Welcome to the Revolution
To create the scholarly life she's led for over thirty years, University of California at Davis history professor Ruth Rosen first had to help wrench open the doors of academe to women including herself. Her just-published book, "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," chronicles how she and hundreds of other radical women launched a new wave of feminism in the late '60s and watched it crash over America, changing how we think about sex, motherhood, and just about everything else.
Rosen is already known for bringing to light one of the major discoveries of feminist scholarship -- 'The Maimie Papers," an early-20th-century prostitute's letters to her upper-class benefactress -- as well as "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-18," about a Progressive Era movement to abolish prostitution. Her latest work, which took ten years to write, is a gold mine of feminist research. For "The World Split Open," Rosen interviewed over one hundred feminist activists and combed scores of archival collections, including FBI files, collections at Radcliffe, Duke, the University of Wyoming, New York University, the Bancroft Library, and Berkeley archivist Laura X's women's library. The bibliography alone -- 31 pages of references to books and articles for readers to follow up on -- is worth the price of the book.
Forcing open academe's doors didn't just help Rosen gain entrance to the ivory tower. It also helped her escape it. Over the years, her old-fashioned academic critics (most of them male) have given her lumps not only over her activism and participatory scholarship, but because she's chosen to write extensively for the popular press -- from Dissent and the Women's Review of Books to hundreds of op-ed pieces for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, to which she is a regular contributor. (Maybe what irked them the most -- given the impenetrable quality of most academic writing these days -- is Rosen's clear prose.) As Rosen says in her book, she wrote it for "the women and men who did not participate in the women's movement, who were too busy trying to survive, who felt excluded or estranged, who were too scared, were too old or too young, were not yet born, or are still not born." As an historian she writes for people who love to read history but aren't necessarily scholars.
In Berkeley, California, where she lives, Rosen talked avidly about her work, her book, and the women's movement:
JUDITH COBURN: I can't resist starting off by asking why you thank Norman Mailer in your introduction to "The World Split Open."
RUTH ROSEN: Two years ago, I was at an annual seminar at Robert J. Lifton's home in Cape Cod, and Norman Mailer was making an informal presentation to the assembled group. As an aside, he said that the women's movement never helped anyone but the women who take the shuttle to Washington, DC with their attaché cases and live like men. I told him how much his version of the modern women's movement was media-generated and without intimate knowledge of what it had actually done. I told him how NOW's first six actions all benefited working-class women as well as privileged women.
He was surprised, but I had just finished my book and knew more than I'll ever know again. No matter what he said, I had facts and knowledge that had eluded him. Afterward we bantered and talked and he asked for a copy of my book. I then reread his infamous "Prisoner of Sex," and we had a lively correspondence. For my part, I told him that I now read his "assault" on feminism quite differently. I heard the vulnerable man beneath the aggressive prose, the man who needed women and feared them. It was quite an experience. I told him also that his great legacy as a major American writer, as well as a progressive activist, will be tarnished by his attacks on the women's movement, and that he should reconsider what he thought in light of the actual history. I await his response.
JC: You have some very funny stuff in the book from Federal Bureau of Investigation files, about the FBI attempting to infiltrate the women's movement, taking all the historical names seriously and starting dossiers on them.
RR: FBI agents were bewildered by J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that they engage in complete surveillance of the women's movement all over the country. Hundreds of women were paid as informants, but not as agents, because no women were allowed to be agents until Hoover died. So they paid hundreds of women to sit in people's living rooms while other women poured out their sorrows and their epiphanies and their revelations, and these women took mental notes. They then gave them to field agents, and the agents then forwarded those reports to J. Edgar Hoover.
In almost all circumstances, the field agents wrote to Hoover that these women are not dangerous, they're not subversive; they simply want greater equality; there's no point in continuing this surveillance. Hoover always wrote back, they are a danger to the national security of the United States; continue surveillance.
JC: You don't think women like us were dangerous?
RR: Yes, but not in the way Hoover imagined. They were searching for bombs and communists. What we were doing was more profoundly subversive, because we were questioning all received wisdom and turning lives upside down.We were questioning the nature of our education, curriculum, our marital lives, our sexual lives, the lives of our children. We were talking about how to change American society, which is deeply, profoundly revolutionary. But not in the way that the FBI viewed subversion.
Every once in a while something hilarious would happen, because Hoover, who was used to infiltrating disciplined groups like the Communist Party, would demand that all the leadership and all the dues-paying membership be sent to him. The field agents would try to explain that there were no leaders, there were no dues-paying members. And Hoover would say, There must be -- get these names.
So the FBI was flummoxed. They really didn't know how to infiltrate the women's movement. Yet there are thousands of pages. My name is in there. Most women I knew, their names are in the files. And the FBI simply didn't know what to say about them. But I must say the FBI is the best clipping service in the world, because every time there was a newspaper article about any event that occurred in the Bay Area, you can find an FBI clipping.
JC: I'm glad they did something useful. The media keeps stereotyping the women's movement as middle-class and white, and has done that since the late '60s. I was fascinated to learn from your book that the suffragist movement was also stereotyped that way. I'm interested in these kind of stereotypes, and whether they were the same stereotype as in the late '20s?
RR: The suffragists who led the movement were mostly middle-class women. But among the 8 million women involved in the movement there were huge populations of working women, poor women, and African-American women. In the modern women's movement, it seemed as though everyone was middle class. But actually, when you looked at their backgrounds, most of these women were the first women in their families to go to college. They grew up in working-class homes. And as a result of their college education, they then looked middle class, talked middle class, were articulate, educated, and they seemed like white middle-class women. Most of the famous leaders -- like Gloria Steinem, or Betty Friedan, or Alix Kates Shulman -- so many of these women were really from blue-collar families. And a lot of members of the women's liberation movement were as well.
What's even less known is the fact that the women who started NOW, and the women who were on John F. Kennedy's first Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, came out of the old left, came out of the black civil rights movements in the '40s and '50s, and also came out of very radical unions. One thing that young women didn't understand -- and I include myself -- was that those women, while they may have appeared to us as matrons by then -- because they were in their forties, and they may have thought they were old and ladylike because they dressed nicely -- were in fact longtime radicals. We didn't understand that these were women who had the longest records of activism. They had been quieted during the McCarthy period, they had raised their children during the McCarthy period, but with the election of John F. Kennedy they came out into the political arena, and they were the most extraordinarily radical women.
And everything they did the first few years between l966 and l973 were class-action suits on behalf of phone operators, textile workers, stewardesses, as they were then called, not for upper-middle-class women. Another example of that is the segregated classified ads. That's something my students know nothing about, that newspapers once had "women wanted" and "men wanted" ads on separate pages. And the very first thing that NOW did was to make sure that that was ended, and that jobs and classified ads were for men and for women.
Now, who did that benefit? Professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, and professional women don't look in the classified ads for jobs. This benefited skilled blue-collar workers. It benefited women who wanted to get into working-class jobs that paid a lot more than the secretarial and clerical workers.
JC: I didn't realize until Betty Friedan's biography appeared that she had actually been a union organizer. We all thought she was a suburban housewife straight out of The Feminine Mystique. You also mention a group called CAW. Could you talk about them a little bit? I never even knew they existed.
RR: The biography is by a man named Daniel Horowitz. And he's the one who really, in a sense, broke the news that Betty Friedan had an extraordinary past. And now it all makes sense, that the connections between the old left among women, and the new left women, were there, and that this wasn't just reinventing the wheel all over again. These women had the language, and activism, and discipline, and writing skills, and rhetorical skills. So Betty Friedan was part of a large group of women who, as I said, came from radical unions. She was a member of the United Electrical Workers, an extremely radical union, and she was a labor journalist. She made the choice in 1959, which was a reasonable one, to portray herself as a sister suburbanite, so that women would just see her as another housewife who was unhappy, rather than experience endless red-baiting and be discredited. Some people think that was the wrong decision, but the success of her book shows, I think, that it probably was the right decision at that historical moment.
CAW, which stands for the Congress on American Women, was an organization in the postwar period. It was an international organization, but the American part was called the Congress on American Women. These were women from the old left. They were dedicated to interracial activism, toward improving women's lives, and toward improving the lives of African-American women. Their agenda was as modern and radical as you can imagine, and they were devoted to economic and social justice.
JC: Do you think the women's movement ever really dealt with race and gender? To take one example, many African-American women thought when they listened to the women's movement, that this idea that women needed to have careers, just simply didn't apply to them because most of them were already working, already trying to raise children while they were working, and at jobs that didn't "liberate" them at all.
RR: I think that most "minority" women saw the first agenda that the women's movement created as fairly irrelevant to them, except they understood that child care was necessary, that equal pay was necessary, that access to education and highly skilled jobs were necessary. And they very quickly redefined women's issues as being the need for shelter, the need for safe communities, an end to institutionalized racism, and access to education. I think the most ignored aspect of the women's movement is that unions began to take up feminist issues very quickly and create entirely new demands on corporations and companies that included basic feminist demands, such as onsite child care, equal pay, access to promotion and to higher wages. And by 1975, there were hundreds of new movements, and those included working-class women and unions, every "minority group" -- Puerto Rican, Native American, African American, Mexican American -- all of whom realized that their history dictated the need for a very different agenda.
JC: Even though they might not call themselves feminists.
RR: That's right. And they didn't always. In fact, what's most surprising was that African-American women -- not those who were involved in the Panthers or in movements, but just ordinary working women -- supported the women's movement to a much higher degree than white women. This is because they were already in the working force, and they understood that they needed certain kinds of rights as working women. They recognized things like sexual harassment and being excluded from skilled trades and from higher education.
JC: The book has a lot of wonderful anecdotes of just the strangeness of the cultures flipping between feminists and tradition in the late '60s. Tell the story about your friend graduating from Stanford.
RR: One of my friends who was about to get her PhD at Stanford didn't know what to do because her husband was out of town and she had this tiny little infant that she had no one to take care of while she went to graduation. So she took the baby to the ceremony and in the hot California sun she fed her baby little pieces of chocolate to try to keep her quiet. Eventually the baby's face and hands were just covered with chocolate, and finally my friend's name was called. She went up the stairs onto the podium, shook hands with the president, somehow managing to get her PhD in one hand and shake hands with the other, while carrying her baby. Meanwhile, on her baby's back she had a sign that read, "We need child care at Stanford." The audience roared its approval and applauded loudly. She then went down the stairs and went back to her seat. Meanwhile, the president of Stanford wondered what that gooey brown stuff was all over his hands.
JC: But child care is still the most important goal we haven't achieved. If poor women are to get off welfare and go to work, we need to have universal, affordable, quality child care. Clinton said he would do that; it's not been done. It's probably the most important part of the feminist agenda that was never achieved. Why do you think that is?
RR: First, I think we still have a Cold War mentality and assume that child care is a socialist and a communist institution, not an American institution. When President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Act of 1971, he explicitly stated that we do not want to sovietize our children. After having passed the Senate and the Congress, that act was vetoed by President Nixon, and wasn't taken up again until Clinton became President, who then dropped it during the Lewinsky scandal.
A second reason is that there's still a deep belief that women ought to be home with their children -- unless they're on welfare, in which case they should be at work without child care. Which doesn't make any sense. But there is still this belief that it's women who are responsible for raising the children. Scandinavian countries have paid leave for men and women for several years to be home with infants. But the political shift in the last twenty years has been so far to the right that the idea of a big, centralized government giving money to the states, or even to community-based groups, is antithetical to the larger trend of privatizing everything.
JC: You've said that the young women in the '60s who started the radical feminist movement didn't really know about this history or feel connected to it. Why do you think that the radical women's movement seemed to burst out of what we thought was nowhere?
RR: I think one reason for that distaste for NOW, or the distaste for women who were working with the government, is that those of us who were involved in the antiwar movement did not trust the government, hated the policy in Vietnam, and were so radical about our revulsion about the war in Vietnam that we couldn't trust people who were calling themselves liberals and who were working within government structures, even working within "the system." A second reason is that many younger women felt very strongly that they did not want to live an exclusively domestic life. And they feared more than anything becoming like the cultural icon of the '50s, of being a woman who lived to serve her husband and her children. The younger, more radical women's movement was a kind of matricide, a kind of revolt against the mothers.
JC: In a way it was the beginning of identity politics. A lot of radical feminists really wanted to reinvent the idea of woman.
RR: That's right.
JC: There was a lot of debate then, and you talk about this in your book, about the question of whether women are really just like men, but have been culturally conditioned to believe that they're inferior, or whether women in fact are very, very different from men, but that their differences are assigned an inferior position by the culture.
RR: I think that the '50s used women's difference so powerfully as a means of excluding women from so many parts of life that the first group of feminists in the '60s, both older and younger, really feared asserting anything but sameness. They wanted to be seen as equals of men, and they wanted the laws to operate equally before the court for men and women. Sameness was the most important, the most salient legal way to fight the exclusions that had been so much part of the '50s.
But by the late '60s, '70s, and '80s, women began to address the reality that women are, in fact, somewhat like men and somewhat unlike men. The problem is, men remained the legal and the cultural and the social reference point. So then women began to argue, well, we should create a society that honors women's difference and considers that as much of a norm as men's life. We bear babies; we lactate. The society should be organized around our life experience as well as men's -- not exclusively around ours, but should accommodate with honor and with dignity women's life experiences.
JC: Certainly lesbian women were very important on this question because their experiences were very different than either men's or heterosexual women's, although of course many of them wanted children and committed relationships or marriages.
RR: That's right. Lesbian women were very important in pointing out different sexualities, in questioning what is really female, what is really male, and making that seen as a much more complicated question. By today, there are fewer people around in the women's movement who would be essentialist and argue that women are completely different than men and morally superior. Equally outmoded is the position that women are exactly like men and that there's no difference, and that all the laws and all the organization of society can equally accommodate men's and women's lives; they can't. A perfect example of that is that women are still fighting when they go to work to have institutions address their real need to be both parents and workers. And men who choose to take parenting seriously are also frequently viewed as unacceptable, as not taking their careers seriously.
One of the stereotypes of radical feminists now is that they're puritans, that they hate sex, that they hate pornography, that sexual harassment is really just flirting, and feminists just want to spoil everyone's fun. It's simply not true that the women's movement was largely prudish or primarily antisexual. It's very important for people to realize that the sexual revolution preceded the women's movement, and quite a number of women were thrilled by the idea of sexual freedom. But abortion was illegal, and many women felt that sexual freedom seemed to have arrived on men's terms. They felt that men could use women like Kleenex and throw them away.
So it's not a surprise that some of the most vitriolic and powerful and rageful farewells that women wrote to new left men include an angry statement about sexual exploitation. It's not that these women were prudish and didn't want sex, but they wanted it in a more respectful and a more equal way. And I argue in the book that, for a good part of the '70s, those women tried to find ways to make the sexual revolution equal, to find a way that a sexual freedom could be experienced with respect and equality.
Now there's another, much smaller, number of women in the women's movement who became obsessed with pornography. They got all the attention because it's very sexy and it's dramatic, and pornography is a very hot topic at any point in history. But there were much larger numbers of women who were in fact trying to look at the ways in which women were sexually harmed through illegal abortion, through sexual harassment, through domestic violence, through rape, through marital rape, through date rape. [Those women] wanted to get rid of those sexual injuries so that there could be true sexual freedom and sexual equality. The image of our generation as a prudish generation is really off the mark.
JC: The stereotype is actually the reverse of what a lot of men experienced, which was that they were threatened by women's sexual liberation. That meant that women had something to say about what the sex would be like, and who approached whom, and the whole question of women's orgasms -- the fact that men didn't really know how to give a woman pleasure and that sex was focused on the male orgasm. Of course, most women didn't really understand that either.
RR: That's right. The ignorance level was astonishing. Here's a sexual revolution and there's a whole generation of young men and women who didn't know how to talk about sex, didn't know much about anatomy. The men knew very little; the women knew even less. And so resentments and angers grew on both sides. There was no malevolence from anyone. It was simply a lot of ignorance, which took a long time to correct.
JC: You talk in the book about "consumer feminism." What is that exactly, and how does it compare to what advertisers were doing in the '50s with the feminine mystique?
RR: Advertising changed a great deal from the '50s to the '60s. It became much more sexualized. So in the '50s you see a nice housewife with a shirtwaist dress putting away ironed linen in a linen closet. In the '60s you see a woman who is scantily clad, lying on those same sheets looking very sexually available. In the '70s advertisers realized that the women's movement had become a household word, and they consciously wanted to appropriate it and use the language of liberation and emancipation to sell things to women.
Advertisers began to assert that in order to be free, women must buy. They'll have to buy appropriate clothes to go to work. They'll have to purchase the proper stereos, the proper cookware. And all in the name of being an emancipated woman.
JC: It's faux feminism.
RR: I call it consumer feminism because it's such an appropriation and such a transformation of feminism, which had been very antimaterialistic and very critical of the materialism of American culture.
JC: Now that the women's movement has made its way out into the mainstream culture, and it affects the majority of American women, what has happened to some of the radical feminist ideas? Do you feel anything has been lost by the movement becoming so mainstream?
RR: I think the women's movement is not a single movement anymore. By 1975, I think, in fact, the women's movement had become "hundreds" of movements and there were hundreds of feminisms. I don't think we lost anything, because what we did was to ignite questioning, and those questions are now at the center of a lot of mainstream politics and cultural and social debate. We have not won. There is no national consensus. The whole country doesn't agree with those ideas. But think about the fact that we put abortion on the political agenda and it has stayed there now for thirty years.
JC: You could say that that means we failed.
RR: Absolutely. I totally agree. We have not won. But it is a great tribute to the women's movement that we were able to change the terms of debate. I don't think we ever had a clear picture of how difficult it would be to win. But in fact, everyday life is different. There are many young women who simply wouldn't put up with the kinds of experiences that we put up with. They simply have a sense of entitlement -- that they should be treated with respect at work and in private life. There are many young women who assume that both parents should take care of children. Now this is not uncontested. No idea is uncontested that came out of the women's movement.
JC: I'm curious that you used the phrase "a revolution," started by the women's movement. The way you use it seems very different than what radical feminists had originally envisioned.
RR: Many radical feminists had the apocalytic expectation that patriarchy would collapse, alongside of capitalism. At the same time we were saying that patriarchal attitudes and values totally permeated the culture, so how could we have an instant revolution and how could we expect such a saturated patriarchal culture to change in a moment, or day, or year? So many early feminists just hadn't thought that through.
I think the net effect is that we did start a revolution, a revolution that's very profound, very disorientating, and therefore extremely threatening. And it is not one that occurs within a decade, or even within our own lifetimes. Feminist ideas continue to burrow deeply into the culture; they're being argued about, debated. And that's a different kind of revolution. And perhaps we should realize that the kind of revolutions that women start do not involve building barricades in the street, or throwing tear gas grenades back at the police, but rather slowly changing our institutions, our homes, our lives.
JC: What are some of the arguments that women historians talk about now, in terms of interpretation of women's history?
RR: One of the very biggest differences today is whether to emphasize women's actual social experience in the past -- the social history of women, what they were saying, what they were doing, their participation in economic, educational, sexual, social, cultural life -- or to look at a society and see the way in which it's gendered. One example might be, how did a political party use particular kinds of imagery to feminize certain men so that the men in another political party looked very strong and masculine -- the way Republicans have, in the last few decades, tried to make democratic men seem effeminate if they proposed too much nurturing or caring by the state.
To me, both approaches are really useful, and really exciting. There are some pioneering feminist scholars who think all this emphasis on gender will just exclude women from the picture. And women will disappear again. And then there are people on the other side who think that what's most important are cultural representations, gendered representations of life, rather than what women did themselves, or what women wrote themselves.
JC: You mention in your book having cancer while you were doing the research and writing it, and how even that experience was affected by the women's movement.
RR: The women's health movement was arguably the most successful movement ignited by feminism. It virtually changed medical practice. It attacked the idea that women should be infantilized and treated as idiotic patients who simply had psychosomatic complaints. And most important to me is that the women's health movement said you have to be responsible for your own health. You can't assume that you are a child who has no responsibility. If you feel things, you experience things, then take those things seriously, because it's possible that the physician who you'll see will ignore them or not take them seriously. For quite some time, I had had a sensation that made me worried. I went to doctors for six months and they kept saying, don't worry about this, this is not cancer, cancer doesn't hurt, you don't have sensations. But the women's movement, in my opinion, saved my life, because I trusted the fact that I was experiencing something abnormal, a sensation that verged on discomfort but not pain, a kind of stinging sensation in breast tissue.
And when I finally convinced a doctor to send me to a surgeon, and when the biopsy was over and it was positive, the surgeon and a nurse were holding my hands. And the nurse was saying to me, you must join a women's support group; you will get through this. At the very moment I was being told I had cancer, I was being told that a women's cancer group would be the means by which I would overcome this. And that was so powerful, because she had no idea who I was, she had no idea that the women's health movement had saved my life and she had no idea that the women's movement had been at the core of my life for so many years. I joined one of the first women's cancer groups, which helped me get through it.
So now, when the breast cancer advocates are a national group and have succeeded in increasing the amount of money, this is a direct outcome of the women's movement. And we shouldn't see this as something that's a fluke. This is a direct outcome of what was started by women in Boston when they began to study women's bodies, women's health, and published the very famous first book, "Our Bodies, Ourselves."
