Awwww Yeah vol. 28

Karen DeCrow shouts to a crowd during a 1975 NOW parade in Philadelphia. (Bill Ingraham/Associated Press) 

 

 

The Feminist Leader Who Became a Men's-Rights Activist

Karen DeCrow served as president of the National Organization for Women, but she often broke with feminist orthodoxy. 

 

 In a 1994 interview, she lamented that “in the battle between the sexes, men and women will go practically to the end of the earth in illogical, irrational ways to give each other pain.” It’s telling that DeCrow saw such behavior as mutual; she was also sympathetic to the controversial argument that domestic violence is a two-way street. In the 1970s, she had fought sexist rape laws that allowed victims to be questioned about their chastity; in the early 1990s, she applauded Katie Roiphe’s critique of “rape-crisis feminism,” The Morning After, as a courageous challenge to a “new puritanism” that depicted women as perpetual victims of male predation. Recalling the bad old days when girls were taught to deny both their brains and their sexuality, DeCrow was tangibly impatient with the idea that “being whistled at, or even slurped at” amounted to “oppression.”