5 RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS, VENTING ANGER, FINDING SISTERHOOD “The Revolution is What is Happening in Every Woman’s Mind” Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has func- tioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves – reinstituting oppression by another name . Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey . frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man- hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about. Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” RAT 1970 1 We talk to each other about ourselves. That doesn’t sound like much, but it turns out to be dynamite . The revolution is what is happening in every woman’s mind.” Woman in a consciousness-raising group, 1969 2 Radical Feminism and the Idea of Consciousness Raising So now we get to the angry, hairy part of the story – radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the brand of feminism that everyone thinks they know, and that most people since that time have shunned lest they be identified with it. This was the era when a small group of women activists tried to launch a feminist revolution. To most Americans, whatever their political persuasion, the legal battles of the 1960s and 1970s were at least understandable. By the 1970s, most people in the U.S. were willing to admit that women were entitled to the same citizenship rights as men. Radical feminists fought battles that were Copyright © 2014. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Group. All rights © 2014. Taylor & Francis Copyright harder for many people to accept and integrate. The struggles they waged were more intimate, more destabilizing of marriages, family hierarchies and gender norms. Radical feminists fought over relationships, over sex, over media images Orleck, Annelise. Rethinking American Women's Activism. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. Accessed March 22, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-22 15:31:48. 106 Raising Consciousness of women. They waged their struggles in kitchens, bedrooms and classrooms. These conflicts exploded with unexpected force in the personal lives of mil- lions in the U.S. – and around the world. In real and profound ways, nothing has ever been the same. Who were the radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s? The dominant image is that they were young, affluent and white. That is not entirely untrue. Most were of a younger generation than the women who had founded NOW. They did not come of age in the 1930s, as did the labor feminist generation, but in the 1950s and 1960s. Many were women who had been active in the civil rights movement, in the anti-Vietnam war movement, in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their activism was deeply influenced by the vision of Ella Baker and Septima Clark. They believed that changes in consciousness mattered at least as much as changes in the law, perhaps more. As Kathie Sarachild described it: “We were applying to women and to ourselves as women’s liberation organizers the practice a number of us had learned as organizers in the civil rights movement in the South in the early 1960’s.” 3 The career of Robin Morgan, one of the best-known radical feminists of that era, in many ways encapsulated the movement’s turn to consciousness-raising as a fresh political strategy. A child of the 1940s and 1950s, raised by a single mother in what Morgan would later call “an apostate Jewish household,” she first became a public figure as a child star on radio and television. Morgan had her own New York radio show in the 1940s, and in the 1950s she played Dagmar Hansen on the sentimental hit television series I Remember Mama . Her experiences as a performer, and her ability as a child to reach large audiences through media, strongly influ- enced her later evolution as a political activist. 4 As a young woman Morgan was radicalized by the social movements and burn- ing issues that defined her generation. In the early 1960s, she joined the New York City Congress of Racial Equality. She also became a militant opponent of the Vietnam War, and was deeply involved in the student movement. Like a great many of the women who would galvanize and articulate radical feminism in New York in the 1960s, Morgan was also a journalist. A lucid and vivid writer, with a flair for the dramatic, she contributed to many different radical publications through the late 1960s and into the 1970s. As the decade wore on, Morgan and many other young radical women felt increasingly uncomfortable about the rampant sexism they experienced in New Left organizations. In 1967, a group of women intellectuals, civil rights and anti- war activists founded a new political organization – New York Radical Women (NYRW). One of the group’s co-founders was a young painter and political theo- rist from St. Louis named Shulamit Firestone who was, like Morgan, the child of Copyright © 2014. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Group. All rights © 2014. Taylor & Francis Copyright a Jewish refugee from Nazism. This circle of radical women promised to use techniques and philosophies they had learned in the civil rights movement to promote the ideals of women’s liberation. (The term women’s liberation drew directly on the language of anti-colonial “liberation” movements then so popular Orleck, Annelise. Rethinking American Women's Activism. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. Accessed March 22, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-22 15:31:48. Raising Consciousness 107 among young Leftists.) Firestone soon began editing a publication called Notes, in which many of the slogans of the new feminist movement first appeared in print. It was in Notes that these activists first declared that “sisterhood is powerful,” and debunked “the myth of the vaginal orgasm.” 5 Early radical feminists drew on lessons learned from the Youth Interna- tional Party, better known as the Yippies. The Yippies were an attempt by activists Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner to use guerilla theater as a form of political protest. Women activists had quickly clashed with male Yippies over their treatment of women. But, they appreciated the political potential of the group’s use of humor and irony. In 1967–1968, Yippies had nominated Pigasus the pig for president and pretended to levitate the Pentagon. Hoffman’s most famous stunt was a protest at the New York Stock Exchange. When guards attempted to keep him out, he deflected their concern, saying, “I have no picket signs. I’m not here to make trouble.” He then proceeded to rain down cash from the balcony so that news cameras would record floor traders crawl- ing around on their hands and news to scoop up the currency. A new form of political protest was born. Morgan and other radical feminists deployed vivid forms of political theater to draw attention to feminism. An important mentor in that regard and a link to Black Power organizations was flamboyant, militant African-American attorney Florynce Kennedy. In 1968, New York Radical Women and Kennedy organized a soon-to-be-world-famous protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They picked the pageant because it was watched by millions of view- ers and they sought quick impact through high visibility. That kind of media savvy became one of the hallmarks of women’s libera- tion. Protester (and future novelist) Alix Kates Shulman recalled: “When I was growing up Miss America was the symbol of what every young girl wanted to be. That was the kind of attainment that everyone yearned for, to be considered beau- tiful. There was nothing else.” To protest Miss America was gutsy, organizer Carol Hanisch felt. “Because up to this point we hadn’t done a lot of actions yet. We were a very small movement . Miss America was this American Pie icon. Who would dare criticize this?” 6 In a press release issued two weeks before the protest Morgan explained why she repudiated “the degrading mindless boob-girlie symbol.” The pageant paraded women down a runway like cattle, she said, while male judges appraised their bodies. Also, New York Radical women saw the pageant as “racism with roses.” No Black, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, or Mexican-American woman had ever won, nor had there ever been a “true Miss America – an American Indian.” The pag- eant was baldly commercial, too, using scantily women’s bodies to sell merchan- Copyright © 2014. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Group. All rights © 2014. Taylor & Francis Copyright dise. Finally, Morgan wrote, they rejected the use of “Miss America as Military Death Mascot . Last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit . We refuse to be used as Mascots for Murder.” Orleck, Annelise. Rethinking American Women's Activism. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. Accessed March 22, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from washington on 2021-03-22 15:31:48. 108 Raising Consciousness The press release put Atlantic City police on notice that, if the protesters were arrested, they would “demand to be busted by policewomen only. In Atlantic City, women cops are not permitted to make arrests – dig that!” It also warned the press that protesters would give interviews only to women journalists. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, who 35 years earlier had closed her White House press conferences to men, New York Radical Women hoped to force newspapers to send women report- ers to cover the event.