In 1970 I was a 22-year-old hippie with a 3-month-old son. The baby’s father had gone off to Tahiti to build us a hut on the beach – his dream of the week. In the previous week’s dream I would support us while he finished high school, college, and a PhD in nuclear physics. The morning he left for Tahiti I told him I would not follow him. I had my own inchoate dreams. I was going back to Ann Arbor, where I had friends to help me get started again.
With other young mothers, mostly single, I formed a baby group. We talked while the children played, and it soon became a consciousness-raising group. We read Our Bodies Our Selves. We examined each others’ cervices with a transparent plastic speculum, and tried to see our own in the mirror.
We all tried to figure out where we were going, and what we would do next. Even the married women didn’t want to be “just” wives and mothers. We would not be defined by a relationship to a man, nor hitch our wagons to a man’s life, but make our own course.
I had not been raised to support myself. The goal was a husband and children – I would take care of the home, he would bring in the money. That was what my mother did.
Now it was obviously up to me. So I went back to college. I would become either a children’s librarian or a lawyer, the former because I loved children’s books, and the latter because I wanted to change the world. By the time I finished college I had decided on law school.
I was a full-blown feminist, bristling with outrage. When I wasn’t wearing flamboyant minidresses, I used to wear brown overalls and hiking boots. I was quick to flare up at a man who assumed I was looking for a leader rather than a lay.
My father and brother teased me when I visited. “Look at the feminist fixing breakfast for her baby.” “You’d better shut up or somebody will get kicked in the balls,” I snarled, and raced off to tell my sister what I’d said. We didn’t speak like that in our family.
The bristles are soft now, the edges and prickly bits smoothed out. Forty years and raising a son have done that.
Some 70’s feminism seems comical now. Popular media defined the movement through symbolic acts, sometimes invented by the media, without acknowledging what the symbols represented.
Bra burning. Flikr.com click
The movement suffered from internal politics, and from a perception that it ignored issues of class, race, and sexual identity, and addressed only white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s issues. But though certain organizations were self-annointed or selected by the media to represent feminism, the movement of the 70’s was anarchic, and way broader than any group. Women of all kinds were telling the truth as they saw it: Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich.
True, these were intellectuals, mostly not subject to the indignities of welfare or the hourly wage. And many middle class women did focus on their own issues. Some professors, free to come and go on their own schedule, complained when a secretary stayed home too often with a sick child. They organized around barriers to tenure rather than the abysmally low pay of custodial staff.
9to5org.blogspot.com click
But others: writers, lawyers, community activists and organizers, took on welfare, childcare, health care, domestic violence and rape. The women’s movement I knew was not about a few leaders selected by and filtered through the media. It was about women supporting and valuing women. It was about changing the world so that women could be self-supporting and achieve power in the workplace while still valuing motherhood. It was about encouraging men to expand their role in the family and share as equal partners.
Some of the changes fueled by the movement are minuscule, some are being eroded by reactionary forces. Some made things worse for poor women. Welfare reform’s fraudulent veneer of empowering women to work failed to conceal the intent to reduce welfare roles by any means necessary. But without the feminist movement of the 70’s we would not have domestic violence shelters, rape shield laws, the glorious flowering of women’s history, and younger generations of women who assume they are equal to men: equally entitled, equally capable.
Peaceful Paths – Gainesville’s domestic violence program
From feminism I learned the significance of being an outsider. For me the most important issues are still those affecting the least powerful. I know that poverty and injustice crush men as well as women, and I am thrilled to work with the (mostly) guys living in tents in the woods. I care more about what happens to them than I do about access to tenure, or a glass ceiling at the top of a business ladder, though I know those matter too.
coursepark.com
But as a group, I like women more than men. I understand and forgive our foibles. I see the world through a female lens, and value “women’s work.” My heroes are the suffragists, the welfare rights organizers, the women in the civil rights movement, and the countless women in the third world struggling against all the brutal forms of patriarchy. I am still a feminist, and proud of the name.
Johnnie Tillmon – welfare rights organizer click
brilliant post! thanks for sharing the story.
It’s weird how many women say these days that they aren’t feminists! How about Planned Parenthood selling t-shirts on their website that say “I had an abortion”? (This is true. I saw it myself and sent them an enraged letter.) I call this time post-post-feminism. And it is weird and wacky. Then again, I feel confident that there has never been a better time or country to be a woman. So there’s that.
and thank you, hannah, for calling it brilliant!
Sara G. – People who say ‘I consider myself a feminist’ annoy me more than those who say ‘I’m not a feminist.’ Are you or aren’t you, sister? Which just goes to show I’m definitely becoming a cranky curmudgeon.
Re the PP t-shirt? I get it. 4 out of 10 US pregnancies end in abortion; a third of US women will have one by the time they’re 45. But we’re supposed to hide it and feel ashamed. I wouldn’t wear the t-shirt because I don’t tell my business to strangers on the street – have no bumper stickers either. I’ve had two abortions. It would be good if women weren’t scared to come out of the closet about it.
I’m going to be honest here, and if people start throwing tomatoes, I won’t blame them. I recognoze the good accomplishments of the women’s movement, but, maybe because I’m from a working class Irish Catholic background, I have an almost visceral dislike of even the word ‘feminism.’ I am horrified by the notion of women sitting in a circle examing their cervixes. I recognize the need for legalized abortion, but I hate the very idea of it. I feel that working class women and ‘girly girls’ as the saying goes, who prefer traditional women’s roles, have been too often ignored or put down by feminists. I feel that, by too often adopting a white male role model of what constitutes success, too many feminists have thrown the baby out with the bath water. I admire Alice Walker who prefers the term “womanist” and who celebrates women’s spirituality and traditions as herbalists, healers etc. I am not contradicting you Liz. I respect what you have presented here, but I am not able to feel differently about my objections, unfair as they may be.
Arupa, I am AMUSED by the memory of women lying around examining their cervices. As for people, whether they’re feminists, Marxists, racists, or Baptists, who spend energy putting down other people, to hell with them.
You mention in your essay that poor people have been screwed in the name of feminism – not the feminists fault at all, but now we have children with both parents serving in a war zone, with talking heads calling women in combat a victory of “equality.” Some women believe that men have co-opted the feminist movement to their own ends. Like, “You want to be equal, great – have at it. Work two jobs (or three as a cashier at Publix recently mentioned to me) or go fight in a war.” I see Alice Walker’s take as an effort to find a different and more tradition-based path to power for women, although one does have to believe in spirituality to buy into it. I do and I think Walker is really on to something. Maybe it hasn’t caught on because there’s no way men can make money off it.
lizzy, i’m alerting all and sundry to read this. so glad you’re my sistah. and yes, i am a feminist, from the flibberty gibbet branch. and, our cervices were amazing and beautiful, like secret flowers.
herewith a pome:
ISTS AND ISMS
CREATE SCHISMS.
luli
Arupa – When I was supposed to be working, I was looking at an old book: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1970). There was a list of demands from a women’s rally, in Buffalo I think. Item one: free child care. Item two: Free universal health care. Guess what the women’s movement hasn’t accomplished? but not for lack of trying! Nobody ever wanted to be liberated to be overworked, underpaid, and forced to choose between our children and our livelihood.
It’s a great post, Lizzy. I am a feminist, but first and foremost, I am a human bean, trying to find my way to self-love. My daughters are 20 and 16 at this point. I am learning almost daily from them: gender identity, shifting sexuality, racism, isolation, finding a place in society. I think the part of the blog that I love the most is the part where you talk about the homeless men in the park vis a vis the glass ceiling for executive women. There is so much work to be done! I see the patriarchy as winding down, the energy of women – which also resides in men, as I’m sure you know – more essential now if we are to move forward toward sustaining ourselves and the planet as opposed to devouring it all in insatiable greed.
Today is Luli’s birthday. I am so lucky to have her in my life, and by extension now, to have your blog, too! Thanks. xo
Nettie – thanks for writing. I appreciate your optimism! It IS Luli’s birthday; she claims to be 42.
As the mother of a 25 year old daughter, I am even more a feminist than I was in the 1960’s. I am kind of shy, so I didn’t do the cervix exam (my own, or others)and I am too queasy to be in medicine. But otherwise, I am still onboard.
I am fascinated by body interiors. I once got to shadow surgeons for a day – THAT was a queasy and bloody experience. But I couldn’t see my own cervix in the mirror – too near-sighted. Same when my son was born – they had a mirror up but I couldn’t see it. (Also I was squinching my eyes shut with effort). Anyway, here’s to women, feminists and not, to bodies, to babies, to human and animal kind. (And the glass of wine that’s fueling my enthusiasm.)
I am a feminist, but I am a modern feminist. When I was younger I was undoubtedly a tomboy, I am now at university studying a degree in Mechanical Engineering so I’ve always striven to be considered equal to any man and think that in the most cases I am seen as equal. Oddly enough in engineering, it is so encouraged to be a woman that they are actually starting to discriminate against men – but that’s another story!
What doesn’t sit well with me is the assumption that feminists aren’t allowed to want to be housewives. I must add that this is a belief I’ve only heard from non-feminists and really extreme feminists. In the same way that today, it is our right to chose to spoil our vote in an election, it is my right to acknowledge that feminism has done so much for us, persue traditionally man’s line of work and then give that up to have a child and be a stay at home mum.
But Liz, you’re right – here’s to human kind!
Pippi – it’s a treat to hear from somebody I’ve never met, and in the UK! Here’s to your dreams, wherever they lead you.