Women on the March

DON'T iron while the strike is hot," advised the slogan of the Women's Strike for Equality. No one knows how many shirts lay wrinkling in laundry baskets last week as thousands of women across the country turned out for the first big demonstration of the Women's Liberation movement. The strike, on the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the women's suffrage amendment, drew small crowds by antiwar or civil rights standards, yet was easily the largest women's rights rally since the suffrage protests.

Barefoot and Pregnant. The day's crowds ranged in size from as many as 20,000 marchers on New York's Fifth Avenue to four women hurling eggs at a Pittsburgh radio station whose disk jockey had dared protesters to flaunt their liberation. In nearly half a dozen cities, women swept past headwaiters to "liberate" all-male bars and restaurants. At the Detroit Free Press, women staffers, angered because male reporters had two washrooms while they had only one, stormed one of the men's rooms, ousted its inhabitants and occupied it for the rest of the day.

In Manhattan leafleteers collared brokers at financial-district subway stops early in the morning; teams of women activists made the rounds of corporations whose advertising "degrades women" to present them with "Barefoot and Pregnant Awards." Also women are boycotting Cosmopolitan magazine because it emphasizes sex rather than the person. Editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, nevertheless endorsed the women's liberation movement as "fantastic."

The city had attempted to confine the women's parade to a single lane on Fifth Avenue during rush hour ("You mean trucks and women keep left" was one scornful reply), but to no avail. Chanting, singing, waving posters, carrying babies, cajoling men friends along the line of march into joining them, they took over the entire avenue, providing not only protest but some of the best sidewalk ogling in years.

In the nation's capital, 1,000 women marched down Connecticut Avenue behind a "We Demand Equality" banner. Members of the organized Federally Employed Women, mindful of the law against striking Government workers, assembled only at lunch, though some participated in a teach-in at the Old Senate Office Building later in the day, and opened lobbying efforts for the equal rights for women amendment, which is to be considered by the Senate. Los Angeles liberationists were confined to the sidewalk during their march, which drew only 500. Seven women dressed in suffragette costumes stood a "silent vigil" for women's rights during the day at the Federal Building.

Easygoing street theater and speeches marked demonstrations in other cities. More than a thousand women and men sympathizers attended a noon-hour rally in Indianapolis, where they watched guerrilla theater. In Detroit, guerrilla actresses played out "a woman's place": she enters the world as "sugar and spice," looks forward to being "Daddy's little girl," then becomes a newlywed who "whistles while she works" and ends up as an "everyday housewife" whose world is circumscribed by "ring around the collar" and who dreams only of winning daytime television glory as "Queen for a Day."

Storks Fly. Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is credited with reviving the feminist movement, originally called the strike at the conference of the National Organization for Women in March. As head of the hastily assembled National Women's Strike Coalition, she had predicted an impressive turnout and was not dismayed by the figures. "It exceeded my wildest dreams," Friedan said. "It's now a political movement; the message is clear. The politicians are taking heed already."

So they are. President Nixon issued a proclamation recognizing the suffrage anniversary, and the mayors of New York, Pittsburgh and Syracuse issued statements designating Women's Rights Day. Feminist leaders vowed that opponents of the equal rights amendment would feel the election-year sting of the women's vote.

Inevitably, the women had their detractors. The San Francisco Chronicle's Count Marco called the strike "a day of infamy and shame" and urged his supporters to wear black armbands "mourning the death of femininity." Boston marchers filed past counterdemonstrators carrying signs saying "Hardhats for Soft Broads." In Los Angeles, H.O.W. (Happiness of Womanhood) members paraded posters proclaiming "Communists Have Done It Again" and "Women's Lib Is a Society of Man-Eaters."

On rare occasions the women replied in bitter kind: "Male Chauvinists Better Start Shakin'--Today's Pig Is Tomorrow's Bacon." But mostly the demonstrations were signally good-natured, marked by cheerful and witty posters: "No Vietnamese Ever Called Me

'Chick' "; "Fight the Fags--Boycott the Midi"; "I Am Not a Barbie Doll." Stewardesses protesting regulations that prevent women with children from keeping their jobs carried banners reading: "Storks Fly--Why Can't Mothers?"

A Boston lady marched along chained to an oversize paper typewriter; in Berkeley, women wore pots and pans strapped to their backs. New Orleans States-Item women reporters ran engagement announcements with pictures of the groom-to-be instead of the bride-to-be. In Los Angeles, women at a rally donned Nixon masks and handed out flyers that read, "Thank you, women of America--by receiving low pay, paying those high, high prices and by increasing unemployment, you are valiantly contributing to my fight against inflation."

Hairy Legs. All in all, the day was a victory for the less flamboyant elements of the Women's Liberation movement.

There were no charred bras and few of the shock tactics of earlier local demonstrations, such as ogle-ins aimed at hardhats ("I bet you've got nice, hairy legs. Why don't you wear shorts?"). The movement has little organization, few chants or ringing slogans, and plenty of detractors, such as West Virginia Senator Jennings Randolph, who called the demonstrators "braless bubble-heads." But the women turned their opponents away with more tolerance and humor than has been the norm in American street politics. In the process, they probably won new support and undoubtedly new awareness among both men and women of the case for female rights.

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