The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Pauli Murray had consistently maintained since 1963 that the two battles for civil rights should be linked. By 1969, she was one of the few prominent black women to argue for an interracial movement. Otherwise, she believed civil rights and feminism would die. Only black women could make the necessary, sustaining connection between the two. Thus she affirmed a key insight of many years of work. “The most essential instrument for combating the divisive effects of a black-only movement is the voice of black women insisting upon the unity of civil rights of women and Negroes as well as other minorities.” Always an integrationist, Murray was convinced that separatism undermined effective democratic movements. Her 1970 article, “Liberation of Black Women,” challenged men’s monopoly on articulating African-American aspirations. She stressed the historic bond of the sexes in race politics but maintained that it was now the woman’s era: “The Negro woman’s fate in the United States, while inextricably bound with that of the Negro male in one sense, transcends the issue of Negro rights.” She pushed it further. It was white women who were black women’s “natural allies”—an unpopular position then, and unpopular ever since.108

  Murray’s devotion to feminism isolated her from younger black women, and her dedication to labor causes and civil rights separated her from young white women. Mixing up issues, weighing one set of concerns against another, and finding common ground made someone like Murray appear less feminist than the newly minted radicals, with their insistence on a sisterhood (on the one hand) or race solidarity (on the other) free of what were supposedly distracting and diluting concerns with other people’s issues.

  In NOW, Murray opposed decisions she saw as leading to a movement “confined almost solely to ‘women’s rights’ without strong bonds with labor and civil rights.” Long before academics invented theories of polyvalent identity and intersections between class, race, and gender, Murray insisted that people could not be fenced off in little plots. She was not only a woman, nor was she only black: “And since, as a human being, I cannot allow myself to be fragmented into Negro at one identity, woman at another, or worker at another, I must find a unifying principle in all of these movements to which I can adhere.”109 “The Liberation of Black Women,” prescient in so many ways, made no ripples in the radical feminist press, which was preoccupied with racism in a different key—racial guilt and breast-beating, pointing fingers, soul-searching, and endorsing the far-fetched claims of male black militants.

  In print, a few others mused on the benefits of allying with white women yet found it next to impossible. Celestine Ware, one of the few African-Americans in New York women’s liberation, couched her reflections in hypotheticals: Both black and white women would have to change by altering their relationships to men. “If women of both races see their problems as originating in female dependency on men and in their self-contempt, then women will make a revolution.”110 The language of real gender identities, imported from black power’s emphasis on authentic black manhood, surfaced the next year in Toni Morrison’s biting distinction in The New York Times between white women, always fancying themselves ladies but really acting like children, and black women, the real women.

  Yet at the same time, Morrison was alert: “The winds are changing, and when they blow, new things move.” She was lyrical, and she was practical. She liked the recent formation of the National Women’s Political Caucus and its goal of increasing female representation in Congress and the two parties. “A hard-headed power base,” she believed, “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights.” Something, she added, outside white men and women’s family quarrel, “and the air is shivery with possibilities.” Morrison thus expressed qualified interest—a reserve that was both critical and tinged with curiosity—about the feminist movement.111

  Reading the reminiscences today, you can’t fail to notice how wrong were the wrongs of women that radical feminists brought to light and how right they were to object. Men didn’t do the housework, not one bit, and even loving fathers made a habit of squirreling out of anything except special Sundays with their children. Women faked orgasms and male lovers balked when partners asked them to change their ways. Little girls could not play baseball or much of anything at all, and teachers shoved them away from math and science. Those were stunning realizations, there in plain sight, but no one had really noticed before. The absence of the subject of women in the entire university curriculum, for instance: Women discovered that they could graduate from the best institutions of higher learning in the country and never read a book about women, or by a woman, in any discipline.

  Under scrutiny, norms and practices buckled, and while victory was remote, benchmarks were set. With the New Left collapsing and the black power movement running aground, women’s liberation was the 1960s survivor, entering the 1970s with powerful ideas and an ardent mass following. Yet the translation of stunning insights into bringing about changes in the here and now was hindered by the dogma that nothing short of absolute change would do. Radical feminists raised questions but came nowhere near wielding the power to demand that they be settled, and in important ways they refused to articulate any ways in which they could be resolved. The purist zeal, impatience with compromise, and cynicism about working with men meant that by default the liberals, who had room for all these impurities in their tactics, took over the job of doing politics on the inside. Women’s liberation instead moved to a footing of permanent opposition. “The phenomenon of pushing a new issue forward and watching the vision play out pragmatically was a dilemma for them,” mused Susan Brownmiller, who was, at the time, one of “them.”112

  In 1970, though, none of this mattered. Time and history seemed on the side of the daughters, conferring on them a heroic role in a drama of world-changing importance. A landmark article in New York’s alternative paper The Village Voice by Vivian Gornick summed up the zeitgeist: “The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs.” When a feminist volume reprinted the essay, Gornick kicked off the traces and changed the pronoun: “The Next Great Moment in History Is Ours.”113

  CHAPTER NINE

  POLITICS AS USUAL AND UNUSUAL POLITICS

  CONFIDENCE CARRIED feminism into the next decade, a belief across the spectrum that, indeed, the moment belonged to women. The early successes were encouraging enough that at times rapprochement between generations took hold. Tensions remained, yet radicals and liberals sometimes worked in tandem in what came to be called the women’s movement—a designation more neutral and anodyne than “feminist.” Liberals depended on the militants to embolden the ranks and stir up publicity. Radicals gained credibility from the liberals’ successes in law and legislation and used them as springboards to stake out new grounds for agitation. Encouraged by solid achievements, black feminists began to organize independently. A vast middle of onlookers massed on solid ground of sympathetic public opinion.

  Success drew in more women, until by 1975 certain suppositions of the women’s movement held across the culture. Even the New Right, which took on feminism with a vengeance in the 1970s, conceded the basic principle that women had a right to equal pay and equal treatment at the hands of the law. “Equal pay for equal work” turned into as unimpeachable a principle as the value of motherhood—never mind the vast ambiguities as to how to go about honoring the precept.

  This sketch goes against most histories and memoirs, which tell a story of steep declension from the golden years of militance. And it is true that countercultural institutions and emblems disappeared or declined: women’s centers, underground newspapers, bralessness, consciousness-raising groups. The 1970s women’s movement sidelined the sensational assertions about beauty, marriage, men, and motherhood. Yet the collapse of the student left amid recriminations and infighting actually bequeathed a more flexible temperament, encouraging pragmatic skills that allowed some women to enter the high-stakes game of politics as usual in Congress and the state legislatures. The claims of 1970s feminism were less extravagant and shockin
g, the protagonists less colorful; mainstream adaptations blunted the most brilliant and incisive analyses and the bravura demonstrations. Many achievements were workaday compromises, dilutions of grander visions. But they were solid and enduring, with unanticipated consequences that gave feminism a strong voice in the country’s life.

  It was liberal feminism, with NOW as the standard-bearer, that modified and transmitted ideas that originated with women’s liberation through a network that reached deep into the heartland.1 No state except Hawaii lacked a NOW chapter. There were outposts in Lake Havasu City, Arizona; Anchorage, Alaska; Weld County, Colorado; Wilmington, Delaware; Moscow, Idaho; and Orlando, Florida. Predictably, groups cropped up in California and along the East Coast: California eventually counted forty-eight chapters, followed by New York state with thirty-eight and New Jersey with nineteen. The organization had a healthy presence in the South. Over the course of the 1970s, Florida actually outdid New Jersey, with twenty-six chapters; North Carolina had ten; Virginia, thirteen; Texas, twenty-one. Clusters of five to ten chapters even appeared in the Deep South, historic stronghold of antifeminism: in the big cities, of course (Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta) but also in smaller places: Meridian, Mississippi; Huntsville, Alabama. West of the Mississippi, chapters were scarcer, and so all the more noteworthy: Kalispell, Montana, a ranching town of ten thousand near the Canadian border; Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas (suburbs of Kansas City).2

  The purpose and force of chapters varied. Some were as evanescent as women’s liberation groups, twenty or so women coming together, publishing a newsletter, throwing a few rummage sales, signing on to NOW national campaigns and then folding. Others lasted years. One typical small chapter was in Knox County, Ohio, a classic middle-American locale, where I happened to grow up. Knox County was forty miles north of Columbus, the state capital, but in the early 1970s it was distant from urban influences. The county seat, Mount Vernon, was a small manufacturing town, overwhelmingly white and highly conservative, ready to jail long-haired hippies simply for the crime of sitting on the town square—“disturbing the peace” by their very presence. The NOW chapter was based in nearby Gambier, a village built around the liberal outpost of Kenyon College.3

  The members, mostly women employed by the college or attached through their husbands, typified the NOW demographic: workingwomen and liberal homemakers. The chapter formed in 1975, a year of uproar at Kenyon, when women faculty’s bottled-up grievances tumbled out of backrooms into government agencies. A philosophy professor denied tenure filed a complaint with the EEOC; her action seems to have broken what amounted to a female vow of silence. In the next months, three women resigned, one sued the college, more complained to the EEOC, and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission launched an investigation of the college. By the end of the year, supporters discovered more complaints going back to 1971: eleven all told, in four years.4

  Knox County NOW displayed a feisty spirit yet took few actions; when it did, it was about injecting the newly claimed identity of feminist into the social practices of the Midwest. The women offered workshops that sought to attract converts, the themes straddling the line between self-help and consciousness-raising: sex discrimination at work, employment rights, female sexuality, rape, and abortion. The emphasis on assertiveness training, not yet the cliché it later became, aimed to turn the psychology of the second sex into an insistence on decent treatment. The chapter newsletter alerted the troops to feminist victories nearby. Cleveland NOW was taking on the Cub Scouts because they wouldn’t let a woman serve as Cub Master! The news appeared as a delightful vignette—so middle-American, the Cub Scouts—because it spoke of a gender order elsewhere being challenged, even as it would have seemed nearly immovable in Knox County.

  Midwestern hatred of nonconformity put newly politicized women under tremendous social pressure in places like central Ohio. “Libber” was the epithet detractors hurled. Local chapters’ connections to national NOW thus helped shore up positions that were treated at home as ridiculous or weird. Everywhere, but especially in middle America, NOW membership offered connections to a wider world: for one, travel to big cities, a precious perquisite of women’s movements since the nineteenth century, when delegates went to regional, state, and national meetings. Stars from New York appeared at state conventions to stir up the faithful: Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy, great stump speakers, were favorites. National NOW distributed commercial knickknacks that conferred the dignity of insignia, protective regalia in a hostile environment: Susan B. Anthony note cards, bumper stickers and ashtrays with the Woman Power symbol, T-shirts, and calendars.

  In cities and metropolitan areas, activity was more purposeful and concentrated. Greater numbers, a higher degree of political sophistication, and ties to major news outlets put these chapters at the forefront of the women’s movement. Princeton, New Jersey, NOW, for example, composed mostly of academics and professionals, started a full-day child-care center that was a model of professional staffing and state-of-the-art facilities. The group helped produce a 105-page, richly detailed study of sex stereotypes and prejudice in high school civics textbooks, which became a pioneering work in the field of curriculum change. It was one spur to Congress to pass the Women’s Educational Equity Act in 1974—a prime example of how local initiatives might end up helping secure major gains.5

  Demonstrations with picket lines, chanting, and signs were relatively easy to stage in this era when left liberals retained the habit of taking to the streets. Some of the most enjoyable and successful were against men-only facilities, common in the early 1970s: the posh Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan; McSorley’s Ale House, a bohemian haunt in downtown New York; the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills; a businessmen’s grill in a Minneapolis department store. Desegregation protests evoked the indisputable justice of 1960s civil rights battles against white-only restaurants. As Friedan told it, “Virtually every woman had experienced or known someone who’d been told, ‘No, we don’t serve women.’ ” Spirits were high in these affairs; the pleasure came from spurning good-girl manners and heckling male patrons, those middle- and upper-class businessmen and professionals who thought they were entitled to indulge in the simple pleasures of a stag bar where the only women were likely to be well-dressed prostitutes.6

  Urban chapters had resources dense enough to support ongoing campaigns against sex discrimination, which smaller local chapters did not. Internal changes in NOW, spurred by Friedan’s sense of feminism as a movement that stood on its own, had severed the links that bound the organization in its early years to organized labor; ties to the civil rights movement also atrophied. This meant that NOW members tended to be middle-class, nonunionized white women. Still, the connection to job issues remained strong. Cleveland, Ohio, NOW was typical in the several fronts on which members pursued fair employment. In 1973 the group pressured the chief of police to hire women after a local woman filed a lawsuit against the department’s cadet program. The same year, they touted ads for jobs that were once male only but now open to women (“The National Guard Needs You!”) and sought complainants who had been fired from the school system because they were pregnant.7

  From the first stirrings of the women’s movement during the Kennedy administration, liberals pondered how to translate ideas into political power. It was not easy. NOW learned in the 1960s how to bring pressure, but not how to initiate legislation and policy. As of 1970, feminists still had no standing in the political parties and no experience in creating bills and navigating them out of the hearing room and into the legislative mainstream. Yet, strangely, two years into the Nixon administration, the situation in Washington looked propitious for those willing to take the plunge. Although there were virtually no women in Congress, both parties harbored pockets of support for women’s rights measures. Democrats controlled both houses and were generally sympathetic. On the one hand, the furious politics of the Vietnam War overwhelmed Washington, but on the other, the war distracted, allowing libera
l social welfare and regulatory legislation to slip through: for example, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the expansion of Medicaid and Medicare, and the administration’s support for affirmative action guidelines for minorities and women.8

  As for Richard Nixon, the president had a distant and ambivalent attitude to feminism. He was “schizophrenic,” a Republican feminist high up in the party in that era described him, not known for his interest but also not for his opposition.9 Nixon was working all the while on crafting a new Republican majority, one that would use conservative positions on civil rights and social issues to pull away Northern ethnic and Catholic voters from their long allegiance to the Democratic Party. The plan was to merge these newly won voters with Southern whites who had broken with the Democrats over civil rights, as well as with traditional Republican constituents. But in the early 1970s, Republican strategists had not yet spotted opposition to the women’s movement as an opportunity. Nixon equivocated on women’s issues, sometimes signaling support, sometimes pulling back. The woman he appointed to head the Women’s Bureau, Elizabeth Koontz, was an African-American associated with NOW, and in his second term he took care to appoint more women to federal office than any of his predecessors. He did not object to a decent women’s plank in the Republican Party platform in the 1972 election, and he supported the ERA. Yet he attacked legal abortion when New York liberalized its law in 1969, a notable presidential meddling in a state matter.