The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [4]
Consider in 1996 that the issue of abortion as women’s choice was the crucial issue splitting the Republican party. Long since the women’s movement declared the basic right of a woman to choose whether or when to have a child, long since the Supreme Court declared that right as inalienable as any right specified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, as they were originally written of by and for the people that were men, long since the Democratic party committed itself to the right to choose, and long since the fundamentalist Religious Right has been fighting a vicious rearguard action, harassing and bombing abortion clinics. The Republican party won elections in the past inflaming fears and hate over the issue of abortion. In 1996 their platform’s demand for a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion again, putting the fetus over the life of the woman, alienated many Republican women and men, a last desperate attempt to turn the clock back. As it became clear that women, now registered to vote in increasing majority over men, would elect the next president of the United States, not just choice but issues like family leave, the right to women not to be forced out of hospitals less than 48 hours after giving birth, the right of parents to take time off to take children to the dentist, or for a parent-teacher appointment became serious political business.
While some media, ads, and movies may still try to define women only or mainly as sex objects, it’s no longer considered chic or even acceptable by much of America. Far from being unspeakable and invisible, sexual abuse of women and less overt forms of sexual harassment are now considered serious enough crimes to bring down a senator or Supreme Court justice or even a president. In fact, the media’s, political muckrakers’, and even feminists’ obsession with such charges, which originated as an expression of women’s new empowerment, now begins to seem almost diversionary. In the focus on sexual harassment, sexual politics has become obsessed with what may in fact be a dangerous symptom of increasing male rage and frustration over economic anxieties, job downsizing, stagnant wages, and career impasse or decline. Sexual politics, we remind ourselves, started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique. It was an explosion of women’s pent-up anger and rage against the put-downs they had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, the rage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands and kids. That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement, and subsided with each advance woman made toward her own empowerment, her full personhood, freedom.
But sexual politics now feeds the politics of hate and the growing polarization of America. It also masks the real threats now to women’s empowerment and men’s—the culture of corporate greed, the downsizing of jobs hitting even college-educated white males, with nearly a 20 percent loss of income in the last five years, to say nothing of minority, blue-collar, and those with less education.1 A backlash from the men, egged on by media and political hatemongers, can make scapegoats of women again. But women are no longer the passive victims they once felt themselves to be. They cannot be pushed back easily into the feminine mystique, though some very shrewd women like Martha Stewart are making mega-millions on elaborate do-it-yourself decor and cuisine, selling pretend feminine