Fault Lines
Page 10
Despite her many accomplishments, Billie Jean King’s biggest moment in the national spotlight came in what had originally seemed just a public relations stunt, the so-called “Battle of the Sexes” match. The idea came from Bobby Riggs, an aging Wimbledon champion who believed that women did not deserve equal prize money and bragged that, even at 55 years old, he could still beat any of the top female players.17 King accepted the challenge. Their September 20, 1973, contest at the Houston Astrodome became a media circus, with ABC broadcasting the contest on its popular “Wide World of Sports” program to an international audience of nearly 90 million, a record for tennis that would last for another three decades. The stakes were clear: both Riggs and King were guaranteed $100,000 for the appearance, with the winner getting another $100,000. (This meant that, if King won, she would nearly double her annual earnings as the world’s top female tennis player.) An inveterate gambler, Riggs promoted the contest as the “battle of the sexes. Man against woman; sex against sex. Husbands argue with wives, bosses with secretaries. Everybody wants to bet.” Las Vegas put him as a 5–2 favorite. Despite the long odds, King dominated from the start and swept Riggs in three straight sets. Even the curmudgeonly announcer Howard Cosell was impressed with her performance, yelling out “Equality for women!” when King won it all.18
In many ways, the ABC “Battle of the Sexes” broadcast fit well with new trends elsewhere in television news. For decades, TV news programs had only featured women in minor roles, mostly as “weather girls.” Slowly, however, women began to find new roles in the male-dominated world of sports journalism. Jane Chastain, for instance, had a twelve-year background in local sports reporting before being signed by CBS to do sideline reports in NFL games in 1974. The next year, former Miss America Phyllis George also joined CBS as a sportscaster; a year later, she became part of the NFL Today team, working alongside Brent Musberger and Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder. In 1978, Jayne Kennedy (a former model and actress) replaced George and became the first African American female host on a network sports program. Such milestones were notable, but in some ways the highest-profile hires—a former Miss America, a future Playboy cover girl—were still in keeping with the old practices in which women were hired with their physical attractiveness in mind, rather than their expertise. Complaints came from all sides, as feminists resented the objectification of such women and male chauvinists complained about their lack of qualifications.19
Meanwhile, in the world of hard news, women made clearer gains. Since the start of television news, few women had been allowed to serve as reporters, while anchoring was entirely reserved for men. “I have the strong feeling,” NBC News president Reuven Frank noted in 1971, “that audiences are less prepared to accept news from a woman’s voice than from a man’s.” That attitude quickly changed. In 1972, Jean Enersen became the first female anchor of a local evening news program, at KING-TV in Seattle. Soon, other women, many of whom would go on to become prominent figures in national news, followed suit as local anchors: Judy Woodruff in Atlanta, Jane Pauley in Indianapolis, and Connie Chung in Los Angeles. Women increasingly took on prominent roles at the networks, too. On NBC, Nancy Dickerson anchored the daily political program Inside Washington from 1971 to 1974. Then, in 1976, Barbara Walters at ABC became the first female coanchor of a network evening news show. In her first one-hour broadcast, she featured a profile on Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn as well as a piece on the singer Barbara Streisand and her partner John Peters. The first show blew away the competing networks, exciting ABC executives who instantly sensed they had a hit on their hands. In such ways, women’s voices were increasingly heard not just in the delivery of news, but in the shaping of its stories as well.20
Meanwhile, women increasingly took top billing in network sitcoms and dramas. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), notably, chronicled the life of an unmarried woman working as a reporter at a Minneapolis television station. (The show’s theme song assured its single-woman star and its similarly situated viewers: “You’re going to make it after all!”) The sitcom was such a hit, it led to eponymous spinoffs for the star’s two supporting characters, Mary’s neighbor Rhoda (1974–1978) and her widowed landlady Phyllis (1975–1977). Meanwhile, Norman Lear’s hit All in the Family featured an outspoken feminist and launched a spinoff of its own, Maude (1972–1978), in which star Bea Arthur frankly tackled feminist topics including sexism and even abortion. One Day at a Time (1975–1984) and Alice (1976–1985) featured working mothers who were divorced and widowed, respectively. Even action shows, long dominated by male leads, increasingly placed women at the center, as seen in prime-time hits like Police Woman (1974–1978), Wonder Woman (1975–1979), and The Bionic Woman (1976–1978). More controversially, Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981) featured three female leads as private detectives, but in portrayals that reinforced sexist stereotypes. “The only good thing I can say about it is that three seasons ago it would have been three young men,” noted Norma Connolly, head of the women’s conference committee of the Screen Actors Guild. “The women take orders from a male voice; they’re little idiot cheerleaders.” 21
While television proved to be a bit problematic, print media offered new opportunities for feminists to make their case on their own terms. In 1972, journalist Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine. (The title itself signaled a new attitude, a demand on the part of feminists that women not be designated as a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”—terms that hinged on marital status—but rather by a more broadly drawn term of “Ms.” that let a woman stand on her own.) The magazine championed a proudly aggressive feminism, modeled after its first cover image, which depicted the superhero Wonder Woman. It repeatedly broke new ground. In 1975, the black radical Angela Davis authored a piece about a black inmate who was tried for murder after killing a prison guard who sexually assaulted her; in 1976, the magazine ran a cover story on the still-taboo topic of domestic violence titled “The Truth About Battered Wives.” In 1977, Ms. broke ground with a story about sexual harassment in the workplace and, a year later, sparked a national debate when Steinem wondered what federal policies would look like if “men could menstruate.” 22
Outside the world of media, women notched several substantial milestones. The ranks of the clergy, long reserved for men, slowly began to open. In 1972, the Jewish Reform seminary in Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College, ordained the first female rabbi in America. The Episcopal Church formally approved its first female deacons in 1970 and its first female priests in 1976. In academia, women achieved several breakthroughs, including selection of the first female Rhodes Scholar in 1976. Meanwhile, in the political realm, Ella Grasso won the Connecticut governor’s race in 1974, becoming the first woman who was neither the wife nor the widow of a former male governor to serve in such a role. The Democratic National Committee appointed its first female head in 1972; the Republicans followed suit in 1974. During the Ford and Carter administrations, four more federal departments were led by their first female cabinet secretaries. By the decade’s end, major cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, and San Antonio had all elected a woman as mayor.23
As professional opportunities such as these increased, younger women adjusted their private lives to meet their broader obligations. Getting married and having children right after school were no longer top priorities for many women, a development that alarmed conservatives who looked back on the Cold War norms of the suburban nuclear family with nostalgia. The marriage rate, which had increased over the 1960s, now reversed course and reached a new low in 1976. Birth rates declined as well, dropping precipitously from 18.4 births per 1,000 women in 1970 down to a rate of just 14.8 five years later. Some speculated that the plummeting birth rate was solely a result of the hard economic times, but in truth the starkest drops took place among the upper classes. The changes were a choice about values and aspirations, not simply a response to need. An alumnae survey conducted by the elite Bryn Mawr College in 1971 reported that the previous five classes had gone
on to have some seventy babies after graduation; when the college repeated its survey five years later, it discovered that the women from the next five graduating classes had only combined to give birth to three babies among them. At the US Census Bureau, nervous officials openly worried that the new generation of women had not simply decided to delay having children, but that they might in fact remain childless forever.24
The newfound control women had over their reproductive lives represented a major breakthrough in the decade. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that unmarried women (and men) had the right to use contraception. The following year, in the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade, the court extended that logic to establish a constitutional right to abortion as well. The ruling reflected an ongoing revolution in American attitudes about abortion. While most states had outlawed the practice in the nineteenth century, public opinion rapidly changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A series of Gallup Polls, for instance, showed that the percentage of Americans who believed a woman should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy in the first three months sharply increased from 40 percent to 64 percent between December 1969 and June 1972. Reacting to these changes in public attitudes, states across the country moved to liberalize their abortion laws. In 1967, Colorado, Oregon, and North Carolina led the way with significant reforms of their abortion restrictions; that same year Governor Ronald Reagan signed legislation that liberalized California’s abortion laws as well. All told, a third of the states enacted such reforms between 1967 and 1973.25
The case of Roe v. Wade took place against this still-shifting legal landscape. The plaintiff, listed as “Jane Roe,” was actually an unemployed carnival worker from Texas named Norma McCorvey. She had given birth to two children before she turned twenty, placing them in the care of others because she lacked means to support them. In 1969, discovering she was pregnant for the third time, she looked into getting an abortion. In her home state, the procedure was still banned by an 1854 law that outlawed all abortions unless the pregnancy posed a significant risk to the mother’s life. McCorvey knew other states had begun to do away with similar laws, but she lacked the money to travel to one of them. Her doctor refused to discuss even the possibility of an abortion, or refer her to a physician who would. But in investigating the realities of abortion restrictions in Texas, McCorvey came across two young feminist lawyers, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were looking for a plaintiff to challenge the statute. By this time, McCorvey was too far along in her pregnancy to have an abortion herself, but she nevertheless agreed to serve as a plaintiff on behalf of other Texas women, as long as she could be given anonymity as “Jane Roe.” 26
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in Roe v. Wade. By a vote of 7–2, the justices held that women had a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, wrote the majority opinion, building on earlier rulings in which the court held that a broad right to privacy shielded individuals from having the state meddle in their sexual and reproductive lives. “The right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision,” he announced. But he immediately added that “this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.” Blackmun asserted that as a fetus grew to viability—to an ability to live outside the womb—the state had a legitimate interest in protecting it. Therefore, he divided pregnancy into three trimesters: during the first, states could not interfere with a woman’s decision; during the second, they could regulate the procedure; and during the final trimester, they could outlaw it entirely. The right to abortion now existed, but as Blackmun cautioned, their decision had not established “an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases.” The initial reaction to Roe was fairly restrained, but in the coming years and decades Americans would enter into fierce arguments about the proper limits, or lack thereof, on the constitutional right to an abortion.27
As the Supreme Court considered the rest of women’s rights, it showed much of the same approach: a general willingness to strike down measures that seemed to discriminate against women, though often with a note of hesitation. Such rulings placed weight on ambiguities in the laws themselves and encouraged legislators and lawyers to advance alternative measures in their stead. Most notably, in the 1976 case of Craig v. Boren, Justice William Brennan declared that the Supreme Court would now take a closer look at laws that made distinctions between the sexes. Speaking for a 7–2 majority, Brennan announced that the court would not adopt the same “strict scrutiny” standard they used to review laws that laid down different rules for different races, but would instead employ an approach of “intermediate scrutiny.” Following the Boren decision, feminist attorneys brought successful challenges against many of the discriminatory barriers women faced in the realm of employment and education. “The ERA was defeated,” conservative writer David Frum later complained, “but the federal courts proceeded to decide cases as if it had won.” 28
Gay Rights
As feminists struggled for their rights as full citizens under the law, gays and lesbians began to fight for simple recognition as such.
Before the 1970s, being gay or lesbian was regarded as a form of insanity. This classification began in World War II, when US Army psychiatrists started to identify gays and lesbians as a personality type unfit for service. In keeping with the new policy, thousands of gay soldiers and sailors were discharged from the military as “psychopathic undesirables,” a designation that would haunt them in their civilian lives. This attitude spread through the federal government during the “lavender scare” of the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were officially banned from all government positions through an executive order. The Federal Bureau of Investigation increased its formal surveillance of gays and lesbians, while local police departments followed suit with campaigns designed to harass and humiliate them. Arrests soon grew to substantial numbers. In Washington, DC, they topped a thousand a year; in Philadelphia, more than a hundred a month. Newspaper editors promoted these “morals” crusades, often printing the names, addresses, and places of employment of those arrested.29
As the rights revolution unfolded, gays and lesbians began to push back. Gay and lesbian activists had laid a foundation for a new movement in the early 1950s, founding “homophile” networks such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. While these organizations worked to connect gays and lesbians to each other and to reconnect them to their rights as citizens, they were necessarily secretive, as most gays and lesbians in the postwar climate of repression kept their sexual identities “in the closet.” But as they gained inspiration and experience from the civil rights and feminist movements, they began to stage more direct challenges to the discrimination and harassment they faced.
The most famous incident came unexpectedly. On the night of June 27, 1969, the New York Police Department staged a raid of the Stonewall Inn, a popular bar in Greenwich Village. The NYPD assumed this would be yet another routine raid of a gay establishment, but the working-class patrons put up a surprisingly strong resistance. Transgender women of color, including several self-identified “drag queens”—the most marginal members of a marginalized community—led the way. Screaming and cursing as they were led to the paddy wagons, they quickly drew a crowd of onlookers, whose initial curiosity soon turned to rage and resistance. As cobblestones and coins rained down on the policemen, they were forced to retreat into the Stonewall until they could be rescued by reinforcements. When the NYPD beat a hasty retreat, the crowd celebrated. In Christopher Park, a group of young transgender protesters sang and danced in a defiant, triumphant kick line: “We are the Stonewall Girls! We wear our hair in curls!” 30
After Stonewall, the movement for what would later be termed LGBT rights accelerated with incredible speed. Hundreds of gay and lesbian periodicals sprang up in the next few years, spreading a philosophy patterned on the self-pride program advanced by Black Power groups. While part of the movement revolved around securing r
ights for gays and lesbians, another important dimension focused on helping them to feel safe and comfortable enough to declare their identity in public. To underline the message that “gay is good,” groups like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) urged gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet” and no longer hide their identities in shame. In doing so, they hoped to transform what had formerly been a private act of acknowledgment to oneself and close friends into a public, political act that represented a rejection of the stigma attached to homosexuality. It was a difficult case to make to a community whose members had been stigmatized and persecuted for decades. “Other minorities have everything to gain by demanding their rights,” worried a closeted oil company executive. “We have everything to lose.” But organizations like the GLF persuasively argued that “coming out” was a crucial step for gays and lesbians, one that was both a sign of personal liberation and public resistance against society. Moreover, it would also help create a stronger and more vibrant movement that could then return to the fight for gay rights, pushing for policy changes and challenging unjust laws. The banner for a GLF newspaper in New York put it simply but powerfully. “Come Out For Freedom!” it urged readers. “Come Out of the Closet Before the Door is Nailed Shut!” 31