Congresswoman "Battling" Bella Abzug rebuts the assertions of an earlier “Voice” article (by Pete Hamill) on the failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. She also discusses the history of women’s suffrage. From December 22, 1975. Page 1 of 3
Bella Abzug: “It is understandable that [Phyllis] Schlafly and other anti-ERA propagandists perpetuate myths about the real status of women in America…especially in the present negative climate when fear and economic insecurity are dominant." From December 22, 1975. Page 2 of 3
Bella Abzug: “The Women’s Movement wears many different faces, speaks with many different voices, ranging from Betty Ford in the White House to the most avant-garde groups that see undifferentiated man as the enemy.” From December 22, 1975. Page 3 of 3
Vivian Gornick asks, “What is ‘female sensibility.’ Does it in fact exist?” From May 31, 1973. Page 1 of 9
Vivian Gornick: “Vast internal changes must occur in women in which old responses, old habits, old emotional convictions are examined under a new light: the light of consciousness.” From May 31, 1973. Page 2 of 9
Vivian Gornick: “What, then, is the ‘femaleness’ of experience? Where are the compositional elements of a female sensibility to be found?” From May 31, 1973. Page 3 of 9
Vivian Gornick: “There are works, however, it seems to me, in which one feels the heroic effort stirring; works in which the writer gropes magnificently for ‘her’ sentence.“ From May 31, 1973. Page 4 of 9
Vivian Gornick: “The city pushes in on them. Bit by bit, incident by incident, one feels Jake and Sophie surrounded by the filth, the menace, the hideous fear of civilization breaking down.” From May 31, 1973. Page 5 of 9
Vivian Gornick: "The plays, properly speaking, have a single subject: the corrosive antagonism at the heart of all sexual relations between men and women." From May 31, 1973. Page 6 of 9
Vivian Gornick: "Didion's great talent lies in her ability to evoke the stunning abstractness of southern California 'dying in the golden light.' Her images of people alone on freeways, beside mansion pools, in supermarkets at 3 in the morning, at despairing beach parties, on blistering streets with curlers in their hair and wedgies on their feet are remarkable." From May 31, 1973. Page 7 of 9
Vivian Gornick: " 'Up the Sandbox' is a work in which fear is capitulated to rather than faced down; the lack of courage is fatal; it results in a dishonest book." From May 31, 1973. Page 8 of 9
Vivian Gornick: "Ultimately, our art is a reflection of the progress of our desires chained to our fears. The meaning of a social movement is that it rises directly out of a gut need to defeat the ascendancy of fear. That need becomes an idea which takes hold slowly, and slowly forces emotional—hence cultural and political—change." From May 31, 1973. Page 9 of 9
Vivian Gornick's seminal article, "The Next Great Moment In History Is Theirs," on the growing women's movement and its various factions. From November 27, 1969. Page 1 of 6
Vivian Gornick: "I was raised in an immigrant home where education was worshipped. As the entire American culture was somewhat mysterious to my parents, the educational possibilities of that world were equally unknown for both the boy and girl in our family." From November 27, 1969. Page 2 of 6
Vivian Gornick: "When I was 14 and I came in flushed and disarrayed my mother knew I'd been with a boy. Her fingers gripped my upper arm; her face, white and intent, bent over me: What did he do to you? Where did he do it? I was frightened to death." From November 27, 1969. Page 3 of 6
Vivian Gornick: "At the very center of all human life is energy, psychic energy. It is the force of that energy that drives us, that must repeatedly spend and renew itself in us, that must perpetually be reaching for something beyond itself in order to satisfy its own insatiable appetite." From November 27, 1969. Page 4 of 6
Vivian Gornick: "Mainly the feminist groups are radical, both in structure and in aim. Some, truth to tell, strike a bizarre and puzzling note. For instance, there is WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), an offshoot of SDS, where members burned their bras and organized against the Miss America Pageant in a stirring demand that the commercially useful image of female beauty be wiped out." From November 27, 1969. Page 5 of 6
Vivian Gornick: "Solanas's penetrating observation on our national life was: 'If the atom bomb isn't dropped, this society will hump itself to death.' " From November 27, 1969. Page 6 of 6
Vivian Gornick observes, "The women's movement has been under fire from the moment it drew its first breath." From December 10, 1970. Page 1 of 5
Vivian Gornick: "It is almost as though the very act of declaring oneself ready to do battle for one's humanity transforms one into something 'other': like the good and innocent men who go to war to fight for the sweetness of civilization and return killers." From December 10, 1970. Page 2 of 5
Vivian Gornick: "She, like the psychiatric patient who cannot stop explaining his behavior in terms of how his mother or father affected him in early childhood, is lost to genuine change. Man-hating, for the feminist, then becomes a waste of energy and a force for retardation rather than progress." From December 10, 1970. Page 3 of 5
Vivian Gornick: "And I want to say: have faith, my sister. The place in which we now find ourselves is unavoidable, but soon it will prove insupportable; soon it will prove emotionally unsatisfying, and with that emotional dissatisfaction comes another leap toward understanding, and with that, the automatic courage to press further and be off down that road once again." From December 10, 1970. Page 4 of 5
Vivian Gornick: "I wish to see every feminist say to herself: 'Yes, the patriarchy has taken my life from me, but also I have given it. I am not going to waste the rest of it in an avalanche of reproach. I am going to fight the patriarchy, but my real energy goes to the hard, drudging work of making myself human—as well as humane. Men may have taken my life from me—but they cannot give it back to me. Only I can do that, fighting inch by inch to reverse the emotional habits of a lifetime.' " From December 10, 1970. Page 5 of 5
Jill Johnston's epic speech-poem from the Town Hall meeting that led to the documentary, "Town Bloody Hall." Moderator Norman Mailer cut her off midway, but the Voice ran it in its entirety the following week. From May 6, 1971. Page 1 of 3
Jill Johnston: "Whaddyou say to the naked lady please please sorry thank you we are getting to the bottom of women's lib we are going down on women's lib I am beside myself with love for you when you are beside me my love..." From May 6, 1971. Page 2 of 3
Jill Johnston: "Listen. If you recognized an aspect of yourself that you love in these ancient new womens heads I too have recognized an admirable aspect of myself in your willingness to be as beautiful as you are who you are My mother was a vestal..." From May 6, 1971. Page 3 of 3
The Voice covers the NYC march that was "Making the case for equality." From September 3, 1970. Page 1 of 4
"Why can't you light your own fucking cigarettes?" the feminist asked impatiently. "Why are you cursing?" asked the MOM girl. "That's very, uh—" "Unladylike," the feminist suggested with a knowing nod. From September 3, 1970. Page 2 of 4
"And up at the Plaza fountain where the march was assembling all was happy chaos." From September 3, 1970. Page 3 of 4
"The march was liberally sprinkled with men. And in the end the newspaper crowd estimates were widely disparate. One march organizer said a policeman told her, 'There must be 50,000 people here.' The New York Post said there were 7,000. But Pete Hamill estimated that 35,000 had taken part in the march. Bryant Park, where they staged their final rally, holds 20,000 and every wet blade of grass in there was occupied." From September 3, 1970. Page 4 of 4
Ellen Willis reviews Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party." Her opening reflects what many art fans have felt at one time or another: "I have to hand it to Hilton Kramer—no matter how often I resolve not to waste anger on such an intractably stupid man, he always manages to get the old adrenalin flowing." From November 5, 1980.
Ellen Willis asks, "Is ecology a feminist issue?" From July 16, 1980.
Ellen Willis on abortion: "To this day I have not heard a more eloquent or chilling metaphor for the essential premise of the right-to-life movement: that a woman's excuse for being is her womb. It is an outrageous irony that anti-abortionists are managing to pass off this profoundly immoral idea as a noble moral cause." From April 2, 1979.
Ellen Willis on propaganda surrounding the politics of abortion: "It would seem, then, that the nitty-gritty issue in the abortion debate is not life but sex. The logic of the right-to-life position is that women's destiny is properly determined by their reproductive function; that women's demand for freedom and equality is inherently selfish and immoral." From March 5, 1979.
Ellen Willis on Simone de Beauvoir: " 'The Second Sex' remains the most cogent and thorough book of feminist theory yet written. With its exhaustive portrayal of the ways in which male domination and female subordination penetrate every aspect of everyday life and shape our cultural myths and fantasies, it offers detailed evidence for the basic claims of second wave feminism—that male supremacy is a coherent system of power relations, and that 'the personal is political.' " From May 27, 1986.
Ellen Willis plunges into family dynamics in the September 17, 1979, issue. Page 1 of 8
Ellen Willis: "Nixon vetoed federally funded child care on the grounds that the state should not usurp the prerogative of the family, code for "Mothers should stay home where they belong and if they don't it's their children's tough luck." From September 17, 1979. Page 2 of 8
Ellen Willis: "Despite all the activism of the past 10 years, our society still regards wife beating as a private domestic matter, condones rape within marriage, hesitates to condemn men for raping independent or sexually active women, restricts women's access to contraception and abortion, discriminates against homosexuals and even throws them in jail." From September 17, 1979. Page 3 of 8
Ellen Willis: "I had married at 20, left three years later, and though I did not rule out marrying again if I had some specific practical reason, the idea bothered me the way the thought of signing a loyalty oath always had." From September 17, 1979. Page 4 of 8
Ellen Willis: "Recently a friend reminded me that in the early, heady days of feminist activism I said to her, 'We're not going to see the results of this revolution in our lifetime; we're making it for the women who come after us.' A judicious and sensible comment, but I'm not sure I ever really meant it. The reason feminism touched me so deeply was that I wanted the revolution for myself; I can't help being disappointed and angry that it is turning out to be every bit as difficult as I claimed to believe." From September 17, 1979. Page 5 of 8
Ellen Willis: "Some former rebels have turned against their past altogether, dismissing their vision as adolescent extravagance, reducing a decade of history to the part of it that was—inevitably—foolish and excessive." From September 17, 1979. Page 6 of 8
Ellen Willis: "Like every other segment of society the counterculture was dominated by men, who benefited from the male privileges built into the family structure and so did not care to examine it too closely. While they were not averse to freeing themselves from their traditional obligations in the family, they had no intention of giving up their prerogatives. To support a woman, promise permanence or fidelity, or take responsibility for the children one fathered might be bourgeois, but to expect the same woman to cook and clean, take care of the kids, and fuck on command was only natural." From September 17, 1979. Page 7 of 8
Ellen Willis: "As it so often does, the right has a clearer grasp of the problem than its opposition, which is one reason 'pro-family' reactionaries have been more politically effective than feminists, who protest that they're not against the family, they just want women to have equality within it." From September 17, 1979. Page 8 of 8