Women's Voices / Women's Struggles By The Decades: Part 2--1960s

by: Paul Rosenberg

Thu Jun 05, 2008 at 09:45

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).

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.