by Gail Collins
A woman who was attracted to members of her own sex thus had an easy time hiding it, if she chose to do so. But she probably had a hard time putting her feelings in any positive context. “I thought I was the only person like that in the world,” said Carol Rumsey, who was 18 in 1960 when she felt stirrings for her girlfriend, the Jackie Kennedy look-alike. They were spending a last day together before the friend’s impending marriage, “and we went to the movies and it was cold in Connecticut—and we got in the backseat and we snuggled up and we were just talking and all of a sudden we kissed and that was, you know, the first time that ever happened to me.” And like many other women in her circumstances, Rumsey responded to her discovery by pretending nothing had changed and getting unhappily married.
At the time, while conservatives saw homosexuality as a sin, liberals saw it as an illness. (When Ms. began publication in 1971, an early issue assured readers that letting their sons play with dolls would not lead them into homosexuality, since “boys become homosexual because of disturbed family relationships, not because their parents allow them to do so-called feminine things.”) No one had much of anything positive to say about it. Time, which had put the author Kate Millett on the cover when it wrote a glowing article about the women’s liberation movement in 1970, rethought the whole issue when Millett acknowledged she was gay. The revelation about Millett’s sexuality, Time said, was “bound to discredit her as a spokesman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.”
Homosexuality was almost never referred to in the mainstream media, and when it was, the references were generally oblique—jokes that could go over the heads of more innocent readers and viewers. In the movies, gay characters were the cause of problems, if not disaster. In 1961 The Children’s Hour, starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, tackled the subject of lesbianism with sensitivity and an ending depressing enough to make the BUtterfield 8 finale look like a situation comedy. Hepburn’s and MacLaine’s characters, the owners of a boarding school for young girls, are falsely accused of having an “unnatural” affair by an extraordinarily unpleasant student. They sue unsuccessfully for libel, and the school is destroyed. Curiosity-seekers come to gawk outside the house, and MacLaine—who turns out to have been nursing a secret passion for her friend all along—hangs herself in the bedroom.
The first attempt by lesbians to organize publicly may have been the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1953 in San Francisco. (By 1970 the editors of their magazine, The Ladder, felt they had made enormous progress when they proudly estimated that each issue was read or at least seen by “approximately 1,200 people.”) Gene Damon, a writer for the magazine, said that to be a lesbian was to be regarded as “automatically out of the human race” and that she was constantly being asked questions such as “But what do you Lesbians do in the daytime?” Damon contributed an essay to the feminist book Sisterhood Is Powerful in 1970 that captured the feelings of persecution: “Run, reader, run right past this article, because most of you reading this will be women… and you are going to be frightened when you hear what this is all about. I am social anathema, even to you brave ones, for I am a Lesbian.”
“SOCIETY HAS BEGUN TO MAKE IT AS ROUGH FOR VIRGINS…”
The prophets of the sexual revolution had more in mind than simply eliminating the double standard. The big thought of the 1960s was that sex should become a perfectly natural part of everyday life, not much more dramatic and profound than a handshake. If people would just give up the idea of sex as a sacred act between a man and a woman eternally bonded together, the argument went, they could throw off their repressions and inhibitions. Sharing and good feeling would triumph over jealousy and negativism. The world could make love, not war. The other famous slogan of the ’60s—“If it feels good, do it”—might mean more than just an excuse for self-indulgence. It might mean a happier society or even world peace. The hippie movement in particular gave great credence to the idea that if people were busy taking off their clothes and coupling, they were not likely to be in the mood for more negative activity.
Alison Foster experienced that side of the sexual revolution very suddenly, after spending her first two years of high school at a private all-girls school in Manhattan with a very strong sense of decorum. “We had dances where they literally had a ruler—if you were dancing too close, the ladies would come and separate you.” She transferred in 1970 to a progressive boarding school, where she discovered a very different world. “Everybody was sleeping with everybody. Professors were sleeping with students. I had a poetry teacher sleeping with a tenth grader. We had professors modeling in the nude in our art classes. We had a lake that we would all skinny-dip in. So I went from what I thought was this very sophisticated New York girl to—oh my God, I am so over my head.” She loved the school. (“Everybody was talking about feelings. It was just the kind of thing I liked.”) But she saw the damage that the new theories about free love could do. “I had friends—they acted like it didn’t bother them, but they felt very bad the next morning when he didn’t call. I figured out pretty early on that I wasn’t going to do that. That I could figure out.”
The pressure to give in to the code of free love was a lot more difficult to resist when it was ideological as well as personal. A 1966 novel called The Harrad Experiment was an enormous hit on college campuses (to the tune of 2.5 million copies sold in a year and a half ), and it was one of those bestsellers that attracts readers with its ideas, not riveting prose or well-drawn characters. Harrad was the tale of a group of wholesome college students brought together to learn how to experience sex in a completely honest, open atmosphere. By graduation, the heroes and heroines have, as promised, taken “the long step away from primitive emotions of hate and jealousy” and formed a six-person group marriage. “Every Sunday when my new husband for the week joins me in my room, I feel like a new bride all over again,” reported one of the women. “Sometimes I wake up in the night and for a sleepy moment I may forget whether I am with Stanley, Jack, or Harry, and then I feel warm and bubbly.” As the curtain fell, they were on their way to settle in an underpopulated state out west, where they planned to take over the legislature and create a utopia where every young citizen would have the right to a free college education, along with cohabitation, nude beaches, and humanistic group sex.
The ideology of the sexual revolution meshed into another ’60s phenomenon, the political upheaval known as the New Left. Although young leftists came in all sorts of packages, many saw monogamy as just another form of private property, and free love as a kind of socialism of the flesh. “Certainly it was a time of fairly extensive sleeping around, a time when couples who remained monogamous were not proclaiming the fact from the rooftops,” said Priscilla Long, a writer and political activist. Jane Alpert, who had traveled a long road from her high school in Queens to a Lower East Side household of two men and two women in intertwining relationships, became suspicious of a new couple her lover wanted to bring into the circle. “I considered their intention to marry reason enough to exclude them,” she said.
Of course, if sex was all about sharing, anyone who refused to share was seen, in some quarters, as selfish or repressed or both. “I think there was subtle pressure,” said Pam Andrews. “You were a truly liberated person that was going to build a new world, a new idealistic world.” Women were still in charge of drawing the lines but were left with fewer arguments against going all the way. Rejected men told them they were sexually repressed or accused them of failing to sympathize with the fact that the men might be drafted for the war in Vietnam. At the time, one woman compared the men she knew to “rabbits,” adding, “It was so boring you could die.” While most women would not have wanted to go back to a time when they were expected to save themselves for the man they would marry, some did feel that things had gone overboard. “The invention of the Pill made millions for the drug companies, made guinea pigs of us, and ma
de us all the more ‘available’ as sex objects,” raged Robin Morgan. “If a woman didn’t want to go to bed with a man now she must be hung up.” Gloria Steinem wrote that “in the fine old American tradition of conformity, society has begun to make it as rough for virgins… as it once did for those who had affairs before marrying.”
8. Women’s Liberation
“A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF LIBERAL MOTHER-DAUGHTER CONFLICT.”
Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, was a Montana pacifist with extraordinary grit and unbelievably bad timing. She had been in office only four days in 1917 when she was called upon to vote on American entry into World War I. Her “nay” cost her the seat, and it took more than two decades before she was able to stage a comeback. Her constituents finally sent her to Washington again in 1941—just before Pearl Harbor was attacked. As the only member of the House to vote against going to war, she effectively ended her political career.
So what better name for a massive women’s protest against the war in Vietnam than the Jeannette Rankin Brigade? Rankin herself, still going strong at 87, volunteered to lead the march. It took place on the opening day of Congress in 1968 and drew five thousand demonstrators. Many of them were dressed in black, in memory of sons, brothers, and fathers lost in combat. It was the largest gathering of women for a political event since the suffrage days, and bringing all those people together had not been easy. The organizers had cast their nets wide, hauling in church groups, civil rights groups, labor groups, and community groups, as well as the usual antiwar coalitions. Their success made two things inevitable: First, although many marchers had been hoping to do something dramatic, such as civil disobedience with mass arrests, there was no way that an event involving so many respectable organizations was going to be anything but well-behaved. Second, when it came time for speeches, there were going to be a lot of them.
Washington police had turned out in force to make sure the marchers did not get anywhere near the Capitol grounds, and the protesters obediently stood across the street, shivering in the snow, while a few representatives delivered their antiwar petition to House and Senate leaders, who promised to refer it “to the appropriate committee.” Grumbling about lawmakers who didn’t have the courage to take on a bunch of “old ladies,” Rankin then led the demonstrators to their fallback destination—the Shoreham Hotel. There, they held a Congress of Women, in which that long list of speakers addressed the somewhat deflated protesters.
The speakers, like the audience, were mostly middle-aged veterans of earlier political struggles, from civil rights to labor organizing to protests against the testing of nuclear bombs. They had grown up in an era when any show of opposition to authority was widely viewed as subversive. Like the carefully dressed black students who sat in at the lunch counters in the South, they went out of their way to make a good impression, to convince people they were typical Americans, not Communist saboteurs. “You know, we’d get dressed in mink coats and hats and gloves to look like the woman next door,” said Amy Swerdlow of Women Strike for Peace, who was one of the organizers.
Suddenly, a group of younger, rowdier, scruffier women took the stage, carrying a papier-mâché coffin decorated with curlers, garters, and hair-spray cans. Beating on drums and tooting on kazoos, they sang a dirge to the corpse—a blank-faced, blond-haired dummy representing Traditional Womanhood “who passed with a sigh to her Great Reward… after 3,000 years of bolstering the egos of the Warmakers.”
This was not the way the women in the audience were used to conducting their events. Many of them had spent their lives trying to look as much as possible like Traditional Womanhood while they picketed the White House.
The performers were from New York Radical Women, a group that had been in existence for less than a year. While most of them had been involved in student protests and civil rights, they were making an initial foray into this particular world of older activist women. They passed out leaflets that denounced the march as too passive—all about “weakness, political impotence, and tears.” They called out to all “radical women” to join them at a countercongress—a protest against the protest—and marched off to another part of the hotel.
Swerdlow had a feeling that the women onstage were looking at the audience and resentfully seeing their own mothers, who went to college and then retired to conventional domesticity. New York Radical Women had representatives on the planning committee for the march, she recalled, “and they were giving us a hard time from the beginning.” Despite their status as the new group on the block, the younger women had bullied the organizers into paying for an extra hotel room to accommodate the countercongress that was going to be attacking them. It was, Swerdlow thought wryly, “a classic example of liberal mother-daughter conflict.”
Swerdlow walked over to the countersession, expecting to hear “more radical and militant strategies for ending the war.” Instead, she found young women “rushing to the mike to speak passionately, but often incoherently, about the way in which the traditional women’s peace movement condoned and even enforced the gender hierarchy in which men made war and women wept.” The gathering was so “chaotic,” Swerdlow wrote later, that most of the older women “came away more confused than enlightened, but definitely shaken.”
It was, in a way, the passing of a torch. Jeannette Rankin was a member of the first wave of twentieth-century American feminism, the rapidly dwindling band of suffragists who had won women the right to vote. Now the performers toting that papier-mâché coffin were heralding a second wave, which would become known as the women’s liberation movement.
The first wave won the ballot but failed to eliminate the wall between women and the male-controlled public world. The second wave wanted an equal role in everything—business, the arts, sports, politics, science, and academia. It had begun a couple of years earlier, in Betty Friedan’s hotel room in Washington. Now it was about to explode into a movement that included reformers such as Friedan and revolutionaries such as New York Radical Women, with countless students, factory workers, teachers, and housewives in between. It was a moment when history opened up to every woman who was ready to join a march, start a consciousness-raising group, or give her daughter a baseball and bat for Christmas.
The movement’s various factions had little in common. The reformers did not want to overthrow the existing system—they wanted to open the gates so that women could become part of it. And they had little interest in changing the rules for private relationships between men and women. “This is not a bedroom war. This is a political movement,” Friedan said. They envisioned themselves—and their daughters—marrying and having children while also sitting in corporate boardrooms or running for Congress. The leaders of the radical wing of the women’s movement wanted to go much farther than simply leveling the playing field when it came to things like job opportunities. They were going to examine everything about American womanhood—in fact, about womanhood back to the time of the pharaohs. They intended to figure out what had kept their sex in such a secondary role. And then they were going to free women to be all they could be, even if that meant getting rid of capitalism or the nuclear family or the Judeo-Christian tradition, or anything else that got in the way. They were convinced that the things that were tormenting them in their private lives were really political. If you could connect all the dots and examine the patterns, you could identify the patriarchal forces that were keeping women down. They wanted to talk about everything from rape as a tool of male domination to the habit younger men had of referring to younger women as “chicks.” Could a husband and wife really be equal partners or was marriage just a romantic form of serfdom? Was motherhood the most fulfilling role possible or a tool of male domination? Did high-heeled shoes remind anybody of foot binding?
American women were about to experience an extraordinary period of change that would undo virtually every assumption about the natural limitations of their sex. It was going to be a journey of many parts—terrifying and
exhilarating, silly and profound, a path to half-realized dreams, unexpected disappointments, and unimaginable opportunities.
“COOL DOWN, LITTLE GIRL.”
The women who had been in their early teens in 1960 when Mademoiselle worried they might be too conservative to do anything interesting had wound up frolicking nude at Woodstock, shutting down college campuses to protest the war, and running off to the Summer of Love in San Francisco with flowers in their hair. They had come of age at a time of constant public turmoil. Those who had been freshmen in high school when President Kennedy was assassinated were freshmen in college when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. There were 167 urban riots in 1967 alone, and the next year, when Dr. King was killed, the nation’s cities seemed to be burning from coast-to-coast. They had watched the war in Vietnam go sour on the evening news, and the draft made it extremely personal. “One of the things I remember most vividly from my college years was sitting in front of the television set the first night they had the draft,” said Laura Sessions Stepp. Picking dates by lottery, the Selective Service System revealed which young men’s birthdays would doom them to be called up first and which would have numbers so high they were unlikely to be drafted at all. “They would read off the number, and I remember this guy Steven—his number was one of the first, and it was like, oh my God. And he just sat there. He was actually picked while we were watching TV. And there was a lot of sobbing and crying and it was horrible.”
