Feminism
The changes in women’s roles were rooted, in important ways, in the larger changes of American political and economic life.
Many Americans assume that feminism inspired more women to move into the workforce, but in truth the reverse was true. It was the movement of women into the workplace, where they confronted chronic gender discrimination and widespread sexual harassment, that fueled feminism. Working-class women, organized in unions, had been at the forefront of the campaign for government protection since the 1930s. As deindustrialization dismantled the postwar economy in the 1970s, the blue-collar union jobs that had long provided working-class men with steady wages and good benefits became harder to find. Some of these displaced workers found jobs in the new service sector, but positions there generally paid less than the ones they had theoretically replaced. Significantly, by 1976, only 40 percent of the nation’s jobs paid enough to support a family on their own. As the average take-home pay for most families dwindled, rising rates of inflation sent their cost of living skyrocketing. Taken together, these changes meant the end of an era in which male breadwinners were the norm. The movement of married women into the workforce, a trend under way for decades, significantly accelerated. At the same time, as the divorce rate in America doubled between 1966 and 1976, a greater number of newly single mothers found themselves forced into full-time jobs as well, having to support themselves and their children. The rise of working mothers was unmistakable: in 1970, 30 percent of women with preschool children held a paid job; in 1976, 43 percent; in 1985, 50 percent.2
The movement of mothers into the paid labor force was part of a larger trend of women at work. In 1970, 43 percent of American women over the age of sixteen held jobs outside the home; in 1980, 52 percent did. As these 45 million women went to work, they traversed an economic landscape with decidedly uneven terrain. On the surface, women seemingly benefited from the fact that the booming business sectors of the 1970s were in fields that had traditionally been regarded as “women’s work.” As the manufacturing sector declined, the service economy began to soar. Between 1973 and 1980, 40 percent of all new private jobs were service sector positions focused on food, health care, and business support. Employers in those fields often preferred to hire women, but usually in part-time positions with low wages and little or no union protections. Even women who were able to secure full-time work, however, faced persistent patterns of unequal pay. In fact, despite their growing presence in the workplace, women’s average wages lagged further behind men’s with each passing year. In 1956, the median income for a woman who worked a full-time job was 63 percent of that of a man who had the same position; by 1964, it had dropped to 59 percent; and by 1974, down to just 57 percent. At service sector jobs, women fared even worse: in sales, for instance, women on average earned only 44 percent of what men did.3
As women faced gender discrimination on the job, they found the federal government unable or unwilling to help. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had a tangled legislative history when it came to gender. The law outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of sex, but the origins of that clause severely undercut its impact. Seeking to sabotage the bill, Congressman Howard Smith, a conservative Virginia segregationist, had inserted “sex” into the list of categories for which discrimination was banned. Liberal representatives might be willing to back equality for racial minorities, he assumed, but they would likely draw the line at equality for the sexes. And indeed, when Smith suggested the idea, the men in the House treated it as laughable. (Liberal Democrat Emanuel Celler, for instance, joked that in arguments with his wife, he always got in the last words: “Yes, dear.”) Despite the derision of their colleagues, the few women in the House took the idea seriously and shamed their colleagues who did not. “If there had been any necessity to have pointed out that women were a second-class sex,” Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan noted, “the laughter would have proved it.” With her backing, the Civil Rights Act passed with the ban against gender discrimination intact.4
But the law meant little on its own. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency Congress tasked with implementing the legislation, simply refused to enforce the ban on gender discrimination. Between 1964 and 1966, women filed more than 4,000 complaints with the EEOC, but the agency dismissed every single one as frivolous. When the commission did take action, it often made matters worse. In August 1965, for instance, the EEOC ruled that sex-segregated want ads did not violate the law. The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that the very idea of gender-neutral job advertisements was ludicrous, dared readers to imagine “a ‘matronly vice president’ gleefully participating in an old office sport by chasing a male secretary around a big leather-topped desk” or a “black-jacketed truck driver skillfully maneuvering a giant rig into a dime-sized dock space—and then checking her lipstick in the rear-view mirror.” Such prospects might seem “ridiculous,” the paper reported, but some women were actually arguing for just such a right. Businesses remained bewildered at the very idea. An airline personnel officer wondered, “What are we going to do now when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify?” 5
Realizing that the political and business establishment would not end the persistent problems of gender discrimination, women activists resolved to do it themselves. In late 1966, leaders including author Betty Friedan and Representative Griffiths banded together in a new feminist civil rights organization, which they called the National Organization for Women (NOW). Its founding statement of purpose called for “a true partnership between the sexes” that demanded “a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children, and of the economic burdens of their support.” NOW initially focused on the last item in that list, targeting sex-segregated want ads in its first major campaign. Picketing the offices of the New York Times and dumping piles of newspapers outside local EEOC offices across the country, the new organization convinced the EEOC to reverse course and outlaw gender-specific job ads in August 1968. At the same time, NOW targeted gender discrimination in individual industries. Most notably, it succeeded in getting airlines to end their traditional rule that required stewardesses, as they were then called, to resign as soon as they married or turned thirty-two. This practice had previously allowed the airlines to showcase stewardesses who were young, attractive, and presumably sexually available to their largely male passengers. More significantly, it let companies avoid granting these women raises, pensions, or Social Security payments, thereby inflating profit margins at their employees’ expense. In such ways, NOW’s first president Betty Friedan observed, “sex discrimination was big business.” 6
While feminists found some successes with this piecemeal approach based on grassroots pressure and protest, the leaders of NOW sought to secure broader protections for women in federal policy. To do so, they turned their attention to the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a longtime goal of the feminist movement. The ERA had been idling before Congress since the 1920s, but in the early 1970s it finally secured passage. The amendment seemed straightforward, a simple assertion that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex” with enabling clauses that allowed Congress to enforce it. In a testament to the newfound clout of feminist organizations like NOW, politicians from across the spectrum readily endorsed the amendment. Leading liberals like Ted Kennedy and George McGovern embraced it, but so did prominent conservatives like Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and Strom Thurmond. In March 1972, the ERA passed Congress easily—in the House, the margin was 354–23; in the Senate, 84–8—and seemed sure to win swift ratification by the required three-fourths majority of the states. Hawaii ratified the amendment the very same day it was sent to the states by Congress; over the next two days, Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho, and Iowa did too. “Ratification by mid-1973 looks probable, but not easy,�
�� noted the editors of the feminist Ms. magazine.7
The forces of reaction, however, proved strong. Despite the promising start, the campaign for the ERA’s ratification soon slowed and stalled. Opponents of the amendment were able to draw on much more support at the state and local level than they had in the halls of Congress. In October 1972, conservative Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly founded STOP ERA to make the case that the Equal Rights Amendment would reduce women’s rights rather than expand them. (Pointedly, “STOP” stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges.”) An accomplished attorney and a force in the Republican Party, Schlafly nevertheless described herself as “just a housewife” who was seeking to preserve traditional protections for mothers and homemakers, including married women’s rights to conjugal support, the obligations of alimony and child support in cases of divorce, and the tendency for women to get custody of children almost automatically when a marriage dissolved. “What about the rights of a woman who doesn’t want to be treated like a man?” she asked in one tract. In 1977, Schlafly made her strongest case against the amendment in her book The Power of the Positive Woman. “The Positive Woman opposes ERA,” she argued, “because it would be hurtful to women, to men, to children, to the family, to local self-government, and to society as a whole.” 8
As Schlafly helped mobilize opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, she shrewdly transformed the terms of the debate. While proponents of the amendment claimed to be fighting for the rights of women, Schlafly insisted that she was working to protect the entire family—women, men, and children, too. Claiming the term “pro-family” for the opponents of the amendment, she marginalized its supporters as radicals who “hate men and children.” Her STOP ERA chapters led the fight against ratification in the states, but other conservative women created organizations of their own. Following Schlafly’s lead, these opponents of the ERA emphasized traditional gender roles, as seen in organizational names like Happiness of Motherhood Eternal (HOME), Mississippians for God, Family and Country, and the Texas-based Women Who Want to be Women. In intensive lobbying campaigns at state legislatures, these women likewise played up their identities as housewives and mothers. In Illinois and New York, for instance, they hand-delivered homemade baked goods to state legislators, with a simple rhyme attached: “My heart and hands went into this dough. For the sake of the family, please say no.” 9
While such appeals to traditional gender norms targeted male politicians, they had deep resonances for many women as well. In an article for Redbook, Vivian Cadden reported that the cause of “women’s liberation” had little appeal “to the wives of truck drivers and farmers and salesmen and auto workers and struggling small businessmen and beginning lawyers” who believed their lives as homemakers compared favorably to the long hours and grueling demands of their husbands’ jobs. Simply put, they didn’t want to be liberated. “I like what I’m doing,” insisted one young housewife. Even those who worked full-time and would have benefited from equal protection on the job still worried about the ERA’s impact off the clock. The amendment, they feared, would have horrible cultural consequences. “This whole Women’s Liberation thing is a crock of you-know-what,” complained a female factory worker at a General Electric plant in Ohio. “Next thing you know it’ll be my turn to drive by and toot the horn and pick him up on Saturday night. Before you know it, it’ll be my turn to pay.” 10
These defenses of traditional gender identities were especially compelling for evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who believed such roles had been divinely determined. From their perspective, God had purposefully given men and women different abilities, in both body and mind, when he created them. Women had a duty to serve their husbands as “helpmeets“ (a version of the term helpmate, derived from the Bible) and were bound by their wedding vows to submit to them at all times. In popular books published over the decade, evangelical authors asserted that submission to their husbands actually elevated women. For instance, in her 1973 best seller The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan argued that “it is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him. She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen!” Not surprisingly, conservative Christians with such attitudes played a pivotal role in the state-level campaigns against the ERA’s ratification. In midwestern states like Illinois, the opposition was predominantly Catholic; in Mountain West states like Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, Mormons dominated; in the South, STOP ERA chapters were overwhelmingly staffed by the Churches of Christ and Southern Baptists. In Texas, for instance, 98 percent of the women who testified against ratification belonged to a church, with 66 percent describing themselves as “fundamentalist Protestants.” 11
This conservative opposition effectively killed the Equal Rights Amendment. Even though the amendment had secured ratification in 35 of the needed 38 states by 1977, the countermovement stopped it in its tracks. Its supporters on Capitol Hill did everything in their power to get it moving again, with Congress extending the deadline for ratification to 1982. No more states signed on; indeed, several moved to rescind their earlier ratifications. In the end, the Equal Rights Amendment died. But its demise, its opponents still insisted, was actually a triumph for women. “The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment is the greatest victory for women’s rights since the women’s suffrage amendment of 1920,” Schlafly proudly announced, but the battle had only begun. “We must renew our efforts and develop the quality of perseverance so that we win in the battle for God, family and country.” 12
And, to be sure, the struggle over the status of women in 1970s America was far from over. While feminists failed to secure ratification of the ERA, they succeeded in obtaining some smaller but still significant legal changes throughout the decade. An early notable victory came in Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act amendments, a measure that banned gender discrimination at all colleges and universities that received federal funding. Linking funding to institutions that adhered to certain social regulations had been integral to the success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and supporters of women’s rights hoped once again to use the leverage of money to ensure change. Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana emerged as the chief champion of the proposal. “We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children and never work again,” he told his colleagues in the Senate. “The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex.’ ” Title IX, Bayh argued, would help women secure “an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills that they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work.” After passing both houses of Congress by large margins, the measure was signed into law by President Nixon in June 1972.13
Title IX represented a significant milestone in equal education for women, but even before its measures went into effect, the revolution in higher education was already apparent. In 1975, a U.S. News and World Report article titled “The American Woman: On the Move, But Where?” informed readers that the numbers of women in professional schools had already dramatically risen. Between 1960 and 1974, the percentage of female students in dentistry schools increased from 1 percent to 7 percent; in medical schools, from 6 percent to 18 percent; in law schools, from 4 percent to 19 percent; in pharmacy schools, from 12 percent to 32 percent. As programs that served as gateways to white-collar careers shed their sexism, so too did the professions they served. In 1971, women represented only 4 percent of all lawyers and judges, 9 percent of doctors, and 10 percent of PhD recipients; by 1981, they counted for 14 percent of lawyers and judges, 22 percent of doctors, and 30 percent of PhDs. Undergraduate education was likewise t
ransformed. Notably, Ivy League schools, which, except for Cornell, had been sex-segregated since their founding, began admitting women over the course of the decade. Yale and Princeton sparked the modern trend in the late 1960s; Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, and Harvard followed suit in the early 1970s; and Columbia, the last holdout, finally admitted women in 1983. Meanwhile, when it went into effect in 1978, Title IX had an immediate impact on education across the board. An unforeseen consequence of the measure was a significant boost to women’s athletics, now that funding could no longer be used solely on men’s sports. In the early 1970s, there were fewer than 30,000 female college athletes on NCAA teams; only one out of 27 women played in high school sports in 1972, with games that were usually relegated to secondary events for the student body.14 By the end of the 1970s, girls’ participation in high school athletics was nearly five times greater than it had been at the decade’s start.15
In many ways, the fight to secure access to the world of athletics symbolized the larger struggles of feminism in the 1970s. To achieve their goals, feminists were determined to remake the world of culture and social relations where ideas of gender were forged in the popular psyche. As much as any other segment of society, sports had long been considered “a man’s world,” and the rise to fame of female athletes signaled important cultural changes in the country. No one better represented the trend than tennis star Billie Jean King. In 1972, after winning three major titles, she became the first woman ever to be honored as Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsman of the Year.” (The achievement was slightly lessened by the fact that the magazine decided to split the title, for the first time in its history, making King share the honor with UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden.) One of the tennis titles King won that year was the US Open. In keeping with the unequal pay of the era, the prize money for the women’s championship was $15,000 less than that for the men’s. King shocked the sports world when she announced that, unless the prizes were equalized, she would not return to defend her title at the 1973 tournament. Afraid of losing a star attraction, the US Open changed its policies and became the first tournament to offer equal money for men and women. From that victory, King went on to launch the Women’s Tennis Association and its tour, the Virginia Slims Championship. In many ways, the tour’s cigarette sponsor seemed to be the perfect symbol of the era, as its slogan blended feminist accomplishment with male chauvinist patronizing: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.” 16
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