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STILL A LONG
WAY TO GO BABY
BY RUTH ROSEN
MS. PRESIDENT 2000
Women must get into the political game and stay in it.'
'There shall never be another season of silence
until women have the same rights men have on this green
earth.'
-S usan B A nthony
-E leanor R oosevelt
Despite the fact that the binary political party system
seems determined to stick wath two (wrtiite) males for the nation's
highest office, a woman elected President of the United States
in the year 2000 would be a proper beginning to the new millen
nium.
American women have had the vote for 80 years, an
almost equal amount of time women spent fighting to attain it *
For most of those years women rather passively voted the way
their husbands or boyfriends voted. Women voted for the first
time in equal numbers as men in 1980, and in 1982 more
women voted than men; though women voted differently than
men that year and succeeding years, they did not necessarily
vote for women
A significant change was made in 1992 when women
campaigned in unprecedented numbers for every conceivable
office in the country: local, state and federal — including at least
one woman for President. Women entered politics backed by
other women, finally using their majority power to elect women
to public office.
Prominent and well qualified women of the two major
political parties could successfully campaign as candidates for
the Millennial Presidency given half a chance and the bi-gender
support of partisans and voters.
It is not an impossible idea. It is a much better idea
than the knee-jerk assumption that only two (white) males are
the only reasonable choices, a form of gender apartheid by a
status quo unwlling to see beyond its own shriveled genitals.
There is certainly precedence. Liberals and leftists have
periodically fronted women for President, more often as Veep in
third parties and once in the Democratic Party with Geraldine
Ferraro in 1980.
"All issues are women's issues," Ferraro said the year
she campaigned as Vice President.
There are many reasons a woman should be elected
the American President in 2000. Chances are very good she
wll probably be a much better leader than a male counterpart
because male culture demands women possess and demon
strate superior skills simply to compete wth the reigning
supremacy of the killer gender.
An excellent reason a woman should be the Millennial
President is that women generally represent the most generous
and humane prospects of humanity. Women are literally preg
nant wth our future and provide the true compassion and Gaia
wsdom of our species
A common question asked by dubious men (and some
women: Phyllis Schafley comes to mind) is: "Do you think a
woman can do better than a man?" The response, proven by
history, is that she certainly couldn't do worse.
But of course that is a piggyback negative. A woman
ought to be President at the start of Western culture's third
millennium simply because after all this time a woman deserves
to be.
- michael M c C usker
Adapted from Ms Smith Goes to Washington. NCTE
JulyAug&Sept'97
"The 19th Amendment to the U.S Constitution, which
was ratified on August 18, 1920 and became law August 26 that
year, declares: "The nght of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any
State on account of sex."
American women entered the 20th century without the
right to vote and ended it with the right 'to have it all1 as long as
they 'do it alt. Progress? It depends on whom you ask.
The nation's citizens are deeply divided about the
changes that have transformed the lives of women. At the
center of the "cultural wars" remains the debate over the proper
role of women in American society.
In many ways, this has been the longest revolution
of the century. Bursts of artillery fire, mass strikes, massacred
protesters, bomb explosions — these are our images of revolu
tion. Some revolutions are harder to recognize: no cataclysms
mark their beginnings or ends, no casualties are left lying in
pools of blood. Though people may suffer greatly, their pain
is hidden from public view. Such has been the case with the
modem women's movement
Women's rights activists didn't hurl tear gas canisters
at the police, bum down buildings or fight in the streets. Nor did
they overthrow the government, achieve economic dominance
or political hegemony. But they did subvert authority and trans
form society in dramatic and irrevocable ways: so much so that
young women who come of age in the 21st century may not
even recognize the America that existed before the feminist
revolution came about
Consider the last half of the 20th century Before the
revolution began during the 1950s, the president of Harvard
University saw no reason to increase the number of female
undergraduates because the university's mission was to "train
leaders."
Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex: employers paid
women less than men for the same work. Bars often refused to
serve women; banks routinely denied women credit or loans.
Some states even excluded women from jury duty Radio pro
ducers considered women's voices too abrasive to be on air:
television executives believed women didn't have enough credit-
ability to anchor the news; no women ran big corporations or
universities, worked as firefighters or police officers, sat on the
Supreme Court, installed electronic equipment or owned con
struction companies.
All hurricanes bore female names, thanks to the widely
held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society
Few people knew more than a few women professors, doctors
or lawyers.Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs.,
depending on her marital status, and if a woman wanted an
abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life searching
among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassion
ate doctor
The public believed that any rape victims had probably
"asked for it," most women felt too ashamed to report it. and
no language existed to make sense of mantal rape, date rape,
domestic violence or sexual harassment Just two words sum
med up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: 'That's
life.”
Long before the modem women's movement began,
American vomen's participation in both the labor force and
the sexual revolution had already dramatically altered their lives.
But it took the modem women's movement to address the many
ways women felt exploited to lend legitimacy to their growing
sense of injustice and to name customs and practices wiiich
had long been accepted, but for which there was no language.
Many men and women did not see it coming. In 1967,
the well-respected and internationally renowoed sociologist
David Riesman, then a professor at Harvard University, uttered •
what has to be one of the most hilarious predictions in recent
history. Writing in Time magazine, he declared that "If anything
remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women."
Poor timing. This was the year that the modem women's move
ment began spreading across the country and entering ordinary
parlance
As women activists learned to see the world through
their own eyes, the feminist movement fragmented, and new
populations of women — trade unionists, the old, the young,
racial and ethnic minorities, some of whom had initially spumed
feminism—began to assert different priorities.With that broaden
ing constituency many feminisms began permeating American
society.
A backlash was inevitable, though few anticipated
its religious and political ferocity "If you're on the right track,
you can expect some pretty savage criticism," veteran feminist
Phyllis Chesler warned young women. 'Trust it. Revel in it. It is
the truest measure of your success."
With its rallying cry of "family values" in the 1980s, the
Republican right successfully tied up the Equal Rights Amend
ment in state legislatures and took the first steps to curtail the
right to an abortion But the backlash masked another reality.
By the end of the 20th century, feminist ideas had burrowed too
deeply into our culture for any resistance or politics to root them
out. The backlash, in short, reflected a society deeply divided
and disturbed by rapid changes in men's and women's lives at
home and at work*
But at the height of the backlash, ironically, more
American women, not fewer, grasped the importance of the
goals of the women's movement. In 1986, a Gallup poll asked
women, "Do you consider yourself a feminist?" At a time when
identifying yourself as a feminist felt like a risky admission, 56%
of American women were willing to do so. Women of all classes
were also becoming aware of the ways in which gender shaped
their lives: 67% of all women, including those who earned under
$12,500 and those who made more than $50,000, favored a
strong women's movement. Pollsters consistently found that
more African-Amencan women approved of the goals of the
women's movement than did wtiite women
In 1985, commenting on legislation that would advocate
child support for all families and would give wives access to
their husbands' pensions, a newspaper editorial declared that
'Women's issues have already become everyone's." And so
they had. Perhaps the most important legacy was precisely that
"women's issues" had entered mainstream national politics
where they had changed the terms of political debate. Everyday
life had also changed in small but significant ways. Strangers
addressed women as Ms. : meteorologists named hurricanes
after both men and women; schoolchildren learned about sexism
before they became teenagers; language became more gender
neutral; and two decades after the movement's first years, the
number of women politicians doubled. Even more significantly,
millions of women entered jobs that had once been reserved for
men.
Although women had not gained the power to change
institutions, they had joined men in colleges and universities in
unprecedented numbers. In the 1950s, women had constituted
only 20% of college undergraduates and their two most common
aspirations, according to polls of the time, were to become the
wife of a prominent man and mother of several accomplished
children. By 1990, women constituted 54% of undergraduates
and they wanted to do anything and everything. Women had
also joined men in both blue-collar and professional jobs in
startling numbers. In 1960, 35% of women had worked outside
the home; by 1990, that figure had jumped to 58%.
Women in other parts of the globe, fueled by inter
national conferences, began challenging different forms of
patriarchal authority and inventing feminism all over again.
Each generation of female activists leaves an unfinished
agenda for the next generation First Wave suffragists fought
for women's citizenship, created international organizations
dedicated to universal disarmament, but left many customs and
beliefs unchallenged. Second Wave feminists questioned nearly
everything, transformed much of American culture, expanded
the idea of democracy by insisting that equality had to include
the realities of its women citizens, and catapulted women's
issues onto a global stage.
The greatest accomplishment was to change the terms
of debate, so that women mattered But they left much unfinish
ed as well. They were unable to change most institutions, to gain
greater economic justice for poor women, or even to convince
society that child care is the responsibility of the wrfiole society.
As a result, American women won the right to "have it all," but
only if they "did it all."
It is for a new generation to identify w4iat they need to
achieve greater equality. As we enter a new century, it is wrfse
to remember that the struggle for women's human rights has just
begun. As each generation shares its secrets, women leam to
see the world through their own eyes, and discover, much to
their surprise, that their problems are not theirs alone. The poet
Muriel Requester once asked, "What would happen if one
woman told the truth about her life?" Her answer: 'The world
would split open." And, so it has A revolution is under way and
there is no end in sight.
Ruth Rosen is a history professor at the University
of California at Davis and the author of The World Split Open:
How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America,
published in February by Viking She wrote this article for the
San Francisco Chronicle
Downtown
"The ERA has been sent to the grave more than once
in the 77 years since Alice Paul wrote the amendment to the
U S Constitution, which has not changed its wording since first
introduced in Congress in 1923: "Equality of Rights shall not be
denied or abndged by the United States or any State on account
of sex " A national referendum would probably make the ERA
law within a few months -MPMc
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