Women's Voices / Women's Struggles By The Decades: Part 2--1960s
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6163
by: Paul Rosenberg
Sat Jun 07, 2008
This is the second installation of a decade-by-decade diary series
calling for people to share their experiences, from everyday
experience of family and friends, to local politics, all the way on
up, as high as our experience reaches. The point of this series is to
get at women's experience and the growth and development of feminist
consciousness-and/or womanist consciousness as many women of color
prefer. Naturally this does not exclude men. We are an important
part of this story, even if we are not the center of it. But our main
role here is one of listening. For a longer explanation, see the
first installment here.
I originally planned to do one a day, but it seems that a slower pace
is called for, so I will leave this one up Wednessday and Thursday,
before going on to the 1970s on Friday. I also invite any woman who
wants to volunteer to write the intro for the next diary to contact
me (see my users page for my email address).
Paul Rosenberg :: Women's Voices / Women's Struggles By The Decades:
Part 2--1960s
--
The 1960s was the decade that changed everything. You can tell by
the way that conservatives never stop demonizing it.
But the first major organizing by women was not about "women's
issues' and indeed relied on affirming, rather than challenging
traditonal images of womahood. It was the emergence of Women Strike
for Peace, founded by Bella Abzug and Dagmar Wilson, which grew out
of an international day of protest against atmospheric nuclear
testing on November 1, 1961. The protest drew tens of thousands of
women across the nation and the world, including 1500 who marched in
Washington DC. It was a maternalist protest that centered around
protecting the health of children, and particularly infants, which
was threatened by the release of radioactive strontium-90, which
subsitutes for calcium in the human body, particularly in bones and
cen enter the body through drinking milk, including mothers milk.
This sinister invasion of the mother-child bond was the fulcrum point
for women's independent peace organizing, and indeed Womens Strike
for Peace was cited by President Kennedy as crucial in brining about
the Limited Test Ban Treaty (signed August 5, 1963), outlawing
atmospheric tests. But that was only the point of origin for their
activism. They were also among the first organized opposition to the
Vietname War-in 1964. They played a crucial role in bringing down
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and their use of a
bottom-up concensus-based organizing model, based on an ideal of
participatory democracy actually preceeded the SDS Port Huran
Statement, which is commonly seen as the first expression of that
hallmark New Left concept. Abzug, of course, went on to become a
feminist icon as the most outspoken faminist and anti-war
Congresswoman after her election in 1970-a campaign in which she used
the slogan, "This woman's place is in the House - the House of
Representatives."
Another, even larger precursor for the emergence of the Second Wave
Feminist Movement was the Civil Rights Movement. Although there were
strong women--such as the legendary Ella Baker--involved in the Civil
Rights Movement, the everyday experience of second-class treatment
clashed intensely with the ideals of equality that lay at the heart
of the organizing they were doing, an historic echo of the same
experience that gave birth to First Wave Feminism out of the
Abolitionist Movement in 1848.
While legislative gains were made without an accompanying mass
movement in the early- and mid-1960s--most notably the Equal Pay Act,
prohibiting wage discrimination, passed on June 10, 1963--things
really began to change with the formation of NOW in 1966, with Betty
Friedan as President, three years after the publication of her
earth-shaking book, The Feminine Mystique. With a national
organization of their own, and years of experience in grassroots
civil rights and anti-war organizing, there followed an explosion of
diversified local faminist organizing, including such notable groups
as New York Radical Women, which pioneered group consciousness
raising methods as a key ingredient of the women's movement, and then
gave rise to the even more influential groups W.I.T.C.H. and
Redstockings, and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, whose
book, Our Bodies, Ourselves (booklet form, 1970) would become one of
the most influential books of the next decade. But these were simply
the tip of the iceberg, as millions of women-particularly those
coming of age in the 1960s, began demanding the equality that
supposedly had always been a founding principle of our nation.
Now it's your turn. Tell us what it was like for you-or, if you are
too young to remember or even know first-hand, what it was like for
those close to you who have influenced your life.
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