Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy Read Free Book Online

romantic life. In the women’s movement, the two were inextricably linked—the personal was political. In a famous article called “Sisterhood Is Powerful: A member of the Women’s Liberation Movement explains what it’s all about,” which ran in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, Brownmiller wrote, “Women as a class have never subjugated another group; we have never marched off to wars of conquest in the name of the fatherland…those are the games men play. We see it differently. We want to be neither oppressor nor oppressed. The women’s revolution is the final revolution of them all.” Brownmiller wasn’t interested in tweaking the system already in place. “The goals of liberation go beyond a simple concept of equality,” she wrote. What Brownmiller and her radical sisters really wanted was a total transfiguration of society—politics, business, child-rearing, sex, romance, housework, entertainment, academics. And they really believed they would make that happen.
    Though she would later admit, “I was not there at the beginning,” in the very first sentence of In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, Brownmiller actually got involved in women’s liberation quite early in the movement’s development. In September 1968, she attended her first meeting of the group that would become New York Radical Women. Like most of the other attendees, Brownmiller had an activist history; she had already spent two summers in Mississippi volunteering with the civil rights movement. But in the civil rights movement—as in the peace movement, as in the Students for a Democratic Society, as in the New Left in general—women played a supporting role. “Background, education, ideology and experience all primed the New Left women for equality. Yet their experience in the national movement was confusing, grating,” writes social historian Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. “Men sought them out, recruited them, took them seriously, honored their intelligence—then subtly demoted them to girlfriends, wives, note-takers, coffeemakers.” It didn’t help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”
    So women began to meet without men—as a sisterhood—for “consciousness-raising.” It was a technique they borrowed from Mao Tse-tung and the “speak bitterness” groups used to energize peasants during the Chinese revolution, which every good radical was reading about in William Hinton’s Fanshen, an account of rural villagers in Shanxi province absorbing the liberating message of communism and casting off the shackles of bourgeois hierarchy. Interest in feminism had already been invigorated in 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and subsequently founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). But the women attracted to consciousness-raising were a new breed. “Friedan, the mother of the movement, and the organization that recruited in her image were considered hopelessly bourgeois,” Brownmiller wrote. “NOW’s emphasis on legislative change left the radicals cold.” Friedan and her disciples had fought for succinct advancements, like the desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads, which were once arranged by gender to distinguish “women’s work” from real careers. But Brownmiller, characteristically, was seeking something more momentous and unwieldy: nothing less than the overthrow of the patriarchy, which had to start in the minds and bedrooms of Americans as well as the workplace—change from the inside out.
    Brownmiller remembers the evening of January 22, 1973, after the Supreme Court handed down their ruling on Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion in this country, as the moment at which she felt the most optimistic about the movement’s success. “The momentum was extraordinary, and it culminated with that case,” she says, three