From the Bermuda Shorts Crisis to Sexual Politics

 

I.  The Bermuda Shorts Crisis at Barnard College (1960)

II.  Image and Reality in Post-World War II America
        A. Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
                          Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)
                          [Videoclip: The Fifties, #4 – 6:41- 23:00]
        B. Consumer Culture 
                1)  cultural lag
                2) Marilyn Monroe
                3) Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" (1953)
                4) Helen Gurley Brown's "Cosmo Girl" (1962)
        C. The Pill (1960) - Katharine McCormick & Gregory Pincus
        D.  Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response (1966)

III. The Younger Feminists
         A. The Decline of Parietals
                 1) Students for a Democratic Society 
                 2) Linda LeClair and the Barnard College Judicial Council - 1968
                 3) Columbia '68 (April) -- B.O.S.S.
         B. Consciousness raising
                 1) the personal is political
                 2) sexism 
                 3) Abortion Speak Outs 
                 4) Columbia Women's Liberation (1969)
                        Kate Millett [author of Sexual Politics (1970)]

 -- to be continued next week
         

 

Introduction: Historians have tended to divide the women's movement into two branches -- the liberals, dominated by NOW, and the radicals, dominated by younger women. [Note echoes of first wave feminism.]  Certainly there was a range of opinion on what feminism meant, but I have found, in looking at the history of women at Barnard and Columbia, that liberals and radicals were in much greater dynamic interaction than traditional accounts allow.  Today I want to show how by looking at the emergence of a women's movement on Morningside Heights in the 1960s -- from the Bermuda Shorts Crisis of 1960 to the publication of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in 1970.

 

I. The Bermuda Shorts Crisis at Barnard College (1960)

In the spring of 1960 Columbia President Greyson Kirk complained to Barnard President Millicent McIntosh that Barnard students were parading across the Columbia campus in costumes unbefitting a serious female scholar.  They were wearing slacks and, worse, shorts.  He called for a dress code; Barnard President Millicent McIntosh reluctantly agreed, and the Barnard Student Council dutifully did as it was told.  According to the code, Barnard students could wear shorts on the Barnard campus, so long as they revealed no more than two inches of leg above the knee, but whenever these young women crossed Broadway they would have to cover themselves with a long coat.  

Thus, for the time being, Columbia's President Greyson Kirk -- the very model of a button-downed college president -- kept the lid on sexual expressiveness on the Columbia campus.


II. Image and Reality in the 1950s

A. Alfred Kinsey: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male(1948); Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953): Sexual Behavior in the Human Male(1948); Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Kirk's battle was inevitably a losing one.  Long-term forces – urbanization, rising levels of education, the decline of religious orthodoxy -- were bringing changes to American society that Kirk was powerless to stop.

The first person to realize this fact was a biologist at the University of Indiana by the name of Alfred Kinsey.  Raised in South Orange, New Jersey, educated at Bowdoin College, and Harvard University, Kinsey made his reputation as a specialist on the Gall Wasp.  But he became famous in the late 1940s when he published his two mammoth, incredibly tedious books on sexual behavior in the human male and female.  What he reported, after 10 years of study and some 20,000 interviews, was that males and females in American society engaged in more premarital sex, extra-marital sex, and homosexual sex than anyone had ever thought possible.  Kinsey found that the rate of homosexual experience had remained relatively constant, but that the incidence of pre-marital and extra-marital sex had been rising steadily since at least the turn of the century.

[Videoclip: The Fifties, #4 – 6:41- 23:00]

Note: Kinsey was not just a "boy scout," as David Halberstam terms him, though he was a very serious boy scout. Nor was he just a traditional family man, though he did marry the first woman he ever loved, fathered several children, and preferred classical music to boogie woogie. Significantly, he was also a secret homosexual, a masochist, and a voyeur, who not only conducted serious, scientific studies of sexual behavior, but also orchestrated elaborate group sexual encounters with his scientific colleagues in his home, which he filmed at great risk to his reputation and career, and with the cooperation of his wife Clara. [See James Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997)]


B. Consumer Culture: What accounts for this discrepancy between the ideology of sexual repression that seemed to dominate American society and the reality of private sexual activity?  

1) Cultural Lag: Barnard sociologist Mirra Komarovsky called the phenomenon "cultural lag." For the first half of the 20thc the American public clung to the Victorian ideals of the 19thc as the necessary foundation for economic success. According to these ideals, to achieve and maintain middle-class status one must repress one’s sexual urges, and redirect all of one’s energies toward education and business efforts. 

But with the tremendous growth in America’s consumer culture over the course of the 20thc – which in turn derived from the forces of urbanization, rising educational levels, greater economic well-being, and declining religious orthodoxy -- there was a shift in which the traditional American ideals of saving, self-denial, and character gradually gave way to the consumer-based values of spending, pleasure, and personality. Why should one save, when the economy was expanding on a rising tide of credit. Why should one deny oneself pleasure, when the advertising industry was expanding the concept of need in order to sell more and more goods. The depression of the 1930s and the war of the 1940s slowed this shift somewhat -- as consumer goods all but disappeared, and the mutual dependence of a secure family life seemed especially important because it seemed so endangered.  But with the economic boom of the post-World War II era the shift from self-denial to pleasure, returned with new force. America may have been Pleasantville on the surface, but underneath lurked a very different, erogenously charged reality.

This tension was a function not merely of the economic expansion I have been talking about; it was also closely related to the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement I have also been discussing.

Cold War: sexual license, like communism, seen to pose a threat to capitalist values. Kinsey was caught up in McCarthyism and charged with being an agent of communist infiltration in America.  If his homosexuality had been known, his influence would have been greatly reduced, if not obliterated.

Civil Rights Movement: The civil rights movement, which had also been long linked to communism (in part because in the 1930s the communists were among the few who battled actively for civil rights in this country), had also long been linked with sexual freedom. The recurrent fear among those who opposed civil rights was that is would lead to licentious sexuality, miscegenation, and the collapse of the self-control that was thought to lie at the foundation of capitalism. 

But at the same time, the very debates that raged over the dangers of sexuality to America’s racial purity and capitalism meant that the taboos surrounding sexuality would inevitably relax.  If a subject is truly taboo no one talks about it.  But in the 1950s everyone was talking about sex.  

Worse, for conservatives, as growing numbers of Americans came to question the hysterical anti-communism of McCarthy and his followers and as the civil rights movement gained increasing support among white Americans, the strict sexual code that racist and anti-communist forces in American society sought to maintain gradually weakened.

2) Marilyn Monroe: No one better evoked the complicated mix of innocence and sexuality that came to dominate the 1950s than Marilyn Monroe – 11741– one of the most popular film stars of the decade. Born Norma Jean Baker (1926-62), she exuded an innocent yet provocative sexuality that made her the sex symbol of her generation. Here she is in The Seven Year Itch (1955). [Film clip on Marilyn]

3) Hugh Hefner: The consumer culture not only encouraged self-indulgence, it made life as a single person easier for men, and even for women than ever before. 

  • Men no longer needed to marry in order to satisfy such basic domestic needs as clean laundry and hot meals. In an expanding service economy, with steadily rising wages, these services could be bought. 
  • Women, on the other hand, were no longer as dependent on men as they once had been for economic support. The expanding white-collar world and service sector provided a rapidly expanding number of jobs that allowed young women to support themselves in far greater numbers than had been true in their mother's time.

No one epitomized the consumer culture's increasing emphasis on pleasure better than Hugh Hefner, who published the first issue of Playboy in 1953. As far as Hefner was concerned, most women were just gold diggers, out to trap some poor guy into marriage so that they (the women) could spend their lives in carefree unemployment, while their poor mates slaved all their lives to support them and their bickering kids. Far better, Hefner argued, to set up a bachelor pad than to become to sole support of the long-term unemployed. [Film Clip on Hefner]

4) Helen Gurley Brown: The female answer to Hefner came a decade later with Helen Gurley Brown. Brown was the publisher of the magazine Cosmopolitan and the 1962 best-seller Sex and the Single Girl. 

Brown was the self-appointed fairy godmother of young working women -- mostly secretaries. Her message to them was -- don't be in a hurry to get married and settle down into being a frumpy housewife with a bunch of screaming kids. Have fun -- buy clothes, go out, have affairs, get men to spend money on you without your having to take care of them. 

Brown's single girl was in many ways the spiritual granddaughter of the 1920s flapper; but she was much more numerous than the flapper had been. 

She was economically independent (a job was a good place to meet men and she needed an income to afford her own apartment); fashion conscious (the magazines told her how to dress and that took money); and sexually experimental. 

Rather than worrying about becoming a spinster, the single girl gloried in her glamorous life. Brown even encouraged young women to have affairs with married men, of whom she said: "While they are using you to varnish their egos, you're using them to add spice to your life."

Helen Gurley Brown used her own example of waiting until she was 37 to marry as proof that women could lead sexually liberated, happy lives. But, in the end, Brown was less intent on showing women how to remain happy and single than she was in showing them how to make themselves attractive to men so that they could get married.

Brown offered an interesting counterpoint to Hefner, but she did not succeed in making the swinging single ideal as popular among young women as among young men, because sexual liberation carried with it the distinct possibility of pregnancy.

 

D. The Pill (1960) - Technological change drove a further wedge between the ideology of sexual restraint and the reality of greater sexual expressiveness. The great birth control leader Margaret Sanger regretted to her dying day in 1957 not having found a "fool proof" female contraceptive. But she believed that her wealthy friend, Katharine McCormick, might remedy that problem.

McCormack: suffragist, MIT trained scientist, philanthropist, birth control advocate; married into McCormick reaper family - vast fortune - husband impotent, possibly schizophrenic, she spent whole life looking for a drug that would cure him - funded research in endocrinology -- discovered Gregory Pincus in 1950s. Pincus had done extensive work on fertility at a time when couples desperately wanted to have children. But the very principles that he discovered to help women get pregnant could also be used to fool the body into thinking that it was already pregnant and therefore prevent pregnancy. McCormick funded his research, which produced The Pill.

Although it is dangerous to attach too much importance to technological change in explaining social developments, the Pill did provide women with a contraceptive that was so far superior to any available before that it made sexual freedom a much more real possibility than it had ever been before.

[Film clip on Pincus].

E. Masters and Johnson: Also important in undermining the ideology of sexual restraint, especially on the part of women, was the sex research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who published Human Sexual Response in 1966. Ever since Alfred Kinsey’s 1940s research, investigators had been raising questions about Sigmund Freud’s theory that mature women experienced orgasm exclusively in her vagina.  Masters and Johnson achieved fame through their clinical observations of human sexual activity and their report that men’s and women’s sexual response was fundamentally the same, that women’s sexual response was located in the clitoris not the vagina.  Just as heretically, they found that women had a far greater capacity for sexual excitation than did men.

If sexual liberation for women had been merely a matter of improved contraception and sexual technique, then emancipation might have been assured by the late 1960s. But real emancipation and independence still foundered on the fact that women simply could not hope to support themselves as comfortably as men could. Short of a revolution in the way society viewed women economically, women were going to continue to have a greater need of marriage than men did. As I suggested in my lecture on "Womanpower," the 1950s and especially the 1960s produced the onset of just such a revolution, with the dramatic influx of women -- especially young, well-educated women -- into the workforce.  That influx fueled further cultural change, especially among women at Barnard and Columbia.  By the late 1960s rhetoric began to come into line with practice.  Female students had long violated rules regarding sexual conduct; by the late 1960s they were demanding that the rules change.

 
III. The Younger Feminists

A. The Decline of Parietals (parietals: administrative authority within the walls of a college) 

1) Students for a Democratic Society - important agent for sexual reform on campuses across the U.S. in the early 1960s -- calls for end to parietal rules.

2) Linda LeClair and the Barnard College Judicial Council - 1968

3) Columbia '68 (April) -- 

Women’s disillusionment with SDS and SNCC to live up to its participatory democracy rhetoric.

Disillusionment with the ways in which the ideal of the liberated woman did less to liberate women than to serve men.

B.O.S.S - Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters forms for mutual support and challenge to Barnard.

B. Consciousness Raising: The questioning that women began to engage in during the Columbia uprising was part of a larger, grass-roots movement among educated women.  Increasingly, these women came to the conviction that the overthrowing of patriarchy demanded more than legal reform; it demanded more than socialist revolution; it demanded, in effect, a psychological revolution -- a major shift in the way women and men thought about masculinity and femininity. To further that psychological revolution the radicals invented Consciousness Raising (CR), a discussion format modeled on early SNCC meetings but never before so successfully employed.  By sharing personal experiences, a group would learn to regard personal problems as common problems with social causes and political solutions.

1) The Personal is Political: Carol Hanisch, of New York Radical Women, who came up with the idea for the Miss American Pageant Protest (fall 1968) coined the term "the personal is political" to convey the idea that problems that many women took to be personal – their lack of self-confidence, failure to advance in their careers, their unhappiness over their bodies – were part of a larger political system that oppressed women as a class.

2) Sexism: Conscious-raising groups soon spread throughout the country. As women talked about their personal experiences they began to see a pattern they called sexism. Sexism operated in much the same way that racism did in restricting the lives of blacks: it came down to defining women by their sex and assuming that women are inferior to men just because they are women.

3) Abortion Speak Outs (Feb. 1969) -- Abortion law reform - particularly intense in New York.  One of a number of states then considering the reform of its highly restrictive abortion laws, New York announced that it would hold hearings in Manhattan on February 13, 1969 and that fourteen men and one woman – a nun – had been selected to give testimony as expert witnesses.  

Outraged by the selection of witnesses, feminists from NOW and the more radical Redstockings began recruiting women to disrupt the hearings.  Columbia economics graduate student Harriet Zellner, who had learned of the protest from other women in her department, met NOW leader Flo Kennedy at the hearings and solicited her advice about starting a women’s group at Columbia.  Kennedy suggested that she contact Kate Millett, a fellow NOW member who was then completing her thesis in the English department and teaching as an Instructor at Barnard.

4) Columbia Women's Liberation (1969) - Kate Millett, et al. -- In the late winter of 1969, 100 women -- students, faculty, and staff -- met in the main floor lounge in Fayerweather Hall to form Columbia Women’s Liberation (CWL).    Zellner proposed the idea of creating CWL to Millett the following week and together they made up fliers and posted them in women’s bathroom stalls all over campus.  Women staff members, graduate students, faculty, and a few Barnard students responded to the fliers by packing the first meeting in Fayerweather Hall.  Millett, who had the more extensive speaking experience, made a few introductory remarks and then turned the meeting over to Zellner.  Nervous before such a large audience, Zellner began by asking the assembled women to assure the confidentiality of the discussions and then asked them to tell their stories.  

The floodgates opened.  Graduate students testified to having been denied fellowship by professors, who told them that the likelihood they would marry made them bad investments.  Those who had not been able to secure outside funding, were working as secretaries in the university and thereby delaying their progress. Junior faculty noted the absence of promotion prospects for women and discrimination in salaries.  Administrative staff complained of having to train men for promotions that they were denied.

Some grievances came out only later, in whispered discussions with friends, and in the consciousness raising groups that became the rage.  In certain departments, male professors saw women only as sexual beings.  A “casting couch” was widely rumored to be the only sure way to a graduate fellowship.  Even for those who succeeded, this ritual carried risks.  A soured relationship might require a change of field, something that in a small department could greatly constrain one’s progress.  Those who did not catch a professor’s eye, or who, for reasons of sexual preference, had no interest, winning academic support could be difficult.  No one knows how much talent failed to develop because of the sexual hurdles that women, more than men, had to clear.

CWL quickly fell into a pattern of weekly meetings.  In addition to Kate Millett and Harriet Zellner, the group’s regulars included Catharine Stimpson, an Assistant Professor of English at Barnard; Ann Sutherland Harris, an Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia; Barbara Buonchristiano, an administrative assistant at the Business School; Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Barnard ’63), a graduate student in English; Linda Edwards, a graduate student in Economics; and Amy Hacket, a graduate student in history.  “We had a rotating chair,” Zellner later recalled; “we were serious feminists who started by working in our own backyard.”  

Members divided themselves into committees to attack specific problems: 

 

-TO BE CONTINUED . . . .