To The Contrary

Funding for To the Contrary, provided by: This week, on To the Contrary, a new behind the scenes peek at the history of second- wave feminism.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Muriel Fox is one of the first women over the fence at the launch of second-wave feminism.

Her new book, The Women's Revolution: What We Did for You, is especially appealing, as the subtitle seems to beckon young, progressive women and men.

While some may not believe things are great now, it's an exercise in the importance of studying history to gain an understanding of where women would be.

But for the work of Fox's generation, Muriel Fox was the preeminent communications expert at that time, promoting women's rights to the growing media.

She was the strategic partner of National Organization for Women, co-founder Betty Friedan and a co-founder of NOW herself.

She joined the movement when, yes, women had the 19th amendment and the right to vote on a national scale, but few other rights.

There weren't many laws protecting against sexism in hiring and pay, against sexual assault, against being fired for getting pregnant.

Few elementary and high schools or colleges had women's sports programs, and when they existed, they were woefully underfunded.

Muriel Fox, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much.

So tell me first why you wrote the book.

I wrote the book at the age of 94 because I was angry.

I was angry about losing abortion rights, and still not having the Equal Rights Amendment.

And I was angry because so many educated young women said they never heard of Betty Friedan.

They never heard of NOW.

And we changed their lives.

They actually, the subhead from my book is The Women's Revolution and How We Changed Your Life. And we changed the lives of everyone, everywhere, forever.

All right.

And, tell me about how did that start?

In somebody's living room, in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

And how did that work?

Well, if you're talking about NOW just rows everywhere.

We were all so tired of hearing we don't hire women.

We don't admit women to this place or this labor union or this restaurant or this job or this.

And we knew there had to be a change.

We were all involved in the civil rights movement, and we really we wanted what people call the NAACP for women.

Betty Friedan, who wrote The Feminine Mystique which was a huge hit.

It was all about suburban women, you know, who married, financially, were able to not have to work or do work that they wanted to try to do, but they were all bored.

And, was essentially what I took away from that book at the time.

And they were bored because they were being limited in what they could do with their lives.

Tell me about her, about Gloria Steinem, who is still with us.

But tell me also about the women who were part of that movement.

And forming NOW who aren't big names in it.

You know, as far as the women's history, the women's movement history is concerned.

Betty Friedan wrote her book, as you say, for suburban, well-educated women, but immediately resonated with all women of all classes and NOW was founded for all women to fight discrimination in jobs.

And most of our early lawsuits were for women in factories who wanted a promotion, who wanted to get into the seniority list for the labor movement.

And so people who say, Well, it was ju middle class women, it was it was all women resonate to the need for ending the idea that you could say, We don't hire women, we don't promote women. And who else was there among you who didn't get, who didn't make it into the current generation's knowledge of women formed second-wave feminism.

My book salutes 30 women, 29 women and one man, a man named Phineas Indritz, a lawyer and every one of them deserves to be in our history books as much as Patrick Henry or John Paul Jones or any other hero.

Every one of them changed our lives and they worked on the issues that were important.

And certainly Pauli Murray, a great educator, lawyer, later became a, you know, an Episcopalian priest and one of our leaders.

And every one of them understood that we were going to change the world.

We didn't think it would happen so fast.

And it happened so fast because as women said, it was long overdue.

It was thousands of years overdue.

And that this time, for instance, as we say in the statement of purpose with Betty Friedan wrote only 1% of our federal judges were women.

Only 4% of our lawyers were women.

Only 7% of our doctors were women.

We had to overcome that.

This was taken for granted.

And medical schools and law schools and business schools says we don't admit women.

And they just took this for granted.

That's the way it had always been, but we change that.

We changed the laws.

We made the government enforce the laws.

We had the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there was something called Title VII, which said you may not discriminate, but it didn't say anything about sex discrimination.

And we got sex discrimination put into Title VII.

And The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and all the experts said, Oh, we can't do that.

It's trivial. Well, it wasn't trivial.

Most of the cases that came up were not only for minorities, they were for women who had been discriminated against.

And we realized that this is a need for the public.

All right.

So okay, tell me for, let's start with property laws, where were women?

In the time period when NOW was new and young and starting out, what property rights did women have?

Because as we know, is still true in some countries, mainly developing nations, women don't even have the right to own property, anything they own at the time they get married goes from being, you know, or may have owned it as an adult, goes from their father to their husband.

You're right.

Well, women couldn't get mortgages, and their salary wasn't counted.

If a husband and wife applied for a mortgage, the woman's salary wasn't counted.

Women couldn't get a credit card.

And, it only had to be in her husband's name.

A single woman couldn't get a credit card.

And if your husband died or you had a divorce, you lost your credit card.

And, we had to change all this so that women could have property rights.

And incidentally, in some states like Louisiana, there was the headed master law, where the woman's earnings didn't care the law.

The man was the head of master, and he had the rights to their property, even if she was the one who was earning the money.

Who were the primary movers and strategizers on how to do that in the financial arena?

Certainly, Betty Friedan, she was our leader for the first four years of NOW Betty Friedan really gave us a strategy.

She gave us our name NOW, and she gave us this wonderful statement of purpose and really our energy.

She was very hard to get along with, but she was a great woman.

And then, as I said, Pauli Murray.

And there are names that you've never heard.

The people have never heard of that they must hear of.

Mary Eastwood, Catherine East, Marguerite Rawalt.

These are all the 30 people in my book.

And I tried to cut it back, like I thought Oh, well thats too many, but every one of them made such a difference in people's lives.

And, I hope people will recognize this and I hope history will begin to salute these people because they deserve it.

All right.

Tell us about some more.

Pauli Murray, what happened to her?

You say she was a great legal strategist.

Pauli Murray was a great woman.

And she actually had some of the ideas that went into Brown vs. Board of Education and other Pauli Murray ideas, separate but equal.

Those were her ideas.

So, she was very active in our movement.

And then she went on, as I said, to become an Episcopal priest.

Now, you mentioned Gloria Steinem.

Gloria came a little later, but when she, she would, in 1969, I led a protest at the Plaza Hotel, Oak Room, because they didnt admit women for lunch.

And Gloria Steinem was one of the reporters there.

I remember she came up to me because we were picketing.

And at that time Gloria said, Well, I'm not a feminist.

I'm a humanist. But soon after she decided, yes, she was a feminist and she's still active today.

Bella Abzug came along a little later again, Bella Abzug, when she was elected to Congress.

Again, I'd say thanks to the women's movement, she introduced and helped to pass the Fair Credit Act, which meant women could have credit cards and could be considered for credit.

And incidentally, the the want ads were still saying help wanted male, help wanted female and all the good jobs were listed, needless to say, under help wanted male and we had to make the the government enforce Title VII to show that you're not allowed to do that.

That was sex discrimination.

So, Gloria Steinem came a little bit later.

But has lasted a lot longer.

Does she do, you think, at least in terms of being one of the mothers of second-wave feminism, does she get too much credit?

No, no, no.

She deserves every bit of credit she receives.

Gloria has been a champion for us all these years, and she's still, at the age of 90, still fighting for women's rights.

It took all of us.

It took these leaders, the 30 leaders, certainly, which included Pauli Murray and Gloria Steinem.

But it also included, really tens of thousands of women and men who were angry about some injustice.

And each person worked on what made them mad in their labor union, in their school, and in their city, in their university, in their company.

Wherever there was an injustice, they worked.

And I wrote my book because I really want especially those 30 people, certainly including Betty Friedan, to be recognized by history so people will know what we did for them, but also what they could do for the future.

You mentioned the cross pollination I think between or how I would put it between, feminism and civil rights.

You mentioned the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

How much was second- wave feminism built on the civil rights movement, which pertained largely at the time to African Americans, and equal rights for them.

They too, have been, you know, hugely denied all kinds of rights that should have been theirs from the beginning.

And, how much, if any, did the civil rights movement learn from the women's movement in putting together its strategy and policy change agenda?

First of all, our movement is part of the civil rights movement.

As we say in the statement, the purpose of NOW, actually the paragraph the Pauli Murray wrote.

Civil rights for all are indivisible.

And so we were all working for the same rights.

And I remember when we met in the White House with Lyndon Johnson's deputy, John Macy, and he said, Well, don't you women want separate rules and separate laws? I said, No, were part of the civil rights movement.

We want the same laws.

We want to be included in those laws, and we want the laws to be enforced against sex discrimination. But then why want a separate Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which consists of just a couple of words I know, but still referred to as the Equal Rights Amendment.

Right.

Because that's something we don't have.

We have the 13th and 14th amendment, which gave people of color their rights.

But, we're one of the few countries that doesn't recognize that women and men should not be discriminated against.

The ERA, as we call, you know, says equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.

That's all it says.

And, it's no special privilege.

It just means don't abridge our rights and it's time that women were in our Constitution, were in the most Constitutions of most developed countries.

And the New York state is going to have a New York State ERA up on their election this November.

Now, there was the famous quote from Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of NAACP.

SNCC, I forget which group.

I apologize, but when asked what the position of women was in the movement, he said the position of women should be prone, which was a pretty huge insult to forward thinking women and the men who supported them.

So were, tell me about the inside, behind the curtain.

What were relations like between the two parts of the of this movement?

Stokely Carmichael was just being smart.

But, most of us realize that our civil rights were indivisible, but women did have to fight for Black civil rights movement, didn't have women leaders, and there were people who made comments like that.

And that was another reason that we needed the National Organization for Women.

And incidentally, it's for women, not of women, because we had a lot of men, wonderful men in the movement, and they understood that our movement is working for our sons as well as our daughters.

Men, men realize that they've been discriminated against in being expected in the old days to be the sole supporter of the family.

That's a burden.

And now, with women sharing the burden as partners, it liberates everybody.

It liberates our sons as well as our daughters.

Are you at all disappointed by what you say?

Women and men, not all men share the burden.

Not all women, quite frankly, want to share the burden has been my unfortunate experience becoming an adult in this society.

Has that held women back?

Because women, today's women certainly don't feel like they are where they need or want to be in terms of equality in society.

Well, you're right.

I mean, we have not reached equal partnership, but we're getting better and better and it's better for everyone.

Gloria Steinem has said it took us 50 years to prove that women can do what men do.

Now we have to prove that men can do what women do, and that means childcare.

It means sharing the housework because the women are out in the workforce.

And it's certainly, good for the men too that the women are sharing the economic burden.

And it's not just about, there are women who work in the home who get great satisfaction from it.

And NOW has always said these women deserve to be recognized and paid, given financial security, security in case of divorce and given respect.

Thats an option.

But you look at most of the statistics, most women, even those of childbearing age, are in the workforce.

And I think it's not only for the money, it's for the satisfaction of doing a job, doing what they like to do, doing what they're capable of doing, doing what they're educated to do.

So it's a whole new world, and I think everybody benefits from it.

I believe that the women's revolution started with the founding of NOW, on October 29, 1966.

And that's when we started questioning all the laws, getting the laws changed, talking about consciousness raising.

So especially women and small groups would share their experiences and understand how they had been suppressed and in many cases, oppressed.

Now, I used to do, there's a point in time in the 80s, 90 where I used to go to a lot of college campuses and some corporate events and speak on women's issues and women's rights, and I had, and these were, you know, I didn't set up the events.

They were mainly white events, and but sometimes women of color would, would come up to me and say, What about us?

We've been left out. Was that something you encountered at the beginning of second-wave feminism and was there, and now when you talk about women's rights, it's almost like it's more important.

Women of, the rights of women and persons of color, and LGBTQ than white women.

So this is a big change in the last 50 years.

Do you believe that NOW reached out enough to not just white women, but other women and gay people and all the other people who were not included at the beginning of the movement?

Well, we evolved, you know, we were a revolution.

We started talking about jobs and education for all women, white women, Black women, disabled women, And we learned more and more that people had additional needs.

Women of color had additional needs at first we didn't pay enough attention to, but we evolved, we learned, and we are working for all women's needs, and they vary.

They're not, all women are not the same.

And, we learned it.

But on the other hand, all women want to be treated equally and fairly.

And that's the thing we were working for from the very beginning.

And then we added things.

We added the lesbians.

We had minority women's, LGBTQ certainly.

And at the beginning we had big fights at NOW.

Should we include lesbianism as a feminist issue?

And it took us about four years before we worked through that.

Tell me about those discussions.

You know, what were the reasons not to, what were the reasons to, and who won out in the end?

At first, some of us, including me, thought that it was a separate issue.

Gender, gender identity, etc.

was a separate issue.

And there were a group of very wise lesbians within NOW who published position papers and told us it is a feminist issue because it's part of how women are perceived.

It's part of how women are stereotyped.

And, so we discussed this and we learned and by 1971 September, actually at the conference where I was elected NOWs national board chair, NOW voted for the first time lesbianism is a feminist issue.

And I'm not pretending we didn't have a lot of discussions and battles about that until then.

But there was never a lesbian purge, as some historians have claimed.

It was just really discussions and differences and arguments.

And we evolved and we learned that we all have to work together.

I'm not aware of the claimed lesbian purge.

What was that about?

And, where did it come from since it didn't.

It really just came from some things that happened that were not lesbian purges.

I mean, to go into, one of them was that Betty Friedan, our great leader, wasn't that easy to get along with.

And she wanted us to fire our executive director at one point who she felt was not subservient to her enough.

So it was really just personal.

This was Dolores Alexander, a wonderful woman.

And actually, Dolores was not a lesbian at that time.

She turned out to just be a lesbian a couple of years later.

But at that time, she wasn't.

So it was not a lesbian purge.

It was.

It was just difference of opinion.

And we had our battles, we had our discussions and our arguments and some lesbians left and thought we weren't considering them enough.

Rita Mae Brown, a very well-know author of Rubyfruit Jungle.

She left in a huff and, you know, said some angry things, but it wasn't a purge.

It was her choice, actually.

And most of us voted to stay in.

And ultimately, we voted that lesbianism was a feminist issue.

And many of our most active members today are members of the LGBTQ community.

Well, we're about out of time here, but I just want to ask you anything that you raised in the book that I haven't asked you about and you'd like to bring up.

I just want to say, we did it.

And you young people can do it too.

We're counting on people to benefit by what we did.

I think the stories will interest them.

Some will still see how hard it was and the mistakes we made, but I think they'll be inspired.

I hope that's what people say about my book, that it's inspiring, as well as entertaining and I hope they'll be inspired to do the work that still needs to be done, and certainly to get involved in politics.

This year, it's all about politics.

in 2024.

We can get abortion rights back.

We can get the ERA, we can get everything.

If we get feminist leaders elected not just to the presidency, but to Congress, to legislatures, state and local, to school boards, politics is absolutely the name of the game this year.

Thank you so much, Muriel Fox, for joining us.

Her book is available online and at most bookstores.

That's it for this edition of To the Contrary. Continue the conversation on our social media platforms, on X, on Facebook, @tothecountrary, and on our PBS web page.

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Please join us next time and whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you soon.

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