FAMILY TIES: FEMINISM'S NEXT FRONTIER

...As for the personal and sexual dilemmas made political by feminism's last wave, in this privatized era they have returned to the realm of the individual, or the individual couple...

...That is the case partly because those issues have changed their nature for reasons that have little to do with feminism...

...On one point, however, Sylvia Hewlett cannot be challenged: In the United States, where foreign visitors since Alexis de Tocqueville have marveled at women's advanced position, women have fewer social and economic entitlements than in other industrialized nations...

...And it's going to be the next frontier for American feminism...

...But the new agitation also poses a possible threat if it forces false polarities on women...

...That is "the awful truth"-not about the women's movement, but about social policy in the United States...

...Even feuding feminists find common ground there...

...No one could fault women for concluding that even a low-paid or miserly husband provided more than they could earn on the job market, or that the plight of housewives wasn't much worse than that of the average nonunion worker...

...A new activism among women on economic and family concerns is evident in the growing number of economic-equity projects and coalitions springing up around the country...

...Today it seems that issues of family, and of personal life generally, have lost much of their power to divide and paralyze women...

...And today many "women's rights" concerns—subsidized child care, pay equity, job training for women, and even welfare reform—are probably best addressed under the banner of family, where they can claim a wider mandate...

...If that situation causes stress in two-parent families, the strain on another late-Twentieth Century social form, the single-parent family, is even greater...

...But those arguments are overshadowed by her attack on the Joan Walsh, a consultant to the California Assembly Human Services Committee, writes frequently on feminism...

...But even when it is judged in its own anachronistic terms, the Reagan policy has been a dismal failure for women...

...What is clear is that feminism can no longer be blamed for trying to destroy the family...

...If the traveler asks who is in charge of cooking, cleaning, and all-purpose caring now that so many women are in the work force, she will find it is all still women's work...

...The current ferment, after the years of drift and apathy that came to be known as "post-feminism," is a long-awaited sign that there is li...

...Or must the modern women's movement, with its crusade for abstract sexual equality and unconcern for women's special needs, share the responsibility...

...Other critics of feminism go further than Friedan...

...On the most volatile issue of all—child-bearing—feminism also came up short...

...In part the movement was done in by its own success, provoking a backlash from conservative business and church leaders and right-wing politicians determined to halt the advance of women's rights...

...In those families, combining bread-winning with child-rearing isn't just a headache...

...women's movement for advocating a social policy that would foster personal independence and sexual freedom and ignore the needs of most women, who have continued to be wives and mothers as well as workers...

...Under Reagan, four million more women and three million more children have descended into poverty...

...Before everyone rushes to disown the "excesses" of 1960s feminism, however, it should receive credit for what it did accomplish: the validation of other roles for women besides those of wife and mother...

...The malaise of the Carter years, continuing to the present, marked the movement's loss of momentum...

...And it took the feminization of poverty to make many upper-middle-class feminists realize that opening the professions to more women had not helped the vast majority of their sisters...

...None of the above exists...

...They don't split on the question of family—they are openly "pro-family" but generously define the family to include women and the people they care for...

...instead, it was generally a footnote on the women's-rights agenda...

...it's often an impossibility...

...Enter Sylvia Hewlett and friends, to indict the women's movement for neglecting such concerns in favor of what they call "lifestyle issues...

...she asks...

...To reviewers like Erica Jong, writing in Vanity Fair, Hewlett's book reveals "the awful truth" about feminism: that it ignores the fact that most women want to marry and have children...

...Then Jimmy Carter, elected as a nominal friend of feminists, presided over the decline of support for the ERA in the states, the rise of the right-to-life movement nationwide, and the disintegration of the fledgling alliance of feminists and the Democratic Party—revived to little success in the 1984 elections...

...And if today more women, while choosing marriage and motherhood, are also questioning why they cannot combine them more naturally with their careers, we need to thank the women's movement...

...Safe, licensed child care should have been as prominent a feminist rallying cry as safe, legal abortions...

...Such efforts, directed at obtaining child care, pay equity, welfare reform, and increased spouse and child support, are models for cross-class, cross-race organizing among women...

...Even the unimaginative visitor would expect, at the very least, that such a society must have a vast system of publicly subsidized child care...

...Two-thirds of all women who work today do so because they are single, widowed, divorced, or married to men who earn less than $10,000 a year...

...Or, as Whittlesey put it, "Once men earn a family wage, all those women can go home and take care of their own children in the way that they did when I was growing up...

...But to many feminists, the book reeks of victim-blaming...

...But Hewlett raises some important points...

...The social gains of the early 1970s came at feminism's crest, when people rallied behind demands for women's equality from the workplace to the bedroom...

...Maybe home life has been redesigned along the lines envisioned by social feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who advocated community-based nurseries, kitchens, and laundries to free women from the responsibilities of their individual homes...

...Perhaps, she might imagine, children are now reared collectively, apart from their parents...

...And it would be wrong to overemphasize consensus and ignore real areas of dispute...

...Non-monogamy, promiscuity, celibacy, lesbian separatism: scary stuff on the evening news, but offering an alternative to compulsory marriage, mind-numbing childraising, and the "problem that has no name" that Friedan diagnosed as "the feminine mystique...

...I don't think we ought to take on their symbols—I think we have to stop that hypocrisy...

...The ERA did lose ground as opponents hammered away at what it would cost women: the little protective legislation left for them after a century of social reform...

...Despite significant disagreements, for instance, NOW has put the ERA at the top of its agenda once again, under the guidance of the re-emergent Eleanor Smeal...

...Today, social and economic transformations ranging from the decline of unionized manufacturing industries to the "male revolt" chronicled by Barbara Eh-renreich have made that impossible: Too many women have no place to return to...

...The women's movement's triumphs and failures during those years had little to do with the politics of Nixon and Carter, and everything to do with the state of the movement itself...

...Hewlett documents the deliberate postwar campaign to push women back into the home, and notes its success...

...Family Ties Feminism's Next Frontier BY JOAN WALSH At the grass roots of American feminism, a great debate is raging: Who is to blame for the deteriorating social and economic condition of many women in the United States...

...Throwing off those social forces required a cultural crusade equal, at least, to the one mounted by the postwar policymakers...

...No doubt work schedules have been restructured dramatically, so that fathers and mothers can more easily meet the demands of being both parents and workers...

...Here Hewlett pulls together some strange bedfellows, linking advocates of abortion, lesbianism, and "Dress for Success" corporate assimilation as conspirators against the...

...Last fall, in a New York Times Magazine piece on "How to Get the Women's Movement Going Again," she said many of the same things, and her words were accepted as conventional wisdom by most feminists...

...Hewlett got to the heart of the Reagan Administration's policy toward women in an interview with former White House liaison Faith Ryan Whittlesey...

...Imagine a time traveler sent to the mid-1980s from the turn of the century to encounter this revolutionized society: Fewer than 10 per cent of all families conform to the mom-at-home, dad-at-work "norm," 60 per cent of all women (including a majority of those with young children) are in the work force, and the strange electronic media depict women as business leaders, athletes, and politicians...

...Our visitor from the past would expect similarly vast changes to have occurred in national social policy...

...There's plenty of room to criticize the women's movement, as feminists themselves know...

...ERA proponents papered over the historic divisions on the amendment among women themselves—between such "social feminists" as Eleanor Roosevelt and many trade unionists on the one hand and hard-line equal-rights advocates, from the Women's Party's Alice Paul through NOW's Eleanor Smeal, on the other...

...Yet neither the deteriorating status of women in the last decade nor the decline of feminism in the same period can be blamed solely on Ronald Reagan...

...Today, the challenge is constructing a social policy that deals realistically with those changes and frees women from the excessive responsibilities of economic and emotional caretaking...

...Why should we try to out-family the Right...

...Reproductive freedom became the movement's bottom line, since the choice to have children or not had for so long been denied women...

...The movement paid less attention to those for whom the choice of motherhood was made increasingly difficult by new economic pressures, sexual tensions, late marriages, and rising divorce rates...

...Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America, offers a brilliant analysis of women's social and economic plight and an outline of the national policy needed to improve it...

...In the last five years, feminism's approach to family issues has been undergoing searching reappraisal...

...Easing the barriers to divorce helped liberate women from unhappy or abusive marriages: Since the spread of no-fault reforms, far more women than men file for divorce...

...But for many women, the right to leave a marriage has proven a hollow victory, since it didn't carry with it the right to a decent living...

...Yet the more severe setback was, undeniably, the indifference and even hostility of many women themselves...

...There are almost twice as many single-parent families as there were fifteen years ago, and the great majority are headed by women...

...Behind today's debate is an issue that has stymied the women's movement since the Nineteenth Century: how to link feminism and the family...

...Unfortunately, Smeal's semantic and political purity is likely to separate NOW from the vast majority of American women, who still find comfort in the notion of family...

...Phyllis Schlafly may have skillfully manipulated media to magnify her support, but there were and are many women who concluded that feminism offered little to advance their interests—and might even hurt them...

...In the 1930s and 1940s, the volatile social transformations brought about by the Depression and World War II led to new ambitions and opportunities for American women...

...Almost half live below the poverty line, so that today three-fourths of the nation's poor are women and children...

...Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), was attacked as a heretic for criticizing the women's movement's disdain for marriage, home, and children in her 1982 book, The Second Stage...

...Even Friedan, the godmother of family-oriented feminism, has attacked Hewlett's emphasis...

...As Jane Mansbridge argues in Why We Lost the ERA, proponents never adequately explained precisely how the ERA would help women—because its practical impact was and is debatable—nor did they address the social anxieties the amendment triggered...

...Like Republican domestic policy in general, says Hewlett, it is based on a form of trickle-down economics: Raise men's wages and hope some money will trickle down to women...

...It is past time to begin searching for common ground...

...Our culture-shocked time traveler would, of course, be wrong on all counts...

...And Smeal, for one, is not convinced by the rhetoric of pro-family feminism...

...In the 1950s, the numbers of women pursuing higher education, work outside the home, and professional careers dropped for the first time in decades...

...Is it the Reagan Administration and allied conservatives determined to turn social policy back to the "Father Knows Best" days of the 1950s...

...I happen to think the word family is very exclusive, very controlling...

...For the past six years, the Reagan Administration has been an obvious target for those concerned about this dramatic social imbalance...

...Today, such "feminist" sociologists as Stanford's Lenore Weitz-man argue that divorce reform did what antifeminists warned it would—leave many women vulnerable to financial and emotional abandonment and desperation...

...In the 1960s and 1970s, some women feared that an antifeminist backlash could do what postfeminist conservatism did in the 1920s and 1950s—push women back into the sphere of home and family...

...Many feminists also missed the boat on problems of motherhood and career...

...The traditional family has been sacrificed to social, political, and economic change, and it would be flattering the women's movement to give it the major share of credit or blame for that turn of events...

...Then national policymakers prescribed the reconfinement of women to the home, and the powerful narcotic of mass media and consumerism enforced the Norman Rockwell family of the 1950s...

...left in feminism, that it did not breathe its last with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment or the disastrous Mondale-Ferraro campaign...

...The sexual and social experimentation the movement fostered, alienating as it certainly was to many women, allowed many others to challenge sex-role conditioning and convention...

...Ironically, for all the domestic and foreign-policy evils perpetrated by the Nixon Administration, the early 1970s saw women win their most significant advances of the postwar era: Congressional approval of the ERA, enactment of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act barring sex discrimination, and the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion...

...majority of women, who want to be wives and mothers...