Sex,
Homophobia, and Women: The Story of Lesbian Feminism
Part 1: The Origins of Second Wave Feminism
Author’s Note: Please note that this
is only an examination of the origins and difficulties between second wave and lesbian
feminism. I understand as a male that I will never fully grasp what it means to live as an
American woman, particularly a lesbian, in a society plagued with homophobia and misogyny. Any critiques that are
made in the following article is purely from an intellectual standpoint and not
a criticism of women, the women’s movement, or the lesbian feminist movement.
Feminism is a word that conjures up images of
pro-choice marches, bra-burnings, and angry women. Often being misunderstood,
feminism has been distorted by the mainstream society to mean that such women
have a hatred of men, often being called “feminazis.” While such a view only
contributes to the oppression of women in American society and socializes the
young to think that it is alright to treat women in a disrespectful manner,
there were and are also problems within the feminist movement itself, with
feminists oppressing others whom, one would think that logically, they should
embrace.
Historically speaking one learns very little about
feminism and only then within the context of the first wave of the feminist
movement, women’s suffrage. This ignores
what is arguably the most influential and important feminist movement
that is the reason for so much of the strides women have made- the second
feminist movement, more commonly known as the Women’s Liberation Movement.
However, even here there is still much unacknowledged history that hasn’t much
gotten into the mainstream, specifically that of lesbian feminism and the up
and downs that that movement had with the liberal feminists. Lesbian feminism
forced the liberal feminist movement to confront its own homophobia and changed
the face of feminism itself.
The Origins of Second Wave Feminism
In order to understand the foundations of lesbian
feminism and its effects, there must first be an understanding of the origins
of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Ironically enough, the feminist movement
found its true start not with a woman, but with both a man and a woman.
Originally there was no care of the plight of women
in society as America more or less revolved around the patriarchal race and
class-based system that favored straight white middle and upper-class males. However,
this began to change with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Originally, he “brought to his cabinet and to his
inner advisory circles other young and (he thought) brilliant men”
calling them the “New Frontiersmen.” Incensed at this, Eleanor Roosevelt
reportedly challenged Kennedy by posing the question “Where are the women on
your New Frontier?” In order to amend the situation and seeing as how Eleanor
had been such an influence in getting him elected, Kennedy agreed to establish
a commission to inquire as to the situation of women in the US, with Roosevelt
as chair.
The women on the commission were those in their
forties and fifties who were professionals in fields such as economics and law
and as such, highly educated and well off. Overall, they were unconcerned with
giving women equal rights and more concerned with “combating the disabilities
women suffered as a corollary of their sex, disabilities such as abandonment
and poverty.”
The very nature of the commission was not to be revolutionary, as the people
that staffed it were not revolutionaries but rather those who wanted so
slightly reform the status quo and thus the cards in the deck would be
reshuffled, but no radical changes would be made to give women full equality.
The commission's first task was to become fully
informed about the situation of women in the country which was quite difficult
seeing as how only the Department of Labor had any information concerning women
and even then women’s employment and pay records were compared only to other
women and “the cost of sex discrimination in employment, as in professional
entry quotas, [had] never [been] calculated.”
Thus, there was much ground work to cover.
By 1963, the commission presented their findings to
the President. The commission recommended that “the president appoint a
permanent citizens’ advisory council on the status of women and that states
create comparable commissions to continue the work.”
Thus, rather than disbanding, the commission was created on the state level and
the findings of each state complied and finally bought back to Washington in
1966. This resulted in Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which states that discrimination
based on one’s sex was illegal. Yet, interestingly enough, Title 7 only came
about due to what one might call an accident.
There was a large amount of disagreement over the
creation of the equal opportunity employment based on race. One Congressional
Representative, Howard W. Smith, introduced sex as a protected category as a
way to “demonstrate the ‘ludicrousness’ of the whole idea of applying equal
rights to jobs.” This
would on him as the thirteen women in the House of Representatives and one
Senator, Margaret Chase Smith, saw Smith’s joke as “an opportunity to write a
prohibition of gender discrimination in employment into the act.”
But even with some senators supporting the
amendment, others were against it as in their minds the Civil Rights Act was
specifically for African-Americans, thus women should not be included in the
bill. Yet the case was made that employers would possibly hire black women over
white women in order to avoid charges of racial discrimination, thus the amendment
should be passed. It is important to note the use of race in this argument,
with the amendment being viewed as a way to ensure that black women didn’t get
economically ahead of their white counterparts and that employment would be
secured for white women.
To enforce Title 7, Congress established the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to hold public hearings on what
regulations should be made, conduct investigations, and then to enforce the new
law. One issue of the EEOC that was important to women was sex-differentiated
want ads. From the point of view of women, such ads not only reinforced
existing discrimination, but also “lowered [the] expectations [of women] and
contributed to female socialization.”
However, the head of the EEOC, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. was not interested
in such issues nor was a resolution that demanded across the board enforcement
of Title 7 allowed to be introduced to Congress thus allowing
sex-differentiated ads to continue.
It was at this moment, this mixture of success,
anger, and hope that allowed for second wave feminism to be born. During the
national conference on Title 7, Betty Friedan and 15 other women met and
decided to push state representatives to enforce Title 7 and reappoint Richard
Graham as head of the EEOC, the only male commissioner that could actually be
called a feminist. When the resolution was refused to even be introduced, women
who had met with Friedan began to discuss taking action outside of the
legislative system. “Days later, thirty woman and men gathered to officially
found the National Organization for Women” in order to “press government from
the outside to better enforce the regulations that were on the books.”
Yet, this united group of feminists would not stand together long as there were
those feminists who would see NOW as not going far enough and break off to form
new strands of feminism.
Second Wave Feminist Theory
Second Wave Feminist Theory finds its roots, for the
most part in Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique in which she
analyzes the oppression of women, specifically that of housewives in the 1950s
and ‘60s.
Friedan initially states that the problem women have
is that of the feminine mystique which came about due, in part, to people such
as Marynia F. Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg. In their book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, they argue
for what is effectively the suppression of women and that they would be much
better off in the home. Farnham and Lundberg stated in the book that it was
more and more common for women to attempt to combine work with childrearing and
“When these two spheres are combined it is inevitable that one or the other
will become of secondary concern and, this being the case, it is certain that
the home will take that position.”
In doing this, the authors are stating that the woman’s natural place is the
home and reduces women to the stereotypical position of nurturer and caretaker
that has been placed upon them. The views of Farnham and Lundberg are extremely
conservative. When discussing women having to balance their careers and home
lives, they express misgivings about such an occurrence, professing that such
circumstances create “a situation that
is by no means as smoothly functioning nor so satisfying either to the child or
the woman. She must of necessity be
deeply in conflict and only partially satisfied in either direction. Her work develops aggressiveness, which is
essentially a denial of her femininity, an enhancement of her girlhood-induced
masculine tendencies.”
(emphasis added) Stating that a woman’s aggressiveness was a denial of a
woman’s femininity is not only a definition of femininity from a male
perspective, but it also restricts women to the role of domesticity and in
doing so puts them at the mercy of men.
They
blatantly put themselves against women gaining independence stating that “it is
imperative that these strivings be at a minimum and that her femininity be
available both for her own satisfaction and for the satisfaction of her
children and husband”
and that
As
the rivals of men, women must, and insensibly do, develop the characteristics
of aggression, dominance, independence and power. These are qualities which
insure success as coequals in the world of business, industry and the
professions. The distortion of character under pressure of modern attitudes and
upbringing is driving women steadily deeper into personal conflict soluble only
by psychotherapy. For their need to achieve and
accomplish doesn't lessen in anyway their deeper need to find satisfactions
profoundly feminine. Much as they consciously seek those gratifications of
love, sensual release and even motherhood, they are becoming progressively less
able unconsciously to accept or achieve them.
This is an open argument that women should dedicate
themselves to the home and the family, damning them to a life of morbidity.
Finally, the two later affirm that a woman with a
career is dangerous as it is contrary to them “supporting and encouraging
[their husband’s] manliness and wishes for domination and power.”
Within all of this was a manner of thinking that espouses that women only exist
to be used by men and for men and argues for the complete and total control of
women within a totalitarian subculture that is the household.
The true ideology that Farnham and Lundberg advocate
is one that effectively dehumanizes woman. By stating arguments that women must
keep their own desires for independence “to a minimum” and that their
“femininity be available both for [their] own satisfaction and for the
satisfaction of her children and husband,” both are showing not only what they
personally think of women, but are showing that they think women are naturally
lesser than men and nothing but a tool to be used for and by men.
It was among this atmosphere of objectifying and oppressing
women that permeated every facet of American culture and created a misogyny
that a new wave of feminism was needed to express that women were in fact human
beings rather than just robots that existed solely for to pleasure and care for
men and have children.
To fill in this void and combat the patriarchal
structure that oppressed women, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique that sparked off the entire second wave of
feminism. In the book, Friedan advocates for the economic independence of women,
stating that "for women to have full identity and freedom, they must have
economic independence” and “Only economic independence can free a woman to
marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless,
intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she
plans not to marry.”
In advocating for the economic independence of women, Friedan is advocating a
situation in which women will be able to take the first step to becoming fully
independent of the patriarchal system. However, this is made all the more
revolutionary when one realizes the fact that economics and politics go
hand-in-hand. By arguing for economic independence, Freidan is setting the
stage for eventual political independence and self-determination that can be
asserted by women in America.
Friedan takes on this view of femininity which only
encourages the subjugation of women. She writes that according to the feminine
mystique the problem is in the past women “envied men, women tried to be like
men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in
sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”
Yet, she realizes the horror of such an existence and expounds upon it. In the
twelfth chapter, Progressive Dehumanization:
The Comfortable Concentration Camp, Friedan compares the situation that
women found themselves into being in a concentration camp. She wrote “In fact,
there is an uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose
her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of
the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.”
After going into the effects that concentration camps had on prisoners such as
the adoption of childlike behavior, being cut off from pasts interests, and
“the world of the camp [being] the only reality,”
Friedan then argues that the 1950s American woman finds herself in a very
similar situation.
All
this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban
housewife. But is her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp?
Have not women who live in the image of the feminine mystique trapped
themselves within the narrow walls of their homes? They have learned to ‘adjust’ to their biological role. They have
become dependent, passive, childlike; they have given up their adult frame of
reference to live at the lower human level of food and things. The work
they do does not require adult capabilities; it is endless, monotonous,
unrewarding. American women are not, of course, being readied for mass
extermination, but they are suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.
(emphasis added)
Her comparison is, without a doubt, quite extreme.
The situation of the suburban housewife, while lamentable and in extreme need
of improvement is not in any way near that of the suffering of a Holocaust
victim. Yet, she was using this extreme hyperbole to make the point that women
are slowly suffering in their home lives.
While Friedan is much regarded as a major figure in
the feminist movement, she does have her detractors that make legitimate
critiques of her analysis. Most notedly, Friedan was critiquted for the mass
amount of exclusivity in her analysis. The sole focus of her book was white
middle-class suburban housewives and because of such a biased analysis, “the
problems facing, for example, millions of poor, working women or non- white
women -- oppressive working conditions and low pay, racism, and the burdens of
a double day -- barely register on the radar screen of The Feminine Mystique.”
By focusing on a specific group of women, Friedan somewhat lowers the value of
her analysis.
Friedan’s class bias affects her analysis of the
situation that women, no matter what socioeconomic class they were in, generally
found themselves in at the time of her writing. Such a view reveals a problem
with liberal feminism as it centers “on its seemingly bland acceptance of
American capitalism as a system structured on economic freedom which merely
needs some tinkering (such as the elimination of ‘unfair practices’ such as
racism and sexism) to make it entirely workable and just.”
In doing this, liberal feminism loses its potential for true revolutionary
change as it advocates what simply adds up to reforms to the system which
allows the overall oppression of groups, including women, and the patriarchy to
continue rather than creating a new system that sought the equality of all
people.
Yet, many women on the Left would find that the
feminism that Friedan and NOW espoused was not for them and could not work for
their given situation. On the Left the marginalizations of women wasn’t
concerned with getting equal access to jobs, but were much more concerned
with getting respect and addressing women’s oppression that existed from the
so-called inclusive Left.
Endnotes
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Dell Book, 1963), pgs 370-71
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