Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (43 page)

⁷²
SeeBravo and Cassedy, 9 to 5
Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment
, p. 7.

⁷³
A number of women’s liberation activists also became involved in the organizing process once plans were off the ground. Rosalyn Baxandall recalls, for example, Meredith Tax, Barb Winslow, and herself. Personal communication, Fall 2000.

⁷⁴
Author’s interviews with Olga Madar, Detroit, December 10, 1982; Addie Wyatt, Chicago, June 15, 1983; Joyce Miller, New York City, February 7, 1983. See also Susan Hartmann,
The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

⁷⁵
Susan M. Hartmann,
The Other Feminists
, pp. 25-26.

⁷⁶
Author’s interviews with Olga Madar, Detroit, December 10, 1982; Dorothy Haener, Detroit, January 21, 1983; Addie Wyatt, Chicago, June 15, 1983; Joyce Miller, New York City, February 7, 1983; CLUW Papers, ca. 1970-1975; Dorothy Haener Papers, UAW Women’s Department Papers; Marjorie Stern Papers 1967-1975, Wayne State University, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit;
New York Times
(March 25, 1974): 27. See also Sarah Slavin, ed.,
Women’s Interest Groups; Institutional Profiles
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 124-128.

⁷⁷
Joan M. Goodin, “Working Women: The Pros and Cons of Unions,” in Tinker, ed.,
Women in Washington
, pp. 141-142.

⁷⁸
Quoted in Goodin,
Ibid
., p. 143.

⁷⁹
Author’s interview with Joyce Miller, New York City, February 7, 1983.

⁸⁰
New York Times
(August 22, 1980): A
I
.

⁸¹
Author’s interview with Anne Ladky, Chicago, Illinois, April 18, 1983.

⁸²
Similar grammatical constructions (e.g., black lawyer, Asian-American doctor) signal the perception that minorities are also “exceptional” in public, professional, and political roles.

⁸³
“‘Man!’ Memo from a Publisher,” New York Times Magazine (October 20, 1974): 38, 104-108.

⁸⁴
Cynthia Ellen Harrison,
Women’s Movement Media: A Source Guide
(New York: R.R. Bowker, 1975), lists 190 periodicals and 39 “publishers,” many of which published one book, catalogue, or journal. Anne Mathas claims that more than 560 feminist publications appeared in the United States between March 1968 and August 1973. “A History of Feminist Periodicals, Part I,” Journalism History, vol. 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 82.

⁸⁵
Amy Erdman Farrell,
Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 27-28, 45, 141.

⁸⁶
Ms
., preview edition (Spring 1972). Amy Farrell describes this cover as a refusal “to construct a definitive image of the ‘
Ms
.’ woman” by combining “the
accouterments of a housewife—the role primarily of a white, middle-class Western woman—[while] the woman herself suggested a Hindu goddess, indicating that this magazine intended to speak to all women, to transcend differences created by race or class.”
Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood
, pp. 31-32, 141.

⁸⁷
Ms
., preview edition (Spring 1972).

⁸⁸
Amy Farrell,
Yours in Sisterhood
, pp. 29-30.

⁸⁹
See Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (New York: Dial Press, 1995); Sydney Ladensohn Stern,
Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique
(Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1997); and Jennifer Scanion, ed.,
Significant Contemporary American Feminists: A Biographical Sourcebook
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

⁹⁰
Ms
., vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 113.

⁹¹
Author’s interviews with Naomi Weisstein, New Providence, New Jersey, July 30, 1975, and Heather Booth, Chicago, Illinois, July 9, 1973, and July 15, 1981. Note that one of the earliest of these was in Chicago in 1966. In 1970, for example, in addition to the multiplication of journals, newletters, and mimeographed essays, major publishers issued
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, edited by Robin Morgan (New York: Random House),
Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett, and
The Dialectic of Sex
by Shulamith Firestone.

⁹²
Friedan,
It Changed My Life
, p. 139; Tobias,
Faces of Feminism
, pp. 191-192.

⁹³
Sheila Tobias, ed.,
Feminist Studies I
(Pittsburgh, PA: Know, Inc., ca. 1970); Florence Howe, ed.,
Female Studies II
(Pittsburgh, PA: Know, Inc., 1972).

⁹⁴
Rosalyn Baxandall, personal communication, September 2000.

⁹⁵
Author’s interview with Karen McTighe Musil, Washington, D.C, November 11, 1997.

⁹⁶
A look at the vitae of a number of eminent feminist historians (Linda Kerber, Joan Scott, Linda Gordon, and Jane DeHart) would reveal that their first books (based on dissertations) were utterly unrelated to women’s history. Slightly younger scholars, such as Karen Musil and Deborah Rosenfeldt, describe the struggle to complete a traditional dissertation even as they were beginning to read and teach the new feminist scholarship. Interviews with Linda Gordon, New York City, December 13, 1997; Karen Musil, Washington, D.C, December 15, 1997, and Deborah Rosenfeldt, College Park, Maryland, December 15, 1997.

⁹⁷
Kate Millett,
Sexual Politics
(New York: Doubleday, 1970).

⁹⁸
Stimpson and Cobb,
Women’s Studies in the United States
, p. 21.

⁹⁹
Susan Cahn,
Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport
(New York: Free Press, 1984), pp. 250-252.

¹⁰⁰
Bud Collins, “Billie Jean King Evens the Score,”
Ms
. (July 1973): 37-43; “There She Is, Ms. America,”
Sports Illustrated 39
(October 1, 1973): 30-32ff.; and Wandersee,
On the Move, 150-154
.

Chapter 4

¹
Dana Densmore, “A Year of Living Dangerously: 1968,” in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds.,
The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), p. 81.

²
Charlotte Bunch with Linda, Elinore, Marlene, Sharon, and Joan, “Ourstory: Herstory and Development of the D.C. Women’s Liberation Movement,” Washington, D.C: mimeograph in author’s possession, n.d. (ca. 1971). The dating for this document is clear from the first draft: Charlotte Bunch, “Ourstory: D.C. Herstory,” compiled for a women’s retreat on May 21, 1971. Mimeo in Bunch’s files and in author’s possession.

³
Bunch, “Ourstory,” p. 6ff.

⁴
Charlotte Bunch notes that these groups formed at a time when the movement had suddenly grown too large for continuing, face-to-face conversation. Most were neither groups that lived together nor specifically project or issue oriented. Rather, they were an effort to create environments in which women could move beyond the initial stages of consciousness-raising and develop analyses and strategies for future work. Conversation with Charlotte Bunch, April 19, 2002.

⁵
Bunch, et al., “Ourstory.”

⁶
Bunch et al., “Ourstory.”

⁷
Bunch et al., “Ourstory.”

⁸
Bunch et al, “Ourstory”; see also Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
, pp. 222-223.

⁹
Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt,” in Bunch and Myron, eds.,
Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement
(Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975), p. 33, quoted in Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
, p. 232.

¹⁰
See Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
, pp. 228-230.

¹¹
Rita Mae Brown, “Living with Other Women,”
Radical Therapist
(April/May 1971): 14.

¹²
Author’s interview with Charlotte Bunch, New York City, December 14, 1997.

¹³
Author’s interview with Charlotte Bunch, New York City, December 14, 1997. For an excellent discussion of the totalizing nature of the new left in the late sixties and early seventies, see Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks,
Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grow up
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

¹⁴
Beverly Jones and Judith Brown, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement,” Gainesville, FL, 1968. Mimeographed pamphlet.

¹⁵
Bernadine Dohrn in New Left Notes, quoted in Kathy McAfee and Myrna Wood, “Bread and Roses,”
Leviathan
(June 1:979): 8.

¹⁶
Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn,” in Robin Morgan, ed.,
Sisterhood is Powerful
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 434, 429.

¹⁷
Maureen Davidica, “Women and the Radical Movement,”
No More Fun and Games
, vol. 1 (August 1968).

¹⁸
Author’s interview with Linda Gordon. Shulamith Firestone responded in
Notes from the First Year
that a separate movement had first to allow women to break away from old categories before it could begin to agitate for specific reforms. Consciousness-raising, in her view, was the pathway to a correct consciousness, a perspective from which to make political decisions.

¹⁹
Author’s interview with Charlotte Bunch. See also Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America
1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 108-114.

²⁰
For detailed accounts of the early women’s liberation movement in New York, see Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
, and Susan Brownmiller,
In Our Time
.

²¹
Charlotte Bunch with Linda, Elinore, Marlene, Sharon, and Joan, “Ourstory: Herstory and Development of the D.C. Women’s Liberation Movement,” Washington, D.C: mimeograph in author’s possession, (ca. 1971), p. 2.

²²
Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad
. Although I am indebted to Echols’ scholarship, my own interpretation is different. She argues that “radical feminism” was a highly distinctive strand of women’s liberation and that “by 1975 radical feminism virtually ceased to exist as a movement. Once radical feminism was superseded by cultural feminism, activism became largely the province of liberal feminists” (p. 5). By contrast, I maintain that the “movement” cannot be confined to a single group; it did not decline in the early 1970s, and those who called themselves “radical feminists” were not as unique as they believed themselves to be at the time.

²³
Robin Morgan,
Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
(New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 119-120.

²⁴
Naomi Weisstein, “Days of Celebration and Resistance: The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band, 1970-1973,” in DuPlessis and Snitow, eds.,
The Feminist Memoir Project
, p. 358.

²⁵
Quoted in Mary Thom,
Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p. 81.

²⁶
Redstockings, “Press Release,” May 9, 1975, in Redstockings, Inc.
The Feminist Revolution
, New Paltz, N.Y.: Redstockings, 1975.

²⁷
On surveillance see Rosen,
The World Split Open
, chapter 7. For detailed narratives of the attack on Steinem and the conflict at Sagaris, see Rosen, pp. 254-260; Brownmiller,
In Our Time
, pp. 233-243; and Mary Thom,
Inside Ms
., pp. 74-49. Redstockings rested their case against Steinem on the fact that in the late 1950s and early 1960s she had worked for the Independent Research Service, a foundation that sponsored American youth to attend international youth festivals in the Communist world. Partially funded by the CIA, the foundation was clearly linked to a liberal Cold War agenda. When this information was first made public in 1967, Steinem had explained her work as the product of her youthful and naive Cold War liberalism, when there was no public knowledge of the violent and disruptive role of the CIA throughout the world.