A Day without Feminism

P R O L O G U EA Day without FeminismWe were both born in 1970, the baptismal moment of a decadethat would change dramatically the lives of American women.The two of us grew up thousands of miles apart, in entirely different kinds of families, yet we both came of age with theawareness that certain rights had been won by the women’smovement. We’ve never doubted how important feminism is topeople’s lives—men’s and women’s. Both of our mothers wentto consciousness-raising-type groups. Amy’s mother raised Amyon her own, and Jennifer’s mother, questioning the politics ofhousework, staged laundry strikes.With the dawn of not just a new century but a new millennium, people are looking back and taking stock of feminism. Do we need new strategies? Is feminism dead? Hassociety changed so much that the idea of a feminist movement is obsolete? For us, the only way to answer these questions is to imagine what our lives would have been if thewomen’s movement had never happened and the conditionsfor women had remained as they were in the year of ourbirths.3Imagine that for a day it’s still 1970, and women have only therights they had then. Sly and the Family Stone and Dionne Warwick are on the radio, the kitchen appliances are Harvest Gold,and the name of your Whirlpool gas stove is Mrs. America.What is it like to be female?Babies born on this day are automatically given their father’sname. If no father is listed, "illegitimate" is likely to be typedon the birth certificate. There are virtually no child-care centers,so all preschool children are in the hands of their mothers, ababy-sitter, or an expensive nursery school. In elementaryschool, girls can’t play in Little League and almost all of theteachers are female. (The latter is still true.) In a few states, itmay be against the law for a male to teach grades lower thanthe sixth, on the basis that it’s unnatural, or that men can’t betrusted with young children.In junior high, girls probably take home ec; boys take shopor small-engine repair. Boys who want to learn how to cook orsew on a button are out of luck, as are girls who want to learnhow to fix a car. Seventeen magazine doesn’t run feministinfluenced current columns like "Sex + Body" and "Traumarama." Instead the magazine encourages girls not to have sex;pleasure isn’t part of its vocabulary. Judy Blume’s books arejust beginning to be published, and Free to Be . . . You and Medoes not exist. No one reads much about masturbation as anatural activity; nor do they learn that sex is for anything otherthan procreation. Girls do read mystery stories about NancyDrew, for whom there is no sex, only her blue roadster andhaving "luncheon." (The real mystery is how Nancy gets alongwithout a purse and manages to meet only white people.) Boysread about the Hardy Boys, for whom there are no girls.In high school, the principal is a man. Girls have physicaleducation class and play half-court basketball, but not soccer,track, or cross country; nor do they have any varsity sportsteams. The only prestigious physical activity for girls is cheerleading, or being a drum majorette. Most girls don’t take calculus or physics; they plan the dances and decorate the gym. Even4MANIFESTAwhen girls get better grades than their male counterparts, theyare half as likely to qualify for a National Merit Scholarship because many of the test questions favor boys. Standardized testsrefer to males and male experiences much more than to femalesand their experiences.1 If a girl "gets herself pregnant," sheloses her membership in the National Honor Society (which isstill true today) and is expelled.2Girls and young women might have sex while they’re unmarried, but they may be ruining their chances of landing a guyfull-time, and they’re probably getting a bad reputation. If apregnancy happens, an enterprising gal can get a legal abortiononly if she lives in New York or is rich enough to fly there, orto Cuba, London, or Scandinavia. There’s also the Chicagobased Jane Collective, an underground abortion-referralservice, which can hook you up with an illegal or legal termination. (Any of these options are going to cost you. Illegal abortions average $300 to $500, sometimes as much as $2,000.) Toprevent pregnancy, a sexually active woman might go to a doctor to be fitted for a diaphragm, or take the high-dose birthcontrol pill, but her doctor isn’t likely to inform her of thepossibility of deadly blood clots. Those who do take the Pillalso may have to endure this contraceptive’s crappy side effects:migraine headaches, severe weight gain, irregular bleeding, andhair loss (or gain), plus the possibility of an increased risk ofbreast cancer in the long run. It is unlikely that women or theirmale partners know much about the clitoris and its role in orgasm unless someone happens to fumble upon it. Instead, themyth that vaginal orgasms from penile penetration are the only"mature" (according to Freud) climaxes prevails.Lesbians are rarely "out," except in certain bars owned byorganized crime (the only businessmen who recognize this untapped market), and if lesbians don’t know about the bars,they’re less likely to know whether there are any other womenlike them. Radclyffe Hall’s depressing early-twentieth-centurynovel The Well of Loneliness pretty much indicates their fate.The Miss America Pageant is the biggest source of scholarA Day without Feminism5ship money for women.3 Women can’t be students at Dartmouth, Columbia, Harvard, West Point, Boston College, or theCitadel, among other all-male institutions. Women’s collegesare referred to as "girls’ schools." There are no Take Back theNight marches to protest women’s lack of safety after dark, butthat’s okay because college girls aren’t allowed out much afterdark anyway. Curfew is likely to be midnight on Saturday and9 or 10 p.m. the rest of the week. Guys get to stay out as late asthey want. Women tend to major in teaching, home economics,English, or maybe a language—a good skill for translatingsomeone else’s words.4 The women’s studies major does not exist, although you can take a women’s studies course at six universities, including Cornell and San Diego State College.5 Theabsence of women’s history, black history, Chicano studies,Asian-American history, queer studies, and Native Americanhistory from college curricula implies that they are not worthstudying. A student is lucky if he or she learns that womenwere "given" the vote in 1920, just as Columbus "discovered"America in 1492. They might also learn that Sojourner Truth,Mary Church Terrell, and Fannie Lou Hamer were black abolitionists or civil-rights leaders, but not that they were feminists.There are practically no tenured female professors at anyschool, and campuses are not racially diverse. Women of colorare either not there or they’re lonely as hell. There is no nationally recognized Women’s History Month or Black HistoryMonth. Only 14 percent of doctorates are awarded to women.Only 3.5 percent of MBAs are female.Only 2 percent of everybody in the military is female, andthese women are mostly nurses. There are no female generals inthe U.S. Air Force, no female naval pilots, and no Marinebrigadier generals. On the religious front, there are no femalecantors or rabbis, Episcopal canons, or Catholic priests. (Thisis still true of Catholic priests.)Only 44 percent of women are employed outside the home.And those women make, on average, fifty-two cents to the dollar earned by males. Want ads are segregated into "Help6MANIFESTAWanted Male" and "Help Wanted Female." The female side ispreponderantly for secretaries, domestic workers, and otherlow-wage service jobs, so if you’re a female lawyer you mustlook under "Help Wanted Male." There are female doctors,but twenty states have only five female gynecologists or fewer.Women workers can be fired or demoted for being pregnant,especially if they are teachers, since the kids they teach aren’tsupposed to think that women have sex. If a boss demands sex,refers to his female employee exclus
ively as "Baby," or says hewon’t pay her unless she gives him a blow job, she either has toquit or succumb—no pun intended. Women can’t be airline pilots. Flight attendants are "stewardesses"—waitresses in thesky—and necessarily female. Sex appeal is a job requirement,wearing makeup is a rule, and women are fired if they exceedthe age or weight deemed sexy. Stewardesses can get marriedwithout getting canned, but this is a new development. (In1968 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—EEOC—made it illegal to forcibly retire stewardesses for getting hitched.) Less than 2 percent of dentists are women; 100percent of dental assistants are women. The "glass ceiling" thatkeeps women from moving naturally up the ranks, as well asthe sticky floor that keeps them unnaturally down in low-wagework, has not been named, much less challenged.When a woman gets married, she vows to love, honor, andobey her husband, though he gets off doing just the first two touphold his end of the bargain. A married woman can’t obtaincredit without her husband’s signature. She doesn’t have herown credit rating, legal domicile, or even her own name unlessshe goes to court to get it back. If she gets a loan with her husband—and she has a job—she may have to sign a "baby letter"swearing that she won’t have one and have to leave her job.Women have been voting for up to fifty years, but theirturnout rate is lower than that for men, and they tend to voteright along with their husbands, not with their own interestsin mind.6 The divorce rate is about the same as it is in 2000,contrary to popular fiction’s blaming the women’s movementA Day without Feminism7for divorce. However, divorce required that one person be atfault, therefore if you just want out of your marriage, you haveto lie or blame your spouse. Property division and settlements,too, are based on fault. (And at a time when domestic violenceisn’t a term, much less a crime, women are legally encouragedto remain in abusive marriages.) If fathers ask for custody ofthe children, they get it in 60 to 80 percent of the cases. (This isstill true.) If a husband or a lover hits his partner, she has noshelter to go to unless she happens to live near the one in northern California or the other in upper Michigan. If a woman isdownsized from her role as a housewife (a.k.a. left by her husband), there is no word for being a displaced homemaker. As adivorcee, she may be regarded as a family disgrace or as easysexual prey. After all, she had sex with one guy, so why not allguys?If a woman is not a Mrs., she’s a Miss. A woman withoutmakeup and a hairdo is as suspect as a man with them. Without a male escort she may be refused service in a restaurant ora bar, and a woman alone is hard-pressed to find a landlordwho will rent her an apartment. After all, she’ll probably beleaving to get married soon, and, if she isn’t, the landlorddoesn’t want to deal with a potential brothel.Except among the very poor or in very rural areas, babies areborn in hospitals. There are no certified midwives, and womenare knocked out during birth. Most likely, they are alsostrapped down and lying down, made to have the baby againstgravity for the doctor’s convenience. If he has a schedule tokeep, the likelihood of a cesarean is also very high. Our Bodies,Ourselves doesn’t exist, nor does the women’s health movement. Women aren’t taught how to look at their cervixes, andtheir bodies are nothing to worry their pretty little heads about;however, they are supposed to worry about keeping their littleheads pretty. If a woman goes under the knife to see if she hasbreast cancer, the surgeon won’t wake her up to consult abouther options before performing a Halsted mastectomy (a disfiguring radical procedure, in which the breast, the muscle wall,8 | MANIFESTAand the nodes under the arm, right down to the bone, are removed). She’ll just wake up and find that the choice has beenmade for her.Husbands are likely to die eight years earlier than their sameage wives due to the stress of having to support a family and repress an emotional life, and a lot earlier than that if womenhave followed the custom of marrying older, authoritative, paternal men. The stress of raising kids, managing a household,and being undervalued by society doesn’t seem to kill offwomen at the same rate. Upon a man’s death, his beloved getsa portion of his Social Security. Even if she has worked outsidethe home for her entire adult life, she is probably better offwith that portion than with hers in its entirety, because she hasearned less and is likely to have taken time out for such unproductive acts as having kids.7Has feminism changed our lives? Was it necessary? After thirtyyears of feminism, the world we inhabit barely resembles theworld we were born into. And there’s still a lot left to do.A Day without Feminism9P R O L O G U EA Day without FeminismWe were both born in 1970, the baptismal moment of a decadethat would change dramatically the lives of American women.The two of us grew up thousands of miles apart, in entirely different kinds of families, yet we both came of age with theawareness that certain rights had been won by the women’smovement. We’ve never doubted how important feminism is topeople’s lives—men’s and women’s. Both of our mothers wentto consciousness-raising-type groups. Amy’s mother raised Amyon her own, and Jennifer’s mother, questioning the politics ofhousework, staged laundry strikes.With the dawn of not just a new century but a new millennium, people are looking back and taking stock of feminism. Do we need new strategies? Is feminism dead? Hassociety changed so much that the idea of a feminist movement is obsolete? For us, the only way to answer these questions is to imagine what our lives would have been if thewomen’s movement had never happened and the conditionsfor women had remained as they were in the year of ourbirths.3Imagine that for a day it’s still 1970, and women have only therights they had then. Sly and the Family Stone and Dionne Warwick are on the radio, the kitchen appliances are Harvest Gold,and the name of your Whirlpool gas stove is Mrs. America.What is it like to be female?Babies born on this day are automatically given their father’sname. If no father is listed, "illegitimate" is likely to be typedon the birth certificate. There are virtually no child-care centers,so all preschool children are in the hands of their mothers, ababy-sitter, or an expensive nursery school. In elementaryschool, girls can’t play in Little League and almost all of theteachers are female. (The latter is still true.) In a few states, itmay be against the law for a male to teach grades lower thanthe sixth, on the basis that it’s unnatural, or that men can’t betrusted with young children.In junior high, girls probably take home ec; boys take shopor small-engine repair. Boys who want to learn how to cook orsew on a button are out of luck, as are girls who want to learnhow to fix a car. Seventeen magazine doesn’t run feministinfluenced current columns like "Sex + Body" and "Traumarama." Instead the magazine encourages girls not to have sex;pleasure isn’t part of its vocabulary. Judy Blume’s books arejust beginning to be published, and Free to Be . . . You and Medoes not exist. No one reads much about masturbation as anatural activity; nor do they learn that sex is for anything otherthan procreation. Girls do read mystery stories about NancyDrew, for whom there is no sex, only her blue roadster andhaving "luncheon." (The real mystery is how Nancy gets alongwithout a purse and manages to meet only white people.) Boysread about the Hardy Boys, for whom there are no girls.In high school, the principal is a man. Girls have physicaleducation class and play half-court basketball, but not soccer,track, or cross country; nor do they have any varsity sportsteams. The only prestigious physical activity for girls is cheerleading, or being a drum majorette. Most girls don’t take calculus or physics; they plan the dances and decorate the gym. Even4MANIFESTAwhen girls get better grades than the
ir male counterparts, theyare half as likely to qualify for a National Merit Scholarship because many of the test questions favor boys. Standardized testsrefer to males and male experiences much more than to femalesand their experiences.1 If a girl "gets herself pregnant," sheloses her membership in the National Honor Society (which isstill true today) and is expelled.2Girls and young women might have sex while they’re unmarried, but they may be ruining their chances of landing a guyfull-time, and they’re probably getting a bad reputation. If apregnancy happens, an enterprising gal can get a legal abortiononly if she lives in New York or is rich enough to fly there, orto Cuba, London, or Scandinavia. There’s also the Chicagobased Jane Collective, an underground abortion-referralservice, which can hook you up with an illegal or legal termination. (Any of these options are going to cost you. Illegal abortions average $300 to $500, sometimes as much as $2,000.) Toprevent pregnancy, a sexually active woman might go to a doctor to be fitted for a diaphragm, or take the high-dose birthcontrol pill, but her doctor isn’t likely to inform her of thepossibility of deadly blood clots. Those who do take the Pillalso may have to endure this contraceptive’s crappy side effects:migraine headaches, severe weight gain, irregular bleeding, andhair loss (or gain), plus the possibility of an increased risk ofbreast cancer in the long run. It is unlikely that women or theirmale partners know much about the clitoris and its role in orgasm unless someone happens to fumble upon it. Instead, themyth that vaginal orgasms from penile penetration are the only"mature" (according to Freud) climaxes prevails.Lesbians are rarely "out," except in certain bars owned byorganized crime (the only businessmen who recognize this untapped market), and if lesbians don’t know about the bars,they’re less likely to know whether there are any other womenlike them. Radclyffe Hall’s depressing early-twentieth-centurynovel The Well of Loneliness pretty much indicates their fate.The Miss America Pageant is the biggest source of scholarA Day without Feminism5ship money for women.3 Women can’t be students at Dartmouth, Columbia, Harvard, West Point, Boston College, or theCitadel, among other all-male institutions. Women’s collegesare referred to as "girls’ schools." There are no Take Back theNight marches to protest women’s lack of safety after dark, butthat’s okay because college girls aren’t allowed out much afterdark anyway. Curfew is likely to be midnight on Saturday and9 or 10 p.m. the rest of the week. Guys get to stay out as late asthey want. Women tend to major in teaching, home economics,English, or maybe a language—a good skill for translatingsomeone else’s words.4 The women’s studies major does not exist, although you can take a women’s studies course at six universities, including Cornell and San Diego State College.5 Theabsence of women’s history, black history, Chicano studies,Asian-American history, queer studies, and Native Americanhistory from college curricula implies that they are not worthstudying. A student is lucky if he or she learns that womenwere "given" the vote in 1920, just as Columbus "discovered"America in 1492. They might also learn that Sojourner Truth,Mary Church Terrell, and Fannie Lou Hamer were black abolitionists or civil-rights leaders, but not that they were feminists.There are practically no tenured female professors at anyschool, and campuses are not racially diverse. Women of colorare either not there or they’re lonely as hell. There is no nationally recognized Women’s History Month or Black HistoryMonth. Only 14 percent of doctorates are awarded to women.Only 3.5 percent of MBAs are female.Only 2 percent of everybody in the military is female, andthese women are mostly nurses. There are no female generals inthe U.S. Air Force, no female naval pilots, and no Marinebrigadier generals. On the religious front, there are no femalecantors or rabbis, Episcopal canons, or Catholic priests. (Thisis still true of Catholic priests.)Only 44 percent of women are employed outside the home.And those women make, on average, fifty-two cents to the dollar earned by males. Want ads are segregated into "Help6MANIFESTAWanted Male" and "Help Wanted Female." The female side ispreponderantly for secretaries, domestic workers, and otherlow-wage service jobs, so if you’re a female lawyer you mustlook under "Help Wanted Male." There are female doctors,but twenty states have only five female gynecologists or fewer.Women workers can be fired or demoted for being pregnant,especially if they are teachers, since the kids they teach aren’tsupposed to think that women have sex. If a boss demands sex,refers to his female employee exclusively as "Baby," or says hewon’t pay her unless she gives him a blow job, she either has toquit or succumb—no pun intended. Women can’t be airline pilots. Flight attendants are "stewardesses"—waitresses in thesky—and necessarily female. Sex appeal is a job requirement,wearing makeup is a rule, and women are fired if they exceedthe age or weight deemed sexy. Stewardesses can get marriedwithout getting canned, but this is a new development. (In1968 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—EEOC—made it illegal to forcibly retire stewardesses for getting hitched.) Less than 2 percent of dentists are women; 100percent of dental assistants are women. The "glass ceiling" thatkeeps women from moving naturally up the ranks, as well asthe sticky floor that keeps them unnaturally down in low-wagework, has not been named, much less challenged.When a woman gets married, she vows to love, honor, andobey her husband, though he gets off doing just the first two touphold his end of the bargain. A married woman can’t obtaincredit without her husband’s signature. She doesn’t have herown credit rating, legal domicile, or even her own name unlessshe goes to court to get it back. If she gets a loan with her husband—and she has a job—she may have to sign a "baby letter"swearing that she won’t have one and have to leave her job.Women have been voting for up to fifty years, but theirturnout rate is lower than that for men, and they tend to voteright along with their husbands, not with their own interestsin mind.6 The divorce rate is about the same as it is in 2000,contrary to popular fiction’s blaming the women’s movementA Day without Feminism7for divorce. However, divorce required that one person be atfault, therefore if you just want out of your marriage, you haveto lie or blame your spouse. Property division and settlements,too, are based on fault. (And at a time when domestic violenceisn’t a term, much less a crime, women are legally encouragedto remain in abusive marriages.) If fathers ask for custody ofthe children, they get it in 60 to 80 percent of the cases. (This isstill true.) If a husband or a lover hits his partner, she has noshelter to go to unless she happens to live near the one in northern California or the other in upper Michigan. If a woman isdownsized from her role as a housewife (a.k.a. left by her husband), there is no word for being a displaced homemaker. As adivorcee, she may be regarded as a family disgrace or as easysexual prey. After all, she had sex with one guy, so why not allguys?If a woman is not a Mrs., she’s a Miss. A woman withoutmakeup and a hairdo is as suspect as a man with them. Without a male escort she may be refused service in a restaurant ora bar, and a woman alone is hard-pressed to find a landlordwho will rent her an apartment. After all, she’ll probably beleaving to get married soon, and, if she isn’t, the landlorddoesn’t want to deal with a potential brothel.Except among the very poor or in very rural areas, babies areborn in hospitals. There are no certified midwives, and womenare knocked out during birth. Most likely, they are alsostrapped down and lying down, made to have the baby againstgravity for the doctor’s convenience. If he has a schedule tokeep, the likelihood of a ces
arean is also very high. Our Bodies,Ourselves doesn’t exist, nor does the women’s health movement. Women aren’t taught how to look at their cervixes, andtheir bodies are nothing to worry their pretty little heads about;however, they are supposed to worry about keeping their littleheads pretty. If a woman goes under the knife to see if she hasbreast cancer, the surgeon won’t wake her up to consult abouther options before performing a Halsted mastectomy (a disfiguring radical procedure, in which the breast, the muscle wall,8 | MANIFESTAand the nodes under the arm, right down to the bone, are removed). She’ll just wake up and find that the choice has beenmade for her.Husbands are likely to die eight years earlier than their sameage wives due to the stress of having to support a family and repress an emotional life, and a lot earlier than that if womenhave followed the custom of marrying older, authoritative, paternal men. The stress of raising kids, managing a household,and being undervalued by society doesn’t seem to kill offwomen at the same rate. Upon a man’s death, his beloved getsa portion of his Social Security. Even if she has worked outsidethe home for her entire adult life, she is probably better offwith that portion than with hers in its entirety, because she hasearned less and is likely to have taken time out for such unproductive acts as having kids.7Has feminism changed our lives? Was it necessary? After thirtyyears of feminism, the world we inhabit barely resembles theworld we were born into. And there’s still a lot left to do.A Day without Feminism9