WOMEN FIGHT BACK

...All this is heady stuff for a movement that has been portrayed in recent years as confused, declining, or even dead...

...Stevens and Wynn-Dixie are women...

...If she says, 'I don't know,' say, 'Hey, we're having a meeting.' And if you aren't, organize one...

...unions whose members have argued that conventions should not be held in those states...

...And they lobbied — in ones and twos and by the hundreds, in person, by mail, and by telegram...

...When the ERA Strike Force crosses state lines to lobby, it is not as "outside agitators" but as representatives of the three-quarters of the American people who live in states that have decided equal rights for women should be law...

...But feminists have also had to take a hard look at the ERA, and many of us discuss it now as we never did back in 1973...

...But it is not the entire American women's movement, only its most organized and visible component...

...city councils which have debated reimbursement of travel to conferences in those states...

...Therefore, the story suggested, feminism causes unemployment and poverty...

...city, is the largest organization in world feminism...

...Though the ERA campaign takes precedence, NOW made clear that reproductive rights is the next item on the agenda...

...Finally, there has been the defeat of gay rights referenda in several cities...

...No movement gets blamed so often for what it doesn't cause, and credited so rarely for the good things it accomplishes...

...We are meticulously shaping an organization that can be democratic, on a budget that couldn't even finance one Senate campaign...

...Liz Cbpeland, a matronly black NOW member from Florida explained how she works for the ERA: "You just ask a woman in the supermarket about it...

...This is not the only possible outcome...

...They also saw a need to create an understanding of the ERA as a national issue, so that people in states that have ratified the Amendment would work as hard as those in states that have not...

...To her, the feminist movement is distant and irrelevant...

...NOW, with its 90,000 members across the country and chapters in every major U.S...

...By now, the movement has reached into the lives of most women...

...We are building an independent political movement in every state...

...an alliance with the AFL-CIO center could lead NOW to moderate some of its more radical demands for economic equality for women...

...Small groups of women are working around the country on specific issues — setting up a hotline for rape victims or a shelter for battered wives, mounting a political challenge to the status quo, issuing feminist newspapers and journals, organizing women's caucuses in unions and professional organizations...

...Since women and minorities have been played off against each other on questions ranging from seniority rights to Federal contracts, a united force here could be important...

...A recent headline announced that more women are holding down highly paid jobs and marrying men who do the same...

...Just as important is the fresh wind of optimism blowing through the feminist movement...

...hall in the Washington Hilton Hotel two fiftyish women in polyester yelled back, "Eat your heart out...

...Minority groups also worked closely with NOW, and more cooperation is expected...

...NOW strategists felt the extension was necessary to show that a national movement exists that cares about the ERA, and that the women's movement is alive and strong and can summon many allies...

...Far from being a movement of affluent white career women, it includes, minority women, labor activists, students, lesbians, housewives, retired women, handicapped women, women with jobs at all levels of the economic spectrum, and a smattering of men...

...Coretta Scott King, one of several minority speakers at the conference, pledged to get the ERA passed in her home state, Georgia, and the delegates sang We Shall Overcome as she left the stage...

...This is not just a quid pro quo...

...NOW has a network so streamlined that the organization's board can mobilize key NOW activists in an hour and a half...

...Californians subsequently rejected the initiative at the polls...

...The still largely male editors of the nation's press tend to play up any sign of weakness in the women's movement while playing down its successes...

...The key to winning the ERA extension was NOW's mobilization of its own membership...

...The Lesbian Workshop's resolution to fight against the California Briggs initiative, which would have denied employment to gay teachers and teachers who defend homosexuality, passed easily...

...These will include massive lobbying, targeting of Congressional "enemies of reproductive freedom" for defeat, coordinated local actions, and pro-choice education for public schools...

...Some members quit jobs and worked nights and weekends after the organization declared a "state of emergency" on the Amendment in March 1978...

...As they have committed themselves to seeking a society where women and men can live together as equals, many NOW members have come to question the basic assumptions of capitalism...

...The divisions in the enemy camp also helped...

...But without the movement, Wanda might well be riding the bus to an office job at barely half the pay...

...First, the radical Right decided to make the ERA its issue just when it looked as if the Amendment would pass without much debate, permitting feminists to move on to more advanced issues...

...Though the ERA was the major topic of the NOW convention, there were others...

...It is probably the combination of organized strength and diversity that has kept the women's movement going in the 1970s, when so many other progressive causes have kept a low profile...

...Like many other seekers after social justice, feminists need to move from the defensive to the offensive...

...many NOW members have come to question the basic assumptions of capitalism' The 1977 International Women's Year Conference in Houston was a turning point, but only a symbolic one...

...But there are stirrings within the labor movement, which also is looking for new allies and new answers...

...A case in point was the National Issues Conference of the National Organization for Women (NOW...

...Though the SWP has made NOW wary of socialists, NOW's determined effort to build coalitions may well contribute to formulation of a stronger, more unified Left which could serve, in turn, as the seedbed of an indigenous socialist movement...

...That's why the ERA extension victory was so important: It showed the women's movement could successfully compete with the Right at the grass roots, could build a strong coalition...

...But manipulative tactics pursued by some sectarian Left organizations have had a chilling effect on the interest in socialist alternatives...

...The right-wing assault and the growing feminist response have compelled us to think more carefully about the meaning of formal equal rights under the law...

...complained to me that other female officers had no understanding of feminism...

...It began on the same day last fall that the Senate finally passed the extension to the Equal Rights Amendment, giving state legislatures three years and three months more to pass the measure...

...recognizing the bond between oppression based on "sex, race, sexual preference, poverty, or ethnic background" and struggling against all simultaneously, and creating full employment by expanding such social services as child care, not the military-industrial complex...

...NOW leader Fran Kolb points out that the boycott of states that have failed to ratify ERA has made the Amendment a topic of political discussion in unlikely places: chambers of commerce in states that have not ratified, many of which have become pro-ERA lobbyists to get their business back...

...A parade of convention labor speakers stressed solidarity...

...we're paid the same as the men and do the same work...

...In particular, the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), as self-appointed guardian of political "correctness," has been a disruptive force, insisting not only on its own rigid positions but even on its own jargon...

...There is also a quiet explosion of women's art that is just beginning to come to the fore — women's music festivals in Illinois and Michigan that draw thousands each summer, women's presses, artists' collectives, filmmakers...

...Phyllis Schlafly, wherever you are...," a blue-jeaned young college student called out, and at the other end of the Judy MacLean, a Chicago free-lance writer, is a member of the political committee of the New American Movement...

...A feminist police officer — "That's police officer, not policewoman...

...Stevens boycott, and the boycott of Wynn-Dixie stores...

...We all live in an unratified country," says a popular NOW button...

...Yet the conference committed no one to anything...

...We're no longer going to fight with civil rights groups over a few crumbs," says Smeal...

...The major point of the extension drive was not, in fact, more time...

...But there are signs the feminist movement is a growing force in American political life — one that can no longer be ignored or misrepresented as merely a vague set of lifestyle changes...

...As early as 1974, NOW adopted a program that called for concentrating the movement's energies on improving the quality of life for all women rather than just getting token women into positions of power...

...Labor was a crucial ally in the ERA extension fight, and NOW passed a resolution calling for more work with unions in the future on such issues as support for labor law reform, the J.P...

...NOW has always been more diverse than its image in the media suggested...

...And one of their top lobbyists, Thea Rossi Barron, resigned in protest...

...The right-to-lifers complied, but many of their troops, being pro-ERA, balked...

...It's the detail work, not the great speech, that creates a movement," said NOW President Eleanor Smeal...

...Then came the assault on abortion rights, culminating in a new law prohibiting Federal funding for abortions...

...More experiences like the ERA extension fight will enable them to say, with Eleanor Smeal, "We are lucky to be part of a time when we are changing the world for the better...

...NOW also agreed to use its ERA tactics to press for the right to choose abortion...

...When the Amendment becomes part of the Constitution — and it is difficult, after attending the NOW convention, to doubt that it will — we will have a more valuable law because of the struggle and discussion that went into ratifying it and because of the political lessons we had to learn in the process...

...But the last two or three years have been demoralizing...

...It showed that feminists could unite around a progressive platform, that the controversial issues of homosexual rights and abortion would not be compromised, and that the interests of minority women and other groups often depicted as opposing feminism were, in fact, part of the program...

...Although a unified alliance of feminists, labor, blacks, Latinos, environmentalists, progressive church groups, and community organizations may be a long way off, NOW's recent move toward labor is one of the many steps necessary to bring such a coalition into being...

...They turned out 100,000 strong for a NOW demonstration in Washington last July...

...Perhaps — but they would not even have thought of applying for the job fifteen years ago...

...These are women's issues," Smeal says: Labor law reform will give women, who are largely unorganized, a better chance to be part of the more highly paid organized sector, and most of the workers at J.P...

...It has also developed remarkably progressive positions on most issues at a time when there is no strong, solid Left to provide pressure...

...The participants in the NOW conference swapped victory stories like veterans of a long battle...

...Whether you are in a small collective or an organization of 90,000, changing the world can be a frightening task — and it doesn't help to read that the movement is hesitating, shrinking, out-of-date, irrelevant, responsible for soaring unemployment and divorce rates, useful only to women who can become executives, or responsible for cutting black men out of union craft jobs...

...Just as important as the mobilization and revitalization of its own members was NOW's growing expertise in coalition-building...

...that's how they got 90,000 Public Opinion Messages sent on one day...

...Stop ERA, the biggest group opposing the Amendment, evidently asked the National Right to Life Committee, the biggest anti-abortion group, to help stop the extension groundswell...

...Veterans of the ERA strike force at the conference told how Western Union operators joined NOW over the phone and helped devise better pro-ERA slogans to fit the fifteen-word limit on the Public Opinion Messages...