Some moments in The Movement seem so archaic it’s hard even for today’s middle-aged women to imagine them, like the inability to get your own credit card, or an airline personnel officer complaining in The Wall Street Journal about laws banning sex discrimination: “What are we going to do now when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify? Or what will we do when some guy comes in and wants to be a stewardess?” Other moments—the inability to get a safe abortion, the rage that flames in response to feminist activism and female power-seeking, the sexism that still courses through even progressive spaces—are easily recognizable.
This sense of ping-ponging from a past so misogynist it’s hard to imagine to decades-old stories that are immediately familiar makes The Movement feel like both a crucial historical record and an urgently needed guidebook. That United Airlines used to offer male-only “executive flights” with stewardesses to serve men steak dinners feels like an artifact from another time; scenes of male legislators opposing equal rights legislation, and of feminists themselves arguing over whether opposing war or advocating for the particular interests of Black women or lower-income women fall under the feminist umbrella (what might now be called “intersectionality”), could have happened yesterday. That many women uttered the words “vagina” and “clitoris” for the first time in workshops to teach women about their bodies seems quaint in a world in which Our Bodies, Ourselves has sold millions of copies. But that women worried about appearing appropriately feminine and likable when telling their abortion stories to the men who would decide how to regulate women’s bodies is infuriatingly familiar.
So is the infighting. From its inception, second-wave feminism was contested in its focus and its strategies. There was hostility to lesbianism from some of the founders of the National Organization for Women, the feminist group started to be “a NAACP for women,” as co-founder and Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan put it; there were also lesbian activists who suggested that any woman who wasn’t a lesbian was insufficiently radical. There were prominent feminists who clung to power to the exclusion of up-and-comers; there were also activists who resented them, along with any feminist who got attention, and seemed motivated by taking more prominent women down a peg and taking part in denunciations and more-radical-than-thou competitions. (“A certain amount of cannibalizing seems to go with the territory whenever activists gather to promote social change,” feminist journalist and author Susan Brownmiller astutely observed.)