"The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," by Ruth Rosen; Viking; 420 pages, $34.95.There's no question where Ruth Rosen stands on the women's movement. Her pride in the accomplishments of feminism animates this accessible -- if occasionally breathless -- history.
Not just a partisan, Rosen was a participant in "Second Wave" feminism, the movement launched by the publication of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963. According to "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," Rosen took part in everything from consciousness-raising circles to a small guerrilla action perpetrated by a group called "Radio Free Women." But she chose not to write a memoir. Instead, she balances between passion and dispassion, between sympathy for the movement's goals and dismay at the infighting that divided its loyalists.
In the end, Rosen, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of two books on prostitution, doesn't believe that the overzealousness of some activists did much to impede the movement. After a decade of research, she reaches a conclusion: Feminism profoundly transformed American society, enlarging the reach of its democracy, expanding educational and job opportunities, and creating a whole new vocabulary, from "male chauvinist pig" to "displaced homemaker."
Even if, in the year 2000, the feminist label no longer has many takers, feminist ideals have become, as W.H. Auden said of Freud, a "whole climate of opinion." True, feminist ranks have splintered, and women who propose "a return to modesty" or question the reality of date rape are hailed as stars by a media establishment always looking for the newest new thing.
This recent fragmentation is a topic to which Rosen pays little attention. Still, as she says, the revolution continues, and some cultural gains appear irreversible. There are few Americans left who would argue -- for example -- that women should not receive equal pay for equal work, even if that goal remains elusive for many. On the other hand, some long-standing feminist issues, such as abortion rights, remain deeply divisive. Still other goals -- such as reform of divorce and child-support laws -- are at best works in progress.
"The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," is above all a useful primer for young women who want to understand how these social changes occurred. For older women, who remember the giddy days of the 1960s and '70s, when so much seemed possible, "The World Split Open" retells many familiar stories.
As one would expect, such iconic figures as Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Catharine MacKinnon move across its pages. Friedan is depicted, as has become customary, as "perhaps unwilling to share the feminist stage with any other leader" and sometimes vitriolic in her resentments. By contrast, Rosen is a big fan of Ms. magazine, whose impact was undeniable, despite its editorial rivalries and poor treatment of writers (unmentioned by Rosen). She lauds Steinem, the guiding light of Ms., for what she calls her "generosity of spirit" and "ecumenical inclusiveness." MacKinnon, whose recent anti-pornography crusade is highly controversial and opposed by many libertarian feminists, wins praise for her "brilliant conceptualization of sexual harassment as discrimination."
"The World Split Open" also reintroduces some lesser-known characters -- among them a former civil rights worker, Carol Hanish, who is said to have coined the slogan "The personal is political," and Kathie Sarachild, who is credited with the related notion of "consciousness-raising."
With both archival research and personal interviews, Rosen's book appears to add new details on topics such as strained gender and racial relations within the civil rights movement and FBI infiltration of the women's movement. "In my wildest flights of paranoia I never imagined the extent to which the FBI spied on feminists or how many women did the spying . . . ," she writes.
Rosen is at pains to revise the conventional wisdom that most Second Wave feminists were from middle-class backgrounds; several, including Steinem, were not. She also discusses the birth of feminism among black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian women. Many feminist leaders, she reminds us, received their political baptisms in male-dominated activist groups. "What fueled their exodus (from these groups)," Rosen writes, "was the ridicule and humiliation they experienced from men in the civil-rights movement and then in the New Left and antiwar movements who could not -- or would not -- understand that the women's liberation movement would expand the very definition of democracy."
Rosen decries simplistic assessments of the gulf between the supposedly reformist National Organization for Women and the more radical women's liberation groups. The two differed in style and emphasis, to be sure. But, writes Rosen, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, NOW members -- although mostly white and middle class -- targeted the problems of ordinary working women, not those of professional women."
In a chapter called "The Politics of Paranoia," Rosen discusses the behavior known as "trashing" or "psychological terrorism." Women considered "too eager to grab the spotlight" were criticized, even ostracized; so were married women, women who wore makeup (!), and those branded as elitist.
While Rosen concentrates on the movement's peak years, she also takes aim at the 1980s myth of Superwoman -- and at the media that helped create it.
In "The World Split Open," the media are alternately hero and villain. Rosen begins with an ironic epigraph, from the Harvard sociologist David Riesman, as quoted in Time magazine in 1967: "If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women."
The book's fascinating chronology, which also includes incidents of "backlash," recounts that, in 1970, "the media blitz" began. Suddenly, the women's movement was impossible to ignore.
And so it remains. In extending her time line through the present to include the World Cup victory of the U.S. women's soccer team, Elizabeth Dole's brief presidential run and Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Rosen suggests that the movement has not disappeared. "A revolution is under way," she concludes hopefully, "and there is no end in sight."