Work That’s Never Done

Ruth Rosen’s history of the post-World War II feminist movement begins and ends with quotes from poets. This is appropriate, for her book--like the best poetry--is an exploration of both reality and consciousness. She begins with Anne Sexton, a self-described “victim of the American Dream,” and ends on a more hopeful note with Muriel Rukeyser. Rukeyser once asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” and then answered: “The world would split open.”

Rukeyser was exaggerating slightly; throughout history, individual women have often told the truth, and the world remained more or less intact. What splits things open is the development of oppositional social movements, which are formed when individuals come together with others who are also suffering and who, rather than accept their pain as natural, proceed to analyze its source and change the world accordingly.

It is this process that “The World Split Open” explores so well. Rosen’s book is not as ambitious as Sheila Rowbotham’s wide-ranging “A Century of Women” (1998); unlike Rowbotham, Rosen concentrates specifically on feminism. But “Split Open” is indeed the history of a movement, not simply of its high-profile leaders; Rosen consistently links feminism’s development and failures to the larger social and economic forces that determined the lives of all women. Written in clear, engaging prose and excellently researched, “The World Split Open” is destined to become a canonical work in college-level women’s studies courses throughout the country. But it should also be widely read by high school students (and filed under “American History,” not quarantined as “Women’s Studies”), for it is a cogent guide to the often baffling world that adolescents have inherited, and which it will be their task to live in and change.

Rosen, a professor of history at UC Davis, begins her story in the 1950s, an era of “cognitive dissonance” that outlawed “dissent and oozed conformity,” in which the white middle-class family “radiated”--at least publicly--”wholesomeness, cleanliness, fecundity, and fidelity.” What the ‘60s (beginning, for some, with Betty Friedan’s 1963 “The Feminine Mystique”) would clarify, though, was that “far from being a shelter from the storm . . . the family proved to be the storm itself.” Rosen notes, though, that even at the height of the feminine--which was actually the domestic--mystique of the ‘50s, women streamed into the paid work force in increasing numbers; by the end of the decade, the full-time housewife was on her way to “becoming more myth than fact. But myths die slowly, especially when they serve a useful purpose. . . . With its illusion of clear gender roles, [the feminine mystique] brought with it a sense of social order.” Rosen notes, too, that it was during the ‘50s that advertising contributed to the breakdown of the domestic unity it ostensibly promoted by targeting men, women and especially teens as separate markets: “Ironically, the very consumer culture that celebrated ‘togetherness’ also addressed husbands, wives, and children as individuals.”

The much-debated “generation gap” of the 1960s was usually considered a father-son problem. In fact, a far greater gap may have existed between postwar mothers and their daughters. The latter had witnessed the “quiet desperation” of their mothers’ lives--the thwarted ambitions, deep depressions, claustrophobic marriages, coerced cult of motherhood and, worst of all, enforced passivity. “The ghost haunting these young women wore an apron and lived vicariously through the lives of a husband and children,” Rosen writes. “Against her, the women’s liberation movement would be forged.” Indeed, the feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler described feminism, perhaps shockingly but nonetheless accurately, as a form of matricide. This in itself was nothing new; undutiful daughters have always sworn not to replicate their mothers’ lives. But new, indeed, were the opportunities--educational and economic, sexual and social--available to women who came of age in the ‘60s, which enabled them to act on that vow of independence. “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you,” Bob Dylan warned in 1965’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and a generation of young women heeded his sage advice.

Because “Split Open” is a history of feminism, it is a history of activism. Rosen locates the origins of modern feminism in the early civil rights movement--especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--and the New Left. She was a participant in some of what she describes, and her account is sometimes tinged with nostalgia (for the early, integrated “beloved community” of SNCC) and anger (at the so-called male left); she clearly prefers the peace sign to the clenched fist. Much to her credit, though, Rosen interviewed people who made different choices than she and, unlike certain feminist memoirists, she does not depict women who remained in the antiwar left as brainwashed zombies, lunatics or scabs. In fact, the story of the various movements she tells is complex, tangled and full of ironies; for young activists, Rosen writes, the ‘60s were “a wild political and cultural roller-coaster ride that left many of them with serious cases of vertigo.”

Paradoxes abound. It was in the civil rights movement, for instance, that many young white women developed organizing skills and, more important, absorbed the principles of self-defined freedom that would become so central to feminism. The expulsion (there is no kinder word) of whites from SNCC was clearly painful; but it was precisely the black-power model of what is now called “identity politics” that, years later, would enable disillusioned female activists to leave the left and create an autonomous women’s movement. Still later, those very identity politics would come to haunt, if not cripple, the feminist movement itself; Rosen recalls attending a women’s studies conference in the late 1970s and being “stunned” at the plethora of caucuses, from anorexic to Christian to Third World lesbian. “Victims were turning into heroines, while the idea of difference was becoming more seductive than solidarity. . . . All the makings of a paranoid movement . . . were now in place.” And though the New Left became increasingly enamored of an authoritarian, ultra-militant style of leadership, the women’s liberation movement developed a fatal attraction to amorphousness, which it somehow mistook for democracy: “We were terrified of power,” Rosen quotes a member of Bread and Roses, a feminist collective in Boston. “Our organizations lasted five minutes. . . . It’s not easy to be a leader in a movement that hates leaders.” Writing well, thinking analytically and speaking eloquently were labelled “male” behaviors; thus was women’s supposed “difference,” which is to say women’s oppression, valorized.

The entrenched sexism of the antiwar left in the late ‘60s, along with its increasing militancy, created both feminist consciousness and a feminist movement: “The beginning of the end of the New Left” marked “the beginning of the women’s movement,” Rosen claims. But she makes clear that this split was rooted not just in doctrinal disputes over “factionalism, violence, vanguardism” but also in a tsunami of sexual humiliation; the sexual revolution may have liberated men, but it revealed itself as a callous new form of exploitation for women. It was this sense of betrayal that, “above all, explains the splenetic rage that women directed against their movement ‘brothers,’ ” Rosen writes. As one woman activist succinctly put it, “I felt like a hooker for the anti-war movement.”

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And it was in this area of wounded sexuality that movement women were perhaps most connected to those outside it. “Between 1965 and 1980, thousands of women participated in an enormous archeological dig, excavating crimes and secrets that used to be called, with a shrug, ‘life,’ ” Rosen reports. “These amateur archeologists unearthed one taboo subject after another. . . . Once they had named so many specific injuries, mere ‘equality’ with men would no longer be sufficient.” Rape (by strangers and husbands), wife-battering, sexual harassment, incest, sexual abuse, abortion, reproductive rights, faked orgasms, lesbian desire, prostitution--Rosen is surely right that the heretofore hidden sexual landscape of American life, and the everyday consciousness of that landscape, have been transformed by feminism. Shame became fury; fury fueled change.

But feminism was not confined to what Rosen calls “the hidden injuries of sex” nor to women learning “to see the world through their own eyes,” crucial though these are. It was collectivist, arguing that no woman’s problems could be solved on an individual basis; it was radical, critiquing every institution from the family to the corporation to the Supreme Court; it challenged the very basis of the country’s economy, culture and politics. Women’s liberation, Rosen writes, was “not just another ingredient you could add and stir into the American Dream”; instead, it demanded “an expansion of the definition of democracy.” And though feminism has succeeded in moving many “women’s issues” into the mainstream of political and cultural debate, it has not, Rosen admits, “gained the power to change institutions in fundamental ways”; in particular, it has failed to foster a society of greater economic justice. Perhaps most astonishing, almost four decades of modern feminism have failed to create a national system of, or even national support for, child care, which is still primarily defined as an individual rather than a social concern.

Rosen’s analysis of feminism’s failures is not entirely persuasive. She writes that, some time in the late ‘70s, the radical vision of feminism was co-opted into “consumer feminism” (power is buying) and “therapeutic feminism” (freedom is self-esteem). She is essentially right (though it should be noted that only people who allow themselves to be co-opted can be). But she goes on to argue that, in the public mind, feminists became confused with selfish yuppies and that the backlash against feminism therefore represents “a profound moral revulsion against the shallow self-absorption of that consumer and therapeutic culture.”

This is singularly unconvincing. As Rosen herself notes, most educated women in fast-track high-paying careers--whom she dubs “superwomen”--explicitly disavowed feminism; it is unclear how, why or even if the public (whoever that may be) mistook such women for feminists. And the backlash against feminism has been organized by New Right leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, Gary Bauer, Randall Terry and Richard Viguerie--none of whom, to my knowledge, has ever articulated the slightest doubts about, much less a profound revulsion for, consumer culture. Rosen is far more on the mark when she notes that feminism ignited what we now refer to as the culture wars and that it posed a fundamental challenge to the nuclear family. Moreover, feminism--like all forward-looking movements--can only offer “a blurry image of the future” that must compete with “a finely etched picture of an idealized but somewhat familiar past.” The backlash against feminism is in fact no mystery; splitting the world open is a scary process.

Rosen’s book is imperfect in other ways. She relies too much on opinion polls, a dubious form of evidence. Her discussion of black women often feels tangential and skimpy. And in attempting to be inclusive, Rosen sometimes risks superficiality.

Nonetheless, this book is a fine achievement. One of Rosen’s greatest strengths is her recognition that feminism is a fluid, ongoing process rather than a sharply delineated thing. What does it mean to live life as a feminist? Will the daughters of feminists commit their own forms of matricide? Can feminism regain its radical vision? How will feminism respond to the “postmodern global economy”? What would a feminist family--not to mention a feminist culture--look like? These are open questions to which there are no certain answers, which is what makes them so exciting. “There is no end to this story,” Rosen writes, which is one of the most hopeful things about it.