Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
The few women who did slip past the no-girls-allowed sign on the White House lawn didn’t exactly feel at home. U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had a revelation one day while sitting in the Situation Room, surrounded by a sea of white male faces. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a rodent scurry across the floor. “I thought to myself,” as she later told the Wall Street Journal, “that the mouse was no more surprising a creature to see in the Situation Room than I.” She left government with this conclusion: “Sexism is alive.”
Faith Whittlesey received the “highest” female post on the Reagan White House staff: assistant to the president for public liaison, giving lip service to women’s and children’s issues. The Reagan administration, she asserted, would aid women by seeing to it that men earned a higher “family” wage, so “all those women can go home and look after their own children.” In her 1984 address on women’s status, Whittlesey assured her audience that women’s rights were in good hands in Washington: “I know the president is deeply committed to providing women with the broadest range of options in exercising their choice.” But working at the White House, Whittlesey soon developed doubts about Reagan’s deep commitments—doubts that likely deepened after Don Regan became chief of staff and demoted her post. Like Kirkpatrick, she eventually bailed out. As she headed for the parking lot with her packing boxes the last day, “all I saw was a sea of men coming and going in those cars,” she recalled. “I began to think, ‘Maybe they’re right. Women aren’t welcome in the White House.’”
The New Right women who received political appointments typically landed in posts that either came with inflated titles but no authority or required them to carry out the administration’s most punitive antifeminist policies. Women like Beverly LaHaye wound up in the first group, shunted to such powerless panels as the Family Advisory Board. On the other hand, a series of women were assigned to the Office of Population Affairs to do the administration’s dirty work against emancipated girls and women. First, antiabortion activist Marjory Mecklenburg was charged with promoting the “squeal rule,” a Reagan policy proposal to make clinics blow the whistle on teenage girls who were seeking birth control without parental permission. Jo Ann Gasper, Conservative Digest columnist and editor of The Right Woman, inherited Mecklenburg’s job (Mecklenburg, ironically, was forced out of office after rumors circulated that she was having an extramarital affair with a staff member). Gasper got the thankless task of shutting down domestic violence programs. She, in turn, was replaced by Nabers Cabaniss—most celebrated for her sexual status as a twenty-nine-year-old virgin—who got to promote a Reagan plan to retract federal funding from any clinic staff that so much as mentioned the word abortion.
OUT WITH THE FEMINISTS . . .
If the Reagan climate in Washington was chilly for New Right women, it was poisonous for feminists: they became targets of a purge incited by the New Right. When the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 Mandate for Leadership itemized the federal programs it wanted cut or eliminated, on its top priority list was an agency “dominated” by feminists. Of the dozens of government services targeted by the Heritage Foundation, the Women’s Educational Equity Act program was singled out for a uniquely fierce, personal, and sustained assault. Mandate for Leadership demanded the dismemberment of WEEA for one reason only: as its authors explained, WEEA represented an “important resource for the practice of feminist policies and politics.” It was a “top priority item for the feminist network” and espoused “extreme feminist ideology.”
WEEA’s director, Leslie Wolfe, a ten-year civil service veteran who had pioneered government programs to promote women’s education and who was one of the few women to have ascended to G.S. 15 status, enraged the New Right like no other government figure. “I was a ‘known feminist,’” Wolfe says later. “And because WEEA was seen as a ‘feminist group,’ it got treated very differently from other government programs that the New Right disliked.” She was one of the only directors of a federal program that the New Right lobby bothered to single out by name. In a flurry of internal memos, public magazine articles, and radio talks, New Right leaders denounced Wolfe as a “radical feminist,” spread slanderous tales about her professional behavior, and called for her “swift dethronement.”
The program at the center of all this fury was a tiny and underfunded office in the Education Department—the only federal program to promote equal education for girls. WEEA offered small grants to projects supporting nonsexist education and combating sex discrimination in the schools. It had been hailed as “one of the most cost-effective programs in government” by the Association of American Colleges. The woman who first proposed WEEA wasn’t even one of those “radical feminists” from NOW; Arlene Horwitz was a clerical worker in a congressional office, a working woman who understood from personal experience—trying to live off her skimpy paycheck—that unequal schooling could have painful and long-term economic consequences. The projects WEEA funded were hardly radical either: a guide to help teenage handicapped girls; a program to enforce equal education laws in rural school districts; a math-counseling service for older minority women returning to community college.
Nonetheless, to the men of the Heritage Foundation, WEEA was “the feminist network feeding at the federal trough.” Charles Heatherly, Heritage Foundation fellow and the Mandate editor who made this charge at August 1983 hearings before the House Education and Labor Committee and attacked Wolfe most vigorously, later admits that he never dealt “with her personally.” But he had made up his mind about the WEEA director. “She was widely perceived to be a radical feminist,” he explains. And his campaign against Wolfe and WEEA only intensified with Reagan’s election: the new president appointed Heatherly deputy undersecretary of management in the Education Department, putting him in charge of the program.
Heatherly recruited his New Right colleagues, some on staff, others, like Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips, as consultants to review the program’s budget. Their mission: wipe out WEEA. They found a sympathetic ear in the White House; soon after his inauguration, Reagan proposed an immediate 25 percent cut of its already approved budget, with total defunding the following year. In Congress, WEEA’s supporters fought back. Led by GOP Representative Margaret Heckler, the program won a reprieve, though not without a 40 percent budget cut.
The New Right leaders weren’t ready to give up after this first round. In the winter and spring of 1982, they pursued a months-long media and letter-writing campaign against Wolfe. Human Events: National Conservative Weekly claimed it had “uncovered” such apparently offensive WEEA grants as an award to the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Conservative Digest, the publication of the Conservative Caucus, attacked Wolfe personally in an anonymously written article by a “concerned employee in the Education Department.” She was guilty, the author asserted, of “twisting the grant approval process,” exercising “near total control,” and using WEEA as a slush fund for NOW and a “money machine for a network of openly radical feminist groups.” Leslie Wolfe was a “monarch,” who was “imperiously guarding her fiefdom.” Again, on a talk show, Howard Phillips accused her of underhandedly funneling money to women’s rights organizations. He complained, too, that she was guilty of insubordination; Wolfe, he said indignantly, once referred to the Education Secretary as “His Wimpiness.”
Just a week after the Conservative Digest broadside, Wolfe was demoted—by memo. WEEA would henceforth be run by a Heatherly appointee, and Wolfe would “serve in an advisory capacity,” the memo informed her. Wolfe wrote back, protesting the decision. She got no response. Finally, three weeks later, Wolfe was summoned to the office of Acting Assistant Secretary Jean Benish—a woman had been picked once again to deliver the bad news to a feminist woman. “You are being temporarily reassigned as of Monday morning to a task force on fraud, waste, and abuse,” Wolfe recalls Benish telling her. “I said, ‘I’m not the right person for that kind of job. My background is education, not fraud.’” The ass
istant secretary told her she had no choice; this was an emergency and the department needed a “high-level manager” with “outstanding management skills” to handle this important project. She told Wolfe to leave her key on the desk by the end of the day.
When Wolfe reported to her new assignment, however, she found no emergency and no request for a high-level manager. Her new boss did, however, point out that she was lucky to land where she did; Heatherly’s men had considered transferring her to the “Secretarial Certification Program.” Again, WEEA’s congressional supporters protested the administration’s heavy-handed tactics. Finally, three months later, Wolfe was told she could reclaim her old job. But when she returned, she found the halls filled with strangers.
Every year, the program must hire 150 outside field readers to review grant applications—and under the WEEA act, the readers must understand and support educational equity laws and have some educational expertise. In Wolfe’s absence—just one day, in fact, after she was reassigned—Heatherly had thrown out her slate of field readers and installed his own: a group of women from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. “There was a general feeling that there had been too much inbreeding,” Heatherly explains later of the wholesale dismissal. “New faces were needed.” These readers weren’t picked for their enthusiasm for WEEA’s goals. As one of them explained it at the time to her hometown paper, the Tulsa World, she was on her way to Washington to help curb a “feminist agency” that Reagan wanted abolished.
The new field readers, for the most part, neither understood nor supported educational equity. One reader, whose job was to review applications that would help enforce Title IX, asked the panel’s moderator plaintively, “What is Title Nine?” Another woman, who was supposed to be reviewing applications to help disabled women, wanted to know if being a Native American qualified as a “disability.” The field reader considering applications for educational equity projects for minority women was on loan from the infamously discriminatory Bob Jones University. They repeatedly rejected grant proposals to alleviate sex discrimination on the grounds that discrimination never existed. “Do not see the need in project,” wrote one field reader in her evaluation. “Most girls and boys go into fields,” she explained, because “it is [the] way parents bring them up and mostly they are born with certain desires. . . . [I] just disagree with the whole approach.” Another wrote of one grant application, “The title of program concerns me.” Why? It “encourages women not to stay in low-paying jobs but to move up if they desire.” Finally, the General Accounting Office investigated and found that 20 percent of the field readers did not meet a single qualification for their WEEA jobs and most only barely qualified. And the numbers of minority field readers, the GAO noted, had been cut by 75 percent. The auditors’ findings, however, did not discourage the administration from continuing its campaign against WEEA.
A year later, Wolfe was ushered into her boss’s office one last time. Her job had been abolished, she was told, and she would be laid off unless she cared to accept a new assignment: clerk-typist in the Office of Compensatory Education. Wolfe resigned. All five other women on the WEEA staff were fired or reassigned—while all five male employees were retained. With Wolfe gone, the Education Department immediately demoted the office to the bottom of the bureaucracy—and the director’s post to “section chief,” a low-authority classification. The job went to a career civil servant, who herself was demoted two grades to fill the post. “Dethronement,” while not swift, had at last succeeded.
. . . AND IN WITH THE FATHERS
The Department of Education, which had starred in the campaign to usurp the feminists, now directed the effort to crown the fathers. If the “pro-family” movement was “pro” anything, it was paternal power.
The White House based the “family policy” office in the Education Department, a logical enough choice for an administration that viewed “family policy” as a series of didactic lectures, not a program offering the family economic, medical, or legal assistance. As Gary Bauer, who would become the department’s family-policy czar, told civil-rights leaders: “The values taught on the ‘Cosby’ show would do more to help low-income and minority children than a bevy of new federal programs. . . . [A] lot of research indicates that values are much more important, say, than the level of welfare payments.” The values he had in mind weren’t simply familial love and understanding. What Bauer found most edifying about “Cosby” was its depiction of a household where, as he puts it in a later interview, “children respect their father.”
Bauer was having some trouble himself mustering respect from the governmental family he joined in 1981. He entered public service as deputy undersecretary for education with visions of launching a “social revolution” from his desk. But he was ignored by senior Reagan officials, and even his staff wouldn’t mind him; Bauer spent his first two years trying to silence the Education Department’s remaining moderates, who insisted on talking to the press without his permission. Bauer finally advanced to director of the Office of Policy Development, only to discover that the office’s purposes primarily involved public relations. When the administration handed him yet another window-dressing assignment, chairman of the 1986 task force on the family, Bauer exploded. His petulantly worded fifty-two-page report was, as Senator Daniel P. Moynihan remarked at the time, “less a policy statement than a tantrum.”
“The Family: Preserving America’s Future” opens, aptly enough, with a quote from that late Victorian champion of endangered masculinity, Teddy Roosevelt: “If the mother does not do her duty, there will either be no next generation, or a next generation that is worse than none at all.” Bauer’s report proceeds to excoriate all manner of independent women who aren’t doing their duty: women who work, women who use day care, women who divorce, women who have babies out of wedlock. In the world according to Bauer, wives are forever abandoning their husbands and children, throwing away their marriages “like paper towels.” The report justifies this position not with statistics but with a newspaper cartoon, in which a bride tells her groom, “I’m sorry, Sam, I just met my dream man in the reception line.” Even female poverty is the woman’s fault; “more and more,” he writes, female financial problems “result from personal choices” like seeking a divorce or bearing illegitimate children. Of the offspring of these broken homes, Bauer concerns himself only with the fate of the sons (a one-gender fixation typical of New Right writings on the subject). He decries the “far more detrimental effects of divorce on boys than on girls”—as if divorce would matter less if it were the girls who suffered more.
Bauer’s “recommendations” to save the family read more like a list of punishments for girls and mothers: bar young single mothers from public housing; revive old divorce laws to make it harder for women to break the wedding bonds; deny contraceptives to young women. On the other hand, he proposes prizes for women who follow his dictates. Mothers who stay home, he suggests, should get tax breaks; the more babies, the more credits.
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“WE’RE RUNNING at 1.8 children per woman in this country,” Bauer says darkly, on a spring afternoon in the final year of Reagan’s tenure. He is seated in his cramped suite in the White House’s west wing; if square footage is any indicator of federal priorities, saving the family ranks low on this administration’s list.
“That’s below replacement level,” Bauer warns of the impending birth dearth. “There are going to be serious consequences for free society if we continue down this path.” Who’s to blame? “Militant feminists who seemed to hold sway ten years ago couldn’t help but have a negative influence on the family.” The evidence? “Take Kramer vs. Kramer. There’s that poignant letter the mother leaves behind addressed to her son, where she says, ‘That’s not all there is in life. Mommy has to do some other things.’ I think that was a real symbol of the times. An excuse for women to run out on their responsibilities.”
Other than the “irresponsible” behavior of the celluloid Mrs. Kram
er—who never actually declared herself a feminist—does Bauer have any other proof that feminism hurt the family? “Look at textbooks,” he offers. “Twenty years ago, women in textbooks were housewives and in the home. Now, you look at a textbook and what’s missing is any sign of women in a nurturing role in the family. Now our daughters are being taught that life is not full unless they’re stewardesses, reporters, etc.”
Bauer says “most women” in America have come to share his views; they “are discovering you can’t have it all. There’s some statistical evidence that women who decided early on to establish a career, and now are getting close to the end of the time they can start a family, feel cheated. Their clock is running out.” Asked to provide this “statistical” evidence, he says that, alas, it isn’t handy.