Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (39 page)

⁸
Jane O’Reilly, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,”
Ms.,
vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 54-55, 57-59.

⁹
See Sara Evans,
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
(New York: Knopf, 1979); Edith Hole and Ellen Levine,
Rebirth of Feminism
(New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), and Jo Freeman,
The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process
(New York: Longman, 1975); Flora Davis,
Moving the Mountain
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

¹⁰
On the concept of “free space” and the origins of feminism, see Evans,
Personal Politics,
and Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte,
Free Spaces: Sources of Democratic Change in America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1986).

¹¹
Seven state commissions were established in 1962 and 1963 while the Kennedy Commission prepared its report. “By February 1976, commissions had been set up in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.” Catherine East, “Newer Commissions,” in Irene Tinker, ed.,
Women in Washington: Advocates for Public Policy
(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Inc., 1983), pp. 35-36.

¹²
See Evans,
Personal Politics,
pp. 50-53, quotes on pp. 51-52.

¹³
One of the best accounts of the traumatic events of 1968 is William Chafe,
1968: The Unfinished Journey
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 12. For other sources on the sixties see Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam, 1995); Terry Anderson,
The Movement and the Sixties
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Alexander Bloom, ed.,
Takin’ It to the Streets: A 60s Reader
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

¹⁴
See, for example, Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn” and Robin Morgan, “Introduction: The Women’s Revolution,” in Robin Morgan, ed.,
Sisterhood Is Powerful
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. xiii-xl, 421-437.

¹⁵
Jo Freeman was one of the first to point out the similarities between the two “branches” of the second wave and to differentiate them primarily in terms of age and structure. Others have agreed with her. See Jo Freeman,
The Politics of Women’s Liberation;
Jo Freeman, “Resource Mobilization and Strategy: A Model for Analyzing Social Movement Organization Actions,” in Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, eds.,
The Dynamics of Social Movements: Resource Mobilization, Social Control, and Tactics
(Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979), pp. 57-189. See also Maren Lockwood Carden,
Feminism in the Mid-1970s: The Non-establishment, the Establishment and the Future: A Report to the Ford Foundation
(New York: Ford Foundation, 1977); Barbara Ryan,
Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement, Ideology and Activism
(New York: Routledge, 1992); and Flora Davis,
Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

¹⁶
Quoted in Hole and Levine,
Rebirth of Feminism,
p. 84.

¹⁷
Hole and Levine,
Rebirth of Feminism,
pp. 81-87; Davis,
Moving the Mountain,
pp. 56-61; and Freeman,
The Politics of Women’s Liberation,
pp. 73-79.

¹⁸
Hole and Levine,
Rebirth,
pp. 95-98; Davis,
Moving the Mountain,
pp. 67-68; Marguerite Rawalt, “The Equal Rights Amendment,” in Irene Tinker, ed.,
Women in Washington: Advocates for Public Policy
(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 60-62.

¹⁹
Florynce Kennedy,
Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 39, 54. See also Gloria Steinem, “The Verbal Karate of Florynce R. Kennedy,”
Ms.,
vol. 1, no. 9 (March 1973): 54-55, 89.

²⁰
Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace Versus HUAC,”
Feminist Studies,
vol. 8 (Fall 1982): 493-520; Amy Swerdlow,
Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 10, 135-141. SWP had begun with a “strike” on November 1, 1961, when an estimated 50,000 women left jobs and kitchens to lobby to “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race” while a radioactive cloud from a Russian nuclear test floated across the U.S. In 1962 the organization was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee where they employed the symbols and language of middle-class domesticity to make hash of the committee’s efforts to intimidate them.

²¹
The description of this meeting in Chicago is based on my own memory of that event, at which I was present.

²²
Kathie Amatniek, “Funeral Oration for the Burial of Traditional Womanhood,” in
Notes from the First Year: Women’s Liberation
(New York: New York
Radical Women, 1968), Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement, an On-Line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library, Duke University.

²³
The breakaway meeting was chaotic because it was huge, beyond anyone’s imagining, and the radicals proclaiming “Sisterhood Is Powerful” had no program or plan of action. About 50 women from New York, Chicago, and Washington continued to meet over 2 days, laying plans for future women’s liberation gatherings, but there, too, the tensions over what New Yorkers began to call “feminists” and “politicos” remained strong. For accounts of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, see Echols,
Daring to Be Bad,
pp. 54-59; Rosen,
The World Split Open,
pp. 201-203; Brownmiller,
In Our Time,
pp. 21-23; Davis,
Moving the Mountain,
pp. 78-79.

²⁴
Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in Sonya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, eds.,
The ’60’s Without Apology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 94. See also Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn,” in Robin Morgan, ed.,
Sisterhood Is Powerful
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 473-492; and Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Leslie Tanner,
Voices of Women’s Liberation
(New York: New American Library, 1970), pp. 268-277.

²⁵
The process of speaking bitterness was described in William Hinton,
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 157-158.

²⁶
“Redstockings Manifesto,”
Notes from the Second Year
(1970), p. 113.

²⁷
Judith Herman, “Dear Kathie,” December 3, 1972, letter quoted in Ann Hunter Popkin, “Bread and Roses: An Early Moment in the Development of Socialist-Feminism” (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, Brandeis University, 1978), p. 59.

²⁸
Linda Gordon, quoted in Popkin, “Bread and Roses,” p. 98.

²⁹
Quoted in Flora Davis,
Moving the Mountain,
p. 143.

³⁰
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, “’Ain’t I a Feminist: Re-forming the Circle,” in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds.,
The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), p. 453.

³¹
Elaine Brown,
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); and Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds.,
Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy
(New York: Roudedge, 2001).

³²
Transcript of Sandy Springs Meeting, p. 37. Also Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 105-107.

³³
Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson, Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds.,
Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 93-95, quote on p. 95.

³⁴
Inez Smith Reid,
“Together” Black Women
(New York: Third Press, 1975), pp.
35-54, quote on p. 40. See also Bell Hooks,
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 189.

³⁵
Anna Nieto-Gomez, “La Femenista,”
Encuentro femenil,
vol. 1, no. 2 (1974): 36.

³⁶
Mirta Vidal, “New Voice of LaRaza: Chicanas Speak Out,”
International Socialist Review,
vol. 32, no. 9 (1971): 8; see also Francisca Flores, “Comision Femenil Mexicana,”
Regeneracion,
vol. II, no. 1 (1971): 6-8; “Chicana Regional Conference,”
La Raza,
vol. 1, no. 6 (1071): 43-44.

³⁷
Flores, “Comision Femenil Mexicana,”
Regeneration,
vol. II, no. 1 (1971): 6-8, quote on 6.

³⁸
Mirta Vidal, “New Voice of LaRaza: Chicanas Speak Out,”
International Socialist Review,
vol. 32, no. 9 (1971): 7-9, 31-33.

³⁹
Jennie V. Chavez, “Women of the Mexican-American Movement: An Opinion,”
Mademoiselle
(April 1972): 82, 150.

⁴⁰
Anna Nieto-Gomez, “La Femenista,”
Encuentro Femenil,
vol. 1, no. 2 (1974): 34-47, quotes on 38.

⁴¹
“Introduction: This Isn’t One of Those Blondes You Can Pick up in the Supermarket,”
Asian Women,
Berkeley, 1971, p. 4. Christina Adachi, “Nisei Women Speak!”
Women: A Journal of Liberation,
vol. 3, no. 4 (1974): 30-31.

⁴²
Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, “The Development of Feminist Consciousness Among Asian American Women,”
Gender & Society,
vol. 1, no. 3 (September 1987): 284-299; Merilynne Hamano Quon, “Individually We Contributed, Together We Made a Difference,” in Steve Louie and Glenn K. Omatsu, eds.,
Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment
(Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001) pp. 207-219; Asian Women United of California, eds.,
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

⁴³
“Indian Women’s Groups Span a Broad Spectrum,”
Indian Truth
(publication of the Indian Rights Association), no. 239 (May-June 1981): 8.

⁴⁴
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, “Ain’t I A Feminist: Re-forming the Circle,” in DuPlessis and Snitow, eds.,
The Feminist Memoir Project,
p. 453.

⁴⁵
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Unlearning the Lie: How One Group of Parents Dealt with Sexism and Racism in Their School and Among Themselves,”
Ms.,
vol. 2, no. 5 (November 1973): 81-83, 110. Quotes on pp. 81 and 82. See also Bell Hooks,
Ain’t I a Woman,
chapter 5.

⁴⁶
Harrison, “Unlearning the Lie,” 83, 110, 82. Similar attitudes were expressed by a number of authors. For example, Linda La Rue wrote, “It is not that women ought not to be liberated from the shackles of their present unfulfillment, but the depth, the extent, the intensity, the importance—indeed, the suffering and depravity of the real oppression blacks have experienced—can only be minimized in an alliance with women who heretofore have suffered little more than boredom, genteel repression and dishpan hands.” “Blacks are
oppressed
…. White women, on the other hand, are only
suppressed
….” See
“The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” in Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare, eds.,
Contemporary Black Thought: The Best from the Black Scholar.
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), pp. 116-125, quotes on pp. 117, 119.

⁴⁷
Harrison, “Unlearning the Lie,” p. no.

⁴⁸
Frances M. Beale, “Sisterhood Is Still Powerful: Speaking up When Others Can’t.”
CrossRoads,
no. 29 (March 1993): 4-5, quotes on 4.

⁴⁹
Ida Sloan Snyder, “Convention 1970: A Gentle Revolution,”
YWCA Magazine,
64 (June 1970): 5-7, quote on 5; ISS, “One Imperative for All,”
YWCA Magazine,
64 (June 1970), 8-11; quote on 8; Renetia Martin, in Sara M. Evans, ed.,
Faithful Journeys: Women, the Student Christian Movement, and Social Justice Activism 1955-1975
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2004).