by Gail Collins
Suddenly, amid the hubbub, 60-year-old George Michaels, a ten-year veteran from a conservative upstate district, rose, his hands trembling. He had opposed the bill all along, he said, because his constituents opposed it. His voice breaking, he told the House, “My own son called me a whore for voting against this bill.” His other son, a theology student who had served as an assembly chaplain, had begged him not to let his vote kill the measure. “I realize I am terminating my political career, but I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow my vote to be the one that defeats this bill,” he said. “I ask that my vote be changed from no to yes.” The legislative secretaries, the Times reported, broke into applause, and New York became the first mainland state to legalize abortion. Later in the year, the Democratic Party in Michaels’s district refused to endorse him for reelection. He lost the primary while he was hospitalized after a car accident, and he lost in November, when he ran as a third-party candidate. Senator Dominick, who had told the story about his wife, was defeated as well.
“I’M GOING TO THE LADIES’ LOUNGE AND READ A BOOK.”
By the end of 1970, three states—Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington—had passed laws permitting abortion on demand for state residents. And New York’s law, which had no residency requirement, made legal abortion readily available to any woman who lived in the East and had access to a bus station. (In the first year the new law was in effect, about 55,000 New Yorkers ended their pregnancies, along with almost 84,000 nonresidents.) In California, the rules were loosened to the point that any woman who could pay for an abortion could usually qualify for one under the increasingly flexible “mental-health” criterion.
Meanwhile, a series of cases challenging state anti-abortion laws were making their way toward the Supreme Court. The one that would finally arrive there began in Texas, where a young lawyer named Sarah Weddington was put in touch with Norma McCorvey, an unmarried hard-luck woman who wanted to terminate her pregnancy. Weddington was only 25 and McCorvey was 21, “a pregnant street person,” as she later described herself, so uneducated she had walked away from a clinic where she had gone for a pregnancy test when the doctor requested a urine sample, because she had no idea what “urine” was. The happier parts of her childhood had been spent in reform school, the worst living as a 15-year-old boarder in the house of a man who raped her every night. She had married at 16, and her husband beat her when he found out she was pregnant. She sought shelter with her mother, who later took the baby to raise as her own. By then McCorvey had begun living with another woman, and her mother threatened to tell the police she was a lesbian unless she gave up her rights to her daughter.
It took, as McCorvey would later admit, an extraordinary degree of disorder for a woman who was living as a lesbian to have three unwanted pregnancies. She had never seen the second baby, which she gave away at birth. She discovered she was pregnant again when she was working as a carnival barker and was astonished when a friend told her about abortion—she had never heard the word and had to look it up in a dictionary. Her search for a way to get one led her to Weddington, who was looking for a pregnant woman who would be willing to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law. McCorvey believed the suit would lead to the desired abortion, and while she waited, “I discovered that if I smoked enough dope and drank enough wine, it was possible to not think about being pregnant.” When, inevitably, the case dragged on and McCorvey’s pregnancy was in the sixth month, she was finally told that it was too late to terminate. She unsuccessfully tried to kill herself, and gave the baby up for adoption when it was born.
Meanwhile, Weddington and her associate, Linda Coffee, argued what would become one of the best-known and most controversial Supreme Court cases in American history. Their combined ages were not equal to that of any one of the justices. Their client, McCorvey, was disguised as Jane Roe and never made an appearance in court. But they were stunningly successful. In January 1973, the Supreme Court ruled, 7 to 2, in Roe v. Wade, that any attempt to interfere with a woman’s right to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy was a violation of her constitutional right to privacy. Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee who wrote the decision, said the state’s right to regulate abortions during the second trimester was limited to rules aimed at protecting the woman’s health and safety. Abortions could be prohibited during the third trimester, he said, except when they were required to protect the health or life of the mother.
While abortion rights had been an ongoing controversy in some states before the Roe v. Wade decision, in others it had barely scraped the surface of people’s consciousness. The sudden announcement that the Supreme Court was making abortion legal came as a shock, and the Americans who were most distressed turned against “activist judges” and everything else they connected with Roe, including the women’s movement. By the end of the 1970s, the National Right to Life Committee claimed more than eleven million members.
The abortion fight ran side by side with the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. People who believed change hadn’t happened fast enough or gone far enough lined up against people who felt the nation had lost its moral bearings and needed to turn back. All this was happening at a time when the economy was betraying working-class families who had not gotten far enough up the ladder to protect themselves when the great postwar boom ended. The entire political texture of the nation was changing, and the Republican old guard, which had been conservative about economics but liberal on social issues, was sinking fast. Mary Crisp, the cochair of the Republican National Committee in 1980, said her party was “about to bury the rights of over a hundred million American women under a heap of platitudes” when the presidential nominating convention ended Republican support of the ERA and added a plank to its platform calling for a constitutional amendment against abortion. She wound up going home midconvention, her name erased from the program.
Anti-abortion feminists went through an equally painful losing battle. One of the NOW founders, Betty Boyer of Ohio, had resigned from the board in 1968 after what she called a “shouting match” over the issue. Some NOW chapters divided themselves into separate local and national organizations so members who opposed abortion could give their dues solely to local activities. “Abortion was about fifteenth on our list of priorities,” said Bev Mitchell of Cedar Rapids. NOW’s national leadership, she said, “got so domineering that according to them, there is just no room in the feminist movement for women who do not believe in abortion.”
The reaction against Roe in Washington began quickly. In 1976 Congress voted to cut off federal funding for abortions except in cases when a woman’s life was in danger. The debate, Representative Barbara Jordan said later, “was awful… the people who got up and sermonized. It was a super mess. We, the sixteen women in the House, were trying to orchestrate the whole thing, and we had these clowns on the floor talking.” One of them, she said, put a pillow under his jacket so he’d look pregnant. “He was ranting around… and I couldn’t take any more of it. I told one of my female colleagues, ‘I’m going to the ladies’ lounge and read a book, and if you need me in this debate that’s where I’ll be.’ And I just left.”
“AS SOMEONE WHO HAS LOVED MEN TOO WELL…”
In 1977 the International Women’s Year Conference was held in Houston (with a competing Pro-Family Rally sponsored by Phyllis Schlafly across town). A resolution supporting abortion rights passed easily, but sponsors were a little more concerned about one being offered on behalf of gay rights. Speaking in support, to many people’s surprise, was Betty Friedan. “As someone who has loved men too well, I have had trouble with this issue,” said the recently divorced Friedan. “Now my priority is passing the ERA. And because there is nothing in it that will give any protection to homosexuals, I believe we must help the women who are lesbians.”
Friedan was delivering two messages: one was in favor of the resolution (which passed), and the other was to remind the world that the Equal Rights Amendment was not about gay liberation. The
idea that it was had crippled progress for the ERA in those critical final states. “I thought we had it made until Phyllis Schlafly came into the state with those films of the San Francisco gay parade,” said Minnette Doderer, the former president pro tempore of the state senate in Iowa. “She spent twenty-five thousand dollars to put those on television and to say, ‘This will happen in Iowa if you get the Equal Rights Amendment.’ ”
The women in Houston had already watched the antigay forces flex their muscles in Florida. Miami-Dade County had been in what the Miami Herald called “hysteria more appropriate to the seventeenth century than the twentieth” over an ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment. The improbable leader of the opposition was Anita Bryant, a 37-year-old former Miss America runner-up who was best known as the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, chirping, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine,” on TV commercials. Suddenly, there she was on the barricades, warning Floridians that gays were out to seduce their kids into a decadent lifestyle: “Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must freshen their ranks with our children. They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.”
Bryant sang, quoted the Old Testament, and hinted that Florida’s ongoing drought might be a punishment from God. One interesting part of the controversy was the low profile of gay women. “Most of the time, Bryant has concentrated her fire on male homosexuals, rather than lesbians, partly because her biblical texts deal with men,” wrote Newsweek. “In addition, lesbians seem less of a threat to the foes of gay rights. Fewer in number than male homosexuals, lesbians are generally less visible in Miami and other cities—and they are playing only a modest role in the gay coalition that [leader Jack] Campbell has assembled.” It was not unusual for gay women to be left on the fringe of the early gay rights movement. Many women claimed that homosexual men behaved like men first and fellow gay rights activists second, and marginalized women when they tried to work together. However, the fact that gay women weren’t seen as a major target of Bryant’s crusade did not mean they were not affected. After the antidiscrimination ordinance was defeated by an enormous margin, Newsweek reported that a lesbian who had worked as an executive secretary in the county government for fifteen years lost her job the morning after the vote. And with Bryant’s help, the antigay alliance successfully lobbied to bar gay Floridians from adopting children.
While other towns followed Miami’s lead, a backlash against the backlash was also under way. Voters in Seattle refused to repeal their city’s gay rights ordinance, and California voters defeated an initiative that would have led to the firing of gay teachers. Bryant’s career, which had been based on her pleasant persona more than any extraordinary talent, floundered. A few years later, she divorced her husband and told the Ladies’ Home Journal that she felt a new kinship with feminists: “I can see how women are controlled in a very ungodly way.” As far as homosexuality went, Bryant said, “I’m more inclined to say live and let live.”
“THIS WASN’T GOING TO BE THE WHOLE THING, WAS IT?”
The women’s movement that was fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment at the end of the 1970s was much different from the one that carried the banner at the beginning. Activists who had cheerfully deferred all thoughts of jobs or money or security in order to devote themselves to the cause were suddenly confronted with the need to think about salaries and pensions and housing costs. “It became much more difficult to live on virtually nothing—the lifestyle that had prevailed in the movement,” said Barbara Epstein, who had been active with California leftist and feminist groups.
Great social uprisings have a short life span. “Essentially it’s a stage of naming reality,” said Gloria Steinem. “It’s the great ‘Aha!’ ” Fixing the reality, of course, takes longer, and the women’s movement would continue in many forms—from national groups such as NOW, to local battered women’s shelters or antirape programs, to women’s bookstores and women’s history departments. But there was no longer that ecstatic sense of being part of a united force mobilized to change the world. Just as some of the young people who had worked in SNCC in the South never got over the sense of loss when the Beloved Community evaporated, women who had come of age in their movement experienced an emptiness. “Life felt good then… ,” wrote the essayist Vivian Gornick.
As long as I had a roomful of feminists to come home to I had built-in company for life. I’d never be alone again. The feminists were my sword and my shield—my solace, my comfort, my excitement. If I had the feminists I’d have community…. Then the unthinkable happened. Slowly, around 1980, feminist solidarity began to unravel…. One day I woke up to realize the excitement, the longing, the expectation of community was over.
“I CAN’T PREDICT PASSAGE NOW.”
The Equal Rights Amendment had been the cause that held the fraying movement together for most of the 1970s, but by the end of the decade, the time limit on ratification was running out, while some state legislatures were attempting to withdraw votes they had made earlier in favor of putting the ERA in the Constitution. In New York and New Jersey, where the state legislatures had approved the ERA long before, supporters pressed for similar amendments to their state constitutions, which would require voter ratification. The show of popular support, they presumed, would give a boost to the national drive. But both amendments, stunningly, went down in defeat. In New York, the results weren’t even close. The amendment lost by more than 400,000 votes. “There was such anxiety,” said Carol Bellamy, a state senator from Brooklyn. “So many women I talked to had a sense that we wanted to take something away from them, some privilege or benefit that in most cases they don’t really have.” One widely distributed flyer in the state claimed the ERA was the product of a “militant women’s group” that wanted to “make it difficult for the wife to remain home with the children and instead push her into the work market.”
In state after state, polls showed that the public favored the amendment, but voters who went to the polls rejected it. There were different explanations in different places, but it was apparent that anxiety was triumphing over hope. Although Congress granted an extension until 1982, the cause had simply run out of steam. Advocates could only theorize that things would improve in the future.
“I can’t predict passage now,” admitted Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1978. “But I can predict passage by the year 2000.”
10. “You’re Gonna Make It After All”
“YOU WALK INTO A MEETING�� AND NOW THERE’S ANOTHER WOMAN.”
In September 1970 Mary Tyler Moore—the actress who had broken television’s no-pants rule on The Dick Van Dyke Show—returned with a new show in which she played Mary Richards, a thirtysomething single woman living alone and working for a local TV station. In the first episode, she fled from a broken engagement, driving tearily down the highway to Minneapolis, renting an apartment, and meeting neighbors and fellow workers who would become her surrogate family in the years to come. “You might just make it after all,” the theme song promised. (It was changed after the first season to the more optimistic “You’re gonna make it after all.”) The show became one of the best-loved situation comedies of all time, and it ran through the decade. Mary, who spent much of the first year sitting around with Rhoda bemoaning their single state, became more assertive as time went on, proficient at her job, comfortable with her life, and more clearly engaged in sexual relations with her various boyfriends—who came and went without making any long-term impact. In a fractious decade, she became a cheerful symbol of the fact that a woman did not require a husband or children or a glamorous career to be happy, as long as she had people and work to care about and a healthy sense of humor.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was, of course, only one program. TV in general was still a man’s world—three-quarters of the characters in prime-time dramas in 1973 were men, and the women who did show up on the screen usually seemed to be in charge of answering telephones. But
it’s interesting to chart the difference between The Mary Tyler Moore Show and an earlier television series about a single woman living on her own. In 1966 ABC had unveiled That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, which followed an aspiring actress named Ann Marie through her adventures in New York City, many of which involved funny jobs (Ann wears a chicken suit, Ann is a meter maid) or mistaken identities. Ann lived in a residential hotel—one step beyond a college dorm—while her parents hovered in a nearby suburb. She spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to her worried mother and father that despite evidence to the contrary (dual hotel-room occupancy, pants in her closet), she was certainly not sleeping with her boyfriend, Donald. Ann was spunky and good-hearted, but she was not really a grown-up.
Like Mary Richards, American women in the 1970s were figuring out how to use their new powers to craft a good life. When viewed from above, it might have seemed that the big story was the backlash against the women’s liberation movement. But on the ground, things looked much different. It was in the 1970s that American women set off on a new course. They went to college thinking about what work they wanted to do, not what man they wanted to catch, and flooded professional schools with applications. After graduation, they no longer marched right off to the altar, and the median age of marriage rose rather dramatically—particularly for women with college diplomas. No matter what their political perspective, they could feel new possibilities. “You walk into a meeting in one of the departments and now there’s another woman,” said Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski in 1978. “You see each other, maybe you wink, and you know you’re both glad to see each other there.”