xur Tbe lYoments Mouement and -, Black Discontent q As far zrs maoy Blacks were concerned, the emergence of the women's movement couldn't have been more untimely or irrelevant. Historians fface its roots to l96L with the President's Commission on the Status of Iflomen chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. At a time when Black students were languishing in southern jails, when Black full-time working women were earning 57 percent of what their tUflhite peers were earning, the commission concentrated its attention on the growing number of middle-class women who were forced to enter the labor market in low-skill, low-paid jobs. In 1963, the year of the March on \$flashington, the Birmingham bombing, and the assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the report from the commission was published. Although it did not go so far as to challenge the uaditional roles of women, its litany of inequities, especially in employment, was telling. PresidentJohn Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, the first federal legislation that prohibited discrimination on the of sex. In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan's Tbe Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class tUflhite women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from inceasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a "meaningful" job outside the home. Not only were the basis problems of the ttrThite suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan's observation that "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the wodd, and also loved, and had children" seemed to come from another planet.l h L964, two developments spurred the women's rnovernent to a new level of intensity. The first of them, the Civil Rights Act, won by blood sacrifice, provided the legal foundation for women's rights as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendmena had a cenrllry -much 300,- WHSN AND \trfHERE I ENrrR earlier. That wasn't what the proponents of the Civil Rights Act had in mind. But when the bill came to the House, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia tacked the word sex to Title VII, which prohib. ited discrimination in employment. Emulating the tactics used after the Civil Var, Smith's purpose was to defeat the entire bill. Sex equality in employment would be viewed as so ridiculous, he believed, that even those whose consciences were pricked by the plight of Blacks wouldn't be able to vote for it. There was m:uch ribaldry in the Congress; the day Smith made his proposal was called "Ladies Day" in the House. But evidently the good ol' boys were laughing so hard they missed a step. Some of their colleagues, particularly Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, were able to marshal forces sufficient to pass the bill-with its sex provision. In fact Griffiths was going to propose the addition of sex herself, but when Smith jumped the gun, she withdrew, figuring that his Machiavellian tactics would gain at least one hundred more votes. Yet it was clear that women had won only a battle, not the war. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission was the enforcement arm of Title VII and its first director, Herman Edelsberg, made some alarming statements. He characterized the sex provision as a "fluke," one "conceived out of wedlock." Such an attitude would be a direct catalyst for the formation of the National Organization for lVomen (NO\UO. At the same time, the feminist consciousness of tUfhite women in the student movernent was also reaching a new plateau. This develop ment had a gte tdeal to do with what was happening within SNCC. In the Black organization's formative years, the role of r$7hite women activists had not been inconsequential. For example,Jane Stembridge, a rU(hite Virginian, was brought to SNCC by Etla Baker and was one of its earliest staff members. She and others who joined the organization were able to perform iust about any task in SNCC that they had heart enough to do. With the "group-centered," egalitafian values of SNCC, any activist who worked hard inevitably had some say in policy decisions. Thus many of the \flhite women gained a respect for their own abilities that would not have been possible in other organizations. Additionally, they benefited from seeing Black women as a new kind of role model. Contrary to Friedan's experience, Black women in SNCC not only performed heroic deeds, but their activism did not preclude many of them from marrying and having children. Most enlightening was the exposure to the rural women who formed the backbone of the Tbe lWomen's lllotement and Black Discontent ^ 301 southern rnovement. "r have been thinking about this,,, wrote stembridge in her notes. "Mrs. Hamei i, *or" educated than I am. That is-she knows more." !7hat Fannie Lou Hamer knew had rittle to do with formal education, Stembridge*ro,", ,.. . . She tno*, something else. . . . she knows that she ir goIa.;; s,.mbridge fert she had no such knowledge about herself. "I ierrt in.o society. I wCI there. And that is where I learned that I was bad. . . . Not ta.i",y i"E i*, sociary shamefuf notguilty as a r7hite ro*t.rn., . . . not unequal".t as wornen . . but Bad.', Perhaps Hamer's isoration from mains*eam society had saved her from learning she was b"d ruth;; gooa, s,"iciiage specuIated. "If she didn't know that, the way she sings. she wourdn't ,t *ith herf,e"&;t sing! land she couldn't speak the yat that she "i., ,p""rs *a ,h; ;;y is this: she announces. I d9 aot *"oun...-I apologize.,;itJ-iir.rence, stembridge concluded, *"s tt i,"a"rroi u".i'Llgr,t to be ashamed of "herself, her body,"it.i-r,-ng voice.,,2 However, the-sNCC of iieq4s was in no position to incubate the development of yhitel -ln-*ose Vears.SNCC was going through an identity crisis whichrrad leftth e irganization in confusion. some of that confusion could be traced io tt Jir,.ritable tensions of interra_ cial liaisons between !flhite women ana ghcr. men which reached a pitch during the Freedom summei. e-rurnir. Sara Evans, put it this way: ".,iuirioiit" period, a* rh..ouar,.?dil ,il il ;;;;, i*r For Black men, sexual access to \uThite women challenged the culrure's ultimate symbol of their denied manhood. And some of the middre-crass women whose attentions ,h;y had experienced a denial ilC of their womanhooa i, ruili"g io?.ii"u. ,t cheerteader standards of high schooro;"r,,i? ,o" iiur"ri.y prevalent in the fifties and iady sixties.r lo.*r r!4onships were constructive, noted Evans, but others had a and "depersonalizing" r"*i". The more ..enthusiastic,, ,.9f3tic" vhite women posed dangers it"ir activities.*t"od"d'ueyond sNCc circles into local southern "rrr"r co-murriti.s. The sexual tension of Vhite women in SNCC, said Evans, -*as to;h;il;A;t key feminism" but also "became a divisive ana e*ptosive force within the civil Many Black activists agreed that vhites were creating more problems in sNcc than sohitionr. ny the wall for a separatist movem.ni'*i many of the r7hites were "" rq6A;";;;;ff;;** 302,- ttr7snN AND IU7HERE I ENrrn being "dernoted" accordingly. For tU(hite women, who were by now budding feminists, this was a painful blow. They had their chance to respond to the developments within SNCC at its \flaveland Confer' ence held in L964. The purpose of the conference was to sort out the problems through discussions and position papers on various issues confronting the organizationihAmong the papers presented for discus' sion was one, unsigned, criticizing SNCC for its treatment of women. The paper cited the relegation of women to clerical work and their exclusion from the decision-making process. It complained of the ",lssumption of male superiority" in SNCC, one "as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro."' Amid all of SNCC's other concerns, the position paper on women was either ignored or ridiculed. Of the latter attitude, Stokely Carmichael's rebuttal, "The ^, only position for women in SNCC is prone," was the most infamoustf, That Black wornen in SNCC did not rise en rnasse against such flagrantsexism reflected a number of factors: First of all, most of them saw the race issue as so pressing that they had little attention to spare for questions of sex. "I'm certain that our single-minded focus on the issues of racial discrimination and the Black struggle for equality blinded us to other issues," remarked Cynthia \U(ashington, a Black project director.6 Second, Black women such as Muriel Tillinghast, though angered by Carmichael's statement, were not aware of sex discrimination in SNCC at the time. Men usually held the top sPots, but the charge that women were shut out from decision-making or leadership positions didn't really hold up. \flomen like Ruby Doris Smith (who would soon become executive secretary), Diane Nash, and Donna Richards Moses were in SNCC's inner circles. Others, like Tillinghast and \U7ashington, had been assigned the non-sexstereoryped roles of project directors in the South-by Carmichael himself. In fact, the influence of Black women was actually increasing at the time; it was \White women who were being relegated to minor responsibilities, in part because of indiscriminate sexual behavior. If Black women had complaints of their treatment in SNCC, those complaints often centered around the "brothers' "role in their White "sisters' " sexual liberation. All this was not to say that there was no sexual discrimination in SNCC-iames Foreman himself admitted there was it was not perceived to be as "crippling" as other problems. In -but any case, by L96L65 such ry King, the authors of the unsigned position p@ 7 Tbe lVomen's Motenent and Black Discontent 303 ^ toward the Students fpr a Democratic Society (SDS), which was predominantly ttr7hite.to, echoing the scenario of the nineteenth cenury, tUflhite wornen developed their feminism in a Black organization and then turned the thrust of their activist energies elsewhere. And as had happened a century earlier, the development occurred at a time when both the Black and women's movements were being radicalized. In 1965, the year that Malcolm X was assassinated and \U7atts set off a chain reaction of major urban uprisings, the concept of "ITornen's Liberation"-4 slsp beyond "rights"-sr4s first presented at an SDS conference. It was laughed offthe floor.7 By 1967 , the year that Black Power called for tU7hites to be purged from the movement, radical feminisa did succeed in passing a resolution calling for their full panicipation in SDS. It was nevertheless clear that men had not lost their derisive anirude toward the woman question. The SDS publication, Neu Ldt Notes, bore on the cover of the issue that contained the resolution a free-hand illusration of a girl in a baby-doll dress holding a sign that said, "W'e want our rights and we want them now!"8 \Uflhen an SDS wornan spoke at a demonstration at Richard Nixon's inauguration two years later, she was jeered. "Take her off the stage and fuck her," an SDS man cried out. tUfhite women may have had their complaints about SNCC, but the comparison to SDS was revealing. Betty Carmen, a member of both organizations, ob. served: "As a woman I was allowed to develop and had and was given more responsibility in SNCC than I ever was in SDS. It would have been tougher for me to develop at all in SDS."e Despite, or perhaps because of, the ridicule of male radicals, $7hite women's liberation groups began to proliferate throughout the country. In l!56, these relatively radical leftist groups would be joined by another type of women's group: the National Otganization for lVomen. NO\f was composed primarily of "mainstream" women: members of the state commissions on women, employees of various levels of government, trade union representatives, business and professional women. Like the old American Equal Rights Association organized after the Civil \Var, it sought to develop a coalition with prominent Black women. Among NOV's early Black participants and/or founding members were: Aileen Hernandez, forrner ItG'SfU union organizer and an EEOC commissioner; Pauli Murray, an Episcopalian priest and lawyer who helped write the brief for the lYbin v. Cook case which struck down state laws denying women the right to serve on 304,- WueN AND tUfHrne I ENrrR juries; Fannie Lou Hamer; Representative Shirley Chisholm (D, N.Y.); Addie L. ITyatt, international vice-president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union; and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, former executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee and assistant to the administrator of the Federal Security Agency. In fact, the stated purpose of NO\V was to act like an "NAACP for women" to ensure the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act. In later years the organization would go through ia own identity crisis. There were regional and ideological conflicts, resulting in the more radical contingent pulling out of NOV because of its hierarchical strucftrre, and the more conservative elements withdrawing because of the otganization's endorsement of a woman's right to have an abortion. The leadership of NOIUT also quarreled with the non-mainstream elements within its own ranks. For instance, Betty Friedan, NOW's first president, initiated a campaign to undermine the influence of lesbian advocates. Although NO\Ufl had made some important breakthroughs by the late sixties-notably the prohibition of sex discrimination by holders of federal contracts-its significance was still largely ignored by Blacks. One reason was that the achievements of the women's movement in general were obscured by derisive media on the one hand and by urgent racial events on the other. In 1968 for example-the year of Martin Luther King's assassination and the explosion of urban ghettos, the year of a planned "Poor People's March," which had been conceived by the grass-roots