When Everything Changed (47 page)

F
OR ALL ITS ACHIEVEMENTS
, the women’s movement had not managed to solve the work/family divide. “You second-guess yourself at work, you second-guess yourself at home, and you second-guess yourself in terms of your own personal time,” said Kathy Hinderhofer, a Boston bank executive with two daughters. “That’s one thing the women’s movement may not have foreseen.” The children themselves were generally not shy about expressing their opinions. Jo Meyer Maasberg says that when her daughters were growing up, they told her that “I spent too much time with other people’s kids,” teaching and grading papers. “They said they would never be teachers. So I guess I didn’t know I was causing tensions, but yet I guess I did.”

Those are the kinds of remarks that stay with a mother long after the children have forgotten uttering them. Jo’s daughter, Jennifer Maasberg Smith, says now that she thinks things “worked out pretty good.” Her mother was not, after all, far away in the little rural Wyoming school system. For six years, she taught Jennifer’s class. “It was funny because she gave me this big speech… how I had to show her respect and call her Mrs. Maasberg and, you know, all on the same playing field as the other kids. But I couldn’t call her Mrs. Maasberg. I called her Mom. So my whole class called her Mom.”

A
LISON FOSTER HAD MADE HER FORAY
into virtually every lifestyle arrangement on the map since her original, idyllic take-the-baby-to-work routine fell apart. She became a typical New York working mother, delivering her son Justin to day care via the subway. “And I would run to work and I’d always be late, and I’d work and at six o’clock I’d run back down and pick him up.” She found the routine frazzling and isolating. “Advertising was definitely a singles business,” she said. “There were men that were married, and they went back home to the suburbs, but not women.” Once, at a meeting, a very successful advertising woman suddenly announced, “I’m turning 40 tomorrow and I don’t have any children. I hate rug rats.”

“She hates me because I have a child,”
Foster thought.

Eventually she and her husband moved to the suburbs, but she found the commute even more draining. Pregnant again, she quit and settled in to become a full-time housewife. “I just hated it,” she said. She felt intimidated by the other mothers, who seemed to her to be doing things perfectly. (“I never had the right stroller.”) And she missed working. “I loved
coming home
to my kids,” she laughed.

The family moved to Europe for her husband’s work. Living in a rather remote Italian village with the children while he traveled constantly, Alison was just as lonely as she had been in the suburbs.

“But at least I’m in Italy,” she told herself.

“I
T WAS BEFORE WASHING MACHINES
.”

In the 1970s, as we’ve seen, Congress bowed to pressure from social conservatives who believed a mother’s place was in the home, and killed plans to provide early child-care programs for American families who wanted them. In 1996, under pressure from many of the same forces, it decided the government should not help support poor single mothers so they could stay home with their children.

A national debate over welfare had been raging for a quarter century by then. The least-popular woman in America was probably Linda Taylor of Chicago, although virtually no one knew her name. She was the model for the “welfare queen” that Ronald Reagan talked about endlessly during his 1976 campaign for president.
Reagan never used
that offensive term, but over and over, he told shocked audiences about the woman who had “eighty names, thirty-six addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” and who used them to collect $150,000 in government benefits.
The real Taylor
was not nearly as good at milking the system as the one Reagan conjured up—she was eventually convicted of welfare fraud and perjury for using two aliases to collect $8,000. But she became an all-purpose emblem of a welfare system that average Americans were coming to hold in contempt.

The nation had been offering aid to poor women with children and no husbands since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but the original recipients were mainly widows. By the last decade of the century, they were almost all unmarried mothers. Most women receiving money under the program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, were white, and although the AFDC benefits were modest to impossibly stingy, depending on the state, many Americans seemed to envision recipients as black women who used their food stamps to buy cans of lobster and other luxuries struggling middle-class families never got to enjoy. Many people also believed that these women kept having more and more babies just so they could get higher benefits, even though the amounts they might gain were so small it would have been a suicidal strategy.

When Congress ended welfare as an entitlement, turning it into a short-term support system that could generally be extended only for the disabled, its backers predicted the change would reduce unwed motherhood. “
When we started the current
welfare program, two-parent families were the norm in poor families in America,” said Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. “Today two-parent families are the exception.” President Bill Clinton did not appear to share that theory, but he signed the bill into law in order to end a controversy that had left the Democrats connected, in many voters’ eyes, with “welfare cheats.” Clinton’s expectations were the ones that held true. Welfare, once the hottest of hot-button political topics, quickly dropped out of the national political debate.

Like the divorce reforms of the 1970s that presumed ex-wives should go to work to help support their children, the 1996 welfare law was a blow to stay-at-home housewives. Whatever it did or did not accomplish, it was a public statement by the federal government that the nation did not put all that much value on full-time mothering. “
When the original welfare
program began, the family was seen as an arrangement where the husband went out to work and the woman stayed home and kept house and raised the children. It was before washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners,” said Senator Daniel Moynihan, who had championed a less-drastic version of welfare reform. But now, he said, many “self-respecting” middle-class women were working to help support their families, and the American public had a right to expect poor women to work outside the home as well.

In truth, the social rule that mothers should stay at home with their children had seldom been applied to poor women.
After the Civil War
, white Americans in both the North and South denounced black families in which only the husband worked. And from the time there were factories in American cities, there were women, many of them mothers, working in the assembly lines. Still, it was ironic that some of the same people who drove down the Equal Rights Amendment, and argued ferociously for motherhood as an all-important calling, were making it their mission to send the mothers of the poorest and most at-risk youngsters into the workplace.

Rather than reducing illegitimacy—or creating a huge spike in homeless families, as some opponents predicted—the changes in welfare seemed mainly to save the government money. Nine million families, virtually all of them composed of single women and their children, left the welfare rolls. A great many women did go to work, but few managed to pull themselves out of poverty. There was some modest evidence that the children benefited if they wound up in day-care programs while their mothers were working, but only about one-seventh of the eligible children actually got day-care subsidies, and there were long waiting lists in at least twenty states.
Jason DeParle, who had
covered the welfare story as a
New York Times
reporter, followed three Milwaukee women to see what effects the changes would have on them and their families. Angie, the most ambitious, got a job as a nurse’s aide, stitched together enough cash to pay for a used car, and then also hopefully signed up with a temporary-employment agency to make extra money. When she finished filling out her application, she discovered her car wouldn’t start. Then it began to rain. Other commuters driving home for dinner, DeParle wrote, “had no way to know that the drenched woman trudging down the road was a welfare-to-work marvel trying to work two jobs.” The high-paying temp service never did come through with enough work to make a difference, and Angie—who was caring for some of her cousin’s children as well as her own—was often unable to get the utility bill paid before the lights went off. “
On welfare Angie
was a low-income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos… ,” DeParle concluded. “Off welfare, she was a low-income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos.” Since Angie often had to leave home before her five kids were awake, they became chronic class-cutters. Her teenagers began experimenting with sex, and her oldest daughter was resentful of being stuck with so much responsibility for the younger children. When DeParle asked Angie if her family was proud of her for holding down a job, she seemed puzzled. “I don’t think the kids think about that. They’d like it if I’d just sit around with them all day,” she said.

“L
EGAL ONLY IN CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES
.”

In 1995 Norma
McCorvey, the Jane Roe in
Roe v. Wade,
switched sides. She had been a pro-choice activist and written a book in which she described herself as “a poor, half-crazed, half-ordinary woman who had been picked by fate to become a symbol of something much bigger and finer than herself.” But she was still subject to depression and bouts of heavy drinking. McCorvey was working at a women’s clinic that offered abortions when she got to know people from the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, who were picketing outside. After talking with them for a while, she claimed she could hear the sound of a baby’s laughter in the clinic and began telling women who called to schedule an abortion that they were killing their child. She converted to evangelical Christianity in a baptism filmed for television and took a job in the Operation Rescue office. “My life has been restored to me, and now I have the privilege of speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves,” she said at the National Memorial for the Unborn in 1997.

The pro-choice camp suggested McCorvey’s change of heart had to do with a desire for attention. (“
They could have been nice
to me instead of treating me like an idiot,” she told CNN.) Whatever lay behind the transformation, it did dramatize the constantly shifting feelings about abortion rights. The pro-choice movement had hoped the issue was settled after
Roe v. Wade,
but instead, opposition to the abortion decision helped precipitate the rightward turn of American politics in the 1980s and the alliance between the Christian right and fiscal conservatives that propelled George W. Bush into office.

For the majority of Americans, the idea of terminating a pregnancy was an uncomfortable one, yet most did not want to eliminate the option. When poll takers came calling, people jumped at any answer that suggested it was none of their business and was a matter between a woman and her doctor. When simply asked whether abortion should be legal or illegal, they tended toward anything in the middle—such as “legal only in certain circumstances.”
Even many of the
women who told
New York Times
pollsters in 1989 that the nation still needed a women’s movement to fight for them said they were opposed to abortion on demand—roughly half favored more restrictions than existed at the time.

The abortion rate peaked
in 1981, when roughly 3 percent of all women of childbearing age in America terminated a pregnancy. It then began to decline slowly. In 2005, 1.2 million abortions were performed, or about 2 percent of women of childbearing age. But since most women weren’t pregnant in any given year, that was still one out of every five pregnancies.

Americans were most likely
to support early abortions, and nearly 90 percent of the procedures performed in the United States occurred during the first three months of pregnancy. By 2005 more than 60 percent would occur during the first eight weeks. The arrival of RU-486, a French drug that caused a fetus to abort without medical intervention very early in pregnancy, helped to propel the trend. But there was very little talk about any sort of compromise that would make early abortions easier to obtain and later ones more difficult. Political advocates on both sides tended to see the issue in terms of absolutes—a woman’s constitutional right to control her own body versus the belief that the fetus had the full rights of a human being. (
In South Dakota, an antichoice
leader said she rejected any suggestions about compromise because “I have to save as many children as I can.”) On the farthest fringe, abortion opponents believed violence was justified if it was directed against people who were involved in what they saw as mass murder. Between 1993 and 1998, seven people were killed in attacks on abortion clinics or on doctors who performed abortions. That led, not surprisingly, to a decline in the number of doctors, hospitals, and clinics willing to provide abortion services. The decline would become more dramatic from 2000 on, leaving women in many parts of the country with few options, no matter how early their pregnancy or how desperate their situation.