Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (28 page)

The ERA was a prominent theme in the 1978 elections, on both sides. Feminists struggled to win seats likely to make a few more states willing to ratify. Republicans began to incorporate “social issues” (ERA, abortion, and “women’s lib”) into the more traditional conservative agenda and to woo southern Democrats, for whom similar forms of negative campaigning on the race issue had long been common. That year Phil Gramm won a House seat in Texas as a Democrat (5 years later he switched parties and became a Republican) by, as one of his campaign officials acknowledged, “… [going] after every rural southern prejudice we could think of…. [W]e were appealing to the prejudice against working women, against their not being home.”
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The Republican Party 2 years later dropped its endorsement of the ERA in its platform for the first time since 1940.

In this atmosphere, it was clear by early 1978 that the ERA would not be ratified by the 1979 deadline. All of the major feminist organizations devoted to electoral work mounted a major campaign to have the deadline extended until June 1982. The Congressional Women’s Caucus, Democrat and Republican alike, pulled out all the stops to achieve this extension. For many feminist radicals who had not paid much attention to the issue of the ERA, thinking it far too moderate a reform, the real possibility of defeat got their attention. For the next 4 years, a very broad spectrum mobilized state campaigns and massive national marches to publicize the fact that in the foundational document of the United States, women were not equal under the law.

A whole new generation of activists was drawn into the final years of the ERA campaign. Under the leadership of Eleanor Smeal, NOW focused on the ERA struggle first to extend the deadline and then to ratify, growing from 55,000 members in 1977 to 210,000 members in 1982.
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Millie Jeffrey became the president of NWPC on a platform of strong support for the ERA. She established a budget of $1 million,
hired a political director, and embarked on an aggressive campaign. “We worked with other women’s organizations, particularly in strategies, what states to focus on, where we should put our greatest strengths and energies, reaching out to labor and many other groups, church groups and so on.”
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For many women, the simple, egalitarian words of the Amendment itself could lead to an epiphany akin to the experiences of consciousness-raising groups 10 years before. Sonia Johnson, a Mormon housewife who had recently moved to Virginia, began reading feminist literature in late 1976 at the behest of an old friend. In the spring of 1977 she heard about a meeting at which a Mormon elder would explain the church’s opposition to the ERA. Hoping to find a way out of the contradictions she had begun to feel, Johnson and her husband attended the meeting. She was surprised when “… he read the short and beautiful text of the Equal Rights Amendment:
Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
Those words changed her life. “[W]hen he read those words in that hostile room that night, they took hold of my heart like a great warm fist and have not let go for one single second, waking or sleeping, since…. Perhaps it was like being born again.”
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In July 1978, she testified in behalf of Mormons for the ERA before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. There she sparred with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who pounded the table and shouted that her claim that an intelligent Mormon woman would support the ERA was an insult to his wife. Headlines around the country blared, “Woman vs. Senator: 2 Mormons Clash Over ERA.”
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By January 1979, Mormons for the ERA had grown to 500 members and they became a regular fixture at: both Mormon gatherings—where airplanes drew “Mormons for the ERA Are Everywhere” and “Mother in Heaven Loves Mormons for the ERA” banners across the sky—and at pro-ERA events. They devoted themselves especially to exposing how the Mormon church leaders organized opposition to the ERA by passing out literature and instructions in churches and busing groups of women to anti-ERA meetings and to lobby legislatures. The model for this new kind of political activism was Houston and its preparatory conferences at which, in Johnson’s description, “Mormon men with megaphones,
whistles, walkie-talkies and signs shepherded Mormon women about, body and soul, telling them when to sit and when to stand, when to come and when to go, what to say and when to say it and, especially, how to vote on every single issue.”
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Johnson’s activist opposition and open defiance of church authorities resulted in her excommunication in December 1979.

Writing in 1981, the final year of the ERA battle, Sonia Johnson spoke (with some hyperbole) for thousands of women who had joined the struggle for the first time:

I am sure I am not the only feminist who is occasionally clear-sighted enough to be grateful to Phyllis Schlafley for making us have to fight so hard for the Equal Rights Amendment. Whether in the end this amendment is the way women will achieve legal equality or not, it is still true that the struggle over its ratification has provided the greatest political training ground for women in the history of the world.
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The momentum had shifted, however, as feminists of all persuasions began to face the necessity to dig in for the long haul.

I
N
1978, G
LORIA
Steinem reflected, “This seems to be where we are, 10 years or so into the second wave of feminism. Raised hopes, a hunger for change, and years of hard work are running head-on into a frustrating realization that each battle must be fought over and over again at different depths, and that one inevitable result of winning the majority to some changed consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.” On the other hand, she noted, “Serious opposition is a measure of success.”
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As the undertow of reaction sparked new energy into the campaign for the ERA, it also forced organizations like NOW, NWPC, and numerous issue-based coalitions to struggle with the long-term necessity of hiring paid, professional lobbyists to sustain a more continuous and professional presence in Washington.
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For many feminist radicals, immersed for years in a counterculture, the late seventies were a time of
crisis. In their case, self-reflection and internal criticism could be harsh indeed: they had set themselves on the road to perfection, and against that measure, the distance between the present and the ultimate goal sometimes seemed greater than ever. Institutions were harder and harder to sustain. Issues were no longer simple or obvious. The emergence of active feminist groups among women of color made race one of the most powerful and disturbing issues for feminists by the late 1970s, laying the groundwork for theoretical debates in the 1980s. Whereas in the early seventies white feminists talked about “women” as a relatively uncomplicated category, by the late seventies feminist journals were filled with criticism and self-recrimination about the “whiteness” of the movement in response to the increasingly visible presence of feminist groups among women of color.
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For a time the movement had become a world to itself for thousands of women. Collectives proliferated to create and manage bookstores, journals, coffeehouses, health clinics, and numerous small businesses. Attention to process was all consuming and meetings could be endless, but Utopian hopes generated wave after wave of new energy. By the late 1970s, however, there were many for whom the lessons of the 1970s spoke loud and clear about the dangers of purism and isolation. Speaking to a Berkeley audience in 1979, Charlotte Bunch outlined a history of the movement from the early consciousness-raising phase through the building of a feminist subculture. “Within that subculture we’ve gained a lot of skills and strength and the ability to control a few areas of our lives,” but she also argued from her own experience of coalition building since 1976 that “We need growth and enrichment, which comes from interaction with people who aren’t like us. Sometimes the subculture stymies that growth because we don’t put any value on interacting with anybody who’s not one of us…. You get a tunnel vision of reality. You start to lose a sense of what else is out there.”
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As backlash gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the feminist tidal wave faced the necessity of re-creating itself yet again.

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Alternative spellings of words like woman (wommon), women (wimmin, womyn), and history (herstory) became common among cultural feminists trying to avoid linguistic subordination. In some instances they misinterpreted the etymology of the word. “History,” for example comes from the Latin
historia
and does not refer to the English masculine possessive pronoun “his.”

CHAPTER 6
Deep Currents

The Reagan administration did it so quietly…. [P]icture the Department [of Education] as a big egg. They didn’t crack it and break it and make an omelet. They poked a hole in the bottom and all the essence just fell right out. And you still have a beautiful egg, but there’s just nothing inside…. Today it is a pale, pitiful shadow of what it was supposed to be.

—LESLIE WOLFE, FORMER DIRECTOR OF WEEA IN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
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T
HE FORCE OF THE BACKLASH
made feminists more invisible in the media and even to themselves in the 1980s, yet feminism not only persisted but flowed into new channels. It had to adjust, however, to a dramatically altered political context. The conservative ethos of the Reagan administration abruptly reversed the political influence of the feminist movement. As the New Right gathered political force in the late 1970s, it framed its concerns around “family values” (the mother-centered traditional patriarchal family). Making effective use of cultural themes initially politicized by feminists—family, sexuality, and reproduction—the new conservatism reshaped the 1980 Republican Party platform, eliminating its long-standing endorsement of the ERA. Both overtly and indirectly, the Republican campaign tarred feminists with blame for skyrocketing divorce, for rising rates of single motherhood (falsely portrayed as a rising rate of teen pregnancy), for growing welfare rolls, and for the displacement of large numbers of high-paying traditionally male jobs in a deindustrializing economy.
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When Ronald Reagan won the
presidential election in 1980, the force of the recoil was felt by feminists of every stripe.

Hostility to feminism was a key component of the new administration’s outlook. Once elected, the new administration removed many feminists from positions on commissions and in federal departments, replacing them with appointees hostile to affirmative action and other governmental activism on behalf of women’s rights and civil rights. Overnight the political atmosphere in Washington became overwhelmingly antagonistic to feminists. The elimination of CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) and LEAA (Law Enforcement Assistance Administration Grants) removed two national programs through which grassroots groups had received funds for staff. Reagan proposed to cut spending on social welfare programs by 17 percent. He accomplished just over half of that, mostly in the first year, and combined with the onset of a devastating recession in 1981 social services and nonprofits found themselves facing higher demand with sharply reduced resources.
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In addition, that legislative initiatives to restrict reproductive choice and oppose lesbian and gay rights remained at the rhetorical forefront (though for the most part they did not succeed) kept feminists in a defensive posture throughout the 1980s.

The ERA had already lost its momentum by 1980, and in this new atmosphere, even with an extended deadline, it proved impossible to gain the required number of states for ERA ratification. By the time the clock ran out in 1982, several states had even repealed their ratification. Most of the large feminist organizations had focused their energies on this struggle for several years and remained committed to it to the end. With only three states needed before June 30, 1982, they mounted major campaigns in states where victory seemed possible. Illinois, which already had a state ERA and had failed to pass the ERA previously by the narrowest of margins, drew the most attention. NOW held mass marches and a weekly silent vigil, and smaller groups of women initiated civil disobedience campaigns: fasting, chaining themselves inside the capitol, burning ERA into the lawn with a massive dose of fertilizer. Sonia Johnson (founder of Mormons for the ERA) led the group of eight women who fasted for 37 days, drawing headlines as they grew visibly weaker.
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Nothing worked.

Subsequent analyses highlighted a variety of reasons for the failure to ratify the ERA. Jane Mansbridge pointed to the unintended consequence of allowing the issue of women in the military to become a pivot of the debate. Mary Berry argued that the very process of amending the Constitution is so arduous and requires such a large majority that failure is the likely outcome in most instances. Jane DeHart and Donald Mathews explored the underlying cultural conflicts in a close analysis of the campaign in North Carolina.
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In addition, many forms of legal discrimination that existed in 1972 had already been changed by legislation or ruled unconstitutional 10 years later. Taken together in the context of a right-wing ascendancy, the outcome seems foreordained. It had sharp consequences, however, for the prolonged losing battle gave a defensive cast to movement organizations, caused a sharp drop in membership, and drove a wedge between activists focused on the policy arena and those who withdrew even further into the utopian hopes of a self-sustaining women’s culture or the abstract theorizing of academia.
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