The World Split Open (6 page)

According to a
Ms.
magazine report, more than eight out of ten women feel favorably toward the accomplishments and goals of the women's movement.

2004  Newly elected mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco issues marriage licenses to more than four thousand same-sex couples. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, which had held in 2003 that same-sex couples are entitled to the “protection, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage,” starts issuing same-sex wedding licenses.

President Bush calls for a constitutonal amendment banning same-sex marriage. The legislation fails in Congress. Revelations about the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo shock the nation. Although Lynndie England and other low-ranking soldiers are found guilty, no high-level administration officials are accused of war crimes or of violating the Geneva Accords.

President Bush signs the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, intended to confer legal personhood on the fetus.

The March for Women's Lives, thought to be the largest protest in the nation's history, draws more than a million people to Washington, D.C., to defend women's rights to reproductive health and abortion.

Ignoring the scientific recommendations of its own panel of experts, the FDA denies women over-the-counter access to Plan B emergency contraception.

Women's wrestling is added to the Olympic games and transsexuals are permitted to compete for the first time.

Congress denies funding for abortions to female soldiers, even for victims of rape or incest.

Wangari Maathai, an African activist famous for planting trees as part of the Green Belt Movement, and a strong advocate for a sustainable environment, peace, and women's rights, becomes the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

PBS anchor Gwen Ifill stumps both Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards during a vice presidential debate with a question about how they would address the AIDS epidemic among African American women.

The Census Bureau reports the wage gap between women and men widening in 2003, with women earning only 75.5 cents on men's dollar.

The four “Jersey Girls,” widows of 9/11 victims, prod a reluctant White House, after 441 days, to create an independent panel to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

A congressional report says that two-thirds of the federally funded “abstinence-only” programs contain “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.”

President Bush is reelected. The gender gap (the difference between male and female votes) shrinks to 7 percent, partly due to fears about security and terrorism. The youth vote increases by 9.3 percent.

2005  Condoleezza Rice becomes the first female African American Secretary of State.

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, ignites a national controversy when he speculates that women may be inferior to men in the field of science. (
By February 2006, he is forced to resign.
)

Islamic women hold the first women-led, mixed-gender Islamic prayer in New York, sparking a worldwide controversy among Muslims.

South Africa becomes the fifth country—joining the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Canada—to legalize same-sex marriage. England and New Zealand legalize civil unions.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra hires the first female conductor to head a major American orchestra.

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of soldier Casey Sheehan who died in Iraq on April 2004, reinvigorates the antiwar movement when she camps outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, until he will explain why her son died.

China officially outlaws sexual harassment and family violence. Women in Silicon Valley hold a conference to address their relative invisibility in the blogosphere and in cyberspace.

At the U.N. Beijing Plus Ten Conference, delegates reaffirm the 1995 Beijing Plan for Action, a broad platform that asserted women's rights as human rights. Many view the U.S. rightward political turn as a major obstacle for improving women's status around the world. Activists call for mainstreaming gender concerns into development, diplomacy, and peacemaking.

Hurricane Katrina causes catastrophic destruction of the Gulf Coast. The people most affected are those households headed by African American women, among the poorest in the region.

Network television broadcasts
Commander in Chief
, the first series about a woman assuming the presidency of the United States. Rosa Parks, who ignited the Montgomery Bus boycott when she refused to give up her front bus seat in 1955, dies at age 92. She is the first female African American whose body lies in state in the Capitol rotunda.

Access to abortion becomes a serious problem: One-third of American women live in areas where there are no providers.

The film
Brokeback Mountain
challenges an iconic image of American masculinity by showing ranch hands whose love endures throughout their marriages and adult lives.

Mukhtaran Bibi, gang-raped in Pakistan on a local council order for crimes committed by her brother, is honored by
Glamour
magazine as a “woman of the year.” With funds from compensation and
New York Times
readers, she builds girls' schools in her village, but fears assassination.

The Sundance Channel broadcasts an eight-part documentary series,
Transgeneration
, that follows four transgender college students
for a year. A feature film,
TransAmerica
, tells the story of a transgender woman who discovers she has fathered a teenage son.

Forty years after the modern women's movement began, women make up 15 percent of both houses of Congress, at least 50 percent of those enrolled in law and medical schools, and 46 percent of the U.S. labor force.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, elected president of Liberia, is the first female leader of an African nation; Angela Merkel becomes the first female chancellor of Germany.

2006  Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking 1963
Feminine Mystique
, dies at age 85.

Coretta King, who took up the nonviolent civil rights campaign of her assassinated husband, dies at age 78.

Effa Manley is the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. A white woman who passed as an African American, she co-owned (with her black husband) the New Jersey-based Eagles, who won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946.

Progressive Michelle Bachelet wins the presidency in Chile. Serious speculation about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential aspirations suggests that an American woman president is no longer unimaginable.

South Dakota passes legislation banning all abortions in the state, including for victims of rape and incest, setting up a direct challenge to
Roe v. Wade.

The 2006 American Time Use Survey released by the Labor Bureau finds that women, regardless of marital status, spend more time on housework and child care than men. More specifically, women report spending one hour a day on housework and three-quarters of an hour on food prepartion, while men do fifteen minutes on each task. More than half of the women surveyed said they had done housework in the past twenty-four hours, while only one in five men had; 66 percent of women had prepared meals versus 37 percent of men. Additionally women with children spent twice as much time caring for them as men with children.

Democrats win both houses of Congress in the midterm elections and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) becomes the first female speaker of the House of Representatives.

“Until I was twenty-eight,” wrote the poet Anne Sexton, “I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill myself.”
¹

Anne Sexton was a deeply troubled artist, but many housewives shared her depression and her demons. More than a few women secretly experienced the fifties as a private nightmare, something observant daughters of the time noted with alarm. Sensing the bitterness and disappointment of so many adult women, these daughters came of age eagerly mapping escapes from what they regarded as the claustrophobic constraints of the fifties. “As we grew older,” one woman explained, “we saw our mothers—our role models, the women we were to become—thwarted in their efforts toward self-realization and expression. A deep and bitter lesson, this one—and one we couldn't take lightly. It reverberated through the core of our beings, and we resolved not to let it happen to us; we resolved to be different.”
²

In 1963, a housewife and former labor union journalist named Betty Friedan published the results of interviews she had conducted with other women who had been educated at Smith College. In the privacy of their suburban homes, these housewives had revealed the depths of their despair to her. Blessed with good providers, nice homes, and healthy children, they puzzled over their unhappiness. Not knowing that other women shared their troubles, they experienced them as personal and blamed themselves for their misery. Friedan called this inchoate unhappiness “the problem that has no name.”

To quell their conflicts, some of the interviewees gulped tranquilizers, cooked gourmet meals, or scrutinized their children as though they were rare insects. In search of stimulation, some housewives had sought out sexual affairs or volunteered their time to churches, schools, and charitable organizations. Some women stuffed their houses with shiny new laborsaving devices. Yet, despite these material comforts, something still seemed to be missing. Many of these educated women, Friedan discovered, had nurtured dreams that were never realized, but also never forgotten. The postwar conviction that women should limit their lives exclusively to home and hearth had tied them to the family, closed other opportunities, and crushed many spirits. Friedan dubbed this powerful belief system “the feminine mystique,” and her book
The Feminine Mystique
became an instant best-seller.

In many ways, Betty Friedan's background made her an ideal person to expose such domestic unhappiness to the American public. Born and reared in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein graduated from Smith College in 1942, already well versed in left-wing ideals of social justice and economic equality. After college, she joined the swirling intellectual and political world of leftist politics, worked as a journalist, and in 1947 married Carl Friedan. When she became pregnant with her second child, she was fired by her employer—not an unusual experience for working women at the time.

She and her husband then settled into a suburban life in which she experienced firsthand the isolation of a housewife. But even as she raised three children, she continued to write for mainstream women's magazines. To ease her own burdens as a mother and a writer, she hired a housekeeper, but when other housewives described the isolation and narrowness of their lives, she clearly understood their frustration. She also had the political savvy to see the significance of their complaints
and the skills with which to describe them movingly on paper. Readers of her book, in turn, imagined her as a sister housewife, trapped in the gilded cage of a suburban home, restless and impatient to lead a life of her own.