Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
the male workers they had to work beside nor the men whose beds they shared. If they kept working, they were humiliated at the office, assailed in the shower stalls, and beaten at home; if they tried to obey the social signals and go home, they would starve.
most glorious reason for living. The backlash told women they must choose between a womanly existence and an independent one, and it made the choice for them; it told women that if they gave up the unnatural struggle for self-determination, they could regain their natural femininity. But the women at Cyanamid weren’t even offered this preselected option. First the company’s fetal protection policy defined the women by their wombs, then it forced them to make the decision themselves to cut their wombs from their bodies. And having compelled the choice, the company ultimately revoked all options—the working women were sent home anyway, without their uteruses.
The distress these women felt was, in large measure, the result of the signals they picked up from their culture and the way these signals conflicted with the real circumstances of their lives. It was a predicament that, to one degree or another, women all over America faced during the ’80s. The particular tragedy for the women at American Cyanamid was that these signals conflicted and pushed them to make “choices” in irrevocable, starkly physical ways.
The backlash could never mold America into the backward-looking, dad-hailing, nuclear family fantasy it promoted. But it could implant that image in many women’s minds and set up a nagging, even tormenting dissonance. If women were miserable in the ’80s—and no doubt many were, more so as the backlash deepened—it was not for the reason most widely offered. In the end, feminism and the freedoms that came with it had little part in making women unhappy. It was rather that women’s desire for equality, an impulse that refused to disappear throughout the decade, kept clashing with the backlash’s agenda, spurring women to batter against the walls of self-doubt and recrimination that the backlash helped to build.
The backlash gave women a prescription for happiness that wouldn’t and couldn’t be effective. It split women’s lives into two half lives, work and home, and then billed the latter as a full, fulfilled existence. When women resisted the prescription, they were made miserable through psychological and material punishments; when they tried to follow it, they found that it was a faulty cure—half fantasy, half punishment—that had no place in their contemporary lives. In fact, it had never been effective; it was always a poor substitute. It could never meet the basic human needs and desires that women have brought forward time and again through the centuries—and that society has always sought to turn back.
Epilogue
THE BACKLASH DECADE produced one long, painful, and unremitting campaign to thwart women’s progress. And yet, for all the forces the backlash mustered—the blistering denunciations from the New Right, the legal setbacks of the Reagan years, the powerful resistance of corporate America, the self-perpetuating myth machines of the media and Hollywood, the “neotraditional” marketing drive of Madison Avenue—women never really surrendered. The federal government may have crippled equal employment enforcement and the courts may have undermined twenty-five years of antidiscrimination law—yet women continued to enter the work force in growing numbers each year. Newsstands and airwaves may have been awash with frightening misinformation on spinster booms, birth dearths, and deadly day care—yet women continued to postpone their wedding dates, limit their family size, and combine work with having children. Television sets and movie screens may have been filled with nesting goodwives, but female viewers still gave their highest ratings to shows with strong-willed and independent heroines. Backlash dressmakers couldn’t even get women to follow the most trivial of fashion prescriptions; while retailers crammed their racks with garter belts and teddies, women just kept reaching for the all-cotton Jockeys.
“I was up against a brick wall,” Betty Riggs said of her terrible predicament at American Cyanamid. Yet in the end she decided, like so many other women in this decade, “there was no place to go but forward.” No matter how bruising and discouraging her collisions with the backlash wall, each woman in her own way persisted in pushing against it. This quiet female resistance was the uncelebrated counterpoint to the antifeminist campaign of the ’80s, a common thread in the narrative of so many women’s lives, no matter where they belonged on the ideological spectrum, no matter what their rung on the class ladder. Even those women who helped build the backlash levees were simultaneously trying to surge over them—whether it was Heritage Foundation’s Connie Marshner typing her right-wing treatise the day she went into labor, or “cocooning” marketeer Faith Popcorn hawking her “back to the home” trend while managing her own business and maintaining her independent lifestyle. Concerned Women for America’s president Beverly LaHaye may have said she was trying to resurrect “traditional” family life, but she also was demanding equal time in the bedroom. Pop psychologist Toni Grant may have believed that ambition doesn’t come naturally to her sex, yet she thrived on it—so much so that she even saw her own marriage as a marketing opportunity to improve book sales.
The backlash did manage to infiltrate the thoughts of women, broadcasting on these private channels its sound waves of shame and reproach. But it never quite silenced what factory worker Jan King had called “this little voice in the back of my mind,” the whisper of self-determination that spurred on so many nearly defeated women. It was this voice, so long held in check, so desperate to be heard, that kept dispatcher Diane Joyce on the job, long after the mockery, threats, and ostracism from the men around her had become intolerable. It was this voice that finally provoked Beverly LaHaye to shuck her housecoat and paralyzing timidity, to write her many books and deliver her many speeches. “Down deep in my heart,” as she said, “I felt I would like to stand up and express myself.” It was this voice, barely audible but still unsquelched, that murmured even in the heart of Operation Rescue’s goodwife Cindy Terry, who confessed to wanting “to make something of my life.” No matter how many times women have been told to sit down and keep quiet, they have struggled to their feet. No matter how often they have heard that they would be happier in the shadows, they have continued to seek a sunnier public stage, where their performance, whatever its form or lyrics, will be acknowledged—even applauded.
American women have always fought the periodic efforts to force them back behind the curtain. The important question to ask about the current backlash, then, is not whether women are resisting, but how effectively. Millions of individual women, each in her own way, spent the last decade kicking against the backlash barricades. But much of that effort proved fruitless. While women didn’t succumb to the backlash agenda, they didn’t gain sufficient momentum to crash its steel-reinforced gates, either. Instead, when women tried to drive privately against the antifeminist forces of the ’80s, they most often found their wheels spinning, frustration and disappointment building as they sank deeper in the same old ruts.
There are so many ways to rebel that pose no real or useful challenge to the system—like the proverbial exploited worker who screws the bolts in backward or the dutiful daughter chronically late to Sunday dinner. Some women tried to slip by the backlash checkpoint by mouthing the backlash passwords or trying to tailor the “pro-family” agenda to their own ends or by insisting that they were certainly not feminists. Still others resorted to the old “feminine” strategy—just be good and patient; the world will eventually take pity on women who wait.
While the ’80s was an era that trumpeted the “one person can make a difference” credo, this strategy proved a blind alley on the road to equal rights. To remove the backlash wall rather than to thrash continually against it, women needed to be armed with more than their privately held grievances and goals. Indeed, to instruct each woman to struggle alone was to set each woman up, yet again, for defeat.
In the past, women have proven that they can resist in a meaningful way, when they have had a clear agenda that is unsanitized and un
apologetic, a mobilized mass that is forceful and public, and a conviction that is uncompromising and relentless. On the rare occasions when these three elements have coalesced in the last two centuries, women have won their battles. The suffrage campaign faltered when its leaders resorted to accommodation and deception—daintily claiming they just viewed the vote as a form of “enlarged housekeeping.” Ultimately, it was the combination of a forthright agenda, mass action, and sheer physical resistance that won the day. Suffragists organized thousands of women, filed 480 appeals to the state legislatures, launched fifty-six referendum efforts and staged forty-seven campaigns at state constitutional conventions. Even so, it wasn’t until the National Woman’s Party members began picketing the Capitol, chaining themselves to the White House gates and enduring imprisonment and forced feedings, that half the population finally got the vote.
Likewise, the women’s liberation movement had many false starts. As political scientist Ethel Klein has observed, despite individual women’s repeated efforts only 10 of the 884 women’s rights bills introduced in Congress in the ’60s ever passed. It took a sheer display of numbers and determination for the women’s movement to force its way into public consciousness. The 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, then the largest demonstration for women’s rights in history, turned the tide—inspiring a vast growth in feminist organization memberships and a flood of legal victories. Before the strike, the politicians ignored feminists. Afterward, seventy-one women’s rights bills were signed into law in a matter of a few years—nearly 40 percent of all the legislation on women’s rights passed in the century.
It was in this period that favorable attitudes toward women’s rights experienced their greatest growth among men, too. While many women in the backlash eras have feared “offending men” with feminist demands, women in the ’70s who were assertive and persistent discovered that they could begin to change men’s views. By vigorously challenging the conventional definition of masculinity, these women allowed men to start to question it, too. After all, to a great extent so many men have clung to sole-provider status as their proof of manhood because so many women have expected it of them. (In the Yankelovich poll, it’s not just men who have consistently identified the breadwinner role as the leading masculine trait; it has also consistently been women’s first choice.) As much as men fought the female challenge in the ’70s, they also absorbed and incorporated it into their private experience; and when they saw women wouldn’t back down, many men started to make accommodations to keep the women they loved in their lives. Even blatant antifeminists like Michael Levin, while vocally decrying the equal rights campaign, were quietly cutting domestic deals with their wives. For what has been largely forgotten in the backlash era—where women are encouraged to please men by their demeanor or appearance rather than persuade them by the force of their argument—is that men don’t hold all the emotional cards. Men need women as much as women need men. The bonds between the sexes can chafe, and they can be, and have been, used to constrain women. But they also can promote mutually beneficial growth and change.
Under the ’80s backlash, in the very few instances where women have tried such a vocal and unapologetic strategy, they have managed to transform the public climate, set the agenda on their own terms, and change the minds of many individual men. The spectacular turnaround in abortion politics, pulled off by a rejuvenated pro-choice movement in 1989, is a textbook case in point. It happened when women who believed in the right to control their own bodies finally made a mighty showing of those bodies in 1989—a half million marched on the Capitol on April 9, Washington, D.C.’s largest demonstration ever—and confronted the antiabortion protesters at the clinic doors. Among female students, too, pro-choice protests drew more undergraduates than came to the antiwar marches in the ’60s. Their vast numbers steamrolled over an antiabortion crusade that seemed, only weeks earlier, on the verge of wiping out women’s reproductive rights. The mass mobilization of a pro-choice coalition defused all but a few of the hundreds of antiabortion bills introduced in the state legislatures in 1989, swept pro-choice candidates into gubernatorial and congressional office and even scared Republican National Committee chairman Lee At-water enough to relabel the GOP “an umbrella party” on the abortion question. In Idaho in 1990, one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bills was vetoed by Cecil Andrus, the state’s “pro-life” governor—after pro-choice women declared a boycott of Idaho potatoes. Some feminist leaders argued against such forceful tactics. “Let the governor make his decision based on the seriousness of this issue and the Constitution, not potatoes,” National Abortion Rights Action League’s executive director Kate Michel-man advised. But it was the boycott that clinched it. “Anytime someone threatens one of our major cash crops,” Governor Andrus explained, “it becomes significant.”
For most of the decade, however, the increasingly reinforced fortress of an antifeminist culture daunted women more than it galvanized them. The backlash watchtowers flashed their warning signals without cease, and like high-security floodlights, they served to blind women to their own prodigious strengths. Women of the ’80s were the majority in the general population, the college campuses, the voting booths, the bookstores, at the newsstands, and before the television sets. They represented nearly half the workers in offices and spent nearly 80 percent of the consumer dollars in stores. They enjoyed an unprecedented and expanding gender advantage in both national and state elections—by the end of the ’80s, a Democratic female candidate could command an instant 12-to 20-point lead from female voters simply by declaring herself pro-choice. Yet so often in this era, women seemed unaware of the weight and dynamism of their own formidable presence.
“Women are not taking advantage of the power they already have,” Kate Rand Lloyd, editor of Working Woman, told a women’s rights conference in 1988. “There are a great many men who know their backs are up against the wall. . . . What is regrettable to me is we don’t yet see what it is we have done, how badly we are needed, how we really do have tools for changing our own future in our own hands.”
That women have in their possession a vast and untapped vitality also explains one of the more baffling phenomena of the backlash—the seeming “overreaction” with which some men have greeted even the tiniest steps toward women’s advancement. Maybe these men weren’t overreacting after all. In the ’80s, male politicians saw the widening gender gap figures. Male policymakers saw the polls indicating huge and rising majorities of women demanding economic equality, reproductive freedom, a real participation in the political process, as well as a real governmental investment in social services and a real commitment to peace. (A record gender gap of 25 percent divided the sexes on the 1991 Persian Gulf war; on the eve of battle, a majority of women opposed military intervention, while a majority of men supported it.) Male corporate heads saw the massive female consensus for child care and family leave policies and the vast female resentment over indecent pay and minimal promotions. Male evangelical leaders saw the huge numbers of “traditional” wives who were ignoring their teachings or heading for the office. All of these men understood the profound force that an American women’s movement could exert if it got half a chance. It was women, tragically, who were still in the dark.
“The reason men ‘overreact’ is they get it,” Eleanor Smeal, founder of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, says. “If women all got together on the same day, on the same hour, we would go over the top.” That day could have been any one of the 3,650 days in the last backlash decade. But women never did capitalize on the historic advantage they enjoyed; and as the attack on equal rights gathered momentum, women’s energies were diverted and ultimately exhausted in fending off antifeminism’s punishing blows. What is perhaps most depressing to contemplate is what might have been. The ’80s could have become American women’s great leap forward.
At the start of the ’90s, some forecasters—most of them advertisers and political publicists—began declaring that the next
ten years was going to be “the Decade of Women.” What they meant by this prognosis was not entirely clear. Were they divining a real phenomenon or just coining another “trend”? Were they suggesting that women would wield more authority in the ’90s, or were they simply envisioning another nostalgia-drenched epoch in which women would adopt a softer, more “feminine” pose?
In any event, when the media set out to report this story, they had the usual trouble rounding up evidence. “I get press calls every election season,” Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics, wearily told a reporter. “But the answer is no, this isn’t the year [for women]—it wasn’t the year in 1986 or 1988, and it won’t be in ’90 or ’92.”
One might hope, or dream, that Mandel’s gloomy prediction is proved wrong. But more productively, women can act. Because there really is no good reason why the ’90s can’t be their decade. Because the demographics and the opinion polls are on women’s side. Because women’s hour on the stage is long, long overdue. Because, whatever new obstacles are mounted against the future march toward equality, whatever new myths invented, penalties levied, opportunities rescinded, or degradations imposed, no one can ever take from the American woman the justness of her cause.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION: BLAME IT ON FEMINISM
Women’s fight for . . .: Nancy Gibbs, “The Dreams of Youth, Time, Special Issue: “Women: The Road Ahead,” Fall 1990, p. 12.
Women have “so much” Eleanor Smeal, ’Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) p. 56.
The New York Times reports . . .: Georgia Dullea, “Women Reconsider Childbearing Over 30,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 1982, p. C1.