1975
American Women
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 5, 1976
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entirely repealed the Code of Hammurabi (woman as male property), but enough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. AT&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 AT&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.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1975
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