The World Split Open (66 page)

By the start of the new century, growing numbers of women across the globe had joined the paid labor force and gained access to some education. In many developing nations, human rights advocates also launched campaigns to prevent violence against women, to achieve greater female economic and political participation, and to provide women with choices about their own reproduction and marriages.

Not surprisingly, such challenges threatened the traditional hierarchical power once reserved for male religious leaders, as well as for fathers and husbands. Cultural battles erupted all over the planet as people fought bitterly over many economic, religious, and social issues. But one question—“
What is the appropriate role of women in contemporary society?
”—nearly always divided traditionalists, who included many religious fundamentalists, from modernists, who often embraced a more secular and pluralist view of society. Whatever their response to the sweeping changes brought about by globalization, nearly everyone agreed that women's historic role has been to preserve and reproduce the traditional customs and values of their culture. Working for wages outside the home challenged centuries of tradition.

To defend cherished values and customs, many men
and
women, within the United States as well as elsewhere, mobilized to prevent
their
women from turning into the iconic image of the emancipated Western woman—a sexually and economically independent person, seemingly unprotected by her family and unmoored from her community.

This cultural storm—in which women, gender relations, and sexuality became lightning rods in both national and global politics—profoundly shaped the early years of the twenty-first century.

The backlash against the women's movement reached a high point in the 1980s. By 2000, it had gained even greater momentum. Feminists had been stereotyped, scapegoated, and vilified as man-hating, hairy, anti-family misfits for so long that young women, with good reason, wanted to distance themselves from the “F” word. The televangelist and political power broker Reverend Pat Robertson, for example, called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
¹

Although candidate George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” in 2000, the extreme Religious Right, long hostile to the women's movement, formed a significant part of his political base. After the Supreme Court halted a recount of votes in Florida, Bush lost the popular vote but won the election. The new president cast this controversial victory as a mandate for radical change. Fueled by a zealous faith in Market Fundamentalism—the belief that unregulated free markets solve all problems—and by his own religious fundamentalism, Bush sought to shrink the federal government, to enact huge tax cuts that mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans, to eliminate or privatize as many government services as possible, to transfer the costs of health care, retirement, and higher education onto families, and to repeal much of the legacy of the 1960s, including women's rights.

Efforts to regulate sexuality, ban abortion, and limit the rights of gays and lesbians quickly vaulted to the top of the national political agenda. Conservative women's groups played an increasingly powerful role in discrediting the achievements of the women's movement. The extremely religious members of Concerned Women of America, for example, crusaded to outlaw abortion and to restore “Christian values” and women's traditional domestic role in the family. Serrin Foster of Feminists for Choice tried to persuade young women that feminism had robbed them of the “choice” to have children, but she offered no means for supporting the offspring of these young single mothers. The Independent Women's Forum (IWF) and The Women's Freedom Network (WFN), both secular organizations of professional women, dubbed themselves “equality feminists,” by which they meant that self-made women needed no assistance from the government. They based their antifeminism on their hostility to liberalism and on their belief that an unregulated
economy would provide prosperity for women. The IWF derided modern feminists as “Dependency Divas”—women who sought government assistance for working families and the poor. These equality feminists also insisted that each woman, as a self-made individual, should pull herself up by the straps of her stiletto heels.
²

The right-wing Republican war against women's reproductive and sexual choices began on the first day the president took office. Bush restored the Reagan-era global gag rule, which prohibited any international agency from receiving U.S. funds if it performed abortions, lobbied to make abortion legal, or even provided counseling about the procedure. The result was disastrous: women in developing countries had less access to contraception and reproductive health care, which inevitably resulted in hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
³

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush declared a “war on terror” and pursued a domestic agenda that had less to do with protecting the nation from terrorism than with manipulating fear, expanding executive power, eroding civil rights and civil liberties, and governing in an atmosphere of unprecedented secrecy. The declaration of an endless war provided him with the political opportunity to advance the Religious Right's political agenda, which had immediate consequences on women's lives.

The Bush administration, for example, repeatedly tried to ban abortion by conferring “personhood” on the fetus. “In as many areas as we can, we want to put on the books that the embryo is a person,” boasted Samuel B. Casey, executive director of the Christian Legal Society.
⁴
In 2003, Congress passed the so-called Partial-Birth Act, which restricted late-term abortions; in 2004, it passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, conferring legal personhood on the fetus of an injured pregnant woman. During these years, at least twenty states passed laws designed to restrict access to abortion, by requiring women to submit to advanced counseling, “cooling off” periods, parental notification, and by limiting funds for reproductive health services.
⁵

Battles over Bush's nominees for the Supreme Court inevitably turned on whether the candidate would vote to overturn
Roe v. Wade
, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that had given American women the constitutional right to choose an abortion. In short, former President Bill Clinton's famous declaration that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” was replaced by an all-out effort to outlaw abortion within the United States.

The relentless campaign to impose legal personhood on the fetus soon rippled outward to other areas of American life, including attempts
to make emergency contraception inaccessible, to intervene in end-of-life decisions, to halt stem-cell research, and to place restrictions on assisted reproduction.
⁶

In its efforts to regulate sexual and reproductive choices, the Bush administration politicized science in an unprecedented way. In 2002, for example, the administration appointed physicians opposed to contraception, reproductive rights, and mifepristone (used for medical abortions) to the Reproduction Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration. When vetting scientists for some 250 advisory boards, Bush officials stunned scientists when they asked such inappropriate political questions as “Do you support abortion rights?” “The death penalty for drug kingpins?” “Did you vote for Bush?” Worried about the politicization of science, Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University and editor of the prestigious journal
Science
, wrote, “If you start picking people by their ideology instead of their scientific credentials, you are inevitably reducing the quality of the advisory group.”
⁷

Ignoring criticism from the scientific community, the Bush administration nevertheless staffed scientific advisory panels with right-wing religious ideologues who disregarded scientific evidence and even posted inaccurate information on government Web sites. In 2002, for example, the National Cancer Institute's Web site inaccurately described abortion as a possible cause of breast cancer. In the same year, the Centers for Disease Control scrubbed information from its Web site about how condoms can protect teens from HIV infection, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Its new version declared that “more research is needed” and omitted a passage on how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Ignoring recommendations from its own scientific experts, the Food and Drug Administration repeatedly postponed a decision to permit over-the-counter emergency contraception, known as Plan B. After the Religious Right organized the Pharmacists for Life movement,
The Economist
magazine reported that “A rising number of pharmacists are refusing to dispense prescriptions [in the United States] for birth control and morning-after pills, saying it is against their beliefs.”
⁸

Determined to defend “traditional family” values, the Bush administration budgeted millions of dollars to promote marriage for poor women and to teach “abstinence only” courses to teenagers. Teen pregnancy had actually declined to record lows—a drop of 20 percent between 1987 and 1994 and another 27 percent decline between 1994 and 2000. Still, as the nonpartisan Alan Guttmacher Institute reported, “the U.S. teen birthrate is one of the highest in the developed world.”
⁹

The president's response to that serious problem was to withdraw funds from any state that offered sex education classes that actually taught about contraception and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. “Abstinence only” courses, by contrast, only instructed young people to avoid sex until they married. In 2004, a congressional report concluded that two-thirds of these federally funded “abstinence only” courses contained “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.”
¹⁰

Both the president and the Religious Right also sought to prop up the heterosexual “traditional family,” which, by the turn of the twenty-first century, included only 25 percent of American households. Divorce, single parenthood, same-sex parenting, economic distress, and cohabitation had transformed American family life. Even Bush's born-again religious constituency was just as likely to divorce as traditional Christians, and the divorce rate of both was only 2 percent below that of atheists and agnostics.
¹¹

Gay marriage quite naturally became a symbol of the dramatic changes that had altered American families. Bush not only called for a constitutional ban against same-sex marriage (which failed) but also denounced the growing judicial acceptance of legal civil unions. Critics of the Bush administration argued that social conservatives seemed to care more about containing sexuality within heterosexual marriage than preventing unwanted pregnancies or sanctifying relationships between loving partners, or matching needy children with same-sex adoptive parents.

But the conservative campaign to regulate sexuality and reproduction and to promote marriage is only part of a far more complicated story. During these very same years, the nation also witnessed major campaigns—by women, gays and lesbians, and transgendered people—to expand reproductive, marital, and sexual rights.

In April 2004, for example, a million people of all ages and from many ethnic and racial backgrounds marched in the nation's capitol to defend a woman's right to reproductive health care and abortion. Organized by a broad coalition of women's and civil rights groups, “The March for Women's Lives”—thought to be the largest demonstration in the nation's history—proved that American women were not willing to concede defeat in the abortion wars.

This rearguard action to protect women's reproductive choice and health was accompanied by aggressive movements to expand the right to express any sexual orientation or embrace any gender identity without fear of violence or discrimination.

After decades of coming out of the closet and fighting for their civil rights, gays and lesbians were hardly strangers to most Americans. Popular culture, including television series and sitcoms, regularly featured at least one gay or lesbian character. When
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
debuted on cable television, the five gay men who gave advice on fashion and home decorating to clueless heterosexual men turned the program into a smash hit. In 2005, the feature film
Brokeback Mountain
, which won an Oscar nomination for best picture, challenged America's iconic image of masculinity when it explored—with great sensitivity and tenderness—the love and passion that endured between two ranch hands throughout their marriages and adult lives.

In rapid succession, gays and lesbians also won expanded rights from American courts. In 2003, the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled that a Texas law against sodomy was unconstitutional, and in 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that same-sex couples are entitled to the “protection, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage.” Just days later, Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's newly elected handsome and heterosexual mayor, stunned the nation when he announced that the city would issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Newsom honored Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79, pioneering feminists and gay rights activists who had shared their lives for fifty-one years, by having them become the first same-sex couple declared “spouses for life.”

During the next month, same-sex couples braved the rain and lined up around San Francisco's City Hall, even sleeping on the sidewalk, hoping to get married before a court injunction closed this historic window of opportunity. It was an unforgettable sight. Beaming faces spread an infectious sense of joy throughout City Hall. Women dressed in stunning white gowns juggled babies and bouquets. Men outfitted in elegant tuxedos, sporting carnations in their lapels, cradled infants, while friends held their paperwork. As couples looked into each other's eyes, arms wrapped around each other, their friends took snapshots and the national media documented the occasion for the evening news. One burly veteran cameraman was so overwhelmed by the scene that he found himself blinking back tears.