Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  After Carder’s story hit the papers, it entered the popular culture’s feedback loop and soon became grist for an episode of “L.A. Law.” But in the TV version, the judge makes the “right” choice. Fetal rights are vindicated: the mother dies but the baby survives. For Carder’s mother, the show was the final indignity. First the hospital sought to invade her daughter’s body against her will. Then the courts knowingly hastened her daughter’s death. And now Hollywood was going to cover up these crimes. When NBC aired that script, Stoner says, “They took Angela’s story away from her.”

  ON THE JOB: THE RISE OF FETAL PROTECTION

  At least in the “fetal-neglect” cases that reached the courts in the ’80s, the doctors and judges were dealing with real fetuses. When corporate America started championing the fetal rights cause, the “unborn children” they proposed saving hadn’t even been conceived.

  Starting in the late ’70s and accelerating in the ’80s, at least fifteen of the nation’s largest corporations, from Du Pont to Dow to General Motors, began drafting “fetal protection policies” that limited or barred women from traditionally “male” higher-paying jobs that involved exposure to chemicals or radiation—exposure that the companies said might cause birth defects. By mid-decade, hundreds of thousands of employment opportunities had been closed to women in this way. And a survey of chemical companies found unanimous support for the exclusion of women from these work settings.

  On their face, these policies looked like enlightened corporate concern for employees. But they were motivated by liability fears, not compassion. And they were uniformly crafted by companies whose histories suggest that they would welcome an excuse to exclude women. Passed off as progressive efforts by health-conscious corporations, fetal protection policies actually had more in common with the backward “protective labor policies” that had proliferated at the turn of the century, policies that restricted the hours, pay, and type of work women could do—and cost women at least sixty thousand jobs. The proponents of these policies likewise professed benevolent interest in women’s prospective children, but many of these proponents were male union leaders and legislators patrolling all-male turf. As Cigarmakers International stated forthrightly in its 1879 annual report, “We cannot drive the females out of the trade, but we can restrict their daily quota of labor through factory laws.”

  In the 1980s, neither corporate America nor the U.S. government made reproductive safety a real priority. In fact, the corporate desire to guard female fertility vanished mysteriously for women who worked outside the high-paid circle of the “male” workplace. Working women were exposed to proven reproductive risks and many of the same chemicals and radiation in garment sweatshops, hospitals, dental offices, dry cleaners, and beauty parlors, but no one was calling for their protection. (Pregnant beauticians suffer a higher rate of toxemia, miscarriage, and premature deliveries; pregnant nurses and hospital technicians are exposed to anesthetic gases, which have been shown to provoke spontaneous abortions.) These companies banned women from their production lines but not their clerical staffs—even though exposure to video display terminals (VDTs) was suspected at the time of causing higher miscarriage rates, birth defects, and other fertility problems. The Reagan administration demonstrated the same double standard over on-the-job reproductive threats. While encouraging fetal protection policies for the 1.4 million women who worked in traditional “men’s” industries, the White House thwarted investigations into the threat that VDT work might pose to 11 million women. When the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) tried to probe the causes behind the higher rates of reproductive problems among Southern Bell VDT operators, the Office of Management and Budget demanded that the agency drop all the survey questions on fertility and stress—claiming that such inquiries had “no practical utility.”

  The companies that passed fetal protection policies in the ’80s virtually all belonged to male-dominated industries that had faced intensive federal pressure to hire women a decade earlier. AT&T, for example, which banned women from its computer chip production-line jobs in 1986, was one of the prime EEOC targets in the ’70s. Officials at Allied Chemical were still stewing about laws that “dictate we must use women” when they moved to lay off some female plant packagers—claiming that these women needed protection from the chemical fluorocarbon 22. After two of the women got sterilized so they could keep their jobs, Allied officials admitted that fluorocarbon wasn’t really a fetal hazard after all. And these companies were eager to bar women from more than simply the jobs that involved chemical exposure. Johnson Controls, the nation’s largest auto battery maker, even banned women from the career path leading to these higher-paying jobs. Any slot that might conceivably, through transfer or promotion, advance a worker one day to a lead-exposing job was out-of-bounds for Johnson Controls’ working women.

  In making the case for fetal protection, the industries restated the antiabortion movement’s view: fetuses were independent people, women were mere holding units. In a federal survey of industry attitudes toward regulating reproductive hazards, corporate officials and industry lobbyists described the fetus as the “uninvited visitor” who needed protection—and the woman as the “room and board,” who needed to maintain a “safe and healthy environment” for her fetus. One industry group described “the unborn child” as “a member of the public involuntarily brought into controlled areas.”

  The companies also repeated judicial priorities on women’s rights in the ’80s—fetuses first, mothers second. In the federal survey on fetal protection policies, company spokesmen consistently said they believed the rights of the prospective fetus should take precedence over the employment rights of women. To the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association, the exclusion of women was a minor inconvenience, “a small price for mothers, potential mothers, and society to pay.”

  These same companies weren’t worried enough about unborn children, however, to ban their fathers from the factory floor—in spite of substantial evidence tying birth defects to men’s contact with industrial toxins. An OSHA study found that twenty-one of the twenty-six chemicals currently covered by fetal protection policies also caused male infertility or genetic damage. Johnson Controls barred women from its battery-making plants because of the danger of lead exposure, but it didn’t bother to bar men—even though lead is a well-known reproductive hazard to both sexes. A 1989 survey of 198 large chemical and electronics companies in Massachusetts found that 20 percent had fetal policies restricting women’s employment; none restricted men’s—even though all but one of the chemicals in question were known to pose reproductive hazards for men, too.

  Nor was the sudden burst of interest in female reproductive health the result of newly available research. On the rare occasions where the companies bothered to produce data to support their fetal protection policies, they generally replied on a few, antiquated studies. Du Pont based its fetal protection policy on a single animal study, later disproven. More often, the “research” didn’t exist. Of the tens of thousands of occupational chemicals in use, only about 6 percent had been subject to scientific review for reproductive effects. And neither corporate nor federal fetal protectors were rushing to finance new studies. In fact, the Reagan administration severely cut federal funds to support research into occupational and reproductive hazards.

  Working women filed suit against Johnson Controls over its extreme fetal-protection policy, which the company had first adopted in 1982. The case inched its way through the judicial system. A federal appeals court upheld the company’s policy. The Bush Administration allied itself with the company’s interests, arguing that such bans on women were perfectly acceptable as long as the employer demonstrated that they were necessary. Finally, in 1991, the Johnson Controls’ female workers triumphed in the Supreme Court; the justices found that the company’s fetal-protection plan violated the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The court could not, however, recompense these women for nine
years of lost wages and missed employment opportunities. Nor were the corporations touting fetal-protection policies discouraged; they simply shifted to subtler and more sophisticated tactics, “counseling” women in new, required-training sessions about fetal threats on the job, or demanding that women get letters from their doctors permitting them to work, or requiring them to sign legal waivers.

  In much the way that Victorian medical manuals had categorized women as “mental” or “uterine,” corporate fetal protection policies of the ’80s divided women into two opposing camps. As these companies would have it, women could choose to be procreators who stayed home—or workers who were sterilized. Take your pick, they told their female employees: Lose your job or lose your womb.

  In the case of American Cyanamid, some women would lose both.

  • • •

  THE COMMERCIAL message of the ’80s backlash received a warm welcome, and additional boosterism, from the American Cyanamid’s beauty division. Marching under its return-to-femininity banner, the Fortune 500 company’s strategists sought a comeback for their ailing Breck Shampoo and hiked sales of their La Prairie skin-“treatment” line. They even hired trend specialist Faith Popcorn to help them to promote “retro” buying habits. But American Cyanamid did more than profit from the backlash; the company pitched in.

  Behind the retouched face of the Breck Girl ranged the belching smokestacks of the many chemical and paint plants belonging to this diversified conglomerate. And, like virtually every company in the chemical industry in the early ’70s, American Cyanamid employed a factory work force that was solidly male. When the federal government began to push for integration on the factory floor, American Cyanamid was one of the first chemical companies to feel the pressure. Its Willow Island, West Virginia, plant, in particular, drew the federal investigators’ attention.

  Since the 1940s, American Cyanamid had operated this sprawling chemical-based production factory in Pleasant County, in what had quickly become an unpleasing swath of polluted land along the Ohio River. The Willow Island plant was (and still is) the only show in town, its assembly line the only workplace for miles offering a living wage. Set in the heart of a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, the plant had at its disposal one of America’s most desperate labor pools. Few residents here, male or female, would have passed up the opportunity to work at American Cyanamid.

  Yet when federal investigators visited Willow Island in 1973, they found the company had never hired a woman to work on its production lines. The federal government soon put American Cyanamid on notice to open its factory doors to women or face legal action. By 1974, Willow Island’s plant manager got the word from New Jersey headquarters to start seeking female prospects. Within days after the news reached Pleasant County, women were pouring into the plant’s personnel office. “After we interviewed a couple,” Glenn Mercer, director of industrial relations at the plant, recalled later, “we had no need to recruit. We had an ample supply of applications.”

  At the time, Betty Riggs was a young mother and clerk at the Farm Fresh Market in nearby Belmont. One day early in 1974, some of the men from the plant stopped by the store for sandwiches. The company might start hiring women, she heard them complaining. When Riggs pressed for details, they told her the plant was “hard work” and “no place for a woman.”

  In Riggs’s experience, men had always talked about a “woman’s place” but wives and mothers had always worked. When she was growing up, the women in her family had put food on the table for the eight children; and when they couldn’t afford groceries, they hunted. “We’d either eat wild meat or we didn’t eat,” Riggs recalls. By the time she was eleven years old, she was holding down a job. After her marriage at fifteen, an unhappy shotgun wedding, she “mostly did the providing.” Her husband drank steadily and worked sporadically. Riggs supported her son, husband, and both parents from her poverty wages at a series of “women’s” jobs: 75 cents an hour as a waitress at the Parkette Truck Stop, $1 an hour as a cashier at Hammet’s Dairy Bar, $2 at Farm Fresh.

  When Riggs heard that American Cyanamid was hiring women, she wasted no time applying. When she got no response, she just kept showing up at the company’s personnel office. “I went down about every other day,” she remembers. But even under orders to hire women, the company’s officials proved reluctant equal opportunity employers. As a number of women who applied later reported, the personnel officers told them either they were too feminine for a man’s plant or not feminine enough. Some were told they were “too pretty” to work in a factory; others were advised they were “too fat.” Riggs recalls that the personnel manager told her he wouldn’t hire her because he thought she was overweight and he wasn’t “running a diet clinic.” Riggs shed the pounds, then reapplied. He still wouldn’t hire her.

  After a year of nearly daily pilgrimages, Riggs finally got a job offer from American Cyanamid—but it was for a position as a cafeteria worker, paying the same salary as she was drawing at Farm Fresh. She turned it down and kept applying for factory work. Finally, in December 1975, American Cyanamid hired her as a janitor. A few months later, she managed to get a transfer to the lead pigments department—where the pay was six times higher than her Farm Fresh wages.

  In the pigments department, Riggs worked as a “cake breaker” and a “blue bagger.” All day, she hoisted fifty-pound pans of solid baked paint from an industrial oven, slid the paint cakes into a grinder, and collected and bagged the blue dust at the other end. “I liked the work a lot,” she recalls. “It was real hard work, real exercise.” In the course of the year, several other women joined Riggs in the department.

  Donna Lee Martin was unemployed and desperately searching for work when she heard American Cyanamid was hiring. She had been looking ever since she lost her $4-an-hour position at a fiber plant that had shut down. When she went over to Cyanamid for an interview, the personnel supervisor “asked me about my family and about having to work shift work and having responsible baby-sitters and how I would handle it if my kids were sick.” She told him she could manage it. In October 1974, she accepted a job at the plant as a “helper” in the catalyst department. Six weeks later, she transferred to the pigments department, because she heard the chances for advancement were better there.

  Barbara Cantwell Christman was in her late twenties, recently divorced, supporting her two boys. She was taking whatever jobs she could find: hostess at the North Bend State Park dining room, clerk in a garment factory, receptionist in a doctor’s office. In April 1974, she, too, applied to work at Cyanamid. In her job interviews, the personnel officers warned her that she would have to “work midnights with a bunch of horny men.” One of them said she “would possibly have to shovel coal in a coal car” and wondered whether she could really manage it. “I told him yes,” she recalled later in a court deposition. “I had worked in a hayfield and I could do that. He told me I was awfully pretty to want a job like that and I told him I wanted the job. . . . I needed the job.”

  All told, thirty-six women were hired for production work between 1974 and 1976. In the pigments department, in the first year that the women joined, both the quality and quantity of production increased dramatically—a fact begrudgingly noted at the plant’s annual banquet that year. Riggs wasn’t surprised that output had improved. She took the company-required quota of twelve completed “center feeds” a night seriously, much to the irritation of her male work partner, who had become used to a more leisurely pace of ten. “You screwed up a good thing,” he told her. She ignored him. “I was hired to do a job,” she says, “and I was going to do it.”

  Riggs’s partner wasn’t the only man in the pigments department put out by the female invasion. “Women shouldn’t be in here working, taking jobs away from men,” was a popular refrain. “One guy,” Riggs recalls, “told Barb [Christman], ‘If you were my wife, you’d be home darning my socks and making my dinner.’” She had to laugh; his wife worked. The foreman was fixated on a
nother “problem” posed by the women’s presence. He complained that they were a safety risk because they could “get [a] teat caught in the center feed” or “get their breasts caught in the pan.”

  As the women’s numbers mounted, so did the reprisals. One day, the women arrived at work to find this greeting stenciled into a beam over the production floor: SHOOT A WOMAN, SAVE A JOB. Another day, the women found signs tacked on their lockers, calling them “whores.” Riggs found a violent pornographic centerfold stuffed into her locker; the note attached said, “This is what I want to do to you.” In two separate incidents, women fended off sexual assaults in the ladies’ locker room and shower stalls.

  For Riggs, the most bitter opposition came from her first husband. He had never been reluctant to use his fists to keep her in line. One year, he had beaten her up so many times that her friends at Farm Fresh gave her an eye patch for Christmas. (It was tragically appropriate; the day she unwrapped the present, she recalls, she had two black eyes.) Before her job at American Cyanamid, Riggs says, she had endured the beatings because her husband owned the house and, when he was working, brought home the larger paycheck—money she badly needed to feed their son and take care of her parents. But now that she was making a decent wage, she had the means to leave him. “That’s why the job at Cyanamid meant so much to me,” she says. “Because I knew one day I had to be on my own.”

  Initially, her husband relied on euphemism to deal with his wife’s new financial strength. “When I first started working at the plant, all of it was ‘his money,’” Riggs recalls. “Whenever payday came, he’d make me sign over the check and then he’d say, ‘This is how much you get for the week.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone how much you make.’” He also fought the domestic shift in earning power by refusing to take care of their son while she worked. Even when he was unemployed, she had to hire help. And, Riggs recalls, “I had to keep getting new baby-sitters because he couldn’t keep his hands off of them.”