• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓
  • ←
  • →

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

In my day, never was longer.

Books are my comfort food!

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Mobile Menu

  • Four Directions Montana
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2024 Elections
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Books / Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 5, “Women’s Liberation”)

Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 5, “Women’s Liberation”)

by Anne Laurie|  July 20, 20118:01 pm| 13 Comments

This post is in: Books, When Everything Changed

FacebookTweetEmail

“A classic example of liberal mother-daughter conflict”
__
… The movement’s various factions had little in common. The reformers did not want to overthrow the existing system — they wanted to throw open the gates so that women could become part of it. And they had little interest in changing the rules for private relationships between men and women… They envisioned themselves — and their daughters — marrying and having children while also sitting in corporate boardrooms or running for Congress. The leaders of the radical wing of the women’s movement wanted to go much further than simply leveling the playing field when it came to things like job opportunities. They were going to examine everything about American womanhood — in fact, about womanhood back to the time of the pharaohs.. And they were going to free women to be all they could be, even if that meant getting rid of capitalism or the nuclear family or the Judeo-Christian tradition, or anything else that got in the way.

Anybody else here remember Rita Mae Brown’s In Her Day fondly? When it first came out (from a small-press womyn’s publisher, of course), I found it both hilarious and true to life. My college dorm mates who were still part of the aspiring lesbian-separatist-marxist collective that had rejected me for insufficient seriousness were scandalized that the celebrated author of Rubyfruit Jungle should lower herself to washing The Movement’s dirty linen in public. Multiple meetings were held, to discuss whether Brown had sold out for the corporatist dollar, or if she had merely been driven temporarily insane by some cruel setback in her personal life; and if so, could the collective still support Rubyfruit as an acceptable softcore entertainment, or must it be discarded with extreme prejudice to demonstrate a commitment to revolutionary seriousness?

Boy, were we young and innocent, in those days.

The Atlantic City demonstration was, in retrospect, a huge success — after all, we’re still talking about it now as the moment when the women’s movement made its debut on the national stage. But when it was over, some of the protestors expressed regret about the tone of the event and said they should have been expressing solidarity with the sisters who were being paraded around in their bathing suits, not making fun of them. (Morgan herself called the sheep “not my finest hour”.) And everyone quickly grew to despise the term “bra burning”. The demonstration captured traits that would come to define the movement. It was didactic and playful, smart and sometimes sophomoric. The women who participated succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, then disagreed about whether or not the message was appropriate…

In 1972 the members of the National Women’s Party walked out of their headquarters and up Capitol Hill to watch the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. At 85, Alice Paul was still in Washington, trying to orchestrate everything. Amelia Fry, an historian who had volunteered to assist with the lobbying, felt Paul’s intensity “like a single beam of strong light”. When an exhausted Fry finally escaped for a lunch where some topic other than the ERA might be discussed, she was conscious that “a mile away was Alice in the one hundred eigtieth day of the forty-ninth year of telephoning, assigning tasks, getting advocate statements written, and running her small army.”
__
The Equal Rights Amendment had become increasingly more popular as legislatures and courts abolished the discriminatory practices the amendment was meant to reverse… Once the bill was released, it passed 352 to 15 after only an hour of debate — the first time the House had acted on it since its introduction in 1923. The Senate held out for another two years… But in 1972 resistance gave way and the bill passed quickly. The Hawaii legislature, waiting expectantly, became the first state to ratify the amendment minutes later.

Because once we had “our” amendment on the books, that would change everything! No, actually, we could still believe that. The Watergate burglaries were still a few months in the future, just to keep the chronology straight…

What do you all remember from those dear, departed days?

FacebookTweetEmail
Previous Post: « Who loves the Sun?
Next Post: Stephen Colbert: It Gets Better »

Reader Interactions

13Comments

  1. 1.

    jeff

    July 20, 2011 at 8:14 pm

    Kind of off-topic:

    My college dorm mates who were still part of the aspiring lesbian-separatist-marxist collective that had rejected me for insufficient seriousness were scandalized that the celebrated author of Rubyfruit Jungle should lower herself to washing The Movement’s dirty linen in public.

    Man, they must have had apoplexy when Sorority Coed Slasher Prom Night Killer Movie (or whatever it was called) came out!

  2. 2.

    b-psycho

    July 20, 2011 at 8:26 pm

    LOL @ the Amazon ad for Fred Sauer’s dumbass book appearing under this…

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    July 20, 2011 at 8:29 pm

    It is fascinating that the older women had a “I can be a man too” template, while the younger ones wanted to break the mold entirely.

  4. 4.

    Peggy

    July 20, 2011 at 8:30 pm

    As a heterosexual socialist feminist, I was never “hardcore”. I just took karate and did consciousness-raising groups. In those groups I would watch in amazement as a woman would start by complaining that her husband didn’t even help with carrying the laundry while she was pregnant, to deciding on a divorce, to coming out, all in the space of a few months.

  5. 5.

    Splitting Image

    July 20, 2011 at 9:19 pm

    What do you all remember from those dear, departed days?

    Not much. I was born on August 25, 1972. Richard Nixon was re-elected a little over two months later. I like to think there is no causal relationship between those two events, but the upshot is that I’ve spent my entire life under the shadow of Movement Conservatism.

  6. 6.

    Ed Marshall

    July 20, 2011 at 9:28 pm

    I’ve got a 25 year old rad fem friend on facebook. Women are still doing the exact same things that they did in 1972. I just don’t bother her, but watching her work through the realization that being a radical feminist doesn’t mean having the biggest problem with men is interesting. I made an incredibly big mistake and tried to tell her that she was a liberal feminist, and I got jumped for being the agent of the patriarchy trying to keep her down. She tried female separatism, and wound up unhappy, and I haven’t heard much about feminism lately.

  7. 7.

    Constance

    July 20, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    Does anyone still read Rita Mae Brown? I do and am about to give her up. I suspect she is a Tea Partier or Libertarian or both.

    I remember being so excited about feminism–in 1974 I had just left an abusive, very conventional marriage and reading and talking about the patriarchy and the possibility of overthrowing that system opened up such possibilities. Watching it all drain away in the last few years is heartbreaking.

  8. 8.

    tkogrumpy

    July 20, 2011 at 10:10 pm

    I remember role swapping with my wife, chucking my career to stay home and keep house. It took a few months to realize that while my wife was willing to give up the housework, she wasn’t willing to give up deciding exactly how when and where it was to be done insisting on micro- managing every thing I did. A difficult time for me trying to do the right thing.Also,too our income was cut in half of course.

  9. 9.

    Anne Laurie

    July 20, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    Thanks everybody… same time, same place next week. Let’s go for two chapters: “Backlash” and “You’re Gonna Make It, After All”.

    I’m thinking it’s a good thing we didn’t pick SHOCK DOCTRINE for our summer reading, yes?

  10. 10.

    kejia

    July 20, 2011 at 10:15 pm

    @Constance: I gave up reading Rita Mae Brown’s later books because they bored me. But some people enjoy them.

    Here’s a short bio she wrote on her webpage: judge for yourself. http://www.ritamaebrown.com/content/about.asp

  11. 11.

    mary

    July 20, 2011 at 10:53 pm

    As a young working class woman in the 1970’s, I felt utterly ignored by the feminist movement. The women around me were dealing with poverty, neglect and often abuse. Sally Field’s movie ‘Norma Rae’ taught us more about feminism than any other medium. Yeah, I know, Sally Field. But feminists were seen to be more interested in arguing over nomenclature and ‘the politics of sex’ while working class women took care of their kids and cleaned their houses and typed their letters. Of course, this is a generalization, but the perceived lack of interest in how most women lived dried up a lot of support.

  12. 12.

    Steeplejack

    July 21, 2011 at 12:58 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    In Her Day linky no work. I fix (actually, improve and streamline).

    Offered by a manly (but sensitive) man in the spirit of pansexual feminism.

  13. 13.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    July 21, 2011 at 11:43 am

    I was just a baby in 1972, so I can’t contribute memories of that time. But I can talk about the repercussions. I’ve really benefitted from what those feminists did. I have a career in sciences that would not have been available, if those women hadn’t broken the barriers down.

    My mom, on the other hand, is a hard core conservative, in part, because of her own bitterness about how feminists treated women (like her) who CHOSE to be a wife and homemaker. She felt that raising a family was one of the best things she could contribute to the world, and the way the second line of feminists (those who wanted to completely redo the role of women) behaved toward women, like my mother, was really, really nasty. I’ve heard the same thing from my partner’s mother (another hardcore conservative).

Comments are closed.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Comments

  • Quinerly on Monday Evening Open Thread: Another ‘Rich’ Narcissist, Having A Bad Start to His Week (Apr 15, 2024 @ 11:46pm)
  • Jackie on Monday Evening Open Thread: Another ‘Rich’ Narcissist, Having A Bad Start to His Week (Apr 15, 2024 @ 11:45pm)
  • MisterForkbeard on Monday Evening Open Thread: Another ‘Rich’ Narcissist, Having A Bad Start to His Week (Apr 15, 2024 @ 11:45pm)
  • bookworm1398 on War for Ukraine Day 782: If the Opposite of Pro Is Con, Then the Opposite of Progress is a GOP Majority in Congress (Apr 15, 2024 @ 11:42pm)
  • YY_Sima Qian on Take the Fucking Win (Apr 15, 2024 @ 11:39pm)

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Balloon Juice Meetups!

All Meetups
Talk of Meetups – Meetup Planning
Proposed BJ meetups list from frosty

Fundraising 2023-24

Wis*Dems Supreme Court + SD-8
Virginia House Races
Four Directions – Montana
Worker Power AZ
Four Directions – Arizona
Four Directions – Nevada

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
Positive Climate News
War in Ukraine
Cole’s “Stories from the Road”
Classified Documents Primer

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Twitter / Spoutible

Balloon Juice (Spoutible)
WaterGirl (Spoutible)
TaMara (Spoutible)
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
ActualCitizensUnited

Political Action 2024

Postcard Writing Information

Balloon Juice for Four Directions AZ

Donate

Balloon Juice for Four Directions NV

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2024 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc

Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!