I've been confused for several decades. I believed that the women's movement was different from feminism. I thought the former was a legitimate movement to gain access to jobs and the latter was unrestrained Puritan prudery.
The photo on the right lets me know I
was wrong, both the women's movement and feminism were of the same
cloth.
The photo on the right is the old roller derby auditorium in San Francisco on Stanyan St. at Waller. These days the banked track has been replaced with a large basketball floor.
Roller derby was wildly popular in the
1950s but died in the mid 1960s. Roller derby is back today. The
sport is just restarting without banked tracks and with woman paying
for their own uniforms. The audiences are large; the athletes still
amateurs. But roller derby is back, alive and healthy.
The obvious pressure that pushed those
frisky roller derby queens into oblivion was the women's movement.
The obvious newfound freedom to be a tough, aggressive and violent
woman arrives with the end of feminism. Thank god, real women are back on the
American scene.
I can now see what the women's movement and feminism had in common. Both saw men as tyrants and women as victims. There was no room for real women with all their idiosyncrasies ... their fire and brimstone vitality.