At the Leading Edge of the Women’s Movement

by Charlotte Linde

“The personal is the political.”  This was a slogan of the Women’s Movement (or what we now call second-wave feminism). I offer  some reflections on being part of a social movement without explicitly recognizing that a social movement was happening and that I was part of it.

I entered Hunter College in the Bronx (laterLehman College)  in  1961,  at the age of 16, after 5 years at Hunter College High School. (I like to say that I was a high school dropout, but formally, it was an early enrollment.)

Hunter High School was at that time, an all-girls school. The most dramatic part of moving to college was being in a coed environment. Half my fellow students were boys! (I use the terms of the time, in hopes of giving a feel for those times.)

Although Hunter High School as a college prep school was academically demanding and very competitive, there were still aspects of the culture’s view of the place  of  women. In  speech class, a required class, someone asked why we needed to learn Robert’s Rules of  Order.  The answer  was  “When you are married, you could very likely find yourself as the president of the local chapter of the  Women’s  League of Voters, and you’ll need to know them.” Nothing about needing them in Congress.

In both high school and college, part of my education came from magazines for girls and young women avidly: “Seventeen Magazine,” “Mademoiselle.” Not yet “Cosmopolitan.” I needed to know how to style my hair, how to choose lipstick, and how to be in the world as a girl. All these magazines gave the same message. Be smart but not  too  smart. Be competitive but not too competitive.

Be a good enough tennis player to give your boyfriend a good game,  but  be sure to lose to him most of the time.

From the earliest moment that I noticed these messages, I was frustrated and outraged. If you didn’t want me to be smart, why did you even bother to teach me to read? I felt that I was being asked to hold one arm behind my back and gracefully pretend I only had one arm. Other women were having these same frustrations, but if there was an ongoing conversation about this, I  was not part  of it. I never spoke about it to anyone.  At that point, my personal experience was not political.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” now considered one of the markers of the beginning of second-wave feminism. I found it in the library, and read it again and again.  I was an 18-year-old college student, not the frustrated suburban housewife she wrote about. But I recognized perfectly the constraints and deceptions she described and felt an astonished relief that someone was seeing and naming what I saw, but as she said, did not have a name for.

Betty Friedan’s revolutionary book The Feminine Mystique sparked the beginning of second-wave feminism

Again, I  did  not   speak  about   this to anyone. It was not yet for me a movement, or the subject of political activism. There may have been organizations forming  in  college around women’s issues, but I was not aware ofthem. I did not join a women’s group until the early 70s, when I was in graduate school.

My college experience also contained a counter-theme. I joined the collegenewspaper as a cub reporter, c and worked on it throughout my college career, finishing aseditor in chief. I never intended tobecome a journalist. I think I joined partly because I liked to write, and partly because I liked thepeople on the paper. Andamazingly,  to someone coming from an all-girls school, it was a coed group, men and women working together. I learned not only how to work with male colleagues, but how to have male friends. Not boyfriends. Friends. That opened up to me an astonishing vista: a world in which women and men were allpeople,with feelings, capacities, desires,fears, eccentricities.

 We have now moved on from second-wave feminism to fourth wave. I hope we can come to a new metaphor,  because the problem with waves is that there is never an end to them. On the newspaper, as we were writing, editing, doing layout, taking the paper to the printers, we were colleagues. It was not perfect, of course. There were many instances of what would come to be called sexism, many misunderstandings and unfair acts. But perhaps the most important thing I learned was that there could be a weakening of the barrier between the “opposite  sexes,” in  which at times, for a moment, I could live in a world in which everyone is people.