Measuring the ‘Mystique’ at 25

Twenty-five years ago today, just a few days past her 42nd birthday, a suburban housewife, mother of three and occasional free-lance writer for women’s magazines published a book called “The Feminine Mystique.”

Two million copies and a revolution later, just a few days short of her 67th birthday, Betty Friedan sat in a room at USC’s Institute for the Study of Women and Men, explaining the “think tank” she helped found two years ago to this year’s newcomers.

New Problems, New Questions

“We need some new and serious feminist thinking to deal with the enormity of the changes our movement has made,” she said. “Young women have such different parameters now. We can’t stay with the old thinking. Our experience has given us new problems, new questions.”

For Friedan personally, the change has indeed been enormous. Divorced since 1969 and now a grandmother, she is currently a visiting professor at USC, teaching a journalism course on women, men and media, planning a conference on that topic to be held at USC later this month and nearing completion of a book on aging called, “The Fountain of Age.”

And for the organized women’s movement for equality, sparked by Friedan’s book decrying women’s subjugation and their confinement to the role of wife and mother, the changes have also been enormous. By proclaiming the personal to be political and the political to be personal, the movement worked its way through the late 20th Century leaving little in life untouched. Roles of men and women, relationships between the sexes, the family, the workplace, society, the economy, the law, government, religion--all have been affected.

But equality is not yet a reality, and at the quarter-century mark, some of those most involved in the organized movement have been taking its measure, reviewing the gains of the last 25 years and looking at what lies ahead.

Among the critical questions--which Friedan intends to raise at an upcoming media conference called “Breakthrough or Backlash?”--are: Will society get on to the second stage of the revolution, where men and women live as equals, or is the movement going backward? And is there a new feminine mystique coming, accepted by women who are either too battle-weary to resist or, among the young, too complacent to see the danger?

Among the organizations started as a direct result of the modern phase of the movement are the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by Friedan and 27 others, the National Abortion Rights Action League, founded in 1969, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, 1971.

Leaders of all these organizations report a cautious optimism, and some change in direction since the beginning.

NOW has seen a lot of its early issues spin off from its task forces into separate organizations, current president Molly Yard said recently, citing battered women’s shelters, the Older Women’s League and rape crisis centers.

No Setbacks in Membership

The organization has not suffered any setbacks in membership, NOW staff report, saying its national group and local chapters have had a combined membership for several years at 160,000 members. NOW started with 300 at its first meeting, climbed to 1,200 in 1967, 40,000 in 1977.

The dangers to the women’s movement that concern Yard are not from within. And she sees plenty of them, naming the “terrible danger” of legal, and physical, threats to abortion rights and birth control, and to equal educational opportunity, especially in sports and physical education. She singled out the new Supreme Court justice, Donald Kennedy, as a particular source of worry.

“Obviously, we are far better off than we were in the ‘60s,” Yard said, but expressed concern with the incremental progress on such issues as pay equity, parental leave, affirmative action.

The so-called complacency of young women does not concern her, Yard said. After a recent article on women’s groups in Glamour magazine, NOW had an upsurge in applications from young women, she said, who worked for the 1986 defeat of anti-abortion referendums in four states.

“I am totally confident that if they understand the issues, they are there,” she said.

The National Abortion Rights Action League started out in 1969 as the National Assn. for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws. When the Supreme Court repealed the laws in 1973 with its Roe vs. Wade decision, NARAL changed its name.

It has been fighting to keep abortion legal ever since, and it is about to change its focus, executive director Kate Michaelman said recently.

“One problem we have had as a movement,” she said, “is that the anti-abortionists have been able to take abortion and remove it from the circumstances of a woman’s life. They have abstracted it symbolically as an evil. They’ve framed the debate.

Reframing the Debate

“Now, we’re reframing the debate,” she said, to include family issues. In addition to protecting abortion laws, Michaelman said, NARAL will be working for better insurance, pregnancy leave, post-and prenatal care and child care.

The organization has 250,000 dues-paying members, she said, and picked up an additional 25,000 in a direct-mail campaign opposing Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

She does have one concern about young people, she said: “Men and women under 30 have no memory, no collective awareness of the savagery of illegal abortion. It’s a great concern. We’ve got to educate them about what it was like.”

In its 16-year history, the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that has as its goal women’s equal representation in government, “has moved from politics as a mission to politics as a career,” Irene Natividad, chair of the group, said in an interview last week.

She offered as examples several women coming up locally--Mary Landrieu, elected to the Louisiana state legislature at 23, state treasurer at 29; Lena Guerrero, in her second term in the Texas legislature at 26; Able Mabel Thomas, elected to the Georgia legislature at 26 and now in her second term.

The caucus has reported a membership of 77,000 for several years, two-thirds Democrat, one-third Republican, with a median age of 47.

“In all candor,” Grace Orlansky, assistant executive director said, “there’s been a drop-off, but I think it’s coming back.” She attributed the drop-off to “burnout and a sense of discouragement” with slow progress and backsliding. Like NOW, the caucus experienced an upsurge in new young members after the Glamour article.

Some of the largest, most influential and mainstream women’s organizations have been around long before either “The Feminine Mystique” or its author. Among them are the 150,000-member American Assn. of University Women, the 125,000 federation of Business and Professional Women’s clubs, and the 250,000-member League of Women Voters, founded in 1881, 1919 and 1920, respectively.

Their histories help put in focus just how uneven the progress of the women’s movement has been.

AAUW staff member Cynthia Davis reports that the organization’s first research project, in 1881, was to demonstrate that higher education was not bad for women’s health. That is one project the modern phase of the movement has not had to take on.

Top Priorities

However, when the League of Women Voters got started in 1920 with a list of 98 issues, one of its top priorities, league president Nancy Neuman said recently, was the Sheppard-Towner Act on maternal and child health care.

“It was a bruising battle, defining the role of the federal government in maternal and child health care,” Neuman said, “and that’s a fight we’re still having.”

Historically, AAUW president Sarah Harder said recently, the organization has been on record with feminist issues, although it did not take a position on the equal rights amendment until 1971, when it made its passage a priority.

On record and in action are two separate things, however, and during the ‘50s and ‘60s the organization was “inordinately involved in our own process of accrediting colleges for membership in AAUW.”

The great social upheavals of 1968, with the Vietnam War protests and the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. turned the AAUW around, Harder said.

The board decided at that time that “it can’t be business as usual,” she said, and dedicated itself to working for a unified society.

“In 1970-71,” she said, “there was an overt adoption of the feminist agenda right down the line,” and although it was strong stuff for some members, the AAUW has been actively engaged in feminist issues ever since.

Harder talked of having to browbeat the next generation of women, who she said may be taking it all for granted. It is time for them to pay their dues, for all the doors that have been opened for them, she added, because without a continued organized voice, they need to know that the doors will close.

“I’m not worried about self-interest or their motivation,” she said. “We’ve got a straight-forward business proposition to offer them. All we have to do is make it.”

Beth Wray, president of Business and Professional Women, and Nancy Neuman, of the League of Women Voters, spoke recently of temporary setbacks the women’s movement brought their organizations.

Although BPW has aggressively pursued a feminist agenda in legislative issues affecting women in the work force since its inception in 1919, members in its local chapters were not necessarily feminists or political activists. Often they were working women who wanted to socialize. As they got older or retired, the chapters often tended to remain the same, resisting change, not attracting new and younger women.

Something to Offer

The challenge has been to have something to offer younger women, “the lifeblood of an organization,” Wray said. “We’ve got to be on the cutting edge for working women today. If women are going to commit any time, they have got to be able to network, to get some professional and personal development. The socializing is simply inherent in their coming together.”

The League of Women Voters also took a back seat in the early years of the movement, Neuman said, and ran head-on into the question: Who had the time to do all the homework that being an activist/reformer in the League required?

“We suffered a lot in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s,” Neuman said, “there was a chipping away. Women had less time to give. In the ‘60s (when she joined) there were these very educated women who would research an issue, write on it, go to government meetings. Those same women who broke the doors down, went through them (into the work force) once they were down.”

In 1984, she said, the League adopted a long-range plan that takes into account “women’s changing role and its impact on the league. We’re meeting at different times, demanding less. We’re turning the corner now.”

Ironically, she added, some women who are working full-time are now joining the league, she said, “because they’ve become so focused there that they want a place where they can focus on the outside world.”

And as for younger women who have never dropped out of the work force, they’re joining too she said.

“They’re used to juggling,” Neuman said of the young.

The juggling is what Betty Friedan calls “the yes, yes problems” of the new generation of women.

Sitting in her journalism class at USC one day last week, she listened as some of the young women in the class waveringly qualified themselves as feminists, and then said, yes, they expected to have careers, yes, they wanted marriages and yes, they also wanted children.

“I really think the things open to women today that they absolutely take for granted are absolutely marvelous, “ Friedan said later. “I love it they have these possibilities. So they’ve got some problems putting it all together. But, they’re ‘yes, yes’ problems.”

Her larger fear, however, is a specter she often raises of a return of the feminine mystique--to the traditional role of woman as wife and mother confined to the suburbs.

Twenty-five years after her book, she points to current movies like “Fatal Attraction,” current fashions like the miniskirt and the reappearance of girdles and current problems like what she calls the “glass ceiling,” a promotion barrier that she sees career women now hitting on their way to the top.

However, she added, “I have great hope. I know there’s danger on the horizon . . . but with the new skills women have, and with the assumption of equality, I think they will rise to the challenge.”

MILESTONES IN THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 1963 --Betty Friedan publishes “The Feminine Mystique,” which sparks the modern women’s movement.

1966 --Friedan and others found the National Organization for Women.

1967 --President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination in employment by federal contractors.

1973 --The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in Roe vs. Wade, strikes down state anti-abortion laws.

1975 --At a conference in Mexico City, the United Nations declares the Decade for Women. It closes in 1985 with a conference in Nairobi attended by 20,000 women.

1978 --Congress prohibits employers from discriminating against women who become pregnant.

1981 --Sandra Day O’Connor is sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court justice; astronaut Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.

1982 --The equal rights amendment dies after the Illinois Senate refuses to ratify it.

1984 --The Democratic Party nominates Rep. Geraldine Ferraro as its vice presidential candidate. The Supreme Court, in the landmark Grove City College case, narrows the interpretation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Congress partially restores the original interpretation in 1988.

1986 --More than 100,000 women march in Washington to protect abortion rights.