“Lesbians are the most dangerous part of the feminist movement.”
In 1969, at the ironically named Second Congress to Unite Women, co-founder and then president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan campaigned for women to enter “into the mainstream of American society, now [in] fully equal partnership with men.”
With this goal in mind, and a position at the top of America’s largest women’s advocacy group at the time, she became the “mother of second-wave feminism.”
“Homosexuality is not, in my opinion, what the women’s movement is all about.”
Friedan was given free license by the public to speak on behalf of all women’s interests, and with that power, she made amazing progress in terms of asserting women’s rights across America.
All except queer women, that is.
“They are a lavender menace to women’s rights.”
With the word “lavender,” Friedan was referring to a slang term for “gay,” which first originated in the 1930s. Queer people at the time would wear light purple lapels to signal their sexuality to other homosexuals. Over the years, this covert method became public and lost its safety as a sign of silent solidarity. It became either a term for closeted (as in a “‘lavender marriage”’) or, in some cases, a reclaimed colour of pride.
Friedan was also alluding to the “red menace” phenomenon during the Cold War, wherein Americans were increasingly suspicious that their neighbours were secretly undercover communists. Friedan clarified this connection, stating that if lesbians were publicly mentioned in NOW’s directive, feminists as a whole would be seen as “a bunch of bra-burning man-haters.”
Despite what Friedan wanted the public to believe, NOW had a very close and beneficial relationship with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a San Francisco based lesbian activism group named after Sappho’s courtesan on the Isle of Lesbos.
The DOB started as a social club. Gay bars were often raided by police, so the DOB organized meetings at confidential locations. Two of its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, said the club started as a safe space to slow dance, as doing so with the same sex in public was illegal. A member would be assigned to door duty, greeting each new participant with the phrase “I’m [name]. Who are you? You don’t have to give me your real name, not even your real first name.”
Though the group was formed to avoid police, it nonetheless attracted the attention of the FBI. Undercover agents were sent to meetings to report back on the group’s activities. Eventually, they concluded that the goal of the DOB was “to educate the public to accept the Lesbian homosexual into society.” Russel Wolden, former City Assessor until his arrest for conspiracy and bribery in 1967, criticized San Francisco’s government by describing the city as a “haven for homosexuals.” In a City Hall Hearing, he warned the public of the “danger” of the DOB:
“You parents of daughters — do not sit back complacently feeling that because you have no boys in your family everything is all right … Make yourself acquainted with the name Daughters of Bilitis.”
We know that NOW was well-acquainted with the DOB, having been sponsored by the group for years. Despite this, they refused to put the DOB’s name on their list of donors, in order to further distance the feminist movement from that of gay rights.
Regardless of how hypocritically Friedan denied lesbian participation in feminism, her sentiment was echoed by the movement as a whole. The message was simple: lesbian issues aren’t women’s issues because lesbians aren’t proper women. Or, as Friedan put it: “We want feminine feminists.”
The effect of this statement was immediate, and NOW began its goal of removing lesbians from feminism, beginning in their own organization. Newsletter editor Rita Mae Brown was fired for being a lesbian, along with all other openly queer women employed by NOW.
In response, Brown created a new group for women who had been excluded by mainstream feminism due to their sexuality, which she called “Lavender Menace.”
The original members, seventeen in total, were made up of previous NOW advocates and women from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Both groups had similar complaints about lesbian issues being sidelined in their organization and yearned for an advocacy group where their demands wouldn’t play second fiddle to either straight women or gay men.
Brown created Lavender Menace with that exact goal in mind, finally offering queer women a space where they wouldn’t have to shout in order to be seen. Their first directive was to remind NOW of the power they’d lost in excluding lesbians from the women’s movement.
So, about five months later in May 1970, they hijacked the Second Congress to Unite Women. Friedan had just taken the stage to introduce the event when several crowd members stood up abruptly. They tore off the shirts to the audience’s shock, only to reveal a second shirt underneath which read Lavender Menace.
A Lavender Menace member took Friedan’s momentary shock as a chance to take the microphone and introduce the group to all the feminists gathered, explaining that their goal was to educate the crowd, not talk over them. She simply announced that outside the building, Lavender Menace was setting up workshops about queerness for any women interested.
They also passed around a manifesto titled The Woman Identified Woman, which contained a resolution to the Second Congress asking feminists to recognize, then and forever, that the movement must:
1. “Be resolved that women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.
2. Resolved that whenever the label ‘lesbian’ is used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied.
3. In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception.
4. All sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.
Each resolution works to give queer women an equal standing in feminism as their straight counterparts. NOW’s biggest pitfall was assuming that all women benefitted equally from the legislation they put forward, completely ignoring intersections of race, class, and sexuality in their platform. In order for feminism to benefit all women equally, the movement must acknowledge the diverse experiences of womanhood, and advocate accordingly.