Gemma Birnbaum: All We Have Standing Between Us is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Leon Levy Foundation, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Atran Foundation, and Anonymous.
Visit the companion exhibition in New York City, on view now at the Center for Jewish History, through 2026.
Archival Audio – Women’s Liberation: The Unfinished Revolution of American Women – ABC News
A protest crowd of women chants:
Snips and snails and puppy-dog’s tails
That’s what little boys are made of.
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That’s what little girls are made of.
Single woman speaks:
You know there has to be a meaning. Every boy in this society is raised to be something. To be a doctor, to be a lawyer, to be something. Not every- every boy is also thinking he’s going to be a husband and a father. Every girl is raised to be a housewife and a mother. She is not raised to be something other than that.
Gemma Birnbaum: During World War II, women entered the workforce in record numbers, the iconic “Rosie the Riveter” image plastered throughout cities and factories around the country. After the war, an expected return to domesticity frustrated many of these working women, and laid the groundwork for what would become known as the second wave feminist movement.
The ideological reckoning that came throughout the 1960s and 70s contained a spectrum of voices. Some women were looking to gain greater political, social, and sexual autonomy, and others prized what they called traditional family structures and conservative values.
Welcome to All We Have Standing Between Us. I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Today’s episode, Free to Become Themselves, begins with a special report.
Archival Audio – Women’s Liberation: The Unfinished Revolution of American Women – ABC News Correspondent Marlene Sanders
50 years ago, women got the vote. It was a bitter struggle, but an easy goal to explain. Today the things women want are more complex. Those involved in what has become known as the Women’s Liberation Movement do not necessarily agree on all the objectives. But there is a serious questioning of the role of women in our society.
Gemma Birnbaum: In 1970, Jewish American news correspondent Marlene Sanders broadcast the first of seven special reports she would go on to produce about the Women’s Liberation movement. Sanders, a pioneer in her own right as the first female war correspondent in Vietnam among other notable milestones, was keenly interested in what would become known as the second wave of feminism.
By the time mainstream media – including the “Big Three” networks of ABC, NBC, and CBS – began to report on the movement, it was already years in the making. Across the country, women had been inspired by Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique, and other seminal works.
The movement also had surprising roots in earlier legislation.
Ronnie Grinberg: For liberal feminism, I mean, one of the things that really propels it is the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Gemma Birnbaum: Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History and core faculty at the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Ronnie Grinberg: It makes discrimination against sex as well as race and religion illegal under the law, and it establishes the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, to adjudicate these matters.
And some of the earliest cases that are being filed are cases by women who are experiencing discrimination in the workforce. And so it becomes a really important tool in liberal feminism in changing laws.
Gemma Birnbaum: Foundational to liberal feminism was the idea that gender equality, especially when it came to political representation and economic opportunity, could be successfully achieved within the legal and democratic structures that governed the nation.
As the feminist movement began to build, several branches and differing ideologies started to take shape.
Ronnie Grinberg: Starting in sort of 1967 and kind of exploding in 1968, you have what’s known as women’s liberation, which is also sometimes referred to as radical feminism, and it emerges out of the experiences of a sort of younger generation of women.
So women who, volunteered to go south as part of the civil rights movement, who participated in the anti-war movement, got involved with Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, and experienced what they, what comes to be termed as sexism, which is a term that they coined. So in these movements for social justice where they’re fighting for these bigger causes, they find that women are treated as second-class citizens, and at first they don’t even have a language to describe it.
The first document of women’s liberation actually comes out in 1964 out of SNCC by Casey Hayden and Mary King, where they talk about, women’s subordination as a type of caste system.
Gemma Birnbaum: Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo was distributed to other women in the civil rights and freedom movements. For Hayden and King, the idea of a women’s movement seemed beyond imagination.
Ronnie Grinberg: And then two to three years later, you have women meeting in small groups known as consciousness-raising groups, where they come to talk about the sexism basically that they face in their lives, not just, you know, being treated differently at work and achieving less pay, but “the personal is political.” That’s when they coined that term that the very intimate matters of women’s lives have political implications. So it’s important who changes the diapers and who, you know, you, who makes dinner. Those are all political issues, and women have been expected to adhere to a certain role that they define as limiting, as a part of patriarchy.
Archival Audio – Firing Line – Betty Friedan
One of the major items of the unfinished business of women’s equality is that there should be economic value put on the work women do at the home. At least recognizing social security and just as so that a woman would take her social security just as she does from one job to another – if she chooses to stay home, for those very few years when her children are little, then she shouldn’t be utterly penalized for doing so, the way she is now. And I think that there should be pensions for housewives, paid vacations for housewives, they shouldn’t be completely dependent on their husbands. All this should be recognized. But at the same instance I think women should have a free human choice not to say, withdraw completely from adult society for 10 to 15 years just because they choose to have children.
Gemma Birnbaum: With the aim of breaking down societal ideas around the division of public and private spaces, radical feminists brought domestic issues into political conversations. They took previously taboo topics such as domestic violence, abortion, and reproductive rights, and made them public.
Jewish women in particular were disproportionately represented in what became known as the Second Wave Feminist movement – a successor to the suffragists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Born in Peoria, Illinois in 1921 to father Harry, a jeweler, and mother Miriam, a housewife who found a career as a writer after Harry’s health declined, the activist and writer Betty Friedan came of age in Marxist Jewish circles.
Ronnie Grinberg: Scholars have gone back and written about her Jewishness shaping her feminism. In The Feminine Mystique she has a provocative analogy that she makes where she compares the comfortable suburban home to a concentration camp. And she is sort of using some of the literature that’s coming out, um, about the psychological implications of the Holocaust. And I think what’s really interesting is that at the time it wasn’t that much remarked upon. Now in retrospect it’s sort of seen as pretty extreme comparison. But I think it points to the way in which Jewishness was there when she was writing The Feminine Mystique.
Gemma Birnbaum: Friedan’s writing both resonated strongly and found its harshest critics within her peer group: middle-class, college educated, and frequently, suburban women.
Archival Audio – Uncommon Knowledge with Mona Charen and Midge Decter – Midge Decter
The scariest statistic now, for the future, is that the number of young men going to college being so much smaller than the number of young women going to college. And if this keeps up, what kind of a life is this, what’s going to happen to this terrible game between men and women which has become really something fearsome.”
“They need a place of safety and a place of appreciation and this will be repaid by your getting protection. The relationship between the sexes have not really changed except they’ve been made so much easier if you’d only be grateful enough to recognize this.
Gemma Birnbaum: One of her fiercest critics was the writer and editor Midge Decter. Originally from Saint Paul, Minnesota and the daughter of a sporting goods merchant, Decter was raised in a middle class Jewish home. Her first husband, Moshe Decter, was an activist and writer best known for being one of the loudest voices to come out against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s rabid hunt for Communists.
They divorced soon after Moshe’s book on Senator McCarthy was published, and Midge went on to marry fellow writer Norman Podhoretz.
Ronnie Grinberg: She is a longtime writer and becomes an editor of Harper’s in 1968. And around that time, she begins to write very harsh critiques of feminism, both its liberal manifestations, she’s critical of Betty Friedan, and she’s also critical of radical feminism. And one of the things she says about Betty Friedan, she says this later, is that, you know, she insulted ordinary housewives. Most women were happy living in the suburbs, and she was insulting that point of view. It was a choice that they made.
Gemma Birnbaum: Among the critiques Decter expressed about Friedan’s work was that it was distasteful, including the assertion that, quote, “one should be asked to extend some special sympathy to healthy, free women who had been lucky enough not to have been burned in Hitler’s ovens.”
Decter, along with the conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly, was also a staunch opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment – a move that would add an amendment to the Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights for all Americans, regardless of gender.
Ronnie Grinberg: Phyllis Schlafly, who is the leader of the new right, who begins to lead a movement starting in 1972 against the Equal Rights movement, and is making all of these arguments that the equal rights movement is basically going to erode all gender distinctions and force women to have to support themselves in marriages, that when they get divorced, they won’t get alimony, that they’ll be drafted in the army.
Gemma Birnbaum: Former liberals who gravitated to the conservative movement later in life, Decter and her husband were considered an influential power couple among those dubbed “neoconservatives” by the writer Michael Harrington – a label intended to be derogatory that was ultimately embraced by many.
Daniel B. Schwartz: Many of them had been children of immigrants, grew up in immigrant areas or immigrant ghettos, you know, became socialists. And over the next few decades, many of them began moving, first in a more reformist left, even Cold War liberal direction. And then in the 1960s, you begin to see some who begin to move, really, to the right.
The Public Interest, which is founded by Irving Kristol, who is often considered the godfather of neoconservatism, had been, you know, a Trotskyite at City College, moves to the center right, becomes a real staunch Cold War liberal, even more quickly than some of the others. But in 1965, he, along with Daniel Bell, who, also had the City College background, form this magazine, The Public Interest, and you know, their main kind of preoccupation there is with a kind of critique of the Great Society.
Gemma Birnbaum: The Great Society was a series of initiatives launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson between 1964 and 1965. These programs were inspired by the legislation of FDR’s “New Deal” and worked to increase the federal government’s role in public social services and social welfare programs.
Daniel B. Schwartz: Not so much from the right. But a kind of skeptical liberalism, a kind of critique that’s looking at whether these federal programs that are being created, do they in fact deliver on their promises? Are these resources well allocated? Do we have any kind of empirical research that’s demonstrating that they are succeeding?
Ronnie Grinberg: There’s sort of two components to the neoconservative critique. One of them is to the radicalism of the new left, or that what they see as the excesses, and also their feeling that the Democratic Party is increasingly catering to that radicalism, something that becomes really evident to them in 1972 when George McGovern is nominated as the presidential candidate, and part of this new politics to kind of bring in more minorities and women into the party, also through affirmative action programs.
And then there’s the wing that Dan was talking about, and they’re all in conversation with one another.
Gemma Birnbaum: In addition to focused critiques and takedowns of the Great Society and other social reform programs, including affirmative action, the neoconservative movement took a deep interest in foreign policy.
Ronnie Grinberg: The neocons in general were avidly anti-communist and they’re increasingly seeing younger radicals embracing Marxist heroes like Ho Chi Minh and Castro, and they’re appalled. They’re appalled that they are not taking anti-communism as seriously as their generation did. And increasingly anti-war activists and new leftists are talking about America as sort of distinctly colonial and imperialist.
Gemma Birnbaum: Known for taking a more hawkish approach to foreign policy, neoconservatives were strongly opposed to the Nixon administration’s policy of detente, which saw an easing of tensions between the United States and its Cold War enemy the Soviet Union. Concessions of this kind, argued Irving Kristol, not only showed weakness, but also delusional naivete at just how far the Soviet Union would go in its quest for global power.
Additionally, the neocons’ approach to foreign policy included taking an active role as watchdog and peacemaker to promote democratic values in foreign nations.
Daniel B. Schwartz: Another crucial element in terms of foreign policy of the neoconservatives, is support for Zionism, and a very muscular Zionism at that.
Zionism really becomes the cause celebre for figures like Norman Podhoretz. I think a very key moment is in 1975 at the UN, with this “Zionism is Racism” resolution, which is you know, really being spearheaded to a large extent by the Soviets and Arab and Muslim states.
Gemma Birnbaum: On November 10, 1975, the United Nations voted to adopt resolution 3379, sponsored by the Arab League, a coalition of majority-Muslim nations in the MIddle East. The resolution, quote, “Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
The response from Jewish groups across the political spectrum was swift, with some condemning not just the content of the resolution, but also its passing on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Daniel B. Schwartz: The US ambassador to the UN in 1975 is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who’s not Jewish. He’s Irish Catholic, and he grew up in New York. He had been kind of, you know, in this neoconservative mold, but he really comes to the defense of Zionism at the UN in 1975, right? Where he gives a famous speech, a blistering speech criticizing, rejecting the Zionism is racism resolution, which passes.
Archival Audio – Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Response to the United Nations
The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and before the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.
There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note one foreboding fact: A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism, as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate, Andrei Sakharov, observed in Moscow just a few days ago, the abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.
Daniel B. Schwartz: And he uses that as his launching pad to run for Senate in New York in 1976, which was a very congested Democratic primary that also featured Congresswoman Bella Abzug.
Gemma Birnbaum: Born in 1920 in New York City to Yiddish-speaking parents, Bella Abzug was a lawyer, activist, and politician, and a leader in the women’s movement. A contemporary of figures like Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan, Abzug ran for Congress on the slogan, “A woman’s place is in the House – the House of Representatives.”
She was anti-war in Vietnam, and a supporter of left-wing Labor Zionism. She and Moynihan aligned on a fair number of issues, such as affordable housing, but the two candidates were in stark contrast when it came to their approach to politics and campaigning.
Daniel B. Schwartz: She was very openly Jewish. She was very flamboyant with her hats. She was a real progressive, you know, real feminist, against the Vietnam War.
And that battle between Abzug and Moynihan,for the Democratic primary, which was held, I think, in September of 1976, that’s a very close race. Um, which, you know, I think in some ways, uh, reveals certain kind of emerging tensions within the Democratic Party, uh, but also, you know, even among New York Jews themselves who, you know, are more drawn actually to Moynihan, uh, than they are to Abzug.
Archival Audio – Kino Library – Bella Abzug 1976
I feel great, I’m gonna win it, and beat Buckley and help Carter and Mondale from the Senate.
Gemma Birnbaum: The 1976 primary was close, and Moynihan narrowly defeated Abzug by just under 10,000 votes.
Moynihan went on to defeat Conservative Republican incumbent James L. Buckley.
Daniel B. Schwartz: Moynihan is the candidate who’s championed by the neoconservatives. Because even though some of them had voted for Nixon in 1972- Not many, but Podhoretz and Kristol had, but they hadn’t really, you know, made a strong pivot to the Republican Party yet. That would only really happen with Reagan in 1980.
Ronnie Grinberg: If we think about neoconservatism merging with the Republican Party in the 1980s, when now a new conservative new right is a major player, and this conservative new right is kind of shaped by, um, the Christian right and evangelical Christians rallying, against so-called family values issues
The Jewish community stayed liberal on social issues, so they didn’t follow the neoconservative turn towards family values for the most part. And that’s super significant.
Gemma Birnbaum: Many Jewish voters in the United States were alarmed by Reagan’s political alignment with conservative christians, fearing that such an influential relationship would erode or interfere with the separation of church and state as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
In 1991, the United Nations voted to overturn the “Racism is Zionism” resolution.
Midge Decter stayed involved in the political arena, and in the 1980s, her organization the Committee for the Free World successfully lobbied to increase military spending as the Cold War came to its dramatic end. She died in 2022 at the age of 94.
In the decades following the Women’s Liberation Movement, Betty Friedan lived a quiet life, though occasionally did speaking engagements, and became active in the fight for gun control. She passed away in 2006 at 85 years old.
While Bella Abzug never served in elected office after her time in the House of Representatives was complete, she remained active in politics, advocacy, and women’s rights. She passed away in 1998 at the age of 77.
Archival Audio – New York State Archives – Bella Abzug July 1977
I am not suggesting that women look alike, think alike, act alike, or have the same needs. We come in different sizes and shapes and colors, we have different sexual preferences. From different economic and social backgrounds from different races. From the home and from the factories, from farms as well as from towns and cities. We speak however the common tongue of womanhood and we share certain experiences. And one of the things we have learned is that women have to act together as women in order to win the right to live as unique individuals, not as somebody’s hot house idea of how a woman is supposed to act.
Gemma Birnbaum: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and Gemma Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the ABC News Archive, the Hoover Institution, Kino Library, New York State Archives, and the UN Archives.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections discussed in this episode, visit ajhs.org/democracy. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
