Remapping Second-Wave Feminism

The Long Women's Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997

Janet Allured

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780820354774, 9780820345383
• eBook ISBN: 9780820350042
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Scholars of second-wave feminism often center their research on northern thought and political activity and usually overlook the vibrant pockets of activism that existed elsewhere. In Remapping Second-Wave Feminism, Janet Allured attempts to reshape the national narrative by focusing on the grassroots women's movement in the South, particularly in Louisiana.

This book delves into unexplored origins of the feminist movement. While acknowledging the ways that the fight for African American civil rights produced the women's liberation movement in the South—and subsequently in the North—Allured also locates other wellsprings of the movement that were particularly important to southern change-seekers, especially preexisting women's organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the YWCA. Also, for many southern feminists, being part of a faith tradition that emphasized social justice reform is what ultimately propelled them into working for gender equality. Allured highlights key figures in Louisiana; divisions based on regional, sexual, and ideological differences; access to abortion; lawsuits that had national implications that emanated from southern women; and the fight against sexual assault and domestic violence. Through detailed archival and oral history research, she has forged a new path, making this a foundational work for the field. Remapping Second-Wave Feminism will amend how we reflexively view feminism as a northern phenomenon, giving proper due to the southern contribution.

CHAPTER 1

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“Me? A Feminist?”

Proto-feminist Women’s Organizations and the Long Women’s Rights Movement, 1950–1967

In the mid-1970s, the Louisiana Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (La. BPW) placed an advertisement with the headline “Me? A Feminist?” in newspapers around the state. The purpose of the ad was to “educate men and women to the meaning of feminism, minimize the hostility some people feel toward the women’s movement, and create an atmosphere more receptive to ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.” The text tried to normalize a term that, by the mid-1970s, carried terribly negative connotations, one that conjured up images of a woman who was antimale, antifamily, antimarriage, and probably a Communist.

To counter the popular perception, the ad asked:

Do you think men and women have equal talents, abilities, and potentials?

Then you’re a feminist.

Do you think men and women should receive equal pay for equal work?

Then you’re a feminist.

Do you think women who spend their lives making a home for their families deserve respect for the job they’re doing?

Then you’re a feminist.

The two thousand or so members of the Louisiana BPW—businesswomen, college professors, teachers in public and private schools, among others—hoped that this ad would convince the average voter that feminism was nothing to be feared and that ratification of the ERA fit squarely within the much-celebrated mainstream ideals and traditions of the United States.¹ Although that endeavor did not succeed, and Louisiana never ratified the ERA, the ad copy illustrates that not all feminists belonged to self-identified feminist groups, and that in fact many traditional organizations like the BPW not only supported feminist goals but allied with avowedly feminist groups such as NOW. The BPW was, in fact, one of many women’s associations that served as a springboard for the resurgent feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.²

Since at least the 1990s, historians have been expanding the definition of what constituted feminist work and in the process have made the case for extending the chronology of second-wave feminism back to the 1950s and perhaps even earlier. World War II and the Cold War created a new set of circumstances that increased women’s participation in clubs and associations and pushed them toward civic activism. Progressive women in the 1950s, historian Susan Lynn recaps, “promoted a variety of causes: an expanded welfare state, a powerful labor movement, a strong tradition of civil liberties, the principle of racial equality, and a new international order in which nations would share economic resources more equitably and negotiate disputes through the United Nations. They worked along a variety of fronts within peace, civil rights, religious, and women’s organizations, and in the case of working-class women, in labor unions.”³ Lynn documents the work of progressive women in all-female as well as in mixed-sex organizations, but in Louisiana, for white women anyway, the most proto-feminist organizations were all-female. Proto-feminist associations viewed their work through a gendered lens that distinguished them from women’s organizations whose goal was to serve the larger community, such as the Junior League; The Links, Inc. (the black equivalent of the Junior League); and the black sororities. These single-sex organizations, dedicated not so much to creating opportunities for women as to ameliorating problems in the larger communities of which women were a part, were far less likely to supply personnel to the independent feminist movement than were the BPW, the League of Women Voters (LWV) and its black counterparts (for example, the Louisiana League of Good Government), the Independent Women’s Organization (IWO), the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. (The National Council of Jewish Women, equally as important, will be covered in the next chapter about women’s religiously affiliated associations.) The traditional “women’s jobs” created by the first wave, especially social work, also provided a cadre of women activists, black and white, to second-wave feminism in Louisiana, thus linking those two waves.

Civic-minded women of the 1950s and early 1960s who joined groups such as the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and the LWV adopted the cultural values of the bourgeoisie. Black or white, they typically wore hats and gloves, were well coiffed and well spoken. They seldom challenged dominant gender roles and held values only slightly left of center. Yet they pushed the envelope in various ways that prefigured the overt feminism of the 1960s.

Preexisting liberal women’s groups and associations such as the BPW developed networks and progressive ideas on which second-wave feminism built. The women’s rights movement was by no means confined to the few small, poorly financed, and often transitory independent organizations such as NOW and the Women’s Political Caucus. Instead, the foundations of feminism in Louisiana rested on a broad base of established women’s groups that counted among their members many traditional-looking—but forward-thinking—southern women, black and white.

While chapter 2 will examine the religious roots of second-wave feminism in Louisiana, the associations described in this chapter are mostly secular—with the exception of the YWCA—and are typically civic in nature. To personify and concretize the themes of the chapter, and to provide a taste of what feminism in Louisiana looked like in the early to mid-1960s, I highlight the lives of one or two members of each organization. Most were born before World War II, usually in the 1930s, so I refer to them as “older” feminists to distinguish them from the younger women of the 1960s generation who were born ten or more years later. Notably, the older women may have been black, white, or mixed-race. Ironically, racial segregation—state law until the mid-1960s—had the advantage of providing leadership opportunities for women of color in their own all-woman organizations.

Examining why a recognizable mass grassroots movement took shape in the mid-1960s rounds out the last quarter of the chapter. The 1964 Louisiana Commission on the Status of Women played a part in generating a new feminist wave, as did the women’s peace movement, which had a long history of progressive activism. Since the early part of the twentieth century, women peace advocates had critiqued militarism, conquest, and colonization of other lands. In the 1960s, they broadened that critique to include violence, conquest, and colonization directed against women in the home, in public spaces, at work, or in society at large. The United States’ participation in the Vietnam conflict swelled the ranks of the antiwar movement in the mid-1960s, and female “peaceniks” (as they were often derisively called) were drawn to the new CR sessions that birthed the grassroots women’s movement at about the same time.⁴

Voter Education Organizations

For white Louisiana women, the most significant organization that produced a cadre of engaged civic activists, at least in terms of numbers, was the League of Women Voters. Formed in 1920 after women in the United States won the right to vote, it had a slow start in Louisiana, which, like most southern states, did not ratify the woman suffrage amendment (the Nineteenth). Kate and Jean Gordon, two suffragists from New Orleans, white social reformers during the Progressive years, campaigned against the federal Anthony Amendment on racist grounds, arguing that only states had the right to grant suffrage—a stab at the Fifteenth Amendment, which had granted freed slaves the right to vote.⁵ However, once the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the federal constitution, all states, even the nonratifying ones, were required to follow it. In the wake of the suffrage victory, the National American Woman Suffrage Association transformed itself into the League of Women Voters with the mission of educating women about exercising their newly won right. Though it did not endorse candidates and remained strictly nonpartisan, the LWV encouraged advocacy on many different issues, not just those involving women. It thus trained many progressive activists, among them Evelyn Daniel Cloutman of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Born in Kentwood, a small town in rural east Louisiana, in 1918, Evelyn Daniel was of the generation who found the LWV an attractive progressive organization, in part because it was the only one available. Daniel graduated from segregated public schools in Kentwood, and from there went to the whites-only flagship university, Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. (Southern University, the historically black public counterpart, sat on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, a geophysical reminder of the second-class citizenship of African Americans living in a white-ruled society.) After acquiring a BS degree and teacher certification, Evelyn moved in 1938 to Lake Charles, an industrial city of seventy thousand people about thirty miles from the Texas border, where her father managed a lumber company. Within a few months, she married fellow teacher Edward B. Cloutman Jr. Because the Calcasieu Parish School Board’s policy forbade the employment of married women, her contract was not renewed, although her husband, needless to say, did not suffer the same fate.

The practice of firing either married or pregnant women was customary in the United States at the time. The shortage of labor during World War II caused many school boards to abandon the policy, but even after the war, it continued in some Louisiana parishes, which explains why many female teachers remained single their entire lives, often living together so that they could share expenses. Clearly, for some women, giving up families of their own to live alone or with another woman was preferable to watching one’s investment in higher education evaporate upon marriage.⁶ For Evelyn Cloutman, however, being fired for no reason other than that she was female was a “click” moment—an epiphany when she realized that women suffered from socially imposed disabilities that men did not.

Evelyn Cloutman was of the demographic cohort—Cold War–era baby-boom parents—described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan’s book arose out of a survey she conducted of her Smith College classmates documenting the malaise felt by many contemporary housewives who otherwise lived a supposedly ideal life in middle-class America. Some women who had retired to a life of conventional domesticity, especially if they had more than a high school education, found themselves feeling unfulfilled, depressed, and restless in their “comfortable concentration camp” of a three-bedroom home in the suburbs. For them, the book struck a chord.⁷ But though she lived in a ranch-style house in a nice subdivision of Lake Charles, Evelyn Cloutman was not one of the discontented housewives Friedan described, and Friedan’s book was unimportant to her dawning feminist awareness. To the contrary, Cloutman’s husband supported her career ambitions. Evelyn bore four sons within five years, yet went back to school to get another degree, this time in social work, while her children were young. Social work was one of very few white-collar careers open to college-educated women at the time; teaching, nursing, library administration, and clerical work were others. The demand for social workers was so great that Cloutman could be reasonably certain she would not be fired because she was the wrong gender, or because she was married.

Working for the Department of Child Welfare as a caseworker, Cloutman saw many women and children, both white and black and nearly all poor, trapped in homes with abusive fathers and/or husbands, with little recourse. The injustice she witnessed in the courts as well as in those homes produced more “click” moments that moved her to action. Feeling as though her work was palliative, she determined to bring about more fundamental changes in the system—institutional, legal, and cultural changes. Possessed of greater opportunities and a broader vision of equality than women of the earlier first-wave suffrage movement, Cloutman joined the local chapter of the LWV. The league was the closest thing to a feminist organization in town and had a reputation for successful lobbying. From her research and experience in the league, Cloutman learned how the entire system “was tilted against women.” The league meetings were held at her church, University United Methodist, and many members of the church joined her in membership. Cloutman’s faith made her believe that eliminating the oppression of women “was just the right thing to do. God did not favor men over women, but the state of Louisiana did.” In the early 1970s, she became president of the local LWV chapter. The league gave her skills and the network that allowed her to put her convictions to work: she lobbied the local legislative delegation in support of ratification of the ERA and committed herself to a variety of social justice and civic-improvement causes. She cofounded the Calcasieu Parish Battered Women’s Shelter (later called Oasis: A Safe Haven for Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence), the second domestic violence shelter in the state, in 1979. The board she assembled provided money, permits, housing, land, and leadership for the new shelter, and included men and women of different faiths, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish.⁸ This collaboration among different groups, many of which were not normally associated with feminism, is typical of how feminist goals were achieved in Louisiana.

The LWV, a powerful and important venue for early feminist activism, has never quite recovered from the stigma conferred upon it by Betty Friedan, who scoffed at its afternoon teas (connoting women who did not work and therefore represented a bygone era). For young student activists in the 1960s, the league conjured up unappealing images of dowdy straight women married to businessmen who played by conventional rules. Yet, despite its shortcomings, this group served as an important bridge and training ground for progressive public activists between the first wave of suffrage and the reinvigorated feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Many league members would not have referred to themselves as feminist (although Cloutman did), for the word fell into disuse after World War I, but they nonetheless advocated some of the same issues that younger women of the second wave later took up.⁹

The league was especially important for women’s political activism in the South, where few alternate independent women’s organizations existed.¹⁰ League actions taught women how to influence politicians at every level of government (local, state, and national) through effective testimonials and lobbying, either in person, in the media, or by mail. The league generally supported progressive policies regardless of whether they were “women’s” issues. For example, though it followed Louisiana law and remained segregated until the mid-1960s, the all-white LWV members in New Orleans worked with other organizations—primarily a new one called Save Our Schools—to oppose continued segregation and the city’s attempts to close public schools.¹¹ League members were disproportionately represented at the International Women’s Year conferences held in Baton Rouge and Houston in 1977, and some league members went on to enter politics themselves. Willie Mount of Lake Charles, for example, president of the local LWV chapter, became the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “To My Yankee Friends”
• Chapter 1 “Me? A Feminist?”
• Chapter 2 “In the Eyes of God”
• Chapter 3 “Their Courage Inspired Me”
• Chapter 4 “To Empower Women”
• Chapter 5 “Murder or Mercy?”
• Chapter 6 “Cherchez Les Femmes?”
• Chapter 7 “We Are All Sisters”
• Chapter 8 “I Wanted More for My Daughters”
• Chapter 9 “Real Progress for Women”
• Epilogue Into the Twenty-First Century
• Appendix 1 People Interviewed
• Appendix 2 Participants in the New Orleans Women’s Movement
• Notes
• Index