The New Feminists: Revolt Against "Sexism"

PORNOGRAPHERS, take note. Two months ago a young man in San Francisco decided to raise some money for a new underground paper called Dock of the Bay by putting out a sex sheet, "a quick porny." On the eve of its publication, several angry young women spirited the entrepreneur away in a car and after twelve hours of intensive indoctrination persuaded him to abandon his plans on the ground that pornography degrades women. The copy for the magazine, dirty pictures and all, was burned in the backyard of one of the girls. "Just roasting marshmallows," said the one-time Camp Fire Girl who masterminded the abduction.

The event is now known in underground feminist circles as the Dock of the Bay affair, and the ringleader is considered something of a heroine. She is a member of Women's Liberation, a movement that has attracted some 10,000 converts across the U.S. over the past three years. The new feminists differ widely on many issues, but on one they are united: sexism must go.

An Incredible Fury

Sexism is their target and battle cry --as racism is the blacks'. They regard 20th century America as a rigid, male-dominated society which, deliberately or more often unconsciously, perpetuates arrant inequities between men and women--in pay, kinds of jobs and, more subtly, self-expression. Women, they say, are constantly put down by the ads that ask "Does she ... or doesn't she?" or proclaim "You've come a long way, baby," because, of all things, she has supposedly got her own cigarette. The militants abhor Playboy as well as most women's magazines, which take an equally narrow view of the woman's role. To demonstrate their disgust and alienation from sexist society, the angries picket the Miss America contest, burn brassieres, and dump into "freedom trashcans" such symbols of female "oppression" as lingerie, false eyelashes and steno pads.

Most middle-aged or older women take a skeptical if not downright hostile view of the new movement, if they have heard of it at all. But younger women, part of a rebellious generation, are fertile ground for the seeds of discontent. They are also having fewer babies, looking ahead to living longer, and thinking more about careers. A study of 10,000 Vassar alumnae showed that most graduates of the mid-'50s wanted marriage, with or without a career, while in the mid-'60s most were insisting on a career, with or without marriage. Women's rising expectations, stemming in part from peak feminine college enrollment (3,000,000), are increasingly out of kilter with reality.

Rutgers Anthropologist Lionel Tiger thinks there is going to be a general revolt by women, which will involve such deep-rooted human conditions, biological as well as economic, that it will make the black problem look comparatively easy to solve. Brooklyn's Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever elected to Congress, says on the basis of eight months of travel in the U.S. that the revolt has already begun. She herself, she feels, has been more discriminated against as a woman than as a Negro.

Many of the new feminists are surprisingly violent in mood, and seem to be trying, in fact, to repel other women rather than attract them. Hundreds of young girls are learning karate, tossing oft furious statements about "male chauvinists," distributing threatening handouts ("Watch out! You may meet a real castrating female!"), and even citing with approval the dictum of the late revolutionary Frantz Fanon: An oppressed individual cannot feel liberated until he kills one of the oppressors. This is all borrowed, of course, from the fiery rhetoric of today's militant black and student movements, but a deep feminine resentment is there nevertheless. "In almost any woman you can unearth an incredible fury," declares one of the women organizers of S.D.S. "And it's an anger that can be a powerful radicalizing force."

A few of the militants are talking about complete segregation, even to the exclusion of sex. For one thing, as an unhappy young demonstrator explained,

"All there is to fall in love with is sexual racists." But most of the sexual segregationists have sterner reasons. Their chastity is not so much a Lysistrata tactic, it seems, as a self-disciplinary measure. "Love between a man and a woman is debilitating and counter-revolutionary," argues Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, daughter of David of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a member of Women's Liberation hard-core Cell 16 in Boston. Declares Boston's Roxanne

Dunbar, one of the movement's few acknowledged leaders: "Sex is just a commodity."

Sexual freedom has never been the primary concern of women's movements --indeed, the English suffragettes even opposed birth control on the ground that it encouraged lust. Nor are the feminists of the Pill generation particularly partisans of the sexual revolution. "In a way, the relaxation of sexual mores just makes a woman's life more difficult," contends Ellen Willis, rock music critic for The New Yorker and militant feminist. "If she is not cautious about sex, she is likely to get hurt; if she is too cautious, she will lose her man to more obliging women. Either way, her decision is based partly on fear and calculation, not on her spontaneous needs and desires."

Paradoxically perhaps, it was the male chauvinism of their fellow radicals that sparked the militant women to organize for themselves. The girls who worked for S.N.C.C. in the early '60s, and later seized Columbia's Library or were arrested last year in Chicago, did a slow burn when they realized that in the Movement as well as outside it, they were regarded simply as chicks to type and make the coffee rather than write the manifestoes. Mark Rudd was possibly less interested in women's rights than is Richard Nixon. The girls were also regarded as a sex pool. Stokely Carmichael long ago said it plainly: "The only position for women in S.N.C.C. is prone."

In 1966, a trickle of radical women started to abandon the various causes they shared with men, and to get together to discuss their disillusionment. They soon developed a pattern of meetings that persists today: they form in groups of eight to ten for "rap sessions" with the express purpose of "raising consciousness." This means drumming their second-sex status into each other by testifying to various indignities, including "bearing witness" to their abortions in painful detail. One of their major demands is the abolition of anti-abortion statutes (see THE LAW). They consider every death from a bungled abortion an execution by the state and claim that the number of such deaths annually exceeds the number of American soldiers killed in Viet Nam.

Redstockings and Uppity Women

Most of the first new feminists were politically radical, and consisted of white college students or recent graduates, unmarried or divorced. They soon attracted a number of women who otherwise had no radical leanings at all. The latest recruits include factory workers, high school girls, a number of discontented housewives, and even a coven or two of grandmothers. There are at least 50 groups in New York (where they have their own feminist repertory theater), 35 in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the movement is picking up 50 new members a month), 30 in Chicago, 25 in Boston, and a scattering of others in cities ranging from Gainesville, Fla. to Toronto. Most of the groups are leaderless as well as nameless, but a few have fancy titles like WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), Redstockings, WRAP (Women's Radical Action Project), and Keep on Truckin' Sisters. Some of the members sport buttons bearing their collective nickname: Uppity Women.

These groups, or cells, which constantly split and multiply in a sort of mitosis, constitute the radical wing of Women's Liberation. The more pragmatic sector of the new movement is the National Organization for Women, or NOW, founded in 1966 by Author Betty Friedan, following the phenomenal success of her book, The Feminine Mystique. (As she defined it, the mystique itself was the American-style Kuche, Kinder, Kirche ethos of the '50s, which Mrs. Friedan claimed had trapped women in unwanted domesticity.) Today, NOW has 3,000 members, many of them teachers and other professional women, who concentrate on practical matters like establishing day-care centers for children of working mothers. A few of the radicals have also joined NOW, and this weekend in Manhattan a giant Congress to Unite Women will draw protesters from as far left as the WITCHES and as far right as Hadassah. A really active woman liberator can go to a meeting every night, raising consciousness one evening and funds the next.

Woman as Negro

Both the radicals and the women of NOW also do "actions," little guerrilla theatricals intended to raise consciousness generally, and a little hell besides. This fall they entered a secret candidate for Miss America, but their elaborate plans to have her denounce the contest from within fizzled. At Grinnell College in Iowa last February coeds stripped to the buff when a speaker expounded the Playboy philosophy. To draw attention to their cause, women in Chicago are concentrating on what they call "little dainties," such as elaborately opening doors for men and lighting their cigarettes.

The feminists have solid legal grounds for other actions. Partly as a joke, Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia, then 81, added "sex" to the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion or national origin." There was a good deal of laughter, but the House passed the bill. It has taken a while for feminists to grasp what they can do under Title VII, but charges of discrimination against women in business and industry account for about 7,500 of the 44,000 complaints filed so far with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Restrictions as to hours were swept away, airline stewardesses won the right to work after age 32, and women got jobs as jockeys, steamship yeomen and telephone switchmen, which were formerly denied them. Soon we may expect legions of female firemen, airline pilots, sanitation men and front-line soldiers (although Anthropologist Margaret Mead thinks that they would be too fierce).

It is fitting that women should be protected along with Negroes by civil rights legislation, because the metaphor of Woman as Negro has been expressed by practically every observer of feminine subjugation from John Stuart Mill to Yoko Ono. As Gunnar Myrdal noted in his classic American Dilemma, both groups have been hampered by the same prejudices: that they were inferior in many ways, and also that they believed themselves to be inferior.

The new feminism parallels the black movement in many ways. Both are encumbered, for example, by a huge fifth column--for blacks, the Uncle Toms; for women, Aunt Tabbies, also known as Doris Days. Like the blacks, the feminists too are asking, with some success, that their "hidden history," the story of women's rights, be taught in schools and colleges. The law school at N.Y.U. has inaugurated a course devoted entirely to the legal problems of women, including divorce law. (Law is one profession that is attracting increasing numbers of women as well as blacks, both groups eager to promote legal reforms.)

The Lonely Ovum

The redoubtable Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mother of seven and one of the few first-rate intellects in the suffrage movement, was so often confronted with Biblical "truths" putting down women that she made it her business to set the Holy Book to rights, publishing a Woman's Bible. The Scriptures bear the "impress of fallible men," she assured her readers. She particularly objected to the authors' use of the expression "The Lord saith" whenever they wanted to make a point. The story of Eve, she was happy to announce, was a fable, and woman was in no way responsible for the problems of the universe.*

The intellectuals among today's feminists have as hard a task as Mrs. Stanton, for they must challenge Freud, one of the most influential sexists the world has ever known, as well as platoons of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, all of whom insist, in one way or another, that "anatomy is destiny."

Harvard Psychologist Erik Erikson, for example, has written that the determinant of a woman's identity is her "inner space, destined to bear the offspring of chosen men." He has observed little boys building "high towers" and "fac,ades with protrusions," while little girls build "interior" scenes with "low walls," often "intruded by animals or dangerous men." There must be a connection, he says, between such play spaces, genital differences, and the unique functions and personalities of the sexes.

Such observations have set many a feminist off on fanciful speculations of her own. Author Mary Ellmann, for instance, has noted that "each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition from the ovary through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus, an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily, too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15." From this, one can only conclude that women must be the more daring, individualistic and imaginative sex.

However adventurous their ova, women themselves do not, in truth, have a record of soaring achievement. (One handicap mentioned by many career women is simply that they don't have wives.) The explanation offered by Darwin among others is that the male is more variable than the female. According to this reasoning, female intelligences cluster at the center of the range, while male intelligences extend to the further reaches of genius--and imbecility as well.

A more obvious explanation is that society discourages women. Boys are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Girls are seldom encouraged to think of themselves as anything but creatures who will one day substitute babies for their dolls. To change such patterns and the resultant personalities is a formidable goal, but the feminists believe that it can be achieved. Says Dr. Alice Rossi, a sociologist at Goucher College: "If you changed rearing practices and stopped punishing people who depart from the accepted patterns, you'd have very minimal sex differences." No one can tell which psychological differences are immutable until social expectations are equal.

The Machismo Backlash

The militant women have understandably aroused a good deal of fury and laughter, but like the extremists among the blacks and students, they have also drawn attention to some real problems. They have, for example, exposed the myth that a woman's income is mostly a supplement: a third of all women of marriageable age are not married; two-thirds of working women, whether married or not, work because they need the money. Thirty-six percent of the nation's families classified as poor are headed by women, as are most urban welfare families. Considered in this light, what seems a monotonous litany of the need for better wage scales and good day-care centers assumes more urgency (2,700,000 children need day-care centers; there are places for 530,000).

Men, for reasons entirely of their own, may soon agree to some of the changes the feminists propose, and indeed over 100 males are members of NOW. New studies show that many men actually want women to combine careers and families, that most women also want both careers and families, but that they think the men want them to stay home. (Just publicizing the studies ought to help eliminate this misunderstanding.) Moreover, what was once a natural and universally admired goal--to have a large family--may, with the threat of overpopulation, be seen as mere self-indulgence. Population experts are already proposing tax changes and legal restrictions to keep families small. As part of the same program, they suggest that women be given education and job opportunities equal to those accorded men.

With a new sense of selfesteem, which is essentially what the feminists are seeking, even those women who elect to stay at home might be happier, which would of course benefit men as well. To encourage self-esteem in women requires more self-esteem in men, who all too often nowadays build up their egos at the expense of women. As male and female roles in society grow more and more alike, masculine pride must depend increasingly on achievement and inner security rather than on machismo. But if the ego of the average man is not up to absorbing the new shocks there may well be a male backlash that will cause an even harsher collision between the sexes than society has yet experienced. The radical women have opened a Pandora's box. But that of course is their birthright. They are her direct descendants.

* England's Emmeline Pankhurst was more religion-minded, telling her suffragettes: "Trust in God: She will provide."

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