“…one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.” ~Anne Sexton
Professor Emerita of University of California Davis, Ruth Rosen is a uniquely qualified historian to write a history of the American Feminist movement. Her qualifications stem from the fact the she was something of a “revolutionary” herself, participating in many of the struggles that she writes about and adding her own anecdotes throughout the text, which is coupled with the fact that she is an historian and social commentator of some distinction. As a journalist for publications like The Nation, Rosen has brought her sense of social justice for women to the forefront, and as a historian she has focused on the experiences of poor and working class women– starting with her dissertation, which was about women and prostitution.[1]
Clearly The World Split Open was written with Dr. Rosen’s “historian hat” on, but it is written in a journalistic style that makes it at once entertaining and interesting. Scrupulously referenced, the book’s notes section is nearly one hundred pages and is followed by a robust glossary of important terms, making it also an excellent textbook for women’s history survey courses. Rosen’s references include books, interviews, newspaper articles, and her personal experiences as a comrade participating in the struggle of the women’s movement.
Rosen tells the story, her story, by starting with an annotated chronology that begins in 1848 and ends with the beginning of the story of the modern women’s movement in the 1950s. It is in this first chapter, that Rosen entitled Dawn of Discontent, where one will see the first striking resemblance to Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. Clearly, Rosen was heavily influenced by the late Friedan and admits that Friedan’s book “had broken the silence and and begun unmasking the reality of women’s lives” (8). The motif of The Feminist Mystique permeates her history in The World Split Open.
Nevertheless, Rosen does not end with Friedan’s critique. Instead, she moves the reader past the early days of gender enlightenment to what she terms the Rebirth of Feminism in section two of the book. This reference to “rebirth” emphasizes the fact that women’s movement issues lay somewhat dormant through the fifties and early sixties. In this section, Rosen begins by laying out the reasons that Liberal Feminism gave way to the Radical Feminist movement. She argues that, even though women had not yet put a name to many of their concerns (56), the children of the fifties rejected the “patriotic role” of Cold War mother and to take a more strident stance on issues of patriarchy and systems of power through “bohemian adventures, love affairs, marriage, the civil rights movement, antiwar activities, and the New Left Movement with unarticulated fears of replicating the world of their mothers” (58).
The middle part of the book addresses, in part, how women experienced the “conversion” from the trap of The Feminist Mystique into a new female consciousness. As an example of this, Rosen uses the experiences of Gloria Steinem and others, who were already older and working when they experienced “conversion” (208). Younger women, Rosen argues, were experiencing the shift in female consciousness in colleges and in small groups, while women of Steinem’s age were experiencing the conversion in “the struggles,” such as the anti-Vietnam War movement, “La Causa” of Cesar Chazev” and press coverage of feminist events, as in the case of Gloria Steinem (209).
Rosen also describes how the conservative Right in the United States responded to the new female activism. In her retelling of the story of Sagaris, a feminist institute created at Goddard College in the summer of 1974, Rosen points out the fear that was rampant among traditionalists and the Right, i.e. that ever-present fear of women rejecting their historic roles and finding new political and economic voices (254). This fear is also illustrated well in Rosen’s discussion of how the FBI infiltrated women’s groups along side such New Left organizations such as the Students for a Demoncratic Society (SDS), “the Black Panther Party, the Native American Movement, the Yippies and many other protest groups” (240).
The weakness of the book is that it seems at time one sided toward the experiences of the middle class, white woman. It doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to the history of female minorities caught up in or on the periphery of the movement, although this might be inevitable since work is just starting to be done in this area. Another weakness of the book as a history is its ideological leaning. While no person, historian not, can be 100% non-biased; Rosen seems to not even recognize hers.
The strength of the book is its telling of the story of the modern women’s movement in a journalistic style that is at once educational and entertaining. Her own experiences as an activist in the movement give it the kind of persuasive power that cannot be learned from books– that is, as hearing the story told by person who was there. Therefore, Rosen’s book is strongly recommended for all students of women’s history who desire to have a deeper understanding of the modern struggle for women’s rights from the perspective of those who struggled.
[1] http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Rosen/rosen-con0.html
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