CHAPTER 18
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature.
—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Second Sex, 1949
I think this has been the unknown heart of a woman’s problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity.
—BETTY FRIEDAN, The Feminine Mystique, 1963
Take a memo, Mr. Smith: Like every other oppressed people rising up today, we’re out for our freedom—by any means necessary.
—ROBIN MORGAN, “Take a Memo, Mr. Smith,” Win magazine, November 1968
IT WOULD HAVE MADE little sense for the Miss America pageant to have gone off without a problem. This was, after all, 1968. Television viewers, after watching the Chicago riots, could take time out from the Soviet subjugation of Czechoslovakia, in between reports of burning villages in the Mekong, to see Bert Parks, the make-believe celebrity, explode onto the stage in white tie and tails like a flat-footed Fred Astaire, to shoo on the young, white, preferably blond, handpicked last virgins of America’s college campuses, competing for the crown of what was purportedly the ideal of American womanhood. To measure up, they would need to display such skills as answering questions without controversy and looking shapely, though not too shapely, in a swimsuit, all the while gleaming with a smile so wide it had gone rectangular—a carnivorous smile not unlike that of Hubert Humphrey. The pageant might have been challenged on race alone. Is the American feminine ideal always white? Would being black or brown or red or yellow be in itself less than ideal?
But that was not the thrust of the attack. In the best tradition of Yippie theater, on September 7 a group of one hundred women, possibly more, met on the boardwalk outside the pageant and crowned a sheep. When the press rushed to them—normally there are not many breaking stories at a Miss America pageant—the protesters insisted on speaking to women reporters only, who in 1968 were not commonplace.
Having gotten the media’s attention, the group, declaring itself the New York Radical Women, started throwing items into a trash bin labeled the “freedom trash can”—language, not by chance, from the civil rights movement. Into the freedom trash can went girdles, bras, false eyelashes, hair curlers, and other “beauty products.” About twenty of the Radical Women managed to stop the competition inside the convention hall for twenty minutes by gurgling the high-pitched Arab women’s cheer, which they had learned from the film The Battle of Algiers, and shouting, “Freedom for women!” while hoisting a banner that read “Women’s Liberation.”
For years after this watershed incident, radical feminists were labeled “bra burners,” although nowhere did they actually burn bras. The original bra burners said they were protesting “the degrading, mindless boob-girlie symbol” of Miss America.
The New York Radical Women who debuted with this action were largely experienced in the New Left or the civil rights movement, and most had worked on the organization of numerous demonstrations. But this was the first time any of them had been pivotal organizers in a protest. Robin Morgan, their leader, said, “We also all felt, well, grown up; we were doing this one for ourselves, not for our men. . . .”
There had been other women’s marches in 1968. In January five thousand women had marched on Washington to protest the war. The demonstration had been organized by the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, named after the first congresswoman, who at the age of eighty-seven was still a fiery activist. Despite turning out five thousand marchers dressed in mourner’s black, which should have been effective for television, the demonstration received very little press coverage. The New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel explained in a television interview that the reason for the lack of coverage was that violence seemed unlikely. Those who worked in the civil rights movement had learned years earlier that the presence of women reduces the risk of violence and that a reduced risk of violence diminishes media coverage.
Morgan regarded the greatest success of the event at the Miss America pageant to have been their decision to speak only to women reporters. The idea, like so many protest ideas, came from SNCC. The Radical Women were more successful at sticking to this, perhaps because their movement was a new beat that newspapers had not been covering. Within a few years this became standard feminist practice, and news media automatically sent women reporters to feminist events. At a time when feminism was becoming a growing story, and women journalists were struggling to get beyond the fashion, culture, and food pages, this had an important effect on newsrooms.
But Morgan had her regrets. The demonstrators appeared to be attacking the contestants instead of the contest, and in retrospect she thought it was a mistake to have protesters saying, “Miss America goes down!” and singing the altered lyrics, “Ain’t she sweet / Making profit off her meat. . . .” The contestants were supposed to be viewed as victims.
September 7, 1968, is often given as the date that modern feminism was launched. Feminists had been campaigning for numerous years, but like the New Left in the early 1960s when Tom Hayden first began writing about it, only a few had noticed until it got onto television. For millions of Americans, “women’s liberation” began in Atlantic City on September 7 with a sheep and a trash bin. Not far away, another group of protesters was holding a black Miss America contest to protest the racist nature of Miss America. But by then, black movements were old news.
It was not that Miss America was a revered institution. By the late sixties it had lost its luster and was widely thought to be racist or empty-headed and as faded as Atlantic City itself. Shana Alexander wrote in Life:
Talent being rarer than beauty in 18-year-old girls, the talent contest places the Smile under a ghastly strain. One girl, a trampolinist, smiled madly upside down. A ballerina smiled her way through “the dying swan,” somehow suggesting death in a frozen poultry locker. A third girl’s talent was to synchronize bubble gum chewing and the Charleston. At rhythmic intervals her smile was wiped out by a large, wet pink splat.
So many things seem wrong and boring and silly about the Miss America Pageant as it comes across on TV that one struggles to rank the offenses in order of importance. It is dull and pretentious and racist and exploitive and icky and sad. . . .
Morgan, who led New York Radical Women, was a child actress turned political activist. For her and everyone in her group, Atlantic City was their first act of radical feminism. Their thinking had clear roots in the New Left. Morgan said of the choice of targets, “Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values—racism, materialism, capitalism—all packaged in one ideal symbol, a woman.” As for Miss America of 1968, which of course had to be the winning Miss Illinois, Morgan said she had a “smile still blood-flecked from Mayor Daley’s kiss.” To top it off, the contestant winner went on a tour of the troops in Vietnam.
But not all the passersby were sympathetic. Men heckled and denounced the demonstrators and suggested that they should throw themselves in the freedom trash can and strangely yelled, “Go home and wash your bras!”—once again buying into the idea that nonconformists are dirty. One outraged former Miss America contestant from Wisconsin quickly appeared with her own freshly painted sign that read, “There’s only one thing wrong with Miss America—She’s beautiful.” The former contestant, Terry Meewsen, surprised no one by wearing a “Nixon for President” button.
Before September 7 the common image of feminism was that it was a movement of long-skirted women in bonnets who fought from 1848 until 1920 to get women the right to vote. In 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, feminism, according to popular belief, had served its purpose, achieved its goal, and ceased to exist. In a 1956 special issue of Life magazine on women, Cornelia Otis Skinner said of feminism, “We have won our case, but for heaven’s sake let’s stop trying to prove it over and over again.” This idea was so entrenched that in 1968, when the press and the public realized that there was a growing contemporary feminist movement, they often referred to it as “the second wave.”
One of the first surprises of the second wave was when The Feminine Mystique, a book by Betty Friedan, a suburban mother of three and graduate fellow in psychology, became one of the most read books of the early 1960s. Friedan was a graduate of Smith College class of 1942, and at the beginning of the sixties the college had asked her to conduct a survey of her classmates. Two hundred women answered her questionnaire. Eighty-nine percent had become housewives, and most of the housewives said that their one regret in life was that they hadn’t used their education in a meaningful way. Friedan rejected the usual concept that educated women were unhappy because education made them “restless.” Instead she believed that they had been trapped by a series of beliefs that she called “the feminine mystique”—that women and men were very different, that it was masculine to want a career and feminine to find happiness in being dominated by a husband and his career and to be busy raising children. A woman who did not want these things had something wrong with her, was against nature and unfeminine, and therefore such unnatural urges should be suppressed. Life magazine in its profile of her called her “nonhousewife Betty.” Television talk shows wanted her for a guest. The media seemed fascinated by the apparent contradiction that a mother of three who was living “a normal life” would be denouncing it. While the media wanted her, the suburban community in which she lived didn’t and began ostracizing her and her husband. But women around the country were fascinated. They read and discussed the book and formed women’s groups that asked Friedan to come speak.
Friedan came to realize that not only had women’s groups been organized all over the country, but active feminists like Catherine East in Washington were fighting for women’s legal rights. In 1966, two years before radical feminism’s television debut, East’s political savvy combined with Friedan’s national reputation to form the National Organization for Women, NOW.
One of the earliest fights had been over airline stewardesses. Stewardesses were required to be attractive females, could be fired for gaining weight, and were fired as too old at the age of thirty-two. The age requirement had not been questioned by many women because most women agreed that a woman should be married and raising children by thirty-two. In fact, thirty-two was considered very late. Stewardesses were expected to leave their job when they married, but many married secretly and kept working until they reached the young age of retirement. The generation of women who were born in the 1940s married younger than any other twentieth-century generation, no doubt in part because there was no war to stop them. The average age of matrimony was twenty. Many couples got married in college, and certainly after graduation there was no time to lose. Those who didn’t go to college were free to marry after high school.
In the meantime, if a woman was extremely attractive and wanted a little career before getting married, she could be a stewardess for a few years. It was considered a glamour job. Stewardesses were told how to wear hair and makeup and were required to wear girdles. Supervisors did “touch checks” to make sure they were complying.
A group of stewardesses led by Dusty Roads and Nancy Collins organized a union and fought for almost ten years to force airlines to stop age and marital discrimination. New guidelines and contracts were not won until 1968, only three weeks before television viewers discovered feminists in Atlantic City.
Slowly women were beginning to take their place in the job market. In 1968, when Muriel Siebert became the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, she still had to convince clients that market advice from a woman could be as worthy as that from a man, despite the fact that by 1968 the United States had more female stockholders than male. But when the year ended she reported “an incredible year.” Before she bought her seat she was grossing half a million dollars, and with her seat in 1968 she grossed more than a million dollars, specializing in aviation and aeronautics stocks. Several large New York banks and all twenty-five of the largest mutual funds were among her clients.
For the first time, women won the right to serve on juries in the state of Mississippi. For the first time, two women were licensed as professional jockeys, although one of them, Kathy Kusner, then broke her leg and was out for the season. The North Vietnamese National Liberation Front taught the West a lesson by sending a woman, Nguyen Thi Binh, as their chief negotiator in the Paris peace talks. And First Lieutenant Jane A. Lombardi, a nurse, became the first woman ever to win a combat decoration.
But progress was slow and long overdue, which was why the feminist organization was called NOW. Already by 1960, 40 percent of American women over the age of sixteen were working. The idea of women as solely housewives was becoming more myth than reality. What was true was that most working women did not have good jobs and were not paid well for their work. In 1965, when the federal government made it illegal to discriminate in employment by race, religion, or national origin, despite rigorous lobbying gender was left out.
NOW made a priority of changing the practice of listing help wanted ads by gender in newspapers. It was now illegal for newspapers to separately list jobs for whites and jobs for “colored.” But it was still common practice to single out women for low-paying jobs by separating “Male Help Wanted” and “Female Help Wanted” listings. NOW fought hard, using such tactics as invading the hearings by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission with huge signs bearing telegenic messages such as “A chicken in every pot, a whore in every home.” The leading New York City newspapers dropped separate listings in 1967. But many newspapers around the country continued the practice until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against it in a 1973 case against the Pittsburgh Press.
In 1968 NOW took on a variety of issues, including a key battle in New York over changing state law to legalize abortion. At the same time, they wanted Congress to produce an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women. Such an amendment, the ERA, had been proposed and rejected by every Congress since 1923.
The feminist movement, like all the great movements of 1968, was rooted in the civil rights movement. Laws that enforced separate female status, a principle repeatedly upheld in the courts, were referred to as “Jane Crow laws.” Many feminists referred to NOW as the women’s NAACP, leading others to insist it was more radical—the women’s CORE or SNCC. Betty Friedan referred to women who pandered to male sexism as Aunt Toms.
Demonstration for abortion rights, New York, 1968
(Photo by Elliott Landy/Magnum Photos)
“There are striking parallels,” insisted Florence Henderson, a New York lawyer best known at the time for her defense of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. “In court you often get a more patronizing attitude to blacks and women than white men: ‘Your Honor, I’ve known this boy since he was a child, his mother worked for my family. . . .’ ‘Your Honor, she is just a woman, she has three small children. . . .’ And I think white male society often takes the same attitude toward both: ‘If we want to give power to you O.K. But don’t act as if you are entitled to it.’ That’s too manly, too . . . white.”
The second wave of feminism might have broken sooner except that in the late 1950s and early 1960s the most talented, courageous, and idealistic women had joined the civil rights movement. Later in the sixties, the New Left was focused on ending the war, while white women in the civil rights movement for a long time felt it unseemly to raise issues of women’s rights, in the face of the far more serious abuse of blacks. Women, after all, were not being lynched or shot.
Among those white women from church backgrounds who went south and risked their lives with SNCC were Mary King and Sandra Cason—later to marry and divorce Tom Hayden and become Casey Hayden. Some of the older female SNCC workers, notably Ella Baker, were tremendous influences on the younger women. Baker, an important inspiration for Mary King and others, had started with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as an adviser to Martin Luther King. But in 1960 she switched to SNCC. She said this about the SCLC:
I was difficult. I wasn’t an easy pushover. Because I could talk back a lot—not only could but did. And so that was frustrating to those who never had certain kinds of experience. And it’s a strange thing with men who were supposed to be “men about town”; if they had never known a woman who knew how to say No, and No in no uncertain terms, they didn’t know what to do sometimes. Especially if you could talk loud and had a voice like mine. You could hear me a mile away sometimes, if necessary.
In fact, Martin Luther King had a number of important issues in his own marriage completely aside from his womanizing. Coretta complained bitterly of being kept out of the movement. “I wish I was more a part of it,” she said in an interview. She envisioned a significant role for herself in the civil rights movement, and he had denied her that. This was a source of continual anger in their marriage and, according to some aides, often led to his being unable to go home at the end of a day. Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with Martin Luther King in the SCLC, said, “Martin . . . was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets. He would have a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do. I’m always asked to take the notes. I’m always asked to go fix Dr. King some coffee. I did it too.” To her it was the times. “They were sexist male preachers and grew up in a sexist world. . . . I loved Dr. King but I know that that streak was in him also.” Only after King’s death was Coretta Scott King free to emerge as an important voice for civil rights.
All of the 1960s movements—until NOW and other feminist groups became active—were run by men. Women in the SDS talked of how intimidating Tom Hayden and other male leaders were. An SDS brochure read, “The system is like a woman. You’ve got to fuck it to make it change.” Hayden in a recent interview said that part of the problem had been that “the women’s movement was dormant at the time SDS was started.” But he attributed the problem largely to his own “ignorance” and that of other leaders. Suzanne Goldberg, a leader in the Free Speech Movement and later Mario Savio’s first wife, said:
I was on the executive committee and the steering committee of the FSM. I would make a suggestion and no one would react. Thirty minutes later Mario or Jack Weinberg would make the same suggestion and everyone would react. Interesting idea. I thought maybe I’m not saying it well enough. I thought that for years. But then at the twenty-fifth anniversary of FSM, I ran into Jackie Goldberg and she said, “No, you were fine. It was classic. I used to use it in my street theater. Suzanne being ignored.”
Bettina Aptheker, another leader in the Free Speech Movement, said, “Women did most of the clerical work and fund-raising and provided food. None of this was particularly recognized as work, and I never questioned this division of labor or even saw it as an issue!”
Probably no group had a more equal distribution of labor than SNCC. SNCC work was physically arduous and always dangerous, and though it was sometimes argued that the leaders who got the media attention were all men, the work and the danger were equally divided. By 1968 SNCC’s problem was no longer attracting violence and media attention, it was surviving the violence. Once SNCC members realized, as did the Janet Rankin Brigade later, that less violence was used against them if they had women present, they wanted a strong female presence. Though they were constantly scared, beaten, arrested, intimidated, shot at, and attacked by snarling dogs—the women had to acknowledge that they were in less danger than the men, and the white women in less danger than the black women. The black men were in the most danger always. In October 1964 in the state of Mississippi, the civil rights movement suffered fifteen killings, four woundings, thirty-seven churches bombed or burned, and more than one thousand arrests.
In this one aspect, at least, SNCC was less sexist than the antiwar movement. David Dellinger was shocked, when organizing peace marches in 1967 and 1968, to find that pediatrician-turned–antiwar activist Benjamin Spock, and even Women’s Strike for Peace, one of the early women’s antiwar groups, urged that women and children not participate in demonstrations because of the threat of violence.
Among the books that were passed around SNCC, along with works by Frantz Fanon and Camus, one book that grew dog-eared, wilted, and coverless was Simone de Beauvoir’s condemnation of marriage and critique of women’s role in society, The Second Sex.Feminist ideas were slowly drifting into the movement. As Bettina Aptheker pointed out, before exposure to de Beauvoir and Friedan and a few others, a woman did not have the vocabulary to articulate her vague feelings of injustice.
In 1964 Mary King and Casey Hayden coauthored a memo to SNCC workers on women’s status in the movement. It was the SNCC style to float ideas in this way and later have meetings and talk them through. The memo consisted of a list of meetings from which women were excluded and projects in which eminently qualified women were overlooked for leadership roles.
Undoubtedly this list will seem strange to some, petty to others, laughable to most. The list could continue as far as there are women in the movement. Except that most women don’t talk about these kinds of incidents, because the whole subject is not discussable. . . .
The memo was anonymous because they feared ridicule. Bob Moses and a few others expressed admiration for it. Julian Bond smiled wryly about it, “non committal with his sidelong glance.” But by and large it was ridiculed. Mary King said that some who had figured out that she authored it “mocked and taunted” her. Late one moonlit night, King, Hayden, and a few others were sitting around with Stokely Carmichael. A compulsive entertainer, Carmichael was on, delivering a monologue ridiculing everyone and everything, keeping his audience laughing. Then he got to that day’s meeting and then to the memo, and staring at Mary King, he said, “What is the position of women in SNCC?” He paused as though waiting for an answer and said, “The position of women in SNCC is prone.” Mary King and the others doubled over with laughter.
In the decades since, the Carmichael quote is often cited as evidence of the sexist attitude in the radical civil rights movement. But the women who first heard it insist that it was intended and was received as a joke.
In 1965 they wrote another memo:
There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a whole. But in particular, women we’ve talked to who work in the movement seem to be caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power which may exclude them. Women seem to be placed in the same position of assumed subordination in personal situations too. It is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women.
This second one that they signed became an influential document in the feminist movement, but of the forty black women, civil rights activists, friends, and colleagues to whom they sent it, not one responded.
The founding members of NOW—such as Friedan; East; Dr. Kathryn Clarenbach, a Wisconsin educator; Eileen Hernandez, a prominent lawyer; Caroline Davis, a Detroit United Auto Workers executive—were women with successful careers. Of their 1,200 members in 1968, many were lawyers, sociologists, and educators. There were also one hundred men, almost all of them lawyers. They hoped to reach out to women who did not have careers, to housewives and women working at low-status, underpaid jobs. But the new wave, much like the antiwar movement, was starting among a well-educated elite who had shed the conventional prejudice of society.
In 1968 a feminist was still denigrated, a woman with a problem, something wrong with her, probably unattractive. Feminists—bra burners—it was believed, were bitter women who opposed beauty because they didn’t have it. Disturbing that stereotype was the head of the New York chapter of NOW, Ti-Grace Atkinson, a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried woman from Louisiana who, it was unfailingly pointed out in every newspaper account, was “attractive,” “good-looking,” or, in the words of The New York Times,“softly sexy.”
In 1968 the least attempts at reforming marriage were considered radical by the general population. It was still considered a radical feminist act for a married woman not to take her husband’s name. Like Simone de Beauvoir, the tremendously influential French feminist who lived with, but never married Sartre, many of the sixties feminists were at best distrustful of the institution of marriage. Atkinson said, “The institution of marriage has the same effect the institution of slavery had. It separates people in the same category. It disperses them, keeps them from identifying as a class. The masses of slaves didn’t recognize their condition either. To say that a woman is really ‘happy’ with her home and kids is as irrelevant as saying that the blacks were ‘happy’ being taken care of by the ol’ Massa. She is defined by her maintenance role. Her husband is defined by his productive role. We’re saying that all human beings should have a productive role in society.” Her own views on marriage were shaped by having been married at seventeen. She divorced, got an arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first director of the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, got a graduate degree at Columbia in philosophy. She said de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex “changed my life.” She wrote to de Beauvoir, who suggested she get involved with an American group. That was when Atkinson found the nascent NOW.
In France, land of de Beauvoir, the feminist movement is also said to have been born in 1968. Yet de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was first published in France in 1949 and by 1968 had influenced a large part of an entire generation of women whose daughters were now reading it. The year 1968 was when activists formed groups pressuring the government to legalize abortion and widen access to the pill, which was available only by prescription. Women were refused prescriptions by doctors for a variety of reasons, including the arbitrary verdict that they were too young.
In Germany, too, the feminist movement can be traced to 1968, to a Frankfurt conference of the German SDS, when Helke Sander declared the equality of the sexes and demanded that future planning take into account the concerns of women. When the conference refused to have an in-depth discussion of Sander’s proposal, angry women began pelting men with tomatoes. But in fact women’s groups had been founded in several cities before this incident, the first one in Berlin in January 1968.
De Beauvoir, with her famously long and deep relation with Sartre, said that people should be joined by love and not legal sanctions. Atkinson and many other American feminists in 1968 were saying that in order for women and men to have equal status, children would have to be raised communally. The commune was becoming a popular solution. Communes were springing up all over the United States. Some child development experts who had studied the kibbutz system in Israel were unimpressed. Dr. Selma Fraiberg at the University of Michigan’s Child Psychiatric Hospital told The New York Times in a 1968 interview that her studies of children raised on a kibbutz produced what she called “a bunch of cool cookies”—cold, unfriendly people. But women in communes began to complain that there was a gender-based caste system there as well, that the women would do the cleaning while the men meditated.
The American feminists of 1968 subdivided into two groups: the politicos and the radicals. The politicos were sophisticated activists, many with long experience in the civil rights movement and the New Left. NOW was a politico group. The radicals included groups such as the New York Radical Women and a similar Chicago group. The New York Radical Women were responsible not only for the Miss America action, but also for even more important innovation: C-R, or consciousness-raising. In 1968, when the New York Radicals came up with this concept for recruiting feminists, the politicos, including NOW, thought it was a counterproductive idea that would alienate men. In consciousness-raising, women talked to other women about all the false things they did to please men such as acting stupid, pretending to agree, and wearing shoes, clothes, and undergarments that were so unnatural they inflicted pain. Women, through C-R sessions, would realize the extent to which they distorted themselves because of the fear that men would not find their true selves attractive. It was out of this C-R process that the Miss America protest was born. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth wrote about how colonized people had colonized minds—they accepted the place the mother country had put them in, but they were not aware that they were accepting this role. The New York Radical Women believed that men had done the same thing to women and that making them aware of this was the key to turning feminism into a mass movement, that this process that appeared to be merely a form of self-therapy would recruit thousands of women for the feminist cause. They were clearly right, and in a few years most feminists embraced consciousness-raising as a way to bring women around to their cause. An example of this was the speakout, where women publicly described the nightmares of their illegal abortions, which had a major impact on changing abortion laws.
In 1968, when consciousness-raising began, people had had a heightened consciousness of race issues from more than ten years of civil rights but very little consciousness of gender issues. In Soul on Ice Eldridge Cleaver described in detail the pleasure he took in what he termed “an insurrectionary act,” the rape of a white woman: “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.” Indicative of the times, this was seen as a confession of racial hatred to be later recanted, and little was said of the sexist implication of a white woman simply being his appendage. Charlayne Hunter, a Russell Sage fellow who reviewed the book for The New York Times, emphasized Cleaver’s ability to articulate the bitterness of “a black man in this country” but said nothing about his attitudes toward women.
By 1968 a level of sexism that seems shocking to contemporary sensibilities was still generally acceptable even among New Left youth. The 1968 film Barbarella starring Jane Fonda featured Amazons in erotic little outfits conquering through sex. In Planet of the Apes the women don’t speak, and have no character, and are scantily clad, with the exception of the ape women, probably because no one is interested in a scantily clad ape. The following year, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, extremely popular with college students because it appeared to be antiwar, starred Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland as martini-drinking army doctors who are contemptuous of any woman who even hesitates to bed down with them. Rock culture was even more sexist. In Ed Sanders’s book that claims to be a novel, Shards of God, women, never with names or faces, appear only to offer for sex one orifice or another to the male characters who have such names as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
By the end of the year, women’s fashions were indicating that the times were “a-changin’ ” again. It was only back in March that New York had the “Down with Dirndl” movement against “those fat, gathering balloon skirts and dirndls, dresses with old-fashioned waistlines. . . . Big ugly belts in the middle of dresses and coats make women look like mastodons in full retreat,” read a petition with sixty-six signatures, of which seventeen were men. The movement was led by Dona Fowler Kaminsky, a twenty-eight-year-old Berkeley graduate who went to department stores to protest the new fashion that had turned from miniskirts toward the long-skirted “maxi.” They threatened to picket department stores with signs that read, “Maxis Are Monstrous.” In the early spring, Time magazine fashion writers were predicting the summer season to be “the barest in memory”—with see-through blouses with nothing underneath, bare midriffs, wide and plunging necklines, and backs open, as Time put it, “right down to the coccyx.” Rudi Gernreich, who in 1964 came out with the topless bathing suit, which the Soviets called “barbarous” and was even banned in the south of France, now predicted that “the bare bosom look” would gain complete acceptance in the next five years. Chicago designer Walter Holmes came out with the miniskirted nun’s habit, also a miniskirted monk’s cowl, both with removable hoods to show plunging necklines, with neither design intended for nuns.
But by the end of the year, to the consternation of many men, the pantsuit had become the “in” look. Women wanted to be taken seriously and compete with men, and that is more difficult to do in a miniskirt. Few noticed that in society something new and exciting was about to happen for women even if it translated badly into fashion. Somehow it seemed that both the unfairness and the fun were going to be over, that the sixties were drawing to a close. William Zinsser wrote in Life magazine, “The city pantsuit is the Richard Nixon of high fashion. Send it away once, unwanted. Send it away twice, unloved. No matter: it will return in slightly different form, to beg approval still another time. Nixonlike, the pantsuit knows that it’s now or never, and I’m very much afraid it’s now.”