Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Rather than meeting the demands of women, the GOP men struck macho stands that they hoped would impress their own sex. Bush hoped especially to prove his manly mettle to members of the press corps, who seemed as obsessed with the “wimp factor” as the male politicians they were covering. “I get furious,” Bush assured them. “I go ballistic. I really do and I bawl people out. Of course, everyone’s running for cover.” He even predicted, more wistfully than assertively, “Maybe I’ll turn out to be a Teddy Roosevelt.”

  During the race, Bush’s campaign managers dismissed questions about women’s rights; they were too trivial to warrant comment, they said. “We’re not running around and dealing with a lot of so-called women’s issues,” Bush’s press secretary indignantly told the New York Times. When Bush summoned a group of elected officials to advise him during the campaign, only one was a woman. While the candidate claimed that opposition to abortion was a cornerstone of his campaign, he didn’t give this critical concern of women’s much apparent thought. When asked in a televised debate if he was “prepared to brand a woman a criminal for this decision,” he said, “I haven’t sorted out the penalties.” His one seeming nod in the direction of working women’s needs during the campaign was a penny-ante child care proposal that would give the poorest working families about $20 a week in tax breaks. This pocket change was supposed to pay for basic child care that, on average, costs four times as much. In the end, the Bush campaign’s only real gesture to women was, incredibly, the selection of Dan Quayle. His youthful blond looks, Republican leaders told journalists, would surely charm the ladies.

  The Democrats would seem the obvious beneficiaries of women’s deepening alienation from the Republican party. (Indeed, the 1988 Los Angeles Times Mirror survey on the electorate found the biggest proportion of women defined themselves as 1960s-style Democrats, identifying with ’60s-era peace and civil rights movements; the smallest proportion of men, by contrast, identified with this group.) Yet, by 1988, Democratic candidates and leaders were so preoccupied with proving their macho credentials and adopting their “pro-family” strategy that they nearly wiped women’s rights off the party slate. Paul Kirk, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, announced that such “narrow” issues as the Equal Rights Amendment and the right to abortion—both supported by large majorities of American voters—had no place on the party platform. Then he tried to disband the party’s women’s caucuses—after explicitly promising during his campaign for chairman that he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, the Democratic Leadership Council quietly omitted abortion rights from its agenda.

  In 1984, when women were still being courted by the Democrats, the Democratic National Committee held a gala dinner party to honor its women, and every presidential candidate spoke before the national women’s caucuses. In 1988, the party for Democratic women was literally over. Not only was there no honorary banquet that year, during the four days of the women’s caucuses, no presidential candidates showed up. Dukakis sent his wife; and his running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, was the only prominent male figure to address the women. In Dukakis’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he did not once mention reproductive freedom. Nor, for that matter, did he take a position on sex discrimination, pay equity, or the ERA. He didn’t offer even a vague endorsement of women’s rights. The closest he came was an allusion to the importance of child care. Like his Republican fellows, he could envision women only when they were tucked snugly into the family unit.

  By turning his back on women, Dukakis managed to turn off his greatest source of support. The 24 percent gender gap that he enjoyed that summer quickly shriveled to less than 8 percent by Election Day. Only then, after the votes had all been counted, did Bush’s men talk about the gap—to claim Dukakis’s failure as their success. “The major accomplishment of Bush/Quayle was the closing of the gender gap,” Bush’s polling consultant, Vince Breglio, crowed later. “It was critical to winning.” Breglio claimed the GOP won women over by playing up child care and a “kinder, gentler” agenda. But the exit polls show this victory to be a less than resounding one; Bush got 49 to 50 percent of the female vote, not a real majority, and women’s affiliation with the GOP party actually fell an additional four percentage points in 1988. (Only 26 percent of women were calling themselves Republicans in the polls that year.) The GOP party only “won” the battle over the gender gap by default. Dukakis, for all his muscle-man flexing, never once summoned the courage to punch through Bush’s family-values facade. Donna Brazile, the one member of Dukakis’s campaign staff who dared to comment in public about the possible hypocrisy lurking behind Bush’s family-man show, was fired for her frankness—and a nervous Dukakis hastily apologized to Bush for his aide’s indiscretion.

  Far from protesting their candidate’s desertion of the female population, most women in the Democratic party seemed to be studying to be ladies, by suffering in silence. When a few women at the caucuses dared to challenge Bentsen for his poor record on women’s issues, their inquiries were immediately shushed—by other women in the room. When feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich approached a prominent female politician about sponsoring a bill on women’s economic rights, she was told to forget it. “We’re not doing ‘women’s issues’ anymore,” the politician’s aide told Ehrenreich—before she even had a chance to describe the proposal. “We’re doing ‘family issues.’”

  Such traditional “feminine” protestations recall the demurrals of second-generation suffragists in the early 20th century. They, too, tried the ladylike strategy; they quit speaking of the need for equality and began claiming that they only wanted to be the guardians of motherhood and domesticity, the “housekeepers” of national politics. Their genteel redecorating efforts even papered over the centerpiece—the women’s vote became the “Home Protection” ballot. Nearly a century later, their counterparts in Washington politics would wrap themselves once more in the family flag. Women’s political groups began billing themselves, first and foremost, as maternal champions; they launched a Great American Family Tour and a “Family Matters” survey, kicked off by a TV special featuring “thirtysomething”’s maternal goddess, Hope Steadman. In a final press mailing a few days before the election, the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Vote Project issued a thick packet that focused with virtual exclusivity on “family” issues. Women should go to the polls, the enclosures instructed, because “America’s Families Need Our Votes.” What about what American women needed? The packet didn’t say.

  Protecting the interests of families and children, of course, belongs in any comprehensive vision of social welfare. And the efforts of women’s groups to aid the family were legitimate, necessary—and far more sincere than the “save the family” cant recited by so many disingenuous presidential candidates. (“I do hope we can move on to matters of importance and stop playing games with this parental leave and child care,” Senate Republican leader Bob Dole griped in Congress—the same year he was running for president under a pro-family banner.) But by allowing themselves to be restricted to family issues alone, women in politics wound up hamstrung and pigeonholed. By “choosing” to neglect women’s issues for the sake of the family cause, female politicians succumbed to yet another of the backlash’s you-can’t-have-it-all axioms. Women could only ask for child care and parental leave by not asking for educational opportunities, pay equity, and reproductive freedom. Not only was this unfair, the half-a-loaf strategy didn’t even work. All the child care and parental leave bills that year were defeated.

  As the “pro-family” ideology expanded into the center of American politics, it pushed women to the fringes. By the end of the decade, the vanishing act had become so accepted that it barely attracted notice. While women’s status in politics received a tangible amount of press coverage in early-’80s election news, the media’s interest evaporated by the decade’s final presidential race. The day after the election, the Washington Post ran a fourteen-page special election section; it incl
uded nothing on women. In the week after the 1988 election, the New York Times devoted more than thirty pages to reviewing and analyzing the electoral results. Only two paragraphs, in the last column of a general story on political trends, mentioned the gender gap—even though the gap decided at least five House seats, evicted several GOP congressmen, and cleaved voting patterns in congressional elections overall (with a majority of women voting for Democrats, a majority of men for Republicans). While a raft of articles probed the election results from the vantage of every conceivable interest group, no story focused on the fate of female candidates. So, not only did the numbers of women elected to national political offices shrink, the public was never informed of this serious setback to American women in politics.

  In January 1989, days after Bush’s inauguration and exactly a year after the first Women’s Agenda Conference, female politicians and activists assembled for the conference’s second session. Even though Bush hadn’t bothered to show up last year, the delegates were still hopeful. Prominent women in politics predicted that Bush would now drop the campaign’s opportunistic antifeminist veneer and show his true colors as a champion of women. But Bush turned down his invitation to speak yet again, sending a videotape this time. On it, he promised “to keep talking” to the women. Of course, on tape he’d never hear their side of the conversation.

  A PARTY OF ONE’S OWN

  The summer after the election, the National Organization for Women met in Cincinnati, just three weeks after the Supreme Court’s famous Webster decision restricting women’s right to an abortion, and just as the Bush administration was applauding the court’s historic retreat from reproductive choice. Some NOW delegates, weary of what they saw as an endless round of betrayals of women by both political parties, proposed the convention talk about forming a third party, one that would, among other causes, champion women’s equality. The motion passed unanimously.

  The press, which generally ignored NOW conventions, exploded with outrage, anger, and derision. “Not NOW—It’s Time for Consensus, not Conflict,” ordered the Washington Post’s Outlook editor Jodie Allen in an opinion piece. “Somebody has to say it, Molly Yard [NOW president], shut up.” As for the rest of the NOW leadership, the editor ordered, “[R]ework your act or bow off the stage.” The dozens of other editorial temper tantrums were little different. Some sample headlines: “NOW Puts Her Worst Foot Forward,” “NOW’s Fantasy,” and “NOW’s Flirtation With Suicide.” Newsweek warned that “the shrill voices of NOW” could destroy the pro-choice movement and quoted an anonymous attendee of the conference, who supposedly said, “I wish we could take out a contract on Molly Yard.” (Given that the conference gave unanimous support to the third-party proposal, this dissenter’s identity is something of a mystery.)

  In its overheated response to the proposal, the press managed to get the story all wrong. They accused NOW president Molly Yard of foisting the third-party idea on the convention delegates, but grass-roots delegates came up with the proposal in a workshop, proposed it, and passed it—while a startled NOW leadership stood and watched. The leaders, in fact, had proposed a much more modest work-inside-the-party plan; Yard had only suggested calling for gender balance on the two parties’ slates. And these delegates were hardly the “rabid radicals” that the media conjured: because it wasn’t an election year for NOW’s leadership, many longtime activists and members from the more liberal East and West coasts had stayed home. The delegates dominating this conference were midwestern, middle American women; in fact, an unusually large proportion of them had joined NOW for the first time that year. Further, their resolution didn’t even call for a new party—only for “an exploratory commission” to consider the possibility of having one. And the party the delegates wished to consider wasn’t even, as the press had dubbed it, a “woman’s party;” the delegates defined it broadly as a human-rights party that would confront racial inequality, poverty, pollution, and militarism, too.

  The phobic response from the press corps and members of the political establishment—who, from the president to the Democratic National Committee chairman to the governors of Maine and Michigan, provided a bountiful supply of condemnatory quotes—was even more ludicrously out of proportion when one recalls that half of the last forty-nine presidential elections have all been three-party elections, seemingly without damage to the American political process. No editorial writers proposed taking a contract out on John Anderson or Barry Commoner when they made their third-party bids just eight years earlier. (It might also be pointed out that the Republican party itself began life as a third party and elected Lincoln in a four-party race.) That an almost timidly worded proposal could generate such fury stunned NOW leaders. “I mean, normally we have to really work for the press to pay even the slightest attention!” a baffled Eleanor Smeal, former NOW president, says. “For the president of the United States of America to mention the NOW resolution [in a TV interview] is unfathomable, incredible! . . . The only thing I can conclude is that many of the powers-that-be are worried.”

  The hail of disdain poured on NOW’s third-party proposal achieved its aim: extinguishing the spark of an idea before it had a chance to spread. Leaders of one women’s rights organization after another rushed to the public podium to prove their personal distaste for the women’s party—often in ladylike language. Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, even called reporters while she was on vacation to say that she opposed the third-party plan, because she didn’t want the many “friends” of women in the GOP and Democratic parties “to feel like we’re going to abandon them.” This was a far different response from 1980, when feminist leaders used the third-party card to force the Democratic party to support a full women’s rights agenda: they threatened then to endorse independent candidate John Anderson if the Democratic party didn’t put the ERA, abortion rights, and child care on its agenda.

  The intense mockery that the third-party idea provoked should have tipped off women in politics to the equally intense insecurity such taunts concealed. Smeal was probably right; the powers-that-be were worried. The political establishment had to deride NOW’s proposal as “cockeyed” and “silly” because it was in fact neither—it was credible and threatening. After all, of all the battles that Bush faced in the ’88 race, it was the candidate’s successful combat against the gender gap that his advisers singled out as the “major accomplishment” of his campaign. “Is it all over for white males?” asked veteran newsman David Brinkley, floating the question nervously on the air as he anchored NBC’s television coverage of the 1988 Democratic national convention. Political commentator George Will returned a gaze of equal consternation and replied, yes, it did seem they were witnessing “the eclipse of the white male.” Behind them, a Democratic podium was awash in a sea of white male faces—but that hardly mattered to the two male pundits.

  By the close of the decade, it didn’t require an overactive imagination to sense the anger and alienation of the majority of American women—first cheated by the Reagan administration, then shut out of the 1988 presidential campaign and finally demoralized by the Webster decision restricting abortion. Women’s anger was, in fact, surfacing in spectacular ways in the national polls. A 1989 Yankelovich Clancy Shulman survey found that a majority of women believed both the Democratic and Republican parties were “out of touch with the average American woman.” And who did they believe was “in touch”? A majority of women cited the following three groups: NOW, the leaders of the women’s rights movement, and feminists. When analyzed by age, the Yankelovich survey results painted a grim picture indeed for the future status of the Democratic and Republican parties: younger women in the poll identified the least of any age group with the traditional parties—and the most with feminist groups and leaders. Among women twenty-two to twenty-nine years old, only 36 percent believed Republicans were in touch with the average woman; on the other hand, 73 percent of these young women said NOW was in touch with their ne
eds. The youngest women, sixteen to twenty-one, weighed in with the most overwhelming figures—83 percent of them believed NOW spoke for them.

  By the close of the decade, women could have constituted an immensely powerful voting bloc—if only women’s-rights and other progressive leaders had mobilized their vast numbers. But in the 1980s, the backlash in the capital kept this historic political opportunity for women in check—with a steady strafing of ostracism, hostility, and ridicule. The women most discouraged by this bombardment, understandably, were the ones in closest range. And so, just as the middle American women at NOW’s midwestern convention were ready to take action, many of their female leaders in Washington were running for cover.