Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Even working women whose biological clocks are in working order, Bauer says, “are realizing they’d rather be at home with their children. Most women work only because they have to.” Mothers should stay home for the sake of the children, he says. Children in day care, which he characterizes as “Marxist,” suffer long-term damaging effects—according to “many studies,” he adds. It comes then as a bit of a surprise to learn that Bauer has subjected his own children to this leftist institution—for nine years.

  He can explain it, he says. His use of day care was “different” and “better” because he placed his children in “home-based” day care—that is, an unlicensed center run out of a woman’s living room. (It’s unclear how this is better: a national review of child abuse statistics at day care centers finds that the most incidents of abuse have occurred at such unlicensed sites.) At any rate, Bauer says, a bit defensively, it’s not like his kids went directly from the maternity ward to the day care nursery. His wife, Carol, waited “at least three, four months” before she returned to work. “For my wife, it’s been a slow process of concluding you can’t have it all.” Carol Bauer, however, remembers events differently.

  “Actually, I went back to work six weeks after Elyse was born,” says his wife, sitting at their dining room table on a spring morning in 1988, picking absentmindedly at bread crumbs on the tablecloth. The children are out—the older ones at school, the youngest in a “mother’s day off” program.

  At the time of her daughter Elyse’s birth in 1977, Carol Bauer explains, she was a top assistant to Congresswoman Margaret Heckler; she couldn’t just quit. A lack of federal assistance programs for mothers also played a role in her decision: “There’s no set leave policy on the Hill,” she points out. Financial considerations entered into it, too: “We had bought a house and we had a mortgage.” And then there was that other impulse that she just couldn’t seem to squelch: “It wasn’t just economics. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work. I loved work.” She laughs. “I mean, when I had Elyse, I literally took my work with me. After I got out of the hospital, I was working the next day at home.”

  For years, at eight o’clock every morning, the Bauers dropped off Elyse, and eventually their second daughter, Sarah, at day care, put in a full day of work, and then picked up the girls on the way home, usually after six o’clock. The children spent so much time at day care, in fact, Carol Bauer says, that when it came time for Elyse to enter kindergarten, they enrolled her in the school in the center’s neighborhood rather than their own. How did the girls feel about day care? “Oh, fine,” Carol Bauer says. “They were very happy there. For them it was normal.”

  What’s been harder is Carol Bauer’s own adaptation to full-time homemaking. National politics had been her obsession since childhood, when she kept scrapbooks of the presidential elections and proudly wore her Republican campaign buttons to school. At Muskingum College in Ohio, she majored in political science and had the Washington Post mailed to her dorm room. “I had Potomac fever,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t wait to get to Washington. I wanted a career. You know, I guess I wanted a family, too, eventually, but what I was really dreaming of was a career in politics.”

  After graduation, she headed for the capital and moved from research assistant in the Republican National Committee to an appointment in Heckler’s congressional office, where she rose quickly to the top executive post. She was especially pleased to be on the staff of one of the few congresswomen. “There was something about working for a woman who had managed to do it all,” she says. When Heckler took charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, Carol Bauer came with her in a part-time position. But then the Reagan administration forced Heckler from office. The new HHS Secretary, Otis Bowen, asked Bauer to stay and help with the transition. She agreed—but with her role model and her power base gone, the job soon lost its appeal. “That was the most difficult part of my career,” she says. “One day you’re the top aide to the secretary, the next day you’re not part of the in-crowd anymore. I felt like something akin to a fifth wheel.” He also refused to give her the flexible schedule she had had under Heckler. Finally, she quit in the late fall of 1986—announcing that her children needed her at home.

  But nesting, she has discovered, has its trials. “It was a long winter,” she says of her first season at home. “It was quite an adjustment.” She pauses. “It still is.” The first months were the worst: “I felt rather isolated. I was so used to going to Washington.” She tried to make the best of her new circumstances. “By last spring I decided if I’m going to be home, I would have to get involved in other things. So this school year, I’m in the Mantua Women’s Club; I’m on the board of the baby-sitting co-op, I do PTA work. It gives me some satisfaction.” She shrugs. “Also, I still talk to my office. And I pump Gary for information every night at dinner.”

  This year, she says, her eldest daughter, Elyse, is running for president of student council. And the other day, Sarah came home from first grade, modeling what Carol Bauer calls “my dream T-shirt.” Her daughter had inscribed it in art class with her life’s goals: “Go to college. Practice. Get a job.”

  JUST NOT ENOUGH GOOD WOMEN

  Gary Bauer never made much headway with his legislative program to promote homemaking. The $5,000 personal tax exemption he envisioned for families with housewives would have cost the deficit-stricken government about $20 billion a year in lost tax revenues. But while New Right men like Bauer lost many of their bureaucratic battles, they would eventually win the war for the national political agenda. In that struggle, the 1984 presidential election figured as a crucial turning point—the Democratic party’s last stand for women’s rights.

  By nominating Representative Geraldine Ferraro to the vice presidential spot on the ticket, the Democrats boldly advertised to women the clear differences between the parties. The measure did not go unappreciated; it earned the Democrats new support from millions of female voters, who contributed more money to Ferraro’s campaign fund than women had ever donated to any candidate’s coffers. In fact, for the first time, a Democratic vice presidential candidate received as much in political contributions as the candidate at the top of the ticket. The Democratic National Committee added 26,000 new names to its rolls, the largest campaign-year increase ever spurred by a single candidate. And Ferraro’s presence encouraged other aspiring female politicians. The number of women running for Senate more than tripled and the number of female congressional candidates jumped to a record high.

  Ferraro’s nomination also inspired instantaneous backlash from the New Right Reaganites, who attacked her not as a politician but as a woman—and, more specifically, as a “radical left-wing feminist.” Before the TV cameras, they repeatedly suggested that her gender would render her incapable of defending the nation. Behind the scenes, they launched a series of whispering campaigns, all focused on her sexuality. “There were rumors about me being involved in lesbianism,” Ferraro recalls, “about me having affairs, about me having an abortion.” The leaders of the antiabortion movement pursued her with vindictiveness. They even followed her around in a blimp.

  Though many political candidates in the ’80s were subjected to harsh attacks and close scrutiny, the assault on Ferraro was unprecedented: It wasn’t her behavior that was on trial, but her husband John Zaccaro’s; she was to be punished for his management of some muddy New York real estate deals. Ferraro herself was no promoter of that profession—in fact, the Realtors association had given her an 88 percent disapproval rating. She was excoriated for her husband’s reluctance to disclose his tax returns—while Bush was unscathed after placing his own assets in a blind trust, thus avoiding having to reveal his tax returns. Rumors about Zaccaro’s improprieties were floated first by the New Right magazine Human Events and the right-wing Accuracy in Media. The Washington press corps probed the business practices of this small-time landlord as if he would soon be managing the White House budget. And reporters applied them
selves with a perseverance that was to be notably absent four years later in the reporting on George Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra affair. The Philadelphia Inquirer assigned thirty reporters to the Zaccaro story. Even after Ferraro released her family’s tax returns and reviewed them in excruciating detail at a one-and-a-half-hour nationally televised news conference, investigations of “her” finances persisted, ranging far afield of her bank account. The press even looked into long-ago business associations of Ferraro’s father (dead since she was eight) and Ferraro’s husband’s father. As columnist Richard Reeves, one of the few journalists to step back from the fray, remarked at the time, “The stoning of Geraldine Ferraro in the public square goes on and on, and no one steps forward to help or protest—not even one of her kind.”

  In the end, as myriad postelection polls demonstrated, neither the scandal over Zaccaro’s business affairs nor Ferraro’s presence on the ticket contributed to the Democrats’ defeat. A recovering economy returned the White House to Republican hands. Nearly 80 percent of voters polled by Newsweek said the flap over Ferraro’s husband did not figure in their voting decision. Voters weren’t rejecting the possibility of a woman in high office either. In fact, a national survey after the 1984 election found that having seen Ferraro on the campaign trail, one-quarter of the electorate was now more inclined to vote for a female candidate. Moreover, exit polls found that among voters who cast their ballot on the basis of the second person on the ticket, Ferraro had the edge over Vice President Bush.

  But history has a way of rewriting itself: “Polling indicated that she detracted from, rather than added to, Mondale’s electoral strength,” an article in the National Review decreed a year after the campaign. It did not cite these mystery polls. Other political analysts in the media characterized Ferraro’s appearance on the ticket as the Democratic “surrender” to feminists—and they blamed these feminists for making Mondale look “weak” to the electorate. Democratic party leaders charged that women were responsible for the party’s poor showing and women had had too much influence in the campaign and were driving away white men. Writer Nicholas Davidson asserted that Mondale “was under the gun from feminists—far more so than from other constituencies. Such was the feminist stick.” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen complained that Mondale had been “henpecked” and had succumbed to “the hectoring and—yes—threats of the organized women’s movement.” He has been reduced to “a stock American wimp” and “might as well sit out the campaign in an easy chair, munching a Dagwood sandwich.”

  Eventually, Ferraro would internalize much of this revisionist history, too—and turn on herself. In subsequent press interviews, Ferraro said that if she had it to do over, she wouldn’t have run for office. Accepting the nomination wasn’t “fair” to her husband, she said. And she backed off from plans to run for the Senate in 1986.

  “[T]he defeat of one woman is often read as a judgment on all women,” Ferraro wrote in her memoirs. And indeed, her rough experience during the campaign and her much publicized regrets later translated similarly in the minds of many American women. In 1984, 53 percent of women in a national poll said they believed a woman would be president by the year 2000; in 1987, only 40 percent expected it. Women who aspired to a career in politics were even more demoralized by Ferraro’s public drubbing. By 1988, recruiters from both parties suddenly encountered difficulties finding women willing to run for office. The bipartisan Women’s Campaign Fund had trouble giving away its seed money. Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics, kept hearing potential women candidates beg off with the same reason; they feared “the Ferraro factor.” The popular California secretary of state, March Fong Eu, backed away from a U.S. Senate bid that year on the Democratic ticket. Her reason: her husband didn’t want to have to disclose his finances like Ferraro’s husband.

  On Election Day, only two women (both Republicans) were on the ballot in the 1988 U.S. Senate race, down from ten in 1984. It was the smallest number of women running for Senate in a decade. On the House side, the number of female candidates slipped, too. And in every category of statewide executive races—from governor to lieutenant governor to secretary of state to state treasurer to state auditor—women’s numbers plunged. Female gubernatorial candidates, for example, dropped to two, from eight just two years earlier. Only in state legislative races did the number of women running increase slightly—and even here, the growth rate had dropped substantially from previous years.

  When the election results came in for 1988, both women who ran for U.S. Senate had lost, leaving the Senate with its usual two women. (The last time women broke out of that holding pattern was in 1953—when the Senate boasted a grand total of three women.) On the House side, only two new women were elected in 1988, down from four in 1986. Overall, the percentage of women in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures had stalled, and the proportion of women in statewide elective office had shrunk to 12 percent from 15 percent just a year earlier—the first decline in eleven years.

  • • •

  ON A bitterly cold morning in January 1988 in Des Moines, Iowa, more than one thousand delegates gathered in the city’s convention center for the Women’s Agenda Conference. The women were there to make their wishes known to the presidential hopefuls. But candidates were scarce. Not one of the six men in the Republican presidential primary showed up for the conference’s central event, the Presidential Forum; and only two even bothered to decline their invitations. Two of the Democrats were also absent: Gary Hart and Albert Gore. It wasn’t that this was a “radical feminist” event: the bipartisan conference was sponsored by the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, a national association with a moderate reputation and a majority Republican membership. It wasn’t that the timing or location was bad: the candidates were all milling about Iowa in January for the primary, desperate for publicity. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been given enough notice: The invitations had been sent out the previous June. It wasn’t that the candidates had more pressing commitments: one of them even went fishing that day. That left only one explanation. As the organization’s executive director, Republican Linda Dorian, reluctantly concluded, “There is something deeply troubling about the way Republican candidates view women.”

  Mostly, the 1988 Republican candidates preferred not to view women at all. They represented a growing Republican problem that the party’s leaders would just as soon not spotlight. The “gender gap” appeared in the 1980 election, when for the first time more women than men favored the Democrats (by a 5 to 7 percent margin), and Gallup polls began reporting that the Democratic party was enjoying as much as a 19 percent edge among women. On the top of the ticket on Election Day, exit polls found, men and women parted company: a majority of men (55 percent) cast their ballot for Reagan, but only a minority of women (47 percent). The split along gender lines was greater than in any previous presidential election—and striking enough to inspire Reagan to commission pollster Richard Wirthlin to investigate how to combat it in the next election.

  That same year, in an unprecedented fissure that went unnoted in the press, a feminist gap also emerged. Women’s rights, in fact, would become the only issue on which Carter led Reagan in the polls. The first substantial feminist vote surfaced—and, as political scientist Ethel Klein observed in her study of national voting patterns, it was a vote that surfaced only among women. It was “the first election,” Klein noted, “in which there was a group of voters having a preferred candidate on women’s rights issues that could be mobilized around a feminist vote.” By 1988, in fact, a remarkable 40 percent of women who favored equal rights said in a poll that they would like to have a “feminist party.” The greatest fear of suffrage’s opponents sixty years ago was finally threatening to come true: a significant number of women were beginning to constitute a bloc of voters who cast their ballots independently of men.

  As the decade progressed, the gender gap widened—for Reagan, at
times, by as much as 17 percent—and, with it, women’s power to sway elections. By 1984, female votes decided more elections than men’s. By 1986, the gender gap returned the Senate to Democratic control; in nine critical Senate races, women favored the Democrat who won, men the Republicans who lost. In 1988, the gender gap would be a factor in over forty state elections. The gender gap’s effect was further strengthened by women’s increasingly large numerical edge at the polls. Female voters outnumbered men in 1980 by 5.5 million votes; by 1984, for the first time a higher proportion of women than men voted; by 1988, women were casting 10 million more ballots than men.

  By 1988 the voting preferences of men and women had diverged so much that at one point in the presidential race, polls picked up a 24 percent gender gap in favor of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. It was single women, whether unwed, divorced, or widowed, who contributed most dramatically to the gap, along with working, educated, professional, young, and black women. In other words, Dukakis’s supporters who gave him this huge female advantage were women who most supported a feminist agenda of pay equity, social equality, and reproductive rights.

  GOP leaders weren’t oblivious to this threat: Republican chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., warned his colleagues during the 1988 presidential race, “We are particularly vulnerable, if I can use that word, among young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five who work outside the home and particularly within that subgroup, those young women who are single parents.” This shouldn’t have come as a surprise: female-headed households had suffered disproportionately from Reagan domestic policy, losing billions of dollars in desperately needed child care assistance, medical aid, legal services, nurtritional supplements, and subsidized housing.

  One solution, of course, would have been for the Republicans to try to win over this expanding female, and feminist, vote by pursuing progressive social policies—policies that the majority of American women clearly supported. Instead, GOP leaders cold-shouldered women and chased twice as desperately after men. None took positions that the majority of women support—from the right to abortion to social welfare funding to the Equal Rights Amendment. And those who once did take such stances were busy recanting them. Bush, Robert Dole, and Pete Du Pont all backed away from previous, more profeminist postures. Bush used to support the ERA, legal abortion, and federally funded birth-control services. The very federal contraceptive program he would attack in the ’80s, in fact, was the one he had co-sponsored as a congressman in 1970—with the pronouncement then, “No one has to feel timid about discussing birth control anymore.” Now, though, Bush and Republican party officials shied away from all but the most symbolic, and empty, expressions of support for women. At the 1988 Republican National Convention, the party’s officers paid homage to women in one respect only: they gave out plaques to four good mothers, including Representative Jack Kemp’s wife Joanne, who had put their careers on hold when they had children.