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wrote a few years later, in an editorial published in NOW Acts in 1968,
 For women, as for black people, self determination cannot be real with-
out economic and political power. 12 In this respect, as with the radicals,
the civil rights movement served as her model.
Although she herself did not directly participate, as had many radical
feminists, in the civil rights movement, Friedan was deeply influenced by
it. She reworded civil rights based paradigms about group identity to
apply to women, much as the suffragists did with abolitionist rhetoric. In
a talk before the organizing conference of the National Women s Political
Caucus in Washington, D.C., Friedan claimed that women had to have
some economic, psychological independence  our new consciousness of
ourselves as people  in order to exert any real political power. To use the
vote in their own interests as women, for instance, they first had to come
into awareness of themselves as a group.13
For Friedan, feminism was a natural extension of American democratic
values, a continuation of the American Revolution. Rooted in the best of
American traditions, feminism was not a countercultural program of dis-
mantling and overthrow but a realization of one s rights as a citizen, and as
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THE BATTLE OF BETTY 79
American as Mom and apple pie. As she later explained,  The logic was in-
exorable. Once we broke through that feminine mystique and called our-
selves human no more, no less surely we were entitled to enjoyment of
the values which were our American, democratic human right. 14
To engage in  politics, therefore, meant to run for a town committee
or for Congress, or go to law school and become a judge.15  Politics
meant legislation, elections, civil service. It was not how you lived but
who you voted for.  Political power meant influence within the legal
arena. And the problem with political power, according to Friedan, was
not that it was intrinsically corrupt; the problem was that not nearly
enough women had it.
BETTY S BATTLE
In the early twenty-first century, almost every major newsweekly has run
a cover story examining the relationship between women and power,
from bedroom to board room.16 Some of these stories argue that women
today have it, and others argue that they don t, but they all share a com-
mon fascination with the question of what women do with power once
they achieve it. Forty years ago, however, this was not the debate. For the
most part, the only power many women held was in the home. But even
there, power was limited. Spousal rape was legal. Divorce often left
women materially bereft and without recourse, since no laws yet existed
regarding the equal division of common property. A woman couldn t
even get a credit card in her own name. And until 1964, women still
lacked the right to equal employment and legal protections from sex dis-
crimination on the job.
In the early 1960s, women s second-class status was increasingly docu-
mented. In 1961 Pauli Murray, an African American legal scholar and a
member of the President s Commission on the Status of Women Commit-
tee on Civil and Political Rights, compiled a list of all the laws that discrim-
inated against women.17 Murray stressed discrimination in employment as
among the most serious forms of discrimination that women faced. In 1964
the pending Civil Rights Act had been broadened to include  sex as well as
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80 SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED
race in the section concerning equal employment opportunity (Title VII),
and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) had been
established to handle complaints. By 1965 working women were flooding
the EEOC with Title VII grievances.
In 1966, as younger, radical women poured their talents and energies
into the student movements of the New Left, Murray, Friedan, and a hand-
ful of others decided to build what many at the time referred to as an
 NAACP for women. The idea that American women needed their own
civil rights organization first articulated by Addie Wyatt, an African
American leader of the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the
NAACP had been spreading among professional civil servants and oth-
ers who risked their government jobs to promote women s issues within the
nation s capital.18 The need for a national organization became more press-
ing to members of this feminist underground when it became clear that the
EEOC was refusing to take women s charges of sex discrimination on the
job seriously in spite of its founding mandate.
In the summer of 1966 delegates from the state commissions for
women established by President Kennedy gathered for the Third Annual
Conference on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C. When it be-
came clear to the delegates that their efforts to force the EEOC to protect
women s rights and specifically to enforce Title VII s injunction against
sex discrimination were in vain, Friedan discussed the situation with
other well-positioned attendees. Pauli Murray; Aileen Hernandez, an
African American woman who was about to leave her position as a mem-
ber of the EEOC; Catherine East of the Women s Bureau of the Labor De-
partment; Mary Eastwood, a former member of the President s
Commission; Esther Peterson; EEOC commissioner Richard Graham;
Congresswoman Martha Griffiths; Kay Clarenbach, head of the Wiscon-
sin Commission on the Status of Women; and Dorothy Haener agreed
with Friedan that something had to be done.
With Friedan at the helm, the National Organization for Women held
its founding conference on October 29, 1966, in Washington and its first
national convention in 1967, attended by 300 women and men. Chapters
sprang up across the nation. At the founding meeting of the New York
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THE BATTLE OF BETTY 81
chapter, Flo Kennedy and Muriel Fox two middle-aged dames decked
out in full makeup, suits, and hats greeted newcomers as if at a tea party.
Many attendees had never before attended a political gathering of this
kind. Friedan charismatically took the floor, reeling off Labor Department
statistics documenting the political, social, and economic discrimination
against women in the United States. It was a powerful juxtaposition.
Revolution may have been in the air, but NOW s founders enacted
their revolution in an orderly fashion: disciplined, polite, and, above all, re-
spectable. The organization lobbied legislators, collected petitions, sent
mass mailings to the White House to pressure government officials, and
formed special task forces. While NOW waged many of its high-profile
battles in the courts, its members also educated, marched, picketed, and
protested to publicize feminist issues. The organization s first target, of
course, was the EEOC. In 1967 NOW forced the EEOC to rule that sex-
segregated want ads were discriminatory. Prior to this,  His Girl Friday
ads appeared in one column, while managerial opportunities ran in an-
other. NOW also supported a sex discrimination suit brought by flight at-
tendants then called stewardesses that year. When the EEOC ruled in
NOW s favor in both cases, President Lyndon Johnson issued an executive
order barring discrimination by federal contractors. The message was clear:
NOW had arrived.
From the beginning, the organization was guided by the principle, per-
petually invoked by Friedan, that  Participation in the Mainstream is the
Real Revolution. 19 Indeed, as NOW s founding slogan conveyed, revolu-
tion had nothing to do with overthrowing the power elite or reformulat-
ing what was meant by  political, as radical feminists were suggesting. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]