A FEW DAYS after the speakout, the Village Voice published Brownmiller’s article, “Everywoman’s Abortions: ‘The Oppressor Is Man.’” The piece included definitions of new terms for the unenlightened reader. One of those terms was oppressor—another word for man. Brownmiller also gave a quick primer on consciousness-raising circles, the leaderless, free-form support groups that encouraged members to tell the truth about their lives—their inner lives, especially—in the company of other women. By the early Seventies, “c.r. groups” and “rap groups” were popping up around the city, in borrowed office spaces downtown, apartments on the Upper West Side, and Brooklyn brownstones. In groups both large and small (but preferably small to create intimacy), women talked about their childhoods, marriages, and sex lives—airing their deepest secrets and insecurities.
It was at her weekly consciousness-raising meeting that Judy Gingold, a Marshall scholar working as a researcher at Newsweek, had an epiphany that eventually sparked a revolt. Her group of eight included an assistant at NBC, who voiced her feeling that she could get ahead in her career if only she were better at it. “Everyone was saying the same thing—‘if I were better, I would get ahead.’ All of us in that room felt inadequate,” Gingold later recalled in Lynn Povich’s book The Good Girls Revolt. “And that’s when I thought, wait a minute, that’s not right. It’s not because we’re undeserving or not talented enough that we aren’t getting ahead, it’s how the world is run. It made me see that the problem wasn’t our fault—it was systemic.”
At Newsweek, Gingold was one of many highly educated women assigned to low-prestige and low-paying jobs. They compiled newspaper clippings, fact-checked articles, sorted mail, fetched coffee, and answered to “sweetheart” and “dolly.” Many had ambitions far beyond the research department, but they kept them in check. After all, the writing and editing jobs they coveted weren’t available to them—they were given to men. In the fall of 1969, a lawyer friend told Gingold that what Newsweek was doing was illegal—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited segregating jobs by gender. Over the next few months, Gingold discreetly spread the message to her female coworkers around the office, recruiting allies as they passed her desk or reapplied their lipstick in the ladies’ room. Soon they had a lawyer—a pregnant civil rights activist named Eleanor Holmes Norton, then assistant legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union—and a solid case. In 1970 there were more than fifty men writing for Newsweek, but there was only one woman.
On March 16 of that year, forty-six female employees held a news conference to announce that they were suing Newsweek for sexual discrimination, after filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would take two years and another lawsuit before the case was settled in their favor.
THE SAME DAY that the lawsuit was announced, the new issue of Newsweek hit stands. The eye-catching red-yellow-and-blue cover featured an illustration of a naked woman bursting through the female gender symbol R and the headline “Women In Revolt.” The former “dollies” who brought the suit against Newsweek cleverly timed their press conference to coincide with the release of the magazine’s first major article about the burgeoning women’s movement—but they were hardly the only women in revolt. Two days after their press conference, Susan Brownmiller (a former Newsweek researcher) led another group of women who were ready to confront their oppressors. On March 18, around two hundred women invaded the Hearst offices of Ladies’ Home Journal, cornering the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, at his desk.
The Journal’s slogan was “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman,” and yet month after month, the articles and advertisements that typically ran in the magazine underestimated both the power and the intelligence of women readers. Seven years had passed since Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, and magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal still presumed that women had nothing better to do with their time than clean the house, pretty themselves up, and have dinner and a fresh martini waiting when their husbands got home.
It was time to put an end to celebrity profiles like “Joanne Woodward: The Care and Feeding of Paul Newman” and fashion features like “Dressing for the Men in Your Life.” It was time to stop assigning disingenuous self-help articles that were really thinly veiled ads for whatever was the new-and-improved freezer or pantyhose or hair dye of the month. Most important, it was time to hire a staff of women, including nonwhite women, and let them determine what kind of stories were important. The protestors were fed up with the image of silly, childish wives depicted in the Journal’s recurring column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” when what women really needed to know was how to get a divorce. Or an abortion. Or how to have an orgasm.
“We demand that the Ladies’ Home Journal hire a woman editor-in-chief who is in touch with women’s real problems and needs,” Brownmiller began.
One by one, she and another organizer read off the rest of their demands in front of a crowd that included reporters as well as members of Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists (a successor of New York Radical Women), and the National Organization for Women (NOW).
“The Women’s Liberation Movement represents the feelings of a large and growing mass of women throughout the country,” she continued. “Therefore we demand that as an act of faith toward women in this country, the Ladies’ Home Journal turn over to the Women’s Liberation Movement the editorial content of one issue of the magazine, to be named the Women’s Liberated Journal.”
In the days leading up to the event, Brownmiller and the rest of her sit-in steering committee alerted members of the press about their plans and even cased the Journal’s offices. Even if he had caught wind of the plan, Carter, a soft-spoken southern man in his early forties, couldn’t have anticipated that he would be spending the next eleven hours in a room with dozens of angry women who had been planning his exit with military precision.
But as they talked, he listened, and his office began to feel more like a giant living room. Clusters of women snacked sitting on the floor and picked through Carter’s box of cigars. They also grabbed their fifteen minutes of fame, hanging a “Women’s Liberated Journal” banner outside a window and airing their grievances to reporters they had invited from outlets like CBS, NBC, and the Washington Post.
Gradually, individual demonstrators spoke up. They talked about their own lives and their mothers’ unfulfilled ambitions. At one point, Carter, dressed in a suit, got up to sit on his desk, where he could see the women’s faces more clearly.
Everything was going according to plan until Shulamith Firestone and another radical, Ti-Grace Atkinson, barreled toward Carter, shouting that they were going to push him out of the window. “We can do it—he’s small,” Firestone said, seconds before leaping at his desk. Reacting swiftly, a Redstocking trained in judo intercepted her before she could hurt him. “He was a quiet little man—and he just sat there,” says Jacqui Ceballos, a NOW member and mother of four who watched the scene in awe. “They were moving towards him, and Susan and the others pushed them back. They didn’t go there to throw him out of the window—they went there to change the magazine and get their articles printed.”
Despite their best attempts, they didn’t get Carter to resign. But by 6 p.m., the editors of the Journal agreed to look into hiring more women. (Three years later, the Journal’s managing editor, Lenore Hershey, became its editor-in-chief.) They also agreed to give members of the women’s liberation movement eight pages of the August issue and $10,000 to fill it as they pleased. As promised, the summer issue included a special insert—unedited—written by thirty of the protestors, who covered subjects including divorce, childbirth, and consciousness-raising.
Plans were already in the works for a new column, “The Working Woman,” by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who left Bernard Geis Associates after nearly a decade to write her own book, How to Make It in a Man’s World. (Doubleday published it in 1970, the same year as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. As it happened, Pogrebin and Millett
shared an editor, Betty Prashker.)
A mother of three, Letty eventually used her national platform to challenge the idea that a working woman should have to adapt herself to a man’s world—on the contrary, the world should adapt itself to working women who needed affordable child care, among other considerations—but when she first signed on to write for the Journal, she says, she was still just “a baby feminist” with a lot of growing to do.
“My editor at Doubleday warned me that I was going to be attacked by women’s libbers and I asked, ‘Who are they?’ I was oblivious,” Letty says. “She gave me Kate Millett’s manuscript. . . . I was just learning. I was just opening my eyes.” By the time her byline started appearing in the Journal, “I was an absolute rabid feminist,” she says. “I insisted on being free to say anything I wanted in my column. I wrote it for ten years.”
The demonstrators had wanted to target a women’s magazine with a man at the helm, and Carter had been an obvious choice, but they threw out other names early on. At one point, someone suggested Helen Gurley Brown.
“I think we passed over it very quickly because we could not say she was the enemy,” Brownmiller says. “Cosmopolitan was so much one woman’s brainchild. She had a successful formula. The circulation statistics were her biggest buttress. Why should she change it?”
( 42 )
THE STRIKE
1970
“The feminist movement was so joyous. Even with the shit we went through, nothing compares to the joy that we felt.”
—Jacqui Ceballos, strike organizer
Hardly a day passed when someone didn’t ask Helen about the women’s liberation movement. Was it a real movement or just a passing fad? What did she make of all those man-hating militant feminists? And where did the Cosmo Girl fit into all of it? Was she pro–women’s lib or against it?
“Like many other women, I’ve come to respect it late in the day, thinking at first it was just an attack by a few hostile nut-burgers who were giving all women a bad name,” Helen confided in her readers in her June 1970 editor’s letter. True, women’s libbers could be absurd in their attitudes toward men, but thanks to them, thousands of people were thinking differently about all kinds of issues. Why, for instance, was it assumed that a woman should do all the housework, even if she worked, too? When women made up nearly a third of the workforce, why were so many stuck with menial jobs like cleaning and clerking? And speaking of double standards, she continued, “Why does a man usually instigate sex when, where, and the way he likes it?”
In her own way, Helen challenged the same system that she had learned how to manipulate long before the women’s liberation movement existed. She asked many of the same questions asked by the leaders of the women’s movement, including Betty Friedan. Not that Friedan would have known. She had been boycotting Cosmo for years, and soon she would ask the rest of the country to follow suit.
In the spring of 1970, Friedan announced that she was retiring as the president of NOW, the organization she founded in 1966, and she intended to go out with a bang. The previous year, she divorced her husband, Carl Friedan, after years of his cheating and violence destroyed their marriage and, as she saw it, undermined her authority as a leader of the women’s movement. “I was finally too embarrassed,” Friedan later wrote in My Life So Far. “How could I reconcile putting up with being knocked around by my husband while calling on women to rise up against their oppressors?”
In her farewell address, Betty called for a national demonstration and twenty-four-hour strike for equality on August 26—marking the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage. From New York City to San Francisco, she envisioned women taking to the streets to demand equal opportunities for themselves in jobs and education; free twenty-four-hour child care; free abortion on demand; and the end to forced sterilization. (In states around the country, poor women of color were being sterilized without giving consent, often while in hospitals or clinics for otherwise routine procedures; many were minors and deemed to be mentally incompetent or otherwise “unfit” as parents.)
“I propose that women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, that the telephone operators unplug their switchboards, the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning, and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more—stop—and every women pegged forever as assistant, doing jobs for which men get the credit—stop,” she told a cheering crowd at the NOW convention. “And by the time those twenty-four hours are ended, our revolution will be a fact.”
There were just a few crimps in the plan. They didn’t have the tens of thousands of demonstrators that NOW promised to reporters, but New York members soon found ways to raise awareness around the march and larger movement. In early August, when Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill barring sexual discrimination in public places, NOW’s vice president for public relations, Lucy Komisar, pushed her way to the bar at McSorley’s Old Ale House, an East Village pub that had been serving only men for 116 years. Later that evening, a group of about one hundred libbers including Kate Millett and an eighty-two-year-old former suffragette took over the Statue of Liberty, unfurling a forty-foot banner on the pedestal below her feet: WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!
Seizing the Statue of Liberty was as good a publicity stunt as any, but there was still no guarantee that people would show up for the march and strike in just over two weeks. The day before the march, Betty Friedan held a news conference in New York. Backed by the National Women’s Strike Coalition, she once again urged women to strike. The coalition also called for women across the country to ban four products that degraded women: Silva Thins cigarettes, Ivory Liquid detergent, Pristeen feminine deodorant, and Cosmopolitan, which they said exploited women and made young girls feel like failures if they didn’t look like the models in the magazine.
“I can’t believe they’ve been reading Cosmopolitan,” Helen told a reporter when she was asked for a comment. The magazine was “very pro lib.” Perhaps the coalition was objecting to the idea of women as sexual objects and nothing more, Helen added: “I think it’s wonderful that a woman is sexually desirable, and I agree that it would be wrong to suggest that that’s her only attraction.”
ALL OVER NEW York, women organized actions to bring attention to the cause. Many of the activists remained nameless in the press, lumped into the labels “women’s libbers” or “militant feminists,” but a few names stood out: Gloria Steinem. Ti-Grace Atkinson. Kate Millett.
In August, Time anointed Millett as “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” Before, much of the movement’s literature consisted of mimeographed manifestos, but her book Sexual Politics—which grew out of a doctoral thesis she had written at Columbia University—reached the masses. Until this year, “the movement had no coherent theory to buttress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assault on patriarchy,” Time proclaimed. “Kate Millett, 35, a sometime sculptor and longtime brilliant misfit in a man’s world, has filled the role through Sexual Politics.” Drawing examples from literature and psychology, she theorized that women were often helpless and compliant because men controlled society. There was only one way to change the power structure: Women had to destroy the patriarchal system that kept them down. It wasn’t enough for women to make it in a man’s world; they had to claim the world for themselves. “Whatever the ‘real’ differences between the sexes may be,” Millett wrote, “we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.”
Scaling to the top of bestseller lists, Sexual Politics was the surprise hit of the summer. In Alice Neel’s oil portrait on the cover of Time, Millett was the face of resistance with her set jaw, heavy brows, and long, wild dark hair.
Although Millett was a reluctant star of the feminist movement, she received attention wherever she went, and around the same time her sisters invaded the Ladies’ Home Journal, Millett and another group of feminists took their fight t
o Cosmopolitan’s editorial offices.
“[They] backed me up against a radiator in COSMO’s reception room and demanded that I turn over part of the book to them,” Helen later recalled. “I said nobody occupied any editorial space in COSMO unless she could write well, and I would have to be the judge of that—we were already a feminist book.”
A women’s lib group did send in a couple of articles, but nothing really came of them. Unlike John Mack Carter, Helen had no intention of letting an unedited manifesto slip into her magazine, but in the November 1970 issue—three years before the Supreme Court decided that abortion was a legal right in the landmark case Roe v. Wade—Helen published an article on one of the movement’s key issues, which happened to be one of hers: abortion. Written by Dr. Selig Neubardt, a New York–based obstetrician and gynecologist with a history of arguing for abortion reform, “All You Need to Know About Pregnancy and Abortion” surely shocked many readers, and helped many more, dispensing the facts about a procedure long considered to be a crime.
In the same issue, Helen ran an excerpt from Sexual Politics, along with a personal endorsement of the women’s liberation movement. “It’s hard for me to understand how any self-loving, man-loving woman could really be against what the movement is for: the realization of woman’s full potential as an achiever and the end of the patriarchal system whereby men have most of the power,” Helen wrote in her editor’s letter. Kate Millett was one of the movement’s most eloquent members, she continued, and readers could find an excerpt from her brilliant book in this issue. “Miss Millett’s book isn’t easy reading, but it’s well worth it.”
Enter Helen Page 27
