The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Two years later, SNCC became a separatist organization and white workers left. The new black-only incarnation soon ended, its members scattering into black power groups and community organizing. Meanwhile, the writers of the first memo, revealed to be respected veterans Mary King and Casey Hayden, rehashed the previous year’s ideas in a document they sent to women in the antiwar movement around the country. The view that radical men were complicit in a system that oppressed women meshed with complaints building elsewhere.8

  In the North and on the West Coast, too, radical black women also held back from the brewing conflict. From the perspective of black power politics, female solidarity across the color line was untenable. In a context where militant black separatism heightened faith in the potency of race solidarity, black women had no use for a revolt of the daughters in league with whites. Female radicals continued to voice pride in black women’s independence and articulate a particular role in the struggle against racism, and a few black nationalist women’s groups organized mothers and low-income women in order to improve day care and family services. But black women’s politics were subsumed by a long-standing tradition of unity in defense of the race, and black women in the 1960s kept a studied distance between their own initiatives and anything labeled feminist.9

  The drawing up of sides between black and white women had deleterious consequences for years to come, depriving mainstream feminism of the vibrancy of African-American women’s contributions and cutting off black women from developments in which they had a profound interest.10

  The New Left in general and its flagship organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in particular professed noble principles of sexual equality. But from the founding of SDS in 1960, men were the public face of antiwar protest: the organizers who orchestrated demonstrations of tens of thousands; the speakers who harangued crowds; the self-styled revolutionaries who at late-night meetings brandished parliamentary procedure like weapons against those who disagreed with them. Half a world away, they were the soldiers who trucked through rice paddies, lives in the balance. Women, too, voiced hatred of the war, poverty, racism, and the hypocrisy of American life, and flocked to the cause. But they served by working in the offices, mimeographing pamphlets, sending out mailings, typing, and lining up speakers. Men wrote the pamphlets and gave the speeches.

  Talented women faltered in the pressure cooker of male self-importance, revolutionary machismo (Che Guevara black leather jackets, spouting Marx and Lenin, Mao and Fanon chapter and verse), high-stakes bids for media attention, and sexual libertinism. The endemic disease of female self-doubt struck full force. Some—like the fabled Bernardine Dohrn, soon to go underground with the terrorist group Weatherman—responded by going macho themselves, sporting leather jackets and flaunting their sexual bravado and prowess. Others played the apprentice to male sagacity, humbling themselves before savants who expounded on the fine points of Marxist texts. “I often find myself frustrated and hamstrung by my own inadequacy,” confessed Carol McEldowney, a talented organizer, to her friend Todd Gitlin in 1964. Gitlin was trying to get her to run for national office in SDS. “I often … lose my tongue when in a conversational situation with those of that superior ilk.”11 “That superior ilk” was, of course, men.

  In 1967–68, arguments about the treatment of women broke out across the country; Casey Hayden and Mary King’s memo had the effect of transforming individual women’s complaints into a general problem. The fault line appeared at a moment when opposition to a hated war was of such depth and ferocity that it left few untouched whether for or against: outraged radicals whose protests mesmerized the nation, or prowar conservatives who, for the moment, fumed at the radicals but lay low and bided their time. In 1968, politics at the top buckled. The January Tet offensive in Vietnam led to LBJ’s surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in April; students took over Columbia University’s administration building and shut down the campus; student and worker demonstrations broke out across Europe in May and in Mexico City that fall, where police shot peaceful demonstrators, killing more than a hundred students. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, thus effectively ending any hopes for an antiwar candidate winning the presidency and putting an end to the war. Riots, looting, arson, and crowd violence broke out in more than a hundred American cities, with seventy-five thousand National Guard troops called out to restore order. The country roiled with fear, grief, anger, frustration, and contempt for the government.

  It is impossible to understand the tone, tactics, and ideas of women’s liberation without grasping this situation. Inside the left, outrage at one injustice fueled outrage at another, fury crackling through a moral circuitry and widening fault lines into fissures between moderates and militants, liberals and radicals, whites and blacks, and men and women. The unwillingness of New Left men to see their culpability in mistreating women seemed of a piece with the administration’s unwillingness to admit its guilt in Vietnam. Denunciations of male behavior, enraged confrontations, and walkouts rocked the antiwar movement in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and the Bay Area. Fed up with the contradiction between professed egalitarianism and men’s actual behavior, groups of SDS women broke away: “Our political awareness of our oppression has developed through the last couple years as we sought to apply the principles of justice, equality, mutual respect and dignity which we learned from the Movement to the lives we lived as part of the Movement; only to come up against the solid wall of male chauvinism.”12

  Radical feminism at first seemed merely another brand of over-the-top protest crashing onto the national scene. Amid war, assassinations, burning cities, and roaring crowds in the streets, women’s liberation provided the public a kind of comic relief. The counterculture’s love of attention-grabbing antics combined with a jaunty rejection of ladylike manners to produce a vaudevillian esprit. The first inkling came from TV news coverage of the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when a bevy of protesters from one of New York City’s first radical feminist groups traveled down for the day to stage a demonstration on the boardwalk outside. Having alerted the New York newspapers and television networks, who sent crews to film them, they made the national news, dumbfounding viewers with indictments of women’s enslavement to beauty standards and displaying a “Freedom Trash Can” into which demonstrators lobbed various “instruments of torture”—hair curlers, false eyelashes, girdles, and bras (the source of the enduring epithet “bra burner”).13

  Grouplets sprang up in cities and college towns along the two coasts and outposts in between.14 They distanced themselves from NOW on the one hand and the antiwar left on the other, branding the former’s reformist goals paltry and the latter’s male radicalism self-serving and inadequate. In the spirit of the times, they called for revolution, led by a vanguard of women. The old order to be toppled was patriarchy, which subsumed capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Initially, the mood was utopian, expressive, exhilarating, and passionate, despite the surrounding political gloom. Looking back forty years later, Ann Snitow, an early engagée in New York women’s liberation, spoke of the immediacy, desire on fire. “It was so exciting, you could die for this.”15 The elation came from the conviction, suddenly shared by many others, that women mattered in a way that they never had before. There was the excitement that came from finding that others shared one’s difficulties. There was the assurance of sinking into a collectivity that was suddenly rendered important, even noble, by virtue of suffering at the hands of men, the satisfactions of joining one’s fate and identity to others: the exalted state of belonging that politics can create among previously dispersed people.

  An identification with any and all oppressed female persons inured radical feminists to charges of bourgeois feminism that former SDS comrades hurled. Feminists shot back that the same system that oppressed blacks, poor people, and workers of all colors subjugated women. “Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of
our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor.”16 Bourgeois feminism was an epithet the left had used since the 1890s to warn its women away from the suffrage movement and any ideas that strayed from the dogma that class struggle was the fundamental task. Girding themselves against the accusation, radical feminists floated analogies that equated white middle-class women with their “sisters” in dire circumstances—North Vietnamese fighters, Chinese peasant women, and African-American mothers on welfare were favorite figures of comparison.

  The extravagant likenesses worked to shore up the revolutionary bonds of womanhood in the face of men who saw themselves as the champions of the wretched of the earth. For what SDS heavy-hitting male was not on the side of Vietnamese and Chinese women? “We define the best interests of women as the best interests of the poorest, most insulted, most despised, most abused woman on earth,” asserted New York Redstockings, one of the first radical groups. “She is what all women fear being called, fear being treated as and yet what we all really are in the eyes of men.” A performance put on by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union was typical, an agitprop piece that evoked a procession of sufferers down a feminine via dolorosa: “the forty five year old file clerk, raped and strangled in her one-room walk up,” the beaten girl whose mother was insane, the black prostitute, the Vietnamese guerrilla, the woman dying of an illegal abortion. These were the martyred figures on a frieze over the door to the future.17

  There was no feminist history to speak of, so instead feminists concocted fables from Third World communism or the proletarian revolution that was supposed to begin soon.18 The strained analogies were melodramatic and far-fetched, silly really, but they were also tools of self-defense against male scorn. The adolescent arrogance of New Left men was a cross between the puerile attitudes of fraternity boys and the hipster misogyny of the older Beats they emulated. Barely out of their teens, radicals quelled their own anxieties by pretending to be swaggering revolutionaries without a care for mere women. In 1969 one SDS chapter published a pamphlet in this mode of the devil-may-care Marxist libertine. It advised that “the system is like a woman; you’ve got to fuck it to make it change.”19 Of course in reality, these monsters of vanity and Marxist preening were the teenaged and twenty-something boyfriends, friends, and brothers of the women who bore the brunt of their idiotic posturing in New Left organizations. Ellen Willis, The New Yorker’s first rock music critic and founding member of New York Redstockings, wrote years later of women’s difficulties around these truculent men. “It’s hard to convey to people who didn’t go through that experience how radical, how unpopular and difficult and scary it was just to get up and say, ‘Men oppress women. Men have oppressed me.…’ We were laughed at, patronized, called frigid, emotionally disturbed man-haters.”20

  But the break was with SDS and male comrades, not with the language and style. Women’s liberation retained the male left’s habits of sweeping indictment, the heavy-handed Marxist-Leninist theorizing, the scorn for compromise, the insistence that life was lived in blacks and whites and not in grays, the penchant for histrionic displays of outrage and suffering, the faith that sheer will could bring about a perfect—or near-perfect—society purged of wrongs, and the scorn for liberalism, electoral politics, and government. The impulse to make a clean sweep, to scour society of every vestige of sexism, came from faith in the powers of a revolution that would clean the Augean stables of exploitation. No place was free of sexist oppression, not the family, not work, not sex, motherhood, mind, psyche, or the inner sanctum of the spirit.

  While the early groups, such as New York’s Redstockings and Boston’s Bread and Roses, vaunted ultrademocratic participation, they also retained the New Left’s vanguard model: an enlightened cadre of the hypercommitted would forge ahead into a future whose perfect shape they, and they alone, could apprehend, leading the masses step by step toward a level of higher consciousness to match their own.21 The persistence of New Left idioms explains some assumptions in women’s liberation circles: for example, that all the isms were co-equals of sexism—imperialism, racism, capitalism. The fantasies about how women prospered under the regimes of various Communist dictatorships and military regimes: Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam. The contempt for electoral politics as bourgeois liberalism. The certainty that nothing short of feminist revolution would purge society of its inherent masculine violence, capitalist greed, racism, and imperialism. The dogma that nothing good, absolutely nothing, could come from the U.S. government, which was a shill for the (male) (white) ruling class.

  The terminology was also more indebted to the Marxist lexicon than to the liberal feminist tradition (which was largely unknown), with heavy-handed phrases such as “male chauvinism” slung around to humble and impress. “This new exhortatory way of speaking,” is how Alma Guillermoprieto describes the revolutionary vocabulary she encountered when she left New York to teach modern dance in Cuba in 1968. “These were sledgehammer words, of such enormous weight that I couldn’t help paying attention to them, and they seemed to invite careful reflection. But I also experienced them as crushing words, without nuances or secrets.” Women’s liberation had its own sledgehammer words. Celestine Ware, living in New York in the late 1960s, complained about the turgid language that purported to capture women’s experience: “The specialized vocabulary … is psychologically confining, adapted as it is from black, New Left and hippie argot.” As with Guillermoprieto’s sledgehammer words, Ware thought that “rarely is there the inrush of feeling that occurs from a newly realized insight.”22 Women’s liberation tried to illuminate the deepest recesses of the female psyche, but it had no room for the shimmering language of emotion, love, and sexual passion. That would only come later.

  Feminism raced through radical circles, galvanizing defections and schisms. The ardor for a separate women’s politics spawned discussion groups, underground newspapers, journals, and in 1969–70, “women’s centers”: low-rent storefronts and free space in college buildings made into gathering places for any and all who sought affiliation. Staffed by volunteers, furnished with ratty old couches, the walls plastered with posters of Vietnamese women toting guns and women worthies (Anaïs Nin, Emma Goldman, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan B. Anthony), the bulletin boards encrusted with notices of marches, abortion counseling, child-care needs, lectures, dances, and projects needing volunteers, the centers beckoned to the faithful as well as to neophytes who wandered in, curious about what all the excitement was about. An inquiring journalist found a “mixture of sorority house and campaign headquarters” in one in downtown New York.23

  The impulse to associate was nearly irresistible to those women who came in contact with women’s liberation, so various and idealistic were the projects, so captivating the faith that female citizens, on their own, could change so much. Myriad small groups focused on particular needs: publishing feminist newspapers, staging street theater, aiding women in prison, waging war on local Playboy Clubs. Many were called collectives, a term that came from the New Left lexicon denoting all-encompassing purpose, as in the Boston Women’s Health Collective, which published in 1970 the first underground edition of what became the world-famous Our Bodies, Ourselves, a handbook for women’s reproductive health and sexual well-being.24 Other collectives published newspapers, ran free medical clinics for women, provided information about where to get an abortion or contraception, offered workshops on auto mechanics and carpentry (to free women from their dependence on men), and formed rock bands.

  Commentators marveled at the speed with which radical feminism spread. “In less than two years, it [feminism] has grown in numbers and militancy, embracing a wide spectrum of women: housewives, professionals, students, women who are married, single, divorced, with children or childless,” reported Sara Davidson, an enthralled California sympathizer, in 1969 in Life, the country’s staple photo magazine.25 By 1970, magazines and newspapers featured ideas that two years earlier were treated as the wor
k of lunatics.

  The slogan was “the personal is political.” The insight was that women’s oppression came from the family, marriage, and the bedroom, as well as the job market and courtroom. If you could transform the power dynamics of personal life, then everything else—the law, politics, education, work, marriage—would follow. The aim was ultimately structural: Radicals believed that institutions shaped and reproduced personal behavior, and only profound institutional change would really bring equality. But activity to effect institutional change was episodic and short-lived, while work on the personal insults of oppression proceeded steadily. The habitual orientation was psychological, changing gender inequities from the inside out, a perspective that cast NOW’s preoccupation with public policy and the workplace as pitifully inadequate. The inward turn, away from the false promises of electoral politics and a liberal democratic system believed to be a sham, ran parallel to the civil rights movement, as black radicals turned away from institutional reforms to fix their attention on structural and cultural racism.26

  An eye for the sexist perfidies that infested daily life became the radicals’ stock-in-trade. The feminist press—pamphlets, journals, and underground newspapers—specialized in stripping down ordinary interactions to lay them bare. It was a roving third-degree interrogation, a vendetta to extirpate the deplorable practices that maintained the sexist status quo. Flirting, for example, was described in 1969 by the stern Boston women’s liberation paper No More Fun and Games as—indeed—fun that had to stop. Flirting might seem playful and innocuous, but really, the purpose was turning a woman into a sexual object. “The gestures pose as flattering, but they simultaneously say that she is defined once again not as an autonomous individual person.”27