Book Review : 4 Activist Women Whose Message Was in the Media

The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World by Marcia Cohen (Simon & Schuster: $19.95: 360 pages)

“Picketing. Demonstrating. Intruding. Showing off!

“And at the Plaza Hotel!

“My God, who were these women?”

Marcia Cohen is describing a 1969 sit-in at the then-men-only Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York, an early feminist skirmish led by Betty Friedan. But Cohen sets out to answer her rhetorical question on a grand scale in “The Sisterhood,” a kind of folk history of the women’s movement that focuses on four of its media-wise leaders: Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett.

“We would hear the voices of millions,” Cohen says, “but, above all, we would hear the voices of a few.”

Of course, each of these matriarchs of the women’s movement was savvy in the ways of the media. In that sense, the book is a self-fulfilling prophecy--Friedan, Steinem, Greer and Millett are authors and journalists who have earned a place in yet another work of the media because they were so adept at catching the attention of the media in the first place.

“They learned . . . to use the media just as the Irish had used politics, the blacks had used sports, the Jews the professions, the Italians construction,” she writes, without any apparent humorous or ironic intent.

“And just as the civil rights and anti-war leaders had used the media to convey social demands, so did these feminist oracles speak, not just for themselves, but for all women.”

An Intimate Glimpse

“The Sisterhood” gives us an intimate glimpse of these four women, and--in the style of old-fashioned “New Journalism”--Cohen always searches for the portentous anecdote.

“It was a great sorrow that my parents were overprotective,” she quotes Betty Friedan as saying, recalling her childhood in Depression-era Peoria, Ill., “and wouldn’t let me have a bicycle.”

The innocent anatomical explorations of a 6-year-old Germaine Greer, the encounters with “dirty old men” in a park, and the severe punishments she earned from her mother all become auguries of the future: “And you can’t hit me now, even in fun, because I have a completely uncontrollable response,” Greer is quoted. “I just burst into tears.”

Cohen honors the traditions of New Journalism, too, by giving us abundant and evocative details, sparing no adjective and working hard to fill out and plump up each scene.

So we see young Kate Millett--who did have a bike--”speed down the river road past the sweet green budding elms to the banks of the great rolling Mississippi . . . dressed in her black serge accordion-pleated skirt and saddle shoes . . . her long, dark braids flying behind her.”

It’s significant, too, that Cohen’s attention is so often fixed on the media. The lives of Steinem, Friedan, Millett and Greer are recounted in terms of the books, movies, plays, television shows and magazine articles that influenced them, or featured them and their work, or--in many cases--featured the work of men and women they knew and loved (or hated).

Indeed, there is enough celebrity name-dropping here to fill several editions of People magazine.

We learn, for example, that Friedan befriended Helen Gurley Brown when these two very different women met at a television studio while promoting their very different books.

“We talked about business, promotion, all that,” Friedan recalls, reminding us of what they had in common.

And, more often than not, the expressions of militancy are defined almost exclusively in terms of the media: “Friedan’s publicist,” Cohen writes, “would recall her screaming at hostess Virginia Graham on ‘Girl Talk’: ‘If you don’t let me have my say, I’m going to say orgasm 10 times.’ ”

Less Accurate Version

“The Sisterhood” is subtitled “The True Story Behind the Women’s Movement,” as if Cohen were debunking some other, less accurate version of feminist history.

The adjective is mostly hype--the truth in “The Sisterhood” is, more often than not, superficial and unsurprising. If we are to believe Cohen’s revisionist account of what she dubs “the Golden Age of Feminism,” the women’s movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s was “a media circus--a crazy time of outrage, discovery and risk, when fame and fortunes rose.”

Some of the most telling moments in “The Sisterhood” are apparently unintended and inadvertently remind us that many of the most profound and troubling challenges in a woman’s life cannot be explained in terms of media coverage or the organizational politics of the National Organization for Women.

For instance, Gloria Steinem confesses that she was mildly distraught (“Yes, I thought about suicide”) when she discovered that she was pregnant in London in 1956 (“It was like being colonized”), but only until she found a doctor who was willing to perform a discreet abortion.

A Decision on Her Own

“I used to try to stir up feelings of guilt,” Steinem reflects. “But I could never muster up one iota of feeling. It was the first time that I took control of my own life, the one time I made a decision totally on my own.”

I wondered, as I read these words, how many women are capable of dismissing an abortion so coolly, or of looking at the experience purely as one of self-liberation. Still, we must admire Steinem for being so candid about her emotions, or lack of them.

One might wish in vain for more of these moments of self-revelation, more expressions of emotional and intellectual honesty, and more attention to the linkages between the “oracles of feminism” and the millions of women whom they sought to lead and whose lives they sought to change.

That, I suspect, is the “true” story of the women’s movement.