The World Split Open Read online

  1872 Victoria Woodhull is the first woman to run for president, even though she cannot vote and is in prison for violating the famous Comstock Law by sending obscene literature through the mail, in this case, about free love.

  1893 Colorado is the first state to allow women’s suffrage.

  1919 Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment, called “The Susan B. Anthony Amendment.”

  Three-fourths of the states ratify it on August 26, 1920.

  1923 The Equal Rights Amendment is first introduced in Congress.

  1953 The National Weather Service begins naming hurricanes after women.

  1954 In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declares that separate but equal facilities for the races are not constitutional.

  1955 The first lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, is founded. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man, igniting the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

  Daisy Lee Bates, President of Arkansas NAACP, leads nine African-American teenagers to integrate Little Rock High School.

  1957 The Soviet Union launches the first space satellite, Sputnik, spurring a demand to train women in math and science.

  1959 Barbie doll is introduced to girls.

  1960 John F. Kennedy is elected president.

  Four young men sit-in at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter after they are refused service. Their action ignites youthful civil rights activists all over the South.

  The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded.

  Young Americans for Freedom founded.

  1961 President Kennedy appoints Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of the first President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Esther Peterson, who had a long history of improving working women’s lives, as head of the Women’s Bureau, making her the assistant secretary of the Department of Labor.

  Fifty thousand women in sixty cities, mobilized by Women Strike for Peace, protest aboveground testing of nuclear bombs and tainted milk.

  Birth control pills approved in 1960 and made available in 1961. Patricia McGinnis and Lana Phelan start the Society for Humane Abortion in California to demand access to abortion as a woman’s right. In 1966 McGinnis sets up the Association to Repeal Abortion Law in California, which provides lists of abortion doctors and offers free classes in self-abortion.

  1962 Helen Gurley Brown publishes Sex and the Single Girl, which gives single women permission to enjoy sex outside of marriage.

  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) launches the student protest movement with “The Port Huron Statement,” a critique of American domestic and foreign policy that also decries the powerlessness of ordinary people.

  Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, which attacks the reckless use of toxins and pesticides.

  Dolores Fernandez Huerta helps Cesar Chavez start the Farm Workers’ Association (Later the United Farm Workers). The Union’s first woman organizing in the field is Jesse Lopez de la Cruz.

  1963 The report from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, The American Woman, is published.

  Some 200,000 people rally in Washington, D.C., and hear Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

  Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique.

  Congress passes the Equal Pay Act.

  1964 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, including Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment—not only on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin, but also on sex. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is created to enforce Title VII, but women’s complaints are ignored and ridiculed.

  Freedom Summer: One thousand northern students join SNCC workers in the South on voter registration and Freedom School projects.

  Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allows funding for the Vietnam War.

  The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tries, but fails, to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Disillusionment within the civil rights movement deepens.

  Casey Hayden and Mary King circulate a memo about sexual inequality within the civil rights movement.

  The Beatles take the U.S. by storm on their first tour of the country.

  1965 Executive Order 11246 is signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, requiring companies doing business with the government to undertake affirmative action in hiring minorities.

  Casey Hayden and Mary King send “A Kind of Memo” to fifty women in the antiwar and student movements. At an SDS conference in 1965, the first group of women meet alone in order to discuss the “Memo.”

  In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court declares that married couples have a right to birth control based on their “right to privacy.”

  Dorothy Height leads the National Council of Negro Women to address problems of women.

  1966 At the Third Annual Conference on the Status of Women in Washington, women realize that the EEOC will not enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and discover that their attempts to pass resolutions are foiled. The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded.

  NOW petitions the EEOC to end the sexual segregation of classified advertisements for employment.

  The call for Black Power begins.

  1967 At a press conference, Betty Friedan, president of NOW, announces that federally funded child care centers for working mothers and a full income-tax deduction for child care costs are central to NOW’s goals.

  President Johnson extends affirmative action to women.

  The Conference for a New Politics ridicules young feminists’ demands.

  The Chicago Women’s Liberation Group begins meeting.

  New York Radical Women also forms.

  Barbara Avedon and other women organize Another Mother for Peace with the slogan, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”

  NOW adopts a Bill of Rights for Women.

  Women on welfare begin to organize. In California Alicia Escalante starts the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization and later founds the Chicano National Welfare Fights Organization. Black activist welfare recipients such as Johnnie Tillmom, Etta Horn, and Beulah Sanders join forces in the National Welfare Rights Organization to educate women about applying for benefits and lobbying for respect within the system as well as for job-training and day care programs. By 1969 there are 22,000 members, but the NWRO lacks funds to continue beyond 1975.

  1968 January 15. New York feminists bring a dummy of “Traditional Womanhood” to the all-women’s Jeanette Rankin Brigade demonstration against the war in Vietnam in Washington, D.C., and state their intention to bury her. For the first time, feminists use the slogan “Sisterhood is Powerful.”

  In Chicago, over two hundred women from thirty-seven states and Canada meet for the First National Women’s Liberation Conference.

  New York Radical Women begin process of “consciousness-raising.”

  Shirley Chisholm is elected first African-American woman representative (D-NY) to Congress.

  New York NOW members picket the New York Times to end sex-segregated classified advertising.

  The Women’s Equity Action League is formed by women who leave NOW to pursue feminist goals other than abortion.

  The National Abortion Rights Action League is formed.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated. Students and young people in Mexico, France, Germany, and dozens of other countries rally, protest, and demand social and economic change.

  In August, U.S. students are beaten in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, and Soviet troops trample “Prague Spring.”

  Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, first newsletter from WLM, is published by Joreen (Jo Freeman) in Chicago. In New York, radical feminists publish Notes from the First Year. Feminist publications sweep across the nation. Between 1968 and 1973, five hundred publications appear.

  IRS allows widows and single or divorced women over thirty-fi
ve to receive head-of-household status with deductions.

  Dorothy Lee Bolden organizes the National Domestic Workers Union.

  New York women’s liberationists protest against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. Ground zero for myth of bra burning.

  1969 Gay men resist police raid at the Stonewall Bar in New York City, launching the gay liberation movement.

  The Boston Women’s Health Collective publishes a pamphlet, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women. In 1973, it is published as a book.

  Accuracy in Media (AIM), a right-wing watchdog on “liberal bias,” is formed.

  Members of Redstockings disrupt a hearing on abortion laws of the New York State legislature when the panel of witnesses turns out to be fourteen men and one nun. They demand repeal, not reform, of abortion laws.

  NOW celebrates Mother’s Day with the slogan “Rights, Not Roses.”

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation begins widespread infiltration of the women’s movement at all levels.

  1970 The great media blitz begins, with stories all year long on the new women’s movement.

  Pat Mainardi offers a proposal for “wages for housework.”

  California is first state to adopt “no-fault” divorce, which ends up impoverishing older women who have no skills.

  The North American Indian Women’s Association is founded.

  Toni Cade publishes The Black Woman.

  Bella Abzug is elected to Congress.

  Feminists stage sit-ins at Newsweek and Ladies’ Home Journal and file an antidiscrimination suit against Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. The Feminist Press is started.

  Major classic works appear in 1970 and 1971: Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran, editors, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness; Shulamith Firestone, Dialectics of Sex; Kate Millett, Sexual Politics; Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful; Celestine Ware, Woman Power.

  In Wisconsin, the first AFL-CIO conference meets to discuss the status of women in unions. It endorses the ERA and opposes state protective legislation.

  On August 26, fifty thousand women march to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the suffrage amendment in New York. Feminists drape a huge banner over the Statue of Liberty that says “Women of the World Unite.” In forty-two states, women participate in the “Strike for Equality.”

  Maggie Kuhn forms the Gray Panthers to fight for older citizens’ rights.

  NOW sues 1,300 corporations.

  WEAL files class action suit against more than one hundred colleges and universities.

  The Lutheran Church in America and the America Lutheran Church allow women to be ordained.

  The Episcopal Church permits women deacons, but not ordination for women.

  Barbara Herman is the first woman cantor, in a Reform Jewish temple in New Jersey.

  National Right to Life Committee is established by the Catholic Church to block liberalization of abortion laws.

  Hawaii, Alaska, and New York become the first states to liberalize their abortion laws.

  Barbara Seaman and others disrupt the Senate subcommittee’s hearing on the Pill, protesting that most witnesses are male doctors and that women are being used as “guinea pigs” in testing.

  Forty-six editorial staff women win a settlement in their suit charging sexual discrimination at Newsweek magazine.

  Women on the staff of RAT take over the New York radical underground newspaper.

  Sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal by one hundred women leads to a special supplement in the August, 1970, issue.

  The Congress to Unite Women meets in New York City. Lesbians stage the Lavender Menace Action, one of the first asserting the right to be public lesbians.

  Chicana feminists in California found the Comision Feminil Mexicana Nacional. They start a model service center for working women. Founders include Gracia Molina Pick, Francisca Flores, Graciella Oivares, and Yolanda Nova.

  Singer Janis Joplin dies of a heroin overdose.

  1971 New York Radical Feminists hold a “Speak-out on Rape,” in which women disclose their personal experiences.

  New York NOW forms a “Baby Carriage Brigade” to demonstrate its support of women’s right to deduct child care expenses. “Are Children As Important As Martinis?” is their slogan.

  Norman Mailer’s Prisoner of Sex, a sophisticated and highly publicized attack on the women’s movement, is published.

  On her first day as representative from New York, Bella Abzug demands that all U.S. troops be withdrawn from Vietnam.

  Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others help found the National Women’s Political Caucus to support more women candidates.

  First Feminist Women’s Health Center founded in Los Angeles by Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman.

  The National Press Club allows women to become full members. Berkeley, California, initiates women’s studies in primary schools.

  The Professional Women’s Caucus files a class action sexual discrimination suit against every law school in the country receiving federal funds.

  President Richard Nixon vetoes the Comprehensive Child Development Bill, passed by both houses of Congress, which would have provided $2 billion for child care.

  Three hundred and forty French women sign a petition, “Manifesto of 340 Bitches,” declaring they have had an abortion.

  The FBI reports that the increase in women’s crime rate is up sharply over that in men’s.

  1972 Puerto Rican women hold their first national conference.

  The Equal Rights Amendment passes both houses of Congress; ratification is necessary by 1979.

  Congress passes Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act to enforce sex equality in education, which forces educational institutions to support women’s sports.

  Congress passes the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment.

  Ms. magazine is launched.

  Representative Shirley Chisholm runs for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States and loses.

  In San Francisco, Margo St. James organizes COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to improve the working conditions of prostitutes.

  Phyllis Schlafly attacks the ERA in her newsletter and forms a new organization, “StopERA.”

  Midge Decter, neoconservative, publishes an attack against the women’s movement in The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation.

  Jesse Helms is elected to the U.S. Senate.

  The country debates whether Maude, a fictional character in a television sitcom, should have a late-life abortion.

  NOW launches an attack on sexism in schoolbooks, with its pamphlet Dick and Jane As Victims.

  For the first time, a girl wins a soap box derby. She apologizes.

  The Equal Pay Act of 1963 is extended to cover administrative, professional, and executive employees.

  The Feminist Press starts the Women’s Studies Newsletter. (In 1977, the National Women’s Studies Association formed; by 1978 there are over 15,000 courses.)

  Women’s issues, including the right to abortion, are included in the platform of La Raza Unida, a Mexican-American political movement.

  Marlo Thomas and friends produce the record Free to Be . . . You and Me, the first record of nonsexist, multiracial songs, poems, and stories for children.

  Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, and members of the Feminist Art Program of the California Institute of the Arts open a seventeen-room Womanhouse exhibit, viewed by 4,000 people.

  The first conference of Older Women’s Liberation (women over thirty) is held in New York City.

  1973 In its Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court establishes a woman’s right to abortion.

  Congress allows the first female page in the House of Representatives.

  Singer Helen Reddy wins a Grammy Award for her song “I Am Woman,” which becomes a kind of info
rmal anthem of the movement.

  AT&T agrees to end discrimination in women’s salaries and to pay retroactive compensation to women employees.

  The National Black Feminist Organization is formed.

  More than three hundred women from twenty-seven countries attend an International Feminist Planning Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their goal is to create an international movement through global conferences.

  Conservative Judaism permits women to be counted in making up the minyan, or ten people necessary for congregational worship. Dr. Mary Daly’s book, Beyond God the Father, rejects male divinity and questions all received religious wisdom.

  George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide, a sustained attack against the women’s movement, is published.

  Billie Jean King’s efforts succeed when the U.S. Tennis Association announces that the U.S. Open will award equal prize money to women and men.

  Bernice Reagon Johnson forms an a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, which emphasizes songs about civil rights and social justice.

  Redwood Records, a women’s music record company, is founded, and issues Holly Near’s Hang in There.

  In Los Angeles, the first West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference is held.

  Office workers form Women Employed in Chicago, Women Office Workers in New York, and 9-5 in Boston. Union Wage in San Francisco had been formed in 1971.

  First U.S. battered women’s shelters open.

  Attorney Marian Wright Edelman founds Children’s Defense Fund. Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match.

  The Supreme Court outlaws sexually-segregated classified ads.

  The AFL-CIO National Convention endorses the ERA.

  The Government Printing Office style book accepts Ms. as a prefix.

  Dr. Benjamin Spock renounces his earlier views on child care and revises his classic book.

  Stewardesses for Women’s Rights formed to support job rights, a dignified public image, and health issues of female flight attendants.

  The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion, founded in 1969, changes its name to the National Abortion Rights Action League and makes its goal the preservation of the 1973 Supreme Court Decision.

  1974 The Freedom of Information Act passes.