Protesting an Inauguration—What a Difference Four Years Make

The Women's March on Washington, January 21, 2020.

Four years ago after Donald Trump won an Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton despite the fact that she won a clear majority of the popular vote outrage spread quickly, especially among women.  Feminists and their allies deplored the ascent of the misogynist, serial sex abuser, chronic liar, business fraud, charlatan, and sociopathic egomaniac.  So they did something about it.

Just a day after the 2016 election Teresa Shook of Hawaii created a Facebook event and invited friends to march on Washington in protest.  Several similar posts were made independently and soon the women and some feminist men discovered each other and began cooperating.  None of them were marquee names in the Women’s Movement, the Clinton campaign, or the Democratic Party.  In addition to middle class white women an informal core group of organizers included African Americans and other People of Color, immigrants, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ communities, and other oppressed groups.

The logo of the Women's March on Washington.

Their efforts were a classic example of bottom-up organizing taking advantage of new social media tools to create an organic movement.  And they did it in an astonishingly short time.  As planning went forward on a March scheduled for January 21, the two days after the inauguration organizers did get the endorsement and technical support from major organizations including Planned Parenthood, the Natural Resources Defense Council, AFL–CIO, Amnesty International USA, the Mothers of the Movement, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Organization for Women, MoveOn.org, Human Rights Watch, Code Pink, Black Girls Rock!, the NAACP, the American Indian Movement, Emily’s List, Oxfam, Greenpeace USA, and the League of Women Voters.  All of those organizations would help recruit marchers from their own memberships and be represented on the speaking platform the day of the march.  But so did scores of other less well known and local groups from a broader movement that was beginning to characterize itself as the Resistance.

March organizer made it clear from the beginning that they planned to adhere to “the nonviolent ideology of the Civil Rights movement.”  In addition to keep the momentum for change going instead of being dissipated in a one-time cathartic event organizers posted the 10 Actions for the first 100 Days campaign for joint activism.

Despite Trump's claim that his inauguration drew the biggest crowds in history--the first Big Lie of his administration--the Women's March dwarfed his pathetic turnout.

While organizers had originally expected over 200,000 people, the march ended up drawing between 440,000 to 500,000 in Washington D.C.  It dwarfed the feeble turn-out for Trump’s inauguration by at least three to one and probably more.

The march was famous for the knitted pink pussy cat caps that many of the marchers wore initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman.  More than 100,000 people down-loaded the pattern for the cap and dozens of small providers vended them on line.  The design was inspired by the resemblance of the top corners of the hats to cat ears and attempts to reclaim the derogatory term pussy, from Trump’s widely reported 2005 remarks that women would let him “grab them by the pussy.”

Women flying all the way from Alaska showed off their Pink Pussy hats on the flight.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands pouring into the nation’s capital for the protest, hundreds of officially unrelated sister marchers were organized in cities big and small across the United States, Canada, and the world, including a massive march in Chicago which I joined along with three Metra train carloads from McHenry County.  Between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people participated in these marches in this country, approximately 1.0 to 1.6 % of the U.S. population making it by far the largest mass protest in American history. Worldwide participation has been estimated at over seven million.

Marching with women of Tree of Life UU Congregation to the rallying point of the Chicago Women's March on January 21, 2017

Nor did the movement fade away.  Annual marches continued and in 2016 there was a special Fall March to the Polls event to boost registration and voting in the midterm elections.

This year due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the heavy security in Washington after the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s minions and White supremacist insurrectionaries, organizers discouraged mass events.  Instead a number of virtual events were posted around the country.

Compare a genuine mass movement of the people to the shady plot to overthrow democracy this year.  Don’t let anyone try to tell you, as some right-wing media is trying to do, that the two events had anything in common.

The Book that Changed America and the Damn Pushy Woman Who Wrote It

Betty Fridanon book tour to promothe The Feminine Mystique.

 

On February 19, 1963 W.W. Norton and Company issued Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.   That book, along with the nearly contemporaneous arrival of the Pill as a reliable and affordable form of contraception, ushered in the social and political movement sometimes called the Second Wave of Feminism.

With astonishing speed—less than a decade—that movement would embrace and personally empower millions of women with local level consciousness raising groups, sophisticated national organizations, political operations, and a network of publications.  Long held assumptions about home, family, work, and other issues would be turned on their heads.  It was in a real sense a revolution.

56 years later the spasmodic eruption of the extreme right wing in this country, empowered by the election of Republicans to national and state level legislative power and Donald Trump to his golden toilet throne  has turned its attention to undoing that revolution.  That is what the current uproar over contraception and abortion is really all about—attacking the gains women felt so confident in that they thought they could never be challenged again.  About 35% of the American population wants to turn back the clock to what they imagine was a safer world where everyone knew their place and “morals” ruled.  They want to recreate the very environment that Friedan rebelled against.

Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921 to a Jewish family in overwhelmingly Goyish Peoria, Illinois.  Her father owned a local jewelry store and her mother wrote society news for the local newspaper—until she was forced to give up her career after marriage, something she urged her daughter never to do.

Growing up in the Depression years, she became inflamed with a passion for social justice.  She also acutely felt the sting of common anti-Semitism.  She developed an interest in Marxism while still in high school, which may have been why, despite being a regular contributor to the school paper, she was turned down for a spot as a columnist.

In 1938 her family found enough money to send her to prestigious Smith College, one of the Seven Sister Schools to the then all-male Ivy League.  Excelling academically, she won a scholarship to continue her education, pursuing a degree in psychology.  She also continued writing, including placing several poems in the campus literary magazine and rising to editor of the newspaper in 1941.  Under her leadership, the paper took a sharply political and leftist tone.

Young Betty Friedan looking every inch the young Marxist.

After graduating with honors in 1942, she went to the University of California at Berkley on a Fellowship.  She plunged into radical political activity there as well.  But in 1943 she abandoned her academic aspirations at the urging of her then boyfriend.

After leaving school she went to work as a journalist for left wing and labor outlets, first  The Federated Press and then beginning in  1945,  the United Electrical Workers UE News.

While working at the UE News, she married advertising executive Carl Friedan in 1947.  As she continued her career the couple would have three children and move to a comfortable suburban life.  Ironically, here union employers forced her out in 1953 after the birth of her second daughter.

Friedan then turned to freelance writing, often contributing to mainstream women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan.

In 1957 Friedan was asked to write an article on what happened to members of her graduating class for their 15th reunion.  She sent questionnaires to as many as she could find and received over two hundred replies.  Most of her classmates, it turned out, had abandoned careers to raise families.  And they were miserable and unfulfilled.  Intrigued by what she called the problem that has no name, she embarked on further research and study.

When the women’s magazines to which she regularly contributed all rejected an article on the subject, Friedan was furious and went to work expanding the article into a book. 

Among other things, she came to the conclusion that popular women’s magazines and cultural in general had abandoned independence as a goal for women and pushed the ideal of finding fulfillment in marriage and family life.  When the nuclear family could not fulfill women and when they lost their identity and sense of self, women became conflicted, guilt ridden, and neurotic.

Friedan advocated for women to pursue careers either in lieu of marriage and traditional family life or within a re-defined marriage of equals.  She outlined the cultural, political, and economic barriers to fulfillment and advocated action to tear them down.

The result was The Feminine Mystique.  It created an immediate sensation, zoomed to the top of the non-fiction best seller list and stayed there for months.  Its notoriety was stoked by the shocked and horrified response of many, mostly male, reviewers and the press in general. 

The Feminine Mistique was already a run-awy best seller but when it hit the drug store paperback racks later in 1963 it became accesible to students, moms, and struggling young working women.

But women, especially middle class women, responded urgently to the books message.  They began meeting in living rooms, libraries, church basements, and coffee shops in small groups to compare their own experiences creating a boom in consciousness raising groups that gave women the support of their sisters and empowered them to act.

A sudden celebrity, Friedan found herself anointed de facto the leader of a new movement.  In 1966 she helped make that status official by being among the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which quickly gave political muscle to the new movement.  She was elected NOW’s first President and launched their first major initiative—a push to revive the moribund Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution and get it ratified by the States.

Friedan on an early NOW picket line.

She served NOW as President until 1970 and then went on to lead the national Women’s Strike for Equality, and led a march of 50,000 women in New York City.  The next year she teamed with her sometimes bitter rival for leadership of the movement, Gloria Steinem, to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Friedan was also a founder of the organization that became the National Abortion Rights Action League.  Despite this she later regretted the emphasis on abortion and sexual rights, believing that the core of the women’s struggle was economic opportunity.  She was also uncomfortable with the rising visibility and importance of lesbians in the movement, although over time her notorious iciness to them softened and became more accepting.

Leading an ERA march in Washington onJuly 9, 1978.  From left: Gloria Steinem, Dick Gregory, Betty Friedan, Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y., Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Rep. Margaret Heckler, R-Mass. 

Friedan was not without critics—and not all of them were enemies of the women’s movement.  She was abrasive, often angry, and hard to work with for associates.  She demanded deference to her position as an indispensable founder.  Beyond personality, some critics of her landmark first book took her to task for writing only for highly educated women in the solid middle class.  Indeed they were the focus of The Feminine Mystique and the backbone of the early movement.  Non-whites and working class women—women who had always worked to support their families and had jobs instead of careers—were at best the subject of benign neglect.

Friedan, originally a socialist and labor person, seemed to have forgotten some of her own experiences.  But she firmly believed that the ERA and reforms like insuring equal pay would raise all boats and elevate the status of pink collar workers along with educated professionals.

But the seeming disdain of the early movement for working class women, and the perceived antagonism to women who chose a traditional family role, quickly became the nucleus around which the rising right wing movement of the late 20st and early 21st Century spun its fantasy of snobbish elites turning class resentments against feminists and other progressives. 

Friedan remained adamant and defiant to the end of her long life.

Friedan continued writing, speaking and organizing almost to the moment of her death.  She never mellowed. She died on her 85th birthday, February 4, 2006.  She left behind three children—and the Women’s Movement.

A Fresh but Flawed Heidi Chronicles at Black Box Theater

There is something more than a little ironic seeing the iconic feminist set piece The Heidi Chronicles three days after the title heroine’s near contemporary unexpectedly lost the Presidency to a boorish lout and bully.  Perhaps especially because the character and the politician were products of such similar backgrounds as intelligent, highly accomplished women from an elite academic background and high professional ambitions.   Both grew up with the rise of the women’s movement and moved into adulthood in times of tumultuous cultural changes.

The play was mounted at McHenry County College’s more than ordinarily ambitious Black Box Theater under the expert guidance of veteran director and theater teacher Jay Geller who routinely mounts productions that stretch the limited expectations of community college productions.  In fact productions at the Black Box which mix student actors, graduates, and occasional professionals, are consistently among the best stage offerings in McHenry County.

The Heidi Chronicles came close to that standard but fell a bit short for reasons not entirely under the control of the director or the attractive young cast.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 play was highly acclaimed and won both Tony and Pulitzer Prize honors.  Hailed as a feminist masterpiece it became a staple for community and college theaters and has been frequently mounted by urban companies, both professional and earnest small troops. 

It is sometimes compared to another acclaimed feminist play, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues which premiered just eight years later in 1996.  Heidi suffers by comparison.  The Vagina Monologues was a much grittier play and a braver one.  Wasserstein’s play seems frozen in amber by the 25 year time span it documents.  Ensler’s work is fresher for being ever evolving and regularly adding new monologues that reflect current events and taking an expansive world-wide view of women’s experiences.  Heidi’s elite world seems cramped and the conflicted angst of its denizens somewhat shallow as both of the major male characters—the smarmy sometime love/lust interest and the glib gay man best friend ironically point out.

In a lot of way the play represents the obsessions of many of the leaders and shaping thinkers of the Feminist movement, many of whom came out the same Seven Sister School backgrounds and the self-contained world of New York intellectuals.   Even the founders of MS Magazine at first seemed to be concerned mainly with establishing powerful careers, achieving autonomy from reliance on men for validation, and “having it all.”  The struggles of working class women, women of color, or even middleclass homemakers and mommy-trackers who were often cast enemies, seemed utterly alien to this brand of sisterhood.

That was certainly the problem that my deeply feminist wife Kathy had with the production.  She is a working class girl from Chicago, a last-minute high school dropout, young bride then struggling single mom of two who after working since she was 14 finally found a career path in mid-life, got her B.A. and Masters Degrees in years of night classes, and became a respected religious educator.  She found almost no common ground with the characters presented to her and hardly recognized their struggles as Feminist.  

Kathy was most deeply offended by Wasserstein’s portrayal of a consciousness raising rap group set in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970, just as the women’s movement was making a sharp, militant turn and flirting with angry separatism.  Urban groups like that were an important part of Kathy’s development and a source of support and encourage.  Here the women are reduced to symbolic stereotypes—the recently empowered housewife, the high school girl victimized by her parents discovery of the sexual revolution, the cultural faddist, and the angry lesbian—in the play’s most comic scene.  The women in it, or variations on them, will show up through the rest of the play in the vignettes of Heidi’s life, all of them highly successful but profoundly disconnected and ambivalent.

So, ok, let’s take the play for what it is and not try and blame it for what it never set out to be.  The play stretches from a high school dance at a toney girl’s prep school in Chicago in 1965 to a New York loft apartment in 1989.  Wasserstein tracks the changes whirling through her episodic play with a heavy reliance on pop music—the kind of soundtrack-of-your-life trick borrowed from innumerable romantic comedies—and a slew of casual cultural references meant to set the audience’s head’s nodding with knowing understanding.

But in 2016, a couple of generations after the play’s blackout, director Geller recognized the inherit problem of staging it for a new audience.  His semi-clever answer was to include a five page glossary of the references in the program ranging from the esoteric Renaissance women painters that art historian Heidi references in her opening lecture, but such jaw-droppingly obvious ones as Richard Nixon and John Lennon whose resignation and memorial service were symbolically coincidental with scenes from Heidi’s life.

Try as they might, the earnest young cast can only glibly reel off the references without always seeming to understand their significance through no fault of their own. 

The Friday night audience was the sparsest I have ever seen at a Black Box production—only about 30 people leaving plenty of empty seats in the intimate performance space.  About half were, like Kathy and I, Heidi’s contemporaries.  The rest were student age or just past.  Judging from the reactions, a lot of those references went over the heads of the younger members but elicited knowing but subdued chuckles from us geezers. 

By the way, Kathy drew my attention to the absence of men in attendance.  Including myself there were just 5, another older man with his mate, and a young gay couple.  Most McHenry County Trump era men could apparently not be dragged to the theater for a Feminist show.  Friday night is date night, Kathy observed.  Presumably men dragged their women to the action-movie-of-the-moment instead.

The cast and the crew: Front row left to right: Matthew Torres, Samantha Catalano, Lara Bell, Jess Piekarski, Monica Hauschild.  Back row left to right: Sean Plotts, Sam Prather, Emily Piesens, Kacie Swanson, Celia Villacres, Vince Calucci.

Still, the play was not without its charms and rewards.  Emily Piesens was appealing as Heidi—beautiful, brainy, emotionally cut off, confused, and conflicted.  The two male leads were also powerful to the point of scene stealing, which worked most effectively when both show up on a morning TV panel and completely override Heidi. 

Sean Potts as best pal Peter Patrone has to overcome being written as too arch, but redeems himself and his character in what is play’s most potent emotional moment as he lashes out in anger and grief as a Gay man who has attended too many memorial services for AIDS victims and calls out Heidi for her blithe self-absorption.

Vince Calucci nailed Scoop Rosenbaum—swaggering, glib, charismatic, exuding unctuous charm with a sincerely thin veneer of idealism and a reservoir of ambition.  He is the bad boy Heidi falls for and can never quite get over although she knows every one of his many faults.  Meant to be a shameless cad, in Calucci’s hands Scoop is none-the-less more human and sympathetic than the parade of Heidi’s two-dimensionally drawn friends.

For me the epiphany of the night came in the first act closing scene where Heidi confronts Scoop at the wedding to the woman he is settling for to facilitate his career.  Heidi is clearly better off without him but can’t quite let go as the lights dim and the two dance as the bride awaits in the ballroom.  It occurred to me that Hillary Clinton—even more talented and ambitious than Heidi—married her Scoop Rosenbaum and stuck with him through triumphs and humiliating shenanigans that would have made Scoop himself blush.

The play ends with Heidi alone in her new nearly empty apartment rocking her newborn child to sleep.  Content?  Well maybe just for this one moment.

That ending proved to be an omen in Wasserstein’s own life.   In 1999, ten years after the closing scene, she gave birth to a daughter at age 48.  Six years later on January 30, 2006 she died lymphoma.  The lights of Broadway dimmed in her honor.