Mouood Mouood English Edition
The nuclear family perished of natural causes after barely more than a decade of moderately good health. When this invented domestic ideal met the headwinds of the sexual revolution and economic crisis, a mass historical amnesia about the real history of the American family would set in. In the aftermath of its demise, the nuclear family would be resurrected as an age-old American tradition, as the endpoint of a desired return to the way we never were, and the source of political warfare about sex and women couched in the appealing yet deceptive brand of family values.
It was inevitable that relations between men and women would change as a result of the sexual revolution, women’s mass exodus from the home into the workforce, and women’s rapid educational advance. It was not inevitable that the new relations would take the form they did. The ultimate result was in good part the handiwork of the American women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1960s, a small group of women and men picked up where earlier women’s rights movement had left off in the campaign to achieve equal treatment of the sexes in politics, law, and the economy. One of their first surprise victories piggybacked on the advancing tide of the civil rights movement. An opportunity presented itself when a southern congressman, Howard Smith, put forward an amendment to ban sex discrimination in employment in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Smith, though himself a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, intended his amendment to function as a poison pill—a provision that would kill the whole bill. Given that almost everyone at the time considered it absurd to pretend the sexes had equal capabilities and aspirations, Smith knew the ban on sex discrimination could give cover to northern Congressmen to vote against black civil rights, while allowing them to avoid being charged with racism. Savvy lobbying by women’s rights advocates foiled Smith’s design, and the provision survived into the final version of the bill. The Civil Rights Act passed, but for reasons having nothing to do with women’s rights.
There have been few pieces of legislation that have had a greater effect on the daily lives of Americans than that one clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII made it illegal for employers to discriminate against any individual on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
Many men, however, didn’t quite appreciate the historic momentousness of the act. The head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency created to enforce Title VII, called the ban on sex discrimination “a fluke . . . conceived out of wedlock.” Clever wordplay. Over the next two years he blithely ignored the thousands of complaints of discrimination women sent to his office. The liberal New Republic, which had been appalled by Southern resistance to black equality, commended the EEOC’s nullification of a national law: “Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?” Other bastions of the elite press became obsessed with the problem the new law posed for clients of Playboy Bunnies. The Wall Street Journal worried for the well-being of businessmen who might encounter “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’” at their local gentlemen’s club. The press started to refer to the sex discrimination clause in shorthand as “the Bunny Law.” A glib New York Times editorial joked, “The Rockettes may become bi-sexual, and a pity, too . . . Bunny Problem, indeed! This is a revolution, chaos. You can’t even safely advertise for a wife anymore.”
The hue and cry over sex discrimination offer a revealing look inside the hearts of powerful men compelled to contemplate a world in which the sexes would be equal. The volcanic potential of these subterranean emotions becomes clearer once we consider the contrast between America before and America after the women’s rights movement of these years. Before, it was perfectly legal to discriminate against women in employment; married women in many states could not get credit in their own name; states routinely treated men and women differently in family matters; state governments set different standards for the duties of citizenship; and sexual violence against women was routinely tolerated. Florida exempted women from jury duty, leaving women defendants to be tried by a jury of their all-male peers. Oklahoma set the legal drinking age for women at 18 and men at 21, so as not to inconvenience the young wives out on a date with their older husbands. Michigan deemed it improper and illegal for a woman to be a bartender, unless she was the wife or daughter of the bar’s owner. Ohio compelled pregnant teachers to go on unpaid leave. North Carolina only allowed virgins to file rape charges, and Maryland had no provision in its laws to allow a wife to sue the husband who had beaten her to a pulp.
As men in power continued to make sport of women’s equality, veterans of the battles over equal employment decided women needed a civil rights organization of their own. In 1966, they founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). Its statement of purpose declared that “the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes.” Between 1966 and 1976, NOW and its allies won campaigns to enforce the laws against wage and employment discrimination; to outlaw discrimination against pregnant women; to end discrimination against women in education; to provide equal funding for women in public education; to reform divorce law; to prohibit sexual harassment in the workplace; and—almost—to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
Today, equal rights, protected by laws banning discrimination on the basis of sex, are so ingrained that most Americans under the age of 50 hardly know it was ever any different. So, if self-declared feminists were the ones who achieved these gains for all American women, why and how did feminism get such an awful reputation? It did so because, at the very moment NOW and its allies tackled legal institutional discrimination, a new kind of activist entered the scene, proposing a more provocative theory about how women were kept down. Women’s liberation offered Americans a new way to look at themselves in the world, wrapped up nicely in a four word slogan: The personal is political.
How was it that personal issues, private matters, had anything to do with politics? At its core, politics is about power, about who rules whom. A nation born in revolution well understood the script of protest and resistance. According to the logic of American politics, one that activists of every shade and opinion share, the oppressed eventually rise up to claim their rights, their interests, and their due. Indeed the two women who first turned the women’s movement onto the women’s liberation track were American Christian reformers, not angry man-hating radicals so prominent in the antifeminist imagination. Mary King was the daughter of a southern Methodist minister who came to politics via the YWCA; Sandra “Casey” Cason Hayden was a Texan, the daughter of a single mother, who had also gotten her initiation into activism in the YWCA. After several years working in the civil rights movement in the South with other student activists, King and Hayden simply asked, who was exercising power over women? Their answer, explained in a widely circulated memo written in the fall of 1965, would send shock waves through American society for the next decade. Of course, distant politicians and presumptuous bosses kept women down, but that was the least of their troubles. Nearer to home, Hayden and King suggested, women met their oppressors—fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, and male friends—face to face. Intimacy and oppression, all wrapped into one. Their memo went viral among women under the age of 30.
