The World Split Open By Ruth Rosen

The World Split Open 

By Ruth Rosen

1970's-Present (Gender)

Thesis:

The 2^nd Wave feminist movement completely transformed the lives of modern day women yet few are conscious of the accomplishments and the work left to be done.

Summary:

The book is organized into four parts—

1.      Refugees from the Fifties: In the 1950’s women were expected to be the perfect picture of domesticity. They vacuumed in heals and had warm cookies on the table when their children got home. In the evening they were expected to be the perfect lover for their husbands. The American home was a large part of the vision for the Anti-Communist Cold War agenda. Women struggled to enter the workforce as jobs were seen as taken away from men who needed them. Women were the ultimate consumer and companies constantly advertised to women, showing them they weren’t whole without this or that. Massive rise in cosmetics, and women’s clothing sales. The Feminine Mystique was published and painted a picture of miserable unsatisfied women struggling desparately to find any meaning in their lives. The book is widely read and many women relate but it fails to link all women together as it focuses mainly on white suburban middle class women.

2.      Rebirth of Feminism

3.      Through the Eyes of Women

4.      No End in Sight

What does this tell us about Gender in the 1950's - Present day?

First wave feminism got women the right to vote and put them in classrooms along with the boys. 19th C.

Second Wave feminism took root in the 1960's as women became disenchanted with their role as mother and wife. Women were  harassed and marginalized in the work place, if they ever got a job. They were limited to what they could accomplish by their sex. In the 1960's many women began to feel passionate about not repeating the lives of their mothers, they wanted more. These women became active in movements for social change but found that here too they were seldom heard. They were given the jobs of secretaries and their opinions were little valued. They were also often used as groupies, and expected to be sexual partners for the men in the movements. Eventually, these women became outraged at their treatment and took their knowledge to form a feminist movement of their own. Many women's organizations rose up, including NOW (The National Organization for Women started in 1966 founders inc. Betty Friedan). Women were encouraged to form Conscious Raising Groups where they would meet to discuss different topics about how they were treated differently and what limitations were put on their lives by their sex. They complained about their husbands, chores, sex, but also about how society boxed them up into a specific role. They found that their problems and complaints were not only theirs but shared by most of the women around them. They built solidarity and eventually outrage at their mistreatment. 

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

Women suffered sexual harassment or were fired for not being receptive to advances

Harvard

Help wanted ads were divided by sex

Feminists actually never used bra burning as a publicity tool, although the press promoted this idea. During one march women set fire to objects that seemed to symbolize the abuse and objectification of women and the pile may have included bras along with countless other items.

General Thoughts:

The World Split Open is a valuable and comprehensive book on the history and impact of the American women’s movement from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

Scholars of modern feminism will value this book for its research and for being the first to treat the women’s movement as a national phenomenon of broad political sweep, but they will miss a persuasive explanation of why, by Rosen’s own account, the challenges she describes so effectively were not more successful in bettering women’s lives.

My Highlighted Passages:

“Since this book covers the entire second half of the twentieth century, I knew my first task was to explain how Cold War culture and its ideas about gender patrolled the boundaries between men and women, gay and straight, patriotic and subversive. For those who weren’t there, it’s necessary to grasp how much the immediate postwar era suppressed dissent, glorified motherhood, celebrated women’s biological difference, and sanctified the nuclear family, all of which led to a revolt against that decade’s cultural icon of motherhood"

Before the revolution, during the 1950s, the president of Harvard University saw no reason to increase the number of female undergraduates because the university’s mission was to “train leaders,” and Harvard’s Lamont Library was off-limits to women for fear they would distract male students. Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex; employers paid women less than men for the same work. Bars often refused to serve women; banks routinely denied women credit or loans. Some states even excluded women from jury duty.

I wanted to evoke the remarkable passion and accomplishments of that powerful moment in our history—and perhaps the future history of women worldwide—without romanticizing it, or ignoring the many mistakes, squandered opportunities, and failures of imagination that are part of every life and every movement.

Feminism became palatable to American mainstream culture by addressing the individual woman, rather than women as a group.

The Soviet Union’s launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, shocked the nation. Were Americans behind Russians in science and technology? It seemed inconceivable, but the evidence was overhead. Government and educational leaders knew that the Soviets educated both sexes in math and in the sciences. Reeling from the enemy’s technological feat, the United States decided to educate not just boys but girls, too, in math and science.

The Pill, which would be approved in 1960, was not yet on the horizon. It is difficult to even imagine what life was like for adventurous young women at a time when abortion remained illegal.

Turpentine, when ingested or introduced by douche, soap or detergent might have been forced up the cervix. Potassium permanganate tablets, pushed into the vagina to stimulate bleeding that emergency-room doctors might then see as a miscarriage

In the post-World War II era, any independent radical critique of American society could be—and regularly was—discredited by being associated with Communism, and with the Soviet Union in particular. In such a chilling political atmosphere, cultural and social critics of all sorts risked stigma, as well as unemployment.

And so the myth spread that women’s liberationists burned bras as an act of defiance. A sexy trope, the media used it to sell papers. In a breast-obsessed society, “bra-burning” became a symbolic way of sexualizing—and thereby trivializing—women’s struggle for emancipation.in 1975,

conventional wisdom, held that a man could rape neither a wife nor a prostitute

Diana Russell, whose pioneering book The Politics of Rape reached a wide audience in 1975, should be credited as the major archaeologist who unearthed the secret of marital rape.

By 1997, all fifty states in the United States had criminalized marital rape.

For black women, rape was not only a sexual violation, it was also a symbol of white power and their double subordination as black women.

What stayed in the American imagination was black male attacks against white women, the exact opposite of historical reality.

Before the women’s movement, few Americans had realized how many relatives sexually violated young girls.

Before the seventies, few women ever dared to admit that they had been beaten. The police, who regarded domestic violence as a private matter, rarely interfered. During the 1970s feminists renamed wife-beating—which sounded more like a traditional custom than a crime—“

In the process, they helped to redefine wife-beating as neither a custom nor a private matter, but as a felony.

The idea that a man’s sexual predatory habits on the job should be illegal had simply never occurred to most women.

Once named, sexual harassment seemed to be everywhere.

At colleges and universities, male faculty sometimes demanded sexual favors from students in return for high grades or letters of recommendation. In business, men often made promotions contingent on a woman’s willingness “to put out.

 In San Francisco, the flamboyant and politically astute Margo St. James, herself a former prostitute, organized a union of prostitutes in 1973 called COYOTE, an acronym that stood for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.” COYOTE successfully provided prostitutes with adequate counsel and persuaded public defenders to prosecute crimes that had actual victims.

pornography inspired violent fantasies that men might then act out on women

Oddly enough, pundits and journalists didn’t seem to notice that feminists had unearthed so many hidden injuries or that they had spent the decade trying to find some kind of equality within the sexual revolution. Instead, journalists and pundits happily buried the decade as though nothing of significance had occurred. The seventies, they said with a sigh of relief, were finally over. They were tired of Americans indulging in

By the 1990s, for example, many young women possessed an awareness of date rape and sexual harassment inconceivable to their mothers,

In a culture increasingly titillated by victimology, the image of woman as victim received far more publicity than stories that recounted feminists’ courageous determination to challenge the norms and customs of American culture and society.

By sharing life stories and questioning the “natural order of things,” women could begin to see their condition through their own eyes.millions of other women have shared this experience.

American women had believed they were among the most emancipated women in the world.

Now they understood that the hyperindividualism of American political culture framed juggling work and family life as an individual problem. Discovering their subordinate status suddenly threw everything in doubt.

Suddenly, you knew that other women shared your grievances, that cultural and institutional discrimination could explain what had previously seemed like personal inadequacy.

Cumulatively, they brought consciousness-raising out of the living room and into the public arena.

On March 8, 1911, American working women had celebrated the First International Women’s Day with parades and demonstrations. The ritual quickly spread to other countries. Due to its radical and socialist origins, Americans had long ago stopped commemorating the event.

There were thousands of protests, rallies, and marches. All over the country, feminists invaded by 

Creating Ms., Steinem left a legacy for which she would be rightfully remembered: she helped educate millions of women to see the world through their own eyes.

defend cherished values and customs, many men and women, within the United States as well as elsewhere, mobilized to prevent their women from turning into the iconic image of the emancipated

Western woman—a sexually and economically independent person, seemingly unprotected by her family and unmoored from her community.

derided modern feminists as “Dependency Divas”—women who sought government assistance for working families and the poor.

office. Bush restored the Reagan-era global gag rule, which prohibited any international agency from receiving U.S. funds if it performed abortions, lobbied to make abortion legal, or even provided counseling about the procedure.

The Bush administration, for example, repeatedly tried to ban abortion by conferring “personhood” on the fetus.

“abstinence only” courses to teenagers.