Vancouver, Canada. Most members of women’s liberation opposed the U.S. intervention in Vietnam
(and later Cambodia). American women in particular, infuriated and agonized by the napalm,
herbicides, firebombing, village razing, and massacres of women and children to which Vietnam was
being subjected, flocked to Vancouver to express solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle for
independence. They had cathected emotionally with Vietnamese heroines portrayed in the news and
were eager to meet them and express sisterhood.
In 1971, a female janitor at Chicago’s city hall contacted the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union
(CWLU) to ask for help. She did the same work as the male janitors but received lower pay, and
although she had more seniority than the men, she was passed over when it came time to get daytime
as opposed to night work. The CWLU then researched the civil service codes, anti-discrimination
laws, and city budgets, worked with a progressive alderman to publish a study, and set off a campaign
by marching on the mayor’s office. Success didn’t come easily, but the feminist group created an
ongoing project, DARE, or Direct Action for Rights in Employment, and eventually won.
In 1972, women at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, both students and faculty, had been
agitating for a daycare center for several years. (The school enrolled many “returning” women
students, working-class mothers who could not afford commercial childcare.) When the university
repeatedly promised to consider the need but did nothing, a group of about a dozen mothers arrived
unannounced at the president’s office, with their toddlers, asking to speak with him. When he once
again said he would consider the request in due time, they conducted a mother-child sit-in. The
president left. The mothers then told his secretary that they were staying and might supply the children
with crayons—but not paper. That grabbed his attention, and before long there was a daycare center.These “firsts” could have been multiplied many times.
There were no “lasts,” no swan songs or concluding events; social movements fade out gradually. But
the fade-outs are by no means failures. It is the nature of social movements not to endure. They make their
impact through intense, mass participation, periods when participants spend prodigious energy and devote
a great deal of time to activism. Except for those who can earn a living through advocacy, few people can
maintain these levels of dynamism and time commitment indefinitely. Students graduate and get jobs;
adults become parents; energies flag. By the 1980s activism was shrinking, vigor weakening. Like a
powerful and fast-flowing river, though, it had radically changed the terrain. It moved rocks, carved out
new courses, and deposited new soil, producing new gender structures. The new riverbed was felt
everywhere: in health, reproductive choices, media and culture, employment, parenting, education, sex,
and man-woman, woman-woman, and parent-child relations. The changes were self-perpetuating, as
women sensed new opportunities and used them to make further changes.
This chapter examines the women’s liberation movement that flourished from 1967 to the mid-1980s.
It discusses its organizing methods, its theory, its problems, and above all its activism. But first, let me
introduce some of its leaders, who may provide a taste of the movement’s diversity of political identities
and backgrounds.
Elizabeth Martínez, known as Betita, was born in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of segregated
Washington, D.C., in 1925, the only child of a Mexican father and a Euro-American mother. Her father,
Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who spoke proudly of the Mexican revolution, had moved up into the middle
class, becoming a professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University. But in Washington, she and
her dark-skinned father had to sit in the back of the buses. The girl next door was not allowed to play with
the Mexican girl. A superb student, she became the first Latina to attend Swarthmore College. After
graduating in 1946 she worked in New York City for a publisher, for the UN, and for The Nation