The World Split Open

“Thoroughly absorbing”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Ruth Rosen has produced an indispensable history of the contemporary women's movement. Her book should be required (and enthralling) reading for women and men who want to understand recent developments shaping the longest revolution in American history.”

—Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author of
The Madwoman in the Attic

“Superb . . . tough-minded, fair, finely written and exhaustively documented,
The World Split Open
offers stunning amounts of information that can enlighten even those who've been immersed in the women's movement for the last thirty years and more. . . .
The World Split Open
is a model of its kind—at once intensely personal and intellectually solid.”

—
The Dallas Morning News

“Comprehensively researched and exquisitely written,
The World Split Open
is destined to become a classic for teachers and students of U.S. history.”

—Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, SUNY Binghamton

“As an activist herself, Rosen is particularly adept at capturing the passion that motivated many participants in the movement . . . a noted feminist academic, in
The World Split Open
she creates a narrative account that should appeal to non-academic readers as well.”

—
Bookpage

“In this brilliant history of recent decades in the feminist movement, Rosen gives us views both panoramic and close up, authoritative and lively. She reviews our triumphs, our mistakes, and the vision we need for the years ahead. Must reading for those who've been in the thick of it, those who've gritted their teeth through it, and those who've done neither.”

—Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of
The Second Shift
and
The Time Bind

“A lively, comprehensive chronicle of the women's movement . . . Rosen vividly describes the key events of the women's movement [and] provides fascinating accounts of the infighting that plagued progressive left-wing groups . . . a fascinating, beautifully readable account of a movement that in many ways profoundly changed America.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“We can never go back to the way things were, but if we want to go forward the feminist vision so powerfully laid out in this book must be our guide.”

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author
of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

“This lively history offers much to learn and ponder.”

—
The Boston Sunday Globe

“Ruth Rosen has given us a study not of abstractions but of real people brought compellingly to life in the pages of her probing, illuminating, engagingly-written history of the modern women's movement, its culture, and its legacy.”

—Lawrence W. Levine, author of
The Opening of the American Mind

“Finally we have a history worthy of the broadest, most successful movement in post-war America and the world. Ruth Rosen explains the rise and spread of feminism in a narrative that is original, comprehensive, critical, witty, and wise. Like the women's movement itself, this splendid book will last.”

—Michael Kazin, co-author of
America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
, and Professor of History, Georgetown University

THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN

Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, teaches history and public policy at U.C. Berkeley. She is the editor of the highly acclaimed
Maimie Papers
, amd author of the classic
Prostitution in America.
An award-winning journalist, she is a former columnist for the
Los Angeles Times
and editorial writer and columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle.
A cofounder and senior fellow of the Longview Institute, she writes for a wide variety of magazines and journals, including
TomDispatch.com
,
The History News Network
,
TomPaine.com
,
The American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation
,
AlterNet.org
, and is a regular contributor to the online political Web site
Talking Points Memo Café.

THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN

Copyright © 2000, 2006 by RUTH ROSEN

This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved.

IN HONOR OF WOMEN—

PAST,

PRESENT, AND

FUTURE

AND

FOR WENDEL

If anything remains more or less unchanged,
it will be the role of women.

—David Riesman, sociologist, Harvard University

Time

July 21, 1967

If we do not know our own history,
we are doomed to live it as though
it were our private fate.

—Hannah Arendt, political theorist

Preface: The Longest Revolution

Chronology

PART ONE: REFUGEES FROM THE FIFTIES

Chapter 1     Dawn of Discontent

Chapter 2     Female Generation Gap

PART TWO: REBIRTH OF FEMINISM

Chapter 3     Limits of Liberalism

Chapter 4     Leaving the Left

PART THREE: THROUGH THE EYES OF WOMEN

Chapter 5     Hidden Injuries of Sex

Chapter 6     Passion and Politics

Chapter 7     The Politics of Paranoia

PART FOUR: NO END IN SIGHT

Chapter 8     The Proliferation of Feminism

Chapter 9     Sisterhood to Superwoman

Chapter 10   Beyond Backlash

Epilogue to the 2007 Edition: Gender Matters in the New Century

Notes

Acknowledgments

Interviews Not Cited in Notes & Archival Collections

Bibliography for Further Reading and Research

Index

Bursts of artillery fire, mass strikes, massacred protesters, bomb explosions—these are our images of revolution. But some revolutions are harder to recognize: no cataclysms mark their beginnings or ends, no casualties are left lying in pools of blood. Though people may suffer greatly, their pain is hidden from public view. Such was the case with the American women's movement. Activists didn't hurl tear gas canisters at the police, burn down buildings, or fight in the street. Nor did they overthrow the government or achieve economic dominance or political hegemony. But they did subvert authority and transform society in dramatic and irrevocable ways; so much so that young women who come of age in the twenty-first century would not even recognize the America that existed before the feminist revolution came about.

Before the revolution, during the 1950s, the president of Harvard University saw no reason to increase the number of female undergraduates because the university's mission was to “train leaders,” and Harvard's Lamont Library was off-limits to women for fear they would distract male students. Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex; employers paid women less than men for the same work. Bars often refused to serve women; banks routinely denied women credit or loans. Some states even excluded women from jury duty. Radio producers considered women's voices too abrasive to be on air; television executives believed they didn't have enough credibility to anchor the news; no women ran big corporations or universities, worked as firefighters or police officers, sat on the Supreme Court, installed electric equipment, climbed telephone poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes
bore female names, thanks to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society. As late as 1970, Dr. Edgar Berman, a well-known physician, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency of the nation. Few people knew more than a few women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs., depending on her marital status, and if a woman wanted an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life, searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor. The public believed that rape victims had probably “asked for it,” most women felt too ashamed to report it, and no language existed to make sense of marital rape, date rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment. Just two words summed up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: “That's life.”

Long before the women's movement began, American women's participation in both the labor force and the sexual revolution had dramatically altered their lives. But it took a women's movement to address the many ways women felt exploited, to lend legitimacy to their growing sense of injustice, and to name and reinterpret customs and practices that had long been accepted, but for which there was no language.

One day in the fall of 1967, soon after I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley to begin graduate studies, I noticed a small card tacked to a bulletin board in the student union: “Women's Liberation Group forming—all are welcome.” At the time, I was also working as a journalist and photographer in the antiwar movement and was quite certain that I didn't need any more emancipation, thank you very much. “But it could be a great story,” I thought. On the appointed day, I entered a small room in the student union and announced I wanted to write a story about the group. They agreed, but insisted that I participate. Two hours later, my world began to turn upside down. As with so many in my generation, feminism cast a new, sometimes thrilling, sometimes unnerving light on my own personal and intellectual past. I lived on the edge, experienced the trauma of a kind of rebirth, and emerged with a sensibility and intellectual commitment that has shaped the rest of my adult life.

Fast-forward to the waning weeks of the year 1979, when media pundits declared—with a collective sigh of relief—that the women's movement was dead, and that the entire decade had been nothing but a political and cultural black hole of self-absorption, populated by hedonists
and narcissists who spent their time in cults and hot tubs. Already the media had dubbed the people who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s “the Me Generation.” To put it mildly, I was flabbergasted. I wondered if they and I had lived through the same years. Had they really missed the not-so-quiet revolution in women's—and therefore men's—lives? True, the media had eventually tuned out, demonstrations had gradually diminished, but the women's movement had ignited a cultural war that raged for decades. As an historian, I was appalled that pundits had already packaged the decade, without recognizing the birth of a revolution that would irreversibly transform American culture and society.