Anti–Vietnam War leaflet, 1970, Bread and Roses.
In all these movements, men dominated the leadership (though SNCC was more sexually egalitarian
than SDS), while women did the organizational maintenance work. Men seemed to assume control
“naturally,” while women deferred to them. That deference reflected the sexual objectification and
subordination of women, problems that had permeated male culture for eons. Women who had written
brilliant political and historical analyses in their college courses were afraid to speak in large meetings
mainly because of their awareness of being seen but not heard and of being evaluated by their sexual
desirability. It was not only men’s “ways of seeing,” in John Berger’s sense, but also men’s ways of
hearing: a woman might make a point, then a man might make the same point, and the point was thereafter
referred to as his. Men automatically regarded other men as their audience, comrades, co-strategists, or
adversaries. For many women, becoming a feminist grew out of a process of recognizing how men—often
unconsciously—could render women invisible as subjects, only visible as bodies.
Still, feminists’ growing understanding of the depth and, often, subtlety of sexism rarely removed them
from these other New Left causes. Women’s libbers, both individually and through their organizations,
continued to work on anti-war, civil rights, and civil liberties issues. They marched against the Vietnam
War carrying banners like FEMINISTS FOR PEACE or WOMEN AGAINST IMPERIALISM. They
introduced feminist analyses of the motives behind the arms race, military interventions, and support for
dictatorships like those in Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, and Uruguay. Eco-feminists, adopting a term from
French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, connected male domination over women with the destruction of