No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

14. "I Had Not Seen Women Like That Before"

With the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many young feminists went looking for a “usable past” of women’s achievement. In New York City, they did not have to look far. New York’s tenant councils had, for decades, operated under predominantly female leadership. And in the late 1960s these organizations supported a new wave of squatter campaigns aimed at relieving the city’s shortage of affordable housing. As young activists rallied to support the squats, they encountered the senior generation of female leaders who directed local and citywide tenant groups. These older women became political mentors to the young volunteers, providing them not only with expertise on housing but with a model of “actually existing feminism.”1 This essay argues that the tenant struggles of the 1960s and 1970s ampli- fied the women’s liberation movement in New York by linking young feminists with the Old Left generation of female housing organizers. Tenant campaigns served as a “parallel space,” alongside other political movements, in which women’s leadership could and did flourish. The tenant story adds to our understanding of second wave feminism by revealing a set of affectionate mentoring relations between two generations of radical female activists, thereby challenging many narratives of feminist politicization that focus primarily on young women’s rejection of what came before, be it postwar domesticity, liberal feminism, or New Left sexism.2 The senior tenant leaders were not entirely anomalous. Recent scholarship has identified a cohort of unsung organizers of the mid-twentieth century, people who kept the Popular Front flame from dying out during the “I Had Not Seen Women Like That Before” Intergenerational Feminism in New York City’s Tenant Movement ROBERTA S. GOLD 329 14 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Cold War and passed it along to activists who ignited the political upheavals of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.3 Although tenant history extends these narratives, it also departs from them, particularly with regard to what might be called “political intentionality.” In most stories of Cold War connections, the struggles young people took up were the very struggles the senior cohort had intended to foster—that is, postwar civil rights activists paved the way for subsequent civil rights campaigns, Cold War feminist strategies informed second wave feminism, and so forth. In New York’s tenant arena, by contrast, senior organizers did not set out in a programmatic way to advance one of the major developments—women’s power—that would inspire their young recruits. Instead they were concerned with housing—both a universal need and, ironically, an entity located in the “domestic sphere” of conventional gender ideology. But their work nonetheless presented a model of “on-theground ” women’s activism, which complemented the more self-conscious women’s liberation movement that exploded on the U.S. political stage just as the squatter actions caught fire. Thus older tenant leaders’ contribution to second wave feminism was largely an unintended consequence of their work on the front lines of struggle over tenant rights versus property rights. The older tenant organizers had picked up a torch, or at least an ember, from the working-class and antiracist tradition that Dorothy Sue Cobble has dubbed “labor feminism.”4 Many of these organizers had been active in leftwing unions during the 1940s, and as mid-century tenant leaders they had continued to place poor people’s needs, along with New York’s pioneering antidiscrimination laws and ghetto-housing struggles, at the top of their agenda. The squatter actions of the 1970s carried on these traditions: the movement was genuinely multiracial, and squatter families were virtually all poor. Such demographics created another contrast between the squatter campaigns and more typical women’s politics, often characterized by a mutually frustrating split between predominantly white, middle-class feminists, on the one hand, and minority and working-class feminists, on the other. The parallel space of New York’s squatter movement offered local feminists an alternative to such political fragmentation. Here young activists not only inherited a set of older, class-conscious feminist mentors; they also came into a field of organizing that centered on low-income, racially diverse participants . And their demand for renters’ rights challenged one of postwar America’s most powerful class and racial stratifying mechanisms: the real ROBERTA S. GOLD 330 estate industry.5 Squatter struggles thus became both a training ground in which Popular Front...