Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Movement and Me
- 2 Among Friends in Philly
- 3 Mississippi Summer: A Quaker Vacation
- 4 Professing at Smith and Selma
- 5 Return to Mississippi (Goddam)
- 6 The Draft: From Protest to Resistance?
- 7 Visions of Freedom School in DC (For Bob Silvers)
- 8 Resisting
- 9 A New University?
- 10 A Working-Class Movement of GIs
- 11 A Man in the Women’s Movement
- 12 Where We Went and What We Did (and Did Not) Learn There
- 13 Authority and Our Discontents
- Appendix A A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority
- Appendix B Syllabus for a Course on the Sixties
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
11 - A Man in the Women’s Movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Movement and Me
- 2 Among Friends in Philly
- 3 Mississippi Summer: A Quaker Vacation
- 4 Professing at Smith and Selma
- 5 Return to Mississippi (Goddam)
- 6 The Draft: From Protest to Resistance?
- 7 Visions of Freedom School in DC (For Bob Silvers)
- 8 Resisting
- 9 A New University?
- 10 A Working-Class Movement of GIs
- 11 A Man in the Women’s Movement
- 12 Where We Went and What We Did (and Did Not) Learn There
- 13 Authority and Our Discontents
- Appendix A A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority
- Appendix B Syllabus for a Course on the Sixties
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the 1969 national convention of the New University Conference in Iowa City, the women formed a separate caucus on the first day. They left the men in order to work out their own organizational demands. In 1969, everyone had “demands.” Students made demands of their colleges, and sometimes their high schools; minorities made demands of mayors; wives made demands of their husbands; and children learned to make demands of baffled parents. Given this trend in the movement and the strong separatist tendencies already evident in nascent feminist groups, it was not altogether a surprise that the women would decide to meet separately—at least for a time.
The guys were not especially troubled; we sat around in the dormitory lounge, reading and arguing, and trying to make ourselves comfortable on the serviceable beige furniture. Some went for a beer and pizza. A certain impatience vexed the lounge—after all, we could be there only for two or three days, and obviously we couldn’t move forward on organizational business with half the people off in another room. But we counted on the affiliations most of us had with one or another of the women. Sooner or later the demands, whatever they might be, would be revealed; discussions, more or less fraught, would begin; agreements would be reached; and we could then get on to the “real work” of the meeting.
Late in the evening, Florence Howe was dispatched by the women’s caucus to meet with some of the men to discuss or perhaps to negotiate these demands. She came into the lounge where we were hanging out and said something to the effect of “here’s what the women have decided we want.” “Sharp struggle,” in the Chinese phrase then popular, ensued, sharpest over the most obvious organizational mandate—equal numbers of women and men on the steering committee. Hardly a radical departure, we were made aware, since both the Republican and the Democratic Parties already had such an arrangement. Even so, we quickly heard every argument against “special group privileges” and the burden such “unnecessary,” rigid measures presented to our radical organization. We were—were we not?—democratically committed as activists, socialists even: Why did we need such rules, which seemed to bring into question our basic commitment to equality?
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- Information
- Our SixtiesAn Activist's History, pp. 183 - 197Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020