Interview with Susan Brownmiller

Brownmiller, Susan ; McKiernan, Stephen

Susan Brownmiller is a feminist activist and author. During the Feminist Movement, she was a writer at ABC-TV. When she saw how much power women have, she began to write about abortion rights. She has written and published books that highlight the hardships women face and how they came to be. She attended Cornell University and studied Acting in New York City.

ND

In Copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

94:01

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Susan Brownmiller
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 17 June 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:02):
Ready? [inaudible] somebody recorded too.

SB (00:00:07):
Here we go. I keep checking this because...

SM (00:00:10):
I know. I know that anxiety very well.

SB (00:00:15):
Yeah. Well, I had experience with Charles. Okay. Second wave feminism.

SM (00:00:23):
I am just checking to see it is on.

SB (00:00:25):
Yeah, it is on.

SM (00:00:27):
Okay.

SB (00:00:28):
It has been pretty good. I interviewed Noam Chomsky this past week.

SM (00:00:31):
Oh.

SB (00:00:34):
I have to... That is going. Second wave feminism. When did it start and how is it different from the first wave? What are the...

SM (00:00:45):
Well, the first wave was the suffragette, the Suffragists.

SB (00:00:48):
Right.

SM (00:00:48):
That was first wave feminism starting in 1848.

SB (00:00:54):
Right.

SM (00:00:54):
Yes. So, second wave feminism started about a hundred years later. Probably a really important kickoff was Friedan's book, "The Feminine Mystique", which came out in (19)63, paperback (19)64. That is when I read it. But there were things happening in the left that were making women angry, quite apart from Betty Friedan's book, which was really directed towards middle class white women. The women in the left, in the civil rights movement had gone south to work for equality. They thought they understood that Blacks and whites were equal, but they also thought that males and females were equal, and to their shock in the southern civil rights movement, they discovered that nobody was thinking that women were equal. This wonderful organization, SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was really set up in the image of the-the young black guy in denim coveralls. On the individual projects in the famous Freedom Summer of 1964, several women discovered that in a sense, they were being pushed to the back of the bus. So the other movement that was happening a few years later was the anti-war movement. There again, the women who went into the anti-war movement discovered that they were relegated to running the mimeograph. That is what we had, the mimeograph machines and getting the coffee for the meetings. If they spoke aloud at a meeting, the guys just like would not hear it. Then a few minutes later, a guy would make the same point, and every would say, "oh, yeah, that is it. That is, it." So they were burning too. These were young SDS women, you know that, Students for a Democratic Society. They were anti-war women. So, there were two groups of women in the (19)60s, the civil rights women and the anti-war women who began to think, what about us? Which was exactly what had happened in 1848. This was closer to 1968, (19)65-6. A hundred years later. In 1848, there were all these movements around abolition, new socialist movements, the year of the Communist Manifesto, things like that, and the women in the abolition movement discovered that they were not equal to men in the abolition movement. There was a very famous, I do write this in "Our Time," my history of the women's movement. So that is why I am being so articulate now. I know it well, and I teach it too. There was a very famous anti-slavery convention in London, and couples of abolitionist, because they were mostly married, went to the World Anti-Slavery Conference from America. When they got there, the women were told that they did not have voting rights and that they would sit in the balcony. That is when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and I think it was.

SB (00:05:19):
[inaudible] home.

SM (00:05:22):
[inaudible] They were in such a state, and they were determined to start a women's rights movement, and they did in Seneca Falls, 1948. So women's movements happen infrequently in history, and they always seem to tag along in a period of great militance in the country. People are organizing for these rights, those rights, and suddenly the women who are active in all those movements say, "whoa, what about us? What about us?" Then a women's movement starts. So that is really how it happened in the late (19)60s.

SB (00:06:00):
That is why Frederick Douglass was so ahead of his time, was not he?

SM (00:06:03):
Yes.

SB (00:06:04):
Because he was sensitive to both issues.

SM (00:06:06):
He sure was.

SB (00:06:07):
I can remember taking my dad before he passed away a couple years ago to Seneca Falls and going through the tour there, the room where the sofa was located, and the fact that Frederick Douglass had come there and spent some time with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

SM (00:06:21):
Yes.

SB (00:06:23):
When you think of the times and how they traveled, that had been so difficult. But he was really ahead of his time.

SM (00:06:27):
He was definitely ahead of his time.

SB (00:06:30):
Sure. This is going. Okay, great.

SM (00:06:33):
Yeah.

SB (00:06:36):
I am going to read these to make sure that I get these too. Before you were an activist, something that I read that you went to Hebrew school and that had a very important effect on you. I will mention what it was.

SM (00:06:48):
Tell me what it was.

SB (00:06:50):
Then you were an actress for a short time.

SM (00:06:52):
I do not think it was Hebrew school that had a great effect on me.

SB (00:06:57):
You were a writer. You had been a writer in many years, and you were a student at Cornell?

SM (00:06:59):
Yeah.

SB (00:07:00):
How did a combination, this is before...

SM (00:07:02):
What was the Hebrew thing? Indeed, I went to Hebrew school.

SB (00:07:05):
The Hebrew School said that it was in...

SM (00:07:07):
East Midwood Jewish Center.

SB (00:07:09):
Yes, I think it was, and I have it here. I could show you what the...

SM (00:07:13):
What was it?

SB (00:07:14):
It said that because of the experience of the Holocaust and what had happened to many...

SM (00:07:19):
Oh, I became very Zionist. Is that it?

SB (00:07:21):
Yeah, that, but you became... Man's inhumanity to a man and that kind of thing, the treatment of people. So, you saw, well, how women were treated, and you said, well, when I was younger, I saw how Jewish people were treated.

SM (00:07:38):
I got... That must be from the Jewish archives or something, because that is an exaggeration.

SB (00:07:44):
In fact, I might even find it here.

SM (00:07:46):
Yeah, please do find the source for that. Because I do not recall the going to the East Midwood Jewish Center had much effect on my development as a feminist.

SB (00:07:57):
I will find it here.

SM (00:08:01):
Do not worry about it. I do not think it is true. I mean, I was a rebel. In 1948, Wallace and Taylor ran. I was 13. Roosevelt had just died. Wallace and Taylor were running on a third party ticket for president. At that age, I kind of knew I was for Wallace. I mean...

SB (00:08:26):
He was much more liberal.

SM (00:08:28):
Yes. So that became my political awakening.

SB (00:08:33):
Were there any, in all these experiences, I have a question later on, but I might bring it up now, because in all the years that you worked, now this...

SM (00:08:43):
I am still working.

SB (00:08:45):
You are still working.

SM (00:08:45):
In all the years I have worked.

SB (00:08:48):
When you were in your early years, when you worked for the Village Voice, ABC.

SM (00:08:53):
Yeah.

SB (00:08:54):
You did NBC TV, ABC TV, and then also Newsweek.

SM (00:08:58):
That was earlier.

SB (00:09:00):
... and national affairs. How were you treated as a female? The question is, I was curious as if those experiences in those earlier years, your work experience, not the experience, you are going down south in the summer of (19)64, but those work experiences as a woman in America in the (19)50s, in the early (19)60s.

SM (00:09:23):
Terrible.

SB (00:09:24):
How were you treated in these jobs?

SM (00:09:25):
I was treated like a second class citizen. See, you asked how the movement started you then you said, but you want to ask the personal questions. Again, I suggest you read "In Our Time" because I do describe how, when I worked at Newsweek in (19)63, (19)64 as a researcher, I wanted to be a writer. I was told women do not write it at Newsweek. Men write at Newsweek. You girls as opposed to do research here for two years and then go off and get married. That is what I was told. It was that job that I quit to go down south and work in Mississippi.

SB (00:10:10):
Right.

SM (00:10:10):
Yeah. I wanted to write, and Newsweek, later the women sued at Newsweek. It was one of the first cases with the EEOC against a corporation. I had gone by then, but a lot of the women [inaudible]. Nora Ephron was working there as a researcher. She left, she made an early and very good getaway, the New York Post, but the ones who remained behind as researchers who did not get married. It was an aging firm of researchers, and they saw that those of us who left had gotten somewhere. They got angrier and angrier, and eventually they hired Eleanor Holmes Norton as their lawyer and sued. Yeah. So at ABC, this was after I came back from Mississippi. At ABC, they had one woman reporter network, and I wanted to be a reporter. They had me...I was a news writer, and they said, "we have our woman." That was it. They had their one woman and they're one blackest. We have one Black. We have one woman. I tried every local TV station in the city. We have our woman.

SB (00:11:37):
Now, what year was that?

SM (00:11:39):
I worked at ABC from (19)65 to (19)68. Yeah. We have our woman, and as they say in my book, they said to me, "you are lucky. You have got a man's job to see you're working at the same job that men can work. What are you complaining about?"

SB (00:12:07):
Was there a quote at any time in your earlier years, what they call a magic moment, where it is like any person, this is the first time I feel I have to stand up and say something and become vulnerable. Because standing up and speaking or writing or saying something in public...

SM (00:12:28):
As a feminist?

SB (00:12:28):
Or...

SM (00:12:31):
As a feminist? No, it was easy for me to talk about it when it came to civil rights. I had no trouble
.
SB (00:12:38):
Do you remember the very first experience that really upset you when you said, and you spoke up, whether it be you could been in high school or the first thing that. This is wrong. This is wrong. Was it going to down freedom summer? Was that it?

SM (00:12:54):
No, I think...

SB (00:12:54):
Your experience in New York City?

SM (00:12:55):
I came from a very good public school and high school in Brooklyn, and I had no trouble expressing myself, but having an opinion is quite different from doing something. When the civil rights movement started, which I date from, I date it from Feb 2, 1960 with the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. But of course, I had already been aware of the Montgomery bus boycotts of (19)55. Oh, did I welcome that movement. Did I welcome it? It was not just Montgomery. It spread in (19)55 to a few other cities, but there was no way I could participate really. But in 1960, when the southern sit-ins started, there were picket lines suddenly in front of every Woolworth in New York, or in front of a lot of Woolworths. So, I joined the picket line on 42nd Street, and I met people in CORE, Congress of Racial Equality.

SB (00:14:08):
James Farmer was the leader of that group at the time.

SM (00:14:13):
They said, come to the CORE office, in New York CORE and work with us. So I did for a year, and then I did other things. But I welcomed this, the civil rights movement. I welcomed my chance to participate, is what I am saying. Yes. Right.

SB (00:14:35):
Yeah. I have here talk about your experience in New York City and the effort to integrate the lunch counters because you...

SM (00:14:41):
Yes. Well, that was it. Somebody, a friend of mine said, "Let us go over to 42nd Street. You will see a picket line. I bet you have never seen a picket line in your life." He was [inaudible] and I had never seen a picket line in my life. There were all these people in front of Woolworth on 42nd Street. I was astonished.

SB (00:14:59):
Were there people that were actually on the other side though, screaming at you, or...

SM (00:15:03):
Not at that moment.

SB (00:15:03):
No. So not that moment.

SM (00:15:05):
Oh. But there were always [inaudible]. They were cra- You know, do anything publicly in New York, you attract crazies. There were people who made their own signs... I remember they would march up and down the outside of the line saying, "Futility. Futility." Then I started my own picket line in front of Old Woolworth near Bloomingdale's. Yeah, it was great.

SB (00:15:35):
When you made that decision to go south, because I have spoken to several people that went in the summer of (19)64. Yes. David Hawk, I do not know if you know David. David was on the core organizers of the Moratorium in 1969, and a couple other people that, of course we know Tom Hayden was in that group, Casey Hayden.

SM (00:15:55):
Yes. She is a Facebook friend now.

SB (00:15:57):
...and a couple people that were either in the first training group or the second training group.

SM (00:16:02):
They were there before Casey. Casey, not Tom, Casey was there before.

SB (00:16:06):
I am interviewing her sometime in July.

SM (00:16:09):
Oh, good for you. Give her my regards.

SB (00:16:10):
She has had some issues, I guess. And she has had to put off interviewing or something.

SM (00:16:14):
Health issues?

SB (00:16:15):
No. Not health issues. Just... First of all, she does not do many interviews.

SM (00:16:20):
She does not.

SB (00:16:23):
Mr. Gor- I think Tom Gorman was a friend of hers, and I interviewed Tom and Casey. Anyways, she has agreed to do an interview in July sometime.

SM (00:16:34):
Great.

SB (00:16:36):
But the question I am really getting at here,

SM (00:16:38):
Well, you should read her contribution to that book of-

SB (00:16:41):
I have.

SM (00:16:41):
Women in the-

SB (00:16:43):
I have. That is the one with the kind of a light brownish cover.

SM (00:16:46):
I do not know. I have it over there.

SB (00:16:46):
Yeah.

SM (00:16:47):
It is like eight women, eight white women in the southern... Yeah, something like that.

SB (00:16:52):
What amazes me, because it was a thousand people in that first wave. I know...

SM (00:16:56):
Yes. But she was there before. She was not among those first wave of students.

SB (00:17:00):
Right.

SM (00:17:00):
She started a few years earlier, she got radicalized at Texas where she met Tom Hayden because he was on some committee of a national whatever. She was a white Texas girl who found her way to that southern movement early.

SB (00:17:19):
As one of the individuals who came from the north to go down south. That had to be for anyone in their, whether you be in their twenties, an experience that could be exciting but then you get down there and then you face the reality of what it's really like. Did you fear for your life?

SM (00:17:39):
Yes.

SB (00:17:40):
Because some people that I have talked to did.

SM (00:17:41):
Of course.

SB (00:17:42):
...and particularly those that followed the first after Chaney...

SM (00:17:46):
Yes.

SB (00:17:46):
...Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered.

SM (00:17:48):
Right. Well, I went down with my friend Jan Goodman, who lives in this apartment building. We were in our twenties. We were in our late twenties actually. By then, we were older than the age of the student volunteer. But hey, a movement was starting, but we had the philosophy that everyone had, which was that this was a cause that was worth giving your life to. Now looking back and looking at those pathetic, crazed suicide bombers, wherever they are. I think that this concept of giving your life to a cause is something that you can think about when you are very young, but when you are older, you are what is important enough to end your life for? So, I remember that Jan and I, we volunteered to go to Meridian and Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had just been declared missing. At our orientation session, which was not at Oxford, it was later, it was in another city, they said, "We need volunteers in Meridian." And they said, "Meridian is really the safest place in Mississippi," And this happened, but it happened outside Meridian in Neshoba County in Philadelphia. So Jan and I, because we were slightly older than, so nobody wanted to go to Meridian. Meridian was a CORE project, and the other projects were basically SNCC projects. Jan and I volunteered for Meridian. Now this is interesting because I quit, Jan quit her job at the Girl Scouts to go, or took her summer leave from the Girl Scouts. She was working as an organizer for the Girl Scouts. I took my leave from Newsweek. Newsweek was not happy that I was going south. Newsweek had two southern reporters who were certain that I was going to mess things up for them, Karl Fleming and Joe Cumming. We had a Newsweek reunion a few years ago, and Joe and Fleming came over to me. We remember the moment and because he objected a lot. He said, "You are sending a young researcher?" No, it is her summer vacation. She is going. He said, "Well, she is going to get arrested, and she is going to be identified with Newsweek, and I have to work both sides of the aisle here." So Newsweek, in its questionable wisdom, took my name off the masthead for the time that I was in Mississippi. Yes. Peter Goldman, who was the Star National reporter. I was his researcher. Peter Goldman, said, she is going to get herself killed. I mean, he was very hostile. Very hostile. But he was writing all the civil rights stories for [inaudible].

SB (00:21:07):
Yes.

SM (00:21:07):
I am sure he told you.

SB (00:21:08):
Yes.

SM (00:21:09):
I was checking the facts. So yeah, Peter was not wonderful at that moment. Yeah. So anyway, Jan and I are driving. She was the driver. She had rented a car. We're driving into Mississippi, and they had told us at the orientation session, I could see her in Nashville, in Memphis, I do not remember. They had told us, when you crossed the border into Mississippi, roll up the windows of your car, and she rolls up the windows of her car. I remember this so well. I said, Jan, what's the difference between where we were two minutes ago and where we are? Why are you rolling up the windows of your car? We were two white women in a car. But she was nervous. Jan stayed in the movement far longer than I could.

SB (00:22:05):
Now You were there just the summer, or...

SM (00:22:07):
Then I went back and yeah, I came back to Newsweek after my summer vacation. It was very hard to resume a bourgeois life.

SB (00:22:19):
I understand that.

SM (00:22:20):
After being in Mississippi.

SB (00:22:21):
What was a typical day like? I know that people were down there, but what was a typical day like when you are trained and when you go off?

SM (00:22:30):
Yeah. Well, it was easy in Meridian. I mean, because everybody was really scared because of Woodman, Schwerner and Chaney. What we did... We were housed with a black family, Jan and I, the Falconers, F-A-L-C-O-N-E-R-S, Falconers. The wife was Johnny May Falconer. She had a daughter named Sandy, and I forget the son's name, and her husband worked for the railroad. In the month that we lived with them, he could never get to sit at the same table with us for a meal. He still could not get him to sit down with the white women. We would take a bus, a city bus to the COFO office, Congress of Federated Organizations. That was the name of the umbrella group that was mostly SNCC, a little bit of CORE. We were doing voter registration, symbolic voter registration for what turned out to be the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We were canvassing Blacks, asking them if they could vote, would they register to vote? Would they? Then they would fill out the forms, and we would pair off in interracial couples to do this. We would also... There were other activities. It was a freedom school, which I think was probably more fun, but...

SM (00:24:03):
... activities. It was a freedom school, which I think was probably more fun, but we did not do that. Then we got a message one day, James Bevel came to town, and he said that Martin Luther King was swinging through on the speech tour, and Jan and I said, "Oh, we could organize that." I mean, yeah, we have done a lot of that sort of stuff. So we helped to organize the turnout for the Martin Luther King rallies in Meridian. So, then we went back to our lives after, when the summer was over, they said, go back to your life. But Jan and I both felt that our lives were too bourgeois. I mean, how could I return? Newsweek was on Madison and 50th, and it was a block away from Saks Fifth Avenue. So, on my lunch share, I would go to Saks Fifth Avenue and shop. How can I do that after Mississippi? So Jan and I, no, I think she had made an earlier arrangement. She hooked up with the MFDP, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I think Lawrence Guyot was still around and had asked her. So I went back down and worked in the Jackson office, 1017 Lynn Street. I lived on the Tougaloo Campus in a house that was famous for having Casey Hayden having lived in it before. I had come back, it felt very important to vote for LBJ in November. So when I went back to Mississippi, by then the movement ... I was in Casey's house, and Casey's clothes were there, but she had already gone to New Orleans. She was burned out. Also, the movement was questioning whites, because as I am sure you know, not all the blacks in SNCC had welcomed these white students who were not all white and were not all students. They were ministers. They were all sorts of people. Then of course, when all the publicity that summer was because two white guys and one black guy had gotten killed, there was a lot of resentment over that too, because there had been other murders in Mississippi, civil rights connected, but they had not gotten the attention of Goodman Schwerner and Cheney. So, this anti-white feeling was seething. After that summer, the movement really did lose its direction a bit. People said to me, "Listen, you have to make your own project, do your own thing, because there's nobody here to assign you to anything." So I did a little of that. I actually wrote my first story for the Village Voice from Mississippi. They were holding a cotton board election. It's complicated, but there was such a thing called a cotton board. Of course, it only whites would get on the cotton board, but they established the cotton allotments, how much you could plant, and how much you could not plant. So COFO thought it would be very important to monitor the elections, and also to try to get blacks to run for the cotton board. So, I and a guy got sent to, I think it was Edina, to monitor the cotton board elections. Now, I thought it was extraordinary the COFO was doing this, and I tried to get the New York press in the Jackson office, alerted to the fact that the movement was still alive and well and we were monitoring the cotton of board elections. I could not get anybody interested in it. Sometime how after that summer of (19)64, the press lost interest in the Civil Rights movement, and the Civil Rights movement was losing its steam and getting very self-involved in who are we?

SB (00:28:51):
Was that when Black Power really came about?

SM (00:28:54):
Ah, yeah.

SB (00:28:55):
Because Malcolm X died in (19)65, but he was "all white men are devils." But then he changed his attitude when he went to Mecca.

SM (00:29:04):
Right.

SB (00:29:05):
But he did not live very long.

SM (00:29:06):
No, but that is what was happening. Stokely was beginning to speak up about Black Power. So I tried to get the white press. I tried to get Life interested, others interested. Nobody was interested in the cotton election. So, I said, "God damn, I am going to write a story myself." I always wanted to write. So I wrote it and sent it to the Village Voice, and it was the first thing they ever print of mine. Wow.

SB (00:29:32):
Yeah. Black Power. It is interesting. We had Tommy Smith in our campus, the guy from (19)68 Olympics who put his fist up. We had him at our school a year and a half ago, and he was really upset when people said that he was a Black Panther. "I had nothing to do with being a Black Panther." And he had to correct them all the time. This is Black Power. It is about injustice against African-American. Nothing to do with Black Panthers. But I was on college campuses, and I know the split that was also happening there. The intimidation in the late (19)60s. The Afros and the encounter classes that were happening.

SM (00:30:11):
Yeah.

SB (00:30:14):
I have asked a lot of our guests, when we talk about the era that Boomers have been alive. Now, Boomers were born between (19)46 and (19)64.

SM (00:30:21):
Yes. I was quite a bit older.

SB (00:30:24):
Again, the difference between the Boomers from the first 10 years and the second 10 years is a difference in night and day. I have learned that through the interview process. But what was it like being a woman in ... what I am trying to describe about the Boomers themselves, the era that Boomers have lived, the 63 years they have been on this planet, because the oldest Boomers are 63 years old and the youngest are 47. So, I am looking at that period of time since right after the war ended. What was it like being a female in the late (19)40s and the (19)50s, and then in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, the (19)80s, the (19)90s, and the 2010s? I break it down by decades. I know it might even be different to some of the people, but what was it like in-

SM (00:31:16):
It was stifling in the (19)50s. You could not be anything. In the (19)60s at first did not change for women. But there were other forms of activism available that I and a lot of other women joined. Civil Rights, Anti-War. But it was not until the start of the women's movement that I found a movement that was directly concerned with me. Never thought it would happen.

SB (00:31:53):
And that is really the (19)70s then, really.

SM (00:31:55):
Well, (19)69.

SB (00:31:59):
(19)69, (19)70 and the (19)70s are when a lot of the movements really came in.

SM (00:32:03):
[inaudible] That was the women's decade.

SB (00:32:08):
And the (19)80s. What happened in the (19)80s besides Ronald Reagan being one?

SM (00:32:12):
Well, I wish you had read "In Our Time," because I talked about that too, that in the (19)80s, women continued to make strides in terms of employment, things like that. But suddenly you needed two incomes in a family to survive under the Reagan Era. Things had been cheap before then, things were cheap in New York. You could get a cheap apartment and have a part-time job and still have time for your political activism. But that disappeared in the Reagan Era. That was, I think, one of the primary reasons why activism fell off in the (19)80s. It was it the pressure to earn a living with the rising rents and double-digit inflation. It became very difficult.

SB (00:33:09):
Before we go in the (19)90s, the (19)70s was the heyday of the second wave of the women's movement. And obviously that was also the environmental movement because of Earth Day. You might even say because of Stonewall, that was the gay and lesbian-

SM (00:33:24):
Oh, absolutely. All happening.

SB (00:33:26):
Certainly, even the Native American movement, that was (19)69 to (19)73. But why is it that that decade, and I just interviewed Dr. Schulman up in Boston, who just wrote a book on the (19)70s. There is something that happens. People seem to remember the first half of the (19)70s, but they do not remember the second half and I said, "Is it because of disco?" So, what happened as how some people look at the (19)60s as the decade.

SM (00:34:00):
That is right.

SB (00:34:01):
And they kind of knock the (19)70s knowing that when you define the (19)60s, that goes up to (19)73 in most cases, because even people say the (19)60s was from (19)63 to (19)73 or something like that. So, what I am saying-

SM (00:34:15):
Well, I know I have heard that, but I date it a little differently. Hold on. Let get a cough drop.

SB (00:34:19):
Yep.

SM (00:34:25):
People have tried to write the women's movement out of history, that is one thing. I have read accounts of the (19)70s, Rolling Stone asked me to contribute to an account of the (19)70s. And I said, "Well, for your purposes, we got Roe v. Wade."

SB (00:34:51):
I got that later on.

SM (00:34:52):
The editor said, "What? That happened in the (19)70s." I said, "Yes, women won abortion rights in the 1970s." "No kidding." There have been many intellectuals who have tried to bury the women's movement. Tom Wolf, most famously, he is referring to it as "The Me Generation." Todd Gitlin famously refers to as the "Identity generation" me, my identity. He does not consider the issues that emerged to be on the level of his great involvement.

SB (00:35:41):
I interviewed him too.

SM (00:35:41):
Yeah. Well, incredibly important movements arose in the (19)70s. At this point, I would say that the gay rights movement is stronger than the women's movement. The environmental movement has certainly gotten a push from the Gulf spill.

SB (00:36:09):
Oh, yes.

SM (00:36:13):
But by the end of the decade, before the election of Ronald Reagan, there were many of us who felt that somehow we were running out of steam in the women's movement, and the great divisions had arose among us. I was part of a group that formed Women Against Pornography in (19)78, and that became a very divisive issue in the movement. Earlier than that some people, like Phyllis Schlafly, had decided to take a very strong stand on surrogacy. She argued, and I guess would still argue, that a woman who offers her body as a surrogate has a right to change her mind. And others of us thought, well, well, a contract's a contract. If you have volunteered your womb, and perhaps your egg to incubate a baby for somebody else, well, you signed a contract. What is this, a woman has the right to change her mind all of a sudden. So, I was surprised when Phyllis Schlafly turned surrogacy into a woman's right thing. And a lot of people were surprised when I turned anti-pornography into a feminist thing, not I alone. I mean, Schlafly alone seemed to be spearheading the surrogate thing in the case of Mary Beth Whitehead. But pornography split the movement a bit or earlier than that, prostitution split the movement a bit because some leftists in our movement, they named it sex work. They named prostitution sex work and said it was as honorable as any other kind of work, and that all work is basically exploited anyway. I said, "Excuse me, what I do is not exploited as a writer. I do not get exploited except maybe by my publisher." I never have royalty statements. But I thought that the effort to redefine prostitution as sex work was really bad and they keep it up, because this is an international dispute now. Those of us who considered ourselves the ones with the real feminist analysis said, "No one should be allowed to buy a woman's body the way no one should be allowed to buy any person's body. I mean, we eliminated slavery. We have to eliminate prostitution." But that battle still goes on.

SB (00:39:25):
Now, when you look at certainly the (19)50s and the (19)60s, you got to think of Hugh Hefner. I have not brought him up very much.

SM (00:39:34):
An enemy.

SB (00:39:35):
Okay, but I have not brought him up hardly in any of the interviews. Well, you are talking about the sexual revolution. You bring up Hugh Hefner, and some people say that his work was more art, but when you compare a Larry Flint that is more pornography. So, they're in the same boat, but Hugh Hefner was the front runner of all this.

SM (00:40:00):
Well, he has a whole team of publicists who are still promoting his role as a great sexual liberator.

SB (00:40:13):
His kids are going to take over, too. His sons who are like 20, 18, when they do. I had a question here on the organizing of the Women Against Pornography. How effective had that been?

SM (00:40:37):
We lost.

SB (00:40:39):
Obviously, they even had a TV show recently on CNN going into that, in-depth on the business and so forth. So that is-

SM (00:40:52):
The industry, it was a very funny thing at the time, even.

SB (00:40:58):
Make sure this is still going. Yep, we are doing fine.

SM (00:41:07):
We had a slideshow on a carousel, and we would invite audiences to see it. Pictures really, atrocious pictures from Hustler, from Penthouse, from Playboy. That was our technology moving the crank on a carousel on a slideshow. Meanwhile, the industry is moving with VCRs. The porn stores are opening all over the place. You can now buy a VCR, take it home in the privacy of your home seat, you do not have to go to a booth in Times Square and masturbate in a booth. You can take it home. So it was hilarious. It was like the technology changes that we were talking about. But we also had a problem, in addition to the fact that the industry was growing by leaps and bounds, and all kinds of people got the idea into their heads, was that, "Ooh, I want to be a Hollywood director, so the first thing I do is make a porn film, make money on that, and then I can direct a real film." I mean, it permeated everybody in the (19)70s. It was disgusting.

SB (00:42:29):
Well, I do remember Hugh Hefner being interviewed, even recently saying, I do not know what it was, he was on television, and he said, "Well, Playboy was very important to change the attitudes in America that bodies are beautiful, that a women's body is art."

SM (00:42:59):
I know his lines, and I have seen the most recent documentary, which unfortunately, I mean, this Canadian woman fooled me, Pat Boone and I represent the opposition. And everyone, including Jesse Jackson and Mike Wallace is saying, "Oh, Hugh Hefner was such a pioneer." It was horrible. I crept out of the screening. I was mortified that she fooled me. She really hood winked me. Anyway, what were we talking about? We were talking about the changes.

SB (00:43:36):
Yeah, we were talking about changes. Yeah, we were talking about changes.

SM (00:43:37):
Well, the other thing that happened in our anti-pornography movement was little did we know that there were ... we saw pornography as something created by men, that men watched and masturbated over it. That is how we saw pornography. And as for gay-on-gay pornography, it did not bother us. Men want to, that is their thing. We were thinking of heterosexual pornography as being a lie about women. It was always showing rapes, gang rapes that women love. But within the women's movement, it turned out we had people and some identify themselves as lesbian feminists, some identify themselves as straight feminists, who said that they found their sexuality in pornography, and that our images that we thought were so horrible about bondage and things like that they enjoyed and that we were censoring their minds. That is a very serious charge.

SB (00:44:47):
You talk about that-

SM (00:44:48):
We did not mean to censor their minds. We did not think those images were very healthy.

SB (00:44:54):
When you wrote "Against Our ..." I am going to get back to the [inaudible], maybe I will finish this question here on the decades. You talk about how about the (19)90s? Where were the women's movement in the (19)90s and 2000s?

SM (00:45:05):
Well, the movement goes on. There are people working in every aspect of it. It was through our movement that we established the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis centers, the laws against sexual harassment. These were women's movement accomplishments of the (19)70s. In the (19)80s, those forms of organizing, having a battered women's shelter, having a rape crisis center, having a hotline, they got taken over by the establishment, as well they should have. They moved into the mainstream of community service. A town with good people funded a battered women's shelter so you did not need feminist activists to be involved in it any more. In fact, they were pushed out because they did not have social work degrees.

SB (00:46:09):
It is interesting, I cannot remember who I interviewed that said, when I brought up the name Gloria Steinem, they said she is the epitome of a person who is now mainstream. She's the most mainstream of all the feminists.

SM (00:46:24):
Well, I do not know. I think she keeps trying to be relevant. She tries very hard. It is her life. It is her life to be a public speaker and to travel to colleges. So, I do not need to criticize her.

SB (00:46:36):
The (19)90s though itself?

SM (00:46:39):
So, getting to the (19)90s.

SB (00:46:43):
Bill Clinton. Stop. Here we go.

SM (00:46:52):
Yep, it is fine. Okay. It is on?

SB (00:46:54):
Yep, it is on.

SM (00:46:55):
I can say from personal experience, because in the (19)90s I was writing my book called "In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution," I would say that my editor, who had signed it earlier in the decade with great hopes and a big advance, was telling me several years later that the salesmen were reporting to her that no one was interested in a history of the feminist movement, and that there was no chance for this book in the public marketplace. So, something happened out there, in the culture at large, where even though individual women were making strides in their individual lives, the movement was dead as an issue that engaged the public.

SB (00:47:55):
See, that was the same criticism that when people praised the (19)60s, they criticized the (19)70s because ...

SB (00:48:03):
When people praised the (19)60s, they criticized the (19)70s because what happened to all those movements? What happened to all of them?

SM (00:48:08):
They were there.

SB (00:48:09):
They were there in the (19)70s.

SM (00:48:10):
They were not their movements. The civil rights movement split off into black power, which I think was very destructive.

SB (00:48:17):
Right.

SM (00:48:18):
Right?

SB (00:48:18):
Mm-hmm.

SM (00:48:22):
The anti-war people, what happened to them? Most of them went into academia and became professors, which a lot of them did. A lot of them quickly jumped into academia.

SB (00:48:37):
And I know the gay and lesbian movement was in its heyday in the (19)70s,

SM (00:48:40):
Yes, and it was a fantastic improvement in civilization, but some people were so angry at it because they were not gay.

SB (00:48:49):
And then AIDS hit in the (19)80s.

SM (00:48:50):
And then it became a really serious movement, and that is when I saw a split off in the women's movement where the lesbian feminist in our movement discovered they identified more with gay men than they did with heterosexual women. It was profound to see that happen at the time of AIDS. It was such a crisis that lesbians felt, Hey, I have been working in this women's movement and we are always talking about abortion rights, and now suddenly a movement closer to my own identity is talking about we need a vaccine, we need something, we have got to stop this epidemic. And they move, they move right over.

SB (00:49:35):
What is interesting too is that when you see, and I have seen it in the universities over the years, is that the split between the African American community and the gay community, even though they are united in many respects, only through crises do groups like this seem to come together. We had a student who now works in Washington who had the gay and lesbian office right across from the BSU office. He said, I was afraid of even walking in there for fear of what someone might say.

SM (00:50:07):
Yeah.

SB (00:50:07):
And the fact that many in the African American community have been raised in the church that this is wrong by their ministers.

SM (00:50:13):
Yeah.

SB (00:50:14):
And so, you have got that split automatically.

SM (00:50:16):
Yeah, but it also did not fit their idea of machismo black men. What? We're not gay. Oh. It is very complicated, it is very complicated.

SB (00:50:27):
Where did Clinton fall on any of this? And he's-

SM (00:50:30):
Well, he started off pretty good, but the Monica Lewinsky case really did him in, as I keep reminding us. On television, I was watching Colbert last night. I think he wanted to have a much more liberal presidency than he could have. One of his very first acts was he wanted to close some military bases in the United States, and people had forgotten this. People jumped on him. You want to make America-

SB (00:51:07):
One of them was right in Philadelphia, Philadelphia [inaudible] I remember.

SM (00:51:07):
Is that one that he wanted to close?

SB (00:51:08):
Yes.

SM (00:51:08):
Yeah.

SB (00:51:09):
Ireland inspector came right after.

SM (00:51:11):
Yeah. Right. Well, see, I am glad you remember it because very few people remember that it was one of the first acts that Clinton was attempting, and he had not thought that through very carefully in terms of the reaction.

SB (00:51:23):
Do not ask, do not tell was the other-

SM (00:51:24):
The other thing was do not ask, do not tell, which he thought was a progressive move at the time, and everyone's hit him on it.

SB (00:51:31):
Oh, yes.

SM (00:51:32):
Yeah.

SB (00:51:33):
David Mixer was the one that really hit him, and I think resigned over it or something like that or he left the White House.

SM (00:51:39):
Yeah.

SB (00:51:40):
And how about this last 10 years, George Bush and of course, and now President Obama. Any changes there, have you seen?

SM (00:51:53):
I know because I am on the mailing list that the Pro-Choice abortion action groups are still with Obama, but worried a bit about him.

SB (00:52:08):
Yeah.

SM (00:52:10):
But cannot fault his Supreme Court nominations. I do not know. He got hit with more stuff as president than anybody else. And of course, there has been this strange sudden rise or coalescing of a nutty far right, a religious, nutty far right. I work really hard as a volunteer in the Obama campaign, which is interesting because many of my old feminist friends were horrified that I was not for Hillary, and that was another division in those of us who identify ourselves primarily as feminists.

SB (00:52:53):
Yeah. I think we are going to see her run again. And of course, he is going to run again. I see her running in, let us see, 2012, (20)16. But there has been some scenario, I am going into it here, some scenarios where she could run in two years.

SM (00:53:15):
I have heard that too. I have heard that, that they have a deal.

SB (00:53:19):
If there is a chance that there is no way he is going to win or ... There is some things going on right now.

SM (00:53:24):
I have heard it. I have heard the same thing.

SB (00:53:26):
Yeah.

SM (00:53:29):
I do not know. I am not in the in group. I just get a hell of a lot of fundraising requests on my email to help the Democrat, because I gave money for the Obama campaign. And I did a lot of telephone work, so I am on their list, but I am not a fat cat, and I really resent saying, do you believe what Obama said today contribute to the Democratic Party?

SB (00:53:55):
I do not like those emails that are sent in. There was an email where after they took the vote on healthcare-

SM (00:54:03):
Yeah, they wanted us to pay for it.

SB (00:54:06):
Yeah, but give a thank you to Nancy Pelosi. Well, I sent a thank you to Nancy Pelosi for doing that, and now all I have been getting now is from the Democratic Committee, all these, send 25, 59.

SM (00:54:18):
Yeah.

SB (00:54:19):
I did not do that to thank Nancy Pelosi.

SM (00:54:21):
Right. They get your name on the list. I mean, I am furious. I mean, I identify the names now. They all-

SB (00:54:30):
Vogel or whatever his name is. They are always coming from a guy named Vogel. And again, when I look at the boomer generation, I always look at the presidents. Harry Truman was president [inaudible] right through Obama. Now, when you look at that, all those different presidents, do any of them stand out as presidents who ... If you had a conference tomorrow on women's issues, I do not think Obama has been in long enough, evaluating the president since World War II, would any of them get passing grades?

SM (00:55:06):
No. No. It was not a primary issue for any president, and I remember Roosevelt too. I was a child. No. Well, because of the abortion issue in particular, it is a tough one to run on. Yeah. And Obama has made statements that can be interpreted several ways, when he says, we want abortion to be legal, but rare. Well, rare? How rare? Inaccessible or everybody is on birth control, using protective measures? What does he mean by that? But it is a very tough issue. And the biggest change I have seen in the national psyche is that we talked about abortion as a woman's right to control her own destiny. And now it has gummed up with all sorts of other things because of the influence of the religious right. My students think that a first trimester abortion hurts. They go, Ooh. Not that they are not having them, ooh, it hurts. And this whole business of killing a baby. We have not killed a baby, we're just killing a tiny little fetus that we are unprepared to raise. So, I have seen a tremendous setback in young women's attitudes toward abortion. And even my heroes on TV like John Stewart, he has said things, I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of abortion. But I mean, he is bending it, but he is backtracking. Okay, you are taking a life. The point was women's life. Before it is born, it is not a life, so we have lost that.

SB (00:57:13):
I wanted to say too, that I think your work and your book, Against Our Will, as a person who has worked in higher education for over 30 years, you have had impact on higher education and the issue of rape.

SM (00:57:25):
I hope so.

SB (00:57:25):
Oh, yes. It is one of the major issues in universities today. Every university I have worked at, it has been a major ... well, they hired a person. The women's center person is normally linked to it, but it is much, much more than that with a health center. So, you got to realize that your book, Against Our Will, and what you did back in (19)75 by writing about this issue has had direct effect on universities today.

SM (00:57:50):
Yeah, that is what I published at (19)75. I started writing it a few years earlier.

SB (00:57:55):
Again, we do not pinpoint it on fraternities anymore, but still a lot of college men have to still hear this story over and over again. And I know it is like a record to some people. They probably heard it in high school, but it is important because it is a very important orientation wherever I have been. And that women, I think in universities today, at least the universities I have worked at, I have worked at four different ones, feel much more empowered. They know their voice counts. And in this particular issue of rape, I am hoping that the stigma and the fear of going to the public safety ... and that is the one thing we have been trying to do, is the stigma and fear that some of them have. And of course, the worry what the parents might think of them for getting drunk and not knowing what was happening.

SM (00:58:56):
Yeah. Yeah.

SB (00:58:56):
But I just praise you for that. I just praise your work.

SM (00:59:00):
Well, thank you, but it was part of a movement. I did not make this all up by myself. Yeah. It was a movement.

SB (00:59:08):
But you had to know that this is ongoing and will forever have a direct effect on male-female relationships, at least within the universities and colleges and community colleges.

SM (00:59:18):
Oh, sure.

SB (00:59:18):
It is part of the daily life, and even in fraternities now. I worked with fraternities. There was a period of time, oh, I got to go through this. No, not anymore. Most of the fraternity guys now work with some of those other people on the other side to educate their fellow brothers or sisters to be sensitive to this issue.

SM (00:59:40):
Yeah.

SB (00:59:40):
And hopefully the biggest stigma is going to public safety. And that seems to be still the hardest thing for some of the females to go in [inaudible] that they have been raped.

SM (00:59:53):
Yeah. Well, because they are still, I think, afraid of a viral internet smear on their reputation, which has happened to several rape victims.

SB (01:00:04):
Right. I have here that Roe v. Wade was the most important legal decision in 1973 since the end of World War II.

SM (01:00:13):
Yes.

SB (01:00:13):
Do you feel that is the most important legal decision?

SM (01:00:13):
Well, I say since Brown versus Board of Education of (19)54. Yeah. That is how I teach it.

SB (01:00:22):
Are you fearful as a person that one day they will try to change that?

SM (01:00:27):
They are trying.

SB (01:00:28):
They will not succeed though. Today they will not succeed.

SM (01:00:31):
They better not, but they are cutting it back and back and back and back. I was reading about the Miranda Rights from Warren Court era.

SB (01:00:41):
Right.

SM (01:00:41):
They are cutting back on Miranda rights. They are cutting back on a woman's right to have an abortion. In many states you cannot get an abortion now. There are so many qualifications. Now you have to watch an ultra ... it is offered to you. You do not have to watch it. You can close your eyes, but before you get an abortion, in many states, you have to look at an ultrasound of this itty-bitty thing that is inside you. But of course, it's blown up big on a screen, and it looks like something is sucking its thumb. That is just one example. It is the latest tactic is the ultrasound. But the parental notifications, the waiting period, all the picketing that they have done, the shooting of abortion providers, so at least four shootings of abortion providers. So, you cannot say it is one nut somewhere. It is part of their movement, they kill. And what else has happened? Well, the hounding of abortion providers in some of the smaller states. New York, I am sure it is pretty easy to get an abortion, but-

SB (01:02:04):
Yeah, on university campuses, there will be groups that cannot actually be on campus, but they have the right to stand on the streets surrounding campuses because it is a public sidewalk. And they have the okay to hand out literature, the body parts and the ugliest pictures you're can ever see, but not a lot on the campus.

SM (01:02:25):
Well, that is good, but there was something else that they are doing. It just went out of my mind. I have to think about it because it is important. Oh, yeah. I just had gotten an email about it. One of the antis strategies now is to have abortion crisis centers and get them in the yellow pages. And women think this is a place where you can go and get an abortion, and it turns out it is not. It is a place that will tell you about the evils of abortion. And once they grab these young women for whom it was a big step to say, yes, I want an abortion, then they get in the hands of these abortion crisis centers, and they are fed a different line altogether and are under an enormous pressure to bring the child to term and give it up for adoption.

SB (01:03:39):
I just had a question here regarding just some of the other classic figures or writers in the second wave. Whether you want to comment on any of these individuals, I will just read their names and some of them are politicians too, of course. Kate Millet and Sherry Hite, Jill Johnson, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abs, Betty Friedan, Jermaine Greer, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker, who I really like.

SM (01:04:05):
Well, I would not put Susan Sontag in a list of feminists if I did not-

SB (01:04:10):
Well, I might put her in the writer area, Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker, who I really think are unbelievable. We have had her on campus. Winona LaDuke, who I think is a fantastic Native American, and Andrea Dorkin, who passed away, and Robin Morgan. I think I have Geraldine Ferrara over here, too, but these are just people when I think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s and some of the books that have been written, and I have some of the books. Oh, I had books of all these people. But what do you think of these people?

SM (01:04:38):
Well, everyone had an important role to play, wish we had more of them, because you are describing ... I mean, your list is made up of the ones who got famous and had extraordinary skills of being articulate, having an ability to write. Not everybody in a movement, although most wish they could, but they do not write, they do not publish, and they cannot speak before a crowd. And yet they are the heart of the movement.

SB (01:05:15):
Yeah. I remember we had a speaker that ... we tried to get Gloria Steinem to come to Westchester. We ended up getting Mary Tom.

SM (01:05:22):
Oh, yeah.

SB (01:05:23):
Now she was very good, but she was very good if you had her on stage interviewing her, but she was not good as a public speaker.

SM (01:05:30):
Well, there you go.

SB (01:05:30):
Yeah. But we wish we had interviewed her because she was great at dinner. What are your thoughts on these conservative women who came to the forefront since World War II?

SM (01:05:41):
Yes.

SB (01:05:43):
These are people that are really against probably women's studies and a lot of the women's issues. And I start right out with Phyllis Schlafly, who I have interviewed, who has been very friendly. We brought her to our campus and our conservative students like her. But her quote is that the troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running today's universities, including all the studies departments, so they are-

SM (01:06:09):
Pardon?

SB (01:06:10):
Women's studies, black studies, gay studies and [inaudible].

SM (01:06:13):
I did say that a lot of former radicals went into academia.

SB (01:06:20):
Right.

SM (01:06:20):
They looked around and said, well, I think I need a steady job for life and a pension.

SB (01:06:28):
So that is truth from-

SM (01:06:30):
I would say it is true. A lot of so-called Marxist, feminist academics, [inaudible] I mean, they just ran into academia.

SB (01:06:39):
And that is been a critic of the university in the (19)80s and (19)90s, that the people of the (19)60s are the liberals who controlled the humanities department. So, they control the liberal arts department, arts and sciences.

SM (01:06:52):
That is probably true.

SB (01:06:53):
What are your thoughts on other ones that stood out during this period, whether they be a Margaret Thatcher, who was during the Reagan era? Anne Coulter, Michelle Malkin.

SM (01:07:05):
Well, I mean, I would not put-

SB (01:07:07):
They are different eras.

SM (01:07:08):
Yeah. No, but they are different kinds of people. Michelle Balkan and Ann Coulter are right wing screamers on television, are not they? Margaret Thatcher was a complicated person, she was conservative. So on one level, I think way, Hey, she got to be Prime Minister. On the other hand, I mean, she destroyed the labor movement in England. But on the other hand, maybe it saved England. I do not know. I am not enough of a student of English history.

SB (01:07:43):
And, well, actually, Colter and Malkin are very popular now because they write books and they go out and speak on college campuses.

SM (01:07:51):
Yeah, very articulate.

SB (01:07:55):
And one of the older ones is Gertrude Himmelfarb, which is I think Bill Crystal's mother, and she is [inaudible] for criticisms of the left.

SM (01:08:03):
Oh, well, yeah. She has been around forever.

SB (01:08:05):
And the other one I have here is, I think it was ... What is her name? Oh, golly. Forget her name now, cannot read my writing here. Oh, Sarah Palin. I have Sarah Palin here.

SM (01:08:19):
Yes. Well, she is quite a phenomenon, isn't she?

SB (01:08:19):
Anita Bryant is the other one.

SM (01:08:24):
Yes. Yeah. Well, just because they are women does not mean that you have to ask me to apologize for them. I mean, what the women's movement did was open up doors for women of all kinds to express themselves, and I guess many of us have been shocked at what has come out of these women's mouths. They are certainly not hewing to a feminist line. In fact, it is very funny. I tangled with one of them on a television show. I do not think it was any of the ones you mentioned. I think she came and went. I think she was with the Heritage Foundation, but it was a Charlie Rose show, and she had been trained to interrupt whatever I said and just go, [inaudible] I could not get a word in and I was so unused to that, and he could not control it either. It was the first time I saw that new women were coming up who ... they did get training in how to speak loudly, forcefully, and not give the opposition a chance. I mean, maybe today they do not need those kinds of training sessions, but at the rise of these right-wing spokespeople, they had training sessions. I just could not believe it. Every time I asked, she said, you believe this, you believe that, duh, duh, duh. And I thought Charlie Rose was supposed to be the moderator here. Tell her to shut up. I do not want to scream too.

SB (01:10:12):
Yeah, we have had-

SM (01:10:12):
But they became fantastic screamers, so many of them with long blonde hair. That is, it. Suddenly we have a generation of long, beautifully thin, blonde-haired screamers on the right, except Sarah Palin-

SB (01:10:26):
Are they on Fox?

SM (01:10:27):
Yeah, they are all on Fox, aren't they? Oh. What have we wrought?

SB (01:10:34):
One of the things the questions I do ask everyone is something that [inaudible] Gingrich talked about when he came into power in (19)94 when the Republicans took over for power. And then I have read some of his writings, and he has a PhD in history too, and he actually is a boomer. And George Will has also made comments in some of his writings, and I know Huckabee has done it on his TV show. And I know when Hillary Clinton was running for President, McCain had made accidentally a reference to her as one of the hippies or whatever from that period. But the question is this, that the reason why we have a breakdown in our society today goes right back to the (19)60s, goes right back to the (19)60s generation and that era, because the increase in the divorce rate, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority-

SM (01:11:30):
And abortion.

SB (01:11:30):
Yeah, and special interest groups.

SM (01:11:31):
Because Gingrich, he is so virulent against abortion.

SB (01:11:36):
But they claim that that is the era when all of the things started going wrong with America, and it is during that timeframe. And they make references to the (19)60s, and they know it is not all boomers, but they make references to the reason why we have these problems, and the isms culture, whatever it might be. And in the end, what they are thinking of is they would like to see a return to the (19)50s.

SB (01:12:03):
In the end, what they are thinking of is, they would like to see a return to the (19)50s, I think, or a period Reagan of what was trying to do in the (19)80s.

SM (01:12:12):
Of course, they are nostalgic for the (19)50s. Women did not have a chance at anything, Blacks did not have a chance at anything. That is what Gingrich really is yearning for. You could not be a public gay, except maybe if you were on Broadway. The changes have been amazing in culture, and who would have predicted the forms they would have taken? It has all been a march forward, except now for this sudden strange rise of the fundamentalist right in this country, and I would add, the strange rebirth of Islamic fundamentalism in the Mid-East.

SB (01:12:57):
What are your thoughts on when Mondale picked Ferraro? In your opinion, was there a seriousness in picking her?

SM (01:13:06):
I thought it was terrific at the moment?

SB (01:13:08):
It was not tokenism?

SM (01:13:10):
Who cares? She was the first candidate of a major party for vice president who was a woman. He should have done more of a background search on her, because John's Zaccaro, her husband... that is the problem. When you have a woman. She comes with a husband who helped her get to where she got. What is his background? That was unfortunate, and she tried to weasel out of it, which made it worse.

SB (01:13:43):
I worked for a woman, Dr. Betty Menson, in my first job at Ohio University. She was very strong in working for the Equal Rights Amendment in Ohio. She worked at Ohio University, and I think she has passed on since I left the university. She worked very hard, and I remember the day as if it was yesterday, when I heard the, "Oh no" in the next room, because it had been defeated at the State House, in Columbus.

SM (01:14:11):
Yeah.

SB (01:14:12):
Why did the ERA fail? I know it passed in some states, but why is it that it will never happen?

SM (01:14:21):
Because the opposition to it was very clever in scaring people about its implications. They kept talking about unisex toilets. They said, "You will not have a separate men's or ladies’ room anymore." Somebody else would say, "Wait a second. First of all, have you ever flown an airplane? You have a unisex toilet. You have adjusted to it on an airplane." That is not a big issue. They were saying that you would have no distinctions between the sexes whatsoever, and that is nuts. People were afraid of it, and I think that now made a mistake in putting so much of its energy into the passage of it, but they did not know they were going to hit these.

SB (01:15:08):
I think Phyllis Schlafly was very strong on the other side, and she organized a lot of people to defeat it. Many people believe she was one of the reasons why it was defeated.

SM (01:15:16):
Well, she has had an interesting career. For somebody who was always championing the role of the stay-at-home wife, she did not stay at home.

SB (01:15:23):
That is right. When you look at the movement itself, the second wave as it stands right now, with the successes in the (19)70s, maybe some of the setbacks in the (19)80s or (19)90s, what have been the major accomplishments of the second wave of feminism?

SM (01:15:43):
That women can work, and have ambitions for career. That women can choose not to be mothers, or to postpone motherhood because of abortion rights. That women have been able to go into what is still called non-traditional work, which is, I think, one of the most important areas of work for women. I care less about a couple of CEOs who are women than I do about seeing women in and police departments, fire departments, bus drivers, train drivers. Those are the jobs that, so much more work has to be done there. The whole opening up of the sexual violence issues was our contribution. That was feminism in the (19)70s, we did that. We made it possible for women to speak up, and for men to understand that sexual assault was a crime. A lot of them still do not get it. The understanding that in war, rape is a very common crime, and that guys who commit rape in war are not psychopaths. They're ordinary young men who, under the cover of war, are acting out of some kind of machismo, because they can get away with it. The courage of a woman to leave a husband that batters her, that is a woman's movement accomplishment. I was called for jury duty last week, and there was a case that none of us wanted to catch, it was very interesting. Nobody wanted to catch it. New York State has a new rule that after a sexual offender, a predator of children, after a child predator has served his term, the state can now put him in a mental facility, obviously to keep him away from children, but also because the state has decided that he is a compulsive molester of children. There was a case, and I think it was the ACLU that was arguing against this continuation of his sentence. It is really a continuation of the sentence. Nobody wanted to serve on this case. We did not want to hear the details, because everyone said, "Lock him up, and keep him locked up," that was the feeling of most everybody. When everybody was being voir dire'd, one after another said, "My girlfriend was raped when she was very young. My sister had an experience. My uncle turned out to be a child molester." People were pouring out this stuff. Nobody would have said this years before.

SB (01:19:19):
Thank God.

SM (01:19:19):
It was amazing. Nobody wanted to sit impartially on a jury that was to determine whether the state had a right to put this guy in another lockup facility. We all did.

SB (01:19:36):
We talked about the sexism that took place within... I know that the Civil Rights movement was rampant, and probably if Dr. King were alive today in his (19)80s, he would be embarrassed by it, but he would have talked a lot earlier on this subject. When we were talking about the movements that took place in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, all of them, I can remember in 1970, when Earth Day was organized, Gaylord Nelson met with members of the moratorium in (19)69, to make sure we were not stepping on their toes, that we were linked, and we were in unity. We both care about ending the war, and we both care about the environment. It seemed like in those days, and again, maybe through the early (19)70s, when you had an anti-war rally, when you had a women's movement rally, when you had a gay and lesbian rally, an environmental rally, you saw signs from all these organizations there in unity, caring for each other's cause. One of the criticisms today is that all these movements have become special interest. They are on their own, they are independent. I know I have talked to some of the gay and lesbian leaders, and they have agreed, this is one of their problems. It is an issue in that community, and they cannot even get people to have a song to sing, which was so important in the movement, "We Shall Overcome" in the Civil Rights Movement. David Mixner, when I talked to him, he said, "It is frustrating, because we proposed that we need to have some songs that we all sing, and no one wants to do it. It is like we are talking to the wind." What I am getting at is, do you think that is part of the problem of all the movements today, just not the women's movement? They have become single issue, special interest, and they do not work with the other movements.

SM (01:21:29):
I have two things to say. One is that the labor movement of (19)30s had folk singers who made up songs to them. The Civil Rights Movement had a spiritual base of songs to rely on, and just change a few words. The women's movement never had songs, and as you said, the gay and lesbian movement never had songs. Songs do not always accompany a movement, that would be the one thing to say. What was the other thing? Oh, the special interest. The amazing thing about the Civil rights movement, and the women's movement, was that our issues were not issues that these larger umbrella groups could successfully address. When we had so-called vanguard parties, talking about the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers party, they claimed to speak for everybody. "We cover all the issues," but they did not. They basically covered the issues that White males felt were important. In terms of civil rights, I would not knock the Communist Party in its effort on civil rights, but their strategies failed. It was an indigenous Civil Rights movement that came out of the South that made the difference. A movement not beholden to these embracive, inclusive, grand vanguard parties of the left. Since then, it has worked that you take your individual issue and you make that your focus, because those other groups never did. They never did.

SB (01:23:23):
One of the heroes, really, of (19)64 was Fannie Lou Hamer.

SM (01:23:26):
Yeah.

SB (01:23:27):
Here is a woman who was really-

SM (01:23:29):
Very religious.

SB (01:23:30):
She was not known, and then, she went to that convention, and Johnson was checking up on her and everything she was saying back in (19)64.

SM (01:23:40):
Sure. She was a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, and tremendously religious.

SB (01:23:47):
I know it is hard to do this, but when you look at the Boomers now, you are older than the Boomers, but almost 40 percent of the people I have interviewed were born before (19)46, but they have lived during the times of the Boomers.

SM (01:24:03):
We are very grateful to the times that allowed us to make a contribution.

SB (01:24:08):
Do you have any thoughts on the Boomer women in particular, as opposed to say some of the more recent women, the younger women that have come on college campuses or in society?

SM (01:24:18):
No, I am not the person to ask that question of.

SB (01:24:20):
Any strengths or weaknesses that you think the generation has, both male or females?

SM (01:24:26):
Women today, and I feel it is another defeat for feminism... my students, let us just talk about the young people that I am in contact with, and the young people I see in the street. They seem to have fallen for some of the traps that we, (19)60s and (19)70s feminists thought we had settled. You do not wear six-inch heels. What is this with pushing your boobs up and forward? You are looking like a tart. This whole business that fashion contributed to, of women looking like babes, "You have to look like a babe," is a big step back, I feel. A big step back.

SB (01:25:21):
The Boomers were not really into that.

SM (01:25:23):
Not at all. People began to dress casually for the first time.

SB (01:25:30):
Do you have any overall thoughts on the generation itself, those people born between (19)46 and (19)63?

SM (01:25:38):
No, that is what you are going to do.

SB (01:25:42):
When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?

SM (01:25:46):
I think it began on February 2, 1960, when those four black students who were quite religious sat in at a local Woolworth in Greensboro. Was not it Greensboro, North Carolina? But, now that I have been doing some reading lately, and I have been thinking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott, Tallahassee was student initiated, unlike Montgomery, which was Rosa Parks initiated. Maybe it should start in (19)55, which would be a year after Brown versus Board of Education, which was the first time-

SB (01:26:39):
In (19)54.

SM (01:26:39):
Yeah. It takes a while.

SB (01:26:47):
A lot of the people of my era, and my college years, felt they were the most unique generation in American history. There was this feeling they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society.

SM (01:26:57):
Yes.

SB (01:26:58):
We were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace to the world, change it like it has never been before. Be more different than anybody that preceded us, and anybody that will follow us.

SM (01:27:11):
What happened? What do they say now?

SB (01:27:13):
Well, that is my question.

SM (01:27:15):
It is your question to raise and your question to answer.

SB (01:27:21):
The majority of people that I have been interviewing think that is a ridiculous, arrogant statement to make. A lot of people have said, either the generation is arrogant for thinking it, or that some people just do not believe in generations like Boomers, which is happening all the time. They just do not believe in what they call the Greatest Generation, Boomer generation, Generation X. They do not believe in that stuff. It is about a period of time, in decades or even years. There is a lot of people saying that as well. Those that do say unique are those, in many respects, that were very involved, and they have just never been as involved as they were then. It was just great memories. It's a combination of a lot of different things.

SM (01:28:10):
You are asking, what happened to it as a generation? Why did not it continue? I can speak to that.

SB (01:28:17):
Yes.

SM (01:28:18):
But, not as a member of it.

SB (01:28:18):
Yes.

SM (01:28:19):
Because of something we have not discussed at all, is that there were so many casualties of the Boomer generation, and it did have to do with drugs and rock and roll. A Hell of a lot of icons were dead before they were 30, and I am sure Charlie talked about that.

SB (01:28:42):
Yes.

SM (01:28:43):
That is his subject. It is not mine, but I am aware of it. I cannot believe the number of people who just died from an overdose.

SB (01:28:58):
I think what is happening, it is a book that needs... forget about the big names, like Jimmy Hendricks and Janice Joplin, how many young people just died? I know two in particular from my community who, because of drugs, they did not live very long.

SM (01:29:13):
Really?

SB (01:29:17):
That is back in the Ithaca, New York area. I was born in Cortland.

SM (01:29:23):
Oh really? Apple country.

SB (01:29:25):
My dad was transferred down to Binghamton, because he was a Prudential salesman. We lived in a community called Lisle, New York. I do not know if you have ever heard of Lisle, it was on the way between Cortland and Ithaca. I only mentioned that because I know you moved to Cornell there.

SM (01:29:43):
Yeah.

SB (01:29:44):
I have relatives there. Everybody has a different answer to this question, so far.

SM (01:29:52):
I think that many people experimented with freedoms in the (19)60s that they were not prepared to cope with. One was a lot of sexual experimentation, and they were not prepared for it. I have interviewed people who have talked about how, on the college campuses, the head of their department suggested that they all have a group sex thing to get to know each other better, and a lot of people could not take that sort of stuff. A lot of people tried drugs, and then went too far with them. The first thing that I noticed in the press, because they're very quick to sound in-depth now, was that they started to talk about themselves and say, "Boy, I remember my days in the (19)60s, when all I did was smoke dope and stare up at the ceiling, and say, "Wow-wow, wow." Suddenly, that became a popular portrait of the (19)60s. Now, I did not know anybody who smoked that much dope that they looked up at the ceiling and said, "Wow-wow, wow." The (19)60s began to be tarnished very early after, by the Reagan era. People were dis-remembering it. They were remembering it as a time when everybody was just flaked out on drugs, and I do not know why they did that. I just do not know why they did that. Probably they were just doing some colorful writing, but certainly it was in the news magazines, that I would start to read these reminisce. Those who were enemies of the changes of the (19)60s quickly grabbed onto it, and there's a time when very few voices were raised in supportive of the (19)60s. That documentary that Charlie and I are in together, done by Oregon PBS, that is rare.

SB (01:32:21):
Which one is that?

SM (01:32:23):
It is called "The (19)60s." He did not tell you?

SB (01:32:27):
Well, I interviewed him four or five months ago. I bet I have had about 70 interviews.

SM (01:32:32):
That is why he mentioned me, because we are stars of it. They chose him because of his book on the (19)60s, and also because he is a gay man, and he talks eloquently. They chose me as the feminist for that documentary, and I remember, after we both saw it on PBS, we called each other, because we used to be friends. We are not friends, we just do not know each other anymore, but we called each other and said, "You were good." "You were good." It has been shown a lot on PBS lately, because these blessed people in Oregon actually got a documentary done called "The (19)60s" that is pro-(19)60s, and that includes the women's movement.

SB (01:33:18):
I think I own that.

SM (01:33:20):
Look at it again.

SB (01:33:21):
I have to look at it.

SM (01:33:22):
It will give you heart. That is why Charlie thought of me, because we are linked in this wonderful documentary that is now as staple on PBS.

(End of Interview)

2010-06-17

Stephen McKiernan

Susan Brownmiller

94:01

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Feminists; Authors; Brownmiller, Susan--Interviews

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