When Everything Changed (29 page)

As Ella Baker had predicted, once people started talking about black women’s need to defer to their men, the women soon became regarded as part of the problem. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future senator who was then a counselor to President Nixon, issued a report on “Black Families in Crisis” in which he blamed many of the economic and social problems of poor African-Americans on female-dominated families, where men were either absent or undermined. While Moynihan made it clear that he blamed the legacy of slavery, not the poor themselves, for their dire economic straits, a reader would have been hard-pressed not to conclude that he also blamed black women. “Both as a husband and as a father the Negro male is made to feel inadequate,” the report quoted the civil rights leader Whitney Young as saying. It expressed alarm over the fact that black girls were doing better in school than their male peers, and suggested that black mothers were favoring their daughters over their sons.

Meanwhile, the black power movement in some cities was veering into outright misogyny. Women were outraged and insulted, and they began to speak out about the sexism they encountered within their community. “
As a black person
I am no stranger to prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far more often discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black,” Shirley Chisholm said. “I knew I would encounter both anti-black and anti-feminist sentiments. What surprised me was the greater virulence of the sex discrimination.”
Chisholm, who became
the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968, ran in a district in Brooklyn where both the voters and the political power structure were black. Her opponent was James Farmer, the former Freedom Ride leader, who ran stressing the need for a “man’s voice” in Washington.

“T
HANK THEE
, L
ORD, THAT
I
WAS BORN A WOMAN
.”

In 1970 Betty Friedan stepped down as head of NOW. In her farewell speech—which her friends suspected she had never wanted to make—she surprised everyone by calling on “every American woman” to stop working for men and take to the streets on August 26, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. “I propose that the women who are doing menial chores in the offices cover their typewriters and close their notebooks, the telephone operators unplug their switchboards… and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more—stop. Every woman pegged forever as an assistant, doing jobs for which men get credit—stop,” she orated. While it was impossible to say how many women would join in “our day of abstention,” Friedan said confidently, “I expect it will be millions.”

Almost no one imagined that women would really risk losing their jobs in a mass walkout or that even if they were willing, such an event could be organized fast enough. But the strike morphed into an anything-goes “action” in which women in every city and town were encouraged to do what they felt best to mark the moment.
On Strike Day itself
, Friedan recounted over and over in later years, she was almost late to the Central Park start-off point of the New York City march because the traffic was unexpectedly heavy. Then, as she rounded the last corner, she saw “not hundreds but thousands of women and men and babies and grandmothers beginning to mass.” The marchers had been ordered to stay on the sidewalks, but when Friedan saw how many there were, “there was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little, thin line. I waved my arm over my head and yelled,
‘Take to the streets!’
What a moment that was.”

Later, at the postmarch
rally, Friedan told the crowd, “In the religion of my ancestors, there was a prayer that Jewish men said every morning. They prayed, ‘Thank thee, Lord, that I was not born a woman.’ Today I feel, feel for the first time, feel absolutely sure, that all women are going to be able to say, as I say tonight, ‘Thank thee, Lord, that I was born a woman for this day.’ ”

The strike for equality, which was marked by parades and demonstrations in cities around the country, drew the kind of bemused tone of superiority from male commentators that the women had come to expect.
A West Virginia senator
got massive coverage for his description of the marchers as “a small band of braless bubbleheads.” On ABC, Howard K. Smith quoted an old saw about three things that were difficult to tame: the ocean, fools, and women (“We may soon be able to tame the ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer”). Nevertheless, it had been a glorious day, and it marked something important. American women understood that a seismic shift in understanding was taking place. Things they had always done in emergencies—such as working in defense factories during the war—and things that only a few unusual “women lawyers” or “women engineers” had done, were now going to be recognized as part of the normal deal. The world had turned, and the conviction that what women needed most was protection had given way to a call for an equal playing field. Relations between men and women were changing in thousands of major and minor ways. The household chores, if not divided, had at least been brought up for discussion. The idea that the most desirable girl was a demure thing who always lost at chess or tennis was slipping away. Young women plotting their futures were not feeling compelled to go for the least-adventurous option. Some people, of course, balked at the swiftness of the change, and others preferred not to pay attention. (“
It’s the funniest thing
. I don’t feel there’s any discrimination. I know my husband feels that way,” said Pat Nixon when NOW began picketing the White House in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.) But the nation’s consciousness was quickly, and sometimes painfully, evolving.

“W
HO’D BE AGAINST EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN
?”

In 1970 Jo Freeman had to fly from Chicago to Washington, with a choice between a puddle jumper that made several stops along the way and a direct flight with United. She chose the puddle jumper and later wrote United a letter, saying she had picked the less-convenient flight because she was boycotting the airline that ran those men-only “executive flights” between New York and Chicago.

“A year later they changed the policy,” Freeman recalled. “And they sent me a telegram.”

Politicians, keenly aware that the new special-interest group they were courting represented half the population, rolled out reforms. In the early 1970s, Congress passed a bill equalizing benefits for married employees, an Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the famous Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in federally aided education programs. “
We put sex discrimination
provisions into everything,” said Representative Bella Abzug. “There was no opposition. Who’d be against equal rights for women?” Meanwhile, Attorney General John Mitchell sued to end discrimination against women in large corporations, and the Nixon administration forced two thousand colleges to submit to an investigation of whether they were discriminating against women in hiring and salaries.

The states followed suit.
Roxanne Conlin, who was assistant
attorney general in Iowa, wrote a bill eliminating all references in Iowa law to man, woman, girl, boy, lady, gentleman, etc. The massive reform of the state code produced a huge protest from… barbers. Ever watchful of their perquisites in every part of the country, the Iowa barbers staged a huge fight against allowing men to have their hair cut in beauty parlors. That was fine by Conlin, “because nobody noticed the rest of it, such as equalization of pensions.”

In 1972 the members of the National Woman’s Party walked out of their headquarters and up Capitol Hill to watch the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. At 85, Alice Paul was still in Washington, trying to orchestrate everything.
Amelia Fry, a historian
who had volunteered to assist with the lobbying, felt Paul’s intensity like “a single beam of strong light.” When an exhausted Fry finally escaped for a lunch where some topic other than the ERA might be discussed, she was conscious that “a mile away was Alice in the one hundred eightieth day of the forty-ninth year of telephoning, assigning tasks, getting advocate statements written, and running her small army.”

The Equal Rights Amendment had become increasingly more popular as legislatures and courts abolished the discriminatory practices the amendment was meant to reverse. By the early 1970s, its passage in Congress was being held up by only a few very powerful and determined committee chairmen. Martha Griffiths took the unusual—and extremely difficult—route of getting a majority of House members to force the bill to the floor through petition. The signatures came with a great deal of help from Marguerite Rawalt, who was attending a convention of the Business and Professional Women in Hawaii. Every night, Griffiths would phone to tell Rawalt which representative needed pressure, and Rawalt would pass on the message to the delegates, every one a woman used to a great deal of letter writing.

Once the bill was released, it passed 352 to 15 after only an hour of debate—the first time the House had acted on it since its introduction in 1923. The Senate held out for another two years, thanks to Sam Ervin of North Carolina. (“
Keep the law
responsible where the good Lord put it—on the man to bear the burdens of support and the women to bear the children.”) But in 1972 resistance gave way and the bill passed quickly. The Hawaii legislature, waiting expectantly, became the first state to ratify the amendment minutes later.
At the same time
, Marguerite Rawalt walked into the Capitol lobby, where a bust of William Blackstone, the famous legal scholar who once described women as “chattel,” stands. Rawalt approached the stony Mr. Blackstone and draped her black scarf over him.

PART III

F
OLLOWING
T
HROUGH

9. Backlash

“…
EXCEEDS WHAT
I
DARED HOPE FOR
.”

I
n 1977 Alice Paul was living in a small Quaker nursing home in New Jersey, having suffered a stroke that left her confined to a wheelchair. “
She’s 92
. She ought to have her amendment before she dies,” said the coordinator of an Alice Paul birthday salute. Paul was very frail, and her caregivers talked about her as a sweet old lady who loved lavender water and who would occasionally ask to hold the many medals she had been given over her long and extraordinary career.
But when a delegation
from the local YWCA’s Center for Women came to deliver a birthday proclamation from the town council, the old Alice Paul popped right back up. “I read the proclamation I had painstakingly written,” recalled Janet Tegley. “When I finished, Miss Paul immediately said, ‘That’s not right! You have the chronology wrong!’ ”

In a birthday interview
, Paul told a reporter that while suffrage had been the great victory of her life so far, the Equal Rights Amendment would be the next. The women were bound to get the last four states they needed to ratify, she said, “because the volume of support exceeds what I dared hope for.” Asked what she would do if she had time for yet another campaign, Paul told the reporter to read the short, succinct text of the ERA, which was dubbed the “Alice Paul Amendment” when it was rewritten from her original version in 1943:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

“It sounds to me kind of complete,” she said.

I
F, IN
1972, you had told ERA supporters that the amendment wouldn’t be ratified by 1977, they’d have been surprised and alarmed. Once it had finally gotten past the long-standing roadblock of Senator Sam Ervin, the ERA passed by overwhelming margins in Congress. Within two days it had been ratified by six states, all by unanimous votes. Twenty-four more had followed, virtually in lockstep. It felt as though the women’s movement had become an unstoppable wave. The whole country was humming Helen Reddy’s megahit, “I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar).” “I am strong. I am invincible. I am wooooman!” sang Reddy, who won a Grammy for her performance and thanked “God because She makes everything possible.”