TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1970s) The Women's Movement </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 08191> <link 08200> <link 08202> <link 08206> <link 01284> <link 01286> <link 00020> <link 00044> <link 00187><link 00190><link 00197><link 00015> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The Women's Movement </hdr> <body> [The liveliest quest and greatest gains made in the 1970s were accomplished by a group that, while among the most disadvantaged and discriminated against, was and is not a minority: women.] (March 20, 1972) Many currents of social change have converged to make the New Feminism an idea whose time has come. Mechanization and automation have made brawn less important in the marketplace. Better education has broadened women's view beyond home and hearth, heightening their awareness of possibilities--and their sense of frustration when those possibilities are not realized. A declining birth rate and the fact that women are living increasingly longer--and also longer than men--has meant that a smaller part of women's lives is devoted to bearing and rearing children. The Pill has relieved women of anxiety about unwanted pregnancies. Just where is American woman today? In a statistical overview, she is nearly 106 million strong, at the median age 30 and with a bit more than a twelfth-grade education. She is likely to be married (61.5%). She makes up more than a third of the national work force, but according to a Department of Labor survey, she generally has a lower-skilled, lower-paying job than a man does. In many jobs she does not get equal pay for equal work. (Her median earnings have actually declined relative to men.) In a recession she is, like blacks, the first to be fired. Because of the instability of marriage and a growing divorce rate, women head more and more households; 20 million people live in households depending solely on women for support. U.S. women are seeking a new role in society at least partly because in recent years millions of them have gone out and found one in the economy--as paid workers. Close to half (44%) of all women over 16 now are in the work force, v. just over a quarter (27%) who chose to have a job in 1940. When the Internal Revenue Service recently revised wage-withholding rates, it raised them partly on the presumption that the two-paycheck family--with both husband and wife employed--had become so common. Yet there remains a shocking double standard in pay scales and promotion opportunities. A federal survey shows that the average woman employed in a full-time job earns only $3 for each $5 paid to a man with a similar job. Men at the top have a stake in maintaining the discrimination. If women workers got as much as men, wage costs would rise by some $109 billion--more than all pretax corporate profits last year. Increasingly, nonradical women have joined movement leaders in demanding a square deal in hiring, pay and advancement. They are making job equality their No. 1 goal. Women's protests are being heard in high places. Under threat of contract cancellation, corporations that do substantial business with the Federal Government have been ordered by Labor Secretary James Hodgson to draft personnel action plans by next month showing that they will take "affirmative action" to "remedy the underutilization" of their women employees. More and more, courts are ruling against laws or work rules that discriminate against women, including bans on laboring long hours and lifting heavy loads. Doors are being opened by the threat of legal action and the "affirmative action" order signed by Labor Secretary Hodgson. Many personnel executives are drafting timetables that all but guarantee a wave of female promotions in the next few years. (April 3, 1972) Since 1923, a constitutional amendment proposing equal rights for women had languished in Congress, debated seriously only rarely. But last week, with a disparate array of midwives in attendance, the Equal Rights Amendment passed the Senate, 84 to 8, and was sent to the states for ratification. If approved by three-quarters of the states, it will become the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. [One goal of the women's movement was "reproductive freedom," the right of women to decide for themselves whether and under what circumstances to bear children.] (February 5, 1973) Soon after her illegitimate son was born two years ago, "Jane Roe," a divorced Dallas bar waitress, put him up for adoption. At almost the same time, "Mary Doe," an Atlanta housewife, bore a child who was also promptly adopted. Both women had asked for abortions and, like thousands of others, they had been turned down. Unlike most of the others, though, Roe and Doe went to court to attack the state statutes that frustrated them. The resulting legal fights took too long for either woman to get any practical benefit. But last week they had the satisfaction of hearing the Supreme Court read their pseudonyms into the annals of constitutional law. By a surprising majority to 7 to 2, the court ruled that Roe and Doe had won one of the nation's most fiercely fought legal battles. Thanks to the Texas waitress and the poverty-stricken Georgia housewife, every woman in the U.S. now has the same right to an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy as she has to any other minor surgery. Writing for the majority--and aware of the potential impact of the decision--Justice Harry Blackmun laced his opinion with a precise set of guidelines. During the first three months of pregnancy, wrote Blackmun, "the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician." The ruling was rooted in the court's view of the right to privacy. Blackmun held that such a right has now become an indivisible part of every American's "liberty," which is specifically protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. Such a protection, he indicated, more than overcomes any state interest in using abortion statutes--as so many states have--to regulate sexual conduct, however indirectly. A fetus, he added, is not a person under the Constitution and thus has no legal right to life--a conclusion that countless anti-abortionists violently object to. [The Supreme Court later seriously qualified the right to abortion by permitting state and local governments to decide for themselves whether or not to finance abortions for needy women through Medicaid. TIME made U.S. women "Women of the Year" for 1975.] (January 5, 1976) 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. 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." (February 26, 1979) "A St. Valentine's Day massacre." So said Illinois State Senator James Donnewald as he assessed the damage done to the Equal Rights Amendment in his state last week. In the ERA's first ratification test since Congress last year extended the deadline to 1982, the amendment was narrowly beaten in both Illinois and North Carolina, leaving it still three votes short of becoming the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. At the same time, state senators in Indiana, Montana and South Dakota tried to rescind their previous approval of the amendment, an action of questionable validity but one that reflects the measure's growing difficulties. Announced a discouraged Sheila Greenwald, executive director of Eramerica, after the latest setbacks: "We're not planning new strategy, because in many cases the legislators that defeated ERA the last time are still there." [When the ERA extension ran out in 1982, not a single additional state had ratified it.] * * * [In the 1970s, the old also mobilized to fight discrimination in the form of "ageism."] (October 10, 1977) It might as well have been a vote for motherhood or apple pie or sunshine. There were no opposing speeches, dissent was muttered only in the safety of the cloakroom, and the final floor vote was a whopping 359 to 4. Yet the bill that breezed through the U.S. House of Representatives may be the session's most important piece of legislation, with ramifications no one can foresee. It extends the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 70 in private industry and removes it altogether for federal employees. Said the bill's sponsor, Florida Democrat Claude Pepper, 77: "At long last, we will have eliminated ageism as we have previously eliminated sexism and racism as a basis for discrimination in this country, and we will be putting a new emphasis on human rights." This abrupt, stunning legislative success is the hallmark of another revolt in America, this time by the aged. The 1960s was the decade of aroused youth; the 1970s may well belong to their grandparents. Some 23 million Americans, about 10% of the population, are 65 or over. Numbers alone give them political clout, because they vote more consistently than younger groups In addition, they have begun to organize with all the skill and determination of other embattled minorities. Such burgeoning pressure groups as the Gray Panthers, the National Council on the Aging, the National Association of Retired Federal Employees and the National Council of Senior Citizens have given their political representatives little respite. Foremost among their goals has been the fight for the right to work. Says Joseph Schwartz, who retired after 27 years as a Chicago schoolteacher, then retired once again as a park supervisor and is looking for a job now: "Above all, you must work. You have to be active mentally as well as physically. If you're not, what good is living?" </body> </article> </text>