The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  It was very different from what began in the waning years of the Ford administration, when the far right ratcheted up opposition to the ERA and legal abortion as core elements of its takeover of the party. Under Nixon, that turn was yet to come. But the move that did presage the conflict was the president’s veto of a popular bill for federally funded child care, the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA), which passed Congress in late 1971. Child care, an issue that cannot be separated from workplace equity for women, commanded support from a surprisingly wide and varied constituency: employers interested in cutting worker absenteeism, child development professionals enamored of the results of Head Start, advocates of the poor, workingwomen, and trade unions. The bill, hammered out by a consortium of civil rights, welfare rights, child advocacy, and liberal feminist groups, had solid bipartisan support in Congress when it was first introduced—“a political sure bet in the months preceding the 1972 election.” Designed for the middle class as well as the poor, it provided for a network of federally funded community centers, with free care to the poorest families and everyone else paying on a sliding scale.10

  The underpinnings of the CDA were promising. It was predicated on the idea that child care was an entitlement, like Social Security or Medicare. With the brief exception of World War II, when the need for women workers was so urgent that the federal government funded some child-care centers, programs in the United States were sparse, treated as a measure of last resort for the needy poor. In Europe, too, child care was stingy, although where it existed it was at least not always tied to poverty. Communist countries professed to offer a bounteous palette of services for workingwomen, although the reality behind the official line was inconsistent. Western European nations varied, with provisions waxing and waning, depending on what any given state thought the public interest (rather than women’s interests) required. Notable exceptions were France, with a pro-natalist family policy that assumed public responsibility for young children’s well-being, and Sweden, whose policies tilted toward encouraging women’s labor force participation.11 While never feminist, the European examples were at least alternatives to no government policy at all; the Swedish program in particular glimmered behind NOW’s push for publicly funded child care. Nixon’s own White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1970 recommended federal funding, pitched to needy families but not limited to them.12 The CDA was by any measure a modest start, compared to the pie in the sky of free child care that NOW advocated. It was only a morsel, given the mammoth need. But from today’s vantage point, what a morsel.

  In the opening salvo, a coalition of Protestant evangelicals and the John Birch Society materialized—out of thin air, it seemed—in a full-out campaign against the bill. Conservative columnist James Kilpatrick rose to the attack, charging that the CDA was designed “to Sovietize our youth.… This bill contains the seeds for destruction of Middle America.” It was a departure from the right’s obsession with Communist subversion and the evils of integration. Nixon, looking to appease the far right wing of the Republican Party in the wake of his newly initiated policy of détente with China, vetoed the bill after initially giving it his full support. His stand against “government interference” in the family meshed nicely with his opposition to “government interference” in segregated schools. He announced he had stopped “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the 92nd Congress” and decried the attack on “the family-centered approach.” Yet so novel and untested at the time was hard-line opposition to women’s issues that even the architect of the Republican New Majority strategy, Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, warned that the party risked losing a crucial slice of young workingwomen’s votes.13

  The New York Times voiced the widespread consternation Nixon’s veto provoked among moderates: “The President’s charge that day care weakens the family ignores the realities of much of modern family life,” including the needs of parents at all levels of income. The Washington Post fastened on the cynical calculations behind his veto: “This message is a bone he has tossed to his critics on the far right, with next November in mind, and at the expense of mothers and children.” The Post denounced the president for ignoring not only the will of Congress but popular support. But the outrage soon died down. Feminist attention was elsewhere, on the movement to legalize abortion. NOW did not rally protest and radicals were unmoved, since from a revolutionary perspective any legislation was, by definition, bound to be compromised and useless.14

  The defeat of the CDA is a neglected episode in an era remembered for the furor over Vietnam, busing to achieve school desegregation, and, soon enough, Watergate. It was a skirmish of negligible interest to radicals on the left. But it was instructive to radicals on the right, who in 1971 were testing their political mettle, coming out of the years in the wilderness after the Goldwater debacle. Looking to take their politics away from the bastions of the segregated South and the anti-Communist fringe of the John Birch Society, they seized on the fight for the family—even though the interests of the family were precisely what the child care bill addressed.

  At the time, no feminist anticipated that antifeminism would become a force in national politics. The immediate problem in Washington was the male makeup of Congress. In the Ninety-second Congress in 1971, there were fifteen women: two in the Senate, thirteen in the House—only two more than in the Eighty-third Congress of 1953–55.15 Shirley Chisholm, Democrat from Brooklyn, took office in 1970 as the first African-American woman elected to Congress. The “coffin route”—a wife or political appointee appointed to a seat vacated by a man’s death—was still the main way women got there. Margaret Chase Smith, one of two women in the Senate that year, was the only duly elected female senator ever. The four who preceded her had all arrived via the coffin route and as a rule refrained from doing serious congressional business. Arkansas’s Senator Hattie Caraway, a famous example of the female senator as onlooker, took her husband’s place in 1931 when he died unexpectedly and then shocked Southern Democrats by running the next year and winning. Despite her unexpected self-assertion in holding on to her seat, Caraway, jokingly called Silent Hattie, made it a point in her thirteen years in the Senate to avoid speaking on the floor. The approach suited her housewife persona—that was the joke; and “Silent Hattie” she’s been ever since, a figure of fun. But as her posthumously published diary makes clear, that silence protected her from ridicule in a setting where she never knew whether she was saying too much or too little—not an unfamiliar experience for a token woman working in what was, in the 1930s, not yet called a male-dominated environment. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, the new secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, a much more accomplished and confident woman, struggled with the same worry during FDR’s cabinet meetings.16

  The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded in 1971 to get more influence in Congress. The goal was to increase the representation of women in both parties at all levels, with the assumption that this would make the government more accountable to women’s needs and demands. The tacit assumption was that having women officeholders would inevitably further the goals of feminism. (Once conservative opposition developed, this equation of Woman and Feminist would be a point of furious dispute.17 The intention was to be nonpartisan, but in effect the NWPC was left-liberal, with a few moderate Republicans added in.18

  Shirley Chisholm’s presence on the NWPC executive board along with other black leaders signaled a willingness to sign on to a women’s movement that was a big-tent consortium rather than an evangelical sect. For the first time, Latinas also allied themselves publicly with feminism. Chisholm saw the NWPC as a “big umbrella organization,” a bloc to provide “the weight and muscle for those issues which the majority of women in this country see as concerns.” Augmented by high-profile women from organizations that were not solely or explicitly feminist, the NWPC acted as a sort of Tammany Hall for women, mostly in the Democratic Party, brokering interests, opening channels of upward mobility, and distributing
patronage. The influx of groups claiming to represent Woman is evident in a 1974 issue of the Civil Rights Digest, published by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which features articles on African-, Asian-, and Native American women, Chicanas and Puertorriqueñas, kicked off by a hopeful article on “Where Feminism Will Lead.”19

  In both political parties, the short-term results were dramatic. Disarray among Democrats over the war and school busing, along with power struggles between Republican moderates and conservatives, opened opportunities for women to move in. Their numbers at both 1972 presidential nominating conventions soared. Among Republicans, the percentage almost doubled from what it had been at the 1968 convention—to 30 percent. Among Democrats the percentage tripled from 13 percent to 40 percent. NWPC women engineered planks on women in both platforms.20

  It was transformative, although not the peaceful revolution the NWPC sought. The 1972 conventions did embolden women to run for local and state offices, and over the decades, their numbers at those levels improved steadily. But in Congress, change was very slow, almost glacial. Among Democrats, the NWPC became an interest group of consequence and feminists flexed some muscle. But among Republicans, conservatives were devoted to marginalizing the moderate wing of the party, which encompassed most of the influential women. Overall, while the number of women elected to Congress remained low, they were more successful at local and state levels, where there were so many positions that a small corps of officeholders began to emerge. In the 1990s, they moved into national politics after long apprenticeships. For instance, Kay Bailey Hutchison was first elected to the Texas state legislature in 1972 and twenty years later won a Senate seat. Nancy Pelosi, daughter of a wealthy and influential Democratic father, became chair of the Northern California party branch in 1977 and chair of the California Democratic Party in 1981; she won her congressional seat in 1987 and twenty years later, in 2008, became the first female Speaker of the House.21 It was not until 1992 that the pace in Congress accelerated, and then only among Democrats.

  Again, the women’s movement dreamed of a women’s vote, and again the hope was vain. But far more than in the 1920s, the women’s movement exerted force in Washington and state capitals after 1971—where before there was none. “The recent awareness, on the part of the general public, of women’s raised consciousness has, it seems, lent credibility to the notion that angry women might damage a legislator’s political career,” observed a not entirely pleased writer about New York state abortion politics. NOW chapters were one source of organized pressure; members prided themselves on legislative savvy. The chapter in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, alerted members to the wiles of a state legislator who courted female voters by supporting women’s legislation that he knew would never get out of committee. Chapters tracked the fate of bills in state legislatures and the votes of representatives.22

  In Washington, D.C., a small feminist policy network came together, amassing expert information and using it to press arguments on legislators. The combination of the NWPC plus professional lobbyists on Capitol Hill was enough to increase the importance of women’s issues for politicians in 1972, a close election year. Newsweek reported uneasily that lawmakers faced “a feminist lobby that was far better organized than ever before—and the Realpolitik of an election year.”23

  The years 1972–74 saw this momentum result in a few legislative victories, one of them—Title IX—a landmark. The failure of the child-care bill was not repeated and, briefly, it seemed that feminist proposals were unobjectionable mom-and-apple-pie issues for politicians from both sides of the aisle. Feminists turned into familiar figures in the halls of Congress, knowledgeable about legislative minutiae. “It’s all hard work and detail,” commented a lobbyist. “And you get tired and it’s a bloody bore. But if I don’t do it and the rest of us don’t do it, we won’t have it. The people who win are the people who stay.”24

  It may seem like hard work and detail to read about them, too; and the wins may seem painfully prosaic, given how high the hopes ran outside the halls of Congress. None of these pieces of legislation turned the world upside down; none abolished sexism. But over the long run they proved much more important than their dry matter-of-fact descriptions reveal at first glance. They created preconditions for modest changes without which more dramatic changes could not have occurred; one measure, Title IX, actually touched off a revolution in women’s athletics.

  The Ninety-second and Ninety-third congresses passed four important bills and a constitutional amendment—the long-delayed Equal Rights Amendment. In addition, “they enacted a veritable cornucopia of legislation prohibiting sex discrimination” in a variety of publicly funded programs. Given the dearth of legislation in American history for women’s rights, it was quite a record. Strong bipartisan majorities in both houses passed the bills, and two Republican presidents, Nixon and Ford, signed them into law.25

  The Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1972) extended the protections of Title VII to public employees and strengthened federal enforcement powers. Passed almost unanimously in both houses of Congress, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974) ensured women access to credit cards, bank loans, and mortgages, resources they had been effectively denied because of the tenacious prejudice of lending agencies. It was a vivid reminder of coverture, this reluctance to let women function as buyers and borrowers. Historian Flora Davis identifies the bind: “Single women were said to be poor risks because they might marry and stop working, and married women were poor risks because they might have a baby and stop working.” The effects were pernicious, especially for women applying for business loans and mortgages. Or even for minor consumer credit, such as buying a couch on an installment plan.26

  The Women’s Educational Equity Act (1974) was so humdrum that Representative Patsy Mink concluded she could not get it out of committee, and tacked it on as a rider to an omnibus education bill. It provided federal money for projects creating sexual equality in schools and universities: training teachers (or retraining them out of habitual sexist practices), improving girls’ success in math and science, and encouraging the newly minted field of women’s studies. It was an under-the-radar bill that had considerable effects in the long run, setting up programs that encouraged girls to go into engineering and science, and injecting women’s studies with doses of government money.27

  Title IX (1972) turned out to be potent and controversial, although at the time it slipped through Congress as an innocuous rider to the Education Amendments of the Civil Rights Act. Title IX required educational institutions that received federal money—which is to say, virtually all schools, colleges, and universities—to provide equal treatment to girls and young women. The bill took its cues from a wave of lawsuits that women faculty filed, beginning in 1970, claiming their employers violated a 1965 executive order by President Johnson that prohibited federal contractors—in this case, universities receiving federal money—from discriminating on the basis of sex.28

  The academics’ actions inspired Democratic representative Edith Green of Oregon to hold hearings on sex discrimination in education. The seven days of testimony generated some thirteen hundred pages of evidence about pervasive, mean prejudice against women. The outcome, Title IX, closed loopholes that allowed professional schools, universities, and high schools to circumvent civil rights law. Quotas limiting women’s admissions had to be abandoned and separate privileges for men came under scrutiny (for example, fellowships reserved for them), although there were exceptions made for religious institutions, military academies, and a few others.

  The few others included Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, anxious lest their continuing preference for men in admissions be curbed (although Princeton and Yale admitted women in 1969, both had quotas, as did Harvard, which had absorbed Radcliffe College for women; Dartmouth was still all male). Once the Ivy League schools got their exemption, concern about the bill disappeared.29 The result was that the bill, unnoticed, retained clout in the area of athleti
cs; it forced high schools and colleges to abandon their parsimony in funding women’s athletics or risk losing federal funds. It was a dramatic break with discrimination so deeply rooted it seemed all but natural.

  The segregation of athletics was universal and unabashed. While girls were present in most sports except football and wrestling, teams were pitifully underfunded and coaches subjected to the same woeful sex discrimination that affected other teachers. At the professional level, women’s accomplishments occasioned interest—especially in tennis—but players, coaches, and the journalists who covered them were considered second string. Women’s ambitions to compete at the level of men, or to compete with men, were treated with mockery and open hostility. When Wellesley College runner Kathrine Switzer quietly entered the Boston Marathon as “K. Switzer” in 1967 and started off with the men, an official, Jock Semple, spotted her and, incensed, lunged into the crowd of runners to tackle her, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race!”30

  Title IX was an unwitting act of genius. Once the implications of the law dawned on the public, male coaches raised the alarm, as they saw athletic budgets stretched to cover girls’ sports. Outraged, coaches and parents of boys claimed that equal treatment was desexing young people. “I think girls have a right to participate but to a lesser degree than boys,” huffed a Wisconsin coach. “If they go too far with the competitive stuff, they lose their femininity.” An official from a Midwest coaches’ association raised the specter of brawny girls unmanning boys. “There is the possibility that a boy would be beaten by a girl and as a result be ashamed to face his family and his friends.” “I wonder if anybody stopped to think what that could do to a young boy,” he mused mournfully. Regardless of periodic assaults, girls’ supporters succeeded in fending off forces that called for the bill’s revocation.31 It fostered a stunning change in a gender order in which the elements of athletics—throwing, running, jumping, catching, blocking, flexibility, and strength—had for centuries lain far outside girls’ reach.