People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [304]
There was a push for child care centers, and although women did not succeed in getting much help from government, thousands of cooperative child care centers were set up.
Women also began to speak openly, for the first time, about the problem of rape. Each year, fifty thousand rapes were reported and many more were unreported. Women began taking self-defense courses. There were protests against the way police treated women, interrogated them, insulted them, when women filed rape charges. A book by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, was widely read—it is a powerful, indignant history and analysis of rape, suggesting self-defense, individual or collective:
Fighting back. On a multiplicity of levels, that is the activity we must engage in, together, if we—women—are to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape. Rape can be eradicated, not merely controlled or avoided on an individual basis, but the approach must be long-range and cooperative, and must have the understanding and good will of many men as well as women. . . .
Many women were active in trying to get a Constitutional amendment, ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), passed by enough states. But it seemed clear that even if it became law, it would not be enough, that what women had accomplished had come through organization, action, protest. Even where the law was helpful it was helpful only if backed by action. Shirley Chisholm, a black Congresswoman, said:
The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. Women in this country must become revolutionaries. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes. . . . We must replace the old, negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive action. . . .
Perhaps the most profound effect of the women’s movement of the sixties—beyond the actual victories on abortion, in job equality—was called “consciousness raising,” often done in “women’s groups,” which met in homes all across the country. This meant the rethinking of roles, the rejection of inferiority, the confidence in self, a bond of sisterhood, a new solidarity of mother and daughter. The Atlanta poet Esta Seaton wrote “Her Life”:
This is the picture that keeps forming in my mind:
my young mother, barely seventeen,
cooking their Kosher dinner on the coal stove,
that first winter in Vermont,
and my father, mute in his feelings
except when he shouted,
eating to show his love.
Fifty years later her blue eyes would grow cold
with the shock of that grey house
and the babies one after another
and the doctor who said
“If you don’t want any more children
move out of the house.”
For the first time, the sheer biological uniqueness of women was openly discussed. Some theorists (Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectics of Sex, for instance) thought this was more fundamental to their oppression than any particular economic system. It was liberating to talk frankly about what had for so long been secret, hidden, cause for shame and embarrassment: menstruation, masturbation, menopause, abortion, lesbianism.
One of the most influential books to appear in the early seventies was a book assembled by eleven women in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective called Our Bodies, Ourselves. It contained an enormous amount of practical information, on women’s anatomy, on sexuality and sexual relationships, on lesbianism, on nutrition and health, on rape, self-defense, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. More important even than the information, the charts, the photos, the candid exploration of the previously unmentioned, was the mood of exuberance throughout the book, the enjoyment of the body, the happiness with the new-found understanding, the new sisterhood with young women, middle-aged women, older women. They quoted the