A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the late 1960s and early 1970s

March 27-19, 2014

THURSDAY
We’re in the big auditorium watching feminist films on the opening night of the Conference on the women’s liberation movement. I’ve arrived a bit late and slip into a seat. Suddenly, full-screen, there’s the iconic 1970ish photo of my friend with her placard saying “I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.”

“Donna Gottschalk!” I blurt aloud her name, startled.

The grey-haired woman sitting in front of me, probably well into her 70s, turns around. “Do you know Donna Gottschalk?”

“She’s a beloved friend,” I say.

“She brought me out when she was 18 years old,” the woman says with a tender, nostalgic grin, “and I only knew her that one night.”

This is my cool opening experience at “A Revolutionary Moment,” an academic conference being held at my alma mater, Boston University, at which, through a kind of miracle, I am among the presenters on a panel. I’ve heard of other academic events about the women’s movement, but I am very far from the minds and literature of scholars. My place here was earned, it seems, by the fact that I had organized the first women’s liberation collective at BU.

Via Facebook, I learn that all sorts of old comrades from the feminist barricades are intending to be there, and for two months, I cradle a level of anticipation that would usually result in disappointment – but not this time. It is everything I hoped for. At the reception, I meet Deborah Belle (Left), the head of the sponsoring department: Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. I wonder which complicated – if not convoluted – political machinations underpin the change from Women’s Studies to this lengthier and awkward name.

During the run-up to the conference and despite her overwhelming to-do list in putting this thing together, Deborah had found the time to work out a problem I had. As a result, I ended up on a great panel. However, originally I was assigned to a panel with four undergraduates called something like Feminism Then and Now. When I saw that on the website, I felt so insulted that I wept. I felt like I was being seated at the kids’ table. There were dozens of panels with my peers – and it was with them that I wanted to talk.

I ran it by several friends who tried to console me by saying that there was so much I could teach the young people – and so much to learn from them. “I’m not,” I said truthfully, “into young people. I’m into old people. They’re my future.” I felt belittled. Since I was apparently one of the few movement founders speaking at the Conference who is not an academic, was I being punished? I felt it was a class slap in the face to be stuck in what I considered a minor discussion away from the grown-ups, the big-wigs, the scholars. “Who’s going to come to this?” I moaned to my friend the professor. “The friends and family of the undergraduates,” she said honestly.

I emailed Deborah and asked to talk to her. She immediately said to call her at home at 7:30 that same night. The minute I said I didn’t think I was well-placed with students – since I have nothing to do with young people, being a teacher of elders and all – she asked me which panel I’d like to be on. “I’d most like to be on Diane Balser’s – Women’s Liberation’s Revolutionary Potential.”

“I’ll write Diane and see if she has room and agrees,” she said without hesitation, and I worried then as well. Diane and I had been friends from different strains of the Boston women’s movement back in the day. Decades had passed. I didn’t know what she thought of my politics around the Occupation of Palestine. The next morning Diane wrote and called me “old friend” and said “it will be fun.” I was elated!


FRIDAY
Because I am taking a bus to the train and then another bus from the train and then walking over a bridge and down a block or two, I miss a short opening film by Liane Brandon I wanted to see and some of the opening remarks of Marge Piercy, who blew the audience of at least 700 away with a powerful run-down of life as we women know it today, not the least the war on women.

For the first session there are only two panels – the other sessions offer seven or eight simultaneous workshops. I start out at the one being chaired by Kathie Sarachild – of the pioneering Redstockings group from NY – and others from the “rad-fem” stream (In the UK that’s what they call radical feminists as opposed to socialist feminists), but within minutes, I slip out and settle into the other panel. Later I am to hear from friends who walked out in disappointment that during the Q&A, that when the Redstockings women were asked if they had changed their anti-lesbian position from back in the day, they refused to respond with clarity.

In fact, throughout the Conference, the influence of at least two crucial groups of early activists is insufficiently explored: lesbians and working class women. It is an unexpected if persistent pattern. I’m surprised too that there is little mention of aging – something we all have in common, quite visibly, quite relentlessly.
 
“Historians discuss our historical narratives”
In the other main room, a large panel of prominent feminist historians – led by Nancy Cott – gives an overview of their field. In fact, without a doubt, historians dominate the Conference panels, and they have been drawing the kinds of distinctions that facilitate a structure for their scholarship. Perhaps this is why they refer to the 60s/70s women’s liberation movement as the “Second Wave” – a term so alienating to me that I cringe each time I hear it. That ends up being a load of cringing. No one back in the day distinguished our movement as a “Second Wave.” This might be a construct imposed for sub-sectioning a scholarly discipline into “wave” specialties.
 
The respected radical historian Linda Gordon, about whom I’ll speak later, provides us with one very useful distinction: she names “women’s liberation” as that period in the late 60s and early 70s when the movement was explosive – probably, she says later in her closing remarks, the biggest mass movement in American history. That leaves “feminism” as a non-time-specific term to describe the overall ideologies, practiced at various points and places in myriad forms.

I have lunch with Connie Field (Left), one of the most important film documentarians of our day. Not long ago I reviewed her powerful latest film “Al Helm: Martin Luther King in Palestine”. She may be better known for three of her other films: “Have You Heard from Johannesburg,” the story of Freedom Summer “Freedom on my Mind,” and the much beloved “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.” Connie and I met in “Bread and Roses,” the large, inclusive women’s liberation group in Boston back in the day. My collective was part of “Bread and Roses,” but we were never at the heart of the larger group. As plain-talking working class dykes, not all of the “Bread and Roses” women were comfortable with both us or our politics. Some of those women are in the room.

The moment I see Connie I remember the affection with which I held her back in the early 70s, and reuniting with her is emblematic of the warm and fuzzy feelings I am to have throughout this weekend. As always was the case, she is like a light in the room. One of many at this fabulous gathering.

“Women’s Liberation’s Revolutionary Potential”
It is then time for the panel I’m on, “Women’s Liberation’s Revolutionary Potential.” The chair, my old friend Diane Balser (Left with me), is now a professor at BU in the sponsoring department. Diane’s wit, clarity, and smarts seem familiar after all these years. She is looking so great, with long salt and pepper ringlets. Many women have long hair when they’re young, she tells me, and cut it when they’re old, so at 70, she’s doing the opposite.

Throughout the weekend, just from quick asides she makes to me, I learn a great deal about the historical and theoretical thinking of feminist academics, what’s behind the odd academic lingo, and the power struggles around the disciplines. Back in the day Diane often played a similar role. We were in different sections of the movement, but she always had piercing insights.

Despite the fact that our panel is one of eight in that time-slot – including a presentation by the well-known Susan Faludi – the room totally fills up until people are sitting around on the stairs. Diane opens with a moving, honest, strong talk that reminds us of the kind of never-go-back personal transformations we went through. Judy Gumbo Albert reads a funny excerpt from her book about the Berkeley Barb and Roberta Salper talks about being the first-ever full-time professor of women’s studies. I close with my talk about starting the first women’s liberation collective at Boston University (BU) in 1969, after having been recruited into this new world of ideas by Roxanne Dunbar and her group, Cell 16, the year before. Amazingly enough, Roxanne is in the room right now. I’m just loving this Conference.

As always when I am speechifying, I have written out and practiced my talk thoroughly. However, quite spontaneously, when I get up, I grab my iPhone and take a picture of the crowded audience. “I need proof,” I say, “that I am actually speaking at an academic conference.”

I get some good laughs and people seem to appreciate a working class activist perspective. I cover the BU collective, which had as our special project facilitating revenge for BU women who had been raped. I mention too my next collective Stick It In The Wall Motherfucker Collective, made up of working-class dykes. As far as I know, it has been entirely erased from feminist history, or rather was never included – although at the time articles of mine such as “Smash Phallic Imperialism” were widely reproduced. But turns out I’m wrong: Diane says that she talks about the Stick It In The Wall Motherfucker Collective to her students at BU!

However, even the historian Linda Gordon, a former member of Bread and Roses and a former friend, who has done such fabulous class-conscious work, states at one point from the podium that Boston women just weren’t writing as much as NY women were. But what about Cell 16’s “No More Fun and Games”? What about our “Lavender Vision” newspaper, one of the first queer publications? These were mostly the writings of edgy working class women and they are nowhere to be found in the otherwise meticulous records of the day.

During the Q&A we are interrupted by hostile questions from very agitated sectarian “lefties” who have flooded the Conference and are making it their business to take exciting, joyous discussions and inject them with meaningless venom. Their specialty seems to be maximum volume and minimum content. As one of them interrupts me when I am attempting to answer a question another of them has asked, she screams, “What about working class voices?!” Duh.

Diane deals firmly with these distracters, and I am buzzed after our super successful, entertaining panel, and from the nice things people say to me afterwards – including a Pittsburgh woman who is doing work about Pittsburgh feminists and wants to interview me.

This evening, BU is honoring Geena Davis. The tribute is being held right in the auditorium we’re using for the Conference. We sit through that event – wow, is Geena Davis tall! – because once they finish, my favorite film is being shown: Left on Pearl. Over a decade in the making, it is about the 1971 historic take-over of a Harvard building, which we held as a women’s space for 10 days and nights. It ended in our gaining the down payment for the Cambridge Women’s Center which today is the longest-running women’s center in the country. This is the only film on earth that I have seen about 10 times – and it’s not even fully finished.

I feel like it is my personal Day of Nostalgia – first giving a speech to an audience that gets my jokes and then being up on the big screen reliving the experience of turning Left on Pearl. How I do enjoy a microphone. I’m in heaven.


SATURDAY
Is it really the last day already? I’ve been in this ecstatic Conference bubble, broken only by my transportation misery. The early-morning commute to the Conference is unreliable, and by the time I’m heading home – to work on a Union newsletter that is under deadline – the buses are literally few and far between.

“Oral History of Cell 16, Female Liberation.”
Today I’m super anxious about the buses because the first session in the morning is “Oral History of Cell 16, Female Liberation.” The speakers are Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dana Densmore, the founders, joined by a younger academic who has just published a book on Valarie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol and who wrote the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting up Men), an outraged and outrageous document we talked about in Cell 16 days.

Dana gives a sober academic run-down of the theoretical achievements of female liberation. The ideas were often truly revolutionary, and she talks with an undertone of bitterness that they were largely unrecognized by the wider movement. Female liberation was their name for the movement. Cell 16 was the name of their particular unit (and the only unit, I believe).

When it’s Roxanne’s (Left) turn, her wit, modesty, broad scope, and strength of belief makes this one of the most exciting of all the sessions. She speaks personally about her life in Cuba as a newlywed when she decided to pick up and go to Boston to foment a women’s revolution. It’s a crazy story but her arrival in Boston in many ways saved my own life. Some of her stories trigger memories of experiences when I accompanied her to talk at posh women’s colleges or when I witnessed an unexpected street skirmish between members of Cell 16 and some violently drunken men. She gives due credit to the lesbian movement. She is both self-deprecating and charming in her unshakable candor. She rejects nostalgia and honors the upcoming generations of feminists. Roxanne enjoys speaking as much as we enjoy listening to her.

I have lunch with my National Writers Union buddies, Barbara and Susan. Our union has a strong showing here – at least three speakers and another half dozen participants. One friend Ken Wachsberger has come halfway across the country to talk to people about his project digitalizing feminist (and other underground) publications. You can read his riveting report on being one of the few men at this conference here. At the end of lunch, my fortune cookie says “You have the makings of a leader, not a follower.” Of course that plus $3.50 will get me a cup of coffee.

I think about how often I’m seeing unresolved conflicts and experiences of injustice aired with a 40-year-old bitterness from the microphone. I had a similar (unamplified) reaction. During the opening reception, a friendly woman approaches me to say I look familiar. It turns out that she was on the founding collective of Our Bodies Ourselves. Like a switch that has been flipped, I flush with anger. When they were pulling together chapters for the first Our Bodies Ourselves, our working class lesbian collective prepared – with their knowledge and agreement – a chapter on the impact of class on health. They rejected it. They didn’t find it a very important topic, apparently. I feel bad to be silently steaming at this congenial woman. But steaming I am. All these decades later.    

To mitigate my attitude (which probably no one else but me noticed), I dredge up a conciliatory anecdote about the book and tell her how I was on the front cover of the first Israeli version of Our Bodies Ourselves. As the first woman black belt and first woman owner of a martial arts institute in Israel, I guess I was a good poster girl for women’s health.

“Organize! Women in 1960s Social Justice Movements Claim Women’s Rights"
“Organize! Women in 1960s Social Justice Movements Claim Women’s Rights” is the title of the afternoon workshop I choose, but really, it could have more simply been called Women of SNCC.” The panelists – just one of them African-American –were devoted activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and several of them knew each other back in the day.

Dorie Ladner (Left) sketches out her life as a poor girl from a Mississippi town of 500 who found her calling as a staff member of SNCC. She was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, dropping out of college three times when various campaigns needed her.  

The descriptions of the tasks these women took on at young ages and the courage with which they accomplished their civil rights work are beyond inspiring. In discussing the role of women in the civil rights movement, one thing is clear. They were both the “backbone” (it is a contentious word at this workshop, implying a supportive, not a leading role) and the face of the movement. They did the basic organizing, feeding, and watering of the other activists, but they also gave speeches, wrote papers, and led marches.

In 1965, one of the panelists, Mary King, together with Casey Hayden, wrote a private piece – then unsigned – called “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo” which they mailed to SNCC women around the country. It was widely circulated and reproduced, and is today considered one of the founding documents of the modern women’s movement.

King talks about Stokely Carmichael. In particular, she remembers the witty and comical story he told that ended with the infamous line: “The position of women in SNCC should be prone.” (Google this comment and you’ll get a Rashomon of versions.) She insists that he was joking. She knew him very well, worked side-by-side with him for a long time, and it was, she says, his sense of humor. A woman from the audience challenges that, saying that she heard him say the same thing in a different venue, in a sober, non-jokey tone. My overall take on the discussion: we have a lot of SNCC veterans in the room, the majority white women, and it was clearly a profound and positive experience that shaped their future lives.

The last workshop I attend is called “Revolutionary Women in the Underground and Beyond,” and it gives me a sense of how young academics are culling the “sheroes” of our day for their interesting if narrow theses. One woman examines in visual and historical detail Cuba’s adoration of Angela Davis, but without, however, ever mentioning the vicious homophobia of Cuban law at the time.

“Feminism Unfinished”
Finally it is time for Linda Gordon’s (Left) highly anticipated closing plenary talk “Feminism Unfinished.” It is the only time in the whole conference in which I take notes. She dates the New Left – her use of that term includes the civil rights, women’s, students’, and anti-war movements – from the 1955 Montgomery Bus boycott, a campaign organized by Black women dealing with racism and sexism. She talks about the long history of slut-shaming, a weapon used against women factory workers during WWII and against Black women throughout history. Like many of us, she sees the financial crisis of capitalism since 2008 as an upward redistribution of wealth and she rejects the myth that hard work gets you ahead.

She looks at why women’s liberation rejected the concept of leadership and connects it to a reaction to both Stalinism and male authoritarianism. Strong women were often accused of “being like a man.” And she reminds us that whether we want to or not, we live in an overall gendered society. In explaining why the women’s liberation movement had the most explosive growth of any within the New Left, she recalls how, because of its huge decentralization, it was so easy to either find or found a small group or project. We were, I agree, everywhere.

Q&As have become the repetitive annoying province of the hostile sectarians, and they attack Linda Gordon and all of us from the microphone – and still I cannot figure out what their schtick is. They’re better at divisiveness than at communication. Linda is clearly used to dealing with them and does so robustly, giving them a chance to scream about who has power in the room.

The conference ends with a sing-along, led by Marcia Deihl and other singers from back in the day. At first I worry that it will be corny, but when I see Diane Balsar’s bright face and fist pumping the air, I can’t help but join in: Move on over or we’ll move on over you!

Comments

[Allen Young]

I loved reading this and seeing the photos and the names of several women I have known over years, and who influenced my life and my way of looking at the world. Thank you for mentioning the way that panelists avoided mention of Cuba's aggressive and cruel anti-gay policies. Around that time, by the way, Cuba paid Stalinist-tyle lip service to equality for women, while the island was being run by macho men. A favorite telling moment of mine in Cuba, back in those days, was a visit to an athletic facility where a beauty parlor was included so that athletic women would be adequately gender-appropriate! I loved seeing your mutual friend Donna at the beginning of your post, and loved your attitude toward academia (a position that you and I share).

[Roberta Salper]

Sue,
How well you write! I, too, missed the lack of mention of Cell 16 and especially "No More Fun and Games" which was crucial in my formation, living in Washington, DC at the time. But what an infusion of energy the conference was!
Roberta Salper

[sue katz]

Thanks Allen and Roberta for your own thoughts and memories. When I heard that this was the first such conference about women's liberation at this level, I was blown away. We must get this history on the record!

[Liz Zoob]

Hi Sue--I met you briefly at the conference, and I also attended the wonderful panel you co-led with Diane, Judy, and Roberta (and the RCP woman who screamed as you describe above). And I so appreciate your report here. When I left the conference I felt unable to articulate and summarize much of what I had heard and experienced. Thanks so much for writing this. By the way, I was at the morning panel in which the Redstockings could not/would not repudiate their anti-lesbian stance in any meaningful way. It was quite disturbing.

[sue katz]

Liz, thanks so much for writing!! How did you find my blog? Without a photo, I can't place you but I wish I could. I very much appreciate your words and yes, it was disturbing to hear of that Redstockings screw-up. I'm thrilled that you were at our panel. Thanks again, Sue

[Liz Zoob]

Sue, I saw the link to your blog on Diane Balser's Facebook page. She and I are FB friends and long time friendly acquaintances. You can see a picture of me on FB, and we could even be FB friends too!

Liz

[Liz Zoob]

P.S. I think we were introduced to each other by Vicki Gabriner.

[kathy]

I enjoyed reading this and enjoyed hearing your talk at the meeting.

Its too bad you walked out of that first panel because TiGrace addressed a major turning point for working women: the Sears sex discrimination suit and I made some comments about aging women.

Why didn't more lesbian feminists submit panel proposals? Ditto for feminists of color? The imbalances at a conference like this seem to reflect self selection.

[sue katz]

Kathy, thanks so much for writing and for filling me in about what I missed. On one point I disagree: under-representation is never ever about self-selection. It is about how the organizers reach out and to whom. I would never have known anything about this conference - even tho I had every right as a women's liberation founder to be there as anyone else - except that I happen to be in Left on Pearl. As a result I know one of the producers who was somewhat involved in putting this together. She didn't approach me - even though she knew my background - but she posted on FB about the conference and I approached her. She was immediately enthusiastic and my proposal was quickly accepted. But when you're not in those lofty academic circles, you don't know nothing about this shit. They had to reach out to non-academic and more diverse communities.

[kathy]

Well, yes, if their goal was to get all the founders together they should have reached out. But I think instead, it was a more passive opening of an academic conference to non-academics. I found out about it via a feminist listserve and thought it was great that they'd take panels from feminists who aren't historians or teaching in Women's Studies. But I do wish the word had gotten out further and brought in more diverse voices.