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By Root 955 0

radicals included groups such as the New York Radical Women and a similar Chicago group. The New York Radical Women were responsible not only for the Miss America action, but also for even more important innovation: C-R, or consciousness-raising. In 1968, when the New York Radicals came up with this concept for recruiting feminists, the politicos, including NOW, thought it was a counterproductive idea that would alienate men. In consciousness-raising, women talked to other women about all the false things they did to please men such as acting stupid, pretending to agree, and wearing shoes, clothes, and undergarments that were so unnatural they inflicted pain. Women, through C-R sessions, would realize the extent to which they distorted themselves because of the fear that men would not find their true selves attractive. It was out of this C-R process that the Miss America protest was born. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth wrote about how colonized people had colonized minds—they accepted the place the mother country had put them in, but they were not aware that they were accepting this role. The New York Radical Women believed that men had done the same thing to women and that making them aware of this was the key to turning feminism into a mass movement, that this process that appeared to be merely a form of self-therapy would recruit thousands of women for the feminist cause. They were clearly right, and in a few years most feminists embraced consciousness-raising as a way to bring women around to their cause. An example of this was the speakout, where women publicly described the nightmares of their illegal abortions, which had a major impact on changing abortion laws.

In 1968, when consciousness-raising began, people had had a heightened consciousness of race issues from more than ten years of civil rights but very little consciousness of gender issues. In Soul on Ice Eldridge Cleaver described in detail the pleasure he took in what he termed “an insurrectionary act,” the rape of a white woman: “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.” Indicative of the times, this was seen as a confession of racial hatred to be later recanted, and little was said of the sexist implication of a white woman simply being his appendage. Charlayne Hunter, a Russell Sage fellow who reviewed the book for The New York Times, emphasized Cleaver’s ability to articulate the bitterness of “a black man in this country” but said nothing about his attitudes toward women.

By 1968 a level of sexism that seems shocking to contemporary sensibilities was still generally acceptable even among New Left youth. The 1968 film Barbarella starring Jane Fonda featured Amazons in erotic little outfits conquering through sex. In Planet of the Apes the women don’t speak, and have no character, and are scantily clad, with the exception of the ape women, probably because no one is interested in a scantily clad ape. The following year, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, extremely popular with college students because it appeared to be antiwar, starred Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland as martini-drinking army doctors who are contemptuous of any woman who even hesitates to bed down with them. Rock culture was even more sexist. In Ed Sanders’s book that claims to be a novel, Shards of God, women, never with names or faces, appear only to offer for sex one orifice or another to the male characters who have such names as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

By the end of the year, women’s fashions were indicating that the times were “a-changin’ ” again. It was only back in March that New York had the “Down with Dirndl” movement against “those fat, gathering balloon skirts and dirndls, dresses with old-fashioned waistlines. . . . Big ugly belts in the middle of dresses and coats make women look like mastodons in full retreat,” read a petition with sixty-six signatures, of which seventeen were men. The movement was led by Dona Fowler Kaminsky, a twenty-eight-year-old Berkeley graduate