In the beginning, there was a book. It was called The Feminine Mystique, and it started a revolution. The year was 1963. The thing about revolutions, though, is that they don’t happen all at once. It takes a long time for those at the back of the parade to get in step with those in the front, all of whom are marching to music only they can hear. Women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug were leading this parade, and they were light years ahead of the rest of us.
The whole concept of “women’s lib” was uncharted territory to those of us who were still waxing our floors in shirtwaist dresses and Mary Jane shoes, driving nursery school carpool in our shiny, new station wagons, and putting dinner on the table every night at 6:00, just as our mothers did.
Let me tell you how I finally got in step. I was tricked into it by a soft-spoken, white gloved, closet feminist. Ever so gently, she convinced me to invite a group of my friends to meet once a week to watch a program on Channel 9 and talk about it. That was all we had to do: watch and talk. She never said the words women’s liberation or consciousness raising. She never suggested that we would be in the forefront of a powerful movement. She just said it might be interesting.
The program, which originated in California (probably at Berkeley), was called “Choice, Challenge For American Women.” It had one simple but compelling message: Ladies, you have choices. How you live your life is up to you.
Week after week, we watched that program and talked, and talked. Week after week, we began to awaken to a new reality. Can you imagine the sound of a room full of young wives and mothers having a palpable aha moment, all at the same time? Our sudden sense of freedom left us breathless. It was 1970, seven years after The Feminine Mystique was published.
I went home and told my husband I wanted to get a job. He thought I was kidding … or crazy. He didn’t think I could possibly mean it. In fact, all over the country, there were husbands in a collective state of shock. We had obviously lost our minds. To prove it, we went back to school, to work, to our typewriters and easels and pianos, and forward to long-delayed careers and single motherhood, if necessary.
To have choices was intoxicating. Understand, it’s not that we didn’t have them before; it’s that we didn’t know we had them. Can you fathom that fewer than 40 years ago we were oblivious to something as fundamental as having the right to choose?
Little by little, of course, we got used to idea. We stretched ourselves and reached out to other women. We encouraged our daughters to ask for what they wanted and refuse to take no for an answer. We even invented a new word (well, Gloria Steinem did) “Ms.” Most of us didn’t chant slogans, or burn our underwear (that’s a myth, by the way), or get all bent out of shape when a man held a door open for us.
We just kept doing whatever it was we had chosen to do, as well as we could possibly do it. And those of who really understood what women’s liberation was all about learned to respect those among us who made different choices from ours.
This revolution, which began 46 years ago, embraced different causes, different colors, and different ages. It was never exclusive, and it was never about being right. Rather, it was about having the right to hear a different drummer … and step to the music we heard, however measured or far away.
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