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

Introduction

Introduction This is an investigation of how Women’s Liberation pioneers gained the courage and consciousness to make a movement against male supremacy in the United States in the 1960s. It chronicles the gaining of that courage and consciousness. It is not about the particulars of the male domination the founding organizers experienced as individuals or their reaction to that domination. Their experience of the sexism rampant in the period, while important, has been told many times, and as activistsociologist Jo Freeman said, “social strain does not create social movements,” only the potential for them.1 The focus of this investigation reflects a change since the rebirth years of feminism. A weighing of past experience and insights of new experience and research clarify the importance of the positive contributions of the Black Freedom Movement and the Left, Old and New, to the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Their unique positive influence played a more significant part in fueling the new feminism than did women’s righteous anger at male chauvinism in these movements and in society as a whole. This study begins in 1953, the year that The Second Sex arrived in the United States and provided the germinal source of feminist consciousness for a significant number of Women’s Liberation founders.2 It is the story of the making of the movement and how it became established. I argue that it 2 Introduction was a 1960s movement very much established by 1970, which in no way suggests that momentous events and advances of the movement were over by 1970. The study closes in 1970, the year the movement was established in the United States and its spread around the world was well under way.3 The investigation seeks the impetus for the movement in the seeds of the new society that early Women’s Liberation organizers wished to create— seeds that, as Karl Marx’s concept has it, blossomed right there amidst the sexism in which the founders lived. I have focused on the sources instrumental to Women’s Liberation in founders’ families, in the Black Freedom Movement, in the Left, Old and New, and in the legacies of earlier feminists, from the “First Wave” of the 1820s through the 1920s to Simone de Beauvoir in the mid-twentieth century. What does it take to make a social movement of such scope? Certainly consciousness that collective action is needed to overcome oppressive conditions is a necessary, if insufficient, ingredient in any radical struggle. Individuals realizing that what appear to be personal problems have a social basis is also critical. So is the related understanding that a liberation struggle is most effective and radical when waged by the oppressed themselves, not saviors from the outside, or when it organizes on the basis of the common stake of all concerned rather than on the noblesse oblige idea of helping the “less fortunate.” In the 1950s and 1960s these essential insights came together for a handful of young women who pressed the ideas into service for themselves as members of an oppressed sex. In the United States today millions benefit from achievements of the Second Wave of feminism, such as legal abortion and public awareness of sexism and gender equality. But the origins and founders of the Women’s Liberation branch of the movement that brought about these changes are little known and even less well understood in comparison with the movement’s moderate branch.4 Feminism resurfaced in the early 1960s in two distinct forms, a moderate branch, then consisting of mostly middle-aged women, and one mostly made up of young women who openly called themselves “radical women.” The younger women used terms like Women’s Liberation, Female Liberation , Radical Feminist, or Socialist Feminist to describe themselves. The founding organization of the moderate branch was the National Organization for Women (NOW). Emblematic of their political and age differences, and demonstrating the Civil Rights Movement’s inspiring influence on both, NOW characterized itself as an NAACP for women, while Women’s Libera- Introduction 3 tion identified with the daring and militant young organizers in the South associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).5 There is important recent literature reclaiming the erased history of the key role black women played in the development of the U.S. Second Wave, in first triggering the earliest of stirrings of feminism in SNCC and other flashpoints.6 But the...