![]()
Chapter One
The United States
In August 1978 the American edition of Cosmopolitan featured an article by Betty Friedan, the âMother of the Movementâ, entitled provokingly âWhere are women in 1978?â In this unusually gloomy piece, a prelude to her controversial reconsideration of the women's movement The Second Stage1, Friedan contrasts the nonchalant attitude of her daughter, who has just got into Harvard Medical School and who considers that feminism is already passĂ©, with her own very personal doubts about exactly what the past decade of women's struggle has achieved. Friedan expresses her worries in her usual direct prose style:
When Betty Friedan's first book, The Feminine Mystique, came out in 1963, a whole generation finally learned about the âproblem without a nameâ, the sense of discontent and unease felt by American women whom the rest of the world considered to be in a position of unrivalled privilege. In the 1950s the antics of scatty sitcom women like Lucille Ball and the Hollywood mystique of the great, all-desirable female star had been joined to the image of the housewife whose chores were rendered almost non-existent by a plethora of labour-saving devices. The myth sold the idea that American women were both family-centred and yet freed from any sense of oppression. Over American womanhood presided the great ideal, the President's wife, First Lady of the greatest land on earth. No presidential contender could afford to be seen without a graciously smiling wife beside him, his mainstay and helpmate, a model for all those American girls whose brothers believed in the possibility of one day becoming President in their own right. George Washington represented an ideal of honesty, integrity and male strength, while his wife, the aptly named Martha, represented the ideal of good wifehood.
Betty Friedan's book did much to shatter the Martha Washington idyll, and she dared to ask in public those questions that women had been asking in the privacy of their own homes. Was there to be nothing more in life than the ritualized abandonment of career in order to put a husband through college, the raising of children in hygienic surroundings, the steadily increased consumerism of middle-class expectations? What, ultimately, was it all for? And how did it square with the rising divorce rate, with the high percentage of housewife alcoholics, with the sense of sterility of which so many women seemed to be tacitly aware in their lives?
After Betty Friedan's book - the deluge! Feminism escalated in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a way that left the rest of the world short of breath. The WITCH manifesto of 1968 was followed by the BITCH manifesto of a year later, while 1968 also saw Valerie Solanas, founder, theorist and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting up Men), produce her manifesto, in which she proclaimed that âEvery man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shitâ.2 And from the confusion of voices asserting a new aggressive role for those women who had been marginalized into passivity for too long, there emerged something the mass media could latch on to and mock: the image of the feminist woman as a bra-burner, publicly discarding the intimate items of female apparel as a gesture of contempt for femininity. It is curious to note how closely the image of the bra-burner, concocted by the media in the late 1960s, follows the pattern of the media-mockery of the nineteenth-century feminists who dared to follow Amalia Bloomer's example and wear baggy trousers instead of the impractical full skirts that the true lady was supposed to wear. In fact, the bra-burning tale seems to have originated with an early feminist protest, the New York Radical Women's Group attack on the Miss America pageant in 1968, when sisters were urged to throw into a huge Freedom Trash Can such things as bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle, âand any such woman-garbage you have around the houseâ.3 But whatever its origins, the idea of the feminist as a bra-burner caught on and was exploited to the full. The polarization between the New Woman and Middle-American Ideal Woman was sharply exposed. The problem without a name was suddenly on everyone's lips. It had become headline material.
Yet ten years later, Betty Friedan was asking what had gone wrong. Was it possible that so much energy could have burned itself out so fast? Friedan was certainly clear in her mind that the demands of radical groups such as the early feminist Redstockings had certainly not been met. The Redstockings, in their 1969 manifesto, had concluded their statement with the following:
And the overreaction of the media, with the denigration of feminism and the spate of violent anti-women movies that followed close on the heels of the early manifestos, showed quite plainly that the new voice of American women was proving to be a very threatening one to the traditional status quo. With so much happening for women, then, with the example of American feminism spreading rapidly across western Europe, pioneering feminists like Betty Friedan must have thought that their wildest hopes were within the bounds of possibility. The bitterness with which Friedan upbraids her successful student daughter in her Cosmopolitan article is thus far more than a conflict between generations - it is the bitterness of a woman who is facing the betrayal of a life-time's work and beliefs:
The discontented housewife for whom Betty Friedan's book provided a voice was not, of course, the prime mover of the revolution that turned into the women's movement. As the civil rights movement began to break up in the 1960s, the role of women activists became an increased focus for discussion. The tone of many of the early liberation manifestos reflects the sense of disenchantment many women felt with their male colleagues on the Left and in the civil rights movement; and there was a temptation to draw parallels with the Russian October Revolution, when the woman question began to emerge as a conflict in its own right once the basis for reconsidering all forms of social oppression was established.
After all, had not Lenin told Clara Zetkin that there were other, more difficult jobs to do before tackling the woman question? Moreover, he had made it perfectly clear that while he was concerned to break the power of property relations over women, discussions on sexuality were irrelevant. â? ask you is this the time to keep working women busy for months at a stretch with such questions as how to love or be loved, how to woo or be wooed?â, he wrote to her in 1920.5 The disenchantment that women had felt in revolutionary Russia provided an apt parallel with the frustrations of American women nearly fifty years later.
The emergence of a separate women's struggle in the 1960s coincided with the emergence of new assertiveness by a range of oppressed groups - blacks, chĂcanos, American Indians, what Marlene Dixon had called the âwhole soft underbellyâ of American society.6 The prospect of minority groups locked in conflict with a dominant colonial power offered a model for feminism which, for a time at least, identified with other groups. But as realization dawned that women were not a minority group by any stretch of the imagination and, moreover, that black women and chicano women were equally oppressed by their male comrades, the tenuous front of solidarity began to fragment. In their useful book Rebirth of Feminism, Judith Hole and Ellen Levine report a statement by a politico woman working in a collective:
The key to understanding the progress of the women's movement in the United States lies in accepting the fact of fragmentation from the very start. There is no single unified movement and there has never been one. The early years of feminism reveal a range of voices, from the intellectual moderates, such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, to the extremes of small far-left or fringe groups, with all kinds of other voices speaking in between. One of the most entertaining of these voices was that of the various WITCH covens, which began to emerge in 1968 and spread across the country. âThere is no âjoiningâ WITCH,â declared the New York manifesto. âIf you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rulesâ.8 Groups of WITCH members appeared from time to time to perform public hexings of organizations and individuals guilty of oppression of women, and the staginess of some of these events stands out even at a time of frequent public demonstration. The New York founding coven incorporated theatricality in its frame of reference, declaring that:
WITCH is in all women, everything.
It's theater, revolution,
Magic, terror and joy.
It's an awareness that witches and gypsies
Were the first guerrilla and resistance fighters
Against oppression â the oppression of women,
Down through the ages.9
The common concern of all the voices is plainly the fact of the oppression of women, but the differences are revealed when we consider the styles of action and the theoretical bases. The oppression of women could not be comfortably linked with the phenomenon of minority-group oppression, just as it could not be comfortably tied to patterns of class oppression â and the class problem in the United States is a peculiarly American minefield of complexities in its own right.
Whereas the British class system is rigidly predetermined and provides categories into which individuals are slotted, the American class system is more flexible and therefore less easy to define. Since class is understood differently, it is possible to move through the American class system and to cross boundaries in ways that would be impossible in the British context. What further confuses matters is the use of the term class by British and American feminists as though they were discussing the same thing, whilst in fact the term only becomes meaningful in context and is effectively untranslatable between the two cultures. Intellectual feminists could properly be said to have emerged from a middle-class tradition, and that tradition was most likely to be white, but as black Americans joined the ranks of the middle classes in legions, the question of black women's emancipation increased in complexity also. Black women activists pointed out that discrimination against them in the area of labour relations, for example, was far more strongly marked than that practised against white women. Black women, and, once they began to make their case known also, chicano women, formed the category of lowest wage-earners in the United St...
