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WOMEN'S LIBERATION

Cigarettes and Liberation

One of the most popular advertising campaigns of the early 1970s was that of Virginia Slims cigarettes. The cigarette was thinner than most, but beyond that, hardly remarkable. The ad campaign, however, was an eye grabber. Magazines and bill-boards displayed slender, apparently self-assertive models in the latest fashions clutching the cigarette. The ad copy said, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby." Sometimes featuring an insert photograph of women in turn-of-the-century dress being punished for smoking by police, ministers, or other authority figures, the ad successfully tied cigarette smoking to the burgeoning women's liberation movement. Emphasizing the fact that at one time it was thought unladylike to smoke, the ad implied that to continue smoking Virginia Slims was an act of rebellion against women's traditional roles. Hugely successful as an ad campaign, the caption "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" also embodied for many the triumph of the women's movement and feminism in the 1970s.

New Roles

The women's liberation movement shattered many established traditions of female subordination in American life and opened up a host of heretofore closed occupations to women. Feminism revolutionized women's and men's sense of their gender roles and transformed literary theory, art, and social analysis. Women's liberation was to the 1970s what the civil rights movement was to the early 1960s—the most significant social movement in the United States. Like the civil rights movement, feminism was controversial and never wanted for opponents; like the civil rights movement, the political and social effects of feminism were widespread and deep reaching. Because the women's movement was so powerful, not only did it rectify a host of injustices in American life, but it also raised important questions which remain unresolved. The Virginia Slims ad campaign, for example, demonstrated the difficulty feminism faced transforming deeply held gender assumptions. As perhaps the most visible everyday reminder of the women's movement, some feminists applauded the ad campaign as reinforcing their conviction that a liberated woman need follow no established social rule save that set by her own conscience. Many feminists, however, were troubled that the antiestablishment women's movement could be so easily appropriated for crassly commercial ends. Many more feminists were troubled that the women in the ad copy were uniformly beautiful and young, unlike the majority of women feminists were attempting to liberate. The ad campaign seemed to many to be the sexist expression of an antisexist philosophy. Such problematic advances, however, were typical of the women's movement in the 1970s. Women had come a long way; they had a long way yet to go.

Equal Pay

By the 1970s women's liberationists were active on a variety of fronts. Reform of divorce and rape laws, improvement of the health-care system, and promotion of day care were important goals. One of feminism's most significant demands was for equal pay for equal work. Increasing numbers of young women, rejecting the role of suburban housewife, were entering the factory and office. Their mothers followed them into the workplace, pressured by the economic downturn of the decade, which forced many families to seek both male and female sources of income. Neither the young activists nor their mothers were paid as well as men, on average earning 57 percent of male wages. Women were further shortchanged by labor laws passed at the turn of the century that prevented women from working overtime; moreover, like African-Americans, women usually were forced to work the lowest-paid, most menial jobs. Women activists sought to change the conditions in the workplace by appealing to the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A female lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hoped to repeat the success the civil rights movement had in challenging inequality in the courts. She won two workplace cases before the Supreme Court, Reed v. Reed (1971), and Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), both of which confirmed that it was illegal to deny women economic equality with men. The federal government reinforced these claims of job equality. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made job discrimination against women illegal, but the federal agency set up to enforce this law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), failed to act on behalf of women for most of the 1960s. In 1970, under a new set of administrators, the EEOC filed suit against American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), and won the company's agreement to set up an affirmative-action program. By 1973 the EEOC had filed 147 more suits, and occupational barriers against women began to fall. AT&T hired women to climb up telephone poles and string wire and employed men to sit at desks and operate telephones. The military academies began to admit women, and the Ivy League universities went coed. Even Las Vegas hired female blackjack dealers. By 1974 only Nevada retained laws limiting overtime work for women. Congress passed a host of legislation reinforcing the prohibition on sex discrimination; women even succeeded in gaining a tax deduction for child care in families with both parents working (a similar proposal to establish a national system of day care was vetoed by President Richard Nixon). Much of the progress, however, was more apparent than real. In 1979 women's wages remained an average of 57 percent of men's, and many professional women complained that high-paying, high-prestige jobs were still denied them. To feminists it was clear that the laws on the books were not sufficient. Many sought a new law, in the form of an equal rights amendment to the Constitution.

ERA

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had first been proposed to Congress in 1923. Resubmitted in a new form, prohibiting discrimination on account of gender, it overwhelmingly passed Congress in March 1973 and was quickly ratified by thirty states. Thereafter the ratification process stalled, several states short of the required three-fourths majority. Part of the problem with passage was that many laws already passed at the state and federal level prohibited discrimination, and the ERA seemed superfluous. The major objection to the ERA, however, was that the amendment was so vague and open-ended as to lead to sweeping changes in American social life. Middle- and working-class women particularly feared the ERA would lead to a loss of alimony in divorce cases, the drafting of women into the military, and the creation of unisex bathrooms. These fears were seized upon and amplified by a female conservative, Phyllis Schlafly, who organized the National Committee to Stop ERA in 1972. Schlafly, a longtime activist in the right wing of the Republican Party, was fundamentally opposed to the ERA on ideological grounds. A militant anti-Communist and opponent of big government, Schlafly feared the ERA would give the government the power to intervene radically in American family life and restructure established customs and laws regarding marriage, divorce, child custody, and adoption. Schlafly pointed out that because the ERA affected only state and federal governments, it would not change discrimination by private employers. She also suggested to state legislators that the amendment would transfer state power to the federal government. Such arguments were persuasive, but Stop ERA's real power lay in grassroots organization and in enlisting the fears of many Americans that the pace of social change was proceeding too quickly. Schlafly's organization included local groups such as WWWW (Women Who Want to be Women) and HOW (Happiness of Womanhood), who flooded state capitols with telegrams, phone calls, and homemade breads and pies, and who protested at rallies behind placards reading "Preserve us from a congressional jam; Vote against the ERA sham." Such efforts resulted in several states rescinding their approval of the ERA. In 1979 the ratification period expired. Congress passed a three-year extension, but not a single new state approved the amendment. By 1982 the ERA was dead.

Conservatives and Abortion

The ERA defeat was symptomatic of a growing conservatism among Americans, both men and women. Sown by economic frustration and harvested by conservative politicians, animosity toward feminists and their social agenda was a staple of the 1970s. Hostility toward women's reproductive rights was particularly pronounced. In the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case, the Supreme Court decided that women, as part of their constitutional right to privacy, may choose to abort a pregnancy in the first trimester. The decision invalidated many state laws that punished abortion—even as a result of rape, incest, or (rarely) because of the threat to the mother's life—as a criminal offense. Although abortion had been legal in most of the United States until after the Civil War, the Roe decision seemed to many to be a radical break with the past and was immediately denounced by religious groups, especially Catholics, Mormons, and Fundamentalist Protestants. Such groups argued that human life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Many conservative Americans also feared that safe, legal abortions would lead to widespread promiscuity, undermining family cohesion and creating social chaos.

Feminists and Abortion

Feminists, by contrast, celebrated the Roe decision. For many feminists abortion rights were axiomatic. As Lucina Cisler put it in her essay in the feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), "Without the full capacity to limit her own reproduction, a woman's other 'freedoms' are tantalizing mockeries that cannot be exercised." For feminists such as Cisler, pregnancy was a trap, whereby men kept women in the home, out of the wider world, and away from self-fulfillment. Cisler noted that in 1970, 40 percent of states still had laws preventing the use of contraception, even by married couples—proof that pregnancy was being used to oppress women. Cisler argued that whatever the law, women wanted the right to control when, and by whom, they became pregnant. Despite the prohibition on abortion before Roe, Cisler estimated that one in every four births in the United States was aborted, and of these abortions 85 percent were performed on married women, who usually already had children and sought to limit the size of their families. Because abortion was illegal before Roe, the operation was performed in a variety of ways: wealthy women flew abroad to have safe abortions in foreign hospitals; doctors would sometimes use legal loopholes to perform the operations; illegal clinics operated in major cities, so long as there were bribable police; poorer women patronized "back-alley" abortionists, who often were not doctors, or tried folk remedies on themselves, often inducing severe illness and sometimes death. Cisler estimated that five hundred to one thousand abortion deaths occurred every year; of these, the majority (79 percent of New York City's abortion deaths) were among poor, nonwhite women. For feminists, given the new contraceptive and abortion technologies of the 1960s and 1970s, such deaths were inexcusable. Such deaths reemphasized the narrow scope of female life options in a society that seemed determined to force women to adopt narrowly defined, biologically based gender roles. "Thus the real question," Cisler wrote, "is not, 'How can we justify abortion?' but, 'How can we justify compulsory childbearing?' "

Unresolved Questions

Many feminists supported Roe and access to abortion because they felt it was central to a new role for women in American society. Few feminists argued that abortion was a positive good, but they insisted that women had the intellectual capacity—and emotional compassion—to determine for themselves whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. They called their position pro-choice, and in Roe the Supreme Court substantially agreed with their outlook. The Supreme Court, however, was ahead of many Americans. Although the majority of respondents in public-opinion polls favored a reform of the strictest abortion laws (but not all of them), many Americans uncomfortable with the changing role of women in American society seized upon the abortion issue as a means of expressing their discontent. Often they tied their opposition to abortion to wider protests against the changing character of the times. Prolife for such people often meant more than the defense of the unborn. It meant an attempt to affirm "natural" limits and boundaries—to the family, the community, and the state. Fundamentalist opponents of abortion routinely condemned not only the abortion procedure, but feminists, liberals, relativism, secular humanism, and any philosophy advanced without reference to absolutes. Conservative politicians and televangelists quickly realized the centrality of the abortion issue in the minds of these Americans and used opposition to abortion to construct a tremendous political coalition, one which would seize Congress in 1978 and the presidency in 1980. Ironically, abortion came to hold as central a place in the social philosophy of conservatives as it did in the political theory of feminists.

Success

Although conservatives mounted the kind of grassroots campaign against abortion they used against the ERA, they had less success. The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976, outlawed the use of Medicaid funding to provide abortions; beyond this, however, conservatives proved ineffectual—especially in their general opposition to feminism. In fact, the 1970s were a decade filled with female firsts and women's achievements. In 1972 women increased their representation in state legislatures by an unprecedented 28 percent. Although Shirley Chisholm, an African-American woman, unsuccessfully challenged male candidates for the Democratic nomination for president that year, Americans sent record numbers of women to Congress, including Pat Schroeder, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Barbara Jordan—women who would become political forces in the 1970s. President Nixon appointed the first two women generals in May 1970, and the FBI hired its first female agent in 1972. Women also flooded into the professions. The proportion of women entering law schools increased 500 percent; 40 percent of those entering classes in medical schools were women; and 25 percent of doctorates earned went to women. Women became increasingly visible in the media, especially as journalists. Female publishers such as Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan were widely admired. Ms., a new feminist magazine begun in 1972 by the articulate journalist Gloria Steinern, sold 250,000 copies of its first issue in eight days. A television sitcom focusing on the character of an independent, female television news producer, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was one of the highest-rated programs of the decade. Movies with feminist themes, such as Julia (1977), The Turning Point (1977), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and Norma Rae (1979), were boxoffice successes. Even female athletes, heretofore eclipsed by their male counterparts, gained the public's attention. Women ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time on 17 April 1972. In a nationally televised challenge, 1939 Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs boasted he could still beat decades-younger women's tennis star Billie Jean King. On 20 September 1973 King whipped Riggs in straight sets, gaining new admiration and respect for women athletes.

Impact

The real impact of feminism took place at the local level, reshaping the intimate conduct of American life. Like its conservative opposition, women's liberation was also a grassroots movement, and in localities across the nation women established badly needed women's health clinics, rape-crisis centers, and battered-women's shelters. Colleges and universities created women's studies programs. In small communities throughout the United States, women demanded new respect from men, access to better-paying jobs, and an end to sexism in everyday life. More secure with their sexuality and less likely to be pressured into compulsory childbirth, women experimented with premarital and casual sex. Women across the country demanded that men set aside their male chauvinism and belief in male superiority. Women increasingly voiced criticisms of sexism in language and manners. They demanded male help with housework and child care. Feminism also promised to reshape public attitudes toward masculinity as well as to liberate femininity. With the help of celebrity friends, actress Mario Thomas made a children's record, Free to Be You and Me, which inverted traditional gender roles and encouraged female athleticism and male sensitivity. That pro football star Roosevelt Grier could sing to boys, "It's all right to cry / Crying gets the sad out of you," was a sign that gender roles in the United States were changing.

Intellectual Revolution

Women's liberation inspired the emergence of a sophisticated feminist social theory that promised to further the restructuring of gender roles in the United States. Inverting the radical political theory of the 1960s, feminist intellectuals and academics argued that systematic male domination, which they termed patriarchy, was responsible for many social ills. Patriarchy was manifest not only in sexism but in irresponsible individualism, sterile science, dehumanizing technology, and punitive capitalism—all of which were the result of masculine rationality. Feminists sought to make the world a more empathie, intuitive, and compassionate place. Borrowing an axiom from the New Left, feminists maintained that "the personal is political." A revolution in gender roles and personal relationships would accordingly result in a revolution in the productive apparatus of modern society. More radically, some feminists suggested that patriarchy operated best by hiding its domination in the guise of a "natural" world order. They maintained that traditionally accepted social arrangements—the family, childrearing by women, heterosexuality—were masks for male domination. Such feminists argued that gender was constructed by a set of social and historical relations that privileged men. By the end of the decade, feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman, and Jenny Holzer were giving expression to such intellectual formulation in sculpture, photography, and verse and challenging established conventions in art and society.

Divisions

The rigor and insight of feminist social theory made it the most effective vehicle for maintaining 1960s radicalism in the 1970s. The incompatibility of such theoretical formulations with the established order of society led to divisions and political fragmentation among feminists. Younger, more militant feminists such as Robin Morgan sought a full-scale overthrow of society; older feminists, such as Betty Friedan, were more interested in achievable social reform. Other feminists were divided over the radical argument that any relationship with men is by definition oppressive. Lesbian feminists suggested that heterosexual feminists were not true feminists. "It is the primacy of women's relations to women," wrote one lesbian feminist, "which is at the heart of women's liberation and the basis of cultural revolution." Radical lesbians such as Andrea Dworkin argued that, given contemporary social and sexual values, heterosexual intercourse was rape and campaigned against pornography, erotica, and offensive speech which they felt were part of a culture of violence against women. Such arguments, especially as they became more fixed in the 1980s, mirrored those of male critics of the women's liberation movement who believed that biology is destiny.

Feminism and the Working Class

Conservatives sometimes used such lesbian arguments to discredit feminism among more moderate women and men, but the women's liberation movement as a whole divided naturally—and sharply—over the issue of class. Many older American women hardly felt oppressed by their marriages. For them domesticity was a positive good, and they feared that feminism would corrode the bond of family. Furthermore, many feminist leaders came from privileged backgrounds and limited their critique of society to its limits on opportunities for women of their class. For working-class Americans feminism did not promise access to the boardroom, the university chair, or the legislature, but to dreary factory or clerical work at low wages. Against such a prospect domestic life seemed indeed blissful. Schlafly, sensitive to such fears, was often able to mobilize female support more effectively than left-leaning feminists. Her success forced many feminists to reexamine the implicit elitism of their approach. By the end of the decade, moreover, the concrete results of women's liberation forced many feminists to reconsider their movement soberly.

The Feminization of Poverty

The class divisions among feminists were most obvious when considering two issues—child care and divorce. Upper-class feminists discussed child care but rarely marshaled their forces to push for increased day care facilities nationally. Wealthy Americans had the economic resources to provide for child supervision in a two-income family, and feminists pursuing professional careers often were unconcerned with child-care issues. After President Nixon vetoed day-care legislation in 1972, women's liberation at the national level abandoned the issue, although ad hoc efforts at the local level continued to be pursued. The need for quality day care, medical assistance, and maternity leave became acute as working-class male income declined and women were forced to take jobs (usually low-skill, low-paying) outside the home. By 1976 one-half of all American mothers were employed. Without a systematic nationwide system of maternity leave and child care, women often found themselves simultaneously struggling to raise children, maintain a household, and hold a job. Similarly, divorce reform that benefited wealthy women proved disastrous to the poor. In the