American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act encouraged women to press for equality and greater opportunity at work, at a time when their labor force participation was continuing to rise. In 1966, three hundred largely female activists, frustrated with the inaction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in countering discrimination on the basis of sex, founded the National Organization of Women (NOW) to fight for equal rights for women and improvements in their daily lives, including more equal marriages and better daycare. Over a third of the delegates to NOW’s founding convention came from the Midwest, which since World War II had been the center of efforts to improve the work lives of women. NOW elected New Yorker Betty Friedan as its first president, but it did much of its initial organizing out of Detroit office space lent by the United Automobile Workers.

  The push for women’s equality gathered strength as women’s wage work outside the home went from being the exception to the norm. Nearly half of all women worked for wages by 1975 (constituting 40 percent of the workforce), including an increasing number with young children. With the huge demand for labor during the Vietnam War–driven boom in the late 1960s, women had plenty of opportunities to work if they wanted to or needed to. But more women working did not bring greater equality on the job. In 1966, full-time female workers made on average only 60 percent of what male workers did, a drop over the preceding decade largely as a result of the increasing segregation of women into occupations with lower pay than jobs typed as male. Only 7 percent of doctors were female, less than 4 percent of lawyers.

  The civil rights movement produced a language of rights and federal legislation to address these inequities, but little seemed to be changing on the ground. NOW’s first campaign was to pressure the EEOC to declare separate classified ad listings for male and female jobs—the common practice—to be illegal, which it finally did in 1968. Fighting sexual discrimination in employment often meant challenging gender stereotypes. Some of the first complaints of sexual discrimination filed with the EEOC came from airline stewardesses, who by industry rules had to be female. Most airlines set age, weight, and appearance guidelines. The EEOC eventually ruled that being female was not a bona fide occupational qualification for the job and deemed it illegal for airlines to fire women when they got married or reached a certain age. But it took extended litigation until the airlines changed their practices, transforming the renamed position of flight attendant from a sexualized job for young, unmarried, usually white Christian women to a long-term occupation for a diverse workforce.

  In 1967 and 1968, a network of young female political activists began organizing what came to be called the Women’s Liberation Movement, which they saw as a radical alternative to the liberal NOW. Writers and activists, meeting in small groups, developed critiques of almost every aspect of American life as it impacted women, from unequal sexual and marriage relationships to the legal status of women, child-raising practices, cultural notions of beauty and worth, and the treatment of women by the medical and psychological establishments. “Women are an oppressed class,” declared the radical feminist group Redstockings in its manifesto. “We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. . . . Our Humanity is denied. . . . We identify the agents of our oppression as men.” Many leaders of the new movement had been involved in the civil rights, student, or antiwar movements, absorbing from them a rights consciousness, knowledge of how to organize, and a strategic sophistication, even as they grew frustrated at being kept in subordinate roles.

  Most Americans first became aware of Women’s Liberation in September 1968, when a group of women protested the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Their demonstration, which received a great deal of media attention (mostly dismissive or mocking), criticized the beauty contest as degrading, racist (there had never been a black finalist), and for bolstering the war in Vietnam (the winner got sent off to Vietnam to meet with the troops). Radical feminists never found an organizational mode or a political language that enabled them to construct mass organizations. Yet within a few years, the issues they raised were widely debated throughout the country.

  Feminist ideas and initiatives won wide acceptance because they spoke to the daily realities of women’s lives: unequal pay and job opportunities, lack of daycare, insensitive and sometimes ignorant doctors, repressive abortion laws, limited educational opportunities. At a time when birth control devices, especially oral contraceptives, had gone a long way toward splitting sexuality away from reproduction and women’s wage earning had lessened their dependence on men, long-established cultural norms and social and legal practices seemed archaic and oppressive to many Americans. More and more women became convinced that they should control their own lives, bodies, and property. In 1962, two out of three women polled did not consider themselves victims of discrimination. By 1970, half did. The enormous popularity of the feminist health book Our Bodies, Ourselves, which attacked the male-dominated medical establishment and instructed women on self-help techniques, was but one measure of the rapidly spreading change in popular consciousness.

  A virtual revolution in the status of women unfolded in the early 1970s, with remarkably little opposition. Starting in 1971, Congress passed a series of laws aimed at eliminating discrimination against women, including a prohibition on sexual discrimination in medical training programs, a ban on discrimination by lenders on the basis of sex or marital status, and a requirement, in Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, that to keep receiving federal funds, educational institutions had to eliminate sexual discrimination, including by giving equal resources to female and male athletic programs. (In 1971, girls made up only 7 percent of high school athletes.) The high point of the legislative flood came in 1972 when the Senate joined the House in passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), in both cases by massive majorities. Twenty-eight states ratified the federal amendment within a year of its passage. Support for ERA came from an extraordinarily broad spectrum of national figures, from actress Jane Fonda, who had become a left-wing antiwar activist, to Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond.

  The Supreme Court pushed forward the feminist revolution. It decided in a series of cases argued by Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to sexual as well as racial discrimination. Its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which forbade states from banning abortions during the first six months of pregnancy, brought about an enormous change in women’s lives. Starting in the late 1950s, medical professionals and population control advocates had been pushing for liberalization of abortion rules, which in most states banned the practice except under very narrow circumstances. Women’s groups joined them in 1970, when New York became the first state to fully legalize abortion. Ten other states soon followed. Roe legalized abortion nationally, giving women control over their bodies as an extension of the right to privacy that the Court had earlier created. Other legal changes included the liberalization of the grounds for divorce or the introduction of no-fault divorce in many states and, beginning with Nebraska in 1976, the elimination of the marriage exemption to criminal rape laws.

  The floodgates of change opened locally, too. When in early 1972 a group of about twenty women and four children occupied a building at Kansas University demanding the establishment of a daycare center, an affirmative action program, a women’s studies department, the provision of comprehensive women’s health care at the student health center, an end to gender-based wage inequalities, and the hiring of more female faculty and staff, the university quickly and with little controversy agreed to their demands, in marked contrast to the resistance and tumult in response to earlier protests by black students and antiwar activists.

  Gay Liberation and the Diffusion of Rights Consciousness

  The movement for gay rights first drew national attention in June 1969, when the police raided a bar in Greenwich Village frequented by homosexual men, the Stonewall Inn. Such raids were routine in many
cities, as law enforcement officials sought to enforce morals laws or collect payoffs. This time, several hundred bar patrons fought back, in what soon turned into a full-scale riot.

  Stonewall brought to the attention of the general public—and many gays and lesbians—a movement that had been slowly coalescing for decades. World War II had been something of a watershed for homosexual men and women, creating greater group consciousness. The first male homosexual advocacy group, the Mattachine Society, was founded by leftists in Los Angeles in 1950; the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis was set up in San Francisco five years later.

  In 1965, a small group of pickets marched in front of the White House to protest the repression of homosexuals in Cuba and the United States, the first of a series of protests against federal antigay discrimination. A few prominent authors, like Allen Ginsberg and James Baldwin, began openly writing about same-sex sexuality in positive terms. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, patrons of gay bars held street demonstrations to protest raids. Still, through the 1960s, homosexuality remained legally proscribed and widely viewed as sinful and unnatural. If revealed, it generally had severe social and economic consequences.

  The Stonewall riot, coming at a moment of heightened rights consciousness and social mobilization, catalyzed an explosive growth in gay and lesbian activism and began to shift social attitudes toward homosexuality, and for that matter toward sexuality more generally. Influenced by the Black Power movement, homosexual groups adopted the slogan “gay is good,” which soon became “gay pride.” In New York and other cities, they fought against legal restrictions and the notion that homosexuality was pathological. As the gay liberation movement grew, it emboldened many men and women to become open about their sexual orientation. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. Two years later, the United States Civil Service Commission ceased deeming homosexuality immoral conduct that precluded federal employment.

  As rights consciousness spread ever further in the society, categories of people who had not in the past been thought of as bearers of particular rights began to claim them, or have them claimed on their behalf. Take children, a group whose problems generally had been addressed in terms of social environment or developmental psychology. In the 1960s and 1970s, a body of thinking and law about children’s rights developed that called for giving them more autonomy and protection, including from their parents. Presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted political programs aimed specifically at children, and in 1973 Marian Wright Edelman founded the Children’s Rights Defense Fund as a legal advocacy, following the model of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 1972, the American Hospital Association issued a twelve-point Patient’s Bill of Rights, applying the language of rights to another group not previously conceived of in such terms. Soldiers and sailors, conventionally thought of as having surrendered most civilian rights upon entering the military, began asserting “GI Rights,” seeking to exercise their constitutional rights while on active duty, including the right to hold protest meetings and openly criticize the war in Vietnam.

  Even opponents of racial desegregation, the issue around which the language of rights had become popularized, adopted its terms. Throughout the postwar period, many segregationists thought of what they were doing as defending their right to choose their neighbors and employees, to decide who should go to school with their children, and to be free of interference from the government about how they used their property and conducted their affairs. By the 1970s, some opponents of integration came to draw directly on the language and tactics of the civil rights movement, sometimes describing themselves as fighting for white rights or white power. In 1975, white mothers in the Charlestown section of Boston, opposing the busing of black students to the local high school, consciously adopted Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of civil disobedience and prayer in the face of repressive authority to promote their cause, at one point even singing “We Shall Overcome” when confronted by policemen trying to stop their march.

  Richard Nixon and the Institutionalization of Reform

  Many of the demands of the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s became encoded into law and government practice during the Nixon administration, sometimes over the objection of the president but often with his acquiescence or support. One of the odder figures in American history, Nixon defied simple political characterization. Born in Southern California to a family of modest means, he rose to power as a belligerent anticommunist, but on most domestic issues he adopted centrist positions, bobbing and weaving in an effort to maintain support from both the liberal and conservative wings of the Republican Party. Prone to seeing conspiracies and enemies all around him, Nixon, even as president, thought of himself as an outsider, fighting a hostile East Coast establishment. Enamored with complex schemes and covert action, he adopted strategies so intricate that his actual views and intentions often remained hidden.

  Nixon entered the White House without much of a mandate, having been elected with a minority of the popular vote after a campaign in which he largely mouthed generalities. Democratic majorities in Congress limited his freedom of action, as evident when the Senate refused to confirm two of his Supreme Court nominees. Nixon hoped to win over some traditionally Democratic constituencies to ensure his reelection and rebuild the Republicans as a national majority party. To woo them, he supported the core New Deal economic and social programs from which they benefited, even as he took conservative positions on other issues. Sometimes taken with thinking of himself as a Tory reformer, Nixon proved willing to take innovative steps most conservatives would blanch at. But most of the time he paid little attention to domestic matters, seeing foreign policy as more compelling, or made decisions based out of political rather than ideological considerations. The upshot was that in spite of the electorate’s rejection of Hubert Humphrey, whose career had been associated with the New Deal order and the Great Society, the federal government remained largely wedded to liberal domestic policies.

  During the eight years Nixon was elected to serve as president (including the period when Gerald Ford finished out his second term), federal social spending, adjusted for inflation, rose at an annual rate of nearly 10 percent, compared to just under 8 percent during the Kennedy-Johnson years. Some of the increase reflected rising costs for existing programs, some the cost of new programs and program extensions. Many of the social welfare improvements were not terribly controversial because they aided broad constituencies that were seen as deserving of support. During Nixon’s first term, Social Security old-age benefits went up 52 percent, with future benefits indexed to the cost of living, a huge structural change. The federal government also took over from the states supplementary, needs-based income guarantees for the elderly, blind, and disabled. Elder Americans, who once made up a major component of the poor, all but ceased living in poverty. The Medicaid and food stamp programs were improved, too.

  Other proposed social benefit reforms proved more controversial, especially those concerning Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), “welfare” in the common lexicon. Ironically, one effect of the War on Poverty, meant to deploy innovative approaches to eradicate poverty, was to expand the long-established AFDC program, which did not address the causes of deprivation but only sought to alleviate the plight of the poor (and lessen the social threat they might pose). The welfare system was a maze of complex regulations and demeaning practices that discouraged eligible women from enrolling. Inspired by the black freedom movement, welfare recipients began organizing to protest inadequate benefits and indignities they suffered, like home visits by caseworkers looking for nonspousal live-in companions. Aided by government-funded lawyers and community workers, the Welfare Rights movement proved effective in knocking down barriers that kept poor people off welfare. Some state and local governments consciously loosened regulations to try to lessen the volatility of poor communities. So even as a booming economy an
d Great Society programs were reducing the number of people living in poverty, the number of families receiving AFDC benefits rose from one million in 1965 to two and a half million in 1970.

  Nixon considered AFDC a “colossal” failure. He proposed replacing it with a guaranteed minimum annual income. Some conservatives, most notably Milton Friedman, had long advocated what they called a “negative income tax,” seeing it as preferable to the extensive government bureaucracy that had grown up around social benefits. Many liberals and welfare recipients saw an income guarantee as recognition of welfare as a fundamental right. Nixon did not fully agree; his proposal—which covered both single-parent, female-headed households that received AFDC and two-parent families of the working poor—required most recipients to be willing to work in order to receive benefits. But he went a long way in that direction.

  The House twice passed versions of Nixon’s plan, but the Senate killed it. The stereotype of the welfare recipient as an unwed black woman—in reality, a majority of welfare recipients were white—led much of the public to view those on welfare as undeserving (in contrast to the elderly). With southern senators opposing the plan as too generous and welfare mothers opposing it as not generous enough, Nixon soon lost interest, happy to let his proposal die as long as he did not get the blame.

  As the welfare fight showed, Nixon did not shy away from the idea of expansive government, evident as well in his environmental actions. He signed one law after another that fundamentally changed the role of the federal government in protecting the environment, partly in reaction to an explosion of support for conservation and environmental groups. Until the late 1960s, these organizations were modest in size and conservative in their tactics. Then, seemingly overnight, a mass environmental movement sprang up. A 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, a plan for an Alaska oil pipeline, and proposed federal funding for a supersonic passenger plane brought new attention to environmental issues. More important, the political sensibility of the protest movements of the 1960s infused environmentalism. Well-established conservation groups found themselves flooded with young members eager to deploy more militant tactics, while the media, relieved to find an issue other than Vietnam or urban problems to focus on, began providing extensive coverage of environmental issues and protests. As environmentalism became a national craze, few economic or political interests initially opposed it, preferring to hop on the bandwagon or maneuver to keep the movement innocuous.