Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (32 page)

Daughters of Sarah, an evangelical feminist group, continued their vigorous discussions via their newsletter and at conferences through the
eighties and beyond. They wrestled with “goddess” language (aware of new directions in feminist spirituality, interested in using female metaphors for God, but concerned to find a Biblical basis), sexuality (chastity, homosexuality, singleness, and celibacy), racism, women in the developing world, health care, reproduction, and abortion (about which they still had no consensus in 1987). A perusal of the newsletter makes it very clear that readers of Daughters of Sarah were aware of, and in conversation with, Catholic feminists, Jewish feminists (“the other Daughters of Sarah”), ecofeminists, and feminist activists in many denominations.
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Given the cultural authority accorded conservative evangelicals with a political inside track, it is startling to discover such a vibrant, open, and radical ongoing conversation among evangelical Christian feminists. Tidal waves in the open sea, of course, are barely visible.

Lael Stegall, who spent much of the 1970s in the NWPC office learning to raise funds for feminist political causes, argues vigorously that the 1980s were a time for feminist capacity building, not eclipse. Feminist institutions shifted into the mainstream, taking on the formal trappings of social service institutions with boards, directors, accountants, funding from the United Way, or even direct government control. In other instances, feminists developed new ways to mobilize in an era of blacklash. Stegall says that the open hostility of the Reagan and Bush administrations meant that feminists understood the necessity of aggressive political interest groups, and they set about building them. Those that survived did so because they were strong. She reels off a list: the National Committee on Pay Equity, domestic violence networks, the National Committee on Women’s Health, Black Women’s Health Network, five or six different women’s legal defense funds, and a large number of women’s funds and foundations.
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This “deepening of capacity” is probably best exemplified by the story of Emily’s List.

In 1982, Ellen Malcolm, former organizer for Common Cause and press secretary for the National Women’s Political Caucus, gained a new perspective on one of the root problems for women candidates. An experience with Harriet Woods’ race for Senate in Missouri taught her about the importance of money, early money, to get campaigns off the ground.

When Woods, a veteran city and state politician in Missouri, announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Senator John Danforth, her party turned a cold shoulder. “We have to have a man for the job,” leaders said to her. She ran anyway, but discovered to her shock that even with party endorsement financial support remained negligible. The Democratic National Committee finally offered $18,000 late in the campaign, not nearly enough to allow her to respond to the onslaught of attacks from her opponent. Woods called Malcolm, who in the brief time left was able to raise only $50,000. Woods lost by less than 1 percent of the vote, and Malcolm believed that she could have won if the resources available to her had not been too little, too late.

Malcolm decided to found a new kind of feminist political action group based on the theory that “early money is like yeast” from which she took the acronym EMILY. Women’s increased labor force participation, she reasoned, meant that they had—perhaps for the first time—resources to invest in the political process. At the same time, few women could make the large contributions toward which most political fundraising was geared. Emily’s list would be designed to increase women’s contributions in ways that were targeted and effective. Malcolm, herself a major philanthropist and heir of one of the founders of IBM, had the resources to get it started.

Emily’s List uses a loophole in the campaign finance laws. Political action committees, as a rule, are not allowed to contribute more than $5,000 to any one candidate. To get around this, Emily’s List uses a technique called “bundling.” Supporters write checks directly to candidates and send them to Emily’s List, which sends them to the candidates.
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A new member pays $100 to Emily’s List in each 2 year election cycle to cover overhead expenses for running the organization and then pledges to contribute at least $100 to each of two candidates recommended by Emily’s List. Once enrolled, the member receives regular mailings about candidates endorsed by Emily’s List, with profiles of their careers, their stands on issues, and the likelihood that they could succeed. The member is free to contribute to any or all of the endorsed
candidates, but the names are rotated from one mailing to the next so that if everyone funded the first two on their list, equal amounts would be raised for all.

Endorsement by Emily’s List is a highly centralized process. It is a partisan PAC. From the beginning, only prochoice women in the Democratic Party have been eligible for consideration. A steering committee made up of the founding mothers of Emily’s List makes decisions based on staff recommendations. From the outset Emily’s List made a point of supporting only candidates who had a realistic chance of winning. According to founder Ellen Malcolm,

The old boys network in politics didn’t believe the women could win. What we did was publicly talk a lot about how tough we were in deciding whom to recommend. And in fact we were. So it started to become a kind of ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval’ which helped decrease the credibility problem.
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Staff recommendations are based on indicators that show a candidate is “viable”:

• Demographics and history of the district

• Analysis of opponents or potential opponents

• Analysis of candidate’s education, political experience, and so on

• Demonstrated success at fund-raising

• Poll data to demonstrate name recognition and grassroots support

Such indicators have been criticized primarily by supporters of candidates who did not receive an endorsement. The last item has been most controversial. Polling is expensive, costing upward of $14,000. For some candidates this requirement is a catch-22. They cannot receive money without a poll. They can’t afford a poll without some money. Malcolm remains adamant, however, that Emily’s List is about winning races. Its recommendations are intended to place women’s contributions where they can do the most good. This in turn requires a policy that she thinks of as a kind of “tough love”: “No poll, no dough” is the
rule. She also defends Emily’s List’s selectivity as a commitment not to waste resources either on races in which the woman is sure to win or on those that are demonstrably unwinnable. By contrast, NWPC and the Women’s Campaign Fund, both nonpartisan, tend to support any woman who met their criteria in terms of support for key women’s issues. Although they were important sources of support for women candidates in the 1970s and 1980s, neither ever approached the level of fund-raising success or the impact of Emily’s List.

Emily’s List had some success in the 1980s, including a few striking victories. When Barbara Mikulski ran for Senate in 1986, Emily’s List contributed $250,000 to her campaign ($1 of every $5 she raised) and claimed her victory as evidence of a winning strategy. Between 1986 and 1990 Emily’s List helped elect seven Democratic women to the U.S. House: Nita Lowey (New York), Jolene Unsoeld (Washington), Jill Long (Indiana), Patsy Mink (Hawaii), Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut), Maxine Waters (California), and delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (Washington, D.C.). In 1990 it supported Ann Richards (Texas) and Barbara Roberts (Oregon) in their successful gubernatorial campaigns.
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By 1990, Emily’s List donated $1.5 million to 14 candidates and its membership list expanded to 3,500.

Very different evidence of the continuing and growing strength of the women’s movement in the 1980s was the growth of women’s studies as a field of academic inquiry. By 1980 even conservative bastions like Princeton, which only began admitting women 10 years before, were embroiled in debates over the institutionalization of feminist scholarship. A
Princeton Alumni Weekly
report on “The Controversy over Women’s Studies” noted that opponents challenged the academic legitimacy of a field they believe was trendy, faddish, and—worse—political. “For many men and some women, ‘women’s studies’ has a militant sound.” The report also made it clear, however, that there was a growing commitment to establishing a formal program with a director and further that Princeton was under substantial pressure to hire, and tenure, more women.
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Over the course of the 1980s, women’s studies became institutionalized at thousands of colleges and universities, complete with majors, minors,
and tenure-track faculty. By the early 1990s over two-thirds of all universities, nearly half of all 4 year colleges, and about one in four 2 year institutions had women’s studies courses. In addition, by the late 1980s there were specialized journals for scholarship on women in the fields of literary criticism, sociology, political science, history, and philosophy, alongside the many interdisciplinary feminist publications. Armed with new knowledge, feminist scholars inaugurated a massive effort to transform the entire curriculum in the humanities and social sciences. With initial funds from the Ford Foundation, faculty development seminars at many universities facilitated the revision of courses with the goal of making them more inclusive, not only of women but also of racial and ethnic minorities. Institutes or centers for research on women sprouted on dozens of campuses, winning research grants, developing curricula at the graduate level, and forming a national network through the National Council for Research on Women.
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It is important to understand these developments as a context for the emergence in the mid-1980s of an orchestrated right-wing attack on liberal education with specific targets feminist and multicultural scholarship and teaching. This was a powerful backlash, but it came from people who perceived, probably accurately, the intellectual influence of such new perspectives. Some disciplines, notably history and English, had been transformed in fundamental ways. History, for example, shifted away from a paradigm of history as public activity focused on the actions of powerful men to include an enormous range of people (powerful and subordinate) and topics (from housework to popular culture to social movements to legislative activity). Scholarly conference programs once focused primarily on political and military history were, by the eighties, replete with sessions on women, race, and class and usually some combination. Older style political historians whose work had defined the discipline since its inception no longer ridiculed women’s history. Some welcomed the new developments; others joined the conservative National Association of Scholars, allying themselves with the political forces trying to stem the tide of feminism and multiculturalism.

As with social service organizations, the institutionalization of women’s studies led to specialization, professionalization, and fragmentation.
Wrestling with the problem of “difference,” academic feminists turned to postmodern cultural theories whose language was accessible only to highly trained insiders; to outsiders it was impenetrable jargon. The proliferation of journals drew academic feminists into specialized, disciplinary conversations, and increasingly theoretical approaches signaled a distressing disconnection between academics and activists.
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Academics debated the “social construction” of gender—questioning the meaning of the very category of “woman” in light of differences of class and race—and activists continued to speak for women as a group. Although sprung from the same roots, academics and activists no longer spoke the same language.

Yet, the institutionalization of women’s studies also gave younger generations a new kind of access to feminism. Throughout the 1980s, despite marginalization and stereotypes, on most campuses intense student groups debated the meanings of feminism and its implications for life choices. Indeed, women’s studies classrooms became a crucial incubator for a new generation of women whose voices gradually became audible in the late 1980s and early 1990s, challenging the fragmentation of the movement.
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T
HE
N
ATIONAL
W
OMEN’S
Studies Association followed a path familiar to many other institutional experiments in the 1970s. Noted for large, lively conferences that melded academic discourses with free-spirited expressions of “women’s culture,” NWSA could barely subsist from one year to the next. By 1982 it was in financial crisis, surviving only because its executive committee stepped in to run the organization on a volunteer basis.
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By 1984 the new half-time director, Caryn McTighe Musil, found to her amazement that the total budget was $85,000. Musil, her staff, and the executive committee plunged into the task of institution building. They learned how to recruit and retain members (little things like business reply envelopes were a surprise), started an in-house newsletter, and began to plan annual conferences systematically to minimize financial risk and and create a dependable source of income. From 1985 on, the association earned $20,000-60,000 at each annual conference. Step by step, NWSA began to take on the accoutrements of a professional
association: an academic, peer-reviewed journal, scholarships and book awards, grants from foundations, a tiny endowment, and a responsibly managed budget of more than half a million dollars. In 1989 for the first time NWSA held a separate conference for directors of women’s studies programs in which they could discuss the nitty-gritty administrative details of finances, curricula, pedagogy, and institutional politics.
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At the same time, however, NWSA struggled to remain true to the personalist, cultural feminist: politics that had given it birth. Increasingly it was two organizations, one professional and institution building, the other a movement engaged in a continuing search for political purity, given voice by whomever showed up at conferences.