The World Split Open (71 page)

Some activists and scholars argued that all political candidates should be pressured to describe the policies they would promote in order to achieve greater gender equality. Charlotte Bunch, president of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, went further and argued that a feminist redefinition of “national security” would have to address the health and welfare of all Americans.
⁷⁹

In 2006, Joan Blades, cofounder of the online progressive organization
MoveOn.org
and her coauthor Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, published
The Motherhood Manifesto
, with the goal of vaulting family policies to the top of the political agenda. Many other activists and scholars described a similar wish list and argued that universal health care, paid parental leaves, high-quality, subsidized, and accessible child care, a higher minimum wage, as well as a real living wage, job training and education, flexible work hours, greater part-time work opportunities, investment in affordable housing and mass transit, and the reinstatement of a progressive tax structure, would go a long way to help support working mothers and their families.
⁸⁰

And how would this wish list be funded? Activists still dreamed of a time when the United States would use its military only for defensive or humanitarian ends, reduce military expenditures for unnecessary space-based weapons and the vast network of American military bases that circled the globe, end resource wars for oil, and instead invest heavily in new sustainable energy sources. They also dreamed of a government that would eliminate tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, reinstate the estate tax and the progressive tax structure that had created a broad and prosperous middle class in the middle of the twentieth century. Together, these savings could fund a great deal of their wish list.

On March 8, 2006, International Women's Day, two Democratic members of the Progressive Caucus—Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), and Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), even proposed legislation to transfer $60 billion allocated for outdated Cold War-era weapons from the Pentagon's bloated budget of $439 billion to schools, healthcare,
and humanitarian aid. “It's time we invest more in our people and less in our defense contracts,” said Woolsey at a press conference. They called their bill the Common Sense Budget Act.
⁸¹

Was this really so ridiculous? Not if the United States did a “gender audit” of its budget. Not if the American government, like other industrial societies, provided for the health and welfare of its citizens.

Although Americans have famously rooted for the underdog and believed in “fairness,” they no longer seemed to feel compassion or empathy with the poor and the vulnerable or even with the struggling middle class. The conservative right wing had successfully persuaded many people that an activist government was the problem, rather than the solution, and that people should rely entirely on themselves. Americans had forgotten that taxes paid for what an individual cannot create or maintain: sewers, highways, public schools and hospitals, emergency preparedness, public health, social services for the aged, disabled, and unemployed, and the nation's vast infrastructure they use every single day.

Nor had the country embraced what sociologist Fred Block has called a Moral Economy, an economic system whose guiding principles—justice and fairness—have long been taught in kindergarten.
⁸²
This is where most Americans have been taught to share with others, to obey rules, to learn not to waste materials, to care for the kid who gets hurt, and to wait and take their turn. This is where they learned cooperation, reciprocity, sustainability, and the democratic regulation of greed.
⁸³

Instead, at the beginning of the new century, growing numbers of American adults seemed absolutely besotted with the right to accumulate wealth and to avoid taxes as the dues they owed their society. Greed no longer seemed shameful; the idea of a common good seemed almost quaint.

Ever since the early 1980s, right-wing social conservatives had persuaded Americans that they—and not liberals—were the ones who embodied and embraced morality and traditional values. But those who dared to dream knew that America's most deeply cherished values had inspired progressive activists when they ended slavery, fought for women's suffrage, passed social security for the aged and insurance for the unemployed, marched to end segregation, fought for the rights of women and gays and lesbians, and launched a campaign for environmental health and justice. This great progressive American tradition had expanded the nation's democracy and reinforced the belief in a public good. But it failed to gain traction at a time when rampant
individualism and the celebration of greed triumphed over movements for social and economic justice.

Yet, as everyone knows, change is inevitable. Would the pendulum swing in a different direction? Would Americans once again root for the underdog and demand fairness from their government? Would the nation engage in endless cultural wars or try to close the widening gulf between the rich and the poor? Could activists renew a sense of a common good, publicize the care crisis, and change the family and workplace for the twenty-first century?

No one knew.

One thing was clear: globalization would certainly accelerate the worldwide gender revolution. The result? As growing numbers of the world's women enter the paid labor force, they will inevitably challenge—and change—women's place in traditional cultures and fundamentalist religions, igniting even more cultural wars, as well as a fiery backlash.

They will also contribute to a global care crisis. Who will care for the world's children, the disabled, and the elderly? Despite feminists' best efforts, the United States certainly has not provided a solution to its own catastrophic Care Crisis. On the contrary, the modern women's movement set in motion thirty years of cultural wars about women's place in modern society.

Observing the social and cultural backlash that accompanied this unfinished gender revolution, Vera Rubin, an astronomer celebrated for her early battles for women in science, sadly concluded, “Thirty years ago we thought the battle would be over soon, but equality is as elusive as dark matter.”
⁸⁴

True, the world split open when women spoke the truth about their lives. Their revelations contributed to an irreversible but unfinished gender revolution that has upended millions of lives. Fortunately, there are still countless men and women everywhere struggling to put our world back together—this time, with equality and respect for women.

See Archival Collections, page 401, for meaning of the abbreviations in these Notes.

1
. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds.
Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 339–400.

2
. Barbara Berg,
The Crisis of the Working Mother: Resolving the Conflict between Family and Work
(New York: Summit, 1986), 38.

3
.
Tikkun
(January/February 1988), 25.

4
. Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Norton, 1963), 25. The term “popular front feminist” was coined by Daniel Horowitz to describe a woman of the Old Left who had always been interested in the problems working women faced.

5
. Gerda Lerner to Betty Friedan, February 6, 1963, Box 201, Folder 715, Betty Friedan Papers, SL; cited and quoted with permission by Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan,” American
Quarterly
(March 1996): 1–31. I thank Daniel Horowitz, author of
Betty Friedan and the Making of Women's Liberation
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998), for giving me early drafts of his meticulous research on Friedan's life and for drawing to my attention the changes in the ten drafts of her work.

6
. Reviews of
The Feminine Mystique
, Box 18, Folder 676, Betty Friedan Papers. Letter in response to
The Feminine Mystique
, Box 21, Folder 739, Betty Friedan Papers;
McCall's
, 1963, 38.

7
. Folder 617,
Feminine Mystique
Letters, Friedan Papers.

8
. Box 21, Folder 739; Box 19, Folder 683; Box 19, Folder 683;
Feminine Mystique
Letters, Friedan Papers.

9
. The contributions of Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., and the other authors to
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) are an important corrective to the view that the feminine mystique ruled every woman and permitted no exit. As much as I respect the contribution made by Meyerowitz and the other authors, I believe the power of the feminine mystique was stronger than the undertow that was pulling it down.

10
. Some of the best sources that reveal the making of lesbian and gay subcultures are John D'Emilio,
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Donna Penn, “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America,”
Gender and History
(Summer 1991): 190–203; Kate Weigand, “The Red Menace, the Feminine Mystique, and the Ohio University American Activities Commission: Gender and Anti-Communism in Ohio, 1951–1954,”
Journal of Women's History
(Winter 1992): 70–94; Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 130–87. One of the best ethnographies is Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis,
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community
(New York: Routledge, 1993).

11
. Warren Susman,
Culture As History
(New York: Pantheon, 1984); William Whyte,
The Organization Man
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); C. Wright Mills,
White Collar: The American Middle Class
(New York: Oxford, 1956). See Glen Elder,
Children of the Great Depression
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

12
. Dr. Paul Pepenoe, who had been a biologist and founder of the social hygiene movement, became the best-known publicist through the column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”; Benita Eisler,
Private Lives: Men and Women of the Fifties
(New York: Franklin Watts, 1986), 278.

13
. William Chafe,
The Unfinished Journey
(New York: Oxford, 1995), 119; Landon Y. Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation
(New York: Ballantine, 1980), 43; Kenneth Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
(New York: Oxford, 1985); Sylvia Hewlett,
A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America
(New York: William Morrow, 1986), 38.

14
. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak,
The Fifties: The Way We Really
Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 8.

15
. Marc Richards, “Recruiting in the Nursery,” dissertation, U.C. Davis, 1998; Donna Alvah, “Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and Cold War International Relations, 1945–1961,” dissertation in progress, U.C. Davis.

16
. Elaine May,
Homeward Bound
(New York: Basic Books, 1988), 25.

17
. “The Two Worlds: A Day Long Debate,”
New York Times
, July 25, 1959, 1,3; “Setting Russia Straight on Facts about the U.S.,”
U.S. News and World Report
, vol. 47, August 3, 1959, 36–39, 70–72; “Encounter,”
Newsweek
, August 3, 1959, 15–19.

18
. J. Warren Kinsman, “The Responsibility of Women in Today's World,” an address before the Wilmington City Federation of Women's Clubs and Allied Organizations, in E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Inc., Papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

19
. Anita Colby, “Ideas from a Woman's Viewpoint,” prepared for the 1955 Du Pont Advertising Clinic, in the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours, Inc. Papers, series II, part 2, Box 18, Hagley Museum and Library.

20
. Miller, 116; Chafe,
The Unfinished Journey
, 112; Miller, 107;
New York Times
, February 14, 1956, 20; September 3, 1956, 14.

21
. For a lengthy discussion of the full impact of McCarthyism on American culture and society, see Ellen Schrecker,
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).

22
. Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, Richard A. Kulko,
The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976
(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 147–149. Ninety-five percent of Americans of marriageable age made the trip to the altar, 5 percent more than their parents. Jones, p. 15; Susan Hartman,
The Home Front and Beyond
, 165ff.; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, D.C.: 1975), part 1, 49, 54, 64; John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, and Douglas Strong, “The Times of Marriage in the Transition to Adulthood, Continuity and Change,” in
Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, American Journal of Sociology
84 (supplement, Chicago, 1978:s120–s150); Paul C. Glick, “A Demographer Looks at American Families,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
37: 1 (February 1975), 15–26; Andrew Cherlin,
Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 22–23. J. Edgar Hoover, “The Twin Enemies of Freedom: Crime and Communism,” address before the 28th Annual Convocation of the National Council of Catholic Women, Chicago, Illinois, November 9, 1956, in
Vital Speeches
23:4 (December 1, 1956), 104–107, quote on p. 104.