The World Split Open (11 page)

During the late thirties and forties, Popular Front activism inspired countless women like Betty Friedan to work for class and race equality. Like her, many of these activists married and raised small children in the fifties, unaware of the change that domestic life would bring. Ruth Friedman, for example, went from full-time activist to fifties housewife within a few short years. At New York's City College, she had been immersed in radical politics and later worked as a union organizer in Hollywood. In 1946, she and her husband started a family.

We didn't talk about it much. What's to discuss? We were married so we should have babies. I'd always assumed I'd have
children, even though I never had any particular feeling for children. . . . So we started to build a nest. Suddenly, my life was different. I couldn't work, couldn't do my political stuff, couldn't even make phone calls without being interrupted.

Soon after the birth of their second child, Friedman's husband began a Ph.D. program.

There was no discussion about which one of us would go on for further education. It was just taken for granted that it would be Ben. It wasn't until some time around the late fifties that I began to feel unhappy being at home alone with the kids and seeing that he was advancing himself intellectually and in every way. He was
out there
and I was
in here.

After some discussion, she decided to return to work.

When I first started back to work, there was a regular chorus, when I left in the morning, of tsk, tsk, tsk all around the courtyard. I was the only woman who went to work in that development, even among those progressives. They were staying home with their children. People would say things to me, they would allude to the fact that “you're never around.” There was not a morning that I went out that I didn't feel conflicted about going. Not conflicted about
wanting
to go to work—I
knew
that was what I wanted. But about whether or not it was the right thing to do.
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Many leftist mothers found a way to continue their political activities as an extended part of their domestic routine. They brought their skills and values into the PTA, the YWCA, volunteer organizations, community activities, and local politics. In one New York City neighborhood, a local PTA became the battleground on which Stalinist and Trotskyist factions fought each other. Adeline Brunner, a longtime leftist activist, joked about how she “infiltrated” the PTA in El Cerrito, California, to improve her children's school's commitment to minorities and the poor. Later, she founded a preschool that educated some of the boys and girls who would emerge as New Left activists in the sixties. Alice Quaytman brought a similar progressive agenda and background into her PTA in the Bronx in New York City. Committed to racial equality and economic
justice, she fought the school board and administrators to ensure that no children experienced discrimination. She, too, helped start a nursery school to give children a head start in life.
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Like Betty Friedan, none of these leftist women ever described themselves as “feminists” before the sixties, but the issue of women's subordination was often on their minds. Life on the Left provided shared values and a community committed to economic justice. But the “woman question,” as it was called, although it permeated most leftist organizations of the thirties and forties, did not necessarily change everyday behavior.

Stella Novicki left her family's farm at age seventeen and found a job working in a packinghouse. There she became an active member of the union. “Women had an awfully tough time because men brought their prejudices there,” she recalled.

Some of my brothers who believed in equality and that women should have rights, didn't crank the mimeograph, didn't type. I did the shit work, until all hours, as did the few other women who didn't have family obligations. And then when the union came around giving out jobs with pay, the guys got them. I and the other women didn't. It was the men who got the organizing jobs.

Novicki also resented the fact that the “union didn't encourage women to come to meetings.”

They didn't actually want to take up the problems that the women had. I organized women's groups, young women's groups. They liked to dance and I loved to dance and we went dancing together. I talked to them about the union. The women were interested after a while when they saw that the union could actually win things for them, bread and butter things. . . . We talked about nurseries . . . we tried to show the community that the union was concerned about the welfare of the young people; we raised the problems of women; we raised the problem of inequality.

Despite her frustration with union men's prejudices, she still felt “it was a privilege and a wonderful experience to participate in the excitement of those times.”
⁶²

Many women activists experienced the same combination of excitement and resentment. One woman complained to her husband, “‘While you sit on your ass making the revolution, I'm out there in the kitchen like a slave. What we need is a revolution in this house.' But, of course, he simply ignored me, and I simply went on doing it.” In 1946, another woman wrote to the Communist newspaper the
Daily Worker
that her husband “could give an excellent lecture on the necessity to emancipate women,” but never thought of helping with housework, cooking, or child care. Bea Richtman, a member of the Communist Party, later asked, “What I want to know is how come so many people were thrown out [of the Party] for white chauvinism [racism] but not one goddamned Communist was ever thrown out for male chauvinism?”

Although these women were well acquainted with the “woman question,” only a handful aired their personal resentments. In 1947, Betty Millard, a leftist feminist, penned an article in the magazine the
New Masses
in which she described “the quiet, more veiled lynching” of American women. “Many of the thirty-eight million American housewives,” she wrote,

are doomed to circumscribed, petty lives, to the stultification of whatever abilities and interest, outside of motherhood, they may have had. The 15,400,000 women wage-earners are discriminated against in almost every field of employment, are notoriously paid less than men for the same work, and are the first to be laid off.

Twenty years before young feminists would redefine rape as an act not of aggressive sex but of violence against and control over women, Millard called it “a violent expression of a pattern of male supremacy, an outgrowth of age-old economic, political and cultural exploitation of women by men.” In a footnote, she added, “It might be interesting to consider the question of rape as a form of violence practiced against women.”
⁶³

As a young activist in the Communist Youth League, Alice Quaytman had fought tenant evictions in Harlem during the Depression. Soon the Party sent her to an institute to prepare her for a greater leadership role. At meetings, she persistently raised the “woman question,” but her male comrades routinely dismissed her grievances as “bourgeois concerns.” At one point, she missed several classes due to illness. Her teacher, a distinguished Party intellectual, invited her to retrieve copies
of his lectures at his apartment. When she arrived, he tried to throw her down on his bed. She successfully fought him off, but told no one; she knew leftist activists would not consider sexual assault worthy of political discussion. “Also, as mad as I was,” she added, “I couldn't imagine harming the reputation of such an important and famous Party intellectual.”

Although male chauvinism infuriated Quaytman, it wasn't until the late sixties that, in her view, she really “got” feminism. One evening in 1968, she cooked dinner for her family and several young friends active in the antiwar and women's liberation movements. When her husband asked her to bring him some butter from the kitchen, she began to rise, but was stopped cold by a young feminist who stood up and bluntly asked the husband, “Why can't you get it yourself?” Alice Quaytman sat down, stunned. It had never occurred to her that shared housework might be a political issue. “Suddenly, I realized what they were talking about. For us, politics had been about changing the world, but we hadn't even noticed the politics of the intimate world in which we lived.”
⁶⁴

Black women activists were not terribly troubled by the feminine mystique, which, they knew, was mostly directed at white middle-class women. For them, racism and discrimination were the greatest obstacles they faced. Jean Williams, a descendant of escaped slaves, joined the Communist Party and worked in a settlement house in a Nashville ghetto. By 1950, she married, moved to Brooklyn, and had two daughters. Her husband, a Party official, was indicted, like a number of Communist Party leaders, under the Smith Act of 1940. The charge was advocating the forcible or violent overthrow of the American government, for which he faced a sentence of five or more years in jail. Like other persecuted radicals, he went “underground,” leaving Jean to raise their children. She did not see him again for five years. Meanwhile, she worked as an assistant to a doctor who had been a Spanish Civil War veteran. While the FBI terrorized her children, following them everywhere they went,

the black community in Brooklyn where I lived was a great source of support for us. . . . We didn't run from it [the FBI presence]. Some people lived in communities where their neighbors turned on them and isolated them and they were forced to move. We tried to organize our whole neighborhood about what was happening, and what my husband was, and
what he believed. Our only problem was that a woman on the first floor of the building was running a numbers operation and she was sure this was interfering with her business.

Williams understood that her main responsibility, like that of most women, whether or not they were Communist activists or suburban Republicans, was to keep her family together. “There weren't that many women in the leadership,” she recalled, “so the people most in danger of being indicted were men. Besides, someone needed to stay and take care of the children.”
⁶⁵

The incipient civil rights movement of the late forties and fifties produced many experienced female activists, some of whom would influence younger women or turn into important feminist leaders themselves. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, two of the great orators and organizers of the civil rights movement, inspired a generation of young civil rights activists to feel proud of powerful female leadership. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, lawyer Pauli Murray, and union leaders Aileen Hernandez and Addie Wyatt all played decisive roles in explaining the double jeopardy that black women faced in American society as women and as minorities. Jesse De la Cruz, a Chicana farmworker who early joined Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, later organized women in agricultural communities.

Among their many contributions, activists in CAW gave a new generation of young women the gift of women's history. Eleanor Flexner, the author of
Century of Struggle
(1959), the first accessible study of the suffrage movement, had worked in the Communist Party during the thirties, organized workers into radical labor unions during the war, and then worked in CAW. Interviewed near the end of her life, Flexner credited the Left movement with opening up the fields of both African-American and women's history in universities. “I can definitely trace the origins of my book,” she explained, “to some of my contacts with Communists like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones (who was quite unknown to the larger white community).” Another major contribution to women's history that grew out of CAW's membership was “The Lady and the Mill Girl,” a seminal article written by Gerda Lerner, which described the ways in which the Industrial Revolution had affected women of different classes. Her work, and Flexner's, both of which emphasized the class dimensions of women's lives, would soon become urtexts for a new generation of women activists and historians.
Later, Aileen Kraditor, another Left activist, wrote
Ideas of the Woman's Suffrage Movement
(1965), an intellectual history of the nineteenth-century women's movement that would help jump-start the field of women's history.
⁶⁶

Some of these women kept a very low profile during the fifties. But through their local activism, they helped preserve a spirit that would prove crucial to the rebirth of the modern women's movement. Women like Betty Friedan, Gerda Lerner, Esther Peterson, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Flexner, Dorothy Haener, Claudia Jones, Aileen Kraditor, Dorothy Height, Eve Merriam, and Mildred Jeffrey, to name just a handful, were among the many women who gained invaluable organizing, oratorical, and writing skills as activists in labor unions, civil rights movements, and other Left movements. We will never know their numbers; we may never know their names. McCarthyism drove many of them into silence and anonymity, but they kept the “woman question” alive in tough times, and taught a new generation of daughters “their mother tongue.” Rosalyn Baxandall, Bettina Aptheker, Jackie Goldberg, Linda Gordon, Barbara Epstein, Kathie (Amatniek) Sarachild, Angela Davis, Ann Froines, Dinky Romilly, and Sharon Jeffrey—just some of the activists crucial to the women's movement of the sixties and beyond—were “Red-diaper” babies whose mothers had passed on, consciously or not, the historical memory of women's radical activism. The continuity between women of the Old Left and the rebirth of feminism among both the middle-aged and the young is part of an important story that still needs to be recovered.

In 1947,
Life
magazine published “American Woman's Dilemma,” an article that described both the discontent of housewives and the growing participation of women in the labor force. Two years later, another
Life
article mysteriously announced that “suddenly and for no plain reason the women of the United States were seized with an eerie restlessness.” Still tracking the “woman problem” in 1956,
Life
devoted a special issue to women's problems that began with this astonishing statement: “Historians of the future may speak of the twentieth century as ‘the era of the feminist revolution.'” The magazine nonetheless concluded that women suffered mostly because they had fought for their
rights instead of enjoying their privileges—femininity, child-rearing, and devotion to beauty. In the same year,
McCall's
published a piece called “The Mother Who Ran Away.” To the amazement of the editors, it generated a deluge of letters from besieged mothers. “It was our moment of truth,” a former editor confided to Betty Friedan. “We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.” By 1960, when the mass media, including almost all the women's magazines, suddenly discovered what they dubbed “The Trapped Housewife,” the woes of the suburban housewife were already less than a well-kept secret. But it took Friedan to put that secret onto the national political agenda.
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