At last the “Moscow Protocol,” forced down the throats of captive leaders while their country was occupied by tanks, was ready for the official signing. Suddenly massive double doors were swung open, and on cue every member of the Soviet Politburo rose to their feet, placed smiles on their faces, stuck out their arms, and crossed the room to embrace their exhausted and defeated Czechoslovakian prisoners.
The delegation went to the airport to return to Prague and suddenly realized that they had left Kriegel behind. Some argued that they would be better off without having him in the returning delegation, but others, including Svoboda and Dubek, insisted that the Soviet authorities turn him over. After a final two hours of negotiation, the Soviets brought him to the airport.
The delegation returned to Prague with a document offering almost nothing. The Soviets agreed to give the Czechoslovakian Party “understanding and support with the goal of perfecting the methods of directing society.” The troops would be withdrawn from their territory on a schedule that depended on progress toward “normalization.” The Czechoslovakian people were fluent in Soviet doublespeak. Normalization was a new word, but they knew what it meant—a return to the old dictatorship. The demands of the Soviets had been solidly declared in the Moscow Protocol, whereas those of the Czechoslovakians, such as withdrawal of troops, were for the future and depended on Moscow’s whim. By now, a week after the invasion, half a million foreign troops and six thousand tanks occupied the country.
On August 27, Dubek, looking as though he could barely stand, gave a speech asking the people to once more show confidence in him and asserting that these were “temporary measures.” He could barely pronounce a fluid sentence. But he and some of the other leaders believed that they would find opportunities for reform. At first the government, with Dubek back in power, showed independence. The National Assembly even passed a resolution declaring Soviet occupation illegal and a violation of the United Nations charter. The leaders were able to fire the pro-Soviet officials within their ranks.
In September measures were forced on the country to curb its free press, though by Soviet bloc standards it remained surprisingly rebellious and independent. Dubek pursued a schizophrenic rule, caving in to the Soviets at one moment, standing by his principles the next. In October, meeting with the leaders of the five invading countries, Brezhnev declared Operation Danube a great success, but everything that followed, he said, was disastrous. Gomułka was even more harsh, insisting that Czechoslovakia was still a hotbed of dangerous counterrevolutionaries. Having so efficiently taken care of counterrevolutionaries in his own country, he had little patience for Czechoslovakia, where students were still fighting with police.
Thousands fled the country, and many who were outside decided not to return. ›erník encouraged immigration. Soon the borders would be closed, and he explained that he could not guarantee even his own safety, let alone anyone else’s. A month after the invasion, fifty thousand Czechoslovaks were out of the country out of a population of about fourteen million. About ten thousand of them had already applied for refugee status in other countries. A number of Czechoslovakians were caught out of the country on their first summer vacation abroad. Many had to wait more than twenty years before they could enter or leave again.
Meanwhile the Czechoslovakian Writers Union, one of the institutions that pushed Dubek hard for reform when he first came to power in January, was urging its members not to go into exile and if they were outside of the country to come back before the borders closed. Pavel Kohout, playwright and novelist, had been shuttling back and forth between Prague and Frankfurt, where his new novel was being published, seeking out Czech writers and persuading them to return to rebuild the writers union as a dissident center. Kohout contacted several members at the Frankfurt Book Fair that was attacked by Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The book fair in 1968 had an unusually high number of Czech writers for the same reason the Lincoln Center Film Festival was suddenly packed with Czechoslovakian directors. Supporting Czech art became an act of political defiance, and many of the artists were still—no one was sure for how much longer—available for travel.
Youth were joining the Communist Party at an unprecedented rate with the intention of taking it over and directing it. In the month following the invasion, 7,199 people joined, and according to official figures, 63.8 percent, two out of three, were less than thirty years old. This seemed certain to have an impact on a Party that had been largely middle-aged and elderly.
The Soviet troops were tucked quietly out of sight, but they were there. When Czech youth staged a demonstration in late September, the Soviets had only to threaten the Czech police that if they did not break up the march, the Soviet troops would be brought out. The police stopped the march.
Youth were also forming Dubek clubs around the country, most of which attracted hundreds of members who collected and discussed his speeches.
In the fall of 1968 Dubek sent a letter to the Czechoslovakian Olympic team in Mexico City. He said that if the team was not as successful as they hoped, “don’t hang your heads: What will not succeed today, may succeed tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 18
THE GHASTLY STRAIN
OF A SMILE
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature.
—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Second Sex, 1949
I think this has been the unknown heart of a woman’s problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity.
—BETTY FRIEDAN, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
Take a memo, Mr. Smith: Like every other oppressed people rising up today, we’re out for our freedom—by any means necessary.
—ROBIN MORGAN, “Take a Memo, Mr. Smith,” Win magazine, November 1968
IT WOULD HAVE MADE little sense for the Miss America pageant to have gone off without a problem. This was, after all, 1968. Television viewers, after watching the Chicago riots, could take time out from the Soviet subjugation of Czechoslovakia, in between reports of burning villages in the Mekong, to see Bert Parks, the make-believe celebrity, explode onto the stage in white tie and tails like a flat-footed Fred Astaire, to shoo on the young, white, preferably blond, handpicked last virgins of America’s college campuses, competing for the crown of what was purportedly the ideal of American womanhood. To measure up, they would need to display such skills as answering questions without controversy and looking shapely, though not too shapely, in a swimsuit, all the while gleaming with a smile so wide it had gone rectangular—a carnivorous smile not unlike that of Hubert Humphrey. The pageant might have been challenged on race alone. Is the American feminine ideal always white? Would being black or brown or red or yellow be in itself less than ideal?
But that was not the thrust of the attack. In the best tradition of Yippie theater, on September 7 a group of one hundred women, possibly more, met on the boardwalk outside the pageant and crowned a sheep. When the press rushed to them—normally there are not many breaking stories at a Miss America pageant—the protesters insisted on speaking to women reporters only, who in 1968 were not commonplace.
Having gotten the media’s attention, the group, declaring itself the New York Radical Women, started throwing items into a trash bin labeled the “freedom trash can”—language, not by chance, from the civil rights movement. Into the freedom trash can went girdles, bras, false eyelashes, hair curlers, and other “beauty products.” About twenty of the Radical Women managed to stop the competition inside the convention hall for twenty minutes by gurgling the high-pitched Arab women’s cheer, which they had learned from the film The Battle of Algiers, and shouting, “Freedom for women!” while hoisting a banner that read “Women’
s Liberation.”
For years after this watershed incident, radical feminists were labeled “bra burners,” although nowhere did they actually burn bras. The original bra burners said they were protesting “the degrading, mindless boob-girlie symbol” of Miss America.
The New York Radical Women who debuted with this action were largely experienced in the New Left or the civil rights movement, and most had worked on the organization of numerous demonstrations. But this was the first time any of them had been pivotal organizers in a protest. Robin Morgan, their leader, said, “We also all felt, well, grown up; we were doing this one for ourselves, not for our men. . . .”
There had been other women’s marches in 1968. In January five thousand women had marched on Washington to protest the war. The demonstration had been organized by the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, named after the first congresswoman, who at the age of eighty-seven was still a fiery activist. Despite turning out five thousand marchers dressed in mourner’s black, which should have been effective for television, the demonstration received very little press coverage. The New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel explained in a television interview that the reason for the lack of coverage was that violence seemed unlikely. Those who worked in the civil rights movement had learned years earlier that the presence of women reduces the risk of violence and that a reduced risk of violence diminishes media coverage.
Morgan regarded the greatest success of the event at the Miss America pageant to have been their decision to speak only to women reporters. The idea, like so many protest ideas, came from SNCC. The Radical Women were more successful at sticking to this, perhaps because their movement was a new beat that newspapers had not been covering. Within a few years this became standard feminist practice, and news media automatically sent women reporters to feminist events. At a time when feminism was becoming a growing story, and women journalists were struggling to get beyond the fashion, culture, and food pages, this had an important effect on newsrooms.
But Morgan had her regrets. The demonstrators appeared to be attacking the contestants instead of the contest, and in retrospect she thought it was a mistake to have protesters saying, “Miss America goes down!” and singing the altered lyrics, “Ain’t she sweet / Making profit off her meat. . . .” The contestants were supposed to be viewed as victims.
September 7, 1968, is often given as the date that modern feminism was launched. Feminists had been campaigning for numerous years, but like the New Left in the early 1960s when Tom Hayden first began writing about it, only a few had noticed until it got onto television. For millions of Americans, “women’s liberation” began in Atlantic City on September 7 with a sheep and a trash bin. Not far away, another group of protesters was holding a black Miss America contest to protest the racist nature of Miss America. But by then, black movements were old news.
It was not that Miss America was a revered institution. By the late sixties it had lost its luster and was widely thought to be racist or empty-headed and as faded as Atlantic City itself. Shana Alexander wrote in Life:
Talent being rarer than beauty in 18-year-old girls, the talent contest places the Smile under a ghastly strain. One girl, a trampolinist, smiled madly upside down. A ballerina smiled her way through “the dying swan,” somehow suggesting death in a frozen poultry locker. A third girl’s talent was to synchronize bubble gum chewing and the Charleston. At rhythmic intervals her smile was wiped out by a large, wet pink splat.
So many things seem wrong and boring and silly about the Miss America Pageant as it comes across on TV that one struggles to rank the offenses in order of importance. It is dull and pretentious and racist and exploitive and icky and sad. . . .
Morgan, who led New York Radical Women, was a child actress turned political activist. For her and everyone in her group, Atlantic City was their first act of radical feminism. Their thinking had clear roots in the New Left. Morgan said of the choice of targets, “Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values—racism, materialism, capitalism—all packaged in one ideal symbol, a woman.” As for Miss America of 1968, which of course had to be the winning Miss Illinois, Morgan said she had a “smile still blood-flecked from Mayor Daley’s kiss.” To top it off, the contestant winner went on a tour of the troops in Vietnam.
But not all the passersby were sympathetic. Men heckled and denounced the demonstrators and suggested that they should throw themselves in the freedom trash can and strangely yelled, “Go home and wash your bras!”—once again buying into the idea that nonconformists are dirty. One outraged former Miss America contestant from Wisconsin quickly appeared with her own freshly painted sign that read, “There’s only one thing wrong with Miss America—She’s beautiful.” The former contestant, Terry Meewsen, surprised no one by wearing a “Nixon for President” button.
Before September 7 the common image of feminism was that it was a movement of long-skirted women in bonnets who fought from 1848 until 1920 to get women the right to vote. In 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, feminism, according to popular belief, had served its purpose, achieved its goal, and ceased to exist. In a 1956 special issue of Life magazine on women, Cornelia Otis Skinner said of feminism, “We have won our case, but for heaven’s sake let’s stop trying to prove it over and over again.” This idea was so entrenched that in 1968, when the press and the public realized that there was a growing contemporary feminist movement, they often referred to it as “the second wave.”
One of the first surprises of the second wave was when The Feminine Mystique, a book by Betty Friedan, a suburban mother of three and graduate fellow in psychology, became one of the most read books of the early 1960s. Friedan was a graduate of Smith College class of 1942, and at the beginning of the sixties the college had asked her to conduct a survey of her classmates. Two hundred women answered her questionnaire. Eighty-nine percent had become housewives, and most of the housewives said that their one regret in life was that they hadn’t used their education in a meaningful way. Friedan rejected the usual concept that educated women were unhappy because education made them “restless.” Instead she believed that they had been trapped by a series of beliefs that she called “the feminine mystique”—that women and men were very different, that it was masculine to want a career and feminine to find happiness in being dominated by a husband and his career and to be busy raising children. A woman who did not want these things had something wrong with her, was against nature and unfeminine, and therefore such unnatural urges should be suppressed. Life magazine in its profile of her called her “nonhousewife Betty.” Television talk shows wanted her for a guest. The media seemed fascinated by the apparent contradiction that a mother of three who was living “a normal life” would be denouncing it. While the media wanted her, the suburban community in which she lived didn’t and began ostracizing her and her husband. But women around the country were fascinated. They read and discussed the book and formed women’s groups that asked Friedan to come speak.
Friedan came to realize that not only had women’s groups been organized all over the country, but active feminists like Catherine East in Washington were fighting for women’s legal rights. In 1966, two years before radical feminism’s television debut, East’s political savvy combined with Friedan’s national reputation to form the National Organization for Women, NOW.
One of the earliest fights had been over airline stewardesses. Stewardesses were required to be attractive females, could be fired for gaining weight, and were fired as too old at the age of thirty-two. The age requirement had not been questioned by many women because most women agreed that a woman should be married and raising children by thirty-two. In fact, thirty-two was considered very late. Stewardesses were expected to leave their job when they married, but many married secretly and kept working until they reached the young age of retirement. The generation of women who were born in the 1940s married younger than any other twentieth-century generation, no doubt in part because there was n
o war to stop them. The average age of matrimony was twenty. Many couples got married in college, and certainly after graduation there was no time to lose. Those who didn’t go to college were free to marry after high school.
In the meantime, if a woman was extremely attractive and wanted a little career before getting married, she could be a stewardess for a few years. It was considered a glamour job. Stewardesses were told how to wear hair and makeup and were required to wear girdles. Supervisors did “touch checks” to make sure they were complying.
A group of stewardesses led by Dusty Roads and Nancy Collins organized a union and fought for almost ten years to force airlines to stop age and marital discrimination. New guidelines and contracts were not won until 1968, only three weeks before television viewers discovered feminists in Atlantic City.
Slowly women were beginning to take their place in the job market. In 1968, when Muriel Siebert became the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, she still had to convince clients that market advice from a woman could be as worthy as that from a man, despite the fact that by 1968 the United States had more female stockholders than male. But when the year ended she reported “an incredible year.” Before she bought her seat she was grossing half a million dollars, and with her seat in 1968 she grossed more than a million dollars, specializing in aviation and aeronautics stocks. Several large New York banks and all twenty-five of the largest mutual funds were among her clients.
For the first time, women won the right to serve on juries in the state of Mississippi. For the first time, two women were licensed as professional jockeys, although one of them, Kathy Kusner, then broke her leg and was out for the season. The North Vietnamese National Liberation Front taught the West a lesson by sending a woman, Nguyen Thi Binh, as their chief negotiator in the Paris peace talks. And First Lieutenant Jane A. Lombardi, a nurse, became the first woman ever to win a combat decoration.
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