In the heady
first years of feminism, lesbians crashed the party, forever
bonding the two movements. To win the presidency, Hillary
Clinton must reckon with both.
Back in the
’70s, America’s founding feminists dreamed of
a future when a woman could run for president. Fewer
than 10 election cycles later, those feminist dreams
are coming true. As we watch girls with i can be
president pins cheering for front-runner Hillary Clinton,
it’s hard to comprehend just how far
we’ve come. Yet for all the symbolic power of her
candidacy, Clinton is still grappling with America’s
ambivalence on the status of women. The very word
feminism remains so divisive that Clinton dared
not speak it at a recent debate, instead evoking feminism
as “this great movement of progress that includes all
of us, but has particularly been significant to me as
a woman.”
In contemporary
America, a successful woman still risks being seen as a
threat to male power. And she can still be damaged by
judgments about her heterosexual allure or lack
thereof. Witness the speculation that has dogged
Clinton throughout her career: Where powerful women go,
lesbian rumors often follow.
This is perhaps
one reason that National Organization for Women cofounder
Betty Friedan took the stage at a NOW meeting in 1969 and
announced that lesbians posed “a lavender
menace” to the progress of feminism. Women
needed to get out of the nursery and into the
manager’s chair, insisted Friedan, and anything
that might distract from that goal -- messy issues
like challenging homophobia or questioning heterosexuality
-- were a threat to women’s common concern.
Her words
crystallized a homophobic sentiment that would both haunt
the women’s movement and serve as a call to
arms. By singling out lesbians, Friedan unwittingly
set the stage for the emergence of lesbian feminists,
a parallel political identity that was to 1970s feminism
what Dennis Kucinich is to the Democratic Party today
-- a leftward-pushing force toward more progressive
and comprehensive justice.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find an out lesbian
in the ’70s who didn’t also consider
herself a feminist. For me, they go hand in hand,”
says Katherine Acey, executive director of the Astraea
Lesbian Foundation for Justice, founded in 1977 to
fund projects directed at female empowerment.
“The feminist movement was a lifeline for lesbians --
it’s where we found each other, mustered the
courage to come out, and shaped a collective
voice.”
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