Excerpt, Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)

Chapter 7, Battle of the Sexes: Women, Men and the Family

Chapter begins by discussing the famous 1973 tennis match between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs, dubbed “Battle of the Sexes”. When King unexpectedly won against an exhausted Riggs, Howard Coseell announced, “Equality for Women!” The matched was less important than the passage of Title IX of 1972 Education Act, which threatened federal funding from schools that failed to devote resources to women’s athletics. The law was to take effect in 1978.

…the Battle of the Sexes dramatized far more than women’s achievement in sport. It also signaled the arrival of the women’s movement as a broad cultural force. Fro the first time in U.S. history, the majority of American women worked outside the home. Married women, even mothers of small children, had flooded the workplace. In 1970, the labor force included only 30 percent of women with children under six years old; by 1985, more than half the mothers of small children held paying jobs. Many American women had always worked, of course, especially the poor and minority women. But a new trend developed; women not only had jobs, they pursued careers. During the Seventies, hospitals, law offices, architecture firms, and faculty lounges opened to aspiring women. . . .

While the (women’s) movement brought together millions of American women and made clear to them that the challenges they faced were not theirs alone, it also further fractured a coalition that had long struggled for unity and effectiveness. Women might share similar problems, but they possessed different ways of understanding and combating them. The movement itself divided into different groups with competing aims, and a potent opposition movement emerged. Many women—individuals and small groups—quite understandably became more concerned with their own private battles of the sexes than with the political struggles of women as a whole. The initial impact of feminism, essayist Vivian Gornick wrote, “came as a kind of explosion.” For the nation as for millions of individual women, it was “shattering, scattering, everything tumbling about, the old world within splintering even as the new one was collecting.” By decade’s end, when the debris settled, women and men would find themselves in surprising new places, with transformed experiences and expectations. But despite its substantial achievements, feminism and the men’s movement it spawned would ultimately succumb to the prevailing political culture of the Seventies and fail in their most ambitious attempts to reconstruct public life.

Into the Mainstream

As the Seventies opened, the women’s liberation movement commanded the attention of the nation for the first time. Nearly every major news outlet ran stories on women’s lib in the first months of 1970. Most of these reports mocked the movement and the women within it. ABC News approvingly quoted Senator Jennings Randolph's description of women's libbers as "bra-less bubbleheads" and CBS News commentator Eric Sevaraid dismissed feminist claims of oppression as unfounded and hysterical.

But commentators like Sevareid, Randolph, and ABCs Cosell, who implied that feminists Re Billie Jean King strived toward manliness, missed the target. "In no way do we want to become men,' the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves explained in the dominant idiom of the late 1960s and early 1970s. "We are women and we are proud of being women. What we do want is to reclaim the human qualities culturally labeled 'male' and integrate them with the human qualities that have been labeled 'female' so that we can all be fuller human people.' Feminists routinely criticized the whole idea of fundamental differences, dismissing rhetoric about separate male and female natures, traits, or abilities as parts of the "tool-kit of oppression practiced by the patriarchy." In the early 1970s few women's libbers questioned that view.

Despite that unanimity, the movement was divided in the early 1970s and would grow more so as the decade proceeded. One faction, a generally older cohort of liberal feminists, organized around the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW had formed in 1966 under the leadership of Betty Friedan, author of the landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. The organization included men as well as women and sought to "bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now ... in truly equal partnership with men.” NOW agitated for the Equal Rights Amendment, legalized abortion, government-subsidized child care, and enforcement of laws against sex discrimination in employment and housing.

The rival camp, a younger cohort of radical feminists, had come to women's liberation out of their experiences in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. The new left's ideology of liberation and the reality of sex discrimination within those movements led many young activists to see sexism as the root oppression and to move into the battle for women's liberation. Radical feminism possessed no national association like NOW; indeed, its adherents rejected such bureaucratic, hierarchical structures. Instead they formed hundreds of small cells or collectives-groups Re Redstockings, WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), and the New York Radical Women.

While NOW liberals sought inclusion into established American institutions on equal terms with men, radical feminists scorned that "naive" objective. They wanted to eliminate the patriarchal sex, caste system. "Marriage and the family must be abolished as institutions," Ti-Grace Atkinson asserted in 1967, "and 'love' as an ideology to justify them must also go." The 1969 Red- stockings Manifesto reiterated this rebellious spirit. "Women are an oppressed class," the New York radical feminist collective declared. 'Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor."

Liberal feminists respected and occasionally emulated these dramatic tactics but found the ideology of radical feminism frightening and counterproductive. In 1970, Friedan warned against the diversionary radicalism that emphasized sexuality and threatened the abolition of marriage and the family. The movement, Friedan warned, needed to "overcome the wallowing, navel-gazing rap sessions, the orgasm talk that leaves things unchanged, the rage that will produce a backlash--down with sex, down with love, down with child- bearing.” She worried that feminism's brightest and most committed young women might turn away from "serious political action.”

Still, both sides agreed that the existing system, whether they wished to reform or replace it, perpetuated artificial and invidious gender distinctions that should be eliminated. Only antifeminists like Phyllis Schlafly defended the differences between men and women as natural, ordained, and valuable. In 1970, no women's libber would abide Schlafly's claim that "where man is discursive, logical, abstract, or philosophical, woman tends to be emotional, personal, practical or mystical" Instead, they stressed the essential humanity of women and men, the need for women to reclaim traits and behaviors long denied them as unladylike.

Such was the situation in the late 1960s. But the experiences of American women, the priorities of feminists, and the strategies of their opponents would shift dramatically over the next decade. The Sixties had left political women with crumbs from John F. Kennedy's table, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) established in December 1961. Like most other commissions, it dawdled and delayed and finally issued a little-noticed report, affirming that women’s roles should remain primarily maternal, but denouncing sex discrimination outside the home. The commission never even considered whether the very notions of traditional womanhood it celebrated themselves contributed to sexism. The PCSW demonstrated that even at a time when blacks, the poor, and rural America received concentrated attention from the national government, women remained on the political margins.

In the Seventies, feminism changed all that. In 1971, another official women's policy board was established, this time by women themselves. The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) included movement leaders Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, members of Congress like Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, civil rights champion Fannie Lou Hamer, United Auto Workers organizer Olga Madur, and even Elly Peterson of the Republican National Committee. The caucus sought to elect more women to public office, strengthen the influence of women in party affairs, and raise money for female candidates, especially after the creation of the Women's Campaign Fund in 1974.

These organizations bankrolled female candidates, but not just any woman received their backing. Eligibility depended on support for "women's issues" broadly construed as opposition to sexism and the desire to move women into the political mainstream. "It can be done," Representative Patricia Schroeder (D, Colorado) reassured the NWPC. "Women can run. And win. You can do it! "

Schroeder was right. During the 1970s women politicos moved into prominent roles in the affairs of the two major political parties, winning substantial numbers of delegate seats at the national conventions and influencing the party platforms. In 1968, women had occupied just 13 percent of the seats at the Democratic Convention; under pressure from the NWPC, the party adopted new guidelines favoring gender equality. Four years later women made up 40 percent of the delegates, and a woman, Jean Westwood, became the chair of the Democratic National Committee. The Republican Party followed suit. Women’s share of convention seats shot up from 17 percent in 1968 to 30 percent in 1972.28

Elective office also beckoned. Women's share of local offices more than doubled, as did the number of female state legislators. Shirley Chisholm mounted a presidential campaign. Ella Grasso won the governorship in Connecticut, becoming the "first lady Governor who was not a Governor's lady." Dixie Lee Ray soon followed suit in Washington State. In New York, Mary Anne Krupsak won the lieutenant governorship with the slogan, "She's Not One of the Bo)*," and Bella Abzug won a congressional seat, declaring, "This Woman Belongs in the House--The House of Representatives.”

Meanwhile, women fared well in the hurly-burly of big city politics. Democrat Jane Byrne won the mayoralty of Chicago, and Republican Kathy Whitmire took over city hall in Houston. Only a few more women won seats on Capitol Hill during the 1970s, but they represented a new breed of feminist Congresswoman. They had won office in their own right rather than succeeded to their husbands' seats; they were younger and often had families. Patricia Schroeder emerged as the leader of this new generation. Women, the newly elected Schroeder declared in 1972, "can no longer be mere spectators of the political process, critics on the sidelines; but active participants, playing an important and vital role out on the field.

Women's entry into the political mainstream precipitated substantial policy changes during the 1970s. New laws prohibited sex discrimination in the armed services and educational institutions, and employment discrimination against pregnant women. The Women's Educational Equity Act Program, enacted in 1974, provided federal funds to public schools that actively countered sex role stereotypes and promoted equality of women’s educational opportunities '32

These advances occasioned little controversy, but other feminist issues proved more contentious. First, activist women successfully fought to reform the law of rape. Inspired by feminist challenges, especially the 1970 Rape Speak-Out of radical feminists and the lobbying of the NOW Rape Task Force, many states revised rape statutes that had long made sexual violence nearly impossible to prosecute. "Rape is only a slightly forbidden fruit," feminists charged in 197 1. 'in New York State, for instance, the law stipulates that the woman must prove she was raped by force, that 'penetrations occurred, and that someone witnessed the rapist in the area of the attack."33

New laws barred the cross-examination of victims about their previous sexual history, a favored technique for intimidating women and undermining their testimony. Reformed statutes also dropped requirements for third-party witness testimony. Feminists fought to improve hospital services for rape vic- tims. By mid-decade, 1,500 antirape task forces and study groups had emerged around the country, including 400 autonomous rape crisis centers. These fem- inist institutions offered self-defense training, hot lines, and shelters and sup- port groups for victims. The Feminist Alliance Against Rape disseminated educational materials, published a national newsletter, and coordinated demands for reforms in courtroom procedures, the rules of evidence, and hos- pital policies. In 1977, women's groups sponsored "Take Back the Night" marches across the United States. Activists launched similar efforts to confront domestic violence.

Second, feminists fought for safe and legal abortion. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts to liberalize abortion laws won some success at the state level. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion across the nation in Roe v. Wade. But Roe did not end the political battle over reproductive rights. In many states, right-to-lifers attempted to restrict access to abortions. Feminists challenged these requirements in the courts and the state legislatures. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Congressman Henry Hyde (R, Illinois) introduced a series of appropriation bill amendments to bar federal funds for abortion, except when the mother's life was threatened. A series of similar Hyde amendments made sure that reproductive rights remained at the forefront of feminist politics.

Third, activist women inaugurated the campaign for "comparable worth.' During the late 1970s and early 1980s, women's incomes continued to lag far behind men's. The problem no longer simply required equal pay for equal work, a requirement already enshrined in law. Rather, the income gap reflected persistent occupational segregation and the undervaluing of women's work. Many typically female jobs, activist women argued, demanded similar or greater skill, effort, and talent than male occupations that received far greater compensation. For example, on average, licensed nurses earned less than truck drivers, child care providers less than unskilled construction workers.

Fourth, feminists paid increasing attention to the feminization of poverty. Activists noted not only that women and children made up the majority of the poor, but that the nation’s impoverished were increasingly young and female Feminists campaigned for subsidized child care for working mothers and stricter sanctions against deadbeat dads-those who did not meet their financial obligations to their children. This concern reflected the diversification of feminism by the late 1970s-broadening attention within the movement to the specific struggles of poor women, African American and Latina women, and single mothers.

The Equal Rights Amendment

By the early 19,70s, feminism had won many substantial battles. Its most important struggles, however, still lay ahead. No other issue so concentrated the battle of the sexes in the Seventies as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), displaying at once the far-reaching consequences and the agonizing limits of women’s liberation. Feminist agitation for an ERA dated back to the 1920s, to the immediate aftermath of the suffrage battle. In March 1972, Congress finally passed the ERA and sent it to the states for ratification. The amendment's text, disarmingly short and simple, hardly suggested the monumental changes in attitude and political latitude the ratification struggle would involve. The first of its three short paragraphs declared, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.' Paragraphs two and three, the enabling clauses, authorized the Congress to "enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article" and specified that "this amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.'

In the beginning, the ERA seemed certain to pass. On the very day Congress sent the amendment to the states, Hawaii ratified. Over the next two days, Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho, and Iowa followed suit. "Ratification by mid- 1973 looks probable, but not easy," Ms. magazine predicted. By 1977, thirty-five of the required thirty-eight states had ratified.

But no more ever would; finally, in 1982, the amendment died. A thorough postmortem revealed a number of intertwined causes for its death. Certainly ERA suffered from its close association with the bitter struggle over abortion. Of the thirty-five states that ratified, thirty did so before the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. Although the ERA had no direct bearing on the abortion issue, both received the sponsorship and vocal backing of the women's movement, and both threatened to remove authority from state legislatures and concentrate that power in the federal courts.

The ERA also had to contend with the emergence of a strong, well-organized antifeminist opposition, led by Phyllis Schlafly. Superficially, Schlafly seemed an odd candidate to lead women against feminism. A master organizer and brilliant speaker, she had run for public office, published several books, and lectured around the nation. In 1970s terms, she appeared as the model of a liberated woman.

Schlafly testified frequently before congressional committees, always urging more defense spending and fewer resources for social programs. She opposed the ERA as much for its impact on the political system (she thought it a scheme to enlarge government) as its effects on the traditional family. The amendment, she warned in 1977, "is a big grab for vast new federal power. It will take out of the hands of the state legislatures and transfer to Washington the last remaining piece of jurisdiction that the national politicians and bureaucrats haven’ yet put their meddling fingers into."

For these views, Schlafly became a darling of conservatives and won the nickname "Sweetheart of the Silent Majority.' Antifeminism formed part of the emerging New Right in the 1970s, but it became a significant force in its own right, a movement of older, married women and younger religious women disturbed by the achievements and the cultural style of women's liberation. Schlafly and company came into prominence during the ERA fight, asserting that the amendment would harm women by destroying traditional family and sex roles. "The Positive Woman opposes ERA," Schlafly asserted, "because it would be hurtful to women, to men, to children, to the family, to local self-government, and to society as a whole.

It was not just the prospect of shared bathrooms and homosexual marriages that frightened antifeminists, although Schlafly famously warned against both. Rather, ERA opponents worried that the amendment would eliminate all legal and traditional protections for married women,. A woman's right to conjugal support would erode, weakening the legal requirement in many states that a husband provide his wife with a home. Men would be free to abandon their wives without the obligations of alimony or child support. Divorced mothers might lose their children to more affluent ex-husbands in custody suits.

Antifeminists depicted housewifery as a bargain-a privilege to be protected--not as the trap Betty Friedan had identified in The Feminine Mystique. At anti-ERA rallies, women passed out home-baked goods, bearing labels with the motto: “My heart and my hand went into this dough/For the sake of the family please vote no.” The defense of traditional gender roles often reflected powerful religious sentiments. Sexual equality, in many minds, violated biblical authority over women's proper roles and Christian teaching on wifely subservience. But Schlafly made the case in typically blunt language. "If you think diapers and dishes are a never-ending, repetitive routine," she noted "just remember that most of the jobs outside the home are just as repetitious, tiresome, and boring"

But there was another factor more crucial to the defeat of ERA than antifeminism: geography. By 1977, with the exception of Illinois, all of the states that failed to ratify the ERA lay in either the South or the mountain states with large Mormon populations--places where feminist groups lacked organization and influence. Although strong majorities of Americans across the nation, male and female, favored the ERA, ratification required action in Sunbelt states, where the amendment generated little support. In the South, the conservative movement linked the amendment to distant, out-of-touch elites. Sunbelt politicians associated the ERA with both an overweening Washington bureaucracy, intent on controlling life even within the home, and New York sexual permissiveness and perversion.

Thus, the amendment failed--a defeat that proved more significant than the loss of the amendment's rather modest reforms. By the late 1970s, frustration over the amendment's failure and disenchantment with the potential for achieving thoroughgoing change in American society turned many of the most committed feminists away from protests and litigation, away from legal and constitutional reform. At the same time, these women's very experiences in the movement suggested a new strategy. They could focus on nurturing distinct and distinctive women's communities, establishing a female counterculture running parallel to the male-dominated, patriarchal mainstream and affirming values antithetical to it. Their efforts betokened a revival of cultural feminism.

Cultural Feminism and the Reassertion of Difference

"After years of trying to explain things to men and to change the outside world," movement experiences at last "gave birth to sisterhood.” Exhausted "from dredging up facts and arguments for men whom we had previously thought advanced and intelligent," Gloria Steinem explained, "we make another simple discovery. Women understand. We may share experiences, make jokes, paint pictures, and describe humiliations that mean nothing to men, but women understand." These "deep and personal connections of women," Steinem reflected in the pages of Ms., "often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture---all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, seem so difficult to cross.' She no longer felt strange by herself or with a group of women in public. "I feel just fine. I am continually moved to discover I have sisters."

By 1973, a wide network of feminist organizations and institutions had emerged: women's clinics, credit unions, rape crisis centers, bookstores, news- papers, book publishers, and athletic leagues. Activists had established few of these institutions with cultural feminist objectives. They had just formed spontaneously, out of the immediate needs of the women's movement. Few, if any, self-consciously sought to serve a specifically female culture or to construct an explicitly feminist set of separate, alternative institutions.

But by the mid-1970s, the sheer weight and influence of women's institutions had prompted a rethinking of their origins and missions. In 1970, there were no battered women’s shelters in the United States, no rape crisis centers, no services for displaced homemakers. By the mid-1980s, literally thousands of institutions dedicated to women’s needs dotted the landscape. In 1970, American universities offered fewer than twenty courses about women; two decades later, there were more than 30,000 on the undergraduate level alone.

This explosion of feminist scholarship and female institutions reflected not just an expansion of the women’s movement but a reorientation of it. Early Seventies radical feminist publications had titles like "It Air’t Me Babe" "Tooth n Nail "off our backs' "'No More Fun and Games.' Late Seventies cultural feminist publications revealed a new emphasis with names like Amazon Quarterly, Womanspirit, and Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture

Cultural feminism accepted gender difference, but without a sense of hierarchy or inferiority. "Women have been socialized to be passive, “ one publication explained. 'But they also learned to be nurturing, affiliative, cooperative, in short endowed with more truly human qualities than men are currently socialized with.” Cultural feminism pointed not toward mere equality but toward a feminist reconstruction of American society based on gender differences.

Instead of radical egalitarianism, such as Shulamith Firestone's insistence that women’s liberation required the abolition of pregnancy and motherhood, feminists increasingly stressed the positive virtues of female biology and women’s culture. Women’s health advocates campaigned for breastfeeding and natural childbirth; they redefined pregnancy as a gift rather than a burden. The findings of psychologists Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan proved particularly influential in this reassertion of difference. According to Chodorow, girls and boys followed vastly different paths of individuation and identity formation. Sons early learned to separate from their mothers; they became competitive, focused on rules and rights. But daughters discovered themselves through their relationships with their mothers. They thus became empathic, relationship oriented, interested in consensus.

In a series of results published beginning in 1971 and eventually collected in the 1982 book In a Different Voice, Gilligan extended and popularized Chodorow's ideas about female development. Gilligan's most famous conclusions derived from her analysis of the Heinz dilemma, a standard test of children's moral development. Heinz’s wife lay dying, psychologists told children, but he could not afford to buy the medicine that would save her. Should he steal the drug? Boys answered clearly, usually invoking abstract principles of laws and rights: No, Heinz should not steal the drug and violate the law; yes, he should because the right to life supersedes the prohibition on robbery. Girls 'responded differently; often they refused to answer at all. They would reject the terms of the question, attempt to inject new information, seek a negotiated solution. And psychologists would dutifully conclude that girls suffered from arrested moral development.

Gilligan reinterpreted those results. Women were not underdeveloped, she maintained, but other-developed. Girls saw a world of connection and relationship, a world that cohered through human connection rather than through a system of laws. They insisted on solutions to the Heinz dilemma that recognized this set of relationships. Psychologists, Gilligan concluded, have tried to fashion women out of masculine cloth by implicitly adopting the male as the norm. "It all goes back to Adam and Eve," Gilligan wryly added, “a story which shows, among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble"

Celebrations of women's differences gained greater currency in the late 1970s. Theologian Mary Daly, author of such books as Beyond God the Father and GynEcology, argued that feminism had awakened a "new and post- patriarchal spiritual consciousness"--that women possessed a different relationship to the earth and to the divine. In 1979, Barnard College assembled leading figures in academia, politics, and the media for a major women’s studies conference, "The Future of Difference"

But the drive toward cultural feminism derived as much from practical experience as from theory. Women's groups founded new businesses-Diana Press, Olivia Records, Women in Distribution, Feminist Credit Unions. "It's useless to advocate more and more 'political action,"' a founder of Olivia Records argued, "if some of it doesn’t result in the permanent material improvement of the lives of women.' Feminist writers or musicians would not have to please male editors or executives. Women would not have to submit to sexist doctors or bankers. And feminist businesses could provide opportunity and self-sufficiency for activists-economic space truly free of the patriarchy.

Even the Battle of the Sexes reflected the ascendance of cultural feminism. During the late 1960s, the major events in the tennis world finally opened to professionals, ending the phony amateurism and under-the-table payments that had long corrupted the system. But when tournaments openly awarded prize money, women players suffered from a vast disparity in the size of purses. Billie Jean King won the Italian Open in 1970 and earned only one-sixth of what the men's champion earned.

In response, King and six other top players joined with publisher Gladys Heldman and the Philip Morris Tobacco Company to create the Virginia Slims tennis circuit in the fall of 1970. The idea of the Slims tour was to build an autonomous, alternative institution, controlled by women for the benefit of women. The tour-and the players' aggressive promotion of it-allowed the circuit to grow despite constant disruption and opposition from the old-line tennis federations. The Slims tour gradually added tournaments and prize money. Billie Jean King had consecutive seasons winning purses over $100,000, the first woman athlete to accomplish that feat.54

The women’s health movement was perhaps the most substantial achievement of the 1970s push toward separate but different. Feminists opened abortion clinics, natural birth control centers, and more than one hundred freestanding birth centers. Staffed by female midwives, these centers offered alternatives to the anonymous, sterile, technological procedures of most hospital maternity wards, where obstetricians treated pregnancy as a disease and dismissed the concerns of laboring mothers.

This increased attention to women’s bodies and their needs also pointed toward more complex shifts in social behavior, especially with regard to female sexuality. The Seventies witnessed the so-called sexual revolutions problematic term, but still a meaningful one. It referred to a wide spectrum of experimentation, from more permissive attitudes about obscene materials to almost comic accounts of swinging suburbanites and spouse-swapping parties. The sexual revolution involved at least equal parts exploitation and liberation, and feminists remained ever on uneasy terms with it.

Erica Jong's sensational bestseller Fear of Flying crystallized the feminist debate over sexuality when it topped the bestseller charts in 1973-1974. Jong's rornan-A-clef told the story of Isadora, a married woman who flees her husband for a lover and ultimately discovers she must find freedom and fulfillment on her own. The novel featured frank female sexuality and explicit language. Isadora openly rated the physical characteristics and sexual skills of her lovers, talked freely about limp pricks, "silky penises" and her 'unappeasable hunger for men's bodies," and idealized the "Zipless Fuck”--perfect, meaningless sex between strangers. Reviewers (mostly male) read the book as an erotic novel. John Updike praised it as the "most uninhibited, delicious erotic novel a woman ever wrote," and Newsweek called it a "funny, horny first novel that would scare any male who believes women don’t think like that."' Some feminists dismissed the book, finding Isadora naive and weak. NOW's president charged Jong with 'confusing libidinal bluntness with liberation.' Still, many readers recognized Fear of flying as a feminist odyssey of consciousness raising rather than a brief for sexual license. Jong had sketched a portrait of an authentic woman, one who wanted freedom, autonomy, and the right to express herself in many different ways.

Whatever its doubts about the sexual revolution, feminism greatly influenced the new, freer forms of sexuality. Premarital sexuality or sexual assertion of any kind no longer made a woman a social pariah, ostracized as easy or immoral. In fact, the women’s movement revolutionized the understanding and the experience of female sexuality. In the Seventies, Americans discovered the clitoral orgasm (and simultaneously uncovered the "myth" of the vaginal orgasm). This "discovery," of course, did not imply that no one had previously experienced clitoral stimulation. Masters and Johnson's landmark 1966 study, Human Sexual Response, had established that women could experience multiple orgasms in sexual encounters and that female orgasms were anatomically centered in the clitoris. But there had been no such term in the lexicon, no such concept, no understanding of women's sexual pleasure that was not morally suspect.

Feminism popularized a new language and a new ideology of sex. In a famous 1970 essay, Ann Koedt described the vaginal orgasm as a male deception, a tool of domination. Men fear lesbianism, Koedt asserted; they worry "that they will become sexually expendable if the clitoris is substituted for the vagina as the center of pleasure for women.' The myth of the vaginal orgasm also made women invisible and insignificant. It defined women-or, in this case, women's sexuality-only in terms of their benefits to men. "Sexually," Koedt concluded, "a woman was not seen as an individual wanting to share equally in the sexual act, any more than she was seen as a person with individual desires when she did anything else in society."

The debate over female sexuality penetrated popular culture in 1975 with the release of Donna Summer's disco hit "Love to Love You Baby." The record featured sixteen minutes of "persuasive moaning" and inspired rumors that Summer had recorded the song in flagrante delicto.- "Love to Love You Baby" inspired intense controversy. Clearly an expression of female sexual assertion, even sympathetic critics wondered whether the song, like much of the sexual revolution, treated women as liberated individuals& or dehumanized sex objects. But as one defender of the song concluded, "If a woman felt it, don't discount it.' Sex was different after the early 1970s, with all the possibilities and dangers that presented to American women.

More than anything else, however, it was the vexed question of lesbianism that linked assertions of a distinctive feminine sexuality to broader conceptions of an autonomous women's culture. Throughout the 1970s, opponents of women's liberation equated feminism with lesbianism and denounced women’s libbers as hairy-legged, unfeminine man haters. Mainstream feminist organizations Re NOW repeatedly refuted these charges, often taking great pains to distance themselves from the aims of lesbian activists. This cold- shoulder treatment so upset some women that a group of lesbian feminists, led by the writer Rita Mae Brown, resigned from NOW.

Nonetheless, self-identified lesbians played a critical role in the evolution of the women’s movement, supplying much of its theoretical edge and rhetorical thunder and laying the foundations for many women's institutions and organizations. During the 1970s, lesbians identified much more often, and more prominently, with feminism than with the gay rights movement. They defined lesbianism not as a form of sexuality or a community based on sexual orientation, but as an expression of feminine identity-a purer distillation of female culture. Soon after departing from NOW, Radicalesbians circulated "The Woman-Identified Woman." What is a lesbian? the broadside asked. "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” The manifesto laid out the argument for cultural feminism, stressing "the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution”

By the late 1970s, that woman-centered version of feminism would dominate the movement, among lesbians and heterosexuals, younger radicals and older liberals. Although this attitude never entirely displaced the more main- stream legal and political agenda of egalitarian feminism, it became a characteristic way of seeing the world--one that resonated with the broader cultural and religious developments of the decade. In their growing distrust of government and politics and their embrace of a distinctive subculture, feminists echoed the tenor of the times. By the early 1980s, they relied more and more on their own organizations and communities, touting the virtues of local institutions, entrepreneurship, and shared identity. Ironically, feminists shared far more with their new-right enemies than either side recognized.

From 'The Duke' to Alan Alda: Men and Masculinity

As feminism spread, it inevitably affected men as well as women, fracturing the once-dominant male archetype just as it had the female. Men had to face new social conditions: renegotiating family roles at home and confronting women in the workplace, the political arena, the club, and the classroom. By challenging ideas about femininity and women's nature, feminist thinkers also made it clear that conceptions of masculinity were up for grabs. Americans' most basic notions of manhood needed to be worked out; they could no longer be assumed.

A few snapshots framed this shift from John Wayne to Alan Alda; from New York Yankees Iron Man Lou Gehrig to Iron John, the mythic hero of men’s movement leader Robert Bly; from the strong, silent type to the sensitive New Age male.

For postwar Americans, the Duke-movie actor John Wayne-had long conjured the very ideal of American manhood. Wayne embodied at once the western frontiersman of yore and the great cinema heroes of the 1950s. Tough, even violent, and fiercely independent, this emblematic man knew the ways of the world. He lived by a code, even if he did not live by the law. He never revealed his feelings. Although he might be burning up inside, he never showed it. He barely even talked.

John Wayne's starring role in the classic 1948 western Red River offered a potent example of this postwar American machismo. Wayne's characters gruff, tough Texas rancher named Dunson-enters into a dispute with an intrepid younger man played by Montgomery Clift. The audience knows Dunson loves his younger antagonist. Clift's Matthew Garth is the son he never had. The female lead begs Dunson to forgive Garth, but Wayne's character refuses, impassively declaring, "Woman, next time I see him, I'm gonna kill him and there's nothing you can say or do that's gonna change my mind.'

Dunson is torn apart inside, but duty, violent duty, calls. The two men finally meet, but Garth refuses Dunson’s challenge to a gunfight. Calling him yellow, Dunson throws away his six-shooter and socks Garth in the face. A fist- fight ensues until Joanne Dru, the female star, picks up the discarded revolver and stops the fight. In a barrage of words, an unstoppable flow of verbiage these laconic men can never even contemplate, Dru says what they cannot. She had been scared for days, but everyone could see that Garth and Dunson loved each other, that they would never hurt each other. The men look on in silent amazement. These guys can express themselves only through violence; they need women to say for them in words, in emotions, what they feel but cannot or will not say.

During the 1970s, new representations of maleness appeared. Actor Alan Alda became, in the words of Redbook magazine, "America's Sweetheart." He is "something more complicated than just a nice guy," the women's magazine reported in 1976. "He is that interesting combination, a man ambitious and successful in his professional life who also is intensely concerned about his emotional and personal life.' A friend of the women's movement, Alda served as the spokesman for Men for the Equal Rights Amendment. He was a member of the National Commission for the Observance of International Women's Year and a self-declared feminist. Alda embodied the new breed of sensitive man who did the dishes and made professional sacrifices for his family. "You might say," one profile concluded, "that he has the kind of personality that's recently labeled androgynous,combining strengths and values traditionally associated with both masculinity and femininity."

Alda found "it harmful that many people think men and women can only come together for the purposes of sex. I find pleasure in working with women,” he explained, “working for women's rights, talking with women, associating with them, becoming friends." In Ms., the actor laid out the male argument for feminism. The women's movement in general and the ERA in particular, Alda claimed, would liberate men as wen as women. Men, "with all their bravado, have seldom had the courage to stick a flower on their desks"

A spate of serious books emerged in the Seventies to examine the problem that Alda identified-The Male Machine, The Liberated Man, The Hazards of Being Male. All of them diagnosed the suffering that traditional notions of masculinity imposed on men and the benefits of becoming more sensitive, more liberated. Medical science seemed to confirm pop psychology. Seventies authorities noted that men developed more ulcers and died younger than women. Men suffered higher incidences of lung, heart, and liver disease and higher death rates from cancer. They shunned nutritious diets as "rabbit food" and loaded up on unhealthy red meat and martinis. Most ominous, as two cardiologists showed in their 1974 best-seller, Type A Behavior and Your Heart, machismo caused heart attacks. Aggressive, competitive behavior and reserved, repressed emotions constituted the Type A personality; these characteristically male behaviors predicted increased risk of coronary heart disease and premature death.

One of these.1970s excavations of masculinity, The Season's of a Man's Life, suggested that the pivotal life change for men came in their thirties and forties, when they must "experience the emergence and integration of the more feminine aspects of the self." These successful Seventies men possessed the traits that earlier sociological surveys had labeled stereotypically female: interest in their own appearance, aware of the feelings of others, gentle, talkative.

By the end of the decade, profound confusion over men's nature and men's roles would give rise to a self-conscious men’s movement. It would eventually produce the poetry and meditations of Robert Bly, the men's studies movement in academia, the drum-beating retreats and new men’s journals of contemporary America.

Even during the 1950s, Americans had recognized that their cinema heroes represented a lost archetype. They were idealizations of a glorious but vanished male past. Long before Betty Friedan shattered the domestic ideal of the Fifties-with its housewives slaving away in what she called the "comfort- able concentration camp" of the suburban home-other critics had condemned the domestic, suburban ideal as a prison for men. Trapped in gray flannel suits and commuter trains, inmates of the "organization," they led lives of not-so-quiet desperation and railed against their overly comfortable, overly feminized lives.

Social science like William Whyte's Organization Man, novels like Sloane Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the rebellious youth culture of bearded bohemians and leather-clad rock 'n' rollers suggested that American men had become soft, dependent, feminine. They all promoted rebellion against the life of the corporation, the commute, the little league and the barbecue.

To be a man in postwar America had been defined more by its negations than by itself. More than anything else manliness meant not to be womanly- and not to be homosexual. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed particularly intense fears of and hostility toward homosexuality; in fact, Americans linked homo- sexuality closely to communism, that gravest menace of the cold war. It was no coincidence that John Wayne, the era's model of assertive masculinity, also served on the Hollywood Committee for the Re-Election of Joseph McCarthy.

Thus, the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s would play a crucial role in transforming American ideals of masculinity. Most postwar Americans understood sexuality as a spectrum running from most manly to most womanly. They assumed that homosexual men were effeminate, lesbians masculine. For a man to prove his heterosexuality, he had to eschew any effeminate behavior or trait.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, gay rights activists had fought against this stereotype; they had argued that sexual preference was incidental, that homosexual men were regular guys, professionals, working men. But during the late 1960s, a new generation of gay rights protest emerged. just as in the civil rights movement Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers challenged the orientation of older leaders Re Martin Luther King, Jr., and within feminism younger radical feminists had challenged their older liberal allies, a more militant gay politics developed. Inspired by the social movements of the Sixties, the new activism also acknowledged and joined with a growing gay sub- culture in places Re San Francisco's Castro District and New York's Christopher Street.

Stonewall defined the emergence of this new activism. On June 27,1969, police officers from Manhattan's Sixth Precinct entered the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. They expected a routine raid. The Stonewall Inn operated without a liquor license, had reputed ties with organized crime, and featured "scantily clad go-go boys as entertainment.' The Stonewall catered to a young and largely nonwhite clientele, including many drag queens. But the patrons at the Stonewall reacted to the raid in anything but the routine way. According to the Village Voice, "The scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows and a rain of coins descended on the cops.' The Voice reporter "heard several cries of 'let's get some gas,but the blaze of flame which soon appeared in the window of the Stonewall was still a shock." Reinforcements arrived on the scene, but the trouble had barely started. Rioting continued into the night, with angry protesters leading assaults on rows of uniformed police. The next evening, graffiti touting "Gay Power" had appeared along Christopher Street.

Stonewall sparked a nationwide liberation struggle; it also led to more open, assertive statements of homosexuality. The Village Voice's silly headline, "Limp Wrists Are Forgotten," captured a basic truth. Among gay America's many varied subcultures emerged a sexually assertive, muscle-building, leather-wearing, almost hypermacho element. During the 1970s; gay males were associated increasingly with short hair, leather boots, Levi jackets, and tight jeans. In 1978, record producer Jacques Morali playfully exploited the new gay machismo when he dressed struggling musical stage actors as a cowboy, a construction worker, a military man, an Indian chief, a leather-clad biker, and a "hot cop" to form the "Village People.' The disco combo would score platinum hits with ironic invocations of machismo like "Macho Man" and "In the Navy."

The gay rights movement transformed Americans' understanding of homosexuality, and of masculinity in general. Straight men could "soften" themselves without fearing they might be labeled effeminate or latent homosexuals. They could become less aggressive and competitive, more sensitive, more concerned about their appearance, their feelings, and their relationships. "It is now in straight discos," one observer wrote in the Seventies, "that we see soft-looking men"

Feminism also contributed to this rethinking of John-Wayne-ish masculinity. In 1974, Warren Farrell published The Liberated Man, which denounced the insidious effects of the masculine value system, for women and for men. 'If John Wayne-the Moses of masculinity-were to hand down the 'The Ten Commandments of Masculinity,"' Farrell explained, "they would forbid crying or exposed emotions, shows of vulnerability, empathy, or doubt.' Men must cultivate ego, bring home the bacon, devote their lives to work, and "have an answer to all problems at all times.' And "above all. Thou shalt not read The Liberated Man or commit other forms of introspection"

The book identified "twenty-one specific areas in which a man could benefit from what is now called women's liberation.' They included freedom from the responsibilities of being sole breadwinner, so a husband could take risks on the job or pursue more fulfilling work, even if it paid poorly. Liberated women also promised freer, more open sexuality and relief from nagging. "If a woman has her own life and destiny to control," The Liberated Man promised, "she win not be as Rely to feel the need to control her husband"

If a relationship soured, Farrell concluded, it would be easier to break up with a liberated woman without "guilt feelings of leaving her with nothing when she has given up the best years of her life to him.' Farrell and other "liberated men" recognized that many feminist achievements-Re liberalized divorce laws and weakening taboos against sexual expression outside marriage-benefited men. In the 1970s, men initiated most divorces under the new no-fault laws, and more American men chose to live as bachelors. The number of men living by themselves doubled over the course of the decade.

In The Male Machine, Marc Fasteau described traditional notions of masculinity as a "Male Mystique.' A male machine lurked in the background of every man, Fasteau warned, "a special kind of being, different from women, children, and men who don’t measure up.' This stereotype harnessed men, restricted them, cut them off from their true, authentic selves. "He has armor plating," Fasteau wrote, "which is virtually impregnable. His circuits are never overrun by irrelevant personal signals.”

Conforming to these stereotypes forced men to repress fears, to stifle the compassion and sensitivity that women were encouraged to feel. In the wake of feminism, Fasteau imagined a future of more natural, androgynous gender roles: "In such a society girls will be allowed to play baseball, and boys win be allowed to play with dolls; girls will call boys for dates, and boys won’t always pay for the rnovie"

Gloria Steinem hailed Fasteau’s conclusions. "Yes" she affirmed, "this book is about the destructiveness of the sexual caste system" and "supports most feminist criticisms of current injustice' " But Fasteau and his fellow sensitive men did not merely voice a condescending sympathy for women’s liberation, "the usual let me help you liberalism that demands gratitude, and probably continued inferiority, in return' " Fasteau and his fellow sufferers applied the insights of feminism to themselves, raised their own consciousness, and changed their own lives.

Masculinity, all the 1970s explorations of the man problem agreed, caused endless suffering. And Seventies men paid heed. At decade's end, an Esquire magazine survey of "today's young men" discovered widespread uncertainty over gender roles. Young men valued success and professional achievement every bit as much as their stuffy elders; they also wanted families. But these twentysomething males insisted on freedom and independence. They feared responsibility and worried about stress. They did not want the heart attacks, the ulcers, the nervous breakdowns of their own Organization Man fathers.

These confused young men tended to put off life decisions; Esquire called them "the Postponing Generation.' According to pop sociologist Gail Sheehy, "Young men aren’t the same anymore." A new dream had "seeped out of the social upheaval of the Sixties and has been progressively softening the edges of the old success mold.' American men in their twenties "don’t want to work hard. They demand more time for 'personal growth.' They are obsessed by what they call 'trade-offs' in life.' Responding to an Esquire magazine survey, these men ranked "being loving" highest on the list of personal qualities they deemed important. "Being ambitious" and "Being able to lead effectively" fell to the bottom of the list. "I don’t think I would consider myself overindulgent," one young man reported. "My father would. But my generation, even those of us who are big achievers, has respect for people who manage to create meaningful lives for themselves doing something other than work. My con- temporaries see being laid-back as a virtue. '

These sensitive, self-exploring, unafraid-to-cry men became the subject of some fun. A decade later, folksinger Christine Lavin would lampoon them in song as "Sensitive New Age Guys." These men "Re to talk about their feelings." They cry at weddings and "are hard to tell from women.' But although "their consciousness is always raising," their "tax-free income is amazing.' They are even "concerned about your orgasm, even though they think it's more important that they have 'em.

By the time of Lavin's parody, the 1970s conflicts over masculinity had received the attention of a vast, self-conscious men's movement. It began formally in 1970 with the founding of the first men's center at Berkeley, over the next two decades, it would spread across the nation. Men's forums and consciousness-raising groups appeared, along with weekend retreats in the woods, men's studies sections in bookstores, even a political mobilization based on assumptions about men's special identity and aggrieved status.

During the Seventies, the men's movement appeared in three distinct manifestations. First, there emerged a tiny political movement organized around so-called men's issues Re reforming the child custody laws, which usually awarded children to mothers. This movement originated with small groups like Boston's Fathers for Equal Justice and eventually found its institutional home in the National Organization for Men. Founded in 1983, the organization modeled itself In the women's movement and consciously sought to promote men’s rights.

Second, a men's studies movement developed in academia. It spawned numerous books and journals and eventually received much attention from the national press. Unlike the National Organization for Men, men's studies arose as an outgrowth of women's studies scholarship and remained sympathetic to feminism.

The third, and by far the biggest and most important, element was the mythopoetic men's movement-the motley assemblage of drum-beating retreats, New Age-style group therapy, men's health magazines and cosmetics, poetry readings, and celebrations of primal masculinity. Led by poet Robert Bly, this phenomenon burst into the national imagination after Bly's appearance on a 1990 Bill Moyers TV special and the simultaneous publication of his book Iron John. But Bly and others had originated the movement during the mid-1970s, in the midst of their own wrestling with new ideas about man- hood. By 1974, more than 300 men's groups had organized and one journalist heard "the first, faltering footsteps of a men's liberation movement"

Like so many of his contemporaries, Bly denounced the narrowness and limitations of inherited notions of masculinity. 'We who are now alive," the early Bly concluded, "represent the tail end of a long development of masculine consciousness,' a flight away "from the mother goddess .... American humanity has gone as far as it's going to go in the direction of masculine consciousness.' Bly discovered he could no longer write poems relying only on his masculine side; he turned to the mother goddess within as a "matter of desperation.

But the "Deep Masculine" soon reemerged. In 1975, Bly organized a "Great Mother" conference for writers, artists, and intellectuals. On the men's beach, from which women were banned, male conferees constructed a temenos, a giant penis. They chanted, sang, and talked, engaging in ceremonies that somehow merged premodern initiation rites with New Age encounter sessions. Out of this strange event, Bly and Re-minded men built a vast movement.

The mythopoetic men's movement repudiated both the macho and sensitive models of masculinity. Bly himself rejected "the savage within men,' which he blamed for much violence, environmental degradation, and other evils, but he also wanted to "dethrone the Great Mother" that had turned men into wimps. In the aftermath of feminism, Bly and his allies attempted to forge a new American man.

Bly agreed with Alan Aida and Marc Fasteau that 'the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in High School do not work in life.' But Bly pointed American men in a different direction, toward ancient texts and oral traditions. "It is in the old myths,' Bly explained, "that we hear of Zeus energy, that positive leadership energy in men, that popular culture declares does not exist; from King Arthur we learn the value of the male mentor in the lives of young men.' Men should not reject the troubling, domineering, aggressive sides of their nature, but accept it, nurture it, channel it.

The Seventies had witnessed a flurry of new identities and associations; Americans found new affiliations, alternatives to the public sphere and the national community. Even feminism split into numerous factions that disagreed as often as they united. The rise of self-conscious masculinity organized-and divided-men over questions that many had never previously realized existed. If John Wayne represented one pole, the Hegelian thesis, and Alan Aida the other, the Hegelian antithesis, Esquire, Robert Bly, and the National Organization for Men formed the synthesis. The men's movement often sparked ridicule, but what it was trying to accomplish was no joke. For example, the revised model of masculinity it forged stimulated new interest in fatherhood.

The Seventies witnessed a redefinition of fatherhood. No longer would Americans accept and even applaud disconnected, distant, disciplinarian dads. Fathers wanted, and their families expected, much more paternal involvement in child rearing. Esquire's 1979 survey reported that raising children gave young men more life satisfaction than any other experienced

In 1979, Robert Benton directed a film investigating these new family dynamics. Kramer vs. Kramer starred Meryl Streep as a wife and mother who splits, leaving her young son with his father (played by Dustin Hoffman), a distant parent who hardly knows his son and has no idea how to run the house- hold. Over the course of the film, that all changes, and Hoffman's Kramer becomes a devoted father, even losing his high-powered job in the process. Kramer cooks meals, arranges play dates, reads bedtime stories. Ultimately he fights-and wins-a custody battle against his ex-wife. At the film’s end, Kramer is a lesser advertising executive but a greater man.

Many real men expressed similar sentiments. In "Conflicting Interests.' one of the first columns to run in the New York Times's "About Men” feature, Harvard professor Donald H. Bell noted the confusion and resentment men of his generation had experienced. "There is a sense that somehow we have been deprived of the chance to become the sort of men we expected to be as we grew up-men who, like those of earlier generations, possess a sure-footed sense of what is expected and of how to meet those expectations.' But in the end, for Bell, the career sacrifices his new familial duties compelled proved more satisfying than conventional achievements. After spending a workday at home with his sick toddler, Bell "found that I had learned something further about what it means to be a man, something that goes beyond simply bringing home a paycheck.”

Still, despite these metamorphoses in fatherhood, much of the old style endured, and confusion prevailed where there had once been consensus. When surveyed by pollsters, men affirmed the priority of spending time with children and helping out with the housework. But fathers and husbands only slowly increased their actual time commitment to family activities, even when their wives were working full time. "More couples wanted to share and imagined they did one study of family dynamics in the late 1970s concluded. But 'behavior changed little.'

The Battle over Family Values

Such dramatic changes in rnale and female roles were bound to induce anxiety and conflict in family life. A 1980 Gallup poll reported that 45 percent of Americans felt that family life had gotten worse over the past decade; only 37 percent thought it had improved. This uncertainty came to a head in two major events of the late 1970s: the Houston conference to celebrate International Women's Year in 1977 and the White House Conference on the Family in 1980.

In many ways, the November 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston marked the crest of the women's movement. Feminists gathered to consolidate their achievements, legitimate their influence, and introduce an ambitious agenda for further action. "Houston," Gloria Steinem asserted, rep- resented a "Constitutional Convention for American women. They ratified the existing Constitution by demanding full inclusion in it, and then outlined the legislative changes that must take place if female citizens are to fully enjoy those rights for the first time.

The conference report, What Women Want, laid out an impressive list of demands. It called for feminist education in the schools, including books and curricula that would "restore to women their history and their achievements and give them knowledge and methods to reinterpret their life experiences." It warned about glass ceilings in industry, politics, and academe and recommended steps to promote women to the highest levels of American institutions. The conference also resolved that the federal government "should assume a major role in directing and providing comprehensive, voluntary, flexible-hour, bias-free, non-sexist quality child care.”

The four-day conference marked the culmination of months of preparation and years of political action. It assembled more than 20,000 women (only 2,000 of whom served as official delegates) and attracted many of the most famous women in America. Bella Abzug chaired the proceedings, and participants included first ladies Rosalynn Carter, Lady Bird Johnson, and Betty Ford, tennis champion Billie Jean King, actress Jean Stapleton, and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Many activists saluted the "spirit of Houston." "If you say 'Houston' to people, that connects you, just like that,' one woman told an interviewer. "It gives you entree, like the 'old boys network."' Reporting back to its English readers, the Evening Standard declared, "The women’s movement is now a truly national, unified engine of change which could conceivably become the cutting edge of the most important issues America faces in the next decade "

But the spirit of Houston proved too intoxicating for sober assessment. Already in 1977, the policy-oriented reforms the conference championed struck many Americans, including many committed feminists, as hopelessly ineffective and bureaucratic. The conclave's central demand-immediate ratification of the ERA-would prove unattainable. Clear-eyed observers could tell the amendment would wither in the harsh, dry soil of the Sunbelt, where the tenacity of antiabortion and antiferninist counterprotests stunned the conferees.

In Missouri, antiferninists led by Phyllis Schlafly actually took over the del egate nominating process for the Houston conference. Arriving in chartered buses on voting day, a horde of New-Right women registered at the door and overwhelmed the feminists who had assembled for a three-day regional planning session. After electing a conservative delegation, this "new suffragist" faction departed in their buses without attending any of the workshops or entering into dialogue with the rest of the participants. Similar guerrilla actions took place in other states, so that antifeminist women controlled about one- fifth of the seats in Houston.

While the National Women's Conference convened, Schlafly organized a counterconference across the city. The "Pro-Family rally" drew large crowds and considerable media attention. "Houston will finish off the women's movement," Schlafly crowed. "It will show them off for the radical, anti-family, pro- lesbian people they are' " The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority did not fire far off-target. Indeed, the New-Right opposition, not the woman's movement, would emerge as the "national, unified engine of change," the real cutting edge of the next decade.

This momentum shift became evident during the 1980 White House Conference on the Family. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter had proposed a national conference on family life, wanting 'to see what we can do, not simply as a government, but as a nation to strengthen the family." After winning the election, the administration repeatedly delayed the conference. More than most other Democrats, Carter and his top aides understood the growing power of evangelical Christians and Sunbelt conservatives. The Houston conference had prominently featured radical feminists and lesbian activists, and the president realized that association with such militants would not help his campaign for reelection. The administration moved slowly and laboriously to redeem Carter's campaign pledge, attempting to install moderate elements like the Red Cross, church groups, and Planned Parenthood in leadership positions.

But the administration could not control the planning or delegate selection processes. Conservative, pro-family activists assailed the dominance of profeminist, pro-ERA, prochoice forces. In some states, like Virginia and Oklahoma, the New Right took over the state meetings. In New York, an influential state legislator threatened to hold up funding for the state's delegation if the governor did not include more "pro-family, pro-life" members. In Alabama, Governor Forrest H. James announced that his state would not participate in the conference. "Terminology used in White House guidelines" the governor's wife complained, did not "establish traditional Judeo-Christian values.' Governor and Mrs. James found the conference's directive to choose delegates without regard to sexual orientation and to respect differences in lifestyle and family structure 'offensive" and believed that they in no way reflected "the basic concepts of most Alabamians.'

The White House Conference on the Family convened not in Washington, but in three regional conclaves during the summer of 1980. President Carter attended the Baltimore meeting in June and tried to balance contending interests. "Where Government involvement is helpful, let it be strengthened," he declared in his opening remarks. 'Where it is harmful, let it be changed." But the president's plea for cooperation fell on deaf ears. Antifeminist groups stormed out of the Baltimore meeting, allowing healthy majorities to endorse abortion rights and the ERA. "The Baltimore Conference,' conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick complained, "had been stacked, packed, and rigged to produce these prepared affirmations. Fiasco No. 2 and Fiasco No. 3 will follow identical scripts. '

In Minneapolis, the profamily delegates stayed, and the rival factions remained more balanced. After heated debate, 6,000 southern and Midwestern delegates endorsed the ERA and rejected a ban on abortion, but the conclave nonetheless approved a definition of families that excluded homosexual relationships. The Minneapolis meeting also denounced the domination of public institutions by "secular humanism. '

In the end, the White House conference reached broad agreement on such noncontroversial measures as encouraging employers to adopt flex-time, efforts to stem drug and alcohol abuse, and home assistance for the disabled. But the conflicts over ERA, abortion, and government social spend- ing pointed to a tidal wave of discontent that had been gathering throughout the Seventies. Americans distrusted the political institutions in Washington and resented the cultural authority of New York and Hollywood. They relied more and more. on their own initiative, on constructing alternative institutions, nurturing alternative private cultures.

In the early 1970s, these rumblings of dissent had cloaked themselves most often in reformist garb-feminists and racial minorities, New Age gurus, independent films, and angry punks had effected the most change. But by decade's end, the storm approached from a different direction. With northerners squabbling over petty differences, the Southerners, who had long bridled at the arrogance of the eastern establishment, came closer to defining the nation's familial values. Evangelical Christians defended their own underground culture; ordinary citizens preferred building their own amenities to spending their tax dollars on public services. In the background, amid the wasted days and disco nights of the 1970s, rumbled a new, furious political movement. Thunder was gathering on the right.