The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [218]
On the plane to Chicago, preparing to bow out as president of NOW, feeling powerless to fight the man-haters openly and refusing to front for them, I suddenly knew what had to be done. A woman from Florida had written to remind me that August 26, 1970, was the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the vote. We needed to call a national action—a strike of women to call attention to the unfinished business of equality: equal opportunity for jobs and education, the right to abortion and child-care centers, the right to our own share of political power. It would unite women again in serious action—women who had never been near a “women’s lib” group. (NOW, the largest such group, and the only one with a national structure, had only 3,000 members in thirty cities in 1970.) I remember that, to transmit this new vision to the NOW convention in Chicago, warning of the dangers of aborting the women’s movement, I spoke for nearly two hours and got a standing ovation. The grass-roots strength of NOW went into organizing the August 26 strike. In New York, women filled the temporary headquarters volunteering to do anything and everything; they hardly went home at night.
Mayor Lindsay wouldn’t close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen’s horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers’ heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try. It was, as they say, the first great nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about the “bra-burners” wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day.
On August 26, it suddenly became both political and glamorous to be a feminist. At first, politics had seemed to be something altogether separate from what we were doing in the women’s movement. The regular politicians—right, left, center; Republican, Democrat, splinter—certainly weren’t interested in women. In 1968, I had testified in vain at the conventions of both political parties, trying to get a single word about women in either the Republican or Democratic platform. When Eugene McCarthy, the chief sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, announced that he was going to run for president to end the Vietnam war, I began to connect my own politics, at least, to the women’s drive for equality. I called Bella Abzug and asked how I could work for McCarthy. But not even the other women working for him thought women’s issues were relevant politically, and many NOW members were critical of me for campaigning openly for McCarthy.
At the 1970 NOW convention in Chicago, I said we had a human responsibility as women to end the Vietnam war. Neither men nor women should be drafted to fight an obscene, immoral war like the one in Vietnam, but we had to take equal responsibility for ending it. Two years earlier, in 1968, standing outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, I had watched helmeted troopers clubbing down the long-haired young, my own son among them. I began to see that these young men, saying