The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  103. Beal, “Speaking Up When Others Can’t,” Crossroads, March 1993, p. 5; Charlayne Hunter, “Many Blacks Wary of ‘Women’s Liberation’ Movement in U.S.,” New York Times, November 17, 1970, p. 47.

  104. “Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up?,” Black Scholar 2 (June 1971), pp. 32–35. On the effects of black power on militant women, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p. 106.

  105. Lerner to Murray, Murray Papers, Folder 1895, Box 105.

  106. Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, p. 342. A short biography of Beal is in Significant Contemporary American Feminists: A Biographical Sourcebook, ed. Jennifer Scanlon (Westport, Conn., 1999), pp. 22–27.

  107. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib”; Norton, “For Sadie and Maude,” Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Morgan, pp. 356, 359.

  108. Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Voices of the New Feminism, ed. Mary Lou Thompson (Boston, 1970), pp. 98, 101, 102.

  109. Murray to Clarenbach, November 21, 1967, Murray Papers, Box 51, Folder 99.

  110. Ware, Woman Power, pp. 98–99.

  111. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” p. 66.

  112. Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 113.

  113. Gornick, “The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs,” Village Voice, November 27, 1969; “The Next Great Moment in History Is Ours,” in Liberation Now!, ed. Babcox and Belkin, pp. 25–38.

  CHAPTER NINE: POLITICS AS USUAL AND UNUSUAL POLITICS

  1. For an excellent analysis of NOW in the 1970s, see Wandersee, On the Move, chapter 3.

  2. Chapter Reports, NOW Papers, Schlesinger Library. The membership increased from 1,122 and 14 chapters in 1967 to 125,000 and 700 chapters in 1978. See Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief, Women and Public Policies: Reassessing Gender Politics (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), p. 27.

  3. NOW Papers, Ohio/Knox County folder.

  4. Kenyon Collegian, October 23, 30, 1975; February 26, April 1, 8, 1976; and passim.

  5. University/NOW Child Care Center survives today, geared to the needs of parents with full-time jobs and eight-hour workdays. The study of stereotypes is Jennifer S. Macleod and Sandra T. Silverman, “You Won’t Do”: What Textbooks on U.S. Government Teach High School Girls (Pittsburgh, 1973); Arvonne S. Fraser, “Insiders and Outsiders: Women in the Political Arena,” Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, p. 130.

  6. Feminist Chronicles 1953–1993, ed. Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida (Los Angeles, 1993), p. 53; Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 57; “Debbie Millenson,” New Orleans Chapter Newsletter, November 1972, NOW Papers, p. 4; Friedan, Life So Far, pp. 199–200.

  7. Women Unite Now (Cleveland), Jan.–May 1973, NOW Papers.

  8. The early 1970s constituted a “window of opportunity for federal involvement in social policy.” See Kimberly Morgan, “A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care,” Journal of Policy History 13 (2001), p. 221.

  9. Tanya Melich, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report from Behind the Lines (New York, 1996), p. 27.

  10. On support for child care, see for example Komisar, The New Feminism, p. 59. On Nixon and Congress, see Melich, Republican War Against Women, pp. 13–35; Morgan, “A Child of the Sixties,” p. 223.

  11. Morgan, “Child of the Sixties,” p. 215; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests, Mother’s Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven, Conn., 1999); Morgan, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Europe and the United States (Stanford, Calif., 2006); Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, ed. Michel and Rianne Mahon (New York, 2002); Celia Winkler, Single Mothers and the State: The Politics of Care in Sweden and the United States (Lanham, Md., 2002).

  12. Urie Bronfenbrenner and Jerome Bruner, “The President and the Children,” New York Times, January 31, 1972, p. 41. Bronfenbrenner and Bruner were child development specialists.

  13. Kilpatrick quoted in Morgan, “Child of the Sixties,” p. 234; Edward F. Zigler and Jody Goodman, “The Battle for Day Care in America: A View from the Trenches,” in Day Care: Scientific and Social Policy Issues, ed. Edward F. Zigler and Edmund Gordon (Boston, 1982), pp. 338–50; Melich, The Republican War Against Women, pp. 27–28.

  14. New York Times, December 11, 1971; Washington Post, December 12, 1971. Friedan mentions the lackluster interest of NOW in child care in Life So Far, p. 200.

  15. “Women in the U.S. Congress 1917–2008,” Fact Sheet, Center for American Women and Politics, National Information Bank on Women in Public Office, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University.

  16. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/lists/bl_list_senate.htm; www.cawp.rutgers.edu/Facts/Officeholders/senate.pdf. Two women were appointed but did not serve because Congress was not in session. Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to be appointed to the Senate (in 1922), served for only one day. Rose McConnell Long was the other senator appointed to a husband’s seat and subsequently reelected. A humorous woman, Hattie Caraway harbored a low opinion of the masculine sex that came from an utterly conventional acceptance of separate spheres. Her diary from 1932 is a sardonic chronicle of the experience of sitting for hours listening to men who loved to hear themselves talk. “Pure bunk” was a typical summary of a colleague’s speech. See Silent Hattie Speaks: The Personal Journal of Senator Hattie Caraway, ed. Diane D. Kincaid (Westport, Conn., 1979); Kristin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (New York, 2009), p. 136.

  17. Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 187–90.

  18. National Women’s Political Caucus Newsletter 1, December 10, 1971, Schlesinger Library. They were Democratic congresswomen, NOW officers, powerful women in the media, Democratic and a few Republican notables, and high-ranking staff from the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The congresswomen included Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.) and Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii). The NOW leaders were Friedan and the new president, Wilma Scott Heide, along with Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. The presidential staff members were Liz Carpenter (former press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson) and Jill Ruckelshaus (aide to Nixon). See Rona F. Feit, “Organizing for Political Power: The National Women’s Political Caucus,” in Women Organizing: An Anthology, ed. Bernice Cummings and Victoria Schuck (Metuchen, N.J., 1979), pp. 184–208; Susan Carroll, “Women’s Rights and Political Parties: Issue Development, the 1972 Conventions, and the National Women’s Political Caucus,” M.A. thesis, Political Science, Indiana University (on deposit in Schlesinger Library). For Republican feminists’ use of the NWPC, see Rymph, Republican Women, pp. 207–8.

  19. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 186; Chisholm quoted in Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 73; Civil Rights Digest 6 (Spring 1974). The NWPC board included Myrlie Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, and Beulah Sanders of the National Welfare Rights Organization; those allied with Hispanic-American politics included Evelina Antonetty, Cecelia Suarez, and Lupe Anguiano. See Feit, “Organizing for Political Power,” in Women Organizing, ed. Cummings and Schuck, pp. 185, 207.

  20. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 186; Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 72.

  21. Wandersee, On the Move, p. 35.

  22. Emily C. Moore, “Abortion and Public Policy: What Are the Issues?,” New York Law Forum 17 (1971), p. 418; Act Now Newsletter (Charlotte, N.C.), June 1973; NOW Newsletters, Box 20, NOW Papers.

  23. The array of groups was funded by a combination of the Ford Foundation (known for supporting women’s causes), left-liberal political groups, and older organizations like the League of Women Voters. See Gelb and Palley, Women and Public Policies, p. 44; Evans, Tidal Wave, chapter 3; Anne N. Costain, “Lobbying for Equal Credit,” in Women Organizing, ed. Cummings and Schuck, p. 83; “Woman Power,” Newsweek, April 3, 1972, p. 28; Fraser, “Insiders and Outsiders,” in Women in Washington,
ed. Tinker, passim.

  24. In Mary Ann Millsap, “Sex Equity in Education,” in Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, p. 117.

  25. A comprehensive list is in Post and Siegel, “Legislative Constitutionalism and Section Five Power,” p. 1996 n 159. See Richard Nixon, Statement About Signing the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972, reprinted by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters in the American Presidency Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3358.

  26. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 148 and passim. Eileen Shanahan recalled that her daughter graduated from Harvard Law School in 1975 and could not get credit to buy a couch; Shanahan Interview, Women in Journalism Oral History Project, p. 149. A political scientist who studied the legislative process in depth concludes that without the organized efforts of women’s lobbies to shepherd the credit bill through the convoluted path to passage, it would have failed, even given the overwhelming support it ultimately received when it came up for a vote. Costain, “Lobbying for Equal Credit,” in Women Organizing, ed. Cummings and Schuck, pp. 82–110.

  27. Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 213–14.

  28. Ibid., pp. 212–13; Sheila Tobias, Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement (Boulder, Colo., 1997), pp. 105–6. LBJ’s order was forgotten until 1970, when Bernice Sandler, a college teacher and recent recipient of an advanced degree at the University of Maryland, realized that women could put the executive order to use against universities’ overt and covert sexist practices in hiring. In short order, some 250 female academics filed suits along with Sandler.

  29. Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 212–13.

  30. Kathrine Switzer, Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women’s Sports (New York, 2007), p. 91, and chapter 7. Semple grabbed her but failed to rip her number off. Switzer, stunned, managed to keep running, and her teammates blocked him, throwing him to the sideline.

  31. Coaches, in Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 215; Millsap, “Sex Equity in Education,” in Women in Washington, ed. Tinker, p. 94.

  32. The vote in the House was 354–23; in the Senate, 84–8. See “Woman Power,” Newsweek, April 3, 1972, p. 28; Melich, Republican War Against Women, p. 30; Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, p. 203.

  The NOW legal task force was of two minds. The Fourteenth Amendment strategy Pauli Murray had in the PCSW mapped out continued to appeal as a more practical route to legal equality, with the advantage that it tied women’s causes to African-Americans’. NOW’s lawyers, however, were unwilling to give up on a measure that promised so much, since in one stroke the ERA would remove all discriminatory laws. The lawyers pushed ahead with a dual strategy, pursuing cases under the Fourteenth Amendment at the same time that NOW mobilized to press ratification of the ERA. See Mayeri, “Constitutional Choices,” p. 792; Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 123, 387.

  33. National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics,” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_269.asp; Mark Silk, “Is God a Feminist?,” New York Times, April 11, 1982.

  34. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women in Law (Urbana, Ill., 1981), pp. 312–14.

  35. In 1970, fewer than two hundred of the country’s ten thousand judges were women and only one of them was a federal appellate judge. Ibid., pp. 1–13; D. Sassower, “The Legal Profession and Women’s Rights,” Rutgers Law Review 25 (1970), pp. 60 ff.

  36. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 203.

  37. See Brenda Feigen’s vivid account of her years at Harvard Law School in the 1960s, Not One of the Boys (New York, 2000), pp. 5–21; Jill Abramson and Barbara Franklin, Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974 (New York, 1986); Kerber, No Constitutional Right, chapters 4–5.

  38. Entry for Carol Christ (an early female graduate student in religious studies), in Feminists Who Changed America 1963–1975, ed. Barbara J. Love (Urbana, Ill., 2006), p. 83.

  39. On the impact of Title IX on the law schools, see Epstein, Women in the Law, p. 95; NYU Law Women’s Conference, videotape of the proceedings, March 30, 2005, Schlesinger Library. The NYU women’s challenge to a male-only scholarship is also mentioned in Diane Schulder, “Women and the Law,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1970, p. 103. The Vietnam War also had an impact once the draft was instituted and male law students were eligible, but less so than has been thought, given that most of the draftees and volunteers were working class, not the demographic group bound for law school. See Epstein, Women in Law, pp. 16, 53; Donna Fossum, “A Lawyer-Sociologist’s View on Women’s Progress in the Profession,” in Women Lawyers: Perspectives on Success, ed. Emily Couric (New York, 1984), pp. 245–59.

  40. Stanford survey cited in Feminist Chronicles, ed. Carabillo et al., p. 62.

  41. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 191; Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (New York, 2009), pp. 14–15.

  42. Dean Albert Sacks of Harvard, in Abramson and Franklin, Where They Are Now, p. 2; on hirings, see ibid., pp. 22–23. Ginsburg anecdote about the dean is in Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 202; and elaborated in Strebeigh, Equal, p. 36.

  43. At a meeting of the American Historical Association, for example, young feminists attacked the profession for erasing women from written history and treating them with condescending stereotypes. Men responded with incredulity, accusing the panelists of political bias. Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 83, describes the 1970 panel, which included Linda Gordon, then a member of Boston Bread and Roses and eventually a major feminist force in American history. The committee that issued the first report on the status of women named overt sex discrimination as the root cause of the dearth of women in history departments. The 1970 committee frankly maintained that the appalling statistics—almost as bad as the law, with only two women history professors among the ten largest departments—were “no accident, that they were the result of intention, and that intentions were shaped by prejudice, misjudgment, and perverse ideology.” Kerber, “On the Importance of Taking Notes,” in Voices of Women Historians, ed. Boris and Chaudhuri, pp. 52–53; Renate Bridenthal, “Making and Writing History Together,” in Voices of Women Historians, ed. Boris and Chaudhuri, pp. 76–85.

  44. On academic degrees in the social sciences and history, see Digest of Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_305.asp, Table 305; for medicine, dentistry, and law, ibid., Table 269. The number of M.D. degrees conferred on women increased from 809 in 1970–71 to 3,833 in 1980–81; L.L.B.s or J.D.s from 1,240 to 11,768; history/social science Ph.D.s from 507 to 848.

  At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a shocking 1999 report on the situation of female professors revealed a dismaying picture of women scientists’ treatment at the institution. The report’s findings prompted an unprecedented agreement in 2001 between the presidents of nine top research universities to conduct equity reviews of women in the sciences in their own institutions. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2, June 11, December 3, 1999.

  45. The intellectual ferment is legendary. One of the first anthologies of essays on academic disciplines and intellectual questions offers a glimpse: Women in Sexist Society, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York, 1971), which includes Nochlin’s essay.

  46. Davis, The Making of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” passim.

  47. Way, “You Are Not My God, Jehovah!,” in Dear Sisters, ed. Baxandall and Gordon, pp. 103–5; Evans, Tidal Wave, p. 84.

  48. Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, personal communication, October 2, 2002, Princeton, N.J.

  49. Conflict over ordaining gays commenced immediately after the General Convention vote. The 1977 ordination of Ellen Barrett, a gay activist, provoked a storm of opposition. See Paul Moore, Jr., Take a Bishop Like Me (New York, 1979).

  50. Quoted in Mary Daly, “Toward Partnership in the Church,” in Voices of the New Feminism, ed. Thompson, pp. 147–48.

  51. Personal papers, evaluation for reappointment in Social Studies, Bard College, 1979.

  52
. Abramson and Franklin, Where They Are Now, chapter 2.

  53. Roraback, in Amy Kesselman, “Women Versus Connecticut: Conducting a Statewide Hearing on Abortion,” in Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000 (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), p. 54. Roraback represented Estelle Griswold in Griswold v. Connecticut. She did not argue before the Court because she and other lawyers for the plaintiff agreed that a woman would lessen the chances of a favorable ruling. Dean Harold Koh, talk at memorial for Roraback, Conference on Roe v. Wade, Yale Law School, October 2008; Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57 (1961).

  54. Ruth B. Cowan, “Women’s Rights Through Litigation: An Examination of the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project, 1971–76,” Columbia Human Rights Review (1976), p. 381; the moment in Roe is recounted in David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).

  55. Feminist Chronicles, ed. Carabillo et al., pp. 58, 67, and passim.

  56. Shanahan interview 9, Women in Journalism Oral History Project, p. 166.

  57. Ibid., interview 6, p. 108.

  58. Judith Paterson interviewed Lorena Weeks for her biography of Marguerite Rawalt, Be Somebody, pp. 184–85.

  59. Roberts’s activities are mentioned throughout the chapter newsletter of Baton Rouge NOW. See the announcement of “Major Victory in Lorena Weeks Case” in vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1971), NOW Papers. The relationship between Weeks’s evolving case and NOW is described in Lois Herr, Women, Power and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Workplace (Boston, 2003), pp. 43–46. See also Evans, Tidal Wave, pp. 64–65.

  60. “No longer would a demonstration that many, or even most, women could not perform a specific job requirement justify such a restriction. Instead, employers (and states) would have to show that all or ‘substantially all’ women could not do so.” Thus a woman who was exceptionally strong could not be barred from a job that required lifting weights that most women could not lift. Evans, Tidal Wave, pp. 64–65. Annabelle Walker, an Atlanta NOW leader, discusses the impact of the Weeks decision in an oral history. “ ‘Walker Talks About Weeks v. Southern Bell,” Georgia Women’s Movement Oral History Project, Georgia State University Library, www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/pages/pages.asp?ldID=105&guideID=534&ID=3512.