Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (38 page)

As a result of longer life expectancies, different generations of women have distinct and sometimes conflicting experiences. Those who fought for access to work and public life face new generations raised with different expectations. Younger women presume that they
will combine work outside the home with family responsibilities. The harsh realities of doing so, however, lead some of them to reassert the value of parenting and family, charging that the values of the marketplace have overshadowed something for which they not only remain responsible but which gives them pleasure and meaning. This explains some of the political popularity of “family values” among people who do not, in fact, advocate returning to traditional, patriarchal family norms. At the same time, older women are creating a new life stage in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Vital, healthy, energetic, they face yet another round of discriminatory attitudes and practices based on sex and age.

Will it be possible to reconcile the goals of women who wish to make work more hospitable and tolerable for those who bear heavy family responsibilities, those who wish to create a better safety net for impoverished women and children, and those who want to reclaim the importance of parenting and motherhood? Finding common ground among women of different generations and backgrounds will be the key to creating spaces for experimentation and building working relationships that go beyond demonizing stereotypes. Women as a group are more favorable to using government as an instrument of social policy. Furthermore, in our still sex-segregated labor force, women are far more likely than men to work in settings—in the health, education, services, and government sectors—in which they experience government as a positive and necessary force rather than as a burden imposing regulation and taxation.

Despite the current suspicion of government, the new century will probably generate a number of decentralized experiments, led by women, to address community problems related to child care, public safety, and health. In their long struggle for access to public life, women in the United States have often invented new forms of voluntary association that have given this country an unusually rich civil society. Renewing that civic resource, as both a training ground for leaders and an environment for experiments in public problem solving, is certainly one of the keys to the survival of democracy in the twenty-first century. Fortunately, an infrastructure exists from which to build. The tidal wave of
feminism created hundreds, even thousands, of organizations and institutions, and many survived and grew through the ebb and flow of the late twentieth century. The Women’s Funding Network, for example, was founded in 1985 with 20 member organizations and by 2002 its members included 90 women’s and girls’ funds and philanthropic organizations.
⁷³

Finally, feminism, like all aspects of life, has become global and leaders of the United States women’s movement have increasingly joined their voices to those of women around the world. After Nairobi, women became a force at every major United Nations conference. In 1990 Bella Abzug and journalist Mim Kelber founded Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), “an international advocacy network that seeks to increase the power of women worldwide as policymakers in governance and in policymaking institutions, forums and processes, at all levels, to achieve economic and social justice, a peaceful and healthy planet and human rights for all.”
⁷⁴
WEDO organized a World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet at which 1,500 women from 83 countries laid plans for the forthcoming 1992 United Nations environmental summit in Brazil. Their success at the summit led to active women’s caucuses at all subsequent major United Nations Conferences to ensure that women’s equality remained on the agenda, whatever the topic.
⁷⁵
Similarly, the Center for Women’s Global leadership has, since 1990, sponsored intensive 2 week leadership training institutes. During the 1990s, seven institutes trained 160 women from 77 countries to become effective women’s rights policy advocates and leaders. The first leadership institute proposed a campaign against violence against women naming November 25 to December 10 as “16 days of activism against gender violence.” Over 800 organizations in at least 90 countries have participated in this campaign since 1991.

When 7,000 American women traveled to Beijing, China for the Fourth World Conference on Women sponsored by the United Nations, they found there “[a] virtual city of female people. Turbans, caftans, saris, abayas, sarongs, kente cloth, blue jeans, T-shirt libraries. Banners, posters, buttons. A twenty-kilometer-long Sisterhood Ribbon initiated by Cambodian women, added to at the forum, later stretched along the Great Wall. Almost four thousand workshops—on soybeans,
sexuality, paid and unpaid labor, reproductive freedom, microcredit, caste, solar stoves, networking techniques, inheritance, health, refugee/ displaced women, regional priorities, you name it.”
⁷⁶

The irreducible realities of difference among women on this global stage have not stood in the way of solidarity largely because of the strong leadership of women from the developing world on issues of concern to them. They in turn cast new light on the dilemmas with which American feminists wrestle. The example of women’s horrific plight in Afghanistan, for example, is a reminder that women
are
victims. At the same time, the active intervention of Afghan women through the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) shows that even under the most extreme conditions, women can and do act to change their situation, broaden their choices, and demand a place at the table. In the eighties, while American feminists struggled mightily with the dilemmas of multicultural feminism, the international movement shifted leadership from Western feminists to women in the developing world and international women’s nongovernmental organizations. As a result women have been central to the initiation of a global civic infrastructure that holds the potential for public problem solving in a world fraught with environmental devastation, murderous violence, and extreme disparities between the wealthy and the poor.
⁷⁷
American women will continue to play a critical role in that struggle, knowing that massive change is possible but there is no end in sight.

NOTES

Chapter 1

¹
See Nancy Cott,
The Grounding of Modern Feminism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

²
Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,”
Harper’s
155 (October 1927): 552.

³
Phyllis Schlafley Report 5
(February 1972), quoted in Jane J. Mansbridge,
Why We Lost The ERA
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 104.

⁴
Gilder quote from
Sexual Suicide
(New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), p. 238; on daycare see George Gilder, “An Open Letter to Orrin Hatch,”
National Review,
vol. 40, no. 9 (May 13, 1988): 32-34.

⁵
Susan Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation,”
New York Times Magazine,
(October 17, 1982): 28-21, 103, 106-107; quotes on 29, 31.

⁶
Paula Kammen,
Feminist Fatale: Voices from the “Twentysomething” Generation Explore the Future of the “Women’s Movement”
(New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991),pp. 2, 7.

⁷
Two or three others of us changed our names in subsequent years when we were no longer in the group. I reclaimed my birth name in 1974.

⁸
The first three books, all published in 1970, were Sara Evans Boyte,
Jenny’s Secret Place;
Paula Goldsmid,
Did You Ever?;
and Margrit Eichler,
Martin’s Father
. At that time Margrit was a graduate student in sociology. She and her then husband were members of the child care cooperative. Today she is Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Studies (IWSGS) at the University of Toronto. Paula Goldsmid was at that time an assistant professor at the UNC School of Social Work. Subsequently she was Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences (in charge of women’s studies) and Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at Oberlin College from 1974 to 1981, Dean of Faculty at Scripps College (Claremont, CA) from 1981 to 1989, where she also taught gender role courses, and Director of the Center for Women and Gender Education at University of California, Irvine, from 1990 to 2000, as well as lecturer in women’s studies during some of that time. Her current title is Graduate Fellowships/Medical Sciences Coordinator at Pomona College.

⁹
Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel,
Workingman’s Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style
(New York: Oceana Publications, 1959); Mirra Komarovsky, “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles,”
American Journal of Sociology
52 (November 1946): 182-189); Komarovsky,
Blue-collar Marriage
(New York: Random House, 1964); and Komarovsky,
Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).

¹⁰
My own work in 1968-1969 as a community organizer in the poor white community of Durham, North Carolina, was a constant reminder of such difference. My pregnancy was an immediate link to the women I worked with, but they were astounded that this was my
first
child at age 25—some of them were already grandmothers in their mid-thirties. Their complicated familial and work histories involved work in textile and tobacco factories, welfare, and frequent household moves in response to divorce and changing economics.

¹¹
New York: Knopf, 1979.

¹²
The publication of
Sisterhood Is Powerful
(New York: Random House, 1970), a collection of early feminist writings edited by Robin Morgan, contained several articles articulating this viewpoint, notably Marge Piercy, “Grand Coolie Damn” and Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That.” Neither actually intended to be a story of origins, although each constituted a jeremiad against the sexism of the left. Together, however, they shaped a narrative that continues to predominate.

¹³
This effort to come to terms with the history of the “second wave” dates at least from the work of Jo Freeman,
The Politics of Women’s Liberation
(New York: Longman, 1975) and Edith Hole and Ellen Levine,
Rebirth of Feminism
(New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971) in the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, there were a growing number of journal articles as well as social scientific studies, such as Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess,
Controversy and Coalition [CITE],
Flora Davis’ encyclopedic
Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), and Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For the most recent works see Nancy Whittier,
Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Sheila Tobias,
Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); Susan Brownmiller,
In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
(New York: Dial Press, 1999); Ruth Rosen,
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America
(New York: Viking, 2000). In many ways, this book builds on what they have already done, adding the interpretation described in this introduction and argued more fully throughout the book and also extending the story of the movement beyond the early 1980s, when most other accounts end.

Chapter 2

¹
Bread and Roses Newsletter
(November 1970): 5.

²
See Elaine Tyler May,
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Wini Breines,
Young, White, and Miserable
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Sara M. Evans,
Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America
(New York: Free Press, 1989), chapter 11.

³
Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Dell Publishing, 1963).

⁴
See Susan Chira, “Standing out in the Crowd,”
New York Times
(August 10 1993): A1, 16. Madeline Kunin’s autobiography offers a wonderful account of her life. See
Living a Political Life: One of America’s First Women Governors Tells Her Story
(New York: Knopf, 1994).

⁵
Sara Ruddick, “A Work of One’s Own,” in Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, eds.,
Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Livesand Work
(New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 129.

⁶
Marilyn Young, “Contradictions,” in Ruddick and Daniels, eds.,
Working It Out,
p. 215.

⁷
Ruddick, “A Work of One’s Own,” p. 141;.