Long-read
Whatever happened to ‘women’s liberation’?
The free-thinking brilliance of the early women's movement has given way to timid conformism.
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With her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, the woman born Bettye Goldstein produced nothing short of a total awakening of the American woman. It argued for the liberation of women from ‘occupation: housewife’, and helped forge what became known as the women’s liberation movement – that great fight for women’s legal and economic rights and freedoms.
Yet in other ways, The Feminine Mystique was a return to one of history’s great problematics: the alternating subjugation and worship of the female sex. The ancient Greeks recounted how Zeus metamorphosed into a swan and raped the cosmic grandmother Leda. Yet those from Zeus’s homeland of Crete were inclined to worship above all other deities the mother-goddess Rhea and her double-bladed axe. Eve’s impassive wantonness turned good men into sinners and Medusa’s ghastly visage turned them to stone. Yet the Virgin Mary gave us perfection of the body and spirit, and so is one of Western culture’s most venerated images; Lisa del Giocondo and Marilyn Monroe are not far behind.
Born in 1921 to Jewish immigrants in Peoria, Illinois, Bettye Goldstein, better known as Betty Friedan, was no deity and certainly no Marilyn. She was something closer to a south-side soothsayer, her hoary voice percolating with a very ethnic kind of outspokenness. According to one of her younger feminist contemporaries, Rita Mae Brown, she was also ‘a bully who had to be the centre of attention’. While we’re at it, Friedan was also criticised for her vainglory, bossiness and acid tongue. But if you had graduated from Smith College with the highest honours ever given in the history of the school, wouldn’t you be on the grandiloquent side? In the end Friedan’s summa-cum-laude intellect, harnessed in fits of flagrant passion, produced a book that by 1966 had sold three million copies, birthed the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and given rise, however improbably, to the subject of Clara Bingham’s new oral history of the women’s lib era: The Movement.
Let’s begin with an uncontroversial premise: In the decade after 1963, something happened to the American woman. But what? Women had long been aware of the magnitude of their plight. Yet it did seem that amid the postwar boom, a whole generation of middle-class American women, living lives of suburban housewifery, had seemingly had their sensitivities dulled with sunshine and cake. Friedan’s smoky snarl fixed all that. As Bobbi Gibb, a ground-breaking marathon runner, put it, ‘I read The Feminine Mystique and I said: “That’s my mother and all her friends. There’s no way I can live like this.”’
Over the next decade it became clear that Bobbi Gibb was not the only one with a pit in the stomach. Women joined together on a mission, led by Friedan’s NOW, to take well-bred, middle-class American society and explode its sexual conventions. A list of its achievements by 1972: the landmark decision of Roe v Wade; successful passage of the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting sex discrimination (though without ratification); Germaine Greer filleting Norman Mailer at the Town (Bloody) Hall; Susan Brownmiller doing the same to Hugh Hefner on The Dick Cavett Show; and the creation of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine. The first edition of the magazine was published on 20 December 1971 and sold out its initial print run, to the tune of 300,000 copies, three weeks later.
In the space of a decade, women went from hitching to Puerto Rico to get a legal abortion to reigning supreme over the New York literati and banking a suite of legal victories in Washington. The Movement aims to explain how.
One unmissable element of feminism’s legal and cultural success is its rampant obsession with language. What occurred between 1963 and 1973 comprised so much analysis, dissection, prognosticating and programmatising – in short, so much talking – that the choice to tell the story of the women’s movement in an oral history seems the only logical one. The Movement is a 450-page testament to the truly staggering amount of verbal work that large cultural shifts engender. Every chapter features a new committee meeting, subcommittee meeting, conference or summit, not to mention the movement’s ‘consciousness-raising’ discussion sessions, which are now the stuff of lore.
If language became the central fixation of the women’s movement, it also became a symbol of its eventual splintering. When a new generation of women educated at liberal-arts colleges gradually joined the movement through the 1960s, certain divides crystallised. Some women, faithful to Friedan’s brand of socially conservative, equality-seeking feminism, carried on the work of punctiliously wording bills and drafting class actions. Others, with names like Shulamith Firestone, Ti-Grace Atkinson and the bohemian poetess Rita Mae Brown, grew weary of playing within a system they argued was rigged against them. Drawing from the fount of their shiny new academic catechisms, this second generation eschewed conventional political progressivism in favour of the kind of symbolic tactics you might develop after one too many comparative-literature classes.
These were the warriors who, for example, gatecrashed the 1968 Miss America pageant because, in the words of Robin Morgan, co-founder of the New York Radical Women collective, the pageant represented ‘a perfect combination of American values – racism, militarism, capitalism – all packaged in one “ideal” symbol, a woman’. The masterplan included bra-burning, which didn’t come to pass, topped off by the coronation of a live sheep as that year’s Miss America, which did. Judy Gumbo explained it as a steely homage to the real pageant’s contestants, who were ‘expected to act like conformist sheep’.
The absurd literalism of this later generation, termed alternately women’s liberationists or radical feminists, seemed a far cry from the earnest pragmatism of NOW’s beginnings. But when you wage scrupulous war over every syllable of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, culminating in a series of high-profile sex-based class actions, it’s perhaps logical that language games will beget more language games. In the course of time, free use of the word ‘cunt’ will then be exalted as a sign of an ‘awakened consciousness’.
Looking back, the linguistic focus of second-wave feminism was a reasonable but despotic stratagem. Control the language of law, of art and of the media, and you control the story. Perhaps it was this very notion that inspired Bingham’s book. After all, this oral history, while ostensibly claiming to be providing numerous perspectives on the women’s liberation movement, conceals its own master narrative.
Bingham gives off the illusion of dissent through superficial disagreements and manufactured interpersonal conflicts (mostly involving the ever-imperious Freidan, along with Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm). Yet Bingham judiciously reinforces an overarching story in which little women in red stockings are pitted against the seemingly unassailable shibboleths of the Big Bad World.
Much from the period that contradicts this narrative is ignored. This is maybe why Greer’s and Brownmiller’s very public defenestrations of their floundering opponents didn’t warrant a mention in The Movement. They ran counter to a story of unequivocal, unsexy, unsung heroics.
Just as bewildering is the excision of Joan Didion. In 1972, Didion wrote ‘The Women’s Movement’, perhaps the great essay about the women’s liberation movement. There’s not a single uncritical sentence in it. With a pen tipped in mirthful disdain, she called out the new generation of women who misidentified the world they were entering into and failed to own their mistake, chastising those ‘scarred not by their class position as women but by the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions’. She continues: ‘That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.’
Didion’s essay is a pitiless, percipient disavowal of women’s liberation and its aims. Yet it is uncited in The Movement. Too contrarian, too ornery. Sparingly quoted instead is someone called Joan Ditzion, which, it goes without saying, is not the same thing.
Of course, the picture hidden beneath this course-controlled ‘history’ is far less yielding than Bingham would like it to be. Anyone with a modicum of education on women’s liberation knows that the splits in the movement were at the essence of its brilliance. People forget that the aforementioned Town Hall debate featured not only Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch tilted towards a radicalism that not all feminists took to, but also lesbian writer Jill Johnston, staid matriarch Diana Trilling and the utterly middlebrow president of NOW’s New York Chapter, Jacqueline Ceballos. There were also various questions posed by the likes of Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cynthia Ozick and, yes, Betty Friedan. It was in these moments, when unremitting voices clashed and diverging ideologies skirmished, that the women’s movement felt most alive.
Abortion split them; lesbianism split them; even Steinem’s magazine split them, with Vivian Gornick and her Village Voice comrades distancing themselves from Ms. because, in Gornick’s words, ‘Gloria was uptown; we were downtown’. The dialectical theory of history was not unknown to these women; most of them, if they were not avowed Marxists, had faithfully recited Marx’s dictum that ‘social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex’. Some even showed shades of Maoism, purging and repurging the movement as it began splitting apart in the early 1970s. Anselma Dell’Olio, one of the few critical voices Bingham deigns to include, was an unfortunate fatality. It is telling that the story of Dell’Olio’s expurgation, which Bingham curtly mentions, is tucked away in a footnote.
At times, you wish there were certain other voices purged from the record instead. Bingham’s David-and-Goliath model relies not on the likes of Greer, whose ideas on transgenderism have incidentally put her in the contemporary feminist’s doghouse, but on the voices of more historically inconspicuous characters. Did it occur at all to Bingham that some of these women may be unknowns because they simply didn’t have the chutzpah or the charm to make a public name for themselves? The Movement is filled with a bounty of rather dull figures whose commitment to policy wonkery and humourless self-importance can sometimes spoil what is otherwise hugely ripe material. Bingham spent so much time trying to empower the female voice that she forgot to make it entertaining. This might seem a petty jibe, but the didacticism of The Movement’s message feels, by the end of the book, pretty meagre reward for 10 hours of laughter-free reading.
And yet, in spite of Bingham’s best efforts, The Movement still manages to carry itself forth on the strength of the attention it gives to two great personalities. Friedan is one, and Shirley Chisholm is the other. Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972, was truly heterodox. She was a hard-talking but principled woman, a self-proclaimed ‘unbought and unbossed’ politician who won the hearts of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton and became the Black Panthers’ preferred candidate. Born in Brooklyn, and later becoming the first black woman elected to US Congress, she wasn’t a member of the coastal elites. She was a public campaigner who spent 1968 going door to door in Bedford-Stuyvesant, building a voting base. She didn’t see herself merely a candidate for Black America, though she vigorously defended the imprisoned Angela Davis when it wasn’t exactly politic to do so. Of course, her presidential campaign didn’t lead her to Pennsylvania Avenue; her time hadn’t yet come in 1972. One feels, 50 years later, it may have.
Now, in 2024, we’ve replaced Betty Friedan with Judith Butler and Shirley Chisholm with Kirsten Gillibrand. It’s fair to say we’re a long way from where we might like to be. The French actress Catherine Deneuve was once an unremitting ally; in 1972 she, along with 342 other women, signed a letter admitting to her illegal abortions and daring to be prosecuted for it. Forty-seven years later, however, she ratified another letter denouncing the excesses of #MeToo. ‘We defend the freedom to importune, indispensable for sexual freedom’, it read.
The renegade scholar Camille Paglia – another critical voice sorely lacking from The Movement’s pages – claims we’re still in the same phase of feminism we were in 1972. This is both true and not true. Some of the episodes relitigated in The Movement – the picketing of the 1970 Whitney Biennale, or Kate Millett’s famous book exposing the misogyny of the Western literary canon – feel unmistakably contemporary. But the dynamic has changed. Postwar women were playing attack, coming from behind on the scoreboard. American feminism today likes to think itself in a similarly browbeaten position, though it mainly holds forth in stout defence, vigorously protecting its hard-won territory, playing most definitely from in front.
And here we come back to the catalyst for that reversal, the late Betty Friedan. After Friedan’s death in 2006, Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian: ‘Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilisation as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilisation as we know it.’ Friedan, like I said, was a soothsayer. Women’s liberation did not end civilisation. But neither was Greer so far off base: the days of 1962, before the quiet woman found her mystique, are long gone. The Movement illustrates just how far, and how near, we are from where we started.
Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia, currently based in New York.
The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, by Clara Bingham, will be published by Atira / One Signal on 29 August 2024.
Pictures by: Getty.
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