HARD TIMES FOR THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

...Most women (about 80 percent) do "women's work" as typists, receptionists, and secretaries, as waitresses, retail clerks, and factory workers, as nurses and elementary school teachers...

...Some companies turn to comparable worth because they fear the high legal fees that will pile up if they are sued...

...Fantasies to the contrary, women's move into the labor force did not fundamentally alter the division of domestic labor...

...The early half-hearted calls for "free 24-hour-a-day child care" grew out of this goal...

...But according to Representative Patricia Schroeder, a major sponsor of the bill, it is a necessary first step and has a realistic chance of being voted into law despite vociferous small business opposition...

...Even more surprising than its success in the public sector is the extent to which major American corporations have been adopting forms of comparable worth...

...Eleanor Smeal, newly reelected president of NOW, is dedicated to "raising hell" as well as consciousness...

...Here is an issue of economic equity as well as a woman's and family issue, given the overwhelming proportion of women and children, and of femaleheaded families, among the poor in America...

...The wage gap between men and women runs the gamut from high-paid professionals to low-paid service workers, but of course is a far more pressing problem for women at the bottom of the scale, where full-time wages hover around the official poverty line...

...In 1984, one out of every four women working full time earned less than $10,000 a year...

...Sociologist Lenore Weizman's startling findings deserve reiteration: the "equitable distribution of property" and "no fault" divorce laws, promoted by feminists in the 1970s, have, ironically, had devastating effects on women and children...

...What we have is an off-again, on-again patchwork of state and federal laws, programs, and policies concerning taxes, wages, divorce and child support, family planning, pensions, income transfers, housing, and health care, all of which have major effects on American families...

...Even the women's movement has not seriously taken up this crucial issue in a way likely to mobilize broad support...

...At some companies this has meant reshaping their job evaluation systems to avoid bias against work typically done by women...

...As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan correctly points out, far fewer low- and moderateincome families would pay any income tax under these revised amounts...

...The percentage of mothers with children under age six who are in the labor force rose from 11.9 percent in 1950 to 18.6 percent in 1960 to 51.8 percent in 1984...

...Perhaps with adept union leadership, comparable worth could evolve into one part of a socially responsive wages policy and address the pressing needs of American working families...

...A recently renewed militancy strains to reverse this decline by emphasizing two "big issues" from the 1970s: abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA...

...Consensus around 401 such an approach might also build broad support for publicly funding abortions in the early months of pregnancy...

...Tax reform needs desperately to be incorporated into the feminist agenda...

...thirty states now have comparable worth bills pending or have commissions studying the issue...

...Comparable worth grows out of the undeniable fact that women continue to enter traditional women's occupations for reasons of their own, regardless of the low pay and status they receive...

...Among those whose youngest children are of school age, labor force participation climbed from 28.3 percent in 1950 to 65.4 percent in 1984...

...Federal tax policies have actually eroded family incomes considerably since the personal and dependent income exemption, the American equivalent of European children's allowances, was introduced at $600 per person in 1948...

...405...

...Their support for comparable worth policies indicates that they are no longer as willing to accept the low pay even though they still want these jobs...

...they can't afford to forgo their incomes, particularly at a time of increasing expenses...

...But as long as women remain the primary caregivers of young children and earn 404 lower wages, it is doubtful that many fathers would seize this opportunity...

...Others no doubt fear that the pending Congressional bill calling for a study will be the opening wedge for government approval to comparable worth...

...Support for Comparable Worth COMPARABLE WORTH IS A SPECIFIC initiative around which these new sentiments could coalesce...

...American individualism and the accompanying suspicion of governmentprovided services (particularly concerning the care of young children...

...Such an approach would distinguish between early and late abortions, highlight the normative superiority of birth control prior to conception...

...4 Alice Rossi, "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal," Daedalus 93 (Spring 1964...

...It is also true, as my husband continually reminds me, that many men are doing more than they ever thought they would, if less than their wives had hoped...

...it incorporates the feminist vision of gender equality by providing parental, not just maternity, leave...

...If feminists truly want to broaden their base, this is an issue that promises to reach far beyond the professional middle- and upper-middle-class women the movement has represented and attracted in the past...

...But the inadequacy of contemporary women's wages is clearer and more 403 damaging than ever, a result of changing roles and family structures, and renders the elaborate legal and historical arguments irrelevant in many ways...

...The misfit between children's school days and their parents' work days is a related issue...

...view women, not as a competitor, but as a member of the household...

...The most substantial (though still limited) childcare initiative in a long time is the Parental Medical Leave Act of 1986, a pending congressional bill that would provide parents with up to eighteen weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to care for a new baby or seriously ill child...

...Although the United States has not (or not yet...

...While the women's movement has tried to shed an earlier anti-family posture, it has not come to grips with women's familycentered roles and needs...

...Even during the Reagan period comparable worth has made considerable headway...

...One man summed up the views of the majority: "Right now I would say that you almost have to have the wife working...

...Affluent women hire out some of these tasks to other women...

...The National Organization for Women (NOW), during the post-ERA presidency of Judy Goldsmith, suffered substantial losses in its membership and treasury...

...perhaps proponents of child care and full employment could come together around demands for a shorter work day...

...President Smeal promises to win that battle this time around, ignoring the opposition of many women who fear more gender-blind legal "assistance" like that ushered in with divorce law reforms...

...BankAmerica, for example, added eye strain to its definition of physical labor, thus incorporating a previously neglected factor in typically female jobs at video display terminals...

...Blue-collar women are proud of their financial contributions to their families' well-being and suffer financially when they lose their jobs...

...Even with the revised "pro-choice" label, critics argue, abortion can easily become just another form of birth control, with no understanding of the profound difference between, say, an eight-monthold fetus and a recently united ovum and sperm...

...One does not have to accept Rossi's conclusions about the endocrinological bases of mothering to recognize the pressing needs that women have, and by nearly all accounts want to have, as members of families...

...Yet these enormous changes have not brought the radical transformations in women's conditions envisioned by 1960s feminists...

...Sylvia Ann Hewlett's A Lesser Life is an extended, persuasive elaboration on this theme.' One of the most acute new problems is that of working-class women in two-earner families...

...In promising to raise wages in traditionally female jobs it speaks to the problems of fairness, vulnerability, and economic weakness that women workers and their families now feel...

...Sheila Kammerman, probably the best-known American expert on European family policies, argues that for low-wage earners unpaid leave is not better than no leave at all...

...An either-or view of abortion that opposes the rights of the woman to those of the fetus is lopsided and bound to leave vast numbers of people dissatisfied...

...The women's issue is still very much a positive Democratic theme...

...Only about 10 percent of women work in the over-publicized, high-paid professions...

...The bill is designed to avoid the "trap" of women's special family-based needs and interests...

...In 1984, 70 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54 were working...

...The evolution of a two-earner family may be providing an opportunity for new family policies to gain support...

...A surprisingly large number of parents work different shifts from each other in order to be at home for their children...

...In fact, and put somewhat differently, people now start paying income taxes even when they are officially designated as falling below the poverty line...

...To offset the same percentage of per capita income today, the exemption would now be about $5,600, not the $1,000 per person to which it was recently raised...

...Coalition-Building Potential WHAT IS SIGNIFICANT, POLITICALLY, about the behavioral changes I've been describing is that they could translate into support for policies that would ease the tensions of women's dual family and work roles...

...When the moderator in the study, trying to tap resentment against working wives, asked "Is too much time spent thinking about working women and not enough time spent on housewives...

...The Equal Rights Amendment, the other major feminist initiative of the 1970s is also back in the headlines...

...Among working-class as well as middleand professional-class men and women, a twoincome family norm is gaining broad acceptance...

...The main thrust of feminists' interest in child-care concerns has been to redistribute parental functions within the family, to relieve women of exclusive day-to-day responsibility for children...

...Currently more than 60 percent of working mothers have no right to any maternity leave...

...There are complex reasons for this, including tradition and gender identity as well as the substantially unequal incomes, and thus power, of husbands and wives...

...There is no institutionalized solution to this problem...

...The ranks of women and children living in poverty include the growing proportion of lower-class teenaged mothers and their children as well as divorced women who previously had been supported by husbands...

...For several decades now many women have preferred working, even in jobs that are monotonous, tedious or physically demanding, to the isolation and relentless responsibility of being home with small children...

...Even if the Democrats recaptured the White House in 1988 and NOW were to achieve its two major goals, the women's movement would still be in deep trouble...

...But the bottom line is this: women at all class levels continue to do the lioness's share of housework and child rearing...

...Liberalized divorce laws have, unexpectedly, meant a loss of status and income for divorced women...

...Yet the dominant feminist strategy emphasizes the basic equality and sameness of men and women and thus the fight for equal rights...

...NOW's leaders insist that the right to an abortion is central to women's freedom...

...Need for Child Care IN A SIMILAR VEIN, child care remains a pressing problem that ever larger numbers of families with working mothers have to solve...

...NOW organized a major demonstration in Washington last March (estimates ranged from 80,000 to 120,000) in behalf of legalized abortion...

...For men and women this is grounded in economic necessity...

...Alice Rossi's classic essay, "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal," sounded the clarion call for this vision in 1964, the early days of contemporary feminism.' But a vision grounded in individual equality has obscured the special family-based roles and needs of women and has precluded a more pragmatic and policy-oriented approach that would introduce new public supports—for child care, family allowances, housing, taxes, and so forth—for women in their continuing traditional roles as mothers and wives...

...And another: "They [wives] have to [work], the cost of living is ridiculous...

...When asked, they consistently express compelling psychological reasons for taking a job outside the home...

...if the focus is on the work place...

...Her 1977 "Biosocial Aspects of Parenting" repudiated her earlier "over socialized" conception.' By providing data grounded in endocrinological research she now argues that there are significant and irreducible differences between men and women that account for the universality of women's child-caring functions...

...The historical origins of a sex-divided work force are complex and multidimensional, as crackling debates between feminist scholars have made clear in the recent Sears case...

...3 Stanley Greenbert Analysis Group, Focus Group on Michigan Democrats (New Haven, Ct., 1986...

...On one level the shift from "equal employment opportunity" to "comparable worth" reflects a changing conception of the meaning of difference...

...racial and class stratification and the resultant stigmatization of meanstested child care programs aimed at blacks and/or the poor (Head Start is an important exception...

...Several analysts have pointed to the glaring family policy gap between Europe and America, as though highlighting this disparity might embarrass the United States into enacting family allowances, parental leave policies, child care systems, etc...

...The men...

...5 Alice Rossi, "A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting," Daedalus 106 (Spring 1977...

...As a woman journalist, an affluent, recently remarried mother 402 of a ten-year-old and an infant put it: "You can hire a 'wife' to do the housework and cooking but you can't really hire a mother for your children...

...Taxes are another problem the response to which could both reflect and further generate a new national consensus...

...Economic difficulties stemming in large part from women's low wages might generate support for comparable worth and tax reform, just as parental struggles with conflicting familywork responsibilities may develop into support for child-care facilities and a parental leave policy that protects jobs of workers who are caring for a newborn or a seriously ill child...

...There is a growing awareness among feminists of the problems women face at both ends of the class scale...

...2 See Sylvia Ann Hewlitt, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986...

...Several issues could become the fulcrum of American family policy...

...Despite these depressing trends, some feminist hopes and media biases blended into a familiar image—the successful, "supportive" helpmate who shares child care, cooking, and even laundry with his fast-track mate...

...A recent study of the values and attitudes of "Democratic defectors" (those traditional Democrats who' voted for Reagan in 1984), commissioned by the Democratic party, provides evidence that even in this group, clearly more conservative than Democrats who supported Mondale, there is a growing sensitivity to women's issues, particularly those concerning the work place and working women.' The men, like typical working women, define women's work in terms of its contribution to the family...

...they don't persuade their husbands to do them...

...The moral ambiguities surrounding abortion may not lend themselves to political organizing and catchy slogans, but the dangers of ignoring these complexities should be obvious by now...

...The troubles of feminism have as much to do with success as with defeat...

...The main change in household/family work ushered in by women's shift into the work force is an overall reduction in the amount of housework that gets done, not its distribution by sex...

...Washington state, despite its apparent legal victory over the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and comparable worth, is spending nearly $500 million to raise the pay of women workers...

...Many working mothers, particularly those in traditionally "female jobs," find themselves more exhausted than fulfilled, poorly paid in spite of equal pay legislation in some states, and still faced with the main responsibility for home and children—the "double day...

...to offset their vulnerability...

...Women in the work force represent an opportunity for the family to get ahead...

...Within a year of divorce the standard of living of the typical ex-husband rises 42 percent while that of the ex-wife (who probably has the kids) dives 73 percent...

...We need a far more complex approach that incorporates and tries to reconcile these entangled claims...

...Notes 1 Economist Diana Pearce coined the term "Feminization of Poverty" in the late 1970s to connote the worsening economic situation of women and children...

...Again the men's responses indicated an absence of hostility and a wellspring of sympathy...

...Upper-middle-class men and women are more likely to give verbal support to this new ideal than are working-class adults, but research suggests that across classes the division of domestic labor remains nearly as lopsided as ever...

...Think of the countless articles on the problems of "Having It All...

...Rossi has again provided a clear and extreme formulation of the problem...

...Feminist involvement in child care has been anchored mainly in women's, not children's, interests and has been part of the wider critique of inequality within the family...

...Even as a de facto maternity leave policy the bill has serious weaknesses...

...Attention to Women in the Work Force MORE AMERICAN WOMEN THAN EVER BEFORE, including those with very young children, are in the labor force...

...From this perspective, the advancement of women at work is considered an economic necessity...

...We still lack identifying labels and related observations and popular accounts that would sensitize us to this experience...

...the defectors didn't take the bait...

...These problems will not disappear...

...Even fast-track women with annual salaries of $80,000 and more, and often working far more than forty hours a week, have to juggle the competing demands of work and family...

...Feminists' preoccupations with abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment have distanced the movement from the compelling daily concerns most families increasingly face within, and between, their work and family roles...

...While social science literature reinforced popular conceptions in the 1960s and 1970s by emphasizing male resistance to women working for pay, some current studies paint a very different picture...

...Searching for men's political resentment against women (as the study had earlier for whites against blacks), the moderator asked: "Is too much attention being paid to the condition of women...

...As things now stand, working parents are left on their own to construct and mend the patchwork arrangements that meet their, and their children's, needs...

...ignoring them creates an opening for the not-so-new right...

...Neither of these issues gets at the two fundamental problems facing women today: increasing impoverishment even as their individual freedoms expand and the conflicting demands of work and family...

...According to the report summary...

...According to the April 28, 1986 Business Week, comparable worth is having some impact at AT&T, BankAmerica, Chase Manhattan, IBM, Motorola, and Tektronix...

...developed a comprehensive family policy, it has not avoided the problems that would call such a policy into being...

...and weaknesses in the child care coalition of the 1960s and 1970s have all been offered as reasons for the absence of a child-care policy in America...

...It is unfortunate that these issues of basic need and fairness are being forced into the procrustean bed of overt discrimination and legal rights, but this is not the only arena in which these battles are being fought...

...The House of Representatives passed a bill last October that would require a comparable worth study of federal workers...

...But the real opportunity comes now from the insistent and unmet needs that women and men experience regularly...

...An affluent few hire fulltime nannies and housekeepers, most commonly before their children enter "full day" schooling...

...This "rights" perspective emphasizes individual autonomy while neglecting an essential but different morality, one that values connection, caring, and responsiveness to the most vulnerable...

...It would also entail developing adoptive and social services to support the unwanted children who will, inevitably, be born...

...Finally, feminists' interest in child care reflect the conviction that children, freed from the corrupting influences of their traditional families, hold the key to a nonsexist future...

...Attention to Women in Poverty THE BITTEREST PILL TO SWALLOW iS that women and children have become the poorest people in our society.' The decline of the traditional family, while genuinely liberating for some women, has delivered many more women into poverty...

...And to compound the problem, one out of every four mothers in the work force is maintaining her own family...

...By expanding the discussion morally and intellectually feminists could speak to the qualified support that most women and men have given abortion over the years...

...Although feminist rhetoric has shifted substantially since the 1960s, from "population control" to "abortion on demand" to "a woman's right to control her own body" or "pro-choice," some underlying moral reservations and questions of numerous women (many of them feminists) go unanswered...