`I have a vision of women leaving
the train station for public life, state
capitals and the nations` capital all across
the land. And I have been forced to observe
and concede that the train is
taking a local route.`
-Ruth Mandel
Actress Jean Stapleton, best-known for her Emmy Award-winning role as the long-suffering Edith Bunker in ”All in the Family,” recently questioned the half-won battle for women`s rights.
”Today, we don`t have the burning issues of ERA as we did in the `70s,” she said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. ”There is a tendency to belittle the issues and to think that women have had their decade and everybody is okay and equal. That is not the case.”
Archie Bunker surely would have groaned.
Stapleton has been a lifelong supporter of equal rights for women. She served under Presidents Ford and Carter as commissioner of the International Women`s Year Commission and, for the last 10 years, has served as president of the board of directors of The Women`s Research and Education Institute, a public-policy advocacy group.
Stapleton`s dim outlook is not without a basis in facts.
In 1966 the National Organization for Women was founded by women and men seeking a true partnership between the sexes. It marked the first organized renaissance of feminist activism since the suffrage movement. By the 1970s, the women`s movement had become a pervasive social framework: the Equal Rights Amendment, wage parity, new career opportunities and abortion rights were all compelling issues.
But, in the 1980s, no single issue has gripped women into an unequivocal national forum to equal that fervor.
Approaching the end of this decade, what is the status of the women`s movement? What have been the gains? Do women, who continue to bear the primary responsibility for the care of their children, really have more choices, or have they simply added responsibilities? What should the future agenda be? Has the momentum been lost?
One organization has tried to answer those questions. The Women`s Research and Education Institute is the nonpartisan research arm of the Congressional Caucus for Women`s Issues. It was established in 1977 to facilitate communication among researchers on women`s issues, members of Congress and other policymakers-in effect, to put timely analysis and figures in the hands of decisionmakers.
The institute, familiar with the realities of the legislative process and armed with data from experts on women`s issues, aims to translate research into action. Every report commissioned is delivered to each member of Congress.
With the aid of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the institute has published two reports since 1987, assessing the continuing changes in the lives of women.
Sara Rix, editor of the report, says, ”When we first investigated, we found all sorts of other status reports-an annual report called `The State of Black America,` and another called `The State of the World.` We were pretty astounded that there wasn`t anything like this for women.”
The institute assembled a 15-member volunteer advisory group of potential users that consisted of researchers, politicians, librarians, economists and women activists. From their suggestions, came the topics and statistics included in the first annual report, ”The American Woman 1987-88: A Report in Depth” (published by Norton in 1987). The topics covered women in business, the military, science, broadcasting, unions, higher education, black and Latino women in the U.S., and women in sports.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.) says, ”The book should be on the desk of every person and policymaker interested in the status of women today.”
Likewise, Rep. Lindy Boggs (D., La.), called the report a ”dream come true.” But the evidence in the latest report, ”The American Woman 1988-89: A Status Report,” published in November, suggests, as Stapleton later pointed out, ”that until the men who retain so disproportionately a share of power in this country commit themselves to sexual equality, we shall continue to have to inch our way to progress. . . . We need to lose the myths, to wake up fully to a better sense of creation in which men and women are of one thought.”
What follows are interviews with a few of the authors of chapters from the report. The authors, researchers from across the country, were
commissioned by the institute to report from their areas of expertise. Their research reveals in many ways what Stapleton called ”a sobering truth.”
PUBLIC LIFE
In less than two decades, women`s relationship with electoral politics has changed dramatically. As documented by Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University, wide public acceptance of women as leaders (and not as the anomalies their predecessors were viewed as), has greatly extended the roles for women serving in public office.
Women have chalked up a string of impressive firsts in positions that had for centuries been considered unfit for women: Ella Grasso`s election as the first woman ever to govern a state, in Connecticut in 1974; Sandra Day O`Connor`s appointment as the first woman ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1981; Geraldine Ferraro`s nomination to be the first woman ever to run on a major party`s national ticket, as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1984; Susan Estrich`s appointment as Gov. Michael Dukakis`
campaign manager, the first woman to serve in that role for a major party presidential candidate, and, on the Republican side, Peggy Noonan`s appointment as President-elect George Bush`s campaign speechwriter. Also in this election year, U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D., Colo.) and former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick were regarded by the public as serious contenders or potential contenders for the nation`s highest office.
Yet, Mandel is cautious in her enthusiasm. ”The atmosphere has changed drastically in a little over 15 years, and we`ve made enormous progress,” she says. ”But as of 1988, parity is still a very long way away for women in U.S. politics today.”
Mandel cites as progress the presence of 1,167 women in state legislatures in 1988, up from 344 women, a jump to 16 percent from 4 percent. ”A quadrupling in the blink of a historic eye,” Mandel says. ”But, we are still moving at a snail`s pace. Sixteen percent is still a very, very small portion.”
At the highest levels of government, only 25 women are in the 435-member House of Representatives. Of 100 U.S. senators, only two are women-no more than in 1960. ”The U.S. places among the nations with the smallest proportions of women in national legislative bodies,” Mandel says.
She blames the ”snail`s pace” of progress on the dominating influence of incumbency, which works ”to the advantage for people who have held power for a long time, and that certainly hasn`t been women.” The staggering cost of seeking elective office also is an obstacle. ”The networks, which train and prepare people for political life, are still not networks that are populated by women,” Mandel says.
”I have a vision of women leaving the train station for public life, state capitals and the nations` capital all across the land,” Mandel says.
”And I have been forced to observe and concede that the train is taking a local route.”
THE WORK FORCE
The movement of women into the labor force has showed no slowdown in the last decade, says Rebecca Blank, an economist with Princeton University. By 1985, 54 percent of U.S. women were in the labor force, compared to 33 percent in 1950. Now, the two-earner household has become the norm among married couples, and the number of women who are the sole earners in their households also continues to grow.
For couples, working wives have enabled many families a higher degree of economic security. Partners have more flexibility to change jobs or take risks, knowing that the other partner can provide some economic income, Blank says. In addition, being in the labor force bolsters women`s self-worth and confidence. ”Women who work by choice in jobs consistently report that they are healthier and list themselves as more satisfied with their lives than other women,” Blank says.
The bad news is that women still are working two jobs. ”Women who work full-time married to men who work full-time still put in twice as many hours working at home as their spouses do,” Blank says.
In addition, studies show that though two-wage earner families may be producing more income, they also may be incurring more costs. According to one study, a household with two full-time workers must earn at least 30 percent more income to purchase the goods and services that are comparable to a one-earner household with a wife working full-time in the home, Blank says.
”It means (they`re paying for) child care. There is less cooking in the home so you eat out more and you pay someone to help with the housework,”
Blank says. ”Some researchers have been led to conclude that two-earner couples on average may actually be worse off (economically) than single-earner couples.”
Progress for women in male-dominated fields has been encouraging. Ten percent of clergy are female. Women are the slight majority, 50.5 percent, of reporters and editors. The number of women working in road construction, though still relatively few, has increased over 10 years to 6 percent from 2 percent. Women represented 48 percent of the graduates of schools of veterinary medicine in 1985-86, up from 11 percent in 1964-65.
But as women replace men as the majority in traditionally male occupations, there is concern that an occupations` prestige declines and therefore, wages drop, reports Barbara Reskin, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Among teachers, insurance adjustors and examiners and real-estate sales people-all fields that have greatly increased their representation of women-wages have dropped
considerably, Reskin reports. For example, among pharmacists, men`s earnings dropped by almost $1,300 between 1969-79 as women`s representation doubled from 12 to 24 percent.
Though Reskin says more information is needed to fully understand how sex composition affects an occupation`s wages, one way to prevent resegregation, she suggests, is to ensure that the full range of occupations is open to women so that they will not need to crowd into just a few.
