The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  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.1 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.2

  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.”3

  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.”4 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.5

  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.6

  What both groups viscerally understood was that women had sustained America’s families and communities. What to do when women worked was a serious dilemma. Neo-traditionalists decried the materialism, selfishness, and greed that undermined “traditional values.” Progressives blamed consumer and corporate capitalism for the exploitation of workers, the destruction of families, and the fr
agmentation of communities.7

  Meanwhile, resentment against feminism only grew fiercer. In her groundbreaking book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), journalist Susan Faludi exposed the many media-generated stories that frightened feminists and women otherwise attracted to the goals of a women’s movement. Media-fueled panics about an infamous “man shortage” or “an infertility epidemic” spooked women who had postponed marriage and motherhood. Now some wondered if they had lost what the media claimed were their infinitesimal chances to meet mates and have children. A popular T-shirt of the time reflected the fears of this generation. Drawn in the melodramatic style of a comic book romance, a weeping woman cries, “Oh dear, I forgot to have children!” Never mind that the man shortage was due to the peculiar demographics of the baby boom generation or that women over thirty-five kept on having children. Even when the authors of these academic studies repeatedly protested the media’s distortion of their research, the damage had already been done.8

  What really shocked and demoralized many veteran feminists was Betty Friedan’s critique of the women’s movement in her book The Second Stage, published in 1981. Worried that the movement might be undermined by the power of the right-wing assault, Friedan tried to promote a new agenda that would, in her eyes, isolate radicals and bring the women’s movement into the mainstream of American life. The feminine mystique, Friedan insisted, no longer oppressed women. What women now suffered from was a “feminist mystique” that prevented them from spending sufficient time with their families. Rather than lambasting men or the government for failing to support working women, or analyzing how consumerism or therapeutic culture had transformed feminism, Friedan blamed the movement itself for the assault upon it.

  Her book generated sharp criticism and fierce controversy. In the midst of the Reagan Revolution, some feminists viewed Friedan’s new emphasis on family life as “a reactionary retreat.” The Second Stage also infuriated those feminists who felt that Friedan had never grasped how sexual politics had rescued thousands of women from assaultive husbands and boyfriends, sexual harassment from bosses and coworkers, or homophobic violence from strangers. And more than a few feminists argued that she was in too much of a hurry; that the first stage of feminism was hardly finished.9

  The backlash also sparked a round of soul-searching among veteran feminists who began to feel demoralized, even defeated. In a 1989 reflective essay, Carol Hanisch, an early and influential radical feminist writer and activist, wondered if “giving up a normal life” for the women’s movement had been a waste. “Did I blow my life?” she asked herself.

  I had a serious consciousness-raising session with myself and asked myself if I would have wanted to live the next 20+ years under the conditions for women of pre-1968.

  Then, lifting her own spirits, she remembered

  the ways my life would have been circumscribed. . . . I began to feel a real panic welling up. It wasn’t the “sacrifices” that I had made that were bothering me so much as that we hadn’t been able to go further—far enough to really solve the problems we raised and were now facing—and we were sort of caught out on the proverbial limb.10

  What really disturbed her was the fact that women had gained the right to work, but that men had not taken over much of the responsibility for family life.

  The feminist writer and activist Jane O’Reilly came to a similar conclusion in her engrossing memoir, The Girl I Left Behind (1980). At the book’s end, O’Reilly imagined a conversation with a future granddaughter, a curious little girl who plies her with endless questions about the early women’s movement. O’Reilly conceded that the women’s movement caused great suffering, that it initially created an impassable gulf between male and female activists, and often left feminists feeling isolated, alone, and afraid. She recalled summers when every one of her friends questioned the wisdom of pursuing professional careers. But then, in a moving ending, O’Reilly described the legacy of the movement:

  That night at dinner the girl I will leave behind me, the girl we have given a start, will look at me and say: “But granny, were you happy being a feminist?” Of course I was happy being a feminist. After all, consider the alternatives.11

  Feminist responses to the backlash began to appear in literature as well. During the heady years of the 1970s, feminist utopian novels had become the genre du jour. Some of the most prominent novels—Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time or Ursula Le Guinn’s The Left Hand of Darkness—had played with gender and sexual identity and optimistically imagined new ways of achieving gender equality. In the wake of the backlash, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood published a bleak dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), which quickly became a best-seller. This chilling novel took the destructive potential of the religious backlash seriously and offered a scary answer to the question: “What if the religious Right actually gained political power?”12

  Despite the sense of gloom and defeat that many feminists experienced at the time, American women were, in fact, increasingly embracing the goals of the women’s movement. Reasons were not hard to fathom. Growing numbers of women were falling into poverty. Diana Pearce’s 1978 phrase “the feminization of poverty” caught a startling and unexpected reality of American life. Divorce rates, which had doubled since 1965, had created a new cohort of women who joined the poor when their marriages ended. By 1984, working women began to outnumber women who worked at home and the glamorization of the superwoman and her career choice had eroded the prestige of homemaking. The growing tendency of middle-class women to postpone marriage and motherhood, combined with an increase in single mothers and divorced mothers, created a critical mass of women who now wondered how they were going to support themselves and their children.13 Polls steadily revealed what the much-publicized backlash obscured, that a majority of women now looked favorably upon the goals of the women’s movement.14

  Women’s attitudes had, in fact, changed rapidly. In a 1970 Virginia Slims opinion poll, 53 percent of women cited being a wife and mother as “one of the best parts of being a woman.” By 1983, that figure had dropped to 26 percent.15 In 1970, very few women expressed concern over discrimination. By 1983, one-third of women agreed that “male chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual stereotypes ranked as their biggest problem”; while 80 percent agreed that “to get ahead a woman has to be better at what she does than a man.” Nor did women still believe they lived privileged lives, as they had in 1975, when one-third of Americans viewed men’s lives as far more difficult. By 1990, nearly half of all adults assumed that men had the easier life.16

  At the height of the backlash, in short, more American women, not fewer, grasped the importance of the goals of the women’s movement. In 1986, a Gallup poll asked women, “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” At a time when identifying yourself as a feminist felt like a risky admission, 56 percent of American women were willing to do so (at least privately to Gallup’s pollsters). Women of all classes were also becoming aware of the ways in which gender shaped their lives. Sixty-seven percent of all women, including those who earned under $12,500 and those who made more than $50,000, favored a strong women’s movement. Pollsters consistently found that more African-American women approved of the goals of the women’s movement than did white women. A 1989 poll found that 51 percent of all men, 64 percent of white women, 72 percent of Hispanic women, and 85 percent of African-American women agreed with the statement: “The United States continues to need a strong women’s movement to push for changes that benefit women.”17

  In 1989, Time magazine ushered in a new decade with yet one more pronouncement of the death of feminism. Its cover story, “Women Face the ‘90s,” bore the subtitle “During the ‘80s, they tried to have it all. Now they’ve just plain had it. Is there a future for feminism?” But, inside, the reader discovered quite a different story. Feminism was endangered, Time magazine suggested, not because it had failed, but precisely because it had been so successful. “In many ways,”
the article declared,

  feminism is a victim of its own resounding achievements. Its triumphs—in getting women into the workplace, in elevating their status in society and in shattering “the feminine mystique” that defined female success only in terms of being a wife and a mother—have rendered it obsolete, at least in its original form and rhetoric.18

  The growth of gender consciousness had, in fact, altered society and culture in countless ways.19 In August 1980, a New York Times editorial declared that the women’s movement, once viewed as a group of “extremists and troublemakers,” had turned into an “effective political force.” The editorial concluded that “the battle for women’s rights is no longer lonely or peripheral. It has moved where it belongs; to the center of American politics.”20 In 1984, commenting on legislation that would grant child support for all families and give wives access to their husbands’ pensions, the Times editorialized that “‘Women’s Issues’ have already become everyone’s.” And so they had. Perhaps the important legacy was precisely that “women’s issues” had entered mainstream national politics, where they had changed the terms of political debate.21

  Everyday life had changed in small but significant ways. Strangers addressed a woman as Ms.; meteorologists named hurricanes after both men and women; schoolchildren learned about sexism before they became teenagers; language became more gender-neutral; popular culture saturated society with comedies, thrillers, and mysteries that turned on changing gender roles; and two decades after the movement’s first years, the number of women politicians doubled.22 Even more significantly, millions of women had entered jobs that had once been reserved for men.

  Although women had not gained the power to change institutions in fundamental ways, they had joined men in colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers. In the 1950s, women had constituted only 20 percent of college undergraduates, and their two most common aspirations, according to polls of the time, were to become the wife of a prominent man and the mother of several accomplished children. By 1990, women constituted 54 percent of undergraduates and they wanted to do anything and everything. Women had also joined men in both blue collar and professional jobs in startling numbers. In 1960, 35 percent of women had worked outside the home; by 1990, that figure had jumped to 58 percent. During the same period, the number of female lawyers and judges leaped from 7,500 to 108,200; and female doctors from 15,672 to 174,000.