The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  42. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, p. 515. The tension between Lucas and the other lawyers is discussed in Faux, Roe v. Wade, pp. 220–32.

  43. Siegel, “Sex Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights: Their Critical Basis and Evolving Constitutional Expression,” Emory Law Journal 56 (2007), p. 823, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=993308.

  44. Ibid., pp. 823–26. Pilpel wrote the amicus curiae brief for Planned Parenthood, Inc., in Roe v. Wade; Stearns wrote the one for New Women Lawyers.

  45. Blackmun, in Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, p. 599; Pilpel, in Faux, Roe v. Wade, p. 304; Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality,” p. 381.

  46. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

  47. Gordon, Moral Property of Women, p. 26.

  48. Stearns, in Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 134.

  49. A ringing affirmation of personal liberty did come from Justice William O. Douglas, who, in his concurrence, lyrically invoked Griswold’s right to privacy. “Freedom to care for one’s health and person, freedom from bodily restraint or compulsion, freedom to walk, stroll, or loaf” led logically to freedom of choice: “Elaborate argument is hardly necessary to demonstrate that child birth may deprive a woman of her preferred life style and force upon her a radically different and undesired future.” Yet Justice Douglas, too, ignored the particularities of pregnancy, presenting the pregnant woman as Everyman in his discussion of the right to privacy.

  50. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, pp. 636–37.

  51. Off Our Backs 3 (February–March 1973); Female Liberation Newsletter, February 26, 1973, p. 4; “The New Feminism/3.” The account of New Haven is my recollection of the meeting, which I attended; Brownmiller, In Our Time, p. 102.

  52. Cisler, “Abortion: A Major Battle Is Over: But the War Is Not,” Feminist Studies 1 (Autumn 1972), p. 127.

  53. Donald Granberg and James Burlison, “The Abortion Issue in the 1980 Elections,” Family Planning Perspectives 15 (September–October 1983), pp. 231–38.

  54. Marie Costa, Abortion: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1991), pp. 76–77.

  55. Rubin, Abortion, Politics, and the Courts, p. 88.

  56. The Phyllis Schlafly Report (February 1972), n.p.

  57. Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, Ill., 1964), pp. 107, 113, and passim; Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, chapter 5.

  58. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, pp. 139–40. A new book, Safe—Not Sorry, chronicled the chicanery that pushed her out. An illustration showed a woman standing before the door to Republican Party headquarters with a sign reading “Conservatives and Women Please Use Servants’ Entrance.” See Rymph, Republican Women, pp. 176–84; the illustration is discussed on p. 184.

  59. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, pp. 140–41. Tanya Melich, one of the feminists who tried to open the Republican Party to women in the Nixon era, notes wryly that Schlafly, the antifeminist, actually embodied a feminist model, “a self-assured woman with a cause.” “Gender was no impediment to Schlafly.… It didn’t matter that her actions and beliefs stood in harsh contradiction.” Republican War Against Women, pp. 45–46.

  60. Phyllis Schlafly Report 5 (February 1972), p. 4.

  61. Ibid., pp. 1–2.

  62. Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville, Va., 2002), p. 174, Table 8. Schlafly Report (February 1972), pp. 1–2. On differences over the status of the homemaker, see Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, pp. 98–112.

  63. Melich, The Republican War Against Women, p. 46.

  64. In ibid., p. 48; “What Is Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women,” Schlafly Report (February 1972).

  65. Davis, Moving the Mountain, p. 393.

  66. Champions cited the amendment’s theoretical ability to uproot tenacious structures of sexual inequality such as the wage gap between men and women. But Title VII was already in place. At best, the ERA might have encouraged judges to interpret the statutes and Fourteenth Amendment cases bearing upon workplace practices and treatment in ways more consistently favorable to women. See Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, p. 57.

  67. In the first case, the spouses were living apart; in the second, the spouses were living together. See David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives (New York, 1985), p. 172.

  68. Davis, Moving the Mountain, pp. 314–17, 321–22.

  69. Dworkin, “For Men, Freedom of Speech; for Women, Silence Please,” in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York, 1980); “We Protest,” flyer to protest the 1982 Barnard Conference, The Scholar and the Feminist, in my possession; “The Powers of Desire, edited by Ann Snitow et al., includes articles and editorials that misrepresent and distort the analysis and activism of feminists,” undated flyer protesting the publication of Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York, 1983), ed. Snitow, Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. Powers of Desire and Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (New York, 1984), ed. Carole Vance, were the major publications on the pro-sex side of what came to be known as the feminist sex wars.

  70. Willis, “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography,” Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York, 1981), p. 225.

  71. Rubin, Abortion, Politics, and the Courts, p. 106. Both were personally opposed in a mild sort of way: Ford wanted the states to handle abortion; Carter opposed Medicaid funding but wanted poor women to have alternatives.

  72. The consolidation is described in Robert Post and Reva Beth Siegel, “Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 42 (Summer 2007), pp. 373–434.

  73. Granberg and Burlison, “The Abortion Issue in the 1980 Election,” pp. 231–38.

  74. Susan Faludi chronicles the making of Fatal Attraction and the changes made to the script in Backlash (New York, 1991), chapter 5.

  75. Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland, p. 61. For a sense of the issues that rocked feminism in the United States in this period, and the political perplexities that surrounded them, see Katha Pollitt’s incisive essays in Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (New York, 1994).

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: GLOBAL FEMINISM

  1. Jus Suffragii (London). See the issues for the 1920s.

  2. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J., 1999), is an elegant exploration of feminist multiculturalism, with attention paid to religion.

  3. Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (New York, 2003).

  4. Global Feminist Workshop to Organize Against Traffic in Women, Rotterdam, April 1983; International Feminism: Networking Against Female Sexual Slavery … Report of the Global Feminist Workshop, ed. Kathleen Barry, Charlotte Bunch, and Shirley Castley (New York, 1984).

  5. Susan Bolotin, while distancing herself from antifeminism, announced the trend in “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 1982. For responses see Susan Bolotin Collection, Schlesinger Library; Lehrman, The Lipstick Proviso (New York, 1997). Lehrman’s was a lesser-known entry in a genre whose best-known exponents were Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Christina Hoff Sommers.

  6. Arvonne Fraser, “Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999), pp. 895–909; Jo Freeman, “Beijing Report: The Fourth World Conference on Women,” www.jofreeman.com/womenyear/beijingreport.htm; initially published as “The Real Story of Beijing,” Off Our Backs, no. 26 (March 1996).

  7. Meeting in Mexico: The Story of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year (New York, 1975); Susan Tiff, “The Triumphant Spirit of Nairobi,” Time, April 12, 1985; Morgan, “Dispatch from Beijing,” Ms. 6 (January/February, 1996), p. 16. A collection of materials from Beijing is in the Wendy Thomas Collection, Papers from the Fourth World Conference on Women, Schlesinger Library.

  8
. Judith P. Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–85,” Journal of World History 13 (Spring 2002), p. 140; Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Anne Winslow (Westport, Conn., 1995).

  9. Sen, “More Than One Hundred Million Women Are Missing,” New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990; Zinsser, “United Nations Decade,” pp. 22–23. Extrapolating from Sen’s figures, roughly 44 million women went missing in China, 36.7 million in India, and 4.4 million in Latin America. An astonishing 13 percent of Pakistani women were unaccounted for and 8.5 percent of Iranian women. See Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), p. 4. In India in 1991, where sex-selective abortion has received much attention, the sex ratio was 927 females per 1,000 males.

  10. Shahrashout Razavi and Carol Miller, From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the Women and Development Discourse, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995, p. 32; Barbara Crossette, “The Second Sex in the Third World,” New York Times, September 10, 1995, p. E1; Joan Dunlop et al., “Women Redrawing the Map: The World After the Beijing and Cairo Conferences,” SAIS Review 16 (Winter–Spring 1998), available at www.iwhc.org/resources, p. 6; Virginia Allan, Margaret E. Galey, and Mildred Persinger, “World Conference of International Women’s Year,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Winslow, p. 33.

  11. Patricia Daniel, “Is Another World Possible Without a Woman’s Perspective?,” www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-africa/wsf_4257.jsp

  12. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, p. 287.

  13. Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), p. 493; see also Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, “Organizing Against Violence: Strategies of the Indian Women’s Movement,” Pacific Affairs 62 (Spring 1989), pp. 54–60.

  14. Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 482–93. See also Nussbaum’s eloquent account of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, in Women and Human Development, pp. 15–17 and passim; Gail Omvedt, Women in Popular Movements: India and Thailand During the Decade of Women (Geneva, 1986), p. 2.

  15. Ifi Amadiume, Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism (London, 2000), pp. 248–53.

  16. Rothschild, “The Quest for World Order,” Daedalus 124 (Summer 1995), pp. 77–83.

  17. Amadiume, Daughters of the Goddess, chapter 12.

  18. Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, “On UN World Conferences,” in A Commitment to the World’s Women: Perspectives on Development and Beyond, ed. Noeleen Heyzer (New York, 1995), p. 258.

  19. Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (London, 1970).

  20. Claudia Von Braunmuhl, “Mainstreaming Gender—A Critical Revision,” Common Ground or Mutual Exclusion? Women’s Movements and International Relations, ed. Marianne Braig and Sonja Wolte (London, 2002), pp. 55–79; Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi,” pp. 149–51. Third World women organized Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN) to push for policies that worked in the interests of women, rather than those that used women to work toward some larger national or international goal. See Deborah Stienstra, Women’s Movements and International Organizations (New York, 1994), p. 122. For an analysis of the shifting uses of feminist perspectives in development models, see Razavi and Miller, From WID to GAD.

  21. From the mid-decade Copenhagen Programme (1980), in Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi,” p. 154; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp. 2–3, 298.

  22. On family allowances in Britain, see Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, p. 143; Agarwal, “Gender and Land Rights Revisited: Exploring New Prospects via the State, Family and Market,” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (January–April 2003), p. 194; Debra Sherman, “Banking on a Woman’s World,” Ms., September/October 1991, p. 15. The pattern has now become a given of studies of household economics, in both developed and Third World societies. See Shelley J. Lundberg, Robert A. Pollak, and Terrence J. Wales, “Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit,” Journal of Human Resources 32 (Summer 1997), pp. 463–80; Shelley A. Phipps and Peter S. Burton, “What’s Mine Is Yours? The Influence of Male and Female Incomes on Patterns of Household Expenditure,” Economica, New Series 65 (November 1998), pp. 599–613; Rae Lesser Blumberg, “Income Under Female Versus Male Control: Hypotheses from a Theory of Gender Stratification and Data from the Third World,” Journal of Family Issues 9 (Winter 1988), pp. 51–85.

  23. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York, 1993), pp. 54–55; Razavi and Miller, From WID to GAD, p. 18.

  24. Razavi and Miller, From WID to GAD, pp. 22–25; Barry, in Crossette, “Second Sex in the Third World”; Helen Zia, “The Global Fund for Women—Money With a Mission,” Ms., July 1993, p. 21.

  25. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Margaret Snyder, “The Politics of Women and Development,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Winslow, p. 111; Stienstra, Women’s Movements and International Organizations, p. 122; Crossette, “Second Sex in the Third World.”

  26. Razavi and Miller, From WID to GAD, p. 8.

  27. Tarak Nath Das, an Indian nationalist and scholar of political science, suggested the correlation at a 1926 international birth control conference organized by Margaret Sanger. Demographers subsequently demonstrated the correlation statistically. See Connelly, Fatal Misconception, pp. 65, 95, and passim. See also Amartya Sen, “Fertility and Coercion,” University of Chicago Law Review 63 (1996), pp. 1052–53.

  28. Bunch, “U.N. World Conference in Nairobi: A View from the West,” Ms., June 1985, p. 80; Dunlop, “Redrawing the Map,” p. 1.

  29. Quoted in Janice Auth, “Pittsburgh Success Stories,” To Beijing and Beyond: Pittsburgh and the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, ed. Auth (Pittsburgh, 1998), p. 189; Margaret McIntosh, “Comment on Irene Tinker’s ‘A Feminist View of Copenhagen,’ ” Signs 6 (Winter 1981), p. 772.

  30. “Preface,” Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women (Millbrae, Calif., 1976), p. xv.

  31. “By raising the demands of Chilean women in their struggle against imperialism we are raising the demands of all oppressed women. By freeing our sisters in Chile, we are freeing ourselves.” Action for Women in Chile, Women’s Packet on Chile (c. 1976), Schlesinger Library.

  32. Two international covenants in 1966 translated the principles of the UNDHR (1949) into legally binding form. They clearly state that the rights put forward are applicable without distinction of sex, thereby positing sex as a ground of impermissible distinction; each covenant also binds ratifying states to undertake to ensure that women and men have equal right to the enjoyment of the rights they establish. However, the United Nations recognized that “the fact of women’s humanity proved insufficient to guarantee them the enjoyment of their internationally agreed rights” and established the Commission on the Status of Women to define and elaborate guarantees of non-discrimination. The CSW produced several conventions and recommendations between 1952 and 1965, but CEDAW was the first comprehensive document.

  33. See Cott, Public Vows, chapter 6, on the history of these laws in the United States.

  34. Pinar Ilkkaracan, Women’s Movement(s) in Turkey: A Brief Overview, Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports, no. 2, p. 16. The English-language text of CEDAW along with the reservations is available at www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.

  htmarticle#9.

  35. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/states.htm. See Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “Cultural Particularism as a Bar to Women’s Rights: Reflections on the Middle Eastern Experience,” in Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York, 1995), pp. 178–79, on the gutting of CEDAW.

  36. Akua Kuenyehia, “Economic and Social Rights of Women: A West African Perspective,” Common Ground, ed. Braig and Wolte, p. 164; Mar
ysa Navarro, “Argentina: The Long Road to Women’s Rights,” in Women’s Rights: A Global View, ed. Lynn Walter (Westport, Conn., 2000), pp. 1–14; also Gratzia Villarroel Smeall, “Bolivia: Women’s Rights, the International Women’s Convention, and State Compliance,” in Women’s Rights, ed. Walter, pp. 17–20; Wolte, “Claiming Rights and Contesting Spaces: Women’s Movements and the International Women’s Human Rights Discourse in Africa,” in Common Ground, ed. Braig and Wolte, pp. 174–77, 80, and passim.

  37. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 11; see “The Promise of CEDAW’s Optional Protocol,” pp. 64–67, on the amendment that allows women to make direct complaint against ratifying countries to a treaty body (“the Committee”) that enforces the convention.

  38. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999), pp. 1231–50.

  39. MacKinnon, Are Women Human?, pp. 22–23; Charlotte Bunch and Niamh Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Rights (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994).

  40. www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.n.

  41. Ilkkaracan, “Do Women and Girls Have Human Rights?,” www.opendemocracy.net/globalization_institutions_government/

  girls_rights_4386.jsp; The Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women’s Human Rights (New York, 1995); Sarah Aejin Seo, “The Contested Historical Memory of the Korean Comfort Women” (senior thesis in history, Princeton University, 2002). U.N. Special Rapporteurs came to Korea twice, in 1996 and 1998, and submitted two separate reports on the “comfort women” scandal.

  On a more mundane level, human rights ideology put up in lights what seemed Promethean struggles against banal kinds of male cruelty. A book on human rights doctrine cites an example of a police officer in Moldova who protested his assignment to the domestic violence unit. “But when his superiors told him that Moldova had to comply with international human rights standards and that the United Nations had stated unequivocally that violence against women, including domestic violence, violated the fundamental human rights of women, he began to experience what can only be described as a personal transformation,” seeing his work imbued with dignity and added importance. See James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp. 128–29.