The World Split Open (21 page)

In 1974, approximately one thousand colleges and universities offered women's studies courses; the steel industry settled a sex discrimination suit that gave $56 million in back pay and wage adjustments to 386,000 women workers; Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed married women, for the first time, to obtain credit in their own names, and the Educational Equity Act, designed to eliminate sexist curricula and achieve equity for all students regardless of sex; and Helen Thomas, after covering Washington for thirty years, became the first woman to be named a White House reporter.

So many successes in so few years. Yet, the speed of change masked a strong strain of resistance that grew alongside the women's movement. Signs of an instant backlash appeared everywhere. After the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, legal challenges met stiffer resistance from a Republican administration. It was not until 1970, for example, that the Justice Department actually pressed its first sex discrimination case. In 1970, former vice president Hubert Humphrey's personal physician, Dr. Edgar Berman, sparked a fierce national debate when he announced that women were unfit for the presidency because they might be “subject to curious mental aberrations.” In the same year, the Catholic Church established the National Right to Life Committee to block liberalization of abortion laws; Billy Graham called feminism “an echo of our overall philosophy of permissiveness”; a group of women in Kingman, Arizona, organized Happiness of Womanhood (HOW), which soon affiliated with the League of Housewives.

The next year, the women's movement suffered one of its most significant defeats. A coalition of feminists and child care advocates had lobbied and nurtured the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have provided child care for all women. Feminists wept with joy when the legislation survived both houses of Congress and was finally passed. But their victory was short-lived. President Richard Nixon vetoed the act and Congress, heavily lobbied by right-wing opponents, failed to override the veto. In his veto message, written by Pat Buchanan, Nixon described it as “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the 93rd Congress,” and said it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing” and “would lead to the Sovietization of
American children.” It would take years before politicians dared touch the issue of child care again.
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In 1972, Phyllis Schlafly attacked the ERA and formed a new organization, Stop ERA; Midge Decter, a neoconservative and wife of conservative Norman Podhoretz, published a diatribe against the feminist movement in a book entitled
The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation;
and North Carolina voters sent conservative Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. By 1973, the EEOC had a backlog of sixty-five thousand uninvestigated complaints; the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment had begun to lobby for a law that would overturn
Roe v. Wade;
the Society for a Christian Commonwealth, a conservative Catholic lay group, called for the excommunication of Justice William Brennan, Jr., for his pro-choice view in the Supreme Court decision; Joseph Coors, looking for a way to fund his conservative political agenda, established the Heritage Foundation, which would become the “think tank” of the Reagan administration—and funded a legal network for the radical Right to protect business and industry from what they termed costly government regulations, such as affirmative action; eighty-six hundred delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming male superiority; Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that prohibited the use of funds for abortion services or research and for abortifacient drugs and devices, which unanimously passed in a Senate that had no female members; and George Gilder published
Sexual Suicide
, a sustained argument against the women's movement.

In 1974, the first “March for Life” took place; Coors funded Paul Weyrich to organize the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and Richard Viguerie became the organization's direct mail fund-raiser; militant antifeminists stormed the Michigan House demanding that they rescind the ERA; and the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), which became the Right's major tool to oppose feminism, was established and headed by John T. Dolan, a former member of the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom. The next year, Phyllis Schlafly organized the Eagle Forum as “the alternative to women's lib.” The race had begun; the antifeminist backlash had as much momentum as the women's movement. Who would emerge the victor was not at all certain.
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For some of that backlash, Betty Friedan believed, the media was responsible. Journalists of all sorts were “still treating the women's movement as a joke.” As a result, “Women feared identifying themselves as feminists or with the movement at all. We needed an action to show them—and ourselves—how powerful we were. I sensed that the women ‘out there' were ready to move in far greater numbers than even we realized.”

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the women's suffrage amendment (August 26, 1920), Friedan called for a national “Women's Strike for Equality.” Although she hoped that women would abstain from their usual work, Friedan viewed the strike as a symbolic gesture. Word went out that local chapters should decide how to participate in the “strike.” After considerable squabbling, feminists finally agreed upon three central demands: the right to abortion, the right to child care, and equal opportunity in employment and education. (Radical feminists, however, carried banners demanding “free abortion on demand and 24-hour child care centers.”)

Here, then, were the core demands of the feminist revolution in 1970.
⁶¹
Riding high on a string of legal victories and widely publicized demonstrations, for twenty-four hours feminists laid aside their factional differences and mounted the largest women's demonstrations held since the suffrage movement. In cities and towns across the country, women marched, picketed, protested, held teach-ins and rallies, and produced skits and plays. Some women actually refused to work. A common poster urged, “Don't Cook Dinner—Starve a Rat Today.” Another reminded women, “Don't Iron While the Strike is Hot.”

On Boston Commons, some feminists distributed contraceptive foam and whistled at and taunted construction workers. At the
Washington Post
, women held a teach-in; in Rochester, New York, feminists smashed teacups to protest a lack of female participation in government; in Dayton, Ohio, two hundred women listened to talks by welfare women and hospital union members; in New York City, women built a makeshift child care center on the grounds of City Hall, draped an enormous banner “Women of the World Unite” over the Statue of Liberty, and invaded advertising agencies with medals inscribed, “This ad insults women.”

It was an unforgettable day. One twenty-four-year-old woman who didn't consider herself a feminist brought her child to work and was promptly fired. She called NOW and one hundred women marched and
picketed until her company rehired her. A female reporter decided to wear a brown and white button that simply read, “Women-Strike, Aug. 26th.” After waiters refused to serve her, she ended her newspaper story with these words: “I'll tell you, wearing this little button really has been an eye-opener.” The media mostly highlighted the march and rally held in New York City. Linking arms, a huge crowd of women (anywhere from ten thousand to fifty thousand, depending on whether your source was the police, the
New York Times
, or rally organizers) marched down Fifth Avenue, banners and posters bobbing above radiant faces. Radical feminists, high-school girls, mothers with strollers, suburban matrons, domestics, and office workers joined elderly suffragists dressed in traditional white to follow the same route taken by first-wave feminists over half a century earlier.
⁶²

Extensive media coverage informed a nation still reeling from black power, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement that the fledgling movement for women's rights and women's liberation was not a passing fad. (The media also felt compelled to report that Betty Friedan arrived late, after having her hair “done.”) In the aftermath of the march, a CBS News poll found that four out of five people over eighteen had read or heard about women's liberation.
⁶³

The 1970 Women's Strike was a stunning success. In the months to come, NOW's ranks swelled by 50 percent. Many feminists remembered the day as a peak experience in their lives. Across the nation, feminists in coastal cities, as well as those in the heartland, no longer felt isolated. Unity, if only achieved for a day, filled participants with exhilaration. For a brief moment, the banners “Sisterhood Is Powerful” and “Women of the World Unite” seemed to describe the future. At the end of the day's whirlwind events, Betty Friedan's keynote speech solemnly expressed the spiritual transformation many women experienced that day:

In the religion of my ancestors, there was a prayer that Jewish men said every morning. They prayed, “Thank thee, Lord, that I was not born a woman.” Today I feel, feel for the first time, feel absolutely sure that all women are going to be able to say, as I say tonight: “Thank thee, Lord, that I was born a woman, for this day.”
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*
WATS telephone lines allowed either free or deeply discounted calls from institutions like unions and universities. Without them, national organization was far more difficult. All social movements at the time depended upon the use of WATS lines to do what e-mail would do in the 1990s.

In May 1964, the
Daily Californian
, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley published the exciting news that “Energetic Women Discuss the Role of Educated Wives.” Less than six years later, in January 1970, the same newspaper reported a campus-wide women's liberation conference titled “Women to Break Shackles.” Accompanying the announcement was a photograph of a woman on her knees, her mouth open in a silent scream.
¹

In the intervening years, some young women felt as if they had lived several lifetimes. Outward appearance told part of the story. They had replaced matronly shirtwaists, tight undergarments, teased and sprayed hair, and heavily made up faces with miniskirts, bell-bottom pants, granny glasses, long, dangling earrings, unshaved bodies, long, straight hair, little or no underwear, and faces without makeup. Their thinking had changed even more dramatically as their sense of entitlement had grown. By 1965, the Zeitgeist, that indescribable but palpable spirit of the times, was affecting much of college youth. Each year, college-educated young women—as well as the larger public—began to take seriously what was still referred to as the “modern woman's dilemma,” shorthand for the debate over women's proper role in modern society.

During the same years that an older generation of women bumped up against the limits of liberalism, a younger generation of women was emerging from the 1950s, shaking off the dust and detritus of that decade, and beginning to question all kinds of received wisdom. They soon began to enter the political, social, and cultural movements then sprouting on college campuses. “The movement,” as it came to be
called, not only included the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, but also a network of friendships, sexual partners, spouses, and communal living arrangements in which the alienated daughters of the fifties had taken refuge. For many young women, it would be an agonizing decision to leave this political community. It meant rupturing years of personal ties to a subculture that, at its most idealistic moments, saw itself as the redeemer of a nation poisoned by racism, materialism, and imperialism. What fueled their exodus was the ridicule and humiliation they experienced from men in the civil rights movement and then in the New Left and antiwar movements who could not—or would not—understand that the women's liberation movement would expand the very definition of democracy. What made it possible was that many of these movements had already begun a downward spiral into self-destruction.

It's difficult to understand the origins and culture of the women's liberation movement without grasping something of the history and character of the New Left. In the post-World War II era, any independent radical critique of American society could be—and regularly was—discredited by being associated with Communism, and with the Soviet Union in particular. In such a chilling political atmosphere, cultural and social critics of all sorts risked stigma, as well as unemployment. The death of Joseph Stalin and the censure of the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy opened up space for new kinds of critical thought. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's revelations in 1956 of Stalin's monstrous crimes hastened the collapse of the Old Left, as many of the faithful deserted the American Communist Party. In England and the United States, small groups of intellectuals began in the late 1950s creating a “New” Left, dedicated organizationally to avoiding the hierarchical, centralized leadership promoted by the Communist Party and ideologically to sustaining a democratic and egalitarian socialist movement.