TEN YEARS LATER: PERSPECTIVES ON THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT

...they have wanted redefinition of who they are and what they are worth both in private relationships and in public ones...

...Perhaps it is characteristic of subjugated groups to become convinced that they have little right to question the views of their "betters...

...They were also persuaded that their first commitment was to the home, whether or not they worked...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...Furthermore, young women were beginning to feel that by going to law school they could "be something' '—a lawyer—an experience few could have had after earning a degree in history or literature...

...In Friedan sketched the problems women faced in a society that judged itself by the degree of equality it offered its citizens while excluding women from that judgment...

...It seems clear that women need jobs more than training, especially because most work is learned on the job...

...We can, however, sketch some areas of major change and others where change is significant but countered by other conditions...

...Middle-class women had louder voices than lower-income ones...

...While Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others who organized the first woman's rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 were regarded as revolutionaries and insurrectionists, Friedan has drawn fire from both the Left and the Right— accused both of middle-class reformism and disruption of the family...

...At the level of middle management, men express fears that they are increasingly deprived of chances for upward mobility because blacks and women are favored for promotions...

...Furthermore, through the current movement women have sought to do more than demand greater access to the resources of society...

...Although these are "management" positions (and thus count on the charts monitored by government agencies) and pay executive-level salaries, these jobs are not on the track to high administrative offices...

...Contrary to critics who labeled the women's movement an enterprise of privileged white middleclass women, the AT&T case proved that women working for women were working for women at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid...

...A few groups argued that women should join together in their own communities, away from man, the enemy...

...Furthermore, the longer these views were supported and adopted by a majority of people, the more "normal" they appeared to be...

...Consider these examples: "the traits that compose the core of the female personality are feminine narcissism, masochism, and passivity...

...She indicated how women's powerlessness drove them to lives of vicarious fulfillment, and how as consumers but not producers they were playing a frustrating role, but one necessary for the continuation of the economic system...

...Quotas on women in medical schools, like those in law and business schools, had been kept at a fairly constant 3-10 percent from the first opening of the doors to women until the late 1960s...

...Yet Ella Grasso, just elected governor in Connecticut, or Congresswomen Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, and Yvonne Braithewaite of California all seem to be their "own women...

...To return to the American situation: in initiating a new woman's movement in 1966, Betty Friedan took a step that was to raise the consciousness of millions of American women and result in the formation of thousands of groups, both formal and informal...

...TEN YEARS LATER: THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT 171 women and minorities...

...But feminists are aware that affirmative-action programs in these organizations are the motivating factor in their hiring and not a sudden appreciation of women's talents...

...Not only the men, the women, too, tire of the battle and may retreat into traditional models of marriage to reestablish equilibrium in their lives...

...Slowly, the barriers to admission of women eased...

...need and distaste—which have not been characteristic of other subordinate groups...

...Still there was evidence that in some professions the study of women or problems relating to women was not considered as serious as study of other problems...

...Many remember the quality of life and work before (was it only ten years ago...

...The change of the feminist movement at the turn of the century from a radical ideology demanding change throughout society to one of relative moderation was probably caused by the powerlessness of women...

...283-88...

...None will easily let the new freedoms slip away...

...there is only the model of the ideal woman whose qualities of dedication to demure service and soft nurturance are inconsistent with the demands of a leader's office...

...only a crust, a crumb...

...Item: While women have increased their percentages in law (from 3 percent to 4.9 percent between 1960 and 1970) and medicine (from 7 percent to 9 percent), this has not substantially affected the generally unchanging sex-division of labor...

...Biology, it turned out, was more politics than science...

...Becoming a widow of a congressman or senator was a common route for women in American legislative life...

...who thought the added word might send the entire act to defeat...

...Lesbianism, in this context, was seen politically as a way of life for women who could express their sexuality apart from men...

...Intellectual and political arguments over sexual capacity, sexual etiquette, and sexual "rights" were fought in the laboratory, movement meetings, the media, and in the bedroom...

...Friedan's book described a malaise, "the problem that had no name...

...perhaps because their aspirations were spurred by rising opportunities they were more discontented...

...Here, as in other spheres, new freedoms created backlash...

...Although much media news about women's endeavors to improve their situation was tinged with derision and humor, and often only the dramatic and radical activities gained attention (picketing and those oft-cited but infrequent bra-burning demonstrations), women throughout America were reporting that they were reassessing their roles as housewives and mothers...

...Earlier, just 170 CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN getting the vote had been dismissed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as "not even half a loaf...

...In the legal profession, for example, women could only find work in the trusts and estates divisions of large firms, or had specialities in divorce, child custody, and real-estate work in smaller firms...

...And while there is some debate as to whether women left factory jobs voluntarily or were laid off because of low seniority, veterans' job priorities, and the closing of war-producing factories, women did not assert their "right" to jobs previously defined as men's work...

...Child care and housework still seem to be assigned to women universally, and this checks their ability to assume commanding positions in other areas of life, even where they constitute dominant numbers...

...There is always the chance that having won more equality in a few areas, as women did at the time they won the vote, they may lower their guard and their militancy...

...Lacking both conventional charisma of person and the charisma of family or office, but with a compelling intensity, she became a person with a message to be reckoned with, at a time when conditions in the economy and the ideological structure of the society were ripe for change...

...Neither past changes in the economy nor the two world wars, which utilized womanpower as never before, caused real alterations in women's roles...

...Part of the attack is directed at the alleged impropriety of her personal style and appearance...

...Law firms often were pleased to hire a few exceptionally able women attorneys...

...Educating women or opening opportunities to work have not necessarily been indicators of public sentiment supporting women's rights to equality...

...A recent count showed women's units within 67 professional organizations as diverse as the Society for Cell Biologists and the American Management Assocation...

...and the few women engineers who graduated in the early 1970s can pick and choose among com= panies looking for minority recruits...

...It was one thing to be for equal pay for equal work...

...Item: Many more women seem to be running for political office...

...There is great fear that a depression would destroy the now uneasy balance between the feminists and the gatekeepers of the opportunity structure...

...The Equal Economic Opportunities Commission (EEOC), which before had handled only cases of discrimination against minority people, established guidelines for compliance with Civil Rights Act provisions relating to women...

...But even this is often no solution because neither partner is really convinced of the ideological worthiness of the compromise...

...Although "the pill" surely made a large difference, contraception was widely used prior to its invention, and fertility, which increased or decreased according to the impact of other experiences, showed in general a downward trend...

...Women found it easier to get into law schools, not because the doors were opened in immediate accord with their demands, but because there were fewer male applicants (draft exemptions were not granted for law school...

...Not even a decade old, it has permeated the fabric of modem life...

...The whole notion of the need for special training may be a bugaboo...

...There were no longer unequal costs to women for having sexual relationships, and some were beginning to initiate them, but sexual equality, women soon found out, was not necessarily linked to equality in other spheres...

...Beliefs concerning women's sexuality had long been used to legitimate their second-class status...

...Science also provided a number of studies to back up that notion and showed case after case where female animals had to present themselves submissively to males in order for sex to work...

...Certainly, word was spreading throughout the U.S...

...That change did not come about by feminist effort alone...

...Men might fight for liberty, but women were to defend only the sanctity of the home and morality...

...Women, forever intimate and integrated with men, have been subservient to them, to a greater or lesser extent, in all societies...

...The swiftness with which they have advanced probably acts in their favor...

...Science had still not provided the answer to who was fit to make decisions in society...

...Those with children under three went up to 29.4 percent...

...Friedan translated ideas into action when she organized the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, and ever since she has been at the forefront of the enterprise, from the organization of the Women's Political Caucus to the first women's bank, and currently the Economic Think Tank on Women...

...Aside from pressure in the 1920s, which led to protective work legislation, women did not create focused political interest or do much lobbying...

...But it is clear that many of them are made assistants to senior executives, or administrative assistants in charge of personnel or affirmative-action programs...

...Science, like alcohol, can apparently make people sexier by loosening their inhibitions, or frigid by depressing them...

...I suggest that this is not because the competing ideas were less philosophically or scientifically sound, but because the gatekeeping, both formal and informal, of the males in power created support for the explanations they preferred...

...Splinter groups broke away from NOW in the late 1960s over issues of radical politics and on the role of lesbians in the movement...

...We know that Soviet women physicians (75 percent of all doctors) must also perform household duties unassisted by husbands, and without the mechanical aids available to American housewives...

...Myth conquered reality, and few recognized that a growing proportion of the labor force—close to one-third and increasing every year—were women...

...The antiegalitarian views—the Old and New Testaments...

...She gave form to women's distress, and provided sound social structural reasons for it...

...But it was clear that whatever truths were discovered, their interpretation could be used to serve any side of an issue...

...Women not counted among the many thousands in feminist organizations were nevertheless following feminist principles even as they rejected the "taint" of identification with the movement...

...All movements need momentum, and an ever-militant corps who will unceasingly maintain pressure...

...They were becoming sensitive to the discrimination they were facing in getting jobs, getting credit, the dependency problems they had in marriage and the disorienting anomie that divorce created in their lives...

...In all countries, and in the "socialist" ones too, despite the ideological claims of writers from Engels to Mao, entrenched habits of mind linked with the vested interests of men in power have kept women assigned to roles men don't respect or wish to perform.' In no country has women's equality yet been accomplished, or has there been complete reevaluation of modes of thought that define women's capacities and roles...

...We have no model of leadership for women...

...With a sense that enough has been done, government and the private sector may lean back and lessen their efforts...

...The problems of black people were obvious to all—even to those who chose not to do anything about them...

...The EEOC action against AT&T not only demonstrated that women had power if they cared to use it, but that there was support for their position in and out of government...

...AT&T was also forced to pay $15 million in back pay to persons who had been denied promotion because of discrimination and $23 million in immediate annual pay increases to women and minority males who were deemed underpaid in their job classifications...

...All of these factors create new conditions for the playing-out of the ambiguous commitment Americans have to women's equality...

...Those who are elected are highly visible and some (Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm) have spectacular images...

...In that way American women were more avant-garde than their sisters in the East European countries...

...It was claimed that men not only disliked all this talk about sexual rights for women, but were "turning off" and becoming impotent in response to these sexually emancipated women...

...The number of working mothers whose youngest child is in the age group from three to five rose by 13.2 percent since 1960...

...But in 1972, 49 percent were still unsympathetic with efforts of women's liberation groups...

...Such changes are extensive if one measures what has happened since the beginning of the woman's movement in the mid-60s...

...unique was that changes in behavior and attitudes were demanded, not only in the society but in personal life as well...

...This movement, multidimensional in character, is striking toward change in the structure of our major institutions, in the quality and content of our culture, and at the level of interpersonal dynamics...

...Getting the vote did not even put women into the political mainstream...

...Although most men today find it necessary to indicate a commitment to the ideals of equality, the translation of it into their personal lives is difficult and often cumbersome...

...Any set of freedoms creates problems of disharmonies between the rights and needs of the individuals involved...

...Today women lawyers are "choosing" specialities that seem largely the same or their equivalent...

...But statistics do not indicate the cause of change, or whether it is rooted or ephemeral...

...As women became more vocal in these male domains, they also insisted that sexism was embodied in the work of the professions and that it be identified and routed out...

...If women were not exercising political power, they were moving into the labor market in increasing numbers and played active nontraditional worker roles during the two world wars...

...The Soviet grandmother is the chief child-care institution in that country, as she is still in Italy, France, Germany, and, to some extent, in the United States...

...176 CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN...

...Young men expected them to be more available sexually outside of marriage and the women felt a compulsion to comply...

...But consider the uproar he would have generated had he asserted he fell somewhere "between" the racists and egalitarians...

...the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and even of political theorists such as Jefferson— have gained popular support through time while competing views—those of John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Gilmans Perkins, and later Karen Homey—did not...

...Assigned to the kitchen to cook for striking students in Columbia University...

...It was the EEOC and a number of feminist lawyers who took on the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the largest employer of women in the world, and won a landmark agreement forcing AT&T to provide goals and timetables for the hiring and promotion of 'I can only refer to the situation in China tentatively because there have been no large-scale studies of change in the role of women there and we are largely dependent on the reports of travelers for information...

...One can look at the data—statistics that indicate rates of change in terms of numbers of women who now work in fields they never worked in before...

...These organized professional women were instrumental in increasing the representation of women in professional and graduate schools...

...Many new women professors in law schools are asked to teach "women and the law" courses and find they are often lecturing mainly to women...

...Changing Women in a Changing Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp...

...Most social commentators agree that Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique provided the ideological underpinning for a woman's movement...

...There is also the insidious backlash many women are experiencing in their personal relations with men...

...The women's movement meanwhile was working steadily and expanded into academic and professional organizations of all types...

...Formally excluded from male societies, women sometimes had formed separate professional associations (which had low prestige and little power) or served peripherally in service roles in the "integrated" organizations...

...There was pressure for demystification of the male medical establishment by feminists and young male physicians who had become alert to the problems of minority groups in getting good medical care...

...In fact, sexuality and sexual activity became targets of attack...

...Item: The woman's movement gained strength during a time of high employment and a vigorous economy...

...Under pressure from the Catholic bishops, Congress had by 1929 cut appropriations for the Women's Bureau and the Children's Bureau...

...hooted off the platform at the SDS national convention for introducing women's liberation resolutions...

...The next day, his wife, when questioned on her views -if women's liberation apparently felt it a thorny issue, and only committed herself as far as "equal pay and equal opportunity" were concerned...

...Item: More women have entered graduate schools of business administration and are then getting management trainee positions in government and business...

...Now American women were reminded of their responsibility 172 CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN for maintaining the intensity of sexual drives in men...

...Young men, now seen as more egalitarian than their elders, may become more conservative as they face the competition of increasing numbers of women for a limited supply of jobs...

...In 1970, 65 percent of American women polled by Gallup believed they got as good a break in life as men, and the 1974 Roper poll reported that three out of four women interviewed said that being a woman has not prevented them from doing the things they wanted to do in life...

...An important qualitative change over the past is that a growing number of women in political life seem to have made their mark without attachment to a male politician...

...Yet each bit of advancement was met with severe opposition...

...Clearly, backlash is mobilizing in many forms...

...The achievements of the women's movement are not a joke, nor are those women who are committed to winning full equality...

...Feminists also analyzed medical texts in current use and exposed stereotyped characterizations of women's psychological makeup which had no basis in reality, 2 in the same way they monitored the media and schoolchildren's texts for stereotyping of women in classic housewife roles...

...Item: Women are going to work at all levels of the economic pyramid, and married women, even with preschool children, have become more firmly attached to the labor force...

...How curious that not only is the leader of the woman's movement judged by how well she fits the acceptable modes for a proper lady, but so too is the movement itself1 Polls indicate a growing sentiment in support of more equality for women, but they show that women not associated with women's groups do not care to be thought of as "women's lib" types...

...Consciousnessraising groups started in suburban neighborhoods with middle-aged women following the models set by young, college-aged women in urban centers...

...There continue to be tendencies toward creating boundaries between "men's work" and "women's work...

...It showed that women were oppressed as a class and that legislation giving middle-class women an opportunity to be hired as lawyers also gave lower-income women the opportunity to be promoted as supervisors in factories and businesses...

...Now that many law schools have classes that are nearly half female, the question remains whether substantial numbers will be able to get jobs...

...Although millions of women had left home to take jobs during World War II, traditional ideology convinced them to yield these jobs to male veterans after the war...

...Many women had felt physicians often treated them as hypochondriacal half-wits whose gynecological pains seemed less worthy of medical concern than pains associated with more androgenous zones of the body...

...Young feminists formed self-help clinics and recruited sympathetic women doctors, although there were few to choose from...

...A 1974 poll reported that almost half (46 percent) the women polled in a national sample preferred a marriage "where husband and wife share responsibilities more— both work, both share homemaking and childcare responsibilities...

...and "sexual pleasure is entirely secondary [to the urge of motherhood...

...The vote became like money in the bank that its owners were afraid to spend even as it lost value through inflation...

...Women, like blacks, are given separate work, apparently equal to male executive jobs but unequal in career potential...

...A major recession would hurt everyone and probably minority groups most, but this society's general acceptance of the idea of equality will make it difficult substantially to undo the work of these past ten years...

...So vulnerable were men, it was claimed, their very sexuality was dependent on women's submissive behavior...

...TEN YEARS LATER: THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT 173 Young women lawyers (as well as interested male researchers) learned that in a number of states women offenders were likely to receive stiffer sentences than men for the same crimes, because women's criminality was perceived as more threatening to the moral structure of society than men's...

...An increasing number of female heads of households, both black and white, have no choice but to work...

...This act, intended to stop discrimination against minorities, was amended to include sex in a last-minute effort by Representative Howard W. Smith (D...

...The movement was gaining strength in a context of concern with civil rights and it was also the time of debate over the Vietnam war...

...Not only did the act pass, it provided the major foundation for movement activity...

...Today there is enough organizational structure in local communities and nationally, in business and the professions, to keep movement projects going and recruit new adherents...

...2 Diana Scully and Pauline Bart, "A Funny'Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice: Women in Gynecology Textbooks," in Joan Huber, ed...

...The women's movement is without precedent because of the special ambivalences that mark the relationship of women to men—the components of attraction and withdrawal...

...mocked by Stokely Carmichael in his classic remark that the only position for women in the movement was "prone"—young women, finding themselves somehow excluded from all social reform programs, sought focus for their rights...

...The combination of law and the organization of women was powerful...

...and none will forget the hard work that went into changing them...

...In the past six or seven years, however, these major associations have had to cope with emergent women's caucuses, which pressed for representation in decision-making committees and offices...

...THE EDITORS the tragedy of their mothers' lives, seemed to be turning more toward planning careers that could be held (still in conjunction with marriage) throughout life...

...At most, women's suffrage may have put a brake on the further enactment of regressive legislation...

...But whether women had a problem, or how important it was, seemed unclear to women themselves...

...It has certainly been true of women, who, in public debate and in philosophical and psychoanalytic tracts, have accepted such definitions and the rationales supporting them...

...Many groups are protesting what they regard as preferential treatment for designated minorities...

...Before the modern woman's movement existed, Philip Wylie was complaining that "Momism" was killing the manhood of American men, and indeed there was a spate of scientific studies that "proved" mothers were responsible for traits ranging from juvenile delinquency and homosexuality to aggressive achievement motivation...

...What made the women's movement in the U.S...

...Witness President Gerald Ford's first address to a joint session of Congress on August 12, and his egregious assertion that he would be "the President of black, brown, red and white Americans, of old and young, of women's liberationists and male chauvinists and all the rest of us in between...

...numbers of women entering business and professional schools...

...it is now 38.3 percent of employed women...

...was the eternal debate, while in fact women were working...

...In fact, college-aged women, infused with a sense of the waste they saw as To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...

...Increasingly tight economic conditions create another source of trouble...

...Energy and the economy have the headlines...

...Item: While more women are now getting jobs in the male-dominated professions, they are still being directed into types of work considered "suitable" for women, and avoiding, or being kept out of, male preserves...

...The great fear of feminists is that the movement's apparent great strides will turn out to be token changes or the result of fads...

...Marriages seem ever more fragile under the new assaults of the incongruent needs for autonomy and privacy, for rest and support on the part of both partners...

...There is indication that the issues of women's equality is still a joke at high levels...

...sexual pleasure is entirely absent or secondary...

...The reaction of some Jewish groups against quotas (e.g., the DeFunis case) speaks to the sensitivity caused by competition between minority groups for a limited number of places...

...The home may have been where their heart was, or was expected to be, but their feet were often off and running...

...As Friedan was asking for women to be "in equal partnership with men," some women's groups were campaigning for separatism...

...Many women are consolidating the gains they have achieved in the struggle for equality by uncovering myths, by advancing in their work, without letting a sense of defeat stop their efforts...

...In writing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan became a Tom Paine for women...

...A general movement toward mass primary and secondary education, and then toward higher education for many students, meant that women were no longer confined to the home...

...love and hate...

...It was an 169 analytic book, and it had popular appeal...

...Because more has happened to alter the position of women in the past ten years than for a score of decades before, I think it is safe to assume that the woman's movement was the driving force...

...Although sexual mores had been changing toward greater liberality since the Victorian period, the talk about sex still seemed radical to many Americans...

...In the late 1960s these women started realizing the extent to which they themselves were victims of discrimination...

...Should or could women work...

...And as inflation puts a greater strain on family incomes, it creates a TEN YEARS LATER: THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT 175 need for both spouses to work...

...Many of the women most involved in "causes" were drawn from those who had been active in the civil rights movement or had been student activists...

...The "ghetto" phenomenon is manifested in other ways...

...There are also fears of the repercussions that may result from entrance of very large numbers of women into professions where they were virtually absent before...

...There were other allies...

...It is difficult to analyze the extent of these changes within American society...

...Family matters, or any areas related too closely to women, have always been at a disadvantage in the prestige structure of the professions...

...The statistics do not substantiate these fears, but it is certainly possible they may be realized as more women become trained...

...to be a marriage and divorce lawyer always meant to be less of a lawyer, as to be a family sociologist meant to be of lower rank than a sociologist of organizations...

...For example, newly created women's firms are dealing with "women's matters" (such as sex discrimination and rape as well as divorce) and thus come to be professional ghettos...

...The attitudes of judges and other lawyers toward women clients and attorneys became the target of feminist attack...

...Currently 56 percent of husband-wife families are multipleworker families, an increase over the present 47 percent of 1963...

...Employers are protesting the economic costs of special training for women...

...liberty, with its connotations of self-realization, was not deemed her province...

...Moving swiftly, organizations such as NOW and WEAL (Women's Equity Action League) sought to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...Friedan does not follow any "great man" model of leadership...

...It was another thing to be in on the discussion about the "big 0." Women's liberationists campaigned for the clitoral orgasm as Freud, in his way, had campaigned for the vaginal orgasm...

...Still, large questions remain...

...Thus women in medicine urged more respect for women as patients and the more serious study of diseases associated with their sex...

...174 CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN It is too early to be certain of the lasting consequences of the women's movement...

...Furthermore, there is some indication that attention directed toward improving the status of women is now being diverted into other realms...

...But there is often little time for movement activity if they have a job and are also doing the dishes and being the mothers in a society still unresponsive to the needs of women for household assistance and child care...

...In fact, a current poll by the Roper organization shows that 57 percent of the women questioned favored efforts to strengthen their status, an increase over the figures reported in 1971 and 1972 by Louis Harris, in which 40 percent and 48 percent expressed support...

...All changes in the direction of emancipation effected by the women's movement could expect to be sabotaged in newer and more subtle ways...

...New freedoms in sexual morality, which gave women permission to discard the ideal of chastity, had their repressive side...

...It was not so in the past...

...Women were insisting on their right to orgasm in reaction to older claims that women weren't as capable of sexual fulfillment as men...

...Employers may feel freer to retreat to older hiring practices, especially when their token group has been completed...

...In law, a number of vigorous women students' associations were formed...