When Everything Changed (26 page)

“Cool down, little girl,” he said. “We have more important things to do here than talk about women’s problems.”

After that meeting
, some of the women got together and “talked about the contempt and hostility that we felt from the males on the New Left and we talked about our inability to speak in public,” said Naomi Weisstein. “Why had this happened? All of us had once been such feisty little suckers.”

It reminded them of the way their mothers had been treated at 1950s dinner parties, when all the questions and responses were directed toward the husbands. Women who were accepted into the leadership of the New Left tended to be the wives or girlfriends of the male leaders, just one breakup away from ostracism. Those in the rank and file could most frequently be found typing, copying, or fetching coffee. “I’ll tell you, I was a whiz with a mimeograph machine. I can collate up a storm,” said Margaret Siegel, who belonged to a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the lead organization in the student antiwar movement.
In a famous remark
about a 1965 SDS meeting, one male attendee said that the “women made peanut butter, waited on tables, cleaned up, got laid. That was their role.”
Seattle women were
stunned when a visiting SDS organizer from Chicago—who had been trying to develop revolutionary fervor in a white working-class neighborhood—explained that in order to relate to the young men in the community, “sometimes we all get together and ball some chick.” The women demanded to know “what did that do to the chick’s consciousness?” and the speaker eventually admitted that he had made up the story in order to appear tough. But the remark quickly took on the status of legend.

Antiwar protesters urged young men to resist the draft, chanting, “Girls say yes to boys who say no!” In previous American wars, from the Revolution on, legends rose up about patriotic young women who vowed never to give their hand to a man who failed to volunteer to serve his country. In the ’60s the message was reversed, but the role assigned to women was pretty much the same.

It was a continuing complaint in the youthful counterculture. Hippie men were keen on getting in touch with their feelings and eliminating macho hang-ups about crying or showing their sensitive side. But there was a strong sentiment that women could reconnect with
their
most profound impulses by being domestic—nurturing others and cooking dinner. “
What I have seen
is a lot of very boorish men on some very heavy ego trips,” wrote a woman who called herself Vivian Estellachild, in a report on ten months of living in two different communes where women were expected to do all the housework. Hippie men, she concluded, “act like suburban studs who look good but are selfish and rarely know how to do anything more than gain a little pleasure for themselves. Hippie women over 30 have that lean and desperate look.” The Yippees, who were supposed to be the lighthearted side of the New Left, liked to suggest that men “shake a chick’s tit instead of her hand.”

The New Left was only a small sliver of America’s young people, and the men who behaved so boorishly—like what would soon be known as “male chauvinist pigs”—were only a sliver of the sliver. But they had a profound impact on the culture of the women’s liberation movement. It was probably no accident that the movement leader with the least confrontational style was Gloria Steinem, who had been born in 1934. “It’s true that the women who were five to ten years younger than I had come out of a particular part of the male left that was very hostile and aggressive,” Steinem said. “That had been their training ground. It probably took a while for that to go away.”

When the women became more outspoken, some of the men reacted with a stunning rage. At the antiwar demonstrations in Washington during Richard Nixon’s inauguration, the women decided that while the men were burning their draft cards, they would burn their voter registration cards to demonstrate that even though they were not subject to the draft, they felt disenfranchised. (
A few reached out
to Alice Paul, still living in the brick house in Washington, and suggested that she might want to join their protest. Paul, who had been jailed and had undergone force-feedings during a hunger strike in order to get the right to vote, said she would rather not.)
At the Washington rally
, Marilyn Webb was scheduled to give a speech announcing the women’s plans. She framed her remarks mildly, assuring the crowd that “this isn’t a protest against movement men.” But the men were either bored or offended. “Take it off!” some of them cried. “Take her off the stage and fuck her!”

The women’s movement would have arisen even if every single male activist had been as sympathetic as humanly possible. (And in fact many of them were.) But the bad behavior certainly helped to speed things along. “
Was it my brother
who listed human beings among the
objects
which would be easily available after the Revolution: ‘Free grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc.’?” asked Robin Morgan in a famous diatribe called “Goodbye to All That” which triumphantly announced, “WE ARE THE WOMEN THAT MEN HAVE WARNED US ABOUT.” It was an essay that was reprinted everywhere there was a college campus and passed around women’s groups all over the country. “Was it my brother who wrote ‘Fuck your women till they can’t stand up’ and said that groupies were liberated chicks ’cause they dug a tit-shake instead of a handshake?” The final straw, Morgan said, was the male counterculture prediction that “men will make the Revolution—and make their chicks.”

“Not my brother, no,” she concluded. “Not my revolution.”

“E
VERY SINGLE WOMAN HATED HER BREASTS
.”

In Baltimore, a little community of antiwar activists had settled in a working-class neighborhood of brownstone houses. A few of the women went to Washington for the Jeannette Rankin march and came back bursting with news about the New York women and their coffin, and ideas for starting a women’s consciousness-raising group. “That really was a big boost for us,” said Vicki Cohn Pollard, a member of the community. “We really got fired up.”

The consciousness-raising group was the central tool of the women’s movement, and it was as simple as a handful of people sitting down together once a week to talk about being women. “One woman wanted us to talk about how we felt about our breasts,” said Pollard. “We went around, and of the ten or twelve women, every single woman hated her breasts. They were too big or too small or too droopy or too perky. Everything you could imagine. We were all just astonished and felt so deeply the body hatred that represented. It was like—whoa, what was that all about in terms of the bigger picture?”

The idea, initially, was that the discussions would help women to discern patterns that would eventually create a portrait of the political, cultural, and economic forces that had kept their sex in such a secondary position. But the groups actually became whatever their members wanted them to be.
At least one in
New York sent shock troops out to confront members’ unsatisfactory husbands. Six stormed into the office of a spouse who worked at
Penthouse
magazine, said Rosalyn Baxandall, “and demanded he resign from the sexist rag. To our surprise he did.” In many more groups, the women encouraged one another to “go for it,” whatever the “it” of their dreams might be, and created a safe atmosphere for poking into painful areas such as body image or low self-esteem.

Sitting and talking with the other women in her group, Vicki Cohn Pollard mentally revisited her mother, who had seemed so harsh and hard to live with when Vicki was a child. Pollard, who had little talent for domesticity herself, tried to envision what it would be like to be restricted to a life of child-rearing and housekeeping. “I began healing with my mother in a way that is one of the most treasured things in my life…. She was so suppressed and so angry because there was no place for her in the world. She wasn’t a natural mom and she was stuck doing something she felt horrible about. My heart totally opened to her.” Although Pollard never shared her insights with her mother, and her mother never examined her own feelings about the life she had led, “it was my shift that mattered,” Pollard said. “We spent the rest of her life very, very close.”

The conversations also raised the members’ sensitivity to their common history as American women. They had almost all grown up in the United States in the postwar era, had watched
Bonanza
with its massive female mortality rate or
Father Knows Best
with its lessons about the inadvisability of competing with boys. They had seen movies such as
Gidget,
where the heroine learns that the highest calling of a woman “is to bring out the best in a man.” They had been discouraged from taking math and science courses, and most had come of age without ever having met a female doctor or lawyer. They had spent their adolescence waiting by the phone for a boy to call, because a woman never ever made the first move. If they let their boyfriends dominate them, if they were hesitant to speak up or take the lead, it was not all because of sexist men. They were carrying a great deal of baggage that had been on their backs long before they started being ignored at political meetings.

“W
E TAKE THE WOMAN’S SIDE IN EVERYTHING
.”

Virtually everyone who spent any time in a consciousness-raising group experienced what
the writer Jane
O’Reilly called a “click of recognition”—“that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds.” It was the moment when a woman realized how the men in her life really saw her, or what her place in society really was. O’Reilly offered up a story from a friend who had been invited for lunch at the executive dining room of a company for which she was doing some work. Later, when she told her husband about her day, she described what she thought was a funny scene of pompous men around the table in a stuffy room. But her husband started laughing before she got to the punch line. “Ho, ho,” he chortled. “My little wife in an executive dining room.”

“Everybody had had those moments, and you could remember when yours had been,” said Nora Ephron. “One of my earliest was when I worked my summer internship in the White House. My fiancé at the time had come to visit and I walked him through, past one fabulous room named after what color it was painted after another. And at the end of the tour he looked at me and said, ‘No wife of mine is going to work in a place like this.’ And it was so funny because—I hadn’t exactly shown him a sweatshop. It was the White House! But he thought he could say where I was going to work. Those things happened for quite a while before anybody added them up and said, ‘Kaching! This isn’t right.’ ”

Catherine Roraback was 49
when she went to a meeting of the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of civil rights attorneys, in 1969. The younger women at the gathering organized a women’s caucus that Roraback remembered as “really a consciousness-raising session.” As she sat listening and feeling much older than the rest of the people in the room, she thought back over her life and realized for the first time the compromises she had made in order to deal with the virtually all-male world of the courthouse, the raw jokes and sexist remarks she had simply smiled at or ignored. “It was as though I had scars on me and people were pulling the scars off of me, leaving the exposed tissue, you know? It was a terrible experience, but a very healthy one.”

Some groups turned outward, inspired to public protest—a sit-in at a department store with a male-only dining room or a letter-writing campaign to a newspaper that allowed only boys to have its delivery routes. And others found themselves transformed into the movement’s revolutionary vanguard. “
The history we learned
, the political sophistication we discovered, the insights into our own lives that dawned on us!” wrote Robin Morgan. “I couldn’t believe—still can’t—how angry I could become from deep down and way back, something like a five-thousand-year buried anger. It makes you very sensitive—raw even—this consciousness. Everything from the verbal assault on the street, to a ‘well-meant’ sexist joke your husband tells, to the lower pay you get at work (for doing the same job a man would be paid more for), to television commercials, to rock song lyrics, to the pink or blue blanket they put on your infant in the hospital nursery… everything seems to barrage your aching brain, which has fewer and fewer protective defenses to screen such things out.”

Women like Morgan began to take their newfound perceptions public, writing essays, staging protests, causing trouble. But they did not have one unifying theory about the sources of oppression. Was it all men or only some? Capitalism? The ageless tradition of patriarchy? “The dogma is that dogma is a mistake,” said Gloria Steinem. “So if there was dogma it has to come out of experience. You listen to women’s experience and take what is the most shared and build from there.”

What some women built was a call to sexual warfare. “
Women are an oppressed
class,” announced the group Redstockings. “Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor…. We identify the agents of our oppression as men….
All men
have oppressed women…. We do not need to change ourselves, but to change men….”

“
We take the woman’s
side in everything,” said the first principle of New York Radical Women.

Some, such as Shulamith Firestone, envisioned an end to marriage and nuclear families—Firestone hoped that in the future, babies could be conceived and grown in incubators. Some adopted “freedom” names like Warrior or Sarachild and tried to rid their lives of the taint of patriarchy. Meanwhile, back in the reform wing, people like the NOW founders believed both sexes could work together to create something new and fairer, and tried to express their ideas in terms that moderate housewives could relate to.

Since the women’s movement was generally opposed to structure or leaders or spokeswomen, there was no way to decide which of the many contradictory theories was right, which of the threads was the most important. “
No one article
is meant to be ‘representative’ of anything other than some part of all women. The women’s movement is a non-hierarchical one. It does things collectively and experimentally,” Morgan wrote in the introduction to
Sisterhood Is Powerful.
In the end, whatever turned out to happen would be… whatever turned out to happen.