The World Split Open (64 page)

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 fragmentation of communities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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The growth of gender consciousness had, in fact, altered society and culture in countless ways.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

The cumulative impact of decades of revelations, education, debates, scandals, controversies, and high-profile trials raised women's gender consciousness, which in turn eventually showed up in a long-awaited political “gender gap.” In 1871, Susan B. Anthony had prematurely predicted that once women got the right to vote, they would vote as a bloc. A gender gap did not appear until 1980, when more men than women voted for Ronald Reagan, whose opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion may have moved some women into the Democratic column. More important was Reagan's pledge to dismantle the welfare state, which nudged even more women toward the Democrats, the party more likely (theoretically) to preserve the safety net. Eventually, the gender gap would cause at least a temporary realignment of national politics. In 1996, 16 percent more women than men voted for Bill Clinton for president. Some political analysts now believed that women were voting their interests as workers, family caregivers, or as single or divorced mothers.
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Gender gap or not, the rightward tilt of American politics led to the demonization of poor women and their children. As some middle-class women captured meaningful and well-paid work, ever more women slid into poverty and homelessness, which, on balance, the women's movement did too little, too late, to change. On the other hand, the lives of many ordinary working women, who had not become impoverished, improved in dramatic ways. In 1992, a
Newsweek
article described how twenty years of the women's movement had changed Appleton,
Wisconsin (the hometown of Joseph McCarthy and the headquarters since 1989 of the John Birch Society). Women, the magazine reported, had taken on significant roles in local politics. In addition, the article observed,

There are women cops and women firefighters, and there are women in managerial jobs in local business and government. There is firm community consensus, and generous funding with local tax dollars, for Harbor House, a shelter for battered women. And there is an active effort, in the Appleton public schools, to eliminate the invidious stereotyping that keeps young women in the velvet straitjacket of traditional gender roles.
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