Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/women/women.015

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                                                                                July 12, 1982 

How Long Till Equality?


American women take stock and step up the pace


     And yet.

     All the gain is on the near side of that first simple word,
all the distance lies right beyond the second. There are more
women working now than ever before, more women in politics, more
teaching, more learning. And yet.

     Most of the women hold down-scale jobs and draw salaries
smaller than a man's for the same work; many live below the
poverty line. The majority of American college students now are
women, and yet the faculties instructing them are still mostly
male. There are, all together, more women in state legislatures,
more in the House and Senate than at any time in history. And
yet. Neither these increasing numbers of women politicians, nor
their male colleagues could manage to get women something that
once looked elementary, something that should have been so
simple: a constitution guarantee of equal rights under the law.

     There are also the numbers, statistics like measured mile
markers, flashing along a dawn drive toward a still distant
reckoning. There were 301 women state legislators in 1969, 908
in 1982; 5,765 female elected officials in 1975, 14,225 just
four years later. And yet, those 908 legislators are only 12%
of the members of state legislative bodies. Only 19 of the 435
members of the U.S. House of Representatives are women, only two
of the 100 Senators.

     The numbers mark distance traveled and distance yet to go.
Eighty percent of all women who work hold down "pink-collar
jobs" and get paid about 66 cents of a man's dollar. Seventy
percent of all classroom teachers are women, yet for the same
job, they make an average of $3,000 a year less than their male
colleagues. More than a third of all candidates for M.B.A.
degrees are women: the numbers encourage. Only 5% of the
executives in the top 50 American companies are women: the
numbers numb. Where once, even recently, there was nothing, all
those statistics and all their corollaries now show there has
been something: some progress forged for women over the past
decade of challenge and confusion. Perhaps those numbers are
really a crude scale for a new geography, exploring the wide
gulf between something and satisfaction.

     But when I began to consider the subject . . . I soon saw
that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to . . .
come to a conclusion. I should never be able to . . . hand you
after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up
between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece
for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one
minor point -- a woman must have money and a room of her own.

     Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own in 1929. It
remains the best book about the situation of women, which says
much for the perpetual pertinence of art, and little for the
mutability of men and social politics. "There is no mark on the
wall," she wrote, "to measure the precise height of women," and,
in the absolute sense, she is still right. The deepest impact
of the women's movement is intangible. Some of feminism's
greatest advances are revealed in the everyday auguries of
family, home and job; some of its greatest power has come in
altering the cadences and the promises of a woman's daily life.
In 1972 women wondered hard about the possibility of having a
family and career, and being able to manage both. In 1982 more
women -- including some of the daughters of the past generation
-- take all this as a birthright.

     Realistically, now, it will have to stand as a birthright
deferred. Feminists of both genders attached a strong symbolic
importance to the passing of the ERA and find in its final and
formal defeat last week intimations of national malaise. "It is
an appalling obscenity not to pass the ERA, when everyone knows
women have to work and society wants them to work," says
Novelist-Critic Elizabeth Hardwick. "There is an illiberal and
I think tyrannical minority imposing its will on obvious needs
for social changes," remarks Novelist John Irving, who wrestled
questions of feminism and family into contemporary myth, The
World According to Garp. "Feminism is simply one of many human
rights. The whole thing is very depressing."

     Feminists took things somewhat less hard than the writers.
Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women,
and other leaders vowed to concentrate women's new consciousness
and resources (NOW has reported recent monthly political
contributions of $1 million) on building legislative strength
to win eventual passage of a resubmitted ERA. Ms. magazine
Co-Founder Gloria Steinem has already drafted marching orders
for the '80s (reproductive freedom, democratization of families,
more respect for work done in the home and comparable pay for
the work done outside it).

     "I'm very disappointed that the ERA didn't pass," admits
Donna Shalala, 40, president of New York City's Hunter College,
who does not hesitate to add that "most of the critical breaks
in my career would not have happened if it wasn't for the
women's movement." Says Shalala: "It's going to be tough. The
problems of the future are going to be more sophisticated. But
I rarely meet a young woman who isn't more militant about
control over her own future, as well as her own body. I'm just
very positive about the future, and I think we all ought to be
positive too."

     The possibility -- and, perhaps, the urgency -- of positive
feelings is in itself a product of progress. For a time, at the
beginning, there seemed to be only occasions of rage.


     I: MAKING ROOM

     I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I
thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in."

     Feminism was the last focus of the civil rights movement
and the more general social activism of the last 1960s. Its
potential constituency was the broadest and the deepest, but so
were the problems it addressed: too wide, too varied, rooted too
deep in sexuality and self-image, even in language. Ms.? An
abbreviation for manuscript; an affectation otherwise, a
pretense. Abortion? A moral question, never a biological one.
Right to work? Something the unions settled during the
Depression.

     After the batterings of Selma and Vietnam, several
assassinations and summers of psychedelic overload, the country
needed a warm bath and a bit of soothing. What it got instead
was a fresh, hard needlepoint shower from the ranks -- indeed,
from the home. It was a little too much. Doors slammed, windows
rattled shut. The national circuits had temporarily shorted out,
and, in the prevailing gloom, the feminist torches looked less
like beacons than sputtering pilot lights from the stoves the
women were threatening to abandon.

     Women's lib it was called then, short for liberation, of
course, but unconsciously, closer to women's lip, with all
attendant condescending connotations ("Ah shut up, I've had
enough of your . . ."). It was tough to be called a libber, even
if you took pride in the politics, and those at first were mean.
They were the politics of long frustration and new anger, and
it was men who took the heat: as repressive husbands,
lackadaisical fathers, selfish sex partners, exclusionary
businessmen, blind-sides artists and perpetrators of a
patriarchy that had to be overthrown. Even Shakespeare was a
sexist for a little while.

     The press cut in on the dark carnival atmosphere, and in
some measure contributed to it. On the occasion of a Miss
America pageant, a marginal faction of young women threw their
underwear into an Atlantic City, N.J., garbage can, attempting
some clumsy metaphorical gesture, and grabbed headlines, air
time and a disproportionate share of posterity. If "libbers"
were the dreary drones of the movement, "bra burners" were the
lacy lunatic fringe. (A note: no bras were actually burned that
day. Not a single flame was lighted, not in any sense.) "Bra
burners" was a convenient, slightly comic way of dismissing
demands and resisting confrontations that had been deferred too
long. Those women were a curiosity and thus a comfort to the
opposition.

     Unfortunately, part of the opposition belonged in the
feminist constituency. The fierce, early rhetoric of the women's
movement boggled many of the same women who had made lives of
substance and happiness with husbands and children, it put them
on the defensive, made them think they had betrayed not only
their womanhood but their selfhood as well. There was a
self-righteousness among feminists that kept all kinds of
potential recruits away. Emily Ann Smith, the second female
designer-builder in Atlanta's history, recalls. "When the
women's movement came along, I was involved in what I wanted
for me. Then, when I did meet with NOW, I was put down. They
told me I was selfish." Her friend Flo Bruns, who helped found
Atlanta's high- powered Women Business Owners club (because "I
didn't want to talk business to a man. My experience is he is
going to patronize me") had a similar experience. "I walked into
a NOW meeting wearing a business suit and ready to volunteer.
I was treated like an outcast by all these young women in jeans.
Power comes from money, honey, but they didn't recognize that."
They did not recognize Raquel Welch either, who reasoned. "Maybe
it might help the movement to be associated with someone less
abrasive, more feminine. They weren't interested."

     Maybe Welch should reapply. There has been much talk lately
among feminists about community and consensus, and building a
broader base, just as, outside the movement, there is a growing
awareness of how much feminism and the battle for the ERA has
meant to most American women. Bruns says, "Our acceptance in the
general business community has a lot to do with what the ERA
people started." Renae Scott, who got herself some college
education and worked herself off welfare to an administrative
job with the Haymarket People's Fund of Boston, says, "No one,
and I mean no one, got here by herself. Women in the past have
paid a heavy price for the women of today. What affirmative
action programs we have, what salaries -- no matter how small
-- were made possible with help from another person."

    Scott, who is black, is a solid refutation of the widely
held notion that feminism is strictly a white, middle-class
issue. That remains a common enough criticism, as if the whole
movement could be bundled up in a Volvo station wagon and sent
off for a spin into irrelevancy. In fact, minority women may
still be more concerned with problems of employment and
discrimination than with the comparatively rarefied legalities
of a constitutional amendment. But even their priority issues,
in the words of former NOW President Aileen Hernandez, "flow out
of the ERA." Adds Ruth Mandel, direction of the Center for the
American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University: "I'd be
willing to bet that there is only a small minority of families
in the U.S. that has not had to deal over the past ten years
with the fact, or the consequences, of the women's movement."

     Some families may have dealt with the consequences so
extensively that for the younger members, the problem has just
about blown away. "Equality is not as big an issue for us as it
is for grownups, says Demetrius Toney, 17, of White Plains, N.Y.
Maybe the reason is that, for Demetrius, it has long been a part
of his second nature. His mother is a day worker, cleaning other
people's houses, "so I do everything in our house. I sweep, I
wash dishes. This week my brother is doing the laundry." At
U.C.L.A., Director of the Women's Resource Center Tina Oakland
says, "Most college women think the movement has worked. Girls
don't think they need a women's movement. They think society is
fair." Lori Harrington, 21, of Yonkers, N.Y., is not quite so
sure. "I haven't lived long enough to know exactly what I'd be
giving up for equality, but I do know what I'd be giving up if
we went back to the '50s," she says. "I wouldn't be in school.
There'd be no reason for me to be in school. I could forget
becoming a journalist, unless I wanted to write a cooking column
some place."

     If Harrington is serious about a column, she might consider
one about women and the law. Along with other benefits, it could
shake up some of her peers. She might explain the immediate
practical need for the ERA ("We are probably not going to see
many more gains without some major legal change such as the
ERA": Donna Lenhoff of Washington's Women's Legal Defense Fund.
"I think we have gone as far as we can under the 14th
Amendment": Gail Harmon, president of the fund). She might point
out that the Supreme Court, lacking any clear standard for sex
discrimination cases, has ruled both that the Martin Marietta
Corp. was guilty of sex discrimination by not hiring women with
children and that a California state disability plan was not
discriminatory, even though it excluded pregnancy as a
disability. If Harrington wants to stir things up a little more,
she might speculate on whether the country's first woman
Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, was more a jurist or a feminist.
Her deciding vote in a case establishing that seniority systems
are immune to suits under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
will probably not guarantee a Women's Legal Defense Fund
testimonial. But her majority decision, handed down last
Thursday, that an all-woman nursing school in Mississippi was
guilty of sex discrimination is sure to rekindle a few
low-burning fires in the feminist camp. O'Connor even added a
kind of bonus in her written decision, when she pointed out that
such segregation by sex only succeeds in reinforcing the
stereotype of nursing as a woman's profession.

     For all the sense of debts owed and steps taken, there is
a simultaneous impression of reluctance, on the part of many
women, to be drawn even into the fringes of the movement. Some
of this may be attributable to residual resentment of old
rhetorical putdowns, and some of it may have to do with
resistance to being commandeered as unenlisted political foot
soldiers or being spoken for by proxy. "A lot of the failures
of the movement are built into the people who are speaking for
women," says Novelist Anne Tyler. "Basically I agree with
everything they say, but I find myself wanting to disagree
because of the way they say it. If people like me, who are pro-
women, are put off by it, imagine other people." Or imagine a
sympathetic parent, particularly a father, leafing through the
beginning of a feminist guide to child rearing and banging a
shin on the following parenthesis: "(See Chapter 24 for a full
discussion of language as an exclusionary tool of male
supremacy)." Imagine getting to Chapter 24; imagine turning the
page.

     It does not do, though, to be so easily put off. Movements
all have their excesses. They come with the territory, even if
they sometimes seem to cover it, like drifting snow over new
paths. Indeed, should the father have persevered, he might have
found some first-rate advice about children in that very same
book. He would also have found a kind of zip-lock naivete that
insulates Author Letty Cottin Pogrebin inside a cocoon of
ideology. How else could a writer suggest, never mind believe,
that children might be encouraged to forsake the music of the
Rolling Stones (sexist, of course) for the uplifting ballads of
Gay Feminist Holly Near. Ideology infringes on reality; one
suspects it can also skew the sense of rhythm. It may not
interfere with a women's getting a job, however. And it may be
able to show her why she cannot get a better one, or get paid
in full for the very one she is doing now.


     II: LEAVING ROOM

     "I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspaper,
by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned
a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies,
making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small
children in a kindergarten . . . I need not, I am afraid,
describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know
perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on
the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what
still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the
poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me."

     When Woolf wrote those words, some women might work, and
a woman alone had to work. Now, more and more, women must work.
During the early 1970s, work was often a matter of finding pride
and alternatives. There was much discussion of
"self-realization" and "growth potential." The idea that a woman
might also grow and realize herself through her children got
short shrift; the notion that a man might experience the same
satisfaction was either radical or sentimental and rates no
attention. Fatherhood as fulfillment and as a responsibility,
full-time, is a concept that may be more popular in the '80s,
when American families struggle to play catch-up with an
inflationary economy and an increasingly competitive consumer
society. For a women, fulfillment may or may not remain a
priority. Work has become a necessity.

     Says Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder: "The primary reason
women are entering the labor force in such unprecedented numbers
is to maintain their family's standard of living." Statistics
are the arithmetic of social revolution: from 1960 to 1980,
one-earner households have declined from 49.6% to 22.4%, a
staggering change. The percentage of married women in the work
force during the same period has risen from 32% to 51%. The
number of children with mothers who work (31.8 million) has
become, for the first time, larger than the number of children
with mothers at home (26.3 million).

     "Even though a woman's paycheck is less than a man's, it
keeps many an American family alive," says Betty Friedan. "Given
the realities of human, family and national survival, there
can't be any serious consideration that women will go home
again." Elizabeth Hardwick puts it this way: "I certainly don't
think the clock will be turned back, not because of any kindness
on the part of society, but because it does not suit society for
women to be in the home. It is not economically possible, it is
not convenient, and it's not practical. The wife economy is as
obsolete as the slave economy." At the very least, Hardwick's
"wife economy" has mutated -- out of the kitchen, into the
office, onto the assembly line -- even as the wages paid for the
new-woman's work range significantly below the male median.

     Traditionally, jobs are the tools of success. In America
they have become something more. "We have learned that jobs do
not simply earn money, they also create people," says Barry
Stein, president of Goodmeasure, a Cambridge, Mass., business
consultancy. Jobs, we have on good authority from the
forefathers, confer respect, status and community well-being.
The foremothers were apparently not consulted on the subject.
It is difficult for a woman to find status in a pay envelope
that is substantively thinner than a male co-worker's.

     Not only has the current Administration made little effort
to redress the wage imbalance, in the eyes of many feminists it
has set out to blunt the victories of the past ten years. Around
the Women's Legal Defense Fund, President Reagan's popularity
rating is about as high as the heels on a California rancher's
boots. Among the grievances: Administration suspension of
stronger affirmative-action regulations for businesses receiving
Government contracts; withdrawal of wage- discrimination and
sex-segregation guidelines for federal contractors; elimination
of the $500 million set aside for child care in the federal
budget.

     Whether intended to do so or not, this has sent a clear
massage to feminists and working women alike. When Republican
Congresswoman Margaret Roukema of New Jersey spoke at a Cape
Cod, Mass., conference of women state legislators to plead for
recognition of "reality" according to Reaganomics, she faced
considerable heat from the floor. "I have the feeling you people
want to shoot the messenger," she objected. State Representative
Arie Taylor from Denver shouted back: "We don't want to shoot,
but we don't have any jobs in Colorado, and we can't take care
of our children! You take that message back to him!"

     The President has never been noticeably receptive to
messages of that tone or type. It is even unclear whether he is
all that keen on sending women out to work at all. Last April,
at a luncheon with editors and broadcasters, he said that part
of the reason for high unemployment "is not as much recession
as it is the great increase in the people going into the job
market, and ladies. I'm not picking on anyone, but [it is]
because of the increase in women who are working today and
two-worker families." Rosalind Barnett, a psychologist at
Wellesley College's Center for Research on Women, has little
patience with such an analysis. "Once you see work as crucial
to both men's and women's sense of who they are," she says,
"that kind of statement is abhorrent." Barnett and a colleague,
Grace Baruch, completed a study demonstrating that, for women
between the ages of 35 and 55, a paying job is the overriding
factor that enhances a sense of worth.

     Kinds of jobs, however, and ranges of salary remain a
significant stumbling block -- indeed, in some cases, a barrier.
"Pay for full-time women clerical workers is extremely low,"
says Karen Nussbaum, executive director of 9 to 5, the National
Association of Working Women. "It averages just over $11,000 a
year for women, as compared with male clericals, who earn over
$17,000. We feel if we could just get equal pay within our job
classification we would be doing well." To date, 9 to 5 has
initiated legal action that won over $3 million in back pay for
women in publishing and banking, in addition to major pay raises
for female employees in banking, insurance and engineering,
including a sizable $1.34 million settlement from Bechtel.

     Nonetheless, equal pay lies beyond the grasp of many women
workers. Pamela Yore, 28, earns just over $10,000 a year in a
small Boston hospital. (Males performing similar on the same
duties get more.) She has to take care of a five-year-old son
and an ailing husband and would certainly be helped by more
equitable pay. However, she says, "You learn not to make too
many waves in the workplace. If you do, there will be ten people
there waiting for your job, and probably half of them have more
education than you. You see women and men sitting side by side
in the same office, doing the same job and making different
salaries, and you have to tell yourself it is more a social
attitude than a personal one directed at you. But it is hard
when you are not making as much as you could or should."

     The situation is not a lot brighter on the management
level. In 1980 the median salary for women managers and
administrators was $12,936 vs. $23,558 for their male
counterparts. A 1981 study by Wellesley researchers demonstrates
that once she reaches middle management, a woman is likely to
be marooned there. As Management Consultant Carol Weiss, who
collaborated on the Wellesley study, points out: "If these women
have got this far, you know they've had to be crackerjacks to
get there. Men look around and they feel threatened."

     Some of the greatest progress has been made in admissions
to law and medical schools. A third of the graduating class of
Harvard Medical is made up of women. Law has had to practice
what is has preached and legislated. When Justice O'Connor
graduated from law school in 1952, the only job she was offered
by major West Coast law firms was that of legal secretary. Now,
if a firm wants the top of the law school class, it has to skim
women along with men in the cream of the crop; 30.2% of 1981's
graduates were women.

     Over the past ten years, women have made significant
progress in professional education. Women who left the campus
with engineering degrees, for example, rose from .8% in 1971 to
10.4% last year.

     But lawyers, doctors and women in what might be called
high-profile jobs (journalism, publishing, broadcasting,
fashion) take an outsize portion of public attention, partly
because they are attractive exemplars of what is possible. But
it is as the nether end of the economic scale that the hardest
battles are being fought, and it is there that the statistics
begin to take on the proportions of a body count.

     Poverty is a longstanding social problem that hits American
women with particular force. "Female heads of households are
the disproportionate group of people in poverty," says Columbia
University Economist Eli Ginzberg. "The feminization of poverty"
is Sociologist Diana Pearce's blunt phrase for it. A Census
Bureau report covering 1980 just goes by the numbers: "About
one-half of all families below the poverty level in 1980 were
maintained by women with no husband present. The poverty rate
for such families was 32.7%, compared with 6.,2% for
married-couple families, and 11% for families with a male
householders, no wife present. "The report indicates that 50.8%
of the female-headed families with related children under age
18 were poor. Seventy-five percent of absent fathers contribute
no child support at all. The Aid to Families with Dependent
Children program, which spent $6.8 billion in fiscal 1981, will
be spending only $5.4 billion in fiscal '83.

     Work must be done, but work cannot always be had. When
government services are curtailed, it is not only a small, fixed
income that is lost, but jobs as well. The people dealing out
federal funds are often one step away from poverty themselves,
and as Cornell University's Barbara Wertheimer points out,"when
you cut out services to the poor, you're also cutting the jobs
that are held by women -- child-care attendants, home health
aides and the like. It's a double whammy." The disproportionate
share of the reduction in federal programs is inexorably borne
by the black working woman. "For me," adds M.I.T.'s Phyllis
Wallace, "the shocking thing is that most families with black
women as heads are impoverished, and nearly half of all black
children are in these families. The problem is how to improve
the chance for these women to get jobs in the private sector."
Women in black families almost always had to work; the need may
be more acute now, but the situation is not new. "Even the most
highly educated black women had no choice," says Wallace. "If
they wanted their children educated, or if they wanted to buy
a home, or just have a middle-class standard of living, they had
to work. Young black women had working mothers, and they knew
that would be their fate. This is new for white families."

     Federal programs that would train women of any color for
jobs have been cut back. Recession has hit the heavy industries,
and experienced male workers are competing for jobs with women
just entering the field. "It is not only that women and men
doing the same work don't get paid the same," says Barbara
Wertheimer. "It's that women are segregated into certain jobs
where they are paid less. What we have to do is look at the
value of the work to the society and determine pay based on
that." What once was a cry for "equal pay for equal work" will,
accordingly, become a demand for "equal pay for comparable
work." How this will be measured and worked out is still a
mystery -- how does an hour at the computer keyboard prorate
against the same time spent in the typing pool?

     If the work equations are ever resolved, they may even help
answer a question some men now ask only with amusement: "Have
women's rights done anything for me?" If may have seemed funny
and a little silly when feminists started talking about men
sharing housework and wives began insisting to husbands that
homemaking was a tough job all it sown. But the joke may seem
strained indeed to whoever is left in the kitchen. And,
guaranteed, there will be more diapers and dishes in Dad's
future.


     III: LIVING ROOM

     "First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then
the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in
feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five
years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let
children run about the streets. People who have seen them
running wild in Russia say the sight is not a pleasant one."

     So many of the issues of the women's movement, from
housework to abortion, were so basic to so much received wisdom
that they seems, by prospect or in perspective, either trivial
or threatening. "Attention was finally being paid," Joan Didion
wrote in a 1972 essay, "yet that attention was mired in the
trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves
engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of
dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed
by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. . . . It was a long way
from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of
woman's role as 'the Other.'" Those examples can be trivial
issues only to women who, in suburban snugness, no longer have
to endure them. Their metaphorical weight -- as symbols of the
wife economy, and of victimization -- should have been difficult
to miss. Difficult, apparently, but by no means impossible.
"Well, I wrote that in 1972 and I haven't really thought about
it since then," Didion remarked recently. "I'm sorry. I've been
thinking about other things."

     For many other women, without Didion's intellectual range
and without her literary privilege, it is still hard to think
about much else. Assaultive language masquerading as sidewalk
compliments can remind any woman of her vulnerability. Rape is
still a waking nightmare, but at least a little daylight has
been let in. The physical wounding and emotional trauma are now
discussed openly. America is being educated; more stringent laws
and penalties are now in effect and reflect a greater
understanding of the crime. But feminism, in its widest
application, is still a home-front revolution, and it is in the
apartment, the tract house and the split-level that its greatest
impact has been felt.

     This is a fact that was more quickly grasped and used by
Phyllis Schlafly and her resistance camp than by the feminist
insurgents, who were, at first, so busy recruiting for the
barricades that they left the main base vulnerable. Schlafly,
however, was a good deal more cunning than anyone first thought.
She has potentially a strong feminist background: a daughter of
the Depression, she worked in a munitions plant to put herself
through Washington University in St. Louis. Feminists might
initially have mistaken her for a kind of grandstanding Betty
Crocker, but Schlafly and her supporters marshaled all the fear
and uncertainty that trails every social revolution, trimmed it
and turned it against the opposition. ERA would encourage
everything from rampant homosexuality to unisex bathrooms, from
women draftees in combat to women victims of some squalid
unisex millennium. Cheap and scary, sure, but as they say about
such quibbles in Hollywood, "Hey, it worked."

     No one took much notice that Schlafly's insistence upon
strength through inequality could have been based on a fear and
contempt for men at least as deep as, say, Radical Feminist
Ti-Grace Atkinson's. What emerged instead was the image of
Phyllis Schlafly as defender of the traditional values, defender
of the home. No matter that all the sociologists and all the
statisticians and all the activists said Ozzie and Harriet were
gone for good, that the conventional nuclear family, with Dad
bringing home the bacon and Mom cooking it for him and the kids,
survived in only 28% of American homes. The divorce rate almost
doubled in the past decade, and the percentage of people living
alone rose from 5.3% to 8.3%. Still, that family with the bacon
is for many Americans not just the ideal family, but the
American dream itself. Schlafly not only defended the home, she
defended the dream, and her constituency has triumphed, for the
moment, because dreams die hard.

     But the lasting strength of families is not in tradition,
it is in the capacity for change. Few novelists in years have
written as well about the ferocious fragility of family love and
family life as John Irving. The World According to Garp has a
protagonist -- no, a hero -- who breaks conventional roles as
if they were a half-hearted hammer lock, who not only tends the
kids while his wife works and keeps the house in order, but
actually takes joy in his tasks. Pride. Fulfillment. The book
was more than a smash. It was a true literary phenomenon, and
there are surely very few admirers of Garp who think, as the
boys in the barroom still say, that he got his balls busted.

     Nitpickers will be quick to raise a point: T.S. Garp was
a writer, and writers work at home. What of the millions of
other men who have to work away? What happens to the children
with both mother and father off on the job? They cannot, as
Virginia Woolf observed, "run about the streets." The options
are limited, and so far imperfect. These days, what Woolf called
"that deep-seated [male role] desire, not so much that she shall
be inferior as that he shall be superior" may have moderated
into an awareness that a different equation is wanted. Finding
and holding the balance, however, requires some acrobatic skill.
It also demands flexibility and a good deal of resilience.

     ABC Newsman Ted Koppel took a year off from a steady job
so his wife Grace Anne could finish school. He sustained no
visible career damage -- indeed his boss gave him a daily
three-minute radio program to keep the bills paid -- and after
his wife graduated, he went on to his greatest success as host
of ABC News Nightline. On the other hand, Don Demers, an
industrial engineer in Dayton, took the kids while his wife
finished med school, then found, after more than two years away,
that he could not find another job. Commented Charles Arons,
president of a Los Angeles employment firm: "There isn't a male
I know of in an executive position who would accept raising
kids as a legitimate excuse for not working for three years."
Note the "not working": to Mr. Arons, a one-way ticket to the
T.S. Garp Hit- the-Mat Seminar and Backyard Barbecue, held
yearly on the grounds of the Hotel New Hampshire.

     Aron's point, however, has a goodly amount of immediate,
and unfortunate, practicality. There are not many executives who
can appreciate or allow that the skill, say, of time management
at home might be applied to office management, just as there are
still very few corporations with personnel departments set up
to accommodate the needs of the new work force and the flexible
family. Other than enlisting the aid of family members, day care
remains the most common way to manage the children during work
hours. Centers all over the country have been damaged by budget
cuts and by some strong conceptual questions. Edward Zigler,
director of the Bush Center in Child Development and Social
Policy at Yale University, estimates that 40% of the children
of working mothers may be in "home day care" (that is they are
cared for either in their own home or in the sitter's), while
fully another 40% are in "family day care", where a sitter
outside the home cares for four to six children. "It is an open
issue for children of every age," he says. Says Psychologist
Michael Meyerhoff, who spent 13 years in the Harvard Pre-School
Project: "If there is any element of choice, we've been trying
to get people to be aware that the job they would be doing with
their child is more important than any job outside the home. And
you don't have to be a woman to be a good mother."

     These doubts about day care can put a crimp in the family
future, and a dent in the budget, but they do not, as Schlafly
might have us believe, atomize the American nuclear family. The
quality of the day care and its basing near the job may come a
little closer to a workable solution. In Massachusetts both Wang
Laboratories, Inc., and Stride Rite Corp. have inaugurated model
projects with long waiting lists of applicants. Stride Rite's
program also includes the options of dental care and
psychotherapy. Adjustments made to work schedules, so-called
flextime, are another component of the solution, as are extended
maternity leaves for both parents.

     There is still a long road to travel before such leaves
become common in the U.S., and probably even a more tortuous
route before men as well as women will want to press hard for
them. Author Maxine Hong Kingston is right when she says that
"in the feminist movement, there are advantages for both sexes.
It's like liberation for both, and not one at the expense of the
other." Getting the majority of men to see those advantages,
never mind seize them, may take a while. Down in the juke
joints, the boys are listening to Merle Haggard sing a tune
called Are the Good Times Really Over, a litany of wistful
memories from "back when the country was strong." The song
yearns for a time "when a girl could still cook and still
would." Those boys may not be able to get a hot meal on the
table themselves, but they won't abandon without a fight their
inalienable right to have it rustled up by the little woman.

     It will be a losing fight, ultimately, and it will not take
place exclusively in the roadhouses. There have already been
skirmishes up in the loftier precincts, where a well-turned
antique compliment (Dr. Johnson to Boswell: "Men know that women
are an overmatch for them") now sounds more like a neat way of
undercutting a woman with awe. James Thurber invited to talk to
the graduating class of Mount Holyoke College in 1949 ("The idea
of addressing the flower of American womanhood would terrify me
even if I could see"), declined by invoking a story about a
World War I soldier who, peering down into a bottomless enemy
trench, allowed that "I wouldn't go down there even if they was
Fig Newtons down there."

     The cookie does not crumble that way any more. The cookies,
in fact, do not crumble at all. This does not mean charm is
passe, or compliments are sexist, any more than it means that,
contrary to all those shoo-fly Schlaflyisms, men and women will
be less distinctive, or less sexual, if they work at the same
jobs or compete at the same sports.

     Biology is immutable. Basic physical differences will not
change, but the law will. Absolute equality between men and
women may be impossible -- absolutes are -- but it is
approachable at least, and now just a little closer.

     Equality does not eradicate differences in gender, it
exalts them, which should be some comfort to cowering sexists
still clinging to every advantage they have ever wangled or
wrung out of women. Equality is only a threat if reality is. In
the rubble of busted pedestals and shredded stereotypes are the
pieces of a new perception: of the real, working, workable way
of equality, of self- awareness, of mutual respect.

     The women usually picked to symbolize change and
re-evaluation are those like Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, who
have achieved a popular success that has turned them into
celebrities. Steinem therefore becomes an articulate and snazzy
figurehead, Fonda a role model whose movie trajectory (from
bimbo to feminist beacon) mirrors very neatly the way in which
women are supposed to see themselves. Watching and listening to
them, though, is not as striking by half as tuning in on a
single studio audience of the Phil Donahue Show. Fifteen years
ago, these same women might have been sitting in the same seats,
whooping it up when the host gave them a pair of nylons, a
month's supply of Palmolive and dinner for two at Casa Claude.
Now, encouraged by a host who is a professed feminist, women
wrangle with each other over issues like abortion and
disarmament, and ask tough questions of guests ranging from Alan
Alda and James Watson to transsexual twins and Henry Kissinger,
who might have an easier time of it on Meet the Press. The
Donahue show is one striking illustration of women, five times
a week, finding a voice.

     Even the defeat of the ERA means just another redrafting,
a further extension of the debate. There is one point on which
feminists and most of their foes can now agree: there is no
going back. The only questions is how to define the future and
how to cope with the challenges that the changing role of women
will present.

     In certain subtle ways, it might be argued that women may
have succeeded too well. Their hopes have been so frequently
dramatized and debated that they have turned into cliches of
fiction before they have become matters of fact. The abundance
of persuasive reexamination and the wealth of fine writing that
have come from this woman's decade -- Anne Tyler and Gail
Godwin, Maxine Hong Kingston and Joyce Eliason, Ann Beattie and
Elizabeth Hardwick and, yet, Joan Didion -- have created a
consciousness that is both more aware and a little restless, a
little reckless, even, about mistaking gains for guarantees.
Critic Janet Maslin summed up the plot of a movie this way:
"[The heroine] confronts her new situation. She redefines her
relationship with her children. She re-enters the work force
and examines her anxieties about men, sex and love. She learns
that she is as much of a person without a partner as she was
with one -- perhaps even more of a person." That breeziness may
just be emblematic of a generally renewed spirit, but somehow
one prefers the rejoinder to a persistent cigarette ad printed
boldly on a T-shirt: I HAVEN'T COME A LONG WAY, AND I'M NOT A
BABY.


     IV: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

     "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses
possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the
figure of man at twice its natural size."

     These things are not measurable by surveys or shows of
hands or random samplings. If they are knowable at all, it is
through some almost incidental combination of art and intuition,
force of feeling and shock of knowledge. Finally it all comes
to this: that women, after years -- after centuries -- are
stepping through Virginia Woolf's looking glass. The measure of
all the change and growth of the past decade is that women,
finally, are coming out the other side of the mirror. The limit
is that they have not shattered the glass. Not yet.

     And yet.


By Jay Cocks. Reported by Anne Constable/Atlanta, Ruth Mehrtens
Galvin/Boston and Janice C. Simpson/New York.