Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Eventually, he resorted to more direct and brutal strategies. He locked her in the house or beat her until she was too bruised to appear in public. One day, after he had smashed her head against the kitchen floor until she had passed out, she made her move. She left and filed for divorce. Her exodus only accelerated his violence. Soon after the separation, he sought out a job at the plant and continued the harassment there, in increasingly frightening ways. One night, she came out to the parking lot to find her car on fire. Another night on the graveyard shift, he slipped into the pigments department, sneaked up behind her, and flung her to the ground. He pummeled her face until her glasses broke. “There was another guy there,” Riggs recalls, “and he just stood and watched. The foreman . . . just ran out of the room. He didn’t want to be a witness.” She reported the attack to the company’s safety officer, who agreed only to give her husband a “verbal warning.”

  • • •

  The women at the Willow Island plant were determined to stay no matter what the men did. But, starting in the late 1970s, a bigger opponent than their blue-collar male colleagues loomed: the company’s top management. In 1976, the plant abruptly stopped hiring women. That same year back at headquarters, company executives decided to develop a fetal protection policy. American Cyanamid had never demonstrated a strong desire to protect factory workers in the past—employees at the explosion-prone Willow Island plant had worked for years in dirty and dangerous conditions. Suddenly, though, management was worried about reproductive hazards in the factory. American Cyanamid’s corporate medical director, Dr. Robert Clyne, quickly drafted a policy statement that would prohibit all women of childbearing age from working in production jobs that exposed them to any of twenty-nine chemicals.

  The protection plan wasn’t a response to complaints from female employees; as Clyne himself conceded, there were none he was aware of, and he never had plant physicians survey workers about possible reproductive problems, anyway. Nor was the move inspired by scientific research. The company’s medical department neither reviewed the literature nor conducted any independent research on the reproductive risks of the chemicals that it had singled out. As Clyne explained later, the twenty-nine chemicals were “compiled as a result of a quick review of computer sheets.” In fact, only one of the selected toxins, lead, was actually known to cause reproductive damage. And while lead is a risk to both sexes, Clyne didn’t consider reproductive hazards for men. “We just did not have enough information to incorporate that facet of it at that time,” he said later in a court deposition. In a radio interview, he said that if it were determined that men’s reproductive abilities were being threatened by conditions at the plant, he wouldn’t call for men’s removal: “Other steps will be taken to protect the man; either possibly discontinuing the manufacture of the product or using personal protective garments, or respirators.” Nor did the company consider another solution—reducing the level of toxins in the workplace instead of banishing the women. The company later claimed that there was “no technology available” that was up to the task. A government inspection, however, had found that some changes in engineering controls could have lowered lead exposure to federally acceptable levels for both sexes. But the price tag—$700,000—apparently didn’t appeal to Cyanamid management.

  In 1978, the company unveiled the first draft of its fetal protection policy. “We recognize that this may infringe on the scope of jobs available to the individual woman,” the company’s executive committee stated in an in-house memo, “but in our judgment this is certainly the lesser of the two evils.”

  The policy wasn’t official yet, but Willow Island’s managers decided to enforce it at once. In a series of meetings in January and February of 1978, industrial relations director Glenn Mercer summoned women to the plant medical office to lay down the new ground rules. After May 1, he told them, no fertile woman under fifty would be allowed to work in eight of ten departments—a ruling that eliminated all but seven factory jobs for women—unless they were surgically sterilized. As Mercer put it to the women, the company was “getting the jump on OSHA,” which, he assured them, would be passing similar regulations any day now. Riggs recalls: “He told us it was going to be worldwide. He said there was going to be a time in the future when women wouldn’t work at any chemical plant unless they were sterile.”

  The women began asking questions. Was he going to lay off the younger men to make way for displaced women with more seniority? No, he answered, just women. What if they took birth control pills? Not good enough, Mercer said, because they might “forget.” What if they agreed to take monthly pregnancy tests? Mercer shook his head again. What if their husbands already had a vasectomy? No, Mercer said. It was the women who had to have the operation.

  The women asked for a list of the chemicals in question. Mercer said he didn’t have it handy but that there were “hundreds of them,” with more being added “almost on a daily basis.” Then a company nurse and doctor stepped forward to explain to the women that sterilization was simple and could be obtained locally. With that, the meeting was adjourned and the women filed out, most too shaken to speak.

  • • •

  Donna Martin listened to Mercer’s speech with mounting horror. She knew she didn’t have enough seniority to get one of the seven remaining jobs. How was she going to support her five children? Her husband was out of work, and they were already beset by financial problems. For weeks she agonized, and the more she turned it over in her mind, the more depressed she became: “Mentally, I couldn’t handle the pressure of having to choose between losing my job and never having more children.” She had some painkillers left over from an old neck injury; in February she took an overdose and wound up in the hospital for a month.

  Within a week after her release from the hospital, she had decided to have the surgery “so I would quit worrying about losing my job.” She went to Dr. George Gevas, a local obstetrician, signed a consent form for the operation that same day and scheduled surgery the following week—because she wanted to be sure she met the company’s May Day deadline for sterilization. Afterward, frightened that she could lose her job if she stayed away too long, Martin allowed herself only three weeks of recuperation—“that was the shortest time he [Gevas] would agree to me being off,” she said.

  When Martin returned to work, she discovered that the plant management had postponed the deadline for surgery in her absence; the corporation’s medical department was redrafting the fetal protection policy. Deadlines were set, then extended, throughout the summer. Finally, that September, the plant’s officials made a final announcement: The list of chemicals had been reduced from twenty-nine to one, lead, and only the women working in the lead pigments department would be affected. These women, he said, had until October 2 to choose between sterilization and termination.

  Barbara Christman wanted to have more children, but she also desperately needed her job. Like Martin, the more she pondered the alternatives, the more she got “all messed up worrying about it.” Finally, she, too, went to Dr. Gevas. He scheduled surgery for the very next day. When Christman surfaced from the anesthesia, she found herself in an inappropriate locale. The hospital had considerately assigned her a bed in the maternity ward.

  Betty Riggs and Lola Rymer also made appointments with Dr. Gevas. The doctor, Rymer recalled, gave each of them a lecture; he said it was “a poor way to hold on to a job” but “if you want it done, I’ll do it.” Both said yes, and he scheduled their operations for the same day. As Riggs says later, she just didn’t see any other option: “I did what I did because I was more or less the sole supporter for a lot of people who were depending on me. I couldn’t let them down. I was up against a brick wall and there was no place to go but forward.”

  In the end, five of the seven women in the pigments department were sterilized. The company bumped the remaining two to the janitorial staff.

  Back at corporate headquarters, the news of the sterilizations would eventually reach the c
ompany physician who had drafted the fetal protection policy. Dr. Clyne heard about it from a woman during an office meeting, but the news didn’t seem to trouble—or even much interest—him. Questioned about it later during a deposition, he responded this way:

  Q: Did she tell you anything else?

  CLYNE: No.

  Q: Did you ask her any questions?

  CLYNE: It was more or less of a brief aside. . . . It was just a piece of information that was delivered to me.

  Riggs returned to work depressed—and frightened. “I wondered . . . if they didn’t get rid of us this way, what would be next?” Her first week back, she recalls, Mercer called her into his office and proposed that, even though she had been sterilized, maybe she would like to transfer out of the pigments department anyway. He warned her that if she stayed she would be “branded” by the men. She told him, “I’ve never done anything that I’m ashamed of.” Mercer had a similar talk with Christman. When she took two or three days to think about it, he complained. She told him that “it was a hard decision and I needed some time to think. And he said he needed to really know because he had a lot of scheduling and things to do and by my not deciding he didn’t know how to work his work schedule.”

  Both women decided to stay in the pigments department. It wasn’t the easy route; as Mercer predicted, they were branded. Soon after Donna Martin returned from her operation, one of the guards handed her an insurance pamphlet on maternity coverage. The men in the department jeered that the women had been “spayed.” “You’re one of the boys now” and “The veterinarian’s having a special” were two favorite lines. The management’s attitude was little better: its own literature referred to the women as “neutered.”

  In early 1979, OSHA conducted an inspection of the Willow Island plant. As news of the investigation spread, along with rumors that the company was considering layoffs or cutbacks in the pigments department, tensions rose even higher. “You women are going to get this place closed down,” men in the pigments department began shouting. “You’re the ones who got us into all this trouble.” That October, OSHA ruled that American Cyanamid had violated the Occupational Safety and Health Act and ordered the company to pay a $10,000 fine. The policy constituted a “hazard” of employment, OSHA found, because it had essentially coerced women into sterilization. In addition, OSHA noted that the lead exposure was equally dangerous to men, and should be cleaned up. American Cyanamid responded by shutting down the pigments department. The jobs the five women had sacrificed their wombs to keep were gone.

  In 1980, American Cyanamid contested the government ruling and an OSHA review commission agreed to set aside the citation, concluding that the violation was not covered by the OSHA Act because the hazard it posed did not “operate directly upon employees.” The Labor Department began preparing an appeal to that decision, but just then the Reagan administration took over, and the appeal was dropped.

  Meanwhile, the women were seeking legal relief themselves—first from the state civil rights commission, then the local office of the EEOC. After officials at both agencies made it clear that it would take years for a government ruling, the women turned to the union and legal services. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International agreed to pursue the legal appeal that the Labor Department had abandoned. And, in a separate action, thirteen women from the plant also filed suit against the company, charging violations of the federal Civil Rights Act.

  The union’s case wound up before federal appellate Judge Robert Bork, and in 1984, he ruled in favor of the company. The fetal protection policy wasn’t hazardous, he wrote, because the women had “the option” of surgical sterilization: “The company was charged only because it offered the women a choice.” The women’s civil rights action would peter out after three and a half years of pretrial proceedings. The company outspent them by millions of dollars. In 1983, they accepted the company’s small settlement offer—$200,000 to be divided among the remaining eleven plaintiffs.

  • • •

  The women who participated in the suit would be among the first laid off in the ’80s. And when they went looking for work elsewhere, they found that their reputations as troublemakers had preceded them. Betty Riggs, the most outspoken, had the hardest time. She finally had to settle for a minimum-wage job at a state park—as a maid. It was back to women’s work.

  One day in 1987, Betty Riggs was sitting with some friends in the gloomy Sunshine Club near the plant, watching Judge Bork’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings on television. Much to her surprise, one of the congressmen on the panel asked about the American Cyanamid decision. She listened carefully as Bork explained his thinking on the case: “I suppose the five women who chose to stay on the job and chose sterilization, I suppose they were glad to have the choice.” Stunned, Riggs jumped up from her seat and found herself addressing the room. “Did you hear that? That lying, lying man.” Desperate “to do something,” Riggs sent a telegram to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

  I cannot believe that Judge Bork thinks we were glad to have the choice of getting sterilized or getting fired. Only a judge who knows nothing about women who need to work could say that. I was only twenty-six years old, but I had to work, so I had no choice. . . . This was the most awful thing that ever happened to me. I still believe that it was against the law, whatever Bork says.

  The letter inspired only two responses. An aide to one of the senators called to say he found the letter too well written—he wanted to know whether an attorney had “put her up to it.” And at the hearings, Senator Alan Simpson said that he found Riggs’s telegram “offensive.”

  By the end of the decade, Bork’s rhetoric had traveled the backlash circuit, from the court record to the press accounts and finally back to Pleasant County, West Virginia, where it would be invoked, time and again, to discount the women’s plight. On a spring morning in 1988, Steve Tice and a friend, both former Cyanamid plant workers recently laid off at the plant, are lounging against one of the many shuttered storefronts down the road from the factory. Asked about the case of the Willow Island women, Tice shrugs and says: “Everybody had a choice. They shouldn’t have went ahead and done it [gotten sterilized] and then raised hell about it. It just got too easy for the women to complain about every little thing.”

  In nearby Parkersburg, on a tree-lined street in the older section of town, Dr. Gevas maintains a thriving private practice. He offers a similar analysis. “I feel these women had a choice,” he says. “If they had a rope around their neck or a gun to their head, then the women would have had a good case. But they had a choice.”

  The company’s industrial relations manager, Glenn Mercer, lives on another well-groomed street; in the yard, rosebushes are in full and fecund bloom. Mercer plants his legs on the wide porch and folds his arms. “I don’t care to talk about it,” is the only answer he offers to each question put to him. Finally, asked if he has any regrets about his instructions to the women, he says: “None whatsoever. That’s all I’ll say. I have no regrets.” Then he retreats inside, slamming the door.

  • • •

  WITH ALL avenues for public redress closed, the women’s anguish turned inward. In the years since the operations, each of the five sterilized women of Cyanamid has come to think of herself as “unfeminine” and “incomplete.” Some say they have stopped sleeping with their husbands—they don’t feel “woman enough.” All have suffered crippling bouts of depression. And when they have sought help, from therapists or doctors, their despair has only been treated, or in some cases deepened, with prescriptions for mind-numbing drugs. They were medicated with tranquilizers, antidepressants, and lithium.

  For a long time after the operation, Betty Riggs simply withdrew from the world around her. “I became cold and very unloving to a lot of the needs of other people,” she recalls. On the street, just seeing a woman with a child filled her with envy and shame. At home, “any TV show that had anything to do with family life just tore me apart.” It was as if,
Riggs says, “I just couldn’t get my mind and my body and my heart together. . . . I was less than a person. I was lacking something. It’s like your sole individuality just went right down the drain. Like you gave up your only right.”

  It was, moreover, the one “right” that the backlash era was supposed to be championing. The women at American Cyanamid, like women in every area, class, and occupation across the country in the ’80s, had been on the receiving end of a relentless cultural barrage. It told them motherhood was their highest calling. It told them they could restore their femininity by giving up their jobs. It told them they could only make economic and public progress by forsaking domestic and private happiness. While this program had little bearing on or practical relevance to the hard-pressed lives that Betty Riggs and her co-workers were leading, it could still make them feel “lacking” in the most deeply personal and agonizing ways.

  The “choice” American Cyanamid gave these employees, like so many of the other options the backlash magnanimously granted women, was framed as a clear-cut and forward-looking development—it represented progress for women. Feminism had opened up choices for women, and now the corporations, the courts, and the rest of the society claimed they were doing the same. The American Cyanamid case shows, through the very extremity and horror of what happened to the women caught up in it, how much of a lie the backlash’s language of “choice” really was. There was never anything straightforward, helpful, or enlightened about the options presented the Cyanamid women. In fact, their alternatives were paradoxical, harmful, and regressive—and rigged against them from the start.

  These were women who had no choice in the matter of their working: it was both a necessity—required by the economy they lived in and the unreliable men in their lives—and a basic source of self-sufficiency and self-respect. They had to work and they wanted to work; yet no one