The World Split Open (63 page)

Meanwhile, middle-class white women took on the cultural burden of guarding the home from market values, which conferred upon them a mantle of moral superiority. They launched reform movements—
asylums for the mentally ill, shelters for wayward girls, charities for the poor, and the immediate abolition of slavery—to care for the casualties of early American capitalism. They became the ones who patrolled society and culture for transgressions against the purity of the home and family.

Early-twentieth-century Americans witnessed—with considerable ambivalence—the gradual transformation of their society from a nation that extolled character, a work ethic, and a producer mentality into a consumer culture that celebrated leisure, consumption, and “personality.” The hedonistic values of that new culture directly challenged those traits publicly cherished by the nineteenth-century middle class—self-control, restraint, and delayed gratification. Advertising made honesty seem quaint. Consumerism celebrated vanity and leisure rather than hard work. The cultivation of “personality” and of celebrity, rather than old-fashioned character, made sincerity seem downright eccentric.

In the years after World War II, a Depression-scarred generation justified their new enthusiasm for consumer goods by purchasing products mainly for home and family, not for the individual self. But in the sixties, sensing a change, advertisers began to target the individual consumer rather than the family. Consider the change in the promotion of bed linens. In the 1950s, a typical magazine ad for linens used the image of the dainty housewife, dressed in a modest shirtwaist and apron, putting nicely folded, well-ironed sheets into a linen closet. By the mid-sixties, the same linen manufacturer advertised the same product with an image of a woman in a see-through negligee, provocatively stretched upon those same sheets, implicitly announcing her sexual availability. Nothing, one might say, remained in the closet.
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The baby boomers, the children of the Great Depression generation, came of age just as the sexualization of consumer culture began to crest. Raised in relative affluence and accustomed to few sacrifices, they came into conflict with parents whose values reflected the ordeals of the Depression and the war. But members of both generations, in fact, felt bewildered by what was, by any measure, a profound societal transformation, one that challenged a past that valued work, delayed gratification, and commitment to families.

In hindsight, the emergence of something like the human potential movement in the seventies now seems inevitable. The therapeutic culture was not merely a fad. It offered secular guidance to modern men and women, at a time when the self was becoming increasingly
unmoored from family and community. The human potential movement, in its many guises, tried to reassure the confused men and women from two generations, in a world where all values seemed up for grabs, that individual happiness should be one's highest priority. And this, of course, fueled a consumer culture that was now targeting and producing for the individual, rather than the family.

The second wave of feminism did not create this individualistic culture, but it emerged at a time when a majority of Americans were already worried, however inchoately, that the celebration of the individual was eroding the cohesion of family and community life.

Middle-class women had long provided moral cover for the spiritual loss and soulless greed that created a society governed by the profit motive and market values. Now such mothers and wives worked outside the home, producing and promoting that very culture. Without women as moral guardians, Americans had to face the threat of a society-wide sense of moral bankruptcy. Who would preserve communal and religious values? Who would counsel compassion rather than competition? Who would care for the nation's children, families, and communities?

The feminist, as remade by the media and popular culture, emerged as a superwoman, who then turned into a scapegoat for America's irreversible decline into a nation of individual consumers. For this, the women's movement was blamed, even though this selfish superwoman would have seemed bizarre, not to say repellent, to most of its early members. Ironically, the women's liberation movement, which had attacked both consumerism and the commodification of women's bodies, ended up being consumed—and condemned—for promoting the very materialism its early members had attacked.

The backlash against feminism, directed as it was against the women's movement, reflected a profound moral revulsion against the shallow self-absorption of that consumer and therapeutic culture. Nonetheless, the growing New Right and social critics like Christopher Lasch blamed feminism—not consumer culture—for the loss of “traditional values” and the unraveling of the family.
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And when Americans took a good, hard look at this narcissistic superwoman who embraced the values of the dominant culture, they grew anxious and frightened, for they no longer saw loyal mothers and wives who would care for the human community, but a dangerous individual, unplugged from home and hearth, in other words, a female version of America's ambitious but lonely organization man.

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Metrecal was a widely used diet drink.

“If you're on the right track, you can expect some pretty savage criticism,” veteran feminist Phyllis Chesler warned young women at the close of the twentieth century. “Trust it. Revel in it. It is the truest measure of your success.” Words of wisdom from one of the pioneer activists who understood the meaning of a fierce backlash.

No movement could have challenged so many ideas and customs without threatening vast numbers of women and men. Some activists viewed the backlash as either a political conspiracy or a media plot hatched to discredit feminists. But the backlash, in fact, reflected a society deeply divided and disturbed by rapid changes in men's and women's lives, at home and at work.

Abortion genuinely polarized American women. Working women, as sociologist Kristin Luker discovered, tended to support abortion rights, while homemakers, who depended on a breadwinner's income, were more likely to regard children as a means of keeping husbands yoked to their families and so opposed it.
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The backlash, which had grown alongside the women's movement, gained strength in 1973 after the Supreme Court, in its
Roe v. Wade
decision, made abortion legal. The Catholic Church—and later the evangelical Christian Right—quickly mobilized to reverse that decision. By 1977, Congress had passed the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of taxpayers' money to fund abortions for poor women. By 1980, the New Right had successfully turned abortion into a litmus test for political candidates, Cabinet officials, and Supreme Court justices. By 1989, the Supreme Court's
William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
decision began the process of chipping away at women's right to abortion.

A long, drawn-out struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment also helped consolidate opposition to the women's movement. Passed quickly by Congress in a burst of optimism in 1972, the ERA needed to be ratified by thirty-eight state legislatures in order to become a part of the Constitution. Within a year, the ERA received swift ratification or support from thirty states, but then it stalled, and in 1978, proponents extracted a reluctant extension from Congress. By 1982, the ERA, unable to gain more state ratifications, had been buried, a victim of the rising symbolic politics of a triumphant political movement of the Right.

The ten-year battle over the ERA and the escalating struggle over abortion helped mobilize conservative women. Ironically, women of the Right learned from the women's movement, even if in opposition to it. In a kind of mirror-image politicking, they began to form their own all-female organizations, including Happiness of Motherhood Eternal (HOME), Women Who Want to Be Women (WWWW), American Women against the Ratification of the ERA (AWARE), Females Opposed to Equality (FOE), and the Eagle Forum. Soon, they engaged in their own kinds of local and national consciousness-raising activities. Their tactics, like those of the women's movement, included polite protest and lobbying in Washington, as well as more militant rallies and protests. But unlike the women's movement, the fringes engaged in actual terrorism at abortion clinics.

The political struggle also catapulted several conservative women to national prominence. Among them was Phyllis Schlafly, a shrewd attorney who nonetheless—like Betty Friedan almost two decades earlier—described herself as “just a housewife,” and founded Stop ERA, which she credited with defeating the ERA. An influential if little-known member of the conservative Right, Schlafly had written a book,
The Power of the Positive Woman
(1977), which attacked feminists for their negative assessments of women's condition in the United States. Schlafly also blamed “limousine liberals,” “the cosmopolitan elite,” and “chic fellow travelers” for living in a rarefied world that cared little about the traditional family and its values. Schlafly used her antifeminism as a vehicle for reinventing herself as a national celebrity. Thanks to the media, her name soon became a household word.
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The growing engagement of women in the religious and secular New Right legitimated an increasing fusillade of attacks on feminism by right-wing male religious and political leaders. In
The New Right: We're Ready to Lead
, Richard Viguerie, one of those leaders, announced that
the New Right had to fight “anti-family organizations like the National Organization for Women and to resist laws like the Equal Rights Amendment that attack families and individuals.” Schlafly, Viguerie, and other leaders of the New Right blamed the hedonistic values of American culture on feminists. For them, an independent woman was by definition a selfish, self-absorbed creature who threatened the nation's “traditional values.”
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Support for the growing backlash came from many directions, including many women who were not members of any New Right organization. Some of those disgruntled women now felt overwhelmed by the double responsibilities they bore at home and at work; they blamed feminism for their plight. The media took its cue from such women. A new formulaic narrative appeared in the print media, that of the repentant career woman who finally realizes that feminism had very nearly ruined her life. Editors began to dispatch reporters in search of professional women who had quit their high-status jobs and returned home with great sighs of relief to care for their husbands and children.

Like the “first woman” stories of the 1970s, these cautionary tales of the 1980s obscured the actual lives of the vast majority of women in the labor force, for whom there was no choice but to get up every morning and go to work. Most working mothers labored at low-paid jobs, and husbands generally avoided even a reasonable share of the housework from their now-employed spouses. So women daily returned home to what sociologist Arlie Hochschild dubbed the “second shift.”
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Even successful professional women were discovering that they, too, had no choice but to enter careers on men's terms. Their new employers expected them to be available “25 hours a day, seven days a week” and their husbands, too, expected the same services they would have received from an unemployed wife. To secure promotions, career women—but not men—felt compelled to choose whether to dedicate their prime childbearing years to their careers and remain childless, or to face the daunting prospect of trying to do it all.

Despite the difficulties women and men experienced as they tried to adjust to this newly configured home life, it's important to recognize that the women's movement did not invariably pit men against women. This was not a battle between the sexes; it was part of the highly gendered and racialized cultural wars that polarized Americans in the wake of the 1960s. Men and women fought
together
on both sides of the divide, for this was a struggle between social and cultural ideals.

Across the great cultural divide of the post-1960s era, one group of men and women, whom we might call neo-traditionalists, resisted any change that altered familiar gender relations. For them, feminism symbolized the decadence of the 1960s and the loss of women's moral guardianship of the family. Fearful of an uncertain future, they yearned for a mythic past in which men earned a family wage and ruled a patriarchal family, when women bore many children and stayed at home to care for them, when homosexuals prayed for conversion or absolution and stayed out of sight, when African-Americans didn't ask for special reparations, and when schools and universities taught the superiority of Western European culture.
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Peering across that cultural divide were their adversaries, men and women whom we might call “progressives,” who knew that the past was far more complicated, and could not be resurrected. But they also lacked a detailed blueprint for creating a different kind of future. Unlike their opposition, these men and women regarded feminists' demands as legitimate claims that expanded American democracy. They also realized, however reluctantly, that irreversible economic and social changes had transformed the nation into a society of individuals, alongside families and communities. Their goal was to protect those individuals from the centrifugal forces of a global economy. Like sailors without a map, they stumbled into uncharted waters, braved storms of protest and waves of resistance, and if they were honest with themselves, they knew that a blurry image of the future faced stiff competition from a finely etched picture of an idealized but somewhat familiar past.
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