(crowd shouting, chattering)
WOMAN: Women's health care is being tossed around like a football.
The argument has been over for a very long time...
to have the right to choose.
We should be mad. Are you mad?
(cheering)
WOMAN: You're not allowed to retire from women's issues.
You still have to pay attention,
'cause somebody is gonna try to yank the rug out from under you.
And that's what's happening now.
WOMAN: Don't mess with Texas women!
- (cheering) - Don't mess with them!
♪♪ (electric guitar)
WOMAN: ♪ Save me ♪
♪ Somebody save me ♪
WOMAN #2: It's really hard for people to understand now
what it was like before the feminist movement.
The wedding was the big thing.
The marriage was success.
WOMAN #3: You couldn't have career aspirations.
You couldn't decide not to have a child.
♪♪ (continues)
WOMAN #4: The most beautiful woman
was never satisfied with how she looked.
You could look like Miss America
and you still thought something was wrong with how you looked.
WOMAN #2: Let's not even talk about birth control and abortion.
The horror, the fear of pregnancy
loomed over anything one did.
WOMAN #3: If you were raped, people wouldn't believe you.
If you were battered, no one would believe you.
WOMAN #4: It was feminists who brought up these issues and put them on the table.
WOMAN #5: We had a sense of momentum.
You know, that was the sense of momentum that came from the '60s.
WOMAN #6: It was like all this energy
had been pent up in these women for all these years,
and it just exploded.
♪♪ (continues)
♪ Are you gonna save ♪
♪ Save me? ♪
♪ Yeah, boy ♪
♪ Save me ♪
♪ Whoo, ohh, save me ♪♪
♪♪ (fades)
(applause)
MODERATOR: The topic for discussion this evening
is a dialogue on women's liberation.
- Mr. Mailer. - (applause)
Let's really get hip about this little matter and recognize
that the whole question of women's liberation is the deepest question that faces us,
and we're going to go right into the center of it.
Let me introduce first Ms. Jacqueline Ceballos,
president of the New York Chapter of NOW, the National Organization for Women.
- Ms. Ceballos. - (applause)
I represent that large middle-class group of women
who could have all the comforts and conveniences of life.
In fact, I did.
But I opted out.
Instead, I decided to devote my time
to fight for equality of women.
CEBALLOS: I just had these feelings...
something's wrong, something's wrong.
Then a friend handed me The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan's book.
I could cry even today.
It just hit me. It was where it was. Absolutely. Absolutely.
I read it that night.
And I just knew, it wasn't him, it wasn't me... it was society.
Well, The Feminine Mystique,
it defines women solely in terms of her sexual relation to a man
as a man's sex object,
as wife, mother, homemaker,
and never in human terms,
as an individual person, as a human being herself.
WOMAN: When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique,
everyone was buzzing about women
and their talents being neglected.
Every time we'd been told, I'm sorry we don't hire women,
we thought, you know, isn't it too bad
there isn't an organization that can fight against that?
In 1966, when they were founding NOW,
Betty Friedan asked me if I would do the public relations,
and I said sure.
We knew we were making history.
We had no doubt that this was a historic occasion.
We knew the world needed
a civil rights organization for women's rights.
That's one reason it exploded
so really quickly and powerfully,
was because it was long overdue.
The mayor this afternoon met the women's liberation movement
in a way that he had not before.
As soon as NOW existed, and I heard about it, I was in NOW.
I became president of the Chicago chapter of NOW.
And against the women of this nation, and we intend to react.
Some of the earliest letters that we got was,
"Where are you? I can't find you."
You know, there was no Internet.
There was mimeograph and stamps. That's what we had.
Um, these were people's memberships coming in.
Here's a woman... And this is so typical of the women joining NOW at the time.
"Recruited by myself!" With a big exclamation point.
Let's see.
I've collected buttons all my life, so...
This one's one of my favorites... "Uppity Women Unite."
We certainly did, didn't we?
FOX: The most important motivation
for all of us in founding NOW
was jobs, employment discrimination.
CEBALLOS: We all know that women are underpaid and overworked
and there is no chance for advancement anywhere.
We in NOW teach women how to fight discrimination against their own companies,
how to sue their companies.
(applause)
The want ads were "help wanted male," "help wanted female,"
and all the good jobs, the career jobs were for the males.
In fact, there was one ad that said, "Just got your BA?
Want a job to be secretary
of a good-looking, uh, executive?
You might end up as his wife."
I swear to you!
WOMEN (chanting): Male chauvinism up against the wall.
Male chauvinism up against the wall!
What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want it? Now!
FOX: I remember we had picketers outside The New York Times
and the man would have a sandwich board, said,
"I got my job through The New York Times"
and the woman's sandwich board said, "I didn't."
♪♪ (upbeat theme)
Good morning and thank you very, very much.
I remember going on television shows when I was the chapter president,
and people would seriously ask you
whether you thought women should get equal pay.
"Well, do you think women should get equal pay?" I mean, people would say that.
You had to say, this wasn't just handed down from Moses.
This was discrimination.
(siren wailing)
♪♪ (protesters singing)
What is the point of your march?
There are hundreds of women that want peace, and we want peace now.
COLLINS: I became aware of what was called the younger branch of the movement.
Now, I was 30. But anyway...
They identified themselves as women's liberation,
and this was people coming out of the antiwar movement
and the college movement and the civil rights movement.
WOMAN: In the Southern civil rights movement,
the most important role that anybody could play was the role of an organizer.
♪♪ (singing)
You know, you met with people and you helped them find the courage to stand up...
that it was their voice and their desires for change that gave a movement its power.
♪ We shall overcome ♪
WOMAN: I worked in Alabama, going door-to-door, canvassing,
getting people to go register to vote.
All the women I encountered
who were working in the civil rights movement...
It was an impressive bunch of women.
What I saw was a different image
of what it meant to be a woman, a different model.
And we do realize
with every step forwards,
and with every effort and sincere prayer,
that we will overcome.
- Yes! - All right!
FREEMAN: Although I didn't fully realize it at the time,
I was, in fact, getting the groundwork for being a feminist.
And to feel that you can have the power in a group
to do something you think needs to be done
that you could never do on your own...
I think it's what I was looking for my whole life.
All these other social change movements
that were going on at that time
led to the women's movement.
They gave rise to women's consciousness
of a need to operate on an equal basis.
♪♪ (pop)
I was a part of the civil rights movement.
I was a big part of the antiwar movement while I was a graduate student at Berkeley.
And women in the new left started talking about what we were feeling.
WOMAN: The women were very much discriminated against.
The guys, their names went on things, they became the spokespeople.
We were used to lick the envelopes.
We did the grunt work. We did the real work, actually.
We often did the real work of organizing.
I had been at an SDS meeting and was talking,
and I was a leader in the organization,
and one of guys in the group said, "Aw, sit down and shut up" to me.
WOMAN: And we started talking about our role as women within SDS.
Why weren't we in the leadership positions?
From that it just kind of sparked in everybody a sense of recognition.
Aha! This is like a shared thing.
It's just not me feeling insecure.
So, at an antiwar demonstration to protest the election of Nixon,
we decided we would come together as women for the first time
and announce we had a movement.
WOMAN: And Marilyn Webb gets up on the stage
in front of this huge audience of new left men
and she starts trying to talk.
Well, the moment I started, there was... this crowd went crazy.
(shouting, jeering)
WILLIS: And the men start whistling and catcalling
and saying things like, "Take her off the stage and fuck her."
And people were yelling, "Fuck her down a dark alley!"
It was just... It was insane.
We were like all looking at each other, like, what?
WEBB: I didn't expect movement men to behave like that,
and I was shocked.
People were organizing blacks
and people were organizing welfare mothers,
and then we were organizing women,
and that everybody would see this as another leg of the whole movement.
But we weren't respected.
WOMEN: ♪ The revolution has come ♪
Off the pigs!
♪ Black is beautiful ♪
Free Huey!
BEAL: The black liberation movement had come into its fore,
and we were talking about liberation and freedom
half the night on the racial side.
And then all of the sudden men are going to turn around
and start talking about putting you in your place?
If you don't want any trouble...
BEAL: That was the contradiction in terms that we were no longer prepared to put up with.
So, 1968, we founded the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee
to take up some of these issues.
A number of women felt that we needed to go off on our own
and focus on what we needed to do in our fight for liberation.
ROSEN: I was a graduate student at Berkeley.
And one day I saw a little 3-by-5 card in the student union,
and it said a women's group was forming.
And these consciousness-raising groups spontaneously grew up
in many areas of the country.
When I first heard about the women's liberation movement,
I had two little kids under five.
My connection with the world was, I felt, finished.
During one of my crises of feeling that my life was over,
I heard some young women talking about meetings they were having,
and they were talking about women's liberation,
and they gave the address of a meeting.
So I went to this meeting,
and there were these women talking about their lives
as I had never imagined people could.
Well, you need to be specially trained to be a housewife.
You get married, there are a whole new set of rules.
We still have to look a certain way and be a certain way,
but there's a whole lot more...
ROSEN: We went around the room, and people asked a very simple question.
How would your life have been different if you had been a boy?
Why do you think being a woman
might limit you as a human being, your possibilities?
(woman continues, indistinct)
BEAL: We challenged concepts of masculinity.
We challenged concepts of femininity.
We talked about skin color,
how young black women would put cream on
in order to make theirself light-skinned.
SHULMAN: Suddenly, everything was up for questioning.
Women did all of the family and housework and cooking,
and the men got to make the living
and get all of the attention in the world.
Why was that?
We don't even realize what goes on
until we sit and compare with other women.
GRIFFIN: And we heard each other.
We heard each other into speech.
You could sense it. You could feel it.
You could cut it with a knife, as they say.
The room was electric
with whatever was gonna be shared.
So I said, (sighs)
I've had three abortions,
and the last one was within the last year.
And I started to cry,
because I suddenly understood that I wasn't alone,
that what I had considered personal embarrassment
was something that was part of this whole larger experience.
The big insight of the women's movement was the personal is political.
Problems that you felt were happening to you alone
probably were your fault.
But if it's happening to other people,
then it's a social problem and not just a personal problem.
Once you stop blaming yourself for all this,
it was like somebody had lifted a rock off of you.
Then here were women around you who were ready to go out there and do something about it.
(chanting)
♪ You're out on the streets ♪
♪ Lookin' good ♪
- ♪♪ (continues) - WOMAN: In Washington, DC,
we were like,
"Have Demonstration, Will Travel."
♪♪ (continues)
WOLFSON: We demonstrated in the halls of Congress.
We demonstrated outside of Congress.
There was a group called
Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell... WITCH...
that was the action arm.
People had folding witch hats and capes in their bag.
And we thought if we could dress up like witches
and then give a hex to people.
We wanted to challenge the white men's canon at the University of Chicago.
And so part of the hex went, "Knowledge is power through which you control
our mind, our spirit, our bodies, our soul."
- Hex! - ♪ Yeah ♪
What you see here is the beginning of a movement
that women are human beings and that we have equal rights.
We intend to go to school, we intend to have child care so that we can go to school.
We want the university to provide us with classes that teach us about our history.
ROSEN: I was in the history department
and I knew zip, nada, zero about women's history.
And we realized we didn't know very much about women's literature or women's art.
In fact, we realized that we had gotten degrees and we knew nothing about women.
Well, a group of us decided to call the press.
We took our advanced degrees...
some were PhDs, some were Masters degrees...
and we burned them in public.
That was a very hard thing to do
because we were very proud of those degrees.
♪ I need you to come on, come on ♪♪
ROSEN: I felt so duped, like I had been fooled my whole life.
♪♪ (orchestra)
♪ Oh, there she is ♪
♪ Miss America ♪
SHULMAN: Miss America seemed like the perfect place to demonstrate
the way women were just judged as sex objects,
just judged by their looks.
There were no such standards for men.
We also recognized how racist those beauty standards were.
We weren't going to have any of it.
♪ There'll be no Miss America ♪
It was, all women are beautiful. That was one of our slogans.
All women are beautiful.
♪ There'll be no Miss America ♪
We had a freedom trash can.
Guys were burning their draft cards.
We would burn our bras and other instruments of female torture.
No more girdles, no more pain. No more trying to hold in fat in vain!
CEBALLOS: Even though I was in NOW, I was always with the radicals.
If they're going to demonstrate for Miss America, I'm going to be there.
Women, use your brains, not your bodies!
It was a blast. What can I say? It was very exciting.
It was something NOW wouldn't do.
FOX: They did things that were outrageous,
and some of us thought that these would be made fun of.
And they were.
But they attracted media attention and, of course, they got results.
♪♪ (singing)
But the best part came when,
right at the moment when they were about to crown Miss America,
the women who had snuck up into the balcony
unfurled this huge banner over the edge of the balcony that said "Women's Liberation."
SHULMAN: And the world got to see those words
for the first time on a national scale.
It was a great success.
♪♪ (women singing, indistinct)
The feminists here tonight do not believe a women's place is in the home, right?
As feminists, what we believe in is very simple,
and that is the social, economic and political equality of the sexes.
Because the relationship between the sexes is, in fact, a political relationship.
We are an oppressed group and we have been through history.
If you do something as remarkable
as changing the relationship between the sexes,
everything is at risk, every possible idea.
And many people don't like it.
Especially men don't like it. They're very threatened by it.
Women's Lib really is a lot of insignificant people
that are really trying to gain their own interests
and boost their own ego,
be it by making brash statements
or being on television or what have you.
You're so oversensitive. Why are you so sensitive?
We don't like being so sensitive. It's not pleasant.
We don't like having to always be catching things. We'd rather they didn't exist.
But as long as people are going to be insensitive to our position,
we're going to have to keep correcting them,
because there's no other way to change the consciousness.
Women, given their educational status,
can earn 60% of what men of the same education can.
What that really means is that a woman
with college education... BA...
earns what a man does who has three years of high school.
This is economic discrimination and exploitation.
Women, as well as men,
told me I was wrong over and over again.
Women are not oppressed.
Or what does it matter?
Who cares? You have a lot of influence.
You were working against cultural norms.
You were working against institutions.
MAN: How do you feel about women's liberation?
Woman's place is more at home
than to advance herself too much.
I know the girls in my office feel the way I do.
We're all right the way we are. There's nothing wrong with this.
I'm totally against it.
I feel I don't know what they're being liberated from.
WILLIS: Many women protested
that they liked cooking and housework and catering to men.
But I would argue with some woman
who was being extremely defensive about the movement,
and then six months later would run into her at a demonstration.
♪ Power ♪
♪ Power to the women ♪
♪ It's the women's power It's the women's power ♪
The status quo is being challenged
by the women's liberation movement.
Today it's still a man's world.
SANDERS: I started getting word from people I knew in the movement by then,
and as I heard about these things
I was able to go out and shoot them.
SANDERS: They startled Wall Street one day
by an exhibition in which roles were reversed.
Oh, they're so beautiful, all of them. Ah!
Those men, those sex objects.
WOMAN: It was reported in the newspaper
that there was a woman who worked in the Wall Street area.
She was very well endowed
and men would wait for her
outside the Wall Street train station.
And they would pinch her,
- make sucking noises at her. - (men chattering, cheering)
And I thought, this is pretty disgusting.
Oh, wow. Look at the legs on that one!
So I organized what I rather grandly called the First National Ogle-In.
Those pants, they just bring out your best.
- WOMAN: Hey, how do you like that hat over there? - Oh, what a chapeau!
All the very clever events helped the women's movement a lot.
Keep your best leg forward, sweetie! (kisses)
SANDERS: Now, it isn't my taste to do the kind of demonstrations and things some of them did.
But I was always sort of gleeful about it underneath
and I thought, you know, go for it.
- Look at that long hair! - Oh, it's a hippie on Wall Street.
Oh, I'm so turned on.
We're trying to point out what it feels like to be whistled at,
put down constantly, sexually, every time we walk down the street.
And we don't want to be sexual objects anymore.
- Is love out? Is sex out? - Unless men change, it's going to be very soon.
Unlike NOW, we didn't want a piece of the pie.
We wanted to change the pie.
WOLFSON: We were talking about changing
the whole paradigm of the way men and women interact.
SANDERS: What about marriage?
WOMAN: Marriage is, uh, unpaid labor.
It's a free household slave for each man.
It will take a major social revolution
for women to be truly liberated.
GIARDINA: We began to reinterpret the whole world.
It seemed that male supremacy and male chauvinism was everywhere.
And it was.
What's your general feeling about
the National Organization of Women's complaints?
(chuckles)
To become a member of the Press Club,
you have to be 21 years of age and be a male.
Leave, or police action will be taken. We will make an arrest.
Now please leave.
I have no intentions of taking the sign down or changing the sign.
If you can get a court order to take it down, fine.
So you have no intention of changing your policy of segregated facilities.
Is that correct, sir?
There's a sign out there now. Come on. Let's go.
- Do you discriminate by sex? - MAN: Come on. Let's get out of here.
Come on, toots.
WOMAN: He has repeatedly used his law classroom
to espouse that women do not make good attorneys,
that they're too emotional, they're vindictive.
WOLFSON: We were angry.
Maybe the anger is what carried us through and made us fearless.
- ♪ Start the revolution ♪ - ♪♪ (vocalizing)
WOLFSON: In Washington, DC,
we had a very, very active women's liberation movement.
I think we met every single day for something or other.
WEBB: We had this organizational structure
with all the different groups.
We didn't want it to be hierarchical,
so we decided on the name Magic Quilt.
(chattering)
In Washington, populated by working-class women,
they were getting a fraction of the salaries they felt they should be getting.
They weren't able to support their children.
So we talked to government workers, clerical workers.
People talked to nurses.
And all these women responded so incredibly.
It was like, "Yeah! Yeah!"
SHULMAN: Pretty soon there were these meetings going on in New York
where there weren't just half a dozen women,
but there were 50, 60, 80, even a hundred of them.
On one side of the block there would be a Redstockings meeting.
On the other side of the block there would be a WITCH meeting.
ROSEN: There were conferences.
People drove all night, all day to get to these conferences.
GIARDINA: I got up to Sandy Springs,
and here were this bunch of women
talking about how we would overthrow male supremacy
with this movement.
So we went back to Gainesville right away
and started a women's liberation group.
Somebody else would write a position paper in another city,
they would send it, we would read it.
ROSEN: Every time there was a meeting,
we'd see all these pamphlets
that just raced across the country.
Why do women not get paid properly?
Why do women not have child care?
They were consciousness-raising too.
All of these writings were very precious to all of us
'cause they were the vanguard.
"There are a vast number of women
who are beginning to wake out of the long sleep
that is known as cooperation of one's own oppression and self-denigration,
and they are banding together to make the beginnings
of a new and massive women's movement in America and in the world,
to establish true equality between the sexes,
to break the old machine of sexual politics
and to replace it with a more human
and civilized world for both sexes,
and to end the present system's oppression of men as well as of women."
We had a lot to say. (laughing)
GRIFFIN: "In answer to a man's question,
'What can I do about women's liberation?'
Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself
or bought in a dress store.
Wear a dress, and underneath the dress
wear elastic around your hips and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress, and underneath the dress wear a sanitary napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back shoes, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress with elastic and a sanitary napkin underneath
and sling-back shoes on your feet
and walk down Telegraph Avenue."
ROSEN: In the Bay Area, poetry was a very big part
of our cultural life.
I think on the West Coast we were accustomed to thinking
that skits and songs and poems
were all part of a movement.
GRIFFIN: We had the wonderful precedent of the Beat movement.
Sometimes a thousand people would show up for a poetry reading.
It was a fantastic experience,
both to be part of the audience and also to read.
Alta is gonna read first.
"I never saw a man in a negligee.
Two times I wore special fucky gowns.
You know the type... one look and he turns off the football game.
But they never do.
I was so busy being dainty and smelling fresh I couldn't hump,
couldn't wiggle, couldn't sweat, couldn't scream.
You know damn well I couldn't come."
ALTA: I started writing poetry,
and then I decided I would start my own press.
I called the press Shameless Hussy
because my mother used that term
for women she didn't approve of,
and no one approved of what I was doing.
In 1969, when I started the press,
only six percent of the books in America were by women.
This is one of the famous poets that I published.
This is Ntozake Shange.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When The Rainbow Is Enuf
became a very big deal on Broadway,
and we got famous
because of her
and because of George Sand.
George Sand had been unpublished in America for about 80 years.
One of the earliest poets that I published was Susan Griffin.
"This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.
This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.
It must be repeated.
It must be repeated again and again, again and again.
Because the woman doing dishes, because the woman doing dishes,
has trouble hearing, has trouble hearing."
Sue and Ruth Rosen and I were all in a women's group.
We decided that a newspaper
was really essential for what we were doing.
WOMAN: I saw the first issue of It Ain't Me Babe,
and I immediately phoned them up and I said,
"Hi. I'm an artist. I want to work with you."
It was so exciting.
So I got into the second issue
of the first women's liberation newspaper in the country.
Here's one where I drew the women's liberation movement as the Bride of Frankenstein,
and you see how terrified all the various hippie types are.
The peace movement guy and the hippie guy and the black power guy
are really afraid of this woman who has just emerged.
And she's making the power sign.
This was something so new and so exciting.
And people read us. People read us.
♪♪ (rock)
WOMAN: ♪ Don't go out in the street, little girl ♪
♪ And don't go out into town ♪
♪ Now, you don't know who you'll meet, little girl ♪
♪ There are bad men around ♪♪
WILLIS: We were always being subjected to a double message.
Sex was supposed to be okay now, but if we were pregnant it was our problem.
There was this idea that
even when abortion was illegal,
middle class women could always get it.
I mean, this was not true at all.
WALTER CRONKITE: Thousands of women in the United States
are hospitalized each year
because of post-abortion complications.
5,000 of these women die.
I had a very good friend in high school
who went away to college
and she subsequently
had an illegal abortion and died.
So within three or four months of going off to college,
she was dead.
GIARDINA: People tried to self-abort.
My best friend took pills,
and she had the miscarriage in the dorm shower with the...
Turned on really hard,
hoping the noise would muffle her cries of pain.
BROWNMILLER: Some were able to find an abortionist.
Some had to have the child that they didn't want.
All those kinds of experiences we discovered were universal.
(shouting, chanting)
And abortion became our big, unifying issue.
Free abortion on demand! Sisterhood is powerful!
Women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies
and to control their own lives.
- (cheering) - Yeah!
Our bodies, our lives! Our right to decide!
Not since the suffragettes fought for the right to vote
has an issue been more critical to women than abortion.
Separate the church and state!
WOMAN: Somewhere around 1970
I went to an abortion rights rally in San Francisco,
and it was a sea of white women...
very few women of color.
And someone grabbed a bullhorn
and asked for the African-American women who were there
to gather under a tree.
WOMAN (on loudspeaker): A society that cares about all people.
BURNHAM: And we decided that we would form a group called Black Sisters United.
I was very glad that, you know,
somebody called African-American women together and said,
"You know, maybe we have something to talk about
that might be a tiny bit different from what's coming from the stage."
And indeed we did.
BEAL: I was invited up to Harlem
to speak at an event around abortion.
Remember, in the black liberation movement,
the big debate is, abortion is genocide.
Women should have babies for the revolution.
And I remember going up those stairs
and my knees were literally knocking.
'Cause this was a bunch of nationalists, and I was really scared.
I concentrated a lot
about the death of black women
as a result of illegal abortion
and how we should be able to choose when we want to have children.
So I managed to survive some of the attacks.
And on my way out... twice it happened...
one woman said to me...
whispered to me,
"Thank God you speak up. Thank God you're speaking up."
And another, as I was approaching the door, said,
"Right on. Right on."
"Dear Brothers,
Poor black women decide for themselves
whether to have a baby or not have a baby.
Black women are being asked by militant black brothers
not to practice birth control
because it's a form of whiteys committing genocide on black people.
Well, true enough.
But black women in the United States
have to fight back out of our own experience of oppression.
And having too many babies stops us from teaching them the truth,
from supporting our children,
and from stopping the 'brainwashing, ' as you say,
and fighting black men who still want to use and exploit us."
It was very difficult for middle-class white women
to have any conception about what was going on in communities of color.
And those differences could have been
in conversation with each other,
but if there isn't even an acknowledgement that there's differences
in experience and perspective
and the voice of one is used as the voice of all, then you have a problem.
That was during a period when black women
did not particularly identify with the women's movement.
Mrs. Norton, why are you, a black woman, involved in women's liberation?
I'm involved in the struggle for women's rights
because I believe women are disadvantaged...
black women no less than white women.
Indeed, black women far more than white women.
Women who have spent their lives
working in other women's kitchens
have a different kind of handicap
than women who have been oppressed for their sex
in other ways.
BEAL: We were grappling with that idea
of how do you integrate race, class and gender.
That's the reason why we had some reservations about the term "feminism."
Because "feminism" just seemed to be dealing
with the female aspect of your being.
NORTON: It's important to keep in mind that black women are organized
in their own organizations,
in their own version of black women's liberation.
BURNHAM: Black Sisters United
was essentially a consciousness-raising group
and it was in that group the very first conversations I'd ever had
about differences in sexual orientation.
It was the first group I was in
in which there were lesbian women.
And so it was
just a deep learning experience.
MAN: There may be some here today
that will be homosexual in the future.
There are a lot of kids here,
and maybe some girls that'll turn lesbian.
We don't know.
They can be anywhere.
They can be judges, lawyers.
We ought to know. We've arrested all of them.
I told no one I went to college with that I was a lesbian.
I never told anyone.
When I got to Barnard,
one of the first stories I heard
was that there were two women in the dorm room who were making out
and a guy at Columbia with binoculars saw them and they were expelled.
The message of that story was certainly
that one could not be
an open lesbian at Barnard.
What the '60s were like for many of us...
We grew up in silence and isolation and shame,
and that's why consciousness-raising was so appealing,
because so much of our lives we could not speak of.
The women's movement had coined the motto,
"The Personal is Political."
But when you were a lesbian and you wanted to talk about lesbian relationships
as opposed to heterosexual relationships,
they didn't want to hear about it.
And here I have to give a lot of credit to Rita Mae Brown.
One thing you were not going to tell Rita was to shut up.
I knew that I was as good as they were,
and I knew I am not who I sleep with.
I was in NOW.
And as NOW went on
I called them on the carpet about class, about race,
and then I called them on the carpet about lesbianism.
I said, you are treating women the way men treat you, and those women are lesbians.
Well, my God, you would have thought I unleashed an elephant in the middle of the room.
CEBALLOS: A lot of women were gay, but they didn't talk about being gay.
They used to say that the NOW meetings was the best cruising place in town.
So Betty Friedan was freaking out.
She was saying you can't bring this up now. This is divisive.
This is what men call us anyway.
Any woman that stands up for herself is called a dyke.
And she said this is like the lavender menace. We can't have it.
The fact that we were beginning to be recognized and treated decently was something.
And all of a sudden, the gay issue?
Betty was really, really concerned that it was going to destroy it.
But Betty wasn't the only one concerned. A lot of us were concerned.
I was concerned too.
It's too soon. That's what we thought. Too soon.
They couldn't bustle me out of that organization fast enough.
I was thrown out.
I thought, you know, we really need to talk about what is happening to lesbians.
Why are we reviled by what should be our own people?
So it was a group of lesbians from Redstockings
and lesbians from the Gay Liberation Front
who started meeting together.
And out of that we decided to write a lesbian feminist position paper,
which was the first of its kind.
BROWN: We each tried to write a piece of this thing.
We put it all together and it became The Woman-Identified Woman.
In essence, give your energies to other women.
SHUMSKY: I don't even know who came up with such a wonderful opening line.
"A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion."
Towards May 1970, there was the 2nd Congress to Unite Women.
But there was not going to be a single panel
that dealt with homophobia or lesbianism.
And we decided we were going to do an action.
We had been labeled the Lavender Menace.
So on the day of the congress we came in looking like we were part of the crowd.
And we had a buddy back behind the curtains who knew how to run the lights.
So the lights went out. (gasps)
And when the lights went out, like Superman, we removed our blouses
and exposed our Lavender Menace T-shirts.
(all shouting)
JAY: The audience was completely surrounded by lesbians.
I was a plant in the audience.
I pulled off my blouse. I had a Lavender Menace T-shirt underneath.
I said, "I'm tired of being in the closet in this movement."
BROWN: Well, nobody knew... Excuse the Southern expression.
They didn't know whether to shit, run or go blind. They did not know what to do.
JAY: And finally we took over the stage
and we demanded that issues of lesbianism be put on the agenda.
And they were.
BROWN: It really did awaken people.
It was like, "Oh, you know, you're kinda right."
It was a lot of fun.
♪ Free ♪
♪ Free ♪♪
WILLIS: When feminism first erupted,
it was, for me, an extremely erotic moment,
'cause I think for the first time
I saw the possibility of what I was
really being beautiful.
WOMAN: ♪ I'll be your mirror ♪
WILLIS: I had kind of been the nerdy intellectual.
I felt that I couldn't be myself and be attractive to guys.
So the idea that wearing what you felt like
and letting your hair go wherever it wanted to be
was actually considered attractive
was very exciting.
Radical feminists were really the first to argue
that women's emotional and sexual needs
should be equally important to men's.
When we started talking about sex,
it turned out that very few of us
had ever even had an orgasm.
Not only that, but we were faking those orgasms.
And I don't know exactly how we knew how to fake them.
Because if we'd never had one, how did we know how to fake it?
♪♪ (continues)
The dissatisfaction of this new generation of young women
who were having more sex than women ever had before,
but not enjoying it particularly.
SHULMAN: And once we started going on it,
we didn't stop until we were able to demand
a decent sexual experience from our lovers.
♪ I'll be your mirror ♪
Part of what distinguished the women's liberation branch
from the more middle-aged, middle-class group
was the interest in sexuality and personal liberation.
The sexuality stuff was a little daunting to me.
You know, even at the NOW conferences later on,
I mean, women, they brought speculums
and they examined each other's vaginas and stuff.
I was, like... I was not into that. That was not me.
I was not doing that.
WOMAN: This is the group's first picture.
This is Wendy, Paula, Esther,
Joan, Me... Vilunya...
Jane, Norma, Pamela,
Ruth, Miriam and Judy.
We look impossibly young.
Why does a women's hormonal system
have to be fucked around with all the time
when it's very complicated and very necessary to procreate the species,
when, in fact, it makes much more sense to have a pill for a male
whose hormonal system is not as complicated?
People were very fired up about birth control.
People were having a terrible time,
particularly 'cause it was Massachusetts
and birth control was illegal.
The thing that struck me the most was that everyone had a doctor story
that they wanted to share,
and some of it was about getting the information,
but some of it was just about being patronized.
There was just this sense of,
"Oh, don't worry your pretty little head about that."
And it was an attitude also.
When I gave birth to my daughter,
she was born around 4:00 in the morning,
and he came in a few hours later and he said,
"Well, how did you like the job I did?"
- (laughing) - I go...
Exactly. Exactly.
We then made a list of subjects that we want information about.
You know, only people in their 20s would have the chutzpah
to make a list from birth to death.
Okay, we need to know about anatomy.
We need to know about birth control.
We need to know about pregnancy, postpartum, nutrition.
We need to know about exercise. We need to know about menopause, death.
You know, the whole gambit.
I went to the doctor. I had an abnormal pap test.
I went home, I wrote about it.
So there was a constant flow between what you lived,
what you learned, what you give out.
MIRIAM: So at the point at which we were ready,
we said, "Well, we're gonna do a course."
We had this material that we wanted to share.
The first course was on masturbation.
Nobody had ever said that word out loud at MIT in a room,
and you could hear a pin drop.
Written on the board!
I remember her standing up, this tall, beautiful woman,
and she's writing about masturbation.
Everybody's like, "Oh, my God." (laughs)
And she had this drawing of a vagina
with all the anatomical parts.
And she started talking about what our genitals look like.
Whoa, you know.
Never heard or thought about any of this before, so this was quite compelling.
I remember that after the first session,
everybody said, "Well, we want to have all the information.
What are those pieces of paper that you had?"
Everybody wanted copies of each of the topics of the course.
Then we said, "This is going to become a book."
We each took the subject that most involved us personally
and started to learn more about it so we would have a larger chapter.
VILUNYA: The first version, the newsprint version,
sold 240,000 copies.
JOAN: Suddenly we have this book, and it's a best seller,
and it was something no one ever anticipated.
WENDY: We felt like any money this book was going to make
came out of women's lives 'cause women needed it,
and so we would use the money to fund women's health stuff.
PAMELA: We made our chapters of these letters that came in
with these personal experiences.
JOAN: Any anecdote became material for the book.
What we were saying is we were a living lab, you know.
That no one knows that much about women's lives.
I said, "We're gonna sell a million copies,"
and people laughed.
I thought, no, because every woman has a body.
It doesn't matter what class or color you are.
We all have the same anatomy.
Holy cow!
Try not to drool on it, okay?
If Kim finds out I have this, she'll kill me.
(knocking)
ROXANNE: My background was very, very different
from many of the people I met on the left in general.
My family were sharecroppers from Oklahoma,
and we were very, very poor.
For me, anything negative that ever happened had to do with class.
I was being put down... even when men were misogynist,
it was because of class.
I didn't internalize it as because that's the way they treat women.
So it wasn't until I was at UCLA
I started seeing how stacked the deck was against a woman.
I got a professor, a young professor.
The first day he met with me he says,
"If I can't fuck you, I'm going to fuck you."
So I quit.
I quit graduate school.
I burned all my bridges, yeah.
And that's when I flew out to start a women's revolution.
"I am a revolutionary. I am a feminist.
There is no possibility for me to be liberated
except that all women be liberated,
and that means power and control
on a political, economic level.
Having had nothing,
I will not settle for crumbs."
♪ Rebel girl, rebel girl ♪
ROXANNE: We formed a group called Cell 16.
We had a motto that we were gonna change the world forever and totally.
We didn't tone it down at all.
There were murders that summer in Boston,
and it was headlines... more slain girls.
We started street patrols for the factories down by the river.
Very dark when the women got off,
and they were constantly being mugged and assaulted and raped.
The first time something did happen on a patrol,
these guys yelled at us, "Bunch of lezzies!"
Fuck you!
I went up and punched him.
And Abby did an upper block.
The guy ran.
He was the most terrified man in Boston that night.
(shouts)
This convinced us all we really needed to make self-defense a priority.
(body thuds)
So we started recruiting women for an all-women's class,
and we went from just our group to about 100 people.
It was important to all of us that we owned the streets.
One evening in my Tuesday night consciousness-raising group,
West Village-1,
of New York radical feminists,
Diane Crothers walked in with a newspaper,
It Ain't Me Babe from San Francisco,
and said, "There's an article here we all have to read."
And it was a story about a woman in Marin County
who'd been raped during a hitchhike.
We read the article, and we went around the room,
and it turned out one woman, Sarah, had been raped.
And the police said to her,
"Who'd want to rape you?"
A friend of mine was raped at knife-point
in her bed in off-campus housing.
I went with her to the student health service,
and she was given a lecture on her promiscuity.
It was very common in a courtroom
to blame the woman for the rape.
And rape was looked at as a crime that occurred
because a man had strong sexual urges
that he couldn't satisfy any other way.
No!
And it was only with the feminist movement
that it came out that rape is not a crime of passion.
It's a crime that expresses the urge to dominate.
BROWNMILLER: People were not used to thinking of rape
as a political crime against women.
That was our slogan.
"Rape is a political crime against women."
♪ Well, Papa, I ain't your friend no more ♪
- ♪ I ain't gonna make your bed ♪ - ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Papa, I ain't your friend no more ♪
- ♪ Better get a dog instead ♪ - Right on!
♪ Well, "Back Street Girl," "Under My Thumb" ♪
♪ Start looking out where you're coming from ♪
WOMAN: The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band was huge.
♪ And, Papa, don't lay that shit on me ♪
♪ The fun and games are gone ♪
In those days, you had to have balls to be a rock musician.
Well, guess what. No.
Seeing women being smarter and tougher,
and the Rock Band was a fabulous example of that,
'cause of being loud on top of everything else.
- ♪ Go down to the corner ♪ - ♪ Get yourself fixed ♪
Whoo! ♪ Can't stop doing what you do to me ♪
♪ You're just gonna drive me wild ♪♪
Chicago was a hotbed of feminist organizing.
There were a lot of people doing a lot of things.
ROTHSTEIN: And there was no communication amongst us.
There was no structure to bring us together.
And at the same time, there were a lot of new people
who were interested in the women's movement,
women who were reaching out.
And so we decided to form the Chicago Women's Liberation Union
as a way to network us all together.
There was the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective,
the Action Committee for Decent Child Care.
We built a Speaker's Bureau,
the Liberation School for Women.
And we would have an open orientation session,
and we would put about 30 chairs out,
and we would get over 100 women.
We didn't know who these women were.
We didn't know how they learned about us.
But they kept coming and they kept coming.
ARCANA: They had classes on stuff women need to know.
Automobile repair, women's history,
the facts of women's lives.
Why have a school? Because these things are not being taught in the schools.
I taught women's sexuality,
contraception, abortion.
Abortion was a very important issue to both groups at that time,
with NOW doing more of the legal work
and the Women's Union doing more of the direct service work.
In 1964, a friend mentioned
that his sister was pregnant and nearly suicidal.
Could I do anything about it?
And I was referred, through a series of connections, to a doctor.
Asked him if he would perform an abortion. He said yes.
And a few weeks later, someone else called
and said they also were looking for an abortion.
The word had spread.
At that point, I decided to set up a bit of a system.
I was living in a dormitory at the time.
So I told people to ask for Jane.
(line ringing)
I could tell within the first minute what they were calling about,
because there was a pause, there was a hesitance, there was a tension.
Many were frightened.
Because three people discussing an abortion in those days
was a conspiracy to commit felony murder.
COLLINS: Jane was this service that was established in Chicago
that provided abortions when abortion was illegal.
- (ringing) - We would have women call us
who were in need of the abortion service.
And of course, having Jane available,
without having to refer them to the mob,
was a godsend.
BOOTH: The group would take in the calls, and we would do counseling.
Then women would be brought to specific houses
on a rotating basis
where the procedures would be done.
The service moved every day from somebody's home to somebody's home,
which is quite amazing.
ARCANA: I joined the abortion service
because I knew that women are sometimes desperate,
and they are going to hurt themselves
in order to end their pregnancies.
When I began Jane work,
a few dozen women a week were coming through.
After about six months, there were at least 100 women coming through.
Ultimately, one really good abortionist
taught Janes how to do abortions
with skill and care,
and then those Janes taught other Janes.
All of us were always aware
that what we were doing was illegal,
that we could go to jail.
You might have to throw everything in your bag and run down the back stairs
at any moment.
But we understood that it was important work,
useful work, necessary work.
(people chattering)
MALE REPORTER: What is the relationship of the movement
to the whole question of motherhood
and the affection of mothers for children and so forth?
It's about being able to have children if you want them
and being able not to have children if you don't want them,
and if you want to have your kids at day care centers.
If you want to work, then you can do that too.
In the women's movement, the myth was that we hated men,
that we hated marriage, we hated children.
That's not right.
The group I was in, we talked mostly about child care
being the absolute precondition for women's emancipation.
FOX: One of the earliest battles was for child care.
It's in NOW's statement of purpose.
We knew that women could not hold jobs and be promoted
until society recognized its obligation
to help take care of our children.
And I remember at some of the early demonstrations,
those who had kids, we would bring the kids.
People would say things like,
"We can't talk with you nursing the babies."
We would say, "Show us the day care center.
We'll be happy to bring the kids to the day care center."
Feminists are accused of wanting woman out of the home
and leaving children, come what may.
We proclaim that when we talk about 24-hour child care,
we mean to have it now!
Twenty-four-hour child care centers today, now,
beginning this school year!
NORTON: After a great deal of work,
where feminists were in the leadership,
we got close to having a real child care system.
ROSEN: In 1971,
amazingly enough, the women's movement,
the Congress, the Senate,
passed a comprehensive child care act.
Most historians don't even remember that, forget about the rest of society.
And President Nixon vetoed it.
He said, "We don't want to make our women like Soviet women.
We want women to take care of their own children."
That was a tragic moment in history.
And we've been paying for it ever since.
It's one thing for women to pay the price.
It's another thing for generations of children to pay the price as well.
I can think of, frankly, of no more important issue
that early feminists raised than educational child care.
Poor people, black women, women on welfare,
are often sterilized against their will.
I mean, that's been known to happen.
The same hospital that wants to sterilize the black women
will not let a middle class white woman be sterilized.
If she says, "I don't want to have any more children,"
they say, "You have to be crazy.
You have to have a medical reason. You have to be sick.
There has to be something wrong with you."
Those things are two ends of the same dimension.
It's still the issue of control over one's body,
whether it's the right to have children if you want them, or the right not to.
(shouting)
In Puerto Rico,
over one-third of the women on the island
have been sterilized.
That means over one-third of the women
are never going to be able to hold a baby in their arms.
Women in Puerto Rico were used as guinea pigs,
as a way of controlling the population.
And with that sterilization program being brought to New York City,
we actively organized,
raising the consciousness about this.
(chanting in foreign language)
The Young Lords Party
was dedicated to issues
effecting Puerto Ricans in the United States.
We were the first ones to begin to articulate an idea
of reproductive justice.
It's just as important for women in our communities
to be able to have children,
raise children that don't go hungry,
have day care,
as well as have access to birth control
and the right to a safe abortion.
VELEZ: The kind of developing feminism that we had in the Young Lords
was make very clear decision
not to separate,
to wage struggle internally with our brothers.
The men had written this program.
One of the points dealt with revolutionary machismo.
What an oxymoron.
We weren't having it,
so we formed a women's caucus
and made demands on the men in the organization.
It was ultimately changed to:
"We want equality for women.
Down with machismo and male chauvinism."
It was important that it's not just women making that statement.
It should be men saying, "Yo, brother.
That's really a macho attitude you're taking. You need to check your shit."
And that's what happened.
MAN: What does women's lib mean to you?
MAN #2: I think they have a lot of good points. Extremely fine points.
The abortion laws are ridiculous.
The fact that, uh, unequal pay... that's ridiculous.
- They're not after your job? - No, I don't think so.
I don't think they can do my job.
I think the no-bra thing is ridiculous.
I'm not so sure about the day centers.
The girls I think of got it over the guys.
They get everything paid for and everything else.
I don't see what they're really arguing about.
Men treated them like ladies as long as they acted like ladies,
and I'm afraid we're losing that femininity.
By that time, we were so angry
that it wasn't so far,
such a reach to say,
"Why are you sleeping with men? Aren't you sleeping with the enemy?"
There were a lot of women very open to the idea
that they should be gay.
The Furies had come to Washington DC.
The Furies was a collective of all women,
most of whom were gay.
My God, what a trip that was. I'm glad I did it, I really am.
But you know, all these women in one house,
it was like PMS in concert.
We were talking about what really is a lesbian,
and how should a lesbian live
and we should withdraw all of our energies from men, all this kind of stuff.
Could we live together in this way and prove that it could be done?
And I think in many ways it worked,
but in other ways, it didn't.
It became too ideological... of which I was guilty, you know.
WOLFSON: I remember being pregnant with Eric
and sitting there in the women's liberation office
when the Furies' announcement came
that male infants were the enemy,
that women could not come into the office with a male child.
That stopped me short. This was even before I had my own kid.
This is wrong.
Women's liberation had the danger,
where you begin to tell each other what to do.
You begin to tell each other how to think.
You begin to pressure people... "You need to leave him."
And there were some women afterwards that were sorry that that's what they did.
We were inventing things,
and that is a very interesting edge to be on.
We were still figuring out what it meant to create a movement
that could help to change the whole world's perception of women,
challenge patriarchy.
You don't have much help,
and you don't have many clues about how to proceed.
We were figuring it out,
and it wasn't always easy, and we didn't always do it right.
Part of the reaction of first new left women,
and then it spread to other women,
to male-dominated authority,
was not only to view structure as bad but leaders as bad.
What women were trying to do was to not have leadership
that was a hierarchy,
but to have leadership that is collective.
I mean, in a certain way it was modeled on utopian ideas,
but there invariably became some people
who were more listened to than others, I guess,
is the only way you can say.
And I was one of those people.
Part of this exuberance of women
finding a movement that was gonna help them find their own voice,
there was also a competition for leadership at the same time.
'Cause this was, for many of us, our one shot
to be progressive leaders
and be recognized
and be able to get our ideas heard.
The first core concept of sexist thought
is that men do the important work in the world
and that the work done by men...
FREEMAN: Doing the kinds of things that were normally associated as male activities...
being interviewed, getting your name in the press,
making speeches, giving lectures.
Those kinds of things... those were condemned.
The only people I had seen in leadership roles were men,
so to be fair, maybe I was mimicking a male-style leadership.
So they kicked me out of Magic Quilt.
It was devastating to have all these people sit in a room
that you had organized in a group to say, "Get out."
People had read about me, so I was like this mini celebrity.
In Cell 16 they said that I was oppressing them.
The most incredible thing anyone ever said to me, I think,
is that, "I feel oppressed just by the fact that you exist."
Okay. (chuckling)
You want me to stop existing?
Listen, I dropped out of the women's movement three times...
'69, '79 and '89.
(laughs)
The women's movement brought about a social revolution in this country.
And while it was painful to be part of that social revolution,
it had to be done.
WOLFSON: Everybody had taken the birth control pill.
Back then it was a huge amount of estrogen.
Nobody had informed us that there could be side effects.
My side effect was my hair started to fall out.
And we got word of hearings on the Hill
about the birth control pill.
WEBB: All the people listed to testify were male doctors and drug company executives.
Males, all.
Not one patient, not one woman, nothing.
I have seen women with thrombophlebitis,
weight gain, nausea, irritable bowel,
cancer of the breast, rheumatoid arthritis-like syndrome.
WOLFSON: Serious reactions.
The blood clots, the heart attacks, the strokes.
They knew about it when they gave it to us,
when they dispensed it like candy.
I want to know how many side effects we have to hear
before somebody does something about these pills.
We are not going to sit quietly any longer.
You are murdering us for your profit and convenience.
If you ladies would sit down...
- Our lives have been interrupted by taking this pill. - We're conducting...
Don't think the hearings are any more important than our lives!
MAN: Now will everyone please leave the room... press and everyone else.
That's a fine way to run...
WOLFSON: We stopped the hearings,
- and they tried to bargain with us... - (gavel rapping)
'cause we were demonstrating every time they reconvened them.
Yes, we are objecting to the fact that there are no women testifying
and that there are no women on the panel.
We are tired of men controlling our lives and our bodies.
And one of our absolute bottom lines was
there had to be information given to women.
And we did get the first patient package insert
which is informed consent.
We were bringing DC to its knees
around women's issues.
MALE NEWS REPORTER: The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover,
found a new and, to his mind, potentially dangerous group...
the women's liberation movement.
Hoover sent the following directive, quote...
"It is absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigation
of the women's liberation movement
to determine any possible threat they may represent
to the security of the United States."
End quote.
ROSEN: J. Edgar Hoover said women couldn't be agents.
So the FBI got women who were informants.
These informants were sitting in on women's consciousness-raising groups,
writing stories back to their agents saying,
"You know, they're just talking about the fact
their men aren't doing child care,
they're not washing the dishes, they're leaving a mess.
They expect us to do everything.
I don't see why I should sit in it on anymore."
They would forward that to J. Edgar Hoover,
who would write back and say, "Continue surveillance.
These women represent a national security threat."
The irony is, for the most part,
women did not do anything dangerous or violent.
The really dangerous thing was talk.
Because telling the truth and talking is very revolutionary.
We're into a very hypocritical thing about the education of women.
We pretend there's a lot of opportunity out there.
"So study hard, girls, and go forward."
And there isn't any opportunity out there, and everyone's kidding them.
WOMAN: ♪ I've been out walking ♪
Racism and anti-feminism
are two of the prime traditions of this country.
I no longer accept society's judgment
that my group is second class.
If women are to be married,
women should receive pensions.
(applause)
All women are lesbians, except those who don't know it, naturally.
They are, but don't know it yet.
I am a woman, and therefore a lesbian.
We talk in different tones.
We don't all agree.
We have the right to define our own differences.
MAN: Now I would like to ask Germaine Greer...
I really don't know what women are asking for.
- Now, suppose I wanted to give it to them. - (women laughing)
Listen, you may as well relax, because whatever it is they're asking for, honey,
it's not for you.
(loud laughter)
♪ And I had a lover ♪
In the name of the mother, the daughter
and the holy granddaughter,
"a-women."
The women in this country are gonna see to it
that the insane directions of this country get changed,
that we stop the business of having wars and military programs,
start the business of having some money for health and housing and child care,
and we're gonna see to it there's a liberation not only of women, but men and women...
♪ It's just that I've been losing ♪
♪ So long ♪
I've been very interested to see the amount of publicity
that has gone to the women's liberation movement in just the last two or three months.
We couldn't get coverage anywhere except in a very joking fashion in 1966.
Everybody thought it was a colossal joke.
I think people aren't laughing anymore.
They recognize the seriousness of it.
COLLINS: At the NOW national convention for 1970,
Betty Friedan gets up and gives her speech.
And much to our shock,
she announced that there would be a women's strike
on August 26, 1970,
the 50th anniversary of women's right to vote.
When we take to the street in Boston, and in New York,
and in Chicago, and in Atlanta, and in Florida, and in California...
Everyone was like, "Oh, my God. Now what do we do?"
CEBALLOS: So Betty Friedan tells the press
50,000 women would march in New York City.
Every week we would have a notice in the Village Voice.
These younger women, they would pour into NOW,
and we would plan this march and strike.
"Don't iron while the strike is hot"
was the slogan.
And we took this poster and distributed it all over town.
CEBALLOS: I said, "How are we going to get 50,000 to march?"
And Pat said, "We'll take over the Statue of Liberty."
And I said, "How can you do that?
The Puerto Ricans did last year, and they're in jail."
So they got two huge banners 40 feet long.
- (ship horn blows) - They had the banners rolled up in their jeans,
and they were walking like they were crippled.
(horn blows)
We got to the island. So we had a group that was going to start demonstrating.
Out of the house and into the world!
CEBALLOS: I was gonna go up those winding stairs.
At the top one where we were putting, "Women of the World Unite,"
I just remember the wind was so strong.
And the next thing we knew, the guys caught on.
By this time there were helicopters.
Then Mayor Lindsay called and he said, "Let the women be. Let them alone."
♪ Glory, glory hallelujah ♪
CEBALLOS: It was a sensation! It went around the world.
Time magazine picked it up, the Italians, the French.
It was fabulous. Can you imagine? "Women of the World Unite."
All that publicity helped.
WOMEN: ♪ Glory, hallelujah It's liberation time ♪
Tomorrow, 50 years after we gave them the vote,
the women are going to strike to support their liberation demands.
Thankfully, Cedar Rapids women's liberation movement is pretty much dormant.
If I knew what they were going out on strike for, I'd be able to answer.
No, I don't believe I will.
I don't think that's necessary at all.
I don't think too much of it. A woman's place is in the home.
So remember, men... if you come to work tomorrow,
and your secretary refuses to do the filing,
and then go home and find that your wife has refused to do the cooking,
don't blame them.
Remember, you gave them the vote 50 years ago.
This is Mike Scott, male chauvinist, TV 9, Eyewitness News.
The press just thought this was so crazy.
And this kept working for us in some ways.
The Sun Times put out a headline the day before...
"Will women strike?"
CEBALLOS: So the day of the march,
I was walking towards Fifth Avenue,
scared to death
that I was gonna see only 3,000.
And I will never, never forget.
You couldn't see the end of the line.
When you looked out at everybody,
I mean, there were women as far as you could see.
Freedom now! Freedom now!
Sisterhood is powerful! Join us now!
Join our ranks! Every woman, join our ranks!
SHULMAN: People were cheering us.
They hung out of the windows and out of balconies
and cheered us on and waved flags for us.
Freedom now!
(chanting)
I was recognizable in New York then,
so I put one of these African turbans on my head,
wore some African garb to say,
"See, I'm in the women's movement. What's wrong with you?"
- Whoo! - Freedom!
There's something wrong when an attractive girl can make more money
as a Playboy Bunny or a cover girl than as anything else.
I'll never be more shocked than I was when I walked up on the podium that day
and looked out and saw the entire plaza was filled.
And feeling the support of these thousands of people all at once,
it was an exhilarating feeling.
WOMAN: We didn't see serious programs devoted to issues that concerned women.
Issues, not recipes. Day care, not chocolate mousse.
I want the freedom not to have a husband.
(cheering)
I want a society where men and women cooperate, not compete.
Where women have to support their children
and men help to rear them.
(cheering)
HERNANDEZ: I think what men want to do, too, is join with women
in making this a society that cares about all people.
Equal pay for equal work!
When do we want it? Now!
And what I would love today is the women and the men
putting their fingers up like this.
And we now know that we have the power to unite together,
to work together, to make the changes that are needed.
And that we have your attention, and that we have the headlines in the media.
You didn't make us. We're making you take us seriously.
MILLETT: It felt like we had triumphed.
It felt like we were changing the world.
Now we are a movement.
It's probably no accident that we, in our time,
didn't know anything about the suffrage struggle
and how long it took to get the vote... 50 years.
You know, I'm one of the few left who can say
their mother worked for suffrage.
I'm very proud of that.
My mother felt so strongly about getting the vote,
and she was so thrilled to get it.
And I loved going with her to vote when I was only five.
And they pulled that curtain,
and nobody... you could only see people's feet.
I just found that kind of mystical, and I still do.
And I later decided
that two emancipators of women were the vote and birth control.
BROWNMILLER: We live in a country that doesn't credit any of its radical movements.
They don't like to admit, in the United States,
that change happens
because radicals force it.
To take away the history of how change got made
helps to cuts down on activism
because people don't think that I, an everyday person,
could make a big social change.
The Supreme Court gave us Roe vs. Wade,
and I'm just a regular woman.
But that's who made abortion rights come...
just a student, and just a mother,
gathering together and protesting.
(crowd chattering)
This is Our Bodies, Ourselves, ninth edition.
It just came out two weeks ago.
We are so happy.
It's like our baby.
It's amazing to think that we have been around for 40 years.
And to me, the global piece has been so amazing.
Our Bodies, Ourselves has given any group of progressive women in any country
the text of the book to adapt it to their own cultural context.
There have been these marvelous projects that have started throughout the world,
and it's been going on since the '70s really.
(crowd applauding)
WOMAN ANNOUNCING: Mama Asiah from Tanzania.
JUDY: For our 40th anniversary, women came from Israel,
from Nepal, from Turkey, from Armenia, from Nigeria, from Tanzania.
They have amazing stories to tell.
In India, when I was doing the work with the Bangla version of OBOS,
young girls hadn't heard of it, but they were jubilant
that something like this was coming to them.
And they all said, "Oh, this is going to take us to a very different place."
So thank you, all of you, for giving us back our bodies
and the right to health.
Thank you so much.
ROSEN: I think there are great achievements of the women's movement.
The women's health movement is one of them.
We named sexual harassment.
We named domestic violence, the battering of wives.
We then made it illegal.
WEBB: Every aspect of life has changed.
Families are different.
My daughter is leading a completely different life because of the women's movement.
They both take care of the children.
They both earn money. They both work.
There's still some sex segregation in the workforce, for sure.
But there were whole fields that were simply closed down to women,
and that's done with.
I don't think we're going back on that.
WILLIS: I think the most profound thing that feminism did for me
was to make me feel that I was capable of genuine freedom.
Before the women's movement, I had my own work.
I knew I wasn't going to live a traditional woman's life.
I felt that I probably wasn't going to have children.
And ultimately, I did have my daughter.
And I think were it not for feminism,
I don't think I could have done that.
WOMAN: Right after I got out of college,
it was November 2006.
My mother passed away.
I got all of these letters and e-mails
from her friends and her colleagues,
all of the feminists that started the women's liberation movement.
And I started to realize that even though I was down with the word "feminism,"
I didn't really know what it meant to me and to our generation.
I think the sexism that we experience
is a little more insidious and it's harder to point out and say,
"See. See. That's sexism."
But I know a lot of young kick-ass feminists out there.
They're blogging, they're out in the streets, they're organizing.
What do you do when you're under attack? Stand up, fight back!
WOMAN: The problem is rapists, and we need to address the problem!
And let me give you a hint. It's not our clothes.
- It's not. - (cheering)
NONA WILLIS: There's this new movement called slut walk
that has now swept 70 different cities.
And it was started by a young woman who heard a cop say about a woman who was raped,
"Well, she was asking for it. She was dressed like a slut."
Believe it or not, people are assaulted regardless of what they wear.
Some people who get raped are in burkas.
NYPD, rape is a felony!
We created a revolution that we are still debating in our society.
We're still arguing over many issues that women raised 40 years ago,
like abortion, like child care.
We still don't have any child care.
ARCANA: In terms of reproductive health, reproductive justice,
we've gone backward in a big way.
WOMEN (chanting): We must decide their fate!
Not the church, not the state!
Women must decide their fate!
Not the church, not the state!
Women must decide their fate!
If we can have order in the chamber,
so that the members can properly cast their vote...
Not the church, not the state!
The bitter lesson is that no victories are permanent.
All our rights are like that.
They're only as good as we maintain them.
This fight is not over. This fight is not over.
I'm seriously disheartened by the current situation,
but at the same time, I'm angry.
And one of the things I learned decades ago...
When we're that angry about something that bad,
we take action against it.
COLLINS: I want people to know that if they organize,
they can actually make really profound change.
So that all women may be free!
You can't convince me that you can't change the world, because I saw it happen.
Freedom!
SHULMAN: But this is a moving target.
Freedom is something that is over the horizon,
and you can't stop sailing toward it
just because you don't reach it.
You just keep going,
and every generation has another opportunity to take it further.
We're black, we're proud! We're feminists! We will be loud!
Show me what a feminist looks like!
This is what a feminist looks like!
Show me what a feminist looks like!
This is what a feminist looks like!
WOMEN: ♪ Hurricane ♪
♪ Hurricane ♪
♪ She's a hurricane ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around ♪
♪ Hide your mother when she's in town ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around ♪
♪ And blow you away ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around ♪
♪ Hide your mother when she's in town ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around and blow you away ♪
♪ But you come running back You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ You come running back You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ Hurricane ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around ♪
♪ Hide your mother when she's in town ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around and blow you away ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around ♪
♪ Hide your mother when she's in town ♪
♪ She comes down to ride around and blow you away ♪
♪ But you come running back You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ You come running back You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ You come running back You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ You come running back ♪
♪ You come running for more ♪
♪ More ♪
♪ More ♪♪