Friday is Venus Day

People who don't know their history are _____

Fill in the blank however you'd like. I'd be inclined to say, "normal which is unfortunate".

Today's example is Michael Agger. During episode 9 of Mad Men Peggy Olson complained to a young lefty that many of the same doors that were closed to blacks were also closed to her as a woman. Agger was, well, puzzled by this:

Just one of the many ways this episode showed oblivious men expecting women to act subservient and deferential. The most surprising and curious instance of this was Peggy at the bar with Abe. He's fired up about the civil rights struggle, and Peggy replies: "Most of the things Negroes can't do, I can't do, either, and nobody seems to care." Abe finds this ridiculous and suggests, with thick sarcasm, that women should stage their own civil rights march. Of course, we know that civil rights does help lay the foundation for the women's movement, but it's fascinating to consider that a conscious guy like Abe would miss the parallels. I suppose it hasn't been in the Voice yet.

Michael Agger is apparently a senior editor at Slate. He also has a website and a Twitter account.  What he doesn't seem to have is much knowledge about the early days of second generation feminism. He thinks it unusual that a pro-civil rights guy like Abe would not have much time for the idea that women too were oppressed in 1965.

Let's set him straight. The following are all courtesy of Susan Brownmiller who has three special qualifications as a witness here. First of all, she was there on the inside of the civil rights movement and radical feminism. Second, as a radical feminist no one could accuse her of having a bias against the left. Finally, she wrote a great memoir of her time in the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s called In Our Time.

Brownmiller writes of the early feminists, "The flash point had been their second class status inside the new left ...." In other words, Abe is not surprising but a very good portrayal of a typical new leftist from the time.

Some examples of that second class status.

In 1964, Brownmiller went to Mississippi to help register black voters. Here is what happened:

The night we arrived in Meridian, a filed secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised our hands.

"Shit!" he exploded. "I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women."

Or how about this:

One evening Stokely Carmichael and a few others took a welcome break down at the dock. Camping it up, he joked, "What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone."

Here is what happened at an attempt to introduce a women's rights motion to the full convention of the SDS:

Hoots and catcalls greeted the resolution when it was read to the full convention. New Left Notes, the SDS newsletter, mocked the women's rebellion in its next report with a cartoon of a leggy doll in polka-dot bloomers waving a placard that read WE WANT OUR RIGHTS & WE WANT THEM NOW!

At the 1968 National Conference for New Politics, Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman tried to put a resolution forward:

"Cool down little girl," the session chairman told her. "We have more important things to talk about than women's problems."

Anne Koedt "an idealistic socialist" and "a ten year veteran of the left' described her experience trying to get her leftist friends to take women's issues seriously,

"But when I had tried to talk about women's oppression with my other political friends, they thought I was crazy. Some man actually said to me, 'Boy, somebody must have kicked you in the head when you were little.'"

That's just one source and I didn't even use all the examples I could have from it.

Eventually, feminists would split with the left. Although they didn't know it at the time, this was a tremendous stroke of luck as the radical left was about to drive the magic bus off a cliff at the end of the 1960s.

I should note that no other political movement was any more accepting of women's issues in the 1960s. But the notion that women have some sort of natural home on the left or that it is surprising that a civil rights activist in 1965 wouldn't have immediately gotten the point is only possibly for someone who is utterly unaware of what they are talking about. Someone like Michael Agger.