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

Epilogue

Epilogue The prediction that had so impressed Anne Forer was coming true: from “just a few women meeting in a room,” a movement that was radical and feminist had “gone nationwide and international.” Soon its victories would include the legalization of divorce in Italy and the legalization of abortion in Italy and France. In the United States the derailing of the Carswell appointment to the Supreme Court by the coalition of NOW, Women’s Liberation, the Black Freedom Movement, and the AFL-CIO demonstrated the promise of the political strength of these constituencies when they mobilized their combined forces. In 1971 black Women’s Liberation continued to expand. The TWWA had established itself on the West Coast, and Poor Black Women was writing its prescient, revolutionary analysis Lessons from the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community.1 The Black Scholar published “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Angela Davis’s classic attack on the Moynihan Report, while Davis was still in jail. Her supporters had organized a high-profile worldwide mobilization of antiracist, Left, and Women’s Liberation forces in her defense. Also reflective of the movement’s momentum was the passage of the ERA in the Senate in 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s pathbreaking presidential campaign, and of course, in 1973, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized most abortions. The Chisholm campaign represented the zenith of Women’s Liberation and at the same time contained within it 238 Epilogue the clearest sign, on the national level, of the rise of centrist forces within the movement and the beginning of radical mass Women’s Liberation decline. In 1972 Shirley Chisholm may have been the best-known feminist in the nation, rivaled only by Betty Friedan and Angela Davis. Davis had just begun to publicly criticize male chauvinism, whereas Chisholm’s record as a feminist had been building for more than four years. One journalism scholar said that by 1972 Chisholm’s name was a “household word,” and called her presidential campaign the “feminist story of the year.”2 When Chisholm won a landslide election to Congress in 1968, she became a national figure because she was the first black woman in Congress—and she was outspoken on controversial progressive issues, especially those advancing the cause of women and of African Americans. She was on national television in public service announcements for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and she publicized that she referred women for then-illegal abortions. She pushed for government-funded child care centers , equal opportunity for women in employment and education, and other feminist goals. Chisholm broke ranks with black and white liberal legislators to seek freedom for Angela Davis, who had been the FBI’s most wanted criminal and the subject of a national manhunt (womanhunt?) as an allegedly armed and dangerous person charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder. Davis had been captured as a high-profile fugitive from justice, who publicly declared herself a Communist and a revolutionary opposed to the “male chauvinism which prevails in our society.”3 Chisholm characterized herself as a “real radical” if not an “all-out” one.4 She championed Davis and took strong positions on many fronts. She supported Black Power, calling it “a real American political truth.” At the same time she declared that “of my two ‘handicaps,’ being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.” She had been speaking out against the war in Vietnam since early 1968, although this was not the official position of her party. She told the nation that money spent on the war was needed for early childhood education programs—that the United States must “use its strength . . . [for] people . . . not for profits and war.”5 Her opponent in the congressional race was the well-known black male civil rights leader James Farmer, who had headed CORE, and who campaigned against her by invoking the stereotype of the black matriarch. Chisholm was elected and reelected from her district in Brooklyn, which was overwhelmingly working-class black and Puerto Rican. Among registered Epilogue 239 voters in the district, women outnumbered men more than two to one. Chisholm attributed her victory over Farmer to the female voters. Both Chisholm and Davis were branded out-of-control black matriarchs, and such was the feminist consciousness in the nation that both were able to turn...