The World Split Open (18 page)

When someone at a White House Conference on Equal Opportunity openly wondered if Playboy clubs would now have to employ male “bunnies,” the press quickly picked up the joke and dubbed the sex amendment the “Bunny Law.” A
New York Times
editorial coyly suggested that

Federal officials . . . may find it would have been better if Congress had just abolished sex itself. Handyman must disappear from the language; he was pretty much a goner anyway, if you ever started looking for one in desperation. No more milkman, iceman, serviceman, foreman or pressman. . . . The Rockettes may become bi-sexual, and a pity, too . . . Bunny problem, indeed! This is revolution, chaos. You can't even safely advertise for a wife any more.
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Title VII remained a joke. In August 1965, the EEOC shocked women activists when it ruled that sex-segregated help-wanted ads were
perfectly legal. The
New Republic
, a liberal journal of opinion, agreed. “Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administration body with this kind of seriousness?” The idea of banishing sex discrimination challenged deeply held ideas about gender and elicited much nervous ridicule. The
Wall Street Journal
asked its readers to imagine “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny' serving drinks to a group of astonished businessmen or a ‘matronly vice-president' lusting after her male secretary.” What are we going to do now, asked a personnel officer of a large airline, “when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify?” In companies that traditionally hired only women, businessmen grew edgy. One manager of an electronics component company lamented, “I suppose we'll have to advertise for people with small, nimble fingers and hire the first male midget with unusual dexterity [who] shows up.”
²⁵

Even if the EEOC had taken sex discrimination seriously, Congress had severely limited its powers. The agency could only investigate individual complaints, issue findings, and seek voluntary settlements. If a company refused to concede race or sex discrimination, the EEOC had to persuade the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to seek judicial enforcement. If the division refused, the complainant's only recourse was to file suit in federal court.
²⁶

Nonetheless, by 1965, working women began flooding the EEOC with their grievances. In some parts of the country, nearly half the complaints came from working women who identified acts of discrimination. Shocked by the volume of these grievances, the EEOC nevertheless remained committed to monitoring only racial discrimination. Mired in the Vietnam War and unsettled by race riots in American cities, neither President Johnson nor Congress gave women's complaints any attention. On June 20, 1966, Representative Martha Griffiths, a tireless fighter for women's rights, denounced the EEOC for its “specious, negative, and arrogant” attitude toward sex discrimination. “I would remind them,” she announced on the floor of Congress, “that they took an oath to uphold the law, not just the part of it that they are interested in.”
²⁷

No one seemed to care—except members of the state commissions who had convened for their third conference in Washington, D.C., ten days after Griffiths attacked the EEOC. Within their respective states, the commissions had supported more flexible working hours, the repeal of discriminatory laws, equal pay, and dozens of other “women's issues.” The state commissions had also created a national network of women
who, by gathering and sharing data about women in their respective states, had gained expert knowledge about women's subordinate status in American society. But by themselves, as delegates to the third conference on state commissions, they were almost powerless. As Betty Friedan later noted, “It is more than a historical fluke that the organization of the women's movement was ignited by that law, never meant to be enforced, against sex discrimination in employment.”
²⁸

They did have one vital resource to call on—what Betty Friedan called “an underground feminist movement” that existed in the nation's capital. Friedan was in constant contact with women who risked their government jobs to promote women's issues there. She credited women like “Catherine East of the Women's Bureau of the Labor Department for spreading the feminist underground around Washington and acting as midwife to the women's movement.” The network also included Esther Peterson; Mary Eastwood, a former member of the President's Commission; EEOC commissioner Richard Graham; Sonia Pressman, an attorney in the EEOC; legal scholar Pauli Murray; and congresswoman Martha Griffiths. Frustrated by the government's unwillingness to influence the EEOC and angered by the EEOC's unwillingness to address sex discrimination—especially sex-segregated “want ads”—fifteen women finally agreed to meet one evening during the conference in Friedan's hotel room to discuss the possibility of starting a new women's organization.
²⁹

Some of the women wondered whether they could even trust one another. For some, surfacing in any advocacy group for women was risky. Friedan later recalled how difficult it was for “women who didn't know each other personally, who hadn't yet acquired the trust we would later earn in action together.” The McCarthy period had left a legacy of fear, and many activists had learned to keep their silence on political issues. The discussion continued past midnight, interrupted by “ladylike rows,” and filled with suspicion and timidity. When the meeting ended, the group was still unable to agree on the nature of the new organization or whether there should even be one. Betty Friedan went to bed feeling the bitter taste of defeat. “I thought the battle was over before it had even begun, not realizing that the same fear and finally the daring necessary to act despite those fears were now under way in the others, just as in me.”
³⁰

In fact, the struggle had just begun. At the conference the next day, a group of delegates presented a resolution insisting that the EEOC enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Conference officials, worried about pressuring the Johnson administration, refused to allow the resolution to come to a vote. The delegates, from various state commissions, grew furious. They were tired of talk; they wanted action.

At lunch, a group hastily gathered around two tables to discuss their next move. Time was running out, because, as Friedan later explained, “most of us had plane reservations that afternoon, when the conference ended, and had to get back in time to make dinner for their families.” In conspiratorial fashion, they whispered, passed around notes on paper napkins, and discussed forming a new organization. On one of those paper napkins, Friedan wrote down a name—the National Organization for Women. Its purpose, she scribbled, would be “to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now” and to fight for “full equality for women, in full equal partnership with men.”
³¹
As they left to catch their planes, the conspirators agreed to call a formal meeting to create the new organization that fall.

The founding of a feminist civil rights organization of some sort was probably inevitable. Women needed a nongovernmental organization that could pressure the government from outside, as an independent movement. But at the time it seemed an audacious act, frightening to many of its potential members. Alice Rossi, the distinguished sociologist, sent membership invitations to thirty or forty sociologists, but few chose to join.
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By creating a feminist civil rights organization, NOW members did more than assert their independence from male-dominated liberal politics; they publicly acknowledged that liberal political culture was inadequate to address the reality of women's lives. By declaring their autonomy from a liberal government, they also freed themselves to consider the question of women's rights from a more radical perspective. “Everything was different,” Friedan recalled. “The problems
looked
different, the definition of the problems, the solutions sought, once we dared to judge our conditions as women by that simple standard, the hallmark of American democracy—equality, no more, no less.”
³³
As she drafted a “Statement of Purpose” for NOW, Friedan found herself “forced to spell out in my own mind the implications of ‘equality for women.'” One thing was certain, “separate but equal” was out of the question. How should one define equality and liberty for modern women?

While Friedan deliberated, a growing public debate about women
was stirring in the media and in the academy. Suddenly, all kinds of people seemed eager to break the spell of the feminine mystique. In 1964, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences helped recast the issue in intellectual terms by publishing a special issue on women in its prestigious journal
Daedalus.
Like the report of the President's Commission, the
Daedalus
collection reflected the cultural ambivalence of the period; it included articles that emphasized women's traditional role in the home and others that challenged received wisdom. Articles by such well-known scholars as Erik H. Erikson and Carl Degler would become classics—later to be embraced or attacked by feminists. The most startling of them, the one that would provide the greatest intellectual legitimacy for a women's movement, was Alice Rossi's article, titled “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” that both shaped and reflected early feminists' ideas about gender.
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A distinguished sociologist and educator, Rossi felt discouraged by the apathy of her female students, noting “there is no overt anti-feminism in our society in 1964, not because sex equality has been achieved, but because there is practically no feminist spark left among American women.” Rossi directly attacked the fifties' obsession with sexual difference, and offered an alternative vision of gender equality—androgyny.

An androgynous conception of sex roles means that each sex will cultivate some of the characteristics usually associated with the other in traditional sex role definitions. This means that tenderness and expressiveness should be cultivated in boys and socially approved in men. . . . It means that achievement, need, workmanship and constructive aggression should be cultivated in girls and approved in women.

Like de Beauvoir, Rossi argued that gender is an artificial construct of culture, adding only, “I shall leave to speculative discourse and future physiological research the question of what constitutes irreducible differences between the sexes.” Though Rossi would later emphasize sex differences, rather than sameness in the 1970s, her “immodest proposal” in 1964 had an enormous impact on the rebirth of feminism. In the wake of the fifties, few women activists and intellectuals wanted to rest their case for equality on “sexual difference.” For them, sexual difference reminded them of all the reasons why women had been excluded from political, economic, and social life. Rossi's emphasis on
androgyny was far more appealing. If both women and men could absorb each other's strongest traits, then they could make choices based on individual talent and temperament, rather than on one's sexual identity at birth.
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Like most activists of the time, Friedan shunned arguments based on difference. “The time has come,” she wrote, “to confront, with concrete actions, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right, as individual Americans, and as human beings.” Friedan recognized American women's right to shape their own lives as well as their right to self-fulfillment. These values, she explained, were “simply the values of the American Revolution . . . applied to women.” “The logic,” Friedan wrote, “was inexorable.”

Once we broke through that feminine mystique and called ourselves human—no more, no less—surely we were entitled to the enjoyment of the values which were our American, democratic human right. All we had to do was really look at the concrete conditions of our daily life in the light of those lofty values of equality which are supposed to be every man's birthright—and we could immediately see how unfair, how oppressive, our situation was.
³⁶

But that wasn't possible without challenging many fundamental aspects of liberal political culture. Women's rights, as it turned out, were not just another ingredient you could add and stir into the American Dream. The citizen whose rights the state protected had always been imagined as a man, and his biological and work lives were dramatically different from those experienced by a woman. The right to pursue happiness, for example, took on new meaning when it included a woman's right to control her own body and reproductive future. Equal opportunity meant something quite different when it involved sharing domestic work, ending sexual harassment in the workplace, and ending all forms of violence against women. When applied to women, individual rights, which most Americans considered the touchstone of American political culture, turned out to threaten men's authority in the family and challenge all kinds of social and cultural traditions. It was not at all clear—to many women and men—that these were “individual rights” that the state should consider protecting. For liberal political culture to recast
the citizen as a woman and embrace fundamental economic and social transformations in the home and the workplace required nothing less than an expansion of the definition of democracy.

In 1966, the radicalism of this challenge to American political culture was not yet fully grasped by Betty Friedan, by young feminists in the women's liberation movement, nor even by their opponents. Although feminists would long debate whether to emphasize women's difference from or similarity to men, neither choice fully embraced the reality of women's lives. Women were both like and unlike men. Any society that didn't honor women's ability to bear and raise children was clearly violating their rights to fully participate in society. Any society that equated equality with women living as men could not be viewed as a genuine democracy. A true “gender democracy” would have to honor the life of the family as much as it honored the life of work. Men would no longer be the frame of reference. But nor would women. The revolutionary thrust of feminism required an extensive expansion of democracy at work, in the home, in public, in private. Nothing less would do.