Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (21 page)

Given the power and persistence of the disintegrative forces both internal and external to the movement, the amazing thing is the movement’s persistence, the ongoing effort to try again and to “get it right” with new projects, new issues, new organizations, and new ideas. Part and parcel of these crosscurrents and undertow was the astonishing force of this tidal wave that fostered growth and innovation even as
some of its founders succumbed to despair. By the mid-1970s, the dramatic decline of the New Left and the rise of a New Right changed the political context for feminist activism. Many early leaders believed by the mid-1970s that their movement was in decline, but they were wrong.
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It was changing so much that the transformations made it hard for some to recognize.

CHAPTER 5
Crest

If you think I’m going to slave In the kitchen for a man who is Supposed to be brave, Then I’m sorry to say But you’re wrong all the way, Because I’m going to be an astronaut
.

—ANITA BUZICK II, 9 YEARS OLD, JUNE 1975
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T
IDAL WAVES OCCUR
when strong forces coincide. Storms build huge waves offshore. If they ride into shore on an in-rushing tide their energy is multiplied both by the powerful pull of the moon and by the compression of the rising seafloor. The wave doubles in size, rising to a great wall of water and sucking up sand, earth, anything in its path. As it washes across the land, reaching into spaces untouched by the sea for hundreds or thousands of years, destruction and creation go hand in hand. New land appears; former shorelines drop into the sea.

In the mid-1970s, the women’s movement seemed everywhere and ever-changing as the “do-everything” ethos of women’s liberation surged across the landscape, rearranging everything in its path. Certainly by 1975, the speed of change meant that no one could “own” this movement nor could anyone ignore it, whether they were thrilled or dismayed. Many early activists mourned the fact that the movement as they had known it in the first 5 years was no longer recognizable, and they did not always understand that it had moved into a new era of institution and theory building. As the crescendo of activism continued to
swell, creativity outpaced disintegration. By the end of the 1970s, however, while feminist mobilization around the Equal Rights Amendment further enlarged the movement, there was also an increasingly sober awareness that change would not be easy, that a counterforce was mobilizing, and that the next decade would be filled with challenge.

I
NSTITUTIONALIZING
F
EMINISM

A
S FEMINISM MOVED
into the mainstream once marginal and radical experiments took on the trappings of institutions and began to build national, issue-based networks. From another direction, mainstream institutions experienced feminist challenges and organizing from within, as newly trained professional women sought new ways to build feminist careers. Liberal political activists, with the advent of a Democratic administration in 1976, began to imagine the possibilities of real political power when new issues like sexual harassment and comparable worth catapulted onto the political agenda. In the courtroom or on the tennis court, women’s activism was everywhere. By 1977 feminists staged a massive, multicultural celebration of the women’s movement in Houston, Texas, honoring International Women’s Year. A few stories of these building blocks of change can at least trace the trajectory.

B
Y 1975 LOCALIZED
projects had grown into institutions. Byllye Y. Avery was one of three women at the University of Florida who provided abortion counseling in the early 1970s, primarily by providing a contact in New York. “But then a black woman came and we gave her the number, and she looked at us in awe: ‘I can’t get to New York….’ We realized we needed a different plan of action, so in May 1974 we opened up the Gainesville Women’s Health Center.” Soon they decided they needed to address the needs of women who chose to give birth as well. “So, in 1978, we opened up Birthplace, an alternative birthing center. It was exhilarating; I assisted in probably around two hundred births.” Avery went on to found the National Black Women’s Health Project in the early 1980s.
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Local institutions—shelters for battered women, rape crisis centers, women’s health clinics, and feminist media—evolved into national networks.
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The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, for example, sprang up overnight. Carol Bonasarro, head of the Women’s Rights Project in the Civil Rights Commission, sponsored a consultation on domestic violence in January 1978 to bring this issue to the attention of the commission. She had her staff contact every shelter in the country and invite them. Accustomed to dignified and professional meetings, she was “stunned that so many of the shelter staff came—with sleeping bags.” In effect, the Civil Rights Commission provided an arena in which a national movement became visible to itself. Shelter staff shared battle stories, institutional struggles, and strategies and sensed not only their need for a continuing network but also the potential power of a national voice. Before the conference ended they had formed the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Bonasarro was “just thrilled.”
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Women also organized within religious institutions. The National Student Christian Federation, for example, initiated a Women in Campus Ministry Caucus in 1972 to bring together clergy, students, and staff:

We held conferences just prior to each national conference of NCMA [the National Campus Ministry Association] to meet each other and discuss how to change our denominations and our campus ministries. Some of us who attended these meetings were ordained and paid full-time to do campus ministry. Most were not. We were wives of paid campus ministers, office managers, seminary students, YWCA workers … and we were thrilled to be together. We shared our stories: the way men in campus ministry were treating us, the way male church leaders were ignoring us, the way the men we lived with were threatened, the sexism we endured at National Campus Ministry conferences, the way our jobs were so part-time or tenuous or even unpaid, the way we risked our livelihood by being feminist activists. These stories helped us make sense out of our isolated experiences as women in the
church. And we examined the politics of sexism, racism, imperialism, and heterosexism in order to move from the personal to a systemic analysis of our experience. We laughed and prayed and danced and shared bread and wine. We indeed re-imagined the sexist traditions we had inherited and created liturgies that offered a celebration of our survival.
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That energy showed up in many religious contexts large and small. Numerous denominational journals by the mid-1970s published special issues on women and equality in the church or women and ministry.
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In the Episcopal Church, the struggle for women’s ordination between 1974 and 1976 energized a national network, and the debate on women’s roles in ministry proceeded heatedly in many denominations. Catholic women, especially those in religious orders, emboldened by the Second Wave and by Vatican II, called a conference in 1975 in Detroit entided “Women in Future Priesthood Now: A Call to Action”: 1,200 attended and another 500 were turned away. A second Women’s Ordination Conference in 1978 responded defiantly to the Vatican’s 1977 declaration against the ordination of women. Some of the participants urged that Catholic women shift their energies in a more militant and feminist direction to challenge all forms of domination and hierarchy based on gender, race, or wealth.
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Theological conservatives also claimed feminism. A small group of evangelical Christian feminists initiated a journal,
Daughters of Sarah
, in November 1974, announcing “We are Christians; we are also feminists. Some say we cannot be both, but Christianity and feminism for us are inseparable. D
AUGHTERS OF
S
ARAH
is our attempt to share our discoveries, our struggles, and our growth as Christian women.” In subsequent issues they earnestly debated sexist bias in liturgical language and hymns, egalitarian marriage, ordination for women, and “the androgyny of Jesus.” Within 14 months they wrote, “From a very grass roots beginning among a few friends on the north side of Chicago, Daughters of Sarah has grown to include a subscription list of over 1000 names. Frankly, we never expected this…. Obviously there are more of you
than we thought.” Because of the primacy of their religious identity, Daughters of Sarah aired debates on such issues as homosexuality and abortion without adopting a singular position.
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N
ATIONAL
O
RGANIZATIONS
also proliferated in and around the interlocking networks of NOW, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Women’s Campaign Fund and focused on electoral activity, judicial appointments, and electing women. These liberal experiments, to their participants, seemed revolutionary. Through the middle 1970s, organizations grew in fits and starts, collecting dues and assembling staff and offices, but the process was bumpy. When Lael Stegal walked in to volunteer at NWPC in 1971 the dues were $1. Stegal gradually became a paid staff member and chief fund-raiser for NWPC, but she recalls how traumatic it was to raise the dues to $10 and then $25 and to begin holding fund-raising dinners for $100 a plate. By the time she left in 1979, the founders of this far-flung network of political activists were keenly aware of just how hard was the task they had set themselves.
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Most of them persevered, some as elected officials, some through government agencies, some with foundations.

Women fired with zeal to change the world began to create new career paths for themselves. Some were in feminist organizations in which women interested in services delivery in particular found outlets for work in health care, education, and psychological counseling. Changes in the law, and the inspiring examples of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, WEAL, and the NOW Legal Defense Education Fund, prompted thousands of women graduating from law school to look for ways to use their newfound skills in the interests of women.
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The stories of Kathleen Graham and Carolyn Chalmers are typical.

Kathleen Graham entered Stanford Law School in 1968, one of the first classes to include a substantial number of women. Fired by the possibilities of legal work against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights, she also began to attend seminars and workshops at conferences on women and the law. Such conferences, unknown in the 1960s, quickly became a regular fixture in the burgeoning world of women’s rights lawyers. There she found that across the country, women were using
the law to help women as a class. Inspired by the work of Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco (a public interest law firm founded by three women and funded initially by the Ford Foundation), Graham joined a small public interest private practice in Minneapolis and set out to fight discrimination.

In 1976 Diana Nagy came to Graham with an all too common story. Again and again her bosses refused to promote her, hiring men instead, but the reasons changed. First they wanted someone with greater experience in the company. Then, when she was the insider already doing most of the work, they claimed they wanted a different kind of college training than she could offer. She found herself repeatedly training the less qualified men who were hired over her, and when they performed poorly and departed the process began again. Nagy was furious, ready for a fight. It was a classic case, just what Graham had been looking for. In 1977 Graham filed a class action suit in behalf of the pink-collar, nonunion women at Nagy’s company Jostens, a national retailer for high school yearbooks and class rings.
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Carolyn Chalmers joined her later that year.

Carolyn Chalmers had entered law school in 1974, where female students were no longer unusual There she found an active women’s caucus that included a core group of women in their thirties, like herself, who came to law school inspired by the women’s movement. As students they volunteered to initiate a new women’s studies course on women and the law, taught collectively by six of them into the 1980s. Carolyn’s passion was fair employment for women and minorities. The suit against Jostens was precisely the kind of case she had yearned to work on.
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With the support of their law partners and financial assistance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a women’s law firm in Cleveland, the two women labored for several years to build a database with which they could prove systematic discrimination. In the process they became nationally visible experts on employment discrimination and models for others who wanted to build a “feminist career.” By 1983 they were ready to go to court against Jostens. Their 1985 settlement was a major victory at the leading edge of a series of similar cases that used Title VII to attack sexism in the workplace.

Another group of feminist lawyers linked the antirape movement to the struggle for equality in the workplace by introducing the (then) novel concept of sexual harassment. As Susan Brownmiller recounts the story, it started at Cornell with a speak-out on May 4, 1975 organized by three women (Lin Farley, Susan Meyer, and Karen Sauvigne) who had worked together in New York Radical Feminists, in the gay liberation movement, and in Alinsky-style community organizing. Motivated by the plight of a brave Cornell employee, Carmita Wood, who was willing to tell her story of sexual harassment, they publicized the event to a list of women lawyers and law students, to local factories and workplaces, and to college dorms alike, inviting all to tell their stories. They had also received encouragement from Eleanor Holmes Norton, chair of New York City Commission on Human Rights. The powerful stories told by secretaries, mailroom clerks, shop stewards, and assistant professors who were ogled, pinched, called sexual names, persistently touched and propositioned, pressured for sex, and even raped became grist for
New York Times
reporter Enid Nemy. In August 1975, “Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work” appeared not only in the
Times
but across the country. For the next few years, the concept became an important focus both for journalists and for lawyers like Nadine Taub, Director of the Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic at Rutgers and formerly a leader of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Within 2 years, early cases had begun to establish that a woman could sue on the grounds of sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which made the EEOC a critical venue for redress. A large proportion, perhaps a majority of the women who came forward in these early cases were women of color.
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