Women's Liberation Revisited

The New Feminism is a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon. Women's Liberation, "the movement," is its visible, articulate and activist manifestation. A look at the organizations, aims, difficulties and range of opinions that help make up Women's Liberation in all its diverse forms:

ORGANIZATIONS. Women's Liberation formally began with the founding in 1966 of the National Organition for Women, which remains the largest and most influential movement group, the original umbrella under which other groups pressed their individual programs. Its membership has doubled to 18,000 in the past year; around 255 chapters now exist in 48 states. N.O.W. has led assaults in Congress and the courts on issues ranging from child care to abortion reform. Growing even faster is the National Women's Political Caucus, aimed at putting more levers of government power into female hands (see following story). There is also the Women's Equity Action League, dedicated to pushing for equality via existing laws and executive orders.

On the local level, the movement flourishes in eclectic profusion. Los Angeles boasts 100 women's groups working on issues as broad as hiring practices and as narrow as do-it-herself auto-repair classes. Washington, D.C., has women's lobbies on Capitol Hill and in other parts of the federal bureaucracy. In New York City and other major urban areas, women's health clinics offer counseling, referral and care free of charge or at nominal fees. Self-help medical techniques, including pelvic examinations and Pap smears to detect uterine cancer, are being devised; male chauvinism, feminists argue, is most humiliating when encountered in an unsympathetic or uncaring doctor.

For all this purposeful activity, the heart of the Women's Liberation movement consists of small groups of women meeting informally to discuss shared problems. Consciousness-raising or rap groups are the recruiting ground of the movement. Says Chicago Feminist Jo Freeman: "The rap group is what the factory was for the workers, the church for the Southern civil rights movement and the campus for the student." Most of the groups are formed, meet for a while and are disbanded, with no one outside the principals--not even organized feminist groups --aware of their existence. Yet it is in the catharsis of consciousness raising that most women find their identification with Women's Liberation.

AIMS. The goals of the movement range from the modest, sensible amelioration of the female condition to extreme and revolutionary visions. The first camp includes the likes of Betty Friedan and emphasizes a more egalitarian society: equal pay for equal work, a nation in which women are not blocked from access to education, political influence and economic power. Items on the immediate agenda:

> Sterner enforcement of the equal employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the bill was before Congress, a Southern opponent frivolously added sex to the standard list of race-creed-color conditions for which no one could be denied a job. Pressure from women's groups led the Government to issue guidelines prohibiting the use of "Help Wanted--Male" and "Help Wanted--Female" rubrics in the classified advertising sections of the nation's newspapers. However, women's rights advocates have found their greatest leverage against employment discrimination in the enforcement of executive orders. Under a 1967 order, federal funds can be cut off to contractors and subcontractors that discriminate in hiring and promoting women. Since most concerns of any size do business with the Government or have a subsidiary that does, federal authorities have a stout stick.

While enforcement of the order in private industry has been uncoordinated and spotty so far, colleges and universities have come under an orchestrated attack that threatens the future of federally funded programs on campus. Complaints against 300 colleges that receive federal aid have been filed by women's groups. Columbia University stands to lose $13.8 million in Government grants; the University of Michigan had $1,000,000 in federal moneys held up because of discriminatory practices.

> Child Care. Late last year President Nixon vetoed a bill that would have begun federal support for a comprehensive system of child-care centers at an initial cost of $2.1 billion. Though part of the cost would be borne by families that can afford it, knowledgeable estimates have it that such a plan could eventually cost more than $30 billion a year--a stunning addition to an already swollen federal budget. Nevertheless, if mothers, including those now on welfare, are to compete freely with men for jobs, they must be able to leave their children somewhere--at a reasonable cost--while they work.

The more radical wing of the movement would not be content, however, with such prosaic gains. They call for a drastic revision of society in general. In their view, the sexual roles must be redefined so as to free both sexes from the stereotypes and responsibilities that have existed for ages. The concept of man as hunter and woman as keeper of the hearth, these feminists declare, is obsolete and destructive for both sexes. It is not enough simply to share these roles without removing the pressures and drives that men now bear. To do so would merely give women, as well as men, heart attacks and ulcers. Hence the argument for freer, less rigidly defined lives for all.

On its most radical level, the New Feminism at times seems to constitute an assault--sometimes thoughtful, sometimes emotional and foolish--not just on society but on the limitations of biology. Some argue that through the science of eugenics, the genetic code could be altered to produce a different kind of man and woman. Short of that, the extremists demand a complete withdrawal from dependence on men, including sexual ties. Village Voice Columnist Jill Johnston, for example, insists that "feminism is lesbianism" and that it is only when women do not rely upon men to fulfill their sexual needs that they are finally free of masculine control. On this plane, the reproductive imperative of sexuality is defied; to refuse all association with men is to allow dogma to obstruct any possibility of pragmatic reform.

DIFFICULTIES. For all its obvious gains and growth, the movement has its troubles. In part the problems are caused by the extreme positions that are taken by only a few feminists but which are often used against the movement as a whole. The issue of lesbianism, for example, has hurt the movement. Says one N.O.W. official: "I have heard a woman called Communist, radical, bitchy, everything--and she can take it. But if anyone so much as breathes the word lesbian at her, she goes to pieces." During the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality that marked the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, the issue of lesbianism burst into the open. Some feminist leaders, warned that the participation of lesbians would overshadow other issues, tried to downplay the controversial subject during the marches and rallies. A quiet, often bitter debate followed; the result was a declaration from N.O.W. and tacit agreement by local groups that freedom of sexual orientation was a humanist concern and therefore could not be ignored by Women's Liberation. Nonetheless, lesbianism has been called the lavender herring of Women's Liberation.

Then there is the hostility of men, often veiled, on occasion brutally frank. Says one Los Angeles feminist: "For some women, getting involved in the movement may be an irreversible process. There is no turning back for many of them, and if their marriages are bad to begin with, they sometimes crack up. I feel like warning women their lives are going to change and there may be prices to pay."

Another problem is the hostility of women. Secure and happy in their traditional roles, many reject any drastic change in their status. They also resent what they regard as a kind of propaganda designed to either force them into more active lives or make them feel guilty about staying home. But the organized female resistance to the movement has been largely frivolous: MOM (for Men Our Masters), started by a Manhattan secretary, and its men's auxiliary WOW (for Women Our Wonders); and the Pussycat League, with its slogan "The lamb chop is mightier than the karate chop." More serious criticism has come from Ti-Grace Atkinson, an early theorist of the New Feminism who withdrew from the movement more than a year ago. Says Atkinson: "There is no movement. Movement means going some place, and the movement is not going anywhere. It hasn't accomplished anything."

Opposition also comes from minority-group women, who often characterize Women's Lib as oriented toward white, middle-class professional women. Among black women, a debate has long raged over priorities: black liberation before women's liberation. Others have argued that it is necessary to reconstruct black family life first. Says a Houston woman: "Within the black community, most of the women are working both financially and emotionally to bolster their men. Black women want to unliberate themselves from the role as head of the house. We feel it is now up to us to help our men more, to enhance their manhood."

There are other opinions, however. Black women are the lowest-paid members of the work force; a black man with an eighth-grade education has a higher median income than a black woman with some college education. Los Angeles Black Activist Althea Scott says, "White women liberationists talk about the difficulties of getting into graduate or professional school. We talk about getting jobs in the five and ten. We're on the nitty-gritty level. Just let black women struggle at their own rate. They'll see they are women." Spanish-speaking women are also somewhat alienated from Women's Liberation. Most, staunchly Catholic, reject movement policy on birth control and abortion, and Latin machismo is another stumbling block.

Says Chicana Leader Cecilia Suarez: "Our issues are bread-and-butter ones; Women's Lib is trying to get equal job opportunities, but we are still trying to get our women into school. We have special problems. For example, our meetings have to be in the daytime, because the average Spanish-speaking husband won't let his wife come out at night." Nonetheless, minority participation in the movement has grown in recent months.

An entrenched group of women that is having none of Women's Liberation rhetoric is prostitutes. One failure that feminists admit was an encounter session with some New York City prostitutes. Says Susan Brownmiller: "It knocked us out for a month; we walked around reeling. No active prostitute will ever take a feminist line. She can't and still work. When she speaks, she's speaking from the man's plantation."

Nor have feminists got much mileage out of efforts to equate the marital bed with cultural prostitution. To characterize the married woman's life as prostitution, argues University of Michigan Psychologist Joseph Adelson, "denies tacitly our contemporary conception of female sexuality, one that sees it as mutual, in that the woman seeks as much as she gives." In these instances, Adelson says, Women's Lib returns to "the dark world of Victorian pornography."

Adelson also takes issue with the wing of the movement that often equates male sexuality with rape --sometimes seeing rape symbolically as the distillation of the normal male sexual attitude. Says Adelson: "As any clinician knows, these days the problem in male sexuality lies in the opposite direction, not in phallic megalomania but rather in sexual diffidence and self-doubt."

VIEWS. In a movement that has sought to avoid leaders, some women have become, more or less willingly, the articulators of the new militant consciousness. Among them are Gloria Steinem, founder of the new feminist magazine Ms., who in speeches and meetings is one of the movement's most effective proselytizers; Susan Brownmiller, an author who has organized conferences on rape and prostitution; and Robin Morgan, a radical feminist who has spent the past six months speaking at rallies. In recent interviews with TIME'S BJ. Phillips, they discussed their current concern:

GLORIA STEINEM: "In terms of real power--economic and political--we are still just beginning. But the consciousness, the awareness--that will never be the same. When we go to a town to speak, we usually spend three or four hours looking for the local issues: What's the name of the company in town that refuses to hire or promote women? How many women on the faculty? Who is the politician who has stood in the way of a child-care center? Since we go out on the next morning's plane, we tell the local women we can run some of their risks on a kind of take-names-and-kick-ass basis.

"It's an emotional experience. It doesn't seem to matter what you say as long as you're talking about the lives of women. The response is women standing up applauding with tears running down their cheeks. Then the questions start: How? How do I get a job, get a lawyer, get my husband to understand what I really feel, get courage? The hostility I get from men, saying that all I need is a good f-- or a good beating--always some kind of conquest--or I must be a lesbian. And the lascivious part; the personally devastating things that people will just walk up to you and say. Even male politicians don't get the kind of viciousness that women get as routine. It is like being gang-banged in public. But it has been worth it because of something great out there, not just the pain and anger. Women are learning to respect and love themselves and each other, and there is a lot of joy and communion in knowing them."

SUSAN BROWNMILLER: "We are convinced that rape is a political crime and can be eradicated like lynching. We have the power to eradicate it, but that won't be done until it is understood not as deviant behavior but as the logical result of sexism. The left can't get over its old view of rape as a hysterical white woman accusing a black man. The left says that all prisoners are political prisoners who are there because they want a piece of society; what they think is their piece of society is a part of our bodies. That person is no political prisoner, he's a criminal.

"The divisions between us and the left are going to get wider and wider over these issues. There's a lot of talk going around that radicalism is in decline, things have cooled, gone conservative. But the truth is that all the women have left for Women's Liberation, and they're not there typing and filing and running the mimeograph for Abbie and Jerry."

ROBIN MORGAN: "Radical feminism is digging in for the long haul, trying to build on women's needs in terms of women's anger. The Midwest is ahead of both coasts on this. The movement there is growing very organically and logically and strongly. The new assault is on the Catholic church. We are trying to separate an individual's faith from this corporation that has so oppressed women. The support from Catholic women is very strong as long as it is the institution, not the faith, that they understand is the problem.

"But I see the beginnings of repression, of backlash. Three places where I have spoken in the last four months there have been bomb scares. A fire bomb was thrown at my car in Michigan; two cars tried to force me off the road in Florida--and I had my baby with me. Still, when a middle-aged woman in Illinois gets up and says we have to seize the genetic code, something's happening!"

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