Feminists Will Celebrate 20th Anniversary of the Women’s Movement : NOW’s Birthday More Than a Nostalgia Trip : Organization Vows to Continue Campaigning for the Rights of Women at Home and at Work

The lights dim. Joan Blondell and a bevy of leggy chorines dance on screen at their Busby Berkeley best, toting their laundry baskets and singing about how they adore ironing shirts. The film is “Dames” and the year is 1934.

But this is no mere nostalgia trip. This is the script for the National Organization for Women’s 20th birthday party, a commemoration of two decades of the women’s movement, a chronicle of battles fought to open the doors of men-only restaurants, to keep the skies friendly for flight attendants over 30 and to de-sex children’s toys.

It is a chronicle, too, of NOW’S fight for women’s reproductive rights, the equal rights amendment, comparable pay for comparable worth, day care facilities for working mothers and for a language that is free of gender-specific words such as mailman .

All-Star Celebration

NOW’s national celebration will be a gala anniversary show Dec. 1 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a 2 1/2-hour extravaganza featuring Jane Fonda, Alan Alda, Morgan Fairchild, Cybill Shepherd, Patty Duke, Ally Sheedy, Vic Damone, George Hamilton, Lily Tomlin and a galaxy of other stars in a sometimes reverent, often irreverent, look back at the infancy and adolescence of the women’s movement.

But the evening will not be solely for reminiscing. The movie clips, with their dizzy “gold digger” blondes, a chorus’ “offensive song medley” (featuring such numbers as “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” and “Someday My Prince Will Come”) and news film of a girl apologizing for being the first female to win a local soapbox derby, aren’t just for laughs.

Act II, focusing on “erosion” of 20 years’ gains in a nation partially in the grip of a new conservatism, is a bit of a downer, acknowledges chair and co-producer Peg Yorkin, who says she’s counting on fiery NOW president Eleanor Smeal, who once led thousands of women into battle for the ERA, to “pull everybody up again” before the final curtain.

A crusade that began in anger and frustration under the long-discarded banner of “women’s liberation,” a movement that in 18 years was flexing enough political muscle to help put a woman on a national ticket, is coming of age.

To Betty Friedan, one of NOW’s founders and the woman whose 1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique,” validated the discontent of millions of housewives who were feeling unfulfilled, the anniversary is both a time for reminiscing and a time to address the new set of problems that she believes stand between women and true equality.

To Eleanor Smeal, who reclaimed the presidency of NOW last year, promising to bring it renewed vigor, the first 20 years were monumental in that “we changed the nation’s psyche.”

‘Anti-Family’ Crusade

But to Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the conservative Eagle Forum and a prominent critic of the women’s movement, 20 years of NOW have added up to an “anti-family” crusade that has contributed to the deterioration of family life in America.

Friedan looked back two decades and at how the women’s movement began. She “certainly couldn’t have predicted” the explosive reaction to her book, she said. Until then, “each woman thought she was a freak, she was alone.”

Friedan, a suburban housewife, was not, by instinct, an organizer--”I didn’t even belong to the League of Women Voters”--but, she recalled, “Everybody sort of seized on me because I was free.”

She was among a group of women gathered in Washington in June, 1966, for a meeting of the largely ceremonial and soon-to-be-disbanded Commission on the Status of Women, women angered by what she termed a dismissive “pat on the head” from the Johnson White House.

‘Patronizing Speeches’

At the final commission banquet, Friedan recalled, there were “patronizing speeches” by Cabinet members about what a nice job the women had done and now they were being told, in essence, to “go home and concentrate on doing good works for the poor.” But these women weren’t going to be dismissed, she recalled. Friedan’s telephone had been ringing since 5 that morning. They wanted a women’s movement.

At the banquet, Friedan said, “I remember I wrote down on a paper napkin, ‘National Organization for Women.’ I knew there had to be men in it, too.” Each woman present chipped in $5 for a mailing.

At the organizing conference for NOW that October in Washington, Friedan was elected the first president. Among its first actions: storming the Oak Room of New York’s Plaza Hotel, demanding that women be served, and demanding hearings for airline stewardesses facing mandatory retirement when they married or reached age 35. “They said stewardesses had to be young and nubile so businessmen would fly,” Friedan said. “It was ridiculous.”

At a press conference in New York, Friedan demanded action by the EEOC to remove gender designations from “help wanted” ads. After a quick call to an underground NOW member in the Justice Dept., Friedan determined that it is possible to sue the U.S. government and, winging it, she added, “We are hereby suing the government for discrimination against women. . . . “

But the initial bravado was rather short-lived. By 1970, Friedan said, the media was “beginning to turn it into a joke” with emphasis on fictional bra-burnings, and NOW was losing the thrust of the real issues. The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, in 1970, provided the opportunity NOW needed. In August, 50,000 marched in New York alone. “After that,” Friedan said, “We were clearly seen as a major movement.”

‘Exhilarating First Edge’

Throughout America, women met in living room consciousness-raising groups. Women demanded to be astronauts and ministers and rabbis. There was an explosion of women in the arts. It was what Friedan looks back on as “that exhilarating first edge, a wonderful heady feeling as women began to empower themselves.”

Today, Friedan said, the gains “are taken for granted,” but “we now face a different set of problems. We also face a backlash of people trying to push us back.” It is a challenge, she believes, that calls for “new thinking” that goes beyond fitting women’s lives into the male model. She calls it “stage two.”

Said Friedan: “We’ve made it into the man’s world. Now, 20 years later, women are making 62 cents for every dollar a man makes. Why? Because most women are doing service jobs and are paid less than they’re worth. Comparable worth is a very crucial issue now.

“Then there is the other issue--how to put it all together, home and work and family,” how to balance women’s values and their ambitions. This, she noted, is “the dilemma that the anti-feminists are playing to,” the despair of that male clone, “superwoman,” who has everything except “a wife to take care of all the details in life.”

Friedan added: “We fought for (reproductive) choice, and that was extremely important, but the ability to choose to have a kid isn’t there yet. We’ve got to have parental leave and we’ve got to have child care so women can choose to have kids before they’re 40.” The other half of the equation, she said, is “equal responsibility for the job (to be done) at home.”

Now that traditional women’s organizations like the AAUW and the Junior League have embraced the feminist cause, Friedan said, there is in place the framework for an alliance to push for legislation such as parental leave and federally funded child care that will “restructure work and restructure home.” Today’s women, she said, don’t relate to “a feminism that sticks to the rhetoric of 20 years ago. It’s got to be a very diverse movement. And there are new avenues for alliances with men.”

Said Eleanor Smeal, NOW president: “When we started, people didn’t know women were discriminated against on the basis of pay, education, college admissions and promotions. We pointed out the discrimination, and then we did the next step. We rammed open the doors, forced them open, pushed them open. We picketed, we demonstrated, we took people to court. People laid their bodies down on tracks so girls could run track. We did everything we could within the law--then we changed the laws.”

‘It’s a Revolution’

Smeal added: “Sometimes we forget that when we started we (women) were 3% of law schools, 8% of medical schools, 1% of engineering schools. I don’t know if we were any percent of divinity schools. Today, we’re about 40% of law students, 30% of medical students, 25% of engineering students, about 60% of seminary students in the Protestant denominations. It’s a revolution.”

She added: “We’re still working on the Catholic priesthood. That will fall.”

Smeal wants NOW to take its cause to the public in a major way and, to this end, the L.A. birthday party fund-raiser will be a kickoff for the NOW 21st Century Fund for the media, part of the NOW Foundation. (NOW members, 150,000 nationwide, will be asked to join a sustaining program, contributing monthly to a media fund.) “You can’t compete with the electronic ministry,” Smeal observed, “with the pony express of newsletters.”

Smeal does not single out a priority for NOW’s next few years, insisting that NOW will be “pushing on all fronts,” from abortion rights to insurance policies that discriminate against women.

Twenty years after NOW’s founding, only two women, newly elected Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, serve in the U.S. Senate, only three are governors and only 23 are in the House of Representatives. “Pretty slim pickings, right?” Smeal said. Still, she prefers to look at it another way: In 1986, 60 women ran for statewide offices, up from 19 in 1984; women will be 15% of state legislatures in 1987, up from 3% in 1972, the year the ERA was introduced. The nation’s school boards are 40% female, up from 14% in 1970.

“We’re doing better at the local levels, where it’s cheaper,” she said. “But we’re cracking fund-raising.” National NOW raised $350,000 in support of candidates in the November election and its local chapters raised an additional $500,000.

The Los Angeles fund-raiser, with tickets ranging from $25 to $500, will raise “well over $350,000” earmarked for the 21st Century Fund, Smeal said, and perhaps as much as $1 million.

One person who won’t be celebrating the anniversary is Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, who believes that 20 years of NOW have produced “no” positive return.

Said Schlafly: “The first goal the feminist movement set for itself was divorce on demand, easy, no-fault divorce. The first state to pass that law (in 1969) was California and it swept across this country in the 1970s so 49 states now have them. The result has been incredible social, financial and emotional devastation for women.”

Schlafly spoke, too, of “20 million abortions” since abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court in 1973, of the “great trauma and unhappiness and bitterness” that have resulted, and of the 14-year battle for the ERA and of the “last attempt to bring it up out of the coffin” this year in Vermont.

Schlafly views the women’s movement as “a series of defeats since 1977, the high-water mark,” when the international women’s year conference was held in Houston. “The legislative agenda they have worked for is outside of the mainstream of what the American people want,” she said, “and they have been generally unsuccessful with their political candidates.”

She criticized the movement as contributing to the erosion of the family, pointing to its support of “the whole homosexual-gay rights agenda and of legalizing prostitution . . . it is part of their ideology that we should have a gender-neutral society in which we are forbidden to make reasonable differences. I see that as anti-family as well as anti-common sense.”

‘Anti-Female’ Impact

Yes, NOW has made an impact over 20 years, Schlafly said, “but I think the impact has all been anti-female. I think NOW has been effective in spreading a lot of their ideas, but I don’t think it’s been good for society and an awful lot of women who followed their line in the ‘70s are not happy in the ‘80s with the choice they made.”

As it enters its third decade, NOW remains as controversial as ever and is perceived differently in different quarters. One area where its support is mixed is among minority groups.

Democratic Assemblywoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, who is black, said NOW has been an ally since she first ran for office in 1976--”the women stuffed mailers for me, walked precincts and they really helped me to understand that there was a women’s vote out there”--but she admits that at times she has been “pretty pessimistic about the ability of this organization to continue in a credible fashion.”

In Waters’ view, NOW was foundering on the abortion issue, losing the interest of housewives and poor women, until Geraldine Ferraro’s vice presidential candidacy “gave it a new look and a new credibility.”

Waters, who joined marchers in a pro-choice rally here in the rain last March, is effusive in her praise of Eleanor Smeal, of her “tenacity” in the face of both external forces and internal strife, such as that surrounding the murder charges brought against former NOW state coordinator Ginny Foat, who was found not guilty.

‘A Real Responsibility’

Nevertheless, Waters acknowledged, NOW “has not had great attraction for black women. In my opinion, it has to do, No. 1, with black women being absolutely committed to the elevation of blacks as a race . . . the issues have always been so great in the civil rights movement and in the black community that everybody feels a real responsibility to the work of elevating the race rather than any portion of it.”

About eight years ago Waters founded Black Women’s Forum to motivate black women, get them to thinking about women’s issues and develop in them leadership qualities to enable them to move with confidence into white women’s organizations.

To Ruth Zambrana, an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at UCLA and the American-born daughter of Puerto Rican parents, the failure of the women’s movement to reach women of color in numbers is due in large part to its being “essentially a middle-class movement” that did not touch the poor and alienated of the earlier Civil Rights movement.

Those in the women’s movement, she said, “wanted more opportunity at a much higher level than where women of color were. The women were essentially college graduates. Many of the women of color were still saying we can’t even get our people into college. In California it wasn’t until the late ‘60s that Chicanos entered the higher education system in any significant numbers. We weren’t talking about getting a position at AT&T.; We were talking about getting our kids past the sixth grade.”

‘Racism, Elitism’ Charged

To a degree, she believes, the women’s movement has succumbed to “racism and elitism.” She asks: “What was the good of having (reproductive) choice if the majority of women did not have the means to exercise that choice? Yet the women’s movement was not necessarily fighting for Medicaid, only for choice. That left out 80% of all women because choice without money is nothing.”

In the Latino community, she said, “There are still cases being talked about of women who go to butchers and die in the process.”

Another view of NOW came from Beverly LaHaye, president of a conservative 7-year-old Christian organization, the Washington-based Concerned Women for America. She said the impact of two decades of the women’s movement has been to cause women of her political persuasion to “rally together” in opposition to the ERA, to fight for parental rights and religious freedom in the schools, for delegalization of abortion and other CWA issues such as stripping magazine racks of pornographic literature.

Feminists “have become very strident and militant, and it’s turned women off,” LaHaye said.

In the wake of Friedan’s book, she said, there was “a sort of anti-mother, anti-homemaker philosophy. Some women bought it, but it began to turn sour on them eventually. Women began to realize, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What I really want is to have children. I want to be a mother.’ There was a real put-down of women who wanted to be super homemakers or super mothers.”

Now, LaHaye said, “Women are just backing off. We really do believe in equal rights for women, but I think they kind of spoiled it by pushing too hard.”

The ‘Farm Teams’

Equally firm in her beliefs is Barbara Mikulski, the newly elected junior senator from Maryland.

Twenty years ago, she said, the women’s movement nudged women into seeking local office and seats in state legislatures and these women became the “farm teams” that have gone on to run for statewide and national office.

Mikulski said the women’s movement has “helped us to realize the importance of . . . everyday problems faced by American families” and making them part of the public policy agenda--issues such as day care and Medicare. It’s what she calls “bottom up, rather than trickle-down” politics.

Twenty years since the beginning of the women’s movement, Mikulski acknowledged, two women in the U.S. Senate is a disappointing box score.

“It’s been 65 years since suffrage,” she added. “I found out today that I’m the 16th woman ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. We’re moving with glacial speed, but I hope I’m the tip of the iceberg.”