The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The ERA also passed Congress in 1972, by huge bipartisan majorities in both houses. At that juncture, it was popular and uncontroversial. By this time, even the trade unions, nucleus of historic opposition, had come around to support the amendment, agreeing that protective laws worked against women, not in their favor. The momentum seemed unstoppable. The Hawaii legislature, still in session because of the time difference when the Senate vote took place, ratified it the same day; five states ratified in the next two days. Within a year the ERA needed approval from only eight more states.32 Amid the recriminations and anguish of these last years of the Vietnam War and, soon, the Watergate scandal, the proposal that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”—the language is from the 1923 draft—was a rare opportunity for sunny consensus.

  The fireworks of women’s liberation spluttered out in the 1970s with the collapse of the New Left and the depletion of millennial expectations. But the way of seeing the world bequeathed by radical feminism, the great refusal to proceed with business as usual, endured in the psyche of a generation of daughters. Women’s centers died, but feminism spread. Work was an arena for less spectacular militance. In a collaboration between liberals and radicals, mothers and daughters that went unremarked at the time, the newest of New Women were able to use new laws, policies, regulations, and court decisions to enter bastions monopolized by men and carve out a place for themselves there. This process stopped short of the hoped-for revolution; the decreasing strength of labor unions, the ascendancy of business conservatism in national politics, and the restructuring of the labor market impeded them. Nonetheless, the entry of feminist-minded women into the labor market and the professions drastically changed American workplaces.

  In the professions, challenges from African-Americans had already ended some customary practices of an old boy network that ushered the “best” young men from the best preparatory schools into the best colleges and then the best professional schools and best firms and institutions. Now under pressure from the women’s movement and (after 1972) Title IX, medical, law, and divinity schools and Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and humanities cracked open to women, reversing a pattern of discrimination established at the turn of the century, when professional schools had formally opened to women, only to keep their numbers down to a handful. The numbers are telling: 1,240 women graduated from law school in 1971; ten years later, 11,768. There were 809 women who received medical degrees in 1971; there were 3,833 in 1981. The number of women graduating from religious seminaries doubled.33

  The integration of the professions had a tremendous impact on Americans’ perceptions of women’s abilities and prospects. It was as if Rosie the Riveter, figure of dazzling competence and valor, were reborn, this time as a physician, trial lawyer, or veterinarian. For the first time, Americans encountered women sitting on high, figuratively (and actually) perched in positions of authority long assumed to be wildly inappropriate for them: in the pulpits on Sunday morning, making hospital rounds trailed by interns and nurses. It was in the professions that the clothing of the workplace changed most dramatically: female ministers and judges in robes, female doctors in white coats; lawyers, businesswomen, and professors in the ubiquitous women’s black pantsuits that served to signify a distinctive gender identity and at the same time transcend the frippery of professional women’s fashion that was still de rigueur as late as the 1960s—little hats and white gloves, matching shoes and purses.34

  Ambitious women did not sashay through these changes with impunity. Resentment and suspicion besieged them. The pace and pulse of opposition varied: Not all university disciplines were as intractable as history departments, not all sectors of medicine as hostile as surgery, not all legal specialties as antipathetic as corporate law. As a rule, the more prestigious or lucrative the domain, the more intense—or, alternatively, the more insidious—the antagonism.

  The law provides a striking study, first, because its masculine exclusivity was rooted in a rationale articulated by Justice Bradley’s assertion in Bradwell that married women could not practice the law, and second, because some who surmounted the obstacles revolutionized the law itself in the 1970s. Over the course of the twentieth century, the ranks of female lawyers had increased so slowly that on the eve of the feminist insurgency in 1967, they were still only 3 percent of the total. Women mostly worked as mid-level government bureaucrats or partners in small offices, since partnerships in any of the big, posh firms were effectively out of reach, as were judgeships and professorships in major law schools.35

  Discrimination was everywhere, but it was vicious at Harvard Law School, at the head of the profession. Harvard Law School only opened its doors to women (with much self-congratulation) in 1950, the last elite school to do so; but the number of female graduates was tiny. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, was one of only nine women who entered with some five hundred men in 1956. A decade later, little had changed: In 1967 there were thirty-two women in an entering class of 565.36

  In the 1960s, the women students’ status as anomalies was emphasized by the debonair sexist humor that was a trademark of Ivy League hauteur. The faculty addressed the class as “gentlemen,” and famed curmudgeon A. James Casner (model for the crusty professor in the 1973 film The Paper Chase) refused, on principle, to call on women in class. The jokes stemmed from the implicit agreement among men (what everyone already knew) that women didn’t really belong at Harvard Law at all. Aristocratic disdain slid into sexual aggression (we would now call it harassment), sublimated in naughty digs about sex at the women’s expense. The subject of rape law, for example, occasioned titters, played for laughs by professors while female students squirmed. Snickering male classmates turned to look up women’s miniskirts as they entered the law school amphitheaters. Ridiculed because they were women, they were also mocked because they weren’t real women: Male peers were wont to consider a woman, at best, just one of the boys.37

  For decades, women law students had experienced these annoyances and indignities as inevitable burdens to bear. Through the prism of feminism, however, students began to see them as sexism: a set of unjust practices and attitudes that was remediable. The harsh treatment of well-placed and well-educated women was so extreme that once women’s liberation entered public consciousness, a surge of daring, a touch of the radicals’ fearlessness and bravado, overwhelmed the bred-in-the-bones discipline of even those raised to be hardworking nice girls. At Harvard, campus protests against the university’s racism, class exploitation (its status as slumlord, for example), and complicity in the war (through ROTC programs and scientific research for the defense industry) exacerbated women’s awareness of the injustices they endured. Soon they were complaining openly about the school’s sexually segregated facilities.

  While few considered themselves radical feminists, the orderly politics that liberals espoused seemed beside the point in these situations. The contempt for women’s possibilities and talents was no longer Friedan’s “problem that had no name.” At Harvard and elsewhere, the problem did have a name: It was men, individualized as the professor who refused to call on women in class, or the one who enjoyed making fun of the female students on “Ladies’ Days,” or the irate caretaker of the squash courts who shooed away women, or the male classmate leering from his seat. For the brave and even the not so brave who found strength in numbers, confrontation and catharsis could be used with some effect to call individuals and officials to account.

  In a student culture still geared to protest politics, these early classes of women, loosely bound together by their minority status, produced ad hoc groups precisely focused on particular local issues—a great source of strength—and strengthened by the lessons radical feminism gave as to why insults like Ladies’ Days weren’t trivial. There were tensions between those who aligned themselves with feminism and those who saw themselves as nonpolitical, only there to take advantage of opportuniti
es finally opened up, as they saw it, on the basis of their own merit. But the tensions were productive, with feminists stirring up complaints that resonated with other women. Everywhere segregated facilities and male privileges came under attack, and some blatant ones collapsed. It was the fearless and brazen at Yale who took part in Operation Shit, the sit-in at the Divinity School that integrated the men’s bathroom in the library stacks.38 But even apolitical good girls could welcome the results, since women’s rooms were as scarce as hens’ teeth at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton—giving rise to the title of Marilyn French’s 1977 bestseller about Harvard, The Women’s Room.

  The collaboration between liberals and radicals was unspoken but effective. Although students were oblivious to the implications of something as remote as a federal law, women’s protests had real leverage because of Title IX. With the threat of legal action hovering in the background, administrators backed off from many provisions that, once women called attention to them, were indefensible. By 1974 they knew that any practice that smacked of overt discrimination was ripe for legal challenge. The gyms, swimming pools, and squash courts that were male only, or squeezed women into a few hours, disappeared; so did the fellowships and prizes reserved for men.

  At Harvard Law, the graduating class in 1974 was more than 10 percent female and the proportion climbed every year thereafter. A souring economy was still sufficiently robust to absorb newcomers in entry-level jobs. The number of practicing lawyers in the country increased by a third between 1960 and 1969. Admissions to law schools and the bar followed the curve of demand, almost doubling. Across the country, what had been in 1963 a population of 1,800 women in law school soared by 1975 to almost 27,000.39

  A new kind of student appeared, her hopes for a life beyond the marriage plot shaping her sense of professional opportunity. The blighted stereotype of the 1950s career woman—sad and anomalous—dissolved. Enough students, male and female, were caught up in the imaginative moment that it was common to speak of vocational goals that accompanied marriage and children or superseded them. In the elite undergraduate programs from which Harvard law students came, the goal of going to college in order to be an educated wife and mother, a once near-universal ambition for young women, was suddenly unusual. A Stanford poll that year found that fewer than 1 of every 25 women graduating saw homemaking as their choice and only 7 percent said they would stop working to raise children. This reversed the poll’s findings from seven years earlier, when 70 percent of Stanford’s female graduates said they would stay home while their children were young.40

  Female law students across the country called for classes on women and the law. The subject simply did not exist in the curriculum or scholarship. When Pauli Murray began working in 1964 on “Jane Crow and the Law,” she found only one article on constitutional issues of sex discrimination; “not a burdensome venture” was how Ruth Bader Ginsburg drily described the task of mastering everything there was to know on the subject in 1969. But with the influx of women, student demand led to new courses, often cooked up on the fly by a marginal woman assigned the task by male faculty. In a felicitous instance, Ginsburg, then a law professor at Rutgers, taught one of the first courses on women and the law anywhere in 1970.41

  The fate of these classes marked a break with the past. Larger numbers meant students could see themselves as a “body of women” (as one administrator put it) rather than as the oddities that Ginsburg and her classmates were, when the dean of the law school invited them to dinner and courteously inquired what they were doing “taking a place that could be held by a man.” Ten sex discrimination lawsuits in the 1970s against elite corporate firms resulted in settlements in which the firms agreed to alter their hiring practices. The result was a wave of interest in women. At Harvard in 1974, a higher proportion of women took jobs in corporate firms than did men. It was the first time that, upon graduation, demotions were not issued on the basis of sex.42

  Across the professions—in medicine, business, academics, and the clergy—a partnership between generations and political temperaments took hold. Mothers who came up through the ranks as a stigmatized minority welcomed legions of daughters as co-conspirators. Typically, older women, schooled in the stoicism of an earlier era but energized by the newcomers’ indignation, would organize a separate women’s caucus in their professional association and generate a fact-finding committee on the status of women. The formal imprimatur of these fact-finding groups—enhanced by eminent men recruited to serve on them—helped impress on the organization’s members the necessity of changing the most egregious practices. A tiny female presence grew to a modest one, always much larger in entry-level positions at the bottom than at the top.43

  Business schools, the research sciences, and engineering were holdouts: Not until the late 1980s, and in some cases the ’90s, would the numbers of women in those fields and their treatment once they got there seriously improve. But elsewhere in the professions, thousands of young women taking up positions in the 1970s as lawyers, doctors, ministers, and professors had a lasting effect on American beliefs that a revolution had occurred between the sexes.44

  Against considerable resistance (often from close male associates), and aided by the new pressures that female clients, patients, parishioners, and students brought to bear, these women also modified the content and practices of their respective professions. They broached profound questions. Art historian Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” a groundbreaking 1971 essay, analyzed the institutional barriers that kept women from exercising a full range of creativity, no matter what their talent. “What if God is a woman?” was a query that went the rounds of theological seminaries and religious studies departments. Freudian theory was organized around a model of male development, women psychologists and psychotherapists observed. The measure of the success of these ideas can be gauged by how unexceptional they seem in the twenty-first century: Accepted wisdom of the culture now, they were provocative and outrageous in the 1970s.45

  In medicine, for example, female physicians joined with intense feminist popular health discussions to challenge the condescending treatment of female patients, especially in obstetrics and gynecology; the construction of childbirth as a pathological event always requiring sedation; the absence of gender controls in trials of drugs; the dangers of IUDs (intrauterine devices) and high-estrogen birth control pills. By the late 1970s, a woman who studied up on the effects of birth control pills in Our Bodies, Ourselves might well locate a female gynecologist sympathetic to her concerns.46

  These patterns were powerfully evident in the nation’s churches and synagogues. Women aspiring to spiritual leadership criticized patriarchal readings of sacred texts and questioned liturgies littered with symbols, practices, and language that encoded contempt for women. “YOU ARE NOT MY GOD, JEHOVAH!” thundered the Reverend Peggy Way in a sermon at the University of Chicago chapel in 1970. “I will not worship a god who only trusts his priesthood and his power and his prophecy to men.… I will not serve … a god for whom a woman’s mission is to listen and a man’s mission to speak.” As if she were summoning up Sarah Grimké, she ended by affirming a Christ “in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” In Judaism, Reform seminaries were the first to ordain women as rabbis in 1972, followed by Conservatives and Reconstructionists. Although most mainstream Protestant denominations had allowed female ordination since the nineteenth century, female ministers were always oddities. Now women flocked to seminaries, transforming them in a manner akin to the law schools.47

  The impact was uneven across denominations. Traces of Saint Paul’s admonitions—“let your women keep silent in the churches”—lingered. The process of integrating the clergy was protracted, the opposition haughty but subtle, rooted in centuries of doctrine. Depending on the particular church, women could be kept out for years. When the Reverend Sue Anne Morrow arrived at Princeton as the assistant chaplain in 1981, twelve years after the universit
y admitted women as undergraduates, no one of her sex had ever preceded her up the stairs of the very lofty pulpit in the very grand chapel.48

  In the Episcopal Church, the battle was ferocious. Women could serve as deacons but not priests. But seminary-trained candidates pressed for admission to the priesthood, backed by liberal parishioners and clergy. In 1974, three retired bishops irregularly ordained the “Philadelphia Eleven,” women who had trained for the priesthood and met all qualifications except for gender. The event touched off an uproar. The church hierarchy invalidated the ordinations and entertained charges against the dissident bishops. The rebellion overcame formal opposition, and in 1976, the General Convention voted to ordain women. Some dioceses, however, resisted church government and have continued to hold out into the twenty-first century. In fact, the battle over women’s ordination forecast the civil war over the ordination of gays, a struggle that as of 2010 threatens to break apart the Anglican Church worldwide.49

  In the Catholic Church, an upswelling of hope after Vatican II came to nothing. So striking was the gap between the changing needs of the Church and its bars to women’s authority that the head of the normally conservative Council of Catholic Women issued a protest: “As the participation of laymen in liturgical and ecclesiastical affairs continues to increase, it becomes painfully obvious that women are being left behind in a class by themselves.”50 The American cardinals suppressed and finally extirpated uprisings among liberal priests and nuns calling for women to be admitted to the priesthood, or, at the minimum, to be allowed an expanded liturgical role.

  These accounts of open conflicts, however, give little sense of the minefields the newcomers traversed when they crossed the gender line on the job. A woman in the most innocuous position could loom in the fantasies of co-workers and clients as a menace to the way things should be done, an impostor, a dangerous, sexless creature on a mission to destroy real femininity. Women ministers could not be trusted to preach the word of God without distorting it for nefarious purposes; female police officers endangered public safety by pretending they could do the job under fire. Better that they should be Sunday school teachers and traffic cops: Now those were jobs for women. A lowly assistant professor in a small college, hired to teach the new scholarship on women’s history, ran into the accusation that she was trying to indoctrinate students. The course “was more like a consciousness-raising session,” a pair of offended students reported to college authorities; the professor was waging a vendetta against femininity, informing students in class, so they claimed, that “women who wear make-up and high heels deserve to be raped.” At work, a generation of hotheaded daughters had to learn how to walk through minefields and proceed with caution.51