Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (8 page)

Sally Madden and the other important women went on a rampage. They just said, ‘You will do this.’ They were supported by the scary, hippie women, … women dripping with beads. Remember that the eleventh commandment: of waspdom is, ‘Thou shalt not make a scene.’ We used this as a tool. The men on the [civil rights] commission were not used to seeing blue-collar women. They were scared to death that between their wives, who were capable of incredible fury, and these hippies, God knows what would happen. So protection for women was put in the code.
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This group went on to desegregate lunchrooms with sit-ins and set up child care, self-defense, and women’s medical self-help classes; they “made honest men of the media by having a Summer Camp Bra-Burn, two weeks of tent/trailer lakeside encampment for women and children…. Every morning we raised a bra on an improvised flagpole while a member … played ‘God Bless America’ on her kazoo.” After the passage of Tide IX, a member of the school board sent a carefully marked copy of the Cedar Rapids school system budget anonymously. With compelling evidence of disparate expenditures on sports for girls and boys in hand, they filed a successful Title IX complaint. In 1973 the group agreed to affiliate with NOW, primarily to prevent an anti-ERA woman from forming a chapter there, but they kept their original name, Cedar Rapids Woman’s Caucus.
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Music and the visual and performing arts were also part and parcel of the women’s liberation movement from the outset and a major form of consciousness-raising outreach. Women’s liberation rock bands emerged in Chicago, New Haven, and Austin determined to “take the sexism out” by writing new words and tunes and by doing everything (playing instruments, serving as sound technicians, and moving equipment) rather than being only vocalists.
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Women artists responded to the movement with a new sense of their work and their audience. In 1969, painter and sculptor Judy Chicago began to describe her own work as using explicitly female
imagery “to show that the subject matter of my work is my identity as a woman.” She and other artists felt released by the women’s movement from striving for neutrality (or at least avoiding work that could be viewed as “feminine”). “Until the Women’s Movement came along, I felt unable to say that my work was not about plastic or color but about my investigation of my vagina as a metaphysical question.”
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In 1970, Chicago announced an exhibition at California State University Fullerton and her legal name change (from a married name that she never actually used) with a photo of herself as a prizefighter, lolling in her corner of the ring with brazen arrogance. The announcement read: “Judy Chicago: a name change and an across-the-board feminist challenge.”
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For many feminists, art became one way of building the movement, and the focus of women’s art was intensely personal and self-reflective: consciousness-raising in another medium.
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At their show in New York entitled “Women’s Art” in 1971, Vivian and Emily Kline focused on daily, domestic objects: a clothesline, bridge cards, a lace tablecloth, chocolate candy, a mop, pink curlers, Tampax, a corsage, a bridal veil. They made them gigantic—a 12 foot mop, a 6 foot Tampax—as conceptual art. Dozens of other artists took up the themes of personal exploration, using images of childbirth to represent women’s oppression as well as women’s creativity. The result, for observers, was a participatory experience “of doing instead of just being,… [of looking] at ourselves with sympathy, not shame….”
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By 1975, Lucy Lippard could argue that conceptual art as a whole had been redirected by women. “The turn of Conceptual Art toward behaviorism and narrative about 1970 coincided with the entrance of more women into its ranks and with the turn of women’s minds toward questions of identity raised by the feminist movement.”
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Playing with identity, an artist like Martha Wilson photographed herself as a man and then as a man dressed as a woman. “Art-making is an identity-making process … I could generate a new self out of the absence that was left when my boyfriend’s ideas, my teachers’ and my parents’ ideas were subtracted.”
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C
ONSCIOUSNESS
-
RAISING WAS
most powerful in the first 5 years of the women’s movement. With CR groups, women discovered that their experiences
were not unique but part of larger patterns, and they discovered female community. They named themselves a sisterhood, a familial metaphor for an emerging social and political identity that captured the key qualities of egalitarianism, love, and mutual responsibility. Because the groups had little or no structure, they could be formed anywhere, from offices to churches to neighborhoods. At meetings, women discovered that the personal issues of daily life—housework, child rearing, sexuality, etiquette, and even language—could be political issues susceptible to collective action and change. Nothing was beyond discussion.

This spreading debate soon infected informal female networks, such as office and neighborhood friendships, religious groups, and other voluntary associations. The new feminism necessitated extensive redefinition of roles, attitudes, and values because the traditional definitions of women and men were so at odds with women’s actual experience. Feminists argued vehemently about whether the division between public and private was universal or particular to American society in recent times and whether women were essentially different from or the same as men. The heat of their debate opened new windows on women’s lives as individuals and as citizens and marked the difficulty of devising new categories for their changing reality.

At first, whatever anyone tried, the movement grew. The liberal desire to battle discrimination in the legal arena, the radical feminist insistence on awakening a female “class consciousness,” and the socialist-feminist attraction to community organizing—all “worked,” and each reshaped the other. NOW task forces on working women, for example, by the early seventies found ready allies among women in emerging socialist-feminist groups interested in organizing clerical workers.
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Similarly, NOW task forces on health and education paralleled and sometimes joined forces with such efforts as rape crisis hot lines or curriculum reform generated by women’s liberation groups.

Yet the radical feminist experiments with extreme forms of democracy, some of them quite rigid, created problems that pervaded all branches. Any activist who received media attention, for example, was likely to be dubbed a “star” and urged to step aside so that other women could share the limelight. Some groups sought to equalize participation
in discussion by passing out tokens. When anyone spoke she used one of her tokens, and once the tokens were gone she had no more access to the floor. Similarly, groups that insisted that they would have no leaders quickly succumbed to what Jo Freeman (founder of the West Side Group in Chicago) later called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” in which leaders denied their own roles and groups found themselves incapable of holding anyone accountable.
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Nonetheless, as women analyzed and politicized the embodied experience of being female and the supposedly “natural” familial roles of wife, mother, and daughter, they also invented new institutions and modes of public action. The range of these actions illustrates their energetic belief that anyone could take action and could make history. Feminists politicized issues relating to the body (rape, violence, abortion, and sexuality) and to the family (marriage and child care) simply by following through on intuitions and patterns discovered in the process of consciousness-raising. Little could they know in these early years that cultural issues like abortion, “family values,” and sexual preference would etch deep and lasting fault lines in the American body politic.

T
HE
P
OLITICS OF THE
B
ODY

From the beginning, feminists focused on highly intimate subjects. Groups analyzed childhood experiences for clues to the origins of women’s oppression, they discussed relations with men, marriage, and motherhood, and they talked about sex. Frequently, discussion led to action, and action on one topic led to another. For example, in an early meeting of New York Radical Women, several women described their experiences with illegal abortion. For most it was the first time they had told anyone beyond a close friend or two. A group of women, subsequent founders of Redstockings, then decided to disrupt a legislative hearing scheduled to hear testimony from fourteen men and one woman (a nun). Claiming that women who had experienced abortion were the “real experts,” they demanded to testify. When the legislative committee refused to hear them, they held a public “speak-out” on March 21, 1969, drawing an audience of 300.
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Thousands of women,
hearing about such speakouts, joined in. Journalist Gloria Steinem recalled that “For the first time, I understood that the abortion I had kept so shamefully quiet about for years was an experience I had probably shared with at least one out of four American women of every race and group.”
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Women’s liberation groups thus made themselves the “shock troops” of abortion rights, joining an already active abortion law reform movement.
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For the most part they offered public education alongside services and assistance to women rather than lobbying for reform. Numerous groups, for example, began to assist women seeking illegal abortions to find competent doctors. Word of mouth usually resulted in a flood of requests. In Chicago, members of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union began offering counseling and referrals in 1969, continuing work done by Heather Booth with help from some members of the West Side Group. Calling themselves Jane, they began to shift in late 1970 from making referrals to doing the abortions themselves. By the time they disbanded in 1973, abortion collective members estimate that they had performed over 11,000 illegal abortions with a safety record that matched that of doctor-performed legal abortions.
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At about the same time that “Jane” arose, a consciousness-raising group made up primarily of graduate students and writers for an underground newspaper in Austin, Texas also shifted its focus to abortion referral. They built an alliance with local members of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion who maintained close contacts with doctors to ensure high-quality services, and by 1973 they referred more than 6,000 women. In September 1969, sitting around at a garage sale to raise money for the group, Sarah Weddington, a recent law school graduate, discussed with another group member the legal risks of their activities and volunteered to do some legal research. That research revealed that outside of Texas, where the law forbade abortion even in cases of rape and incest, judicial and legislative precedents offered reason for hope. Thus began the process that resulted in the landmark Supreme Court case,
Roe v. Wade
, in which Sarah Weddington argued her first case at the age of 25.
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Sarah Weddington’s small group had initially formed in the fall of
1969 to discuss a pamphlet entitled “Women and Their Bodies” by a women’s health collective in Boston. The collective had formed as a result of a series of discussions about female sexuality within Bread and Roses. Inspired to gather information about women’s health, they named themselves the “doctor’s project.” They first created a recommended list of female gynecologists, then moved on to teach a course and to write the pamphlet that found its way to Austin. Even after the demise of Bread and Roses, this group continued as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and formally published a revised edition of their pamphlet as a book,
Our Bodies, Ourselves
. Still in print, the book demystifies medical expertise by giving women direct information through personal stories and narratives stressing women’s sexual self-determination.
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Similarly, Anne Koedt’s paper, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” and the enthusiasm elicited in early workshops on sexuality, made understanding orgasm and learning to masturbate regular items at consciousness-raising sessions. One of the most common memories of such groups revolves around the moment when one woman confesses that she had faked orgasm; one after another would acknowledge the same.
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Efforts to increase women’s sexual autonomy frequently sparked concerns about the problem of sexual violence as well. Cell 16 in Boston made headlines with its advocacy of female celibacy (which never really caught on) and karate for self-defense (which did). One of the classic realizations in CR groups had to do with the sexual objectification and vulnerability of women in public. Meredith Tax, a founder of Bread and Roses, described the daily experience of young women:

A young woman is walking down a city street. She is excruciatingly aware of her appearance and of the reaction to it (imaginary or real) of every person she meets. She walks through a group of construction workers who are eating lunch in a line along the pavement. Her stomach tightens with terror and revulsion; her face becomes contorted into a grimace of self-control and fake unawareness…. What they will do is impinge on her. They will demand that her thoughts be focused on them. They will use her body with their
eyes. They will evaluate her market price. They will comment on her defects, or compare them to those of other passers-by…. They will make her feel ridiculous, or grotesquely sexual, or hideously ugly. Above all, they will make her feel like a
thing
.
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