Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (95 page)

The optimistic, prosperous spirit of the time further advanced Friedan's message. Relatively few of the women who responded to
The Feminine Mystique
, surveys suggested, were from minority groups or the blue-collar classes. Many of these people, after all, had always worked outside the home, ordinarily in low-paid and sex-segregated jobs, and they found little that was liberating in her talk about careers. Those among them who were mothers of small children knew they could never afford day care that would enable them to seek employment with a future. For these and other reasons the women's movement after 1963 was slow to attract wives and mothers in the working classes. But many middle-class, well-educated women responded eagerly to Friedan's book. Although they had not yet developed a collective, strongly feminist view of their world, they sensed that there was more to life than cleaning house and bringing up children.

Moreover, women in general were developing increasingly high expectations, which they were passing on to their children. Public opinion polls revealed how rapidly these expectations expanded during the 1960s. A Gallup survey in 1962 indicated that only about one-third of American women considered themselves victims of discrimination. Eight years later the proportion had risen to a half, and by 1974 to two-thirds. By any standard these were striking measures of social and cultural change.
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The sense of being discriminated against grew especially acute among young women who worked in SDS or in civil rights groups. Men in these groups may have been a little more sensitive to the rights of women than were men in American society at large. But they, too, could be domineering, patronizing, and chauvinistic. When Stokely Carmichael, a leader of SNCC, was asked what should be the role of women in the civil rights movement, he replied (in jest), "The only position for women in SNCC is prone." Anti-war activists opposed the draft with the slogan "Girls say yes to guys who say no." Women were one-third of SDS membership but had only 6 percent of the seats on the SDS executive council in 1964. At the SDS convention in 1965 a male delegate assessed the situation. Women, he said, "made peanut butter, waited on tables, cleaned up, got laid. That was their role." When a woman arose at the gathering to discuss the "women's issue," she was greeted with catcalls. One delegate shouted, "She just needs a good screw."
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By then some of the female activists began to react in outrage. As one woman later complained of the men who called themselves radicals, "They had all this empathy for the Vietnamese, and for black Americans, but they didn't have much empathy for the women in their lives; not the women they slept with, not the women they shared office space with, not the women they fought at demonstrations with. So our first anger and fury was directed against the men of the left."
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Two of these angry women, Casey Hayden (Tom Hayden's wife) and Mary King of SNCC, reacted by writing and circulating widely a memo on "Sex and Caste" in late 1965. It drew a parallel between the subordination of blacks and of women. Both groups, they wrote, "seem to be caught in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power that may exclude them. . . . It is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women."
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The memorandum of King and Hayden did not do much to change males in the anti-war and civil rights movements. Attitudes about gender roles die hard. But growing numbers of many young women on the left came to share their anger. By 1966 and 1967 some of them were calling not only for equal rights but also for "women's liberation." Joining "consciousness-raising" groups, they shared with other women their understanding of sexual exploitation and injustice. They read and circulated memoranda such as "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" and "The Personal Is Political." They were a vanguard in support of a "sexual politics" that was to demand reproductive freedom, the legalization of abortion, changes in family dynamics, and—in time—lesbian rights. The rise of women's liberation exposed as clearly as any development of the mid-1960s the tendency of protestors to assert the rights of groups and to employ the language of rights and entitlements.
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Most of the women who led the drive for women's rights in the mid-1960s, however, were not primarily advocates of sexual liberation. Rather, they were middle-aged political leaders like Congresswoman Martha Griffiths of Michigan and professional women like Friedan who demanded legal equality for the sexes. Their primary goal was to get the EEOC to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing sexual discrimination in employment. Friedan, called to Washington to assist the cause in June 1966, grew frustrated by the timidity of the commission—some of its members thought Title VII was a joke—and by the lethargy, as she saw it, of other women lobbyists for the cause. At a luncheon she sat down and scribbled on a napkin the words calling for a National Organization for Women.
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Four months later, NOW was formed, with Friedan as its first president. It had only a small membership, most of whom were white, middle-class women who advocated legal equality. Then and later the organization had difficulty attracting blue-collar or minority women to its ranks, and it was cool, especially at first, to demands for sexual liberation. Still, it was an assertive organization, calling forthrightly for gender equality. Its statement of purpose emphasized that "a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens of their support."

NOW also managed to be heard. It was in part its lobbying that induced Johnson to add "sex" in October 1967 to the phrase "race, creed, color, or national origin" that he had used in 1965 in his Executive Order 11246 against discrimination in employment. NOW also endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, thereby jettisoning the long-held focus of female lobbyists on protective legislation. In the new climate of equal rights, the courts gradually struck these protective laws down in coming years. In 1968, after further lobbying, NOW and other advocates even succeeded in reaching the EEOC. Before then the commission had insisted that complaints about discrimination first be heard by the courts. Henceforth, it now decided, it would agree to hear them itself. The EEOC also opposed airline regulations that had authorized the firing of stewardesses who married or reached the age of 32, as well as want ads that appeared in sex-segregated newspaper columns.
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Thanks to the activity of NOW and other new women's organizations after 1966, the media gave great attention to the rise of "feminism" in the United States. From its modest beginnings in the mid-1960s the women's movement, though hampered as before by racial and class divisions within its own ranks, grew to establish one of the most durable legacies of the decade. The rise of the women's groups, moreover, exposed with special clarity the proliferation of well-organized lobbies in American politics, as well as the focus of these lobbies on legal action and administrative procedures. Much of the pressure for equal rights in America after the mid-1960s emanated from the courtrooms and the offices of the government bureaucracy.

That this was so, however, also revealed the political limitations of organizations such as NOW. Like many other pressure groups for expanded rights in the mid- and late 1960s, NOW found Congress cool to its efforts: only in late 1970 did ERA escape the House Judiciary Committee. Congressional resistance, in turn, reflected wider popular doubts, among women as well as among men, about many feminist causes. Polls indicated that while women were growing increasingly sensitive about gender discrimination, only a small minority liked to be called "feminists." The majority of housewives, indeed, told pollsters that they were largely content with their lives. Many resented being told by "elitists" that raising families was boring. Other women questioned the emphasis that NOW placed on the satisfactions of working outside the home. Most American women in the 1960s, as earlier, had been socialized in traditional ways. They anticipated marrying, having children, and, if necessary to support their families, working. For this reason—not to compete with men—millions did take jobs outside the home. But many of them had derived little satisfaction from the jobs that were open to them, which notwithstanding the efforts of feminists and others continued to be low-paid and sex-segregated, and they often returned to the home if family budgets so permitted.
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Attitudes such as these indicated that powerful cultural continuities persisted in the United States amid the turmoil of change in the 1960s. Activists for sexual liberation encountered especially fierce resistance from traditionalists. But even those women, like the leaders of NOW, who concentrated on legal rights, faced formidable opposition. Frustrated, some of them grew confrontational and assailed the "sexism"—soon to be a rallying cry—of American men, indeed of American society. The "sexists," bewildered and hurt, shot right back. The war of words expanded, firing up the thunderous language of rights and sparking in time an explosion of litigation. By the late 1960s a "battle of the sexes" had become one of many polarizing struggles that were rending American society.

W
HATEVER SATISFACTIONS
that rights-conscious activists derived from the Warren Court, the grape-pickers' strike, and the women's movement were shaken by the blows that battered Johnson's Great Society in the last three years of his presidency.
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LBJ tried to move ahead on the domestic front, especially in 1966, when he called on Congress to approve a sizeable agenda. It included truth-in-packaging and truth-in-lending legislation to benefit consumers, an increase in the minimum wage, and laws to improve safety in mines and on the highways. Other goals were equally important: improving child nutrition, cleaning up rivers, reforming the bail system, providing rent supplements for the poor, increasing support for urban mass transit, and expanding the availability of low-cost housing. Johnson sought especially to stop the racially discriminatory practices of developers and landlords. The list of his objectives highlighted a special concern of liberals in mid-decade: to improve the quality of life in the cities.
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Congress approved a few of these measures in 1966, finishing its work in October with passage of what LBJ and other liberals hailed as the Model Cities Act. In the next two years the act offered more than $900 million in federal matching grants (80 percent federal, 20 percent local) to cities for a range of programs aimed at improving housing, education, health care, crime prevention, and recreation. Congress, however, refused to approve an "open housing" measure that Johnson had urged to combat discrimination in the real estate market. And the effect of laws that did pass was modest. The Model Cities Act, the most highly touted measure of the session, aided some people, including upwardly mobile blacks who found jobs in the expanding bureaucracy necessary to operate the programs.
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But, like urban renewal legislation in the past, it did little for the poor. Some of the projects amounted to little more than pork barrel efforts that shifted federal money to Democratic urban machines. Others were badly managed.
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So it was that the 1966 session turned out to be at most a feeble last hurrah for liberalism on Capitol Hill. Throughout the session conservatives harped on the flaws of Great Society laws passed earlier, notably those that were part of the war on poverty.
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They especially assailed the Warren Court, which they blamed for a rise of crime and racial unrest in the cities. Gerald Ford of Michigan, the House Republican leader, asked, "How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of any civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?"
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Advocates of rights for the disadvantaged scored a few victories in the 1966 elections, including the triumph of Walter Mondale, a young liberal who replaced Humphrey in the Senate. Massachusetts voters sent to the Senate Edward Brooke, a moderately liberal Republican who became the first black person in American history to be popularly elected to the upper chamber.
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But conservatives did better. Californians chose Ronald Reagan governor over two-term incumbent Edmund "Pat" Brown, conqueror of Nixon in 1962. Alabamans, prevented by law from re-electing Wallace, installed his wife Lurleen instead: Wallace remained governor in fact. Lester Maddox, a vehement racist who had gained notoriety for banning blacks from his restaurant, succeeded to the governorship in Georgia. Republicans, most of them conservatives, replaced forty-seven Democratic incumbents in the House and three in the Senate.

A chastened Johnson recognized the conservative handwriting on the wall. His State of the Union message in 1967 was so modest that the columnist James Reston ridiculed it as a "guns and margarine" address. LBJ continued, however, to press for urban reforms, and in 1968 Congress authorized $5.3 billion in federal money over the next three years to subsidize low-cost private housing. It was hoped that the law would lead to the construction of 1.7 million homes or apartments within the next ten years. The housing law did result in an upsurge of building. But many developers, as in the past, managed to evade quality controls and to build shoddy structures. Scandals erupted, draining congressional support. The program was largely suspended by 1970.
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