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American sexual culture: women's liberation, rock music, and evangelical Christianity, 1968-1976
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American sexual culture: women's liberation, rock music, and evangelical Christianity, 1968-1976
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AMERICAN SEXUAL CULTURE:
WOMEN’S LIBERATION, ROCK MUSIC,
AND EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY, 1968-1976
by
Rebecca Sheehan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Rebecca Sheehan
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The completion of this dissertation has been a long journey. I am pleased to have
the opportunity to acknowledge and thank the many people who have helped, inspired,
and sustained me along the way.
The journey began in Sydney at the University of New South Wales. There I was
fortunate to take classes with Ian Tyrrell who ignited my passion for U.S. history and
Max Harcourt whose brilliance and generosity was unique. Peter Slezak encouraged me
to seek a graduate school education in the United States. Sean Brawley gave me my first
teaching job in his course about the 1960s in Australia and the United States. Sean’s
continued mentoring and friendship have covered many drafts and life in-between. Nick
Doumanis also became a friend at UNSW and introduced me to Dirk Moses who
encouraged me to complete graduate training in the U.S. instead of returning to Australia
at the end of my Fulbright exchange year. Dirk connected me with Gina Morantz-
Sanchez who generously gave her time and invaluable advice on my graduate school
applications. When I returned to Sydney, Dirk gave me research work and urged me to
apply for a postdoctoral fellowship; both enabled me to finish the dissertation.
During the Fulbright year I spent at UCLA I was fortunate to study U.S. history
with Ellen DuBois, Steve Aron, and Henry Yu, each of whom had a significant impact on
my intellectual development. Ellen’s extraordinary mind and commitment to women’s
history were an inspiration. Steve taught me to look for the big questions of history.
Henry modeled the possibilities of combining personal heritage, the immigrant
iii
experience, and scholarship. Their support enabled me to continue graduate school in the
U.S.
Lois Banner was instrumental in my admission to the History Department at USC.
Lois extends boundless generosity to her students and I am fortunate for all that she gave
and invested in me. In courses with Maria Lepowsky, Steven J. Ross, Paul Lerner,
George Sánchez, Marjorie Becker, and Carole Shammas, I learned about feminism,
research, European history, sharp questions, creativity, courage, and statistics. In addition
to an intellectual education, each of these very different teachers gave me kindness,
understanding, and time. A special thank you to Marjorie in whose class on non-
traditional history writing I first wrote about Cynthia Plaster Caster and whose
commitment to clear prose I have tried to emulate.
My dissertation committee made a timely completion possible and I am deeply
grateful to them. Conversations with my advisor, George Sánchez, were always
enlightening. He combines an uncanny ability to pose sharp questions and see the heart of
ideas—even when they are not fully formed—with a dedication to the process of research
and writing. I cannot thank him enough for his ongoing encouragement and belief in my
process. Alice Echols’ passion for and knowledge about music cultures and feminism
have been inspiring and crucial to my work. Diane Winston has been a model of
academic integrity and personal warmth. Her comments on drafts were invaluable. Robin
D. G. Kelley’s work on race and his commitment to social justice continue to inspire.
Although not on my committee, Niall Ferguson has extended a great deal of support from
afar. His generosity helped me to finish.
iv
I was fortunate to teach for Steve Ross, Philip Ethington, Lois Banner, and Sharon
Gillerman and I learned much from them about teaching and also about history. Terry
Seip’s commitment to teaching has been a powerful influence. Thank you to my students
at UNSW, UCLA, and USC for all that you taught me, especially about different
perspectives. Thank you to Karen Halttunen, who, as Director of Graduate Studies,
guided me through a challenging time; to Joseph Styles for all his administering; and to
Lori Rogers, LaVerne Hughes, Brenda Johnson, and Sandra Hopwood who brought their
patience and warmth to the department office.
This dissertation was funded by the Australia-America Fulbright Foundation; a
University of Southern California Merit Award; a Graduate Fellowship from the USC
Center for Law, History and Culture (CLHC); the Roberta Foulke Summer Fellowship,
the Department of History at USC; and the United States Studies Centre at the University
of Sydney.
For their assistance with finding materials I am grateful to librarians at the Kinsey
Institute at the University of Indiana, Bloomington; The Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas, Austin; the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University; the National Film and Sound Archive, Sydney; Smith College Special
Collections; Paul A. Ericksen at the Billy Graham Center Archives and Museum,
Wheaton College; and at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.
To my colleagues and friends at USC: I am so glad to have been there with you!
Jerry Gonzalez, Alex Aviña, Joop van de Wege, Jeffrey Kosiorek, Gustavo Licón, and
Phuong Nguyen made the office a dynamic environment full of brilliance and laughter.
v
Conversations with Alex and Joop changed my thinking forever—thank you my
comrades. Jerry, Alex, and Craig Loftin read drafts of my work, as did Gerwin Gallob
and Olivia Banner. Without Olivia’s editorial eye the dissertation would not have been
finished in time. For their conversation and companionship I am grateful to Anabel Mota,
Hyrum Lewis, Andrew Fogelman, Kristina Burhman, Michael Block, and Ian Livie. In
the final months of writing, my colleagues at the United States Studies Centre provided a
stimulating environment and eased the cultural re-entry to Australia: Brendon O’Connor,
Willie Gin, Sabino Kornrich, Jason Casellas, Jeremy Pressman, and Mark Geiger.
Thank you to Helen Stellar who brought music back into my life and who taught
me about music and love anew. I have been blessed with my friendships. Thanks to the
Nicholls family, Michael Winnel, Renee Pietrangelo and David and Harper Brown, Jaime
Wolf—from whom I first learned about Cynthia Plaster Caster, Gerwin Gallob for his
incredible mind and gentle spirit, Jim Barber, Sarah Maguire and Gary Sinclair, Fiona
Morris, Donna Green, Sasha Fegan, Dustin Robles, Daniel Waters, Charley Morgan,
Jessica Holmes, Laurie Astor-Dubin, Jillian Kleiner, and Shoshanna Hecht. I am grateful
to Michael and Heather Craft for their generosity.
My mother Rosalie, brother Philip and sisters Michele and Veronika, grew me up
in music, from Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to the Bee Gees and Earth, Wind and
Fire. Philip insisted that I learn to play the guitar by using the sheet music to “Stairway to
Heaven” and his David Bowie songbook, a challenge that reflected both his passion for
the music and his belief that my femaleness should not interfere with an important
education. He taught me to swim and surf, and introduced me to incredible musicians.
vi
Although he was a heterosexual male in a homophobic suburb, he never judged people on
the basis of their gender or sexuality. I dedicate the glam rock chapter to Philip.
Special thanks to Aimee Ravek whose friendship brightened my final year in Los
Angeles. My love and gratitude to Lachlan Mitchell for his friendship, love, and support.
The final months of writing were buoyed by his presence.
My father started asking me whether or not I was a feminist when I was about
eight. Every time I expressed interest in something I thought a woman could not do, he
found and gave me evidence to prove that women can do anything. Over the years he has
read countless drafts of my work and has supported me every way that he possibly can. I
would not be here without him.
I dedicate this dissertation to the friends who were there at the best and worst of
times. Jerry Gonzalez and Kristina Alvarado—you are the salt of the earth. Olivia
Banner—you have taught me, among many other things, about grace and endurance.
Sarah Goodes—I love walking through life with you. Your friendship has made this
possible.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: “We Are Furious (Yellow)”: Grove Press, Sexism 22
in the New Left, and the Rise of White Radical Feminism
—Figure 1: Cartoon “Goodbye to all That” 64
Chapter 2: “Prisoners of Sex”: Patriarchy, Biology, and the Challenge 65
of Women’s Liberation
Chapter 3: Cynthia Plaster Caster’s “Rock Cocks”: Groupies, Rock Culture, 113
and the Paradoxes of Female Desire
Chapter 4: “All The Young Dudes”: Liberation and Commodification in 152
Glam Rock’s Sexual Ambiguities
Chapter 5: “I Don’t Know How To Love Him”: Evangelical Sex Roles and 187
the Rise of the Total Woman
Conclusion 232
Bibliography 241
vii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation argues that in the years between 1968 and 1976 groups within
the women’s liberation movement, rock music culture, and evangelical religion
transformed American sexual culture and forged a new sexual order. An examination of
these groups together demonstrates their similarities and differences and offers insight
into the paradoxes of sexual liberalization. White radical feminists sought to achieve
women’s liberation through deconstructing patriarchal power and rejecting biologically
determined roles. Rock music groupies sought sexual freedom through rejecting passive
femininity. Glam rockers performed liberation through androgynous and bisexual
personas in order to sell records. Evangelical women sought freedom through sexual
pleasure and through submitting to the existing sex role system. All focused on sex roles
and used arguments about freedom, and they began to revolutionize sexual norms by
asserting women’s right to sexual pleasure; by pushing the boundaries of gender roles to
include new masculine and feminine styles; and by promoting greater tolerance for
homosexuality. Yet the newly permissive culture challenged biblical orthodoxy on sex
roles and incited an evangelical counterrevolution designed to reassert heterosexual
marriage and male dominance within the home. These competing revolutions
compromised and fed sexual liberalization and created a new and ambiguous sexual
order. The new sexual order combined the language of gendered liberation with
permissive sexuality and biblical morality. It affirmed active female sexuality and
privileged heterosexual marriage.
1
INTRODUCTION
A sexual revolution would require…an end of traditional sexual inhibitions and
taboos, particularly those that most threaten patriarchal monogamous marriage:
homosexuality, “illegitimacy,” adolescent, pre- and extra-marital sexuality. The
negative aura with which sexual activity has generally been surrounded would
necessarily be eliminated, together with the double standard and prostitution. The
goal of revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and
one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual
alliances.
— Kate Millett
1
Historians have argued that multiple strands of sexual revolution in the 1960s
erased a dominant sexual culture in the 1970s. Positioned in the context of three
historiographical streams—a history of sexuality that largely ignores the 1970s; the
growing historiography on post-World War II American conservatism; and the emerging
scholarship on the historical ambiguities of the 1970s—this dissertation argues that in the
years between 1968 and 1976 strains within the women’s liberation movement, rock
music culture, and evangelical religion transformed American sexuality and forged a new
sexual order. During this period, as these three powerful cultural forces struggled to
define the meanings of gender and liberation, they often adopted surprisingly similar
strategies that were justified by very different ideologies and motivations. By making
sexual liberation central to individual liberation, they all promoted a focus on self
transformation and shifted consciousness away from challenges to the economic order.
White radical feminists sought to achieve women’s liberation through deconstructing
patriarchal power and rejecting biologically determined roles. Rock music groupies
sought sexual freedom through rejecting passive femininity. Glam rockers performed
1
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), 62.
2
liberation through androgynous and bisexual personas in order to sell records.
Evangelical women sought freedom through sexual pleasure and through submitting to
the existing sex role system. Their struggles were broadcast in the public arena by the
publishing houses that made radical feminist and evangelical women’s writings widely
accessible; by the record companies that banked on groupie credibility and that ushered
glam rock to public attention; and by the mainstream news media that reported and
capitalized on cultural developments. The battles over gender and sexuality thus occupied
center stage in the drama of American culture in the 1970s. There, they began to
revolutionize sexual norms by asserting women’s right to sexual pleasure; pushing the
boundaries of gender roles to include new masculine and feminine styles; and promoting
greater tolerance for homosexuality. But the challenges posed by the newly permissive
culture to biblical orthodoxy on sex roles also reinvigorated evangelical thinking on
sexualized liberation which brought with it a cultural backlash. Evangelicals launched a
counterrevolution designed to reassert biblical sex roles. These competing revolutions
rendered each other incomplete and created a new and ambiguous sexual order. The new
sexual order combined the language of gendered liberation with permissive sexuality and
biblical morality. It affirmed active female sexuality and privileged heterosexual
marriage.
This dissertation aims to show the complexity and nuances of American sexual
culture in the 1970s through examining how competing revolutions both compromised
3
and fed sexual liberalization.
2
In the existing literature, sexuality and religion are either
distinct fields of study or, when discussed together, are posited as binaries locked in
combat.
3
My argument draws together fields of historical enquiry that have traditionally
been dealt with separately. By studying them together, it is possible to interrogate some
of the paradoxes of sexual liberalization and its connection to an Evangelical awakening.
In arguing that a new sexual order emerged in the 1970s, I challenge existing histories of
sexuality that assume the absence of a dominant sexual order in the 1970s.
During the 1960s, sex, freed from its 1950s containment within the private realm,
became increasingly public and permissive. Landmark court cases that overturned
nineteenth-century obscenity laws enabled the rise of sexual content in the public realm;
advocates from a variety of social groups pushed for sexual liberation as a means to
individual and cultural freedom; and the birth control pill ushered in widespread
behavioral changes by freeing sex from reproduction. Yet the new sexual liberalism
entailed contradictions: culture industries were dominated by men who idealized
promiscuous male sexuality and commodified women’s bodies under the guise of free
speech and liberation; and social organization, from private intimacies to public
structures, continued to privilege heterosexual men. Inspired by the civil rights
movement, women and homosexuals revolted against the existing order. In their
2
For a discussion of the incomplete conservative revolution in the 1970s see Bruce J. Schulman and Julian
E. Zelizer, “The Incomplete Revolution,” Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 28.
3
There are few historical studies of religion in post-war America—most are sociological. See Robert
Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998); Steven Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). On the post-war era as the fourth great awakening see
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000).
4
bedrooms, on the streets, and with words, they called for a sexual revolution that placed
gender and sexuality at the centre of human-rights and identity considerations: sexual
liberation meant individual empowerment.
These liberation movements had a significant impact on public culture as
individuals and businesses were inspired by their example and also sought to capitalize
on advances they made in shifting the discourse of sex roles away from a falsely
naturalized order that conflated anatomical sex with male and female social roles and
with sexual orientation. Theories of and debates over gender and sexuality became big
business for publishers and the mainstream news media who rushed to print books and
articles on radical feminist ideas and their opposition. The success of women’s liberation
literature created a new market for literature about female agency, laying the groundwork
for a variety of women writers to comment on sex and women’s place.
In 1970, when women’s liberation became a force in American publishing, the
Wall Street Journal announced that rock music had become a major business. Although
rock music was a popular music genre during the 1950s and 1960s, it was in the 1970s
that it became the U.S.’s biggest entertainment business (and a self-consciously global
business), and it sought to grow and capitalize on its rebelliousness and sexual openness.
As Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, put it, “Rock and roll is now the energy core
of change in American life…But capitalism is what allows us the incredible indulgence
of this music.”
4
Capitalism found new markets in the young people who flocked to rock
’n’ roll. Rock as a musical form had roots in racial and class rebellion and had sex coded
4
“Rolling Stone’s Rock World,” Time, April 25, 1969.
5
into its rhythms, lyrics, and performance; as such it had been a force for sexual
liberalization since the 1950s. Traditional gender roles were challenged in the rock realm
where men and women rejected domesticated lives in favor of sexual promiscuity. In the
early 1970s, as the rock industry grew into a major global business, record companies and
musicians became keenly aware of new marketing possibilities made available by the
contextual cultural focus on gender and sex. As a result, glam rock emerged and became
popular. A subgenre of rock that shocked and inspired audiences with its visual
androgyny and cross-dressing—old performance styles that gained new currency in the
context—glam rock created new communities of fans and carved havens for them to
explore their sexual and gender identities.
In the postwar decades as sex became more public so too did religion, particularly
through the rise of new religious movements. Despite the increasing secularization of
American culture in the 1960s, evangelical Christianity began to gather cultural power
through taking on some countercultural styles. Christian-themed rock music especially
reinvigorated evangelical Christianity by attracting new audiences, spreading Christian
messages and creating a new market of Christian rock music. The rise of Christian rock
and the new youth converts who developed and spread it brought evangelicalism to
national attention in 1971.
Evangelical culture was also profoundly affected by women’s liberation.
Evangelical women were inspired to apply feminist theory to religious structures and
seek freedom from existing sex roles that subordinated women to men. Female sexual
pleasure was also important. As women’s liberation and glam rock made headlines in the
6
early 1970s, a new movement of evangelical women was growing. Borrowing from both
feminist arguments for female agency and the sexualizing culture, these women
revolutionized evangelical marriage through separating sex from sin and liberating their
own sexual pleasure.
Yet, as evangelical culture adapted to the increasingly permissive society it also
mounted a challenge to it. For cultural and religious conservatives, the permissive culture
threatened the structures and morality of American life, especially the family unit, which
they believed was central to America’s stability. A series of events demonstrated how the
changes in the culture impacted legislation: the proposed ratification of the Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA) in 1972, and the legalization of abortion and the de-federalization of
obscenity laws in 1973. These developments were evidence to cultural and religious
conservatives that the state was not acting as a moral arbiter thus creating a moral
vacuum.
5
From 1972 they galvanized around challenges to the sexual order. Evangelical
women contributed to the cultural backlash. Although they promoted sexual liberation
within marriage, they also promoted the old biblical gender order in which the husband
was dominant, the wife submissive, and homosexuality an abomination. This set up, they
believed, was the only one that would grant the spiritual freedom afforded by God’s
blessing. By being a sexually active wife and mother who adhered to the biblical sex
order, a woman could achieve liberation, happiness, and fulfilment.
5
This fits with Michel Foucault’s argument that the discourse of sexual liberation and therefore freedom
from oppression is in fact mistaken, due to the falsity of the “repressive hypothesis.” For Foucault,
repression such as censorship actually increased sexual discourse, and thus increased the state’s ability to
become involved in and regulate sexuality. So, during the 1968-1976 period when state regulation of
sexuality relaxed, other groups stepped in to gain control of shaping and regulating sexuality. See Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).
7
Thus, even as women enjoyed greater freedoms and homosexuality became more
visible, permissive sexuality was countered by traditional Christian morality and its male-
dominated gender order. The outcomes of entrenched patriarchy and homophobia were
not preordained but were instead fought for and won by religious conservatives in a sex
role culture war.
6
The dissertation focuses on the years between 1968 and 1976 in order to
foreground the importance of that period in sexual transformations. Discussions about
post-war American sexuality have tended to characterize the 1960s as a revolutionary
period and ignored the 1970s.
7
More recently, studies have considered the timing and
extent of the sexual revolution: was there a sexual revolution or a lesser cultural
liberalization? Were the changes in sexual culture exclusive to the 1960s, or were they
generated earlier?
8
Recent works by Miriam Reumann and Alan Petigny posit a longer
evolution, as opposed to revolution, that begins with behavior during World War II,
6
Natasha Zaretsky has argued that Reagan’s 1980 presidential win was the result of the Right’s deployment
of the personal and the political in the rhetoric of family and national rebirth. Zaretsky’s work is the latest
in a historiographical strand that connects family, gender, race, and nation. See Natasha Zaretsky, No
Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (University of North
Carolina Press, 2007). See also Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender
and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Mary Dudziak’s
study of race, nation, and foreign policy, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of
American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots
Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2006). For a discussion of the way that legal and medical discourses established a connection between
whiteness, gender order, and respectable behavior and helped to establish a “master discourse of national
whiteness at the core of twentieth-century American modernity” see Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex,
Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
7
On the 1970s see Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America
Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Beth Bailey and David
Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
8
In their chronicle of sexuality from colonial times through to the twentieth century, John D’Emilio and
Estelle B. Freedman argue that the twentieth century heralded a “new sexual order” conceptualized
primarily in scientific terms. From 1920 onwards, commercialized sexuality was separated from
reproduction. See Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
8
professional discourse in the 1950s, and public practice in the 1960s.
9
Reumann argues
that the Kinsey Reports on male and female sexuality, published in 1948 and 1953
respectively, revealed high levels of extramarital and interracial sex and homosexuality,
and because of their implications for gender roles, family, public life, and the moral
reputation of the United States in a Cold War context, put what she calls “American
sexual character” at the center of social and national debates.
Where Reumann charts attitudes, Petigny charts behavior to argue that “the
sexualization of the popular culture did not anticipate the liberalization of mass
behavior.”
10
Instead, he argues, the 1960s’ permissive culture followed behavioral change
in the 1950s. Using statistical evidence of doubling rates of single and never-married
mothers, Petigny argues that the surge in “illicit sex” during World War II continued after
the war’s end but was obscured by the reticence in 1950s public culture.
11
Petigny
dismisses the notion of sexual revolution altogether: he argues that there was no sexual
9
Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey
Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alan Petigny, “Illegitimacy, Postwar Psychology,
and the Reperiodization of the Sexual Revolution,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 1 (2004).
10
Petigny, “Illegitimacy, Postwar Psychology, and the Reperiodization of the Sexual Revolution,” 63. For
a discussion of the sources necessary to provide a full picture of the timing of changes in sexual behavior
see Daniel Scott Smith, “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” in
The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. M. Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1973).
11
For a discussion of 1950s reticence and the way in which American identity was idealized as suburban,
consumer, heterosexual and familial see Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Ringwood, Victoria:
Penguin Books, [1963] 1973); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family
Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For revisions of the 1950s
stereotype see Joanne J. Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass
Culture, 1946-1958,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne
J. Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Other important essays in the collection
include Ruth Feldstein, “I Wanted the Whole World to See”: Race, Gender, and Constructions of
Motherhood in the Death of Emmett Till”; Regina G. Kunzel, “White Neurosis, Black Pathology:
Constructing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy in the Wartime and Postwar United States.”
9
revolution in the 1960s but that there was an upheaval in social conventions of public and
private behavior.
Kinsey Institute statistics about sexual attitudes in the 1960s and 1970s (collected
by NORC in 1970 and released by the Kinsey Institute in 1989) support Petigny’s
argument against a 1960s revolution.
12
The statistics show a discrepancy between the
increasing permissiveness in public culture and the realities of fairly stable conservative
private practices. These statistics caused a huge media splash when released in 1989, with
journalists quick to argue that the “sexual revolution” was simply a media event.
13
Certainly the data refutes the notion of a sexual revolution in the 1960s. However, as the
study is based on data collected in 1970, it cannot offer much insight into changes in
sexual culture after that time. In fact, statistical data demonstrates that, overall, American
attitudes to sex became increasingly permissive over the course of the 1970s, calling for
attention to sexual revolution in that decade.
14
As journalist Tom Wolfe argued: it was
“in the seventies…that the ancient wall around sexual promiscuity fell.”
15
12
Albert D. Klassen, Colin J. Williams, and Eugene E. Levitt, Sex and Morality in the U.S.: An Empirical
Enquiry under the Auspices of the Kinsey Institute (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
1989).
13
Clippings in the Colin J. Williams Collection, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and
Reproduction.
14
B. K. Singh, “Trends in Attitudes toward Premarital Sexual Relations,” Journal of Marriage and Family
42, no. 2 (1980). Religiosity was a key determinant in attitudes to sexual permissiveness. On the early
1970s as a critical period in U.S. history see Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America
in the 1970s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies:
The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001).
15
Tom Wolfe, “The Sexed-up, Doped-up, Hedonistic Heaven of the Boom-Boom Seventies,” Life,
December 1979. For discussions of sexual changes in the 1960s see Beth Bailey, “Sexual Revolution(s),”
in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994), 235–62; Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); David
Allyn, Make Love, Not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, (Little, Brown and Company,
Boston, 2000).
10
Arguments such as Petigny’s fail to deal with the way that, as Jane Gerhard puts
it, “the trope of ‘revolution’ change[s] based on who speaks it and who uses it.”
16
For
example, Petigny borrows public-choice theory from the discipline of economics to argue
that due to the high numbers of women and low numbers of single men during World
War II, men could demand sex before marriage, and women would comply because they
wanted the men. He mentions the “V [for Victory] Girls”—the “groupies” of the war
era—but fails to consider their active pursuit of or participation in sex. He frames his
argument in terms of male power and male sexual desire and thus gives no consideration
to female desire or to the possibilities of same-sex relationships that blossomed during
the period. As Lillian Faderman argues, “while some women may have been pressured
under the guise of sexual revolution into having sex primarily for a man’s delectation,
others were motivated by the desire to explore their own erotic potential and to please
themselves.”
17
This dissertation seeks to identify the meanings of sexual revolution as
defined by some of the people who spoke about it.
Barbara Ehrenreich argues that post-war decades were indeed revolutionary for
sex in the United States. While more journalistic than academic, her work on female
sexuality and masculinity is important to gender history, and it deserves acknowledgment
16
See Jane Gerhard, “Review: Make Love Not War,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001).
17
See Lillian Faderman’s discussion of the way in which lesbian political consciousness started to develop
in World War II in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
(London: Penguin, 1992) and Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between
Women, Drom the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981).
11
and revision.
18
In The Hearts of Men Ehrenreich discusses the designated male roles of
heterosexual breadwinners and family men and argues that in the 1950s various new
rebellious masculine styles developed and offered new possibilities for defining male
identity. Pornography, in the form of Playboy magazine, was an integral part of a post-
war sex role revolution for men because it linked bachelorhood, sex, and consumption
with liberated masculinity.
19
Male sexuality certainly found new forms in the post-war decades, but the
changes did not occur in a vacuum: women contributed to the construction of new
masculine styles and instigated their own sexual revolution. In the coauthored volume
Re-Making Love, Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs argue that during the
1960s and 1970s, women—from groupies to female fundamentalists—were involved in a
revolution in female sexuality. During that time women started having more sex with
multiple sexual partners. Changing sexual norms opened up possibilities beyond the
existing ideological order in which women were sexual gatekeepers and men were sexual
aggressors. Yet, they argue, this revolution in female sexuality has gone largely
unheralded, including by feminists who tend to characterize the sexual revolution as
male-dominated and male-favored and “to concentrate on women’s roles as bystanders or
victims, not as instigators.”
20
This dissertation picks up on Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs
by considering the way in which white radical feminists during the 1960s and 1970s
18
Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New
York Anchor Books, 1986); Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight
from Commitment (New York: Anchor Press, 1983).
19
Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, 42-51.
20
Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, 4.
12
rejected the notion that there had been a sexual revolution and why. It explores the ways
in which women did attempt sexual liberation as instigators: in the 1960s and 1970s
feminist activism and intellectual work were realms in which women overturned old sex
roles; rock music was an arena in which women could publicly express their sexual
desire; and even female evangelicals embraced the power and possibilities of women’s
sexuality.
Recent studies that focus on the 1960s and argue for sexual revolution during that
decade demonstrate that there were several concurrent revolutions. Beth Bailey groups
them into three broad categories: first, changing policy such as changes in censorship;
second, the sexualization of culture; and third, behavioral change, which she supports
with statistics of increasing numbers of illegitimate births, single mothers, and de-facto
relationships.
21
Together these revolutionary currents constituted a wider sexual
revolution that challenged the structure and ideology of the Victorian sexual order still
prevalent in U.S. middle-class mores in the 1960s. Bailey argues that the changes
constituted evolution as much as revolution because the strain between covert and overt
practices—using Kinsey’s language—had reached a critical point. One of Bailey’s
conclusions is that the multiple strands of revolution erased a dominant sexual culture.
Key to the argument for the 1960s as broadly revolutionary are the shared visions
of different groups and the geographic spread of the revolution. As Bailey puts it,
liberalists were all interested in individual sexual freedom, whether they were lesbian
separatists or Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, whether they lived in coastal cities or the
21
Beth Bailey, “Sexual Revolution(s),” and Sex in the Heartland.
13
Midwest. Similarly, in his wide-ranging discussion of the 1960s sexual revolution, David
Allyn argues that a variety of groups shared the goal of liberation, their visions manifest
in the slogan “make love not war.” These groups were inspired by lessons learned from
civil rights challenges to state power, by antiwar activists, feminists, social inequality,
and disgust with the perceived national tolerance for hypocrisy and self-deception. In Sex
in the Heartland Bailey argues that sexual revolution occurred in Lawrence, Kansas, a
university town during the 1960s, to illustrate her point that sexual revolution made
fundamental changes to U.S. culture across the nation.
22
Allyn closes his discussion of the sexual revolution with a chapter on the
fracturing of the consensus on the importance of sexual freedom. He argues that the
backlash during the 1970s was motivated by new economic woes and took the form of a
conservative return to traditional morality. The state stepped back in with censorship;
anti-porn feminists aligned with the religious Right; and evangelical megachurches were
on the rise. Yet Allyn’s argument seems too invested in establishing a 1960s consensus at
the cost of recognizing the standpoints of different groups during that period.
23
The 1970s
backlash was not only motivated by economics: radical feminists were motivated by the
absence of real liberation for women in the sexual changes of the 1960s.
24
Conservative
groups in the 1970s were not purely motivated by morality: they sought liberation too.
22
Bailey, Sex in the Heartland.
23
For discussions of divisions in the 1960s see Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Rebecca E. Klatch, A
Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1999).
24
On radical feminism see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s
14
The growing scholarship on conservative movements and the rise of the New
Right expands our historical view on the relationship between liberation and morality.
25
Michael Kazin argues that part of the strength of conservative movements derived from
the way they combined moral and liberation rhetoric in the form of populist appeals.
26
Lisa McGirr’s study of grassroots conservatism in Orange County looks at social issues,
resurgent evangelicalism, and the local activism that helped Ronald Reagan’s landslide
election in 1980.
27
McGirr argues that liberation dreams drove the conservative revival as
much as morality. There are many important aspects of this scholarship, including that it
gives conservative movements their due as serious historical players and that it
complicates the straightforward ascension or declension narratives often associated with
histories of liberation or revolution.
Yet by focusing on social and political upheavals, the scholarship tends to
marginalize culture and with it the role that cultural forces played in transforming sex
roles and in the conservative ascendance of the 1970s. This dissertation follows Stuart
Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random
House, 1979); Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social
Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: McKay, 1975); Angela Y. Davis, Women,
Race & Class (London: Women’s Press, 1982); Boston Women’s Collective Health Book, Our Bodies,
Ourselves; a Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
25
See Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2003); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the
Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Dennis
A. Deslippe, “‘Do Whites Have Rights?’: White Detroit Policemen And “Reverse Discrimination” Protests
in the 1970s,” The Journal of American History (December 2004).
26
Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1998).
27
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001). On women’s role in the post-war conservative ascendancy, see Michelle
Nickerson, “Women, Domesticity, and Postwar Conservatism,” OAH Magazine of History (January 2003).
15
Hall and George Lipsitz’s theoretical positioning of culture as both a form and site of
power struggle to argue that culture was a major force of change in the 1970s, an era in
which market forces expanded such that culture played an even more dominant role than
it had previously.
28
The dissertation analyzes women’s liberation, rock music, and
evangelical Christianity as separate and competing cultural forces that contributed to the
remaking of the wider sexual culture. It was in the 1970s that the battle lines were drawn
for the culture wars that have been fought ever since over sex roles, including over such
issues as abortion and gay rights.
One cannot write about culture or sexuality without reference to Michel Foucault
whose work has been enormously influential in histories of sexuality.
29
One important
aspect of his work has been his theory that sexuality is not a natural essence but a
historically contingent construct made up of cultural discourses, where discourses are
systems of specialized meaning and communication (including but not limited to written
and spoken language) that are used to organize power relations. In this argument Foucault
28
Stuart Hall was influenced by revisionist Marxists Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. See Stuart
Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael
Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1981); George Lipsitz, “Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of
Rock and Roll,” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For a discussion of the “war of position” as a war for dominance
fought in a cultural terrain see Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Joseph A. Buttigieg. ed. (New York
City: Columbia University Press, 1992), 233–238. For discussions of the relationship between identity
formations and culture see George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Robin Kelley
argues that although the phrase “culture wars” is traditionally associated with “curriculum debates,
‘political correctness’ on college campuses, or the politics of arts and humanities funding,” serious battles
over culture and identity are not limited to these areas. The term can thus be expanded, he argues, to cover
any battles fought in the culture realm. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in
Urban America, 9.
29
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1990).
16
moved away from the notion of sexuality as naturally occurring and uninformed by
context. Yet Foucault’s theories were first published in the late 1970s and in the 1980s,
years after white radical feminists had articulated similar arguments about sex as a
cultural construct. Thus while this dissertation draws on Foucault, it also draws directly
on radical feminist theories that challenged notions of biologically determined sexuality
and sex roles.
30
By drawing on radical feminist theories this dissertation seeks to address the need
for histories that accord agency to marginalized groups. Ramón Gutiérrez argues that
history writing grounded in discourse theories elides agency: such histories erase
“provisional” sexual orderings with “oppositional spaces for resistance.”
31
Scholarship
about oppositional groups is a crucial corrective to this problem.
32
To focus only on
dominant ideals suggests there is no interplay between dominant, popular, and
marginalized cultures. Examining a variety of social groups provides a fuller picture of
all the voices engaged in cultural struggle.
Accordingly, this dissertation comprises case studies of oppositional groups
selected to get at the diversity and ambiguity of American sexual culture in the 1970s.
Following the example of cultural historian Robert Darnton and the ethnographic
30
Judith Butler’s work adds to Foucault’s theory because it deals with sexuality not just in terms of desire-
orientation but as identity performance. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
31
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” Journal of American History (December 2001).
32
George Lipsitz and George Chauncey have been particularly successful in putting music and
homosexuality into the historical conversation. See respectively George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The
Hidden Histories of Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); George Chauncey, Gay New
York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic
Books, 1994).
17
perspective of history influenced by Clifford Geertz, the case studies act as windows into
a complex decade and demonstrate how broader social and political themes are enacted
and negotiated within individual lives and group contexts.
33
The dissertation is organized
into five chapters that examine sex roles and liberation ideologies in radical feminism,
rock music culture, and evangelical Christianity, between 1968 and 1976.
34
Chapter One begins with the story of a 1970 feminist action against the radical
publishing house Grove Press. The story offers a window onto the sexualization of public
culture in the 1960s, sexism in leftist movement culture, and the rise of white radical
feminism. Beginning in the 1950s, Grove Press published Beat poets and controversial
“erotic” literature, earning a reputation as a trendsetter and beacon of dissent for leftist
writers and intellectuals. During the 1960s Grove Press was at the center of high-profile
legal battles that redefined the meanings of obscenity and so indirectly contributed to the
1970s growth of mass and hardcore pornography. But as Grove’s profits grew and its
business expanded beyond literature to include pornographic film distribution, its female
workers and supporters saw how their male counterparts were capitalizing on their own
sexual freedom at the cost of women’s. Robin Morgan led a feminist action against
Grove Press. Wearing badges bearing the slogan “We Are Furious (Yellow)” (a play on
the Grove Press-distributed pornographic Swedish film title I Am Curious (Yellow)), the
protesters charged that the Grove Press men had cashed in on female, black, and Latino
33
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York:
Basic Books, 1985); Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in
The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30.
34
For an excellent historiographical discussion of developments in the social and cultural history of
women, masculinity, whiteness, and homosexuality, see Daniel Wickberg, “Heterosexual White Male:
Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History.” The Journal of American History, 92.1 (2005).
18
bodies through the publication of demeaning pornographic materials and exploitative
royalty distribution and work practices. The conflict galvanized women to organize and
take action to change their material, intellectual, and cultural circumstances, action that
blossomed into the women’s liberation movement. The feminist actions deliberately and
explicitly overturned notions of female passivity; they also directly impacted newspaper
and magazine content, and discussions about women’s liberation entered the national
mainstream press and so helped both to cohere the notion of a women’s movement as
well as to impact existing definitions of female sex roles. As a result, women’s voices
entered the public realm with force. In the feminist arguments against pornography we
can see the ideological beginnings of anti-porn feminism, a faction that developed within
radical feminism and created a split from pro-sex feminists over whether women’s
liberation was compromised or enhanced by pornographic displays of women’s bodies.
Chapter Two takes a public debate on women’s liberation held in 1971—between
various representatives of the women’s liberation movement and Norman Mailer who
represented the patriarchy—as an entry point into an examination of the visions, theories,
and fears of sexual liberation as seen by feminists and cultural commentators in the early
1970s. Using key texts of women’s liberation, Norman Mailer’s personal papers, news
stories, archival material, and documentary footage of the event, this chapter argues that
white radical feminists dismantled the logic of “sex roles” by separating anatomical sex
from male and female social roles, reproductive roles, and sexual orientation.
The third and fourth chapters move to an examination of rock music, a mass
cultural form with working-class roots. Through reading specific individuals as symbols
19
of wider cultural developments, the chapters explore manifestations, practices, and
performances of sexual liberation in rock music culture. Through claiming public spaces
for expressions of previously closeted sexual desires and gender play, groupies and white
glam rockers expanded sexual culture to include assertive women and non-traditional
social bodies. Chapter Three begins with Cynthia Plaster Caster, a rock music groupie,
who began making plaster casts of the penises of her favorite male musicians in 1968.
Although Cynthia was a unique character both within and outside groupie culture, her
penis objectification was nonetheless emblematic of new sexual dynamics influenced and
enabled by rock music culture. Using personal papers, memoirs, interviews, song lyrics,
rock magazines, and national newspaper articles, this chapter argues that the sphere of the
groupie became an arena for public expressions of female sexual desire; that women’s
sexuality shifted from being visually passive to visually active en masse because of the
phenomenon of the groupie; and that in this context women’s sexuality was redefined as
public and active. This chapter connects to the first chapter’s discussion of feminists and
the fifth chapter’s examination of evangelical Christian responses to sexual liberation:
some feminists cheered the unprecedented sexual freedoms that groupies enjoyed, while
other feminists argued that the female groupie/male rock star dynamic was predicated on
promiscuous male sexual behavior that was devoid of responsibility, and that forced
women into secondary roles. Rock music culture and evangelical Christianity found
common ground in positioning women as helpmeets.
Chapter Four examines the new masculine styles and sexual ambiguity in glam
rock, a rock subgenre named for its appropriation of makeup and traditionally female
20
garb that queered traditional rock performances through ambiguous sexuality, on-stage
gender bending, and flamboyant theatrics. Glam rock self-consciously manipulated
expectations of genre, gender, and sexuality and thus challenged and subverted notions of
“authenticity” that had been prevalent in the New Left and countercultural quests of the
1960s. With the 1972 rock music concept album and tour The Rise and Fall of Ziggy
Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie captured the zeitgeist of glam rock and
self-consciously critiqued rock culture’s nihilism. As the title character Ziggy, Bowie
presented himself as an androgynous rock messiah who falls prey to the excesses of
worship and fanaticism. Taking his cue from the mood of gay liberation, he gave press
interviews proudly claiming his bisexuality and wore make-up and women’s clothes off-
stage. His outré persona contributed to his rise as an international cultural icon. The
chapter argues that glam rock’s spectacle created a permissive and fashionable arena for
new masculine styles, gender ambiguity, bisexuality, and homosexuality.
In Chapter Five, the dissertation turns to sex roles in Evangelical Christian culture
in the 1970s. Although many Evangelical Christians believed in women’s equal
opportunity, many were also concerned that the newly permissive sexual culture—
particularly the push for female and homosexual liberation—flouted God’s laws as laid
out in the bible. There was a significant movement to counter the challenges to traditional
sex roles and critiques of the heterosexual family. By incorporating theatrical and musical
elements from rock music culture, and taking the emphasis on women’s sexual pleasure
into a religious context, evangelical Christians attracted new followers and reasserted
dominant masculinity, submissive femininity, and the family. The impact on Evangelical
21
Christianity of women’s liberation and the sexualized culture were evident in evangelical
author Marabel Morgan’s book The Total Woman which was the best-selling nonfiction
book in 1974. It recommended domestic female empowerment through a combination of
submission to a husband’s will and good sex. The response from readers was
overwhelmingly positive, with claims of a greater sense of equality within marriage.
Although feminism and the sexualized culture influenced more permissive sexuality for
women within evangelical marriages, evangelical culture reasserted traditional gender
roles and undermined the program of women’s liberation.
Together these chapters demonstrate that sexual culture in the 1970s was
reformulated through the similarities and differences in groups who sought to make sense
of, cope with, and capitalize on sexual liberation. The different ideologies and
motivations of each group fed and subverted the sexual revolutions they each sought. By
studying these different groups together we can gain a better understanding of the
paradoxes of sexual liberalization, including an understanding of how an increasingly
permissive sexual culture inspired an evangelical awakening, how women could be more
sexually liberated but also less free, and how homosexuals could have gained greater
visibility and acceptance yet be denied civil rights.
22
CHAPTER 1
“WE ARE FURIOUS (YELLOW)”: GROVE PRESS, SEXISM IN THE
NEW LEFT, AND THE RISE OF WHITE RADICAL FEMINISM
Women are usually more patient in working at unexciting, repetitive
tasks….Women on the average have more passivity in the inborn core of their
personality… . I believe women are designed in their deeper instincts to get more
pleasure out of life—not only sexually but socially, occupationally, maternally—
when they are not aggressive.
— Dr. Benjamin M. Spock
1
We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies; bright glowing mad in our inferior
brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening… . We are rising
with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time
we will be free…
— Robin Morgan
2
Was it not explained that it was for such self-possessed and revolutionary people
that you published this heretic, that outcast, claiming to find the way of
redemption in the sin of Genet and the way of responsibility in the crime of
Guevera? The New Man you’ve been trying to summon with an incantation
jointly authored by some of the best writers of our period at last materializes in
the magic circle…and good God, it’s a woman.
— Carl Oglesby
3
At 8.45am on April 13, 1970, twenty-six women led by Robin Morgan barricaded
themselves into the executive offices of the controversial publishing house Grove Press,
located in New York City’s Greenwich Village. A few days earlier, eight employees
1
Dr. Benjamin M. Spock, from Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior (1970), quoted
in “Know Your Enemy: A Sampling of Sexist Quotes,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of
Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),
35-36.
2
Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New
York: Random House, 1977), 129-30.
3
Carl Oglesby to Fred Jordan, April 28, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University.
23
including Morgan and other key women had been fired after they handed out union
cards.
4
This union-related sacking was a flashpoint, as Morgan seized the moment to
voice concerns that had been brewing for years over sex roles and hypocrisy in the New
Left. Charging Grove Press with crimes against women, the occupiers issued a statement
of demands, flew a red and white women’s liberation flag from the sixth-floor window,
and refused to leave until Grove’s owner Barney Rosset returned from business in Europe
and agreed to their conditions. In a document that began “Women have Seized the
Executive Offices of Grove Press Because:,” the women claimed that “Grove Press and
its subsidiaries…have earned millions off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading, and
dehumanizing women through sado-masochistic literature, pornographic films, and
oppressive and exploitative practices against its own female employees.”
5
Their demands
included an end to all Grove activities that were degrading to women; appropriate
negotiation with the employees’ union; full financial disclosure; and the re-direction of
company profits to childcare, women’s education and welfare, and to the black and
Spanish-speaking communities. The statement of demands ended with the phrase
“Freedom for everyone or freedom for no one.”
Outside the Mercer Street building, seventy employees held a union protest
against Grove’s actions. For several months, under the leadership of Henry Foner, the
4
Marlene Nadle, “Blues for Mr Barney: They Are Furious (Grove),” The Village Voice, April 16, 1970;
Rita Delfiner, “Nine Feminists Are Busted at Sexy Publishing House,” New York Post, April 13, 1970.
Those fired were: Helen Lane (author), Gilbert Sorrentino (poet), Ward Damio, Cicely Nichols (former
Grove Press editor of “The Wall Street Jungle”), Emily Goodman (former Grove Press legal counsel),
Robin Morgan, Beverly Ravitch, and Martha Friedberg.
5
“Women Have Seized the Executive Offices of Grove Press Because…,” 1970. Robin Morgan Papers,
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
24
Joint Board of the Furrier, Leather and Machinery Workers Union (FLM), a white- and
blue-collar union, had been trying to organize workers at twelve other publishing houses,
among them Grove, Random House and Harper and Row. They sought an end to $75 per
week wages and wanted job protection. On the day before the sacking, Grove employees
had distributed union cards. More than half of Grove’s 110 employees signed up.
The double action against Grove, as the Village Voice reported it, also consisted
of a third group dubbed the “new wave.” In addition to the unionists and the women’s
liberationists, the new wave protested Grove’s apparent shift toward caution in what the
company published. They wanted Grove to return to the publishing policy that had earned
it supporters and made its reputation as a radical avant-garde and dissenting publishing
house. Since its inception Grove had published controversial authors including Henry
Miller and William Burroughs, and its flagship literary magazine Evergreen Review had
published more black writers than any other American magazine.
6
But in a seeming
reversal, it was now refusing to publish books deemed “unsafe,” in particular books by or
about the Black Panthers. Timidity over black civil rights was a characteristic of the
American liberalism that radicals had reacted against.
7
In the mid-afternoon, when Robin Morgan allegedly called for books to be burned
and the occupiers started trashing the Grove offices, the police were called. Forty officers
swarmed the vice president’s office, and nine women were arrested and charged with
misdemeanors: Geraldine Maleba, Suzanne DeVicenzo, Beth Katz, Martha Altman,
6
Julius Lester, “Women—the Male Fantasy,” Evergreen Review, September 1970.
7
Nadle, “Blues for Mr Barney: They Are Furious (Grove).”
25
Barbara Chambers, Robin Morgan, Wendy Roberts, Barbara Kevles, and Ti-Grace
Atkinson. The “Grove Press nine” were held in jail for twenty-four hours. They were not
allowed to communicate with lawyers, and were subject to humiliating and unnecessary
“strip and squat” body searches. When Atkinson refused to comply, she was handcuffed
to her prison cell bars and forcibly stripped.
8
The charges against the women were raised
to felonies because the damage done to Grove property was valued at more than $250. In
court the women were represented by Emily Goodman—former Grove Press legal
counsel who was one of the people sacked and one of the feminists who occupied the
building—and Florence Kennedy.
9
In their statement of explanation, the Grove Press Nine spotlighted the sexism and
capitalist profiteering entrenched in both the corporate structure and content of a business
that had styled itself as radical. By calling the police—“the pigs”—on the feminists,
Grove Press appeared no better than the repressive authorities from whom they had
sought to distinguish themselves.
10
The incident split Grove’s constituency, setting off a
nationwide reaction in support of the women and against Grove: authors resigned from
Grove publications, Evergreen Review subscriptions were canceled, and bookstores
refused to stock Grove books, actions that had a considerable impact on Grove’s profits.
An examination of the Grove takeover and the events that triggered it offers an
opportunity to explore three factors that were critical to the creation of a new sexual order
8
Barbara Kevles, “Raising My Fist for Feminism: I Discovered the Movement in Jail,” Works in Progress,
no. 5 (1972): 170-77.
9
Tom Topor, “Jailed Feminists Wait Arraignment,” April 14, 1970.
10
Carl Oglesby to Fred Jordan, Robin Morgan Papers.
26
in the 1970s: first, the increasing sexualization of American public culture during the
1960s through erotic print media, film, and relaxing censorship laws; second, the
political-cultural sexism that divided women and men in the New Left; and third, the
emergence of white radical feminist groups who called for women’s liberation. The
chapter begins with an examination of Grove Press’s cultural significance as a radical
publishing house. Started in the 1950s, it gave voice to both the literary avant-garde and
political radicals, and offered hope to a community of readers disaffected by widespread
cultural conservatism. By disseminating banned erotic literature and film, and fighting
obscenity cases over them, Grove promoted free speech and contributed to the increase of
sexual content in the public sphere. But, as the chapter shows, many women felt that
Grove used and demeaned women through sex, a practice that mirrored their experiences
of male behavior in the New Left. The chapter then explores the development, from those
experiences, of new feminist groups who saw that women could not be liberated as long
as they were being sexually exploited. They took over existing publications and founded
their own underground newspapers, establishing a precedent for the Grove Press
takeover, and for the movement of women and feminist consciousness into mainstream
publishing. Returning to Grove Press, the final section of the chapter examines the
ramifications for the publishing house of the union and feminist actions. A majority
supported the women, signaling a sex-based schism in a movement of people who had
previously seemed united in common cause and a new consciousness about the place of
women in society.
27
Grove Press, the Literary Avant-Garde, and Obscenity
Since its inception in 1951, when Rosset dipped into inherited wealth to buy the
name and assets of the struggling young publishing house, Grove Press played a
significant role in changing the literary landscape in the United States. It was a beacon for
cutting-edge, left-leaning writers and thinkers. It published the Beat poets, became the
first U.S. publisher of Samuel Beckett’s work, and went on to publish controversial erotic
works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet, and William Burroughs
among others, and controversial political works by Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, and Che
Guevara. In so doing Rosset gave national prominence to counterculture artists, French
Surrealists and German Expressionists, dramatists, and black, ethnic, and third-world
writers. Grove also published anthologies of Japanese and Chinese literature, and books
about the New Left, Transactional Analysis, international art films, and jazz. His family
money enabled Rosset to take financial risks without too great a concern for profit.
A veteran of World War II and a former member of the Communist Party, Rosset
did not imbue Grove Press with a particular political ideology beyond what his
biographer S. E. Gontarski calls “broad-based avant-gardism, a general postwar
dissatisfaction with the status quo, a militant antiauthoritarianism, empathy for the
oppressed, and an unwavering commitment to complete freedom of expression.”
11
Rosset
11
S. E. Gontarski, “Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,” in The Grove Press Reader, 1951-
2001, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 2001), xvii. On Grove Press see also S. E. Gontarski,
Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina, 2000). On Rosset, see John Oakes, “Barney Rosset and the Art of Combat Publishing:
An Interview,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (Fall 1970); Obscene: A Portrait of Barney
Rosset and Grove Press, DVD, directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor (U.S.A., Arthouse Films,
2008).
28
was against censorship, as he believed it compromised individual liberty. Freedom of
expression for Rosset included explicit sexuality.
Grove Press under Rosset emerged at a time when the United States was
dominated by what the Left perceived as a suffocating liberal consensus that denied the
existence of domestic conflict and claimed that all the big public issues had been
resolved. Radical activist and writer Carl Oglesby, who had been president of Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1965 to 1966, described the impact that Grove
Press authors published in the 1950s had on 1960s radicalism.
12
During the 1950s, the
Korean War and McCarthyism were forces influential in creating widespread social
anxiety in the United States. The experience made it impossible to love or hate one’s
country: love was “out of the question not only because of McCarthy…but more
disturbingly because life’s quality was becoming so conspicuously synthetic and thin for
everyone; and hate [was] out of the question, too, because the ignominious slave-labor
camps of the USSR seemed to have foreclosed to us…the option of rebellion. We were
stuck.”
13
As Oglesby described it, although poetry and literature could not solve
America’s problems, the writers a decade previous to his generation took on portraying
America and its problems as their artistic and moral work. For Oglesby, Grove was part
of, and in some way—because it published the authors—presided over a new movement
12
For more on Oglesby see Carl Oglesby, “Trapped in a System,” in The New Left: A Documentary
History, ed. Massimo Teodori (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1969) and “Notes on a Decade Ready for the
Dustbin,” in Toward a History of the New Left: Essays from within the Movement, ed. R. David Myers
(Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, (1969) 1989). On the New Left see James Miller, Democracy Is in the
Streets: From the Port Huron Statement to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, (1987) 1994). On the New Left and liberalism, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of
Rage (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1987).
13
Carl Oglesby to Fred Jordan, 2.
29
of hope, expressed through the writing of existentialists like Samuel Beckett and the
Beats. The Evergreen Review published the Beat Poets Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti,
and Burroughs, who “bespoke the possibility of an authentic life, even in that place, that
time.”
14
For Oglesby, Grove Press came to be synonymous with artistic work that
described the problems of the times, considered people’s feelings, responses, and
solutions, and in so doing provided a sense of hope—an aesthetic or practice of “heroic
collectivism.”
Grove Press also had a significant impact in the United States because of its role
in affecting censorship laws and related debates over the meanings of obscenity. Its
publication of several banned books and the associated court cases earned Grove its
reputation as a publisher of erotica. Rosset believed that sexually explicit material could
end sexual repression and in turn promote political reform. Rosset biographer S. E.
Gontarski writes, “Rosset understood early on that sex was a political issue, and that
censorship, in any of its guises, was simply a means of social and political control.”
15
As
the result, Rosset invested heavily in acquiring erotica and in combating its censorship.
Grove was involved in several high-profile censorship battles that challenged
obscenity laws in place since 1873. The Comstock Laws made illegal the mailing of
“obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials, including contraceptives or information
relating to contraception. In 1959, Grove published the unexpurgated version of D. H.
14
Carl Oglesby to Fred Jordan, 2.
15
Gontarski, “Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,” xiii.
30
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was banned in the United States.
16
Contravening the Comstock Laws, Grove advertised the book by mail and sent it by mail.
The postmaster general deemed Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene and seized copies that
had been mailed. This boosted sales enough that the book reached second place on the
New York Times bestseller list. The violation of cultural “norms” of sexual representation
and an inordinate and lascivious focus on sex were the two key considerations in
determining obscenity. In the court case Grove brought against the ban, the judge ruled in
favor of Grove, saying that although the book was filled with explicit language and that
sex was its major theme, the book was not obscene. The ruling repudiated the authority of
the postmaster to judge obscenity and provided a precedent for future cases.
In 1961, Grove published another book banned in the United States, Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The book was also banned by the postmaster general, but he
lifted the ban before Grove Press could appeal in court. Booksellers stocking Tropic of
Cancer were arrested in states around the country. Cases were brought against them, but
Grove Press had committed to acting in their defense. In 1964, the Florida Supreme Court
decision overturned the obscenity conviction.
17
The combined effect of the Lawrence and
Miller court cases was to make it easier for material previously deemed obscene to be
circulated via post.
16
Charles Rembar, the lawyer defending Grove Press, offers an account in Charles Rembar, The End of
Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill (New York: Random House,
1968).
17
John E. Semonche, Censoring Sex: A Historical Journey through American Media (Lanham; Plymouth:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 39-40.
31
Naked Lunch, published by Grove Press in 1962, was graphic and sexually
explicit to the extent that it even divided many in favor of free speech. In 1966 the
Massachusetts State Supreme Court ruled that the book was protected by the First
Amendment. In Roth v. United States (1957) the mailing of sexually explicit materials
was deemed a punishable offence (as it had been since the nineteenth century) primarily
on the basis that obscenity had no redeeming social value and so was not protected by the
First Amendment. In 1965, Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the court case over the erotic
novel Fanny Hill, shifted emphasis, requiring proof that so-called obscene material had
no social value before it could qualify as obscene. Yet as David Allyn writes, “certainly a
book as controversial as Naked Lunch was socially significant by virtue of its
controversial nature.”
18
After the court found that Naked Lunch was not obscene, erotica
could be sold openly. Furthermore, the decision pushed the debate away from one over
the meaning of obscenity toward a debate about freedom of speech and in particular the
state’s right to intervene in and regulate content and behavior. These cases established
precedents that affected the 1973 Miller case, in which the Supreme Court de-federalized
obscenity laws by giving individual states the right to determine the meaning of obscenity
based on their community definitions.
18
David Allyn, Make Love Not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Litte, Brown
and Company, 2000), 69. On the history of censorship in the United States see Rochelle Gurstein, The
Repeal of Reticence: A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity,
Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Edward De Grazia, Censorship
Landmarks (New York: Bowker, 1969); Edward De Grazia, Banned Films: Movies, Censors, and the First
Amendment (New York: Bowker, 1982); and “Special Issue: Hollywood, Censorship, and American
Culture,” American Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1992). On the history of pornography see Linda Williams, Hard
Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
32
In 1969, Grove’s profits increased dramatically and the company’s public stock
soared when it distributed the Swedish pornographic film I Am Curious (Yellow).
19
Approved by Swedish censors (except for those under the age of fifteen), the film was
seized by U.S. customs and prosecuted for obscenity. In Europe the film was widely
well-received, and it was praised for its relevance to young people and the social,
political, and sexual issues they faced.
20
Its director, Vilgot Sjo ̈man, chose the themes of
eroticism, self-exploration, voyeurism, and nonviolence for a film that was supposed to
be about the freedoms of the young. In the film’s sex scenes, he wanted to move beyond
the inhibitions of the traditional cinematic representation of sex through fade-outs and
covered genitals. In the U.S. court case, witnesses, including film critics, a psychologist,
sociologists, psychiatrists, and celebrated American novelist Norman Mailer (also a chief
witness at the Naked Lunch trial), were called to testify to the value of the film. Mailer
testified that the film was a “major work” that “attempts to deal with the nature…[and]
the extraordinary complexity of modern reality…. I think it is a profoundly moral
movie.”
21
After deliberating for two hours, the jury found the film to be obscene. By that
time it had already grossed $4 million on very few screens, and it had become the first
foreign-language picture to top Variety’s highest-grossing films list.
22
19
In 1967 Rosset was clear that the combination of radical politics and explicit sex had a mainstream
market and he took Grove Press public on the stock exchange. Gontarski, Modernism, Censorship, and the
Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy, 7.
20
I Am Curious (Yellow), directed by Vilgot Sjo ̈man (Sweden, Grove Press, 1968); John Lahr, “Sex and
Politics: An Interview with Vilgot Sjöman,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 56 (July 1968); Vilgot Sjo ̈man, “I
Was Curious,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 56 (July 1968).
21
Sjo ̈man, “I Was Curious,” 19.
22
“Sex Dominates B’way First-Runs,” Variety, March 19, 1969, 9.
33
The financial success of I Am Curious (Yellow) had an impact on the increased
production of films with X-ratings, and it signaled to Hollywood that more sexual content
could reinvigorate the film industry after the collapse of the studio system and the rise
and success of foreign and independent films.
23
Curious was able to be screened because
of changes to the film censorship system—the Production Code of America (PCA),
known as the Hays Code—which had come into effect in 1930 and ended in 1968. It was
replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) new ratings system,
which enabled the production and distribution of more explicit films, including X-rated
films. Under this system, the hardcore pornographic films Behind the Green Door and
Deep Throat screened in X-rated theaters in major U.S. cities in 1972. Their success
formed part of what the New York Times dubbed “pornochic.”
24
Thus Grove Press was involved in and contributed to a larger cultural shift toward
more explicit sexual content in publishing and in film. Yet Grove’s commitment to free
speech appeared disconnected from any consideration of whose freedoms were
compromised along the way. Despite his leftist sympathies, Rosset was always an
entrepreneurial figure, and the profit motive impacted his political sympathies.
25
Even if
unintentionally, the publishing house worked toward its free speech agenda by exploiting
minorities and women as authors, subjects, and workers. The paradox was revealed in
23
Peter Braunstein, “‘Adults Only’: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York During the 1970s,” in
America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of
Kansas, 2004).
24
Ralph Blumenthal, “Pornochic: “Hard-Core” Grows Fashionable—and Very Profitable,” New York
Times, January 21, 1973. See also Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship
Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University, 2000).
25
Gontarski, “Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,” xvii.
34
Grove’s retaliation against union organizers, and it was at the heart of the feminist action
against the press in 1970.
Hypocrisy: Grove and Evergreen Content and Labor Practices
An article by Ellen Smith Mendocino that appeared in the San Francisco
Chronicle was the first to publicly criticize “Evergreen, the expensive magazine read by
radicals and others who advocate freedom for everybody in America except women.”
The article upset Rosset, according to Cicely Nichols, former Grove Press editor. In it
Mendocino compared Evergreen to Playboy for its exploitation of women, a comparison
at odds with the artistic and literary intent of the magazine. She noted the six female
employees on the masthead and suggested that they mostly performed menial duties,
especially given that only two out of forty-three articles in the last four months had been
written by women. Mendocino wrote: “While putting down the ethos of middle class
commercialism in its articles and fiction, Evergreen turns around and sells itself by the
worst sort of pandering to that ethos. Women aren’t loving human beings who dig
walking in the rain, reading William Butler Yeats; running for Congress or whatever their
thing might be. They’re amazingly dumb inarticulate sexual beasties suitable only for
framing covers of Evergreen for the enjoyment of New Leftie misogynists.” Women in
the stories of Dotson Rader, Charles Bukowski, and Julian Mitchell are “physically
abused and sexually exploited. Occasionally they’re Super Moms providing never
35
endings [sic] wombs of understanding for whichever brilliant creative first person male
writer needs it. Never are they pictured as artists or individuals.”
26
Certainly, the content of Evergreen was dominated by a male perspective, and
generally there was not a balanced portrayal of men and women. The magazine featured
images of sexual couplings, but its homosexual couplings were of women only, and the
prevalence of female nudity—which increased over the course of the 1960s as censorship
laws relaxed and after Rosset acquired a significant amount of Victorian erotica in
1966—reflected an assumed male gaze.
27
There had been a theme of sadomasochistic sex
throughout Grove’s publication history, beginning with its publication in 1953 of The
Marquis de Sade, a selection of de Sade’s writings with Simone de Beauvoir’s
accompanying essay “Must We Burn Sade?” De Beauvoir read de Sade’s sadomasochism
as emblematic of a universal human condition: the struggle between individual
fulfillment and the desire to be accepted by the community.
28
That publication was
followed most prominently by the first American edition of Pauline Reage’s The Story of
O in 1965, a novel about female sexual submission and the happiness it could bring.
29
In
Evergreen, the cartoon “Frank Fleet and His Electronic Sex Machine” by Dick Strong
and illustrated by Lance Sterling featured fully clad men and naked women, and it
26
Ellen Smith Mendocino, “A Feminist Takes on the Evergreen [transcript of article published in the San
Francisco Chronicle],” Robin Morgan Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University.
27
On the concept of the male gaze see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen
(Autumn 1975). Gontarski, Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press
Legacy, 7.
28
Simone de Beauvoir, The Marquis De Sade (New York: Grove Press, 1953).
29
Pauline Reage, The Story of O, trans. Sabine d’Estree (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
36
typified Mendocino’s concerns.
30
In the cartoon Frank Fleet, a young political scientist, is
called to help J. Edmund Groover combat Chinese Communists who have turned
American women into nymphomaniacs. “This is a Communist plot to take over America
by striking at us through the most gaping hole in American security,” Groover explains in
episode V. “The American vagina!” Frank Fleet exclaims. “The one hole we’d never
have thought of plugging.”
31
In a 1949 novel outline, Barney Rosset wrote a character that his biographer S. E.
Gontarski notes was similar to Rosset. He defended women’s equality, but only for his
own purposes: he sought the admiration of women, but only from women who had what
he considered sufficient intellectual development to offer it to him. The character
believed it was impossible for whites “not to have vestigial remnants of anti-negro
feeling, and for men not to feel superior to women.”
32
Rosset’s racial and sexual blind spots were evident in numerous Press actions.
The Press published Che Guevera’s diaries without authorization from his widow.
Malcolm X’s widow did not receive profits from Grove’s publication of his
autobiography. At Grove offices, a female worker was denied the health insurance for her
child that was automatically given to male workers.
33
The offices of male workers at
Grove displayed explicit images of women. Rosset criticized union organizing and
30
Dick Strong and Lance Sterling, “Frank Fleet and His Electronic Sex Machine, Chapter I, the Nude
Intruder,” Evergreen Review, April 1969.
31
Lester, “Women—the Male Fantasy,” 33.
32
Gontarski, Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy, 20-21.
33
Jennie and James Orvino Sorcic to Fred Jordan, May 12, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers, Rare Book,
Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
37
defended his own response to it by arguing that no other publishing houses in the United
States had unions. Yet in other ways Grove sought constantly to distinguish itself from
other publishing houses.
34
Dotson Rader, one of the authors whom Mendocino targets, certainly used women
as sexual catalysts in his stories. Yet the stories also demonstrate the complexity and
anxiety over sex roles and identity in leftist movement politics.
35
His story “Rosalie,”
published in 1969, intertwined radical politics with explicit sex and reflected the growing
anxiety and confusion over movement efficacy and sexual behavior.
36
Set against a
George Wallace rally, Vietnam draft protests, and the Columbia University protests—all
of which represent the implosion of American democracy—the story foregrounds the
relationship between twenty-six year-old protagonist Rader and Rosalie, a fifteen-year-
old runaway and a fellow radical activist. Rosalie challenges Rader’s lack of
revolutionary action within the movement and with it his manhood, telling him: “You’re
supposed to be the man, the one with the balls between the legs, yet you’re the one
always preaching moderation.” Yet Rader feels exhausted and unable to live up to the
masculine ideal: “Always she held me to some impossible standard, a romantic picture of
manhood that I…could never live up to. Me, because of age and class, she expected to be
forever heavy-balled and strong. Well, I am worn of courage. Beat out.” After describing
her naked childlike body, he writes: “Each time I came away with guilt. My Christian
34
“Rosset interview,” Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press.
35
Rader was himself a complex character who had worked as a male prostitute.
36
Dotson Rader, “Rosalie,” Evergreen Review, Feb 1969.
38
past, Holy Father. Guilt. Gave an edge to sex. As sin. Made it seem dirty (Puritan mind)
and corrupting. Leaving her, I had a desire for violence and humiliation….To find at last
the leitmotiv of the liberal sexual imagination: the massive, leathered, butch, delectably
cruel, German camp mistress…” Curiously, after this admission of sadomasochistic
tendencies, he then characterizes Rosalie, who prefers women to men and seeks a
revolution, as “politically and sexually fucked up, increasingly the nation’s sickness
hers.”
37
It is this lack of self-reflection that bears out Mendocino’s claims about
Evergreen content most clearly: for Rader the problem is located outside of himself, and
the story is named after the female love/sex interest despite being largely about his own
sense of loss and confusion in violent times. He even couples dissent with manhood
despite having revealed Rosalie’s greater capacity and energy for dissent when he writes
that “my America my manhood was intimately connected with dissent…in a country
whose System emasculates young men…tempting violence had become rituals of
manhood.”
38
Women’s LibeRATion: The Precedent at Rat and “Goodbye to All That”
1970 was an important year for women in publishing: radical feminists took over
existing underground papers and started their own. These publications enabled them to
articulate and spread the ideas of liberation, to build networks and a mass movement.
They also made inroads into content production in mainstream publishing. In the
mainstream, although 80 percent of publishing employees were women, men controlled
37
Ibid., 64.
38
Ibid., 65.
39
the field, which was the third largest industry in New York.
39
Male-dominance affected
the tone and content of the publications. By carving spaces for women’s voices to be
aired and reflected, women worked to overturn the problem articulated by Kate Millett
that “It is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of
recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so
continuous.”
40
In January 1970 Robin Morgan received a phone call from fellow radical Jane
Alpert, who told her that for one week women had control of Rat Subterranean News
(Rat) and needed help to put out an all-women’s issue of the paper. Started in 1968, Rat,
a major underground paper of the New Left based in New York with a national
circulation, “sought to synthesize New Left politics and the countercultural lifestyle.”
41
The paper gained notoriety when it reported on the 1968 student uprising at Columbia
University. By 1970, it had begun to reflect the shift in the Left toward militancy, and its
pages reflected what Morgan described as “a kind of “cultural nationalism” for young
white males: rock music coverage, pornography articles, and sex-wanted ads.”
42
A “sex-
and-porn special” of Rat was evidence to Alpert that Rat, where she was a salaried writer,
was “deteriorating from a lively radical journal into a sophomoric joke sheet,” in turn a
39
Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Random House,
1977), 116.
40
Millett, Sexual Politics, 24.
41
Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1985), 93. Robert Glessing argues that the underground press was in part a reaction to declining
individualism in the United States, a forum for individual expression to work against conformity. See The
Underground Press in America (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970).
42
Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, 116.
40
reflection of the hopelessness she was feeling about the efficacy of the Left.
43
The “sex-
and-porn special” looked to Alpert and fellow female staffers like Al Goldstein’s Screw,
a hardcore pornography magazine that was launched in 1970 and was particularly brutal
in its objectification of women. Alpert thought of resigning from the paper, but a
colleague said that resigning would be “bourgeois individualism.” Collective action was
necessary, and so the women who could no longer tolerate the “blatant sexism” of Rat
took over its offices.
The anger that spurred the Rat takeover and that was articulated on the “We Are
Furious (Yellow)” badges worn at the feminist Grove Press occupation had been
germinating among radical women throughout the 1960s. Their involvement in civil
rights and New Left activism exposed them to groups whose radical politics did not
extend to their conception of gender roles. In fact, for some groups the most radical
political acts included the practice of free love, which did not, for many women, translate
into liberation. The transformation from conceiving radical political practices as protest
actions or other forms of militancy to conceiving of it in terms of sexual practice was
partly due to the reorganization of the left in the 1960s. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were, as
Alice Echols puts it “virtually synonymous with what is commonly referred to as the
‘Movement.’”
44
The antiwar New Left led by SDS absorbed a number of displaced white
43
Jane Alpert, Growing up Underground (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1981), 242-47.
44
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, 23.
41
activists after they were expelled from SNCC in 1967.
45
SDS then focused on anti-war
activism and on student organizing. Although SDS drew its greatest numbers when it
organized against Vietnam, the focus on the draft further marginalized women, since the
draft did not directly affect them. SDS then became occupied with the notion that one’s
own oppression must inform revolutionary action: thus radical politics should embrace
authentic individual experience rather than act to support the freedom movements of
other groups. Increasingly SDS moved toward militantism, which is when the faction
known as the Weatherman (later the Weather Underground Organization), became
prominent. The Weathermen grew out of a desire to overturn through violent action the
bourgeois and timid nature of middle-class students.
46
As the organization of groups changed, there was an ideological shift that
positioned “free love” and free speech as political-cultural acts. During the mid-60s,
“large segments” within the Left started to look toward the revolution as something that
would occur in the way that they lived, rather than through political activism.
47
This was
what distinguished the New Left from the Old Left: whereas the Old Left had focused on
45
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its
Relation to the Policy Process; Winifred D. Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s,
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988). On the racial antagonisms in SNCC see Clayborne Carson, In
Struggle: Sncc and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981). On the sexual tensions see Alice Walker, Meridian (London: Women’s Press, (1976) 1982).
46
See Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the
New Left; Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971);
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975.
47
Gail Paradise Kelly, “Women’s Liberation and the New Left,” in From Feminism to Liberation, ed. Edith
Hoshino Altbach (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Pub. Co., 1971).
42
capitalism and politics, SDS looked away from economics to the psychological and
cultural mechanisms of domination.
48
By 1965 sexual openness was common in the Left. As a result, women enjoyed
new sexual freedoms, but they also encountered exploitation and sexual humiliation.
Women entered the movement and found their status could change depending on their
sexual relationship with a man: they could be involved in meetings regarding central
projects, or they might be shunted to the periphery. The double standard had apparently
been abolished, but in fact men criticized women for being “uptight” and “unliberated” if
they did not have sex with them when men wanted it.
49
Men wanted sexual relationships
without commitment, perhaps partly in rejection of the domesticity of their fathers’
generation, or, as Doug Rossinow argues, as part of a virile assertion of what they
believed was authentic, natural masculinity.
50
There was a belief that there could be sex
without any other form of attachment, and movement men thought that women could
adopt their own standards of promiscuity without any consideration for what Sarah Evans
calls the “needs already socialized into [women] for security, stability, and dependability
in relationships.”
51
48
See Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968 (New York: Praeger 1982).
49
Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left, 177.
50
Ibid., 152-55. Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New
Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
51
Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left, 153.
43
As the result of the discomfort that women experienced, sexism in the movement
came under scrutiny. In 1964 during Freedom Summer, a document titled “The Position
of Women in the SNCC” discussed the role of women in the movement and triggered a
number of responses that undermined women, including Stokely Carmichael’s infamous
comment that “the position of women in SNCC is prone.”
52
In 1965, women raised the
issue of sex roles within SDS at the National Council meeting. In September 1967 at a
National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), women presented their demands for civil
rights.
53
Their claims were dismissed as excessive. The two women who reacted most
strongly to the dismissal, Jo Freeman and Shulamith Firestone, went on to found
women’s liberation groups in Chicago—the Westside Group—and New York.
54
Firestone cofounded the New York Radical Women with Pam Allen in 1967. The same
year various feminist groups formed independently of one another in Chicago, Toronto,
Detroit, Seattle, and Gainesville, Florida.
55
In 1968 the women’s liberation movement’s
first national action took place: a protest in Atlantic City against the Miss America
pageant where they threw “instruments of torture to women” into a “Freedom Trash
Can.”
56
The media reported that there was a bra burning, but that did not happen.
52
See Ibid; Levine, Rebirth of Feminism; Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-
1975.
53
See Hole and Levine, Rebirth of Feminism.
54
For a discussion of the meeting and Chicago organizing see Freeman, The Politics of Women’s
Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process.
55
Jo Freeman, “The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Origin, Structures and Ideals,” 1971. Documents
from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Special Collections Library, Duke University.
56
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, 93.
44
Radical white women were not only spurred to action by the sexism they
experienced, they were also inspired by the role models provided by powerful black
women in SNCC and the wider black community.
57
As Sara Evans writes, “Feminism
was nurtured in the contradiction that the intensification of sexual oppression occurred in
the same places where women found new strength, new potential, and new self-
confidence, where they learned to respect the rebellion of strong women.”
58
At the same
time, the different backgrounds of black and white women kept the women divided from
one another. White women were seeking the economic and social independence from
men that many black women had had forced upon them; and race-based civil rights and
black power remained the focus of many black women who did not see their feminist
struggles as necessarily separate from black community issues.
59
57
See for example, Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On black feminist organizations see
Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham [N.C.]:
Duke University Press, 2005).
58
Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left, 154. For a discussion of the divisions between white and black feminists see Winifred Breines, The
Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006). Robin Kelley discusses the different ways that black feminists battled
sexism within the black freedom movement and how their unique position in relation to black men, white
feminists and the New Left laid the foundations for black radical feminism in Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). For a history of Chicana feminism emerging from the
Chicano movement see Alma M. Garcia, “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970-1980,”
Gender and Society 3, no. 2 (1989). For a study of white, black, and Chicana feminisms see Benita Roth,
Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
59
Maxine William and Pamela Newman discuss the problems black women faced and the establishment in
1969 of the Third World Women’s Alliance in order to address issues that white women’s liberation was
ignoring. See “Black Women’s Liberation,” 1971. Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement,
Special Collections Library, Duke University; Third World Women’s Alliance, “Black Women’s
Manifesto,” 1971. Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Special Collections Library, Duke
University. The first national Chicana conference was held in 1971. Mirta Vidal, “Chicanas Speak Out,”
1971. Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Special Collections Library, Duke University.
45
Women in the New Left split between “politicos” and “feminists” (radical
feminists): the former saw women’s liberation as part of a wider revolution that would
come with the destruction of capitalism, whereas the latter saw women’s liberation as a
movement necessarily separate from the Left. Initially radical feminists were the
minority, but as Alice Echols demonstrates, by 1969 they had become a major force who
focused on the “sexual politics of personal life” rather than on “women’s exclusion from
the public sphere”—the latter being the main focus of liberal feminism.
60
Ti-Grace
Atkinson, former president of the New York chapter of NOW, was disgruntled with
NOW’s politics, because of its interest in getting women into positions of power. Her
goal was to abolish power, and she founded the October 17
th
Movement, which became
known as The Feminists.
61
A revolutionary action group, The Feminists sought to
overturn the sex-role system including the institution of heterosexual sex.
62
Radical feminism was heterogeneous. There were regional influences on different
goals, and individual backgrounds impacted styles of feminist consciousness. Echols
distinguishes the Chicago and New York groups on the basis of political culture—or lack
thereof. Whereas women in Chicago groups tended to have organizational backgrounds
in SDS, in New York feminists like Ellen Willis came from cultural criticism and did not
have organizational ties to the Left, or they had civil rights backgrounds.
63
Willis’s article
60
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, 15.
61
Ibid., 167-85.
62
“The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt
(New York: Quadrangle Books, [1969] 1973), 368-78.
63
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, 72.
46
“Women and the Left” established her as a feminist and not a politico.
64
She wrote for the
Village Voice and in 1969 founded the Redstockings with Shulamith Firestone with the
goal of consciousness-raising and with a pro-woman stance that said men needed to
change their behavior.
65
Firestone’s New York Radical Women published the journal
Notes from the First Year, which included Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal
Orgasm.”
66
Koedt’s article encouraged women to redefine their sexuality on the basis of a
correct understanding of their anatomy. Where Freud had theorized that clitoral orgasms
were immature and that women incapable of achieving vaginal orgasms were frigid,
Koedt argued that clitoral stimulation was necessary to female sexual pleasure. Although
this information was made clear in sex studies including those by Alfred Kinsey and by
Masters and Johnson, Koedt argued that men continued to maintain the myth of the
vaginal orgasm because it suited their own purposes.
67
In December 1969, New York
Radical Feminists replaced New York Radical Women (NYRW) and issued a manifesto
called “The Politics of Ego,” which argued that patriarchy was driven by male ego and
had nothing to do with economics.
68
Other radicals formed the cheekily named WITCH
64
Ellen Willis, “Women and the Left,” in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major
Writings of the Radical Feminists (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970); Willis, Beginning to See the
Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1981).
65
Redstockings, “Redstockings Manifesto,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the
Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
66
Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” in Notes from the First Year (New York: The New
York Radical Women, 1968).
67
Ibid.; William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown,
1966).
68
“The Politics of Ego: A Manifesto for New York Radical Feminists,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne
Koedt (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973).
47
(Women Inspired to Commit Herstory) in an attempt to bridge the politico-feminist
divide.
69
Their action-oriented group targeted corporate America (often referred to as
Amerika) as the culprit in the oppression of both radical women and men.
Jane Alpert was a New Left activist who met Robin Morgan and Ellen Willis at
consciousness-raising groups. She did not see the importance of women forming a
separate political group as Willis wanted, but Morgan’s idea of replacing men in
leadership roles within the Left “electrified” her.
70
Alpert was inspired to take action at
Rat in January 1970 when she and her lover Sam Melville were awaiting trial for their
roles in eight New York bombings that took place in 1969.
After Alpert contacted her, Morgan organized about thirty women from other
women’s groups in New York City to work on the women’s Rat, and although these
women were newcomers to publishing they put out an edition of Rat on time. For Alpert,
it was a mediocre effort, except for Robin Morgan’s piece “Goodbye to All That,” which,
with its call for women to lead the revolution—“It seems obvious that a legitimate
revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown,
and white women—with men relating to that the best they can”—inspired Alpert and
many of the other women at Rat to keep the paper under female leadership.
71
Under the
changed name Women’s LibeRATion, the paper lasted another two years.
72
69
“Witch Papers,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation
Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
70
Alpert, Growing up Underground, 185.
71
Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 123.
72
Alpert, Growing up Underground, 243.
48
Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That” included a cartoon of a sinking ship bearing the
name “the male-dominated left” (see Figure 1).
73
The article was reprinted in feminist
papers and read aloud at meetings. For Ruth Rosen, the style of the piece was reminiscent
of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
74
The comparison is an important one. Morgan’s piece was
certainly a howl of pent-up anger, which was in keeping with her stance on violence, in
particular defensive violence: “hatred must be released against the cause someway,
somehow, or be turned in against the victim who has been forced to host that feeling.”
75
In “Goodbye to All That” Morgan called for the complete eradication of
supposedly left-leaning but pornographic publications: “No more, brother. No more well-
meaning ignorance, no more co-optation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all
fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No
more.”
76
She continues, “A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or
titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men
competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom
(and functioning as objectified prizes or ‘coin’ as well). Goodbye to all that.”
77
Significantly, Morgan called out the “so-called sexual revolution”: “Goodbye to Hip
Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s
73
Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to all That,” Rat, 7.
74
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin
Books, 2001).
75
Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, 134.
76
Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 122-23.
77
Ibid., 123.
49
freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituted oppression by
another name.”
78
The piece also heralded the shift in female sex roles beyond the passive roles
traditionally prescribed for women: “Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey,
frustrated, crazy, Solanaesque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating,
libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the
women that men have warned us about” (emphasis in original).
79
While Morgan
acknowledged that sexual stereotypes were harmful to men, she challenged the notion
that, since they were the oppressors, men could be oppressed. “In the long run, Women’s
Liberation will of course free men—but in the short run it’s going to cost men a lot of
privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.”
80
Finally, Morgan made the point
that was the lodestone of so much feminist practice, that the personal is political, and that
sex itself constituted a political act. Morgan recognized that the personal nature of the
change required would not be easy because “It hurts to try and change each day of your
life right now—not in talk, not ‘in your head,’ and not only conveniently ‘out there’ in
the Third World…or the black and brown communities…but in your own home, kitchen,
bed.”
81
78
Ibid., 124-25.
79
Ibid., 126. “Solanaesque” was a reference to Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM (the Society for Cutting
Up Men) and author of its manifesto. At one point, Solanas was in discussions with Barney Rosset to
publish her work. Morgan included an excerpt of the SCUM manifesto in Valerie Solanis, “Excerpts from
the SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) Manifesto,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings
from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
80
Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 126.
81
Ibid., 128.
50
In Morgan’s recollections of the Rat takeover and her feminist awakening, she
distinguished between women’s liberation and the lingering notion that the “real
revolution” was of the Marxist variety. This politico-feminist split was not so clear-cut at
the women-run RAT, which, by trying to appeal to both women and men, was not, for
Morgan, a fully feminist paper. Eventually Morgan worked out what she called “The
Awful Truth”: that it was leftist political theory itself that was problematic, because it
was written by men. Three key texts and experiences made her realise this. First, she read
Detroit feminists Kathleen Barry, Barbara Burris, Terry Moon, and Joanne Parrent’s
Fourth World Manifesto, which described women around the world as a caste in service
to male imperialism and in which they bid farewell to the politics of the New Left
because it failed to recognize that caste.
82
Second, she read Shulamith Firestone’s critique
of Marx and Freud in her influential The Dialectics of Sex: The Case For Feminist
Revolution in which Firestone argued that sex, not economics, was the fundamental unit
of oppression.
83
Finally, Morgan’s own writing—“the core of my existence”—was being
threatened in a climate of downward mobility and anti-intellectualism.
Morgan’s movement away from the male-dominated Left and her interest in
taking control of the means of cultural production was echoed in the founding of other
feminist papers in 1970, including off our backs in Washington D.C., It Ain’t Me Babe in
California, and Iowa City’s Ain’t I a Woman. In 1971, the Chicana feminist group Hijas
de Cuauhtémoc published their own newspaper named after their group. Based in Long
82
See Barbara Burris et al., Fourth World Manifesto (Glebe, N.S.W.: Words for Women, 1971).
83
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; the Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).
51
Beach, California, the newspaper included articles from Chicanas in other parts of the
U.S.
These newspapers were critical in building networks and connecting feminists
around the U.S.
84
The Rat takeover established a precedent followed in other cities where
women temporarily or permanently took over male-run underground papers, or
challenged publishers on sex discrimination.
85
Since 1968, the women’s liberation movement had avoided speaking to male
reporters as part of an effort to avoid misrepresentation and to force them to hire more
female reporters.
86
Some groups, such as The Feminists, had a policy of not
communicating with the media at all in order to avoid promoting single personalities or
leaders at the cost of group equality. The effect was to increase interest from male
reporters who felt excluded, and women journalists who covered the movement were
often converted to feminism as the result of their experiences with activists.
87
Barbara
Kevles, one of the Grove Press
Nine, exemplified this conversion experience. Ti-Grace
Atkinson invited her to the Grove Press action as she believed that Kevles would report
84
Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: Las Hijas De Cuauhtémoc, Chicana Feminism, and Print
Culture in the Chicano Movement, 1968-1973,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Aída
Hurtado Gabriela F. Arredondo, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2003).
85
Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s; Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and
Times of the Underground Press. The first national newsletter for the women’s liberation movement—
Voice of the women’s liberation movement—started in 1968 in Chicago and was published until June 1969.
See Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its
Relation to the Policy Process, 109-10.
86
Todd Gitlin discusses the problems that the New Left had with the media in The Whole World Is
Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980).
87
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its
Relation to the Policy Process, 113.
52
the event accurately. Kevles did not reveal herself as a reporter to Morgan or the other
women for fear of reprisal. Initially wary of radical feminists, her experiences in prison
and seeing the treatment of the other women by the prison guards converted her to
feminism. She left the event vowing to “be an action of one each day and…[to] protest
with other women for our rights as a political class.”
88
Feminists also took action against bigger and mainstream publishing houses. In
March 1970, 46 women on staff at Newsweek charged the publication with discrimination
against women in editorial jobs and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission.
89
A week later 100 feminists (from Media Women, the
Redstockings, the New York Radical Feminists, NOW, and including Ti-Grace Atkinson)
occupied the New York headquarters of the Ladies’ Home Journal. They requested a
change in content away from stories that encouraged women to be domestic, and they
wanted the editor and publisher John Mack Carter to resign or to be fired. A Newsweek
report on the feminists’ demands was unsympathetic to their tactics and manner. Carter
would not resign, and he also refused to allow the feminists to publish an issue of the
Ladies’ Home Journal. He did, however, agree to let them write a women’s liberation
supplement for an issue of the journal, and he told Newsweek, “It’s been one of the most
interesting days of my career… . And I would be proud to lead the way in the day-care
and training programs.”
90
In May, 37 of the 40 female editorial staff at the Washington
Post issued a statement to the editors accusing them of discriminating against women in
88
Kevles, “Raising My Fist for Feminism: I Discovered the Movement in Jail.”
89
“Woman Power,” Newsweek, March 30, 1970.
90
Ibid.
53
content and labor practices. At Time Inc.—publishers of Time-Life Books, Time,
Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated—ninety-four women, who comprised 36 percent of
its editorial staffers, filed charges of sex discrimination with the New York State Division
of Human Rights. A particular provocation came from an interoffice memo written by
Time’s managing editor Henry Grunwald, in which he stated, “I don’t intend to make a
deliberate attempt to recruit or nurture female writers… . I must add in candor that I have
not met many women who seem to have the physical and mental energies required for
Time senior editing. (Of course, I have not met too many men who fill that bill either.).”
Time, Inc. denied the charges, but the New York State Division of Human Rights
directed the company
to negotiate directly with the women. After eight months of
negotiation, Time Inc. promised to try harder.
91
At the end of August, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification
of the nineteenth amendment in which women were given the right to vote, Time
published a special women’s issue. Positioning her as the theorist and ideological
figurehead of the women’s movement, the special issue featured a cover painting of Kate
Millett with an accompanying article about her just-released book Sexual Politics.
92
A
long article detailed key points of the women’s liberation movement and described
consciousness-raising as the heart of the movement. Publishers seized on the emerging
market for women’s liberation literature. In late 1970 and into 1971 they contracted and
91
“Male and Female,” Newsweek, May 18, 1970. In his memoir, Henry Grunwald recognized the memo as
“a highly patronizing statement, and I was embarrassed by it in hindsight.” See One Man’s America: A
Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 408.
92
“The Liberation of Kate Millett,” Time, August 31, 1970.
54
published numerous volumes including Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and
Robin Morgan’s edited anthology Sisterhood is Powerful which included writings by
black feminists and Chicanas.
93
Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, played an
important role in publishing black women’s writings. In 1970 several major black
feminist texts were published and heralded the arrival of black women’s liberation. They
included Toni Cade’s The Black Woman, an anthology of African-American feminist
writings, work by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and Shirley Chisholm’s
autobiography.
94
Thus, the publishing industry, while capitalizing on the interest in
women’s liberation, also assisted in spreading the new feminist consciousness.
In sum, these actions were a significant step for women in gaining access to the
power of content production and representation.
95
In the early years of the 1970s, radical
feminist ideas circulated in mainstream publications and key women in the movement
became household names. In 1972, Ms. magazine began publishing. The first national
magazine founded by women and with feminist concerns, it ended its first six months
“running in the black, a situation almost unheard of in modern publishing,” according to
93
Grace Lichtenstein, “Women’s Lib Wooed by Publishers,” New York Times, August 17, 1970.
94
Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist
Movement. For a discussion of black radical feminist writings see Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination. On black feminism see Deborah G. White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in
Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Kimberly Springer, Living for the
Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2005).
95
Laura Furman, ‘“A House Is Not a Home’: Women in Publishing,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An
Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1970); Lindsay Van Gelder, “The Trials of Lois Lane: Women in Journalism,” in Sisterhood Is
Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1970).
55
Time and “[s]urveys show that 90% of subscribers are women...Only 18% are affiliated
with Women’s Liberation groups.”
96
Ramifications for Grove and the fracturing of the movement
In May 1970, the union efforts at Grove were ended when they lost a National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election at Grove, after which the issue of the sacking
that had triggered the double action was referred to arbitration.
97
In brief telegrams to
those fired and later in arbitration reports, Barney Rosset had given company
“reorganization” as the reason for terminating employment, and Fred Jordan, editor of
Evergreen Review, insisted that the sackings were “econom[ic] measures to better
withstand the pressures of today’s recessionary period.”
98
In some cases they cited the
poor performance of some employees, and they denied knowledge of union activities by
most of those who were fired. In written testimony, Morgan, who had served as editor at
Grove Press for two and a half years, explained that the FLM Joint Board had been
meeting for a month prior to the sackings. Although she did not attend the union
meetings, she supported the union effort and became involved in handing out cards. She
claimed that the reason given for her termination—“reorganization”—was false, because
on the Monday before she was sacked she was given a project that would last four
96
“Ms. Makes It,” Time, December 25, 1972. On Ms. see Amy Erdman Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood: Ms.
Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1998). Ellen Willis argues that although Ms. supported feminist reform that it did not seek to overturn the
existing socioeconomic order. See Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in No More
Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Hanover: Published by University Press of New England [for]
Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 137.
97
Henry Raymont, “Grove to Rehire Four It Dismissed,” New York Times, August 8, 1970.
98
Letter of Termination to Robin Morgan from Barney Rosset, [telegram] April 10, 1970. Robin Morgan
Papers.
56
months. Two weeks earlier, Grove’s vice president and director of fulfillment, Myron
Shapiro, asked her to confirm the rumors he had heard about union organizing. Although
she would not name names, Morgan confirmed that there was employee discontent and
offered ideas about how they could clear grievances. At around the same time, Dick
Seaver, vice president of Grove Press and head of Grove Press Books, told her he was
pleased with her work. In a letter to Thomas A. Knowlton, the arbitrator of the case at the
American Arbitration Association, and appointed by the National Arbitration Association
of the National Labor Relations Board, the attorneys Cammer and Shapiro gave evidence
that Miss Friedberg was fired because of union support and that Morgan was highly
regarded until that time. Her involvement in the Women’s Liberation Movement and her
views had been known to Grove since she started working there in 1968.
99
In August, Knowlton made his decision on the future of employees fired: he
found that Grove was concerned that a successful union drive would affect its profits and
that four women were dismissed “solely for union activities in which Grove employees
were engaged.” Grove was ordered to rehire Cicely Nichols, Robin Morgan, Beverly
Ravitch, and Martha Friedberg with backpay. A joint statement issued by the FLM Joint
Board and Grove Press said that while Grove disagreed with the decision, it would
comply in good faith.
100
The statement also noted that given the company downsizing
that had occurred since the original incidents, the women had agreed not to take up their
99
Cammer & Shapiro, Letter to Dr Thomas A. Knowlton, June 22, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers, Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Robin Morgan Papers.
100
Raymont, “Grove to Rehire Four It Dismissed”; FLM Joint Board, “Arbitrator Orders Reinstatement of
4 Women Employees Discharged for Union Activities by Grove Press,” (1970). Robin Morgan Papers.
57
former positions. Some of Morgan’s backpay was to be deducted to cover the damage to
property.
101
The decision was seen by labor leader Henry Foner as positive for those who
sought union protection and those who seek “political and civil rights.”
102
Despite the resolution, the schisms among Grove’s radical supporters who had
once found common cause combating censorship and sex repression had been revealed,
and the damage to Grove’s business had been done.
103
For Grove, the feminist occupation
had a significant impact on its subscriptions and on support from community bookstores
around the United States. Jennie and Jim Orvino Sorcic, managers of Interabang
Bookstore in Milwaukee, wrote to RAT that they had taken action against Grove in
solidarity with the women.
104
As a community bookstore, they sought to carry the work
of black and Latin revolutionaries, as well as gay literature, and so had carried many
Grove publications and ordered Evergreen. Upon seeing Evergreen, they covered it with
stickers that read “this insults women” and canceled their order. They also wrote to other
booksellers in the area asking for them to act similarly.
105
In their letter to Fred Jordan,
editor of Evergreen, they wrote about Evergreen’s blatant exploitation of women, its
sexist advertising, sexist copy, and the exploitation of homosexuals. Most distasteful was
101
FLM Joint Board and Grove Press, Inc. “Joint Statement.” Robin Morgan Papers.
102
Shapiro to Arbitrator Knowlton, Robin Morgan Papers.
103
Revenue from I Am Curious (Yellow) had stopped and Grove lost the capital it had invested in real estate
when the New York real estate market collapsed. This happened just after it spent millions of dollars
refurbishing its offices, so that after the market collapsed, the cost of refurbishment exceeded its market
value. In late 1971 Grove suspended publication of Evergreen.
104
The usage of the name changed from Rat to RAT to reflect the new title Women’s LibeRATion under the
women’s leadership.
105
Jennie and Jim Orvino Sorcic to RAT, May 28, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers.
58
the way that Grove had treated the Grove Press Nine: “the publishers of Che Guevera,
Franz Fanon and Malcolm X did what even the Ladies Home Journal didn’t do—they
called the pigs—and had nine women carried away to spend an especially harassing and
degrading night in jail.”
106
The letter reiterated the call for the end to the degradation of
women, the return of profits to the black community, the direction of profits to helping
abused women, and the establishment of a company cooperative. Finally, they refused to
pay their bills until steps were taken to meet their demands. Jordan’s response was short:
in it he told the couple not to threaten with non-payment. According to Robin Morgan,
Jordan and Rosset were upset because the Sorcics’ letter was the “fifth such they [Grove]
had received that very morning.”
107
The feminist paper off our backs was “repulsed by the hypocrisy and low down
meanness of the self-proclaimed radical publishing house.”
108
Their article about the
incident listed those fighting for women—Carl Ogelsby, Julius Lester, James Forman,
Paul Goodman, Brian Glick, Kathy Boudin, Eleanor Raskin, Gus Reichbach—and
exposed those who did not—Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsburg, Jules Fieffer, Nat Hentoff,
Dotson Rader, and Jack Newfield. The piece stated that sexism could lead to riches in
America but hoped that the “feminine revolt in the publishing industry in New York is
the beautiful beginning of the end of the slick sexism of the ’60s.”
106
Jennie and James Orvino Sorcic to Fred Jordan, May 12, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers.
107
Robin Morgan to Jennie and Jim Orvino Sorcic, 26 September, 1970. Robin Morgan Papers.
108
“In the Groves of Erotica,” off our backs, June 26, 1970.
59
Carl Oglesby wrote a strong open letter of criticism and “political resignation” to
Fred Jordan, which he copied to Robin Morgan. He began the letter by recalling what
happened at Rat: he then recalled conversations he had had with Jordan about the crimes
and sins of Evergreen and Grove, conversations that included recognition of Morgan as
Grove’s potential adversary. They were aware that there would be a reckoning but not
that it would be so soon. What bothered Oglesby most about the way that Grove handled
the feminist occupation was that it destroyed his faith in a publishing house that had,
through its commitment to avant-garde artistic and literary insights, represented hope and
freedom.
Oglesby argued that the women’s “loving insurrection” “was in fact the best pay-
off yet on Rosset’s basic bet,” by which he meant that the women were able to act as they
had because of the dissent Rosset had helped to create.
109
Rightists had accused Grove
Press of avarice and filthy-mindedness, and now the women were accusing them of the
same thing because of their own experiences with the press. Oglesby wrote, “you must
take responsibility, somehow, for those whose moral intelligence you have in some
measure helped to form. I am thinking precisely of the nine women who protested and
quite conventionally sat in….”
110
Furthermore, like many others, Oglesby was disgusted
by Grove’s response of calling the police on Morgan and her fellow protestors, saying
that in doing so Grove had squandered its currency, had become the very authoritarian
109
Oglesby to Fred Jordan, 4.
110
Ibid., 4.
60
body that it had so often attacked. Oglesby then went on to attack Grove for being
parasitic on real revolutionaries.
After reading Oglesby’s article, Grove author Jack Newfield wrote a letter of
resignation, which Evergreen printed as a matter of “political integrity.” In it Newfield
agreed about the magazine’s problematic portrayal of women although he undermined
the strength of his position by writing: “Please don’t take this personally. My girl friend
has also persuaded me to reject an assignment from Playboy on the same grounds,”
giving the editors fodder to respond with, “And what did your mother say?” In the
Village Voice, Newfield wrote that Grove was “guilty of exploiting and dehumanizing
women.”
111
Another Grove author, Julius Lester, also sided with the women. In a letter of
April 14, 1970, he said he would no longer publish with the press if the charges against
the women were not dropped. In his article “Women—The Male Fantasy,” published in
Evergreen in September, he detailed the problematic perceptions and portrayals of
women.
112
He wrote: “Now that women are ceasing to play the game by male rules, no
man who wants to live as a human being (and not merely as a man) can avoid the painful
confrontation with himself which the new consciousness of women demands. . . .
Basically, a man wants a ‘helpmeet,’ someone who does not exist in her own right, but
whose function in life is to help him. She loves him, honors him, obeys him, and, above
111
Jack Newfield, “Jack Newfield Resigns,” Evergreen Review, August 1970; Newfield, Village Voice,
June 25, 1970.
112
Lester, “Women—the Male Fantasy.” Gontarski, “Introduction: The Life and Times of Grove Press,”
xxviii.
61
all, serves him—in the kitchen, the laundry room, the maternity ward, the nursery, and
the bed.”
113
The article analyzed the “sexual revolution” as “nothing more than the
attempt to institutionalize the concept of woman-as-pussy.”
114
This sexual revolution, as
Lester described it, was nothing more than the increasing appearance of sex in advertising
and the existence of Playboy. Even though he thought Evergreen’s representations were
tasteful, Lester expressed concern that they only offered a male perspective and that
women were not represented as anything other than sexual beings. The publication
reeked of fear and hatred of women, according to Lester—an interpretation borne out by
its many stories and articles that seemed intent on appeasing or gratifying men who felt
sexually inadequate. Lester ultimately implored men to become better human beings.
Evergreen published Carl Oglesby’s letter along with Fred Jordan’s response to it.
Jordan wrote that, of all the women who occupied the Grove offices, only Robin Morgan
was known to Grove Press: the other women were members of the women’s liberation
movement. He stated that Robin pressured Carl into his resignation, and that Robin
withheld information pertinent to Carl’s decision. Further, he wrote, “don’t let anyone tell
you she was chagrined when her high jinks led to a felony charge. Why else would she
have fought us so hard when we moved to dismiss the charges against her and her eight
friends?”
115
He accused Morgan of abandoning her principles in return for a paycheck
and not taking action until after she had been dismissed—an accusation in which he
113
Lester, “Women—the Male Fantasy,” 31-32.
114
Ibid., 32.
115
Fred Jordan, Evergreen Review 1970, 70.
62
omitted his prior awareness that action was brewing.
116
The “real issue,” as Jordan saw it,
was “censorship,” and his stance against censorship was absolute and resolute. He asked
“has freedom of speech really become irrelevant to the Left?” and compared Morgan’s
demands with those of the “lunatic Right,” who had been trying to suppress Grove. He
claimed that they called the police in opposition to Morgan’s demand for book burning.
To him, “freedom of speech is a radical and, yes, revolutionary principle, a beachhead of
radical action carved out against constant incursions and threats, no matter what the
source.” In the years ahead, he insisted, “we’ll all be compelled to defend every inch of it
against the proto-fascists of the Nixon era.” At no point did he address the issue of the
degradation of women, nor did he address profiting from minorities.
In an open letter to the Village Voice, six women expressed their solidarity with
women’s liberation but disagreed with and criticized the attack on Grove Press and
Evergreen Review. To them, erotic literature was “interesting, arousing, and amusing,”
and they were concerned that the “anti-sex” trend in women’s liberation linked the
achievement of women’s rights with nineteenth-century standards of sexual purity. They
asserted “We like our bodies and our sexuality and feel no need to deny or ignore them.”
The real women’s issues for them related to workplace reform and legalized abortion.
117
Their position contrasted with Morgan’s hard line stance on pornography. Morgan and
others argued that women’s liberation depended on the eradication of pornographic
depictions of women as objects of male fantasy. Here lay the seeds of a division between
116
Even Arbitrator Knowlton noted that the hostility of WLM to some of Grove Press’s activities was
known to Grove management.
117
Letters to the Editor, “Women’s Glib,” Village Voice, July 2, 1970.
63
feminists over what constituted sexual liberation or exploitation for women, a division
that deepened during the 1970s and that manifest in the “sex wars” of the 1980s.
118
Conclusion
Grove Press played an important role in providing a forum for and also creating a
new avant-garde literary and politically radical community. Barney Rosset believed that
free speech was essential in achieving individual liberty, and recognized the role of
explicit sex in achieving that freedom. By fighting against restrictions on erotic literature
and an erotic film, Grove pushed for new definitions of obscenity and contributed to the
increase of sex in the public sphere in the 1960s. At the same time, sex became a
profitable business for Grove, and women charged that the publishing house was
capitalizing on women’s bodies and compromising their freedoms. Grove’s
objectification of women mirrored the hypocrisy and sexism that women had experienced
in the movement. Women were galvanized by their combined experiences of gendered
oppression, civil rights and political activism, and cultural criticism. In 1967 they began
to organize into a variety of feminist groups dedicated to overturning the existing sexual
order. The split between women and men weakened the movement at a time when it was
118
Joanne Meyerowitz charts the involvement of women in anti-porn activism since the rise of the national
social purity movement in the late nineteenth century in “Women, Cheesecake and Borderline Material:
Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S.,” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 3
(1996). Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois explain that the social purity movement in the nineteenth century
grew out of feminists’ concern with protecting women from sexual danger, particularly from rape and
prostitution. They situate anti-porn feminists in a similar trajectory that problematically saw women as
victims and removed women’s agency. See “Seeking Ecstacy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in
Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought,” Feminist Review, no. 13. On the pornography debates and
for a critique of the “cultural feminists” who saw feminism and sexual liberation as opposed, see Alice
Echols, “Cultural Feminism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement,” Social Text 7
(Spring - Summer, 1983).
64
already flagging and turned attention for the new decade away from economic revolution
towards a sex-based revolution.
White radical feminists fueled the 1970 takeoff of the women’s liberation
movement. By making significant inroads into underground and mainstream publishing
through creating their own content and protesting employment discrimination, the new
feminists built and extended networks and communities for a new sexual consciousness,
and drew attention to their cause. The sexual politics that sparked feminist activism
against Grove Press, and in publishing more generally, takes center stage in the following
chapter which explores the intellectual challenges women’s liberation posed to the
existing sexual order.
Figure 1: Cartoon printed with Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to all That” in Rat
65
CHAPTER 2
PRISONERS OF SEX: PATRIARCHY, BIOLOGY, AND THE
CHALLENGE OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears
a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of
human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and
values to which a culture subscribes.
— Kate Millett
1
Women’s Liberation means the sexualization of women. It means becoming a
consciously and proudly sexual human being and not regarding your sex life as
something to be manipulated by other people.
— Germaine Greer
2
The whole sexes question is rooted in language, the language that we use daily,
the language that makes us say “he” every time we refer to a single person when
the question of whether it’s a he or a she isn’t important….[sensitivity to t]he
rootedness in languages of sexual stereotypes…that is the particular contribution
that writers can make in the struggle for women’s liberation…
— Susan Sontag
3
April 30, 1971. “It was the night that my hair turned gray,” said Norman Mailer—
a night, according to Time editor Henry Grunwald, that “was remembered by some as a
defining battle in the war between the sexes.”
4
On that night at Manhattan’s Town Hall,
Mailer chaired a discussion, billed as “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” with four
1
Millett, Sexual Politics, 23.
2
Claudia Dreifus, “Freeing Women’s Sexuality: An Interview with Germaine Greer,” Evergreen Review,
October 1971, 52.
3
“Susan Sontag in a Dialogue on Women’s Liberation [transcript],” Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom
Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
4
Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1988), 289; Henry Grunwald, One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of
His Country (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 410-11.
66
feminists who represented four strands within the women’s liberation movement and
demonstrated its diversity: President of the New York chapter of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) and liberal feminist Jacqueline Ceballos; Australian-
born radical feminist Germaine Greer; lesbian-feminist Jill Johnston; and literary critic
and feminist Diana Trilling.
5
High-profile American feminists, including Robin Morgan,
Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Gloria Steinem, had refused to take part. Millett
declined on the grounds that “whether women should have their rights … is not a
debatable subject.”
6
Morgan “said she would come only if she could shoot Mailer, adding
that she had a license to carry a firearm.”
7
Sold out for weeks in advance, the event was
filled “with the elite of a thousand intellectual battles,” among them Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., Philip Roth,
Susan Sontag, and Betty Friedan, as well as the editors of America’s
leading national magazines.
8
At $25 per ticket, seats cost twice as much as those for a
Broadway show, and newspaper reports made note of the middle-class nature of the
audience.
The event, attended by so many major intellectual figures and members of the
American press, reflected the significant impact of the women’s rights movement and
radical feminism on American intellectual and public culture. Rather than a singular,
5
Rosalyn Drexler, “What Happened to Mozart’s Sister?” Village Voice, 6 May 1971; Rebecca Mead, “The
Movement: Changes,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2004; Frederic Morton, “Sexism—a Better Show Than
Sex,” Village Voice, 6 May 1971; Israel Shenker, “Norman Mailer vs. Women’s Lib,” New York Times,
May 1, 1971.
6
Kate Millett quoted in Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Viking, 1985), 524.
7
Hilary Mills, “Mailer and the Feminists,” in Mailer: A Biography (Kent: New English Library, 1983),
366.
8
Israel Shenker, “Norman Mailer vs. Women’s Lib,” New York Times, May 1, 1971; “People,” Time, May
10, 1971.
67
internally focused, radical fringe movement, women’s liberation—as represented by the
four women speakers at the Town Hall debate—was a multifaceted transnational cultural
movement that had quickly become part of public dialogue, its ideas and visions
circulating not only through grassroots actions and through underground and radical
presses but through mainstream publishing. Liberal feminists in organizations such as
NOW, represented in the debate by Ceballos, pushed for legislative reform and women’s
equality within the existing system. By contrast, radical feminists like Germaine Greer
sought to overturn such patriarchal institutions as marriage and the family, and in the case
of radical lesbian feminists like Johnston, heterosexuality.
Although there were different
ideologies between radical feminists, generally they challenged both patriarchal and
biological determinations of sex roles, fought for women’s sovereignty over their own
bodies through control of reproduction, and developed the effective tool of
consciousness-raising through politicizing the personal.
9
As Alice Echols puts it,
“liberation, not equality, was their goal.”
10
As such, radical feminism was the theoretical
heart of the women’s liberation movement.
11
9
Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” in Feminist Revolution / Redstockings of
the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Kathie Sarachild (New York: Random House, 1978).
10
Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975; Roxanne Dunbar, “Female
Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from
the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
11
For a collection of writings by radical feminists see Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine and Anita Rapone, eds.,
Radical Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973); Notes from the First Year (New York: The New
York Radical Women, 1968). On radical feminism’s theories and practical application to women’s rights
see Jo Freeman, The Women’s Liberation Movement: Its Aims, Structures, and Ideas (Pittsburgh: Know,
1971); Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s, 55-101. For a comprehensive history of
the white women’s movement see Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement
Changed America.
68
This chapter argues that through its critique of the patriarchy and repudiation of
biologically determined sex roles and practices, radical feminism drove a “cultural turn”
in consciousness about American gender and sexuality. At the time of the Town Hall
event, the most commonly used phrase to describe women’s and men’s social roles was
“sex roles.” The phrase conflated anatomical sex, sexuality, and social roles, where an
individual’s anatomy—especially reproductive anatomy—determined sexual desire and
public and private behavior. “Sexual liberation” as it was conceived by radical feminists
referred to the liberation of sexual desire and behavior from state control and social
norms and from biologically determined parenting and heterosexuality. It also meant
liberation from the way that anatomical sex determined and was used to construct
behavior, including reproduction and sexual orientation. In rejecting “natural” male and
female roles, radical feminists put in motion an ongoing debate over whether these roles
were the result of culture or biology. They also mounted a significant intellectual
challenge to prevailing norms that held that women’s active sexual pleasure and
homosexual sex were unnatural. Arguments for and against women’s liberation
confronted, implicitly or explicitly, the ramifications of overcoming biology and
demonstrated a core cultural anxiety: what would happen to the existing order if sex roles
were overturned? Male obsolescence? Suicide of the sexes?
12
These issues and questions
were illustrated in the intellectual battles that led up to the Town Hall and were in full
force on the night.
12
George Gilder argued that the goals of women’s liberation movement amounted to a suicide of the sexes.
See “The Suicide of the Sexes,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1973.
69
The chapter sets the scene for the Town Hall debate with a discussion of the ideas
presented in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch
(1970), and Norman Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971). Millett explicated the
existence and workings of patriarchal power in order to demonstrate the sexual politics
that made women second-class citizens. In her analysis of sexual politics in the literature
of several major novelists, Millett attacked Norman Mailer’s novel An American Dream
for its focus on anal sex and its descriptions of the associated power the protagonist
achieved over women through acts of sexual dominance. She called the novel “a rallying
cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last resort of a
ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”
13
As Millett saw it, Mailer believed
that virility and aggression were core qualities of masculinity, and “he was the leading
spokesman of that particular point of view for his generation.”
14
That patriarchal view
and system had to be overthrown in order for women to be liberated. Where Millett had
focused on exposing patriarchal power, Greer focused on female sexuality. She argued
that the patriarchal construction of women as passive beings had robbed women of their
sexual energy. By claiming their own active sexual pleasure, women would be liberated.
Both women received significant coverage in the mainstream news media. By favoring
Greer for her attractiveness and passionate heterosexuality while portraying Millett as an
13
Millett, Sexual Politics, 16.
14
Kate Millett quoted in Mills, “Mailer and the Feminists,” 359.
70
angry militant and attempting to discredit her ideas with the story that she was bisexual,
the media representations of these women undermined their radicalism.
15
Mailer, a writer, public intellectual, one of the founders of the Village Voice, and
a champion of free speech, responded to Millett and put forward his musings on women’s
liberation in “The Prisoner of Sex” published in the March 1971 Harper’s.
16
Peppered
with explicit language, it focused on the radical call for a cultural and sexual revolution
as articulated by various feminists including Millett and Greer. Mailer argued that the
desire of women’s liberation proponents to move away from biological definitions of sex
roles, including through contraception and reproductive rights, advocated technology
over humanity and was dehumanizing. Further, the “woman question” necessarily begged
“the man question,” he wrote, and feminists had failed to consider men’s passionate drive
to be masculine or the courage necessary to be so. Mailer’s critiques of women’s
liberation reflected anxiety over the potential redundancy for and objectification of men if
women were able to define sexual pleasure on their own terms and disconnect it from
reproduction. His conclusions reflected his belief in traditional sex roles: women should
be liberated if only to have greater opportunities to find their mates, and he would not
15
For a discussion of the relationship between the mainstream press, the New Left, and feminism see
Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left; and Kate
Millett, Flying (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Jo Freeman states that the concentration of the
news media in New York meant that they focused on that region for their information, including about the
women’s liberation movement. As the result, women chosen as leaders by the press were New York based.
See Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its
Relation to the Policy Process and Gaye Tuchman, “The Topic of the Women’s Movement,” in Making
News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978). Patricia Bradley argues for the
crucial role the mass media played in building second-wave feminism, but that the media also presented a
fragmented movement and stereotypes. See Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-
1975 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003).
16
Norman Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1971.
71
share domestic chores with them unless their work was as important as his. The Mailer
issue of Harper’s became the single biggest-selling issue in the magazine’s history.
17
The chapter then examines the arguments presented at the debate. At the outset of
the evening Mailer spluttered that the event had taken place “[a]lmost over my dead
body. I have vanity but not enough that I’ll take on four women.”
18
Yet the statement
belied the active role Mailer had taken in challenging and capitalizing on women’s
liberation. The publishing industry, the organizers of the Town Hall event, and
individuals including Mailer and Greer benefited enormously from the publicity and
profits. Not only did “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” illustrate the complexity in
and competing arguments about sex roles, it showed that radical feminism was
simultaneously a battleground, an arena for liberation, and a commodity.
19
Second-Wave Feminism and Sexual Politics
Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics was published in July 1970, timed to coincide
with the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage in August. It had begun as a doctoral
dissertation when Millett was a student at Columbia University where—in 1968 in the
context of the Columbia University student strikes—she wrote “Theory of Sexual
Politics,” which became the center of the book.
20
Beth Prashker, Millett’s editor at the
publishing house Doubleday, said “I felt the scales drop from my eyes,” when she read
17
Mills, “Mailer and the Feminists,” 364.
18
Town Bloody Hall, directed by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (New York, USA, Pennebaker
Hegedus Films, 1979).
19
Timothy Foote, “Lib and Let Lib,” Time, March 20, 1972.
20
“The Liberation of Kate Millett.”
72
Millett’s work in 1969. To Prashker it was not just a dry academic piece, nor was it a
women’s rights polemic. Instead Millett’s thorough attack on the sexism in literary
culture was the most exciting work she had seen in years.
21
Sexual Politics became a
bestseller, went into its fourth printing just a month after publication, and became a
Book-of-the Month Club selection. Its paperback rights sold for $75,000.
22
The book was inspired partly by Millett’s own background. She had a middle-
class Catholic upbringing and a frightening father who wanted sons and beat his three
daughters before abandoning them when Millett was fourteen. Her college-educated
mother had difficulty being considered for jobs commensurate with her intellect and
ability. Millett took first class honours in Victorian literature at Oxford and lived in Japan
before returning to the U.S. and Columbia University. Her husband, Fumio Yoshimura
was a sculptor: they married to enable him to stay in the United States.
23
She was the
education director of the New York chapter of NOW, a member of the New York Radical
Lesbians, and had been a member of Ti-Grace Atkinson’s group The Feminists.
24
Millett’s work synthesized ideas from radical feminism and as a text followed
from two influential books credited with ushering in the second-wave of feminism:
21
Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World, 232.
22
Lichtenstein, “Women’s Lib Wooed by Publishers.”
23
Frank J. Prial, “Feminist Philosopher Katharine Murray Millett,” New York Times, August 27, 1970.
24
Ti-Grace Atkinson founded The Feminists which grew out of a breakaway organization from NOW and
included women like Anne Koedt from New York Radical Women and women disaffected by
Redstockings. See Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, 167-85.
73
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
25
Published in France in 1949 and in the U.S. in 1953, The Second Sex was widely read in
the United States by the mid-1960s.
26
It critiqued biological and other definitions of
“woman.” Looking at the history of women over time, de Beauvoir found that woman
was constructed and perceived as an “Other” to man, and was positioned as secondary
and subordinate to him. De Beauvoir argued that a woman must “perform” femininity to
be considered a woman and that the traits of being female did not stem automatically
from her biology. This understanding of gender as a cultural construction was hugely
influential and became central to early radical feminism. Ultimately, de Beauvoir sought
equality for women, an equality that would be measured against the opportunities
available to men, most fundamentally economic. For, as de Beauvoir saw it, “As long as
complete economic equality is not realized in society and as long as the mores authorize
woman to profit as wife or mistress from the privileges held by certain men, so long will
her dream of unearned success remain and hamper her own accomplishment.”
27
25
The first wave of feminism was focused on women getting the right to vote. Simone de Beauvoir, The
Second Sex (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books); Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. Sandra Dijkstra
compares the two texts, arguing that Friedan was able to take some difficult ideas and make them
accessible to a wider audience. See “Simone De Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission,”
Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (1980).
26
Alice Echols discusses the impact that The Second Sex had on radical feminists including Ti-Grace
Atkinson in Daring to Be Bad, 167 and 337. For the book’s impact on Betty Friedan see Daniel Horowitz,
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern
Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). For a re-reading of The Second Sex see
Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, “Seeing “The Second Sex” Through the Second Wave,” Feminist Studies 6, no.
2 (1980).
27
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 392.
74
In 1963, ten years after the U.S. publication of The Second Sex, The Feminine
Mystique appeared.
28
Like de Beauvoir, Friedan sought rights for women equal to those
of men. Her approach, however, was different from de Beauvoir’s. Friedan did not
question that women had innate leanings toward domesticity and mothering but argued
that a self-definition based purely on those roles caused depression and great unhappiness
for women. Friedan challenged the institution of the family as one that subordinated and
limited women. Her purpose in writing the book was to reveal “the problem that has no
name”—the misery experienced by a growing number of women who were unfulfilled in
and trapped by their roles as wives and mothers. Friedan called for an opening up of
choices for women in order to free them from this “feminine mystique” and to enable
them to have both families and careers. In 1966 Friedan founded NOW, which sought to
promote women’s equal rights.
29
Although influenced by de Beauvoir and Friedan, Millett’s theories departed from
their focus on economics reflecting her radical feminism. Millett argued that sex roles,
more than economics, oppressed women; that the economic system was structured along
sexist lines so that gender, not class, was the key issue in women’s oppression; and that
this gender oppression needed to be politicized.
30
Millett defined the meaning of “sexual
28
Doug Rossinow discusses the impact of Friedan’s work on young women in the New Left in Rossinow,
The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, 308.
29
On the history of NOW see Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement
(New York: Random House, 1976). Daniel Horowitz locates the roots of Friedan’s feminism in her 1940s
labor activism in Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold
War, and Modern Feminism.
30
There were overlaps between Marxist and radical feminism. Self-identified radical feminists Shulamith
Firestone, Gayle Rubin, and Heidi Hartmann drew on Marx and Engels’ model of class analysis. They
expanded the Marxist model to consider class as a social/cultural construct and biological sex roles as
75
politics” by arguing that “sex is a status category with political implications,” and politics
referred “to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons
is controlled by another.”
31
She argued that women had secondary status to men because
of the notion of male birthright to power and that they suffered as a lower caste in a
society dominated by and run by men—a patriarchy. Although patriarchy was itself a
social construct, it had been naturalized to the extent that sex oppression had become
more pervasive and more insidious than class or race oppression. She called for a cultural
revolution effected by the economic independence of women and an abolition of sex
roles.
Patriarchy, Millett argued, secured power for men in various ways, most of which
were invisible. Under patriarchy, ideologies of sex roles and associated stereotyped sex
categories—in which the masculine was associated with aggression, intelligence, force,
and efficacy and the feminine was associated with docility, “virtue,” and
“ineffectuality”—were naturalized and internalized.
32
They were not acknowledged as
ideologies but were assumed to be biological differences. Here Millett offered correction
and distinguished between anatomy (biology) and the cultural character of gender. Millett
argued that society and the state were patriarchal but that “patriarchy’s chief institution is
social/cultural constructs. For a discussion of influences on radical feminism see Shulamith Firestone, “The
Dialectic of Sex,” Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex,” and
Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,”
in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson, (New York and London:
Routledge, 1997).
31
Millett, Sexual Politics, 24, 23.
32
Ibid., 26.
76
the family.”
33
The role of the family was to mediate between the individual and the social
structure in order to organize and control behavior. Therefore, it was in the interests of
the patriarchy to defend the family unit.
Although women were connected most powerfully by their shared status as
women—more so than by race or education levels—they were played against one another
as rivals, forced to trade on their beauty, virtue, and age. Through myth and religion—for
example in the biblical story of original sin in which women were connected to sex and to
sin—there had been the sense that “woman’s sexual functions are impure,” which led to a
cultural obsession with virginity. Denied sexual freedom and the “control over her body
through the cult of virginity, the double standard, the prescription against abortion, and in
many places because contraception is physically or psychically unavailable to her,”
woman was obliged to seek advancement through men.
34
Millett supported her theory through a historical consideration of sexual
revolution from 1830 to 1930, a revolution which, she argued, was left unfinished due to
a counterrevolutionary period from 1930 to 1960. During that time Nazism, Stalin’s
communism, and Freud’s theory of penis envy worked against women. Women were
repressed by those political regimes, in particular by family policies, and the repressive
behavior toward women was supported by Freud’s claims that there was a universal
feminine tendency toward passivity, masochism, narcissism, and penis envy. These
sexual politics, Millett argued, were illustrated in literary descriptions of sexual activity
33
Ibid., 33.
34
Ibid., 54.
77
especially in the writings of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Each of
those authors, as Millett read them, presented male sexuality in combat with female
sexuality. Generally, the message in their literature was that sex was a matter of caste or
biology: in both instances men had power over women and women’s sexuality was to be
available to and controlled by men.
One New York Times review heralded Millett’s book as the women’s liberation
movement’s “first above-ground political analysis” and noted that “Kate Millett is being
called the Karl Marx of the women’s liberation movement.”
35
In the first section of a
two-part review for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt stated that
Millett’s book was so brilliant, and “written with such fierce intensity that all vestiges of
male chauvinism ought by rights to melt and drop away like so much fat in the flame of a
blowtorch.”
36
In August 1970, Time magazine featured her on the cover of a special women’s
issue released to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment that granted women the right to vote. The image was an Alice Neel oil
painting that depicted an unsmiling Millett gazing directly at the viewer.
37
In the issue
Time called Millett “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”—the theorist and
35
Marilyn Bender, “Some Call Her the ‘Karl Marx’ of New Feminism,” New York Times, July 20, 1970.
36
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “He and She (I),” New York Times, August 5, 1970. 33.
37
“The Liberation of Kate Millett.” In an autobiography about her life in the year after Sexual Politics was
published Millett explained that the painting was done from a photograph and that she was put on the cover
of Time without notice or having given her permission. See Kate Millett, Flying, (University of Illinois
Press, (1974) 2000), 17.
78
ideological figurehead whose work had given coherence to a women’s movement that
had been laboring since 1920 without a clear focus.
38
A week later, Life featured a spread on Millett along with an article on the rise of
the women’s movement.
39
Life called her book “to Women’s Lib roughly what Das
Kapital was to Marxism” and presented Millett as a former sculpture who was happily
married. In the interview Millett admitted that she “had to overstate my case and find the
most brutal episodes. I hope I pointed out to men how truly inhuman it is for them to
think of women the way they do, to treat them that way… . All I was trying to say was,
look brother, I’m human.”
40
Many of the mainstream press reviews of Sexual Politics shared common themes,
themes that fed the stereotypes of radical feminists that have been used ever since to
discredit the substance of their arguments.
41
Millett was characterized as a fierce militant
revolutionary whose academic work was shoddy, who was against nature, who hated
men, and who was bisexual.
42
In his long review essay of Sexual Politics in Harper’s
Irving Howe, a leftist who like Diana Trilling had broken away from the New Left,
agreed that the women’s movement’s demands such as equal pay for equal work and
38
“Nation: Who’s Come a Long Way Baby?” Time, August 31, 1970.
39
Marie-Claude Wrenn, “The Furious Young Philosopher Who Got It Down on Paper,” Life, September 4,
1970.
40
Ibid., 22.
41
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975.
42
“Behavior: Women’s Lib: A Second Look,” Time, December 14, 1970.
79
child care for working mothers were “transparently just.”
43
Yet, he argued, because such
requests seemed almost dull they received little attention, and they paved the way for
“ideological dramatics,” such as those dished up by Millett. To him, her ideologies stood
in the way of her scholarship.
44
The primary concern in Howe’s review was Millett’s rejection of biology. To him
Millett’s fear “that any concession to biology must mean to accept as forever fixed the
traditional patterns of male domination” was naïve.
45
Howe insisted that human nature
shaped human conduct with no clear distinction between nature and culture. Furthermore,
he asked, “Why cannot intelligent and humane people look upon sexual difference as a
source of pleasure, one of the givens with which nature compensates us for the miseries
of existence? Why must differences be seen as necessarily invidious?”
46
For Howe,
Millett refuted biological determinism but offered cultural determinism in its place.
Social anthropologist Lionel Tiger also disagreed with Millett’s rejection of
biology. He asserted that the argument that patriarchal domination over women was
purely cultural did not get to the root problem of inherited characteristics and therefore
failed to do any realistic problem-solving. To support his case, Tiger used statistics that
43
Irving Howe, “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1970, 110. In the
February issue of Harper’s there was a discussion of Millett’s ideas that made similar comments about her
lack of academic rigor and accused her of propaganda. See Edward Grossman, “In Pursuit of the American
Woman,” Harper’s Magazine, February, 1970.
44
Howe was the son of immigrant Jewish workers and a leading literary critic. He cofounded the
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973. See Alan M. Wald, “The Cul-de-Sac of Social
Democracy,” in The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s
to the 1980s, UNC Press, 1987, 311-320.
45
Howe, “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett,” 112.
46
Ibid., 126.
80
showed that women’s scores on exams diminished prior to the onset of their menstrual
flow, and that showed a correlation between their pre-menstrual week and women’s
admission to mental hospitals. He concluded that “[b]ecause [feminists] ignore biological
factors (like many other reformers), the feminists run the risk of basing their legitimate
demand for legal and economic equality on a vulnerable foundation.”
47
Millett’s discussion of patriarchy was interpreted by some critics as Millett
suggesting a vast male conspiracy. This notion of a male conspiracy was anathema to
Millett’s critics, who felt that she hated men. Generally, her work seemed confronting to
male readers. One of her Ph.D. advisers, George Stade, was quoted as saying that
“[r]eading the book [Sexual Politics] is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker.”
48
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt spoke of his simultaneous admiration and guilt while
reading it, saying that “it is nearly impossible for a man to experience “Sexual Politics”
without oscillating wildly between profound admiration for its strength, its almost
military dispatch, and nervous doubt that everything it aims its fire at can really be so.”
49
Irving Howe argued that Millett’s “middle-class parochialism” interfered with her ability
to see that different women—and men—had different experiences and that men suffered
too. By privileging sex she ignored, he argued, “the alienation of labor in an exploitative
society” that affected men in the workplace while suggesting that women are reduced to
47
Lionel Tiger, “Male Dominance? Yes, Alas. A Sexist Plot? No: Not a Sexist Plot,” New York Times,
October 25, 1970.
48
“Nation: Who’s Come a Long Way Baby?”
49
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “He and She—II,” New York Times, August 6, 1970.
81
the level of animals at home when they “can at least reach toward an uncontaminated
relationship” with their children.
50
Discussions of Millett specifically and women’s liberation more generally were
often interchangeable. In a December article, Time discussed the criticisms various
authors had pointed at the Women’s Liberation Movement. In the New Republic Janet
Malcolm expressed concern that “Women’s Libbers” discussed children as objects, much
as Playboy discussed women as objects, and Esquire writer Helen Lawrenson said
women’s liberationists were “sick” and “silly.”
51
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s criticism
that Sexual Politics was “too masculine, itself a denial of femininity” spoke to the
concern that women’s liberationists were too much like men.
52
In that criticism
Lehmann-Haupt conflated logical argument with masculinity, reflecting his own notion
of traditional gender roles.
Millett also faced criticism from other feminists. Initially excited about the Time
article, Millett had seen it as an opportunity to publicize the movement. Yet by branding
her the “high priestess” of feminism in a movement that was not supposed to have
figureheads, the article had upset movement women. According to Marcia Cohen,
underground lesbians accused Millett of damning them because Life quoted her as saying
“I’m not into that” in connection with her membership in a radical lesbian organization.
53
50
Howe, “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett,” 114.
51
“Behavior: Women’s Lib: A Second Look.”
52
Lehmann-Haupt, “He and She—II.”
53
Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World, 240; Wrenn, “The
Furious Young Philosopher Who Got It Down on Paper,” 22.
82
When the members of Radicalesbians confronted her to do so, Millett admitted that she
was a lesbian. The next day a Time reporter asked her to confirm that story and then
printed the news that she was bisexual. This fed the mainstream media’s dismissal of
Millett: they argued that her bisexuality would discredit her and did so in an article that
was supposed to be about achievements in women’s liberation.
54
No logical reason was
given for why Millett’s sexual orientation would undermine her arguments; instead the
dismissal indicated the very ingrained social and sex role prejudices that Millett sought to
overturn.
55
Lesbianism had been an issue of concern within the women’s movement for
women like Betty Friedan who feared that the taint of homosexuality would discredit the
movement. The way that the mainstream media ran with the story about Millett’s
bisexuality was a manifestation of Friedan’s fears. Yet feminists united against the
behavior that Aileen C. Hernandez, national president of NOW, called “sexual
McCarthyism.” To confront the issue, on December 18, 1970, a group of feminists
including Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, Ruth Simpson president of NY Daughters of
Bilitis, Susan Brownmiller, and Ti-Grace Atkinson held a press conference to address the
issue of lesbianism and feminism.
56
Millett read out a statement in which she said that the
label “lesbian” was used to keep women in their existing sex roles and that women’s
liberation sought autonomy for women, regardless of sexual preference. The feminists
54
“Behavior: Women’s Lib: A Second Look.”
55
Distressed by the media circus and the way her life changed after the publicity, Millett attempted suicide
six times. See Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World, 254.
56
Judy Klemesrud, “The Lesbian Issue and Women’s Lib,” New York Times, December 18, 1970.
83
thus communicated that lesbianism was both a feminist issue and a political issue, and
presented a united front to the media on the issue of sexuality.
57
The Female Eunuch
In Britain, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was released a few months after
Sexual Politics appeared in the United States and it sold out within a week. Where Millett
had analyzed literature and focused on patriarchy and male representations of sexuality,
Greer focused on women’s sexuality. At the time, she argued, there was “no positive
concept of female sexuality. It’s just this idea of these domestic creatures, whose lives are
all in response to other lives and whose posture is always receptive and never
innovative.”
58
With all the focus on beauty—make-up and false eyelashes—Greer felt
like a female impersonator. She wanted to link the new feminism to libido and to ecstasy.
Like Millett, Greer repudiated Freud’s notion that women suffered from penis
envy. She argued instead that women had in fact been castrated from their own sexuality.
Like the Grove Press feminists, Greer saw that although the culture had become more
sexualized, there had been no real sexual liberation. Instead, “the permit to speak freely
of sexuality has resulted only in the setting up of another shibboleth of sexual normality,
gorged with dishonesty and kitsch.” That shibboleth was one in which women had been
disconnected from their sexual energy and thus from their full personality and powers.
This passive female, Greer contended, was a eunuch. Without libido, women were
57
For a discussion of lesbianism and feminism see Paula C. Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian
Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 126-52.
58
Marcia Cohen, transcript of interview conducted by Marcia Cohen with Germaine Greer. Marcia Cohen
Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Section 11, 42.
84
controlled by and enslaved to men in their roles as mothers, wives, employees, and
lovers. Bound to biological destiny, women were desexualized for any purpose other than
reproduction. Their potential for sexual pleasure was thus cut off.
Greer also rejected Freud’s belief that clitoral orgasms were a sign of frigidity.
Yet she did not idealize clitoral orgasms either, arguing that vaginal stimulation was also
pleasurable. This commentary endeared her to those male readers who feared that if
women did not require vaginal stimulation for sexual pleasure they would become
obsolete.
59
But more so, Greer argued that all orgasms were good, however they were
achieved. A sexual revolution would come from the achievement of ecstasy, from the full
embrace of sexuality, not from a clinical focus on genitality.
60
Greer called for women to seek knowledge of their own bodies and minds,
arguing that women’s body knowledge was fundamental to a pleasure revolution and that
pleasure was more likely to bring revolution than violence. Once women freed
themselves to experience pleasure, they would no longer be trapped in their biologically
or culturally ordained roles. As Greer envisioned it, this kind of sexual revolution would
benefit women and men who could similarly liberate themselves, for both were
oppressed. For example, when economics dictated family size and thus sexual behavior,
59
See, for example, Nat Lehrman, “Playboy Interview: Germaine Greer,” Playboy, January 1972.
60
Here she was influenced by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and by Alfred Kinsey. Reich believed that
orgasm was a sign of sexual health and that it released sexual energy that otherwise could manifest in
delinquency. Kinsey counted orgasms as his primary measure of sexual activity. See Christine Wallace,
Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc, 1998); Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual
Revolution: Towards a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: The Noonday Press, 1962); and
Elizabeth Hess Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York
Anchor Books, 1986), 43-44.
85
“The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal.”
61
Here Greer connected
reproductive biology to economics, arguing that if women and men reclaimed sexual
pleasure and joy, they would overturn the economic order.
Greer rejected the notion of an overpowering patriarchy. As she saw it history and
civilization had created an oppressive society in which neither women nor men were free.
Women had colluded in their own oppression and men would resist women’s liberation
as long as they were not free themselves. Furthermore, where de Beauvoir and Friedan
implicitly encouraged women toward male-centered models of equality, Greer argued
that “[r]eaction is not revolution. It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt
the manners of the oppressors and practice oppression on their own behalf. Neither is it a
sign of revolution when women ape men….”
62
In this statement, Greer spoke to the
libratory essence of the women’s movement.
Yet Greer critiqued contemporary feminists as well, which did not sit easily with
many of them.
63
She criticized Kate Millett for failing to recognize that Norman Mailer
had attempted to deal with his sexual neuroses in An American Dream.
64
She was
generally critical of liberal feminists because they sought reform within an oppressive
61
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 228.
62
Ibid., 313.
63
Claudia Dreifus criticized Greer’s lack of active connections with any women’s liberation groups in
Britain and accused Greer of writing unkindly of her sisters. Claudia Dreifus, “The Selling of a Feminist,”
in Radical Feminism, ed. Ellen Levine Anne Koedt, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books,
(1971) 1973). Evelyn Reed accused Greer of catering to men and blaming women for problems created by
men. Evelyn Reed, “Feminism and ‘the Female Eunuch,’” International Socialist Review, July-August
1971.
64
Judith Weinraub, “Opinions That May Shock the Faithful,” New York Times, March 22, 1971.
86
system.
65
She questioned Betty Friedan’s acceptance of Freudian psychology, and her
identification of sex with motherhood. Greer argued, “[Friedan’s] whole case rests upon
the frustration suffered by the educated woman who falls for the Freudian notion that
physiology is destiny…. For Mrs. Friedan sexuality seems to mean motherhood, an
argument which other feminist groups also seem to be misled by, so that in rejecting the
normative sex role of women they are forced to stress nonsexual aspects of a woman’s
destiny at the expense of her libido, a mistake which will have serious consequences.”
66
Greer separated sexuality from motherhood, prioritized sexuality, and argued that
sexually liberated women could choose what paths—including but not necessarily
maternity—they would take.
A New York Times headline introduced The Female Eunuch as “the best feminist
book so far.” For the reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Greer’s book “combines the
best of masculinity and femininity” and he wished that it had come out before Millett’s
and received the bulk of the attention.
67
Most mainstream press articles about Greer in
Britain and the United States tended to focus on Greer as a larger-than-life feminist. By
repeatedly commenting on her appearance, her pro-sex stance, and her attraction to men,
they communicated that Greer embodied the substance of her arguments and endorsed
her as an ideal brand of women’s liberation.
68
Time suggested that it was Greer herself
65
Robert Greenfield, “A Groupie in Women’s Lib,” Rolling Stone, January 7, 1971.
66
Greer, The Female Eunuch, 294.
67
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “The Best Feminist Book So Far,” New York Times, April 20, 1971.
68
Carolyn Faulder, “Single Women Must Never Marry,” Nova, Octover 1970; Weinraub, “Opinions That
May Shock the Faithful.”
87
who would make the book a bestseller in the United States, introducing her as
“Australian-born and magnetically attractive, she boasts of having spent fourteen years as
a ‘groupie follower of pop musicians.’” To add to her cachet, “she looks like a cross
between Anna Magnani and Vanessa Redgrave, affects a wildly uninhibited life-style
with an all-embracing libido and seasons her sociological observations with four-letter
words that would make a gunnery sergeant wince.” Repeatedly articles referred to
Greer’s physical attractiveness, her media savvy, and her exotic status as both a self-
proclaimed musician’s groupie who loved men and sex, a professor of English with a
Ph.D. from Cambridge, and her upbringing in Australia.
69
Time argued that although
surely American men had had enough of women’s liberationists, Greer’s impressive
credentials made her a worthy new candidate.
70
According to Newsweek, the women’s
liberation movement in Great Britain had lagged behind its U.S. counterpart but it was
ramping up “and rising out of today’s version of this discontented distaff army, like an
Amazon among the pygmies, is the awesome 6-foot figure of 32-year-old Germaine
Greer, a dazzling combination of erudition, eccentricity and eroticism whose passionate
treatise…may well be women’s lib’s most realistic—and least anti-male—manifesto.”
71
The article stated that Greer was interested in bringing “sex back to pleasure, gentleness
and nonpossessiveness,” and that the latter was key to her “philosophy of interpersonal
happiness.” Although most articles stressed that Greer rejected marriage, her charisma
69
Greenfield, “A Groupie in Women’s Lib.”
70
“Sex and the Super-Groupie,” Time, April 12, 1971.
71
“The Female Eunuch,” Newsweek, March 22, 1971, 48.
88
seemed to mitigate even that transgression. As Timothy Foote wrote “One hesitates to
call an opponent of marriage engaging, but Germaine Greer is certainly that.”
72
Life magazine featured Greer on a cover in May 1971 with a headline that
summarized her appeal: “Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like.”
73
Various articles
distinguished her from feminists who suggested giving up sex and/or men. Instead, “sex,
she says, is the arena of confrontation in which new values must be hammered out.
”74
Greer demonstrated both her desire and sympathy for men when she said “[m]en ought to
be more conscious of their bodies as an object of delight, and women less so.”
75
She
thought her perspective might win more male supporters than her “American sisters”
could claim. “I don’t go for that whole pants-and-battle-dress routine. It just puts men off,
and there’s already been too much defensiveness in the movement.”
76
Some American feminists wondered whether the media were promoting, as the
New York Times Book Review writer had feared, “a spokesman whose only qualification
for the post was her ability to traffic with the enemy.”
77
In the Village Voice Jill Johnston
described Greer as “an individually liberated woman whose background is such that very
few women could interest her intellectually,” and described her as a ‘“male identified
woman’—the special woman who’s made it in a man’s world by learning the man’s head
72
Foote, “Lib and Let Lib.”
73
Jordan Bonfante, “Germaine Greer,” Life, May 7, 1971.
74
“Sex and the Super-Groupie.”
75
“People.”
76
Bonfante, “Germaine Greer,” 30.
77
Sally Kempton, “The Female Eunuch,” New York Times Book Review, April 15, 1971.
89
and by a super combination of brains and body.”
78
Greer thus was not endorsed by nor
representative of American radical feminists. Further, she was clearly not a “typical”
woman which made the efficacy of her program questionable in terms of its application
for ordinary people. Nonetheless the impact she had in the mainstream media—she was
dubbed “everybody’s favorite feminist” by Mademoiselle—and on American readers
who found her book “beautiful” made her a significant figure in the public presentation
and remembrance of women’s liberation.
79
The Prisoner of Sex
Norman Mailer was almost fifty when he took on women’s liberation; the women
he battled were in their thirties. Their generational difference mirrored the battle with the
patriarchy—with the father figure—that ran throughout much of the writing. As Mailer
told it, Henry Grunwald, editor of Time, had asked him to do a cover story for the
magazine on his reactions to the surge of interest in women’s liberation because Mailer
was “perhaps the primary target of their attacks,” “their major ideological opposition.”
80
Mailer declined on the grounds that he did not want to involve his family in a journalistic
piece during their vacation. In the midst of his fourth divorce, sparked by his wife’s
distress that her career had drowned while trying to manage such a large household,
Mailer was in Maine with five of his six children determined to do the work of raising a
78
Jill Johnston, “Germaine & Guillaume in Baltimore,” Village Voice, April 22, 1971, 32.
79
Mary Cantwell, “An Opinion: Thoughts after an Evening with Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana
Trilling, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and a Cast of Thousands,” Mademoiselle, July 1971. For a
discussion of American reader reactions to The Female Eunuch see Vivian Cadden, ‘“Women’s Lib? I’ve
Seen It on TV,’” Redbook, February 1972.
80
Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” 43.
90
family. From the outset he planned that his three daughters would help him with the
domestic chores and the care of his two sons. Within days he had employed a
housekeeper to do the cleaning and laundry, invited his sister to help for several weeks,
and was then joined by his mistress who divided the kitchen duties with him.
Six weeks later when Kate Millett appeared on the Time cover, Mailer decided
that he had to write about women’s liberation, for “the themes of his life had gathered
here. Revolution, tradition, sex and the homosexual, the orgasm, the family, the child and
the political shape of the future, technology and human conception, waste and abortion,
the ethics of the critic and the male mystique, black rights and new thoughts on women’s
rights…”
81
His article, “Prisoner of Sex,” appeared in the March 1971 issue of Harper’s
magazine and achieved instant notoriety.
In the article, Mailer explained that he had decided not to interview key women in
the movement; rather, “the only decent way to approach the liberation of women was by
the writing of its participants.”
82
He collected articles from across the women’s
movement. After delineating the legislative reforms sought by liberal feminists he chose
to focus on white radical feminist literature, including the underground feminist papers
Rat and off our backs and the edited collection Sisterhood is Powerful, searching for
revolutionary ideas.
To Mailer, the movement was obsessed with orgasms. Like other reviewers,
Mailer mentioned Millett’s discussion of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s work
81
Ibid., 46.
82
Ibid., 46.
91
on married women who had not had orgasms.
83
What Mailer took from the studies was
not the importance of clitoral stimulation for the women to achieve orgasm. Rather, he
focused on the fact that the women achieved orgasms with an artificial phallus.
According to the studies, the mechanical stimulation gave women more orgasms than
manual stimulation and this suggested that women were theoretically capable of
achieving an unlimited number of orgasms.
84
Mailer wondered why women would want
such endless satisfaction, a query that reflected his inability to conceive of women’s
sexuality in terms of female pleasure. Instead he found Millett’s discussion of Masters
and Johnson and multiple orgasms to be “mechanical.” In all of this, Mailer’s concern
was for men’s self-esteem which he thought would be diminished by the focus on clitoral
orgasms. Mailer liked Greer because although she was glad to do away with the Freudian
myth of the vaginal orgasm she did not think it should be replaced by a pure focus on the
clitoris or a denial of feeling in the vagina. To Mailer, that was a matter of affirming male
pride.
In response to Millett’s criticisms of Henry Miller, Mailer explained that Miller’s
brilliance was that he had “captured something in the sexuality of men as it had never
been seen before, precisely that it was man’s sense of awe before women, his dread of her
position one step closer to eternity (for in that step were her powers) which made men
detest women, revile them, humiliate them, defecate symbolically upon them, do
83
See “The Female Orgasm,” in Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response.
84
Mary Jane Sherfey, “A Theory on Female Sexuality,” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytical
Association, 1966.
92
everything to reduce them so one might dare to enter them and take pleasure of them.”
85
In this argument Mailer all but admitted that Millett had every reason to criticize Miller
for misogyny.
Although Mailer found the notion of revolution seductive, he questioned its
genuine possibility given that “the ultimate logic of the sexual revolution required women
to stand equal to the male body in every aspect—how could this equality prevail if
women” had to grapple with the biological reality of menstruation and childbirth? How
could women be equal competitors to men?
86
Mailer did not like the solution offered by
some in women’s liberation which he argued suggested a problematic totalitarian
eradication of human nature in favor of the technological. Here he singled out Ti-Grace
Atkinson as “The Chief Engineer of Women’s Technology” because she had argued that
“sexual intercourse would have to cease to be Society’s means to population renewal”
and that women could be liberated from their biological roles through “[e]xtra-uterine
conception and incubation.”
87
Mailer saw this as problematic: he equated the use of
technology with the removal of pleasure from sex. In this, he failed to understand the
85
Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” 66. Later, Greer responded that “[w]hat Mailer will not heed is the cry of
the mothering sex that they are depleted by this attritive war of the sexes…” “To an abused woman it is a
bitter blasphemy to explain, as Mailer would, that her humiliation is enacted simply to prove the ‘power
and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe,’ for she feels only the female in her debased
self” in “My Mailer Problem,” Esquire, September 1971, 93.
86
Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” 54.
87
See Atkinson’s article “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse,” in Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links
Books, 1974). Mailer left out mention of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex which made a big
impact in 1970. In it she took a different stand than Millett on the cultural construction of sex roles. Instead
she argued that it was the very real facts of reproductive biology that kept women oppressed and argued
that women needed to seize control of reproduction. They could free themselves from biology through
technology. Human eggs could be fertilized in test tubes and babies could gestate in artificial wombs. See
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).
93
point being made: that women could harness technology as a means to their liberation
and that they did not necessarily have to become enslaved by that technology.
Contraception, abortion, and homosexuality were thrown together in Mailer’s
discussion of these practices: they went against nature. He believed that the “base
impulse” of men was to put semen into women, and so men who did otherwise—that is,
men who practiced contraception or had sex with other men—were debased. He also
suggested that heterosexual sex with contraception was like homosexual sex: it removed
“awe” from sex, an “awe” that resulted from the procreative capacities of the act. Mailer
also thought masturbation and abortion were bad for the same reason.
88
Mailer wanted sex to be meaningful—he was a self-declared prisoner of it—and
he thought that Millett and women’s liberation reduced it to a meaningless act. He wrote
that for women’s liberationists, “No thought was so painful as the idea that sex had
meaning: for give meaning to sex and one was the prisoner of sex—the more meaning
one gave it, the more it assumed, until every failure and misery, every evil of your life,
spoke their lines in its light, and every fear of mediocre death.”
89
He believed that
ultimately a woman’s role was to find the best mate and to procreate for the good of
humankind. He admitted that liberation might be the best way for women to do this. In a
review of the book version of the article, Time saw this as Mailer’s capitulation to
88
Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” 81.
89
Ibid., 89.
94
women’s liberation but failed to realize that Mailer was only agreeing to women’s rights
as a means to fitting in with his worldview on sex roles.
90
The Mailer issue of Harper’s became “an instant media event.”
91
Time wrote:
“‘The Prisoner of Sex,’ out this week, features more four-letter words than Harper’s has
printed in all its 121-year history. Mailer’s 47,000-word exercise in sexual dialectic will
probably blow brains not only among Lib ladies but a sizable segment of the magazine’s
359,000 circulation.”
92
According to Harper’s editor William Morris, the explicit sexual
content and use of four-letter words in the piece became central to an argument he was
having with the Harper’s management, and soon after the issue came out he and other
key staffers resigned.
93
This episode increased interest in The Prisoner of Sex, the book
version of Mailer’s article.
Susan Brownmiller was commissioned to review Mailer’s book for Life but found
her review absent when she bought the issue in which it was scheduled to appear. It was
then published in More: A Journalism Review. The magazine suggested that the review
was pulled because two of Mailer’s books, including the Prisoner of Sex, were published
by Little, Brown, a subsidiary of Time Inc. Brownmiller described it thus: “Norman
Mailer challenging the entire Women’s Liberation Movement to put up its dukes and
90
“Where She Is and Where She’s Going (Special Issue: The American Woman),” Time, March 20, 1972.
91
Mills, “Mailer and the Feminists,” 364.
92
“The Press: Women’s Lib: Women’s Lib: Mailer V Millett,” Time, February 22, 1971.
93
Midge Decter claims that this was a story that Morris fed to the media to save face. The real issue behind
his conflict with Harper’s was money management. Nonetheless, Decter resigned in a show of support for
Morris out of fear that her reputation in the literary world would have been otherwise ruined. Decter quoted
in Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times, 519-20.
95
fight like a man in the stadium of his sexual preoccupations.”
94
The Town Hall event
provided the forum for the fight to occur.
The Theatre for Ideas presents: A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation
In December 1970, Theatre for Ideas organizer Shirley Broughton asked Mailer if
he would be interested in appearing at the Theatre for Ideas with Germaine Greer—of
“Women’s Lib London” —to coincide with Greer’s U.S. book tour. Broughton offered to
“talk to some TV people in an effort to make it a lucrative venture” for Mailer.
95
For
Broughton the sellout event rescued the sinking Theatre for Ideas, which was suffering
financially. She thanked Mailer profusely for agreeing to participate and instructed him to
come rested, as his job on the night would “require the nervous system of a well loved
cat.”
96
Although Mailer anticipated that the night “will certainly be something to worry
about,” the appearance worked to his advantage.
97
He wanted the publicity: soon, the
book of his article “The Prisoner of Sex” would be released.
Greer was also to benefit from the publicity. The day after the Town Hall even
she was due to sign copies of The Female Eunuch at Bloomingdale’s. In her recollection
of the event she wrote that she was flattered to be invited to debate Mailer, to receive
such a level of recognition for a new writer, and agreed to attend. Further, she thought
94
“Brownmiller Reviews Mailer…Almost,” More: A Journalism Review, October 1971, 1.
95
Memo to Mailer [probably from his assistant], 22 December 1970. Norman Mailer Papers, Harry
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
96
Shirley Broughton to Norman Mailer, [undated]. Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The
University of Texas at Austin.
97
Mailer to Broughton, April 2, 1971. Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of
Texas at Austin.
96
that Millett was wrong about Mailer being the enemy and said “I’d really like to help that
man.”
98
Then she read “The Prisoner of Sex” and was horrified, seeing that for Mailer
“Women’s Liberation had become simply another battle of the books in a war in which
he had been campaigning all his life.” “In challenging the women’s movement,” she
wrote, “[Mailer] put himself in danger, for theirs is a fight for life, no holds barred.”
99
Various New York based feminists asked her to boycott the event, yet she knew that
Diana Trilling and Jacquelyn Ceballos had already committed to attend, and she did not
want to withdraw her support from them. So Greer played along with the media hype: “It
became a standing joke that I would seduce Norman Mailer and prove to the breathlessly
waiting world that he was the world’s worst.”
100
By the night of the Town Hall, when she
faced her opponent, the audience, and the film cameras there to capture the event, she
was ready for battle.
101
Jacqueline Ceballos, President of the New York chapter of NOW, was the first
speaker of the evening. She positioned herself as representing “that large middle class
group of women who could have all the comfort and conveniences of life” but who
“opted out to fight for the equality of women.”
102
After initially refusing to participate in
the event with Mailer she decided to attend in an attempt to communicate what women’s
98
Weinraub, “Opinions That May Shock the Faithful.”
99
Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” 92.
100
“People.”
101
Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” 90.
102
On NOW see Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the
Women’s Movement (New York: Random House, 1976).
97
liberation was really trying to do. According to Ceballos, NOW was considered the
“square” branch of the women’s liberation movement but even so their program and the
implications of women’s liberation were frightening to many. In fact she believed that
NOW was the most radical organization of women’s liberation because they were trying
to get at the root problem and change women’s lives within the existing system. She
dismissed biological arguments, arguing that they were not important compared with the
fact that women had a right and duty to be in the world. At that point the Beat poet
Gregory Corso leapt up yelling about the rights of all of humanity, not just women, and
stormed out.
103
Ceballos responded: “I think we are fighting for all of humanity…we
believe sincerely that the root of everything is women’s liberation.”
Ceballos expressed concern over the sex roles that males and females were
socialized into from birth, roles that kept women and men from reaching their full
potential. The advertising industry contributed to an ongoing problem for women through
ludicrous representations of women. The messages advertising communicated, according
to Ceballos, included “she gets an orgasm when she gets a shiny floor. Before marriage
she’s encouraged to keep herself deodorized to get the man.”
Defending accusations that women’s liberation was against marriage, Ceballos
argued that “what we’re against is the structure of marriage.” NOW sought for women to
be paid for the work they did in a marriage and wanted both parties to have an equal
share of responsibilities and access to marriage insurance and social security in case the
marriage did not work out. NOW sought to make marriage and society more equal for
women so that they could get their basic rights met. For example on the matter of
103
Shenker, “Norman Mailer vs. Women’s Lib.”
98
abortion Ceballos argued that women were not able to control their own bodies because
the laws were made by men. To change those laws women needed to get into the system
that made them so NOW wanted to focus on training women for political office.
At the end of her speech Mailer asked Ceballos a question that was smugly
dismissive: “In every part of your powerfully concerted and forceful speech…is there
anything in your program that will make life not as profoundly boring as it is today?”
Although he later clarified that he saw NOW as central to the project of women’s
liberation, Mailer clearly did not afford Ceballos the same generosity she had given him
when she had said earlier that in his Harper’s article “The Prisoner of Sex” she believed
Mailer was sincerely trying to understand the motivation and goals of the women’s
movement.
When he introduced Germaine Greer, Mailer recognized that it was she “who had
done a great deal to fill this house.” However, although the audience anticipated that
Greer would speak about female sexuality, she instead focused on deconstructing the
kudos given to male artists. For her the evening meant “having to confront one of the
most powerful figures in my own imagination, the being I think most privileged in male
elitist society, namely the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite. Bred as I
have been, most of my life has been most powerfully influenced by the culture for which
he stands so I’m caught in a basic conflict between inculcated cultural values and my
own conception of an injustice.” That injustice was one in which women were stifled
creatively. And, in instances when women were creative “it was very clear that the
99
female artist’s own achievement will disqualify her for the love of men.” Yet men, she
argued, were loved for their achievements all the time.
Greer expressed anguish that she did not know what happened to Mozart’s sister,
riffing on Virginia Woolfe’s account, in A Room of One’s Own, of the impossibility of
Shakespeare’s sister developing her talent in a context that confined women to the
home.
104
Greer used the notion of the historical invisibility of female talent to illustrate
her point that the only creative role attributed to women was mothering, a role, unlike
that of the artist open to men, neither freeing nor lauded. When she was an eccentric little
girl, Greer recounted, she wanted to write poetry, and yet everything in her culture told
her that was not an activity acceptable for women. Thus Freud’s assumption that the artist
was a man angered her, and she asked “What could this be? Can it be a natural order that
wastes so much power that it breaks a little girl’s heart to pieces?” Looking at women’s
role in the history of Western art, Greer assessed women’s depictions and roles as “either
low floppy creatures—menial—or goddesses. Or worst of all we were meant to be both
which means that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.”
There was a costly gap, Greer argued, between the lip-service given to the
idealized female and the reality of women’s everyday lives: “the barbaric yawp of utter
admiration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is
uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time.” The result was a war
within women and between the sexes “because we are…improper goddesses and
unwilling menials there is a battle waged between us.”
104
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929).
100
Most distressingly the male artistic ego was achieved at women’s expense, for the
eternal battle with women appeared to sharpen male resistance, develop its strength, and
enlarge the scope of male cultural achievements. Although she spoke in general terms
Greer could have been speaking of the Town Hall event and of everything that Mailer
had gained in publicity and royalties from engaging with women’s liberation. Greer then
suggested that perhaps an artist who feeds on such “is more a killer than a creator, aiming
his ego ahead of all….Is it possible that the way of the masculine artist in our society is
strewn with the husks of people worn out and dried out by his ego?” What was the cost of
living in a society that lionized art, implicitly the art of writers like Mailer, when perhaps
“the art on which we nourish ourselves is sapping our vitality and breaking our hearts”?
Mailer responded that although Greer’s arguments were exquisite, in particular
the notion “that we are artists all,” that they belonged to “a species of social
instrumentality” that he called “diaper Marxism.” The problem of women’s liberation,
Mailer argued, was that it failed to provide the means to the end.
105
Mailer could not
understand why there was “anything so fundamentally debilitating to the human notion
that a woman be both a goddess and a slob at different hours of the day.” Indeed, he
argued, both the liberal arm of women’s liberation as personified by NOW and radical
women’s liberation as personified by Greer avoided dialectic—a process through which,
Mailer believed, women could, by leading double existences, achieve a higher state.
Greer merely shook her head, for by that point in the debate it was clear that Mailer
simply did not understand the female perspective.
105
Several feminists commented on Greer’s failure to provide a clear program for revolutionary action. See
Reed, “Feminism and ‘the Female Eunuch’”; Kempton, “The Female Eunuch.”
101
Although Mailer complimented Greer on her book, he said that it lost him at
points, and he shifted direction to Millett’s charge that men were oppressing women.
Mailer continued to return to his simplified notion of patriarchy and male blame, and
Greer challenged his oversimplification, defending Millett by saying she was sure Millett
would be surprised to be charged with blaming men for everything. Greer defended
herself, and feminism more broadly, saying that there was not yet a clear, step-by-step
program toward liberation, that it was a work in progress. Here Greer showed herself to
differ from the charges made by some women’s liberationists that men benefited from the
patriarchy: she argued that “[i]f the fact is that men have been unconsciously tyrannical,
and I think that probably is the case, then it’s certain also that they were debauched by
their own tyranny and degraded by it and confused by it almost as much as the people
they tyrannized over.”
During the question-and-answer period, Peter Fisher of Columbia University
questioned Greer about Mailer’s position on homosexuality, in particular Mailer’s
characterization of homosexuals as “female men” and what Fisher saw as Mailer’s
associated negative evaluation of women. He asked Greer whether there was a
connection between women’s liberation and gay liberation. Greer responded that unlike
many of her sisters she thought they were part and parcel of the same movement. To
Greer, sexual politics by and large had something to do with the “act of fucking being to
the advantage of the one who fucks and to the disadvantage of the one who is
fucked….The one who is fucked is always female and inferior. And we all have an
interest in changing the grammar of that verb, of opening it out to all its many
102
permutations” instead of what was then its limited focus on male heterosexual penis-
centered sex.
106
Her comment was met with loud applause.
Mailer introduced Jill Johnston as a “master of free associational prose at the
Village Voice.” Indeed, Johnston’s column had become known for her unique writing
style, which she said was influenced by dada.
107
Johnston read a freeform piece entitled
“New Approach” that began: “All women are lesbians, except those who don’t know it
naturally they are but don’t know it yet.” To appreciative laughter from the audience, she
spoke of the Bible in which men “had only sons who begat more sons and sons.” As a
result, the Bible gave very little sense about mothers and their daughters.
Johnston’s argument reflected her lesbian-feminist beliefs, which were
summarized in her statement: “Until all women are lesbians there will be no true political
revolution.” Lesbian-feminists believed that lesbianism was the only true way to
women’s liberation because it cut out sexual interactions with men and thus any female
dependence on them.
108
Johnston wove into her speech quotes from a defining paper
“The Woman-Identified Woman,” written by the Radicalesbians in 1970. It claimed a
lesbian was “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” and argued that
106
Germaine Greer in “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” [transcript], Norman Mailer Papers, Harry
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 3-90 and 3-91.
107
Jill Johnston, Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years (1970-75) (London: Serpent’s Tail,
1998).
108
Martha Shelly, “Notes of a Radical Lesbian,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from
the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). On the
Daughters of Bilitis and the homophile movement see Gene Damon, “The Least of These: The Minority
Whose Screams Haven’t yet Been Heard,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the
Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
103
women had been socialized to believe that they were lesser beings.
109
The notions of
heterosexuality and homosexuality were the product of a patriarchal society characterized
by rigid sex roles in which heterosexuality necessarily made women second class
citizens. Both male and female homosexuality were denigrated: male homosexuals were
accused of being like women, and lesbians were accused of stepping outside their proper
social roles. Both cases demonstrated contempt for women. The label lesbian came to
signify women in breech of their duty as women and was “throw[n]…at any woman who
dares to be a man’s equal.”
110
In bonding sexually with another woman, a woman could
express not just solidarity with other women: she could also reclaim her sense of self,
defined on her own terms rather than the male terms of the existing social order. As
Johnston put it, “a woman finds pleasure in caressing a body whose secret she knows, her
own body giving her the clue to its preferences, giving each the other their sense of self,
tracing the body of the woman whose fingers in their turn trace her body, that the miracle
of the mirror be accomplished.”
Mailer angrily cut Johnston off after she had gone five minutes over her allotted
time. Then, in a pre-planned act, Johnston began kissing and then rolling on the floor
with two other women. Mailer, conscious of the audience, shouted: “It’s great that you
paid $25 bucks to see three dirty overalls on the floor when you can see lots of cock and
cunt for 4 dollars just down the street!” Johnston asked if she could skip her question and
109
“The Woman-Identified Woman” was a position paper issued at the Second Congress to Unite Women
in May 1970. See Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt,
Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 240.
110
Ibid., 241. See also Anne Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt,
Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, (1971) 1973).
104
finish her poem. He responded angrily: “Either play with the team or pick up your
marbles and get lost.” The audience voted that, since she was out of time, Johnston
should not get to finish. She continued embracing one of her friends on the floor and then
left the stage for the evening.
The staged lesbian performance and Mailer’s enormous irritation spoke to several
issues. First, Johnston compromised her ability to get her message across in any serious
way. She was not there to answer Mailer’s later comments on her speech in which he said
that she had highlighted the fact that women’s liberation is two things: “it is a profoundly
political movement and it is a profoundly sexual movement.” Mailer said that women’s
liberation naturally took on lesbian overtones but argued that lesbians have a difficult
time which “accounts in part for that intense detestation they have of men.” To him, that
perceived hatred of men was the worst part of women’s liberation.
Second, Johnston’s “performance” served to marginalize lesbian feminism in the
eyes of an audience that was immune to any shock value the performance was meant to
illicit. Greer said Johnston’s poem was “exquisite and outrageous, much the most
entertaining thing that had happened, if only the love scene at the end had not been quite
such an anti-climax.”
111
Diana Trilling later wrote “it was a miscalculation to have
thought that a Lesbian exhibition could break up a meeting like ours—in New York City,
1971.”
112
Johnston’s behavior and Mailer’s comments that she should “pick up her
marbles”—connoting that her performance was more madness than it was part of rational
111
Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” 214.
112
Diana Trilling, We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade (New York and London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 201.
105
debate—fed into one another, effectively eliminating any serious discussion of
lesbianism or homosexuality from the evening or in the news reports about it.
Mailer introduced Diana Trilling as “our leading lady critic for many years” (a
comment that later drew fire from Susan Sontag who, during question time, asked
Trilling how she felt about being described as a “lady” critic and not simply a critic).
Trilling began her arguments by stating that she was aware, when asked to participate in
the panel, that women’s liberation was a multi-faceted movement that meant many
different things to its participants and to those who feared it. Among these diverse
meanings were that it was “a new strategy of personal assertion…a new occasion for
cultural and institutional assault,…a long delayed revivification of the women’s rights
movement,…a prophetic vision of an erotic utopianism…” What Trilling did not realize
until she “watched one woman speaker after another drop away from this panel as if
under penalty of some special form of female torture, should she submit to the presence
of a male moderator, and in particular this male moderator, was that women’s liberation
was an authoritarianism already this advanced in purpose and efficiency.” She did not
think that men were such clear enemies but that biology and culture were forces that held
far greater power over women and men.
Although she had characterized him as the greatest living American writer,
Trilling diminished Mailer’s importance when she contrasted Mailer’s focus on biology
with Greer’s call to vanquish biology. To Trilling, Greer’s book was a “call to a new kind
of consciousness” that would alter society. Despite Mailer’s brilliance “…it is not to
106
Mailer, it is to Miss Greer, to the radical lesbians, to all the strange, contradictory voices
which make the present day chorus of radical female protest that we must attend if we are
to hear the contemporary message of a society altered on the basis of a revolution in
consciousness.”
113
Yet Trilling, although she disagreed with Mailer’s anti-contraception stance,
preferred his insistence on “poetic biology” than the rejection of it by her “spirited
sisters.” She disagreed with the invalidation of biological differences between the sexes;
however she did not wish to join the attack against those women, since the attack was
driven by the desire to protect the present sexual culture. She critiqued Freud’s
characterization of men as active and women as passive by arguing that “[t]he words
themselves…imply a value judgment, a judgment favorable to activity as being energetic,
positive, productive, a judgment favorable to passivity as being lax, inert, uncritically
receptive to whatever happens to be going.” She described the irritation experienced by a
woman who is active in her public and private life of being told that she is going against
her true nature. Although Trilling believed that men had to have at the very least some
active participation in sex in order to propagate the species, she argued against Freud’s
conclusion—that biology determined men’s roles as culture makers and that women must
not interfere in such—as an “intolerable use” of the biological difference between the
sexes.
Trilling’s speech outlined a moderate position, especially when she spoke about
the “absolutism” in the movement that she saw manifest in the campaign for the female
113
“Diana Trilling in a Dialogue on Women’s Liberation [transcript],” Norman Mailer Papers, Harry
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1-40.
107
clitoral orgasm. She rejected replacing an existing ideology with another one that
similarly sought to impose norms on individual sexual responses. To her it discredited the
impetus of a movement motivated in part by deconstructing such norms: “Nothing in the
sexual culture of recent decades has been more justifiably attacked than the idea of a
single definition of what is or is not normal in sexual desire or response.”
Although she interpreted Mailer’s piece as one that sought the enhancement of
life and that was vivid in its imagining of women, Trilling also saw that it failed in
imagining the full humanity of women “as it would never fail in its imagination of the
full humanity of men.” Mailer assumed that women were fulfilled by love and
motherhood and that “unlike men, they have no unused libido which presses for
sublimation in art or in work.” Mailer thus ignored the unequal reality for women and
outlined a position that combined Trilling’s acceptance of some biological influences
with her rejection of an anti-female culture: “Women all have their biology but they also
have a repressive and life diminishing culture to contend with.” Mailer responded that
Trilling had misunderstood his position on biology. He had not intended to say that
biology was destiny, but it was certainly half of it. To him ignoring biology was a form of
left-wing totalitarianism that denied human liberty.
Mailer next critiqued the humorless element in women’s liberation and the
absence of compassion for men: both “terrified” him. With the exception of The Female
Eunuch there had been almost no recognition from women’s liberation that the life of a
man is also difficult. Perhaps, he argued, women suffered a profound cowardice that
welcomed their terrible state. What women needed to do was “cut the crap and the name
108
calling” because the injustice men felt at being blamed was the single biggest factor that
would close off the possibilities of women’s liberation. “In the dialogue you’ve got to
allow us our terms as well,” he demanded—an especially ironic comment given that the
women with whom he was sharing the podium were trying to establish their terms and
enter the dialogue themselves.
Mary Cantwell reported in Mademoiselle that after the event, she “went home
alone, and sat alone, and thought about how everyone in that enormous room was alone.
Separated by sex and semantics and anger.”
114
Certainly the hostility between some of the
women, between the panelists and the audience, and between leading feminists and
Mailer was palpable. If so many great minds could not manage to hold a respectful,
productive dialogue, then what hope was there for women’s liberation? Indeed, the
conflicts between participants reflected the conflicts over sex and gender in the wider
culture.
If Greer had believed that she was going to connect with, liberate, or—perhaps
most ideally—beat Mailer, she was disappointed. She found the evening full of
“skirmishing and foolishness” and “not even effective as revolutionary theatre.” To her
the New York audience was self-congratulatory and pandered to an arrogant, childish
Mailer.
115
Still hoping for some kind of rematch, Greer entered discussions with Mailer to
114
Cantwell, “An Opinion: Thoughts after an Evening with Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana
Trilling, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and a Cast of Thousands,” 40.
115
Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” 215. Marcia Cohen and Germaine Greer [interview transcript]. Marcia
Cohen Papers. Schlesinger Library, Section III page 14.
109
appear with him on the David Susskind Show. Soon she discovered the behind-the-scenes
machinations in which Mailer had worked to secure the literary rights for the interview.
Similarly she found out that as the main draw of the Town Hall event, Mailer had been
given a level of editorial control over the documentary footage of the night (Mailer had
personally paid for the film to be made), and possible future publishing rights.
116
No
similar contractual arrangements had been made with any of the women who
participated. Greer recalled the warnings she had been given against participating and
concluded, “What was Mailer after all but a typical patriarch, friend of the fetus and
oppressor of the child?”
117
Greer expressed these sentiments in a cover story in the September issue of
Esquire. Despite her disgust with Mailer, the evening cemented her role as a darling of
the American media. Like other American feminists, Diana Trilling was not impressed
with Greer. She perceived Greer as a “floozy” and a media opportunist who had used the
Town Hall event “to further her personal ambitions, both sexual and commercial.”
118
Yet,
Trilling recognized that Greer’s actions could be seen another way. Trilling commented
that “by being so overt about her desires Miss Greer had scored a victory for our sex:
transcending reticence, she had transcended traditional femininity and moved all of us up
a notch in the scale of male-female equality.”
119
116
Alexander Klein to Norman Mailer with attached transcript of the event. May 25, 1971. Norman Mailer
Papers.
117
Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” 215. For eight years Greer refused to sign a release for the film until she
was certain that Mailer was not going to edit it or provide a voiceover.
118
Trilling interviewed in Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times, 521.
119
Trilling, We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade, 201.
110
Trilling’s comment spoke to the paradox of commercialism and empowerment in
women’s liberation during the first years of the 1970s. Mailer and Greer had both
capitalized on the cultural moment as had American publishers. As Jill Johnston later
commented “Our revolution…was being funded and promoted by the male-owned and-
run media.”
120
In 1973 Henry Grunwald, editor of Time began a new section in the
magazine called “The Sexes.” He did this “To further explore the conflict” between men
and women that he had seen writ large at the Town Hall and, by his own admission, “to
exploit it.”
121
At the same time, the new column in Time demonstrated the impact of
feminist ideas on the mainstream and was evidence of how the ideas debated at the Town
Hall were not limited to New York and its intelligentsia, but spread into national
discourse.
The attempt to cash in on cultural revolution led to the publication of mediocre
feminist writings that watered down the original messages in the movement, and as the
different media responses to Kate Millett and Germaine Greer demonstrated, the
mainstream media played a role in constructing and feeding ideas of what feminism was
about. They implicitly endorsed attractive, sexually available heterosexual women over a
radical change in sexual politics. Yet women’s liberation also benefited from the
coverage. The increased visibility contributed to widespread consciousness-raising on the
issues.
122
One important result of feminist interrogation was to literally change the terms
120
Johnston, Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years (1970-75), 2-3.
121
Grunwald, One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country, 410-11.
122
Cadden, ‘“Women’s Lib? I’ve Seen It on TV.’”
111
of the conversation and this was evident in the language used in American newspapers
and magazines. The concept of “sex roles” was split into two categories: gender—to
connote the socially constructed behaviors “male” and “female” —and sexuality—to
connote sexual preference and behavior. By 1973 the shift in language was
commonplace: a Harper’s article reported that the words “sex” and “sexuality,” “are
assumed to refer chiefly to copulation” and no long suggested gender roles.
123
Conclusion
In 1970, white radical feminist ideas moved from the underground to the
mainstream and had a major impact on public discourse. The participants in the Town
Hall “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” represented the varying ideas and agendas
within the women’s liberation movement, the intellectual challenges they presented to the
existing sexual order, and the opposition they faced. Radical feminism is popularly
remembered as a militant sideshow, but this chapter’s reconstruction of the enormous
attention it received and the debate that it generated among those who held cultural power
demonstrates and restores its centrality both to the women’s liberation movement and to
the sexual restructuring of the 1970s. Through their ideas, white radical feminists
including Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Jill Johnston exposed the workings of
patriarchal power and the way that it cast women in secondary roles, removed their
sexual agency, and perpetuated heterosexual norms. Together they dismantled the logic
of “sex roles”: they argued for a separation between anatomical sex, culturally
constructed male and female roles, and sexual orientation. As the result, gender and
123
Gilder, “The Suicide of the Sexes,” 42.
112
sexuality became new cultural categories and, at least conceptually, men and women
achieved some measure of liberation from confining “sex roles.” These sexual
revolutionaries and their ideas entered national consciousness through the mainstream
media which facilitated, compromised, and capitalized on women’s liberation.
Yet a core paradox remained unresolved. As Norman Mailer had argued, to
acknowledge sexuality’s importance meant giving it power and with power came its
ability to hold humans prisoner. Germaine Greer had argued that women had to take back
their sexuality in order to be liberated. Jill Johnston argued that heterosexual sex was a
manifestation and reinforcement of patriarchal power and that women could not be truly
free until they stopped participating in it. The question remained: could heterosexual
women be liberated by sex or would they inevitably be trapped by it? The following
chapter explores this paradox through an examination of rock music groupies.
113
CHAPTER 3
CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER’S “ROCK COCKS”: GROUPIES, ROCK
CULTURE, AND THE PARADOXES OF FEMALE DESIRE
1
…insofar as the music expressed the revolt of black against white, working class
against middle class, youth against parental domination and sexual Puritanism, it
spoke for both sexes; insofar as it pitted teenage girls’ inchoate energies against
all their conscious and unconscious frustrations, it spoke implicitly for female
liberation. The Big Beat was a universal code that meant “Free our bodies.”
—Ellen Willis
2
I think no one lives who isn’t a groupie at heart, who doesn’t find a famous name
just a little aphrodisiac.
—Lillian Roxon
3
In 1968, inspired by a college art project requiring her to cast “something solid
that could retain its shape,” Cynthia Albritton, a young Catholic woman from the suburbs
of Chicago, began making plaster casts of the erect penises of male musicians. Her
adolescent desire had been turned on by British musicians who appeared on television in
“tight tailored trousers.” Cynthia learned Cockney rhyming slang—a working-class
vernacular that replaces words with rhyming counterparts—from a little known British
1
The 2002 film The Banger Sisters took inspiration from the Plaster Casters. The story revolves around
two middle-aged women, Suzette (Goldie Hawn) and Lavinia (Susan Sarandon) who were once
supergroupies. After years without contact, both women are revitalized when they reunite and recover their
sexual pasts. At the core of the film, they go down into Lavinia’s basement, light an old joint, and get out
the polaroids they took of various musicians’ penises. They refer to the photo collection as their “rock
cocks.” The inversion of the usual order of this phrase makes the phallus secondary. “Rock” then becomes
the primary definer, and “cock rock” just one of its manifestations. This allows for other categories
including groupies and female musicians to have an acknowledged place in a world they created and
defined too, and not just in phallic terms. Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn produced and starred. The
Banger Sisters, directed by Bob Dolman (USA, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002).
2
Ellen Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” New Yorker, October 23, 1971, 169.
3
Lillian Roxon, “Who Are the Real Groupies?” Village Voice, November 26, 1970, 45.
114
band. The borrowed language enabled her to avoid the “sin” of swearing and to
distinguish herself from other American groupies.
4
She then used it to write explicit
messages to her music idols asking if she could cast them, explaining “It’s my way of
letting you know I really like your band.” When a casting event took place, Cynthia
would make the mold, and a series of assistants, starting with her best friend “Pest,”
would provide oral sex to sustain the musicians’ erections.
Equipped with a logo-bearing traveling case and business cards that read “Plaster
Casters of Chicago: Lifelike Models of Hampton Wicks,” Cynthia and her assistants
quickly gained notoriety in the world of rock.
5
In 1968 the Plaster Casters cast Jimi
Hendrix. Word spread quickly through rock circles and the Plaster Casters became
celebrities in their own right. From the 1960s through the 1970s high-profile musicians,
from the Monkees and The Beatles to Led Zeppelin and KISS, requested audiences with
them.
In December 1968 the Plaster Casters were featured in an article on groupies in
the underground newspaper The Realist. In February 1969 they appeared in a special
issue of Rolling Stone magazine dedicated to the phenomenon of (primarily female) rock
music “groupies.”
6
Addressing the artistic and sociological importance of what the
4
Cynthia Plaster Caster, in discussion with the author, October 2007.
5
Ellen Sander, “The Case of the Cock-Sure Groupies,” The Realist, November 1968.
6
Jerry Hopkins, John Burks, and Paul Nelson, “The Groupie Issue,” Rolling Stone, February 15, 1969. The
article was published as a book in 1970 with one major change: many of the musicians who had originally
been named had now been quoted as anonymous sources. See John Burks and Jerry Hopkins, Groupies and
Other Girls (New York: Bantam, 1970). The phenomenon of groupies existed prior to the term coming into
popular usage. See John Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (London:
Continuum, 2003), 237-238. On femininity and fandom see Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are:
Growing up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Time Books, 1995.)
115
Plaster Casters were doing, musician Frank Zappa told Rolling Stone that: “Pop stars are
idolized the same way General Grant was. People put up statues to honor war heroes. The
Plaster Casters do the same thing for pop stars. What they’re doing is making statues of
the essential part of the stars.”
7
Time and Harper’s followed soon after with stories on
groupies and rock.
8
Cynthia lived for the moment and embraced the new sexual morality. In her bold
articulation of sexual desire, in her active pursuit of fulfilling it, and through exposing
and literally objectifying a part of the male body usually hidden in western popular
culture (she assigned each cast a five-digit serial number) Cynthia crossed the boundaries
of public and private, as well as the norms for “decent” female behavior. She could have
drawn and fantasized—like many other music fans did—in the privacy of her bedroom.
But by becoming Cynthia Plaster Caster (she changed her name legally), she found
liberation from her family (and her father’s name), defining her new identity by her
unique craft. Both sex and the rock ’n’ roll moment were commodified and consumed in
her transactions.
This chapter views Cynthia Plaster Caster’s story as a window onto the
contradictions and complexities of sexual politics for women in the shift from the 1960s
to the 1970s and argues that aspects of traditional gender roles were redefined in the rock
7
Zappa was writing on the cultural revolution for Life. Pamela Des Barres discusses Zappa moving Cynthia
to LA in I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie (London: Helter Skelter Publishing, (1987) 2003),
97.
8
“Manners and Morals: The Groupies,” Time, February 28, 1969; Sara Davidson, “Rock Style: Defying the
American Dream,” Harper’s Magazine, July, 1969.
116
realm with consequences for the new sexual order of the 1970s.
9
Although Cynthia was a
unique character both within and outside rock music groupie culture, her behavior, and
her penis “art” as she called it, were nonetheless emblematic of the new sexual dynamics
that influenced and were enabled by rock culture. A musical form with roots in black and
working class rebellion, ghosts of which lived on in its rhythms, rock music valorized the
individual and promoted a message of individual liberation.
10
Its sound and sexual
spectacle transgressed taboos that relegated sex to the private domain and that repressed
its expression in the public sphere. In the 1960s, rock music became the music of
generational rebellion. Its rising popularity helped to increase the presence of sex in the
public realm: via television variety shows and through radio, rock musicians entered
suburban homes. Their sexually charged performances and suggestive song lyrics
reflected and fed relaxing censorship laws in radio and television broadcasting.
11
News
footage of excited female fans at rock music concerts countered notions of passionless,
passive female sexuality. Far from having a limited influence on the mainstream, rock
music culture had a major and lasting impact on ideals of masculinity and femininity and
associated sexual motivations and behaviors.
12
While it idealized promiscuous male
9
Stuart Hall examines the contradictions of popular music and commodification in Hall, “Notes on
Deconstructing ‘the Popular’”; see also Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” Popular
Music 4 (1984).
10
On rock music’s roots see George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 133-160. Eli Zaretsky discusses the impact
that youth culture, liberation movements, and market forces had on the new emphasis placed on individual
expression in Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage
Books, 2005).
11
Eric Nuzum, Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America (New York: Perennial, 2001).
12
Peter Biskind discusses the impact this culture had on the emergence of a New Hollywood after the
studio system collapsed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation
117
sexuality, it also provided an arena for the public expression of active female sexual
desire, modeled gender roles that were antithetical to middle class “norms” of the nuclear
family, and made visible androgyny and homosexuality.
The chapter begins with a discussion of new masculine styles that developed in
the post-war years, in particular the idealized rebel male. Rock musicians represented the
ultimate idealized rebel male. They presented an alternative masculine type to that of the
family man and breadwinner of the 1950s: they spent their lives on the road and were
paid to play. The chapter then moves to a discussion of groupies. The rise of groupies as
a named cultural phenomenon coincided with, reflected, and contributed to the
liberalization of sex in American culture and the birth of the women’s liberation
movement.
13
Germaine Greer argued that groupies demystified sex and—because they
were not possessive about the musicians—challenged stifling prescriptions about
monogamy. Frank Zappa saw groupies as embodiments of, even fighters for, sexual
revolution.
14
Cynthia Plaster Caster’s story demonstrates the creativity and freeing
possibilities of groupie life. Yet groupies did not experience straightforward freedom.
They encountered frequent rejection, sexual disease, and sometimes suffered physical and
emotional abuse from musicians. Those who got pregnant were often abandoned without
Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Biskind, however, does not offer any detailed
gender analysis.
13
Kathryn Kerr Fenn distinguishes post-Beatles groupies from their precursors the bobbysoxers and
teenyboppers of the 1950s, arguing that groupies were more mobile, and were seen as a cultural
phenomenon in their own right. See “Daughters of the Revolution, Mothers of the Counterculture: Rock
and Roll Groupies in the 1960s and 1970s” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2002).
14
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 15.
118
acknowledgment or support.
15
Through an examination of media representations of
groupies, the chapter demonstrates that while the rock music industry banked on
groupies, it also represented them in unflattering ways. Generally groupies were
portrayed as pathetic and marginal figures who sought to buoy their own lucklustre
identities through sexually objectifying and consuming men who were truly creative.
Such representations failed to acknowledge the unpaid groupie labor that fueled rock
stardom or to subject musicians to the same kind of scrutiny which served to highlight
and renew a sexual double standard.
The final section of the chapter turns to feminist analyses of rock music culture
and groupies. Given the relative absence of women as stars in their own right within the
rock realm, and considering the media representations of groupies as beautiful helpmeets
at best and hangers-on at worst, some feminists expressed concern that groupies
refashioned but fed into a traditional gender hierarchy. Although they recognized that
rock was a realm of rebellion, they saw that women’s rebellion was limited to sexuality.
More broadly, they critiqued rock as a male-dominated realm, arguing that it was
impossible for women to be free in a world in which everything from the song lyrics to
the music magazines oppressed women, a world that essentially promoted the secondary
status of women. Other feminists countered that rock music, as an inherently rebellious
15
On groupies see: Victoria Balfour, Rock Wives: The Hard Lives and Good Times of the Wives,
Girlfriends, and Groupies of Rock and Roll (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986); Des Barres, I’m with the
Band: Confessions of a Groupie; Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and
Supergroupies (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007); Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie
Grows Up (New York: W. Morrow, 1992).
119
and sexual form, inspired women to assert and be proud of their sexuality. In this way,
they argued, rock music encouraged women’s movement towards liberation.
Playboy Dreams
During the 1950s, the family home became a site of control.
16
In the idealized
image of suburban domesticity, Elaine Tyler May argues, sexuality was safely contained
within the home and heterosexual marriage. Similarly, Miriam Reumann argues that
marriage was seen as the “cornerstone of personal fulfillment” in the postwar years.
17
During these years too, homosexuality was targeted for attack in a prominent campaign
against it.
18
Many men experienced frustration with the repressive culture and with their
social roles within it. Barbara Ehrenreich details a “flight from commitment” by men
during this period, a flight manifest in three strands of masculine styles that protested
existing roles.
19
The first was the “gray flannel rebel”: he resented working, corporations,
and the constraints of middle-class manhood but maintained his job and his social role
while developing a critique of emasculating conformity. This type of rebel male also
scapegoated women. Philip Wylie’s book Generation of Vipers (1942) set the tone for
16
See May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.
17
See Reumann’s chapter 4 ‘“I’m a Much Better Citizen Than if I Were Single’: Remaking Postwar
Marriage and Reconfiguring Marital Sexuality” in Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex,
Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
18
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London: Pandora Press, (1984) 1992), 267-319.
Margot Canaday argues that the G.I. Bill essentially built a closet in federal social policy and also
normalized and institutionalized heterosexuality. See “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social
Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003).
19
Barbara Ehrenreich talks of a “flight from commitment” by U.S. men since the 1940s in The Hearts of
Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment.
120
critiques of American women that abounded in the 1950s. It argued that power-hungry
mothers held power in America by controlling money in the home and through their
consumption. As a result, both home life and mass culture were feminized and
degraded.
20
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy launched in 1953 and brought with it a new rebel style—
“the playboy” who sought a single life. The first issue of the magazine critiqued alimony
and women who sought money through marriage. In essence it hated wives. Wives, with
their clamoring for security, compromised the freedom that men craved. Although
Playboy attacked the conventions of married life it did not critique work, for an
aspirational playboy needed a career in order to afford his lifestyle, a lifestyle which in
turn would provide evidence of his status. But, Ehrenreich argues, he did “not have to be
a husband to be a man.”
21
Playboy provided the notion that by paying for sex as a service,
men could avoid buying into the problems of marriage. It tied liberation to free sexuality
20
Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1995). For a specific discussion of the female gendering of mass culture see Tania
Modleski, “Femininity as Mas(s)querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture,” in Popular Culture: A
Reader, ed. Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage Publications, 2005). For a discussion
of the problems of defining the “authentic” in mass production, see Walter Benjamin’s influential “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. Raiford Guins
and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage Publications, (1936) 2005). There has been a long association
between femininity and popular culture. Gayle Wald interrogates the “authentic ideal” through an
examination of the meanings and forms of masculinity and femininity in the pop world, and the way in
which authenticity is manipulated to sell records. See ‘“I Want It That Way’ Teenybopper Music and the
Girling of Boy Bands,” Genders 35 (2002) and “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural
Construction of Female Youth,” in Rock over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, ed.
Denise Fulbrook, Roger Beebe, and Ben Saunders (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). In her
discussion of Rosetta Tharpe, Wald challenges the masculinist secular basis of rock ’n’ roll to argue for its
female and religious roots in gospel thereby challenging the male-gendered “authentic.” See Shout, Sister,
Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
21
Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, 51.
121
and consumption. At the same time, the magazine’s success relied to some degree on
married men seeking escape and a life denied to them.
“The Beat” was the third new masculine style, and included rejecting both white-
collar work and marriage. The Beats critiqued American consumer culture and
conformity. Ehrenreich argues that in the Cold War era in which class was largely denied,
the Beats embraced the subversiveness of blue-collar masculinity and were a “reminder
of the invisible class outside and the repressed masculine self within.”
22
Through their
style—fashion and language—the Beats enacted rebellion. They rejected the notion that a
man was to be strong and ambitious. Unlike playboys they did not engage in cultural
rituals like dating that involved paying for women in the hope of getting a sexual reward.
Beat writers like Jack Kerouac loved jazz. It was not just because of the music,
however. In a 1957 essay called “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer argued that white
“hipsters” (Kerouac’s label) embraced black music and culture because they saw the
ghetto black man as authentic, a real American frontiersman. As Simon Reynolds and Joy
Press have explained, “His struggle for a virile existence was a shining example to
whites, who were equally emasculated by suburban matriarchy and corporate
capitalism.”
23
Although they were derided by the mainstream media, the Beats had a
significant influence on cultural rebels in the 1960s. As Carl Oglesby wrote to Grove
22
Ibid., 58.
23
Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll, 122.
122
Press, the Beat poetry that appeared in Evergreen Review “bespoke the possibility of an
authentic life” even in an anxious, conformist cultural context.
24
Taken together, the common threads of these new masculine styles amounted to a
new idealized rebel male who sought liberation from the traditional male role in which a
man was to be a financial supporter and protector of women, to hold back emotion in a
competitive world, and restrict his ego.
25
Freed of the stifling effects of feminization and
social conformity, he was untrained and sexually potent. He did not have to pay for sex
either through dating rituals or through marriage. He attracted it by his coolness, a
byproduct of his authenticity. In the 1960s, rock musicians appeared to embody this rebel
male. They did not have regular jobs or hours, they took drugs, played music, and had the
ability to make a lot of money from doing so.
26
African-American Jimi Hendrix was the
ultimate example of this authentic male rebel.
27
In an article reporting on the cultural revolution for Life, Frank Zappa discussed
the growing movement against sexual repression alongside the development of rock
music from the 1950s. White parents feared the influence of black music on their children
and A&R departments of record companies tried to find a way to market underground
rock music to mainstream audiences. The Beatles provided a more acceptable white
24
Oglesby, Letter to Fred Jordan, 3.
25
Ellen Willis, “See America First: Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant,” in Beginning to See the Light:
Pieces of a Decade (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, (December 1969) 1981), 57.
26
Davidson, “Rock Style: Defying the American Dream.”
27
See the most recent biography of Jimi Hendrix as an example wherein elemental black male sexuality
manifests the possibilities of the American dream and transcends material reality. In this way the author
argues for Hendrix’s authenticity. Yet the very title of the book belies this simple formula. See Charles R.
Cross, Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (New York: Hyperion, 2005).
123
alternative to black musicians.
28
Given the history of racial prejudice in popular tastes,
Zappa argued, Jimi Hendrix—with his enormous popularity in the U.S.—was a
revolutionary figure. According to Zappa, Hendrix was most popular with white women
aged 13 to 30 and white men between the ages of 15 and 22. Women swooned over his
sex appeal, and men admired his appeal along with his technical proficiency and singing.
They wanted to be like him.
The term “cock rock,” popularized by rock critics in the 1970s, summarized what
rock culture promoted: promiscuous male sexuality focused on the satisfaction of male
desire.
29
When Jimi Hendrix compared rock stars of the 1960s to generals and soldiers in
wartime he unwittingly described the transformation of the spheres in which masculine
desire would circulate: “[It u]sed to be the soldiers who were the gallant ones, riding into
town, drinking the wine and taking the girls. Now it’s the musicians.”
30
The liberating
promise of rock masculinity was that it existed outside convention. It was not about
28
Historians of rock and roll argue that the roots of this musical form lie in country, folk, and blues,
uniquely American musical genres in which working class whites and blacks critique authority, capitalism,
and an industrializing culture losing its relationship to production and, by corollary, a more authentic
world. See particularly the influential work of Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1958); LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963); Charles
Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Johnny Otis, Listen to the Lambs (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1967); and Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music,
4th rev. ed. (New York, N.Y.: Plume, (1975) 1997). George Lipsitz argues that rock music was both a form
and site of power struggle in “Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll.”
29
The term “cock rock” was popularized by music critics in the 1970s. For examples of its early use see
“Cock Rock,” Rat, October 15-November 18, 1970; Jay Ehler, “Cock Rock,” Los Angeles Free Press,
March 1, 1974, 17; and Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “On the Expression of Sexuality,” Screen
Education 29 (1979).
30
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 22. Robert Nye argues that codes of honor began to disappear around
the time of World War One when a new kind of warfare emerged. In the new rules of engagement,
honorable conduct was likely to be detrimental. See Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern
France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and “Kinship, Male Bonds, and Masculinity in
Comparative Perspective,” The American Historical Review 105, no. 5. (December 2000).
124
securing patriarchal lineage, or the protection of private property. Middle-class
expectations of gentlemanly behavior were smashed along with the hotel rooms,
television sets, and musical instruments on stage. But the strength of these men, in
contrast with warriors of the past and the men drafted to fight in Vietnam, was not in
military service but in playful civic life—in the altered states produced by marijuana and
hallucinogens, and in the multiple sexual partners encountered on concert tours that
represented a life far removed from suburban confines.
31
The rock music business banked on the rejection of the traditional family, and it
tailored rock stars’ images in opposition to middle-class domesticity. During a publicity
campaign to boost a musician’s image, one executive ordered: “Get a paternity suit filed
against him….Get him some groupie status.”
32
In this way, the rock gendered order was
coded into the music industry. Importantly, hetero rock masculinities and femininities
were mutually constructed—the musicians would not have been stars without their fans.
They were defined in part by their attractiveness to women, and the presence of groupies
gave them authenticity.
Groupie culture, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and the new realm of female desire
Rock music fans first entered the public consciousness in the 1950s via news
reports exclaiming over their hysterical responses to Elvis Presley. In 1964,
“Beatlemania” was the name given to the latest wave of hysterical fans. The associated
images of teenage females publicly and actively expressing their passion for men
31
Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment.
32
Eric Gottschalk, “The Sound of Money,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1970, 1.
125
challenged existing beliefs about feminine passivity and lingering Victorian stereotypes
of passionless women.
33
In their expression of desire, young female fans rejected the
ideals of domesticated women who waited for sex until marriage.
34
In choosing
musicians as their objects of desire they rejected traditional masculine types. Stars from
Elvis Presley and the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix were working class. Their hair was long,
they were social rebels, and they flaunted a kind of gender ambiguity.
35
At the time Dr
Joyce Brothers argued that teenage girls were attracted to androgynous men because they
were less sexually threatening than manly men.
36
But androgyny was attractive in itself,
as the following chapter on glam rock demonstrates. By blurring the distinction between
male and female, androgynous rock stars challenged the division between the sexes and
their socially prescribed sex roles. In these ways rock stars were attractive not only on a
sexual level: they also represented freedom from limiting biological and social roles, and
from suburban domestic confines. In the rock realm, just as women were commodified in
pornography, men’s bodies were on display. Hendrix would pluck his guitar strings with
his teeth and point to a woman in the audience with his tongue moving suggestively.
Mick Jagger was slender, feline, and onstage often moved with his groin forward. To
33
Miriam Reumann discusses the existence of two different paradigms of female sexuality in the postwar
years: good women who were passive and bad women whose aggressive sexuality was destructive. The
groupies were characterized in the popular press as a potentially destructive force. Yet they became
prominent characters at a time when attitudes to female sexuality were liberalizing. See Reumann,
American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports, 87.
34
Barbara Ehrenreich, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, 27.
35
Gael Graham examines the conflict over male hair length in “Flaunting the Freak Flag: Karr V. Schmidt
and the Great Hair Debate in American High Schools, 1965-1975,” Journal of American History 91:2
(September 2004).
36
Barbara Ehrenreich, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, 34-5.
126
groupie Pamela Des Barres, “Jagger personified a penis.”
37
The attraction to, the beauty
of, this masculinity was its explicit sexuality and its ephemerality: these men might be
sexual partners, they were unlikely husbands. Through connecting to these men, young
women could achieve some sense of liberation.
The phenomenon of celebrities and female fans was not particular to the post-war
years. Female fan culture, including hero worship and fan magazines, emerged in
connection with the film industry in the 1910s when showmen sought to legitimize and
bring respectability to cinema through appealing to female audiences. In the 1920s, the
studio system promoted actors based on differing masculine styles. These male stars drew
and were created by large female audiences. Rudolph Valentino was the most popular of
these stars and was significant because he transgressed norms of respectable white
masculinity. Through the androgyny and sexual danger he represented on screen, he
offered female fans a fantasy realm in which they could explore their own gender and
sexual rebellion.
38
Like the 1960s, the 1920s was a decade of sexual liberalization. Yet
there were several factors particular to the 1960s and 1970s that differentiated groupie
culture from earlier female fan culture. First, groupies did not simply admire their heroes
from afar or enact their rebellion in a fantasy realm. They actively sought intimate, in-
person connections with rock musicians. The fact that rock musicians toured and played
live performances made them physically more accessible than film stars and so there was
37
Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, 27.
38
Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and
Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
127
a real possibility that a fan could meet her idol. Second, groupies lived the freedoms of a
new sexual culture facilitated by effective contraception. With sex disconnected from
reproduction due to the availability of the birth control pill and then the legalization of
abortion in 1973, biology no longer necessarily determined destiny: a woman could
experiment sexually without the threat of pregnancy and domestic confinement.
39
Third,
the sometimes itinerant groupie lifestyle was enabled by the 1960s culture of youth
rebellion and mobility. Groupies were part of national networks of young women who
pursued musicians, and in some cases lived together, worked and traveled together, and
offered mutual support. Some formed official groupie groups, like the Los Angeles based
GTOs, Portland’s The Flying Garter Girls, and The Texas Blondes.
Through the networks they established, groupies were at the vanguard of fan
culture and were vital to the economic success of musicians and the music industry. Not
only were groupies considered tastemakers to some degree, but, as Frank Zappa said,
“Groupies are very influential on the record market because they know so many
people…If you’re a hit with the groupies, you’ll sell 15,000 records in L.A. alone.”
40
Jimi
Hendrix remembered a city “by its chicks. Instead of saying ‘We’re part of the love
scene,’ they’re actually doing it. They take you around, they wash your socks and try to
make you feel nice while you’re in town because they know they can’t have you
39
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York:
Harper & Row, 1998); Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence, Kansas:
University Press of Kansas, 2004).
40
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 15. For a discussion of groupies leading music fashion see Ann
Powers, “The Love You Make: Fans and Groupies,” in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in
Rock, ed. Barbara O’Dair (New York: Random House, 1997).
128
forever.”
41
These roles were necessary support for little known bands who did not yet
have the resources to pay for such amenities.
42
By the late 1960s the music industry recognized that groupies were crucial to the
business: they acted as “word-of-mouth” publicists; they created success for the
musicians they favored; and their presence was considered a marker of stardom.
43
They
played a key role in the “rock revolution”: the consolidation of rock’s role in making
music a major business both domestically and globally. Like other young people who
made up the new youth market, groupies were empowered by their role as independent
consumers. Music provided them with a cultural voice and with it a means to subvert
generational authority and social norms. By 1972 music had become the most popular
form of entertainment in the United States and indeed internationally, with $3.3 billion
worldwide sales in records and tapes.
44
Cynthia Plaster Caster was born in 1948. She grew up in a time when the culture
for “good” white girls embraced pre-marital virginity and restrained and repressed
sexuality for teenagers. She was raised in a forbidding household. Her father was a civil
servant and she referred to her strict and controlling mother as “the Warden.” Rock music
41
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 22.
42
Fenn, “Daughters of the Revolution, Mothers of the Counterculture: Rock and Roll Groupies in the 1960s
and 1970s,” 17.
43
Gottschalk, “The Sound of Money,” 1; John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” “Manners and Morals: The
Groupies.”
44
“Pop Records: Moguls, Money and Monsters,” Time, February 12, 1973; John Joyce, “The Globalization
of Music,” in Conceptualizing Global History, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1993); Gottschalk, “The Sound of Money”; John J. O’Connor, “Pop Music Explosion,”
New York Times, April 9, 1969; “Pop Records: Moguls, Money & Monsters,” Time, February 12, 1973;
Steve Ditlea, “Rock Sings an International Tune,” New York Times, June 11, 1978.
129
represented liberation from her stifling family environment and inspired her sexual
awakening. When the Beatles appeared, as Cynthia explains, “I was 17, I was a Catholic,
and obviously a virgin. I didn’t know sex was meant for anything more than reproductive
purposes and none of my friends knew anything about sex, or would admit to anyway,
because sex was evil and a sin.”
45
She watched musicians on television, and the
combination of their appearance and the sound of the music ignited her desire. “I had all
these crushes on British musicians and my crushes were starting to change a little bit,
having a little bit of a different dimension. I started noticing they wore these tight tailored
trousers over in Europe that were conveniently packed with very mysterious bulging
crotches, and the sight of these 3-dimensional bulges…would make my vagina kind of
flicker and flutter, I swear. My spinal cord would tingle, I’d get goose bumps. I mean it
was almost like it was from the vibration of the sound waves.”
46
Cynthia’s desire motivated her to seek out the company of musicians. From the
British band the Robin Hood Clan who had moved to Chicago, Cynthia learned Cockney
rhyming slang including words like: “Rig. It’s cockney slang for dick….bristol cities are
titties, daisy roots are boots, chopper, rig and hampton wick, they all mean cock, and
charva means fuck.”
47
Cynthia used the language in her own distinctive way, as
evidenced in letters she wrote to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.
45
Cynthia Plaster Caster, “Visiting Artists” Series: Sculpture,” Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago,
December 1, 1997.
46
Quoted in Lisa Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 143-44.
47
Sander, “The Case of the Cock-Sure Groupies,” 15.
130
Dear Keith (Richards),
We watched you on teevee [sic] the other night and the first thing that grabbed
our eyes [sic] was your hampton wick. After that we did a little [sic] besides
studying it. We’re not kidding, you’ve got a very fine tool. And the way your
pants project themselves at the zipper, we figure you’ve got a beauty of a rig.
Sometimes we hope you’d whip it out or something but they don’t have cameras
that would televise anything that large, do they? Hey, tell Mick (Jagger) he
doesn’t have to worry about the size of his, either: we noticed that (really, who
could help, but?)
Keith, we’re serious. We judge boys primarily by their hamptons because they’re
so exciting to look at and contribute so much to a healthy relationship. We can
hardly wait until you come to Chicago in November; maybe then we can find out
more about what’s inside your pants.
Dear Beatles,
We happen to know that you hold the record for charva championship around the
world. We suppose that’s why you’ve got such healthy looking hampton wicks.
Tight pants tell a lot of stories you know. And from the way yours projects at the
zipper we can tell you’ve got four rocks of gibraltar stashed away. Maybe this is
the secret behind your success. If your rigs get nervous from being cramped up
and need a little exercise when you’re in Chicago, we are the girls for you. We’re
two barclays bankers, our bank has convenient night hours and you can make all
the deposits you like…
48
Cynthia’s use of the language made her stand out to British musicians who were
in the United States. At a Beatles concert in Chicago she and Pest went outside to the
limousine to greet them when they finished the show, but there was already a mob of
girls there. Cynthia quickly made a sign that said “Charva” and ran further down the road
to wait for the Beatles to drive past. Paul McCartney was surprised into paying attention
when he saw the sign.
49
Then Cynthia and Pest learned that Paul Revere and the Raiders
used the word “lanoola” for “rig” so they held up a sign with that on it at their concert. At
the end of the Raiders’ show, one of the band members thanked “Lanoola” and it was
48
Letters reprinted in Ibid., 16.
49
Ibid., 16
131
reported the next day in the Chicago Tribune, cementing for the Plaster Casters the
importance of the language in distinguishing themselves.
When she finished high school, Cynthia went to the University of Illinois to study
art. It was there, in 1966, that she was given an assignment to make a cast of something
solid that would retain its shape, and she immediately thought of penises.
Serendipitously, that weekend Paul Revere and the Raiders were in town as part of the
Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. Cynthia went to their hotel and offered to cast the band. She
did not get a cast that weekend, but she did have sex for the first time with Mark Lindsay,
the lead singer of Paul Revere. In her diary afterwards she wrote about the wonderful
experience of having her first sexual experience with someone from a band with a
number one song. Even more important to her was that he told her that she was
“groovy.”
50
For Cynthia, a shy girl who worried about her weight, the experience was
validating.
The first penis Cynthia cast belonged to a friend. With him she was able to
practice her molding techniques. After several botched efforts she altered the mixture to
include dental alginates that enabled the cast to capture “all the little veins and crevices
and indentations and everything.”
51
In 1968, when she heard that her favorite musician
Noel Redding, the bass player in The Jimi Hendrix Experience, would be in town to
perform, she put together her casting kit. When she went backstage with her “plater”
Dianne, she saw Hendrix there and thought she might insult him if she did not offer to
50
Cynthia Plaster Caster diary entry, read to author, October 2007.
51
Sander, “The Case of the Cock-Sure Groupies,” 16.
132
cast him.
52
Hendrix agreed to the casting. In her art process journal Cynthia recorded the
experience:
He has got just about the biggest rig I’ve ever seen! We needed to plunge him
through the entire depth of the vase…we got a BEAUTIFUL mould. He even kept
his hard for the entire minute. He got stuck, however, for about fifteen minutes
(his hair did) but he was an excellent sport—didn’t panic...he actually enjoyed it
and balled the impression after it had set. In fact, I believe the reason we couldn’t
get his rig out was that it wouldn’t GET SOFT! ... A beautiful (to say the least)
mold with part of a ball and some random embedded hairs…a little on the Venus
de Milo side, but it’s a real beauty.”
53
The story that two young women had taken a plaster cast of Hendrix’s penis
moved fast in rock circles. The story was embellished to one in which Hendrix almost
lost his penis as it had gotten stuck in the plaster, so while many bands wanted to meet
the Plaster Casters they often offered their road managers as test cases. Hendrix’s fame
lent the Plaster Casters credibility in rock circles, and when other musicians heard about
the Hendrix cast they wanted to meet the Plaster Casters. In a 2000 documentary about
Cynthia, Danny Doll Rod, lead guitarist of the contemporary band the Demolition Doll
Rods goes with Cynthia to the hotel room where she “castered” (Cynthia’s language)
Hendrix. He lies on the bed masturbating while Cynthia mixes the plaster and speaks to
the camera about how excited he is just thinking about going where Hendrix had been.
The whole experience for him, including having sex with Cynthia, becomes an
opportunity for him to get close to his musical idol. In that same documentary, another
young musician, Chris Connelly, talks about his experience with Cynthia. His
52
Cynthia eventually did cast Noel Redding and his cast came out lopsided.
53
Plaster Caster diaries quoted in John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 20.
133
“performance” worries were outstripped by his desire to join the ranks of the castered.
“Obviously there were minor anxieties as to whether I could fulfill the necessary
commitment I made,” he said. “Of course this is something we have no control over.
However in general terms I thought it was a great idea for a project…it was quite a
dynasty I was joining.”
54
But who was at the head of this family of power? Was it the
musicians’ dynasty or Cynthia’s?
In 1977, in the hopes of wooing the Plaster Casters into casting them, KISS wrote
a song about them and then boasted that they got what they wanted.
55
The lyrics from the
KISS song suggest that to them the Plaster Casters were immortalizing their erections, an
act that affirmed their power. Using the word “love” as a euphemism for their erect
penises, they sang, “Plaster caster, plaster caster /She wants my love to last her, last her,
last her / And she calls me by the name of master, master.” Yet Cynthia did not cast on
request. It was not until years later that Cynthia confronted KISS with the truth on live
radio. To Cynthia, KISS was mainly a visual band whose music was average, and she
was not interested in them. After such a public request, the band members were too
embarrassed to admit she had refused their advances.
56
Other groupies, even if they did not wish to be involved in plaster casting
themselves, saw the measure of Cynthia’s power. They commented on her creativity and
54
Chris Connelly of the Revolting Cocks interview in Plaster Caster: The Rock & Roll Adventures of
Super-Groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, DVD, directed by Jessica Everleth (USA, Xenon Pictures, 2001).
Cynthia Plaster Caster continues to make casts of musicians who inspire her, although the castings are not
always sexual. Primarily her work since the 1990s has been about the art of the cast (she casts breasts now
too).
55
The song “Plaster Caster” appeared the KISS album Love Gun, (Casablanca, 1977).
56
Plaster Caster: The Rock & Roll Adventures of Super-Groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster.
134
courage and were also amused that Cynthia had managed to keep tokens of musicians.
“She keeps them on the headboard of her bed!” one groupie exclaimed with admiration
about Cynthia’s casts.
57
To Cynthia, her activities were about pleasure, not about power.
She states “In my groupie travels, the sensation of being in control OR being used does
not occur to me. It’s just like sex with a civilian—hopefully the two of you are mutually
attracted to each other, each getting their rocks off, each ‘using’ each other. Except that
the groupie has the added bonus of having scored a night in the sack with the Face on the
cover of her favorite album.”
58
In this statement Cynthia recognized implicitly that
objectification and commodification did not just apply to women: men were also
commodified in the rock realm.
In 1968 Eric Clapton, who was playing with the band The Cream, introduced
Frank Zappa, the lead singer/guitarist of the Mothers of Invention, to the Plaster
Casters.
59
Zappa was drawn to what they were doing and told Cynthia it was art.
60
In
1969 he moved her to Los Angeles and paid for her room and board so she could
concentrate on building her art collection for an exhibition.
61
Cynthia said of Zappa “I
was a keypuncher when he discovered me…Frank was the first person that called me an
57
Groupies, DVD, directed by Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard (USA, 1970).
58
Cynthia Plaster Caster, e-mail message to author, April 20, 2005.
59
Barres, Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies, 91.
60
On the Plaster Casters and the GTOs see Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote: The Definitive Story of
Frank Zappa (Omnibus Press, 2003), 123-125.
61
The exhibition did not come together in Zappa’s lifetime as Cynthia was not able to collect casts of
enough famous musicians to attract an audience. Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen took the casts for “safe-
keeping” and then claimed ownership. Cynthia fought and won a legal battle in 1993 to get the casts back.
Most of them were returned. See Barry Miles, Zappa (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 177-78.
135
artist.”
62
Cynthia felt that “if her collection were put in the hands of somebody who
believed in it, it would be a significant thing…a tribute to and reflection of the sexual
revolution, a radical change in morality.”
63
Like Norman Mailer, Zappa saw the potential value of sexuality and liberation in
women’s culture, yet Zappa invested in the women directly, encouraging them to develop
themselves. In addition to Cynthia Plaster Caster, Zappa mentored and financed the
GTOs—which stood for Girls Together Occasionally—who were made up of Mercy,
Sandra, Miss Christine, Pamela, Cynderella, and Sparky.
64
The GTOs had met in clubs on
Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip and begun moving around the groupie circuit together. Once
they officially formed a group, they danced in clubs, sometimes opening for bands, and
recorded an album of songs with Zappa. He planned to release a book of their diaries and
other paraphernalia called The Groupie Papers. In a 1968 article for Life Zappa
mentioned the Plaster Casters and the GTOs.
65
Zappa wrote the article from an implied
perspective that the 1960s was over and that the current music, exemplified by the
existence of groupies with their sexual freedoms, was the way of things to come.
Rock gender roles and groupie representation
From 1965 to 1969 a cartoon about The Beatles called “Hard Day’s Night” was
aired on American television. The opening sequence of each episode depicted John, Paul,
George, and Ringo with bowl haircuts in blue suits desperately running away from the
62
Ibid., 177.
63
Sander, “The Case of the Cock-Sure Groupies,” 17.
64
For more on the GTOs see Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie.
65
Frank Zappa, “The Oracle Has It All Psyched Out,” Life, June 28, 1968.
136
hysterical and relentless female fans who pursued them. This was a sharp reversal from
arguments that posited masculine activity and female passivity as natural biological roles.
Beyond The Beatles cartoon, newsreel footage of mass fan hysteria at concerts
documented the challenge to notions of “natural” female behavior. In the late 1960s with
reports of throwing their underwear on stage, offering sex and a good time, groupies, en
masse, performed a brazen female sexuality. As one groupie said, “I’m very aggressive. I
don’t think anything of waiting for them to come out on stage and grabbing their arms or
copping a feel and telling them what I want.”
66
Female sexual aggression writ large
challenged the traditional gender order.
Cynthia Plaster Caster asserted her desire to Ellen Sander, a journalist who wrote
an article on groupies for the underground paper The Realist. “I’d like to cast Jagger,” she
told Sander, flicking through a wallet case of images until she came upon a photo of
Mick Jagger’s crotch that she had cut out of the fan magazine Tiger Beat. This aggressive
female sexual style impacted rock masculinities. As they overturned notions of female
passivity, groupies enabled a new “passive” masculinity. Rock musicians had
straightforward access to sex that they did not have to work for or pay for. Without
action, their responsibility was removed. When feminist rock critic Ellen Willis talked
about the way in which sexual freedom for women became, in the rock realm,
“availability on men’s terms,” she attributed it to the influx of power-hungry middle-class
men into rock. Yet women had been active in the process of redefining a kind of passive
66
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 12.
137
rock masculinity. Men were able to expect women to be available to them on their terms
because they had easy sexual access to groupies.
67
The Rolling Stones’ song “Stray Cat Blues” exemplified a male rock attitude to
groupies’ free sexuality, shrugging off responsibility of their own and welcoming the
attention regardless of the youth of the girl.
I can see that you’re fifteen years old
I don’t want your I.D.
I can see that you’re
So far from home—but
That’s no hangin’ matter
It’s no capital crime
Oh yeah, you’re a stray, stray cat
Come to scratch my back
You’re a stray, stray cat
Betcha mama don’t know you can scream like that
I betcha mama don’t know you can spread like that…
I bet yer mama dunno ya can scratch like that
I bet yer mama don’t know you can bite like that
Say you got a friend and she’s wilder than you?
Why dontcha bring her upstairs
If she’s so wild that she can join in too…
68
In addition to the male perspective in the song lyrics, a masculine perspective
dominated commentary and analysis on the music industry.
69
This had an effect on the
way that rock music gender roles were presented to and remembered by the public.
Rolling Stone magazine’s special groupie issue, published in February of 1969, became
the definitive analysis of groupie culture. The groupie, it wrote, was a woman who
67
Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” 170, 169.
68
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Stray Cat Blues,” on Beggars Banquet (Abkco, 1968).
69
Lisa L. Rhodes examines in detail the depictions of groupies in the popular media, particularly by music
journalists, throughout the 1960s. She argues that groupie culture was significantly more complex than
mainstream male journalists depicted. See Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture.
138
pursued and bedded the objects of her desire. How she did this and why depended on the
individual, and here Rolling Stone constructed a groupie hierarchy. “Starfuckers” were at
the bottom of the hierarchy. They did not care about the music or the individual; they
only cared about associating themselves with the power of a name. Although he initially
reveled in groupie attention, Eric Clapton was one of the stars who became increasingly
distressed by this de-personalizing objectification. He said it made him feel used.
On the next level of the hierarchy were the groupies propelled by their sexual
attraction to the musicians. At least in their case, as Rolling Stone presented it, they were
attracted to particular individuals, but still, their failure to truly appreciate the music
precluded any possibility of their being “cool.” Then there were the groupies who wanted
the music, the sex, and the particular individual. These women were described as being
average in looks and accounted for the largest proportion of the phenomenon. Cynthia
Plaster Caster was a unique case as she sat on the line between this category and the
ultimate category of “supergroupie” (she was famous but not considered beautiful).
Supergroupies were the rare and truly beautiful women whose company was
actively sought by the musicians. These exceptional women, just by their very presence,
added value to rock lives. Some, like Pennie Lane (of the Flying Garter Girls), whose
character features in Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film about
the time, became legends in their own right.
70
Some were musicians or had other trades
and interests of their own, like Linda Eastman (later McCartney), who was a
photographer. Rolling Stone portrayed her as one of the “successful” groupies—success
70
Crowe had been a teenage journalist for Rolling Stone. Almost Famous, directed by Cameron Crowe
(USA, 2000).
139
defined by the fact she ended up marrying a Beatle—but Linda resisted the label. In a
similar vein, a 1970 article in Esquire introduced Yoko Ono as a groupie, even though
she was an artist.
71
By including as groupies women who had professional roles with the
musicians as clothing designers, photographers, and rock critics, the popular press
categorized most women in the rock scene as hangers-on.
72
The very fact of their being defined as groupies on the terms set by Rolling Stone
suggests that the women were still subordinate to, not as worthy as, the men whose
company they kept. Groupies, as Rolling Stone portrayed them, had no real identity
separate from the musicians. Groupies, on the whole, were crazed, desperate, and sad.
Psychologists were brought in to offer their explanations and applied the kind of Freudian
analysis that Kate Millett and other radical feminists lambasted: groupie behavior was the
result of penis envy, castration fantasies, and the perpetual female lack that needed to be
filled. Their fathers did not love them; their childhoods were bad. A psychologist from
the Los Angeles Free Clinic said that groupies treated sex as a status symbol, and that
“the whole thing can be seen in homosexual perspective, to the extent the chick is balling
rock stars simply to be able to brag to her girlfriends.”
73
The fact that psychologists pathologized groupie sexual activity and did not
analyze the behavior of the musicians is evidence of the sexual double standard: women
were behaving unnaturally and improperly; men were just doing what men do. By
71
Charles McCarry, “John Rennon’s Excrusive Groupie: One the Load to Briss with the Yoko Nobody
Onos,” Esquire, December 1970.
72
Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll.
73
John Burks, “The Groupie Issue,” 12.
140
essentializing masculinity in this way, the construction of the new rock masculinity was
naturalized. By focusing blame on the groupies, men were freed of responsibility. In the
world of rock ’n’ roll this meant that if anyone got a sexually transmitted disease, for
example, it was said to be caught from a groupie: she had probably picked it up in a
sexual exchange with a street dealer in return for drugs that she then used to seduce rock
stars. If she got pregnant, that was her fault and her problem.
Rolling Stone also revealed a heterosexual bias in its discussion of male groupies.
Rather than discussing homosexual relationships between stars and male fans, the article
argued that the small number of male groupies was because they did not have anything to
offer: “you can pretty much rate a male groupie by what it is that he uses as a vaginal
substitute.”
74
There was a brief mention of a heterosexual male groupie, Pogo, who loved
Janis Joplin and kissed her when he met her.
There is an interesting contrast between the content of the Rolling Stone issue,
written and compiled by three men, with an article that appeared a year earlier written by
a woman. The tone of Ellen Sander’s article was one of admiration for and amazement
about the activities of the groupies. Remarking on the various strategies they had for
getting to the stars she wrote: “When I have the opportunity to watch them in action, it is
not without a genuine sense of admiration that I note their acuity.” She described Cynthia
as “an artist, a pioneer, right up there in the front lines of the new morality.” Unlike the
Rolling Stone journalists who conducted interviews with groupies primarily by phone,
Sander met groupies in person and accompanied them on their travels. In the Rolling
74
Ibid., 13.
141
Stone article on groupies, Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band described the Plaster
Casters as “sick,” “really a cheap, trashy trip.” Ellen Sander was witness to his meeting
with them. He had been curious to meet them but Cynthia spent the night with Lonnie,
Steve Miller’s bass player, Dianne spent the night with the road manager, and Miller
himself had ended up alone.
In the feminist underground paper off our backs, Bobbie Goldstone reported on
both Groupie, a British novel about the groupie phenomenon, and on the paperback
version of the Rolling Stone report on groupies. Quickly dismissing the novel as only of
interest “to those who want to know that blowing is called plating on the English rock
scene,” Goldstone turned to “The Report,” describing it as a poorly written attempt to
make some quick money from the subject. More importantly, she wrote, it offered “an
object lesson that any “liberation”—sexual or otherwise—for women on the rock scene
seems pretty much a myth.” Groupies were divided into “good” and “bad”—the bad ones
only wanted to “fuck a star so they can be a ‘somebody.’” Good groupies offered one-
way monogamy and domestic service and if they were lucky were rewarded with
marriage. It concluded that Rolling Stone, by treating the girls as commodities, was the
biggest groupie of them all.
75
In 1970 the documentary film Groupies was released. The director Ron Dorfman
and producer Robert Weiner were accused of making an exploitation film that degraded
groupies and deliberately showed “the dark side of strictly glamorous trans-continental
75
Bobbie Goldstone, “Culture Vulture: Groupies, et. al,” off our backs, July 31, 1970.
142
sport.”
76
They defended themselves, arguing that they had edited together footage that
represented the “median” from 80 hours of film. Yet the camera angles in the film reflect
the exploitative nature of the filmmakers’ perspective on their subjects. In one interview,
a groupie lies on a bed and speaks about her experiences. The conversation is filmed from
the bottom of the bed with the camera peering up at her face from between her legs. The
image for the viewer is of a young woman’s face framed by her spread thighs.
77
In her response to the film, rock critic Lillian Roxon (one of the women to whom
Germaine Greer dedicated The Female Eunuch) rejected the notion that the filmmakers
were presenting the median by arguing that Cynthia Plaster Caster—who appeared in the
documentary—was certainly not average given the unique nature of her casting.
78
Roxon
began her review by describing a groupie who “had more class than Jacqueline Onassis,
more professional expertise than Gloria Steinem, and more self-assurance than Bella
Azbug.”
79
This groupie was at the top of the groupie hierarchy in Roxon’s eyes, and
ended up in a “perfect match” with an extremely famous and loved musician. The second
most successful groupie she knew was exceptionally beautiful. Why then, she wondered,
was Groupies full of “slags, scrubbers, and band molls?”
80
In this statement, Roxon
reinforced Rolling Stone’s groupie hierarchy. To Roxon the film represented only a
portion of the groupie world although what it did show was an accurate window onto the
76
Roxon, “Who Are the Real Groupies?” 44.
77
Groupies, directed by Dorfman and Nevard.
78
Roxon, “Who Are the Real Groupies?”
79
Ibid., 42.
80
Ibid., 42.
143
“deeply depressing” world of young girls hanging desperately around band rooms and
backstage. Although women had always had heroes, Roxon argued that rock was a world
that provided the first opportunity for women to get to them. There was something
wonderful to her in the possibility that groupie culture offered of a fantasy coming true.
She found the film a crushing blow to the fantasy that “sustained us nicely through some
bad times.”
81
Feminist perspectives
In their study of gender and rock, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press suggest that
“many groupies were frustrated artists themselves, just looking for any connection to the
creative excitement.”
82
A 1970 article printed in Rat (later anthologized with the author’s
name as Susan Hiwatt) spoke to the problems of the male-domination in rock. In rock,
Hiwatt argued, there was no place for women to be creative: “…the only place I could
look to see anyone who looked anything like me was in the audience…”
83
Stereotypical
sex roles influenced women’s exclusion from rock: women could not play electric guitars
as they did not know anything about technology. If women were involved in music they
were “supposed to be composed, gentle, play soft songs” like folk music. Issues of
physical strength and aggression were also used against women: “Women aren’t strong
81
Ibid., 45.
82
Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll, 232. Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo
argue that groupie-dom presented a trap for women in Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and
Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977), 277-278.
83
The article was first published in Rat in 1970 shortly after the death of Janis Joplin. It was then published
in a music collection under the name “Susan Hiwatt” which was an allusion to a British line of guitar
amplifiers. That information is in The Rock History Reader, ed. Theo Cateforis (New York: Routledge,
2007). For this chapter I have used Susan Hiwatt, “Cock Rock,” in Twenty-Minute Fandangos and Forever
Changes: A Rock Bazaar, ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Random House, 1971), 142.
144
enough to play the drums; women aren’t aggressive enough to play good, driving rock.”
84
Therefore, being a groupie was one of the only two roles women were allowed in the
rock realm. The other role was singer, but, Hiwatt argued, a woman had to be twice as
good as a man in order to sing rock, citing Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin as examples.
Yet, Hiwatt wrote, Janis was subject to ridicule on the basis of her sexual promiscuity, so
even though she was an extraordinary singer she was demeaned as a woman.
85
Women in rock were expected to be “beautiful and groovy” and make no
demands that might infringe on male freedom. Hiwatt quoted an unnamed groupie who
said that “[b]eing a groupie is a full time gig. Sort of like being a musician. You have two
or three girlfriends you hang out with, and you stay as high and intellectually enlightened
as a group of musicians. You’ve got to if you’re going to have anything to offer. You are
a non-profit call girl, geisha, friend, housekeeper—whatever the musician needs.”
86
Hiwatt compared her experience listening to lyrics in rock songs to a Stokely
Carmichael story in which he talked about how he had cheered the cowboys in westerns
until he grew up and realized that as a black man he was an Indian and so had been
cheering his own demise. Women identified with youth culture as a form of rebellion
against their parents’ unhappy lives. Yet, like the sexism that women encountered in
leftist movement politics during the 1960s, the sexism in rock culture was simultaneously
liberating from generational confines and negative because of the manner in which it
84
Hiwatt, 143.
85
On Janis Joplin see Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (New
York: H. Holt, 2000).
86
Hiwatt, 146.
145
excluded them. Hiwatt concluded that women were disconnected from one another and
lamented the absence of a women’s culture.
87
In its place she said that women identified
with men who sang lyrics against women, lyrics that were also directed to men so that
women were not even addressed as the listening audience.
Feminist and rock critic Ellen Willis distinguished between pre-1967 and post-
1967 rock, arguing that rock music had become more calculated about its sexism since
that time. In the earlier period women identified with male rock stars and made the best
out of the liberation the music afforded them in a context in which there was nothing
better and no feminist movement to raise their consciousness. Rock was then taken over
by “upper-middle-class bohemians” who were interested in power and women had
become further marginalized. Willis compared song lyrics to illustrate her point, arguing
that by reversing the sexes one could get a better sense of the sexism at play. She chose
for her example the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” which, she argued, worked for
either sex as a song about revenge. By contrast Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” was not as
adaptable because “it’s hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he’s too
innocent for the big bad world out there.”
88
Yet other feminists saw no distinction in the sexist content of rock. In 1972 Jill
Johnston wrote “to rolling stone why don’t they print a photo of a female rock star with a
nude man in the background. Or a male rock star with the same. Like say mick jagger
87
Sheryl Garratt argues that in the absence of female role models as performers in their own right, women
fantasized about musicians for “fame and recognition by proxy.” She also writes that “groupies” became a
derogatory term used to describe any woman in the music industry. See “All of Us Love All of You,” in
Signed, Sealed and Delivered: True Life Stories of Women in Pop, ed. Sue Steward and Sheryl Garratt
(London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984).
88
Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” 170.
146
with a depressed anonymous naked man in the background. And also how do they come
off covering the women on their scene exclusively by men. And why can’t they call their
rag the male rolling stone.”
89
The same year, an article in Time, reporting on the status of
women’s liberation, wrote that “[w]omen have come to protest what seems to them to be
the male chauvinism of rock music. An all-female group in Chicago belts out:
Rock is Mick Jagger singing
“Under my thumb, it’s all right”
No, Mick Jagger, it’s not all right
And it’s never gonna be
All right again.”
90
Founded in 1970, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band (CWLRB) were a
work-group of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. They attempted to use rock as a
cultural form to communicate a political message.
91
The CWLRB were inspired by the
New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band—who shared a similar goal. As Hillary
Reser argues, the CWLRB used theatricality and humor in their performances, a factor
that refutes Norman Mailer and the mainstream media representation of many feminists
as humorless.
There was no doubt that rock music and the industry that flourished around it was
sexist. But, as Ellen Willis argued, the “social events that produced a sexist “cultural
89
Jill Johnston, “The Genius I’ve Squandered in Bed,” in Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation
Years (1970-75) (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), 92-93.
90
“Where She Is and Where She’s Going (Special Issue: The American Woman).”
91
Hillary Reser, “The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band: Cultural Transformation” [Seminar
Paper], (2004). Additional information about the CWLRB is available online at the CWLU’s herstory
project.
147
revolution” produced a sexist radical left, which, in turn, gave rise to the women’s
liberation movement.”
92
In the early 1970s women were breaking in to rock music
despite the culture’s resistance to them. Singers and songwriters including Carole King,
Joni Mitchell, and Alice Stuart released albums. Women musicians like the Joy of
Cooking appeared and “flouted the convention that women in rock must be either passive
or bitchy or desperate.”
93
As women were offering feminist critiques of rock music in writing and
performance and developing their own styles, there were also feminists who found
freedom within rock music as it was. Germaine Greer claimed her own status as a super-
groupie.
94
In 1969 Greer had written a cover story for the underground British magazine
Oz. The article was called “The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s Vision.”
95
In it,
Greer interviewed a famous groupie named Dr G—“the only groupie with a PhD in
captivity.” In the article Dr G talked about her various sexual experiences with musicians.
The mainstream British press picked up on the story and, according to a Greer biography,
Greer “gained considerable notoriety as the first groupie ever to give an interview.”
96
Greer later admitted that the whole article was based on her own experiences.
92
Willis, “But Now I’m Gonna Move,” 171.
93
Ibid., 172.
94
“Sex and the Super-Groupie.”
95
Germaine Greer, “The Universal Tonguebath: A Groupie’s Vision,” Oz, March 1969.
96
Wallace, Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, 145.
148
Rolling Stone introduced Greer to its readers as “a groupie in women’s lib.”
97
When questioned by feminist Claudia Dreifus in an interview for Evergreen Review
about why Greer permitted Rolling Stone to use such a demeaning label, Greer explained
“I’ve always considered myself a musician’s woman.”
98
Greer felt that the popular press
had misrepresented and sensationalized groupies as degraded women when in fact “[t]he
real groupies are women who simply associate with the musicians. They happen to be
very free sexually...” and were not degraded by their sexual behavior.
99
The reason she
gave for calling herself a groupie was an attempt to give musicians a different perspective
on the women and accord them greater respect. According to Greer, “What happened
when the groupie cult started was that the musicians moved in straightaway to put
groupies down. They called them “slags,” which is an English term to say they are
rubbish….So I moved in to say that a groupie is a musician’s woman, and a musician’s
woman is just like he is. She’s an artist in her own right.”
100
This was, perhaps, an
unofficial answer to the question she discussed in the Town Hall debate—what happened
to Mozart’s sister? For Greer, Mozart’s sister became a groupie.
In an article in Ms., Karen Durbin discussed the development of her thoughts
about feminism and rock.
101
She traced her journey with the Rolling Stones whom her
97
Greenfield, “A Groupie in Women’s Lib.”
98
Dreifus, “Freeing Women’s Sexuality: An Interview with Germaine Greer,” 27.
99
Lehrman, “Playboy Interview: Germaine Greer,” 78.
100
Dreifus, “Freeing Women’s Sexuality: An Interview with Germaine Greer,” 27.
101
Karen Durbin, “Can a Feminist Love the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band?” Ms, October 1974.
149
feminist friends thought of as the “quintessence of rock ’n’ roll machismo.”
102
She argued
that as the Stones were in fact “specialists in irony and ambivalence,” that their
machismo was not all that straightforward. Sexuality was central to rock music and the
Stones did not dilute it. She refused to see women as victims in rock culture, arguing that
“[t]he idea that hard rock is inherently macho depends on the assumption that women are
sexually passive (objects waiting to be acted upon) and men are sexually aggressive
(agents).”
103
For Durbin, “Rock music…provided me and a lot of women with a channel
for saying, “I want,” for asserting our sexuality without apologies and without having to
pretty up every passion with the traditionally “feminine” desire for true love and
marriage, and that was a useful step toward liberation.”
104
In a later essay, Ellen Willis explored the reason that she found much of the
“women’s-culture” music she had heard unsatisfying. She felt that women had merely
switched “from trying to please men to trying to please other women” and that the music
itself was often too timid to arouse in her the same inspirational feelings as rock. Her
conclusion was that the very sound and style of rock music bypassed the sexism of its
content and provided her with positive inspiration. She wrote: “[M]usic that boldly and
aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated—as good rock-and-roll did—
102
Ibid., 23.
103
Ibid., 26.
104
Ibid., 26.
150
challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual,
in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation.”
105
Conclusion
Rock music was a realm in which new male and female styles developed. In the
1960s, the male rock musician became idealized as the ultimate authentic rebel who lived
a life antithetical to suburban domesticity and corporate work and enjoyed multiple
sexual partners with few consequences. This was the kind of masculinity—reflected in
Grove Press publications and in New Left culture—that Robin Morgan saw was part of
“white male cultural nationalism” and that inspired feminist activism. Rock music
groupies made headlines at the same that women’s liberation was emerging. Rock was a
realm in which female groupies displayed active and public female sexual desire. In
doing so they helped to change existing notions of female passivity. Yet they were
undermined by unflattering portrayals: while the rock industry relied on groupies for
credibility and sales, the rock music press largely represented them as secondary and
subordinate to male musicians. Feminists debated whether rock culture offered sexual
liberation or whether it merely retooled women’s traditional role as helpmeets in a new
guise. Yet to see groupies purely as helpmeets denied them agency and belittled the
freedom they found in expressing and indulging their own sexual desires.
Cynthia Plaster Caster embodied the paradoxes for women in the sexually
liberalizing and male-dominated culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. From one
perspective, by participating in a system of male worship, in trading sex to get access to
105
Ellen Willis, “Beginning to See the Light,” in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New
York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1981), 98, 99.
151
men she admired, and in creating phallic art, Cynthia Plaster Caster’s behavior could be
read as both an internalization of male power and a reinforcement of the patriarchy, a
reinforcement that in turn problematizes the supposedly radical edge of the culture she
was a part of. From another perspective, Cynthia made public the most private part of the
male body: in objectifying and commodifying the penis, she challenged the very power
source of patriarchal culture. So, arguably, rather than fuelling male power—and by
association a gender order that favored men—she de-mythologized and challenged it.
Moreover, Cynthia embraced her sexual desire and with it asserted her individual power.
She left behind a repressive home and found a world in which she could explore the
pleasures of music, promiscuous sex, and to some extent, her own creativity.
In these ways, Cynthia demonstrated the ambiguities of rock culture. It was a
culture that gave new forms to heterosexual male power but also offered possibilities for
liberation through the individual rebellion and sexuality inherent to its form. The next
chapter examines the way that glam rock, a rock subgenre popularized in the early 1970s,
used the form to experiment with and win freedoms for androgyny and homosexuality.
152
CHAPTER 4
“ALL THE YOUNG DUDES”: LIBERATION AND COMMODIFICATION IN
GLAM ROCK’S SEXUAL AMBIGUITIES
In American society, men are supposed to be masculine, women are supposed to
be feminine, and neither sex is supposed to be much like the other.
—Sandra Lipsitz Bem
1
[A]ndrogyny hints at a new equilibrium in an unbalanced world….In an
androgynous world, men would be unable to escape their humanity by putting on
the aggressive attitudes of maleness; women would be unable to escape theirs by
adopting the passive attitudes society has urged on females. This seems a small
enough price if we can bring humanity, to its salvation, back toward the center of
the masculine-feminine spectrum. We may even discover the gentleness of men,
the forcefulness of women, and not be afraid.
—Carolyn G. Heilbrun
2
For me it wasn’t about glamour so much as the idea of changing identity or
thinking up your own identity.
—Brian Eno
3
You’ve got your mother in a whirl. She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.
—David Bowie
4
“Oh you’re just a girl, what do you know about make-up?”
5
David Bowie teased
his wife Angie who was getting advice from Bowie’s make-up artist. The two were
1
Sandra Lipsitz Bem, “Androgyny vs. The Tight Little Lives of Fluffy Women and Chesty Men,”
Psychology Today.
2
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, “Androgynous World,” New York Times, March 19, 1973.
3
Barney Hoskyns, Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1998),
8.
4
David Bowie, “Rebel Rebel,” Diamond Dogs, (RCA Records, 1974).
5
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture, DVD, (Virgin Records U.S. (1973)
2003). D. A. Pennebaker, who had filmed the Mailer-Greer Town Hall event, flew to London’s
Hammersmith Odeon with his cameras to capture the show.
153
backstage in the dressing room as Bowie was transformed into the dazzling, otherworldly
Ziggy Stardust. Bright orange hair stood up in spikes above a pale mask-like matte face.
Angular cheekbones were circled with orange-rouge and lips were glossed with soft pink.
Black kohl and silver shadow highlighted two very different eyes: one with a green iris
and the other blue, one with a permanently dilated pupil.
6
Proudly displaying the contents
of his closet, Ziggy strode and sashayed through a variety of costume changes on stage:
an off-the-shoulder long sleeve one-legged leotard emblazoned with an American flag; a
rich cream and blue satin tunic reminiscent of a cheerleader’s outfit and the colors of the
Virgin Mary; knee high boots showing off slender thighs encased in a glittering leotard; a
feather boa draped around his neck as he sang in a baritone voice “you are not a victim.”
At one point during the show he got down on his knees in front of the guitarist Mick
Ronson and simulated oral sex on Ronson’s guitar.
The year was 1973. The concert was the final show at the end of a whirlwind
twelve months in which David Bowie’s publicly declared bisexuality coupled with his
androgynous persona had propelled him and glam rock into the public consciousness,
first in Britain and then in the United States. Glam or “glitter” rock emerged in the late
1960s, capturing and horrifying audiences with its norm-confronting spectacle: male
rockers in make-up and women’s clothing. Glam rock was both a continuation of rock
and a development of it. Musically, it often used the same chords as many 1950s blues
and rock songs but by making the sounds louder and distorting them, glam combined a
retro rock sound with the new and tougher sounds of garage rock and 1970s heavy metal.
6
Bowie’s eyes were permanently damaged after a schoolyard fistfight.
154
Lyrically, glam mixed rock’s traditional sex and rebellion with contemporary themes
from space travel and environmental decay to identity confusion and experimental
sexuality. Visually, glam rock was highly theatrical. Individual glam rockers wore make-
up and dressed in various costumes, sometimes creating performance personas like Ziggy
Stardust, or acting out elaborate stage shows.
This chapter argues that in its use of cross-dressing, glam rock challenged the
existing male/female binary and broadened existing norms of masculine styles. As radical
feminists attacked and dismantled notions of biology and human “nature,” glam
performance deconstructed sex roles by demonstrating that there was not necessarily a
connection between anatomy, gender, and sexuality. By embracing artifice through its
imagery, glam rock challenged notions of authenticity and undermined the power of the
traditional heterosexual male rock rebel. Glam rock created a permissive arena for—and
made fashionable—the rejection of traditional masculinities, gender ambiguity,
homosexuality, and bisexuality.
7
Fashion was a realm of consumption and materialism,
but it was also a symbolic marker of rebellion and style politics that empowered identities
outside the mainstream and made them recognizable to one another.
8
Through shared
taste in music and fashion, individuals who had been closeted by social norms were able
to form connections and communities regardless of their individual sexual orientation. By
making androgyny and bisexuality fashionable in the public realm, glam created a safe
7
Jim Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity,” in Rolling Stone: The
Seventies, ed. Holly George-Warren Ashley Kahn, and Shawn Dahl (Boston: 1998).
8
On style as a form of cultural commentary or resistance, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of
Style (London & New York: Routledge, 1979).
155
zone for the exploration of gender and sexual identity. Thus, for its fans, listening to glam
rock and taking on its style had the same liberating potential as marching in a gay rights
rally.
Gay liberation groups did not necessarily recognize or embrace glam rock as a
cultural formation of their politics in part because any implication that sexual orientation
was merely a fashion could work against their cause. Glam rock was not necessarily gay
music; it was not played in clubs or at gay parties, and glam icons like David Bowie and
Lou Reed, known for flaunting their homosexual desires, both married women.
9
Nonetheless, glam rock made sex and gender play visible and audible at a time when
heterosexuality was considered the universal norm and religious groups decried
homosexuality as an abomination.
10
Set in the context of the emerging gay liberation movement, this chapter begins
with a discussion of some of glam rock’s stylistic influences and the male musicians who
manifest them.
11
Three important influences were New York’s artistic avant-garde which
drew significant influence from drag queens and transvestites in Greenwich Village’s
large gay community; Detroit’s garage rock scene which rejected the counterculture’s
9
Lester Bangs, “The New Living Bowie,” Creem, January 1975. Adam Block, “The Confessions of a Gay
Rocker,” in The Rock History Reader, ed. Theo Cateforis (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).
10
Joan Scherer Brewer, “A Guide to Sex Education Books,” Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 1975.
On glam rock see: Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music
(University of Michigan Press, 2006); Hoskyns, Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution; Van
M. Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1995).
11
For discussions of the significance of the 1970s American black female group Labelle to glam rock see
Mark Anthony Neal, “Bellbottoms, Bluebelles, and the Funky-Ass White Girl,” in Songs in the Key of
Black Life: A Nation of Rhythm and Blues (New York; London: Taylor & Francis, 2003) and Sonnet
Retman, “Between Rock and a Hard Place: Narrating Nona Hendryx’s Inscrutable Career,” Women and
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16, no. 1 (March 2006).
156
search for authenticity and embraced nihilism; and artist Andy Warhol’s fascination with
surfaces, fame, and self-creation. Drawing on these influences, Alice Cooper, the most
visible early glam rock band in the United States, became infamous for “shock rock”
tactics, conjuring hell and insanity through gender-bending personas and bloody stage
theatrics which included mock executions, chopping up baby dolls, and chasing live
chickens around the stage.
12
Their make-up and cross-dressing conveyed monstrousness
rather than femininity and acted as a semiotic affront to social norms, particularly norms
of masculine presentation. In that way Alice Cooper opened up possibilities for different
masculine styles. At the same time, the band members made clear to the press that they
were heterosexual offstage and so did not present a challenge to the dominant sexuality.
The greater tolerance for effeminate males in British popular culture gave British
glam rockers more room for gender and sexual play. Marjorie Garber argues for the
importance of seeing androgyny as a phenomenon in its own right, a “third way.” To her
the presence of transvestites is a marker of general category crisis. To Judith Butler
gender is not only a social construct but a performance that is contingent on its context.
Butler argues that cross-dressing—specifically male drag performance—is an ideal way
to destabilize gender categories and thus provide potential liberation from sex roles. This
is because it exposes and questions the binary of male and female that underlies the
construction of heterosexual gender norms.
13
An examination of Bowie shows that he
12
Don Heckman, “Alice Cooper Plays Rock to Sink Your Fangs Into,” New York Times, August 12, 1972,
17. See Miles, Zappa, 176.
13
See Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1993); Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
157
drew significant influence from his American counterparts but used make-up and
costume to suggest a “third” gender identity. In these ways he challenged neat
categorizations of gender and sexual preference. The chapter goes on to explore the
reactions to Bowie and glam from the news media and from fans. Through successfully
commodifying “otherness,” glam rock played into, reflected, and capitalized on debates
and fears about androgyny and queer sexuality triggered by the rise of women’s and gay
liberation.
Gay liberation and glam rock’s artistic influences
The gay rights movement coalesced after the Stonewall riot.
14
On June 27, 1969,
the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, was raided by police. The reason
given for the raid was that the bar was operating without a liquor license. The raid was
one in a long history of police attacks on gay bars as part of an ongoing campaign against
the practice of homosexuality which, in 1969, was still against the law in almost every
state in the U.S. On this occasion the inhabitants of the bar resisted arrest and fought
back. Many of the participants were young, drag queens, and men of color. The riots
lasted six days and were considered a breakthrough in gay civil rights: the existing
homophile movement had been a reform movement, but now, influenced by civil rights
and women’s liberation, gays and lesbians sought liberation on the basis of their sexual
orientation and put sexuality on the map in civil and human rights considerations. The
14
Gay subculture existed prior to Stonewall. See Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and
the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The
Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998); Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-
Century America. On Stonewall see David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004).
158
gay subculture that had been burgeoning since World War II became more public. By the
end of the following month the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had formed, and over the
next year gay liberation groups spread around the United States.
15
Although there had been stirrings of pro-gay liberation in the New Left,
homosexual rights were not seen as a primary issue for the movement. After Stonewall,
Rat published the Gay Liberation Front’s (GLF) statement of purpose. It read: “We are a
revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that
complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social
institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and
definitions of our nature.”
16
Many left-leaning publications did not make gay liberation a
prominent issue. As the result, a variety of specifically homosexual underground
publications emerged.
17
Gay liberation critiques, influenced by radical feminist ideas,
cited the family as an institution of subordination and control that naturalized sexual
categories in which heterosexuality was normal and homosexuality was deviant. By
critiquing the family and heterosexuality, gay liberation helped to move sexuality out of
the private, domestic sphere and into the public realm.
15
Jeffrey Weeks, “Dennis Altman and the Politics of (Homo)Sexual Liberation,” in Making Sexual History
(Malden, M.A.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Dennis Altman, Homosexual, Oppression and Liberation,
Revised ed. (London: Allan Lane, 1974).
16
Reprinted in Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 321.
17
Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press.
159
“Coming out” was the key strategy for building the gay liberation movement.
18
The declaration of one’s sexual orientation was thus turned into a political action, an
action that joined individual identity with sexual orientation. By going public, the
expression of homosexuality challenged social norms. Thus, in John D’Emilio and
Estelle Freedman’s words, coming out “became both a marker of liberation and an act of
resistance against an oppressive society.”
19
It was an expression of self-acceptance and of
individualism as well as a social statement.
It was in the context of the rise of gay liberation that glam rock appeared, taking
its influences from the underground avant-garde in New York and Detroit. Musicians
there, most notably the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and Alice
Cooper, drew together themes that were precursors to those that became full blown in
glam rock.
20
They played a key role in bringing theatre to rock and were a big influence
on many artists including David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Roxy Music, and the New York
Dolls who in turn influenced punk and post-punk bands.
21
Rejecting the hope of the
18
D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970, 235.
19
Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 322.
20
On the Velvet Underground see Richard Witts, The Velvet Underground (London: Equinox, 2006); Albin
Zak III, ed., The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer
Books, 1997). The Velvet Underground’s influence also extended to international political change: Václav
Havel who became the President of Czechoslovakia after the peaceful overthrow of communism there in
1989—known as the Velvet Revolution—was a big fan of the Velvet Underground. Such music inspired
his cultural rebellion. He also asked Frank Zappa to be his Minister for Culture. See Torn Curtain: The
Secret History of the Cold War, radio documentary, directed by Tom Morton (Australia, Radio National,
2006). See also Lou Reed on his relationship with Havel “Lou Reed,” Arts Initiative and the Columbia
Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), http://havel.columbia.edu/lou_reed.html.
21
Van M. Cagle, “Trudging through the Glitter Trenches: The Case of the New York Dolls,” in The
Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep (New York and London: Routledge,
2000), 129.
160
peace and love movements, they embraced nihilism. Andy Warhol’s ideas and cultural
milieu also had a major impact. Warhol absorbed style and social influence from
Greenwich Village’s big gay community, including from drag queens and transvestites.
They fueled his fascination with surfaces and posing, and the conclusion he came to
which was that individual fame could be achieved—albeit briefly—through self-
creation.
22
The Velvet Underground was originally formed by Lou Reed and John Cale. In
1965 college-graduate Reed who had been influenced by the Beats, sent some of his
experimental compositions to the avant-garde violinist Cale. Cale had trained in
musicology in London and was influenced by experimental electronic music such as the
work of John Cage. Cale was intrigued by Reed’s lyrics which spoke on taboo subjects
including sadism and masochism in “Venus in Furs,” drug use in “Heroin,” and
transvestites in “Sister Ray.” Together Reed and Cale made dark, dissonant music. They
imagined it as a new kind of rock that would challenge the predominant romantic folk
rock designed to raise social consciousness.
23
The themes they chose to focus on were
despair and alienation, reflected in their choice to wear all black clothing. They began to
build a following in New York’s Greenwich Village.
At the same time, Andy Warhol was looking for a way to ground his passion for
rock music and decided he wanted to manage a band. Warhol saw great potential in the
22
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979);
Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam Books, 1989); Stephen Koch,
Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films, 2nd ed. (New York: M. Boyars, 1985); Andy Warhol and
Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ’60s (London: Pimlico, 1996); Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy
Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
23
Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol, 80.
161
Velvet Underground but thought they might be too dark to have much audience appeal.
He introduced the German singer Nico to the group, thinking that her striking beauty and
monotonous voice would offer the necessary ambiguous contrast to the overall image of
the group. Soon the Velvet Underground and Nico had set up a rehearsal space in
Warhol’s Factory.
24
Reed and Nico embodied Warhol’s pop ideals of asexual glamour
coupled with cool distance.
25
Reed was thrilled to be a part of the Factory where
homosexuality was open and accepted. As a child his parents had subjected him to
electric shock treatment to cure his sexuality and so he felt comfortable and inspired in an
environment where gay men were esteemed tastemakers. Further, he was interested in
Warhol’s fascination with surfaces and incorporated the notion of surface and play into
his lyrics.
26
In live performances, the Velvet Underground and Nico combined rock with art
and the avant-garde using experimental sounds, live shows that featured projections of
films shot by Andy Warhol, fetish dancers like Gerard Malanga who performed a dance
with a whip, strobe lights, and other psychedelic visuals. When they played in Ann Arbor
at the University of Michigan Film Festival, they met and had a major impact on a young
musician named Jim Osterberg. Over the next few years he transformed himself into Iggy
Pop.
24
On Warhol’s Factory see Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films.
25
Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol, 84. On the Detroit rock scene see
David Dalton and Lenny Kaye, eds., Rock 100 (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977).
26
Victor Bockris, Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). On Nico’s
impact on Reed’s songs see Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London and New York:
Methuen, 1987).
162
In Detroit the rock music scene was divided between those committed to political
messages and those interested in the artistic avant-garde.
27
The latter rejected the notion
that peace and love could bring change, and embraced nihilism instead. There, the garage
bands MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges built underground followings. They all
embraced the performance of primitivism, a chaotic visual style underpinned by the
belief that one did not have to be a professional musician to make music. The resulting
sound was distinct for its raucous nature, speed, brutality, and angry defiance. Of all the
bands, Iggy Pop and the Stooges were the most dramatic. With bleached blonde hair and
wearing lipstick and ripped clothes, Iggy Pop would deliberately throw himself into the
audience, stab himself, pour hot wax on himself, and expose his genitals—raw sexuality
and violence were important parts of his performance. In his lyrics, Pop sang to kids like
himself who had grown up in trailer parks in the shadow of Detroit factory assembly
lines. Rejecting political lyrics because he thought they stifled spontaneity, he sought to
allow the audience to express and comment on their everyday experiences. Detroit-based
music magazine Creem described Pop as a local hero of sorts. Rolling Stone found the
music too confronting.
28
Later, the only female glam rocker Suzi Quatro also came out of the Detroit
garage band scene. Wearing leather jumpsuits and little makeup, Quatro carefully
constructed a masculine persona. By taking on the performance style of cock rockers
27
Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol.
28
R. Serge Denisoff, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books,
1975). On Iggy Pop see Per Nilsen with Dorothy Sherman, The Wild One: The True Story of Iggy Pop
(London: Omnibus Press, 1988) and Iggy Pop, I Need More (Los Angeles, CA: 1997).
163
including playing an electric guitar held at times like a large phallus between her legs, she
challenged notions of female passivity.
29
Alice Cooper
In 1969, after disastrous tours on the West Coast where audiences were horrified
by the brutal music and the band’s appearance in make-up and dresses, Alice Cooper
went to Detroit.
30
There, where audiences were used to the confronting garage sounds of
Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper found fans. In keeping with the countercultural rejection
performed by other nihilistic bands in Detroit, and in taking on drag and a woman’s
name, Alice Cooper critiqued the hypocrisy of the counter-culture—its hippy affiliations
with “nature” and by implication the authentic, as well as critiquing its heterosexual
assumptions. Alice Cooper was retrospectively labeled a glam rock band because of their
use of androgyny and theatricality. The band offered a total concept through their lyrics,
stage performance, and storylines. Although there had been concept albums before,
musicians had not taken on the characters in their concepts.
Alice Cooper was fronted by Vincent Furnier who came to be known individually
as Alice Cooper. He was influenced by surrealism and dada, particularly Salvador Dali’s
work, which conveyed visual confusion. Out of that, he developed a visually confronting
style that included black eye make-up that ran in streaks under his eyes and women’s
clothing and accessories. The feminized image was discordant with both the lyrical
29
Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music.
30
On Alice Cooper see Alice Cooper with Steve Gaines, Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper
(New York Putnam, 1976) and Alice Cooper Scrapbook, (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Publishers, 1975).
164
content of the songs—which was often about murder and insanity, and with the sound of
the music. Alice Cooper cited television as one of his biggest influences, in particular
science fiction and horror shows contributed to his use of violent imagery.
31
Alice Cooper staged theatrical shows and shocked audiences. When he threw live
chickens into the audience at a 1969 concert in Toronto, the audience shredded the
chickens while trying to catch them. The incident became blown up in the press as
Cooper cutting off chicken heads and drinking their blood. Although it was not true,
Cooper did not deny the story as it attracted so much attention. Over the next few years
the band developed more elaborate stage shows. For the Killer album tour, Cooper acted
out a teenage gang rumble with knives and choreographed leaps. Then, after Alice had
killed a band member, he was hung in mock gallows surrounded by smoke. Once the
smoke cleared Alice appeared in a white tailcoat with a top hat and cane, and parodied a
television musical routine.
32
In another show he simulated death by electric chair. Parent
groups and religious groups around the U.S. called for bans on the music and
performance which had the effect of creating more publicity for Cooper.
In 1970 the song “I’m Eighteen” became the band’s first national success. The
lyrics were about the difficulty of being both a boy and a man, and of feeling trapped and
confused. The lyrics spoke to the emerging post-1960s generation who had grown up in a
decade of chaos and uncertainty and in the shadow of the Vietnam War. By 1972 Alice
Cooper’s three Warner Bros albums—“Love It to Death,” “Killer,” and “School’s Out”
31
Heckman, “Alice Cooper Plays Rock to Sink Your Fangs Into”; Mike Quigley, “Interview with Alice
Cooper,” Poppin’, September 1969.
32
Heckman, “Alice Cooper Plays Rock to Sink Your Fangs Into.”
165
(which included a free pair of bikini bottoms)—had sold more than $1 million worth of
records.
33
In attempting to explain their success Alice Cooper said “Violence and sex sell.
That’s our appeal. The audience knows I’m parodying what they see every day on
television. We’re the ultimate American band—the end product of an affluent society.”
34
In trying to understand the audience appeal of the band Don Heckman wrote that
Alice Cooper’s dramatization of violence and sex were potentially cathartic. Gregg
Kilday thought that Alice Cooper shows were anti-sex and that they appealed to fourteen
year old boys who were nervous and uneasy with their developing sexuality: in
performances that communicated madness, fear, and isolation, teenage anxieties were
potentially exorcised through rituals of violence.
35
Lester Bangs agreed that there was
some potential freedom in Alice Cooper’s performance. Unlike Iggy and the Stooges who
were about “savage nihilism,” Alice Cooper reflected the violence and chaos of the
culture around them and suggested that through surrealism and insight the environment
could be “capitalized on and transcended.”
36
In 1970 a Time article discussed the troubling rise of “unisex” in the United
States, a blurring of sex roles that threatened America’s existence. It cited an
anthropological study of 2,000 different cultures that found that not a single one of the 55
cultures characterized by sexual ambiguity had survived. Anthropologist Charles Winick
33
“Music: Vaudeville Rock,” Time, October 30, 1972.
34
Ibid.
35
Gregg Kilday, “Son of Glitter: Hyping It for a New Gay Hope,” New York Times, September 1, 1974.
36
Lester Bangs, “Alice Cooper All American: A Horatio Alger Story for the Seventies,” Creem, January
1972.
166
argued that “until people have acquired what people call sexual identity, and until they
recognize the reality of their sex, they cannot accept or cope with other realities.”
Androgyny, he continued, would impair America’s ability to adapt to change. The
message of the study was that clearly distinguished sex roles were necessary for the
survival of the nation.
37
Record companies promoting glam bands manipulated these
fears in order to garner publicity.
In 1971, Warner Bros held a record launch for Alice Cooper and hired the
Cockettes—a group of drag queens from San Francisco—to attend the party. Their
presence led the press to conflate Alice’s onstage cross-dressing with the company he
kept and report that Alice Cooper was a transvestite.
38
Alice Cooper explained his use of
gender-bending in performance by saying that: “Everyone is part man and part woman,
and you’ve got to accept all parts if your head is together. It’s natural law. The people
who are threatened by us haven’t really dealt with their own sexuality, so after they’ve
seen us we’ve given them something to think about.”
39
Despite Alice Cooper’s
performance of transvestitism, he broadcast his heterosexuality offstage often having his
girlfriend prominent in press photos. It was unlikely that an American performer would
have wanted to appear genuinely homosexual in a culture in which homosexuality was
still widely considered a perversion.
40
Indeed, as Lucy Komisar had written, in the United
States “[t]he enemies of national “virility” are called “effete.” The American masculine
37
“Behavior: Killing a Culture,” Time, October 12, 1970.
38
Kilday, “Son of Glitter: Hyping It for a New Gay Hope.”
39
Elaine Gross, “Where Are the Chickens, Alice?” Rolling Stone, October 15, 1970, 13.
40
Kilday, “Son of Glitter: Hyping It for a New Gay Hope.”
167
mystique, she argued, was predicated on institutionalized violence and male supremacy.
41
In the late 1960s Cooper had experienced discrimination based on the assumption that he
was homosexual: radio stations would not play the music, live venues would not book the
band, and audiences responded negatively.
Through his stage shows, Alice Cooper acted out the masculine mystique. Read
one way, the violence potentially reinforced existing modes of masculinity and by
conflating cross-dressing with monstrosity, Alice potentially re-inscribed dominant
beliefs about the horror of feminized masculinities and by extension homosexuality. His
use of gender-bending alongside his vehement heterosexuality limited the libratory
possibilities of Cooper’s spectacle. As Philip Auslander argues, Alice Cooper represented
a clash of male and female, not a new gender identity.
42
Indeed Alice Cooper reflected a
state of sex role conflict rather than liberation from existing sex roles. However the very
performance of the conflict illuminated and drew attention to American sex roles. Read
from the perspective of young audiences struggling to come to terms with their sex roles,
Alice Cooper performed confusion and in doing communicated potential catharsis. One
of glam rock’s most potent messages was that liberation—even if momentary—could be
found in performance. Alice Cooper’s appeal was in the rebelliousness of his refusal to
appear like a traditional man.
41
Lucy Komisar, “Violence and the Masculine Mystique,” Washington Monthly, July 1970.
42
Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, 32.
168
The Rise of Ziggy Stardust
In commenting on glam rock’s rise as a mainstream phenomenon in Britain, rock
journalist Jim Farber highlighted the different styles of masculine culture and the role of
population size and media content. He argued that Britain did not share the same kinds of
masculinity that had emerged from American cowboy culture, and that the size of their
media market enabled trends to spread faster.
43
The gender play seemed key to the
different and more explicit way that glam rock developed in Britain. British rock
musicians had long demonstrated a willingness to show and play with femininity, a fact
that stemmed perhaps from the historical traditions of pantomime and cross-dressing—
the latter having been a more accepted form of popular entertainment in Britain than in
the United States.
44
The reactions in Britain and the U.S. to the cover of David Bowie’s
1971 album The Man Who Sold the World illustrated the difference between how glam
rock was experienced in each country. With a hand poised, just touching the crown of his
long wavy hair, Bowie appeared on the album cover reclining on a daybed wearing a
creamy satin dress printed with large blue flowers and women’s boots. Released in
Britain, the album cover was rejected by the American record company who feared that
radio stations would not play a transvestite’s songs.
45
43
Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity.”
44
Ellen Willis, “Bowie’s Limitations,” New Yorker, October 14, 1972; Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul:
The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (New York: Free Press, 1994).
45
James E. Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 16; Tony
Zanetta and Henry Edwards, Stardust: The Life and Times of David Bowie (London: Michael Joseph,
1986), 83-84.
169
Marc Bolan and his band T Rex are credited as launching the glam rock craze in
Britain. In 1971, T. Rex performed on Top of the Pops, a British precursor of sorts to
MTV that featured in-studio performances of new and charting bands. Bolan played
rocking bouncy guitar rhythms that shook his shoulder-length halo of dark curls. His
white coat sparkled with his glitter under his eyes, and his green satin flares clung to his
legs as he strode the stage in fashionable platform shoes. The glitter stars on his porcelain
face caught and emanated light. In the foreward to his book on glam, Barney Hoskyns
remembers Bolan’s performance as mesmerizing. Bolan was “a vision of pure pop
androgyny…Was he a boy or a girl? Would he come on to me or would he lead me to
cosmic delight?...Please, God, don’t let my mother walk into the room right now.”
46
After
that appearance, the phenomenon known as T Rextacy was born, and it soon became
bigger than Beatlemania with the band selling 100,000 records a day at the height of their
fame.
47
Former Beatle Ringo Starr made a documentary film about Bolan in 1972.
48
In
some parts Bolan appeared wearing a t-shirt with his own image on it, and in the
background there were big images of him reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s iconic images of
Marilyn Monroe. An art school graduate, Bolan incorporated Warhol’s self-conscious
iconographization of the day-to-day into the visual style of his music. He influenced
musical acts including Sweet, Slade, and Gary Glitter to incorporate glitter and platform
46
Hoskyns, Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution, 4.
47
Marc Bolan: Born to Boogie, directed by Ringo Starr (UK, Apple Corps, 1972).
48
Ibid.
170
boots into their performances. Some music critics dismissed these bands, arguing that
they were too popular and pretty to be taken seriously as musicians. Two other glam acts
were seen as more serious: Roxy Music and David Bowie. Roxy Music’s Brian Eno
became known for his experimental music and his striking androgynous look—a long-
haired balding man in full make-up. Yet Roxy Music’s album covers which progressively
featured more scantily clad women established their heterosexuality. Bowie’s sexual
daring put him into a league of his own.
David Bowie (born David Jones) wanted to be famous. Throughout the 1960s he
had worked as a session musician, learning from different bands and connecting himself
with the best musicians in London. He was influenced by the Beat generation and by folk
singers including Bob Dylan. Bowie once said that reading Kerouac’s On the Road was
the most important thing that ever happened to him in part because it had awakened him
to Buddhist ideas about the inadequacy of the human form and to eastern cultural
influences.
49
He was also influenced by Little Richard whose glittery camp had made him
Bowie’s teenage idol.
50
Little Richard was a vital influence on androgynous performers
from Elvis Presley to Prince. In the 1950s when segregation in the U.S. impacted the
ability of black musicians to play to white audiences, Little Richard had used make-up,
glitter, and a gay persona as a way to distract audiences and critics from his race.
51
He did
not use gender-bending purely as a decoy: his flamboyant performances were part of the
49
Hubert Saal, “The Stardust Kid,” Newsweek, October 9, 1972.
50
George Tremlett, David Bowie: Living on the Brink (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996),
13.
51
Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, 302.
171
entertaining and colorful spectacle he offered to audiences. Glam rockers were thus not
the first to use glitter as a means to shock and entertain. A key difference between Bowie
and Little Richard was that Bowie created a decoy from a dominant rather than marginal
persona—his life as a middle-class white male. It was not until Bowie took on glitter
style that he distinguished himself from the many other white folk-rock musicians of his
era.
In the late years of the 1960s, Bowie studied at the London School of Mime with
Lindsay Kemp, whose shows drew on gay writing and the theatrical traditions of cross-
dressing and gender play. There Bowie also learned Japanese kabuki theatre, a gender-
bending theatrical form.
52
For the Ziggy Stardust persona, Bowie used mime technique
and kabuki garments including kimonos which helped to create the imagery of
otherness.
53
At this time Bowie also became aware of and was influenced by Andy
Warhol and his Factory crowd of rent boys and transvestites. In London, Bowie became
involved in “labs” in small coffee shops which were mini versions of Warhol’s Factory.
Artists, writers, film-makers, playwrights and musicians gathered at the labs to
experiment.
In 1969 Bowie enjoyed some musical success with the song “Space Oddity”
which tapped into the cultural consciousness of the space race and the 1969 moon
landing. The song, written from the point of view of an astronaut and inspired by Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, explored the themes of alienation, dehumanization,
52
David Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story (London: Virgin Books, 2001),
134.
53
CBC interview with David Bowie, November 25, 1977.
172
and technological nihilism. Major Tom, the character in the song, was Bowie’s first
persona. Soon after, Bowie met manager Tony DeFries who shared Bowie’s ambition of
“world domination.”
54
It was then that Bowie began experimenting with androgynous
imagery.
In 1971 Bowie went to New York and met Warhol, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. He
had been inspired by the underground play Pork which had toured London earlier that
year and had a lot of Warhol’s entourage in it. Particularly important was the gender play
and role-playing in their costumes.
55
In the U.S., drag queens and transvestites at Max’s
Kansas City influenced Bowie.
56
With DeFries, Bowie signed management contracts with
Pop and Reed. It was them, he told the British magazine Melody Maker, who had “helped
him to expand his unconsciousness.” Bowie was also inspired by New York, by the
energy on the streets created in part by feminism and gay liberation. It gave his new
writing a sense of immediacy. The song “Suffragette City” which appeared on the Ziggy
Stardust album was what Bowie called a British view of American street energy. Bowie
also took on American rock language—words like “cat,” “jive,” and “chick,” peppered
Ziggy Stardust.
57
Bowie understood the curiosity and shock value of experimental sex and sexual
orientation. In January 1972, six months after London’s first gay pride parade, in a
54
Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story.
55
Hoskyns, Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution, 25. See also Zanetta and Edwards,
Stardust: The Life and Times of David Bowie.
56
Hoskyns, Glam! Bolan, Bowie and the Glitter Rock Revolution, 28.
57
Buckley, Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story.
173
Melody Maker interview, David Bowie said that he was gay, but that he had a great
relationship with his wife and that they had a son. He told the interviewer that he did not
identify with gay liberation as he “despises…tribal qualifications.”
58
Bowie had decided
to appear at the interview as though he was already a superstar. He arrived in a
provocative tight combat suit that exposed his bare chest, with red plastic shoes and
impeccable hair. The interviewer Michael Watts recognized that Bowie had taken on a
persona and that Bowie was tapping into the cultural currents by presenting as a camp
queen. At the same time Watts noticed Bowie’s self-awareness, a sly knowingness that
suggested that he was playing a game with sexual identity and exploiting, in a timely
way, the confusion over sex roles.
59
In another interview the same year Bowie claimed his gender-bending was not
unique to him but was part of a long rock trajectory that included Elvis Presley, Little
Richard, and Mick Jagger: “If [Elvis Presley’s] image wasn’t bisexual then I don’t know
what is….People talk about ‘fag-rock’ but that’s an unwieldy title at the best of times. I
think it’s all rock ’n’ roll.”
60
The interview portrayed Bowie’s image as one that reflected
a turbulent time in which sex roles and associated social values were blurred.
61
Bowie
embraced the category confusion saying “I get flawed [sic] when people ask if I’m
straight or gay or whatever. I don’t want to recognize those categories. I refuse to. I will
58
Michael Watts, “Oh You Pretty Thing!” Melody Maker, January 22, 1972.
59
Ibid.
60
Steve Turner, “The Rise and Rise of David Bowie,” Beat Instrumental, August 1972.
61
Ibid.
174
not be tied down by those kinds of things. I am drawn to those people with whom I have
a sexual empathy.”
62
Bowie’s admission of bisexuality garnered enormous attention within the music
business and the general media.
63
In that context Bowie released the concept album and
the associated stage show The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
As the title character, Bowie played an androgynous rock star messiah. Ziggy Stardust,
through his cosmic themes and physical “otherness,” communicated escape, particularly
from existing sex roles.
64
Lyrically, he commented on topics including youth, fashion,
sexuality, rock culture’s nihilism and a wider sense of social meaninglessness.
Ultimately, Ziggy was a “leper messiah,” destroyed by the excesses of ego, hedonism,
and fan worship. Yet he offered momentary connection through sex, drugs, and rock
when he exhorted with the voracity of an evangelical preacher: “Oh no love you’re not
alone…no matter who or what you’ve been, no matter when or where you’ve seen…I’ll
help you with the pain…turn on with me and you’re not alone.”
65
The song about the title character was a commentary on the phenomenon of rock
stardom—Bowie was deconstructing himself and the world of rock while simultaneously
carving his own place in it. The songs on the album led the listener through a story about
62
Henry Edwards, “The Rise of Ziggy Stardust: David Bowie’s Version of Camp Rock,” After Dark,
October 1972.
63
Watts, “Oh You Pretty Thing!” Peter Holmes, “Gay Rock,” Gay News, July 1972; Robert Hilburn,
“David Bowie Arrives with a Burst of Stardust,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1972; Cameron Crowe,
“Candid Conversation: An Outrageous Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual Switch-
Hitter,” Playboy, September 1976.
64
Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 61.
65
David Bowie, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Mars (RCA Records, 1972).
175
a rock star messiah trying to save a dying planet earth—it had only five remaining years
of life. He played on the notion of stardom, linking celestial bodies with human bodies,
and critiquing the notion that salvation could come through fame. Throughout, he
compared Christian themes of the second coming of Christ with the way rock musicians
were lionized, commenting on both rock and religion as fundamentally superficial and
self-destructive. Thematically, Bowie was riffing on the rock opera Jesus Christ
Superstar which had become a worldwide hit in 1971. In particular, the final song on the
Ziggy album, “Rock ’n’ roll Suicide,” evoked the breakdown, loneliness, and futility
expressed in the rock opera’s version of Christ’s passion. Later Bowie admitted that with
Ziggy he packaged a “totally credible, plastic rock ’n’ roll singer…Most people still want
their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys.”
66
He identified charisma and
performance as key to stardom, saying that while people wanted freedom, they were easy
victims to charisma over substance.
67
In a 1976 interview for Playboy, Cameron Crowe asked Bowie why he chose to
exploit his bisexuality. In retrospect Bowie claimed that it was the United States with its
inability to understand the European way of dressing and posing in asexual and
androgynous ways that had forced him to declare a sexual proclivity. In the early 1970s
in the United States, he said, “Sex was still shocking. Everybody wanted to see the freak.
But they were so ignorant about what I was doing. There was very little talk of
66
Crowe, “Candid Conversation: An Outrageous Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual
Switch-Hitter.”
67
Ibid.
176
bisexuality or gay power before I came along.”
68
Bowie laid the groundwork for
American glam rockers to be more explicit: he influenced the New York Dolls to raise
the stakes from bisexuality and proclaim that they were “trisexual.”
69
Crucially, Bowie positioned Ziggy as a “third sex” by using alien imagery. Ziggy
Stardust transgressed expectancies of gender and sexuality. David Bowie’s creation of the
alien rocker “Ziggy Stardust” performed what Dick Hebdige calls a “meta-message of
escape”: from class, from sex, even from humanity.
70
In visually embracing “the alien”
on stage, playing with and exaggerating the hetero-masculinity of rock and its homoerotic
overtones, and flaunting his bisexuality off-stage, Bowie turned the connection between
other and different sexualities into a fashion, creating an atmosphere of permission as
well as a space of freedom. Glam rock as a fashion incorporated people across the
spectrum of sexual orientation, including hetero-identified people who did not subscribe
to gender norms or who felt in some other way alienated from mainstream culture. By not
being explicitly or necessarily gay, the fashion cloaked and enabled homosexual
exploration and experimentation. In his remembrances of glam rock New York Daily pop
critic Jim Farber wrote that during the glam period, “no one had to know that I was
precisely as gay as my clothes might inform anyone from a later—or earlier—
generation.”
71
68
Ibid.
69
Quoted in Cagle, “Trudging through the Glitter Trenches: The Case of the New York Dolls,” 130.
70
Hebdige discusses the way in which Bowie alienated a lot of white working-class youth because of the
way he breached expectancies of gender and sexuality. This laid the groundwork for their receptivity to
punk. See Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
71
Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity,” 142.
177
A criticism of glam rock was that although it challenged sex roles, it did so by
characterizing homosexuals as effeminate. In doing so it exoticized and separated
homosexuality rather than showing it to be normal, and created a kind of public closet
that reinscribed homosexual stereotypes. However, as George Chauncey has argued, the
gay closet has historically provided a means for agency within oppression.
72
By taking
the closet to the stage, glam created a safety zone in which, by dressing up in glam style,
young people could explore their sexual identity without necessarily being labeled or
identified. For Jim Farber “glitter’s zone of ambiguity…defended me against my own
fears and sheltered me from the world’s judgment. I’m sure gay kids still have to suffer
many of the same old internal fears and external hostilities….Shorn of glitter’s use as a
cunning decoy, modern kids lose a whole world of freedom that made the style such a
gift to my generation of the stumbling young.”
73
The British band Queen who became a big success in the United States in 1976
illustrated the way in which glam’s androgynous styling provided both a cloak and a
stage for homosexuality. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer, was arguably more camp than
any other rock star and even the name of the band connoted a certain kind of
homosexuality—Mercury chose the name because he wanted something British and
“campy.” Yet the band became hugely popular with a young white male audience. They
72
Ibid. Eve Sedgwick argues that the closet was central to the construction of gay sexual and gender
identities. George Chauncey develops and modifies Sedgwick by arguing that the closet enabled gay
agency within an oppressive culture. In applying Sedgwick’s theory to an historical case study, Chauncey
argues against historical myths of homosexual isolation, invisibility and internalization and concludes that
the closet was a means for agency within oppression. See Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of
the Closet, updated edition (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, (1990) 2008).
73
Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity,” 145.
178
were received into the mainstream, rising as stadium rockers with their songs played at
major American sports events, even as Mercury transformed from an androgynous glam
rocker into a Greenwich Village-styled leatherman in full view of his audience.
74
Bowie set a popular precedent—a man who could play rock guitar and was
openly bisexual. Through this he gave courage and voice to what was previously in the
closet and inspired some people who felt alone and isolated in their sexuality to feel
connected to a community and to come out.
75
While for some glam rock gave them the
shelter to explore their own different identities, for others it was an explicit marker of
identity. Lance Loud was one of these people. He was the oldest son in the 1973 PBS
television documentary “An American Family” which chronicled the Loud family of
Santa Barbara.
76
Over the course of the 12-part show, Bill and Pat Loud announced that
they were getting divorced and Lance, who wore lipstick and women’s clothes,
announced that he was gay. It was the first television program to show a gay son as part
of an American family. Lance’s record collection was featured on the show and included
the latest glam music from London.
77
Loud later wrote “As many gay men of that glam-
74
Robert Hilburn, “Queen Nears the Royalty of Rock,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1976; Robert Palmer,
“The Pop Life: Queen, 4 Pure Escape Artists,” New York Times, July 21, 1982.
75
In his film homage to glam rock director Todd Haynes portrays a homosexual character, Arthur, who
sees the fictional glam star Brian Slade declaring his homosexuality on the cover of the newspaper and
yells: “that’s me!” The identification gave him a sense of confidence. See Velvet Goldmine, directed by
Todd Haynes (U.S.A. Miramax Films, 1998).
76
Jeffrey Kevin Ruoff, An American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002). Matthew Lassiter argues that with its 10 million viewers each week, the show was a cultural
phenomenon that elicited debate over the state of and crisis in the American family. See “Inventing Family
Values,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and
Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
77
Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity.”
179
rock era did, I had already announced my intentions in deeds if not in words. There was
my fondness for glittery costume jewelry and black leather, my weakness for (gulp) head
scarves and blue lipstick and red eye shadow, the time I wore a woman’s antique fur
jacket to my high school junior prom.”
78
For heterosexual women who were drawn to glam rockers, their gender-bending
and bisexuality did not necessarily compromise their masculinity: it enhanced it. Despite
his make-up and spandex bodysuit, Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson looked like a man.
His muscles and genitalia were pronounced in the silhouette created by his body suit.
Ellen Willis and other women found Ronson the most sexually attractive member of the
group because the glam attire freed him from off-putting machismo.
79
Indeed, glam
rockers were appealing to heterosexual women because of their rejection of machismo
and with it the associated violence of the masculine mystique.
Bowie’s appeal was not purely about sexual orientation or gender-bending. He
was a great storyteller, creating the new mythological figure of Ziggy Stardust. By
performing songs with themes about sexual and gender identity, environmental
degradation, and individual alienation with such colorful theatricality, Bowie
simultaneously communicated pain and hope. Fans were captured by the story, entranced
by the way that he combined images and ideas, and felt less alone when they heard him
singing about the very issues they were struggling with. Glam style was colorful and cut
78
Lance Loud, “Coming Out: It Separates the Men from the Boys,” PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/lanceloud/lance/comingout.html.
79
Willis, “Bowie’s Limitations.”
180
through what one fan described as “the drab age of denim.”
80
The community it created,
as another fan remembers, was one of “outlandish people, men wearing dresses, masses
of silver and gold lame—totally outrageous but all good natured.”
81
The music drew
together a diverse group of people who, exposed to one another, developed greater
tolerance for difference.
In these ways, Bowie’s glam style and the responses to it embodied contemporary
theories about androgyny and freedom. Some feminists conceived of androgyny and
camp homosexuality as liberating forces. In 1964, Alice Rossi, whose work, Ruth Rosen
argues, had a major impact on the rebirth of feminism, conceptualized androgyny as a
means to sex equality. To her an androgynous society was one in which “each sex will
cultivate some of the characteristics usually associated with the other in traditional sex
role definitions.”
82
The same year Susan Sontag published her essay “Notes on “Camp”“
in which she outlined the nature of “camp” as an aesthetic phenomenon, a code of
cultural identity that embraced artifice and exaggeration and was linked to androgyny and
homosexuality. By focusing on style, camp rejected content and the notion of the natural.
It saw the world in an ironic mode.
83
In 1973, Carolyn Heilbrun argued that androgyny
80
Madeleine, “Ziggy and Our Teenage Dream,” Ziggy Stardust Companion. www.5years.com/madx.htm.
81
Period Fan Letters and Fan Club Memorabilia. Ziggy Stardust Companion.
www.5years.com/fanletters.htm.
82
Alice S. Rossi, “Equality between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” Daedalus 117, No. 3, Three
Decades of “Dædalus” ((1964) Summer 1988): 26. For a discussion of Rossi’s impact see Rosen, The
World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, 76-77.
83
Susan Sontag, “On Camp,” (1964).
181
was vital to the salvation of humanity.
84
She argued that rigidly assigned sex roles had
become prisons for women and men, and that the androgynous ideal would allow both to
move towards greater freedom of choice in “individual roles and personal behavior.”
85
The results of a study of androgyny published in Psychology Today in 1975 found that
androgyny expanded behavioral options for all people, thus enabling them to cope with
different situations and with change.
86
Glam became a commercial success in a culture
that both feared androgyny and saw it as liberating.
Glam’s impact on rock and sexual culture
The music industry machine behind Bowie played a significant role in
emphasizing his sexuality and outrageousness. In 1972 his record company RCA flew a
group of major American rock journalists to London to see Bowie perform before he
arrived in the United States in order to create an advance buzz. The group included
Lillian Roxon—who called him the Elvis of the ’70s—Ellen Willis, and Lester Bangs.
Bowie’s first show in Cleveland was a surprise sellout, and then Bowie staged a hugely
successful show at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall on September 28, 1972.
87
The New York
Post called the concert “the super culture event of the season.”
88
The show was attended
84
Heilbrun, “Androgynous World.”
85
On drag performance and androgyny see Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety;
Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940;
Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age; Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
86
Bem, “Androgyny vs. The Tight Little Lives of Fluffy Women and Chesty Men,” 62.
87
“Music: Vaudeville Rock.”
88
Alfred G. Aronowitz, New York Post, September 29, 1972.
182
by Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, the New York Dolls, actors including Tony Perkins
and Alan Bates, musician Todd Rundgren, and all the big agents and rock critics. The
audience was also populated with men in silver face paint, women in vibrant feathered
costumes, and many androgynous people.
89
The Bowie phenomenon appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, followed by
rushed articles in Newsweek and in Time magazine.
90
In New York the news reports said
Bowie was not very gay at all whereas the Miami Herald called him “the incarnation of
‘gay rock.’”
91
In the Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn examined the
contradiction Bowie embodied: the usual rising star would welcome comparisons to Elvis
Presley, but Bowie preferred to think of himself as the Judy Garland of the 1970s.
92
The
Rolling Stone cover featured an alien-looking Bowie with the caption “Are You Man
Enough For David Bowie?” The article included a photo of Bowie simulating oral sex on
Mick Ronson’s guitar and described Bowie’s appearance as extreme.
93
Yet Rolling Stone
recognized that for all the hype around Bowie’s gender-bending and bisexuality that it
had a natural appearance to it rather than the air of a gimmick.
94
89
Don Heckman, “Rock Music: A Colorful David Bowie,” New York Times, October 1, 1972.
90
Hilburn, “David Bowie Arrives with a Burst of Stardust.”
91
James Roos, “Swishing Through ‘Gay Rock,’” Miami Herald, November 18, 1972.
92
Robert Hilburn, “David Bowie Rated Top Recording Artist of 1972,” Los Angeles Times, January 7,
1973.
93
Timothy Ferris, “David Bowie in America: The Iceman, Having Calculated, Cometh,” Rolling Stone,
November 9, 1972.
94
Richard Cromelin, “Review: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972),”
Rolling Stone, July 20, 1972.
183
Rock critics and mainstream journalists were divided over Bowie’s theatricality.
Some saw him as a commercial charlatan. To many, rock music was supposed to
represent authenticity and Bowie challenged that ideal.
95
The implication was that the
“high renaissance” of rock—such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles—was real, was
authentic. As Ellen Willis put it, Bowie was not “real” and to her “real” in “rock-and-roll
is the only fantasy that counts.”
96
Yet Bowie deliberately played with notions of reality
and truth. He admitted to lying and changing his answers in order to confuse interviewers
and he constructed a string of public personas while maintaining an elusive self.
97
He
rejected group affiliations in favor of developing his own individualism saying “I’m not a
queen; I’m not into the scene of it….what’s important [is to] be a person, an
individual.”
98
Individual identity then, was not innate or fixed. Rather, it was something
that could be achieved, experimented with, and expressed through style and performance.
In 1972, Grace Lichtenstein voiced the fears of what gender-bending in glam rock
signified for the culture in a New York Times article about Alice Cooper, David Bowie,
and the New York Dolls: “there is wide disparity in the styles of the groups….What
unites them is their use of standard hard rock music as a framework for kinky lyrics,
bizarre costumes, garish make-up, and, most of all, flamboyant stage shows that blend
95
Tom Zito, “Was There Anywhere for Rock to Go but Down?” The Washington Post, March 11, 1973.
96
Willis, “Bowie’s Limitations.”
97
Crowe, “Candid Conversation: An Outrageous Conversation with the Actor, Rock Singer and Sexual
Switch-Hitter.”
98
Barbara A. Staib, “David Bowie—That Strange Glitter,” Ingenue, March 1973.
184
homo-eroticism, and sado-masochism into a goulash of degeneracy.”
99
The various terms
given to glam rock, often used interchangeably, reflected the cultural anxiety about and
the conflation of rock music, men in drag, and homosexuality: glitter rock, camp rock,
fag rock, gay rock, transvestite rock, art rock, decadent rock, freak rock, and in the case
of Alice Cooper shock rock and violence rock.
To others, Bowie infused rock music with a new rebelliousness at a time when it
was becoming a major global business and was thus losing its edge. To Simon Frith,
David Bowie had created the perfect rock star, “remote, androgynous and thrilling. The
image that kept occurring to us was of a rock phoenix risen from the ashes.”
100
Bowie’s
use of artifice was seen as an insightful commentary on the realities of the rock music
community which assumed the pose of authenticity but which had always been a
commercial venture to varying degrees.
101
In 1973, when Bowie had a total of six albums
in Billboard magazine’s top 200 bestsellers, Robert Hilburn named Bowie 1972’s Artist
of the Year for the freshness and imagination he brought to rock. In 1972 RCA re-issued
two earlier Bowie albums as part of their press drive—Space Oddity and The Man Who
Fell to Earth. Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust were among the year’s top 10 albums, and
Bowie wrote “All the Young Dudes” and produced the album of the same name for Mott
the Hoople. “All the Young Dudes,” a song about a glitter rocker at odds with the
revolutionary 1960s beloved of his older brother, became a glitter anthem. Bowie also
99
Grace Lichtenstein, “Alice Cooper? David Bowie? Ugh! And Ugh Again!” New York Times, September
24, 1972.
100
Simon Frith, “Letter from Britain: Join Together with the Band,” Creem, September 1972, 32.
101
Dave Laing and Simon Frith, “Bowie Zowie: Two Views of the Glitter Prince of Rock,” Let it Rock,
June 1973.
185
produced Lou Reed’s album Transformer, the album from which Reed had his first
commercial hit with “Walk on the Wild Side.”
102
The song made the top 20 in the U.S.
charts and was the first song played on AM radio to include homosexuality, prostitution,
and transvestism.
103
Because of Reed’s association with Warhol and the fact that he was a
precursor of the glam rock movement, he did a lot to make bisexuality “hip.”
As the result of glam rock’s commercial success, sexual ambiguity became more
explicit in mainstream music acts. According to Jim Farber, “[a]t its commercial zenith
(1974-75), glitter shone through nearly every genre of pop. It dictated fashion and
loosened behavior: The more fey an act, the more media play it got, affecting everyone
from hard rock acts…to R&B groups.”
104
In this way, glam rock spread up from a
subcultural phenomenon to mainstream rock. Record companies moved to capitalize
further on the phenomenon. In the U.S. Jobriath was packaged as the American Bowie.
But explicitly homosexual glam musicians did not enjoy popular success.
105
This failure
points to the continued level of homophobia in the culture. But it may also indicate the
appeal of musicians who embodied ambiguity. Ambiguity both reflected the uncertainty
of the times and represented possibilities.
Conclusion
In the context of women’s and gay liberation, and by combining an eclectic array
of influences from Little Richard, the Beats, nihilism, the artistic avant garde, and pop
102
Hilburn, “David Bowie Rated Top Recording Artist of 1972.”
103
Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol, 152.
104
Farber, “The Androgynous Mirror: Glam, Glitter and Sexual Identity.”
105
Block, “The Confessions of a Gay Rocker.”
186
culture, glam rock performed the possibilities of individual liberation from repressive sex
roles. Alice Cooper expressed gender confusion through shocking stage shows that used
cross-dressing to explore and challenge the violence of the masculine mystique. Ziggy
Stardust communicated escape through performing as a third-gendered alien. Through
embracing artificial personas, glam rockers challenged notions of natural or authentic sex
roles and showed that gender and sexual orientation were not necessarily connected. By
demonstrating that androgynous men could be powerful, successful, and attractive
cultural agents, glam rockers provided role models for new masculine styles and revealed
the potential in embracing—and commodifying—“otherness.” Glam rock made visible
and fashionable forms of sexuality that had been previously considered deviant, and
through its visual style created a zone of safety and permission for individuals to explore
and express their own gendered and sexual identities.
Yet while glam rock’s ambiguities meant freedom for some, others were
concerned about the implications of unisex identities for American stability. The next
chapter examines the evangelical response to the increasingly permissive sexual culture
and to the challenges posed by feminists to traditional sex roles.
187
CHAPTER 5
“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVE HIM”: EVANGELICAL SEX ROLES
AND THE RISE OF THE TOTAL WOMAN
Each of you has a body, soul, and spirit. The Bible calls this entity a “spiritual
house.” The outside of your house is your frame—your body. Your husband just
loves your frame. In fact, he craves it. And that’s O.K. because God made him
that way. Inside of your house is your soul. This is who you are; what you think;
what you feel, how you say it. And your spirit is your Power Source and
determines what you will become. When all areas of your house are working
properly…the result is a warm, responsive “Total Woman.”
—Marabel Morgan
1
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make
him an help meet...
—Genesis 2:18
2
Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman begins by describing the steadily
disintegrating married existence of Marabel and Charlie Morgan, a state of affairs for
which their courtship had not prepared her. When Charlie returned home from work each
day, he brought a cloud of tension that permeated the home and contributed to a barrier of
silence between them. Marabel was grouchy and uptight. Communication for the couple
had become perfunctory, and their sexual relationship had lost all passion. One night
when Marabel protested against attending a social event Charlie had arranged, they had a
terrible fight. Icily, he instructed her that he would no longer tolerate being challenged on
his decisions. From that moment on, she was to follow his lead without disagreement.
1
Marabel Morgan, “How to Improve Your Marriage,” transcript of television program Warmer QUBE,
Columbus, Ohio, January 19, 1978. Transcript included as an appendix in Janet Larentia Fallon, “A
Rhetorical Analysis of the Total Woman Movement” (Master of Arts thesis, The Ohio State University,
1979), 125.
2
Quoted in Billy Graham, “Jesus and the Liberated Woman,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1970, 42.
188
The argument was a turning point for Marabel, who realized it was time to make
significant changes in her life. She decided to educate herself by reading books on
marriage, business, psychology, and sex. She also studied the Bible. Throughout her
readings she saw a pattern—a set of principles—that she used to transform herself into a
“Total Woman,” with “stunning results” for her marriage.
3
Marabel Morgan chose to
submit to her husband and accept her God-made female role as a wife and mother. In the
same year that radical feminists were making headlines for their push for women’s
liberation from patriarchal institutions and their repudiation of biologically determined
sex roles, Morgan began teaching Total Woman courses to other women in a Southern
Baptist Church in Miami, Florida. Excitement spread and enrollments grew. Although
several Christian sex advice books had appeared in the 1960s, they were written by men.
4
Morgan’s female perspective played a significant role in her appeal to women.
In 1971, during an interview about her Total Woman courses, Morgan told the
Phil Donahue show’s audience about a moment of inspiration when she greeted her
husband at the door wearing pink babydoll pajamas and white boots. He was so excited
that he chased her around the dinner table as their two young daughters looked on,
3
Morgan’s personal journey as reflected in the way she told the story of becoming a Total Woman
mirrored the kind of conversion experience that Michael Lienesch argues is central to religious
conservative thinking. See Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 23. For a discussion of the conversion experience in
evangelical women’s self-help literature see Jennifer L. Heller, “The Search for Something More:
Evangelical Women, Middle-Class Marriage, and The “Problem That Has No Name” in Popular Advice
Books of the 1970s” (Ph.D., University of Kansas, 2007).
4
See, for example, Herbert J. Miles, Sexual Happiness in Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing
House, 1967).
189
delighted at their parent’s newfound happiness.
5
Costumes, Morgan found, were a terrific
tool for creating an exciting, unpredictable, mutually pleasurable sex life—and good sex
was crucial to a happy marriage. Most importantly, Morgan argued, marital sex was
endorsed by God. Morgan became an audience favorite, and her course became more
popular. The Total Woman, the book based on the course, published by a small Christian
press in 1973, bypassed the Watergate expose All the President’s Men to become the
biggest-selling non-fiction book of 1974. In 1975 the mainstream media realized that
while the women’s liberation movement had been garnering attention and generating
debate, another women’s movement had been quietly growing in the suburbs of the
United States.
Despite growing literature on the origins and rise of the Religious Right in the
1970s, few works explore the vital role of gender and sexuality in the era’s debates.
6
Examinations of conservative women’s participation have focused on the political
mobilization—of women like Phyllis Schlafly—against the Equal Rights Amendment
and on anti-abortion religious coalitions.
7
Yet there was also a significant cultural
5
Morgan argued that it was good for children to see attraction between their parents as it would set a
positive heterosexual model.
6
Marjorie Spruill argues that the role of gender in the political rightward shift has been underexamined in
“Gender and America’s Right Turn,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed.
Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
7
McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right; Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the
New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). On the fears for the American family and the
conservative backlash see Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National
Decline, 1968–1980. On the vital role of evangelicals in the rise of the Religious Right see Paul Boyer,
“The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism,” in Rightward Bound: Making America
Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2008). William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in
America (New York: Broadway Books, 2005).
190
mobilization of evangelical women that impacted the transformation of gender and
sexuality in the 1970s.
8
Although many Evangelical Christians believed in women’s
equal opportunity, many were also concerned that female and homosexual liberation
threatened the American family and thus threatened social and national stability. The
increases in divorce rates and defacto relationships were taken as evidence of the social
impact of gender and sexual liberation. In this context, evangelical marital advice
literature and courses flourished during the 1970s. The literature and courses promoted
the Bible’s gender roles and sexual morality, which were then framed in terms of
individual liberation. Just as groupies found freedoms within a male-dominated culture,
white married evangelical women found freedom within their marriages. Unlike women’s
liberationists who sought to reform or transform sex roles and patriarchal institutions,
Total Women chose to transform themselves.
9
Like groupies, Total Women contributed
to changing the belief that women were sexually passive: Total Women were sexually
active but only within the confines of marriage. By taking the increasing social
permissiveness of the era and the feminist emphasis on women’s sexual pleasure into a
religious context, evangelical women like Marabel Morgan and her advocates contributed
both to the liberalization of sex for women as well as to a reassertion of traditional and
8
R. Marie Griffith examines the cultural mobilization of women in the Pentacostal community in God’s
Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, 1997). Brenda Basher and Margaret Bendroth study fundamentalist women. See Brenda E. Brasher,
Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1998) and Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism & Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993).
9
For a discussion of the rise of individualism in American religion during the 1970s see Wade Clark Roof,
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
191
“natural” gender roles based on difference and inequality: dominant masculinity and
submissive femininity, contained ideally in a heterosexual, patriarchal family.
This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the way that evangelical culture
struggled with and adapted to social change in the post-war decades. In the 1950s,
popular preachers like Billy Graham led an evangelical revival which gained momentum
in the 1960s because of an increasing youth audience. The evangelical youth movement
that Graham dubbed “the Jesus Generation” brought hippie styles and rock music into
Christian culture, renewing Jesus as a cultural icon at the same time that radical feminists
called for the dissolution of patriarchy. By adapting countercultural forms like rock music
to Christian themes and crusades, evangelical Christianity gained new social relevance
and increased its audience. Yet despite the flexibility evangelical Christianity
demonstrated with some cultural forms, it remained resistant to changes in gender roles
and extra-marital sexual permissiveness. The chapter goes on to examine sex role
ideologies and debates about them among Christian feminists and evangelical leaders.
Although there was growing support for recognizing women’s equality through the
ordination of female ministers, conservative ideologies based on the notion of biblical
inerrency maintained that women were secondary and subordinate to men. Through an
examination of Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, its success, and the various
reactions to it, the third section of the chapter shows one way in which conservative
evangelical gender ideologies were repackaged using some of the language of women’s
rights and sexual liberalization and gained popular appeal.
192
Changes in evangelical culture and the impact of the Jesus Generation
An evangelical revival began slowly in the late 1940s. After the horrors of
World War II, with fears about Communist invasion on the rise after North Korea
invaded its south and the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb, a young preacher named
Billy Graham told a captive audience that the Communist threat was God’s retribution for
America’s immoral turn—its sinful materialism and secularism. The news media ran with
the story and propelled Graham to national attention. The evangelicalism Graham
promoted was based on three core principles: a powerful conversion experience, a belief
in the bible’s authority, and trust in the workings of biblical doctrines.
10
Soon Graham’s
crusades had attracted a large following. Throughout the 1950s, more religious leaders
emerged who spoke to similar issues. In 1951, Bill Bright established the
interdenominational college group Campus Crusade for Christ which sought to promote
evangelicalism.
11
In 1956 Carl F. Henry and Billy Graham established Christianity
Today, a journal intended to assist the revival by bringing evangelical thought to
Christians of all denominations.
12
The 1960s was the decade in which evangelicals gained momentum, in large part
because of the energy brought by a new youth audience. Social movements of the 1960s,
in particular civil rights and the anti-war movement, inspired activism among Christian
10
Erling Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born Again Christianity,
1960-1981 (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1981), 7.
11
John G. Turner, Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
12
Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born Again Christianity, 1960-
1981.
193
clergy and youth, shifting a culture that had traditionally avoided it towards political
involvement.
13
New religious movements emerged, including those that embraced Zen
Buddhism and meditation, and religious-based communes. Of these, the Jesus movement
had the most significant impact on evangelical culture. In 1967, as radical feminism took
shape, the Jesus movement began with its members variously referred to as Jesus Freaks,
Jesus People, and Street Christians. The Jesus movement was an evangelical movement
that comprised young people disillusioned with the 1960s counterculture, and with the
New Left—in that way they shared common origins with radical feminists, gay
liberationists, and even glam rockers.
14
The movement emerged most prominently in
California, where young people began turning to Jesus Christ after the various attractions
of the 1960s—including Eastern religions, occult practices, political groups, and
hallucinogenic drugs—left them spiritually empty, and in some cases, physically broken.
For them, Jesus, with his long hair and hippy style, offered personally identifiable
redemption in the maelstrom of choice. A contemporary book commented that for the
Jesus movement “[t]he unconverted life is described as confused by countless options,
symbols, and alluring paths.”
15
Accordingly, the catch-cry of this Christian youth
movement was “One Way: the Jesus Way!”
13
Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
14
On the failure of New Left politics in the counterculture and the role of Christian liberalism in the search
for an authentic existence see Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New
Left in America; James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (N.Y.: Routledge,
1997); and Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American
Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Routledge, 2002).
15
Robert S. Ellwood Jr., One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), 54.
194
The Jesus movement rejected sexual permissiveness and human authority and
sought to connect directly to divine authority through a personal relationship with Jesus
via biblical teachings.
16
Important to them was the sense of an authentic connection to
religion, hence they emphasized experiential Christianity, an emphasis that contributed to
the revival of “born again” Christians. A new underground Christian newspaper The
Hollywood Free Paper emerged in 1969 to cater to the movement and soon had a
circulation of more than 1 million per month. New evangelical churches were founded
that attracted the evangelical youth as well as adult and middle-class audiences who were
attracted to the new style.
17
Although evangelical conservatives were concerned about the influence of youth
styles on evangelical life, other Christian crusaders saw how the use of countercultural
forms like rock music could attract and mobilize followers that the traditional church
could not reach. They wanted to save souls and counter moral decay more than they
wanted orthodox routes to salvation. One pastor’s wife reflected their viewpoint when
she said that she would rather see young people “excited about God than drugs. I’m
conservative but I’m for whatever reaches them for Christ.”
18
Billy Graham exemplified
the possibilities of expanding the religious flock through intergenerational connection.
Graham allied himself with the Jesus Movement, became involved in Christian rock
concerts, and took on a more permissive tone in his public addresses. In 1969, Graham
16
“The New Rebel Cry: Jesus Is Coming!” Time, June 21, 1971.
17
McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.
18
David Fortney, “The Jesus People: Their Now Crusade Gains Followers,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1971.
195
appeared as a special guest at the Miami Rock Festival. He was invited by the promoter
who wanted to give the festival an air of respectability. Once there, Graham got a feel for
the crowd by circulating in a disguise. He sensed in them a righteous rejection of
materialism and a desire for “something of the soul.” On stage Graham sold Jesus as the
ultimate individual rebel. “Jesus was a nonconformist,” he told the audience, encouraging
them to avoid the ephemeral high of drugs and instead “get high on Jesus,” “tune in to
God…Turn on to His power.”
19
Three years later Graham appeared on stage at Explo ‘72, an evangelical
conference organized by the interdenominational college group Campus Crusade for
Christ and held in Dallas that ended with a concert that was dubbed the “Christian
Woodstock” or “religious Woodstock.”
20
The event exemplified the evangelical
movement’s appropriation of language and style from rock culture and sexual liberation.
By day, young people studied the bible and at night they listened to Christian rock
headlined by Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. “Operation Penetration” was the code
name given for the follow-up strategy in which each Explo participant was expected to
recruit five others with the broader goal of converting young people around the U.S. by
1976 and the world by 1980.
21
Christianity Today claimed that as the result of young
19
Billy Graham, Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (San Francisco, Calif.:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 420.
20
Ellwood Jr., One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning, 116; Turner, Bill Bright & Campus
Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America.
21
Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change. Larry
Eskridge, ‘“One Way’: Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture,”
Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998).
196
people connecting with Christ through rock, record numbers of youth were entering
ministries at home and overseas.
22
It was rock music that brought these new trends in evangelical Christianity to
national media attention. In 1971, just five years after one of its cover stories asked “Is
God Dead?” Time magazine reported on the Jesus Revolution.
23
The article connected the
successful rock operas Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell to the “God Rock”
movement and the rise of the Jesus People in the United States. The same year, a Life
cover story on “the groovy Christians of Rye” in New York commented on the success of
Superstar. It connected the new openness to Christian themes in secular culture with the
rise of “God rock” and suggested that the combination signaled the potential growth of
the evangelical movement.
24
Jesus Christ Superstar highlighted Christian gender roles and demonstrated the
common ground between rock music culture and evangelical Christianity: both
positioned women as helpmeets. Conceived by British composers Andrew Lloyd Webber
and Tim Rice as a concept album in 1970, Superstar placed the biblical Jesus in the
22
“Discovering Jesus, 1973,” Christianity Today, August 31, 1973. By the end of the decade Jesus Rock
had become its own industry. Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), although separate from the
mainstream rock industry, paralleled it culturally and commercially through commodifying Jesus, and
using media networks to spread the gospel. See Jay R. Howard and John M. Streck, Apostles of Rock
(Lexington, KY, 1999), 30. On the impact of JCS on the rise of CCM see William David Romanowski,
“Rock ’n’ Religion: A Sociocultural Analysis of the Contemporary Christian Music Industry”; (Ph.D. diss.,
Bowling Green State University; 1990).
23
“The New Rebel Cry: Jesus Is Coming!”
24
Jane Howard, “The Groovy Christians,” Life, May 14, 1971.
197
milieu of rock music stardom.
25
It made explicit themes of idolatry, celebrity, and gender
roles implicit in both narratives. Superstar told the story of Jesus’ last seven days. Its
three main characters—Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene, were—consciously or not—
invested as the central sites of sociopolitical meaning. The rock opera portrays Jesus as a
man struggling with his identity and his destiny. Once sure of his purpose, his last days
are filled with doubt about the meaning of his life. Judas questions whether or not Jesus is
a messiah. Concerned that Jesus’ followers will revolt against him when they realize he is
a man and not a god, Judas betrays Jesus in order, he explains, to save them all. Mary
Magdalene is styled as Jesus’ closest ally and as an adoring groupie—albeit one who has
renounced her sexually promiscuous ways. In the song “I don’t know how to love him”
she expresses confusion about her role in relation to Jesus: she is strongly attracted to him
but is aware that they cannot have a sexual relationship. Unlike the male characters in the
rock opera Magdalene does not have a rock voice: her songs are lullabies and with them
she supports and soothes the men in the story.
By taking on some countercultural styles evangelical culture modified its public
image and gained new followers, but, like the 1960s counterculture, it maintained a
gender order that placed women second in a hierarchy of power. In the early years of the
1970s, as the women’s and homosexual liberation movements pushed for changes in the
existing gender and sexual order, women’s roles in evangelical culture also came under
scrutiny. They proved particularly resistant to changes in gender ideology.
25
Ellis Nassour and Richard Broderick, Rock Opera: The Creation of Jesus Christ Superstar, from Record
Album to Broadway Show and Motion Picture (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973); “A Reverent Rock
Opera,” Life, May 28, 1971.
198
Sex role ideology in evangelical culture
In 1970 Billy Graham responded to the women’s liberation movement with an
article published in the Ladies’ Home Journal.
26
Titled “Jesus and the Liberated
Woman,” the article summarized the women’s liberation position as one which argued
that women’s rights and privileges as people had been excluded by subjugation to men, a
subjugation Graham characterized as “bearing children, keeping house, sleeping with her
husband…enhancing his life.”
27
Quoting Betty Friedan’s notion of the feminine
mystique—the “problem that has no name”—Graham argued that the real problem was a
spiritual one. Women—and men—were bored and frustrated because of their failure to
accept their “God-given” roles and the “spiritual laws laid down in the Old and New
Testaments.” The women’s liberation movement echoed the permissiveness of a society
that had abandoned Biblical morality. In the modern world, pleasure had substituted
discipline, success had replaced duty, and nonsensical human notions had replaced God’s
word. Social problems would be solved only when humans acknowledged and took
responsibility for their disobedience and returned to God’s plan.
Graham acknowledged that some women had to work to support families, that
some old or single women found purpose in work, and that some unusually talented and
driven women could manage to work full-time outside the home. Graham believed that
these women deserved respect, dignity, and equal rewards. But he was adamant that these
women not lose sight of the fact that career alone could not bring them true fulfillment.
He was careful to say that he was not against women’s freedom, but he was absolute that
26
Graham, “Jesus and the Liberated Woman.”
27
Ibid., 40.
199
women had God-ordained roles to which they must adhere. Key to Graham’s argument
was the reliance on the Scriptures as the word of God: the Bible stood as evidence of
nature as God created it, including the order of the sex roles. In that regard, the sex roles
were outlined in the Old Testament with Adam and Eve: Eve was created from Adam’s
rib as a helpmeet to him; she was thus second in the human order. Their assigned roles
were as father, husband, and breadwinner, and wife and mother. Historically, when there
was deviation from these roles there were serious consequences. As helpmeet, woman
complemented man’s biological and emotional strength with her “feminine tenderness
and loyalty.” In turn, she would be completed by man’s strength and leadership. The
husband’s first loyalty was to his wife; the wife was to be loyal to her husband and
second in command. Quoting the New Testament, Graham argued that as the church was
subject to Christ, so too women were to be subject to their husbands. But Graham also
noted the role of men: just as Christ gave himself for the church, husbands should love
their wives. “In defense of women’s liberation,” Graham continued, “I also suggest that a
man’s love for his wife should include recognition of her as an individual, with her own
personality and her own needs, including the need for appreciation, understanding and
real respect.”
28
He concluded that true liberation is separate sexes at one with God.
According to Graham, most women with whom he spoke said that they wanted to
be feminine. They did not want, for example, to fight in trenches or be drafted. Yet they
needed to have pride re-instilled in their roles. The competitive secular ethic had caused
them to defer to “specialists,” such as pediatrician and parenting expert Dr. Spock, for
28
Ibid., 42.
200
advice, and they had lost the pride of motherhood. Women needed to see the potential
within their roles: “As queens in the home they wield the powerful scepters of faith, trust,
loyalty and justice and impart them to their husband and children.”
29
For this, they could
turn to the Bible, which had uplifted women wherever its teaching spread. Graham
argued that in the West, because of Christianity, women had more freedom than
elsewhere in the world. The New Testament taught monogamy, a factor that gave women
a new freedom, and the women of the Bible, for example Mary with her adoring worship
of God and her selfless love of her family, were important role models. Crucially, Jesus
had been a liberator of women. He communicated with outcast women and uplifted them.
Yet while Christ brought women out of objectification, he did not free them from the
home. Rather, he encouraged women to be good wives and mothers.
30
In his book on the Jesus Generation Graham denied that society was going
through a sexual revolution. Instead, he described the times as characterized by a “sexual
tempest,” a “sex pollution.” God ordained and blessed sex but only within the confines of
marriage: sex was for procreation and union, and therefore homosexuality was wrong.
Graham encouraged self-restraint, arguing that energy from sexual urges could be better
directed into other areas of life. He quoted the Rolling Stones in support of his argument
that sin brings no satisfaction.
31
He used Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix as cautionary tales
29
Ibid., 114.
30
Ibid., 42. For discussions on Jesus in American culture see Richard Wightman Fox, Jesus in America:
Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Stephen Prothero,
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003).
31
Billy Graham, The Jesus Generation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971), 143.
201
for the incorrect use of sex: they were “perhaps the wildest exponents of sensuality,” and
both died young. Christ had a virgin mother and no human father—as such he did not
inherit sin. Here, despite having said that sex was blessed, Graham communicated an
implicit connection between sex and sin.
In these writings, Graham was not only responding to youth culture and the
women’s movement in the wider culture, but to arguments about equality within
Christian culture, including those that were being developed by a number of Christian
feminist theologians. From 1940 to 1970 there had been a shift toward more liberal
gender attitudes in evangelicalism: the religious culture became more accepting of
women working outside the home, and some leaders complimented men who took on a
share of the housework.
32
In the early 1960s conversations began in the evangelical
community about developing new Sunday School materials that presented non-
stereotypical gender roles. Christianity Today (the largest evangelical magazine in the
U.S.) wrote an editorial on the issue of women’s ordination. The writer noted that some
denominations were beginning to recognize that they were allowing women to preach in
foreign ministries but not allowing them to preach at home. The correct response should
be a focus on each individual’s fulfillment of her potential rather than on treating women
as a group and making their status a rights-based issue.
33
32
See David Harrington Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American
Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Sally K. Gallagher, “The
Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism,” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 3 (2004).
33
Editorial, “First at the Cradle, Last at the Cross,” Christianity Today, March 16, 1973.
202
Increasingly Christian feminist writings appeared in Christian publications.
Influenced by the women’s movement, second-wave evangelical feminists emerged from
progressive evangelical institutions, and in 1973 they began organizing: the feminist
evangelical newsletter The Daughters of Sarah was founded in 1974, and the first
Evangelical Women’s Caucus (EWC) was held in 1975.
34
Their agenda was similar to
that of liberal feminists: they sought educational and employment reform and greater
equality at home; they rejected the notion of natural sex roles and emphasized instead the
socially constructed nature of women’s roles. They differed from secular feminists in that
their arguments stemmed from theological readings of the bible, focusing on the biblical
story that men and women were created in the image of God and were thus equal. They
coupled this with analyses from emerging social science literature on gender.
One of the most prominent feminist theologians, the Roman Catholic radical
Mary Daly argued that women’s liberation could transform Christian consciousness by
first declaring the death of “God the Father.”
35
For Daly, the Judeo-Christian tradition
had legitimated sex-role imbalance and a patriarchal society, and the women’s revolution
was “the greatest single potential challenge to rid itself of its oppressive tendencies or go
out of business.”
36
Patriarchal religions offered “the false security of alienation, that is, of
34
Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism, 110.
35
Mary Daly, “After the Death of God the Father,” Commonweal, March 12, 1971, 7-10. On the
relationship between women’s liberation and the Catholic Church see Daly, “Women and the Catholic
Church,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed.
Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). Daly’s first book The Church and the Second Sex (1968)
argued for equality for women in the church. See Beyond God the Father. For a discussion of Daly’s
rhetorical strategies see Krista Ratcliffe, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions:
Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 65-106.
36
Daly, “After the Death of God the Father.”
203
self-reduction to stereotyped roles.”
37
She hoped that women’s liberation would remove
the notion that Jesus was a “God-man” and doubted that the renewal of interest in Jesus
as a divine man would endure. Religion would have to adapt and generate new and
relevant symbols to the changed culture—such as a Father-Mother God and other
“bisexual” (androgynous) imagery—and hopefully focus on the divine in all individuals.
Here Daly showed her difference from evangelicals who held to the Bible on the basis
that it was without error. To her the fixation on symbols was in itself idolatrous, and
authentic faith should exist regardless of the forms religion took in a social context.
38
Daly was interested in placing personhood first, above sexual differentiation. She argued
that “By becoming whole persons women can generate a counterforce to the stereotype of
the leader as they challenge the artificial polarization of human characteristics.”
39
For
Daly, the primary goal was for women to become whole.
Another prominent feminist theologian, Rosemary Ruether, argued that the male
clergy was the “last bastion” of a male consciousness characterized by individualism,
domination, and dualism. This problematic consciousness bred prejudice and hatred
against women and other minorities.
40
In another article she explored the development of
the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood in which women were elevated as pure,
37
Ibid.
38
Similarly, Methodist Sheila D. Collins called on the church to distinguish between its true values and
those that were “cultural accretions,” namely the unequal view of males and females. See Sheila D. Collins,
“Women and the Church: Poor Psychology, Worse Theology,” Christian Century, December 30, 1970.
39
Daly, “After the Death of God the Father.”
40
James Hitchcock, “Women’s Liberation: Tending toward Idolatry,” The Christian Century, September
22, 1971, 1105.
204
domestic, maternal beings yet were simultaneously excluded from the public sphere and
from passionate feelings. It was a class ideal that attempted to normalize the bourgeois
woman and by corollary placed the working-class woman as one who had fallen from the
sanctified home. Ruether wondered whether the increasing focus on individual
fulfillment was self-motivated or whether it was driven by churches, big business, and
government as part of a scheme to make people turn to their personal lives for salvation
rather than focusing on reforming—or revolutionizing—a system that alienated them
from their work.
41
Although Christian feminist arguments were not uncritically accepted, the
evangelical community acknowledged their importance. In 1974 Letha Scanzoni and
Nancy Hardesty’s book on evangelical feminism, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical
Approach to Women’s Liberation, was published and was named by Eternity magazine
the most important book of the year. Along with Paul K. Jewett’s book Man as Male and
Female which argued that St Paul’s sexism reflected his training as a rabbinical scholar
and thus portrayed outdated gender roles rather than divine inspiration, they essentially
challenged a core tenet of evangelical Protestantism: biblical inerrency.
42
Elsewhere
Scanzoni argued that the public image of women’s liberation as anti-male and anti-
marriage missed the point of the fight for women’s equal rights, a fight that was not
incompatible with Christianity. She reminded readers that the first feminist movement
41
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Commonweal, November 9, 1973. On
Ruether’s theories see Nicholas John Ansell, “The Woman Will Overcome the Warrior”: A Dialogue with
the Christian/Feminist Theology of Rosemary Radford Ruether (Lanham: University Press of America,
1994).
42
Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born Again Christianity, 1960-
1981, 60-67.
205
had come out of abolitionism and had strong links to Protestant Christianity. Drawing on
arguments made by nineteenth-century feminists, including the Grimke sisters and
Lucretia Mott, she systematically refuted the standard biblical arguments used to support
male dominance (the creation story, the writings of St. Paul, and the way Jesus treated
women) and concluded that there was much biblical evidence for the equal rights and
treatment of men and women.
43
Yet there was tension over the fundamental definition of gender roles: the biblical
reinterpretations by Christian feminists were seen as nothing less than attacks on the
foundations of traditional evangelicalism. Refuting any notion of biblical error, Harold
Lindsell, editor of Christianity Today, supported the notion of male dominance and
female submission within marriage based on the order in which God created Adam and
Eve. To Lindsell feminism was a rejection of God’s authoritative sex roles, and women
would find true liberation in embracing their roles as wives and mothers.
44
Anyone who
doubted the bible did not deserve to call themselves evangelicals. Samuel H. Nafzger of
the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod wrote to Lindsell in support, stating that “[e]qual
rights for women is a commendable goal, but not at the cost of the denigration of what
the infallible Scriptures have to say about the roles and relationships inherent in God’s
43
Letha Scanzoni, “The Feminists and the Bible,” Christianity Today, February 2, 1973. In an article
written for the Christian Century, Robin Scroggs called for a radical reinterpretation of St Paul, arguing
that he was in fact a women’s liberationist. See Robin Scroggs, “Paul: Chauvinist or Liberationist?”
Christian Century, March 15, 1972.
44
Harold D. Lindsell, “Egalitarianism and Scriptural Infallibility,” Christianity Today, March 26, 1976. For
his defense of the bible see Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub.
House, 1976).
206
creation of the two sexes.”
45
Although there were criticisms of these arguments from
within the evangelical community, Lindsell’s position at Christianity Today and
endorsement by Billy Graham gave his judgments enormous power in the evangelical
community.
46
More broadly, conservative evangelicals like Lindsell worked to discredit
evangelical feminists by arguing that they were taking on secular feminist arguments at
the cost of their faith. Historian of religion, James Hitchcock, criticized feminists for
using their faith for political purposes. He accused Rosemary Ruether of perpetuating
gender stereotypes through her definition of male consciousness. To him, Mary Daly’s
belief that women’s liberation would undo a supreme being was ludicrous—where Daly
thought God was a patriarchal construct, Hitchcock argued that no human action could
impact God who was a real spiritual being. Although to him it was clear that women
should be ordained, he thought that the request for overturning Christianity in its current
form was a rejection of Christianity altogether.
47
As these theoretical issues were debated, social changes provided an immediate
focus for evangelical attention. From 1972 onward, the Equal Rights Amendment became
a central point in evangelicals’ conversations, tying together fears about changing gender
roles, legalized abortion, and homosexual rights. They argued that its ratification would
have radically detrimental effects on the American family. Christian leaders encouraged
45
Samuel H. Nafzger, “Letter,” April 5, 1976. Harold Lindsell Papers, Billy Graham Center Archives,
Wheaton College.
46
For a discussion of the divide created in the evangelical community see Jorstad, Evangelicals in the
White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born Again Christianity, 1960-1981, 53-59.
47
Hitchcock, “Women’s Liberation: Tending toward Idolatry.”
207
Christians to use political action to oppose it.
48
They saw the ERA as an attack on God’s
image, “for it is an attack on the unalterable distinctions God Himself created between
men and women.”
49
Conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly and Christian leaders argued
that the ratification of the ERA would usher in a host of social problems including: a
unisex public culture in which women and men would share the same facilities such as
restrooms and be subject to immoral temptations; rampant androgyny that would defy
God-made sex differences; abortion-on-demand; and campaigns for homosexual marriage
and other homosexual civil rights.
50
The arguments against the ERA also cleverly
deployed a woman’s rights stance by arguing that the amendment would remove
protections for women such as child support. While these issues politicized some
Christians who had previously avoided political activism, a cultural phenomenon was
growing that would have a significant role in re-asserting biblical sex roles, countering
the liberalizing culture, and invigorating evangelicalism.
51
Evangelical self-help and The Total Woman
Beginning in the mid-1960s and becoming widely popular in the 1970s,
evangelical personal development courses began springing up around the United States.
48
For a discussion of the way that the ERA battle revived the political right see Donald T. Critchlow,
Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2005) and McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. On women against
the ERA see Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of Era: A State
and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
49
Rev. Peter G. Doyle, “True Liberation—or Bondage to a Lie?” undated. Harold Lindsell Papers, Billy
Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College.
50
“Era and Homosexual ‘Marriages,’” The Phyllis Schlafly Report, September, 1974; “Why Virginia
Rejected Era,” The Phyllis Schlafly Report, June, 1974.
51
Gallagher, “The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism.”
208
Seeking to bring people into the evangelical fold, they shared a focus on marriage,
family, and individual spirituality. Leaders of these courses argued that ignoring God’s
intent produced tense marriages, divorces, and worst of all, homosexual children. The
chain of command must be followed: God is at the top and all must to submit to him and
his will. Although these courses and the principles they promoted were not feminist, they
drew a predominantly female audience and provided the framework for a different kind
of women’s movement: one that resisted the changes in sexual culture. Many women saw
their parents’ family values attacked by the sexual revolution and then by the women’s
movement, and they wanted to defend a way of life that they had assumed was above
question. As they saw it, the fault lay not with the institutions of marriage and
motherhood but with themselves. The majority of these women were white, middle class,
and college-educated—from the same socio-economic group as many in the women’s
liberation movement. The key difference, though, was their conservative religious belief.
Although the women were not necessarily members of fundamentalist churches—their
membership included Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian—they believed that the
Bible was the solution to life’s problems.
In Dallas, Reverend Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts offered
seminars that embraced traditional evangelical beliefs combined with new trends in
psychology: his lectures assumed biblical accuracy, taught the doctrine of submission,
and included units on self image, family, conscience, rights, freedom (through morals),
success, friendship, dating, and commitment.
52
Gothard founded his Institute in 1969
52
Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born Again Christianity, 1960-
1981, 92.
209
with 65 people and by 1974, purely through word of mouth, drew 20,000 people to see
him speak at the Dallas Convention Center.
His success inspired others such as Tim Timmons and Susan Key to begin similar
programs. Susan Key taught a course called “Eve Reborn,” which was modelled on
Gothard’s seminars, and, like his, taught that women must submit to men, even to the
point that if a husband had a mistress, the wife must not criticize him but must become
even more submissive.
53
By the mid-1970s Baptist minister Tim Timmons’s seminar on
“God’s game plan for family living” developed a devoted following in Dallas, and
Timmons travelled most weekends to offer it in different cities around the United States.
Timmons had worked for Campus Crusade for Christ and graduated from Dallas
Theological Seminary. His seminars were sponsored by Christian Family Life, Inc.,
which he helped to found. Although he regularly criticized countercultural people and
Jews, a local reporter characterized him as the least regressive of the seminar teachers in
the region.
54
Timmons focused on the doctrine of women’s submission to men but also
emphasized men’s obligations, just as Billy Graham had done. The male is “God’s
representative authority in the family,” Timmons told his audience, but a husband’s
sacrificial love for his wife would prevent him from using his power against her in any
negative way. His earlier seminars used the Song of Solomon to discuss sex, but when
audiences found it too strong, some of his students asked him to tone it down. As a result,
53
Gregory Curtis, “Retreat from Liberation,” Texas Monthly, June 1975, 92.
54
Ibid.
210
he shifted to a general message that once the spiritual side of marriage is taken care, good
sex would naturally be the result.
55
Unlike these marriage advisors, Marabel Morgan offered a way to incorporate
aspects of the new sexual culture into a Christian family without compromising biblical
doctrine. As National Review later argued “Christians, on the defensive in a radicalized
society, have stressed traditional religious strictures against permissive sexuality. In
doing so they have tended to bring repression home with them.”
56
Morgan’s stance that
passionate, mutually pleasurable sex within marriage was God-ordained was a significant
intervention in evangelical culture which still conflated sex with sin. Certainly, she was
influenced by the increasingly permissive public culture of the early 1970s—which
included sex advice manuals like Alex Comfort’s bestselling Joy of Sex (1972)—but for
Morgan, too much emphasis had been placed on unmarried sex and not enough on
married sex.
57
Like Billy Graham, she believed that men and women had equal status but
had different functions in relationships. Without acknowledging her debt to mainstream
culture, Morgan appropriated the tone of female empowerment from women’s liberation,
the sizzling sex from sexual liberation, and combined them with a conservative
evangelical gender order.
Marabel Morgan’s father left when she was three, and her stepfather—a
hardworking policeman who made too little money to afford family vacations—died
55
Ibid.
56
D. Keith Mano, “The Phenomenon,” National Review, April 25, 1975, 458.
57
Dorothy Austin, “Mrs. Morgan’s Theories Are for All Ages,” The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 7, 1977.
211
when she was fourteen, leaving her “heartbroken.”
58
Her mother remarried, but none of
her mother’s three unhappy marriages provided Morgan with a model of a successful
marriage. (Morgan would come to believe that it was this all-too-common experience of
growing up without the example of a healthy marriage that led so many people to try sex
without marriage.)
59
After attending beautician school, Morgan worked at a beauty shop,
and the money she earned enabled her to go to Ohio State University, where she studied
philosophy and majored in home economics.
Morgan had been on a spiritual quest since her stepfather died, and although she
found interesting some of the philosophers that she read in college, she also found them
contradictory and uninspiring. When a friend’s encouragement brought her back to
God—whom she described in her book as her “power source”—her inner void was filled.
When her savings dried up, Morgan left college, and after working for a time again as a
beautician, work that she ultimately found unrewarding, she moved to Florida, where she
found work as a counselor for Crusade for Christ at the University of Miami. There, she
met her future husband Charlie Morgan, a law student. Once married, “I was a typical
woman’s libber,” she later told an interviewer. “I’d called my own shots for 27 years. I
wasn’t ABOUT to go some man’s way. I opposed Charlie in every subject. I tried to
make him over.”
60
58
Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975); Marion Knox, “The Sexes:
The New Housewife Blues,” Time, March 14, 1977.
59
“Marabel Morgan ‘Preferring One Another,’” Christianity Today, September 10, 1976, 15.
60
Pat Roberts, “The Total Woman and How She Grew,” Authors in the News: 359.
212
In her Total Woman book, Morgan described her courtship with Charlie, in which
he talked and she listened adoringly. She was surprised that he was so communicative,
for she had always assumed that all men were emotionally withdrawn. But after being
married for six years they settled into an unromantic routine: Charlie was withdrawn and
silent, and when he did speak he would accuse her of being uptight and of challenging
him on important decisions. Confused about the unhappiness that had developed in a
marriage that had looked so perfect at the outset, Morgan turned to the knowledge
contained in books on marriage, business, psychology and sex, and she studied the Bible.
When she applied the principles she learned to herself and her marriage, the barriers
came down: Charlie talked and shared his dreams again, and Morgan discovered for the
first time that marriage was fun.
61
Once the communication returned, romance followed.
Charlie began to express his love for her in words and actions and acknowledged requests
she had previously been denied, such as buying her the new refrigerator she had wanted
for years and allowing her to redecorate the house.
Wanting to share her newfound happiness, Morgan began teaching a four-lesson
“Total Woman” course in her local Southern Baptist Church based on the principles she
had found to be so successful. The first principle concerned time management: she
recommended keeping a to-do list that prioritized items and included scheduled time for
the self. The most unpleasant tasks were to go at the top of the list so that a woman would
never be caught off guard later in the day with her worst tasks undone. Not only will you
61
Morgan, The Total Woman, 14.
213
appreciate the order, she told her readers in a chatty, confidential tone, your husband will
be thrilled.
In a chapter titled “interior decorating” Morgan encouraged women to transform
themselves from the inside out: “A great marriage is not so much finding the right person
as being the right person.”
62
She encouraged women to write out their philosophies of
womanhood along with their strengths, weaknesses, and personal goals, both short term
and long term. Then a woman was to accept everything about herself that she could not
change, including her body. Morgan encouraged women to love themselves, a quality
that was essential to loving others.
The principle of “the four As” directed women to accept, to admire, to adapt to,
and to appreciate their husbands. Nagging, counseled Morgan, reminds men of their
mothers and destroys romance. If you have lost your love for your husband, ask God to
restore it, she recommended. The Bible tells that women should love their husbands, and
“a Total Woman caters to her man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or
sports.”
63
According to psychiatrists, Morgan wrote, men needed sexual love, approval,
and admiration. Women, by contrast, needed to be loved. Men expressed love in sex and
material goods; women expressed it in words. In this, Morgan demonstrated her belief in
the biological difference between men and women. At the same time, she used cultural
arguments about gender, arguing that from birth, males were taught not to cry while
females were indulged in their feelings. The resulting combination of “Mr. Cool and Miss
62
Ibid., 37.
63
Ibid., 60.
214
Passion” created a conflict that could be mitigated if women followed biblical teachings
and revered their husbands.
Morgan believed that the conflict of egos was the primary cause of trouble in
most marriages. The biblical remedy was for wives to submit to their husbands—indeed,
God had delineated ground rules in order to prevent exactly such problems and conflict.
When families tried to reverse God’s order, they collapsed quickly. “Adapting…is not
always easy, but it’s right,” Morgan wrote, and the rewards of adapting were
significant.
64
“It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and
worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him. She
becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen!”
65
Finally, women were to
appreciate their husbands and be grateful for what they provided, even if they could not
afford to buy their wives expensive gifts.
The third part of Morgan’s book (and the course) concerned sex. It had taken her
six years of marriage until she learned the importance of sex, she wrote, and she had been
uninformed about sex from a male perspective: “I had no idea men think about it almost
all the time. A lot of women can take it or leave it. But with a man it’s a driving force. In
a normal marriage, it’s very important. It’s like the oil that keeps it smooth and
running.”
66
Although sex was everywhere in the public sphere, people seemed to be
enjoying it less. Morgan quoted from the Ann Landers advice column that “nine out of
64
Ibid., 88.
65
Ibid., 97.
66
Sally Quinn, “Marabel Morgan: Does She Have the Answer?” Toledo Blade, February 19, 1978.
215
ten divorces start in the bedroom.”
67
Good sex, however, could help couples get through
other marital problems. Moreover, orgasms were great physical and emotional therapy: a
woman’s orgasm, coupled with the joy she received from giving herself to her husband,
could complete her and stop other tensions developing in the house. Yet a surprising
number of men and women did not know that women should have orgasms. Morgan
directed readers to Herbert Miles’s Christian sex manual Sexual Happiness in Marriage
(1967) for specific advice and education.
Morgan took care to correct the common misperception that sex was sinful. The
biblical line that said “man was conceived in sin” did not mean that sex itself was sinful;
instead, it referred to the sinful nature of human disobedience. Not only was sex not a sin,
it was physically healthy and had spiritual meaning when it took place within marriage.
Morgan encouraged her audience to recognize any sexual hang-ups and get help for them
and not to use sex as a weapon or as a reward. With that said, Morgan told wives to be
ready for sex every night of the week. Fundamental to a good sex life was that wives take
care of their physical appearance. “The outer shell of yours is what the real estate people
call ‘curb appeal’—how the house looks from the outside. Is your curb appeal this week
what it was five years ago?” Morgan asked.
68
A wife who sat at home clothed in her dirty
underwear and smelling of the breakfast she cooked could not compete with the dazzling
perfumed secretaries in her husband’s office. Not only should a woman be well-groomed,
but she should use imaginative costumes—like the pink baby doll pajamas and white
67
Morgan, The Total Woman, 124.
68
Ibid., 112.
216
boots that had worked so well for Marabel’s seduction of her husband. In this sense, sex
was not just the nighttime act itself: it was an attitude that matched the costume, and a
mood that began at the breakfast table with loving respect served up with the coffee.
Morgan recommended learning techniques of seduction from mistresses: titillate your
husband under the dining table and other exotic locations, she suggested. Make sex
unpredictable.
Morgan also told women to build bridges. Communication was vital. A wife
should be a good listener, never offering advice or criticism to her husband. She should
control her own tears and not react to any negative behavior from him. Without a proper
bond between parents in which a wife deferred to her husband’s leadership, a male child
might over-identify with his mother and become susceptible to homosexuality; a daughter
would grow up resenting men. Morgan recommended a loving acceptance of children
coupled with strict boundaries, spanking, and religious education.
Most important to achieving all of this was to be “plugged in” to God, the great
power source. By combining her recommendations with a fundamental dedication to God
a woman could become Total: a warm, loving homemaker, a sizzling lover, a mother who
inspired her children to grow. Morgan concluded the book with examples of other
relationships transformed by her program, including many wives of Miami Dolphins
football players. She noted the extraordinary success enjoyed by the Miami Dolphins the
following season, implying that the players were so successful because their wives had
become Total Women.
217
Morgan started teaching her course in 1971. She appeared on the Phil Donahue
show and was so well-received that Donahue had her back for multiple appearances
which helped popularize her courses.
69
Word spread also through her courses themselves,
often taught in churches of various Protestant denominations. Editors from a small
religious publishing house, Fleming H. Revell Company, who had heard about her course
approached her and asked her to write a book based on her its principles.
70
Although she
would later claim that while writing the book she doubted her ideas, when she
contemplated the potential impact of the book she decided “that in order to penetrate, I
would have to agitate.”
71
She wrote the book for a mass audience—anyone with at least
“a fifth-grade education.” Over 370,000 hardcover copies sold, and the paperback rights
were sold for $600,000, a significant increase from the $75,000 that Kate Millett received
five years earlier for Sexual Politics.
72
By 1975 there were more than 100 instructors
teaching Total Woman courses in 28 states in the United States and in Canada. Women
paid $15 for four two-hour sessions, and more than 15,000 women across the United
States had attended courses.
73
Soon, Morgan claimed, the White House approached her to
69
Austin, “Mrs. Morgan’s Theories Are for All Ages.”
70
Virginia Lee Warren, “In This Day of Liberation, They Study How to Please Their Men,” New York
Times, June 28, 1975.
71
Quinn, “Marabel Morgan: Does She Have the Answer?” 1.
72
Warren, “In This Day of Liberation, They Study How to Please Their Men.” McCall’s states that the
paperback rights sold for $750,000. See Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “The Books That Teach Wives to Be
Submissive,” McCall’s, June 1975.
73
Andy Taylor, “Marabel & Charlie Morgan: Being a Total Woman May Mean Love under the Dinner
Table,” People, April 7, 1975.
218
teach government wives, as did the heads of corporations, who believed that men would
function better in their jobs if their wives were properly trained.
74
The success of the book took the mainstream press by surprise. “A movement has
been spreading so quietly that it might almost be underground, but it has never been a
secret,” began the New York Times article on the topic.
75
The Total Woman movement—
and others like it—had grown and spread through courses and word of mouth without the
attention that women’s and homosexual liberation or rock music had received.
76
Fascinating Womanhood, another course that caught mainstream attention at the same
time as Morgan’s, was the brainchild of Southern Californian Mormon Helen Andelin.
Based on her 1965 book, Fascinating Woman, Andelin’s course had been running since
1963. An initial attendance of eight women grew exponentionally, and when Andelin
could not meet demand she decided to write a book of its principles. When no publishers
expressed interest, Andelin and her husband published it themselves.
Like her course, the book sought to help women make men feel superior. Andelin
based her advice on booklets from the 1920s called The Secrets of Fascinating
Womanhood, and as in those booklets Andelin described proper femininity as a storybook
74
Harrison, “The Books That Teach Wives to Be Submissive,” 113.
75
Warren, “In This Day of Liberation, They Study How to Please Their Men”; Taylor, “Marabel & Charlie
Morgan: Being a Total Woman May Mean Love under the Dinner Table”; Harrison, “The Books That
Teach Wives to Be Submissive.”
76
Diane Winston argues that ideological blinders and journalistic narrative conventions impeded the
mainstream media’s ability to see the religion and politics stories that pointed to the coalescence of
conservative politics and religion. See “Back to the Future: Religion, Politics, and the Media,” American
Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2007).
219
version of a little girl.
77
She suggested that women get fashion ideas from children’s dress
shops and recommended that they adopt childlike ways of laughing and demonstrating
anger in order to “bring husbands to heal.”
78
Men would be entranced by these
behaviours that so strongly contrasted with their own masculine strength. Ninety percent
of the Fascinating Womanhood courses were offered in churches, temples, or in
association with a church group. Often there was no fee. The alignment with churches
enabled women to accept the authority of what they were being taught. By 1975, when
Andelin was a mother of eight children and had been married 32 years, 11,000 teachers
had been trained to teach the course at the Fascinating Womanhood Foundation in Santa
Barbara, California, and over 300,000 women had taken the course around the nation.
79
More than half a million copies of the paperback version were sold in 1974.
Largely middle-class in nature, both the Total Woman and Fascinating
Womanhood movements posed an alternative to the women’s liberation movement.
80
They shared a belief that men and women were different and that their differences were
created by God. In these God-determined sex roles, men were authorities, protectors, and
providers, and women were subservient to the husband’s authority. They both stressed
the importance of attention to physical appearance and of sexual attractiveness. The key
difference between Andelin’s and Morgan’s books was that Morgan’s book, by making
77
Harrison, “The Books That Teach Wives to Be Submissive,” 83.
78
“The Sexes: Total Fascination,” Time, March 10, 1975.
79
Gregory Curtis, “Retreat from Liberation,” Texas Monthly, June 1975 and “The Books That Teach Wives
to Be Submissive,” 113.
80
Juanne N. Clarke, “Becoming Fascinating,” Alternative Lifestyles 4, no. 1 (February 1981).
220
sex central to the Total Woman transformation, brought evangelical marital advice into
the permissive 1970s. In that way Morgan, like the Jesus movement, brought some of the
styles of wider American culture into American evangelicalism. Perhaps she also found a
receptive audience in evangelicals who had already experienced a degree of liberalization
due to the influence of the Jesus movement.
Morgan’s focus on sex and the gender roles she promoted drew attention from
and created controversy among commentators in the Christian community. Billy Graham
alluded to Morgan’s arguments in his sermons.
81
The Wittenburg Door, a Christian satire
magazine founded in 1971 in Southern California as part of an effort to expose hypocrisy
in evangelistic circles, found The Total Woman too traditional. The Moody Monthly,
published by the evangelical Moody Bible Institute, found it too sex-focused and took
exception to Morgan’s statement that any kind of sexual behavior was acceptable within
marriage.
82
In the Christian Herald, a magazine that sought to encourage compassion, Dr.
Virginia R. Mollenkott expressed concern that Morgan placed the burden of marital
transformation on women alone and that they were encouraged into “self-sacrificial
idolatry.”
83
In Christianity Today, Morgan defended herself on the issue of focusing
responsibility on the woman by arguing that if she had not done so, women would have
avoided responsibility altogether: in this formulation women were naturally passive and
Morgan was calling them to action. Morgan’s answer to those who felt her book was too
81
Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism.
82
“Marabel Morgan ‘Preferring One Another.’”
83
Quoted in Claire Safran, “Can the Total Woman “Magic” Work for You?” Redbook, February 1976, 130.
221
sexual was to quote the Bible: “marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled.” She
clarified that God, not sex, was the most important factor in maintaining a marriage,
noting that even relationships with great sex would end if they were not powered by God.
Sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson were concerned about
Morgan’s framing of sexual desire, in particular her characterization of men as sex
obsessed and women as mostly impartial to sex. The binary obscured female sexual
desire and potential. More broadly, although they saw some warmth and good advice in
The Total Woman, they were concerned that it encouraged women to act against their
own feelings and men to act as insecure adolescents. Their ultimate concern was that
women would betray the discovery and development of their true selves by performing
acts of submission and seduction.
84
Why would women want to perform in these ways? Writing for the New York
Times, Joyce Maynard described the Total Woman phenomenon as a counterrevolution to
women’s liberation, arguing that “It is quite a different kind of liberation these women
long for. How distant…how unreal, this talk of ‘open marriage’ and bisexuality and
vibrators that free women from male tyranny.”
85
More relevant to the women of this
counterrevolution, Maynard noted, was a movement that could offer freedom within the
confines of marriage. If women’s liberationists sought to wage war, these women sought
to keep the peace. Maynard pointed out the “deep evangelical line” running underneath
84
William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, “A Warning About Books That Teach Women to Pretend,”
Redbook, March 1976.
85
Joyce Maynard, “The Liberation of Total Woman,” New York Times, September 28, 1975. The coverage
of Total Women in the mainstream media fits with Todd Gitlin’s argument; that when the news media
report on radical single-issue movements they frame them in opposition to others. See Gitlin, The Whole
World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left.
222
Morgan’s breezy Cosmopolitan style: sex was for marriage only, and divorce was not an
option. All Morgan’s arguments, according to Maynard, led back to Jesus. Maynard
perceived something “more than benign manipulation” under the surface of
submissiveness, and she described Morgan’s sexual advice as reminiscent of Xavier
Hollander’s 1971 call girl memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. While recognizing
that Total Women were manipulating a system of power, Maynard was put off by the
way that they did so.
To research her article, Maynard traveled to Muncie, Indiana, with Diane Blacker,
a trained Total Woman teacher. There, at the United Methodist Church, Maynard
attended the Total Woman course to get a sense of the women who were taking it in “the
parts of America people on its two coasts tend to forget about.” Diane began the course
by telling the story of her own twenty-year marriage, and it became clear that personal
stories of success were important for modeling and inspiration. All of the 85 women in
the audience were white and were not noticeably affluent; most were married, with two
or more children, and were in their late twenties and thirties. Maynard was struck by the
paradoxical mix of “a teen-age-slumber-party kind of closeness…with that deeper kind of
‘sisterhood’ feminists speak about—an instant recognition and understanding among
women who’ve never met before, based solely on the common experience of femaleness
and marriage.”
86
Ultimately though, to Maynard, while it was good that women were
given some sense of sexual liberation, the Total Woman course was demeaning to
86
Maynard, “The Liberation of Total Woman.”
223
women—presenting them as weak, empty-headed, materialistic complainers—and to
men.
The women’s monthly fashion and advice magazine Redbook offered similar
coverage of the Total Woman movement. Although Redbook disagreed with the “Plastic
Woman” nature of Morgan’s proposals, its editors sent Clare Safran to Miami to attempt
to understand the women drawn to Morgan. Instead of attending a course, Safran put a
group of Total Women together with a group of women sympathetic to the women’s
movement. After watching their interactions she concluded that the first group had
decided on the answers, and had thereby shut themselves off from full development,
whereas the second group was filled with “unfinished” individuals, women who were
open to change and possibility.
87
Where both Joyce Maynard and Clare Safran recognized that Total Women were
making choices about their lives even if they disagreed with those choices, some feminist
authors argued that Marabel Morgan’s work and the movement it inspired reinforced a
patriarchal system in which women had no agency. Anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin
described Morgan’s book as “how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of
Jesus Christ.”
88
An article in off our backs argued that Marabel Morgan’s doctrine of
submission was a “dangerous apologia for marital fascisms and…a virtual bible for
battered wives.”
89
The accusation was based on Kathleen Barry’s formulation of a system
87
Safran, “Can the Total Woman “Magic” Work for You?”
88
Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (London: Women’s Press,
1983), 25.
89
“Female Sexual Slavery,” off our backs, January 31, 1980.
224
of sexual slavery that distinguished between the system and the individuals who were
trafficked within it. The distinction made possible critiques of the system that were not
tainted by considerations of whether or not its victims were compliant. In this way,
feminist analyses dismissed the libratory possibilities of Morgan’s program.
The New York Times printed a range of public responses to the Total Woman
movement. Lucy Lazzopina-Gambino was thrilled to read that there were other women
like her who had no desire to be liberated from their roles as “wives, homemakers, and
happy hookers.” Paul Levine was concerned that if a man wanted obedience he should
get a dog. Mary Calderone, Executive Director of the Sex Information and Education
Council of the U.S. (SEICUS), wrote to compliment Morgan on her “outstanding
contribution to the real liberation of women.” Since 1964, she wrote, SEICUS had
asserted the right of individuals to be sexual “within the framework of their own value
systems.” Herself a Quaker, Calderone said she would feel comfortable in one of
Morgan’s classes. Tayloe Ross simply wrote “Great Sappho! To think heterosexuals say
that we are peculiar.”
90
By sheer force of numbers, the women who took Total Women courses and
bought the book outweighed the criticisms and spoke to its relevance. Thanks to Morgan
their roles were validated, they reaped the rewards of submitting to their husbands, and
they felt sexually liberated. Many women were grateful to have their roles at home
affirmed. As Marabel Morgan said of the mainstream portrayal of the housewife, it was
“very sad that propaganda from women’s magazines is insinuating that she doesn’t have
90
“Letters: More on ‘the Liberation of Total Woman,’” New York Times, September 28, 1975.
225
a brain or that she’s put it on a shelf or that she’s a non-person because she enjoys
making a home.”
91
Morgan was not against women having careers outside the home, as
long as they maintained their roles within the home. In fact, she explicitly stated in her
book that in the career realm women should be free to be as competitive as necessary.
Morgan’s own home-career arrangement reflected her different position on the two.
Within her marriage she characterized Charlie as the “President” and herself as the “Vice
President,” a role division she recommended to other women. In the business realm,
Morgan was the president of her company Total Woman Inc. and Charlie was its vice
president. The message for some, as schoolteacher Susan Reynolds said, was that “a
career and happy marriage can be combined. The Total Woman course doesn’t try to
keep a woman barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. There is nothing in it to squelch a
woman’s potential. If anything, it provides her with more freedom for developing it.”
92
Many women reported that they had difficulty taking the first step toward submission and
changing their marriages, that they had sacrificed careers in order to do so, and that they
resented having to take the initiative. Yet they told stories of the rewards that came when
they made the necessary changes. The singer Anita Bryant who became known in 1977
for her opposition to homosexual rights had struggled to submit to her husband but found
that her marriage was transformed as soon as she did so.
93
Bonnie Green, a former
department store buyer, said that “[t]he surprising thing is that once women start to be
91
“Marabel Morgan ‘Preferring One Another,’” 1211-12.
92
Warren, “In This Day of Liberation, They Study How to Please Their Men.”
93
Anita Bryant, “Lord, Teach Me to Submit,” in Reaction to the Modern Women’s Movement, 1963 to the
Present, ed. Angela Howard and Sasha Ranae Adams Tarrant (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., (1976)
1997).
226
kinder and nicer to their husbands, the men seem to come along.”
94
Their experiences
supported Morgan’s claim that once a woman submitted to her husband’s rightful claim
as head of the household, the husband would become more thoughtful.
For 35-year old Doris Toole, married fourteen years, the Total Woman course
gave her the permission to enjoy sex, “to be a [Playboy] bunny.” Reflecting her
disinterest in women’s liberation alongside her interest in sex she said “Ms. Magazine? I
haven’t read it. But, sure, I enjoy Playgirl. I like to see a centerfold of Burt Reynolds.
Women can have their rights too.”
95
For her women’s rights meant the right to sexual
pleasure. She spoke with concern of the permissive sexual culture that included de facto
relationships, orgies, and couple-swapping, saying it was very different than when she
was dating and that she did not think that young people could handle it mentally. For
Lynn, whose mother had raised her to believe that sex was bad and who had been married
twenty-eight years, Total Woman helped her—and many other women—to see that
female sexual pleasure was not a sign of promiscuity or sinfulness.
96
Morgan’s public persona was a testament to her arguments.
97
Interviewers
described her as being very much like her former May Queen and Miss Congeniality self:
not intellectual, but perceptive about people, polite, and friendly. She was generally
94
Warren, “In This Day of Liberation, They Study How to Please Their Men.”
95
Maynard, “The Liberation of Total Woman.”
96
Ibid. Safran, “Can the Total Woman “Magic” Work for You?”
97
Janet Fallon argues that Morgan was seen to create her own social reality and thus to provide a role
model for other women seeking to do the same thing. See Fallon, “A Rhetorical Analysis of the Total
Woman Movement.”
227
characterized as upbeat and positive.
98
The conservative National Review commented
that it was possibly because Morgan was not an intellectual that “Marabel has had a more
profound effect on American family life than any woman of our time.”
99
The statement
suggests that intellectual women were not well-received which may have been due to
cultural beliefs about women’s proper social place. Yet it may also have reflected the
social reality of the 1970s when only 21% of American women had one or more years of
college education. Morgan’s simple language and ideas were more accessible to a wider
audience than arguments put forward by highly educated women. In response to
criticisms from feminists, Morgan would smile and say that she was not advocating her
program for everyone, merely saying that it had changed her life and the lives of many
others she knew. She was not advocating slavery, she insisted, nor was she against
women’s liberation, rather she was trying to make a marriage work. She declined to state
her opinion on the ERA, abortion, gay rights, or other controversial matters, as she
believed that the Total Woman was controversial enough.
100
Morgan’s public refusal to
be drawn into politics worked in a similar way to David Bowie’s lies and evasions of
truth in interviews: she successfully created a public persona that gave her the widest
appeal while retaining a measure of personal freedom and privacy.
Part of Morgan’s public persona was her successful marriage: she and her
husband Charlie maintained a united front about their marriage and how it was evidence
98
Austin, “Mrs. Morgan’s Theories Are for All Ages”; Quinn, “Marabel Morgan: Does She Have the
Answer?”
99
Mano, “The Phenomenon,” 457.
100
Safran, “Can the Total Woman “Magic” Work for You?” 129.
228
that her philosophies worked. Charlie told a reporter, “Once I knew she was trying, I
knew we were not in an adversary position, that we were on the same team, then I wanted
to do the things she wanted me to do.”
101
He said that when men asked him for a copy of
the book for their wives, he advised them to make changes in themselves, and their
wives’ behaviors would follow accordingly. To Charlie it was not because Marabel was
female that she had written the book. There could have been a Total Man book, as far as
he was concerned.
In 1976, named “the year of the evangelical” by Time and Newsweek after
Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter won the presidency, Morgan followed up The Total
Woman with a revised version of the same principles in Total Joy.
102
“Eat your heart out,
evangelical feminists! Your sister is back with her message of total submission, total
materialism, total sex and total Bible reading,” trumpeted the Christian Century.
103
In
1977 Time magazine featured Morgan on its cover. The accompanying article explored
the disjuncture between the legitimate goals of the women’s liberation movement and the
number of American housewives who did not want to work outside the home or change
their gender roles. The results of a poll they had conducted among a sample of Morgan’s
followers, aged 18 to 64 years of age, demonstrated that the women felt confused and
threatened by the new range of choices available to them, they felt that their roles were
being denigrated, and they feared the ERA even though it was purported to secure their
101
Quinn, “Marabel Morgan: Does She Have the Answer?” 10.
102
Marabel Morgan, Total Joy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977).
103
Martin E. Marty, “Fundies and Their Fetishes,” The Christian Century, December 8, 1976.
229
rights. Approximately a third had jobs or careers—less than the national average for
women generally, which was 47 percent. Many of the women said that Morgan’s advice
gave them happy and equal relations with their husbands and gave them much-needed
validation in their roles at home.
104
Feminism, Time concluded, had not solved the “just a
housewife” syndrome. For many women suffering from what Friedan had called the
feminine mystique, Marabel Morgan’s movement seemed to provide practical solutions
to existing circumstances without requiring entire personal makeovers.
Conclusion
In the decades after World War II, an evangelical revival began. During the
1960s, as the result of greater youth participation and the incorporation of countercultural
styles, evangelical Christianity gained greater popularity, making national headlines in
the early 1970s with the rise of the Jesus generation. While evangelical culture made
stylistic adjustments and gained new relevancy in its social context, it remained resistant
to changing fundamental ideologies about sex roles. Christian feminist arguments that
sought to overturn or reinterpret biblical orthodoxy threatened the fundamental
evangelical tenet of biblical inerrancy and inspired a strong backlash from conservative
evangelicals. The proposed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the legalization
of abortion, and the women’s and homosexual liberation movements gave evangelicals
new sex-role based social issues to galvanize against. Political activism moved
evangelical women away from the trend in discussing women’s roles in evangelical
culture and from challenging biblical inerrancy to focusing on perceived external
challenges to the evangelical community.
104
Knox, “The Sexes: The New Housewife Blues.”
230
As political activism rose amongst evangelicals, a social movement was
burgeoning that addressed concerns over the perceived attack on the family in a personal
and cultural manner. Self-help styled marriage seminars offered by evangelicals taught
the doctrine of submission which required women to submit to their husband’s authority,
and encouraged individuals to look to personal transformation rather than social change.
Where they shied away from dealing with sex and so lacked cultural relevance for some
in an increasingly sexualized culture, Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman course and book
brought sex and evangelical faith together. Morgan separated sex from sin and liberated
women from the notion of sexual sin—albeit within the context of heterosexual marriage.
She encouraged women to be sexually active, and thus overturned the notion of female
sexual passivity. While some critics accused Morgan of encouraging women’s sexuality
only in service of manipulating their husbands, for many of its proponents The Total
Woman Movement offered an alternative route to a sense of freedom without forgoing
security or their moral values. In that way, Marabel Morgan extended the feminist
program of sexual pleasure and female agency to evangelical women. Morgan was, to her
fans, a symbol of liberation just as David Bowie was to his.
As groupies found freedoms within rock culture, so too evangelical women
inspired by Marabel Morgan found freedoms within their religious culture. However,
there was a significant difference between the two groups of women. Rock’s form
inspired sexual desire and promoted individual rebellion even while the culture was male-
dominated whereas evangelical culture, due to its insistence on biblical orthodoxy, was
grounded by rigid sex roles. Thus, as feminists sought to overturn the sex role system and
231
popular cultural forms helped to liberalize women’s and gay sexuality, Total Women—
despite gaining some freedoms especially in terms of sexual desire—reinforced a sex role
system that dictated female subservience within the home and made sinful extra-marital
sexual permissiveness and homosexuality.
232
CONCLUSION
This dissertation has argued that American sexual culture in the 1970s was
characterized by competing revolutionary forces. All placed gender and sex at the center
of their revolutions yet they did so for different reasons: white radical feminists sought
liberation through overturning the existing sex role system; groupies found some
freedoms within a male-dominated culture through sex; glam rockers communicated
escape from the existing sexual order through commodifying “otherness”; and
evangelical women found liberation through bringing sexual pleasure into marriage and
in submitting to their biblically ordained roles as helpmeets to their husbands.
White radical feminism was a powerful force in setting the terms for sexual
revolution in the 1970s. It was born out of civil rights and from women’s experiences of
sexism in the New Left. Although sex had become increasingly public in the 1960s,
feminists rejected the notion that women had experienced any sexual liberation. The
publishing house Grove Press mirrored developments in the Movement during the 1960s.
Committed to free speech, it played an important role in providing a forum for
countercultural literary and radical political voices, and it pushed the boundaries of
obscenity laws through erotic literature and film. Yet Grove Press capitalized on
women’s bodies and compromised the possibilities of true freedom of speech or
liberation for its grassroots constituency. The resulting feminist action exposed the
hypocrisies of a supposedly radical publishing house and reflected a broader split
between women and men in the New Left. Radical feminists established their own
233
networks of communication and consciousness-raising including through writing and
newspapers.
Radical feminism was the driving theoretical force of women’s liberation. It
posed a profound intellectual challenge to the existing sex role system and left a deep
imprint on public discourse. The idea of natural versus culturally constructed gender roles
and sexuality pervades popular discourse to this day primarily because radical feminists
including Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Jill Johnston dismantled the biologically
determined logic of differentiated male and female roles. In the 1970s radical feminists
took “unnatural” sex—pleasure-driven and homosexual sex—and delivered it to society
as a new norm. As the result, gender and sexuality became new cultural categories and, at
least conceptually, men and women achieved some measure of liberation from confining
“sex roles.” Radical feminism was both assisted and undermined by the mainstream
media which brought it to national consciousness and helped to circulate its ideas. Yet the
mainstream media tended to portray “women’s libbers” as unpleasant man-hating
militants. The American media’s choice of Germaine Greer as a favored representative
for women’s liberation reflected its interest in reform rather than revolution: as a sexually
free heterosexual woman, Greer did not pose the same threat to men and heterosexuality
as did American radical feminists who challenged heterosexuality and patriarchal power.
As women’s liberation permeated the public sphere, rock music established itself
as a major global business, trading on the sexually liberated yet male-dominated gender
order it had established during the 1960s. During that decade, two new masculine and
feminine styles had emerged in the rock realm: the male rock musician who was idealized
234
as the ultimate authentic rebel and the female groupie who publicly flaunted her desire
for this rebel male. Both defied the strictures of middle-class marriage and behavioral
norms and helped to sexualize the public culture. Yet most male musicians and rock
music critics undermined the important role that groupies played in establishing and
building the popularity—and profits—of male musicians. Instead they portrayed them in
a largely unflattering light, causing feminists to wonder whether there were any freedoms
for women in a culture that accorded them secondary status. Other feminists argued that
the innate rebellion and explicit sexuality in the rock form encouraged women to
liberation.
Glam rockers manipulated rock’s sexual liberation to win new audiences through
their performances of individual liberation from repressive sex roles. American glam
rockers expressed gender confusion and in doing so posed a challenge to traditional
masculinity. British glam rockers, who had greater license to play with sexual ambiguity,
communicated escape from gender and sexuality through “third-gender” personas and
through insisting on their individuality. Through embracing artifice, glam rock
challenged 1960s countercultural ideals of authenticity. Like radical feminists they
challenged the notion of natural sex roles and demonstrated that gender and sexual
orientation were not necessarily connected. Even while capitalizing on trends in sexual
liberation, glam rock took non-normative gender and sexual styles into the public sphere,
and created a zone of safety and permission for individuals to explore and express their
own gendered and sexual identities.
235
While radical feminist theories, rock’s promiscuous sexuality, and glam rock’s
gender and sexual ambiguities meant freedom for some, they presented a threat to
conservatives who feared that Americans would become prisoners to human laws instead
of God’s laws. In the 1970s, the evangelical revival that had begun in the 1940s reached
critical mass. In the late 1960s as radical feminists were organizing, a new evangelical
youth movement emerged bringing rock music together with Christian themes and
gaining new converts and social relevancy. Although evangelical feminists attempted to
reinterpret the bible to argue for women’s rights, evangelical culture was particularly
resistant to changes in the gender order because such changes challenged biblical
orthodoxy. The proposed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the legalization of
abortion, and the women’s and homosexual liberation movements shifted evangelical
women away from discussing their roles and towards focusing on perceived challenges to
God’s order. The political activism amongst evangelicals was underpinned and
complemented by the cultural force of evangelical women inspired by courses and books
like Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman. Morgan updated evangelical culture by
arguing that sex was biblically condoned within marriage and therefore not a sin. By
using evangelical biblical tenets, and encouraging sexual play, she gave women the
instructions for and permission to transform themselves and their marriages from
passionless sites of conflict into sexually adventurous romances. Critics accused Morgan
of encouraging women to use sex to manipulate their husbands and feminists saw
Morgan’s ideas as counter to genuine female agency. Yet Morgan’s many fans felt that
she offered them validation as wives and mothers, and that she offered them routes to
236
freedom within their moral systems. Morgan empowered women’s sexuality within a
male-dominated culture. In this way she shared similarities with Cynthia Plaster Caster.
A crucial difference between evangelical culture and rock music culture is that
rock music was significantly more malleable. Although male musicians and rock critics
worked to keep women in secondary roles, the rock form itself was not exclusively male.
Evangelical Christianity, however, because it held to the doctrine of biblical inerrency,
was grounded by rigid sex roles. Thus, as feminists sought to overturn the sex role system
and popular cultural forms helped to liberalize women’s and gay sexuality, Total
Women—despite gaining the freedom of sexual desire—reasserted a sex role system that
required female subservience to men within the home and made sinful extra-marital
sexual permissiveness and homosexuality.
Individually, these stories demonstrate how different groups fought for and found
liberation. White radical feminists sought to revolutionize the sex role system, and the
other groups found freedom—and profit—within their own cultures through creative
manipulations. If we leave the stories there, we could conclude that a dominant sexual
order was erased in the 1970s. However history is not made up of discrete forces. When
considered together these stories demonstrate competing and conflicting ideologies about
sex and gender. Although each group contributed to an increase in sexual permissiveness
in the years between 1968 and 1976, they also contributed to paradoxes in sexual
liberalization. As the line between American public and private culture was erased and
the wider culture became more sexually permissive, evangelicals were awakened to the
threat of sexual liberation.
237
In the 1970s, heterosexual sex was largely liberated from the old sex role system,
and gender and sexuality were split into separate categories. Through sexual liberation
women achieved some measure of gender liberation, shifting away from cultural beliefs
in their passivity. As the result of conflicting sex role ideologies, male-dominated cultural
forms were renewed even as feminists sought liberation from patriarchal power
structures. Evangelical ideas were spread through culture and so beliefs in biblical sex
roles in which men were dominant, women were submissive, and homosexuality was
against God’s order gained new traction. The result was an ambiguous sexual order in
which liberated sexuality was mitigated by evangelical morality, a sexual order that was
both more liberated and less liberated.
238
ARCHIVAL AND OTHER PRIMARY SOURCES
Archival and Manuscript Collections
Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Special Collections Library, Duke
University
Harold Lindsell Papers, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, Illinois
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana
Colin J. Williams Collection
Marie Koenig Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Marcia Cohen Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University
Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of
Texas at Austin
Robin Morgan Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke
University
Women’s Liberation Collection, 1959-2006, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, MA
Newspapers and Periodicals
After Dark
Beat Instrumental
Chicago Tribune
Christian Century
Christianity Today
Commonweal
Creem
Esquire
Evergreen Review
239
Gay News
Harper’s Magazine
Ladies’ Home Journal
Life
Los Angeles Free Press
Los Angeles Times
Mademoiselle
McCall’s
Melody Maker
Ms.
National Review
New York Post
New York Times
New Yorker
Newsweek
Nova
off our backs
People
Playboy
Rat
Redbook
Rolling Stone
240
The Realist
Texas Monthly
Time
Toledo Blade
Village Voice
Wall Street Journal
Washington Monthly
241
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This dissertation argues that in the years between 1968 and 1976 groups within the women’s liberation movement, rock music culture, and evangelical religion transformed American sexual culture and forged a new sexual order. An examination of these groups together demonstrates their similarities and differences and offers insight into the paradoxes of sexual liberalization. White radical feminists sought to achieve women’s liberation through deconstructing patriarchal power and rejecting biologically determined roles. Rock music groupies sought sexual freedom through rejecting passive femininity. Glam rockers performed liberation through androgynous and bisexual personas in order to sell records. Evangelical women sought freedom through sexual pleasure and through submitting to the existing sex role system. All focused on sex roles and used arguments about freedom, and they began to revolutionize sexual norms by asserting women’s right to sexual pleasure
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Asset Metadata
Creator
Sheehan, Rebecca
(author)
Core Title
American sexual culture: women's liberation, rock music, and evangelical Christianity, 1968-1976
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
History
Publication Date
02/12/2012
Defense Date
12/16/2009
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Alice Cooper,androgyny,Barney Rosset,Billy Graham,Biology,culture,David Bowie,evangelical Christianity,Evergreen Review,Germaine Greer,glam rock,groupies,Grove Press,Jesus movement,Kate Millett,Marabel Morgan,Norman Mailer,OAI-PMH Harvest,Prisoner of Sex,Robin Morgan,rock music culture,sexism in the New Left,sexual politics,sexuality 1970s,The Female Eunuch,The Total Woman,white radical feminism
Place Name
USA
(countries)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Sánchez, George J. (
committee chair
), Kelley, Robin D.G. (
committee member
), Winston, Diane (
committee member
)
Creator Email
rebeccajsheehan@gmail.com,sheehan@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2847
Unique identifier
UC1162144
Identifier
etd-Sheehan-3427 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-303827 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2847 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Sheehan-3427.pdf
Dmrecord
303827
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Sheehan, Rebecca
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
Alice Cooper
androgyny
Barney Rosset
Billy Graham
David Bowie
evangelical Christianity
Evergreen Review
Germaine Greer
glam rock
groupies
Grove Press
Jesus movement
Kate Millett
Marabel Morgan
Norman Mailer
Prisoner of Sex
Robin Morgan
rock music culture
sexism in the New Left
sexual politics
sexuality 1970s
The Female Eunuch
The Total Woman
white radical feminism