Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (31 page)

The list of “firsts” multiplied continuously. In 1981, President Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor to the United States Supreme Court. In 1984, the Democratic Party nominated Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro for Vice President. Wilma Mankiller was elected Principal
Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in 1985, the first woman to lead a major Native American tribe. On May 1, 1986, Ann Bancroft reached the North Pole by dogsled. During the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Americans stayed riveted to their televisions as African-American track stars Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner set world and Olympic records. West Point graduated its thousandth woman. Charlayne Hunter-Gault (the first African-American woman to attend the University of Alabama in 1963) and Connie Chung anchored network news shows. The Episcopal Church elected an African-American, the Reverend Barbara C. Harris, as its first woman bishop in 1989.

Women’s leadership also continued to grow among community-level activists, who further broadened women’s participation in public life. Poor and working-class women brought new issues and definitions of public life into the political arena that cut against the grain of the conservative ethos of the 1980s. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) created a powerful political base for the Mexican community. Building on the foundation of Catholic churches in the community, it tackled problems ranging from poor schools and housing to unpaved streets and open drainage ditches. The effectiveness of COPS depended to a great extent on the talents of women. As former president Beatrice Cortez put it, “Women have community ties. We knew that to make things happen in the community, you have to talk to people. It was a matter of tapping our networks.” The program’s success provided a model for dozens of new, frequently female-led, community organizations in Hispanic, black, Asian-American, and white ethnic communities across the country. Community-level activism increased the number of female officeholders as well. In 1969, only 3.5 percent of state elected officials were women; by 1983, women held 13 percent of elected state offices. In municipal governments, the proportion of women grew from about 10 percent in 1975 to 23 percent in 1988.
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The work of the National Black Women’s Health Project offers a more issue-focused example of community-level activism. Founder Byllye Avery describes how she had only recently begun thinking of herself
as a black woman, not just as a woman, by the time she left the Gainesville, Florida birthing center in 1981. Working in a community college setting, she came face to face with the stories of other black women and what she came to call the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounds their experience. By 1983 she had organized a group to launch the National Black Women’s Health Project at a conference attended by 2,000 women. At the center of the NBWHP was a kind of consciousness-raising to break the conspiracy of silence. Talking with each other they discovered that they were “… dying inside. That unless we are able to go inside of ourselves and touch and breathe fire, breathe life into ourselves, that, of course, we couldn’t be healthy.” Conference planners started to develop a workshop called “Black and Female: What Is the Reality?” “This is a workshop that terrifies us all. And we are also terrified not to have it, because the conspiracy of silence is killing us.” Two issues emerged as priorities: “The number one issue for most of our sisters is violence—battering, sexual abuse…. If violence is the number one thing women talk about, the next is being mothers too early and too long,” Throughout the 1980s, the NBWHP initiated community self-help programs, held conferences and weekend retreats, and produced educational films and publications on black women’s health in the context of black culture. By 1988 the NBWHP had created 96 self-help groups in 22 states, with international groups in Kenya, Barbados, and Belize.
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Women’s athletics, propelled by the requirements of Title IX, continued to trace a profound, if measurably incomplete revolution. Through the 1980s the growth in women’s participation continued to the point that young women could no longer even imagine the restraints their mothers had faced. In 1971, 300,000 girls participated in intercollegiate sport; by 1992 that number topped 2 million. From high school teams to offers of college scholarships to international stardom in Olympic competition, female athletes had begun to seem “normal.” The apparent sea change in behavior modified the backlash. Few openly dared to argue that women should not compete or that an athletic body was, by definition, mannish. When the NCAA realized that it could not reverse Title IX, however, it made a successful bid to bring women’s
athletics under its control, destroying in the process the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which governed and promoted women’s intercollegiate sports in the 1970s. The result was a dramatic loss in female leadership for women’s athletics as most schools merged men’s and women’s athletics under male leadership. When coaching positions for women’s teams began to receive better salaries, higher status male coaches displaced almost half of the women coaches. Men’s programs routinely received twice the scholarship money and three times the operating funds compared to women’s. Under a system of shared, male-dominated governance, women’s athletics remained second-class.
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For women in the military, gains took place despite the ERA defeat in 1982 partly on the grounds that it would expose women to the unacceptable physical stress and the dangers of the battlefield. The first woman astronaut, Sally K. Ride, traveled into space in 1983 aboard the shuttle Challenger. By the time of the Gulf War in 1990-1991, 11 percent of the armed forces were female, and many women, although supposedly not “in combat,” served in positions that were within range of enemy fire. Women flew helicopters, reconnaissance planes, inflight fueling tankers, strategic transport, and medical airlifts. They also served on naval logistics ships in the Gulf and the Red Sea. Two women were taken as war prisoners, and 15 women died.
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The “do everything” participatory impulse of women’s liberation was also working its way through vast numbers of mainstream organizations. New alliances at state and local levels linked the organizational power of working women with that of elected officials, producing policy initiatives that belied the conservative image of the 1980s. Comparable worth, for example, made dramatic headway in a number of states after a 1983 U.S. District Court decision in
AFSCME v. State of Washington
held that the state of Washington had discriminated against women by systematically paying female-dominated job classes lower wages than comparably rated male-dominated classes and awarded 10 years of back pay in compensation.
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The case was later reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but for a time there was a surge of hope on the part of proponents. In the meantime, many states were considering legal
changes in response to pressure from unions, from feminists active in the policy arena, and from state commissions on the status of women. These factors were prominent in Minnesota, which had a highly unionized state labor force (organized primarily by AFSCME) and an influential feminist community with strong feminist caucuses in
both
political parties.

In the late 1970s the Minnesota Council on the Economic Status of Women, chaired by Representative Linda Berglin and staffed by Nina Rothchild, a suburban school board member and political activist, issued a stream of publications on women in the Minnesota economy. Berglin and Rothchild stood at the center of a network that reached out into grassroots women’s organizations, AFSCME, and CLUW, feminist caucuses in both major political parties, and members of the Minnesota Legislature sympathetic to women’s issues. Their political skill paid off when, in 1982, the Minnesota Legislature with very little fanfare passed a State Employees Pay Equity Act “to establish equitable compensation relationships between female-dominated, male-dominated, and balanced classes of employees in the executive branch.”
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The thoroughness of its implementation was assured when, with the election of a Democratic governor later that year, Nina Rothchild was appointed Commissioner of Employee Relations.

By the mid-1980s, however, in Minnesota and across the country, what had looked like a fairly uncomplicated drive for legislative and judicial change had run into a buzz saw of opposition to government intervention into “free markets.” In 1984, the Reagan Administration shifted from quiet to active opposition. Agencies that had pressed for comparable worth, notably the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Commission, now headed by Reagan appointees, became bastions of hostility. Despite active opposition by the Reagan Administration, however, by 1987 more than 40 states and 1,700 local governments had taken major steps toward implementing comparable worth policies to raise the wages of female-dominated job classes. Such success produced strong backlashes in 1983 and 1984, however, following several key court cases and legislative victories. From that point on, instituting comparable worth policies was increasingly difficult.
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The controversy over comparable worth demonstrated the growing credibility and clout of a network of women’s policy research institutes that could generate sophisticated data analyses and provide expert testimony for elected and appointed officials. With support from the Ford Foundation, the National Council for Research on Women brought together the proliferating number of research centers (most on campuses but also freestanding think tanks like Heidi Hartmann’s Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

The receptivity of some corporations to policy-oriented research reflected their conscious need to find ways to attract and sustain an effective labor force with substantial numbers of women at all levels, as well as their desire to avoid litigation around discrimination claims. The authors of
Megatrends
found only 300 corporations in 1980 that offered on-site child care. By 1990 they counted 3,500. A staff member of the Conference Board gave an even larger figure for employer-assisted child care in 1990: 7,000.
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Sexual harassment training became commonplace as companies sought to avoid litigation by changing work cultures. Gender-polarized images, common in popular culture, also appeared in a new guise when management consultants discovered that the characteristics of what they called the “new leader,” as opposed to the outmoded “traditional leader,” were culturally coded as female. Thousands of workshops on leadership styles encouraged the adoption of “women’s leadership,” which emphasized change over control, facilitation over giving orders, empowerment over commands, creativity over discipline, and networking over hierarchy.
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The rumbling of feminist ideas through mainstream institutions can be traced in religious institutions as well. Whereas many denominations ordained their first female clergy and rabbis in the 1970s, by the 1980s, seminaries were filled with women and major denominations embarked on inclusive language revisions of liturgies and hymnbooks. “Mankind” and “brotherhood” gave way to “humankind” or “people of faith.” Congregations experimented with feminine images of God.
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Synagogues in the 1980s became as accustomed to
bat mitzvahs
for 13-year-old girls as they were to
bar mitzvahs
for boys.

Catholic women who organized in the 1970s to press for women’s ordination turned in the 1980s to building Women Church, a grassroots network of women who shared liturgy and rituals, celebrated life cycle events (puberty, menopause, and divorce), and wrestled with theological inquiry. Moderates continued to work within the church structures, but a national conference in 1983, “From Generation to Generation: Women-Church Speaks” launched a movement, in the words of Rosemary Radford Reuther, “not in exile but in exodus.” Theologian Mary Hunt proclaimed “a new baptism—a baptism into a Church which acknowledges that it is guilty of sexism, heterosexism, racism and classism.”
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When the Women-Church Convergence held a second conference in 1987 in Cincinnati, speakers included both feminist theologians and secular feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and Charlotte Bunch. Workshops at the conference embraced a broad vision of social justice: sanctuary movement, antiracism, abortion, the problem of sexual assault, lesbians keeping faith, community organizing, women and AIDS, and economic literacy.
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This radical challenge, however, was at once exhilarating and painful. As Barbara Moral and Karch Schwarz wrote, “The Roman Catholic Church is our history and our heritage. It is our spiritual and religious ‘home,’ an integral and essential aspect of our identity. It is also the source of our greatest pain and alienation for, as women, we are both invisible and insignificant to this church we call ‘ours.’”
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The church hierarchy responded to the visible threat of feminist activism with targeted assertions of authority. Several nuns who had become public, elected officials, for example, were forced to give up politics or resign. Mary Ann Sorrentino, former executive director of Planned Parenthood in Rhode Island, was excommunicated. Swift discipline was meted out to the 97 Catholic scholars, social activists, priests, and nuns who signed an October 1984 ad in the
New York Times
asserting a “diversity of opinions regarding abortion” among committed Catholics and calling for “candid and respectful discussion on this diversity of opinion within the church.”
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