race and sex inequality are far greater: almost all women live with and love men, as fathers, brothers,
husbands, sons; and women’s subordination was naturalized far more deeply than that of blacks.
Furthermore, in the rhetoric of analogizing women to blacks, black women dropped out of the picture.
(One classic feminist book put the hidden exclusion behind the analogy perfectly: All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men.)
Within the civil rights movement, SNCC exerted the greatest influence on the rest of the New Left.
Hundreds of northern students, white and black, volunteered for the summers of 1963 and 1964. Although
not many stayed for two years, as Betita Martínez did, even a summer was intense enough to change them
forever. SNCC’s commitment to internal democracy, nonviolent resistance, and grassroots organizing,
along with the extraordinary patience and bravery of its staff and supporters, showed that even the least
powerful people could make social change. The horrific rage and violence of the southern white
resistance also produced an impact: volunteers experienced vicious beatings in Selma, saw cross
burnings and firebombings by the White Citizens Councils in Mississippi, and experienced the murders of
their friends. Many other women watched this violence on TV. They were learning the intensity with
which those who held power would resist sharing it. Sexual attacks on black women were commonplace,
as white men had virtually never been prosecuted for these crimes. In 1959, in the first case to lead to a
conviction, Betty Jean Owens was pulled out of a car in Tallahassee by a crowd of white men who had
decided to “go out and get a nigger girl,” then raped seven times.^28
As civil rights advocates were winning major legal and legislative victories, most young feminists
were also participating in the anti–Vietnam War movement. This campaign was sparked by Students for a
Democratic Society, a national campus organization that grew rapidly in the mid-1960s, and the draft
resistance movement. Both were even more male dominated than civil rights, for two reasons: only men
could be drafted, so only men could resist the draft; and SDS gained mass support largely through big
demonstrations, public “teach-ins,” and charismatic speeches—at a time when most women were too
diffident, due to their conventionally feminine upbringing, to take on assertive public roles. Karen
Nussbaum was active in SDS and Black Panther support activity at the University of Chicago, and her
older brother was a draft resister. Betita Martínez was no longer a student, but she and virtually all civil
rights supporters saw U.S. imperialism—especially the United States’ invasion of small, distant, and
entirely unthreatening Vietnam to impose the kind of political system it wanted—as a global extension of
racism. That war turned “peaceniks” into critics of American economic and military imperialism.