428 ChaPter^8
“Women’s Liberation” described that more militant approach, and it grew
out of the Civil Rights and New Left movements of the 1960s. “Most of us,”
feminist activists and scholars Linda Gordon and Ann Popkin explained, “came
through the male-dominated New Left.” Women had been active in Civil
Rights struggles, did community organizing, and had an important role in
activities, but “we kept forgetting about ourselves.” Within those movements,
women were “relegated to positions of typists, office clerks, janitors, and flun-
keys... Our opinions were seldom asked for and rarely heard.” The primacy
of antiwar activity, along with the growth of Black nationalism and the depar-
ture of Whites from many Civil Rights organizations, brought most women
into the New Left in 1965 and 1966, and thus exposed females, again, to dis-
crimination within the movement. Men in the New Left had thus subordi-
nated women as a secondary gender—with traditional and less-respected
roles—at the same time they were attacking White racists and the ruling class
for such subordination of the poor and Blacks. Indeed, at the December 1965
SDS convention, when women complained about being treated like second-
class citizens by the men in the group, the conference broke up and women
formed their own caucus. Men in the movement could critique the White
power structure for its racial and class attitudes, but would not tolerate women
who pointed out that male behavior in the New Left was quite similar to the
“enemy.” Toward that end, women began to focus on the questions of their
social roles. They held “consciousness-raising” sessions to discuss common
problems and plan collective action and to take a political role on women’s
issues.
Many women complained about the secondary roles they had in Civil
Rights and New Left groups. In 1967, in the movement journal New Left
Notes, Francine Silbar called on women to organize separately from men.
“Let’s define our own roles,” she advised. “We don’t have to be secretaries to
be useful. What’s the matter with men’s hands anyway?” By mid-1967, anger
and frustration between men and women was rampant in SDS. Female activ-
ists and that “ women are in a colonial relationship to men and we recognize
our roles as part of the Third World,” like Vietnamese or Blacks. They called
on New Left men to recognize and deal with their male chauvinism “in their
personal, social, and political relationships” and for women to demand child-
care, birth control and abortion rights, and equal sharing of housework. With
their “Resolution for Women’s Liberation,” females in SDS had struck a nerve