The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  But she was a diva who appeared at a critical juncture to identify those issues that could ignite mass protest. An extravagant personality, she turned into a talented speaker who could voice some of feminism’s most uncomfortable truths in a way that listeners could easily grasp. In the 1980s, I introduced her at a speech at Princeton University. She plopped down on a chair in the middle of the stage—at this point she was too frail to stand—and, without notes, launched into a talk about the bad old days before NOW, when women wore girdles. “How many of you know what girdles are?” she asked the listeners, as if she were chatting over coffee. She maundered on, as confident as if she were delivering a spellbinding analysis of sexual oppression. But as rambling and banal as she was, she held an audience of several hundred young women rapt for over an hour.

  The founding charter artfully wove criticisms of women’s treatment into a clear and calm exposition of what needed to change. It carried over points from the PCSW: women’s lengthened life spans, which meant they spent a small proportion of their lives raising children; girls’ troublingly high dropout rates from high school and college. The language was tactful. “Nobody used the word oppression,” Kay Clarenbach later marveled.103 The tone was more direct and urgent than that of American Women. The time for study and deliberation was past. Enough commissions: Now was the moment for action to remedy the wage gap between the sexes that had increased since the war, the crowding of black women in the lowest-paid occupations, and the dismal average income of the female worker.

  NOW parted ways with the PCSW’s conciliatory nods to domesticity. In this the organization followed the lead of The Feminine Mystique. The charter insisted that full-time domesticity turned women into lifelong dependents and stranded both sexes in an invidious half-equality. Creating new arrangements was “a basic social dilemma which society must solve,” not an individual woman’s responsibility. National child care was practicable and possible. Social policies must allow women to meet their responsibilities in the world along with family obligations. “We do not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other.”104 A jolting idea then, and still contested today.

  NOW’s founders were marked by a no-nonsense willingness to work with men and a hard-boiled optimism about what one could achieve in their company. Five men were charter members, their presence testimony to the founders’ background of working in mixed settings and the value they placed on male support.105 Why men? NAWSA, after all, had never admitted men or solicited their commitment. But NOW made male membership a mark of its up-to-date orientation. Any woman who came to prominence in the 1950s had made her way through crowds of men, sometimes with their help, more often despite their disdain, indifference, and antagonism. Still, these women survived, often by bending over backward to give men credit for the slightest inclination toward fair play. As a generation, their experience disposed them to see female separatism as faintly Victorian: regressive and man-hating. In line with this sensibility, the NOW charter held up an egalitarian idea of marriage as a “true partnership between the sexes.” The charter balanced action that was for women with activism that came from both sexes and would benefit all: a “we” composed of men and women.

  The sensibility resonated with hopes for racial integration still burning bright. It also looked back to the early twentieth century, when feminists celebrated the human race and heterosexual partnership. But NOW was not an organization that tapped into the politics of daughters. Rather, it was responsible, productive marriages the founders championed, as if they were borrowing from African-American women’s notions of industrious partnership in service to a common cause. Without ties to men, no action would proceed, nor would sex equality be complete.

  The name was National Organization for Women, not National Organization of Women. It was always a difficult position to maintain, this loyalty to men, and it soon was evident that their incorporation was more symbolic than real. The emphasis would always limit NOW’s ability to speak to and explain male opposition, such as that already flaring up in the conflict over Title VII. And the problem gathered strength as the politics spread outward. NOW soon veered toward separatism, but leaders retained their courteous attitudes about men, even when radicals mocked them as wishy-washy and deluded.

  NOW founders used their influence with the administration to pressure President Johnson to expand an executive order requiring federal contractors to comply with equal employment policies including sex discrimination—thus going beyond JFK’s analogous order that only banned sex discrimination in the federal civil service. Since federal contracts amounted to trillions of dollars of business, the order was actually much more effective than Title VII in intervening in prejudicial practices. LBJ’s action effectively pushed the obdurate EEOC to attend to women’s grievances.106

  But the agency still would not budge on the issue of discriminatory want ads: “Female Help Wanted” and “Male Help Wanted.” The practice was the exact analogue of “No colored need apply” designations, which were now highly illegal. The ads effectively nullified Title VII by throwing up a mental barbed-wire fence against female trespassers. The EEOC, though, refused to touch the ads, regardless of ruling that any other designations—race, religion, or national origin—were illegal.

  No issue raised NOW’s hackles more. Within a year, NOW spawned satellite chapters around the country, and in late 1967, the organization held demonstrations in six cities against EEOC policy. For a staid select organization of liberals, NOW grew impressively adept at moving outside official channels to embarrass the agency. The New York chapter, already savvy at attracting media attention, invaded the EEOC offices in the city with huge bundles of newspapers bound up in red tape. The newspaper companies started to cave in to pressure, the New York papers first, then papers in other cities. It took time and considerable effort, though. Not until 1973, when Pittsburgh NOW’s challenge to sex-segregated ads in the local papers reached the Supreme Court, was the issue settled.107

  In 1967, NOW was the sole feminist organization in the country. The fight over the EEOC gave form to what would otherwise have been inchoate grievances and drew liberal women into the fray. After 1967, as opposition to the administration intensified and the antiwar movement surged, NOW picked up the fervor of mass politics, outstripping its insider origins. Women joined from sectors where there was already agitation: union women, teachers, stewardesses, more nuns (radicalized by the war and the Catholic Church’s rigidity about women in the priesthood), and housewives reassessing their lives.

  Younger members arrived, too, brandishing 1960s weapons of street politics: ferocious controversy, stern moralizing, and finger-pointing at men and those women judged to be their collaborators. Feminism was tacking around, to head into far stormier waters than anyone in the select group foresaw in 1966. In 1968, the feminist movement broke open and a crowd of rowdy, riled-up daughters poured in, to help but also to criticize, judge, scold, and instruct the responsible mothers.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE REVOLT OF THE DAUGHTERS

  IN 1968, the pace of feminist politics picked up—steadily, then astonishingly. Outside NOW, expatriates from the New Left and refugees from the counterculture jumped ship to join a radical movement dedicated to women. A feminist avant-garde appeared, given to flamboyant demonstrations and a lacerating critique of a society ruled by men. For the first time since the 1910s, the ranks teemed with young women, aggressive, swaggering, and brimming with bravado, aroused by new ideas about where sexual injustice was lodged—not only in wage work but in the inequities of housework and child rearing, the way men looked at women and talked to them, their selfishness in bed, their leers and wolf whistles on the street, the oppressiveness of trying to please them—in short, the multiple indignities borne by the second sex.

  A feminist family quarrel flared up, to engulf a generation already given to pitche
d emotion in politics. Radical feminists ratcheted up a version of the revolt of the daughters into a fever of revolution. The aim was to topple patriarchy, not to make the EEOC comply with Title VII. But it was not the ultimate patriarchal authorities who drew the most fire. Rather, it was the brothers, whose complicities with oppression made them the enemies to be expelled. Mothers, too, came in for disdain, for their capitulation to a soul-crushing system, their timidity before male power, their compulsion to conscript their daughters into the same circumstances that crippled them. This was a politics with the habit of lashing out at intimates rather than august authority.

  The mood of the late 1960s bequeathed a sense of momentous transformation. The writer Alice Munro captured the sensibility in a short story about a daughter’s coming of age: “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women,” the vivid, sympathetic mother prophesies. “Yes. But it is up to us to make it come.” The change did come, and no aspect of American life was untouched.

  Women’s liberation, as these politics were called, appeared in the midst of the 1960s turmoil that brought politics as usual to a halt. By 1968, fury at the escalation of the Vietnam War drove all before it, determining political alignments for and against. The Johnson administration’s grandiosity and lack of credibility fed on each other, provoking massive distrust and anger, which spilled over from the antiwar movement into the broader public. Protest heated up all the more as a cultural revolution of sex, drugs, and rock and roll ripped through the student population. Searing denunciations of American society—attacks on racism, profiteering, warmongering, greed, imperialism—and apocalyptic visions of its collapse streamed through the New Left. Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency that November stoked the sense of impending doom. Nothing like this had ever happened.

  Radical feminism came out of this combustible mix. The recruits carried with them the New Left’s precepts and applied them to women: that only revolutionary change could bring change; that the law and government were façades for class and racist rule; that the social fabric was rotten. Tuned to the millennial pitch of the left—the apocalyptic sense of perpetrators’ wrongdoing and zeal to purge the world of sin—radical feminism was searing, melodramatic, and rambunctious. Its proposals to liberate women captured and transformed a national audience, a public alternately appalled and enthralled, scandalized and persuaded.

  The newest feminists, largely middle-class white students and recent college graduates, scorned compromise. They took from the New Left a contempt for incremental change and electoral politics and cared nothing for working with men to change public policy. Rather, they identified the grounds of change as personal life; changes in hearts and minds would destroy patriarchal institutions. In discussions, revelations, and denunciations of the status quo, women’s liberation generated countless pressure points of agitation, a myriad of ad hoc campaigns to change sexual mores, manners, men’s expectations of women and women’s expectations of themselves, and the very language of gender. “Many an office or kitchen has become a battlefield, strewn with male and female tears,” wrote one witness from the fray.1

  Initially, the ideas belonged to knots of expatriates from the New Left. But they spread quickly, electrifying thinking about women and among women. The politics of confrontation, catharsis, and personal transformation proved applicable to almost any situation.

  The change seemed to come out of nowhere—of that everyone agreed. Yes, there had been The Feminine Mystique, the President’s Commission, and NOW. But these all predicated their proposals on an orderly conception of pressure politics and appealed to women with families, who were accustomed to working in civic organizations. Women’s liberation was proudly unorganized, sprawling, militant, and in-your-face, given to upheavals and accusation, not battles over the EEOC. Looking back, it seems inevitable—African-Americans mobilized, why not women? We know this story so well that it seems destined. But early in the 1960s, the possibility of a feminism as potent as the civil rights movement was so remote that no one ever anticipated a mass movement of women. What changed?

  Women’s unhappiness on the New Left surfaced early in the student wing of the Southern civil rights movement. There, the dangerous work of registering voters and running freedom schools conferred a rough reciprocity on dealings between the sexes. In the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960, women were prominent at every level, including veteran organizer Ella Baker, the organization’s guiding genius, and the near-legendary young organizers Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and Diane Nash. “As SNCC developed a bold and brazen public image, bold and brazen women were attracted to it,” writes Barbara Ransby, Baker’s biographer. “And once they joined, no one sought to constrain them.” The strength of female leadership in SNCC, however, did not extend into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, despite the huge numbers of women in the campaigns and demonstrations. There, men did the leading.2

  In SNNC, there were buried tensions. White women were in an especially vexed position. Because their very presence working and living with black men inflamed segregationists, they tended to work in the offices in cities rather than out in the countryside. African-American women were much more likely to run projects registering voters or running freedom schools. The divisions shouldn’t be overstated. All SNCC workers considered themselves equals in a “beloved community”: brothers and sisters, blacks and whites, friends, colleagues, and lovers, facing violence and possibly death together. Yet some women saw gradations that stood out against the guiding principle of strict participatory democracy. Men (white and black) usually called the shots in important political matters; and men subtly or not so subtly assumed that women performed the customary roles, cooking and cleaning in the communal houses where everyone lived, typing and mimeographing in the offices.

  In 1964, in the aftermath of the bloody, tragic voter registration drive in Mississippi called Freedom Summer, two SNCC women submitted a short paper for discussion at a national meeting held to assess the future. The document, unsigned because the writers feared recriminations, challenged a bundle of assumptions about SNCC men’s treatment of women. It began with a list of small insults—women were always asked to type and take minutes at meetings (as if they were secretaries); “girl” was sometimes appended to women’s names on lists of organizers and attorneys, as if their lesser identity had to be noted. Then the memo went big by arguing that women’s position vis-à-vis men was akin to that of blacks vis-à-vis whites. “Just as negroes were the crucial factor in the economy of the cotton South, women are the crucial factor that keeps the movement running on a day-to-day basis.” Men’s assumptions about their own superiority were as “widespread and deep-rooted and every bit as much crippling to woman as assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro,” the writers asserted, anticipating the ridicule that would ensue. But they ended with a jab at male self-satisfaction: The movement needed to learn “this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”3

  This put male civil rights workers, black and white, in a position analogous to the white supremacists who ruled the Southern economy—an analogy that, on the face of it, was absurd. The comparison between women and blacks went back to the abolitionists, but it’s doubtful that anyone in SNCC knew it, and even if someone did, the comparison was as disturbing in 1964 as it had been in the 1830s, since the writers aimed it at men who risked their lives working with black tenant farmers. One set of accounts (mostly white women’s) recalls the memo drawing fire at the meeting, attacked as self-indulgent and melodramatic; another set of memories (black women’s) recalls no reaction at all. Yet on balance, the evidence suggests that among white women (and perhaps surreptitiously among some black women), the memo struck a chord.4

  Publicly, African-American women drew back with one accord from the brewing criticism. Black women experienced considerable day-today respect in SNCC and saw themselves as proud carrie
rs of the same African-American tradition of high female competence and self-assertion that was at work among the poor Southern farm women SNCC worked with. The public face of the movement was male, but everywhere women were the backbone. “Women carried the movement, there is no doubt about it. I mean, there were some men who stood up, but it was a minority,” testified James Miller, a participant in the Claiborne County, Mississippi, drive; his was a common observation.5 In a milieu that depended so much on local women’s initiative and courage, black SNCC women bridled at the memo’s description of female deference, the assumption that all women took on the role of subservient field hands.

  Decades later, a few African-American women who were in SNCC acknowledged that they too had complaints about how men dealt with women. At the time, though, they kept silent and routed their resentment into anger at white women. They felt themselves to be desexed, treated as men’s neutered sisters, while white women were seen as objects of sexual attraction. “Our skills and abilities were recognized and respected, but that seemed to place us in some category other than female,” Cynthia Washington remembered. She was a project director who had important responsibilities in the field, but she believed she paid a price for her prominence.6 Both white and black men sought out white women as lovers; the interracial affairs aggravated and infuriated black women.

  The sexual tension gave men, not women, power. “The negro girls feel neglected because the white girls get the attention,” complained a black female staff member at the meeting where the memo was brought up. “The white girls feel misused.”7 White women felt mistreated because of their menial place in the work of the organization, and black women felt mistreated because of their menial place in heterosexual love. The men on top escaped with only a brush with criticism.