … and that the only person responsible for making those choices was me. Me and me alone. The changes began inside.” Having experienced her consciousness-raising as a very effective form of assertiveness training, this person returned to school, got paralegal training and then went to law school.
⁷⁰

This therapeutic turn, utterly congruent with an inward-looking national mood in the mid-1970s, was an ironic, if understandable evolution within some parts of the Second Wave. The perceptions of many founders, however, that their movement was disintegrating into individual therapy on the one hand and cannibalistic self-destruction on the other represented a partial view. The radical feminisms of the late 1960s and early 1970s constituted a wave of utopian experiments, none of which achieved the impossible goals that they set for themselves. Even though most groups lasted only a few years, the patterns and ideas they set up were reenacted again and again. Conflicts over ideology, lifestyle, race and class, structure and structurelessness, leadership and egalitarianism showed up in virtually every version of feminist activism in the coming decades, yet the movement surged on.
⁷¹