The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [216]
In these past years of action, I have seen myself and other women becoming both stronger and more gentle, taking ourselves more seriously, yet beginning to really have fun as we stopped playing the old roles. We discovered we could trust each other. I love the women with whom I took the adventurous and joyous actions of these years. No one realized how pitifully few we were in the beginning, how little money we had, how little experience.
What gave us the strength and the nerve to do what we did, in the name of American women, of women of the world? It was, of course, because we were doing it for ourselves. It was not charity for poor others; we, the middle-class women who started this, were all poor, in a sense that goes beyond dollars. It was hard even for housewives whose husbands weren’t poor to get money to fly to board meetings of NOW. It was hard for women who worked to get time off from their jobs, or take precious weekend time from their families. I have never worked so hard for money, gone so many hours with so little sleep or time off to eat or even go to the toilet, as in these first years of the women’s movement.
I was subpoenaed on Christmas Eve, 1966, to testify before a judge in Foley Square, because the airlines were outraged at our insistence that they were guilty of sex discrimination by forcing stewardesses to resign at age thirty or upon their marriage. (Why, I had wondered, are they going to such lengths? Surely they don’t think men ride the airlines because stewardesses are nubile. And then I realized how much money the airlines saved by firing those pretty stewardesses before they had time to accumulate pay increases, vacation time, and pension rights. And how I love it now when stewardesses hug me on an airplane and tell me they are not only married and over thirty, but can even have children and keep flying!)
I felt a certain urgency of history, that we would be failing the generation coming up if we evaded the question of abortion now. I also felt we had to get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the Constitution despite the claim of union leaders that it would end “protective” laws for women. We had to take the torch of equality from the lonely, bitter old women who had been fighting all alone for the amendment, which had been bottled up in Congress for nearly fifty years since women had chained themselves to the White House fence to get the vote.
On our first picket line at the White House fence (“Rights Not Roses”) on Mother’s Day in 1967, we threw away chains of aprons, flowers, and mock typewriters. We dumped bundles of newspapers onto the floor of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in protest against its refusal to enforce the Civil Rights law against sex-segregated “Help Wanted: Male” ads (for the good jobs) and “Help Wanted: Female” ads (for gal Friday-type jobs). This was supposed to be just as illegal now as ads reading “Help Wanted: White” and “Help Wanted: Colored.” We announced we were going to sue the federal government for not enforcing the law equally on behalf of women (and then called members of our underground in the Justice Department to see if one could do that)—and we did.
I gave lectures in Southern finishing schools and commencement addresses at out-of-the-way colleges of home economics—as well as at Yale, UCLA, and Harvard—to pay my way in organizing NOW chapters (we never did have money for an organizing staff ). Our only real office in those years was my apartment. It wasn’t possible to keep up with the mail. But when women like Wilma Heide from Pittsburgh, or Karen De Crow in Syracuse, Eliza Paschall in Atlanta, Jacqui Ceballos—so many others—were so determined to have NOW chapters that they called long distance when we didn’t answer their letters, the only thing to do was to have them become local NOW organizers.
I remember so many way stations: Going to lunch at the for-men-only Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel with fifty NOW women and demanding