When Everything Changed (27 page)

“P
EOPLE WOULD END UP LYING ON THE FLOOR
.”

The heroines of the battles of the mid-’60s, such as Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray and Muriel Fox, were a little shocked to realize that the younger generation regarded them as timid and perhaps passé. Granted, they had come of age long before the era of sexual/cultural/political revolt. (“I have some pictures of the early NOW meetings. We wore hats,” said Muriel Fox.) And because they were working for specific political and legal goals, they had a keen eye toward public relations and how things would be portrayed in the media. But they did not think of themselves as conservative in any way—or at least not until they heard what the newcomers were saying.

In March 1968
Muriel Fox picked up the Sunday
New York Times
and found an article on the “Feminist Wave” that quoted Ti-Grace Atkinson, the new 29-year-old president of New York’s NOW chapter, comparing marriage to slavery and predicting that once women were really liberated, “people would be tied together by love, not legal contraptions. Children would be raised communally.” That came as quite a surprise to many NOW members, who believed no such thing. Atkinson was a relatively new face in the movement. She was a wellborn Louisianan who was studying at Columbia. Betty Friedan had championed her as a NOW leader, at least in part in the hope that Atkinson, with her elegant Southern manner, would be good at fund-raising. “Betty and I were delighted to have this beautiful socialite be active in the movement,” said Fox. Ti-Grace did bring a wealthy suitor to the Fox home for dinner once, Muriel remembers, and “it was a pleasant evening,” but no donation came from it.

NOW was still a relatively small organization—the
Washington Post
put its membership
at about twelve hundred, with a third in New York. But it was, for several years, the only game in town for the feminist movement. Women of every conceivable ideological stripe flocked to it. At the meetings of New York NOW, Fox began to notice a great number of new faces. Her husband, Dr. Shepard Aronson, was chairman of the board—an example of NOW’s long-standing commitment to welcoming male members—and that
Times
article marked the beginning of what Aronson always referred to as “the worst year” of his life. In the summer, 28-year-old Valerie Solanas, a disturbed hanger-on in the New York art scene, shot artist Andy Warhol on behalf of what she called SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and issued a manifesto calling for the elimination of the male sex.
When Solanas was arraigned
, Atkinson showed up with a crowd of supporters in court, while Solanas’s lawyer, Florynce Kennedy, described her client as “one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement.”

This was not a thought that many other people shared.
Jacqui Ceballos, another NOW
leader who often sided with the radicals, remembers being at a meeting in a basement apartment when Atkinson asked for support “in getting NOW to take the Solanas case and declare Solanas the first martyr of the movement.” Atkinson handed out copies of the SCUM manifesto, which Ceballos said she read while “howling with laughter” on the bus afterward.
The whole episode
horrified Marguerite Rawalt, who found herself being horrified with disturbing regularity. “While I am for having university women in our midst… I do not want to see NOW in the midst of student rioting on campuses, or quoted as supporting some of the leftist doctrines read every day,” she wrote to Betty Friedan.

“The battles!” Fox recalled. “You had to go to every board meeting because you didn’t know what was going to be passed.” Many of the gatherings were held at the Fox apartment and went on endlessly. It was, Muriel understated, a very intense time. “People would end up lying on the floor. Not only from sleepiness but from total stress.” Among other things, Atkinson and her supporters wanted to eliminate conventional officers and choose leaders by lot, with a great deal of rotation. It was part of a growing sentiment in the radical side of the women’s movement that there should be no leaders, no “stars,” and that every person’s opinion had equal weight. When their proposals were rejected, Atkinson led them off to establish a group of their own.

In December of that “worst year,” Fox picked up the newspaper and found that the
Times
had, after years of resistance, eliminated its separate male and female help-wanted ads. The original NOW agenda, she was reminded, had been moving briskly along. “I said. ‘Okay, I guess it was all worth it.’ ”

“W
OULD YOU BELIEVE A BRA BURNING
?”

The nation as a whole had little inkling that anything new was going on with American women until September 1968, when Robin Morgan, whose experience as a former TV child star made her a creative feminist event planner, came up with an idea for a Miss America demonstration.

The Miss America pageant in Atlantic City had been the most-watched program on television in the early 1960s. The cultural upheaval of the decade had begun to dent its appeal a bit, but Miss America was still regarded by many as the icon of youthful beauty and grace—“the queen of femininity,” as its theme song went. It was the one program that President Nixon said he let his daughters, Julie and Trisha, stay up late to watch. The entrants were judged for their beauty in swimsuits and evening wear; for their talent in a much-satirized competition that usually included both classical singing and flaming baton-twirling; and for their poise in answering questions such as “What do you think is the secret to attaining world peace?”

Waving placards saying
NO MORE BEAUTY STANDARDS
—
EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL
! and leading a sheep that was supposed to represent the contestants, the demonstrators indulged in some guerrilla theater while photographers—delighted at a break from the usual scripted activities—took endless photos.
“We protest,” read
the leaflet prepared by New York Radical Women, “
the degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.
The Pageant contestants epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women. The parade down the runway blares the metaphor of the 4-H Club county fair, where the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best ‘Specimen’ gets the blue ribbon.”
Female passersby, Morgan
said, seemed amused, while a group of men gathered across the police barricades, yelling, “Dykes! Commies! Lezzies.”
A few demonstrators
managed to make their way into the front row of the auditorium balcony, where they unfurled a banner reading
WOMEN’S LIBERATION
and released what police said was a stink bomb but what the demonstrators claimed were just the ingredients from Toni Home Permanent, the sponsor.

Since the Atlantic City Fire Department had refused to provide a permit, the protesters skipped over their plans to light a ceremonial bonfire in which they would burn some implements of fashion-torture such as girdles and hair curlers.
However, a sympathetic
reporter for the
New York Post,
Lindsy Van Gelder, was working off the original program when she wrote a preview story: “Lighting a match to a draft card has become a standard gambit of protest groups in recent years, but something new is to go up in flames this Saturday. Would you believe a bra burning?” It would turn out to become critics’ favorite byword for the entire women’s movement. “I shudder to think that will be my epitaph—‘She invented bra burning,’ ” Van Gelder said later.

The Atlantic City demonstration was, in retrospect, a huge success—after all, we’re still talking about it now as the moment when the women’s movement made its debut on the national stage. But when it was over, some of the protesters expressed regret about the tone of the event and said they should have been expressing solidarity with the sisters who were being paraded around in their bathing suits, not making fun of them. (
Morgan herself called
the sheep “not my finest hour.”) And everyone quickly grew to despise the term “bra burning.” The demonstration captured traits that would come to define the movement. It was didactic and playful, smart and sometimes sophomoric. The women who participated succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, then disagreed about whether or not the message was appropriate. But one thing was certain: the protesters got more coverage in the national media than the new Miss America—Miss Illinois, a blond physical-education major who wowed the judges with her talent on the trampoline.

“I
T MADE ME FEEL NORMAL
.”

By late 1969, what was up with women had become a huge national story. NOW was racking up legal and political victories, while the younger, more colorful feminists fascinated, thrilled, and appalled the nation. Newspapers, magazines, and television networks all ordered up features. Every time one appeared, a new flood of letters would pour into any group or person or address that was mentioned. “
Heartfelt and handwritten
on pink or blue notepaper, they basically asked the same question, ‘How do I find a Women’s Liberation Group near me?’ ” said Susan Brownmiller, a member of New York Radical Women. “Most of the letters went unanswered. The new movement was swamped.” Responding would have required an army of women with Marguerite Rawalt’s letter-writing skills or technology that was yet to be invented. Women’s liberation, Brownmiller noted, was “the last American movement to spread the word via mimeo machine.”
Rosalyn Baxandall, looking
back, thought, “If we only had computers, what we might have done!”

By the end of 1970, when four out of five Americans told pollsters that they knew something about the movement, women all around the country had figured out how to organize themselves without direction from the feminist celebrities.
Barbara Epstein, a graduate
student in California, watched the movement spread “with an astonishing pace” through 1968 and 1969. “In Berkeley, women’s consciousness-raising groups sprang up everywhere; when Women’s Liberation… held a public meeting, it was difficult to find a hall big enough for the crowd.”
By the end of 1969
, one count found thirty-five women’s groups in San Francisco, thirty in Chicago, twenty-five in Boston, and fifty in New York.

Nearly every group found plenty of things to challenge in their own backyard. “
We were considered
really radical in Dubuque,” said Ruth Cotter Scharnau, describing her group’s fight to open up elementary school patrols to girls. (“The principal of one school said it was ‘too cold’ outside and that girls had other jobs: ‘They wipe the tables after lunch and take care of the kindergarten children once in a while.’ ”)
In a more fanciful
effort, feminists at the Iowa State University town of Ames cast a witch spell on the university football stadium, in opposition to the money spent on men’s sports. “The stadium which was under construction, did indeed collapse and had to be restarted. We just loved that, of course,” said Irene Talbott, a president of Des Moines NOW.

Very little happened in the movement that didn’t wind up being written down. “
Any time a group
of more than two or three feminists came together, they seemed to produce a newsletter at least, if not a newspaper or journal,” said Mary Thom. In 1972 Thom was part of a group, led by Gloria Steinem, that founded the monthly
Ms.
Glossy as a traditional women’s magazine,
its first issue sold
out in eight days and generated more than 20,000 letters—along with 26,000 subscription orders. In Baltimore, Vicki Cohn Pollard’s group began
Women: A Journal of Liberation,
which grew to a circulation of more than 30,000 and lasted for twenty-five years. It was unusual in its success and duration but typical in that its creators were all dedicated to the point of obsession. “It was beautiful,” Pollard said proudly. “We typed it up. We laid it out. We did absolutely everything to put that magazine together. We were up all night long. We were impassioned. My husband and I with our little baby went to Cambridge to hawk it on Harvard Square. Many hours standing in Harvard Square. And we sold a lot.” To underwrite the costs, one of the founders refinanced her house. Pollard recalled the “wonderful thinking and tremendous heart” that went into their efforts, as well as their over-the-top rhetoric. Her own essay for the first issue was about childbirth, and it had one sentence that decreed: “All doctors are the enemies of women.” The other editors suggested that “most doctors” or perhaps even “many doctors” might be better. “But I adamantly refused,” she recalled wryly. “
All
doctors were the enemies of women.”

All across the country, millions of women who never took part in a demonstration or joined a consciousness-raising group watched what was going on and had flashes of recognition. “I loved it. I loved it,” said Georgia Panter, the flight attendant. “Oh, I wanted to be there—I was off somewhere and I wanted to be there when they were marching in the streets, with Gloria Steinem. I saw pictures of those little old ladies with gray hair—I thought, oh, I wanted to be part of that.”
Madeleine Kunin, the would-be
journalist who was raising a family in Vermont and thinking about trying for a seat in the state legislature, felt as if the women’s movement was “a timer, set years ago, which had gone off, telling me to run.” Without it, she thought, she would have felt obliged to wait until her children were grown. And, Kunin said, the women’s movement had a second effect: “It made me feel normal.”

“W
E CAN DO IT
. H
E’S SMALL
.”

In March 1970 about one hundred women took over the office of John Mack Carter, the publisher and editor of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
At his side during the long day of confrontation was Lenore Hershey, the only woman in management,
who demanded to know
how many of “you girls” were married.
The protesters unveiled
a long list of demands, including free day care for all employees, no more “advertisements that degrade women,” and an end to the popular “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column. The protesters also wanted to eliminate all celebrity articles, “all articles oriented toward the preservation of youth,” and “slanted romantic stories glorifying women’s traditional role”—a litany that pretty much did away with the entire table of contents. They also demanded Carter turn the magazine over to the movement for one issue. In what was perhaps the more exciting moment of the confrontation, tiny Shulamith Firestone jumped on Carter’s desk, intent on deposing him by force. “We can do it. He’s small,” she said, diving at the editor. One of the other women,
Susan Brownmiller reported
, “grabbed Shulie’s arm and expertly flipped her off the desk and out of danger.”