Feminists Will Celebrate 20th Anniversary of the Women’s Movement : Looking to the Future--What Direction Is Next?

“Where is the women’s movement going in the next decade?”

Feminist Gloria Steinem: “We now have majority support for equal pay but we don’t have equal pay. We now have majority support for women in high political office but we have few women in high political office. We have majority support for equal parenthood but we don’t have parental leaves so that fathers can be home when new babies arrive. We have created tools for change. But the structures of our lives are just beginning to change.”

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown Jr.: “I think it’s absolutely unlimited. Women have just scratched the surface. . . . The 1986 elections reflect this in the number of women who ran for significant offices with complete budgets, complete party support and all the other apparatus of mainstream political participation.”

Columnist Erma Bombeck: “It’s in limbo because the younger generation thinks it has all the rights it can have and are asking, ‘What’s all the flap about?’ We’ll almost have to start all over again. I think we have kept the awareness . . . but the momentum has been lost, the incentive has been lost. The 40- and 50-year-olds need to pass the torch to someone but there’s nobody there.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird: “I would hope that the women’s movement would be energetic and active in ensuring not only women’s rights but also minority rights in the years ahead. They have much to offer with many fine leaders and many more to come.”

Attorney Gloria Allred: “There’s going to be more emphasis on economic issues, a further push to win comparable worth. Also, as more and more women enter the workplace, there’ll be more emphasis on expanding child care and many more cases of sexual harassment filed. There’ll be more civil rape cases as women begin to assert their right to be free of rape. Lesbian rights issues will surface--lesbian mothers’ rights and the rights of domestic partners, lesbian life-mates who cannot be married under the law but seek the same legal protection afforded to married couples. There’s also going to be a push for child-support enforcement.”

Susan Brownmiller, author of “Against Our Will”: “I think it’s a period of retrenchment. I was never a NOW person. I was always in the more radical wing of the movement and I don’t see much activity for that part of the movement now. But there is plenty of room for NOW. It’s more important today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. What NOW is doing today is the really solid committee work of consolidating the gains.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky: “I think there will be a shift (in the women’s movement) with the increasing role that women have come to play in the workplace. Now that women have leverage in the workplace, I expect to see increasing attention paid to flex time and child care and similar issues. But they’re going to have to bring attention to those issues themselves, and they will.”

Singer Helen Reddy (“I Am Woman”): “I think it has taken the 405 (freeway) north. There’s a lot of things that we take for granted that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, like a woman reading the news as a co-anchor. But in many cases we have gone backwards . . . and I’m worried that the next generation will take everything they have for granted. If that happens, all the hard-won freedoms will be lost.”