IN 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to
sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a
new phenomenon. It had a brand-new slogan: ‘You’ve come a long way,
baby.’ The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in
TV ads that featured women of the early twentieth century being punished
for smoking. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set
of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality
— independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation.
As it happened, the only equality this campaign ended up supporting
involved lung cancer. Today, women and men die at similar rates from
that disease.
Still, women have come a long way since the mid-twentieth century, and
it’s worth considering just how far — and just how far we have to go.
Once upon a time
THESE days it may be hard for some to believe, but before the women’s
movement burst on the scene in the late 1960s, newspapers published ads
for jobs on different pages, segregated by gender. Employers legally
paid women less than men for the same work. Some bars refused to serve
women and all banks denied married women credit or loans, a practice
which didn’t change until 1974. Some states even excluded women from
jury duty.
Radio producers considered women’s voices too abrasive to be on the air
and television executives believed that women didn’t have sufficient
credibility to anchor the news. Few women ran big corporations or
universities, or worked as fire-fighters and police officers. None sat
on the Supreme Court, installed electrical equipment, climbed telephone
poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes had female names,
due to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to
society.
As late as 1970, Dr Edgar Berman, a consultant to presidents and to
Medicare, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by
hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency. Few people ran into
women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as
either Miss or Mrs, depending on her marital status, and if a woman
needed an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life
searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate
doctor.
The public generally believed that rape victims had probably ‘asked for
it’, most women felt too ashamed to report rape, and no language existed
to make sense of what we now call domestic violence, sexual harassment,
marital rape, or date rape. One simple phrase seemed to sum up the
hidden injuries women suffered in silence: ‘That’s life’.
On August 27, 1970, in response to such injustice, 50,000 women marched
down New York’s Fifth Avenue, announcing the birth of a new movement.
They demanded three rights: legal abortion, universal childcare, and
equal pay. These were preconditions for women’s equality with men at
home and in the workplace. Astonishingly, they didn’t include the ending
of violence against women among their demands — though the experience
and fear of male violence was widespread — because women still suffered
these crimes in silence.
Those three demands, and the fourth one that couldn’t yet be articulated, have yet to be met.
The hidden injuries of sex
AS THE women’s movement grew, women activists did, however, begin to
‘name’ their grievances. Once named, they could be identified, debated,
and — with a growing feminist political voice — turned into policy or
used to change the law.
It turned out that there were plenty of hidden injuries, which women
activists discovered and publicized through consciousness-raising
groups, pamphlets, and books. Rape, once a subject of great shame,
became redefined as a physical assault that had little to do with lust.
Date rape, for which there was plenty of experience but no name, opened
up a national conversation about what constituted consensual sex. Few
people had ever heard the words ‘marital rape’. (‘If you can’t rape your
wife,’ California Senator Bob Wilson allegedly said, ‘then who can you
rape?’) In this way, a new conversation began about the right of wives
to have consensual sex and the nature of power relations within
marriage.
From the very beginning, the mainstream media and the public labelled
women activists as ‘lesbians’. Why else would they complain about male
behaviour? Provoked by constant efforts to ‘tarnish’ all feminists as
lesbians, activists chose to embrace the label, rather than exclude
lesbians from the movement. In the process, they also began to write
about and then discuss compulsory heterosexuality. Together with a
burgeoning men’s gay movement, feminist lesbians and gay men formed the
Gay Liberation Front in the 1969. Soon, lesbian feminists created an
all-women’s group called the Lavender Menace.
The birth control pill and the sexual liberation movement of the
mid-1960s gave women new freedoms. Grasping the limitations of such
changes without abortion being legalised, feminists soon joined the
medical abortion rights campaign of that era. Determined to repeal laws
against abortion, in New York they testified before the state
legislature and passed out copies of a ‘model abortion bill’: a blank
piece of paper. Through ‘public speak-outs’, they openly discussed their
own illegal abortions and explained why they had made such choices. In
Chicago and San Francisco, activists created clandestine organisations
to help women seek qualified doctors. Some feminists even learned how to
perform abortions for those who could not find a competent doctor.
Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its famous Roe v Wade
decision, which legalised abortion and ignited the abortion wars that
still rage today. You could even say that this is where the culture wars
of the coming decades really began, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
What had feminists started? In essence, they had begun to redefine one
‘custom’ after another as crimes. For instance, one of the greatest
hidden injuries suffered by women in those years was the predatory
sexual behaviour of male bosses. In 1975, a group of women at Cornell
University coined the term sexual harassment. Previously, some women had
called it ‘sexual blackmail’, but when legal scholar Catherine
Mackinnon used the new phrase in the title of her 1979 book, Sexual
Harassment of Working Women, both feminists and judges began using it in
litigation against predatory bosses. After Anita Hill’s accusations
against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, the phrase became
a household term. In that same year, Congress added amendments to Title
VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, accepting the feminist argument that
sexual harassment violated a woman’s right to earn a living and work in a
non-hostile atmosphere.
If the naming of sexual harassment changed the workplace, the reframing
of wife-beating as domestic violence turned a custom into a felonious
crime. At the same time, feminists spread a network of battered women’s
shelters across the nation, offering havens from marital violence and
possible death.
A half-century to go
IF THE women’s movement often surprised and sometimes blindsided men, it
also radically expanded America’s democratic promise of equality. Women
are now everywhere. No one is shocked in 2013 when a woman enters an
operating room or a lecture hall. More than half the undergraduates at
most universities are women.
Now, if your boss drives you crazy with sexual advances, you can report
him for sexual harassment and sue him in court. If your husband beats
you, he can be charged with a felony and, in most urban areas, you can
escape to a battered women’s shelter. Women like Marissa Mayer, the CEO
of Yahoo!, and Ruchi Sanghvi, head of operations at Dropbox, are some of
the most powerful players in the new technology universe. Three women
have served as secretary of state and one as national security advisor.
Three women sit on the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton almost became the
first woman president and may still achieve that goal. Major magazines
and newspapers have women executive editors and managing editors — even
the New York Times, which waited until 1986 before reluctantly putting
‘Ms’ in front of women’s names on its pages. Hurricanes now bear male
and female names. Women in the US military fight alongside men. They
work as fire-fighters and police detectives, and when a female plumber
shows up to fix an overflowing toilet, most people don’t panic.
Because so much has changed, many people, including young women, believe
that the longest revolution is over, that we should stop complaining,
be proud of our successes, and go home. Consider for a moment, though,
the three demands made in 1970, and the fourth one that couldn’t even be
articulated.
As anyone who’s been awake for the last decade knows, despite Roe v
Wade, women can’t access abortion providers in many parts of the
country. States have passed laws requiring pregnant women to watch
ultrasound ‘pictures’ of their ‘babies’, and forced them to endure 24-
or 48-hour waiting periods so that they can ‘rethink’ their abortion
decisions. In May 2012, Utah established the longest waiting period in
the nation: 72 hours. In that year, in fact, anti-abortion legislatures
managed to pass 43 new laws that, in one way or another, restricted
abortion.
In big cities, finding an abortion provider is often not difficult —
unless of course you are poor (because the government won’t pay for
abortions). Women in rural areas have, however, been hit particularly
hard. They have to travel long distances, pay to stay in hotels while
they ‘rethink’, and then, and only then, can they make the choice that
was promised in 1973. So yes, women still have the right to legal
abortion, but less and less access to abortion providers.
And what about child care? In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive
Childcare Act (CCA), providing national day care to women who needed it.
(Such a law wouldn’t have a chance today.) President Richard Nixon
vetoed it that December. Using Cold War rhetoric, he argued that the
legislation would harm the family and turn American women into their
Soviet counterparts — that is, working drudges. His veto was also
payback to his religious supporters in the South who opposed women
working outside the home, and so using child care. It set childcare
legislation back until, well, this very moment.
Ask any young working mother about the nightmare of finding day care for
her infant or a space in a preschool for her child. Childcare, as
feminists recognised, was a major precondition for women entering the
labour force on an equal footing with men. Instead of comprehensive
childcare, however, this country chose the more acceptable American way
of dealing with problems, namely, that everyone find an individual
solution. If you’re wealthy, you pay for a live-in nanny. If you’re
middle class, you hire someone to arrive every day, ready to take care
of your young children. Or you luck out and find a place in a good
preschool — or a not-so-good one.
If you’re poor, you rely on a series of exhausted and generous
grandparents, unemployed husbands, over-worked sisters, and goodhearted
neighbours. Unlike every nation in Europe, we have no guaranteed
preschool or after-school childcare, despite our endless political
platitudes about how much we cherish our children. And sadly, childcare
has remained off the national political agenda since 1971. It was never
even mentioned during the 2012 presidential debates.
And let’s not forget women’s wages. In 1970, women earned, on average,
59 per cent of men’s wages. More than four decades later, the figure is
77 per cent. When a university recently invited me to give a keynote
address at a conference, they asked what fee I expected. I wasn’t quite
sure how to respond. The best advice I got — from my husband — was:
‘Just tell them to give you 77% of whatever they’re paying the male
keynote speaker.’ That response resulted in a generous honorarium.
But what about all the women — widowed, divorced, or single — who can’t
draw on a second income from a man? How can we claim we’ve reached the
1970 equal pay demand when 70 per cent of the nation’s poor are women
and children? This isn’t about glass ceilings. What concerns me are all
the women glued to the sticky floor of dead-end jobs that provide no
benefits and no health insurance, women who, at the end of each month,
have to decide whether to pay the electricity bill or feed their
children.
As an activist and historian, I’m still shocked that women activists
(myself included) didn’t add violence against women to those three
demands back in 1970. Fear of male violence was such a normal part of
our lives that it didn’t occur to us to highlight it — not until
feminists began, during the 1970s, to publicize the wife-beating that
took place behind closed doors and to reveal how many women were raped
by strangers, the men they dated, or even their husbands.
Nor did we see how any laws could end it. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in a
powerful essay recently, one in five women will be raped during her
lifetime and gang rape is pandemic around the world. There are now laws
against rape and violence toward women. There is even a UN international
resolution on the subject. In 1993, the World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna declared that violence against girls and women violated
their human rights. After much debate, member nations ratified the
resolution and dared to begin calling supposedly time-honoured ‘customs’
— wife beating, honour killings, dowry deaths, genital mutilation —
what they really are: brutal and gruesome crimes. Now, the nations of
the world had a new moral compass for judging one another’s cultures. In
this instance, the demands made by global feminists trumped cultural
relativism, at least when it involved violence against women.
Still, little enough has changed. Such violence continues to keep women
from walking in public spaces. Rape, as feminists have always argued, is
a form of social control, meant to make women invisible and shut them
in their homes, out of public sight. That’s why activists created ‘take
back the night’ protests in the late 1970s. They sought to reclaim the
right to public space without fear of rape.
The daytime brutal rape and killing of a 23-year-old in India last
December prompted the first international protest around violence
against women. Maybe that will raise the consciousness of some men. But
it’s hard to feel optimistic when you realise how many rapes are still
regularly being committed globally.
So, yes, we’ve come a long way, but without achieving full access to
legal abortion, comprehensive childcare, or equal pay — those three
demands from so many decades ago. Nor have we won the right to enjoy
public space without fearing violence, rape, or worse.
I always knew this was the longest revolution, one that would take a
century or more to unfold. It’s upended most of our lives, and
significantly improved so many of them. Nothing will ever be the same.
Yet there’s still such a long way to go. I doubt I’ll see full gender
equality in my lifetime.
TomDispatch.com, February 21. Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for
the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, is professor
emerita of history at the University of California at Davis and a
scholar in residence
at UC Berkeley.
