The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Murray long advocated for Black women and white women to join together in coalition to fight the concentration of power in the hands of wealthy men. But Friedan’s NOW would fail to be the Black-white alliance Murray sought, much less a broadly multiracial one. Despite a somewhat diverse leadership, the organization largely enacted Friedan’s agenda: enabling middle-class women to thrive. Hedgeman was leading NOW’s task force on poverty, but the bulk of NOW increasingly sidelined her, just as it dismissed Murray when she insisted that the organization fight the federal government to include jobs for women in its poverty remediation programs. NOW wanted to focus instead on middle-class women who were entering the workforce, emphasizing measures such as gaining access to public accommodations that still barred women, removing quotas on women’s admissions to graduate school, and supporting federal childcare centers for working mothers. Poor women weren’t on their agenda. Friedan championed passing the Equal Rights Amendment, a bill that Murray, at the time, didn’t support because it would focus only on the rights of sex. Disappointed, Murray withdrew from the organization she had not only helped found but had helped inspire. The single-axis focus on the ERA, Murray wrote, pulling her name from the NOW board of directors nomination slate in 1967, would result in NOW’s restricting itself “almost solely to ‘women’s rights’ without strong bonds with other movements toward human rights.” The hierarchy of sex NOW was adopting might even “develop into a ‘head-on collision’ with Black civil rights and other struggles,” she warned.64

  Many of its founders had established NOW as “an NAACP for women,” but the organization was now pursuing white feminist politics rather than building coalitions to fight the intertwined forces of racism, sexism, and capitalism. Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW treated women as a class unto themselves, held back by sex alone. Murray told her colleagues that she wouldn’t participate in a platform that sliced her three ways, “into Negro at one time, woman at another, or worker at another.”65 She insisted that Black women had to fight on all fronts simultaneously.

  For a moment, there had been a possibility that the counterhistory of feminism would productively transform white feminism, pulling it toward a more capacious notion of justice. But that moment was short-lived. White feminists continued to view Black women as resources to be tapped, rather than strategists of true equality.

  Betty Friedan speaking to reporters in 1967. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  Friedan, meanwhile, helped build NOW into a powerful organization that represented sex discrimination cases, conducted boycotts, organized pickets, and fought for abortion rights. She “wanted young Black women” in the movement, “especially in the South,” though she didn’t always recognize the imperiousness of her wish—even after four decades to reflect. On a trip to Atlanta in the late 1960s, she encouraged women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to join the feminist movement and was dismayed when many insisted their priority was affirming Black men, not strengthening Black women. “Well, I wanted to spank them,” Friedan reflected—in the year 2000!—“but they learned soon enough. They eventually came in.” Yet the statistics tell a different story. In 1972, pollsters conducted a national survey to gauge support for the women’s liberation movement. They found that 67 percent of Black women agreed with the cause of women’s rights, while only 35 percent of white women did.66 Once more it was Black women, not white, who led the way in feminist consciousness, just as they had in 1963.

  Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW turned to the task of making women’s liberation respectable. This meant cleansing the movement. For Friedan, infamously, feminism had internal enemies who threatened the success of the movement and must be eliminated, and those enemies were lesbians. She sought to build an organization that would influence the people who she thought mattered—heterosexual middle-class Americans—and the visibility of lesbians and lesbian politics struck her as “the lavender menace.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, Friedan and her socialist associates had been pursued by McCarthy’s campaign to cleanse government of the “red menace”; now, she was wielding a similar technique within the movement. Lesbians, to Friedan, were “radical man-haters” who endangered her agenda of speaking “to and for and from the mainstream.”67

  When Friedan organized NOW’s first Congress to Unite Women in 1969 to bring together multiple factions of the women’s movement, she excluded any out lesbian speakers, prohibited any discussion of lesbianism, and purged lesbian groups like the Daughters of Bilitis, a middle-class club formed in 1955. Soon, she fired out lesbian Rita Mae Brown from her position as New York–NOW’s newsletter editor. Meanwhile, several deeply committed members resigned in protest of the organization’s homophobia, including the first executive director.68

  But lesbians wouldn’t disappear quietly. Rita Mae Brown was determined to make clear that lesbian issues were integral to women’s liberation. She and a group of about forty women staged a “zap”—a seemingly spontaneous, theatrical style of protest begun the year prior by the Gay Liberation Movement—at the opening event of NOW’s second annual Congress to Unite Women. Inside the public school auditorium, one activist waiting backstage cut the lights and microphone. When she turned the lights back on, dozens of others popped out of the aisles and seats and tore off their blouses and tops to reveal purple T-shirts proclaiming “Lavender Menace.” The Lavender Menace stormed the stage and challenged the audience to join them in their politics and passion. “A lesbian,” the manifesto they circulated throughout the crowd proclaimed, “is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”69

  The NOW women, Brown later remembered, were nonplussed, unsure if they should “shit, run, or go blind.” Brown would soon establish the Furies, a lesbian commune in DC, and publish the twentieth century’s most widely read lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. But for the next thirty years, Friedan would maintain that the Lavender Menace action, along with the “radical lesbian fringe” more generally, was the work of undercover CIA agents akin to those in the Black Power movement trying to “alienate” the movement from the mainstream.70

  Friedan aimed to “restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home”—not by dismantling those institutions, but by changing women’s position inside of them. She wanted middle-class women to be free to pursue a career. That essentially meant one thing: convincing bourgeois white people, both women and men, that housewives deserved to flourish. That meant lesbians had to go, because they jeopardized her mission to transform mainstream sex roles and social inequality between women and men. This emphasis on Friedan’s antagonistic posture toward other women is no exaggeration. Friedan herself characterized NOW’s early days as beset by “the enemies without and the enemies within.”71

  Friedan was pushed out of the NOW presidency in 1970 by term limits and the repercussions of her own ego and temper. Aileen Hernandez, an African American civil rights activist and labor leader who had earlier resigned her position as an EEOC commissioner in frustration with its refusal to act on Title VII, assumed the helm. Friedan remained a central influence, however, and served as the figurehead of the wildly successful 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality that drew tens of thousands of women to the streets to commemorate fifty years of (white) women’s voting rights—an event she mentioned for the very first time during the NOW press conference publicizing that Hernandez was assuming the presidency. “When she announced it, I almost fell off my chair,” Hernandez reflected—though the faux pas wouldn’t have mattered much, for all cameras were trained on Friedan. Her bombshell had done the trick of keeping her center stage. In 1971, NOW adopted a resolution that lesbianism was “a legitimate concern for feminism.” At the end of the decade, however, years after Hernandez stepped down from the presidency, she lamented that NOW “has been silent on almost any issue that deals with the inequity of society more than the inequity of being female.”72

  The result of these white feminist politics was that whit
e women, and white women alone, flocked to the organization in the tens of thousands. In 1974, an internal survey revealed that NOW’s members were 90 percent white. The results were never released to the public, and NOW doesn’t appear to have studied its own demographics in the forty-five years since.73

  Yet Friedan wasn’t the only person openly worried that lesbian politics would weaken NOW’s ability to effect institutional change. During a self-aggrandizing account of her role in the women’s movement for a 1973 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Friedan took the opportunity to lambast lesbians for attempting to “manipulate” feminism “into an orgy of sex hatred.” A flurry of letters to the editor followed from prominent feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Toni Carabillo, the national vice president of NOW; all those published criticized Friedan’s position on homosexuality, except for one. Pauli Murray, though grieving the death of her partner Irene Barlow just two weeks earlier, sat in front of her typewriter and fired off a letter to the Times. Friedan’s article, Murray upheld, was “mellow, well-reasoned and fair,” an opinion she authorized with her own credentials as a feminist initially encouraged by “the late Eleanor Roosevelt” to contest Harvard Law’s ban on women students back in 1944. “A lesbian take-over” of the movement, she agreed with Friedan, would only strengthen its opponents. “Birchites, racists, segregationists and arch-conservatives” knew “that Friedan and her cohorts are far more of a threat… than the so-called revolutionary feminists” because they worked to reform the system from within. Lesbians, Murray concluded, “are only a minority” of women. “Problems of equality peculiar to lesbians” thus did not rise to the level of “feminist problems.” Murray and Friedan spoke in unison: homosexuality was a “private personal matter.”74

  Murray and Friedan’s shared belief that homosexuality was not a valid political issue for feminism likely stems in part from their common roots as activists. Both first came into social movements through labor and socialist organizing, which generally saw economic issues as the baseline of all political relations, the only structure that counts. Both Friedan and Murray made significant innovations to the Old Left framework, pushing it into the realm of sex justice, and for Murray, racial justice, too. But homosexuality, for this pair, did not have a history, and was not connected to structural uses and abuses of power: it was a bedroom concern.

  At a Kansas City event in 1981, a lesbian audience member approached Friedan after her lecture about reinventing the family.

  “Why don’t you talk more about gay families and lesbians?” she asked.

  “That’s sex, not politics. Or it should be,” Friedan replied.75 The irony of her own work to exclude lesbians from the movement—the very definition of politics—seems to have escaped her.

  While Murray and Friedan shared a public attitude in common, each had very different personal stakes in the role of queerness in feminism. In Murray’s own writing, she often inserted the term “social minorities” alongside victims of race and sex discrimination as the constituents for whom she fought—a likely innuendo for those, like her, who fell outside sex and sexuality norms. Once, in a letter in 1977 criticizing an Episcopalian bishop for speculating about her sexuality, Murray interrogated his authority to speak about queerness at all: “What do you really know about sexuality—heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, homosexuality, transsexuality, unisexuality? What do you know about metabolic imbalance?… The varieties of approach to mental health?” It was about as close as she would ever come to publicly associating with trans people. But Murray crossed out the lines and then never mailed the letter.76

  In public, Murray remained haunted by her own leanings to keep the movement and her own biography solidly within the boundaries of sex respectability. And she was likely denied an important opportunity to change institutions from the inside, her preferred agenda, on account of her queerness. Though she was nominated to the EEOC in 1966, she failed to pass the FBI’s security clearance—and was deeply spooked by what the agency possibly learned about her sex identity, romantic relationships, socialist affiliations in the 1930s and 1940s, and history of mental health breakdowns. When Murray wrote her second autobiography in the early 1980s, as she was dying, she scrubbed any mention of her romances and her persistent self-knowledge that she was more male than female. She refers to her life partner, Irene Barlow, only as one of her “dearest friends.” Gender and sexuality were not public issues, for Murray, and thus not part of her account of the intersections of power, even as she consistently pushed against social expectations of binary male/female and binary Black/white identities she saw as “rigid molds” constraining her.77

  Friedan, for her part, remained hostile to the role of sexuality in feminism throughout her life—except for when she chose to write about her own sexual liberation and her passionate feelings for men. Perhaps this very public heterosexuality made gay rights less threatening to her personally as time went on. She came to endorse lesbian rights as a distinct cause, lending surprise support at a crucial moment. When the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston debated a highly controversial resolution supporting lesbian rights, Friedan took the floor to announce, “I am known to be violently opposed to the lesbian issue.… Now my priority is in passing the ERA. And because there is nothing in it that will give any protection to homosexuals, I believe we must help the women who are lesbians.”78

  Pauli Murray was ill-suited to the radical politics of the late 1960s and 1970s. As a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, she offered some of the nation’s first women’s studies courses emphasizing African American feminist thinkers. Relatedly, she only earned tenure after mounting a characteristically fierce battle against the tenure review committee’s criticism that her research lacked “brilliance and conceptual power.” But she clashed with students in the rising Black nationalist movement. Just as she had wanted alliances between Black and white feminists to fight for institutional change, Murray wanted integration between Black and white society rather than distinct radical movements. She was also profoundly uncomfortable with the reclamation of the term “Black,” insisting on the identity “Negro.” Both positions infuriated her students. When Murray opposed their demands for an Afro-American Studies program in 1969, one of her star undergraduates stormed out of class, shouting “Black solidarity” as she went. The student was Patricia Hill—soon to be known as Patricia Hill Collins, the scholar most responsible for carrying the theory of intersectionality out of the realm of law and into feminist movements.79 Murray helped train the next generation of intersectional feminists, even as they clashed against her old-fashioned ways.

  But neither academia nor the book of poetry she published was to remain Murray’s destiny. She still had other barriers to demolish. Irene Barlow’s death from cancer in 1973 left Murray bereft. As Murray knelt before the cross and placed her hands on the coffin of her “silent partner” and “spiritual mate,” she felt a current of energy pulsing through her. Active in the Episcopalian church since the age of thirty, a faith she had shared with Barlow for nearly fifteen years, Murray knew that spirit become palpable was no coincidence: it was a call to serve. The Episcopalian church, however, still refused to ordain women to the ministry, a position it shared only with Catholicism. But Murray took an 80 percent pay cut and entered the seminary anyway, and in 1977, at the age of sixty-six, became the first African American woman to be named an Episcopalian priest, and during the same month the church first ordained a woman. For her first service administering the Holy Eucharist, an event CBS broadcast on its evening news, Murray chose a church with profound personal significance. She held service at the North Carolina parish where her grandmother Cornelia, then enslaved, had been baptized.80

  Reverend Pauli Murray. Photograph by Susan Mullally. (Courtesy of the artist)

  Murray’s departure from law and academia for the priesthood was a significant shift in her political tactics. But it wasn’t necessarily a change in strategy. Throughout her life, Murray was gu
ided by deep faith and wrestled with power in myriad forms, fighting institutional, legal, and organizational battles against injustice wielded in the name of race and sex. Her turn to spiritual life can be understood as an extension of her fundamental engagement with power, in all its forms. Power, for Murray, was not strictly secular: it extended to the universe itself. In uniting her politics with faith, she continued a long tradition of feminist activism that cultivated a relationship with the divine as the ultimate arbitrator of justice. As theorized by activists from Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Zitkala-Ša through Murray, intersectional feminism negotiates a new relationship to power both material and divine, extending beyond the “rigid molds” of the flesh. To that end, she published some of the first work bringing Black theology and feminist theology into relation.81

  “When I say that I am a child of God—made in his image,” Murray sermonized before a congregation in 1975, “I imply that ‘Black is beautiful,’ that White is beautiful, that Red is beautiful, [and] Yellow is beautiful. I do not need to make special pleading for my sex—male or female, or in-between—to bolster self-esteem.”82 All were connected to the divine and all were equally valuable, including those who defied the binary of biological sex.

  By contrast, white feminist politics generally restricts itself to the material dimension, emphasizing secular rationalism, scientific modernity, and capitalist hierarchy as ways to optimize human existence. In the white feminist agenda, power is something to be seized to maximize opportunity and quality. Its horizon becomes biopolitics, the twinned movements of enhancing the health and earning potential of the few while extracting, depleting, and disposing of the many.

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