Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (30 page)

Choices that had been cheered as liberating in the 1970s evoked criticism and dire warnings in the 1980s. In 1973,
Newsweek
had praised the emergence of singleness: “Within just eight years, singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable—style of
American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.”
³⁰
By the mid-1980s, another cover story in the same magazine warned single women that their opportunities for marriage may have passed by. “For many economically independent women, the consequences of their actions have begun to set in. For years bright young women single-mindedly pursued their careers, assuming that when it was time for a husband they could pencil one in. They were wrong.”
³¹
This warning was based on a poorly researched, unpublished study that rapidly had become the basis for numerous cover stories and TV special reports in which single women (but not men) emoted about their loneliness and lost opportunities.

Certainly a higher percentage of women remained single, and many of them hoped eventually to marry. The media played expertly on the anxieties of women living out new life patterns without familiar models to show the way. Despite overwhelming evidence of life satisfaction and mental health among working women, whether married or not, many women began to believe that they
should
be lonely and panic-stricken. Similarly, the changing work patterns of married women provided fodder for divisive coverage. In a 1982 story entitled “Women vs. Women,”
Ladies Home Journal
declared that there was a “New Cold War Between Housewives and Working Mothers.” Anyone who read to the end of the story would find a plea for communication and understanding, but the large type lead framed a very different message: “During the 1970s there was a lot of talk about ‘sisterhood.’ … In practice, however, the events of the last decade may have done more to divide us than to bring us together.”
³²

Film images of women and men had seemed to be moving in the 1970s toward androgyny, but the 1980s saw a return to stories in which raw male violence and aggression dominated and women were either absent or depicted as sexualized accessories. The shift was not immediate, however, as the early eighties saw a number of movies that challenged gender boundaries with men passing as women (like Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie
) and women passing as men (like Julie Andrews in
Victor/Victoria
and Barbara Streisand in
Yentl
). The waning social movement idealism of the seventies also produced several early 1980s films
about activism—
Reds (1981), Gandhi (1982),
and
Silkwood
(1983)—and a cluster of movies centered on strong female characters (
Country, Places in the Heart,
and
The River
). Such themes rapidly disappeared, however. In the blockbuster
Rambo
series, movie star Sylvester Stallone’s untamed, macho screen image displaced the “sensitive man” as portrayed by Alan Alda in the TV series “Mash.” Furthermore, the motivations of the Rambo character shifted sharply to the right between 1982 and 1985 as he became a one-man militia.
³³
Similarly, fashion sharpened the contrast between aggressive masculinity and sexualized femininity with a return to cinched waists, high heels, miniskirts, and childlike poufs. In the mid-1980s, feminist author Susan Brownmiller attributed the reemphasis on femininity to “a sociological fact of the 1980s … that female competition for two scarce resources—men and jobs—is especially fierce.”
³⁴
By the end of the decade, fashion photographers were selling clothes with photographs of pale, pinched, and sometimes beaten women, a style that came to be known as “heroin chic.”

In the wake of the ERA’s defeat, most national women’s rights organizations experienced a sharp contraction of membership and cuts in government funding combined with membership losses destroyed many smaller feminist groups.
³⁵
The popular media in the early 1980s discussed the “death of feminism” or, more kindly, “postfeminism.” Young women began to perceive feminism as a source of stigma.
³⁶
Elle
wrote, in 1986, that the new generation of women “no longer needs to examine the whys and hows of sexism…. All those ideals that were once held as absolute truths—sexual liberation, the women’s movement, true equality—have been debunked or debased.”
³⁷

Like other feminist institutions,
Ms.
had a bumpy ride in the 1980s, struggling for survival against the rising tide of conservatism and the growing invisibility of feminism. New commercial journals, such as
Savvy, Working Woman,
and
Working Mother,
had emerged to reach a market of young professionals. The covers of
Ms.
became less controversial, emphasizing self-help more than consciousness-raising (advertisers, for example, did not want women on the cover who were not beautiful or who did not wear makeup). The number of ads increased and the journal was sold several times in a search for a niche in which it
could continue to exist. Simply by surviving,
Ms.
provided a continuing voice on mainstream newsstands that analyzed such issues as the feminization of poverty, provided research about the conservative right, and offered an outlet for feminist writers.
³⁸

Empowered by the Republican administration, right wingers kept up a relentless criticism of women’s labor force participation, successfully blocking most legislation designed to ameliorate the strains of work and family life while turning the blame for those very stresses back on feminism itself. Opposing state subsidies for female-headed households, for example, George Gilder charged that proponents of such measures “… want to ratify the female-headed family as the norm in America. They do not want to subsidize families; they want to subsidize feminism…. The female-headed families of today create an unending chain of burdens for tomorrow as their children disrupt classrooms, fill the jails, throng the welfare rolls, and gather as bitter petitioners and leftist agitators seeking to capture for themselves the bounty produced by stable families.”
³⁹

Political commentator E. J. Dionne, Jr. pointed out that “feminism had the misfortune of gaining ground in the period when the American economy suffered from its most severe shocks since the Great Depression.” As a result, women entered the labor force in two “parallel streams,” one highly educated and eager to seize new opportunities, the other forced into work by a declining economy and falling male wages. The latter, of course, ended up in service jobs that were not particularly fulfilling.
⁴⁰
In light of the ongoing struggles for equal pay and affirmative action it is deeply ironic that conservatives were so successful in casting feminists as antimale and antifamily “dress for success” professionals who cared little for the trials of ordinary women.

Such stereotypes, however, governed the perceptions of the vast majority of young people of the eighties, both male and female. Paula Kamen, writing for the student newspaper at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1988, “quickly learned that taking a stand on anything even remotely construed as a women’s issue aroused strange and strong suspicions.” When she subsequently interviewed more than 100 women of her own generation, she found that their associations with the word “feminist”
were infused with rigid and extreme stereotypes of “bra-burning, hairy-legged, amazon, castrating, militant-almost-anti-feminine, communist, Marxist, separatist, female skinheads, female supremacists, he-woman types, bunch-a-lesbians….” She attributed the power of these stereotypes in part to the sense that young feminists were virtually invisible in the 1980s. “During our ‘coming of age’ years from 1980 to 1990, young feminists didn’t seem to exist.”
⁴¹

Indeed, with amazing speed the women’s movement receded to the margins of public consciousness. Younger women were left to believe that the problems were solved. After all, they had experienced athletic opportunities unheard of only a decade before as a result of Title IX, unparalleled access to education and jobs, and curricula in both schools and organizations like the Girl Scouts that were explicitly designed to give them a broad perspective on their own potentials and choices. At the same time the utopian optimism of the sixties and seventies no longer found fertile ground after Vietnam and Watergate. Writing in 1989, Amy E. Schwartz described the experience of those who, like herself, left home for college at the beginning of the eighties:

We are the generation that grew up liberated already; we had no need to rebel. When we hit puberty, sex was OK; when we got old enough to imagine college, girls were already established inside the old Ivy League barricades, with coed dorms and freedom of behavior taken for granted. Girls were as likely as boys to talk about bright futures; more important, primed on the Judy Blume books they were just as entitled to feel lustful. Abortion was legal, contraception was available, drugs were undeniably around.
⁴²

Another woman in that same generation, Arrington Chambliss, grew up around strong women in the 1970s but heard little or nothing about feminism beyond the popular stereotypes Kamen described. In the early 1980s, at the University of Richmond, she became a rape crisis counselor at the YWCA. “Women in the rape crisis center asked whether I considered myself a feminist.” Arrington asked what that meant; they said equal rights, equal pay, etc. “I said ‘of course I do.’ They were jubilant.”
Her subsequent experience as an activist in organizations of young people devoted to social service work and active citizenship replicated those of female student activists in the sixties. Men in leadership positions frequently came on to her, leaving her unsure whether her value to the organization was simply sexual attractiveness “or if I was really talented.” Young people expected themselves to give everything to the cause, work day and night, sleep on floors. There were no boundaries. “Women had a role in that, but women involved did not identify themselves strongly as women.” As a result, women had few defenses against what was already being named in other circles as sexual harassment. For example, when Arrington went to the Democratic Convention in 1984, “It was OK that I was staying in the same room with my boss who was a man I didn’t know. ‘OK [because] this is the 80s, it’s OK to do this. The discomfort I feel right now is wrong.’ There was no one to talk to, no support, no one to help identify what was going on or name it.” When Arrington began to speak up about sexism, “people said what is the deal about getting on this women’s bandwagon?” Social justice issues, in their view, revolved around economic disparities and racial discrimination. To speak up for oneself in the same context was to be self-indulgent, uptight. Her response, however, was “how can you not get on it? It’s part of the whole social justice thing!”
⁴³

Chambliss’s story highlights the isolation of young feminists in the 1980s, but it also captures the reality that many did find their way to feminist activism. Even in the 1970s, feminists were a distinct minority of women on most campuses. When political scientist Jesse Donahue interviewed a group of women like herself who had been activists in college during the 1980s, she found patterns not strikingly different from those a few college generations ahead of them. Inspired by strong role models and infuriating experiences of sexism, they joined an array of student groups working on abortion rights, lesbian activism, and women’s health, all of which were available on campuses. Missing in their experience, however, were both the early generation of women’s liberation consciousness-raising groups and any of the more institutionalized feminist organizations that continued into the 1980s. NOW, in fact, had made a strategic and devastatingly shortsighted decision not
to devote resources to organizing the transient population of college-age feminists.
⁴⁴

Campuses in the 1980s were not uniform, however. Most young women in the mid-1980s had to stumble their way to feminism (if they got there) through a thicket of stereotypes, but on many campuses, especially among young lesbians, there were enclaves in which the women’s communities of the 1970s seemed to continue uninterrupted. Jeannine Delombard recalls coming out as a lesbian during her freshman year at Vassar in 1985, when “political correctness was sweeping American campuses.” They were “blissfully unaware” of arguments among feminists about lifestyles and sexuality as well as of the distance most of their generation felt from feminism. Instead they adopted a “standard dyke or lesbian feminist uniform—baggy, rumpled clothes, Birkenstocks, no makeup, unstyled hair” and engaged in “politically correct unions” that were more political than passionate.
⁴⁵

T
HE VIRULENT
, even vicious opposition to feminism in the 1980s was less a death knell than an indicator of the fact that feminism had become a powerful force in American society and culture, reworking the shape and mission of numerous mainstream organizations as well as the nature of public life. Backlash was not the dominant reality of the 1980s. Indeed, the new hostility to change reflected the fact that, whether as working professionals or homeless “bag ladies,” women had become omnipresent in public life. Although too often still tokens in terms of total numbers, they were there nonetheless—in corporate boardrooms, on highway crews, at truck stops (driving trucks!), in courtrooms (as judges and lawyers and also as the accused), in the pulpit, and in combat fatigues. The simple appearance of a woman in a position of authority no longer provoked disbelief. Furthermore, the joint impact of the feminist and civil rights movements meant that many of these newly visible women were women of color.