The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Because New York set the terms for news coverage, local ties between feminists and journalists influenced the national picture. Women’s liberation provided great material. Radicals revived the tactics of publicity-grabbing spectacle that feminists in the early century had used to such good effect. Certain groups could be counted on for wild theatrics, “freaky, neo-Dada actions,” as the downtown art critic Jill Johnston described them. Take the 1970 Wall Street Ogle-In. A human interest story in the news that spring concerned boyish antics on Wall Street, where a crowd of men gathered around a particular subway stop to hoot and leer as a woman notorious for her large breasts came up the stairs on her way to work. Feminists bent on evening up the score descended on Wall Street one morning before the New York Stock Exchange opened, with a TV producer and crew along for the fun. The group ogled, whistled, hooted, and hurtled remarks about the physical endowments of bankers and traders as they hurried to work. In the terms of the times, this was direct action and guerrilla theater. But we could also see it as a tactic lodged deep in the memory of the sex, a latter-day enactment of the carnival pastime of turning the world upside down, the men turned into the mocked, women into the mockers.44

  The actions were all the more exciting because it was women doing them. “Get the bra burning and the karate up front,” editors were known to demand once they came around to the appeal. “Women’s liberation is hot stuff this season, in media terms,” reported the young feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller in 1970, not without satisfaction. Book editors dangled lucrative contracts before aspiring writers: Doubleday turned English professor Kate Millett’s doctoral thesis in English literature, a polemic against the misogyny of male writers, into the bestselling Sexual Politics (1970). TV talk shows invited radical feminists to appear to explain themselves. The media attention was so aggressive that some groups took a disdainful attitude to the press, first banning male reporters and then banning all reporters.45

  NOW also learned how to get media attention. Muriel Fox, a New York advertising executive and a charter member, made sure that protests and demonstrations made the news. On August 26, 1970, NOW staged a huge Women’s Strike for Equality on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification, replete with slogans and sound bites that could survive hostile coverage.46 The Women’s Strike for Equality, which had sister demonstrations that day in cities across the country, combined the orderly march and list of demands with enticing hints of wildcat actions: Friedan announced that Boston women would distribute four thousand cans of contraceptive foam and that “we’re going to bring babies for a baby-in to sit on the laps of city fathers to show the need for child care centers in New York.” She hinted that women everywhere just might take the day off from ironing, cooking, and making love.47

  Among both radicals and liberals, media-ready figures appeared, sometimes entrancing, sometimes fearsome but consistently newsworthy. Some were beautiful: Gloria Steinem, with long legs, a gorgeous mane of blond hair, and a model’s sculpted features. Some were eloquent: Betty Friedan looked like a frowsy suburban housewife, but her imperious intonation was oddly mesmerizing. Some were slapstick comics: Rita Mae Brown, remembered as “a lesbian Huck Finn with curly short hair and intense dark eyes,” a self-styled Southern rascal who on occasion upstaged Friedan herself; Flo Kennedy, a middle-aged lawyer who upended the stereotype of the respectable, socially conscious African-American lady with foul-mouthed wisecracks and harangues against “this fucking business” (i.e., sex) and “the chocolate covering on the shit of housewifery.” Some were seasoned media personalities: Robin Morgan had been a child actress on television and radio in the 1950s. And some were scary, humorless zealots like the hard-core Cell 16 of Boston, who specialized in martial arts and required a vow of celibacy, so counterrevolutionary did they see any form of sex.48

  What is remarkable is that the journalists managed to frame feminism as a serious matter, worthy of consideration. At the most basic level, the mainstream media provided information about what feminists were protesting, thereby disseminating the terms of grievance and widening the circle of the aggrieved. Articles in magazines from Esquire to Ladies’ Home Journal to Cosmopolitan to Time presented a variety of voices and topics, from the silly and self-dramatizing to the serious and timely. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, a genteel magazine of cultural and political commentary, published a special women’s issue in 1970 covering a range of subjects, from the law to men’s place in feminism to job discrimination. The Atlantic stressed more palatable issues and downplayed thornier ones. There were brisk, informative articles about combating discrimination in the labor market and the law, and cogent discussions of gender stereotypes, mixed in with a few mellifluous objections in order to lend balance. “The word feminism is outmoded,” sniffed Catherine Drinker Bowen, a wealthy writer of an earlier generation who had made a successful career as a biographer of great men. Yet for all her haughty dismissal of the feminist hoi-polloi, she took the occasion to express her own resentment of the prejudices she had endured in her working life. Others in The Atlantic angled to position themselves in the emerging genre of middle-of-the-roaders, the smug “I’m an independent woman but I’m oh-so-happy in my marriage and family” testimonial.49

  True, ridicule was the media’s default pose. A Time article on the Women’s Strike for Equality saw the march as a spectacle of sexiness: “They took over the entire avenue, providing not only protest but some of the best sidewalk ogling in years.”50 Exotic stereotypes made good copy. A portrait of a glowering Kate Millett in a karate outfit was Time’s cover on the eve of the march. The lead article cast Millett as angry, hurt, and full of invective, spewing distrust and dislike of men. But even negative reportage spread the news to eager recipients who received it as anything but preposterous.

  The coverage reached millions, far from the cities. Marlene Sanders, high-ranking producer and a NOW charter member, produced a documentary on women’s liberation for ABC and inadvertently brought in converts. A teenager sent her a note scrawled in a juvenile hand: “can you give me some information on how I can joint The Womens Liberation and how do I write to. I am 15 years old. What do you think about it.” Another viewer, a Kentucky woman who cared for other people’s children for a living (“babysitting”), wrote to ask advice on how she could rectify her situation: “Miss Sander’s I want to be literated also—will you please tell me what is an equitable wage for 10 hours—(a day). And how I should word my ad.”51

  It was a fruitful collaboration between activists, journalists, and an audience in formation. Veteran New York Times staffer Eileen Shanahan, the paper’s star economic reporter, remembered covering the women’s movement as “the happiest experience I ever had as a reporter.” “It was as blissful for me as for any twenty-year-old, maybe more so, because I knew what discriminations were out there.” The journalists gave militance a national platform, and women’s liberation gave journalists a platform for their own fight. Newsweek women, for example, held a press conference to announce they were filing a grievance with the EEOC the same day in 1970 that the magazine’s big feature “Women’s Lib: The War on ‘Sexism’ ” appeared.52

  Journalists learned to make their own protests into media events. The collaboration underlay a famous 1970 sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal. Media Women, having alerted the reporters and TV networks, descended on the magazine’s offices with a crowd of a hundred women—journalists and sympathizers—to accuse editor John Mack Carter of injuring the entire sex by publishing the lies and delusions of standard women’s magazine fare. The invaders occupied the office for ten hours, cameras rolling. The sit-in was notably free of rancor. In the newsreel footage, everyone seems to be having a good time, from the cheerful, occasionally bored-looking demonstrators to the handsome Carter, who lounges at his desk with his chair tilted back as he parries their charges, his body language connoting bemused condescension. The protesters’ demands concerned both the asinine content of the magazine and its
employment practices: a man as editor, women concentrated at the bottom of the hierarchy and pay scale, the absence of any African-American staff, and no child care.53

  Here the attack was not only about discriminatory policies but also cultural stereotypes that the media purveyed. The demonstration unfurled like a “speak bitterness” session in China’s Cultural Revolution, with prosecutorial leaders taking turns confronting Carter with articles and ads from the Journal while the crowd cheered and heckled. The list of evils included virtually every vicarious delicacy of women’s magazine fare: pieces about celebrities, food, makeup, fashion, and “all articles oriented to the preservation of youth.” The denunciation of beauty obsessions and the mandate to please men tied the charges together. The message, a demonstrator sneered, was “better stay young … beautiful … keep this marriage going.”

  Thus in two years’ time the press became a local forum as well as a platform for the entire country. Feminists were heroines of a big story. The coverage emboldened women—both the subjects of the writing and the readers—drew in recruits, and charged up political action that much more. New protagonists pushed into the political community, women who had been on the margins of other 1960s radical movements or hadn’t participated at all.

  The process by which an individual put “the personal is political” into motion was called “consciousness-raising.” Because women’s liberation put so much stress on the psychological dimensions of sexism, consciousness-raising was more fundamental to being feminist than joining an organization or taking action. Raising consciousness was action, the pivotal action, because it was necessary to shear away so many assumptions. Before anyone could be effective as a feminist, she must see that her problems were not hers alone. The point was to realize that most women—perhaps all of them—had troubled, painful relationships with men: bosses, family members, teachers, and male authorities of any kind. Consciousness-raising could occur in many settings: when a woman was reading feminist literature, talking to friends, or writing in her journal.54 Beginning with New York Radical Women in late 1968, feminists established small talking groups to make consciousness-raising systematic. The goal was to replace the false with the true.

  The term was an offshoot of the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” the distorted view of the world that kept workers in thrall to capitalism instead of rising up in proletarian revolution. Culture was to blame, because misogyny pervaded all previous knowledge about women. Thus women themselves, speaking without inhibitions, were the sole repositories of truth. But in normal settings, patriarchal authorities blinded them to their oppression. In order to bring buried truths to light and apprehend the real state of things, they must listen to one another in a trustworthy setting. “We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture,” decreed Redstockings. “We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.”55

  The point was changed consciousness, a comprehension of how structures of male power shaped the deepest, most intimate experiences. The aim was “to develop knowledge to overthrow male supremacy” in all its immensity. Yet personal experience was the slingshot that was to be aimed at this Goliath; thousands of slingshots together could bring down the behemoth. Redolent of the therapeutic encounter groups of the 1960s human potential movement, consciousness-raising (or “C-R”) groups turned self-awareness into political pedagogy and, in theory, inspiration for action. Groups met in apartments and women’s centers. A question kicked off the discussion, with members sharing their experiences in (supposedly) equal measure. “Discuss your relationships with men. Have you noticed any recurring patterns?” “When you think about having a child, do you want a boy or a girl?” Stories of families, marriages, love affairs, professional slights, men’s emotional thuggery, mothers’ wrongdoing, broken hearts, and thwarted ambitions entered a stream of political narrative, refashioned into home truths of sexist oppression, the dark side of American womanhood revealed. Grievance seeded grievance.56

  The excitement of doing politics in an entirely novel way, so intimate, so different from the mass actions of the antiwar movement, crackled through the experiment. Women laughed over dating experiences, debated the pros and cons of being married or single, discussed their parents’ marriages and their hopes for their own families. They talked about their bodies—feeling fat, feeling ugly—and being afraid to go out after dark. Some revealed that they had been raped or molested. Women mulled over their surnames, some deciding to shuck husbands’ and fathers’ names to announce their newfound independence. They talked about lack of confidence, their shame about sex, their resentments of brothers’ seemingly better deal in the family, their gnawing timidity.

  The groups, however, were seldom the loving communities of sisterly support that promoters described. The process could be embarrassing and intrusive. For all the claims that they were havens for authentic truth, they unquestionably laid down a party line. Some revelations counted, others were whisked aside. Testimonies to good-enough marriages, supportive fathers, and the pleasures of motherhood were not especially welcome. If an intrepid participant ventured something in this vein, the group tended to twist her story to bring it in line with prevailing wisdom.57

  But despite the psychological clumsiness, consciousness-raising was inspired. The groups did much more than modernize the age-old women’s practice of complaining to one another about men. They churned out a huge database on which feminists could draw, revelations about the hidden dramas of women’s lives. The resulting critique of patriarchal society, elaborated many times over in writing, artistic work, and political dialogue, contained brilliant ideas about what, exactly, went into the making of modern womanhood and revealed a disturbing asymmetry between the fates of the brothers and the sisters in liberal, prosperous, meritocratic America.58

  Discoveries were data for a burgeoning ethnography of the gendered self, a kind of top-to-bottom, inside-out, and outside-in account of femininity that developed at a breakneck pace. The Second Sex was a text of conversion. “Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex opened doors for me!” a self-described grandmother, an avowed convert, chirped to the women’s liberation monthly Off Our Backs in 1972.59 Almost certainly, more women knew about the book or owned the book than read the book. As A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been in the nineteenth century, the volume was as much a flag that women planted to claim a position as it was a text absorbed chapter and verse. But its core insight, that women are made not born, was a reagent that worked its way through the tissue of women’s lives, dissolving norms and assumptions that had only a short time before seemed facts of nature.

  The making of women seemed bound up with the business of men: that is, the labor and thought women devoted to attracting, pleasing, and mollifying men, bearing and raising their children, tending their domestic, sexual, and psychological needs. While the business of men clearly involved fathers and male authorities, the stress was on peers—lovers, husbands, workmates, roommates, political comrades. It was above all the fictive brother-friends whom consciousness-raising exposed as woefully inadequate. Whereas liberals made the inclusion of men a point of pride, radicals sought to jettison the desire for male companionship as foolish and self-destructive.

  The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,

  the lost brother, the twin—

  for him did we leave our mothers,

  deny our sisters, over and over?

  asked Adrienne Rich.

  By the late 1960s, the patina of companionship and camaraderie that glossed different versions of twentieth-century heterosexuality for women was patchy, rubbed bare by the hypocrisy of the sexual revolution. On the left, the fantasies of the 1960s blended dreams of living happily ever after with utopian fancies of sexual freedom. Radicals spurned monogamy for its possessiveness and roots in bourgeois life and conflated marriage with the property relations of capitalism. The most advanced believed the future lay with
multiple love affairs and communal households, as if they were channeling Fourier. But, as in the nineteenth century, free love was a mixed blessing for women, more of a license for men’s traditional philandering than a new deal for sex. The double standard persisted; in the counterculture and SDS, nasty gossip swirled around female sexual adventurers while men gained in reputation for their erotic conquests and profligacy—usually at the expense of the women they slept with.

  The sex could be bad—as women testified in C-R groups—organized around men’s needs, not women’s. And in communal households, men slept around, did drugs, and pontificated on the coming revolution along with their female comrades; but when it came time to scrub the bathtub or put the children to bed, the responsibility was women’s. No matter how disaffected or distanced from the American status quo, men were accustomed to seeing women in subordinate positions, and they defined themselves to some extent through their superiority, just like the fathers they maligned.

  Marriage was thus an easy target for women’s liberation. Blending the New Left’s dislike of monogamy as bourgeois with a quickened understanding of male/female power relations, radical feminists produced a view of marriage as bleak and scabrous as any account since Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the desperate women she saw dancing their fates out in the meat markets of English society balls. “Marriage is the model for all other forms of discrimination against women,” asserted Sheila Cronan from New York, unknowingly evoking centuries of protest. Emotionally speaking, “wife” took shape as an inherently degraded identity. One divorced woman’s dictum that “I have come to view marriage as a built-in self-destruct for women” was a commonplace sentiment.60