Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  An accurate charting of American women’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. The American woman is trapped on this asymptotic spiral, turning endlessly through the generations, drawing ever nearer to her destination without ever arriving. Each revolution promises to be “the revolution” that will free her from the orbit, that will grant her, finally, a full measure of human justice and dignity. But each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line. Each time, the American woman hears that she must wait a little longer, be a little more patient—her hour on the stage is not yet at hand. And worse yet, she may learn to accept her coerced deferral as her choice, even to flaunt it.

  Whenever this spiral has swung closer to equality, women have believed their journey to be drawing to a close. “At the opening of the twentieth century,” suffragist Ida Husted Harper rejoiced, the female condition was “completely transformed in most respects.” Soon the country would have to open a Woman’s Museum, feminist Elsie Clews Parsons mused in 1913, just to prove “to a doubting posterity that once women were a distinct social class.” Still later, at the close of World War II, a female steelworker declared in a government survey, “The old theory that a woman’s place is in the home no longer exists. Those days are gone forever.”

  Yet in each of these periods the celebrations were premature. This pattern of women’s hopes raised only to be dashed is peculiar neither to American history nor to modern times. Different kinds of backlashes against women’s mostly tiny gains—or against simply the perception that women were in the ascendancy—may be found in the rise of restrictive property laws and penalties for unwed and childless women of ancient Rome, the heresy judgements against female disciples of the early Christian Church, or the mass witch burnings of medieval Europe.

  But in the compressed history of the United States, backlashes have surfaced with striking frequency and intensity—and they have evolved their most subtle means of persuasion. In a nation where class distinctions are weak, or at least submerged, maybe it’s little wonder that gender status is more highly prized and hotly defended. If the American man can claim no ancestral coat of arms on which to elevate himself from the masses, perhaps he can fashion his sex into a sort of pedigree. In America, too, successfully persuading women to collaborate in their own subjugation is a tradition of particularly long standing. White European women first entered the American colonies as “purchase brides,” shipped into Virginia and sold to bachelors for the price of transport. This transaction was billed not as servitude but choice because the brides were “sold with their own consent.” As a perplexed Alexis de Tocqueville ob served, the single woman in early 19th-century America seemed to have more freedom than her counterpart in Europe, yet also more determination to relinquish it in confining marriages: “It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle.” Such a trait would prove especially useful in the subsequent periodic campaigns to stymie women’s progress, as American women were encouraged to use what liberty they did have to promote their own diminishment. As scholar Cynthia Kinnard observes in her bibliographical survey of American antifeminist literature, about one-third of the articles and nearly half the books and pamphlets denouncing the campaign for women’s rights have issued from a female pen.

  While American backlashes can be traced back to colonial times, the style of backlash that surfaced in the last decade has its roots most firmly in the last century. The Victorian era gave rise to mass media and mass marketing—two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women’s aspirations than coercive laws and punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, and claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests.

  If we retrace the course of women’s rights back to the Victorian era, we wind up with a spiral that has made four revolutions. A struggle for women’s rights gained force in the mid-19th century, the early 1900s, the early 1940s, and the early 1970s. In each case, the struggle yielded to backlash.

  THE ALL-AMERICAN REPEATING BACKLASH

  The “woman movement” of the mid-19th century, launched at the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention and articulated most famously by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, pressed for suffrage and an array of liberties—education, jobs, marital and property rights, “voluntary motherhood,” health and dress reform. But by the end of the century, a cultural counterreaction crushed women’s appeals for justice. Women fell back before a barrage of warnings virtually identical to today’s, voiced by that era’s lineup of Ivy League scholars, religious leaders, medical experts, and press pundits. Educated women of this era, too, were said to be falling victim to a man shortage; “the redundancy of spinster gentlewomen,” in the parlance of the time, inspired debate in state legislatures and frenzied scholarly “research.” A marriage study even made the rounds in 1895, asserting that only 28 percent of college-educated women could get married. They, too, faced a so-called infertility epidemic—this one induced by “brain-womb” conflict, as a Harvard professor’s best-selling book defined it in 1873. And Victorian women who worked were likewise said to be suffering a sort of early career burnout—“exhaustion of the feminine nervous system”—and losing their femininity to “hermaphroditism.”

  Then as now, late-Victorian religious and political leaders accused women who postponed childbearing of triggering a “race suicide” that endangered (white) America’s future; they were, in the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, “criminals against the race” and “objects of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Married women who demanded rights were charged, then as now, with creating a “crisis of the family.” The media and the churches railed against feminists for fueling divorce rates, and state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws between 1889 and 1906. South Carolina banned divorce out-right. And a band of “purity” crusaders, like the contemporary New Right brigade, condemned contraception and abortion as “obscene” and sought to have them banned. By the late 1800s, they had succeeded: Congress outlawed the distribution of contraceptives and a majority of states criminalized abortion—both for the first time in the nation’s history.

  In the early 1910s, women’s rights activists resurrected the struggle for suffrage and turned it into a nationwide political campaign. The word “feminism” entered the popular vocabulary—even silent film vamp Theda Bara was calling herself one—and dozens of newly formed women’s groups hastened to endorse its tenets. The National Woman’s Party organized in 1916, a campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment began and working women formed their own trade unions and struck for decent pay and better working conditions. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, founded in 1900, grew so quickly that it was the American Federation of Labor’s third largest affiliate by 1913. Margaret Sanger led a national birth control movement. And Heterodoxy, a sort of feminist intelligentsia, began conducting early versions of consciousness-raising groups.

  But just as women had won the right to vote and a handful of state legislatures had granted women jury duty and passed equal-pay laws, another counterassault on feminism began. The U.S. War Department, with the aid of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, incited a red-baiting campaign against women’s rights leaders. Feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman suddenly found they couldn’t get their writings published; Jane Addams was labeled a Communist and a “serious threat” to national security; and Emma Goldman was exiled. The media maligned suffragists; magazine writers advised that feminism was “destructive of woman’s happiness;” popular novels attacked “career women;” clergymen railed against “the evils of woman’s revolt;” scholars charged feminism with fueling divorce and infertility; and doctors claimed that birth control was causing
“an increase in insanity, tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, diabetes, and cancer.” Young women, magazine writers informed, no longer wanted to be bothered with “all that feminist pother.” Postfeminist sentiments first surfaced, not in the 1980s media, but in the 1920s press. Under this barrage, membership in feminist organizations soon plummeted, and the remaining women’s groups hastened to denounce the Equal Rights Amendment or simply converted themselves to social clubs. “Ex-feminists” began issuing their confessions.

  In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920—the same year women won the vote. In place of equal rights, lawmakers, labor and corporate leaders, and eventually some women’s groups endorsed “protective” labor policies, measures that served largely to protect men’s jobs and deny women equal pay. The ’20s eroded a decade of growth for female professionals; by 1930 there were fewer female doctors than in 1910. When the Depression hit, a new round of federal and state laws forced thousands of women out of the work force, and new federal wage codes institutionalized lower pay rates for women.

  “All about us we see attempts being made, buttressed by governmental authority, to throw women back into the morass of unlovely dependence from which they were just beginning to emerge,” feminist Doris Stevens wrote in 1933, in Equal Rights, the National Woman’s Party publication. “It looks sometimes as if pre-suffrage conditions even might be curiously reversed and the grievance held by women against men be changed into a grievance held by men against women,” Margaret Culkin Banning remarked in an essay in Harper’s in 1935. But like today, most social commentators held that the feminists’ tents were folding only because their battle was over—women’s rights had been secured. As political science scholar Ethel Klein writes of the 1920s, “The dissipation of interest in the women’s movement was taken as a sign not of failure but of completion.”

  The spiral swung around again in the 1940s as a wartime economy opened millions of high-paying industrial jobs to women, and the government even began to offer minimal day care and household assistance. Federal brochures saluted the hardy working woman as a true patriot. Strong women became cultural icons; Rosie the Riveter was revered and, in 1941, Wonder Woman was introduced. Women welcomed their new economic status: 5 to 6 million poured into the work force during the war years, 2 million into heavy-industry jobs: by war’s end, they would represent a record 57 percent of all employed people. Seventy-five percent reported in government surveys that they were going to keep their jobs after the war—and, in the younger generation, 88 percent of the 33,000 girls polled in a Senior Scholastic survey said they wanted a career, too. Women’s political energies revived; working-class women flooded unions, protested for equal pay, equal seniority rights, and day care; and feminists launched a new campaign for the ERA. This time, the amendment won the endorsements of both political parties, and, in the course of the war, for the first time since the ERA had been proposed in 1923, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted it to the Senate floor three times. In a record outpouring of legislative goodwill, the ’40s-era Congress passed thirty-three bills serving to advance women’s rights.

  But with the close of World War II, efforts by industry, government, and the media converged to force a female retreat. Two months after a U.S. victory had been declared abroad, women were losing their economic beachhead as 800,000 were fired from the aircraft industry; by the end of the year, 2 million female workers had been purged from heavy industry. Employers revived prohibitions against hiring married women or imposed caps on female workers’ salaries, and the federal government proposed giving unemployment assistance only to men, shut down its day care services, and defended the “right” of veterans to displace working women. An anti-ERA coalition rallied its forces, including the federal Women’s Bureau, forty-three national organizations, and the National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment. Soon, they had killed the amendment—a death sentence hailed on the New York Times editorial page. “Motherhood cannot be amended and we are glad the Senate didn’t try,” the newspaper proclaimed. When the United Nations issued a statement supporting equal rights for women in 1948, the United States government was the only one of the twenty-two American nations that wouldn’t sign it.

  Employers who had applauded women’s work during the war now accused working women of incompetence or “bad attitudes”—and laid them off at rates that were 75 percent higher than men’s. Advice experts filled bookstores with the usual warnings: education and jobs were stripping women of their femininity and denying them marriage and motherhood; women were suffering “fatigue” and mental instability from employment; women who used day care were selfish “fur-coated mothers.” Yet another Ivy League marriage study drew headlines: this Cornell University study said college-educated single women had no more than a 65 percent chance of getting married. Better watch out, the Sunday magazine This Week advised its female readers; a college education “skyrockets your chances of becoming an old maid.” Feminism was “a deep illness” that was turning modern women into a woebegone “lost sex,” the era’s leading advice book warned. Independent-minded women had gotten “out of hand” during the war, Barnard sociologist Willard Waller decreed. The rise in female autonomy and aggressiveness, scholars and government officials agreed, was causing a rise in juvenile delinquency and divorce rates—and would only lead to the collapse of the family. Child-care authorities, most notably Dr. Benjamin Spock, demanded that wives stay home, and colleges produced new curricula to train women to be good homemakers.

  Advertisers reversed their wartime message—that women could work and enjoy a family life—and claimed now that women must choose, and choose only home. As a survey of women’s images in postwar magazine fiction would later find, careers for women were painted in a more unattractive light in this era than at any time since the turn of the century; these short stories represented “the strongest assault on feminine careerism” since 1905. On the comics pages, even the postwar Wonder Woman was going weak at the knees.

  Again, a few defenders of women’s rights tried to point out signs of the gathering political storm. In 1948, Susan B. Anthony IV remarked that there appeared to be a move afoot to “crack up” the women’s movement. Margaret Hickey, head of the federal Women’s Advisory Committee to the War Manpower Commission, warned that a “campaign of undercover methods and trumped up excuses” was driving women from top-paying government jobs. But most women’s rights groups were disowning their own cause. Soon, Hickey herself was declaring, “The days of the old, selfish, strident feminism are over.” Meanwhile, a younger generation of women, adrift in a TV-shaped dreamscape of suburban patios and family dens, donned padded bras and denied personal ambition. Soon, the majority of young college women were claiming they were on campus only to find husbands. Their age at first marriage dropped to a record low for the century; the number of their babies climbed to a record high. The ’50s era of the “feminine mystique” is amply chronicled, most famously in Betty Friedan’s 1963 account. But in fact the much publicized homebound image of the ’50s woman little matched her actual circumstances. This is an important distinction that bears special relevance to the current backlash, the effects of which have often been discounted, characterized as benign or even meaningless because women continue to enter the work force. In the ’50s, while women may have been hastening down the aisle, they were also increasing their numbers at the office—soon at a pace that outstripped even their wartime work participation. And it was precisely women’s unrelenting influx into the job market, not a retreat to the home, that provoked and sustained the antifeminist furor. It was the reality of the nine-to-five working woman that heightened cultural fantasies of the compliant homebody and playmate. As literary scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe of the postwar era, “[J]ust as more and more women were getting paid for using their brains, more and more men represented them in novels, plays, and poems as nothing but bodies.”

  These cultu
ral images notwithstanding, the proportion of women working doubled between 1940 and 1950, and for the first time the majority of them were married—forcing the average man to face the specter of the working woman in his own home. Even at the very peak of the postwar industries’ expulsion of female workers, women were quietly returning to the workplace through a back door. While 3.25 million women were pushed or persuaded out of industrial jobs in the first year after the end of World War II, 2.75 million women were entering the work force at the same time, in lower-paid clerical and administrative positions. Two years after the war, working women had recouped their numerical setbacks in the job market, and by 1952 more women were employed than at the height of the war economy’s output. By 1955 the average wife worked until her first child was born and went back to work when her children started school.

  The backlash of the feminine-mystique years did not return working women to the home (and, instructively, almost none of the wartime clerical work force was laid off after V-J Day). Rather, the culture derided them; employers discriminated against them; government promoted new employment policies that discriminated against women; and eventually women themselves internalized the message that, if they must work, they should stick to typing. The ranks of working women didn’t shrink in the ’50s, but the proportion of them who were relegated to low-paying jobs rose, their pay gap climbed, and occupational segregation increased as their numbers in the higher-paying professions declined from one-half in 1930 to about one-third by 1960. The ’50s backlash, in short, didn’t transform women into full-time “happy housewives;” it just demoted them to poorly paid secretaries.