Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (4 page)

CHAPTER 2
Personal Politics
Revolutionary Survival: Lesson One

More women
Should throw
More dishes
At more walls
More often

—UNSIGNED, NOVEMBER 1970
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I
N THE MID
-1960s, most Americans hardly knew there was such a thing as feminism. The postwar era’s emphasis on suburban domesticity, early marriage, consumerism, and high fertility produced a generation of women only vaguely aware that there were issues worthy of discussion regarding the place of women in society.
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Yet the terrain on which they lived their lives was changing at a remarkable pace, pulling their experiences increasingly out of line with the words and concepts available to describe them. The pressure that built up in this disjuncture explains much of the explosive force of the women’s movement in the late sixties and early seventies, and that energy, like a tsunami that carries the force of an ocean floor earthquake, seemed to flow in all directions at once.

In 1963 Betty Friedan in
The Feminine Mystique
described an aspect of this dilemma as “the problem that has no name.” Virtually every powerful cultural institution—magazines, television, advice books, schools, and religious leaders—prescribed a middle-class ideal for
women: they were to be wives and mothers, nothing more, nothing less. Friedan called this ideology the “feminine mystique” and went on to describe the isolation of suburban life for highly educated women whose child-rearing years were largely over by their mid-thirties. They enjoyed a life filled with “labor saving conveniences” but also isolated from what many thought of as the “real world.” Suburbs gave a new, geographic twist to the old split between private and public, family and work, personal and political. The work suburban women actually did, inventing new forms of creative motherhood and elaborating networks of volunteer institutions, was not seen as, well,
real
work. Invisibility, lack of definition, and barriers to entry into the (male) public world left millions of women to cope with a nameless private anguish.
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The privatized definition of the suburban housewife also operated as an all-pervasive force limiting the possibilities and aspirations of additional thousands whose lives no longer conformed to the tenets of the feminine mystique. The dramatic expansion of education and service industries in the aftermath of World War II created millions of jobs for women. Married women entered the labor force faster than any other group in the population through the fifties and sixties, earning incomes that made it possible for their families to enter the middle-class world of home ownership, automobiles, televisions, and higher education for children. They met open exclusion, however, both from higher paying blue-collar jobs and from managerial and professional occupations. Female-dominated jobs, such as clerical work, were ghettos that offered less pay and fewer opportunities for advancement. Until 1963 it was perfectly legal, and very common, to pay women less than men for exactly the same work on the presumption that only men were breadwinners.

The silence imposed on women was a source of pain and confusion in many women’s lives but most acutely in the lives of educated women, who received contradictory and ultimately un resolvable messages about their lives. The small but growing minority of professional women in the 1950s faced a lonely struggle. Maria Iandolo New, Chief of Pediatrics at Cornell University Medical College, remembered decades later the chastising words of a medical school dean in 1950 in response to her plea that her application be judged on its merits and not dismissed because
she had married. “You are an impertinent young lady, and I am more sure than ever that we do not want you in our medical school.” Major law firms routinely rejected female applicants like Ellen Peters, first in her class at Yale Law School in 1954, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, first at Columbia in 1959 and later a Supreme Court Justice. In 1957, Madeline Kunin, a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, applied for a newsroom job at the New York Times. She was offered a job in the cafeteria. Kunin later served three terms as Governor of Vermont and was President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of Education. While these women persevered, many dropped out when professors announced that “women don’t belong in graduate school.” Those who persisted hid their pregnancies and paid careful attention to dress and demeanor. Male colleagues encountered in professional settings routinely assumed that the white women present were secretaries, and black women, domestics.
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A new generation, raised in postwar affluence, flooded colleges and universities in the 1960s. Many recalled bitterly that they had no idea what their work should be or how to imagine themselves as adults. Their lives were rife with mixed messages. Certainly they knew they were supposed to marry, have children, age gracefully, and enjoy grandchildren, but their actual life choices included college, graduate school, and professional expectations. “In my generation,” as philosopher Sara Ruddick put it, “women’s work histories were so buried in our life histories as to be barely visible.” Unable to write her dissertation while her husband pursued his first academic job, she wrestled with an indescribable “pain of worklessness.” “I had learned to think of life as a matter of personal relations, to think about myself as a daughter, wife, friend, and lover. I knew more about myself as a mother, more about babies even before I ever had children, than I knew about myself as a worker.”
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In June 1967, Marilyn Young, a recent Ph.D. in history, confided to her diary, “How ineffective. I shall live out the rest of my life as if it weren’t really happening and then die surprised … I have no proper work, and for me that is hard. And I grow lazier, mentally, by the hour.” She remembers her life then as happy for the most part, caring for small children and playing the role of faculty wife. Her own Ph.D. in history
was just “money in the bank,… insurance. “Much later, in a women’s consciousness-raising group, I spoke the bitterness of those years. But I … I wasn’t angry
then
.”
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For such women there was “… an invisible, almost amorphous weight of guilt and apology for interests and ambitions that should have been a source of pride,” a sense of an unvalidated life.
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7

Women with graduate degrees were still a small minority, but it is easy to detect broad changes in behavior that show millions of women, and men, making choices that no longer conformed to dominant cultural values. The trend toward younger marriage reversed; by the mid-1960s people married later and more of them not at all. The introduction of the birth control pill, which had weakened the link between sex and marriage, also helped accelerate the falling fertility rates as the “baby boom” vanished precipitously. Married women and women with children continued to enter the labor force in massive numbers. Those who dropped out to bear and raise children devoted fewer and fewer years to child care as an exclusive occupation. The flood of young women into colleges and universities was matched by a rising tide of older women returning to continue and complete educations suspended in the 1950s. Millions, then, knew that something was amiss, that they should have more than just a private life, but few could give it a name or link individual experiences to give form to their collective grievance.

When women’s consciousness-raising groups began to spring up everywhere, these were the women who walked in the door and immediately felt at home. In later years they talked about the “click,” that moment of naming after which the world looked and sounded and felt different—crystal clear and infuriating.
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In thousands of ways they immediately set out to
do something
, and their actions surged through the landscapes of American daily life.

T
HE SPECIFIC ORIGINS
of the second wave of feminism in the United States lay in the experiences of two cohorts of women, predominantly middle-class, who came to feminist activity with different but complementary perspectives. The older group were professionals involved in the networks surrounding federal and state commissions on the status of women. The younger branch of feminism grew among activists in
the civil rights and student movements of the 1960s.
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Both groups were deeply inspired by the civil rights movement that from the mid-1950s had offered a model of people consigned to the margins of American society, who nonetheless laid claim to their full rights as citizens and in the process enriched and redefined the meaning of American democracy. Each had also learned the skills of public life and developed a belief in gender equality in the sixties through their involvements in government commissions on the status of women and the civil rights movement itself.
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Then, having discovered their own capacity for public action as women, each found the remaining power of patriarchal structures and mores intolerable. Together they moved to create a new wave of feminist activism.

The founders of NOW came together through a network of government commissions on the status of women. When President Kennedy appointed a national commission in December 1961 and state governors followed suit in subsequent years, they unwittingly facilitated an organized revolt.
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Professional women on such commissions, or commission staffs, explored and documented the broad patterns of discrimination each had experienced in her own career. Empowered to think about and recommend policy changes, they enjoyed a period of community building and political consciousness-raising, only to discover that as insiders they could do little without organized pressure from the grass roots.

Similarly, young women in the civil rights and student movements engaged in passionate, and sometimes courageous, action in the name of egalitarian ideals. Breaking the middle-class rules of female decorum as they organized for voter registration, taught in freedom schools, and joined demonstrations likely to land them in jail, they discovered themselves as political actors, acquiring the necessary skills as they went along. In the civil rights movement they were immersed in a community long bowed down by racism and grinding poverty but that vibrated with a new sense of rights and collective power. The eloquence and raw courage of southern black leaders, many of them women, contributed to the sense that the vision of a “beloved community” of black and white together was worth risking one’s life. Every community, for example,
had its “mamas.” One SNCC worker wrote that “there is always a ‘mama.’ She is usually a militant woman in the community, out-spoken, understanding, and willing to catch hell, having already caught her share.” He gave the example of 70-year-old “Mama Dolly” in Lee County, “who can pick more cotton, ‘slop more pigs,’ plow more ground, chop more wood, and do a hundred more things better than the best farmer in the area.” These were the same women who risked their lives to register to vote, who mobilized their friends and neighbors to do the same, and who housed and fed white civil rights volunteers at great cost and danger to themselves.
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The movement was infused with the conviction that the beloved community was more than a distant ideal, it was already visible in the ways they lived their daily lives. When it came to relationships between women and men, however, such egalitarian ideals did not always hold. Too often women found themselves expected to perform the “housework” of the movement, to assume clerical tasks, and to remain outside the limelight. In that contradiction, they found a new voice, claiming for themselves as women the ideals of radical egalitarianism.

T
HE FEMINIST CHALLENGE
owed much of its subsequent shape and character to the broader political climate surrounding its birth. The late 1960s was a time when many saw themselves as “making history” in apocalyptic ways. Popular cultural images of “the sixties” often draw from these years when despair and utopianism fed on each other. The civil rights movement had taken a black nationalist turn, expressing the rage of urban black youth by indicating a willingness to use violence in self-defense and emphasizing racial solidarity. The horrors of the Vietnam War dominated the national news as they reshaped both radical and mainstream politics, even bringing down a president when Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection in 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy shook the nation. By 1969-1970, the student movement, never particularly well organized, began to implode, turning against its own national organizations (Students for a Democratic Society, University Christian Movement, and even the student YMCA) amid hypermasculine revolutionary
and militaristic rhetoric: “shut down the Pentagon,” “stop the war machine,” “days of rage.”
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At the same time, however, assassinations, the inhumanity of war on nightly television, and urban riots contrasted with hippie gatherings, called be-ins or gentle Thursdays, and images of long-haired youth placing flowers on the bayonets of National Guardsmen. Young men as well as women playfully resisted the constraints of gender in hair, dress, lifestyle, and nonmarital sexual expression. That those same young men also referred to women as “chicks,” relegated them to housekeeping tasks, and accorded them status based on relationships with male leaders only fueled the rage those women were so shocked and empowered to discover within themselves.
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“Equality” and “liberation” were the demands that launched the second wave of women’s rights activism. Both slogans challenged the ways women had been differentiated from, and subordinated to, men, but the first drew on the liberal discourse of equal rights and the second proposed a cultural and ideological transformation in which sex roles would be eliminated. “Equality” made a reasonable, liberal request for legal and economic equity; “liberation” raised a set of radical demands about culture and subjective identity.
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