1968 - Mark Kurlansky [186]
In 1968 the least attempts at reforming marriage were considered radical by the general population. It was still considered a radical feminist act for a married woman not to take her husband’s name. Like Simone de Beauvoir, the tremendously influential French feminist who lived with, but never married Sartre, many of the sixties feminists were at best distrustful of the institution of marriage. Atkinson said, “The institution of marriage has the same effect the institution of slavery had. It separates people in the same category. It disperses them, keeps them from identifying as a class. The masses of slaves didn’t recognize their condition either. To say that a woman is really ‘happy’ with her home and kids is as irrelevant as saying that the blacks were ‘happy’ being taken care of by the ol’ Massa. She is defined by her maintenance role. Her husband is defined by his productive role. We’re saying that all human beings should have a productive role in society.” Her own views on marriage were shaped by having been married at seventeen. She divorced, got an arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first director of the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, got a graduate degree at Columbia in philosophy. She said de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex “changed my life.” She wrote to de Beauvoir, who suggested she get involved with an American group. That was when Atkinson found the nascent NOW.
In France, land of de Beauvoir, the feminist movement is also said to have been born in 1968. Yet de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was first published in France in 1949 and by 1968 had influenced a large part of an entire generation of women whose daughters were now reading it. The year 1968 was when activists formed groups pressuring the government to legalize abortion and widen access to the pill, which was available only by prescription. Women were refused prescriptions by doctors for a variety of reasons, including the arbitrary verdict that they were too young.
In Germany, too, the feminist movement can be traced to 1968, to a Frankfurt conference of the German SDS, when Helke Sander declared the equality of the sexes and demanded that future planning take into account the concerns of women. When the conference refused to have an in-depth discussion of Sander’s proposal, angry women began pelting men with tomatoes. But in fact women’s groups had been founded in several cities before this incident, the first one in Berlin in January 1968.
De Beauvoir, with her famously long and deep relation with Sartre, said that people should be joined by love and not legal sanctions. Atkinson and many other American feminists in 1968 were saying that in order for women and men to have equal status, children would have to be raised communally. The commune was becoming a popular solution. Communes were springing up all over the United States. Some child development experts who had studied the kibbutz system in Israel were unimpressed. Dr. Selma Fraiberg at the University of Michigan’s Child Psychiatric Hospital told The New York Times in a 1968 interview that her studies of children raised on a kibbutz produced what she called “a bunch of cool cookies”—cold, unfriendly people. But women in communes began to complain that there was a gender-based caste system there as well, that the women would do the cleaning while the men meditated.
The American feminists of 1968 subdivided into two groups: the politicos and the radicals. The politicos were sophisticated activists, many with long experience in the civil rights movement and the New Left. NOW was a politico group. The