The Problem with No Name/Making the Personal Political

Betty Friedan: Feminine Mystique (1963)
--“the problem lay buried"
--Women “could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity,"
--Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
--Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

National Organization for Women:
"to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men."
1967: 1000 members
1971: 15,000 members

FREEDOM SUMMER:
"we didn't come down here to work as a maid this summer."

"Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deeply rooted and every much as crippling to the women as the assumptions of white superiority are to the Negro."

LIBERAL VS. RADICAL FEMINISM

Liberal:

Members of NOW picket the headquarters of New York mayoralty candidates before recent election for not taking a stand on women's rights. They urged female volunteers to "stop licking stamps and boots."

Radical:

SCUM Manifesto”

“Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity.”

W.I.T.C.H.
Redstockings
Cell 16

Robin Morgan (WITCH): "Women shouldn't be afraid to be assertive," she says. "And men shouldn't be afraid to be dependent."

("Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History," "Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays,")

“To assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production…to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally… The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex(1970)