Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (7 page)

Among college and university students in the late 1960s, however, the YWCA offered a space for unity of black and white women primarily around issues of race. Renetia Martin was a student at Berkeley in the late 1960s. The black student movement she found there discouraged women’s leadership. The student YWCA, however, was a women’s organization that linked her to an older generation of black female leaders and the possibility of interracial discussion. Black women in the YWCA, under the leadership of Dorothy Height and Valerie Russell, were already wrestling with the meaning of black power, and they organized a separate meeting before the YWCA National Convention in Houston in April 1970. Young women (17-35) also held a separate meeting, and Renetia, Chair of the National Student YWCA and therefore a leader in both, became a pivotal figure in pushing adult blacks toward militancy while winning the active support of young women of all colors. When the formal conference opened, 2,700 women, “all kinds, all ages, all shapes, all sizes,” met in a hall hung with banners “for peace, for justice, for freedom, for dignity.” Young women declared their activism and their discomfort with religious labels, naming themselves Young Women Committed to Action. All 500 black delegates stood as their report was read, demanding that the fight against racism become the singular focus of the YWCA. In response, the convention adopted the One Imperative: “To thrust our collective power toward the elimination of racism wherever it exists and by any means necessary.” Everyone present still remembers slender, militant young Renetia Martin pronouncing her benediction: “In the name of Malcolm, Martin and Jesus—Power to the struggle.”
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Following the convention, Renetia returned to Berkeley where, through the auspices of the campus YWCA, she began to organize personal support groups for black women. The demand for such groups was huge, and the women who came were filled with pain. These were, in fact, consciousness-raising groups, but they did not go by that name and they remained primarily focused on personal support rather than political action.
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Black nationalists had made the reclamation of “manhood” a centerpiece of the black movement by the early seventies.
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They were perhaps the most vociferous, but similar attitudes also prevailed
in the Chicano movement, the militant American Indian Movement (AIM), and Asian-American civil rights movements as well. Black feminism had no room to breathe. Consciousness-raising was about all that could be done.

T
HE ENERGY OF INTERNAL
conflict was the flip side of an immense creativity unleashed by the women’s movement between 1967 and 1975. In these heady days, the women’s movement was decentralized in the extreme. Unaware of historical precedents, they replicated the brilliant “Do Everything” policy of Frances Willard in the 1880s. As President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Willard announced that local chapters would choose their own focus. Unconstrained by national priorities that were either too radical or too restrictive for their own taste, the WCTU chapters rapidly became a major force for progressive reform, stretching their opposition to alcohol and immoral male behavior to include activism in behalf of children (founding kindergartens and the PTA), working women, female prisoners, and even suffrage.
⁵²

Similarly, NOW’s structure encouraged the creation of “task forces” at the local and national levels on virtually any topic. These, in turn, issued a string of reports—on sexism in education, legal discrimination, or violence against women—with recommendations for action. Eleanor Smeal recalled that “We were not real philosophical in those days [the early 1970s in Pittsburgh]. We became instant experts on everything. On child care. Started our own nursery school. We worked on employment cases…. First we started organizing local NOW chapters. Then we organized the state. I went to every village and town, organizing; if you have just one or two people, you can get a chapter going. I organized housewives. Because that’s where I was. You have to do what you know. It never occurred to me that we weren’t going to get housewives, and we did. We have.”
⁵³

Women’s liberation, with its antistructure, antileadership, “do your own thing” ethos, spawned thousands of projects and institutions. Most of those actions will probably never be recorded precisely because they were so spontaneous and ubiquitous. Jan Schakowsky, for example, was aware of the women’s movement in 1968 and 1969, but as a suburban
housewife she had no idea how to get involved. With two kids in diapers, “I felt totally trapped.” But she found time to read about feminism between diaper changes and at naptime. “By the time my husband walked in the door all hell would break loose. He was responsible for all the evils of the world and especially responsible for keeping me trapped. What kind of person was he? Didn’t he understand?” She felt supported by “all those unseen people” she was reading about. “I knew that if I ever met Gloria Steinem we would be best friends.” Her first consciousness-raising group was a consumer action group she and her neighbors formed in the early 1970s. They initiated a meat boycott to protest inflationary prices and spent their meetings discussing their problems as women “and the kinds of changes as women that we had to go through in order to face those things.”
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The accelerating spread of the women’s movement finally caught the national media’s attention in 1968 and 1969. Between January and March 1970, substantial stories on the movement appeared in virtually every major journal and broadcast network.
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Media attention tended to be condescending if not hostile, but the powerful message overrode its medium. Indeed, the zeal of feminists was fed in equal parts by their optimism that an egalitarian world was possible and by the hostility and derision they met at every turn. They may have felt, initially at least, that they were simply claiming a birthright, the opportunity to pursue their own dreams and to participate as equals in public and private life. But leftists shouted at feminist speakers, “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and on ABC News a senator called women’s liberation a bunch of “braless bubble heads.”
⁵⁶
Time
took note of the new movement with the claim that “the radical women have opened a Pandora’s box. But that of course is their birthright. They are her direct descendant.”
Time
announced 4 months later that “… last week the movement scaled new
piques
….”
⁵⁷
When the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment in August 1970, the
New York Times
editorialized on “The Henpecked House,” and James J. Kilpatrick described the ERA as “the contrivance of a gang of professional harpies…. [M]en who voted for this resolution had but one purpose in mind, to get these furies off their backs.”
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In general, media coverage
sensationalized and mocked women’s liberation with nicknames like “women’s lib” and “libbers.”
⁵⁹
One editor was known to have instructed a journalist to “get the bra-burning and karate up front.”
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No bras were burned at least in the early years, when the “bra-burner” epithet appeared, although one of the organizers of a demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in August 1968 suggested ahead of time to a journalist that they might be.
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Instead, participants tossed “objects of female torture” (girdles, bras, curlers, issues of the
Ladies Home Journal
, and so on) into a “freedom trash can,” auctioned off an effigy of Miss America (“Gentlemen, I offer you the 1969 model. She’s better every year. She walks. She talks. She smiles on cue.
And
she does housework.”), and crowned a live sheep.
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Only 2 years later, proliferating groups and media coverage had made the new feminism a major topic of national debate. Many mainstream institutions faced feminist insurgencies from within as well. Sheila Collins described herself “as one of those odd birds, an aroused woman, and also as a former seminary student now a minister’s wife and the mother of two preschool-age children….” In 1969, she and several other women in the New York Conference of the United Methodist Church “formed a task force to discuss the ‘woman’ issue and to influence our church to take some kind of action in regard to women’s liberation.” Their concern, like that of numerous other small groups interested in sex role socialization, was to analyze and to challenge the images of girls and boys that dominated their denomination’s Sunday school curricula. “The church must repudiate once and for all the unchristian formula of male superiority-female inferiority…. [It] can begin to join the revolutionary age by taking a second look at its own literature.”
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Soon after that the national magazine of the Methodist Student Movement,
motive
, published one of the earliest collections of women’s liberation writings in a special issue edited by Charlotte Bunch and Joanne Cook.
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When NOW called for a “women’s strike” on August 26, 1970 in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote, the national scope of this new movement became visible to activists and observers alike. Its insistence on the politics of personal life were likewise
on display as women took action under the slogan: “Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot.”
Life
magazine reported that

… in Rochester, NY, women shattered teacups. In Syracuse they dumped 50 children in the city hall. In New York City, Boston and Washington thousands marched and rallied and hundreds more held teach-ins and speech-ins in dozens of other cities. Women’s liberation is the liveliest conversational topic in the land, and last week, all across it, the new feminists took their argument for sexual equality into the streets…
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In New York City between 20,000 and 50,000 women staged the largest women’s rights rally since the suffrage movement, blocking Fifth Avenue during rush hour. Theatrical and humorous actions abounded: a guerrilla theater group in Indianapolis portrayed the middle-class female life cycle from “sugar and spice” to “Queen for a Day”; Boston women chained themselves to a huge typewriter; women in Berkeley marched with pots and pans on their backs; New Orleans reporters ran engagement announcements under photos of future grooms; stewardesses carried posters challenging discriminatory airline rules (about which they did, in fact, successfully sue): “Storks Fly—Why Can’t Mothers?”
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T
HE CONTAGION OF FEMINISM
lay in its ability to touch women at a deeply personal level, politicizing matters that were previously taken for granted as “the way things are.” When
Newsweek
published a cover story on the women’s movement it hired a freelance writer, having rejected versions by the few females in the ranks of reporters and editors. The day the cover story reached the newsstands, however, a group of women on the staff called a press conference to announce that they had filed a sex discrimination complaint with EEOC. At that time all but one of the
Newsweek
research staff were women; all but one of its fifty-two writers were men.
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Sophy Burnham laughed when she received an assignment from
Redbook
to do a story on the women’s movement. “A lunatic fringe,” she thought. But “within a week I was so upset, I could hardly focus my
ideas.” In 4 months of listening to women’s anger, pain, and quest for identity, “chords were struck that I had thought long dead…. I thought I had come to terms with my life; but every relationship—husband, child, father, mother—was brought into question.” By the end she was a convert: “I am now offended by things that would never have bothered me before. I am now a feminist. I am infused with pride—in my sisters, in myself, in my womanhood.”
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The wide spectrum of feminist activism that existed by 1969-1971 in many cities attracted a broad range of women. NOW and WEAL chapters (and in 1971 the National Women’s Political Caucus) attracted middle-class professional and semiprofessional women who had experienced discrimination in employment and in the political arena. These were women who were ready to jump in and work systematically both in the courts and in the legal system. Radical groups, in contrast, drew first on a constituency of New Left activists. Consciousness-raising also drew in women who were attracted to the idea of a women’s movement but who came with many questions about whether women were really oppressed and in what ways. These two modes of organizing soon overlapped.

For example, Iowa feminist Bev Mitchell recalled, “I became a feminist in 1971 when I went to Chicago for a weekend with my someday-to-become-ex-husband. We were just two Nebraskans gawking at the big buildings. There was a women’s liberation rally in Grant Park. It was just about the most exciting thing I had ever been to. It was also scary. I remember one woman dressed in nothing but the American flag. Her fingernails were three inches long and she had a sparkly top hat. It was fabulous. It was the first time I had ever been to a speech or a political rally where I agreed with every single point, or it was something I had never thought of before and in the next twenty minutes I mulled it over, and said, ‘Yes, that is true.’”

Back in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she joined several other women she had met in graduate school in Cedar Rapids to form a women’s liberation group. When they learned another group had met the same week, the two joined forces. The second group had been convened by the (then) wife of a major industrialist in Cedar Rapids. The combined group included prominent, powerful women and countercultural leftists alike.
When they learned that the Cedar Rapids civil rights code omitted women altogether,