Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (22 page)

Tide IX, the 1972 law requiring equal treatment for women and girls by educational institutions, ushered in a revolutionary change in women’s athletics. Participation levels in women’s athletics at high school and college levels skyrocketed and women’s access to Olympic team competition broadened with the approval of women’s basketball and women’s team handball in 1976 and women’s field hockey in 1980.
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By 1978,
Time
featured women’s sports on the cover under the title, “Comes the Revolution.” “The revolution in women’s athletics is at full,
running tide, bringing with it a sea change—not just in activities, but in attitudes as well” intoned the magazine.
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Of course there was resistance. The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) lobbied fiercely to exempt athletics from Title IX prohibitions against discrimination, claiming that intercollegiate sports would be “doomed” if forced to share resources with women’s programs. Unable to change the law, opponents slowed enforcement efforts so that through the decade of the 1970s, not a single institution was fined for failure to comply.
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In the arena of electoral politics, the contagion of feminism touched an enormous range of women’s organizations, both new and old. Policy groups buzzed with meetings, plans, and actions. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) under the leadership of Dorothy Height initiated a series of meetings of the presidents of national women’s organizations “ … to develop collective strategies concerning two basics of life—Shelter and food…. This may be the first time some of us have met together…. Let us view this coming together as a launching pad for unleashing the full force of power created by
WOMEN UNITED
.”
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The Women’s Action Alliance in New York called a series of meetings in 1975 to create a national women’s agenda. From May to July the meetings drew an astonishing array of 61 women’s organizations. The involvement of such a wide-ranging coalition of women was a source of elation for many women of color.
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A Puerto Rican woman, Paquita Vivo, wrote in the first issue of
Women’s Agenda
:

“With the creation of the US National Women’s Agenda, the women’s movement of the United States has become every woman’s movement. For too long we have heard that the movement is not relevant to the
puertorriquena
or the Chicana or the Asian woman or the black woman. By joining forces with scores of other women’s groups and participating actively in preparing the Agenda, organizations such as the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, Mujer Integrate Ahora, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Institute of Spanish-Speaking Women and the National Council of Negro Women have made it our movement. Our participation has forced other groups to take
notice of issues which mean a great deal to minority women but which had not been thought of generally as women’s issues.”
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In the meantime, the Democratic Party Task Force of NWPC, chaired by Millie Jeffrey, was working to build support for a requirement that all party conventions be 50 percent men and 50 percent women. In the months leading up to the 1976 convention, Jimmy Carter, the leading candidate, promised to work closely with them in the future, although he was unwilling to endorse that specific goal in the short term. When Carter’s presidency began, the new feminist forces had unprecedented access to the halls of power. Carter appointed National Black Feminist Organization founder Eleanor Holmes Norton to head the EEOC; Sarah Weddington (the young lawyer who had argued
Roe v. Wade
) as Special Assistant to the President; Mary Frances Berry, a young black lawyer who had written the brief on reproductive rights for the Civil Rights Commission’s Women’s Rights Project, as Assistant Director of the Department of Health Education and Welfare and later as head of the Civil Rights Commission, and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug to chair the International Women’s Year Commission. Leslie Wolfe left her work at the Civil Rights Commission to work as Mary Berry’s assistant in HEW, where she directed the Women’s Equity Education Act program in the Department of Education.
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At both state and national levels, feminist elected officials worked closely with grassroots networks to place issues of concern to women on the political agenda. The Congressional Women’s Caucus formed in 1976, with the tenacious leadership of N.Y. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who joined forces with Republican Margaret Heckler and Democrat Shirley Chisholm.
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From the beginning the Caucus had strong links to the leaders of national women’s groups in Washington. In the early years, their greatest impact was the 1978 mobilization for an extension of the ERA deadline.
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Similar, though usually less formal, networks in many states drew on strong links with state commissions on the status of women, the NWPC, NOW, and CLUW.

One of the major rallying issues of the 1980s would arise from these networks combined with growing activism among women workers.
“Comparable worth,” the idea that women and men should receive equal pay for jobs of equal value to their employers, emerged from the simultaneous efforts of unions in the feminized service sector, active state commissions on the status of women, the new clerical workers organizations like 9 to 5, and feminist organizations. Debates raged in union halls, working women’s organizations, professional associations, government agencies, and courtrooms about the causes and possible remedies for the persistent gap between men’s and women’s wages.

NOW initiated a campaign in the mid-1970s to call attention to the fact that full-time women workers earned less than 60 percent of the average male wage.
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Pins, bumper stickers, and posters bearing the “59¢” slogan generated widespread recognition of women’s low wages.
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The aggregate data that identified this issue, however, sorted into two different problems with different policy implications: (1) lack of access to traditionally male jobs (addressed by access to education and affirmative action) and (2) the relatively low pay of female-dominated jobs in comparison to the pay for equivalent jobs occupied by men. The latter problem, in a labor market that remained highly segregated by sex, generated the policy called comparable worth, or pay equity, which argues that different jobs that can be evaluated as equivalent in terms of skill level and required training, responsibility, effort (how hard is it to do), and working conditions should be paid along the same scale. EEOC, in fact, was flooded with wage discrimination cases, many of which challenged the lower pay for female jobs compared to “equivalent” male jobs. In one famous case in Colorado, the comparison was between nurses and tree trimmers. Later cases pointed out that school secretaries were paid less than janitors, and that caretakers for retarded adults (mostly female) received less than zookeepers (mostly male).
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Several unions took these cases into court and into collective bargaining. The women’s caucus of a union local in San Jose, California published its own study in 1977 and in 1978; soon a woman mayor and a female-dominated city council were hearing demands for an “equity standard” for city pay practices. City managers agreed with some reluctance to conduct an official study. When negotiations over wage hikes foundered, the union initiated the first-ever comparable worth strike.
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Meanwhile, at the national level the EEOC seemed open to an interpretation of Title VII compatible with comparable worth. EEOC Chair Eleanor Holmes Norton commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to examine the issue in 1977 (a study codirected by Heidi Hartmann and Donald Treiman). By 1980, Norton endorsed comparable worth as “the issue for the 80s,” setting the stage for a series of major policy innovations and a national debate.
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Another success in the policy arena was the continued funding and expansion of the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA). Under pressure from women’s organizations (the National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs and the Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, which together represented almost 50 education associations and women’s organizations), the congressional reauthorization of WEEA in 1978 shifted its purpose toward assisting educational agencies and institutions to meet the requirements of Title IX and required the department to establish priorities for funding. That was when Mary Frances Berry, Assistant Secretary of HEW, appointed Leslie Wolfe to be her assistant and head up WEEA. Wolfe, who worked on the Women’s Rights Project at the Civil Rights Commission for several years, brought a new level of feminist energy to WEEA. “By then this was my whole life—building a multi-ethnic feminist movement step by step anywhere you can.” She ran the WEEA office “as a feminist collective in the middle of a bureaucracy” with a staff that included two men.
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Wolfe and her staff began by soliciting public comments and feedback on proposed priorities and then revised them substantially. All WEEA projects would be “model projects” whose results and project materials could be replicated in other places. Some created new teaching methods. Others generated curricular materials. Their first priority was to assist educational institutions to comply with Tide IX prohibitions against discrimination in education on the basis of sex.
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In addition, separate priorities called for model projects “on educational equity for racial and ethnic minority women and girls … [and] for disabled women and girls.” Minority women had insisted on the specific focus on the experience of double discrimination based on race and ethnicity, and the emphasis on
disability created the first federal program to target the specific needs of disabled women. Additional priorities revealed strategies for change in response to community pressure: “model projects to influence leaders in educational policy and administration” to increase their commitment to Tide IX compliance and “model projects to eliminate persistent barriers to educational equity for women.” In rural school districts, simply the presence of outside funding could increase the commitment of administrators for equity-based projects and curricula. WEEA projects created a handbook on disability, “No More Stares,” with first person stories and guidelines on the needs of disabled girls. An urban school system established a women’s studies component in its curriculum with WEEA funding, and WEEA helped to sponsor the First National Hispanic Feminist Conference hosted by the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, the National Association of Cuban American Women, and the Mexican American National Women’s Association (MANA) in March 1980, where over 1,000 women gathered “to discuss topics such as bilingual education, lesbians in the Hispanic community, the socialization process and the Equal Rights Amendment.”
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H
OUSTON
1977: I
NTERNATIONAL
W
OMEN
’S Y
EAR

The breadth of the women’s movement and the mainstreaming of what had been extremely marginal issues only a decade before became visible in 1977 at the massive International Women’s Year Conference in Houston, Texas and the 50 state conferences that preceded it. The idea for the conference emerged from the experience of the U.S. delegation to an international United Nations-sponsored conference honoring the 1975 International Year for Women. Meeting with 6,000 women from around the world and learning that numerous other countries had recognized the year with conferences and commissions, American delegates returned fired up to demand that the United States do the same. The National Women’s Agenda discussions call by Dorothy Height provided precisely the broad base needed. Together they developed a plan to present a U.S. National Women’s Agenda to the President’s Commission on the International Women’s Year (IWY), asking for support
for a national conference on women. Bella Abzug and 15 other congresswomen agreed to submit a bill to fund such a conference sponsored by the President’s Commission on IWY.
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She embedded into this enabling legislation a vision of a highly participatory, diverse gathering by requiring that delegates to the conference be selected at conferences held in every state and providing funding for low-income women to attend. After the 1976 election, President Carter appointed Abzug to head the commission that planned the conference itself.

Preparation for the conference became a massive organizing opportunity. Because of guidelines that stressed that conferences should be broadly inclusive and provide funding for low-income women, in many states these became the most diverse gatherings yet of the women’s movement. In state after state, conferences engaged in a highly visible form of consciousness-raising as they debated equal pay, day care, abortion, sex education, violence against women, and the ERA. Right-wing anti-feminists also organized in response in many states, and they succeeded in dominating conferences in Indiana, Mississippi, and Utah. For some feminists, this was a sobering encounter with the political power and organizing savvy of the anti-ERA, antiabortion, and openly homophobic forces backed by the conservative religious groups (Catholics, Mormons, and fundamentalist Protestants), as well as rightwing organizations (the Moral Majority, Stop-ERA, and others). At the same time, for some conservative women, debating the issues directly with feminists (who turned out to be real people, not ogres) challenged their sterotypes and changed their minds.
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