energized by Simone de Beauvoir, who was the ultimate and too rarely acknowledged source of Friedan’s principal ideas.
Cultural histories of the mid-twentieth century have vastly overstated the role of the second-wave women’s movement in the transformation and liberation of modern women. That tremendous change had already been in motion for other reasons from the early 1960s on. In the United States, my baby-boom generation was awakened and propelled forward by a great surge of optimism and idealism with the election in 1960 of the youthful, charismatic John F. Kennedy (for whom I had campaigned in Syracuse). Popular culture was an even more powerful force: the brash, body-based rhythms of rock ’n’ roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music, were our percussive anthem, breaking into general cultural consciousness when Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was blasted at high volume over the credits of The Blackboard Jungle in movie theaters in 1955.
It was young women who were most jolted by Beatlemania. I have a reel-to-reel audio tape of a girls’ party at my house on the night the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The noise level of our ecstatic response overwhelmed the microphone. That was the moment, nationwide, when American girls slew forever the decorous conventions of the 1950s. At their Shea Stadium concert the following year, the Beatles could not hear each other onstage and security guards covered their ears, so massive was the nonstop shrieking of girls exhilarated by their collective new freedom.
Barbra Streisand has never received due credit for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism. Emerging from bohemian nightclubs where her campy patter and vintage costumes were shaped by gay male sensibility, Streisand embodied a scrappy non-conformism and confrontational toughness that strikingly contrasted with the emotional depth and elegant beauty of her singing. Her uncompromising ethnicity was career-risking: she refused to bob her prominent Jewish nose or moderate her harsh Brooklyn accent. A frequent guest on TV shows of the early 1960s, she was catapulted to fame by the Broadway musical, Funny Girl, which landed her on the covers of Time and Life in 1964.
As a huge Streisand devotee (I saw her onstage shortly before Funny Girl closed), I hailed her as a radical new woman who was smashing the genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day–Debbie Reynolds regime. Entering Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton) in the fall of 1964, I was amazed by the verve and audacity of the huge cadre of Jewish-American women students from metropolitan New York. They were politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free. Their unsparing realism often came from the harrowing experience of their grandparents’ generation during the Holocaust. Streisand’s rise from obscurity to stardom was a bellwether for a revolution stirring among American women well before the founding of NOW.
Young British women were also riding the zeitgeist in Swinging Sixties London, as England recovered from its post-war economic slump. Throughout my college years, I viewed the scintillating London of music, movies, and fashion as my distant spiritual home. In Binghamton, I somehow dug up gender-bending knockoffs of Carnaby Street–Portobello Road style gear—flowing Tom Jones or paisley shirts; men’s chevron ties; flared, pin-striped hip-huggers; a sailor’s maroon pea coat with gold military buttons; zipped Beatles boots with Cuban heels. Harpur’s laid-back hippies, who affected a tattered, thrift-shop look, didn’t like it one bit but prudently kept their distance. When I got to graduate school in 1968, I foolishly kept it all going—even adding a purple suede vest and a psychedelic orange-and-green stained-glass pendant on a leather thong from Greenwich Village. Needless to say, the tweedy Yale professors weren’t thrilled.
The vivacious young women of London were photographed by John D. Green for a 1967 large-format book, Birds of Britain. In his introduction, Anthony Haden-Guest called “the new British girl” a “shock genetic mutation” produced by “the London Scene” and crossing social classes, from salesgirl to debutante. She was the mercurial, coltish Julie Christie in Darling (1965) and the volatile, enigmatic Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up (1966). Among the 55 sparklingly kinetic British girls in Green’s book: Susannah York, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Mills, Mary Quant, Jane Asher, Sarah Miles, Pattie Boyd, Cilla Black, Lulu, Dusty Springfield, and Marianne Faithfull.
The British youthquake, with its flamboyant “unisex” trend in clothing and hair styles for both men and women, proves that second-wave feminism was only one strand in the ongoing gender transformations of the 1960s. The formidable Diana Rigg was already in her black leather cat suit and throwing karate chops as Emma Peel in the hit British TV series, The Avengers, in 1966. The first and most influential militant female persona of the period was probably Ursula Andress as the fierce conch-hunter Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), where she steps from the sea in a dazzling white bikini and with a knife strapped to her hip. (I borrowed her heraldic knife for the Amazonian cover photo of Vamps & Tramps.) That bewitching scene, with its mythic evocation of an armed goddess born from the waves, would inspire the enduringly iconic poster for a 1966 British film, One Million Years B.C., for which Raquel Welch as a cave woman in a ragged hide bikini spontaneously struck a combative, athletic pose. But the early hostility of second-wave feminism to the great sex symbols of film—indeed to all blatant eroticism in the entertainment industry—prevented those spectacular images from being incorporated into the history of women’s modern advance.
Among my many quarrels with second-wave feminists was my enthusiastic admiration for the sexy “Bond girls” and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, as well as for Francesco Scavullo’s glossy, glamorous, plunging-bodice covers for Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine. (Feminist protestors, led by Kate Millett, staged a sit-in at Brown’s offices in 1970.) Similarly, the hugely popular Charlie’s Angels TV series (1976–81) was contemptuously dismissed as “jiggle” or “tits and ass” TV by feminist puritans. Hence my delight at the return of Charlie’s Angels after the triumph of pro-sex feminism in the 1990s: thanks to producer-actress Drew Barrymore, there have been two successful Charlie’s Angels films (2000 and 2003) and a TV series (2011).
Betty Friedan, a tireless, outspoken advocate for women’s rights, was incontrovertibly the primary figure in the historic revival of organized feminist activism. But Betty Friedan did not create the formidable Germaine Greer in Australia, and she did not create me in the snow belt of upstate New York. I have repeatedly called Greer one of the emblematic women of the twentieth century. She remains the living person whom I most admire. Feminism would not have gone so wrong so fast had Greer retained the exuberant, slashingly satirical, all-conquering, and openly libidinous persona of her international debut after the publication of her first book, The Female Eunuch, in 1970. I have written and commented extensively about Greer, but there is room here for only one piece—my review of her 1995 study of women poets, Slip-Shod Sibyls.
The present book opens with half of the highly controversial first chapter of Sexual Personae, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art.” Most feminists who fumed about it were usually reacting to out-of-context quotation of my signature one-liners (inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers). This chapter, with its dark overview of biology, is a protest against the omnipotence of nature and the outrage of gender. It is written from a trans-gender or should I say supragender point of view, like that of Tiresias, the invisible observer of sexual mores in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Chapter One is merely an overture, inspired by Wagner. The rest of the book is quite different in tone, with chapters inspired in whole or in part by Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Puccini, Satie, and Delius, in addition to movie music by Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa, and Bernard Herrmann. Real readers, as opposed to lockstep ideologues, appreciated the sudden emotional shift (as in Hollywood soundtracks) into Chapter
