[Chaka Khan- I'm Every Woman]

 Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Why are we listening to Chaka Khan instead of the usual theme?

[Chaka Khan- I'm Every Woman]

 Brian: Here's why. Now, we continue our series; The Eights: A Brief History of the American Culture Wars, Decade by Decade. Today, we arrive in 1978, by which time the modern culture wars as we generally think of them had really arrived. The US had always had a culture war and a legal war and a fighting war over racial equality. But the new ways of thinking about family and religion and sexuality that had emerged in the 1960s were becoming more mature and also causing a new kind of backlash. Tomorrow, we'll look at how the environment protecting the earth and our public health became cultural issues, not just about medicine and science.

Today, we focus on women's rights as a culture war issue, as you may have figured out from that Chaka Khan selection. How did the simple notion that women should be treated equally to men under the law and in the workplace become a source of such fierce backlash? Our first piece of historical audio will be from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In the '70s, Ginsburg was an ACLU lawyer focusing on women's rights. At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1993, she was asked why she led the way to replace the term sex discrimination with the term gender discrimination.

Justice Ruth Bader: In the '70s, when I was at Columbia and writing briefs about distinctions based on sex and writing articles and speeches, I had a secretary. She said, I've been typing this word sex and let me tell you, the audience that you're addressing, the men that you were addressing- and they were all men in the appellate courts in those days- the first association of that word is not what you're talking about. I suggest that you use a grammar book term; use the word gender. It will ward off distracting associations.

[laughter]

Brian: Ruth Bader Ginsburg at her confirmation hearing for Supreme Court recalling the 1970s. As that decade progressed, there were notable firsts. In the political arena in '72, Brooklyn Congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, became the first African American woman to run for the Democratic nomination for president. She talked, at the time, about the need for women in high public office.

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm: Yes. I, definitely, am feeling and recognizing that is a result of over 20 years in political life, only emerging eight years ago publicly, that there is a great need for more women in the political arena. I happen to believe that there are certain aspects of legislation that probably would be given much more attention if we had more women's voices in the halls of your legislatures, on the City, State, and National level. Legislation that pertains to daycare centers, education, social services, mental services; the kind of legislation that has to do with the conservation and preservation of the most important resources that any nation has, and that is the human resources.

Brian: Shirley Chisholm in 1972. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision overturning anti-abortion laws came in '73. In '76, with Jimmy Carter nominated for president in the Democratic Party, Texas Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, became the first African American woman to speak at a Democratic Convention.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan: We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group but all the people, has an obligation to actively- underscore actively- seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement. Obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition; the government must remove them.

Brian: Congresswoman Barbara Jordan at the Democratic Convention in 1976. As in those Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan clips, gender equality was taking its place side by side with racial equality in top-line political circles in a way that had not been the case even in the '60s. Throughout the decade, women were becoming more active in raising issues like equal pay in the workplace, representation in government and more equality of power in the home as well.

The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution became a defining issue, but a big backlash developed at the same time. We'll talk about the backlash too, because that's what makes a culture war. Probably the most well-known backlash leader was Phyllis Schlafly. For example, she said this about feminism on Good Morning America in 1978.

Phyllis Schlafly: I think what feminism does is to teach women to put their-- Well, in the first place, it's a negative outlook on life. It teaches women that they've been oppressed and discriminated against and the cards are stacked against them. Secondly, it teaches them that they should put their own self-fulfillment over every other value. Now, it's a free country for those who choose that, but I think that marriage and motherhood require a lot of social compromises.

Brian: Coming up, we'll hear Phyllis Schlafly and feminist, Betty Friedan, from an ERA debate and more historical audio, but let's bring in our guest for The Eights today. It's New York Times columnist, Gail Collins, who among the many things she has done in her career is to write the book; When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. Originally published in 2009. Gail, thanks so much for being part of The Eights and welcome back to WNYC.

Gail Collins: It's an honor.

Brian: We'll get to the ERA specifically as we go, but give us the big picture first, and especially for younger listeners who didn't live through those years, how feminism became so prominent in the '70s?

Gail: The Civil Rights Movement had been the great thing that had kind of mobilized, particularly young people, but everybody was sort of looking at change and progress in the '60s. That gave birth, really, to a lot of the people who had worked on those projects in the South, who had fought for civil rights, went back to their own homes and looked around and said, what's going on around here? One of the things that became really, really, really important was the women's movement. If you'd been around in that period, in the '60s and the early '70s, things were moving so fast.

It was, truly, everything was changing, it seemed, overnight. Suddenly, all these Bills were being passed. Women were getting rights to equal credit, to equal employment opportunities, all kinds of court decisions were being made, and everybody's vision of what their future was going to be seemed to be transformed. It was the most exciting time possible. When you think about how gender in the Western civilization had been regarded for millennia; suddenly, in a very short period of time, in less than a decade, you had this transformation. It was just amazing.

Brian: Betty Friedan's book; The Feminine Mystique, actually came out in the early '60s- 1963, still the height of the Mad Men era. What was The Feminist Mystique and why was it so influential?

Gail: Friedan wrote a book from the perspective of the full-time housewife, really, which almost everybody had been at that period of time. Everybody who was middle class, who could afford to stay at home, wanted to get married, have children and be a full-time housewife. That was the goal. Suddenly, Betty Friedan who had met that goal in her own life and had found herself to be wildly bored and dissatisfied with it, wrote this book saying, "Hey, this is not the best possible outcome of all worlds. This can be really boring. Let's talk about getting jobs. Let's talk about having a life that involves more than this ideal we have built up of the full-time housewife staying at home with the kids while her husband goes out and supports the family."

It was huge. Everybody was talking about. Everybody that I ran into later when I was writing my book who was of that era, who had been a housewife in the 1960s and '70s, said that book; that was the thing. We talked about it. Me and my friends, we started a book club. It was just humongous.

Brian: That's a great start. We're going to take a break. When we continue with Gail Collins, we'll actually open it up for some of your oral histories. Including, on that very point, who listening right now remembers reading The Feminine Mystique in the 1970s? I guess really the '60s or '70s because of when it came out. Who listening right now remembers being a woman in the 1970s and what the emerging modern feminist movement meant to you and your life or your way of thinking? 212-433-WNYC. We'll do that.

We'll also hear more historical audio including Phyllis Schlafly and Betty Friedan debating each other over the Equal Rights Amendment, so stay with us as we continue with; The Eights: A Brief History of the American Culture Wars, Decade by Decade, with Gail Collins, and you, and historical audio in 1978 today. Stay tuned.

[Gloria Gaynor - I will Survive]

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue our series; The Eights: A Brief History of the American Culture Wars, Decade by Decade. We're in 1978 today, asking how the simple notion that women should be treated equally to men led to such a backlash and helped to spark what we consider the culture wars today.

Listeners, you know about the big women's marches on Washington of 2017 and 2018, obviously after the election of Donald Trump, but there was also a very big women's march of an estimated 100,000 people in 1978 in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. The proposed amendment to the Constitution that simply said, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. And the Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article and this Article shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. That was it. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.

Now, spoiler alert; it came close but has never been ratified by enough states because of the backlash from people like culture warrior, Phyllis Schlafly.

Phyllis: The laws of all the 50 states say that the husband must provide the financial support for his wife. These are good laws. These are laws which give to the wife her right to be a full-time homemaker. Laws which establish the obligation of the husband and father to provide the financial support of his family. These laws are designed to keep the family together, to give the baby a mother in the home. They're good laws, but they're not sex-equal.

If we have it in our Constitution that you can never make any law that has a difference of treatment based on sex, all those laws must become sex-equal. They cannot have a difference of treatment. Now, what will ERA do to the law that says the husband must support his wife?

Brian: Phyllis Schlafly in a 1977 speech there. We'll hear more as we go, including a clip from the Phyllis Schlafly-Betty Friedan ERA debate. We continue with our guests for today; New York Times, columnist, Gail Collins, whose credits include the book; When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. This was originally published in 2009.

Gail, you actually write that the ERA might have passed were it not for that one woman, Phyllis Schlafly. Why was she so opposed, and why was she so effective?

Gail: She was really-- I never met her until she was pretty well retired, but the women in the movement who ran into her, who debated her, who had arguments with her, were just driven so crazy by her. I think it was Betty Friedan who threatened to sock her once [chuckles] or something, but there was a very strong sense of-- The craziest thing about Phyllis Schlafly was that she was on a crusade to protect the domestic housewife's right to live a traditional woman's life at home.

She was the mother of six children, who gave more than a 100 speeches a year, who wrote tons and tons of books, who never stopped working, in fact. One of the things that most drove the women's movement crazy about Phyllis Schlafly was that she was living out the dream of every woman who thought about that someday she'd like to break free of her normal traditional housewife standards and go out into the world. She was doing it all, but she was doing it for this opposite cause. It drove everybody crazy, but she was extremely effective.

I think one of the reasons was that she came at a moment in history when women who had been told all their lives that their highest achievement would be to get married and have children and to run a good household while their husband worked; who had lived through that forever and thought that was what they were supposed to do and that that's what they were being honored for, were suddenly being told, in the '70s, that they were failures. That they were slaves. That they were prostitutes. That they were staying home and they were not doing anything, and they should all get out and get jobs.

It was a very traumatic moment and it sort of fed into the whole cultural rights thing that was moving up at that time. As you said, there was Roe v. Wade. Suddenly, we had abortion rights, which in many states, people had never even thought about before. There were all these changes and this fed into it. The stunning fact that the Equal Rights Amendment- which had been passed almost unanimously, one state after the other as soon as Congress passed it, you could just see the states lining up wanting to be next- suddenly, it came to a screeching halt. It was one of the most astonishing things I had ever seen covered in politics.

Brian: You're saying a couple of Schlafly moments in the book that particularly infuriated and were effective against the feminists, like this one that I found the clip off after reading it in your book. In 1977, in Cincinnati, after she thanked the sponsor; the Daughters of the American Republic-

Phyllis: I would like also to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come.

[laughter]

Phyllis: I love to say that because it irritates the women's livers more than anything I say.

[laughter]

Phyllis: Actually, I can't complain about my husband ever interfering with my civil liberties. Every time we have an argument, he always assures me of my Constitutional right to remain silent.

[laughter]

Brian: That sounds like a Rodney Dangerfield line that would be delivered from the other side- from the male chauvinist side- and she delivers it as a woman with such glee against feminism.

Gail: Yes. Nobody knew much about her husband. He just didn't show up much in the outside world, but I can't imagine what it must've been like to have a wife who was traveling 200-odd-days of the year, giving speeches, writing books; when she was at home, giving birth to six babies, three of whom were in diapers at the same time. I don't know what Mr. Schlafly was doing, but I'm sure he was in the background picking up a lot of the extra effort.

Brian: For the listener, oral history portion of The Eights today, who remembers being a woman in the 1970s and what feminism meant to you at that time? We also put out the call a few minutes ago for anyone who remembers reading Betty Friedan's, The Feminist Mystique, in either the '60s or the '70s, or how it influenced you or anyone you knew then? 212-433-WNYC. Let's go to Jean in Mount Kisco. Hi, Jean. You're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Jean: Brian, how are you

Brian: Good, thank you.

Jean: I'm so glad to speak to you today.

Brian: Great to have you on the air.

Jean: I was 17 in 1978, but I read Betty Friedan's book in college, and I always felt that her book was really for upper class women. We were middle class. My father was a fireman. My mother had her own business and all of my aunts worked. I didn't meet any mothers who didn't work until I went to college and met very upper class kids whose mothers never worked. Like I said, all of my friends, all of my family members, their mothers worked. So, I always felt like her book spoke to very upper class women who could already afford to stay home.

Brian: Did it make you identify less with the feminist movement in general?

Jean: A bit, when I was 17, 18, 19. Now that the movement has moved on to be more inclusive, I identify with it more, but I had a working mother from the day I was born so I didn't identify with it then.

Brian: Jean, thank you so much. Gail, that was an issue then. It was kind of an invisible issue then for the most part, at least to most White feminists, and it's even an issue now; the intersectionality, the class issues, as well as race issues that should inform what feminism is.

Gail: Yes. There was certainly a time, in the '60s and early '70s in particular, when the women's movement; because it was reacting so strongly to that sense of patriarchy and women must stay home-- If you read women's magazines, for instance, in that period, they were all about staying home and taking care of the kids and that was the whole point of your life. There was a violent reaction against that. Against the idea that that would have to be your future. Because of it, there were some things said about traditional housewives during that time that were really unfortunate and really unfair and really mean. It was part of the rhetoric of the moment, and you could understand why any woman who was a housewife and who was working, too, would get really ticked off at that kind of verbiage.

Also, it's really important to point out the 1970s were a period of complete economic chaos. They started in that glorious sort of post-war era that the United States had when we were growing faster and becoming more and more middle class every year and everybody was moving up. Then you had the oil crisis, you had a whole series of economic crises, inflation was, I think, at 13% in 1978. Unemployment was at 8% or so. Suddenly, the idea- even if you thought that that was your goal in life to be a full-time housewife- the idea that anybody would be able to afford to be a full-time housewife faded away very suddenly.

Brian: Jessica and [unintelligible 00:21:11], you're on WNYC. Hi, Jessica.

Jessica: Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my call.

Brian: Sure.

Jessica: I just joined the workforce right out of college in 1978 and my first job was in Merrill Lynch in commodities. I still wanted to work. I never had any notion that I would be out there looking for a husband or what have you. I joined in a commodities group because I really wanted to find out more about consumer behavior and I had majored in economics. I would say that my two to three years at Merrill Lynch were informative because I recognized that women were treated differently. From day one, my boss said to me that- it was suggested that we had been lovers in a prior life, that I had great size, and I thought, "This is not how it's supposed to work." So being the kind of person I am, I pushed back and got reassigned to another group.

I'm still in Wall Street and it's been 40-odd-years. I still have these conversations that are perplexing, mostly with male managers, on the basis that- just recently that we have to sell our soul. When you work for a company, you sell your soul. I mean, I have two children, I worked through maternity leaves and had to fight for certain things about them. I've always been pondering the fact that people think when you work and have children and make the most important decision of your life that, all of a sudden, you become irresponsible, not dependable. In my experience with other women I know who have worked through having a family and bringing it up, that's the furthest from the truth.

Brian: Right, but there's still the question of where are the men- the fathers in that equation, right?

Jessica: Yes, exactly. Now, we have paternity leave. A lot of things we've gotten so much better. But as I made the comment to the screener earlier; I think talking to young women now, they didn't have to go through the struggles in the 70's, 80's, 90's, see us rise from 79% on the dollar to maybe now we're at 82% on the dollar. They don't understand what it's like to get passed over, talked over and then following one. So, they're all impressed, I think, with the equality aspect that you hear a lot of in the workplace but not the equity aspect.

Equality is treating everybody the same. Equity is recognizing differences. To be a woman and working and the stages in your life, it's just different.

I think we're making progress there, but I question whether young women in the workforce right now actually recognize the struggles that women who have preceded them- and are still they're struggling- have had to deal with.

Brian: Jessica, thank you so much. Gail, do you have a thought on that call?

Gail: Thank you very much. It was very interesting hearing the story. On the one hand, it is true, in general, that the younger generation never understands whatever it is [chuckles] that the last generation went through and they work out their story in a different way. The Me Too Movement right now is a really great example of the fact that these fights don't end. They just change and you find new ways to work things out. The challenge of having families and relationships and work and balancing it all out will never end, and every generation keeps on fighting in their own way.

Brian: You wrote in your book that one aspect of the ERA debate that really hurt it was the idea that women would be subject to any future Military draft as man already were. Here's a minute of a televised debate on ABC at the time between Schlafly and Betty Friedan. We'll also hear the moderator who I'm not sure who it was. I think it was a Good Morning America host, but I'm not sure who it is. You'll hear Phyllis Schlafly and Betty Friedan and the moderator is in there too. You'll recognize when it's the moderator. Betty Friedan speaks first.

Betty Friedan: If there is such a thing as adjusting necessary worth, though, for the defense of the nation, there isn't any reason that women should be exempt on the basis of sex. [crosstalk] No reason at all, why your daughter or mine should have any right not to defend society when the Service [crosstalk]--

Phyllis: Okay. Well, that's a fundamental difference between those who are for ERA and those who are against it. You think my daughter should serve, I think women should have the choice not to serve.

Moderator: I think a woman wouldn't want her son killed any more than she'd want her daughter killed.

Betty: Yes, right.

[crosstalk]

Moderator: Shouldn't a woman have a right to defend her country as a man has a right?

Phyllis: She's got the right. If she feels that's her obligation, I think she should run not walk into the nearest recruiting office and sign up. But you are absolutely taking away the rights of the young women by ERA, and you have to be kidding to call that an advance for women.

Brian: Gail Collins, I think, among other things, we hear in that clip what we so often hear in Right versus Left debates to this day. The person on the Left is speaking in the language of complexity. The person on the Right boils it down to simple slogans and truths as they see them. Make America Great Again is only the latest example. Do you hear that clip that way or anything else you want to say about it?

Gail: Yes, it was so interesting. The ERA advocates back in the '70s, if they had chosen to, could have ducked the whole Military thing because really, the Military itself could have set up whatever standards they wanted. It wasn't actually inevitable that passage of the ERA would instantly have meant women getting drafted. Of course, nobody was getting drafted right then anyway, if people remember the draft and how traumatic it was. It's one of those things that you get wound up in.

I think one of the amazing things, if we can just talk about today for one second, is that when you're looking at new politicians coming up, and politicians talking about their war records or their Military records, so many of them now are women. Tammy Duckworth is one of the few people in Congress who can just take on Donald Trump and his bone spurs anytime she wants. She's lost both of her legs in combat. So it's a huge leap, but it was one of the things that people talked about constantly with the ERA.

If I could say the problem for the ERA people was that so many of the things that they had promised would happen with an Equal Rights Amendment had already happened by the time it was making its way through the final states. You already had equal credit, Congress had passed a trillion laws. Courts had done a great deal of work. So a lot of the things that people had imagined they would get with an Equal Rights Amendment were already there.

The things that they talked about were things that probably wouldn't have happened, but which people like Phyllis Schlafly could bring up because the Amendment sounded general. "We'll lose all of our rights to alimony, we'll lose our rights to child support. Husbands will be divorcing their wives and walking out the door." She threatened often that the Girl Scouts would be forced to merge with the Boy Scouts, which of course, has happened anyway even without the Equal Rights Amendment.

Brian: We've just got a minute or two left. Big picture of that moment, '78 and that time in general, from the feminist side and from the backlash side, you wrote in the book that the women's movement fighting for the ERA at the end of the 1970s was very different from the one that carried the banner at the beginning. On the backlash side, you wrote that the Conservative leaders of the 1950s and '60s, like Barry Goldwater and Robert Taft, had no desire to get involved in social issues, like abortion or gay rights.

Give me a little on each side. From the backlash side, what began to change in the '70s and why did something as straightforward as equal treatment for women help spark the modern culture wars and make the Conservative movement change?

Gail: The Equal Rights Amendment was the thing that was out there at a time when the social right was being born, when reaction to-- There was a change in the political parties. Everything changed right then. The Democrats, who had been the socially-conservative party when it came to things like abortion, divorce, stuff like that, were changing and moving Left. The Republicans who had been very much of the Barry Goldwater type- I think he had a gay son; gay rights, fine; abortion, fine; go planned parenthood- were moving in the other direction. So, you had a twisting of both sides, you had this enormous social upheaval.

If I can just read you one quote that is my favorite of all time. Your friend, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in '78, said, "I can't predict passage now, but I can predict passage by the year 2000," and here we are.

Brian: [chuckles] And here we are, still not. From the feminist side, how is the movement different at the end of the '70s- by 1978- than it was at the beginning of the decade?

Gail: Well, at the beginning of the decade, the movement was very much-- You'd moved from a period where you had very maternal-looking women trying to convince the world that they were reliable and they should be given equal rights, to, in the '60s and '70s, women reacting against all of the social rules that had kept them under control; no bras, everything, free sex, free love, whatever. There was a sense of disorder about the whole thing that took a little while to calm down.

By the time it did, you had this new reallocation of the parties, you had a new reallocation of the world, you had women talking about new issues, having gone past the original ones of, say, equal rights, equal credit rights, equal employment rights, into questions about pay, about sex treatment in the workplace. Everything changed again in the late '70s, and here we are.

Brian: Tomorrow, folks, we'll talk about how the seemingly consensus notion of protecting the environment became a flashpoint in the culture wars by 1978. For today, we thank New York Times columnist, Gail Collins, who is also author of the book; When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. Gail, thank you so much-

Gail: It's always a pleasure.

Brian: -and listeners, thanks for your oral histories.

[Koko Taylor - I'm a Woman]

Brian: Thanks to Koko Taylor for taking us out of this segment.

 

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