The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [6]
The old wars still divide us. In the Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, ten miles from Peoria where I grew up, a group of women have filed the largest lawsuit in sexual harassment history, against men alleged to have subjected them to mauling of buttocks and breasts and obscene name-calling, “slut” and “whore,” as well as refusing to give them the training and support they needed in their nontraditional jobs. In that part of Illinois, with the Caterpillar strike lost, those Mitsubishi jobs were the only good jobs left. The men were clearly threatened as women began to take those jobs. I was proud of NOW, the National Organization for Women (which I helped start when I saw we needed a movement to get beyond the feminine mystique and participate as equals in the mainstream of society), when it went to Japan to be joined by forty-five Japanese women’s organizations to take on Mitsubishi in its own base. But women’s victory over male abuse can’t last, isn’t solid, until the causes of that insecurity and rage are addressed by and for women and men.
Still, the new power of women is being felt all over the world now as was made clear in 1995 at the Beijing conference. When the authoritarian Chinese government could not get the Olympics, it welcomed the UN World’s Women’s Conference, expecting the women to shop and pose in pretty pictures against picturesque Chinese backdrops. When 40,000 women from women’s organizations, in movement all over the world, demanded visas, and protested at Chinese embassies when they were denied, the Chinese government tried to wall off the nongovernment conference into an isolated suburb. But they could not stop the women of the world. Told they could demonstrate only at a children’s playground, women from Tibet who had been denied visas brought CNN to that playground and, shrouded in black, took their story to the whole world. Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted “women’s rights are human rights” to the whole world. The official delegates to that UN conference were, of course, women now, empowered women, where twenty years ago they were men or wives and secretaries of male officials who took their government’s seats at the crucial votes. The women this time not only declared a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and her childbearing as a universal human right, but declared the genital mutilation of little girls a crime against humanity. Under the feminine mystique, men all over the world took for granted their right to beat or abuse their wives. Now, in the United States and, after Beijing, in the world, they no longer can assume that right. In the United States, the Department of Justice has set up an office to train police to deal with violence against women.
Violence against women seems to be increasing in the United States, partly because women are reporting as abuse what they used to accept passively as private shame, but maybe also because men’s increasing frustration and desperation is being taken out on women. Studies and reports from California, Connecticut, and elsewhere show an increase in sexual abuse and violence against women, as well as suicide, child abuse, and divorce, in the face of corporate downsizing, and the lack of community, the dwindling of time and concern for larger purposes in the “me” decade. But women’s concerns now go beyond their own security. It was concern for their families, and not only their own families but those poorer or otherwise less fortunate, that motivated American women in 1996 to rise up against the Republican’s threats to cut Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Social Security, student loans, child immunizations, and the protection of the environment. Co-opting feminist rhetoric did not get women’s votes for politicians who threatened the welfare of children, old people, the sick, and the poor. Abstractions of “balance the budget” did not mask for women the danger of