A report by a crusading feminist during the closing days of the “decade of discontent” (the Sixties) announced that those darn hunky revolutionaries of “the New Left” were not as forward-thinking as they let on – as a matter of fact, they were just as cranky and chauvinistic as their grandfathers. No matter which group a woman joined, Black Panthers, the Weathermen, SDS the Venceremos Brigade or the Balto Cong- you name it, the task of the women members was purely clerical and custodial in nature:
“I found to my sadness that the vision of the new society and the revolutionary consciousness didn’t include women. Women typed speeches for men, they didn’t give them. Women brewed coffee for men to drink. At the SDS convention in 1967, the women tried to put a woman’s plank in the platform. They were laughed at and had tomatoes thrown at them. In the New Left, the men judge a woman on whether the sex was free.’… She called it ‘a counterfeit Left, male-dominated cracked-glass reflection of the Amerikan nightmare. Women are the real Left”
These men were big on reading the blather of the underground press and you can read about their journalistic tastes here…
More on this topic can be read here…
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