PORNOGRAPHERS, take note. Two months ago a young man in San Francisco decided to raise some money for a new underground paper called Dock of the Bay by putting out a sex sheet, "a quick porny." On the eve of its publication, several angry young women spirited the entrepreneur away in a car and after twelve hours of intensive indoctrination persuaded him to abandon his plans on the ground that pornography degrades women. The copy for the magazine, dirty pictures and all, was burned in the backyard of one of the girls. "Just roasting marshmallows," said the one-time Camp Fire Girl who masterminded the abduction.
The event is now known in underground feminist circles as the Dock of the Bay affair, and the ringleader is considered something of a heroine. She is a member of Women's Liberation, a movement that has attracted some 10,000 converts across the U.S. over the past three years. The new feminists differ widely on many issues, but on one they are united: sexism must go.
An Incredible Fury
Sexism is their target and battle cry —as racism is the blacks'. They regard 20th century America as a rigid, male-dominated society which, deliberately or more often unconsciously, perpetuates arrant inequities between men and women—in pay, kinds of jobs and, more subtly, self-expression. Women, they say, are constantly put down by the ads that ask "Does she ... or doesn't she?" or proclaim "You've come a long way, baby," because, of all things, she has supposedly got her own cigarette. The militants abhor Playboy as well as most women's magazines, which take an equally narrow view of the woman's role. To demonstrate their disgust and alienation from sexist society, the angries picket the Miss America contest, burn brassieres, and dump into "freedom trashcans" such symbols of female "oppression" as lingerie, false eyelashes and steno pads.
Most middle-aged or older women take a skeptical if not downright hostile view of the new movement, if they have heard of it at all. But younger women, part of a rebellious generation, are fertile ground for the seeds of discontent. They are also having fewer babies, looking ahead to living longer, and thinking more about careers. A study of 10,000 Vassar alumnae showed that most graduates of the mid-'50s wanted marriage, with or without a career, while in the mid-'60s most were insisting on a career, with or without marriage. Women's rising expectations, stemming in part from peak feminine college enrollment (3,000,000), are increasingly out of kilter with reality.
Rutgers Anthropologist Lionel Tiger thinks there is going to be a general revolt by women, which will involve such deep-rooted human conditions, biological as well as economic, that it will make the black problem look comparatively easy to solve. Brooklyn's Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever elected to Congress, says on the basis of eight months of travel in the U.S. that the revolt has already begun. She herself, she feels, has been more discriminated against as a woman than as a Negro.