by Gail Collins
“The battles!” Fox recalled. “You had to go to every board meeting because you didn’t know what was going to be passed.” Many of the gatherings were held at the Fox apartment and went on endlessly. It was, Muriel understated, a very intense time. “People would end up lying on the floor. Not only from sleepiness but from total stress.” Among other things, Atkinson and her supporters wanted to eliminate conventional officers and choose leaders by lot, with a great deal of rotation. It was part of a growing sentiment in the radical side of the women’s movement that there should be no leaders, no “stars,” and that every person’s opinion had equal weight. When their proposals were rejected, Atkinson led them off to establish a group of their own.
In December of that “worst year,” Fox picked up the newspaper and found that the Times had, after years of resistance, eliminated its separate male and female help-wanted ads. The original NOW agenda, she was reminded, had been moving briskly along. “I said. ‘Okay, I guess it was all worth it.’ ”
“WOULD YOU BELIEVE A BRA BURNING?”
The nation as a whole had little inkling that anything new was going on with American women until September 1968, when Robin Morgan, whose experience as a former TV child star made her a creative feminist event planner, came up with an idea for a Miss America demonstration.
The Miss America pageant in Atlantic City had been the most-watched program on television in the early 1960s. The cultural upheaval of the decade had begun to dent its appeal a bit, but Miss America was still regarded by many as the icon of youthful beauty and grace—“the queen of femininity,” as its theme song went. It was the one program that President Nixon said he let his daughters, Julie and Trisha, stay up late to watch. The entrants were judged for their beauty in swimsuits and evening wear; for their talent in a much-satirized competition that usually included both classical singing and flaming baton-twirling; and for their poise in answering questions such as “What do you think is the secret to attaining world peace?”
Waving placards saying NO MORE BEAUTY STANDARDS—EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL! and leading a sheep that was supposed to represent the contestants, the demonstrators indulged in some guerrilla theater while photographers—delighted at a break from the usual scripted activities—took endless photos. “We protest,” read the leaflet prepared by New York Radical Women, “the degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol. The Pageant contestants epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women. The parade down the runway blares the metaphor of the 4-H Club county fair, where the nervous animals are judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best ‘Specimen’ gets the blue ribbon.” Female passersby, Morgan said, seemed amused, while a group of men gathered across the police barricades, yelling, “Dykes! Commies! Lezzies.” A few demonstrators managed to make their way into the front row of the auditorium balcony, where they unfurled a banner reading WOMEN’S LIBERATION and released what police said was a stink bomb but what the demonstrators claimed were just the ingredients from Toni Home Permanent, the sponsor.
Since the Atlantic City Fire Department had refused to provide a permit, the protesters skipped over their plans to light a ceremonial bonfire in which they would burn some implements of fashion-torture such as girdles and hair curlers. However, a sympathetic reporter for the New York Post, Lindsy Van Gelder, was working off the original program when she wrote a preview story: “Lighting a match to a draft card has become a standard gambit of protest groups in recent years, but something new is to go up in flames this Saturday. Would you believe a bra burning?” It would turn out to become critics’ favorite byword for the entire women’s movement. “I shudder to think that will be my epitaph—‘She invented bra burning,’ ” Van Gelder said later.
The Atlantic City demonstration was, in retrospect, a huge success—after all, we’re still talking about it now as the moment when the women’s movement made its debut on the national stage. But when it was over, some of the protesters expressed regret about the tone of the event and said they should have been expressing solidarity with the sisters who were being paraded around in their bathing suits, not making fun of them. (Morgan herself called the sheep “not my finest hour.”) And everyone quickly grew to despise the term “bra burning.” The demonstration captured traits that would come to define the movement. It was didactic and playful, smart and sometimes sophomoric. The women who participated succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, then disagreed about whether or not the message was appropriate. But one thing was certain: the protesters got more coverage in the national media than the new Miss America—Miss Illinois, a blond physical-education major who wowed the judges with her talent on the trampoline.
“IT MADE ME FEEL NORMAL.”
By late 1969, what was up with women had become a huge national story. NOW was racking up legal and political victories, while the younger, more colorful feminists fascinated, thrilled, and appalled the nation. Newspapers, magazines, and television networks all ordered up features. Every time one appeared, a new flood of letters would pour into any group or person or address that was mentioned. “Heartfelt and handwritten on pink or blue notepaper, they basically asked the same question, ‘How do I find a Women’s Liberation Group near me?’ ” said Susan Brownmiller, a member of New York Radical Women. “Most of the letters went unanswered. The new movement was swamped.” Responding would have required an army of women with Marguerite Rawalt’s letter-writing skills or technology that was yet to be invented. Women’s liberation, Brownmiller noted, was “the last American movement to spread the word via mimeo machine.” Rosalyn Baxandall, looking back, thought, “If we only had computers, what we might have done!”
By the end of 1970, when four out of five Americans told pollsters that they knew something about the movement, women all around the country had figured out how to organize themselves without direction from the feminist celebrities. Barbara Epstein, a graduate student in California, watched the movement spread “with an astonishing pace” through 1968 and 1969. “In Berkeley, women’s consciousness-raising groups sprang up everywhere; when Women’s Liberation… held a public meeting, it was difficult to find a hall big enough for the crowd.” By the end of 1969, one count found thirty-five women’s groups in San Francisco, thirty in Chicago, twenty-five in Boston, and fifty in New York.
Nearly every group found plenty of things to challenge in their own backyard. “We were considered really radical in Dubuque,” said Ruth Cotter Scharnau, describing her group’s fight to open up elementary school patrols to girls. (“The principal of one school said it was ‘too cold’ outside and that girls had other jobs: ‘They wipe the tables after lunch and take care of the kindergarten children once in a while.’ ”) In a more fanciful effort, feminists at the Iowa State University town of Ames cast a witch spell on the university football stadium, in opposition to the money spent on men’s sports. “The stadium which was under construction, did indeed collapse and had to be restarted. We just loved that, of course,” said Irene Talbott, a president of Des Moines NOW.
Very little happened in the movement that didn’t wind up being written down. “Any time a group of more than two or three feminists came together, they seemed to produce a newsletter at least, if not a newspaper or journal,” said Mary Thom. In 1972 Thom was part of a group, led by Gloria Steinem, that founded the monthly Ms. Glossy as a traditional women’s magazine, its first issue sold out in eight days and generated more than 20,000 letters—along with 26,000 subscription orders. In Baltimore, Vicki Cohn Pollard’s group began Women: A Journal of Liberation, which grew to a circulation of more than 30,000 and lasted for twenty-five years. It was unusual in its success and duration but typical in that its creators were all dedicated to the point of obsession. “It was beautiful,” Pollard said proudly. “We typed it up. We laid it out. We did absolutely everything to put that magazine together. We were up all night long. We were impassioned. My husband and I with our little baby went to Cambridge to hawk it on Harvard Square. Many hours standing in Harvard Square.
And we sold a lot.” To underwrite the costs, one of the founders refinanced her house. Pollard recalled the “wonderful thinking and tremendous heart” that went into their efforts, as well as their over-the-top rhetoric. Her own essay for the first issue was about childbirth, and it had one sentence that decreed: “All doctors are the enemies of women.” The other editors suggested that “most doctors” or perhaps even “many doctors” might be better. “But I adamantly refused,” she recalled wryly. “All doctors were the enemies of women.”
All across the country, millions of women who never took part in a demonstration or joined a consciousness-raising group watched what was going on and had flashes of recognition. “I loved it. I loved it,” said Georgia Panter, the flight attendant. “Oh, I wanted to be there—I was off somewhere and I wanted to be there when they were marching in the streets, with Gloria Steinem. I saw pictures of those little old ladies with gray hair—I thought, oh, I wanted to be part of that.” Madeleine Kunin, the would-be journalist who was raising a family in Vermont and thinking about trying for a seat in the state legislature, felt as if the women’s movement was “a timer, set years ago, which had gone off, telling me to run.” Without it, she thought, she would have felt obliged to wait until her children were grown. And, Kunin said, the women’s movement had a second effect: “It made me feel normal.”
“WE CAN DO IT. HE’S SMALL.”
In March 1970 about one hundred women took over the office of John Mack Carter, the publisher and editor of Ladies’ Home Journal. At his side during the long day of confrontation was Lenore Hershey, the only woman in management, who demanded to know how many of “you girls” were married. The protesters unveiled a long list of demands, including free day care for all employees, no more “advertisements that degrade women,” and an end to the popular “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column. The protesters also wanted to eliminate all celebrity articles, “all articles oriented toward the preservation of youth,” and “slanted romantic stories glorifying women’s traditional role”—a litany that pretty much did away with the entire table of contents. They also demanded Carter turn the magazine over to the movement for one issue. In what was perhaps the more exciting moment of the confrontation, tiny Shulamith Firestone jumped on Carter’s desk, intent on deposing him by force. “We can do it. He’s small,” she said, diving at the editor. One of the other women, Susan Brownmiller reported, “grabbed Shulie’s arm and expertly flipped her off the desk and out of danger.”
Like the Atlantic City demonstration, the Ladies’ Home Journal takeover was a small and exceedingly colorful protest about a very serious issue. Americans saw virtually everything through the lens of the mass media, and the newspapers, magazines, and television stations that did the communicating hired very few women, promoted even fewer, and broadcast a vision of what the American woman ought to be that was both trivial and stultifying. In the end, Carter—who impressed the protesters by lasting through an eleven-hour siege without ever going to the bathroom—agreed to give the women an eight-page supplement. It appeared in August 1970, and the magazine said 34 percent of its readers liked it, while 46 percent gave thumbs-down and 20 percent had a mixed response. The women thought Carter had stacked the numbers, but the supplement definitely did have the flavor of something written by a committee. Nora Ephron, who was supposed to do some of the editing, remembered sitting in “a gigantic circle” with twenty-four other women while the submissions were read out loud. The pieces, Ephron recalled, were for the most part “polemical and humorless,” but the editors were “not allowed to be critical in any way” since the code of the movement was to always offer support to other women’s efforts. And when the supplement was finally put together, the layout involved “just bundles of type next to one another. So if you wanted to read it, it was the unfriendliest layout imaginable and God help you.”
Looking back, Ephron thought that the real victory had been not the supplement but the demonstration itself. “They had gotten all this publicity, and it was really kind of great.” It was the pattern that would continue throughout the movement’s course. Things that seemed critical at the time, from the Commission on the Status of Women to the Ladies’ Home Journal supplement, would turn out to be important not in themselves but for the way they changed the women who worked on them, and the country that watched it all happen.
In what was perhaps the ultimate compliment to its growing influence, the women’s movement got an FBI tail in 1969. When field officers suggested that there might be better uses for the agents’ time than hanging around what the bureau liked to call the WLM, director J. Edgar Hoover responded, “It is absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish subversive ramifications of the WLM and to determine the potential for violence presented by the various groups connected with this movement as well as any possible threat they may represent to the internal security of the United States.” One FBI report from the early ’70s announced that “the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement had its origins in Soviet Russia,” and offered a “look at the red-hot mommas” of the movement leadership. “Most seemed to be making a real attempt to be unattractive…. One of the interesting aspects of the delegates’ dress was the extreme fuzzy appearance of their hair.”
“YOU’RE NOT WEARING A BRA, RIGHT?”
Maria K. was initially pleased with all the talk she heard about a women’s rights movement, but then she felt that, “as often happens with good things, people got carried away.” When she and a friend went to New York City in the early 1970s, the women they stayed with, who had decorated their apartment with feminist posters, criticized Maria for wearing makeup. She lost interest in the cause when it appeared to equate trying to look attractive with subservience. “Of course I wanted more money and I didn’t want the director to have the right to slap me on the butt when he walked by, but at the same time, I really didn’t understand why I shouldn’t wear a bra.”
The declining popularity of foundation garments such as bras and girdles had as much to do with the general trend toward comfortable clothing as it did with feminism. But like the controversy about women in pants, the idea of women not wearing bras struck a deep chord and roused more public interest than many of the larger theories about equality of the sexes. “I remember walking down the sidewalk,” said Wendy Woythaler. “I was by myself and there was this couple coming toward me and I’m walking along and all of a sudden they said, ‘Would you stop just a minute?’ and the man goes, ‘You’re not wearing a bra, right?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not.’ I think he was trying to make a point to his girlfriend.”
The term “bra burners” stuck like a burr. Betty Friedan once claimed that the story about bra burning at the Miss America contest was “the work of agents provocateurs” who wanted to undermine the movement. (Friedan was not above using it herself when provoked. She was quoted in 1970 telling college students not to fall into “the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school” of women’s liberation.) People could point out every day that no bras had ever actually been burned, but it still resonated. To many women, going braless suggested a deeply personal kind of liberation—literally not being tied down. To others, it simply meant sloppy, and they equated feminism with unattractiveness. “I didn’t know what to make of them at first because I thought they were so militant and so unfeminine and so… too radical. Because it was, like, from one extreme to the other,” said Sylvia Peterson, a hairdresser in New Hampshire. “The only one I admired was Gloria Steinem because she kept her femininity… but at the same time, she had the fight, she did something.”
Gloria Steinem was the person America would come to identify most closely with the women’s liberation movement, and she was a relatively late arrival. She had been a successful journalist in the 1960s, best known for that exposé in which she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny (“New York’s Newest Young Wit,” announced Glamour magazine). She was a striking woman, with spectacular long hair and a great figu
re. (“The miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia,” said a Washington Post columnist.) She dated some of the most attractive men on the intellectual side of the celebrity circuit. “She was so beautiful and smart and funny and went out with one amazing person after another,” said Nora Ephron. “If there was anyone in the world you wanted to go out with, she had gone out with them and they all had been in love with her.” When Steinem began to gravitate toward the women’s movement—first through journalism and then as a nearly full-time activist—she was the spokesperson every television show wanted to book. Betty Friedan, who was older, sharp-featured, and less charming, was overshadowed.
“Gloria is a very nice person, and of course beautiful and articulate,” said Muriel Fox. “So when the media latched on to her, they really did drop Betty. And of course Betty was furious. And it really was unfair because Gloria was not a founder, although she was a wonderful philosopher of the moment. But Betty was the one who had the vision, and the energy and drive that got us going.”
Looking back, it’s clear that the movement needed them both. Friedan had been the outspoken standard-bearer who got angry on behalf of a generation too constrained to make itself heard. Steinem translated the sometimes raucous and disturbing language of a movement in full bloom in a way the nervous nation could relate to. For instance, on the extremely touchy issue of childbearing, which Ti-Grace Atkinson called “the function of men oppressing women,” Steinem would say that every woman did not need to be a mother any more than “every person with vocal chords needs to be an opera singer.” It was a comment that attacked the idea of motherhood as women’s universal destiny while also complimenting the mothers. (Being an opera singer, after all, was something really special.) Her approachable style drew people to her; she made women feel that they were in the fight together. “I knew that if I ever met Gloria Steinem we would be best friends,” said Jan Schakowsky, a housewife who found herself feeling “totally trapped” by the long days alone with two small children.
