The World Split Open (20 page)

Many of NOW's public demonstrations targeted sex discrimination in public spaces. After a particularly “tedious lawyerish” discussion at a NOW national board meeting in New York City in 1968, a few members adjourned to the Men's Bar and Grill at the Hotel Biltmore to calm their nerves. There, the bartender informed them that he could not serve female customers. After alerting the media, twenty women moved to stage a sit-in at the bar. The bar decided to close for twenty-four hours. But NOW members picketed anyway in full view of network cameras. To celebrate Valentine's Day in 1968, Betty Friedan led an invasion of the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Soon afterward, New York feminists invaded that epitome of the male sanctuary, McSorley's Old Ale House. Such demonstrations had their cumulative impact. Gradually, individual states began banning sex discrimination in public accommodations.
⁴⁹

A certain wilder spirit of protest began to enter NOW, thanks in part to younger women who by 1967 were creating loosely affiliated small groups collectively known as the women's liberation movement. Though NOW and women's liberation groups often joined forces for specific protests, efforts to form coalitions between the two branches of the movement frequently failed. The demons that haunted the daughters of the fifties never fully disappeared. Meredith Tax, an early activist, realized how much the female generation gap influenced the culture of the young women's liberation movement:

My friends and I thought of NOW as an organization for people our mother's age. We were movement girls, not career women; NOW's demands and organizational style weren't radical enough for us. We wanted to build a just society, not get a bigger slice of the pie. Besides, we were generational sectarians; we didn't trust anybody over thirty.
⁵⁰

Influenced by the antihierarchical spirit of New Left groups, as well as by the theatrical thrust of the counterculture, the younger women's liberation movement was not particularly concerned with proving their
respectability; on the contrary, they wanted to shake things up as much as possible.

Meanwhile, NOW officials became increasingly worried that the movement would appear too undisciplined or unrespectable. In March 1968, an article by Martha Lear on the new women's movement appeared in the
New York Times Magazine.
Its title, “The Second Feminist Wave,” christened the movement with a name that connected it to “first wave” feminism in the suffrage movement.
⁵¹
Lear's article also reported that some members were preparing a “black comedy” to dramatize the EEOC's reluctance to take sex discrimination seriously. Twelve women, dressed for cocktails, planned to crash an EEOC hearing, make a commotion, get thrown out and possibly arrested, and then meet with the press to explain their grievances. One of the large, home-lettered signs was to read, “A Chicken in Every Pot, a Whore in Every Home.” After some deliberation, some NOW members, worried that the press might headline the demonstration as “Prostitutes Picket EEOC,” decided on a different image: two secretaries chained to their typewriters.

The “Valerie Solanas affair” intensified some of the conflicts between older and younger feminists in New York's NOW, where tensions were already high. In 1968, a disturbed artist in New York's avant-garde art scene wrote—by herself—a document she called the “SCUM Manifesto,” an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men. Her manifesto not only blamed men for every evil in the world, but also argued for their collective annihilation. Shortly afterward, Solanas shot and wounded pop artist Andy Warhol, whom she blamed for her own marginality. She was arraigned for attempted murder and consigned to psychiatric observation.

A few younger feminists turned Solanas into a cause célèbre; others viewed her as a disturbed woman in need of sisterly assistance. When Ti-Grace Atkinson, the president of New York NOW, publicly appeared at Solanas's trial, some NOW members worried about being identified with “man-hating” women. NOW's board consisted of university professors and administrators, state and national labor union officers, local and federal government officials, business executives, physicians, and members of religious orders, all of whom were dedicated to preserving NOW's public reputation and credibility. Atkinson, already dissatisfied with what she considered NOW's “elitist” structure, then resigned to form her own organization, the October 17th Movement (named after the day she left), later renamed “The Feminists.”
⁵²

Collisions between the women's liberation movement and NOW were
frequent and probably inevitable. In November 1969, a year not remembered for youthful deference, NOW attempted to gather disparate groups from the mushrooming women's movement at a Congress to Unite Women in New York City. For three days, over five hundred women from a wide range of groups and organizations debated feminist issues, but it was clear that the young women dominated the agenda and that their rebellious spirit ruled the meeting. Betty Friedan, for instance, would never have convened a workshop to discuss “whether women's liberation would end sex or make it better.” As she later wrote:

I didn't think a thousand vibrators would make much difference—or that it mattered who was in the missionary position—if unequal power positions in real life weren't changed. . . . It was the
economic
imbalance, the power imbalance in the world that subverted sex, or made sex itself into a power game where no one could win. . . . I feel like a grim spoilsport sometimes, always insisting to my sisters in the movement on that dull economic basis that had to change for any woman to be able to enjoy her own sexuality, or to truly love anyone. . . . It was so much easier and more fun just to talk about sex, vibrators, women, men, underneath or on top. But to extrapolate sexual joylessness and lonely need, masochism or cruelty as the permanent condition of women is in my opinion to give up the battle. This is the sexual pathology bred by our inequality and the reaction to it.
⁵³

On the first evening, a group of women from Boston's Female Liberation took the stage and formed a semicircle around one woman who proceeded to cut off the luxurious long hair of another. Wearing short hair, the women explained to the audience, was a rejection of the conventional feminine image cultivated by society. The audience was electrified. Some women shouted that they shouldn't cut their hair, that long hair was lovely and countercultural. Other women denounced the image of the long-haired, hip, radical, movement “chick.”

Betty Friedan looked on with horror. To her, the hair-cutting demonstration perfectly captured the differences that separated NOW from the women's liberation movement. To Friedan, as to most other NOW members, the highest priority was to change social policy and to eliminate legal sex discrimination. After women gained economic independence,
NOW members reasoned, they would have the power to make changes in their private lives as well.

To older women, transforming oneself was not, by itself, a political act. Friedan loathed “the abusive language and style of some of the women, their sexual shock tactics and [their] man-hating, down-with-motherhood stance.” Their message, she argued, “was to
make yourself ugly
, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop wearing makeup or pretty dresses—any skirts at all.” Whether liberals or Marxists, older women viewed politics as a disciplined activity; one changed the system from within in order to give women choices about how to live their lives.
⁵⁴

Despite NOW's determination to maintain its respectability, the women's liberation movement continually nudged the organization in new directions. Initially, NOW scorned the idea of consciousness-raising, arguing that feminism was about action, not talking. But as new women entered the organization, unfamiliar with politics of any sort, let alone feminism, older members discovered that “rap groups” helped such novices “catch up” on movement issues.

The truth is, both branches of the movement were essential. NOW activists promoted leadership and the organizing skills that made them effective lobbyists, organizers, and strategists. They also provided the modern women's movement with the staying power it needed to withstand backlash after backlash. Although they didn't always agree—Kay Clarenbach, for instance, recalled that at early NOW meetings, the “decibel level in sessions became unbelievable”—they somehow figured out how to keep NOW alive as a national feminist organization.
⁵⁵
Some younger liberationists characterized NOW as “liberal” or “reformist,” an organization that merely wanted a piece of the pie, rather than entirely new ingredients. But it is much too simple to categorize these two branches of the new women's movement as liberal versus radical, or legislative versus revolutionary. NOW's struggle for equal opportunity, especially in employment and education, required a
collective
solution to individual women's problems. Nor could all members of the organized women's rights movement be described as simply “liberals.” Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Pauli Murray, Gerda Lerner, Addie Wyatt, and Esther Peterson, for example, were among those whose activism in the labor and civil rights movements brought a working-class and race-conscious perspective to the women's movement.

Young feminists contributed something equally important—a radical critique of patriarchal culture, visions of alternative lifestyles, and the
unmasking of the hidden injuries women had suffered. Although they generally chose to work outside established institutions, they created a network of alternative, grassroots, self-help, nonprofit services—rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters, for example—that eventually became established institutions themselves. Sometimes the injuries these younger women unmasked changed laws; sometimes NOW's legislative efforts altered the nation's consciousness. In many ways, the differences were really about the targets and the style in which the struggle was waged. At times, ideological or generational differences bitterly divided feminists, but neither branch of the movement, by itself, could have brought about the staggering changes that swept through American culture during the remaining decades of the twentieth century.
⁵⁶

To impatient young women, NOW members often seemed stuffy and stolid. They voted; they elected leaders; they even paid dues. Rather than staying up all night seeking consensus, they relied on Robert's Rules of Order. But young women weren't the only ones who knew how to have fun. In her memoir,
It Changed My Life
, Betty Friedan described a gala celebration in 1973 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publication of
The Feminine Mystique.

A dramatic celebration of our herstory closed with the song “I Am Woman”; suddenly women got out of their seats and started dancing around the hotel ballroom, joining hands in a circle that got larger and larger until maybe a thousand of us were dancing and singing: “There is nothing I can't do. . . . No price too great to pay . . . I am strong . . . I am invincible. . . . I am woman.” It was a spontaneous, beautiful expression of the exhilaration we all felt in those years, women really moving as women.
⁵⁷

By the mid-1970s, the challenge to traditional liberalism, waged by attorneys and activists through commissions, class action suits, hearings, and protests, had achieved a stunning series of successes. As the scholar and activist Cynthia Harrison observed:

They had produced legislation mandating equal treatment for women in education and in credit, eliminating criminal penalties for abortion, changing prejudicial rape laws, banning discrimination against pregnant women, equalizing property distribution at divorce, and offering tax credits for childcare.
⁵⁸

The momentum of the women's movement seemed unstoppable. Exploiting its conservative image, WEAL waged an aggressive campaign against American university policies in 1969. Within a year, WEAL filed complaints against more than three hundred colleges and universities, including every medical school in the nation. In 1970, NOW filed a blanket complaint against thirteen hundred corporations that received federal funds, forcing them to give back pay to hundreds of women workers. In the same year, NOW documented Judge Harold Carswell's record of discrimination and helped to derail his nomination to the Supreme Court. In 1971, over three hundred women met in Washington, D.C., to found the National Women's Political Caucus, whose goal was “to awaken, organize and assert the vast political power represented by women.” Early members included Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Liz Carpenter, and Gloria Steinem. Within a few years, the NWPC had active local caucuses in every state and began fielding female candidates for political office.

In 1972, Congress quickly passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for what many assumed would be a quick ratification. In the same year, Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which denied funds for men's sports unless an equal amount were provided for girls' and women's sports, a piece of legislation that instantly altered women's relationship to athletics and sports. In the same year,
Ms.
magazine made its debut; women for the first time became floor reporters at political conventions; the Equal Pay Act was extended to cover administrative, executive, and professional personnel; NOW and the Urban League filed a class action suit against General Mills for sex and race discrimination; NOW initiated action against sexism in elementary-school textbooks with
Dick and Jane as Victims;
and women theologians called for the “castration of sexist religions” at the largest and most prestigious gathering of biblical scholars in history.

One year later, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in
Roe v. Wade
that abortion was constitutionally protected by a woman's right to privacy; Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a much-hyped “Battle of the Sexes” tennis game; AT&T signed the largest job sex discrimination settlement—$38 million—in the nation's history; the U.S. Printing Office agreed to accept “Ms.” as an optional title for women; the Bank of California settled a lawsuit by NOW and minority groups who had charged sex and race discrimination; NOW organized an International Feminist Planning Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which three hundred women from twenty-seven countries attended; a New Jersey court ruled
that the state Little League must admit girls; and Helen Reddy won a Grammy Award for the hit record “I Am Woman,” an explicitly feminist song that became the unofficial anthem of the women's movement.