Freedom for Women: Forging the Women's Liberation Movement, 1953-1970

7 “After that paper, there would beno turning back”

7 In the movement’s founding years a struggle emerged, fueled by the radical logic of Black Power, over the need for a mass independent Women’s Liberation Movement that classed men as well as racism and capitalism among women’s oppressors. Debates raged both in black Women’s Liberation groups and in predominantly white groups over whether men were among women’s oppressors. The“Dialectic”: Opposing Arguments ProduceTheoryThat Builds a Power Base forWomen’s Liberation In 1967 Poor Black Women took on what they called “bourgie . . . educated Black women” for what they considered “simplistic nationalist” views.1 The nationalist women did not agree with Poor Black Women’s idea of men as women’s oppressor and wrote to them saying, “Stop being so damned antagonistic to the Black man” and “work together with him.”2 Poor Black Women member Joyce H. responded that black women had been trying “for centuries . . . to work hand in hand with him” and he had just taken advantage. “Not this time,” responded another. “No more masters, bluffers.”3 Poor Black Women could be said to have held the radical feminist position that men, because of their vested interest in the systemic power imbal- “After that paper, there would be no turning back” “After that paper, there would be no turning back” 127 ance that favored the male sex, should be, as “Toward a Female Liberation Movement” coauthor Brown put it, “for a time at least” a central target.4 In 1969 black radical feminist Cellestine Ware cofounded New York Radical Feminists, a predominantly white group whose manifesto read, “We are engaged in a power struggle with men. . . . the agent of our oppression is man insofar as he . . . carries out the supremacy privileges of the male role. . . . men have set up institutions . . . to maintain this power.”5 In contrast “politicos,” as Marilyn Webb called herself and the women in her camp, held the opposing and at first majority position, at least among white radical women, that capitalism alone was to blame for women’s oppression .6 Said Webb, “we saw ourselves colonized in the same way as Fanon has described the Algerians, and our enemy was not men. . . . both men and women have their roles . . . shaped by advertisers for economic use in the consumer market.”7 The culpability of men in the oppression of women was a key point of difference . But even as radical feminists and politicos debated it sharply, they shared some points of unity. The most important was that the status quo for women was intolerable and they were going to make it their business to change it. Sue Munaker of the West Side Group in Chicago put it this way: “We began to realize that the way in which we were radical women defined us as non-radical. . . . we were activists in . . . the black movement . . . or in SDS, but as women we accepted the status quo.” They were beginning to see that “no group can be free . . . until each defines its liberation for itself.” Thus Munaker counseled women playing a supportive role to men who refused the draft or who opposed the war in Vietnam by playing on female stereotypes to “see that work for what it is. It can be auxiliary.”8 Another point of unity among radical women was opposition to capitalism . Black and white, politico and radical feminist, Women’s Liberation founders opposed capitalism as the exploitive, oppressive system of labor within the United States and as the engine of imperialism, the source of war and exploitation around the world. They differed on the extent to which they understood capitalism to be the source and fuel of white supremacy and male supremacy, and, as Patricia Robinson pointed out repeatedly, on the class consciousness of their members and organizing strategies. Cellestine Ware said that radical feminists were “actively pressing for the inception of socialist institutions as the prerequisites to the emancipation of women,” and that they wanted to “eliminate sexual class, economic and racial distinctions which are the bases for power and domination.”9 The politicos, for the most 128 Chapter 7 part, stuck to the view that capitalism oppressed women primarily in their role as brainwashed consumers. The debates among the radical women helped give rise to the ideas upon which the coming movement was built. This “dialectic,” as then-politico Peggy Dobbins later called it, was immensely productive, unlike its “nearly lethal” depiction in much...