The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Feminist Fringe

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 12 Comments

As mentioned previously, I’ve been re-reading Susan Brownmiller’s feminist memoir In Our Time, and what stands out — if one reads with an informed and critical eye — is how Women’s Liberation (a/k/a “Second Wave” feminism) originated on the far-left fringe among women whose life experiences were atypical, if not downright weird.

Brownmiller herself had three illegal abortions before 1968, and her book’s biographical profiles of other feminist pioneers are littered with examples of how the movement’s leadership came out of the anti-war New Left and the bohemian “alternative lifestyles” of ’60s hippie culture. Here is Brownmiller’s description (pp. 189-192) of the founders of the Denver-based feminist newspaper Big Mama Rag:

Chocolate Waters, a Navy brat from Pennsylvania (she legalized her childhood nickname), got dumped in the city by her old college boyfriend. “Yeah, we were traveling across the country and he took off and left me with no money in one of those old-timey women’s bars. I was bisexual then, so I started hooking up with the dykes. At a women’s festival somebody had an idea about doing a newspaper. We passed around a sign-up sheet.”
Jackie St. Joan — then Jackie Bryson — arrived in Denver with her husband and two children. Her interracial marriage, the first in Virginia after the Supreme Court struck down the state’s notorious antimiscegenation statute in 1967, began to founder when the couple moved west. Jackie swallowed her pride and went on welfare for five months before she found work as a secretary. At a potluck dinner sponsored by the Denver Peace Coalition, she heard about plans for a women’s paper. . . . Big Mama Rag came to fruition late in 1971. Maureen Mrizek, radicalized at college in Carbondale, Illinois, set the tone of the first issue by asking, “How can you conquer an oppressor when you sleep with him every night?” . . .
After leaving her husband, Linda Fowler from North Carolina had taken her child to a commune in the Colorado Rockies . . . “Those were my days of pot and acid,” she says. “I was smoking dope, chopping firewood, learning carpentry, and trying to figure out who I was, and how lesbianism fit into feminism.” On a trip into Denver she stopped into a radical bookstore and saw Big Mama Rag. “The fog lifted,” she exclaims. “Within a month I left the mountains and got involved with the paper.” . . .
Some of the women paired off: [editor] Carol [Lease] with Linda, and Chocolate with Jackie, who solemnly chose St. Joan as her new last name. . . .
[In 1975] the women learned via the establishment media that “Carla Weinstein,” who’d been in on their start-up, was the fugitive Jane Alpert, wanted in New York on bombing charges. . . .

Non-conformists, radicals, misfits, druggies, divorceés, lesbians and, of course, a terrorist bomber: Such were the freaky ingredients of the fringe movement that feminism was in its origins. And I point this out because one sometimes hears people who are ignorant of feminism’s radical beginnings express the mistaken belief that there is, or once was, a “mainstream” feminism which has somehow been “hijacked” by radicals.

No, the women’s movement was radical from the start, and if you ever thought feminism was “mainstream,” you just weren’t paying very close attention. Not paying attention to the radical fringe may seem like a safe bet — “Just ignore those kooks!” — until one day you notice that the kooks and radicals have taken over the country:

Outrage Over Sexist Remarks Turns
Into a Political Fund-Raising Tool
In the past few months, Republicans have called Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for Texas governor, “Abortion Barbie,” likened Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, to an “empty dress,” criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s thighs, and referred to a pregnant woman as a “host.”
Democrats do not just get mad when they hear those words. They cash in.
In fact, they are trying to find even more examples by tracking Republican opponents, their surrogates and conservative news media personalities, then blasting their comments out to supporters to build voter lists and drum up donations, casting aside the well-worn advice to shrug off sexist comments lest they draw attention to gender over issues.
It is proving effective. Emily’s List, the political action committee that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, has raised a record $25 million this election cycle. . . .

So, a pro-abortion group has raised a record sum to elect Democrats, who are now The Abortion Party. If you are against abortion, you’re anti-woman, see? And this startling turnabout — a revolution in morals, standing common sense on its head — has been accomplished by those weirdo radicals you ignored for so long.

 

Category: Feminism

Comments

12 Responses to “The Feminist Fringe”

  1. Jeanette Victoria
    February 28th, 2014 @ 9:34 pm

    I remember these folks from the early 70’s they were angry freaks when a bunch of them got together the hate was palpable. I knew several couples who had happy marriages until the wife fell in with these freaks. all divorced and a lot of these women became practicing lesbians.

    I never could understand the attraction. They were all so angry unhappy, bitter and well… UGLY

  2. Kirby McCain
    February 28th, 2014 @ 9:47 pm

    You want to drive these wackos crazy? Hit the freakin’ tip jar!

  3. Bob Belvedere
    February 28th, 2014 @ 11:35 pm

    I was very young when the Second Wave started [born in the Year One of The Age Of Obama – 1961], but remember well observing those Women’s Liberationists. And what I most remember was just how crazy-angry some of them were. I later learned, as did Stacy, their backgrounds and realized this was a movement born of Marxism and mental illness.

    The only possible good thing that came out of it was women not wearing bras – at least that was what teenage me believed, but we’ve since witnessed the droopy results.

  4. Jeanette Victoria
    March 1st, 2014 @ 7:27 am

    LOL the no bra doesn’t work for real women who have REAL breast

  5. RS
    March 1st, 2014 @ 8:52 am

    Maureen Mrizek, radicalized at college in Carbondale, Illinois, . . .

    I’ve been to Carbondale. It’s a nice little town in Southern Illinois’ “Little Egypt.” Hard to see getting “radicalized” there. Most people spend their free time fishing at Rend Lake or hiking the Shawnee National Forest.

  6. trangbang68
    March 1st, 2014 @ 9:53 am

    Now these freakazoids are the old granny looking dykes showing up to get married at whatever state or city gets taken over by the demonic legions of hell.
    …”By the time we get to Woodstock, we’ll be half a million strong and everywhere is the sound of celebration”….morphed into by the time we get to Social Security, we’ll be wrinkled up carpet munchers you have to keep away from the grandkids…

  7. Dai Alanye
    March 1st, 2014 @ 4:19 pm

    Whatever happened to dignified protest? Do they assume that looking and acting like freaks will win political points?

  8. Bob Belvedere
    March 1st, 2014 @ 6:48 pm

    Well, you have to let the girls free now and again – for health’s sake, don’t ya know.

  9. Jeanette Victoria
    March 1st, 2014 @ 6:54 pm

    Heh

  10. Bob Belvedere
    March 1st, 2014 @ 6:56 pm

    Heh, heh.

  11. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    March 2nd, 2014 @ 9:12 am

    […] The Other McCain discusses the feminist fringe […]

  12. Quartermaster
    March 2nd, 2014 @ 12:33 pm

    That’s what I tell my wife.