To conclude our look at women's liberation in the 60s and 70s, we will look now at issues of gender and sexuality more specifically. And another word for what was going on in regard to gender and sexuality during the 60s was called the sexual revolution. It is a time of perceived liberation from the way of life that was promoted in the 50s that was more focused on the nuclear family as the unit, the main unit of society, the expectation for women to marry and become mothers.
And so you have alternate forms of living arrangements. arising during the 60s, for example, communal living or communes. You had a decrease in the sexpectation of marriage or motherhood, a belief that sexual relations were more free and had fewer unwanted consequences. In some states, you...
could more easily obtain a divorce in the 70s through the arising of no-fault divorce. And women had a new view of sexuality in general. People started talking about sexual pleasure for women, which had kind of been a taboo subject in the past. You had this beginning of some strong criticism of the tradition of Freudian psychological views of sexuality. For example, this essay, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, right, that there's this misperception about sexual frigidity from Freud, that there was a misunderstanding of female anatomy and the way that most women orgasm, which is not.
just through vaginal penetration, but through the clitoris. And then even more influential is Our Bodies, Ourselves, the book published by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective in 1970 that went over all of these issues of women's anatomy, women's health, including sexual health, pregnancy and birth control. menstruation and menopause and sexual violence, right? So this is a groundbreaking public discussion of women's physiology and health in relation to sexuality.
So this is a huge shift from the 50s and before when these were all pretty universally taboo subjects, as we saw with the Kinsey report regarding... more broad sexual behaviors, that was a cause of a huge uproar, right? And this, these works like Our Bodies, Ourselves are going into much more detail about the specifics of sexuality for women. And we can't talk about this time period and sexuality, which out without talking about the pill, the birth control pill, which was first developed in 1957. the very first one, Enovid, and it was originally approved for treating menstrual cramps, and then it wasn't approved until 1960 to be a contraceptive.
This, again, was contentious, even leading to legislation making it illegal to use contraceptives. This was seen as a a a problem of morality, of public morality, right? And so we have cases like Griswold versus Connecticut in 1965, where it was illegal to use contraceptives in Connecticut.
And Planned Parenthood, a clinic in the town of Waterbury, was trying to provide contraceptives and was prevented. And so they challenged this law by opening a birth control. clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, right?
And the executive director of Planned Parenthood is arrested. along with a doctor that had volunteered for this. And so this was a really important ruling by the Supreme Court that this was an unconstitutional law, that there is a marital right to privacy that is linked to the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, and that married couples, so very specifically married couples, could buy and use contraceptives.
And then this leads to another piece of legislation, Eisenstadt versus Baird in 1972. So this is now a law in Massachusetts that's being challenged, again, for giving out contraceptives, this time contraceptive foam. And this was regarding unmarried couples, right? So the argument was if the Griswold versus Connecticut ruling said married couples can access contraception.
then it's inappropriate discrimination to not then also allow unmarried couples to do so. So it was linked to the rights of privacy for the individual, not their marital status, right? So these are two really important pieces of law that confirmed women's rights to access birth control.
Now, that is not to say that it was universally approved of, right, there were some major issues or worries about specifically the pill as contraception. So we have this case of a journalist, medical journalist, Barbara Seaman, who uncovered the risks of the pill, which were not widely known at this time. She wrote a book in 1969 called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill.
pill. And you can see here in this image, it's been updated more recently. So this is continues to be, you know, something that people are concerned about.
But in 1970, her book inspired hearings in the US Senate regarding this, right. And, and this was, we can see in retrospect, justified the pill at that time was a very high dosage of hormones that would lead to serious side effects, including blood clots and strokes. So for example, Enovid had almost 10 milligrams of progestin and 150 micrograms of estrogen.
Today, birth control pills typically have a third or less of those two hormones. So the dose was really high, and it did lead to problems. but then there was an issue with the testimony in Congress that no women who actually had taken the pill were testifying or allowed to testify so this was a critique of these hearings but the hearings did lead to this lowering over time of the hormone levels in the pill and that it was required that women receive the information with the prescription so they could make informed decisions. So sort of emblematic of these concerns now at a very specific health-related level, not so much the social level. But these issues of women's sexuality, women's anatomy, women's sexual health in general continue through this time period.
And we have this kind of humorous piece from Ms. Magazine in 1978 talking about if men could menstruate. And it's looking at this parodying this issue of patriarchy, this issue of men running the U.S. society, running medicine as well. Right.
So they're saying what would happen if suddenly magically men could menstruate and women could not. So a gender reversal. They say clearly menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event, and men would brag about how long and how much. And it goes on in kind of a humorous way to talk about menstruation would be the envied beginning of manhood, and there would be parties and gifts, and there would be significant funding for problems with menstrual cramps, right, to solve this. that the supplies for menstruation would be federally funded and free, and there would be the prestige of linking.
Brands with different famous cultural figures like Paul Newman or Muhammad Ali and so on. And so it's really sort of skewering and pointing to this lack of support for menstruation, which the majority of women go through sort of socially on all these different levels. So. women's liberation feminism really kind of continuing to poke at these issues in a much more public way during this time, talking about formerly taboo issues like menstruation.
So you also have issues of sexuality really coming out into public discussion much more at this time, and partly because of issues within women's liberation. And we've talked about this before, that there was quite a bit of solidarity between different demographic groups of women, but there was still exclusion. So we've talked about the exclusion of Black women. There was also stigma against lesbians in some feminist or women's lib groups, right?
One of the most famous cases of this is Betty Friedan calling lesbians the lavender menace of women's liberation. that there was this worry that women's lib would be discredited if associated in the public's mind with lesbianism. The national organization expelled the lesbian group Daughters of Belitis from its Congress to Unite Women, right? So there's continuing exclusion going on.
So lesbians fight back against this, right? So the 1970 Congress to Unite Women. Unite Women in New York had a protest by lesbians who cut the lights and revealed themselves as the lavender menace. So they are sort of reclaiming this term and distributing essays about lesbians at this event. And there, you know, there's this collective of lesbian separatists called the Furies that were very sort of hardline.
wanting women to be completely separate from men. So lots of conflict within this, these movements. And then we also have trans women, right, who are really at the forefront of what we call the gay liberation movement.
They're also being excluded sort of socially or culturally. Many gay clubs and bars did not accept. transgender people as customers, but there were cases, two most kind of famous cases of protest in which trans women were really at the forefront. So we know about Stonewall that we'll talk about in a minute, that's kind of the most famous sort of gay-led protest, but the Compton riot was really the first.
It's just less well-known. And so this is regarding Jean Compton's cafeteria in San Francisco. And in 1966, there were some trans women present there, and the police were called to remove them. So again, exclusion. And when one of these women was being arrested, she threw a cup of coffee in the police officer's face.
And this was kind of a flashpoint for violence and a riot broke out. And the next day, members of the LGBTQ community picketed the cafeteria and smashed the windows to protest the fact that the cafeteria had called the police, right? So this is one of the first protests by gay people against particularly police oppression, as well as sort of institutional exclusion.
by a business, and this is being led in particular by trans women. So this is in 1966. Then in 1969, we have the significantly more well-known Stonewall event at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. So this is arguably a larger event in scope, and certainly it has been commemorated more. At this point in New York, things like holding hands or kissing or dancing with members of the opposite sex or even wearing clothing of the opposite sex were illegal. in the state of New York.
And so police would raid bars and clubs where this was believed to be happening, so trans or gay people present. And so the Stonewall Inn, which was a club, was owned by the mafia. And so they would often, through their Behind the scenes dealing with the police would receive a tip when the police were about to raid them.
And so then the customers would be able to leave. But in this moment in 1969, no tip came. And so the police raid the Stonewall Inn and they're arresting 13 patrons.
And there was a lesbian who is presenting. in a masculine way that is called butch, right? And she's hit in the head by an officer as she's being put into the police van and she calls out to the crowd who was still outside, you know, do something.
And there were hundreds of people present on the street. They threw up, threw things at the police. A fire was, something was set on fire.
Some accounts credit Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, two trans women that you see here on the right in this photo, as the first to throw things at the police. It's unclear whether they were actually literally the first, but they were certainly present there and leading protests as trans women. And this protest lasted for six nights. Five.
additional nights after the night of the raid with crowds protesting. This led to this event being commemorated the next year with a march in Greenwich Village, which is credited as being the first gay pride parade in the United States, right? So, and then eventually Stonewall becomes acknowledged as a National Historical.
site just a few years ago to be preserved as an important part of LGBTQ history. So you have trans women really being at the forefront of this, even though they're often excluded in some ways from not only private businesses like the Compton Cafe, but also by law in, for example, in wearing clothing. the clothing of one's opposite sex, as it was called at the time in New York City, or New York State, rather. And this is part of the shift in the late 1960s, generally speaking, with gay rights in general, where we had this earlier homophile movement that we've talked about before, that was more about assimilation, now shifting.
the movement generally for gay rights is shifting to more radical groups like the Gay Liberation Front. And we can see these kind of more violent protests against oppression as being part of that. So to sum up, we have this time period of the late 1960s and through into the 70s being a time of more social approval of discussion of women's sexuality, of women's anatomy and sexual behavior and sexual response.
You have the pill becoming kind of a flashpoint issue about sexual behavior, both within and outside of marriage. You have both women of color that we've already seen critiquing women's lib. but also lesbian women, really pointing to exclusionary issues within sort of feminism and women's live at this time.
And then we have trans women who are really leading this kind of activist effort in the LGBTQ community, despite being marginalized, both from, at the time, from organizations and... being excluded from really existing legally in some cases, but also being marginalized from that history in our current popular awareness. Marsha Johnson is somewhat gaining popular understanding, popular awareness as being a leader, particularly of Stonewall. But generally speaking, this is not an aspect that is well known.
So lots of sort of shifts during this period, making people more aware of issues and yet others being continuing to be marginalized.