Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (15 page)

Both 9 to 5 and Women Employed inspired similar groups in a number of other cities and a movie starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton. Actress Jane Fonda, who knew Nussbaum through antiwar movement networks, arranged a conversation with members of 9 to 5 who were invited not only to tell stories of office work from the point of view of secretaries but also to imagine changes they would like. These became grist for the script writers. The movie used comic exaggeration to portray scenes that any woman who ever worked in an office would recognize: incompetent men whose offices run only because of the behind-the-scenes competence of women, secretaries with skill and ambition who experience routine harassment and discover that promotion is impossible. The sequences in which women take over the office, exact revenge on evil bosses, and run it more effectively than ever were drawn directly from the fantasies of members of 9 to 5.
⁷¹

In 1981, 9 to 5 agreed to become District 925 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and to take on the unionization of clerical employees using their new methods.
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The labor movement, however, had in the meantime enjoyed its own upsurge within the ranks in which women began to work together to build a Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). The initiative that led to the formation of CLUW came from women who had been active in the formation of NOW and the NWPC.
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Most important were the Women’s Department of the United Auto Workers, which had housed NOW in its first year; the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (IUE); the Communications Workers of America (CWA); the American Federation of State County and Municipal Workers (AFSME); and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). UAW and IUE, with their deep roots in the radical unionism of the 1930s, had provided leadership on women’s issues from the very beginning of the Second Wave. AFSCME, CWA, and AFT had organized constituencies in the growing female sectors of the labor force. But traditional union divisions not only prevented concerted action, for the most part they kept female activists in different unions from being aware of each other, even when they worked in the same city. By the late sixties and early seventies, however, they were meeting on other grounds.
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Several CLUW founders recalled the charged atmosphere in the early seventies. Those who were active in NOW, WEAL, or commissions on the status of women were constantly asked, “When are you people going to do your part [i.e., begin to raise women’s issues within the labor movement]?” Female workers now regularly resorted to government intervention against both their employers and their unions. The IUE, for example, in 1966 expanded its Civil Rights Department to a Social Action Department in order to incorporate women’s issues; the following year it held a national women’s conference that spotlighted the problem of sex discrimination.
⁷⁵

It was difficult to organize across union lines. A few leaders got to know each other in the aftermath of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and then through state commissions, NOW, and WEAL. A few more met at the roundtable discussions of women union
leaders hosted by Elizabeth Koonz at the U.S. Women’s Bureau. Others, like Olga Madar of the UAW and Addie Wyatt of the Amalgamated Meatcutters Union, met in antiwar activities or in support of the farmworkers’ organizing efforts.
⁷⁶

More than 3,000 women showed up at the founding meeting for CLUW in 1974, twice the expected attendance. Joan Goodin described the excitement as “electric.” “I remember being hugged in a jammed elevator by a stranger who proclaimed: ‘Sister, we’re about to put trade union women on the map.’”
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Founders were surprised at how exciting it was simply to establish a network among union women. Addie Wyatt, elected Vice President, proclaimed, “CLUW has been a shot in the arm to the total labor movement. It has brought trade union women to the surface … never again will they be content to be absent from the world’s agenda.”
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In subsequent years, despite serious internal divisions between 1974 and 1977, CLUW became an important training ground in leadership skills as well as a support group for women. For many, leadership in CLUW has translated into further leadership roles in local unions.
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Joyce Miller, the first woman on the AFL-CIO Executive Council in 1980, was a president of CLUW.
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Yet CLUW also fueled a serious internal struggle with some radicalized graduates of elite colleges, determined to spread revolution. The effort of leftist sectarian groups to infiltrate and take over CLUW provoked a strong reaction by the founders of CLUW and forced a relatively closed hierarchy to seal its borders. CLUW was also shaped by the nature of the labor movement. Careful not to encroach on the organizing territories of individual unions or to appear in any way to be competitive with them, CLUW forswore any effort to reach out to unorganized workers.

At the height of the movement, women were not only challenging employers and political parties, they were rewriting the language itself. The story of Women in Publishing shows how a social movement can find its way into newspapers, textbooks, and schools across the country. Ann Ladky, a founder of Women in Publishing, attended one of Day Piercy and Heather Booth’s training sessions at the Midwest Academy in 1972 and went on to become a leader in Women Employed. Her path
to activism, however, had been through an eclectic mix of grass roots consciousness-raising that surged through workplaces, kitchens, bedrooms, and even car pools. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1970, Ladky found a job in publishing as a writer in the promotion department of Scott Foresman. The car pool she joined in April 1971 to get to her office in the Chicago suburbs was filled with women “who were all reading and talking about the women’s movement.” Several were members of NOW, and in the car they would debate the sexism of textbooks, offering examples from their own experiences as well as from discussions in NOW. Soon they began to ponder setting up a women’s group at work. They also urged Ladky to join the Chicago NOW chapter. “I didn’t see myself as a joiner at all, but I was disturbed the longer we talked.” Late in 1971 a dozen or so women working for different publishers decided to create a citywide organization, Women in Publishing. Their first concern, that language itself encodes the subordination of women at every turn, drew on the insights of numerous CR groups and task forces. They drew up guidelines for nonsexist language use and set out to persuade major publishers to adopt them.
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In October 1974 the
New York Times Magazine
published excerpts from “Guidelines for Equal Treatment of the Sexes in McGraw-Hill Book Company Publications,” an 11-page statement that had been distributed to all editorial employees and to 8,000 nonfiction authors of textbooks, reference works, trade journals, educational materials, and children’s books. These guidelines inscribed the key elements of feminist ideas about sex roles and individual choice by the middle 1970s: “Men and women should be treated primarily as people, and not primarily as members of opposite sexes.” Thus the guidelines advised avoidance of typecasting either men or women either by the type of work or by level of authority. “Members of both sexes should be represented as whole human beings with human strengths and weaknesses, not masculine or feminine ones.” Not: only were authors advised to avoid stereotypic and simplistic presentations, they were also warned to deal with women and men in the same terms (negative example: “Henry Harris is a shrewd lawyer and his wife, Ann, is a striking brunette”), to
avoid patronizing, “girl-watching,” and sexual innuendo, and to treat women “as part of the rule, not as the exception” (e.g., woman doctor).
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The grammar of sexism was spelled out in admonitions to avoid the generic use of “man” or male pronouns (with numerous examples to illustrate possible substitutions: firefighter, not fireman; chair, not chairman; humanity, not man) and the many ways that women can be diminished by being referred to by first names when men are designated with full names and tides or by identification in terms of roles as wife, mother, sister, or daughter regardless of relevance, or by such pairings as “man and wife” and “the men and the ladies,” and by never being first in order of mention. The disquiet of the
Times
editors, who themselves had not adopted such guidelines, was reflected in the subtitle: “The McGraw-Hill Book Company’s guidelines for equal treatment of the sexes, in which the average American loses
his
pronoun, Betty Co-ed becomes simply
student
and boys shall henceforth grow to
adulthood
.”
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By the time publishers began to pay serious attention to the grammar of sexism, women’s liberation had been a major force in the mass media for several years. Feminists communicated among themselves in a startling array of journals and newsletters. By 1975 there were upward of two dozen feminist presses and nearly 200 periodicals.
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The most prominent bridge between the internal conversations generated by these publications (often within very specific groups, such as professional caucuses or feminists interested in such topics as abortion or therapy referral) and the broader public was Ms. magazine, whose preview edition, enclosed in an issue of
New York
magazine, appeared at the end of 1971.

Ms
. set out to compete with mainstream women’s magazines on the shelves of grocery stores. Glossy, slick, professional—run by professional journalists Gloria Steinem and Pat Carbine (former editor of
McCall’s
and
Look
)—the first “stand-alone” issue of
Ms
. sold out 300,000 copies within 8 days, generating a modest but encouraging 36,000 subscriptions and an astonishing 20,000 letters.
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On the cover, a figure of the Hindu goddess Kali brandished in her ten arms the tools of women’s daily lives: an iron, a telephone, a hand mirror, an automobile steering wheel, a clock, a feather duster, a frying pan, and a typewriter.
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In that
issue women first read about “the click” in Jane O’Reilly’s “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth.” Gloria Steinern explained “Sisterhood” as “deep personal connections of women … [which] often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture—all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, had seemed so difficult to cross.” Judy Syfer humorously addressed working women’s exhaustion with “I Want A Wife”; Letty Cottin Pogrebin explained how to raise children without imposing traditional sex roles in “Down with Sexist Upbringing,” and Cellestine Ware interviewed Eleanor Holmes Norton on “The Black Family and Feminism.” Additional articles on welfare as a women’s issue, how to set up child care centers, abortion rights, where to complain about job discrimination, and lesbian love portrayed a significant range of feminist concerns and activities.
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This first issue was the brainchild of Gloria Steinern from start to finish. She chose its contents, and the authors were drawn from her own circle of friends.
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Steinern is an interesting link between the various branches of the Second Wave. Generationally she was a bit older than the founders of women’s liberation and a bit younger than the founders of NOW. Already a professional journalist, she was drawn into the professional and political circles around NOW and WEAL, but she was radicalized, fundamentally, by radical feminism. With her media connections, and good looks, Steinem was quickly anointed a feminist leader and spokesperson by journalists. For this she came under considerable fire. Yet because most of her close political connections were through networks of policy activists, she could be a superstar like Bella Abzug or Shirley Chisholm without being driven from the movement. Hers was always a multicultural vision of feminism. Through the 1970s she insisted that she share the platform with a woman of color at all her speaking engagements. A founder of NWPC, activist in the Democratic Convention in 1972, and founder of Women’s Action Alliance in New York, she continually functioned as a link between groups and a popularizer of some of their more radical ideas.
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Ms
. lacked the raw angry passion of women’s liberation manifestos, but neither was it a dry, policy-oriented brief. It packaged feminism in an optimistic and personalized frame using the approaches of traditional
women’s magazines, such as “how-to” articles with an altogether new twist: how to raise children without imposing stereotypic sex roles or how to file an EEOC complaint about discrimination on the job. Through Ms., a new form of address entered the popular culture. Many Americans found it odd, even insultingly strange, but Ms. defined its title as a “form of address meaning whole person, female” that did not define women according to their marital status (as Miss and Mrs.).”
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Women’s liberation found another institutionalized and mainstream outlet in the creation of women’s studies programs on campuses across the country. Women’s studies started with informal courses at “free universities” and other alternative settings. Indeed the campus setting of much of the New Left made it natural for consciousness-raising groups and women’s caucuses of New Left organizations to offer courses as a form of outreach. Leaders of such courses made no pretense of expertise, but they wanted to spread the word that women were oppressed and needed to band together. They used courses to extend their own understanding of women’s history and the nature of female oppression, to review classics like Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
, as well as to read the new feminist literature that was growing with breathtaking speed.
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To colleges and universities, they began to make the claim that women were a worthy subject of study.