The Longest Revolution

...Even more significantly, millions of women had entered jobs that had once been reserved for men...

...television executives believed women didn't have enough credibility to anchor the news...

...By the end of the twentieth century, feminist ideas had burrowed too deeply into our culture for any resistance or politics to root them out...

...On the other hand, the lives of many ordinary working women, who had not become impoverished, improved in dramatic ways...

...She was right: no movement could have challenged so many ideas and customs without threatening vast numbers of women and men...

...Second Wave feminists questioned nearly everything, transformed much of American culture, expanded the idea of democracy by insisting that equality had to include its women citizens, and catapulted women's issues onto a global stage...

...Some political analysts now believed that women were voting their interests as workers, family caregivers, or as single or divorced mothers...

...But some revolutions are harder to recognize: no cataclysms mark their beginnings or ends, no casualties are left lying in pools of blood...

...language became more gender-neutral...

...As women activists learned to see the world through their own eyes, the feminist movement fragmented, and new populations of women—trade unionists, the old, the young, racial and ethnic minorities, some of whom had initially spurned feminism—began to assert different priorities...

...ABACKLASH WAS inevitable, though few anticipated its ferocity...

...Some states even excluded women from jury duty...

...Women of all classes and income levels were also aware of the ways in which gender shaped their lives...

...banks routinely denied women credit or loans...

...Such was the case with the modern women's movement...

...The public believed that any rape victims had probably "asked for it...

...With its rallying cry of "family values" in the 1980s, the Republican right successfully tied up the Equal Rights Amendment in state legislatures and took the first steps to curtail the right to an abortion...

...and female doctors from 15,672 to 174,000...

...Revel in it...

...In 1992 a Newsweek article described how twenty years of the women's movement had changed Appleton, Wisconsin (the home town of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society...

...There is firm community consensus, and generous funding with local tax dollars, for Harbor House, a shelter for battered women...

...Her answer: "The world would split open...

...But they left much unfinished as well...

...First Wave suffragists fought for women's citizenship and created international organizations dedicated to universal disarmament, but left many customs and beliefs unchallenged...

...Many men and women did not see it cornDISSENT / Spring 2000 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS ing...

...schoolchildren learned about sexism before they became teenagers...

...popular culture saturated society with comedies, thrillers, and mysteries that turned on changing gender roles...

...to the center of American politics...

...And so they had...

...This has been the longest revolution of the century...

...By then, there was no single movement...

...All hurricanes bore female names, thanks to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society...

...In 1986, a Gallup poll asked women, "Do you consider yourself a feminist...

...Consider the last half of the twentieth century...

...Radio producers considered women's voices too abrasive to be on air...

...Bars often refused to serve women...

...As we enter a new century, it is wise to remember that the struggle for women's human rights has just begun...

...Eventually the gender gap would cause at least a (temporary) realignment of national politics...

...But it took the modern women's movement to address the many ways women felt exploited, to lend legitimacy to their sense of injustice, and to name and re-interpret customs and practices that had long been accepted, but for which there was no language...

...In 1967, the well-respected and internationally renowned sociologist David Riesman, then a professor at Harvard University, uttered one of the most hilarious predictions in recent history...

...Sixty-seven percent of all women favored a strong women's movement...

...Meanwhile, women in other parts of the globe, fueled by international conferences, began challenging different forms of patriarchal authority and inventing feminism all over again...

...If you're on the right track, you can expect some pretty savage criticism," veteran feminist Phyllis Chesler warned young women at the close of the twentieth century...

...A gender gap did not appear until 1980, when more men than women voted for Ronald Reagan, whose opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion may have moved some women into the Democratic column...

...During the 1950s, before the revolution began, the president of Harvard University saw no reason to increase the number of female undergraduates because the university's mission was to "train leaders," and Harvard's Lamont Library was off limits to women for fear they would distract male students...

...In the 1950s, women COMMENTS & OPINIONS constituted only 20 percent of college undergraduates, and their two most common aspirations were to become the wife of a prominent man and the mother of several accomplished children...

...Everyday life had also changed in small but significant ways...

...meteorologists named hurricanes after both men and women...

...A 1989 poll found that 51percent of all men, 64 percent of white women, 72 percent of Hispanic women, and 85 percent of African-American women agreed with the statement, "The United States continues to need a strong women's movement to push for changes that benefit women...

...With that broadening constituency, many different feminisms began permeating American society...

...As late as 1970, Edgar Berman, a well-known physician, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency of the nation...

...Pollsters consistently found that more African-American women approved of the goals of the women's movement than did white women...

...Bursts of artillery fire, mass strikes, massacred protesters, bomb explosions—these are our images of revolution...

...It is the truest measure of your success...

...This was the year that the modern women's movement began spreading across the country and entering ordinary parlance...

...Though people may suffer greatly, their pain is hidden from public view...

...But the growth of gender consciousness had altered society and culture in countless ways...

...Poor timing...

...The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life...

...Her most recent book is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America...

...At a time when identifying yourself as a feminist felt like a risky admission, 56 percent of American 6 . DISSENT / Spring 2000 women were willing to do so (at least privately to Gallup's pollsters...

...As some middle-class women captured meaningful and well-paid work, ever more women slid into poverty and homelessness, which, on balance, the women's movement did too little, too late, to change...

...Each generation of women activists leaves an unfinished agenda for the next...

...employers paid women less than men for the same work...

...They were unable to change most institutions, to gain economic justice for poor women, or even to convince society that child care is the responsibility of the whole society...

...By 1990, women constituted 54 percent of undergraduates and they wanted to do anything and everything...

...But at the height of the backlash, ironically, more American women, not fewer, grasped the importance of the goals of the women's movement...

...Perhaps the most important legacy was precisely that "women's issues" had entered mainstream national politics, where they had changed the terms of political debate...

...And there is an active effort, in the Appleton public schools, to eliminate the invidious stereotyping that keeps young women in the velvet straitjacket of traditional gender roles...

...In August 1980, a New York Times editorial declared that the women's movement, once viewed as a group of "extremists and troublemakers," had turned into an "effective political force...

...RUTH ROSEN is a history professor at the University of California, Davis...

...so much so that young women who come of age in the twentieth-first century may not even recognize the America that existed before the feminist revolution came about...

...As each generation shares its secrets, women learn to see the world through their own eyes, and discover, much to their surprise, that their problems are not theirs alone...

...Women, the magazine reported, had taken on significant roles in local politics...

...Activists didn't hurl tear gas canisters at the police, burn down buildings or fight in the streets...

...Trust it...

...In 1985, commenting on legislation that would support child support for all families and that would give wives access to their husbands' pensions, another editorial declared that " Women's Issues' have already become everyone's...

...The cumulative impact of decades of revelations, education, debates, scandals, controversies, and high-profile trials raised women's gender consciousness, which in turn eventually showed up in a long-awaited political "gender gap...

...Words of wisdom from one of the pioneer activists who understood the meaning of a fierce backlash...

...LONG BEFORE the modern women's movement began, American women's participation in both the labor force and the sexual revolution had dramatically altered their lives...

...Their greatest accomplishment was to change the terms of debate, so that women mattered...

...most women felt too ashamed to report it...

...and two decades after the movement's first years, the number of women politicians doubled...

...Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex...

...During the same period, the number of female lawyers and judges leaped from 7,500 to 108,200...

...by 1990, that figure had jumped to 58 percent...

...DISSENT / Spring 2000 • 7...

...women didn't run big corporations or universities, work as firefighters or police officers, sit on the Supreme Court, install electrical equipment, climb telephone poles, or own construction companies...

...The nation's citizens are deeply divided about the changes that have transformed the lives of women...

...At the center of the "culture wars" remains the debate over the proper role for modern women in American society...

...It has moved where it belongs...

...It is for a new generation to identify what it needs to achieve greater equality...

...Few people knew more than a few women professors, doctors, or lawyers...

...In 1960, 35 percent of women had worked outside the home...

...As a result, American women won the right to "have it all," but only if "they did it all...

...Women had also joined men in both blue-collar and professional jobs in startling numbers...

...In 1996, some 16 percent more women than men voted for Bill Clinton for president...

...In Appleton, "There are women cops and women firefighters, and there are women in managerial jobs in local business and government...

...Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs., depending on her marital status, and if a woman wanted an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life, searching in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor...

...and no language existed to make sense of marital rape, date rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment...

...The backlash, in short, reflected a society deeply divided and disturbed by rapid changes in men's and women's lives, at home and at work...

...A revolution is underway and there is no end in sight...

...Nor did they overthrow the government, achieve economic dominance or political hegemony...

...The editorial concluded "that the battle for women's rights is no longer lonely or peripheral...

...But they did subvert authority and transform society in irrevocable ways...

...Although women had not gained the power to change institutions, they had joined men in colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers...

...Strangers addressed a woman as Ms...

...Writing in Time magazine in 1967, he declared, "If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women...

...And, so it has...

...Just two words summed up the injuries women suffered in silence: "That's life...

...But the backlash masked another reality...

...Gender gap or not, the rightward tilt of American politics led to the demonization of poor women and their children...

...In 1871, Susan B. Anthony had prematurely predicted that once women got the right to vote, they would vote as a bloc...