Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement

"Dear Sisters is a collection of documents from the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s put together by Rosalyn Baxandall and the renowned women’s historian Linda Gordon. Each document has a beautifully-written headnote giving us contextual historical background. But the documents themselves are a glorious wide-ranging array of cartoons, poems, songs, manifestos and declarations. My favorite is a beautiful poster that said “American Foot Binding—Stamp Out High Heels.” These documents capture the spirit of the moment and of the movement. Reflective of that moment in the history of the women’s movement, the collection is inclusive of a broad range of activists. It includes documents from the Third World Women’s Alliance, Catholics for Free Choice, and a socialist-feminist organization called Bread and Roses, among others. I use it in my classes all the time, and students always enjoy it. Women’s liberationists in the late 1960s were younger and more radical than activists like Betty Friedan, who founded the National Organization for Women. Many came out of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. Inspired by those movements, they called for women’s liberation. Self-emancipation has always been part of the women’s rights movement. It’s a link back to the Declaration of Sentiments from the first women’s rights convention in 1848, where they talked about property rights and legal rights and voting rights. But they also talk about the emancipatory ideal of being free from societal norms. The concept of liberation in the 1960s carries forward the idea of self-emancipation, which is why consciousness-raising was so central to their activism. We’ve stopped talking about liberation as an ideal, and shifted to talking about equality. I use the term ‘second wave’ to capture the resurgence of mass mobilization and engagement with feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to the late-19th and early-20th-century mass mobilizations that resulted in the right to vote, which was the first wave. While working on a cultural history of working mothers, I realized that the record on second wave feminism’s activism on behalf of work and family was incomplete. Feminists had been blamed for throwing women into the workplace and ignoring the family, but when I researched the record of women’s activism in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw a lot of activism around family and work-related issues. I discovered that feminists of this era had an incredibly comprehensive vision of the changes we needed to make—both as a society and in intimate relationships—in order for full equality to be achieved. For example, they not only demanded that men share in childcare and housework, they also demanded a thoroughgoing reconstruction of domestic work to achieve equality between marriage partners. They envisioned men living full lives as fathers as well as breadwinners. They envisioned a world with readily available childcare and adequate support for mothers, particularly poor mothers. What is more, they envisioned changing workplaces—say, with rights for pregnant workers and flexible schedules—so that women could be full citizens and full workers without having to give up bearing and caring for children. In a whole range of veins and venues, I found feminists sketching out and filling in the lines of this big picture of change—change at the most personal level. Change in restructuring the big institutions. The full picture is one that historians hadn’t put together. Individual pieces of it had been told, but the panorama of second wave feminists’ work in these areas had never been shown. That’s what I set out to do. This book reveals how feminists’ efforts were blocked. It’s not that feminists lacked a compelling vision for substantive change: it’s that a conservative movement rallied to oppose them. The cultural changes feminists envisioned entailed an alteration of deep-seated outlooks. That provoked resistance from those who felt threatened by the profound changes that were proposed. The lesson for today is that on the one hand, our foremothers had a workable vision worth recovering. On the other hand, that vision was so powerful that it triggered political challenge and cultural backlash. Being mindful of the organized opposition to feminist change in the last century is important for today’s activists so that they can prepare to identify and counter forces that seek to hold them back as much as possible."