Pauli Murray, an eminent black lawyer, came to that meeting, and Dorothy Haener and Caroline Davis from the UAW, and Kay Clarenbach, head of the Governor’s Commission in Wisconsin, and Katherine Conroy of the Communications Workers of America, and Aileen Hernandez, then a member of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. I asked them to come to my hotel room one night. Most didn’t think women needed a movement like the blacks, but everyone was mad at the sabotage of Title VII. The consensus was that the conference could surely take respectable action to insist that the law be enforced.
I went to bed relieved that probably a movement wouldn’t have to be organized. At six the next morning, I got a call from one of the top token women in the Johnson administration, urging me not to rock the boat. At eight the phone rang again; this time it was one of the reluctant sisters of the night before, angry now, really angry. “We’ve been told that this conference doesn’t have the power to take any action at all, or even the right to offer a resolution. So we’ve got a table for us all to eat together at lunch, and we’ll start the organization.” At the luncheon we each chipped in a dollar. I wrote the word “NOW” on a paper napkin; our group should be called the National Organization for Women, I said, “because men should be part of it.” Then I wrote down the first sentence of the NOW statement of purpose, committing ourselves to “take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.”
The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, the architecture of the home, the practice of medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of the race.
I now see the women’s movement for equality as simply the necessary first stage of a much larger sex-role revolution. I never did see it in terms of class or race: women, as an oppressed class, fighting to overthrow or take power away from men as a class, the oppressors. I knew the movement had to include men as equal members, though women would have to take the lead in the first stage.
There is only one way for women to reach full human potential—by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society.
Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn. When the young radical kids came into the movement, they said it was “boring” or “reformist” or “capitalist co-option” to place so much emphasis on jobs and education. But very few women can afford to ignore the elementary economic facts of life. Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she plans not to marry. But the importance of work for women goes beyond economics. How else can women participate in the action and decisions of an advanced industrial society unless they have the training and opportunity and skills that come from participating in it?
Women also had to confront their sexual nature, not deny or ignore it as earlier feminist had done. Society had to be restructured so that women, who happen to be the people who give birth, could make a human, responsible choice whether or not—and when—to have children, and not be barred thereby from participating in society in their own right. This meant the right to birth control and safe abortion; the right to maternity leave and child-care centers if women did not want to retreat completely from adult society during the childbearing years; and the equivalent of a GI bill for retraining if women chose to stay home with the children. For it seemed to me that most women would still choose to have children, though not so many if child rearing was no longer their only road to status and economic support—a vicarious participation in life.
I couldn’t define “liberation” for women in terms that denied the sexual and human reality of our need to love, and even sometimes to depend upon, a man. What had to be changed was the obsolete feminine and masculine sex roles that dehumanized sex, making it almost impossible for women and men to make love, not war. How could we ever really know or love each other as long as we played those roles that kept us from knowing or being ourselves? Weren’t men as well as women still locked in lonely isolation, alienation, no matter how many sexual acrobatics they put their bodies through? Weren’t men dying too young, suppressing fears and tears and their own tenderness? It seemed to me that men weren’t really the enemy—they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
In these past years of action, I have seen myself and other women becoming both stronger and more gentle, taking ourselves more seriously, yet beginning to really have fun as we stopped playing the old roles. We discovered we could trust each other. I love the women with whom I took the adventurous and joyous actions of these years. No one realized how pitifully few we were in the beginning, how little money we had, how little experience.
What gave us the strength and the nerve to do what we did, in the name of American women, of women of the world? It was, of course, because we were doing it for ourselves. It was not charity for poor others; we, the middle-class women who started this, were all poor, in a sense that goes beyond dollars. It was hard even for housewives whose husbands weren’t poor to get money to fly to board meetings of NOW. It was hard for women who worked to get time off from their jobs, or take precious weekend time from their families. I have never worked so hard for money, gone so many hours with so little sleep or time off to eat or even go to the toilet, as in these first years of the women’s movement.
I was subpoenaed on Christmas Eve, 1966, to testify before a judge in Foley Square, because the airlines were outraged at our insistence that they were guilty of sex discrimination by forcing stewardesses to resign at age thirty or upon their marriage. (Why, I had wondered, are they going to such lengths? Surely they don’t think men ride the airlines because stewardesses are nubile. And then I realized how much money the airlines saved by firing those pretty stewardesses before they had time to accumulate pay increases, vacation time, and pension rights. And how I love it now when stewardesses hug me on an airplane and tell me they are not only married and over thirty, but can even have children and keep flying!)
I felt a certain urgency of history, that we would be failing the generation coming up if we evaded the question of abortion now. I also felt we had to get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the Constitution despite the claim of union leaders that it would end “protective” laws for women. We had to take the torch of equality from the lonely, bitter old women who had been fighting all alone for the amendment, which had been bottled up in Congress for nearly fifty years since women had chained themselves to the White House fence to get the vote.
On our first picket line at the White House fence (“Rights Not Roses”) on Mother’s Day in 1967, we threw away chains of aprons, flowers, and mock typewriters. We dumped bundles of newspapers onto the floor of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in protest ag
ainst its refusal to enforce the Civil Rights law against sex-segregated “Help Wanted: Male” ads (for the good jobs) and “Help Wanted: Female” ads (for gal Friday-type jobs). This was supposed to be just as illegal now as ads reading “Help Wanted: White” and “Help Wanted: Colored.” We announced we were going to sue the federal government for not enforcing the law equally on behalf of women (and then called members of our underground in the Justice Department to see if one could do that)—and we did.
I gave lectures in Southern finishing schools and commencement addresses at out-of-the-way colleges of home economics—as well as at Yale, UCLA, and Harvard—to pay my way in organizing NOW chapters (we never did have money for an organizing staff ). Our only real office in those years was my apartment. It wasn’t possible to keep up with the mail. But when women like Wilma Heide from Pittsburgh, or Karen De Crow in Syracuse, Eliza Paschall in Atlanta, Jacqui Ceballos—so many others—were so determined to have NOW chapters that they called long distance when we didn’t answer their letters, the only thing to do was to have them become local NOW organizers.
I remember so many way stations: Going to lunch at the for-men-only Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel with fifty NOW women and demanding to be served…Testifying before the Senate against the nomination to the Supreme Court of a sexist judge named Carswell who refused to hear a case of a woman who was fired because she had preschool children…Seeing the first sign of a woman’s underground in the student movement, when I was asked to lead a rap session at the National Student Congress in College Park, Maryland, in 1968…After a resolution for the liberation of women from the mimeograph machines was laughed down at the SDS convention, hearing the young radical women telling me they had to have a separate women’s-lib group—because if they really spoke out at SDS meetings, they might not get married…Helping Sheila Tobias plan the Cornell intersession on women in 1968, which started the first women’s-studies programs (how many universities have them now!)…Persuading the NOW board that we should hold a Congress to Unite Women with the young radicals despite differences in ideology and style…So many way stations.
I admired the flair of the young radicals when they got off the rhetoric of sex/class warfare and conducted actions like picketing the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City. But the media began to publicize, in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was hailed as the ideology of sex/class warfare by those who claimed to be the radicals of the women’s movement. After the man-hating faction broke up the second Congress to Unite Women with hate talk, and even violence, I heard a young radical say, “If I were an agent of the CIA and wanted to disrupt this movement, that’s just what I would do.”
By 1970, it was beginning to be clear that the women’s movement was more than a temporary fad, it was the fastest-growing movement for basic social and political change of the decade. The black movement had been taken over by extremists; the student movement was immobilized by its fetish for leaderless structure and by the growing alienation from extremist hate rhetoric. Someone was trying to take over our movement, too—or to stop it, immobilize it, splinter it—under the guise of radical rhetoric and a similar fetish against leadership and structure. “It’s fruitless to speculate whether they are CIA agents, or sick, or on a private power trip, or just plain stupid,” a black leader warned me. “If they continually disrupt, you simply have to fight them.”
It seemed to me the women’s movement had to get out of sexual politics. I thought it was a joke at first—those strangely humorless papers about clitoral orgasms that would liberate women from sexual dependence on a man’s penis, and the “consciousness-raising” talk that women should insist now on being on top in bed with men. Then I realized, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, that these women were in part acting out sexually their rebellion and resentment at being “underneath” in society generally, being dependent on men for their personal definition. But their resentment was being manipulated into an orgy of sex hatred that would vitiate the power they now had to change the conditions they resented. I’m not sure what motivates those who viciously promulgate, or manipulate, man hate in the women’s movement. Some of the disrupters seemed to come from extreme left groups, some seemed to be using the women’s movement to proselytize lesbianism, others seemed to be honestly articulating the legitimate and too-long-buried rage of women into a rhetoric of sex/class warfare, which I consider to be based on a false analogy with obsolete or irrelevant ideologies of class warfare or race separatism. The man-haters were given publicity far out of proportion to their numbers in the movement because of the media’s hunger for sensationalism. Many women in the movement go through a temporary period of great hostility to men when they first become conscious of their situation; when they start acting to change their situation, they outgrow what I call pseudo-radical infantilism. But that man-hating rhetoric increasingly disturbs most women in the movement, in addition to keeping many women out of the movement.
On the plane to Chicago, preparing to bow out as president of NOW, feeling powerless to fight the man-haters openly and refusing to front for them, I suddenly knew what had to be done. A woman from Florida had written to remind me that August 26, 1970, was the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the vote. We needed to call a national action—a strike of women to call attention to the unfinished business of equality: equal opportunity for jobs and education, the right to abortion and child-care centers, the right to our own share of political power. It would unite women again in serious action—women who had never been near a “women’s lib” group. (NOW, the largest such group, and the only one with a national structure, had only 3,000 members in thirty cities in 1970.) I remember that, to transmit this new vision to the NOW convention in Chicago, warning of the dangers of aborting the women’s movement, I spoke for nearly two hours and got a standing ovation. The grass-roots strength of NOW went into organizing the August 26 strike. In New York, women filled the temporary headquarters volunteering to do anything and everything; they hardly went home at night.
Mayor Lindsay wouldn’t close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen’s horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers’ heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try. It was, as they say, the first great nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about the “bra-burners” wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day.
On August 26, it suddenly became both political and glamorous to be a feminist. At first, politics had seemed to be something altogether separate from what we were doing in the women’s movement. The regular politicians—right, left, center; Republican, Democrat, splinter—certainly weren’t interested in women. In 1968, I had testified in vain at the conventions of both political parties, trying to get a single word about women in either the Republican or Democratic platform. When Eugene McCarthy, the chief sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, announced that he was going to run for president to end the Vietnam war, I began to connect my own politics, at least, to the women?
??s drive for equality. I called Bella Abzug and asked how I could work for McCarthy. But not even the other women working for him thought women’s issues were relevant politically, and many NOW members were critical of me for campaigning openly for McCarthy.
At the 1970 NOW convention in Chicago, I said we had a human responsibility as women to end the Vietnam war. Neither men nor women should be drafted to fight an obscene, immoral war like the one in Vietnam, but we had to take equal responsibility for ending it. Two years earlier, in 1968, standing outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, I had watched helmeted troopers clubbing down the long-haired young, my own son among them. I began to see that these young men, saying they didn’t have to napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove they were men, were defying the masculine mystique as we had defied the feminine one. Those young men, and their elders like them, were the other half of what we were doing.
And during that summer of 1970, I started trying to organize a women’s political caucus; later, it stuck together enough to get Bella Abzug elected to Congress. She and Gloria Steinem joined me as conveners of our August 26 Women’s Strike for Equality march. So many women who had been afraid before joined our march that day; we, and the world, suddenly realized the possibilities of women’s political power. This power was first tested in the summer of 1972 in Miami when, for the first time, women played a major role in the political conventions. Although inexperienced caucus leaders may have been too easily co-opted by Nixon or McGovern, or infiltrated by Watergate agents, they brought change to the political arena. They won commitments from both parties on child-care, preschool, and after-school programs. And Shirley Chisholm stayed in the Democratic race right to the end. By 1976, I predict, even the Republicans will have a woman running seriously for vice-president, if not for president.