Living The Legacy The Women

the United States.” A constitutional amendment would apply uniformly, regardless

of where a person lived.

The second wing of the post-suffrage movement

was one that had not been explicitly anticipated in the Seneca Falls “Declaration

of Sentiments.” It was the birth control movement, initiated by a public

health nurse, Margaret Sanger, just as the suffrage drive was nearing its

victory. The idea of woman’s right to control her own body, and especially

to control her own reproduction and sexuality, added a visionary new dimension

to the ideas of women’s emancipation. This movement not only endorsed educating

women about existing birth control methods. It also spread the conviction

that meaningful freedom for modern women meant they must be able to decide

for themselves whether they would become mothers, and when. For decades,

Margaret Sanger and her supporters faced down at every turn the zealously

enforced laws denying women this right. In 1936, a Supreme Court decision

declassified birth control information as obscene. Still, it was not until

1965 that married couples in all stat! es could obtain contraceptives legally.

The Second Wave

So it’s clear that, contrary to common

misconception, the Women’s Rights Movement did not begin in the 1960s.

What occurred in the 1960s was actually a second wave of activism that

washed into the public consciousness, fueled by several seemingly independent

events of that turbulent decade. Each of these events brought a different

segment of the population into the movement.

First: Esther Peterson was the director

of the Women’s Bureau of the Dept. of Labor in 1961. She considered it

to be the government’s responsibility to take an active role in addressing

discrimination against women. With her encouragement, President Kennedy

convened a Commission on the Status of Women, naming Eleanor Roosevelt

as its chair. The report issued by that commission in 1963 documented discrimination

against women in virtually every area of American life. State and local

governments quickly followed suit and established their own commissions

for women, to research conditions and recommend changes that could be initiated.

Then: In 1963, Betty Friedan published

a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique evolved out

of a survey she had conducted for her 20-year college reunion. In it she

documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class

educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. The book

became an immediate bestseller, and inspired thousands of women to look

for fulfillment beyond the role of homemaker.

Next: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights

Act was passed, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex

as well as race, religion, and national origin. The category “sex” was

included as a last-ditch effort to kill the bill. But it passed, nevertheless.

With its passage, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established

to investigate discrimination complaints. Within the commission’s first

five years, it received 50,000 sex discrimination complaints. But it was

quickly obvious that the commission was not very interested in pursuing

these complaints. Betty Friedan, the chairs of the various state Commissions

on the Status of Women, and other feminists agreed to form a civil rights

organization for women similar to the NAACP. In 1966, the National Organization

for Women was organized, soon to be followed by an array of other mass-membership

organizations addressing the needs of specific groups of women, including

Blacks, Latinas, Asians-Americans, lesbians,! welfare recipients, business

owners, aspiring politicians, and tradeswomen and professional women of

every sort.

During this same time, thousands of young

women on college campuses were playing active roles within the anti-war

and civil rights movement. At least,that was their intention. Many were

finding their efforts blocked by men who felt leadership of these movements

was their own province, and that women’s roles should be limited to fixing

food and running mimeograph machines. It wasn’t long before these young

women began forming their own “women’s liberation” organizations to address

their role and status within these progressive movements and within society

at large.

New Issues Come to the Fore

These various elements of the re-emerging

Women’s Rights Movement worked together and separately on a wide range

of issues. Small groups of women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots

projects like establishing women’s newspapers, bookstores and cafes. They

created battered women’s shelters and rape crisis hotlines to care for

victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. They came together to form

child care centers so women could work outside their homes for pay. Women

health care professionals opened women’s clinics to provide birth control

and family planning counseling-and to offer abortion services – - for low-income

women. These clinics provided a safe place to discuss a wide range of health

concerns and experiment with alternative forms of treatment.

With the inclusion of Title IX in the Education

Codes of 1972, equal access to higher education and to professional schools

became the law. The long-range effect of that one straightforward legal

passage beginning “Equal access to education programs…,” has been simply

phenomenal. The number of women doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects

and other professionals has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually

limiting women’s enrollment in graduate schools were outlawed. Athletics

has probably been the most hotly contested area of Title IX, and it’s been

one of the hottest areas of improvement, too. The rise in girls’ and women’s

participation in athletics tells the story: One in twenty-seven high school

girls played sports 25 years ago one in three do today. The whole world

saw how much American women athletes could achieve during the last few

Olympic Games, measured in their astonishing numbers of gold, silver, and

bronze medals. This was another very visible result of T! itle IX.

In society at large, the Women’s Rights

Movement has brought about measurable changes, too. In 1972, 26% of men

and women said they would not vote for a woman for president. In 1996,

that sentiment had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for men.

The average age of women when they first marry has moved from twenty to

twenty-four during that same period.

But perhaps the most dramatic impact of

the women’s rights movement of the past few decades has been women’s financial

liberation. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married women were not

issued credit cards in their own name? That most women could not get a

bank loan without a male co-signer? That women working full time earned

fifty-nine cents to every dollar earned by men?

Help-wanted ads in newspapers were segregated

into “Help wanted – women” and “Help wanted- men.” Pages and pages of jobs

were announced for which women could not even apply. The Equal Employment

Opportunity Commission ruled this illegal in 1968, but since the EEOC had

little enforcement power, most newspapers ignored the requirement for years.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the issue all the

way to the Supreme Court to make it possible for a woman today to hold

any job for which she is qualified. And so now we see women in literally

thousands of occupations which would have been almost unthinkable just

one generation ago: dentist, bus driver, veterinarian, airline pilot, and

phone installer, just to name a few.

Many of these changes came about because

of legislation and court cases pushed by women’s organizations. But many

of the advances women achieved in the 1960s and ’70s were personal: getting

husbands to help with the housework or regularly take responsibility for

family meals getting a long-deserved promotion at work gaining the financial

and emotional strength to leave an abusive partner.

The Equal Rights Amendment Is Re-Introduced

Then, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment,

which had languished in Congress for almost fifty years, was finally passed

and sent to the states for ratification. The wording of the ERA was simple:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the

United States or by any state on account of sex.” To many women’s rights

activists, its ratification by the required thirty-eight states seemed

almost a shoo-in.

The campaign for state ratification of

the Equal Rights Amendment provided the opportunity for millions of women

across the nation to become actively involved in the Women’s Rights Movement

in their own communities. Unlike so many other issues which were battled-out

in Congress or through the courts, this issue came to each state to decide

individually. Women’s organizations of every stripe organized their members

to help raise money and generate public support for the ERA. Marches were

staged in key states that brought out hundreds of thousands of supporters.

House meetings, walk-a-thons, door-to-door canvassing, and events of every

imaginable kind were held by ordinary women, many of whom had never done

anything political in their lives before. Generous checks and single dollar

bills poured into the campaign headquarters, and the ranks of NOW and other

women’s rights organizations swelled to historic sizes. Every women’s magazine

and most general interest publications had st! ories on the implications

of the ERA, and the progress of the ratification campaign.

But Elizabeth Cady Stanton proved prophetic

once again. Remember her prediction that the movement should “anticipate

no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule”? Opponents

of the Equal Rights Amendment, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, feared that

a statement like the ERA in the Constitution would give the government

too much control over our personal lives. They charged that passage of

the ERA would lead to men abandoning their families, unisex toilets, gay

marriages, and women being drafted. And the media, purportedly in the interest

of balanced reporting, gave equal weight to these deceptive arguments just

as they had when the possibility of women winning voting rights was being

debated. And, just like had happened with woman suffrage, there were still

very few women in state legislatures to vote their support, so male legislators

once again had it in their power to decide if women should have equal rights.

When the deadline for ratification came in 198! 2, the ERA was just three

states short of the 38 needed to write it into the U.S. constitution. Seventy-five

percent of the women legislators in those three pivotal states supported

the ERA, but only 46% of the men voted to ratify.

Despite polls consistently showing a large

majority of the population supporting the ERA, it was considered by many

politicians to be just too controversial. Historically speaking, most if

not all the issues of the women’s rights movement have been highly controversial

when they were first voiced. Allowing women to go to college? That would

shrink their reproductive organs! Employ women in jobs for pay outside

their homes? That would destroy families! Cast votes in national elections?

Why should they bother themselves with such matters? Participate in sports?

No lady would ever want to perspire! These and other issues that were once

considered scandalous and unthinkable are now almost universally accepted

in this country.

More Complex Issues Surface

Significant progress has been made regarding

the topics discussed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The people

attending that landmark discussion would not even have imagined the issues

of the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1990s. Much of the discussion has

moved beyond the issue of equal rights and into territory that is controversial,

even among feminists. To name a few:

Women’s reproductive rights. Whether or

not women can terminate pregnancies is still controversial twenty-five

years after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade affirmed women’s choice

during the first two trimesters.

Women’s enrollment in military academies

and service in active combat. Are these desirable?

Women in leadership roles in religious

worship. Controversial for some, natural for others.

Affirmative action. Is help in making up

for past discrimination appropriate? Do qualified women now face a level

playing field?

The mommy track. Should businesses accommodate

women’s family responsibilities, or should women compete evenly for advancement

with men, most of whom still assume fewer family obligations?

Pornography. Is it degrading, even dangerous,

to women, or is it simply a free speech issue?

Sexual harassment. Just where does flirting

leave off and harassment begin?

Surrogate motherhood. Is it simply the

free right of a woman to hire out her womb for this service?

Social Security benefits allocated equally

for homemakers and their working spouses, to keep surviving wives from

poverty as widows.

Today, young women proudly calling themselves

“the third wave” are confronting these and other thorny issues. While many

women may still be hesitant to call themselves “feminist” because of the

ever-present backlash, few would give up the legacy of personal freedoms

and expanded opportunities women have won over the last 150 years. Whatever

choices we make for our own lives, most of us envision a world for our

daughters, nieces and granddaughters where all girls and women will have

the opportunity to develop their unique skills and talents and pursue their

dreams.

1998: Living the Legacy

In the 150 years since that first, landmark

Women’s Rights Convention, women have made clear progress in the areas

addressed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her revolutionary Declaration of

Sentiments. Not only have women won the right to vote we are being elected

to public office at all levels of government. Jeannette Rankin was the

first woman elected to Congress, in 1916. By 1971, three generations later,

women were still less than three percent of our congressional representatives.

Today women hold only 11% of the seats in Congress, and 21% of the state

legislative seats. Yet, in the face of such small numbers, women have successfully

changed thousands of local, state, and federal laws that had limited women’s

legal status and social roles.

In the world of work, large numbers of

women have entered the professions, the trades, and businesses of every

kind. We have opened the ranks of the clergy, the military, the newsroom.

More than three million women now work in occupations considered “nontraditional”

until very recently.

We’ve accomplished so much, yet a lot still

remains to be done. Substantial barriers to the full equality of America’s

women still remain before our freedom as a Nation can be called complete.