Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  Today’s story is another Grimm Brothers tale, “The Raven,” in which a hero, enfeebled by a witch and a variety of overbearing women, must rediscover his manhood by battling giants before he can claim the princess. When the story is over, Bly asks his listeners to identify which part of the story most fits their personal situation. When hardly any of the men choose the part in which the hero storms the glass mountain, Bly is disgusted. “You are all in the ‘feminine waiting’ part,” he grumbles. “I want to see action. I want to see anger. You’ve got to get out there and kill the giants.” Bly entreats the men to “growl,” and throws up his hands at the tepid response. “C’mon, c’mon. Show your teeth. Show some anger.”

  A young man raises his hand. “But Robert, Gandhi didn’t resort to violence to achieve his ends.” Bly stomps his foot. “You’re all so naive. You’re full of all kinds of weak ideas that soupy philosophers, including Gandhi, have encouraged.”

  It’s time for a lunch break. As the audience streams out, the woman with the flower tote bag approaches Bly and hands him a note. He jams it into his shirt pocket, then stalks off without speaking—to a back room, where two gray-haired women from the Jung Center are setting out his meal.

  For months, Bly has refused requests for an interview—his media interviews are largely with men—but today he accedes to a brief conversation over lunch. Between man-size bites of a sandwich, the poet says he bars women from most of his events because men need a sanctuary from a female-dominated world. “There’s no place for the warrior in this country. The feminists have taken over from the Catholic priests.” And this is only the start of the female incursion. “I just see it getting worse and worse. Men will become more and more insecure, farther from their own manhood. Men will become more like women, women will try to be more like men. It’s not a good prospect.”

  What evidence does he have that all this is happening, or that feminism is actually turning men “soft”? The venerable poet flies into a sudden rage. “I don’t need evidence. I have brains, that’s how I know. I use my brains.” He refuses to answer any more questions and swivels his chair until he’s facing the side wall. An uncomfortable silence falls over the room; the two women from the Jung Center try to coax him back to good spirits with murmured compliments about his “brilliance” and offers of more apple juice. He says nothing for a while, then, apparently remembering the other woman who made him mad earlier, he dips inside his shirt pocket and fishes out the note. He shakes his head, snorts, then starts to read it out loud: “I was very hurt and angry at the way you simply dismissed my comments and made fun of me.” What hurt most of all, she wrote, was the way he attacked her when she said she wanted more emotional support from her husband. She needs that support, she wrote, because she is battling ovarian cancer. Bly says sarcastically, “Oh, so I can’t understand ovarian cancer unless I’ve gone through it?” He stuffs the note back in his pocket and polishes off his sandwich.

  SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: THE NEOFEMINIST’S LESSER WORK

  “I grew to understand why Phyllis Schlafly was appealing,” Sylvia Ann Hewlett, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and other think tanks, says. The author of A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America is seated at the well-buffed boardroom table in the council’s Upper East Side office. “I realized that the ERA, though it might appeal to elite and chic career women who belong to NOW, might actually get in the way of helping ordinary women.”

  Hewlett explains how she reached her revisionist view of feminism. “I used to be quite active in the women’s movement,” she says. She recalls attending a consciousness-raising group in the 1970s and helping occasionally to canvass for the Equal Rights Amendment. “But slowly I came to see that the ERA would take away special protective labor legislation for women. If the ERA were around today, I would not vote for it because it could really backfire.” Ordinary women have convinced her, she says. As she writes in her book, “In a profound way, feminists have failed to connect with the needs and aspirations of ordinary American women.” They failed to understand that “many homemakers did not want to be treated equally.” And finally, she says, “When you add in the legitimate fears of blue-collar women that they would lose their hard-won protective benefits, you have a powerful constituency ranged against the ERA.”

  When did Hewlett, who was living at the time at a fashionable Manhattan address with her investment banker husband, come into contact with these ordinary women? In A Lesser Life, she gives a few examples—a very few. In one case, she quotes an anonymous millworker getting off her shift at an Atlanta-area textile plant; the woman tells her that she’s against equal rights because “us girls get an extra break in the shift.” Hewlett says that she was so shaken by the woman’s remark that she never canvassed for the ERA again. This is a strange anecdote: the year that Hewlett says she visited Atlanta, all but one of the mills in the Atlanta area had shut down, and that one maintained only a skeletal staff. At any rate, none offered women an “extra break.” (In fact, as former millworker Joyce Brookshire recalls: “If anything, the men got the extra breaks, because they got to go to ‘the smoker’ [room] for cigarette breaks. Women weren’t allowed to use the smoker.” Brookshire notes that she and all the mill women she knew supported the ERA.)

  Here is another “ordinary” female example that Hewlett cites: an anonymous woman, one of the “traditional women of Middle America,” who complains, “Women’s liberation wants to liberate us from the very institution that is most indispensable to overcoming our present social crisis: the family.” Her footnote attributes these words to a woman quoted in George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide. But if you look up the original reference, you find that Hewlett has altered the quote—adding the “us,” among other things—to make it read as if a woman were saying it. In fact, the words are Gilder’s own. This “traditional woman” is an antifeminist man. Asked about it later, Hewlett will say only, “I don’t have much of a sense of [how] that happened. It’s not clear to me.”

  Based on these informative encounters with the average woman in the street, Hewlett concludes that feminism has gypped her sex. “The American [women’s] movement has defined the problem of women-kind as that of acquiring a full set of legal, political, and economic rights, and achieving control over one’s body.” But most American women, she asserts, don’t want equality, personal or sexual freedom; they “want to strengthen, not weaken the traditional family structure.” By concentrating on equality instead of maternity, feminists made “one gigantic mistake.” The women’s movement actually created “a lesser life” for women by failing to champion the needs of working mothers and their children. Feminism “threw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  Playing up this “mistake,” especially with her supposedly “feminist” credentials, guaranteed Hewlett immediate attention from the backlash mass media. Hewlett’s book proposal sparked a bidding war between eleven eager publishing companies and a six-figure advance. The publishers were mistaken about female readers’ interest in this thesis. A Lesser Life did not become a major seller. But they weren’t wrong to anticipate huge press enthusiasm for such revisionist fare; the book became an instant media event. As a Washington Post reviewer cheered, “SING HOSANNAS! Someone reputable has finally said it in print.” As Hewlett observes in an afterword to the paperback edition a year later, she was besieged with talk-show requests—“all one hundred ten of them!” And she immediately became a national authority on family policy—“Senator Moynihan, Governor Cuomo, and Representative Oakar have sought my counsel”—the governor of Arizona appointed her to a family-welfare panel and the Woman’s National Democratic Club tapped her for the keynote address.

  For the next several years, hundreds of journalists, newscasters, and columnists would invoke Hewlett’s work whenever they wanted to underscore the tragic consequences of feminism. Her attack on the women’s movement earned her a showcase in every press outlet from the New York Times to People to “Donahue.” Even the Nat
ional Enquirer was intrigued; the tabloid featured the book’s incredible findings under the headline “Gals Are Being HURT—Not Helped—By Women’s Lib.”

  Hewlett indicts the women’s movement on three counts. Feminists failed women by (1) promoting the Equal Rights Amendment, (2) pushing for no-fault divorce laws, and (3) ignoring motherhood. Maybe the Enquirer coverage should have been a clue; her “facts” were often closer to tabloid fare.

  “It is sobering to realize that the ERA was defeated not by Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, or any combination of male chauvinist pigs, but by women who were alienated from a feminist movement[,] the values of which seemed elitist and disconnected from the lives of ordinary people,” she writes. The majority of women opposed the ERA, she says, because it would have eliminated homemakers’ right to be supported by their husbands and working women’s right to “hard-won protective benefits,” such as “extra rest periods and better rest rooms.”

  To support these assertions, Hewlett quotes almost exclusively from one source: Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, who directed the Stop ERA program. The only other authority Hewlett quotes on the ERA is “a prominent labor and civil-rights lawyer,” never identified, who assures Hewlett that the ERA is unnecessary. Hewlett does not explain how she knows that the majority of women opposed the ERA at the time. If she had checked the national polls then, she would have found nearly 60 percent of women favoring the ERA. (The proportion has only increased since then—to more than 70 percent.) And “ordinary” women weren’t exactly hostile to the ERA. According to a 1982 Gallup poll, clerical and saleswomen were even a bit more enthusiastic about the ERA than professional women—and low-income women favored extending the deadline to ratify the amendment more than upper-income women.

  Hewlett says women opposed the ERA because they knew it would cost them in marital support and “protective labor benefits.” But the ERA would have had no effect on these supports other than to make them sex blind, as most state laws had already stipulated anyway. Half the states didn’t require husbands to support their wives—and, as any abandoned wife could have told her, the states that did have such provisions hardly enforced them. As for protective labor benefits, the courts had already eliminated them—having found them to be in violation of women’s civil rights. These laws had served historically to protect not women but men’s jobs, by shutting women out of higher-paying occupations. And it was blue-collar women who petitioned the courts to overturn these “benefits.”

  Ultimately, the people who defeated the ERA were not ordinary women but a handful of very powerful men in three key state legislatures. These were men who opposed the ERA not because it would hurt women’s traditional protections but because it challenged their own belief that, as one of the key state legislators put it, “a woman should serve her husband.”

  Hewlett’s second count—that feminist advocates hurt traditional homemakers by promoting no-fault divorce—is based on a backlash myth. Hewlett’s evidence is drawn from Lenore Weitzman’s flawed The Divorce Revolution.

  Hewlett’s final allegation is the most widely quoted. The women’s movement, she charges, “revile” and “rage at” mothers and children; ’70s feminists gave “bottom” priority to child care and failed even to take up the cause of maternity leave. The “antichildren” and “anti-motherhood” stance, she says, has discredited the women’s movement today in the eyes of most ordinary women. This negligence she contrasts with Western European “social feminists,” whom she credits for the availability of government-supported child care and maternity leave benefits.

  But in fact the European policies she praises were drafted not by social feminists but, decades earlier, by governments trying to reverse falling birthrates and replenish war-devastated populations. And, in America, the “equal rights” feminists’ record on child care and maternity leave is hardly blank. While the women’s liberation movement certainly, and rightfully, criticized American society for offering mothers hollow Hallmark sentiments as a substitute for legal rights and genuine respect, its leaders also pressed for a wide range of rights that would benefit mothers. In the early ’70s, feminists campaigned for five day care bills in Congress. Three of the eight points of NOW’s original 1967 “Bill of Rights for Women” dealt specifically with child care, maternity leave, and other benefits. In the following years, NOW and other women’s groups repeatedly lobbied Congress, staged national protests, and filed class-action suits to combat discrimination against pregnant women and mothers. And, a key point that Hewlett and like-minded critics overlook, when feminists pushed for women’s rights in other areas—employment opportunities, pay equity, credit rights, women’s health—mothers and their children benefited, too. Anyway, Hewlett is just wrong when she says most ordinary women see the feminist movement as “antifamily.” When the Yankelovich pollsters in 1989 specifically asked, “Is the women’s movement antifamily?,” the vast majority of women, in every age group, said no.

  The last piece of evidence Hewlett offers to support the movement’s “antimotherhood” bias is strictly personal. She lingers over the story of her own battles to balance child care and career while teaching economics at Barnard College, a one-woman struggle that, she concludes, was a likely factor in her failure to win tenure. Feminists at the university, she tells us, were “less than enthusiastic about families,” afforded her no sympathy while she was pregnant, “were opposed to any kind of maternity policy,” and looked down on the committee she says she formed to campaign for maternity leave at the college, accusing her at Women’s Center meetings of seeking a “free ride.” The director of the Women’s Center, she says, took her aside later and “apologetically explained to me that maternity leave was a divisive issue among feminists.” Hewlett recalls thinking at the time: “If this was the other side of the coin of liberation, . . . heaven help the working mother. It was clear our sisters wouldn’t.”

  Jane Gould, the director of the Barnard Women’s Center at the time, was baffled when she read this section of Hewlett’s book. Hewlett, Gould says, didn’t play a central role in the Barnard women’s campaign for a maternity leave policy and the few female professors who opposed that campaign weren’t even feminists: “The feminists were the ones who formed the committee on maternity leave,” Gould says. “Sylvia never even set foot in the women’s center.”

  On the national front, the real “antimotherhood” crusaders weren’t feminists, either; they were New Right leaders, conservative politicians, and corporate executives, who not only ignored mothers’ rights but attacked them. It was, after all, Phyllis Schlafly, not Gloria Steinem, who led the opposition to congressional child care and maternity leave bills for two decades. It was the Chamber of Commerce, not the National Organization for Women, that was the single most effective force behind the defeat of the 1988 Family and Medical Leave Act. (The Chamber triumphed largely by claiming that the legislation would cost businesses at least $24 billion a year; the General Accounting Office later put the cost at about $500 million.)

  Governmental and corporate indifference to the rights of working mothers would eventually become painfully apparent to Hewlett, too, when she tried to organize a family policy panel at the Economics Policy Council, a New York think tank. Hoping to bring government and business leaders together to draft a benefit plan for working mothers, she approached big names like Atlantic Richfield’s chairman Robert Anderson, Warner Communications’ chairman Steven Ross, and even former president Gerald Ford. But she found that once the men realized the panel’s subject matter, they typically bailed out. “It became this sort of revolving door,” Hewlett recalls. “It was a real disappointment.” The men would stay for one session, fidgeting and checking their watches, then disappear. “There was this real sense that they’d be contaminated, that people would think they were wimps,” Hewlett recalls. Some requested that they be switched to another panel that didn’t deal with “women’s stuff.” “Why don’t I send my head of human resources?” one chief executive
told Hewlett when she approached him. “She’s a woman; she’d be interested.”

  Nonetheless, Hewlett kept the panel going, and the group finally issued a set of recommendations, released with much fanfare at a black-tie dinner on Capitol Hill. The recommendations themselves, however, were little different from those contained in dozens of feminist reports in the last two decades. The document proposed the usual solutions for working mothers: government-assisted child care, maternity leave, maternal and child health care, and flexible work schedules. Policymakers received them and, no doubt, filed them in the usual spot.

  BETTY FRIEDAN: REVISIONISM AS A MARKETING TOOL

  When Hewlett organized her family policy panel, she had included two women from “the feminist establishment,” as she called it. One of them was Betty Friedan. Like some of the men, Friedan attended only one meeting and then vanished. She would later publicly criticize Hewlett’s work as a “deceptive backlash book.” The attack surprised Hewlett, who had assumed after reading Friedan’s latest work that they were kindred spirits. “I specifically invited Friedan to sit on the panel because she seemed to be thinking along the same lines as me in her new book, The Second Stage.”

  Indeed, in The Second Stage, published in 1981, Friedan issued many of the same charges against the women’s movement. Its leaders had ignored the maternal call: “Our failure was our blind spot about the family.” Not only that, Friedan’s book alleged, the feminist campaign often mistakenly concentrated on “direct” and “confrontational” political tactics—tactics she herself had pioneered but which she now found too “masculine”—when they should be trying volunteerism and taking up a more genteel “Beta style.”