Lift and Separate

By Ariel Levy
November 8, 2009

A women’s-liberation parade on Fifth Avenue, in New York, in August, 1971.Photograph by Bettmann / Corbis

Bra burning—the most famous habit of women’s libbers—caused a fair

amount of consternation back in the seventies, and the smoke has
lingered. Wives and mothers were torching the most intimate accessory
of control; what might they put a match to next? “Often today those who
cherish family life feel, even in their own homes, under constant
assault,” the cultural critic Michael Novak wrote in 1979. The goals of
the women’s-liberation movement, he saw, were incompatible with the
structure of the traditional family. That’s why bra burning became the
most durable and unsettling image of modern feminism.
So it may be worth noting that it never actually happened. In 1968, at a
protest against the Miss America pageant, in Atlantic City, feminists
tossed items that they felt were symbolic of women’s oppression into a
Freedom Trash Can: copies of Playboy, high-heeled shoes, corsets and
girdles. Lindsy Van Gelder, a reporter for the Post, wrote a piece about
the protest in which she compared the trash-can procession to the
burning of draft cards at antiwar marches, and a myth was born. In her
engaging tour d’horizon “When Everything Changed: The Amazing
Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present” (Little, Brown;
$27.99), Gail Collins quotes Van Gelder’s lament: “I shudder to think
that will be my epitaph—‘she invented bra burning.’ ”

It’s as if feminism were plagued by a kind of false-memory syndrome.

Where we think we’ve been on our great womanly march forward often
has less to do with the true coördinates than with our fears and desires.
We tend to imagine the fifties and the early sixties, for example, as a
time when most American women were housewives. “In reality,
however, by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been
at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were
married,” Collins writes. Forty per cent of wives whose children were
old enough to go to school had jobs. This isn’t just about the haze of
retrospection: back then, women saw themselves as homemakers, too.
Esther Peterson, President Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Labor,
asked a high-school auditorium full of girls how many of them expected
to have a “home and kids and a family.” Hands shot up. Next, Peterson
asked how many expected to work, and only a few errant hands were
raised. Finally, she asked the girls how many of them had mothers who
worked, and “all of those hands went up again,” Peterson wrote in her
1995 memoir, “Restless.” Nine out of ten of the girls would end up
having jobs outside the house, she explained, “but each of the girls
thought that she would be that tenth girl.”

There are political consequences to remembering things that never

happened and forgetting things that did. If what you mainly know about
modern feminism is that its proponents immolated their underwear, you
might well arrive at the conclusion that feminists are “obnoxious,” as
Leslie Sanchez does in her new book, “You’ve Come a Long Way,
Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American
Woman” (Palgrave; $25). “I don’t agree with the feminist agenda,”
Sanchez writes. “To me, the word ‘feminist’ epitomizes the zealots of an
earlier and more disruptive time.” Here’s what Sanchez would prefer:
“No bra burning. No belting out Helen Reddy. Just calm concern for
how women were faring in the world.”

The world that Sanchez has in mind is really Washington, D.C. Sanchez
has a day job as a Republican political analyst; perhaps this is why she
measures progress solely by the percentage of people with government
jobs who wear bras. Her great hope is that there will be a female
President in her lifetime, and she bitterly regrets that the former
governor of Alaska did not make it to the West Wing. “Most of
us are Sarah Palins to one degree or another,” Sanchez asserts. Palin “so
very clearly reflected the lifestyle choices, hard work ethic, and
traditional values that so many women admire.”

One sign of our cultural memory disorder is that you can describe a
female governor of a state as “traditional” and not get laughed at.
Conservative career women are eager to describe themselves in those
terms. “I don’t like labels, but, if there’s a label for me, it would be
‘traditional,’ and I’m very proud to be traditional,’’ Cindy McCain told
voters when her husband was running for President. Since 2000, she has
been the chairman of Hensley & Company, one of the largest
distributors of beer in this country, with annual revenues exceeding three
hundred million dollars.

Neither she nor Sarah Palin is, of course, a traditional woman. In a

traditional family, a wife and mother does not pursue success outside her
own home. Even when a large sector of the female population worked,
as Peterson pointed out, women tried to forget this reality so that they
could conceive of themselves as idealized traditional housewives.
Traditionally, women were not considered suited to economic or
professional independence, let alone political leadership, no matter what
they had accomplished. “Billie Jean King was the winner of three
Wimbledon titles in a single year and was supporting her household with
the money she made from tennis,” Collins writes, “but she could not get
a credit card unless it was in the name of her husband, a law student with
no income.” Unquestioned male authority is the basis of traditional
marriage, and that is why the zealots of an earlier and more disruptive
time wanted to scrap it.

Feminists have long been criticized for telling women that they could
have it all. But conservatives have done us one better: apparently, you
can have it all and be traditional, too. Mrs. McCain told George
Stephanopolous that she asked Palin, just after she was picked for the
Republican national ticket, how Palin would reconcile her
responsibilities as a mother with her prospective job. “She looked me
square in the eye,” Mrs. McCain recounted, “and she said, ‘You know
something? I’m a mother. I can do it.’ ” It used to be that conservatives
thought motherhood disqualified women for full-time careers; now
they’ve decided that it’s a credential for higher office. All of this raises a
question: why has feminism, which managed to win so many battles—
the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly
unexceptionable—remained anathema to millions of women who are the
beneficiaries of its success?

Once, it was easy to say what feminism was. Its aim was to win full
citizenship for women, starting with suffrage, an issue that began
amassing support in the United States in the eighteen-forties. More than
a century later, Betty Friedan was working in that tradition when, in
1966, she co-founded the National Organization for Women, whose goal
was to obtain legislative protections for women and insure employment
parity. Like the suffragists, Friedan was devoted to a politics of equality.
Here’s another detail we’ve forgotten: historically, it was the Republican
Party that was more amenable to women’s rights. “It had been the
Democrats, with their base in heavily Catholic urban districts and the
South, who were more likely to resist anything that encouraged women’s
independence from the home,” Collins writes. The wealthier classes,
represented by Republicans, had less to fear, because their families
could continue pretty much undisturbed no matter how many activities
the lady of the house busied herself with: they had staff.
By the late sixties and early seventies, of course, things had changed.
The argument had moved from civic equality to personal liberation:
feminists started talking about orgasms as well as ambitions. The women
who marched past the Freedom Trash Can outside the Miss America
pageant weren’t protesting the absence of female judges; they were
protesting the contest’s underlying values. “The goals of liberation go
beyond a simple concept of equality,” Susan Brownmiller wrote in
the Times Magazine in 1970. “now’s emphasis on legislative change left
the radicals cold.” Betty Friedan became marginalized within the very
organization she had started. (She was, as Brownmiller put it,
“considered hopelessly bourgeois.” Friedan returned fire by cautioning
young women against the “bra-burning, anti-man” feminists who were
supplanting her.) The radicals taking over feminism, many of whom
were active in the civil-rights and antiwar movements, wanted to
overthrow patriarchy, which would require transforming almost every
aspect of society: child rearing, entertainment, housework, academics,
romance, business, art, politics, sex.

Some of that happened and some of it didn’t. By the early seventies, the
Supreme Court had granted legal protection to birth control and
abortion. But the politics of equality—forget liberation—swiftly ran into
resistance. Catholic and Protestant conservatives found a common
threat: the destruction of the traditional family. The Republican Bob
McDonnell, who won last week’s race to become governor of Virginia,
described the peril in a master’s thesis he wrote in the nineteen-eighties:
“A dynamic new trend of working women and feminists”—women who
have sought “to increase their family income, or for some women, to
break their perceived stereotypical role bonds and seek workplace
equality and individual self-actualization”—is “ultimately detrimental to
the family.”
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In the run-up to the election, McDonnell scrambled to distance himself

from the thesis. But he was telling a particular truth that liberals and
conservatives have different reasons for evading: if the father works and
the mother works, nobody is left to watch the kids. In societies where
these families constitute the majority, either government acknowledges
the situation and helps provide child care (as many European countries
do) or child care becomes a luxury affordable for the affluent, and a
major problem for everyone else.

Social movements, like armies, define themselves by their conquests,

not by their defeats. Feminism failed to make child care available to all,
let alone bring about the total reconfiguration of the family that
revolutionary feminists had envisaged, and that would have changed this
country on a cellular level. Like so many other ideals of the sixties and
seventies, the state-backed egalitarian family has gone from seeming—
to both political parties—practical and inevitable to seeming utterly
beyond the pale. The easier victories involved representation, or at least
symbolic representation. For all the backlash against Roe v. Wade, the
movement had steady success in getting women into the government and
the private-sector workforce. The contours of mainstream feminism
started to change accordingly. A politics of liberation was largely
supplanted by a politics of identity.

But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained

of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals,
like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with
other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try
to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand
for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then
one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism
without feminists. You could have, for example, Leslie Sanchez or Sarah
Palin.

Sanchez acknowledges that Sarah Palin was a problematic candidate.

She writes that Palin’s interviews were “a mess,” and that Palin gave
Katie Couric “lackluster answers—many of which were downright
incoherent.” And yet she manages to wonder why female voters
wouldn’t “applaud her candidacy as a fellow-woman?”
When Gloria Steinem wrote, in the Los Angeles Times, that “Palin
shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton,” Sanchez was outraged.
She tells us, “As I read that, it means, ‘you can run, Sarah Palin, but you
won’t get my support because you don’t believe in all the same things I
believe in.’ ” More precisely, Palin believes in almost none of the things
that Steinem believes in. But for people like Sanchez—for people who
are concerned chiefly with demographic victories—that’s a trivial point.
Hence Palin, during her first public appearance as the Republican Vice-
Presidential nominee, could enjoin all women to vote for her: “It turns
out the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that
glass ceiling once and for all.” Isn’t that what really matters?
Revolutions are supposed to devour their young; in the case of
feminism, it has been the other way around. Sanchez says that she
speaks for many women who are happy to live and work in a reformed
and comparatively fair America but dislike the movement responsible
for this transformation. “Perhaps like me, they were put off by the
brashness and tired agendas of the women’s rights advocates,” she
writes. Content with symbolic representation, Sanchez shuns noisy
activism to the point of embracing political quiescence: I am woman,
hear me snore. But though Sanchez and her sisters (thirty-seven per cent
of women describe themselves as conservative, and three out of four
women abjure the label “feminist”) may not like rowdy revolutionary
posturing, we live in a country that has been reshaped by the women’s
movement, in which the traditional family is increasingly obsolete. As of
September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than sixty
per cent of American women aged twenty and over were working or
seeking work, and, according to the Shriver Report, women are either
the primary or the co-breadwinner in two-thirds of American families.
For many of them, this isn’t an exercise in empowerment; it’s about
making a living and, for working mothers in particular, often a hard
living.

Feminism as an identity politics has enjoyed real victories. It matters

that women serve on the Supreme Court, that they make decisions in
business, government, academia, and the media. But a preoccupation
with representation suggests that feminism has lost its larger ambitions.
We’ve come a long way in the past forty years; there’s no “maybe”
about it. The trouble is that the journey hasn’t always been in the
intended direction. These days, we can only dream about a federal
program insuring that women with school-age children have affordable
child care. If such a thing seems beyond the realm of possibility, though,
that’s another sign of our false-memory syndrome. In the early
seventies, we very nearly got it.

In 1971, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Walter Mondale, came up

with legislation that would have established both early-education
programs and after-school care across the country. Tuition would be on
a sliding scale based on a family’s income bracket, and the program
would be available to everyone but participation was required of no one.
Both houses of Congress passed the bill.
Nobody remembers this, because, later that year, President Nixon vetoed
the Comprehensive Child Development Act, declaring that it “would
commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side
of communal approaches to child rearing” and undermine “the family-
centered approach.” He meant “the traditional-family-centered
approach,” which requires women to forsake every ambition apart from
motherhood.
So close. And now so far. The amazing journey of American women is
easier to take pride in if you banish thoughts about the roads not taken.
When you consider all those women struggling to earn a paycheck while
rearing their children, and start to imagine what might have been, it’s
enough to make you want to burn something. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 16, 2009, issue, with the
headline “Lift and Separate.”