Abstract:

In recent historical assessments of genders’ role on both sixties collegiate antiwar activism and Second-wave feminism in the United States, some have postulated a causal relationship between the two movements. Specifically, certain historians have theorized that the combination of women’s frustration with antiwar groups’ behavior and the New Left’s proliferation of oppression-based analysis contributed to the rapid rise of Second-wave feminism at the turn of the decade. This paper expands on this theory, which to this point has only examined national trends, by demonstrating in depth how this relationship operated, on a single college campus University of Oregon. Employing diverse source materials, ranging from student diaries and notes to public op-eds, club documents, and press materials, this paper reconstructs the narrative of exclusion faced by two groups of antiwar women: non-activists with antiwar sympathies and the activists of the New Left. The New Left alienated the former through their liberal drug use, “free love” hypersexuality, and increasingly violent tactics and the latter through gender based work assignments, limited leadership opportunities, and lack of care for female centric issues. While female alienation curbed the effectiveness of UO antiwar activism, it spread amongst the female student body a subconscious awareness of gender oppression, whose confrontation only required the arrival of its name. Upon arming themselves with a framework of their own oppression, UO Second-wave feminists set reformative goals that not only addressed sexism on campus, but the discrimination women faced within UO New Left organizations.

Gender and University of Oregon Campus Life in the 1960s

While University of Oregon had achieved balanced gender representation in its undergraduate student body by the early sixties, a combination of campus policy and implicit societal expectations segregated UO down gendered lines. On-campus housing, which by 1966 sheltered 47% of female students, had policies mandating all student dormitories be exclusive to one’s own sex. This policy extended to every UO accredited student organization, with the exception of student council, which fluctuated one and two female members. Major department selection, while not gendered in legal writing, fell into traps of stereotypical gender roles. Female students gravitated in mass towards education, nursing, and art, while male students constituted the near entirety of liberal arts and business departments. This issue only worsened at the staff level, with an vastly underrepresented female faculty, six entirely male taught liberal arts departments, and only one female represented in the UO administration. Due to this extreme separation, male students rarely, if ever, encountered women holding positions of power, showcases of female student intellect, work requiring cooperation with women, nor women in a casual environment.

Modern analysis of one particular student’s publication reveals the separation dynamic’s resulting culture of gender disconnect, and further defaults to female objectification and body shaming. In 1964, the Daily Emerald published male student, Stephen Green’s, letter-to-the-editor that expressed his feelings campus dress standards, specifically that of female students:
“While enjoying [campus dinning] … 250 pounds of co-ed oozed past my table in a stretch pants and a T-Shirt…. As I continued to gaze around the room, I saw many clear-cut reasons for retaining my bachelor status. There were shorts exposing hairy legs and knobby knees that would put any football team to shame, slacks that looked as if they contained potatoes instead of the ‘beautiful female torso.’ Many of the girls looked as if they had been poured into their clothes… at dinner I think that all students – particularly the women – have an obligation to dress as if someone cared. For believe me girls, we do”

This passage exposes not just blatant body shaming, but Stephen’s underlying expectation that every encounter with women have been sexual in nature. Despite the casual context of the dining hall, he found himself unable to allow woman the benefit of matching the setting. Instead, angry at the women’s apparent lack of acknowledgement of his and other men’s sexual desire, Stephen dubbed the women “potatoes” for not dressing in more visually pleasing wear. This indicates not just an inability to distinguish females from sex, but anger at the female students’ for even trying to separate themselves. Given the horrific implications of this letter, one may wish to dismiss this as a lone misogynist’s ramblings. But we must note both the “we” in his final statement, and the Daily Emerald’s choice to publish without critique. These, in combination, likely indicate a broader campus expectation that women not even try to be anything more than objects of male pleasure.

This mentality manifested itself in similar publications, which also revealed a culture of domestic expectation, and invalidation of women’s intellect. Another UO endorsed publication, the 1967 Oregena yearbook, featured tandem articles entitled, “Apathy: A Big Problem for the Freshman Girl/Boy,” which provided an overview of the expected freshman experience for the separate sexes. The male article offered two types of freshman men, one having been the “ultimate of suave… with the latest campus beauty on his arm,” the other having had the “sole intention is to top the campus record for the best grades.” Meanwhile the female article assumed that, while some were “testing their ability to function independently” the majority were “marriage-minded girls [seeking] an education in order to be somewhere near the intellectual level of their future husbands.” Evidently, the male author determined male student’s value to have been either in academic achievement or in the ability to seduce women. In contrast, he reduced the female student to either having struggled to find independence or, more positively, the slightly less intelligent partner of a man. In combination with female students’ trend towards education degrees, male students seem to have concluded that a subservient nurturance role was the only viable path for women.

Ultimately, women at UO lacked a viable avenue to voice their concerns with these behaviors and harmful expectations during the whole of the sixties. The dismissive mentality towards female intelligence extended to all the way to the administration, as made evident by Professors, Joan Akker, Joyce Mitchell, and Jane Gray’s 1970 report, “The Status of Women at the UO” which indicated unmitigated discriminatory hiring practices and harassment of female faculty. This pattern had also gone unchecked “for years,” despite the University having had data on the subject, and simply did not bother to organize it. Because the male dominated campus devalued female voices at every level, those who faced demeaning conditions had little sense by which to validate themselves, let alone each other. The roots of sexism ran very deep at the UO, so much so that when leftist progressive activism arose in response to the United States’ increased involvement Vietnam, even they were not immune to this pattern of gender based discrimination.

The New Left Movement and Female Students’ Antiwar Activism

When the United States began increasing troop involvement in South-East Asia, they prompted swift backlash from a formerly underground student group of Civil Rights activists, referred to under the catch all “New Left.” This umbrella term included amalgamation of national peace groups, such as Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom(WILPF), the War Resisters League, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and college campus organizations including members of Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the Free Speech Movement (FSM), Young Democrats (YD). The New Left’s most notable group however, was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). While starting out as a student civil rights group, the SDS rose to national prominence mostly from “campus popularity… as a vehicle for antiwar protest.” The New Left operated under a pretense of equality and wide platform, with the mostly Marxist leaning “intellectuals and militants [of] the antiwar movement” including people of “different colors and sexes.”

As the sixties wore on, however, the SDS and other New Left organizations began to show cracks in their unity. National historians point to the movement’s tension of a lack of diverse leadership contributing to the growing perception of antiwar activism as a man’s movement, as they “moved to assert their authority over an issue that greatly affected them.” Despite SDS attendance lists fluctuating between 32 and 39 percent women, women held 6% of executive leadership positions in 1964 and dropping. “The women who worked within SDS and other antiwar organizations [began to] recognize that men set the tone and that few women could demonstrate the verbal aggressiveness so highly prized.” As the SDS grew rapidly in the face of a growing draft, early feminist leaders, such as Jenette Rankin, and pacifist groups broke off of the movement to focus on their own issues. The decentralizing and increasingly male group “veered towards greater militancy in tactics and rhetoric in the second half of the 1960s,” which backfired in 1970, as a wave of negative press brought the movement to a halt.

At the University of Oregon, the SDS began in the same tradition as the national movement, initially populated by a closely-knit community of civil rights activists and leftists, such as CORE member Laura Bock. Bock, after participating in CORE’s Freedom Summer in 1965, arrived as a sophomore at UO during fall term’s outbreak of student antiwar activism. Under the UO culture of objectification and body shaming, Bock felt “very shy” and “self-hating” amongst her all female dorm, and when meeting men on campus. Bock dedicated substantial amounts of her sophomore year to YD, but did not find a group with whom she identified until joining the SDS. Describing the group as feeling “like a family,” the SDS was remarkably integrated, and diverse by UO’s standards when Bock arrived. Upon joining, she and other members organized the Faculty Commission Against the War in Vietnam, which notably elected male and female faculty as its first co-presidents. The early UO SDS, while eccentric, held a level of respect from the university, holding teach-ins about the war, keynote speakers, and the occasional protest. Like many early SDS members, Bock felt welcome in the group’s diversity relative to campus, but stayed upon finding “it was very supportive” of her when the campus was not.

Despite the family like atmosphere of the early UO SDS, Bock, like many other female SDS members, eventually noted an unpinnable feeling of discomfort with her role in the UO SDS. Most group leaders held underlying assumptions of “the position that… young women were given” Bock explained. Despite the progressive theoretical underpinnings of the SDS, “in 1967, women in the movement were still licking envelopes.” Club rosters of the SDS, YD, and FSC demonstrated a pattern of gender based labor in the antiwar movement. Amongst the six secretarial roles dispersed over three years, female members held five of the positions, in addition to Bock’s role as secretary of the FSC. While remarkably more progressive than the whole of the university, the equality minded women of the New Left likely knew they were capable of more than the work group leaders assigned to them, despite not yet having the Second-wave Feminist theoretical framework to criticize their role.

The increasingly male dominated UO New Left exacerbated the SDS women’s misgivings about the group, made more apparent by the rising gender awareness of SDS women. During Bock’s tenure, SDS events always featured a roster of mostly male speakers, but as the movement progressed, the already dominant male wing overtook the entire leadership of the New Left groups and its message with it. Only one woman, the FSC co-chair, held a non-secretarial position of leadership amongst thirty-one offices listed by various UO New Left organizations. Local news media’s portrayal of the movement reinforced this masculine perception, as most protest photos focused on male participants. Cemented in a belief that the antiwar movement was theirs to lead, the SDS and YD leaders evidently dropped all input from women on club direction, drafting platforms that neglected even the most obvious issues affecting primarily women, such as abortion, sexual assault, education, and child care. The New Left had become another entry in the list of male dominated UO institutions that denied women a platform.

By the time Bock graduated and left the SDS in 1968, she had developed major grievances about changes in the SDS’s culture. In the late sixties, the UO SDS leadership moved to embrace its hippie image, and began hosting public LSD trip events called “Peace Trips,” in an attempt to “expand the minds” of potential members Despite common perceptions depicting antiwar activists as hippies, in reality “those who dedicated themselves primarily to ending the war in Vietnam” believed embracing a countercultural image would hurt the cause. Bock, a dedicated activist, felt disappointed with the trend after formerly active members “started dropping out… and smoking pot all the time.” Meanwhile, Bock also observed some friends become convinced that property destruction would be a more effective attention grabber, having grown frustrated by administrative inaction. Former SDS members joined the group “Weather Underground,” which threw “fake blood” and conducted “weapons testing” on certain buildings in protest. Though Bock seemed to understand the reasoning behind escalation, explaining how “people could be sent to Vietnam to be fodder,” yet the public would only respond if “a building burned down.” Still, despite understanding the reasoning behind the shift, the move to radicalism alienated the pacifist wing of the group, which by 1970, had lost most moderate activist dissent. Subsequently, the competitive masculinities of the SDS leaders began not only trying to outdo each other in verbal aggression, but in physical aggression as well.

Radical Escalation: Alienation of the Peace Movement

The growing toxic masculinity in the New Left only worsened as the Vietnam war escalated. As further draft rounds pulled more angry students into the war resistance, “the pacifist movement, internally divided by the mid-1960s over questions of coalition politics, exclusionary policies… could not provide a clear alternative to SDS’s swing towards violence.” The public learned about the Mai Lai Massacre in November of 1969. The UO SDS, having lost much of its democratic socialist/pacifist wing, reorganized and decentralized. Now 150 strong and angrier than ever before, the group set its radicalized sights on a local target – the removal of the campus ROTC.

The 1970 SDS, larger and less communal than in previous years, pressured unwilling, often female students to participate in their drug and “free love” cultures. One freshman woman, Riki, described in a diary how her hippie acquaintance often ignored her unease, both with drugs and sex. Her roommate, an SDS member, often denounced less sexual women by ranting how “virgins… killed her. Running around thinking they are God just to save their purity.” At parties, her leftist friends “always tried to get [her] stoned” despite her objections, pressure to which she eventually succumbed. Riki herself was raised in a conservative household and often fixated on retaining a sense of modesty. The antiwar students, in Riki’s own words, “had a passion for inserting all the filth they [could] into one sentence.” Rather than turn her on to progressiveness, the liberal student body’s pressures on Riki made her fear she “was the only innocent one left” While the progressive students felt liberated by the counterculture, their pressures on the more conservative women to abandon modesty showed a lack of respect for their values. Though the New Left preached values of liberation and equality, male leaders only considered what those values meant in their own minds.

The reorganized UO New Left’s lack of respect for female preferences, especially regarding sex, extended itself into the realm of female objectification. One former SDS member described a pattern of male members introducing their girlfriends as “[their] chicks,” implying ownership. Riki, at a hippie friend’s party where she was one of two female attendees, felt shamed by “the eyes of all” the men’s fixation on her. Riki experienced this and worse. She wrote how “one of the more dominant members” of her SDS friend group, M, “decided [she]… would be [his] girlfriend,” and later exploited her for sex, “[ignoring her] by day… but [becoming] very nice when he [got] horny.” Riki expressed the crushing effects of this treatment as feeling “dehumanized to an object.” Eventually, Riki, “sick of greasy guys propositioning [her]” and “tired of being used, molded, ordered and generally treated like an object,” concluded she was “not really satisfied with the underground world of radicals.” By 1970, the UO antiwar crowd had lost the flawed, yet supportive atmosphere that made them attractive to women like Laura Bock. Instead, they devolved into slightly more liberal version of the broader sexist campus culture.

In the spring, the SDS adopted more extreme rhetoric and considered peace activist’s input less and less. In spring of 1970, the UO SDS organized its usual teach-ins, with the addition of sit-ins and rallies. Amidst this however, an unidentified group broke into and ransacked President Clark’s office, followed shortly by an act of arson in the ROTC building. Additionally, the radical factions of the SDS organized a riot outside a Mac court rock concert. Some SDS members tried to assure peaceful resistance, with one insisting “although we are mad enough to do it, the consequences you get from throwing rocks isn’t worth the consequences” but the de-escalation did not last. When campus protests broke out in response to Clark’s decision to support ROTC, the local police responded by tear-gassing the whole assembly. At the subsequent SDS rally, furious students hurled insults at “the university” and the “pigs” (police), who they claimed, “wanted to destroy [them].” One student cautioned against this language, fearing this would alienate their community support, to which one female student replied “fuck the community! The community gassed us this afternoon.” Much like the national SDS abandonment of early feminist groups, the new antiwar movement left behind UO peace activists in the growing student fury.

By late April, the disconnect between the antiwar factions the surrounding community’s demand for law-and-order seemed irreconcilable, frustrating largely female peace advocates. In response to campus riots, conservative community members wrote letters condemning “communist indoctrinated” students as “espousing the downfall of government,” with “mob tactics.” Others called for a government crackdown in support of the silent, “long suffering taxpayers… tired of the lack of respect for authority,” demanding UO fire protesting professors, and expel SDS students. Reading these types of community responses in the Sunday Oregonian, Riki expressed feeling conflicted about the whole affair: “I get the feeling we’re just digging ourselves deeper into the ground by arousing hostility from the older people… But how can I call myself a human being if I just sit while people are getting killed[?]… In three years my brother will be ripe for slaughter.” These feeling was evidently shared by a large portion of the female student body. In early May, four female students presented President Clark a petition containing 2,600 student signatures that condemned the rioters’ damage to school property. Two female student wrote letters to the Register Guard in response to the riots, one supporting the cause while asking them to leave her studies alone, the other calling for peace vigils instead of riots. Women at UO had no shortage of sympathy for the Peace Movement, but most preferred the movement be peaceful itself.

After the Kent State Shootings in May, violent activism sharply declined as students grew fearful of retribution by the government, school, or surrounding community. President Clark, fearful of riots in response to the shooting, canceled classes for three days after. However, rather than riot, UO students held a candlelight march in solidarity. Vietnam veteran and antiwar student protester Earl Steven described his devastation at the shooting: “it’s just very upsetting to be in the shoes where you’ve just left a battlefield,” and then have such an “unbelievable thing… happen… what did you earn the right to do with your service? To protest.” Rather than continue with the evident danger of rallies, antiwar students expressed a desire for understanding from the community; Wallace Duncan, wrote to Register Guard how most students “[were] ashamed of the conduct of their fellow students” but argued that the cause of students, “if to end war, is very just.” Still, many SDS members found the public perception of the movement hard to ignore, and dropped out. On October 2nd, 1970, a bomb detonated in the basement of PLC, but rather than attract attention to the antiwar cause, near all sides, including the rapidly shrinking SDS, condemned the action. On October 11th, the Register Guard posted an article declaring the National SDS “dead.” By the end of the 1970 fall term, the SDS had largely dissolved, leaving behind a mixed legacy and an opening in the progressive public consciousness.

Change in the Fem Focus: Antiwar to Antisexism

The women of the University of Oregon wasted no time filling the activist void. Amidst the campus chaos in the spring, Montreal sociology professor Marlene Dixon, presented to a packed symposium of roughly 100 students the main arguments of the socialist Women’s Liberation Movement. Over the summer, those arguments evidently took hold, so much so that in the fall, a large group of students created an unofficial Women’s Liberation club. Also during that term, Professors Acker, Gray, and Mitchell persuaded President Clark to commission and publish their report detailing faculty discrimination and harassment. By 1971, the Women’s Liberation club had evolved into the officially recognized University Feminists, backed by local feminist magazine, the Eugene Women’s Press. By November 1972, they, along with a coalition of female faculty, established the EMU University Feminist Office, the Women’s Studies Steering Committee, with over 100 students expressing interest in the program. In effect, UO Second Wave Feminism had cemented its place at the University of Oregon in just two years of existence.

Unsurprisingly, many of the reforms pursued by UO feminists were direct reactions to the sexist conditions that most women faced on campus. The 1970 “Status of Women at UO” report made explicit recommendations to combat years of discrimination experienced by female faculty. In addition, it advocated UO take “more aggressive recruitment of female undergraduate and graduate students into [male dominated] disciplines” to break down the barriers of gender separation. The Women’s Liberation club explicitly condemned their frequent subjection to sexualized “public humiliation (whistling, hooting).” Former SDS member Laura Bock also fought this culture of objectification off campus. Since her graduation, Bock became a queer feminism and body acceptance activist, a direct response the gender segregation and body shaming that had made her feel so unwelcome at UO. Because the broad issues of gender separation, objectification, and faculty discrimination harmed the majority of women on campus, UO feminists treated these as high priorities in their advocacy.

While many reformative steps taken by UO feminists connected to the broader sexist environment of the campus, some addressed sexist conditions specific to the New Left. In a Women’s Liberation document describing indicators of chauvinism, the writers explicitly denounce men who “dominated conversations, especially between women” and dismissed females “organizing because ‘other struggles’ were more important.” Both of these complaints can only describe patterns of behavior in men of the New Left, organizations unique on campus for their level of integration between sexes, and their description of advocacy in terms of “oppression” and “struggle.” Additionally, the dismissal of women centric conversation and women’s advocacy altogether connected to a national trend in the New Left, one best described in historian Sara Evans’ account of the SDS National Conference’s Workshop on Women:

“When the women’s workshop convened it included both men and women, but it gradually broke down into three or more subgroups… The men and women remaining in the lounge of the Student Union began to argue about whether there was an actual “problem.” Some women took the position that men held a set of attitudes toward women, analogous in thrust and content to those of racists. Both men and women disagreed, some on a theoretical level and others more personally; “Not me,” “I’m not a problem.” For a number of the women it seemed clear that the discussion they wanted to have could not happen in a context where they had to debate the need to talk at all. Soon there was a mixed group at one end of the lounge… an all-female group at the other, and some of the men, left alone, fumbled about for something to say.”

Due to frequent male dismissal, feminist groups that grew out of the New Left were keenly aware of the problem of discussion derailment. The UO Women’s Lib club’s decision to include those specific complaints indicates a local knowledge of this problem as well.

Male derailment of female issues connected to a broader problem in the UO New Left, specifically the assumptions of male and female limitations. The New Left men often failed to see any limits in their ability to lead the New Left, to construct comprehensive platforms, to fully understand the issues, and to offer relevant information to any discussions. Consequently, they led the movement with toxic competitiveness, ignored criticism, and constructed faulty platforms at the expense of women’s issues. “In belittling the work of women activists [by] assigning them grunge work” and in competition with each other, “men acted to prove their masculinity.” Meanwhile, many women overestimated their limitations to a crippling degree, believing they had little to offer beyond secretarial work. Laura Bock’s testimony indicated this exact phenomenon at the UO: “I think that’s a lot of why second wave feminism came about, because of the dissatisfaction of many of us within the antiwar movement… and the civil rights movement: the position that we as young women were given and the things we were assumed that we would do and would not do.” Once women began breaking these assumptions, such as when Bock lobbied YD to appoint her as a representative abroad, the masculine construct began to crumble.

When the antiwar men failed to breakdown their “masculinity-based anxiety” about admitting limitation by promoting leadership equity, the frustrated women left to form their own organization.
For the departed female members of the SDS, feminism was the natural evolution of their ideals, simply applying New Left theories, values, and terminology to gender advocacy. The UO feminists still were fervently antiwar, promoting solidarity with the female victims of violent conflict, and anticapitalistic, treating it as the root of oppression. Their main thought framework and terminology centered around the traditions Marxian oppression theory. The New Left’s favorite slur, “fascist pig,” updated to “chauvinist pig.” Additionally, in response the male dominated SDS leadership’s reluctance to confront gender roles, the University Feminist official platform promoting the reversal of learned feelings of inadequacy and oppressive gendered expectations through female empowerment. The blatant contrast of the New Left’s stated opposition to subjugation and unhealthy competition with its actual practices, displayed more clearly than ever, the need for female centric activism at the University of Oregon. Because the New Left male leadership failed to recognize the incredible potential of its own female activists, as made evident by the rapid successes of UO feminists, the campus antiwar movement only has itself to blame for the death of their cause.

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