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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1976

Women of the Year

Great Changes, New Chances, Tough Choices



   They have arrived like a new immigrant wave in male
America. They may be cops, judges, military officers, telephone
linemen, cab drivers, pipefitters, editors, business executives
-- or mothers and housewives, but not quite the same subordinate
creatures they were before. Across the broad range of American
life, from suburban tract houses to state legislatures, from
church pulpits to Army barracks, women's lives are profoundly
changing, and with them, the traditional relationships between
the sexes. Few women are unaffected, few are thinking as they
did ten years -- or even a couple of years -- ago. America has
not entirely repealed the Code of Hammurabi (woman as male
property), but enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken
possession of their lives that the event is spiritually
equivalent to the discovery of a new continent. Says Critic
Elizabeth Janeway: "The sky above us lifts, the light pours in.
No maps exist for this enlarged world. We must make them as we
explore."

   It is difficult to locate the exact moment when the
psychological change occurred. A cumulative process, it owes
much to the formal feminist movement -- the Friedans and
Steinems and Abzugs. Yet feminism has transcended the feminist
movement. In 1975 the women's drive penetrated every layer of
society, matured beyond ideology to a new status of general --
and sometimes unconscious -- acceptance.

   The belief that women are entitled to truly equal social and
professional rights has spread far and deep into the country.
Once the doctrine of well-educated middle-class women, often
young and single, it has taken hold among working-class women,
farm wives, blacks, Puerto Ricans, white "ethnics." The Y.W.C.A.
embraces it; so do the Girls Clubs of America and the Junior
Leagues. A measure of just how far the idea has come can be
seen in the many women who denigrate the militant feminists'
style ("too shrill, unfeminine") and then proceed to conduct
their own newly independent lives. At year's end a Harris poll
found that by 63% to 25%, Americans favor "most of the efforts
to strengthen and change women's status in society." Five years
ago, it was 42% in favor, 41% against.

   1975 was not so much the Year of the Woman as the Year of
Women -- an immense variety of women altering their lives,
entering new fields, functioning with a new sense of identity,
integrity and confidence. Those whom TIME has selected as Women
of the Year accomplished much in their own right in 1975, and
they also symbolized the new consciousness of women generally.

   -- In the White House, Betty Ford, though she used a platform
that she owed wholly to her husband, enlarged the customarily
dutiful role of First Lady.

   -- In the Cabinet, Carla Hills took command of the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, the third woman to serve in
the Cabinet (after F.D.R.'s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and
Dwight Eisenhower's HEW Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby).

   -- In the statehouse, Connecticut's Ella Grasso took office
as the first woman Governor elected in her own right. (Governors
Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, Miriam Ferguson of Texas and
Lurleen Wallace of Alabama had succeeded their husbands.)

   -- In Congress, Texas' Barbara Jordan emerged as a rising star
in the House of Representatives and the Democratic Party.

   -- In the law, Susie Sharp of North Carolina served with
distinction as the first woman to be popularly elected chief
justice of a state supreme court.

   -- In education, Jill Ker Conway was named the first woman
president of Smith, the nation's largest women's liberal arts
college (2,468 students).

   -- In sports, Billie Jean King, who almost singlehanded has
put women into the mainstream and helped greatly to raise the
pay of women athletes, became a kind of business and sports
conglomerate.

   -- In literature, Susan Brownmiller made a scholarly,
disturbing contribution to the discussion of the sexes with her
much bruited book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.

   -- In labor, Addie Wyatt, women's affairs director of the
550,000 member Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen,
fought successfully to eliminate wage differentials between men
and women workers.

   -- In the military, Kathleen Byerly, a Navy lieutenant
commander who is one of the many fast-rising women executives
in the armed forces, became a top aide to the fleet's Pacific
training commands.

   -- In journalism, Carol Sutton, the first woman to be
managing editor of a major U.S. newspaper, brightened the
editorial content while she successfully ran the Louisville
Courier-Journal, one of the nation's best dailies.

   -- In religion, Alison Cheek, first woman to celebrate
Communion at a U.S. Episcopal church, was hired as a priest at
Washington's Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation.

   The backgrounds, achievements and views of these women are
amply detailed. Scores of others might be added to the list --
distinguished lawyers, economists, business executives,
actresses, writers. For example, Economist Alice Rivlin, chief
of the new Congressional Budget Office, has taken on the tough
job of analyzing for Senators and Congressmen just how their
legislation will probably affect national spending, budget
deficits, prices and employment. Sarah Caldwell, the formidable
director of the Opera Company of Boston, week after next will
become the first woman to conduct at the New York Metropolitan
Opera. Journalist Charlotte Curtis wields powerful political
influence as editor of the New York Times Op-Ed page. NBC-TV's
Barbara Walters, co-host of the Today show, is one of the best
interviewers in journalism. Joan Ganz Cooney, who launched
Sesame Street in 1969, now presides over the Children's
Television Workshop, is a member of the media-monitoring
National News Council and a director of Xerox and the First
Pennsylvania Corp.

   What was exceptional in the year of American women was the
status of the everyday, usually anonymous woman, who moved into
the mainstream of jobs, ideas and policymaking. The mood was
summed up by Lawyer Jill Ruckelshaus, the Administration's
leading feminist, who is head of the U.S. International Women's
Year Commission. Said she: "The women's movement is burning."

   Despite the scope and maturity of the movement -- and in
some ways, because of it -- women suffered a number of setbacks
in 1975. The organized women's movement fell into factional
disputes. The National Organization for Women designated Oct.
29 as "Alice Doesn't" Day and called on women to stage a no-work
strike; it was a spectacular failure. Betty Friedan, a godmother
of feminism, joined twelve other current and former NOW members
in a splinter group called Womensurge, arguing that NOW is
growing too radical and alienating the masses of American women.
The dissidents were especially disturbed that last October NOW
pledged to make lesbian rights a priority issue.

   There were legal defeats. To feminists, the most startling
and discouraging setbacks came when both New Jersey and New York
voters rejected state equal-rights amendments. Meantime, the
national Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution remained
stalled, with four states still needed for ratification.

   Yet the problems of the ERA could not be entirely
interpreted as a rebuke to women's rights. The sweeping
simplicity of the amendment -- "Equality of rights under law
shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." -- made many
voters, especially women, nervous. The anti-ERA lobby, led by
Phyllis Schlafly -- a conspicuously liberated woman who at 51
is working for a law degree -- conjured up the prospect of
unisex public toilets, an end to alimony, women forced into duty
as combat soldiers. In fact, the effects of the ERA are not
known, and some constitutional lawyers argue that it would be
better to rely on specific antidiscrimination laws rather than
on an amendment that might have unpredictable social results.

   Far more important than such setbacks was the psychological
momentum that gathered force and made many changes in everyday
life in 1975. Says Connie Birmingham, an aide to U.S. Senator
Richard Clark of Iowa: "Ten years ago, the thing to do at a
party was for the women and men to break up into groups. Well,
they still do that, but instead of talking about toilet training
and where they get their hair done, women are talking about
feminism. They discuss what they are doing, and it is definitely
more interesting, even more interesting than the men." Her view
of women ten years ago may be partly caricature, but the sense
of change is real.

   Mothers' mind-sets have altered about their children,
especially their daughters. Says Kathy Snell, 25, an Illinois
farm wife, speaking of her four-year-old daughter: "I hope she
doesn't spend her whole life learning how to please people. I
spent so much of my energy making other people like me that it
took 23 years to like myself. I want my daughter to be
independent."

   More and more older women are now finding lives of their
own once their children are grown -- if not before. Says Sue
Shear, 57, who was elected to the Missouri state legislature
in 1972: "I used to feel guilty when Harry went into the jungle,
and I was a cook and chauffeur for the kids. I felt he was doing
everything, and I was doing nothing. Now I'm finding that the
jungle is not any harder or scarier than being home."

   But it is particularly among young women that the
psychological changes have taken hold. Carol Driver, 38, a
twice-divorced Portland, Ore., woman who runs her own building
maintenance service, detects the shifts in her teen-age girls.
Says she: "They don't view marriage as an automatic end. They
are much more aware of possible alternatives, to marry or not
marry, have children or not. We never used to question the
inevitable marriage-and-motherhood route."

   It is the young who seem most likely to overcome the
psychological handicaps under which many women labor. In a
classic study eleven years ago, Psychologist Matina Horner, now
president of Radcliffe College, concluded that as a result of
their childhood training and various social pressures of home
and family, many women are hobbled by a fear of success -- a
learned fear that the risks of succeeding are "loss of
femininity," loss of womanly identity. The "fear" is also quite
practical -- in the face of expected discrimination, a woman may
decide that the effort to succeed is not worth it.

   Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim, co-directors of the
Simmons College graduate program in management, believe women's
attitudes toward work are so different from men's that it is not
surprising so few have risen to the top in many fields. Women,
they have found, often view a job as something to be done
competently and carefully. Indeed, women not uncommonly are such
perfectionists that they get bogged down in detail. Females have
been (or at least used to be) shaped by society to have no broad
prospective of career, whereas men go after long-range goals and
set priorities.

   "When a woman achieves," says Jardim, "the clear inference
is that her home and family suffer. So it becomes a horrid
psychological trick." But this happens only as long as the
woman's feminine identity remains fundamentally rooted in
marriage and home. As attitudes toward women's roles change,
and especially as the young grow up with more expansive and
varied expectations, the kind of crippling guilt will recede.

   Men's attitudes are shifting along with women's. The Harris
survey found that 59% of men advocated greater opportunities
for women. In some ways, the recession brought a kind of
enforced enlightenment: husbands badly needed their wives' --
or daughters' -- paychecks to help support the family. Many men
may still ask their oafish versions of Freud's infuriating
question, "What does woman want?" But a surprising number of
them have -- guiltily perhaps -- acknowledged the seriousness of
women's complaints. While some advances have come because of
women's push for equality or from affirmative-action programs,
others have also resulted from a dawning recognition of the
justice of women's demands for equal rights.

   In almost all areas -- business, the professions, blue-
collar work, education, politics, the family -- a new
sensibility among both men and women has led to more
enlightenment -- and a restless understanding of how far away
sexual equality remains.

BUSINESS: Inroads to Management

   At the top, business is almost wholly a men's club. In the
1,300 biggest U.S. companies, there are about 150 women
directors v. about 20 five years ago. With rare exceptions,
women have not risen as high as vice president in the big, old,
basic industries, such as steel, autos, oil, railroads.
Generally women have done better in less tradition-bound fields:
computers, communications and finance, though those who have
climbed to vice presidencies tend to be in personnel, corporate
relations and other ancillary areas.

   Yet worlds hitherto closed to women are opening.
Increasingly, women are seen attending business conventions,
sometimes with their husbands -- when the spouse is invited.
More and more women are becoming junior executives and sales
representatives, positions that often lead to the top; roughly
12% of Xerox's traveling sales force and 7% of Levi Strauss's
are women. A T & T's booklets no longer refer to operators as
she and managers as he. Businessmen are increasingly scouting
for women management trainees, and women are rising fast in the
nation's graduate business schools. Between 1971 and 1975, the
percentage of women in the incoming business class rose from 4%
to 24% at Pennsylvania's Wharton, 5% to 19% at Stanford, and 6%
to 33% at Columbia.

   Of course, a business degree does not guarantee success or
equality. Carol McLaughlin, a graduate student at Wharton, has
surveyed Wharton graduates from 1945 to 1974. Among her
findings: after being out of Wharton for 7 1/2 years, men were
earning an average salary of $23,000 a year v. $17,000 for
women. On the average, the men had a staff of 30 people
reporting to them; women averaged two or three. Observes
McLaughlin: "The staff size is really startling. It shows that
women are kind of doing things, but they are not really
managing." From the comments on her questionnaires, McLaughlin
has determined that "there are an awful lot of discouraged
women out there." One Wharton alumna wrote, "I work twice as
hard as a man just to prove I am not a dumb women." Anti-female
prejudice leaves a mark even on the most successful women.
Virtually all harbor memories of slights and obstacles that were
-- or are -- put in their paths.

   But whatever the traumas, an increasing number of women
have successful business careers. After working up through the
corporate ranks, Marion Kellogg now earns more than $100,000
as General Electric's first woman vice president. Mary Wells,
chairman of the Manhattan agency she helped found, Wells, Rich,
Greene, Inc., is the advertising world's most heralded women.
Banker Catherine Cleary, president of the First Wisconsin Corp.,
sits on the boards of A T & T, Kraftco and General Motors. Kay
Knight Mazuy, senior corporate vice president of Shawmut
Association Inc., New England's second largest banking firm,
is an odds-on favorite to become Boston's first woman president
of a major corporation.

The PROFESSIONS: Finally Making It

   Some 17% of women in the nation's work force are
professionals, though most of them are teachers and nurses. But
growing numbers are gaining access to law and medicine, in part
because those professions demand specific skills that can disarm
sex prejudice. About 25% of entering medical students are now
women, up from 11% in 1971. Some 20% of law students are women,
v. 8.5% in 1971.

   Today, 7% of U.S. lawyers are women -- an increase from
2.8% in 1972. Says one of them, Ann Quill Niederlander, 60, of
St. Louis: "There is no question that women in the legal
profession have made great strides. Women are now willing to go
to women lawyers. We are finally making it."

   The new willingness of women to consult women professionals
-- often their insistence on it -- extends to doctors, notably
gynecologists. Women make up a remarkable 80% of the work force
in the nation's health services, but overwhelmingly, they are
nurses and technicians -- helpers rather than leaders. Only 9%
of physicians are women. Female med students still find much to
complain about. Says one: "Guess what part of a male cadaver I'm
assigned to dissect first." But, says Dr. Frances K. Conley, 35,
a top neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, "I've
been well accepted by professionals and patients all along the
way. If you pull your own weight, do a competent job, you're
accepted." Conley is both amused and irritated when she goes to
a party with her husband Philip, a financial analyst: "Everybody
asks him what he does, and conversation revolves around that.
Nobody asks me what I do. They think they know."

   Atlanta's Dr. Nanette Wenger, 45, who is director of the
cardiac clinics at Grady Memorial Hospital, notes a change since
she got her M.D. 21 years ago: "Women are now referred to as
'Dr. Smith' or 'Dr. Jones' -- not 'that woman doctor,' as I was."
Because of sheer ability, Wenger is in great demand as a
physician and consultant round the world. In one week recently,
she jetted to Israel to deliver a paper to the International
Society of Cardiologists; then she popped over to Geneva for a
meeting of the World Health Organization; next she flew to
Dallas for a conference of the American Heart Association, of
which she is a vice president; from there she headed for New
York City for a gathering of the American College of Cardiology.
At 6 p.m. Saturday, she was welcomed home by her three teen-age
daughters -- just in time to bustle off to a party with her
husband Julius, a gastroenterologist.

   Women have long had some positions of influence in American
religion, but now they are gaining in power. The most notable
disputes have been over admitting women to equal status as
clergymen. Ever since St. Paul's strictures on the subordination
of women ("I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over
men"), Christianity has been patriarchal. Yet Roman Catholic
women are now participating in the Mass as lectors, and in the
distribution of the Eucharist. Nuns, of course, have undergone
an astonishing transformation in the past decade, doffing habits
and leaving cloisters to live in the community at large.

   In Protestant churches, s small but rising number of
parishioners look up at the pulpit on Sunday morning -- and see
a woman. The United Methodist Church has 576 ordained women, up
from 332 in 1970, and the United Presbyterian Church has more
than 200, compared with 103 in 1972. The Lutheran Church in
America, which began ordaining women in 1970, has 27 women in
clerical posts.

   The Episcopal Church has yet to recognize women as priests.
But 251 women are attending seminaries, some with hopes of
becoming priests, others with plans to teach in seminaries. Over
the past 18 months, 15 women have been ordained as priests by
four bishops. One of the women, Nancy Wittig, 30, served for
four months as a deacon at St. Peter's Church in Morristown,
N.J., but resigned because of lack of support from the vestry.
In some perplexity, Wittig demands, "How come, if the church
proclaims we are all God's children, I am considered less?"
Among the others ordained, one is a part-time prison minister
in Rochester; two are professors at the Episcopal Theological
School in Cambridge, Mass.; the Rev. Lee McGee is a chaplain at
Washington's American University. Alison Cheek, of course, has
her church work in Washington. But most of the others are working
at secular jobs -- because they cannot get anything else.

WHITE COLLAR, BLUE COLLAR: Out of Women's Ghettos

   More than 40% of all employed women work in the traditional
female ghettos, as salesclerks, secretaries, bookkeepers,
receptionists, telephone operators. Their wages are low,
averaging $4,700 for sales clerks and $6,400 for clerical
workers. Even these jobs are becoming harder to find, as college
graduates, including many men, are competing for them in a tight
job market.

   Sometimes learning more physical blue-collar work can be
a way out of the white-collar ghettos. Ann Serrano, 25, was a
telephone operator for Pacific Telephone in Inglewood, Calif.,
a few years ago. Now, after on-the-job training, she has doubled
her salary by learning to repair and maintain telephone
equipment. "Some men resent it and still don't have confidence
in women," she says. "But they will have to recognize that from
now on this is the way its going to be."

   In Los Angeles, Janis Stark, 26, a telephone installer,
drags around 60 lbs. of equipment and says that "going up
telephone poles was fearsome at first. Now its second nature."
Still less usual is the work of Evelyn Newell, 28; tired of her
dead-end job as a railway clerk, she apprenticed as a fireman
and attended a locomotive training school, becoming the first
woman locomotive engineer in the U.S. With three years'
experience, she now earns close to $25,000 annually. The support
from the men on the job has been terrific, she says. "There are
no conflicts in my life. But it would probably take another
railroadman to understand."

   Until the weather stalled construction for the winter, more
than 3,000 women were working on the Alaska pipeline as
craftsmen, clerks, cooks. Adele Bacon, 22, for a time was an
apprentice pipefitter on the line. "The men watched their
language when I was around," she admitted, "so I had to watch
mine." At Prudhoe Bay, petite Kathleen Cotton, 26, was a
warehouse checker. Among her duties: helping to get 17,000-lb.
sections of pipe moving on rollers as they were being cleaned.
The women on the pipeline, although their bedrooms are sometimes
side by side with the men's, encountered few problems in coed
living. "They're treated just like everyone else," says one
electrician. "I walk down the halls in my shorts. If they don't
like it, too bad. Most of us are family men. If one guy starts
giving a woman a hard time, there are twelve others ready to
knock him down. We sort of watch out for them."

   One complaint of blue-collar women in several areas is the
prevalence of calendar nudes around the shops. A woman working
in construction near Seattle was appalled to climb into the cab
of a truck and find its ceiling papered with crotch shots.
Sometimes the hazards are more serious. Because many men fear
women will take their jobs away, there is much hostility. One
woman apprentice machinist in Seattle was told by men workers
that it was safe to put her hands into a container of acid. She
did not. Others in the construction trades complain that they
have been given the silent treatment for months.

   Breaking into the male unions is often difficult. Says a
staff member of San Francisco's Advocates for Women, which
places women in nontraditional jobs: "We had a women who tried
to get into the plumbers' union. She went through three tests
and finally got to the oral interview. They accused her of being
a spy for women's lib. They said she just wanted to juice up her
master's thesis. But this woman was on welfare. She needed a
job." Others are having better luck. In Seattle, an organization
called Machanica, which helps women find blue-collar jobs, has
placed women as carpenters, machinists, diesel mechanics,
laborers and truck drivers. One 24-year-old has a bachelor's
degree in psychology from Antioch College but now works in
Seattle as an auto mechanic, for $5.45 per hour, which, she
says, "is better than being an unemployed psychologist."

THE MILITARY: Some Amazing Gains

   The U.S. military has moved ahead of industry in
eliminating sex barriers. Of a total 2.1 million people in the
armed forces, 91,000 are women; 4,600 are nonmedical officers,
including two brigadier generals. Fully 92% of the job
categories in the Army -- everything except the infantry,
artillery and other direct-combat roles -- are open to them. So
are all but the topmost chief-of-staff ranks. Young women like
Commander Byerly can aspire to positions that older women
officers never dreamed of -- they came up when females in the
services were circumscribed and largely segregated in separate
corps. Now women are so fully integrated that the Navy WAVEs and
Air Force WAFs have been disbanded, and the days of the Army
WACs are numbered.

   Most of the women are in staff jobs, but the Air Force will
soon begin a pilot-training program in which women will fly
C-130 Hercules hospital or weather-reconnaissance plans and T-
39 trainer jets. The Air Force has women in fatigues maintaining
and repairing missiles, airplanes and weapons. The Army has
women chaplains, helicopter pilots and tank drivers and 136
drill instructors. The Navy has anti-submarine warfare
technicians, line handlers on tugboats, airplane welders,
bulldozer operators and a deep-sea diver. All recruits go
through rugged basic training, learning to shoot and strip
rifles (just in case they ever have to in an emergency) and slog
through mud, with full packs, to cadence-counting chants
("Standin' tall and lookin' good/We ought to be in Hollywood
. . . ")

   The service academies are preparing for women in the
classes that will be admitted next summer. West Point will take
in about 100 women cadets, the Naval Academy 80 and the Air
Force Academy 100. The women will wear handsomely cut uniforms,
basically like the men's except that the females will carry
purses and wear knee-length skirts, as well as slacks.

   Men in the services seem to be accepting the women easily
enough. For a time, there was a preoccupation with shower and
toilet arrangements, but the construction of a few doors,
partitions and separate shower rooms has relaxed the
apprehensions. The services do their best to assign married
women to the same posts as their uniformed husbands. When that
is impossible, the couple must make a choice. For one woman Navy
ensign married to an Army captain, the choice is clear. If he
is transferred to a landlocked base, she will stay with the Navy
in Washington. Says she: "I joined the Navy before I married
him, and that is my loyalty."

   No longer must a pregnant women leave the services. At
military bases, some soldiers are finding themselves saluting
pregnant officers. Now an expectant mother must apply for
discharge or else accept maternity leave (normally ten weeks)
and then return to duty. Even an unmarried woman with children
may remain in the services.

POLITICS: A New Importance

   Women make up 53% of the nation's registered voters but
hold only 5% of the elective positions. Still, the total --
7,000 women in elective office -- is double five years ago. And
in this year's elections, predicts Barbara Jordan, "the
candidates will play to women's issues wherever they think it
will help them."

   In all, 18 women serve in the 94th Congress, up from 16 in
the 93rd. Mississippi and Kentucky last fall elected women as
Lieutenant Governors (New York already had one). More than 1,200
women in 1974 were candidates for state legislative office,
one-third more than in 1972. About half of them won.

   Like blacks, women are making their greatest gains on the
lower levels: mayor's councils, city councils, various boards
and commissions. From there, more and more will be percolating
up to state and federal office in future years. "When you write
stories about the women's movement now," Jill Ruckelshaus told
the National Press Club recently, "don't look for us in the
streets. We have gone to the statehouse."

   Female candidates must often overcome the inbred mistrust
of some women voters, who can be even more critical than the
male constituency. Yet, says Susan Block, a member of the Iowa
Women's Political Caucus, "the public is beginning to look at
women with less suspicion. Voters often view a woman candidate
as someone who has lived the human experience, had kids, done
volunteer work, cooked supper and been to the grocery store.
People can relate to her better than to a man."

   That thought comes close to the theory -- less prevalent
now than a few years ago -- that women in positions of
leadership would somehow humanize public affairs and gentle down
the truculent, aggressive style practiced by men. It is a sexist
notion, attributing superior virtues to women. As Smith's Jill
Conway says, "There are lots of inhumane women in the world."
(Two women who went far to prove that point were Lynette
["Squeeky"] Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore; both made attempts on
the life of President Ford.)

   Janet Grey Hayes, the first woman mayor of San Jose,
Calif., points out a kind of reverse handicap for women in
politics: "The other night, when George Moscone won the mayoral
election in San Francisco, he cried on television. I would never
do that in public. I could never allow myself. You know what
people would say -- 'emotional woman.'"

   Margaret Hance, the first woman mayor of Phoenix, is
optimistic. "Obviously," she says, "the males of the country
have overcome their fear of women in politics. Every success
creates an aura of confidence for the next woman who tries it."
(Women are also mayors of San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Wichita,
Kans., Cincinnati and Lincoln, Neb.) Not long ago, a Gallup poll
found that 73% of the American people would support a qualified
woman running for President.

THE FAMILY: The Delicate Dilemmas

   The ruination of the American family, so widely proclaimed
during the '60s and frequently welcomed as a symptom of the
liberating deluge, was obviously far from total. But American
attitudes toward marriage and family have indeed changed. In
many cases, it was the instability of the family that drove
women toward greater independence and self-assertion. Sometimes
it was the other way around. Greater independence, of course,
is not necessarily incompatible with family stability -- but it
does bring considerable strains.

   "Most women," says Boston Psychologist Rose Olver, "almost
have to defend themselves for staying at home these days. I
think it is unfortunate. I would prefer it somewhere in the
middle, where we all question our lives, and there is a good
deal of choice -- and acceptance."

   For the first time in American history, the Census Bureau
reported last year, the average household consisted of fewer
than three persons. Marriages are declining, divorce rates
increasing, more women remaining single longer -- and having
fewer children if and when they do marry. As much as anything,
it is this widening of domestic alternatives that has led
women to assert themselves in the world outside the home.

   Husbands and wives are working out new arrangements in
which the men -- supposedly -- share household chores equally.
"When we first got married in 1968," says Joyce van Deusen, an
official of the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Human Rights Commission, "I
taught school and Bob was in the military. I did the laundry,
kept the house, and Bob read, sat and ate." In 1972 they drew
up a contract covering the household chores, and the arrangement
is second nature now. Very often, however, Americans follow the
Soviet and Eastern European pattern of "liberation" -- women are
theoretically equal, but their new freedom merely means that
when they return from their jobs they still have to do all the
housework. "It's the same old baloney," says Polly Ely, who
works as a counselor in a rape-crisis center in Cedar Rapids.
"I come home so tired I can hardly see, and John flops down with
the paper while I stumble into the kitchen."

   Some couples have reversed their traditional roles -- the
men stay home and tend house and children, while the women go
off to work. The practice can be enlightening and often
demoralizing to the househusband. The man finds himself lolling
distractedly around the house, watching soap operas, complaining
when his wife comes home late from the office.

   Even for the best organized women, meeting the multiple
demands of career and family takes great effort. Carla Hills and
her husband Roderick, chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, get up about 6 a.m. Before leaving at 7:15, she
tries to spend some time with at least a couple of their four
children -- braiding a daughter's hair, playing with another
for a few minutes. She keeps a kitchen bulletin board, telling
who will be home for dinner (one of the parents always tries to
make it), listing each child's chores and times for piano
lessons. Both Carla and Rod bring home work at night, but they
often pore over it in the living room in order to sit with the
children. Says she: "I often feel like a piece of salami, with
a slice here for one and a slice there for another, and there
isn't enough to go around."

   Mothers and fathers, increasingly aware of sex stereotyping,
sometimes seek out schools where their children will find
different expectations. At Manhattan's Educational Alliance Day
Care Center, for example, little girls learn to use hammers and
nails, boys practice rolling dough for cookies. The object is not
a reversal of roles as much as an interchange of them. Similarly,
girls are moving more than ever into traditionally male sports.
High school and college gym classes are becoming coed as a
consequence of a new Government regulation that orders equal
treatment of the sexes in schools receiving federal aid. The
Little League, under court pressure, agreed to admit girls in 1974.
In just the past couple of years, hundreds of thousands of young
women in high schools and colleges have begun competing in team
sports.

   Novelist Anne Roiphe has movingly written of the often
difficult choices women must make about careers and marriage and
children. Speaking of the ideological urge of some to discourage
motherhood entirely, she says, "The very idea of removing by
social surgery a woman's or man's connected love for a child is
part of a coming ice age of relationships -- the dehumanizing
of mankind. We may find that intellectual activity is not
enough, that achievement in the industrial, technological world,
while important, is not sufficient, and that we also, man and
woman alike, need the roots into biology, the touch of one
another that child rearing brings."

   Both men and women now seem to be edging toward Roiphe's
idea: "As women, we have thought so little of ourselves that
when the troops came to liberate us, we rushed into the streets,
leaving our most valuable attributes behind as if they belonged
to the enemy." It is not an argument for sweet maternal
submission to the household gods but for an admission that,
unless society is transformed in an almost utopian way (far
beyond merely providing daycare centers), women cannot free
themselves totally from the destiny of raising children. It is
also a recognition that the hard choices about families,
children and careers cannot be made entirely through cold
ideology.

WOMEN ABROAD: Breakthroughs and Bickering

   Abroad, women are also moving forward, notably in developed
countries. Economic progress is the necessary road to female
emancipation. As a nation is industrialized, women are freed
from much of the routine burden of the farm and the household.

   Outside the U.S., European women fare best. In France, for
example, some 22% of lawyers are women; so are 18% of doctors,
40% of medical students and 90% of pharmacists. President Valery
Giscard d'Estaing has two women in his Cabinet: Simone Veil
(Health) and Francoise Giroud (Women's Affairs). Divorce and
abortion laws recently have been liberalized, as have been
property rights, which until recently sharply discriminated
against women. Many of the changes are more apparent than real.
Career women are largely a Paris phenomenon; in the provinces,
the laws have changed much faster than the customs that limit
many women to home and minor jobs.

   British women have taken a rather relaxed approach to
feminism, with a minimum of confrontation. Nevertheless, a bill
guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work went into effect at
year's end. And no one has made a better case for the competence
of women than Margaret Thatcher, the Tory Party leader, who
happens to be cool to feminism.

   Italy is in the process of catching up with its northern
neighbors. Last month some 20,000 women marched through downtown
Rome, urging abortion on demand and chanting: "The womb is
mine/and I'll manage it fine!" A compromise bill is likely to
be enacted, permitting abortion in the first 90 days of
pregnancy if a doctor approves.

   The battle for equality is almost totally won in
Scandinavia. Divorce is relatively easy, abortion is mostly
free, and in Sweden, either parent can receive temporary
compensation from the state for staying home with a baby or a
sick child, instead of going to work. To demonstrate that the
country cannot function without them, Icelandic women staged a
one-day strike in October: schools, theaters and telephone
service were all shut down.

   More Japanese women than ever are working in fields that
range from physics to zoology. Yet most women still wield their
power in the home, following the ancient saying: "A wise falcon
hides his talons."

   In the less developed countries of Asia, Africa and Latin
America, women are much further behind. The profound differences
among women of varying cultures were starkly revealed at the
U.N. World Conference for International Women's Year in Mexico
City last summer. The meeting bogged down in bickering and
accomplished little. Women in much of the Arab world remain
isolated and subservient; in Saudi Arabia, they still inhabit
harems. But in Egypt and Lebanon, stirrings of emancipation are
evident.

   By becoming the first modern woman dictator last year,
Indira Gandhi proved anew that women can be as domineering as
men. An ardent feminist, she has fought the Indian practice
of bridegrooms demanding dowries. (One telling vignette: in
response to a suitor's request for a motor scooter as a dowry,
one village girl jilted the man; he had to settle for a sheep
from a less affluent bride.)

   Indonesian women are scarcely concerned with equal pay and
abortion, since they must still contend with forced marriage and
polygamy. A marriage law passed in October makes it harder for
a man to take a second wife or to dismiss a spouse with the curt
command: "I divorce you." In 1975 Thai women won the right to
run for election as village chief or attain the rank of general
in the army. But they still cannot sign a contract or apply for
a passport without their husband's permission.

   China furnishes proof that total revolution does not
necessarily bring equality of the sexes. Women dress like men,
walk like men, work like men, but, with the exception of Mao's
wife Chiang Ching, few have attained positions of importance in
the country.

THE FUTURE: Reordering the Roles

   American women, if they have not arrived, are in the
process of arrival. Just how far they will go -- and how fast
-- is not totally clear, for women are themselves altering the
destination, changing it from a man's world to something else.

   A lot of men are enjoying the change. They are discovering
there is much in women's liberation that is to their benefit --
a loosening of their own role as breadwinner, for example. But
it would be foolhardy to ignore the many men who regard the
women's upsurge as a threat and try to keep women -- wives,
daughters, co-workers -- in "their place." As more women arrive
on the job market, more men may wonder if they will lose their
own posts and promotions in the new competition.

   Indeed, the gravest difficulties of the women's movement
are now economic: How can women find equality in jobs if the
jobs are not there? Equality may be possible only in a fairly
rapidly growing economy. Lacking that, justice may require a
greater reordering of the old sex roles, with men assuming more
of the domestic work-load as women move into the job world. Such
a reordering will be difficult to achieve, but for men -- as
well as women -- the psychological advantages could be enormous.

   Women in their dependence have always exacted a price in
the guerilla war of the sexes. Philip Wylie's devouring Mom of
30 years ago or Alexander Portnoy's horrific mother or countless
wives and mistresses of fancy and fact were really figures of
thwarted womanhood, exacting an understandably neurotic revenge.
Women's liberation, while it thrusts women into a new world of
difficult choices and questions of identity, should ultimately
accomplish much for the sheer sanity of both men and women. In
any case, as Addie Wyatt says, "All we're asking is that we be
recognized as full partners -- at home, at work, in the world
at large. Is that too much?"

   The drama of the sexes remains -- the Old Adam and the New
Eve. As 1976 begins, the plot and characters are changing -- for
the better of both.