Organized by Nancy Rosenstock
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
Most books about our history are written by the so-called “historians” who study events of the past by reading books as well as the original information. Rarely do we see books written by the actual people who participated in the making of historical events that have influenced our lives. Inside the Second Wave of Feminism is a series of interviews with the participants of the feminist movement in the years 1968-1972.
I was an acquaintance of Nancy Rosenstock, as well as several of the women interviewed in this book when we were members of the Socialist Workers Party. Today none of us supports the politics of the SWP, although we all continue to support the international movement to liberate the working class.
The first wave of feminism culminated in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that gave women the right to vote. As with the Second Wave of Feminism, the first wave required women to organize in demonstrations just so they could win the right to vote. Alice Paul, as well as several of the suffragettes served time in prison merely for demanding that basic right.
In order to begin to appreciate what the Second Wave of Feminism was, I believe we need to think about other movements that have erupted in the history of this country. In those movements, there were periods of anger that evolved into rage against unjust conditions. Then, events took place that caused what I call a tipping point. Those tipping points turned the rage against injustice into a mass determination to struggle for basic human dignity.
In 1970, I believe there was a tipping point with respect to the struggle for women’s rights. Clearly there were other tipping points that began to galvanize social movements in this country.
The Labor Movement
In the year 1934 this country was in the midst of a depression. Jobs were almost impossible to find. Most of the available jobs didn’t have wages that could provide for enough food to feed a family. So, in that year there was a generalized sentiment that things needed to change in a profound way.
So, in the year 1934 three strikes erupted that won tremendous support. I will call the year 1934 a tipping point for the labor movement. After tenacious battles took place, employers finally recognized union representation. Then, millions of workers joined unions and continued the struggle to improve their living and working conditions. By the end of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and won significant concessions.
The struggle for civil and human rights
After the Civil War, Black people won rights they never had before. They won the right to vote. Millions went to school and learned to read. During the years of slavery, the government as well as enslavers viewed most Black people as nothing more than property.
Then, in the year 1877, the federal government withdrew their support of the reconstruction governments. This action effectively gave political power to organizations that had the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, racist forces murdered thousands of Blacks in lynchings and Black people effectively lost citizenship rights where Jim Crow segregation was the law. Things weren’t much better in the northern states.
Then, in December of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus so a white passenger could have that seat. This was another tipping point that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For 385 days Black people in Montgomery refused to travel on the busses in the city. By the year 1964 and 1965, the civil rights movement forced the federal government to outlaw Jim Crow segregation in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
Why did women want to be liberated?
The following quotation from the introduction of Inside the Second Wave of Feminism summarizes the routine discrimination against women in employment in the year 1963.
“Women seeking employment outside the home found job listings for men and women. In 1963, the commission on the status of Women released a report revealing that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned. Black women made roughly 40 percent of what white men made. In 1970 only 43 percent of women participated in the workforce, to a large extent in occupations of service, such as secretarial work, teaching, waiting tables, and nursing. Five times as many Black women worked as maids and household cleaners compared to white women in 1972. When employed, restrictions on clothing were common—women in offices were expected to wear a dress or a skirt with nylons, not pants. Opportunities for career advancement were limited. Avenues were not open for most women who wanted to be architects, engineers, welders, plumbers, carpenters, or other jobs that were considered at the time to be jobs only for men.”
These are a few more quotations from the introduction that give us an idea of the reality women faced in the past.
“Sexual harassment in the workplace was barely recognized. Domestic violence was a real part of many women’s lives, and fighting it was not an easy option. Rape was often not reported because doing so subjected a woman to further harassment and humiliation from the police and often from the male abuser.”
When women asked bank officers for credit they were asked, “Are you married? Do you plan on having children? Many banks required single, divorced, or widowed women to bring a man along with them to cosign for a credit card. Getting a divorce was often difficult.”
Today women are mobilizing in protest of the Supreme Court decision to take away women’s right to decide if and when they become mothers. Ginny Hildebrand reported on the laws that prohibited women from even attaining contraception.
“Contraception was illegal in Massachusetts unless you were married or had a medical reason for it. The laws were very reactionary. It was illegal to display the pill. You had to go to a gynecologist, either you had to say that you were married, or they had to say they would give it to you to regulate your menstrual cycle. That’s how we got birth control. This was unacceptable from both a practical and feminist point of view.”
Many women who experienced these conditions were aware of or participated in the civil rights movement. These women began to see how mass movements had the potential to make basic changes.
Then, in the year 1968 the Vietnamese people launched their Tet Offensive. Before this offensive, the commander of the United States armed forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, argued that his forces were winning the war. The Vietnamese Tet Offensive began to convince people all over the world that there was no way the United States was going to win that war.
The movement protesting the war against Vietnam started with small demonstrations. After the Tet Offensive, those demonstrations mushroomed to millions of people protesting all over the world. By 1973, the U.S. government understood that they had been decisively defeated, and they withdrew their forces from Vietnam.
Women viewed all these events and began to see that their time had come. So, on August 26, 1970, women marched in New York City as well as in ninety cities across the country demanding women’s rights. This was the tipping point transformed the movement.
Women’s attitudes begin to change
The women interviewed for this book were members of a Boston based organization called Female Liberation. Jean Lafferty explained why this organization called itself Female Liberation and not Women’s Liberation.
“It might be more sensible to question the word ‘woman,’ which has more social implications and innuendos. It often implies to fulfill the requirements of one’s sex is an achievement rather than a given biological fact. Somewhere in the process of striving for the rewards offered to ‘good women’ we became aware of our humiliating role as men’s willing victims, and that to be a woman meant to dress and act the part of a clown. How then could the simple biological designation of ‘female’ be more embarrassing than the social definition of ‘woman’?
Nancy Williamson gave her thoughts on how damaging the word “ugly” has been for women.
“In consciously deviating from the Hollywood—Madison Avenue—Playboy norm, we have indeed affected a studied ugliness. Many of us have cut our hair and chosen to wear loose-fitting pants. Shirts with high necks, sturdy shoes, rather than tight short skirts and dresses and flimsy, fall-apart shoes for several reasons: It is more comfortable. It causes less attention on the streets. It is less abasing. It is less expensive, less time-consuming.
“Any woman who has walked down the street in a miniskirt and lowcut blouse and high heel sandals knows that this attire is not only less comfortable than blue jeans and an ordinary shirt, but that it attracts far more catcalls, hooting, and leers. Leering and catcalls though humiliating, are sometimes interpreted as flattery. If they look at me that way, I must really look beautiful today, we often think. Though this is degrading behavior on the part of men is physically harmless, it is humiliating and physically damaging to women to be subjected to it day after day, wherever we go.”
Maryanne Weathers had this to say in an article she wrote in 1969 titled An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary Force. This article appeared in the journal No More Fun and Games.
“Any time the white man admits to something, you know he is trying to cover something else up. We are all being exploited, even the white middle-class, by the few people in control of this entire world. And to keep the real issue clouded, he keeps us at one another’s throats with this racism jive. Although whites are most certainly racist, we must understand that they have been programmed to think in these patterns to divert their attention. If they are busy fighting us, then they have no time to question the policies of the war being run by the government. With the way the elections went down, it is clear that they are powerless as the rest of us. Make no question about it, folks, this fool knows what he is doing. This man is playing the death game for money and power, not because he doesn’t like us. He could care less one way or the other. But think for a moment if we all got together and just walked out. Who would fight his wars, who would run his police state, who would work in his factories, who would buy his products?
“We women must start this thing rolling.”
Maryanne Weathers had this to say about why Black women need to have the right to decide if and when to become mothers.
“This then adds still another cause for pain in the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy. What will my Jesus say? What will my family say? Will this make them angry? Will this force me even deeper and further away? The obvious answer, after four hundred years of heavenly, paternal and maternal pronouncements, day in and day out, is HELL YES! But we are finally beginning to see that if He hasn’t done anything about anything else, He probably isn’t going to make any sudden moves at this late date about a step towards practical reality and survival. As far as the family is concerned, they are neither eager or able to take on the added expense of an extra mouth to feed and body to clothe.”
When we think of what it means when women do not have the right to decide if and when to become mothers, this article by Nancy Williamson on Abortion: A Feminist Perspective gives us a glimmer of what life used to be for women who wanted to terminate unwanted pregnancies. This article appeared in the Second Wave, vol 1, no. 3 in 1971
“Seven thousand or more women die each year from botched illegal abortions. 350,000 more end up with serious complications. The incidence of reported child abuse in New York City went up 549 percent in the past five years. That’s a hard figure to assimilate, but if you’ve talked to a nurse or a doctor or a social worker, or [have] been one yourself and seen children who’ve been beaten with instruments ranging from bare fists to baseball bats, children burned over open flames, gas burners, strangled or suffocated with pillows or plastic bags, drowned, then it’s easier to understand what the statistics mean. These are unwanted children. These children are usually born into poverty—60 percent of battered children are from poverty homes.”
These statements underscore the fact that the oppression of women is linked to the natural functioning of the political economic system of capitalism. Many of the women in Female Liberation became active socialists.
In fact, Frederick Engels one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto also wrote a book titled The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State. In that book Engels reported that the family, as we know it, was created for capitalism. In the family, children learn to do what they are told in preparation for their time when they will do what they are told by an employer.
Engels also reported that in the so-called primitive societies this was not the case. In that era, women did some of the most important work and they had real political power. Evelyn Reed gave a comprehensive history of the lives of women in those societies in her book Women’s Evolution from Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family.
Delphine Welch had this to say about what her participation in Female Liberation meant for her life.
“I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if I had not embraced feminism and Female Liberation. I believe that our activities have made life better for the young women today. Now it’s their turn to take up the fight!”
The struggle against police brutality and murder
Well Delphine, I think that we can say loudly and clearly that young women today are taking up the fight. I will end this review by reporting on new tipping points that are erupting today.
Elizabeth Hinton wrote her book America on Fire about hundreds of rebellions that took place in this country protesting police brutality as well as murders by the police. These rebellions took place between the years 1965 and 1984.
Then, in the year 2020 police officer Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd. That murder was captured on video and seen around the world. This appeared to be another tipping point in the history of this country.
In June of 2020 I was one of about 100,000 people who demonstrated in front of the Art Museum in Philadelphia protesting murders by the police. This was in the midst of the pandemic, before vaccinations were available.
The keynote speaker at that demonstration was Eugene Puryear who argued that racist victimizations by the police and racist mobs have a long history in this country. He argued that we need to get rid of the system that allows for this vicious racism to continue. Puryear’s remarks received an enthusiastic response. About ninety percent of the demonstrators appeared to be under thirty years of age.
Then, I attended several demonstrations in Philadelphia demanding that women continue to have the right to abortion. These demonstrations are showing me that today young women and men are continuing to take up the fight.
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