This summer, and every summer I teach social movements we read Jo Freeman’s “On the Origins of the Women’s Movement.” Most entertaining is the passage in which Freeman chronicles the making of a modern feminist.
Papers had been circulated on women and individual temporary women’s caucuses had been held as early as 1964 (see Hayden and King 1966). But it was not until 1967 and 1968 that the groups developed a determined, if cautious, continuity and began to consciously expand themselves. At least five groups in five different cities (Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Seattle, and Gainesville, Florida) formed spontaneously, independently of one another. They came at an auspicious moment, for 1967 was the year in which the blacks kicked the whites out of the civil rights movement, student power was discredited by SDS, and the New Left was on the wane. Only draft resistance activities were on the increase, and this movement more than any other exemplified the social inequities of the sexes. Men could resist the draft. Women could only counsel resistance.
At this point, there were few opportunities available for political work. Some women fit well into the secondary role of draft counseling. Many didn’t. For years their complaints of unfair treatment had been forestalled by movement men with the dictum that those things could wait until after the Revolution. Now these political women found time on their hands, but still the men would not listen.
A typical example was the event that precipitated the formation of the Chicago group, the first independent group in this country. At the August 1967 National Conference for New Politics convention a women’s caucus met for days, but was told its resolution wasn’t significant enough to merit a floor discussion. By threatening to tie up the convention with procedural motions the women succeeded in having their statement tacked to the end of the agenda. It was never discussed. The chair refused to recognize any of the many women standing by the microphone, their hands straining upwards. When he instead called on someone to speak on “the forgotten American, the American Indian,” five women rushed the podium to demand an explanation. But the chairman just patted one of them on the head (literally) and told her, “Cool down, little girl. We have more important things to talk about than women’s problems.”
The “little girl” was Shulamith Firestone, future author of The Dialectic of Sex, and she didn’t cool down. Instead she joined with another Chicago woman she met there who had unsuccessfully tried to organize a women’s group that summer, to call a meeting of the women who had halfheartedly attended those summer meetings. Telling their stories to those women, they stimulated sufficient rage to carry the group for three months, and by that time it was a permanent institution.
Particularly when the lives and freedoms of women are again under attack, we mourn the passing of another American hero.
icancstructures:
Papers had been circulated on women and individual temporary women’s caucuses had been held as early as 1964 (see Hayden and King 1966). But it was not until 1967 and 1968 that the groups developed a determined, if cautious, continuity and began to consciously expand themselves. At least five groups in five different cities (Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Seattle, and Gainesville, Florida) formed spontaneously, independently of one another. They came at an auspicious moment, for 1967 was the year in which the blacks kicked the whites out of the civil rights movement, student power was discredited by SDS, and the New Left was on the wane. Only draft resistance activities were on the increase, and this movement more than any other exemplified the social inequities of the sexes. Men could resist the draft. Women could only counsel resistance.
At this point, there were few opportunities available for political work. Some women fit well into the secondary role of draft counseling. Many didn’t. For years their complaints of unfair treatment had been forestalled by movement men with the dictum that those things could wait until after the Revolution. Now these political women found time on their hands, but still the men would not listen.
A typical example was the event that precipitated the formation of the Chicago group, the first independent group in this country. At the August 1967 National Conference for New Politics convention a women’s caucus met for days, but was told its resolution wasn’t significant enough to merit a floor discussion. By threatening to tie up the convention with procedural motions the women succeeded in having their statement tacked to the end of the agenda. It was never discussed. The chair refused to recognize any of the many women standing by the microphone, their hands straining upwards. When he instead called on someone to speak on “the forgotten American, the American Indian,” five women rushed the podium to demand an explanation. But the chairman just patted one of them on the head (literally) and told her, “Cool down, little girl. We have more important things to talk about than women’s problems.”
The “little girl” was Shulamith Firestone, future author of The Dialectic of Sex, and she didn’t cool down. Instead she joined with another Chicago woman she met there who had unsuccessfully tried to organize a women’s group that summer, to call a meeting of the women who had halfheartedly attended those summer meetings. Telling their stories to those women, they stimulated sufficient rage to carry the group for three months, and by that time it was a permanent institution.
[Button from Vidal’s unsuccessful 1960 run for Congress.]
Gore Vidal rises in his defense. Don’t you just love the written word?
–A 1977 New York Times review (4/20/77) by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of a collection of Vidal’s essays:
So we are left to speculate over the psychological implications here, and to conclude that Mr. Vidal’s animus toward everything from West Point to the American Establishment–not to speak of academicians, who are, after all, instructors–boils down to an unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.
–A New York Times piece by Sam Tanenhaus (8/2/12):
Mr. Vidal, whose disdain for American vulgarity was tinged, some said, with antisemitism and dislike of the “lower orders.”
Gore Vidal isn’t here to respond to Tanenhaus’s attack. But he did write a letter to theTimes responding to the 1977 review. It did not appear in the Newspaper of Record, but was published in the New York Review of Books (7/14/77).
That letter, in part:
This is quintessential New York Times reporting. First, it is ill-written, hence ill-edited. Second, it is inaccurate. Third, it is unintelligent in the vulgar Freudian way. There is no evidence of an “unresolved hostility” toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters, a Novel in the Form of a Memoir: “My father was the only man I ever entirely liked….” Nowhere in my writing have I “admitted” (“cheerfully” or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the proposition that cold-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.
These demurs to one side, I am grateful to your employee for so beautifully demonstrating in a single sentence so many of the reasons why The New York Times is a perennially bad newspaper.
This “unresolved hostility toward the father,” incidentally, is a minor current in what passed for psychological reductionism in social movement theorizing in the ’50s and ’60s, until researchers of the ’70s and ’80s came along. I am happy to help dispel such reductionism in the summer course I’m teaching right now.
(via Smearing Gore Vidal, Then and Now | FAIR Blog)
Oh how quaint the attitudes of those boys, even change-oriented ones, in the days before second wave feminism. I will be using this visual in class today during a discussion of the origins of the women’s movement. But better still is the story of Shulamith Firestone.
icancstructures:
Welcome to the attitude that helped give rise to second wave feminism. Be sure to read in that link about Stokely Carmichael and Shulamith Firestone.
newmanology:
GIRLS SAY YES to boys who say NO
Anti-draft poster, 1968, featuring Joan Baez (left) and her sisters
Photograph: Jim Marshall
Happy birthday Joan Baez!
Ridin’ Dirty
I don’t mean the song by Chamillionaire (though that was a favorite of the teens on the “Gallop to Gallup” service learning trip). Rather, I thought it was curious that the word “riding” kept popping into my head when I considered the waves of weather here. First it rains, and is cooler and breezy, then the sun comes out and it gets positively steamy. I think a cold front is descending on us from Canada.
Then I realized that I’m teaching tonight about Mancur Olson’s “free rider problem.” “Beware of economists bearing gifts,” my professor William Gamson and his colleague Bruce Fireman wrote, providing examples of places actual people depart from the assumptions of rational choice. I have to teach this to the night class.
So today I’m riding heat and storms without and within.
This poster reflects the role draft-age American women could play in the anti-war movement. Highly objectified as sexual prizes for avoiding the draft, young women were always marginalized in their contributions to the anti-war movement (Kinney, 148). (via Figures and Images)
I’m using this in the Social Movements class tonight, partly to illustrate the origins of the radical wing of second wave feminism in the unquestioned sexism of draft resistance, antiwar, civil rights and student movements of the 60s and 70s. It’s my understanding that Joan Baez and her sisters Mimi Fariña and Pauline Marden appear in the photo. Barefoot and creative!
Today marks the centennial anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history and a seminal moment for American labor. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died after a fire broke out at the factory. Many of them leaped to their deaths when they tried to escape and found the emergency exits locked. “I saw people throwing themselves from the window. As soon as we went down, we could not get out because the bodies were coming down” says the last survivor of the fire in a 1986 interview with Amy Goodman. Denied any collective bargaining rights, the Triangle workers were powerless to change the abysmal conditions in their factory: inadequate ventilation, lack of safety precautions and fire drills—and locked doors.
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100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire via DemocracyNow!
Growing up as I did in New York, not far from “the City” as we used to call it, we learned about this in history class. How could conditions have been so bad in the ole USA, which we also were taught to think of as so grand? Eventually we learned that the country only got that way by effort and attention to what was just.
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This post is masterfully written, and extremely helpful. The visualization provides evidence for the argument that reality is beyond these binaries of “a Twitter revolution” and Gladwell’s reductionism. A healthy skepticism of opposing claims is in order; a synthesis that can be substantiated is better.
icancstructures:
Protesters charge their mobile phones in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
In my previous post on “Digital Dualism Versus Augmented Reality,” I lay out two competing views for conceptualizing…
![[Button from Vidal’s unsuccessful 1960 run for Congress.]
Gore Vidal rises in his defense. Don’t you just love the written word?
–A 1977 New York Times review (4/20/77) by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of a collection of Vidal’s essays:
So we are left to speculate over the psychological implications here, and to conclude that Mr. Vidal’s animus toward everything from West Point to the American Establishment–not to speak of academicians, who are, after all, instructors–boils down to an unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.
–A New York Times piece by Sam Tanenhaus (8/2/12):
Mr. Vidal, whose disdain for American vulgarity was tinged, some said, with antisemitism and dislike of the “lower orders.”
Gore Vidal isn’t here to respond to Tanenhaus’s attack. But he did write a letter to theTimes responding to the 1977 review. It did not appear in the Newspaper of Record, but was published in the New York Review of Books (7/14/77).
That letter, in part:
This is quintessential New York Times reporting. First, it is ill-written, hence ill-edited. Second, it is inaccurate. Third, it is unintelligent in the vulgar Freudian way. There is no evidence of an “unresolved hostility” toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters, a Novel in the Form of a Memoir: “My father was the only man I ever entirely liked….” Nowhere in my writing have I “admitted” (“cheerfully” or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the proposition that cold-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.
These demurs to one side, I am grateful to your employee for so beautifully demonstrating in a single sentence so many of the reasons why The New York Times is a perennially bad newspaper.
This “unresolved hostility toward the father,” incidentally, is a minor current in what passed for psychological reductionism in social movement theorizing in the ’50s and ’60s, until researchers of the ’70s and ’80s came along. I am happy to help dispel such reductionism in the summer course I’m teaching right now.
(via Smearing Gore Vidal, Then and Now | FAIR Blog)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m86u8coCRg1qaoramo1_400.jpg)
