Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Meanwhile, Pat Lorance kept getting laid off and rehired. Finally, on March 31, 1989, she was laid off for good. She had to take a job as a bartender. Two months later, when she turned on the television set one night to watch the news, she learned that she had lost the ruling. “I was very disappointed,” she says. “I don’t think the court gave it a fair look. None of us were screaming. We just wanted to right a wrong, that’s all.”

  King wasn’t surprised by the decision. “You could see, the way the court had been going, we weren’t in good water.” The ruling was a financial disaster for King, who was now a single mother. Her violent husband had been killed in a street brawl in 1983. After his death, she took a leave of absence to pull herself together. While she was away, the company fired her, maintaining she had failed to notify the personnel office at the appropriate time of her return date. Desperate for work to support her two children, King cleaned houses, then took a job as a waitress. She lost all her benefits. “Today I cleaned the venetian blinds at work,” she says. “I make $2.01 an hour and that’s it, top pay. It’s demeaning, degrading. It makes you feel like you are not worthwhile.”

  As she scrapes gravy from diners’ plates, King replays the scenes that led her to this dismal point. “Whenever I’m thinking about it, the feeling I get is of all these barricades, the ones with the yellow lights, and every time you try to take a step, they throw another barricade at you.” But in spite of everything, she says—the legal defeat, her late husband’s reign of terror, the humiliating descent to dishwasher—she has never regretted her decision to ask for more. “If it gets someone fired up enough to say, ‘We’ve got to turn this thing around,’ then it’s been worth it,” she says.

  That same year, back at the “Breakthroughs and Backlash” media conference in California, some of the most influential female journalists and women’s rights leaders were busy recoiling from conflict. They were pondering the question of whether women really wanted “male” jobs and “male” power. Jan King, who likes to say, “Just call me one of those women’s libbers,” would have doubtless found such proceedings strange and depressing—even shameful. She hasn’t lost sight of what she and many other economically deprived women want, and she is still willing to rush the backlash barricades to get it. “I don’t believe you have to accept things the way they are,” she says. “I’ll never change my mind about that.”

  14

  Reproductive Rights

  Under the Backlash:

  The Invasion of Women’s Bodies

  DON’T KILL ME, mommy!” A grown man clutching a crucifix shouts these words over and over, as he tries fruitlessly to push through a line of women guarding the Sacramento Pregnancy Consultation Center. He is just one of the many “warriors” in Operation Rescue’s “National Day of Rescue II”—the title that the antiabortion group chose for its dramatic sequel, an April 1989 nationwide siege of family-planning clinics.

  But the spear carriers on location here have been outflanked by feminists. Operation Rescue’s northern California caravan set out for the clinic at dawn, only to find the doors barred and the center’s defenders circled around the building, their arms linked in a human chain. Frustrated, the Operation Rescue men resort to force, twisting wrists, kicking shins. As they push, they praise the Lord but they also curse the women; mingled among the “amens,” the words “whore” and “dyke” can be heard more than once. A man in a baseball cap presses his face before a woman hoisting a pro-choice sign. “I’ll smash you through the window,” he says, making a fist. But the press is watching; he keeps his clenched hands at his side.

  Down the block, Operation Rescue’s “Prayer Support Column,” a largely female auxiliary, is lined up in neat rows along the sidewalk. The wives and daughters of the “warriors” stand very still, their lips whispering “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” their palms raised toward heaven. “We’re not allowed to speak,” one of the women says when approached for an interview.

  Across the street, Russell Walden III takes a break from the skirmish. A stocky man with sad eyes, he mops his brow as he offers some personal history. Waldens I and II, he says, were both city tax assessors, community pillars; he’s the first to fall from the family line. Muddling along in a series of odd jobs, mortuary assistant and wild-animal caretaker among them, Walden III joined Operation Rescue after he met some of the group’s members—in a county jail cell. They were there for trespassing on clinic property; he was there on a drunk driving charge. When they offered him some paralegal work, he accepted and joined their campaign.

  “My wife almost had an abortion a few years ago but I stopped her,” he says. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’” They had four kids and his wife didn’t want another; when she went to the clinic anyway, he followed her into the examination room, where she was lying in a hospital gown. “I came in and snatched her and I said, ‘Let’s get out of here. Now!’ I’m not going to let her be anywhere where I’m not.” She had the baby, but later she left him. Tears fill his eyes as he says this. He wipes them away and explains, “I’m crying for the unborn babies.”

  While he’s talking, Don Grundemann, a gaunt young chiropractor in an army jacket, joins the conversation. His girlfriend had an abortion without even asking him, he says. “What I think is, the woman didn’t want a child like me.” Abortion, Grundemann says, is women’s way of getting even: “In a subliminal way, it’s revenge against men. Men have treated women shabbily and now the women’s movement has struck back in overkill.”

  • • •

  IN 1986, Randall Terry, a twenty-six-year-old used-car salesman from upstate New York, launched Operation Rescue. His mission: to padlock the doors of the nation’s family-planning clinics. Like the “anti-vice” crusade against contraception and abortion in late Victorian America—also led by an underemployed New York salesman, Anthony Comstock, who also raided women’s health clinics—Operation Rescue attracted thousands of young men who, one way or another, felt locked out themselves by a world that no longer seemed to have a productive place for them. Contrary to the popular image of the antiabortion lobby as a group of grizzled Christian elders, the Operation Rescue men (and the majority were men) most often resembled the youthful and angry “Contenders” that the Yankelovich researchers had identified. Virtually all of Operation Rescue’s leaders and about half its active participants were in their early twenties to midthirties, and the vast majority belonged to the lower income brackets. These were men who belonged to the second half of the baby boom, who had not only missed the political engagement of the ’60s but had been cheated out of that affluent era’s bounty. They were downwardly mobile sons, condemned by the ’80s economy to earn less than their fathers, unable to afford the ballooning mortgages or to put food on the table without their wives’ help.

  The media would define the struggle over abortion as a moral and a biological debate—when does life begin? Doubtless for many uneasy about abortion, that was the central issue. But the peculiarly fierce animosity that Terry and his followers brought to the battle over women’s reproductive freedom was fueled by passions other than philosophy or science. While they may well have been “crying for the unborn babies,” these men were also hurting from severe economic and social dislocations in their lives—changes that they so often blamed on the rise of independent and professional women. As they lost financial strength at work and private authority at home, they saw women gaining ground in the office, challenging their control of the family at home, and even taking the initiative in the bedroom. As resentment over women’s increasing levels of professional progress became mixed with anxiety over the sexual freedoms women had begun to exercise, they developed a rhetoric of puritanical outrage to castigate their opponents.

  For public consumption, the spokesmen of the militant antiabortion movement called feminists “child-killers” and berated them for triggering “breakneck” abortion rates. But more revealing was what they said under their breath: their whispered “whores” and “dyk
es” were perhaps their more telling epithets. Sexual independence, not murder, may have been the feminists’ greater crime.

  To men like John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, legal abortion assailed not only the fetus but the primacy of male family control. Pro-choice women, he charged, “do violence to marriage,” because they “remove the right of a husband to protect the life of the child he has fathered in his wife’s womb.” “God didn’t create women independently,” Father Michael Carey, the keynote speaker at the National Day of Rescue II rally in San Jose, declared, a point that he would hammer home throughout his address. What was most distasteful about these abortion rights activists, he said, was their insistence that women be free to make reproductive choices without consulting their husbands. If these “feminist-infected” women have their way, he warned his audience, men “won’t be allowed to decide about abortion.” In his 1986 Men and Marriage, George Gilder most forthrightly expressed the fear underlying much of the male anxiety about female reproductive freedom. The feminists’ successful campaign for birth control and abortion, he wrote, “shifts the balance of sexual power further in favor of women,” depletes male patriarchal “potency,” and reduces the penis to “an empty plaything.”

  So often in the battle over the fetus’s “right to life” in the ’80s, the patriarch’s eclipsed ability to make the family decisions figured as a bitter subtext, the unspoken but pressing agenda of the antiabortion campaign. The desire to defend traditional paternal authority surfaced again and again in the many “father’s rights” lawsuits filed to stop abortions in the decade, where plaintiffs were typically husbands struggling with wives who wouldn’t listen or wouldn’t comply with their commands or had recently filed for divorce. In the case of Eric Conn of Indiana, his wife sued him for divorce only hours before he lodged his complaint on behalf of the fetus. “I just didn’t like being threatened and told what to do,” David Ostreicher, a Levittown orthodontist and another “father’s rights” litigant, told the court. Not only did his wife seek an abortion against his wishes, he said, but she was also challenging the premarital agreement he had insisted that she sign—an agreement that would leave him with most of the marital assets. In upstate New York, the twenty-six-year-old sailor who sued to stop his fiancée’s abortion in 1988 was also trying to stop a separate decision she had just made—not to marry him.

  The men of the antiabortion movement may have said they were just trying to staunch the runaway pace of abortions in this country, but the rate wasn’t really escalating. In fact, American women have been terminating about one in three pregnancies for at least the last hundred years; the only real difference post-Roe was that women were now able to abort unwanted pregnancies legally—and safely. And while the number of legal abortions did increase between 1973 and 1980, it then promptly leveled off and was even declining by the early ’80s. From 1980 to 1987, the abortion rate fell 6 percent.

  The real change was women’s new ability to regulate their fertility without danger or fear—a new freedom that in turn had contributed to dramatic changes not in the abortion rate but in female sexual behavior and attitudes. Having secured first the mass availability of contraceptive devices and then the option of medically sound abortions, women were at last at liberty to have sex, like men, on their own terms. As a result, in the half century after birth control was legalized, women doubled their rates of premarital sexual activity, nearly converging with men’s by the end of the ’70s. (At the same time, men’s premarital sexual encounters increased much more slowly, at about half the pace of women’s.) By 1980, a landmark sex survey of 106,000 women conducted for Cosmopolitan found that 41 percent of women had extramarital affairs, up from 8 percent in 1948. In fact, women’s sexual behavior and attitudes had changed so much that they were now close to mirroring men’s. “The woman we’re profiling,” Cosmopolitan observed in its introduction to the survey, “is an extraordinarily sexually free human being” whose new bedroom expressiveness constitutes a “break with the old double standard.”

  Women also became far more independent in their decisions about when to have children, under what marital circumstances, and when to stop. In these decisions, the biological father increasingly didn’t have the final say—or much of a say at all. Women’s support for motherhood out of wedlock rose dramatically in the ’80s. The 1987 Women’s View Survey found that 87 percent of single women believed it was perfectly acceptable for women to bear and raise children without getting married—up 14 percent from just four years earlier. Nearly 40 percent of the women in the 1990 Virginia Slims poll said that in making a decision about whether to have an abortion, the man involved should not even be consulted. And more women were making unilateral, and irrevocable, decisions about family size, too. Sterilization became the leading form of female birth control in the ’80s, chosen by nearly one in six American women. This was, again, a one-gender development. In the ’80s, men’s sterilization rate increased by a mere 1 percent. Until 1973, married men and women sought vasectomies and tubal ligations in equal numbers; by the second half of the ’80s, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of all sterilizations among married couples.

  To many men in the antiabortion movement, the speed with which women embraced sexual and reproductive freedom could be frightening. And unlike the rise of the gender voting gap or the increasing number of women at work, this revolution in female behavior had invaded their most intimate domain. “Males have almost completely lost control of procreative activity,” Gilder wrote; it is “now dependent, to a degree unprecedented in history, on the active pleasure of women.” No wonder, he observed, so many men “resist abortion on demand.” Men who found these changes distressing couldn’t halt the pace of women’s bedroom liberation directly, but banning abortion might be one way to apply the brakes. If they couldn’t stop growing numbers of women from climbing into the sexual driver’s seat, they could at least make the women’s drive more dangerous—by jamming the reproductive controls.

  • • •

  The political imagery of the ’80s antiabortion movement bore all the hallmarks of the New Right ideology that had preceded it. In its war-torn psychological landscape, the enemy was feminism, the weapon was aggressively moralistic rhetoric, and the strategy for reclaiming the offensive was largely semantic. Like the New Right men, antiabortion leaders saw feminists as figures of frightening size and power. “The harridans,” antiabortion advocate Tom Bethell called them in The American Spectator—women who “howled” and “scream[ed] with awesome ferocity.” In his 1988 antiabortion work, Grand Illusions, George Grant portrayed pro-choice women and clinic counselors as “contorted, wildeyed” Furies guarding the “Altar of Convenience” with a “frenzied rage.” Planned Parenthood, he said, is an institution that dwarfs the Pentagon; its mighty force “has muscled into virtually every facet of modern life.” Antiabortion leader Father Norman Weslin felt the same way. He said he had served as a paratrooper and “commander in charge of nuclear weapons” in the U.S. Army for twenty years, but “that was bush league,” compared with the feminist foes he faced now.

  To stake out the commanding position, to remake themselves into true “activists,” the antiabortion men resorted to the verbal tactics pioneered by the New Right. In Joseph Scheidler’s Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, a primary text of the militant antiabortion movement, the Pro-Life Action League director underscored the importance of “controlling” the language on abortion. When speaking to the press, his manual instructed, “[R]arely use the word ‘fetus.’ Use ‘baby’ or ‘unborn child.’ . . . You don’t have to surrender to their vocabulary. . . . They ill start using your terms if you use them.” The Willkes’ Abortion: Questions and Answers, which became the bible of antiabortion activists, stressed the same objective: “Let’s be positive, if possible,” the book asserted. “We are for protection for the unborn, the handicapped, and the aged. If possible, don’t accept the negative label ‘antiabortion.’”

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sp; In their battle for verbal control, antiabortion activists also co-opted their enemy’s vocabulary and images. The Willke handbook urged followers to borrow the “feminist credo” of “right to her own body” and apply it instead to aborted female fetuses. At antiabortion demonstrations, “The baby has to have a choice!” became a favorite chant. “Little Ones,” an Operation Rescue protest song, called for “Equal rights/ Equal time/For the unborn children.” Women didn’t choose to have abortions; they were “Women Exploited By Abortion,” the name of the national antiabortion group that promised to counsel the “victims” of abortion. Antiabortion literature portrayed abortion providers as quasi rapists who subjected young women to untold horrors, then snatched their money and drove off in limousines. By identifying women as victims of their own right to an abortion, the antiabortion movement did more than debase the rhetoric—it reinforced the backlash thesis. The cause of women’s liberty was once again defined as the cause of women’s pain. Women who were unhappy, the movement’s spokespersons contended, were probably suffering the residual effects of “postabortion syndrome,” the new ailment that the antiabortion movement claimed plagued the female population.

  By and large, antiabortion leaders denied that they were hostile to women’s rights, but their actions spoke louder. National Right to Life leader John Willke said he supported equality—while opposing the Equal Rights Amendment; soon the National Right to Life board recanted its once neutral position on the amendment. Pro-Life Action League director Joseph Scheidler said, “I have no problem with women’s rights;” he just wanted to make women’s lives “less painful” by sparing them the physical and mental agony of abortion. Yet at a 1986 antiabortion conference, he vowed to inflict “a year of pain and fear” on any woman who disagreed with him.