Womenswar

Founders call it "Womansurge." Opponents dismiss it as "Womanpurge." By any name, the new group, which says it will go into action this week, means more factionalism within the feminist movement and threatens to turn the National Organization for Women (NOW) into Then.

Feminist-Author Betty Friedan, 54, co-founder of NOW in 1966, and a dozen of its officials and ex-officials formed Womansurge at a secret eight-hour meeting two weeks ago in a New Orleans airport-motel room. The strategy: to counter what they see as the ruinously revolutionary drift of the present NOW leadership, including President Karen DeCrow, 37, a Syracuse lawyer who narrowly won re-election in October on the slogan OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM AND INTO THE REVOLUTION. Argues Brandeis Professor Mordeca Jane Pollock, 34, one of the moderate dissidents: "If you have any political sense, you don't talk about revolution in America today. We've grown up. Look at Eldridge Cleaver."

Though the new revolutionary style of NOW is hardly the bomb-throwing variety, it will mean a return to the gung-ho exhortations and disruptions of 1960s' militants. Toni Carabillo, 49, a NOW official from Los Angeles, told TIME that the group will go in for sit-ins and interruptions of congressional hearings. "Our pattern of professional lobbying has slowed us down, and we'll go back to the former techniques." NOW is also expected to become more explicitly political by endorsing and opposing candidates for public office.

Last Gasp. The DeCrow group, which took 25 of 34 NOW offices in the October elections, regards Womansurge as a splinter faction of aging professional women willing to accept token advances and avoid new issues. "It's the last gasp of a very small group with a condescending view of what feminism is like," says DeCrow. "If you mention you want to change the behavior of men or if you mention gay rights, they're frightened away."

Womansurge counters that NOW is overstressing lesbian rights and alienating housewives with firebrand oratory, when the main task is to build coalitions on bread-and-butter issues: more jobs for women, day care, legal protection and help with marriage and divorce problems. Says Friedan: "A lot of women dropped out because NOW was no longer speaking for them. The sexual preoccupations and radical rhetoric seemed to take over." Like many other feminists, she believes that a housewives' revolt against narrow, strident feminism produced the recent stunning defeats of state equal rights amendments in New York and New Jersey (TIME, Nov. 17).

The NOW-Womansurge warfare comes at a time when much of feminism's early momentum is gone. Though Womansurge is planning a national conference of feminists to take stock of the movement, it has no plans to become a membership organization rivaling NOW. But, says Wendy Winkler of the New Orleans 13, "if the leadership of NOW is so alienated from its members that there is no place to go, we may become a viable alternative to NOW. I'm hoping it doesn't happen."

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