Women's Liberation and Second-Wave Feminism: “The

12_Gosse_11.qxd 11/7/05 6:54 PM Page 153 Chapter 11 WOMEN’S LIBERATION AND SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM: “THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL” Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. —Casey Hayden and Mary King, “Sex and Caste,” November 18, 1965 Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.... We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy; men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women. We identify with all women. We define our best interest as that of the poorest, most brutally exploited woman. The time for individual skirmishes has passed. This time we are going all the way. Copyright © 2006. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Macmillan. All rights © 2006. Palgrave Copyright —Redstockings Manifesto, 1969 Van, Gosse,. Rethinking the New Left : A Movement of Movements, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unistthomas-ebooks/detail.action?docID=308106.<br>Created from unistthomas-ebooks on 2017-11-17 13:44:54. 12_Gosse_11.qxd 11/7/05 8:02 PM Page 154 154 | RETHINKING THE NEW LEFT [T]o the white women’s liberation groups we say . until you can deal with your own racism and until you can deal with your OWN poor white sisters, you will never be a liberation movement and you cannot expect to unite with Third World peoples in a common struggle. Most white women involved in liberation groups come from a middle-class and student thing. They don’t address themselves to the problems of poor and working class women, so there is no way in the world they would be speaking for Third World women. They call for equality. We answer, equal to what? Equal to white men in their power and ability to oppress Third World people?? It is difficult for Third World women to address themselves to the petty problems of who is going to take out the garbage, when there isn’t enough food in the house for anything to be thrown away. Fighting for the day-to-day existence of a family and as humans is the struggle of the Third World woman. We are speaking of oppression, we don’t need reforms that will put white women into a posi- tion to oppress women of color or OUR MEN in much the same way as white men have been doing for centuries. —“Equal to What?” Statement of the TWWA, 1969 Many different activist and intellectual currents fed into the mass women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which built upon the underground organizing and hard-won legislative successes of the 1950s and early 1960s, but had much greater visibility and influence. The new feminism included everything from lobbying campaigns for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to clinics, battered women’s shelters, and publishing companies. Its con- stituencies ranged from informal groups of suburban married women to lesbian collectives. Many of its most important victories took place in workplaces and families where women spoke up to change the sexual division of labor, and in personal struggles to enter traditional male preserves, from construction sites and coal mines to law and engineering schools. Ultimately, this new or “second wave” feminism became the largest and longest-lasting of all the movements of the New Left, with an unbroken trajectory that stretches into the twenty- first century. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has aroused the deepest opposition, even among women themselves. It may not have included all women—a nearly impossible task—but the women’s movement brought about clear benefits for all, white or black or brown or yellow, young or old, rich and poor, pro- or antifeminist. The best jobs could no longer be advertised as “men’s”; women could not be fired because they were married or past a certain age limit, or denied credit simply because they were female; men no longer had the legal right to rape their wives; women stopped dying from illegal abortions; hundreds of shelters and Copyright © 2006. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Macmillan. All rights © 2006. Palgrave Copyright rape-crisis centers were opened for victims of male violence; schools from Van, Gosse,. Rethinking the New Left : A Movement of Movements, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unistthomas-ebooks/detail.action?docID=308106.<br>Created from unistthomas-ebooks on 2017-11-17 13:44:54. 12_Gosse_11.qxd 9/7/05 7:27 AM Page 155 WOMEN’ S LIBERATION AND SECOND- WAVE FEMINISM | 155 kindergarten to college were required to provide athletic facilities for girls as well as boys; finally and not least, though demeaning terms like “broad,” “babe,” and “bitch” hardly disappeared, they became much less acceptable in public. These changes affected the texture of life everywhere, though the movement’s influence took longest to reach rural and small-town America. In the movement’s early years, activist women divided themselves into liberal, radical, lesbian, and socialist strands, while African American and Chicano women built their own separate feminist movements, and fierce conflicts raged over sexual orientation and organizing strategy. Indeed, the term “Women’s Liberation” was originally used to distinguish “radical feminists” (who wanted to abolish the “sex-gender system”) from “liberal feminists” (who worked to end discrimination in schools and employment). But these distinctions blurred very quickly, at least among white women activists. Married, older, and professional women who considered themselves liberal feminists took up radical issues like abortion and rape, while younger radicals found a home in the main liberal group, the National Organization for Women (NOW). There were significant distinctions between the many varieties of feminism, yet they also shared a newly awakened, intense awareness of the personal consequences of male domination, coupled with the excitement and power of sisterhood. As we shall see, however, the tensions between a uni- versal sisterhood and the fundamental differences between women divided by race (and thus class) produced distinctive varieties of feminism. NOW AND EQUAL RIGHTS FEMINISM, 1965–1968 “Second wave feminism” (the “first wave” was the struggle for suffrage and basic citizenship rights from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s) was the product of conscious organizing by thousands of women during the postwar decades when feminism was denigrated (as described in chapter 7), combined with demographic and economic shifts that began in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s. The scope of these changes is crucial to understand- ing why so many women reacted with spontaneous agreement when first exposed to feminist ideas. The postwar changes in the lives and expectations of American women can be grouped into two major categories: education and career opportunities, and sex and family life. In 1950, only one in four students receiving college degrees was female. By 1968, almost half of graduates were female, while the student population itself grew massively. But these millions of well-educated women faced a very low glass ceiling, and were shunted into the “pink collar” ghetto of low-wage clerical work. Women with bachelor’s degrees were systematically Copyright © 2006. Palgrave Macmillan. All rights reserved. Macmillan. All rights © 2006. Palgrave Copyright shut out of the graduate training that provided access to the professions—law Van, Gosse,. Rethinking the New Left : A Movement of Movements, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unistthomas-ebooks/detail.action?docID=308106.<br>Created from unistthomas-ebooks on 2017-11-17 13:44:54. 12_Gosse_11.qxd 9/7/05 7:27 AM Page 156 156 | RETHINKING THE NEW LEFT and medical school professors often barred women from their classes because they took places from “more deserving” men. In 1960, only one in ten Ph.D. degrees were awarded to women, a significantly smaller proportion than earlier in the century. Alongside open discrimination, and men’s exclusive access to the best jobs in the professions, skilled trades, and public employment, was the constant assertion by academic experts, journalists, politicians, and the pro- ducers of movies and television shows that a woman’s natural role in life was motherhood and keeping house. Further limiting women’s options was the sexual double standard, which encouraged girls to be “sexy” and seductive to get and keep a husband, but punished them severely if they enjoyed the experi- mentation and sexual freedom that was encouraged in boys. By the early 1960s, well before the new feminists began questioning traditional marriage, young women were taking a different road from the prescriptions of 1950s neo-Victorianism. They flocked into universities and sought autonomy by congregating in cities and defining women’s sexuality as more than procreation. From 1959 on, the percentage of women in their twenties who remained single increased dramatically, and the percentage who stayed childless grew sixfold in ten years. In 1960, “the pill” became available— the first reliable, simple contraceptive that a woman could use without men’s knowledge. The sweeping success of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 demonstrated the potential constituency for a revival of feminism among younger college-educated women, married and single.

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