The World Split Open (26 page)

Dorothy Burlage, one of the Old Guard, highlighted the difference between her generation and the younger women who followed: “The opportunity for exploitation grew because the institution of marriage was breaking down within the movement, many of us were getting divorced, and women were becoming more vulnerable and alone.” Another woman added that “the high drama of personal relations became part of political culture.” “We began to live as though we had already created a new society, but we certainly weren't ready for it!” “And nothing was ever wholly private,” Dorothy Burlage added. When Tom and Casey Hayden divorced, an SDS memo documented the split.

One of the women who entered SDS after 1965 pointed out that by then, the change in sexual mores and lifestyles had transformed the culture of SDS. “To men, especially the Old Guard, the story is one of political decline and disintegration.” But women, she argued, experienced more continuity:

All of us, one way or another, achieved our status through our connection to a man. No matter what year you entered SDS, that was the truth. The big difference—for us—is that as the movement grew, and the sexual revolution and drugs changed our lives, we no longer gained status as wives, but as lovers of important men. So we became more vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

She hit a raw nerve. A number of women nodded in agreement. “The only way to gain any authority,” as one woman put it, “was to be with a man in the Old Guard.” Sometimes, added Marilyn Webb, “men used younger women to threaten and control older women.” To which a former SDSer added, “Yes, and women rose or fell depending on a man's sexual interests. When an affair ended, we could be thrown out of the inner circle. We didn't want—or have—the marriages that would have offered some security.” Sarah Murphy, who first joined SDS at fourteen, described how she avoided sexual liaisons by allowing herself to be cast
as a “mascot.” “I think it was a strategy that worked, but at a very high cost to me personally.”
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In December 1965, one month after “A Kind of Memo” reached movement women, Students for a Democratic Society convened what organizers dubbed a “rethinking” conference in Champaign-Urbana. As with SNCC at Waveland, the conference represented the group's attempt, in a period of enormous growth in membership, to recapture the soul of its original vision. At the conference, many SDS women experienced the kind of intimidation or exploitation they later described in 1988, but they didn't know how to talk about it. Men set the political agenda because, well, they knew about politics. Women did the mimeographing and coffee-making because, well, women always did such things. “We just didn't think it could be different at that time,” one former activist remembered. “In many ways, the movement was so much better than ordinary life, who would have thought of complaining?” The movement, after all, gave them great freedom to explore their ideas and values. They also learned how to organize, write press releases, run mimeograph machines, and mediate conflicts. Intimidating, not to say tedious, as the verbal debates and position papers might have been, they were teaching a critical mass of young women how to think strategically and theoretically.

Still, feelings of status deprivation ran deep. Gaining skills and confidence, but not recognition, provided some of the fuel for women's dissatisfaction.
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As Barbara Haber pointed out, “It is precisely because the early years so closely matched my ideal of a dream life that the disappointments felt so enormous.” Ambitions ran high. They were going to overthrow the world of their parents. They were in the process of redefining “obscenity” as war, racism, and poverty. They wanted to be viewed as serious people, not simply as the playmates or housewives of movement men. The difficulty men had in recognizing this budding sense of self-confidence set the stage for a painful collision.

In the wake of the conference, most SDS activists agreed that the “rethinking” had been a dismal failure. The organization had neither recaptured its earlier spirit nor discovered a new vision. While some men would view that failure as the beginning of the end of the New Left, some women would later regard it as the beginning of the women's movement.

Hayden's “Memo” dominated the conference. Discussions trailed
into the early hours of the morning. Some remember an all-men's group forming briefly. Just who was where, and who met with whom, is now impossible to reconstruct. When someone finally announced a workshop to discuss women's problems in the movement, most of the Old Guard men and women immediately joined right in.
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At first, the discussion turned on whether or not women constituted an oppressed group within SDS. Most women said they did; many of the men denied it. The fact that the debate began—and foundered—at such an elementary level so angered some of the women that they decided to meet by themselves in another room. In the mixed group that met outdoors, the members began to debate whether there was any problem at all and whether “sex roles” were natural or not.

Martha Zweig, an SDS activist, shocked Barbara Haber by insisting that the sexual division of labor—in society as well as in SDS—was both natural and essential to maintain, rooted as it was in women's sexual and emotional passivity. Haber, who had avoided joining the all-women's group—out of loyalty to her husband, Al—became indignant. She argued with Zweig, saying that she didn't experience herself as a passive sexual being. As her irritation grew, Haber found herself regretting that she had not joined the women's group. In front of the approximately twenty or so men and remaining women, she heard herself defending women's right to equality with men. “At that moment,” she recalled, “I knew I had become a feminist.”
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As the evening grew chilly, Haber suggested that the group move inside. No one noticed; no one moved. She made the same suggestion several more times; no one paid any attention. “Watch this,” her husband Al Haber sympathetically whispered. He repeated her suggestion. Everyone picked up their chairs and withdrew from the nippy night air.
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Meanwhile, the all-women's group listened as someone read the “Memo” out loud. When a few men asked to join, the women made a historic decision to meet alone. They began by asking questions. What were legitimate “women's” issues as opposed to individual problems? What aspects of sex roles were, in fact, natural? Where was the vocabulary to discuss any of this? The word “sexism” did not yet exist. If some daughters of the Old Left were familiar with the terms “male supremacy” and the “woman question” in the winter of 1965, there were still precious few ways to talk about and explore such matters.

Shortly afterward, Sharon Jeffrey and Carol McEldowney mailed out typewritten notes based on the workshop. In a preface, they expressed
their anxiety that “their notes might not capture the excitement and emotion, and real seriousness with which these questions were pursued at the conference.”
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What made the moment historic, Heather Booth later recalled, was not that women discussed their grievances with men's behavior and attitudes in their absence, but that they also explored their own dreams and aspirations.

In those brief few hours alone for the first time, they addressed many of the issues that feminists would debate for the next three decades. Are women essentially different from men or socially constructed as different creatures? What, if any, male qualities should women seek to embrace? Is there a female way of knowing and doing? Who would care for the children if women entered the labor force? How can a woman be a sexual person and still be treated as a serious person? What kind of equality would also recognize and honor the differences between men and women?

The issue of “identity” surfaced again and again. Men, they pointed out, gained their identity through work, income, and public activity. How could women achieve their own independent identities and still maintain love for and a connection with men and children? As a start, suggested these activists, “We should develop our own personal identity and accept our limitations, abilities and needs, as WE define them, and not as men define them. . . . When a woman tries to prove herself, it should be to herself and not to a man, or men, or society.” Like Betty Friedan, they also advocated work as the solution to women's inequality, but as radical activists, they favored work that fostered social change.

These women felt little desire to imitate men. Even in 1965, the group already recognized that they needed to transcend conventional male and female social identities and career paths. How to do that, they could not yet imagine. Although few SDS women had children, most realized that childbearing complicated any discussion of changing the future for the benefit of women. Given the organization of society, children were bound to deepen the inequality between movement men and women. The most striking statement—years ahead of its time—came from Nanci Hollander, who said, “Instead of the women assuming the major responsibility for raising the children, the man and woman should assume and share in the task equally. In order for this to work, however, society would first have to re-arrange work and make it more flexible.”
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Responses to the workshop varied considerably. Some men viewed the women's criticism as a way to restore community and civility in SDS.
Some of the married women felt apprehensive about recognizing the subordinate nature of their situations. They feared the struggles and ruptures that lay ahead. But everyone agreed that what had seemed like personal dilemmas suddenly had taken on a new significance when amplified by a group of women. Some women felt the full weight of the moment. Nanci Hollander remembered thinking, “We've just started a women's movement.”
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It would take another two years before significant numbers of New Left women began leaving what many would call “the mixed Left” or the “the male Left.” Meanwhile, activists were swept up in a dizzying swirl of events. The emergence of black power had ended an era in which white women could participate in an interracial civil rights movement. Students demonstrated against the draft, held gigantic antiwar marches, and when neither ended what seemed like an interminable war in Vietnam, some activists moved from protest to what they called “resistance” in a militant effort to “shut down” the system.

In 1968, history seemed to speed up. Many American activists, as well as ordinary citizens, began to wonder whether the nation, if not the world, was unraveling. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the election of Richard Nixon, and the collapse of international youth activism and rebellions from Mexico to France moved New Leftists from hope to despair. During the month of August 1968 alone, police beat activists outside the Democratic National Convention and Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to stop the democratic flowering of “Prague Spring.”

In the midst of these tumultuous events arose another kind of dissidence—a new hippie culture or “counterculture,” strongly linked to the Beats, that encouraged the young to “drop out” of schools and jobs, “to do your own thing,” and to live as if the revolution had already happened. Appearing just as the women's movement took off, the hippie counterculture also challenged conventional ideas of appropriate gender roles. Both men and women grew their hair long, dressed in loose, flowing garments, and adorned themselves with jewelry from various folk and Indian traditions. “Be-ins” and “happenings” created cultural solidarity among these alienated youths. Dancers, high on psychedelic
drugs, freed of clothes, let their bodies and minds float toward an altered state of consciousness. Excess became common as a new language reflected that things were “far out,” “out of sight,” beyond normal comprehension.

In the spring of 1965, at the first antiwar march in Washington, D.C., young men had dressed in suits and ties and worn their hair short. Their female companions had worn neat shirtwaists, nylons, and flats. Only a scattering of demonstrators had long hair and wore sandals—even though they were the ones who always appeared on the evening news. Two years later, in 1967, San Francisco's burgeoning hippie counterculture had completely transformed the look of demonstrations. The immense antiwar marches in San Francisco combined political protest with celebrations of love. People danced in the street to rock bands perched on flatbed trucks. Stoned on marijuana or psychedelic drugs, young marchers protested not only the war, but also the “straight” society that “made war, not love.”

At first, “politicos” and hippies seemed to have nothing in common. As one hippie admitted, “We weren't interested in taking over administration buildings. We were interested in blowing people's minds, basically. Making them confront the idea that there was an alternative to the straight way of life.”
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And a few staunch politicos never touched any drugs or danced all night to psychedelic music. But between 1965 and 1967, these worlds began to overlap. “There was a continuum between politics and culture at every school,” explained former student activist Paul Buhle.

At one end there were these tight-assed people whom you suspected of being close to the Communist Party. At the other end you had a lot of burn-outs. Radical political publications soon appeared at “head shops” along with underground comics—or comix as they were relabelled—incense, posters and drug paraphernalia. At a hippie grocery store you could see a poster with the headline “Fight Imperialism! Eat Organic Food!” It was something you couldn't believe in unless you were nineteen years old.
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The blurring of the radical political and countercultural worlds also accelerated all sorts of social relationships. “You became intimate with people very easily,” recalled Devra Weber, then a Los Angeles student.