Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (29 page)

The personalism and utopianism of the movement proved to be tenacious characteristics, changing form, appearing and reappearing though frequently in ways detached from direct protest. In some arenas, for example, the Catholic Church, feminist radicalism continued to grow. At the same time, many radicals had migrated into liberal forms of activism to work for specific policy changes, sobered by the power of the state both for change and for containment. Greater engagement with the state challenged politically pure ideals but also signified feminism as an ongoing force in the political landscape. What fell between the cracks, given these two directions, was the recruitment of younger women who found their way to feminism, when they did so, pretty much on their own.

S
HORTLY BEFORE
Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, the Heritage Foundation released its blueprint for the future,
Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration
.
⁷
The study had been requested by Edwin Meese, one of Reagan’s key advisors, and its editor, Charles L. Heatherly, was subsequently appointed head of the Office of Management in the Department of Education. In
a wide-ranging analysis of administrative units and policies (including recommendations to eliminate legal services for the poor and to limit enforcement of Title IX), this right-wing think tank singled out the Women’s Education Action Project within the Department of Education for special scrutiny:

Women’s Education Equity is the unit within the office that is, to judge by the content of programs receiving grants, more in keeping with extreme feminist ideology than concern for the quality of education…. [Authorization] figures suggest the increasing political leverage of feminist interests…. WEEAP is a top priority item for the feminist network and is an important resource for the practice of feminist policies and politics. Its programs require immediate scrutiny and its budget should be drastically cut.
⁸

Aware of the administration’s hostility (although not of this particular blueprint for the destruction of WEEA edited by one of her superiors), Leslie Wolfe defiantly refused to remove a poster of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara from her office wall and continued to nurture strong relationships with WEEA supporters in Congress. When the Reagan Administration proposed to consolidate a number of programs in the Department of Education into block grants to the states, congressional advocates championed WEEA with such vigor that it survived, although its funding was cut. Similarly in 1982, when the Administration tried to zero out WEEA as a separate program, Congress voted to continue it with $6 million in funding. As the Heritage Foundation described in a later “case study,”

Since it became apparent that Congress was not going to unfund WEEA, administration officials began to channel their attention toward gaining control of the mandatory program. The Program Director Wolfe resisted each step in this process.
⁹

The attack was launched with an anonymously authored article in
Conservative Digest,
April 1982, charging that Wolfe was a “radical feminist”
who handpicked funding recipients who followed her “personal political agenda.” “Anonymous” demanded the “swift dethronement … [of this] monarch in the feudal Washington bureaucracy, imperiously guarding her fiefdom.” Wolfe’s boss, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education Jean Benish, called her in, threw the
Conservative Digest
article on the desk, and asked if she had seen it.
¹⁰
Several weeks later Wolfe received a memo stipulating that “the formulation and articulation of all policies concerning the WEEA program will be assumed by the Office of the Assistant Secretary,” and then she was summarily “detailed” for 90 days to a task force on waste, fraud, and abuse.
¹¹
Wolfe remembers naively taking this reassignment seriously and arguing that she was really not the most qualified and anyway she had a program to run at a critical point in the grant-making process. Her boss “screamed at me, ‘no, you’re going; leave your office today, leave your key on the desk, and report there on Monday.’”
¹²

Once rid of Wolfe, Acting Assistant Secretary Benish set out to override the program’s selection of field readers, the people who read and evaluated grants submitted to WEEA for funding. The new readers were people like Grace Bulton, a Republican National Committeewoman from Oklahoma, who told a home newspaper that she was “… brought to Washington for a week to help check a controversial feminist agency which the Reagan Administration wants to abolish.” Other appointees were affiliates of Phyllis Schlafley’s Eagle Forum, a professor from fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University (notorious for its racial discrimination), and Republican Party activists. Many brought no experience at all in education on women’s issues.
¹³

But the insider-outsider links, which had been forged in more than a decade of feminist activism, were not so easy to defeat. Wolfe, who had left the interview with her boss deeply shaken, met several staffers in the hallway, worried about how long she had been in the boss’s office. “My troops were waiting for me,” she recalled. That Friday afternoon “we filled out slips for the staff, sick leave slips,” which Wolfe signed so they could take Monday off. Then they hid Wolfe’s most important files in the bottoms of drawers so that they could not be found. “On Monday morning, we met at the Hyatt Regency … and we plotted what we
would do.” They knew that the field readers would soon arrive to review proposals, so they spent the afternoon mobilizing support among allies in the Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, and members of the Congressional Women’s Caucus. Republican Congresswoman Peggy Heckler recruited the “Wednesday Group” of Republican moderates in Congress to write a letter of protest.
¹⁴

The outcry created by their campaign resulted in Wolfe being returned to her job after the 90 day exile and a later series of investigations in which the General Accounting Office confirmed her contention that the newly appointed field readers were utterly incompetent for the job at hand. The Reagan juggernaut was not to be held back for long, however. “Another battle won, another war lost. A year later my job was abolished. I was fired.”
¹⁵
Within a year, WEEA had been “downgraded from a separate Program Office located in the immediate office of the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education to a small section (under a branch, under a division) in the office that administers state and local education programs (including the ‘block grant’ and impact aid programs).”
¹⁶
Wolfe went on to work for the Project for Equal Education Rights (PEER) at the NOW Legal Defense Fund, where Susan Faludi found her in 1984. Faludi was beginning to work on a book about the backlash against feminism and had met a number of people who told her she was imagining things. Wolfe filled her ears.
¹⁷

As in the case of WEEA, the Reagan Administration was overtly antagonistic to most of the women’s rights initiatives that had made some headway in the 1970s. For example, grassroots activism and EEOC support of comparable worth had laid the basis for policy initiatives on this issue at the state level, but the Reagan Administration was notably cool to the idea and, after the 1984 election, openly hostile. Such policies, they said, interfered with the free market and would cause severe disruption and unemployment. Michael Horowitz, counsel to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, pitted middle-class white women and working-class African-American men against each other: “There is nothing the Reagan Administration has done that holds as much long-term threat to the black community as comparable worth.
The maintenance man will be paid less so the librarian can be paid more.”
¹⁸
Civil Rights Commission Chairman Clarence Pendleton declared comparable worth the “looniest idea since Looney Tunes came on the screen.”
¹⁹
His assistant, Linda Chavez, campaigned against comparable worth, writing and speaking across the country.

In other social areas, in which the Republicans used rhetoric but achieved only modest policy changes, a grassroots conservative movement accomplished far more than the politicians could. The political power of antiabortion forces had made abortion the most severely polarizing issue in American politics and one of the defining issues for the New Right. At national, state, and local levels, right-wing politicians found a growing number of ways to impose restrictions on access to abortion. Following the successful passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1977, which forbade the use of federal funds (i.e., Medicaid) for abortion, antiabortion forces successfully lobbied for increasingly restrictive state laws, requiring waiting periods and parental notification for minors, for example, and barring poor women from obtaining abortions using state-funded health care programs, and a series of court decisions upholding such laws suggested that the
Roe v. Wade
decision was in jeopardy.

The passage of legal constraints, however, was mild in comparison to the rise of a violent antiabortion movement that focused its attacks on abortion clinics, many of which had grown out of feminist networks. A campaign of both legal protest and terrorist violence began in the late 1970s and persisted through the 1980s. It was the most virulent expression of hostility to changes in gender roles and sexuality. On the grounds that abortion was murder, abortion opponents escalated from civil disobedience and picketing to verbal harassment of clinic staff and clients and, finally, outright violence. Law enforcement officials estimated that by 1990 abortion clinics had experienced 8 bombings, 28 acts of arson, 28 attempted bombings or arson, and 170 acts of vandalism.
²⁰
Women’s rights activists offer much larger estimates.
²¹
At one clinic, which became the weekly target of picketing and vandalism, the director remembered that time as “… terrible, just awful…. Sometimes there were as many as 150 picketers, and they would be, you
know, just right up against our front: door … in people’s faces, screaming and yelling….”
²²

The political atmosphere of the eighties authorized more open expressions of hostility to women and minorities. Battles to eliminate language demeaning or belittling to women, for example, which seemed to have been won in the 1970s, turned out to be only partially achieved. Growing violence against abortion clinics accompanied a growth in hate crimes (violence or threats of violence against minorities and homosexuals) and a greater tolerance for overt expressions of prejudice. Perhaps because the boom did not affect everyone—and in fact squeezed many in the middle as major industries “downsized”—women and minorities were basically offered up as scapegoats.

Some of the most vivid evidence of growing intolerance could be found on college campuses. Throughout the decade, campuses became more diverse than ever as a result of the growing numbers of minorities and a massive new wave of immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 1987, women constituted 55 percent of all undergraduate students. At the same time, funding for higher education contracted sharply, forcing steep increases in tuition, larger classes, and cutbacks in scholarship funding. The perception that some groups (especially minorities) had “special privileges” in terms of admission and scholarships certainly added to the tendency to scapegoat those groups.
²³
Incidents of racial name-calling and verbal harassment of homosexuals that would have been unthinkable in the years immediately following the civil rights movement abounded on campuses. Half of each of those groups were women, of course, and attacks were sometimes directed specifically to them, as in the case of a black woman student at Central Michigan University who found trash bags and a sign reading “bitch” taped to her dormitory door.
²⁴
When it came to women’s studies, and homophobic fears, such attitudes sometimes received official sanction from politicians and administrators. In Southern California, for example, a group of conservative Christians allied with several state legislators attacked the Women’s Studies Program at California State University at Long Beach for “prolesbianism and marxist revolutionary bias.” Certainly it was a program that housed political radicals, but what marks
this incident is that politicians who disliked certain
ideas
could demand, and get, an administrative review that resulted in firing the women’s studies director, canceling a course, and closing the campus women’s center.
²⁵
So much for academic freedom.

T
HE POPULAR MEDIA
reinforced a sense that the new complexity of women’s lives, rather than the inflexibility of the world in which they lived, was the problem. Newspapers and magazines deplored the toll on women trying to meet standards for success as
both
professionals
and
housewives, two full-time jobs. Numerous articles profiled women who dropped out of high-powered, high-paying jobs to have time with their children.
²⁶
In 1986,
Fortune
magazine published a cover article on “Why Women are Bailing Out” of successful careers.
²⁷
Such coverage laid the groundwork for Felice M. Schwartz’s idea, promulgated in the
Harvard Business Review
in 1989, that businesses should offer a separate career track for women (later dubbed the “mommy track”), on the grounds that most women are “career-and-family” oriented rather than “career primary.”
²⁸
The next year, however, a study of 50 women who left Fortune 500 companies after more than 5 years found that their primary reason for leaving was the limited opportunity for advancement. It was the “glass ceiling,” not a lack of family-friendly benefits that drove them away.
²⁹
Both reasons were probably valid: many young professional women felt trapped by the conflicting demands of their professions and of motherhood at the same time that they
also
encountered increased resistance to advancement as they moved through the ranks. What alarmed feminists about the mommy track idea was that it cast aspersions on the ambitions of women in a way that could reinforce the glass ceiling. Furthermore, it failed to entertain the feminist demands for a reevaluation of work and family to make it possible for
both
parents to be significantly involved in the lives of small children without jeopardizing their careers.