The World Split Open Read online

  Praise for Ruth Rosen and The World Split Open

  “Thoroughly absorbing”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Ruth Rosen has produced an indispensable history of the contemporary women’s movement. Her book should be required (and enthralling) reading for women and men who want to understand recent developments shaping the longest revolution in American history.”

  —Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic

  “Superb . . . tough-minded, fair, finely written and exhaustively documented, The World Split Open offers stunning amounts of information that can enlighten even those who’ve been immersed in the women’s movement for the last thirty years and more. . . . The World Split Open is a model of its kind—at once intensely personal and intellectually solid.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Comprehensively researched and exquisitely written, The World Split Open is destined to become a classic for teachers and students of U.S. history.”

  —Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, SUNY Binghamton

  “As an activist herself, Rosen is particularly adept at capturing the passion that motivated many participants in the movement . . . a noted feminist academic, in The World Split Open she creates a narrative account that should appeal to non-academic readers as well.”

  —Bookpage

  “In this brilliant history of recent decades in the feminist movement, Rosen gives us views both panoramic and close up, authoritative and lively. She reviews our triumphs, our mistakes, and the vision we need for the years ahead. Must reading for those who’ve been in the thick of it, those who’ve gritted their teeth through it, and those who’ve done neither.”

  —Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Second Shift and The Time Bind

  “A lively, comprehensive chronicle of the women’s movement . . . Rosen vividly describes the key events of the women’s movement [and] provides fascinating accounts of the infighting that plagued progressive left-wing groups . . . a fascinating, beautifully readable account of a movement that in many ways profoundly changed America.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “We can never go back to the way things were, but if we want to go forward the feminist vision so powerfully laid out in this book must be our guide.”

  —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

  “This lively history offers much to learn and ponder.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “Ruth Rosen has given us a study not of abstractions but of real people brought compellingly to life in the pages of her probing, illuminating, engagingly-written history of the modern women’s movement, its culture, and its legacy.”

  —Lawrence W. Levine, author of The Opening of the American Mind

  “Finally we have a history worthy of the broadest, most successful movement in post-war America and the world. Ruth Rosen explains the rise and spread of feminism in a narrative that is original, comprehensive, critical, witty, and wise. Like the women’s movement itself, this splendid book will last.”

  —Michael Kazin, co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, and Professor of History, Georgetown University

  THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN

  Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, teaches history and public policy at U.C. Berkeley. She is the editor of the highly acclaimed Maimie Papers, amd author of the classic Prostitution in America. An award-winning journalist, she is a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and editorial writer and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. A cofounder and senior fellow of the Longview Institute, she writes for a wide variety of magazines and journals, including TomDispatch.com, The History News Network, TomPaine.com, The American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation, AlterNet.org, and is a regular contributor to the online political Web site Talking Points Memo Café.

  THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN

  Copyright © 2000, 2006 by RUTH ROSEN

  This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved.

  IN HONOR OF WOMEN—

  PAST,

  PRESENT, AND

  FUTURE

  AND

  FOR WENDEL

  If anything remains more or less unchanged,

  it will be the role of women.

  —David Riesman, sociologist, Harvard University

  Time

  July 21, 1967

  If we do not know our own history,

  we are doomed to live it as though

  it were our private fate.

  —Hannah Arendt, political theorist

  CONTENTS

  Preface: The Longest Revolution

  Chronology

  PART ONE: REFUGEES FROM THE FIFTIES

  Chapter 1 Dawn of Discontent

  Chapter 2 Female Generation Gap

  PART TWO: REBIRTH OF FEMINISM

  Chapter 3 Limits of Liberalism

  Chapter 4 Leaving the Left

  PART THREE: THROUGH THE EYES OF WOMEN

  Chapter 5 Hidden Injuries of Sex

  Chapter 6 Passion and Politics

  Chapter 7 The Politics of Paranoia

  PART FOUR: NO END IN SIGHT

  Chapter 8 The Proliferation of Feminism

  Chapter 9 Sisterhood to Superwoman

  Chapter 10 Beyond Backlash

  Epilogue to the 2007 Edition: Gender Matters in the New Century

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Interviews Not Cited in Notes & Archival Collections

  Bibliography for Further Reading and Research

  Index

  PREFACE: THE LONGEST REVOLUTION

  Bursts of artillery fire, mass strikes, massacred protesters, bomb explosions—these are our images of revolution. But some revolutions are harder to recognize: no cataclysms mark their beginnings or ends, no casualties are left lying in pools of blood. Though people may suffer greatly, their pain is hidden from public view. Such was the case with the American women’s movement. Activists didn’t hurl tear gas canisters at the police, burn down buildings, or fight in the street. Nor did they overthrow the government or achieve economic dominance or political hegemony. But they did subvert authority and transform society in dramatic and irrevocable ways; so much so that young women who come of age in the twenty-first century would not even recognize the America that existed before the feminist revolution came about.

  Before the revolution, during the 1950s, the president of Harvard University saw no reason to increase the number of female undergraduates because the university’s mission was to “train leaders,” and Harvard’s Lamont Library was off-limits to women for fear they would distract male students. Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex; employers paid women less than men for the same work. Bars often refused to serve women; banks routinely denied women credit or loans. Some states even excluded women from jury duty. Radio producers considered women’s voices too abrasive to be on air; television executives believed they didn’t have enough credibility to anchor the news; no women ran big corporations or universities, worked as firefighters or police officers, sat on the Supreme Court, installed electric equipment, climbed telephone poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes bore female names, thanks to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society. As late as 1970, Dr. Edgar Berman, a well-known physician, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency of the nation. Few people knew more than a few women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs., depending on her marital status, and if a woman wanted an aborti
on, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life, searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor. The public believed that rape victims had probably “asked for it,” most women felt too ashamed to report it, and no language existed to make sense of marital rape, date rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment. Just two words summed up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: “That’s life.”

  Long before the women’s movement began, American women’s participation in both the labor force and the sexual revolution had dramatically altered their lives. But it took a women’s movement to address the many ways women felt exploited, to lend legitimacy to their growing sense of injustice, and to name and reinterpret customs and practices that had long been accepted, but for which there was no language.

  One day in the fall of 1967, soon after I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley to begin graduate studies, I noticed a small card tacked to a bulletin board in the student union: “Women’s Liberation Group forming—all are welcome.” At the time, I was also working as a journalist and photographer in the antiwar movement and was quite certain that I didn’t need any more emancipation, thank you very much. “But it could be a great story,” I thought. On the appointed day, I entered a small room in the student union and announced I wanted to write a story about the group. They agreed, but insisted that I participate. Two hours later, my world began to turn upside down. As with so many in my generation, feminism cast a new, sometimes thrilling, sometimes unnerving light on my own personal and intellectual past. I lived on the edge, experienced the trauma of a kind of rebirth, and emerged with a sensibility and intellectual commitment that has shaped the rest of my adult life.

  Fast-forward to the waning weeks of the year 1979, when media pundits declared—with a collective sigh of relief—that the women’s movement was dead, and that the entire decade had been nothing but a political and cultural black hole of self-absorption, populated by hedonists and narcissists who spent their time in cults and hot tubs. Already the media had dubbed the people who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s “the Me Generation.” To put it mildly, I was flabbergasted. I wondered if they and I had lived through the same years. Had they really missed the not-so-quiet revolution in women’s—and therefore men’s—lives? True, the media had eventually tuned out, demonstrations had gradually diminished, but the women’s movement had ignited a cultural war that raged for decades. As an historian, I was appalled that pundits had already packaged the decade, without recognizing the birth of a revolution that would irreversibly transform American culture and society.

  One day, in the early 1980s, I was standing at the front of a cavernous hall that passes for a classroom at the Davis campus of the University of California. I gazed out over hundreds of my students, many of whom were no older than I’d been in 1967. I was just about to give a lecture on the roots and impact of the contemporary women’s movement. On an impulse, I began by asking the class what they knew of the world of women before the movement had taken off, the era of their parents. And what issues, I also asked, had the women’s movement redefined?

  Eyes glazed over. Their main political memories focused on cars waiting in long lines for gas, and helicopters fetching a disgraced president into retirement or lifting Americans out of Saigon. What in the world was I talking about? What issues? I stood there listening to the silence and then spontaneously began to sketch out that world. I began to cover the blackboard with short catchphrases that reflected some of the ordinary but invariably painful female experiences that the women’s movement had excavated and exposed to public view. Then, noting their growing amazement, I paused, took a deep breath, and stared at my own sprawling list.

  Every life, I suppose, is allowed at least one epiphany. I could have been depressed by how little they knew. Instead, I felt a strange sense of elation. It wasn’t just the enormity of all that women had challenged that still seemed breathtaking. What stunned me was that the changes in women’s lives had been so deep, so wide-ranging, so transformative. I realized that the women’s movement could not be erased, that it had brought about changes that these young people now took for granted.

  That realization led, through many unexpected twists and turns, to years of archival research, interviewing, and analysis for a book on the origins and impact of the contemporary women’s movement. I wanted to evoke the remarkable passion and accomplishments of that powerful moment in our history—and perhaps the future history of women worldwide—without romanticizing it, or ignoring the many mistakes, squandered opportunities, and failures of imagination that are part of every life and every movement.

  Research for this book proved to be a pleasure, as well as an exercise in frustration. Sometimes, I sat at clean desks with a pencil in tidy, well-organized archives. Often, I sat on dusty floors, in attics or in library stacks, examining cartons filled with uncatalogued documents, yellowed letters, and undated flyers. I interviewed people who lived in penthouses with wrap-around terraces, in suburban homes with decks and pools, and in sixth-floor walk-up apartments, where bathtubs sat in the middle of kitchens, surrounded by armies of roaches.

  This is not a book just about an isolated section of society. Dissident movements provide a microcosmic view of the dominant culture’s values, assumptions, and social structure. American political culture shaped contemporary feminism, and the women’s movement, in its turn, has transformed that political culture. Many readers, I suspect, probably know that American feminism was shaped by the political culture of the fifties and sixties. But it also developed out of much longer and deeper political traditions—such as the disestablishment of religion as a state force and a profound distrust of centralized government; the celebration of individual enterprise and initiative; a class politics expressed mostly through race and gender; a long evangelical tradition that has existed outside political parties and government; and a deep and abiding belief that in America, one can always reinvent oneself.

  Since this book covers the entire second half of the twentieth century, I knew my first task was to explain how Cold War culture and its ideas about gender patrolled the boundaries between men and women, gay and straight, patriotic and subversive. For those who weren’t there, it’s necessary to grasp how much the immediate postwar era suppressed dissent, glorified motherhood, celebrated women’s biological difference, and sanctified the nuclear family, all of which led to a revolt against that decade’s cultural icon of motherhood.

  But movements are made by people, not simply by ideas. The more I interviewed women, the more I understood that the movement arose from two generations of women who recognized, with considerable anguish and anger, that neither traditional liberalism nor the politics of the New Left was addressing what equality could mean for modern working women. And this was just the beginning. As these women activists learned to see the world through their own eyes, the feminist movement fragmented, and new populations of women—trade unionists, the old, the young, racial and ethnic minorities, some of whom had initially spurned feminism—began to assert different priorities. With that broadening constituency, many different feminisms began permeating American society.

  Such a threatening movement spread to the general public through familiar sources of media and popular culture. Feminism became palatable to American mainstream culture by addressing the individual woman, rather than women as a group. What I began to call “consumer feminism” and “therapeutic feminism” had enabled a small political movement to enter daily life. Eventually, the idea of “sisterhood” gave way to the image of the Superwoman, who, with her hair swept back, briefcase in one hand, baby in the other, tried to have it all, by doing it all.

  A backlash was inevitable, though few anticipated its religious and political ferocity. With its rallying cry of “family values” in the 1980s, the Republican Right successfully tied up the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in state legislatures and took the first steps to curtail the right to an abortion. So many hard-won gains of t
he women’s movement seemed under siege. But the backlash, I eventually realized, masked another reality. By the end of the twentieth century, feminist ideas had burrowed too deeply into our culture for any resistance or politics to root them out. Meanwhile, women in other parts of the globe, fueled by international conferences, began challenging different forms of patriarchal authority and inventing feminism all over again.

  The women’s movement changed lives in ways that are rare in the history of social movements. Living life as a feminist was—and is—an intensely personal and dramatic experience. Naturally, there will be some people who will be disappointed not to find their particular memories and experiences in this book. All of us experienced the women’s movement from our own perspectives, at different distances, and at varied ages. Some of us never experienced it at all. There were many stories; there are many memories. I hope there will be many more histories.

  I did not write this book only for my generation, those of us raised to live as traditional women, whose lives were dramatically disrupted and transformed by the power of feminist insights. Although I believe present and former activists need to rethink the past, to know where we have been and how we arrived there, I have always kept a much broader audience in mind. This book is also written for those women and men who did not participate in the women’s movement, who were too busy trying to survive, who felt excluded or estranged, who were too scared, were too old or too young, were not yet born, are still not born.

  Ruth Rosen

  Berkeley, California

  CHRONOLOGY

  (Signs of backlash in heavier type)

  1848 Married women allowed to own property.

  The First Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, produces the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman” and the demand for women’s suffrage.