Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (9 page)

Popular reactions to these sweeping social trends—greater sexual freedom, increasing out-of-wedlock pregnancy, soaring divorce rates—differed sharply, but a generational gulf was obvious: Younger people were much more likely to defend the new ways. Older Americans were more frightened by what was happening to family life. Nostalgic for what they saw as the golden age of the 1950s, they deplored the “plagues” of “fatherless families,” “permissive” child rearing, and “latchkey” children. Hoping to save the “traditional family,” they were shortly to mobilize behind conservative spokespeople who waged “culture wars” on behalf of an earlier, better America.
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In looking for villains, some of these Americans blamed the rise of the feminist movement, which in their view diminished paternal authority and threatened the family. This movement, which had expanded rapidly in the late 1960s, championed varied goals that included sexual liberation as well as equal rights under the law. Fissures along class and racial lines consistently hampered unity among women in the movement. But agitation for rights was nonetheless vibrant in the “She Decade” of the 1970s, when feminists, led by the National Organization for Women (NOW), became far more visible than in the past. Aided by the extension of affirmative action policies, they battled to move from “the bedroom to the boardroom.”

In so doing, feminists for the first time forced Washington to listen. In 1972, Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been stalled on Capitol Hill since the 1920s, to the states for possible ratification. It stated, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of sex.” By 1977, thirty-five of the thirty-eight states needed for ratification had approved it. In 1972, Congress also added Title IX to existing civil rights law. Title IX barred sex discrimination in any educational institution receiving federal aid, thereby in time promoting changes in university procedures. The law later did a good deal to advance women’s athletics in schools and colleges. In 1975, the major service academies admitted women for the first time.

The year 1973 proved to be another banner year for feminism. In
Roe v. Wade
the Supreme Court invalidated most state laws that criminalized a women’s access to abortion, enhancing privacy as a constitutional right. Between 1974 and 1977, 3.5 million legal abortions were performed in the United States—or nearly four for every ten live births. The number of abortions further increased in the early 1980s and remained high until the early 1990s, averaging over 1.5 million a year between 1980 and 1990. Starting in the mid-1990s, decreases in teen pregnancy and slight increases in use of contraceptives slowly lowered the number of abortions from their peak in 1990 of 1.6 million, but large numbers persisted, among both married and unmarried women.
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It was hardly surprising that feminists and others who cherished the right to privacy and choice continued to place preservation of
Roe
, which was greatly embattled, at the top of their rights-conscious agendas.
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A less serious but widely noted gain for women in 1973 took place on the tennis court. Billie Jean King, twenty-nine, a top female tennis player, whipped Bobby Riggs, who had been a men’s tennis champ in the 1930s, in three straight sets. The fifty-five-year-old Riggs, having bragged that he would clean up the court with her, was humbled before 30,000 people—the largest crowd ever to see a tennis match—at the Houston Astrodome. Of this widely touted “Battle of the Sexes” the
Los Angeles Herald American
crowed, “Pigs Are Dead . . . Long Live the King.” King’s triumph helped establish the Women’s Tennis Association, which she founded in 1973, and to advance the growth of a women’s professional tennis circuit.

The forward strides continued. In 1974, Ella Grasso won a gubernatorial race in Connecticut, thereby becoming the first woman governor in American history who was not the wife or widow of a former governor. In 1976, a woman was selected as a Rhodes scholar, a first. In the same year, the Episcopal Church decided to ordain women as ministers. Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of a phenomenally popular guide to baby and child care, announced in 1976 that the next (fourth) edition would be the first one to “eliminate sexist biases.” The new edition would refer to babies as “she” as well as “he.” Spock, who had come under fire from feminists, now stressed that fathers, too, had major roles to play in raising children.
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Women, having long been demeaned in stereotyped images, either as airheads or as sex objects, also began to be portrayed in less predictable ways in movies and television. Films that broke with the old ways included
An Unmarried Woman
(1977),
Annie Hall
(1977), and
Norma Rae
(1979). The chief character of television’s
Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Mary Richards, was an intelligent, independent, working woman who showed no real interest in securing the matrimonial knot and who confronted blundering, sexist men on the job. The show, which ran from 1970 through 1977, won top ratings and twenty-five Emmys.

Changes in the area of higher education, which had a long history of gender discrimination, were especially encouraging to women in the 1970s. Though affirmative action procedures helped these changes along, the advances mainly owed their force to the rising expectations of young American women.
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These changes steadily gathered strength over time. Between 1970 and 1996, the percentage of PhDs granted to women rose from 13 to 45; of MBAs, from 4 to 38; of MDs, from 8 to 41, and of law degrees, from 5 to 44. Virtually all the formerly male colleges and universities in America turned coeducational in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to lift the percentage of female BAs from 43 in 1970 to 55 by 1996. By that time, many colleges were anxiously looking for ways to attract male applicants so as to offer female students a better social situation on campus.
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In all these ways, agitation for women’s rights in the early and mid-1970s mounted as never before. A counter-reaction then arose in 1976, at which point Congress approved an amendment limiting federal funds for abortions.
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Foes of the ERA, predicting that it would lead to unisex toilets and to women in combat, helped prevent states from ratifying the measure after 1977. Congress extended to mid-1982 the time during which ratification might be accomplished, but to no avail. On June 30, 1982, the ERA died.
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By that time, however, statutes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX in 1972, along with a number of court decisions and bureaucratic decrees, had guaranteed women virtually all the rights that the ERA would have conveyed constitutionally.

The greatest change in the status of many women in these years—one that especially distressed many defenders of traditional family life—owed relatively little to the rise of feminism. That was the long-standing, inexorable increase in the employment of women outside the home. This advance had first appeared in a major way during World War II, when women had been in demand as defense workers. Though many of these workers lost or left their jobs during postwar demobilization, the percentage of women, including married women, who entered the labor market rose rapidly during the late 1940s and 1950s, even though feminism was weak at the time. What many of these women cherished was work for pay in order to help their families, not large feminist visions of equality. By 1960, 38 percent of American women (aged sixteen or older) were in the civilian labor force. Ten years later, 43 percent were, and by 1980, 52 percent, or 45 million women, were working outside the home. The trend continued in later years of the century, bringing the number of women in the labor force to slightly more than 60 percent of women—66 million—by 2001.
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As these numbers mounted, activists for female equality mobilized to fight against sex discrimination in the work force. This called for waging an uphill battle, because sex segregation in employment stubbornly persisted, all but excluding women from a number of traditionally male occupations. Even liberals could be slow to come around. In 1960, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who during his long career in public life had backed a number of black and female causes, rejected on the grounds of gender the application of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be his clerk, even though Ginsburg (later appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Court) had graduated number one in her class at Columbia Law School.
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Experiences such as Ginsburg’s remained common in the 1970s and 1980s, thereby greatly swelling litigation alleging discrimination in hiring and wages. The gap between the wages of full-time male and female workers narrowed only slightly between 1960 and 1985, during which time the wages of women crept upward from 61 percent of men’s wages to 65 percent. Later, women’s wages improved more rapidly than men’s, to an average of 77 percent of men’s by 2001.
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Even in the 1990s, however, many small businessmen, anxious to cut costs, still resisted provision of flex time or parental leave. Then, as in the 1970s and 1980s, few women managed to climb above the “glass ceiling” that kept them below top management. Legal battles against sexism in the workplace, though aided by the new legions of female professionals coming out of law and business schools, were long and frustrating.

While discrimination by employers was a considerable problem, it was not the only source of economic inequality facing women in the United States. For the most part, young, white, well-educated, and childless women did not face overt discrimination on the job. They tended to fare as well in workplaces as did men of comparable background.
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But large numbers of women with children were also entering the workforce. By the mid-1980s, some 55 percent of all mothers, a majority of them full-time employees, worked outside the home.
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Most of them were not climbing career ladders, and they did not consider themselves to be feminists. Rather, they entered the labor market, often in relatively low-paying jobs, in order to add to household income, at least until such time as their children had grown up and left the home.

Still, increasing numbers and percentages of young women did start out on a career track, only to confront difficult dilemmas when they had children. More so than many men, they were likely to develop powerful commitments to parenting, but the United States—unlike some European nations—had no system of state-supported children’s allowances that were allotted to mothers whether or not they worked outside the home. Generous children’s allowances would have enabled some American mothers to consider staying at home instead of working for wages, or to use the allowances to pay for day care while on the job. Caught between monetary needs and strongly felt parenting obligations, many American mothers opted for part-time work or moved in and out of the labor force. If in time they decided to resume a career, they normally had to settle for positions that were several rungs down the ladder from men of comparable age.
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Many of the mothers who continued to be employed outside the home struggled hard to combine both family and work. Though their husbands generally helped a little more around the house than they had in earlier eras, most of the men had trouble coming to grips with this “revolution at home,” as one scholar called it.
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Men remembered, or thought they did, the golden age of their own childhoods, when
their
mothers had stayed at home, at least until their children had been old enough to go to school.
Their
fathers had not been expected to do a great deal of domestic work. The pull of sweet reminiscence aroused a sharp sense of loss.

Having put in long hours at the factory or the office, these husbands expected to rest when they came home. When their working wives, equally tired, asked for help, husbands often objected or procrastinated. When their wives complained, many husbands distanced themselves emotionally. Trying to keep the peace, most wives continued to do the cooking and cleaning, including virtually all of the dirty work, such as scrubbing toilets. They handled the shopping and the hassles involved with getting appliances repaired. And they were normally the first to attend to the needs and demands of their children. Though new labor-saving appliances eased their tasks a little, the double shift remained burdensome. It exposed the simple fact that women had not achieved parity at home. By the 1970s, one careful study concluded, wives who were also in the labor force worked (at home and outside the home) fifteen more hours per week than their husbands did. Over the course of a year this was an extra twenty-four days.
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Many wives necessarily settled for compromises. Some lacked the time to prepare home-cooked meals, relying instead on one of the most significant domestic additions of the era, the microwave oven. First introduced in 1974, microwaves enabled people to nuke leftovers and to eat on the run, thereby threatening the family supper hour. Still other family members regularly picked up fast food and ate it away from home, and in doing so helped to promote the fantastic growth of chains such as McDonald’s. By the 1990s, physicians and nutritionists were insisting that fast food, along with a sedentary life featuring television and automobiles, was creating an “epidemic” of obesity, especially among children.
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