Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (13 page)

Involvement in NWPC brought women of color together not only with white women but also with each other. Their caucuses further nourished growing networks among minority feminists, who increasingly felt the need for organizations that could articulate their needs and their perspectives directly. The black caucuses of the NWPC and NOW led to the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In response to a call in the summer of 1973, over 100 African-American women gathered in a New York church “to find out what this women’s lib thing is all about.” A reporter for
Essence
described the gathering:

As the meeting progressed with women shooting hands into the air to speak, a testifying filled the crowded room like vapor. Applause, laughter and ‘right ons’ greeted the different chapters of each woman’s life as recognition and empathy flashed through the women’s minds. The talk was of being on welfare, of not having day care facilities and black men; of color discrimination within the race, salary and job discrimination, of being a lesbian, of being treated as a sex object, of learning to love oneself and black men.

Black men have confidently scoffed at “those crazy white women who just want out of the kitchen.” As one brother said to me “Our women got more sense.” But black women, regardless of their attitudes toward the women’s movement, are largely disregarding male rhetoric about “stepping back” and the benefits of the “prone position.”
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At a press conference, founders of the NBFO announced that

The distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of the movement to Third World women, especially black women. The movement has been characterized as the exclusive property of
the so-called ‘white middle class’ women and black women seen involved in this movement have been seen as ‘selling out,’ ‘dividing the race,’ and an assortment of nonsensical epithets. Black feminists resent these charges and are therefore establishing
THE NATIONAL BLACK FEMINIST ORGANIZATION
, in order to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast aside, half of the Black race in Amerikka, the Black woman.
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Their militant rhetoric, including spellings that visually link the United States to its racist past (the KKK or Ku Klux Klan), marked the continuing influence of black separatism and identification with Third World revolutions.

Carolyn Handy, an early member of NOW in Syracuse, New York, described the two reasons for founding NBFO. First, founders recognized that predominantly white feminist organizations may have tried to address the concerns of black women but had failed to do so effectively. As a result, black women felt a need “to get their heads together over issues—independently” as black women. Their second purpose however, was “… to make the movement—the women’s movement—stronger and to attract and support all those black women with questions—even though the media keeps saying ‘minority women aren’t involved in the movement because they are already liberated.’ … It’s time that minority women stand up and say,—Listen, it’s our movement, too, and we’re supportive of our white sisters, and if you have any questions about our commitment, here we are. Ask us.—”
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An East Coast regional meeting of NBFO in November drew 500. Black women who attended spoke afterward of healing, of energy, of no longer being alone. Francella Gleaves wrote, “Never before have I felt such genuine sisterhood with other black women. A longtime feminist, I have often felt I was a pariah, since very few black women I knew ever admitted sharing my views.”
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Suzanne Lipsky approached the meeting cautiously, tentatively, with low expectations. “But I came away with a feeling that something had been fulfilled; that I had been waiting for this weekend; that something very important and personal had been confirmed.”
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Alice Walker wrote lyrically about the power of being in a
room of black women who were not afraid and who talked about “things that matter …. So the air was clear and rang with earnest voices freed at last to speak to ears that would not automatically begin to close.” She pondered the need to retrieve the history of black women, to persevere despite criticism from other black people and especially the fear of lesbians. “I only met other black women, my sisters, and valuable beyond measuring, every one of them. And we talked and we discussed and we sang for Shirley Chisholm and clapped for Eleanor Holmes Norton and tried to follow Margaret Sloan’s lyrics and cheered Flo Kennedy’s anecdotes. And we laughed a lot and argued some.
And had a very good time
.”
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Within 4 months NBFO had a mailing list of 1,000.

With less fanfare, Latinas also created new organizations, but they found that identity politics was a continuing obstacle to unity among themselves (Mexican, Chicana, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc.) as well as with other groups. Early groups of Puerto Rican women had begun to meet in Washington, D.C. and New York City in 1970-1971. Efforts to meet with Mexican-American women led them to believe they needed to develop separate organizations. As one of the early Puerto Rican activists recalled, she had “been deluded by the North American idea of Hispanic homogenization,” which overlooks differences among the groups. “Latinas were not ready to have that kind of unity, for each group needed first to develop by itself.” Lourdes Miranda also remembers her group meeting in the Cleveland Park Library in Washington D.C., where she and Carmen Maymi brought their daughters. One time her daughter came running down the hall saying that there was another group of women in the building “just like you” and asking why the two groups didn’t meet together. As it turned out, there was a NOW chapter just beginning to form that also met in the library, but “of course” the two could not unite at that time. “We needed space to develop our brand of feminism. Our issues were not strictly gender issues, but racial as well.” In 1972 the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women held their founding meeting at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Washington. Despite mutual suspicions between professional women and community activists, the women who gathered discovered the power of Puerto Rican sisterhood. “What happened was so beautiful”
that it inspired participants to build a national organization that quickly grew to more than 20 chapters and endured for 25 years. Facing suspicion from other Puerto Rican organizations, chapters of NCPRW focused on the needs of specific communities, violence against women, employment inequality (linked to racial discrimination as much as sexism), and the broader issues of racism, poverty, and education. The leadership of NCPRW were also positioned to have a voice in such organizations as NWPC and a network of presidents of national women’s organizations initiated by Dorothy Height.
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By the time Eliza Sanchez moved to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1975, Chicanas there had been meeting for several years. At the age of 8, Sanchez had walked union picket lines with her Mexican immigrant mother in the 2 year (1950-195 2) strike by Chicano mine workers in New Mexico, later immortalized in the movie
Salt of the Earth
. When a court injunction enjoined workers from picketing, women in the community not only took over the picket lines but also insisted that their issues—having to do with sanitation and lack of hot water in company-owned housing—be on the table alongside hours and wages. That was, for Sanchez, “a defining experience. I knew what the power of women could be.” During the early years of women’s liberation, however, she was cutting her own activist teeth in the black civil rights movement as an organizer for Community Advancement Incorporated, an OEO (Office for Equal Opportunity, the federal “antipoverty” program) organization in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She had no idea that “her” movie,
Salt of the Earth
, had become a staple of women’s liberation events.
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Soon, however, the growing assertiveness of women within the Chicano movement drew her in. “In Dallas in 1974, several women friends and I got on the nomination committee of the local IMAGE [Mexican-American Government Employees] chapter. [We were] tired of all those men, decided to make our votes count, [and] took over the chapter. The guys were pissed. We were beginning to feel more like ‘Hey, wait a minute. We can think, strategize, run meetings, etc. as well as you can.’” The next year when she arrived in Washington and heard that women were organizing she thought “wow, this is where I want to be.” What she found was a group calling itself the National Mexican American Women’s Association (MANA), whose
meetings involved 25-30 at any one time, eager to “do something” and willing to weather the stress and tension over leadership and power that inevitably followed.
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Multicultural feminism also found a small niche within the federal bureaucracy. Carol Bonasarro attended the Houston founding conference of NWPC as director of the Women’s Rights Project of the Federal Civil Rights Commission. She had served on the Commission staff since the mid-1960s, and when Congress mandated that the Commission must include issues of sex discrimination within its jurisdiction, she received the appointment to head the Women’s Project. A white woman, Bonasarro was acutely aware that the leadership of the commission viewed feminism as a “white women’s thing” and had resisted previous efforts to place women’s rights within its jurisdiction. As a civil rights veteran, she set out to win the Commission over to a vision of a multicultural, multiracial women’s rights program. Bonasarro undertook a series of trips around the country to meet women in the movement and get responses to her program. She met with Hispanic, Asian, and black women, as well as noted white feminist leaders. It was an experience of “light bulbs going off, chords being struck.” Things she had known all along “were up there in neon.” Suddenly she had names and explanations for her “year from hell” as an electrical engineering undergraduate at Cornell whose classmates refused to be her lab partner and whose advisor continually asked, “when are you going to liberal arts where you belong”—and for the frustrations in her career when men received recognition and awards that she knew she deserved. Finally she could link her own anger together with her passionate commitment to racial equality. For Bonasarro, the Houston conference was utterly enthralling.
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With the support of the Commission’s Staff Director, John A. Buggs, Bonasarro hired a diverse staff and set out to educate the Commission and its staff on the issue of women’s rights. Of course she ran into prejudices. When she brought in Gloria Steinern and Margaret Sloan to speak, she was unprepared for the negative response of black women on the staff (Sloan was black but also lesbian). Bonasarro’s goal, however, was to link the issue of women’s rights to every other issue considered by the Commission.
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Carol Bonasarro discovered a multicultural women’s movement because she was looking for it. The work of the Civil Rights Commission, which focused on investigation and policy recommendation, further strengthened the participation of minority women by linking them not only through openly feminist organizations but also in their communities. The difference was that organizations like NOW focused strictly on women’s rights: the Civil Rights Commission refused to separate issues of sex and race, and they understood the political necessity of giving each group an opportunity to speak in its own voice. With a multicultural staff, the Women’s Project published a special women’s rights issue of
Civil Rights Digest
in 1974, in which they gave voice to the specific concerns of Chicanas, Native American women, Puerto Rican women, Asian-American women, Chinese immigrants, Issei women, and black women. The issue was tided, “Sexism and Racism: Feminist Perspectives.”
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Similarly, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to assert leadership in the women’s movement through a contract with the Office of Equal Opportunity of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to generate data on discrimination against women in housing. A leadership policy statement in 1974 claimed the feminist legacy of their founder: “Mary McLeod Bethune’s idea for uniting women to secure justice, the idea on which she founded the National Council of Negro Women, never had more relevance than in this day when women throughout the nation are raising their collective voices demanding their rights as persons in all areas of life.” Having worked with HUD to develop a home ownership opportunities program, NCNW leaders had learned “from this and our own life’s experiences, … [that] sex discrimination is pervasive in every area of the housing industry.”
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Shortly thereafter, NCNW President Dorothy Height wrote to the presidents of major national women’s organizations “to fulfill this idea of unity of women … [by coming] together to develop collective strategies concerning two basics of life—shelter and food.”
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B
Y FAR, THE SINGLE
greatest impact: of the women’s movement was in the American workforce. Beyond housing, beyond day care, beyond issues of housework between husbands and wives, it was issues of career
and work opportunities that allowed women to remake the nation. Whether they worked in factories, in offices, or as professionals, the politics of work was an abiding concern for feminists.
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Consciousness-raising groups facilitated the decisions of millions of women to take advantage of crumbling barriers to professional education and occupational advancement, but women also brought concerted pressure to bear on the workplace.