The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Once the interrogation began, there was no end to the treachery that had to be uncovered. Staple delicacies of an American white woman’s upbringing were suddenly suspect: Under the glare of the third degree, not only frilly clothes and high heels, but Nancy Drew detective mysteries and romantic Hollywood movies were unmasked as brainwashing operations. Madeline Belkin, a self-proclaimed film addict, confessed that she liked to kiss her husband as if they were Hollywood lovers. “I hadn’t thought about it until then, but I’d actually been up on my toes since my first kiss years ago, half waiting to be kissed the way Fred Astaire kissed Ginger Rogers, bent backwards over his knee.” Smash mass-produced sexist fantasy! “We have been weaned on gross distortions of womanhood.… The positive images we must learn to accept and appreciate are the way we really look, who and what we really are.”28

  In Australia, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, feminist movements were also emerging, but the historic ties of women’s rights in those countries to the left and labor movements tempered the purity and self-righteousness with other commitments beyond the drama of Woman. The French movement would come slightly later, with its own ties to the left parties but also to the intellectual avant-garde.29 But in the United States, there was a single-minded fervor that came from emotional sources in the American radical tradition, reaching back to the abolitionists and their politics of moral outrage and redemption. The feminist’s task was to purge herself of false consciousness, distance herself from the unregenerate (men), and free others from oppression. Feminists saw themselves not so much as seeking power but as seeking rebirth: to live “clean,” “unfettered by the inhibitions and the trade-offs necessary in mainstream politics,” testified Dana Densmore of Boston’s ascetic Maoist sect Cell 16. “It was like the anticipation of the end of the world for early Christians.”30 These convictions of moral purity and the desire to bring others to a new life fired up but also consumed political aims.

  It was not the purist tenor of these early circles, however, but the ideas they generated, that gave feminism its strength and durability. The unworldly separatism petered out within a few years, relegated to a women’s counterculture of communes and music festivals. But the penetrating critique of life-as-women-lived-it was a point of contact between strangers and far-flung sympathizers, even when other signs of affiliation were absent. This was what Jane O’Reilly meant in 1971 when she described the “click,” feminist shorthand for the decisive moment when women’s eyes met across a room, in unspoken recognition of some outrage disguised as normal life, men’s petty dominion over women’s time, attention, labor, and self-esteem, whether expressed in monopolizing a conversation or expecting a female employee to take notes at a meeting.31 Life was saturated with political and moral meaning. The old rules were obsolete, but the new ones had yet to take root. By 1970, color-coded clothing for babies (pink for girls, blue for boys), the text of the marriage ceremony (“man and wife”), and the myth of the vaginal orgasm were all under indictment. In the turbulence of so many wrenching conflicts, resolution seemed to require nothing short of a clean sweep.32

  In spring 1968, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, followed by the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the Democrats’ nomination for president of Hubert Humphrey—whom radicals scorned for his equivocation on the Vietnam War—marked the collapse of any hope of a left-liberal coalition. The terms of invective—womanhood as we know it must go!—recast NOW as the tired liberals, feminism’s counterpart to Humphrey.

  NOW was “hopelessly bourgeois,” composed of appeasers who wanted a more equal share of the patriarchal-capitalist pie rather than a different pie altogether, a revolutionary pie.33 Radicals took their in-your-face aversion into the heart of NOW. In one notorious episode, Cell 16 members forced their way into a big 1969 national meeting in New York that NOW called to unite all feminist organizations. Cell 16 presented a riveting demonstration of militance: One woman cut off another’s luxurious long hair to illustrate what it meant to defy male-dominated beauty standards. From the audience, some women screamed with horrified dismay, others in wild approval. It was not what NOW had in mind.34

  Typically, feminist liberals’ identities and affiliations were already set in marriage and motherhood, professions and political commitments. They had histories in institutional settings—women’s groups, government, universities, political parties, trade unions, and professional elites—and they were accustomed to dealing with men in these settings. NOW had officers, charters, and membership dues, and operated according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Liberals pulled back from the rhetoric of revolution and the searing examinations of personal relations.

  The radicals, clustered in big cities, college towns, and universities, were younger and more labile in their sense of family and work options: generally unmarried and without children, students and recent college graduates starting out in careers or making do with menial jobs and low-paid political work, living in the cheap, roomy apartments that were the unrecognized bounty of the era. Some came out of a half decade or more of work in the New Left or the civil rights movement. They were overwhelmingly white. The New Left veterans had experience with direct action and mass protest (street demonstrations and sit-ins), and they were skilled in the uses of polarization—the art of maximizing political disagreements in order to rally the faithful around a radical position. They brought to women’s liberation a repertoire of protest tactics: large demonstrations, marches, dances, street theater, and daring “actions” accosting or attacking a purveyor of sexism. Women who had worked in the South brought skills in community organizing and civil disobedience. But as a political generation, they had virtually no experience—or interest—in pressure politics, legislative action, or elections.

  As in the New Left, disdain for age and political experience reigned. Tensions between liberals and radicals simmered in the political semiconscious, breaking out in brawls such as the hair-cutting drama. Liberals assumed the role of prudent mothers, urging patience and diplomacy—including amicable relations with men. For their willingness to improve women’s lives within capitalist society—instead of striving for revolution—they were treated as compliant housewives who fooled themselves that the system was receptive. Radicals were the daring daughters. “My friends and I thought of NOW as an organization for people our mothers’ age. We were movement girls, not career women; NOW’s demands and organizational style weren’t radical enough,” recalled Meredith Tax, in Boston at the time. “Besides, we were generational sectarians; we didn’t trust anybody over thirty.” Upstarts shoved aside veteran feminists who had worked for years in hard-pressed situations; they scorned the veterans’ belief in democratic process and their willingness to work with men. “The gung-ho gals,” Pauli Murray acerbically dubbed the radicals. Newcomers, she complained two years later, “tend to see older women as ‘passé’ and … do not have the same respect for and deference to older veterans as my generation does.”35 Depending on one’s vantage point, radical feminism was new and revolutionary, and NOW was passé and stodgy. Or, from the other angle, women’s liberation was self-destructive and foolish, and NOW was level-headed and practical.

  Still, the embattled and precarious state of feminism, its novelty, and its astonishing growth put radicals and liberals into close contact, personally and ideologically, often with creative results. One essential element in feminism’s astonishing takeoff was the fluidity of exchanges between the wings. Never entirely separate, these were more tendencies than clearly defined positions, sometimes merging in a force field across a center-left spectrum. A few leaders moved between the camps: The outré Flo Kennedy, a wisecracking African-American lawyer, was associated with NOW but shared the radical penchant for shocking conventional sensibilities. Lucinda Cisler headed NOW’s task force to legalize abortion and maintained contact with women’s liberation as well. The Italian-born actress Anselma Dell’Olio, cabaret performer and producer in New York, happ
ily traveled between establishment uptown and bohemian downtown. She preferred the uptown women, with their marriages and dinner parties and professional accomplishments and connections, “if for no other reason [than that] the establishment women had a lot more to lose.” But uptown or downtown, she later stressed, “there was an outpouring of ideas, brains, wit, and talent, the likes of which I have never experienced before.”36

  It was ideas and their application in personal circumstances that transmitted the identity of feminist. Ideology, with its connotations of dogma, is too strong a description; what spread was more a political sensibility, a disposition of the heart mixed with intellect. The inchoate mental structures were all the more important because women’s liberation lacked organizational structure, designated leaders, and specific goals. “Structurelessness” was a point of pride, authorizing ad hoc groups without any formal underpinnings or leaders (in point of fact, there were plenty of leaders who did dominate, although the tenets of absolute democracy worked to obscure their very real power).

  What accounts for the velocity with which the ideas moved out of urban circles and into the culture? One primary source of acceleration was the eager engagement of female journalists, whose age, metropolitan location, and college educations put them right in the center of the women’s liberation demographic. In other words, the media itself was a feminist venue. At the time (and ever since), conventional wisdom judged the media to be implacably hostile, a villain in the dramaturgy of embattled women fighting the patriarchal minions. The evidence, though, speaks to a more complicated interaction. Previously sidelined female journalists brought a measure of respect and sympathy to the subject, increased the coverage, and urged the average woman to take the radicals seriously.

  Media work was a daughter’s profession, a field for New Women since the 1910s. Journalism had long had a reputation as a glamorous profession for tough, adventurous women. The delicious screwball comedies of the 1930s imprinted the image in film. His Girl Friday (1940), for example, features an imperious, handsome, and impeccably dressed Rosalind Russell as the paper’s star reporter, striding through adoring crowds of men in the newsroom. The memory of the great female reporters and photojournalists of World War II—Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller—lingered, enticing the ambitious with the hope that with chutzpah and brains, a woman could really succeed in this man’s world. In Vietnam, a few daring reporters, such as the swashbuckling New York Times Vietnam correspondent Gloria Emerson, embodied the legend.

  But the promise was hollow. Women were overwhelmingly crowded at low levels in the print and broadcast media. An unwritten law divvied up jobs: The real writers, men, were on one side of the line, the researchers, women, on the other. Camaraderie—laced with the comforting fiction that men and women stood shoulder to shoulder in the task of getting out the news—tempered the inequalities, day by day. Friedan, a freelance writer and former reporter, knew the world firsthand and mentioned it in The Feminine Mystique as an example of frank discrimination that everyone, male and female, accepted. The woman journalist “doesn’t get mad; she likes her job, she likes her boss. She is not a crusader for women’s rights; it isn’t a case for the Newspaper Guild. But it is discouraging nevertheless. If she is never going to get anywhere, why keep on?”37

  Circa 1968–69, discrimination against women in the news media—flip that around, and you can call it preference for men—was the industry standard of the age: good-humored and unabashed. Editors turned down women who applied for reporters’ jobs if they were married to men who worked for other papers, on the principle that professional rivalry would hurt their marriages. If women did become reporters and feature writers, it was likely to be for the women’s or society section, covering fashion, recipes, and the goings-on of the rich and famous. Society was the one editor’s slot a woman could get. A few who managed to escape the ghetto became reporters, never to advance to editors or bureau chiefs. The National Press Club in Washington—the venue routinely chosen by world leaders visiting the United States to deliver major speeches—banned female reporters from the floor and relegated them to a stifling balcony where there was only room to stand, not sit. Male reporters went out to lunch at men’s clubs with male editors and the men they were interviewing.38 Serious treatments of women’s issues and women in the news was rare; they made it into the papers as party givers, consumers of recipes and fashion, and wives of famous men. Initially, the emerging women’s movement was slated to be trivialized within these terms, treated with flippancy or not at all.

  Journalism was thus a typically integrated field of the 1960s, laden with meritocratic promise but in actuality keeping hordes of women in dead-end jobs. Its very collegiality accentuated the contrast between smart, upwardly mobile men and smart, perpetually subordinate women. It was a hothouse of suppressed female resentments. Betsy Wade, who over two decades climbed the ladder to become a high-ranking editor—but never the managing editor—at The New York Times, described the atmosphere of jovial sexism when she took her first job as copy editor in 1956. The first woman ever to work in that position, she arrived the first day to find the men had put ruffles around the paste pot on her desk (copy editors cut up corrected galleys and pasted them on a proof sheet). They were gathered around waiting with a photographer to record the merry moment. Wade, looking back, mused on the photos from the day: “I look at those pictures now and I look at my face and I remember myself as I was so long ago, really unable—I couldn’t do anything. I was in a cage. I couldn’t pick up that paste pot and throw it in the wastebasket. I couldn’t tell the people to go away, I couldn’t tell them to stop taking my picture. I couldn’t say, ‘Just let me do what I have to do and let’s see if I can be good enough for this job.’ ”39

  Women in journalism were in a position to experience the contradictions of supposed meritocracy and equality firsthand. These were the contradictions that Title VII was supposed to fix, but the veneer of prejudice was so thick, the rationalizations for men’s superiority so dense, that it was impossible to conceive a plan of attack. Complaints to the EEOC wouldn’t do it. How to explain to male colleagues what was wrong with the little prank they played on Betsy Wade? Or, continuing with Wade, how could she object to the long-running show that a hostile male co-worker put on for her benefit for years? As a courtesy to the new woman, the management removed all the spittoons (a customary fixture of the hard-boiled male newsroom) when she started. But one man made his hostility known, by pointedly walking past her desk every day to dump the coffee can he used to spit in, now that the spittoons were gone. Wade’s challenge was not to gag. “A man behind him, who ran the national copy desk, had said he would resign his job if they ever put a woman on his desk. So there was a lot of traditionalism, that was holding on there,” Wade added, “despite the fact that I was not, I think, a conspicuous person.”40

  These structures meant that journalism was a field where the battle was joined early on. When feminism broke into the news in 1968, male editors (and editors were only male) assigned the subject to low-ranking women because it was “their” subject. What the men were not prepared for was that reporters liked and—worse—rallied to the new cause. In New York, the first overt challenge to sexism in the newspapers came from a young woman who stood right at the intersection of women’s liberation and the profession. Lindsay Van Gelder, a reporter for the New York Daily News, was two years out of Vassar College and a cub reporter in 1969 when she touched off the first skirmish of what became a protracted war in the media by refusing a demeaning assignment. Nineteen sixty-nine was a big year for the New York Mets, and Van Gelder got the woman’s job of interviewing pitcher Tom Seaver’s wife—known as Mrs. Tom Seaver. When she balked, her editor assigned her Mrs. Gil Hodges the next week, to teach her a lesson. That time she refused flat out and the editor fired her on the spot, violating the union contract under Newspaper Guild rules. The entire newsroom, including the printers, walked out. The upshot was that V
an Gelder got her job back and she never had to do the “wives interview” again.41 A routine matter—sending a woman out to cover the wife of a famous man—suddenly turned objectionable. You could say it was a controversy that revolved around a young woman’s sudden refusal to abide by the logic of the second sex.

  Small clashes touched off big battles in a city where NOW and women’s liberation were everywhere in evidence. Journalists were connected to both wings of the women’s movement through friends, and by 1971, feminist complaints rippled through The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, television networks, publishing houses, and a score of smaller operations. Female employees filed grievances with the city’s Human Rights Commission, as required by law, and then the EEOC.

  Editors found themselves in a bind—accustomed to assigning anything about women to female reporters, they found that those same reporters were too sympathetic to what they were covering. The accusation of “advocacy—of being too close” dogged women journalists. “You practically had to go in and take an oath that you didn’t believe in the women’s movement in order to cover the women’s movement,” Wade recalled caustically.42 It would have been unthinkable to deny an assignment to a reporter who was covering the civil rights movement, she pointed out, because he believed in desegregation. “But to have a woman cover the women’s movement?” Editors concerned about objectivity picked women known for their doubts about feminism, thinking they were commissioning a critical article, but they came up short. “Women’s Lib: The Idea You Can’t Ignore” in the middlebrow magazine Redbook was such a conversion story. The writer Sophy Burnham testified that she went into the assignment put off by stereotypes of hairy-legged bra burners and came out on the other side an angry feminist. “Suddenly I see no reason why one whole group of humanity is given intellectual satisfaction and another is given the satisfaction of motherhood.”43