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• Forty-six editorial staff women win a settlement of their suit charging sex discrimination at Newsweek magazine.
• Dr. Edgar F. Berman resigns from Democratic Party committee on National Priorities after arguing that women cannot hold decision-making roles because of their "raging hormonal imbalance."
• The League for Women's Rights forms to restructure marriage and divorce laws, calls for recognition of homemaking as "recompensable employment." 
• Women on the staff of Rat take over the New York radical underground newspaper.
• Sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal by 100 women leads to special supplement in August, 1970, issue.
• Congress to Unite Women meets in New York City. Lesbians stage Lavender Menace Action, one of the first asserting the right to be public lesbians. 
• Chicana feminists in California found the Comision Feminil Mexicana Nacional. They start a model service center for working women and two child-care centers. Founders include Gracia Molina Pick, Francisca Flores, Graciella Olivares, Yolanda Nava. 
• Radical Lesbians is founded. Write landmark "Woman-Identified-Woman" piece.
• off our backs (Washington, D.C.), Ain't I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa), and It Ain't Me, Babe (Berkeley, California), feminist newspapers, begin publishing.
• Gray Panthers founded by Maggie Kuhn to gain national attention for the rights of the elderly.
• Singer Janis Joplin dies of a heroin overdose.

1971
• New York Radical Feminists hold "Speak-out on Rape."
• Berkeley, California, initiates women's studies in primary schools.
• U.S. Supreme Court rules that companies cannot refuse to hire mothers with small children unless same policy applies to fathers.
• New York Board of Education votes to allow high school girls and boys to compete in noncontact sports. 
• The University of Michigan becomes first university to incorporate an affirmative action plan for hiring and promotion of women, including goals and timetables, as the result of a class action suit filed by Michigan FOCUS.
• The Professional Women's Caucus files a class action sex-discrimination suit against every law school in the country receiving federal funds. 
• Boy Scouts of America admits girls into its Explorer Scout Division.
• Girls are appointed as Senate pages for the first time in U.S. history.
• The National Women's Political Caucus is organized to put more women who speak for women's issues and all less powerful groups into positions of elected and appointed political decision-making.
• Stoughton High School, Stoughton, Wisconsin, offers one of the first-known high school courses in the history of women in America.
• Fighting antiabortion laws is the impetus for formation of the Women's National Abortion Coalition.
• Billie Jean King, at 27, becomes the first woman athlete to earn more than $100,000 in a year (more than any American male tennis player that year). 

62/Ms./December 1979
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between their words and my own life, but was often put off by their emphasis on getting a piece of the existing professional pie: on bringing women, as the National Organization for Women put it in 1966, "into full participation in the mainstream of American society," and on becoming "a civil rights movement to speak for women, as there has been for Negroes"—this last seeming to imply either that all women were white, or that Negro women didn't suffer from sex discrimination. 
     As a journalist, I was already near the mainstream of my profession and very far from the suburbs; yet I was still suffering from a world in which I was assumed to be far less "serious" (and to need far less money) than my male colleagues, and where the highest praise I could earn was, "You write like a man." I felt alienated among the powerful men of that "mainstream," and attracted to the farm-worker meetings or black-run community centers about which I chose to write; yet those early reformers couldn't help me to understand why. They seemed to want to become the "token woman" I already was. 
     Only in the late '60s when many women who had grown up in the peace or civil rights movements began to propose feminism—that is, an analysis that included all women as a caste and called for a transformation of patriarchy, not just integration into it by a few women—did my own feelings of recognition, empathy, and hope begin to explode. Many of these feminists had rejected their own hard-won but subordinate places inside male-run professions or political groups. Some had the courage to expose the real sexual caste systems inside movements that were supposed to be about social justice, but whose revolutionary sons treated women the same or with less equality than their conservative fathers had done. A few took on both political and literary heroes by occupying a prestigious publishing house that was actually supporting itself with sadomasochistic pornography, or by writing well-documented attacks on the sexual politics of male cultural heroes. 
     In each case, there was some odd echo of an experience that I had thought was idiosyncratic and mine alone. One woman told of the years she had spent doing much of the research and background work for radical male colleagues, for instance, but her major reward was to be called "a real brother." I had been doing free-lance editing jobs for the male editor of a national women's magazine who always handed me manuscripts with the instruction (intended as praise, since he had such contempt for his readers), "Pretend you're a woman and read this." Furthermore, I had always felt resentful or depressed when reading much-admired literary works in which women were humiliated, yet I assumed I had no right to criticize. 
     Instead of demonstrating outside posh "men only" lunch havens, as some of the reformers were then doing, these feminists were declaring their common bonds with women as a group, and holding public speak-outs on such populist and still illegal issues as abortion. For the first time, I understood that the abortion I had kept so shamefully quiet about for years
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