The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [219]
And during that summer of 1970, I started trying to organize a women’s political caucus; later, it stuck together enough to get Bella Abzug elected to Congress. She and Gloria Steinem joined me as conveners of our August 26 Women’s Strike for Equality march. So many women who had been afraid before joined our march that day; we, and the world, suddenly realized the possibilities of women’s political power. This power was first tested in the summer of 1972 in Miami when, for the first time, women played a major role in the political conventions. Although inexperienced caucus leaders may have been too easily co-opted by Nixon or McGovern, or infiltrated by Watergate agents, they brought change to the political arena. They won commitments from both parties on child-care, preschool, and after-school programs. And Shirley Chisholm stayed in the Democratic race right to the end. By 1976, I predict, even the Republicans will have a woman running seriously for vice-president, if not for president.
And so most of the agenda of Stage 1 of the sex-role revolution—which is how I now see the women’s movement for equality—have been accomplished, or are in the process of being resolved. The Equal Rights Amendment was approved by Congress with hardly a murmur in either house after we organized the National Women’s Political Caucus. The amendment’s main opponent, Emanuel Celler, has been retired from Congress by one of the many new young women who, these days, are running for office instead of looking up Zip Codes. The Supreme Court has ruled that no state can deny a woman her right to choose childbirth or abortion. Over 1,000 lawsuits have been filed forcing universities and corporations to take affirmative action to end sex discrimination and the other conditions that keep women from getting top jobs. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company has been ordered to pay $15 million in reparations to women who didn’t even apply for jobs better than telephone operator before because such jobs weren’t open to women. Every professional association, newspaper office, television station, church, company, hospital, and school in almost every city has a women’s caucus or a group taking action on the concrete conditions that keep women down.
Lately, I’ve been asked to lead consciousness-raising sessions for the men who plan the training of guidance counselors in New York and Minnesota, priests in Missouri, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and even investment bankers. (I’ve also organized the First Women’s Bank & Trust Company to help women get control of their own money and use their economic power.) The State Department has said that women can’t be fired from the Foreign Service just because they are married and that secretaries can’t be told to go for coffee. Women are beginning to change the very practice of medicine by establishing self-help clinics that enable women to take active responsibility for their own bodies. Psychoanalytic conferences ask me, and other movement women, to help them change their definition of feminine and masculine. Women are being ordained as ministers and rabbis and deacons, though the Pope says they still can’t say Mass. And the nuns and priests whose ecumenical rebellion is on the front edge of the sex-role revolution are asking, “Is God He?”
The women’s movement is no longer just an American possibility. I’ve been asked to help organize groups in Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Sweden, France, Israel, Japan, India, and even in Czechoslovakia and other Socialist countries. I hope that by next year we’ll have our first world conference of feminists, perhaps in Sweden.
The United States Census Bureau reports a drastic decline in the birth rate, which I credit as much to women’s new aspirations as to The Pill. The women’s movement is strong enough now to bring out