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In 1966, a trickle of radical women started to abandon the various causes they shared with men, and to get together to discuss their disillusionment. They soon developed a pattern of meetings that persists today: they form in groups of eight to ten for "rap sessions" with the express purpose of "raising consciousness." This means drumming their second-sex status into each other by testifying to various indignities, including "bearing witness" to their abortions in painful detail. One of their major demands is the abolition of anti-abortion statutes (see THE LAW). They consider every death from a bungled abortion an execution by the state and claim that the number of such deaths annually exceeds the number of American soldiers killed in Viet Nam.
Redstockings and Uppity Women
Most of the first new feminists were politically radical, and consisted of white college students or recent graduates, unmarried or divorced. They soon attracted a number of women who otherwise had no radical leanings at all. The latest recruits include factory workers, high school girls, a number of discontented housewives, and even a coven or two of grandmothers. There are at least 50 groups in New York (where they have their own feminist repertory theater), 35 in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the movement is picking up 50 new members a month), 30 in Chicago, 25 in Boston, and a scattering of others in cities ranging from Gainesville, Fla. to Toronto. Most of the groups are leaderless as well as nameless, but a few have fancy titles like WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), Redstockings, WRAP (Women's Radical Action Project), and Keep on Truckin' Sisters. Some of the members sport buttons bearing their collective nickname: Uppity Women.
These groups, or cells, which constantly split and multiply in a sort of mitosis, constitute the radical wing of Women's Liberation. The more pragmatic sector of the new movement is the National Organization for Women, or NOW, founded in 1966 by Author Betty Friedan, following the phenomenal success of her book, The Feminine Mystique. (As she defined it, the mystique itself was the American-style Kuche, Kinder, Kirche ethos of the '50s, which Mrs. Friedan claimed had trapped women in unwanted domesticity.) Today, NOW has 3,000 members, many of them teachers and other professional women, who concentrate on practical matters like establishing day-care centers for children of working mothers. A few of the radicals have also joined NOW, and this weekend in Manhattan a giant Congress to Unite Women will draw protesters from as far left as the WITCHES and as far right as Hadassah. A really active woman liberator can go to a meeting every night, raising consciousness one evening and funds the next.
Woman as Negro