Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  The counter culture, radical politics and women

  The political consciousness of the author of The Dialectic of Sex was forged in the late 1960s, in a period of manifest contradictions, many of which are articulated by Firestone herself. They have to do with the situation of women who, while being told that they had unprecedented freedoms and opportunities, were still living lives as inferior beings. They have to do with a perception, widespread among the younger generation, that there was a malaise at the heart of the Western world and particularly of America: that far from being the land of the free, America was a place of widespread economic injustice, of the systematic oppression of African Americans, of brutal military interventions overseas.

  And they have to do as well with the situation of women within the counter cultural movements themselves. These often reproduced the structures of domination characteristic of the very mainstream culture that they protested against, expecting women to make the tea and to answer the phones but excluding them from decision-making. Issues of sexual equality were rarely on the agenda. Indeed, leftist radical movements were often actively hostile. In 1969, at the Counter-Inaugural conference in Washington DC, designed to protest Nixon’s presidential inauguration, Firestone and another campaigner, Marilyn Webb, faced a struggle even to get women’s liberation on to the program.16 Webb’s eventual speech was met with chanting by some male activists of ‘“Take her off the stage and fuck her!”’ The response to Firestone was ‘more feral’ still, and rather than rebuking the hecklers the conference organizer tried to compel the women to leave the stage. Firestone later commented that ‘“a football crowd would have been … less blatantly hostile to women.”’

  After the 1967 National Conference, Firestone had gone on to co-found a number of women’s groups, emerging as a driving force behind the burgeoning women’s liberation scene. These groups admitted only women and they campaigned around the urgent issues facing women as women. The first was the Westside group in Chicago; and then, following Firestone’s relocation to New York, she co-founded a number of women’s groups there. New York Radical Women was the first women’s group in New York City, and was established by Firestone and Pam Allen in 1967. In February 1969, however, frustrated that NYRW was not an explicitly radical feminist group and in the aftermath of the horrific experience of the Counter-Inaugural conference, Firestone formed the Redstockings with Ellen Willis.17 The group’s name was designed to recall the “bluestockings” of the eighteenth century (a pejorative name for intellectual and educated women) but adding to this tradition the ‘“red of revolution.”’18 In the fall of 1969, Firestone left the Redstockings to co-found, with Anne Koedt, the New York Radical Feminists, intended as an umbrella organization for the radical feminist groups that were cropping up across the state. Firestone is recalled by her fellow radicals as being fiercely intellectual and unafraid of confrontation. At a protest at the Ladies Home Journal, for example, where between 100 and 200 women activists occupied the offices and issued demands including the hiring of female and black personnel, the establishment of a day-care center, and the publication of an issue dedicated to women’s liberation, Firestone met the reluctance of the male editor-in-chief by clambering onto his desk and ‘shredding copies of the Journal.‘19 But her very outspokenness and intellectualism aroused resentment among some other members of the groups, who found Firestone elitist, dominating and dictatorial, and who objected to the limelight attracted by women who had written books within a movement supposed to be leaderless and egalitarian.20 Firestone and Koedt finally suffered a rebellion against their Stanton-Anthony Brigade. All this no doubt contributed to Firestone’s eventual withdrawal from movement politics.

  Firestone’s trajectory encapsulates that of many radical women in the period. At first a part of the loose coalition of hippies, students, anti-war activists, black civil rights campaigners, and anti-capitalists that made up the US counter culture, women eventually sickened of the marginal roles accorded them and the routine misogyny to which they were subjected, and left these movements to form their own ones. In so doing they pushed the emerging Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in new directions.

  The problem with no name

  That movement had been kick-started in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s bestseller, The Feminine Mystique.21 Friedan had asked herself why so many women of her acquaintance who were supposedly living “The Dream” – hubby, children, suburban home, vacuum cleaner – in fact endured lives of quiet desperation. In the early 1960s women typically married very young and began families shortly afterwards. They were entering higher education in unprecedented numbers, but were studying in heavily gendered areas and were expected to abandon any careers upon getting married. Friedan’s conclusion was that American women had been sold a lie. A life of stultifying routine and repetition, without outlets for creativity and intelligence, had been repackaged for them as the ultimate fulfillment of eternal womanly qualities. Her book became a publishing sensation, striking a chord with the thousands of women whom she had diagnosed as suffering from the ‘Problem that Has No Name’: an amorphous condition of dissatisfaction that – lacking any framework of political analysis – women interpreted as a problem or failing within themselves.

  Friedan’s book was a call for women to reject the housewife-as-destiny creed and to seek fulfilling lives outside the home, through paid employment and access to the professions. She argued that this required legal reform: rescinding laws that restricted access to contraception and abortion, but also campaigning for laws against the discrimination of women in the workplace and, especially, against unequal pay. In 1966 Friedan went on to found the National Organization of Women (NOW), which campaigned on these and other fronts to enlarge women’s legal freedoms and to end discrimination against them in the workplace. This sort of feminism is usually characterized today as “liberal” feminism, for its reliance upon a tradition of liberal political thinking about the autonomy and rights of individuals.

  What if capitalism itself is the problem?

  By the late 1960s, however, the significance of liberal feminism was already waning. For many young women, the goals of NOW or similar campaigns were simply not far-reaching enough. Friedan’s solution, for example, was that the middle class women she predominantly addressed could hire help to perform the domestic and child-raising tasks that they themselves eschewed. It is a “solution” that relies upon the continuing existence of a class of worker (probably female, often non-white) who performs alienated, poorly paid, and essential work. Friedan’s feminism was about securing participation for women on equal terms with men. But what if the system itself were wrong?

  Women on the political Left turned to traditions of socialist and Marxist thought to argue that the origins of the problems lay not in bad laws but in the economic basis of society. For these thinkers, the problem was capitalism itself: there could be no equality within capitalism because it is a system predicated upon the existence of an exploited class (whose surplus labor is expropriated by the capitalist as profit). A feminism that accepted capitalism could only be a movement seeking the enrichment of some women while the majority of other women (and men) remained oppressed. Socialist revolution was therefore the necessary condition of gaining true equality for women (and men). If previous socialist revolutions (in the USSR, for example) had not delivered gender equality, then this only showed the necessity of making women’s issues central to the revolutionary campaign.

  Radical feminism

  Firestone’s work is usually identified as belonging to radical feminism, a strand of feminism that, like socialist feminism, is “revolutionary” in seeking a wholesale transformation of society. Radical feminism, however, typically rejects the socialist feminist emphasis upon economics, and argues that the theoretical framework offered by classical Marxism is inadequate for understanding the nature and extent of women’s oppression.

  The 1970s radical feminists championed consciousness-raising gro
ups in which women would come together in small groups without the presence of men, to discuss their experiences of the home, marriage, children, work and sex. By starting with the perceptions and feelings of women, it was believed, women would come to formulate their own tools for analyzing their situations, rather than having to rely upon the male-authored concepts of Marxist theory – which would inevitably determine in advance what aspects of female experience had political significance and in what ways. Radical feminists were also responsible for one of the key slogans of second wave feminism: “the personal is political.” The formulation expresses the feminist insistence that politics is not something that occurs only in the so-called public sphere, stopping politely at the threshold of the home; but that instead, those aspects of our lives which we consider most intimate – whom we love, how we have sex, what we see and feel when we look in the mirror – are governed by versions of the relationships of power that structure society itself, and as such are both “public” and deeply political. Radical feminists argued that it was in fact one of the defining characteristics of their society that it was organized to ensure the subjugation of women to men, in the interests of men, introducing the term “patriarchy” to capture this idea. But if this was the true extent of the problem, they argued, then the liberal feminist idea of “discrimination” barely touched its surface. For radical feminists, women were not merely discriminated against: they were oppressed. Patriarchal culture had a distorting effect upon women, preventing the full expression of their potential, and transforming even their sexuality into something artificial that was shaped according to the dictates of male desire.

  Despite Firestone’s conventional labeling as a radical feminist she does in fact diverge in some important ways from other such thinkers, as comparison with the two other hugely influential books of 1970 – Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics – reveals. And importantly she was also (in her own particular way) a socialist feminist, yoking her proposals for changes in the sphere of sex and reproduction to a socialist demand for shared ownership of the means of production and for the distribution of resources according to need. One particularly important thing that Firestone’s work thus reveals is the inevitable provisionality of the labels “liberal,” “socialist” and “radical” feminist. These may be useful ways to begin to map the field of second wave feminist politics, but they quickly start to obscure as well as to illuminate its details.

  Reformists versus revolutionaries

  When Firestone herself came to map the strands of American feminism, in the second chapter of the Dialectic, she proposed that beneath this tripartite structure there lay a more important twofold distinction, between ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ feminisms. Rather provocatively, she placed the leftist/socialist feminists of her day (the ‘Politicos’) on the reformist side alongside liberal – or in her terms ‘conservative’ – feminists. Identifying the resurgent interest in feminist ideas as ‘the second wave of the most important revolution in history,’ (15) Firestone argued that since the nineteenth century the women’s movement had always been divided between a genuine (because genuinely radical) feminism on the one side, and on the other a set of tendencies that channeled energies elsewhere and thus wasted their revolutionary potential.

  Her key example is women’s obtaining the vote. This had, she argued, initially been conceived as only a step towards obtaining political power, but it was seized by reformist women’s rights campaigners as the priority, thereby marginalizing other issues of equal or greater importance. The eventual granting of the vote in 1920 in the US was, she argues, just an act of appeasement that conned women into accepting mere formal equality in place of substantive equality; and consequently dissipated the feminist struggle for the following 50 years. She describes the subsequent decades in terms of the permutations they offer of the ‘Myth of Emancipation’ – an ideology that works to ‘anaesthetize women’s political consciousness’ (24) by affirming that, since they are now equal, if any woman should still feel anger, dissatisfaction or despair, it must be a personal failing and one that requires a private solution.

  Unpleasant residue of the aborted revolution

  Firestone writes searingly of the Sixties counter culture as one in which ‘the boys,’ fed up with the ‘cloying romanticism’ of the Fifties, have rejected monogamy and the traditional family but nonetheless want to have a ‘chick’ in tow – one who will never turn down sex (not be ‘uptight’) nor demand commitment (be ‘a drag’) (26–7). It is a faux radicalism, she contends, in which women are ‘still invisible as people’ (27). And it is one in which many people are channeling their anger into impotent forms of “politics” that ameliorate their personal frustrations while doing nothing to bring about real change. (This sounds a warning, perhaps, for today’s Internet warriors.)

  She claims that many of the ‘rebellious daughters’ of 1970 don’t even know that there has been a feminist movement, so effective has been the ‘blackout of feminist history’ that distorted and misrepresented the movement, celebrating the reformers and willfully forgetting the radicals such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth (28). But these daughters are rebellious nonetheless, since they are confronted with the contradictions that are the ‘unpleasant residue of the aborted revolution’: they have near full legal freedoms, but no power; educational opportunities, but are unable to use them; supposed sexual freedom, but one that is an intensified sexual exploitation, enacted through the circulation of their bodies between (supposedly radical) men, and the circulation within the wider media of endless ‘hateful or erotic images of themselves’ (28–9). For Firestone the feminists who identify with various forms of leftist politics (the ‘Politicos’) do not offer any genuine solution to these contradictions. Unwilling to insist on the centrality of women’s issues, they instead try to fit them into the ‘existing leftist analysis and framework of priorities – in which, of course, Ladies never go first’ (33). In the Dialectic Firestone would do the reverse, fitting a socialist analysis into a feminist analysis that prioritized issues of sex and reproduction. For her, any putative feminism (conservative or leftist) that fails to start with these issues will achieve superficial reforms at best, since it will have failed to tackle the roots of women’s oppression.

  So what were the issues around sex and reproductive control that faced women when Firestone was writing in 1969?

  Crimes against chastity

  At one point in the Dialectic, Firestone notes acerbically that contraception is not the same thing as ‘family planning’ (185). While widely offered to married couples who could be understood as seeking merely to delay starting a family (following a 1965 Supreme Court ruling), in 1969 birth control was legally available to unmarried women only in some states in the US, reflecting a moral insistence that the purpose of sex was procreation. Until 1970 it was possible even for references to contraception to fall foul of federal anti-obscenity laws. For example, a campaigner, Bill Baird, was jailed for three months under Massachusetts’ “Crimes Against Chastity, Decency, Morality and Good Order” law after he handed contraception to a female Boston University student, Sue Katz, as a political action at a talk he’d given on birth control and abortion. In some respects Baird was lucky, since under this law he could have received as much as ten years in prison. Suitably unchastened, he continued to fight and in 1972 won the Eisenstadt v. Baird Supreme Court judgment that legalized contraception for all Americans.

  Finding Jane

  In 1969 abortion was illegal in all but a handful of US states, and these had decriminalized it only in relation to very specific circumstances, such as where pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or where continuing to term would threaten permanent disability or death to the mother. In consequence, illegal, unsafe, so-called “back-street” abortions were rife; and were disproportionately sought by women on low incomes, who could not afford in-patient hospital stays and were unlikely to know person
ally doctors who would help them.22 The numbers of women who died through these back-street procedures are highly disputed, but NARAL: Pro-Choice America estimate it was as many as 5000 each year.23 One such woman was Geraldine Santoro, in 1964. Santoro had fled an abusive marriage and on becoming pregnant by her married lover had feared that her husband would kill her and her children. Failing to obtain an abortion any other way, Santoro’s lover eventually performed the procedure on a motel room floor with borrowed tools and instructions, before abandoning Santoro when it became clear that things had gone wrong. Her corpse, slumped forward over bloodied towels, was discovered the following morning by a chambermaid. The police photograph of the scene testifies to a death as horrific as it was unnecessary. After it was published in the feminist MS magazine in 1973, the image was mobilized as a national pro-choice symbol. Santoro was 28 years old, and left behind two daughters, who had been told that their mother had died in a car accident.

  By the late 1960s women’s liberation groups were responding to this situation with direct action. In February 1969, feminists interrupted the proceedings of New York State’s legislative hearings on abortion reform. As Echols reports, a panel of 15 experts had been invited to give evidence, consisting of ‘fourteen men and one woman – a nun.’24 After one of the experts had proposed allowing abortions to women ‘who had “done their social duty” by having four children,’ one of the protestors stood up and demanded to hear from ‘“some real experts – the women.”’25 Also in 1969, a group of women in Chicago formed “Jane,” the pseudonym for their Abortion Counseling Service. Jane members started out by helping pregnant women to find an abortionist and assisted during the procedure. Eventually learning that the abortionists, who were always men and always charged an extortionate price, were usually not doctors at all, the women themselves started performing low cost abortions, the payment to be decided by what the woman determined she could afford.26 Jane’s phone number was distributed in movement leaflets, on notice boards, by sympathetic friends or even professionals, and women would call “her” to leave their contact details and be phoned back. The Jane operation was busted by police in 1973 and seven members were charged with battery, although the case was eventually dropped in the wake of the Roe v. Wade judgment that established a legal right to abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy.