It was no Year of the Woman, that ballyhooed 1992 Camelot that saw the election of record numbers of women to the House and Senate.
But it was no Year of Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment either. There were advances, and there were retreats, and some developments were simultaneously both.
The mixed nature of the year can perhaps be exemplified by the most prominent woman of the year: Marcia Clark, prosecutor of O.J. Simpson.
Women watched with pride as every day for a year on its TV screens the nation saw a smart, accomplished, powerful woman at high-level, high-pressure work.
But there was also a sense of despair as the nation focused on her skirt length, her hair style and her fitness as a mother. In the end, too, she lost the case. For many women the professional defeat of one woman was a defeat for all battered women, as a man more than half the nation believed had murdered his ex-wife and her friend went free.
It seemed that for every victory of a Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the senator whose relentless pursuit of sexual misconduct charges against Bob Packwood helped bring about his resignation from the Senate, there was a loss of a Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), the veteran congresswoman who announced her retirement.
Women continued to make their way in the world — in their homes, on their jobs, on racing boats and on screen. Sometimes it went well; sometimes it went backwards.
In other words, it was a lot like the Year of an Any Woman, with the joys and sorrows of private life mirrored on the public stage. As when we take stock of the year in our own lives, we hope that however we finally judge the past year, next year will be better.
Conduct unbecoming officers and gentlemen was in full view at The Citadel when Shannon Faulkner, the first woman cadet at the state-supported military academy in Charleston, S.C., quit after more than two years of legal battles and a week of grueling physical training in 100-degree heat.
Faulkner was one of 30 cadets who dropped out after Hell Week but the only one whose departure was greeted by classmates’ cheering, doing pushups in formation and packing her bags.
Critics crowed that the young woman who had endured death threats was weak compared with the young men, many of whom expressed their courage by wearing T-shirts describing the student body as “1,952 BULLDOGS AND 1 BITCH.”
The boys may want to hold on to those T-shirts: Nancy Mellette, daughter of a Citadel graduate and sister of a Citadel cadet, has expressed interest in attending.
Conduct unbecoming a U.S. senator led to the resignation of Bob Packwood in September from a 27-year career in the Senate after the Ethics Committee unanimously recommended that the Oregon Republican be expelled for sexual and official misconduct.
The commitee accused Packwood of making at least 18 unwelcome advances toward women between 1969 and 1990, of improperly using his office for financial gain and of obstructing the committee inquiry by tampering with his diaries.
Packwood claimed that he was guilty only of kissing women. The women’s testimony told it differently. An example reported in the Washington Post, which broke the story in 1992: In Packwood’s Senate office one evening, one woman told the Post, he “grabbed her by the shoulders, pushed her down on the couch, kissed her on the lips and repeatedly pushed her back on the couch as she fought to get up.”
Packwood’s fall was a victory for his chief opponent in the Senate, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Boxer became nationally known after she called for Packwood’s resignation in 1992, and she proceeded to spend more than two years pushing for public hearings on the charges.
No Newt is good Newt, I: Newt Gingrich’s mother confided to CBS newscaster Connie Chung, who had assured her the remark was “just between you and me,” that her son had called First Lady Hillary Clinton a bitch.
No Newt is good Newt, II Gingrich opined that women are unfit for combat because “females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections.”
Men, on the other hand, “are basically little piglets; you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it.”
Good news for Newt’s mom: Chung was ousted as co-anchor with Dan Rather for the “CBS Evening News.” Some critics charged sexism, but Tribune television critic Steve Johnson said Chung slipped on her own fluffy image, “tainted by years of chasing celebrities for various failed TV newsmagazines.”
Wouldn’t Johnnie look fabulous in dreads? For her troubles in heading the massive, year-long prosecution of O.J. Simpson, Marcia Clark had her hair and clothes analyzed exhaustively and her custody of her two young children challenged by her ex-husband. At one point, “Hard Copy” asked its viewers whether they thought Clark’s sons, ages 3 and 5, should be allowed to stay with her during the trial.
Defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr., on the other hand, suffered nary a glance at his hair or his personal life. Left largely unmentioned were allegations by his first wife, which Cochran has denied, that he physically abused her during their marriage, although domestic abuse was the central issue in the trial, unlike child custody arrangements of working mothers.
Hillary, frankly: Hillary Clinton minced no words when she addressed the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, where intimidating security and abominable conditions set an alternately menacing and chaotic tone.
Without directly criticizing China, she spoke out against forced sterilization and abortion, and in a pointed reference to the exiling to a far suburb of 30,000 delegates to the parallel conference of non-government organizations, said that “freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize and debate openly.”
But on public display along with the Chinese government’s heavy hand were issues such as female infanticide, genital mutilation, economic discrimination and women’s rights under international law. Also, defiance: When Chinese security men seized a videotape about Tibet, angry women in the audience forcibly took it back.
Bottom’s up: The nation’s breasts now firmly pushed into place with the padded-pushup bras, attentions turned south with the introduction of Miracle Boost jeans, a kind of Wonderbutt that promises to hike up wayward haunches. The promise of gravity-defying buttocks proved less than alluring; most women elected to let their hindquarters be.
For best performance by a U.S. legislator portraying a victim of love, the Oscar goes to Rep. Enid Waldholtz (R-Utah), who wept on national TV as she blamed irregularities in her personal and campaign finances on blind love of a deceitful husband.
In a tearful, five-hour news conference, Waldholtz, a lawyer, said she had recently realized that her husband was a con man who betrayed her and bilked her father out of $4 million.
Joe Waldholtz, who spent six days on the lam before turning himself in, is under investigation in connection with a $1.7 million check-kiting scheme.
“Joe handled all of our personal and our campaign finances,” she said in an odd echo of a stereotypical 1950s housewife. “I loved Joe Waldholtz and trusted him with all my heart.”
Enid Waldholtz, 37, has filed for divorce and asked for custody of the couple’s infant daughter. She apologized to the candidates she beat with the help of the tainted money, but she did not resign.
“There’s no way to return an election,” she said.
Women we already miss: Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum, 63, the respected Republican moderate from Kansas, announced that she would retire next year to “pursue other challenges, including the challenge of being a grandmother.”
Kassebaum, daughter of Alf Landon, a former Kansas governor and the 1936 Republican nominee for president, who lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enjoys widespread popularity in Kansas.
One of a shrinking number of GOP moderates in Congress, she is a fiscal conservative who has defended abortion rights, supported gun control and joined the Democrats to vote for the 1994 crime bill.
Chair of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Kassebaum is the only woman heading a Senate committee.
Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), the longest-serving woman in Congress and a fierce opponent of Gingrich, also announced that she would not seek re-election.
Schroeder, 55, has been in office for 24 years. Known for her political wit, she dubbed Ronald Reagan the “Teflon president” and has derided Gingrich regularly.
After the the speaker of the House complained that President Clinton had snubbed him on Air Force One, Schroeder took to the House floor, carrying a small statue she said was Gingrich’s “Academy Award for best child actor.”
Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both the Senate and the House and a voice of conscience against the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, died at the age of 97.
A Republican from Maine, Smith was elected to her husband’s House seat after his death. She served in the House from 1941 to 1949, then in the Senate from 1949 to 1973.
In 1950, she gave a widely hailed Senate speech warning Republicans not to “ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”
Twenty years later, during the height of the Vietnam War protests, she spoke out against extremism from the Left.
Smith was the first woman elected to the Senate without having been appointed to fill a vacancy, the first GOP female senator and the first woman placed in nomination for president at a major party convention, in 1964.
She declined to call herself a feminist.
“Women are people,” she said. “They should expect office only on the basis of personal qualifications.”
Rose Kennedy, matriarch of the Kennedy clan, whose ambition, political savvy, toughness and steadfast courage made her a regular entry on most-respected-women lists for decades, died at 104.
Man on board: The first all-women’s America’s Cup crew, America3, became a 15-women, one-man crew when Dave Dellenbaugh, chief off-boat tactician and strategist, replaced the starting helmsman.
The move had the full support of the female crew, which was dismayed because America3’s boat, Mighty Mary, was drifting into the Defender’s Cup semifinals in third place. Dellenbaugh was tactician/helmsman of the winning 1992 America3 team.
Mighty Mary, still called the women’s team, was beaten by only 52 seconds by Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes, which went on to lose the America’s Cup to New Zealand.
Sinead O’Connor, call your office: In a letter addressed to “every woman” in the world, Pope John Paul II in July issued an apology to women for complicity by the Roman Catholic Church in women’s oppression.
Women “have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude,” the pope wrote. “If objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry.”
Getting closer: An international team of scientists identified a second major breast-cancer gene that makes some women likely to get the disease.
The first breast cancer gene, BRCA-1, was identified last year. Both genes inhibit the growth of tumors and have been shown to have a strong connection with the form of breast cancer that runs in families.
In families with strong histories of breast cancer, women who inherit a defective version of either gene have a significantly higher risk of developing breast cancer during their lifetimes. In the case of BRCA-1, such women also stand a greatly increased chance of developing ovarian cancer.
Researchers also discovered this year that BRCA-1 may play a role in far more breast cancers than originally thought.
Only 5 percent of breast cancers run in families. But researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio found that the BRCA-1 gene affects not just familial breast cancers, but nearly all breast cancers.
They found that the gene is flawed even in women with breast and ovarian cancer who have no family histories of the diseases.
Scientists hope that learning about the biology of breast cancer will lead to new treatment for the disease. More immediately, identification of the genes holds promise for identifying and monitoring women at greater risk for developing breast cancer in hopes of catching the disease early.
Comeback kid I: Monica Seles, 21, returned to women’s tennis after a 28-month absence. She was recuperating physically and emotionally from an attack by a crazed fan of rival Steffi Graf who had stabbed her in the back during a tournament in Hamburg, Germany, in 1993.
In her first U.S. Open since her return, she lost a close match to Graf but sounded like anything but a loser in describing how she felt to be back:
“Ecstatical.”
Comeback kid II: Rachel Barton, the violinist who lost part of her left leg in a Metra train accident in January, in July took to the stage at the Petrillo Music Shell for her first performance after her recovery.
She was greeted by a standing ovation and went on to give a performance of the Dvorak Violin Concerto that proved definitively that she had lost none of her virtuoso musical ability.
Wrong kind of fame: Selena, a singing star in the Mexican-American style of pop known as Tejano, burst onto the national scene in the worst possible way. At the age of 23, she was shot and killed by the former president of her fan club. A jury rejected claims that the shooting was an accident and convicted Yolanda Saldivar of murder. She was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 30 years.
Women not invited: Women were off the invitation list for the Million Man March in Washington. A group of black female activists, professionals and educators, led by former Black Panther Angela Davis, held a news conference protesting the exclusion of women from the event.
Other women, however, offered support. Maya Angelou and Rosa Parks addressed the gathering. Dorothy Height, chief executive officer of the National Council for Negro Women, said the importance of women’s issues were in no way diminished by the march.
“I don’t think it’s a denial of women, but (for men) it is affirmation of themselves,” she said.
Girls’ night out: It was a good year for “gal movies,” with the crop including “Little Women,” “How to Make an American Quilt,” “Now and Then,” “Sabrina,” “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Something to Talk About,” “Home for the Holidays,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Waiting to Exhale.” Very little women got a movie of their own, with Disney’s “Pocahontas.”
Raw, meaningless sex failed to sell in “Showgirls,” the NC-17 rated paean to lap dancing that proved a box office bomb. “Anti-erotic,” “bare-butted bore,” critics yawned. Not to be deterred, Demi Moore has pocketed $12.5 million to take it all off in the next table-dancing saga, “Striptease.”
Jenny Craig, call your office: Veteran dieters drooled at the announcement of the discovery of a hormone that melts fat away. So far it is good news only for plump laboratory mice: After daily injections of leptin, the mice lost 30 pecent of their weight, lowered their cholesterol and glucose levels and generally turned friskier. Human trials may begin in 1996.
Bogeyperson of the year: The welfare mother, popularly blamed for everything from the federal deficit to the decline of family values.
Still top gun: The official investigation into the fatal crash of Lt. Kara Hultgreen, the Navy’s first female carrier fighter pilot, laid to rest a rumor campaign that claimed she was an inferior pilot allowed to become a combat pilot because of affirmative action.
“Lt. Hultgreen was fully qualified to fly the F-14A,” the Navy report concluded in its report on the October 1994 incident. The cause of the crash, which occured a few hundred yards off the carrier, was engine failure at a crucial point in her approach.
Roe vs. Roe: Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” whose pursuit of an abortion led to the 1973 Supreme Court “Roe vs. Wade” decision legalizing the procedure, was baptized by the leader of Operation Rescue and joined the anti-abortion group.
McCorvey did not, however, join entirely with the group’s views. She said in an interview that she still believes that “a woman has a right to have an abortion, a safe and legal abortion, in the first trimester” — when 89 percent of abortions are performed.
Outpatient lobotomies all around for the insurance companies and HMOs pushing one-day hospital stays for women after childbirth, which critics deride as “drive-through deliveries,” as a cost-saving measure.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called for a moratorium on reductions in hospital stays until it can be proved that the health of mothers and babies is not compromised. Four states have passed legislation requiring insurance companies to pay for a minimum hospital stay or home health care. Seventeen other states have similar bills pending, and Kassebaum and Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) have sponsored such a bill in the Senate.
Late abortion procedure banned: Both the U.S. Senate and House voted to ban a rare, late-term abortion procedure. Abortion foes called the procedure, in which the fetus’ head is punctured with surgical scissors and the skull collapsed so the fetus can fit through the cervix, brutal.
Supporters said it is performed only in cases in which women’s lives are in danger or whose babies have serious defects, and that it holds out the best hope that the woman might be able to conceive again.
Woman of steel: After six years of house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s most prominent dissident and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, was freed. Suu Kyi reacted cautiously, and it remained unclear if she was free to speak out against the military government or to travel. She appeared at the UN Women’s Conference via smuggled videotape.
The worst horror: The crime was so unimaginably horrific — a 23-year-old woman letting her car roll into a lake with her two young sons strapped inside, the little boys spending the last six minutes of their lives watching the water rise — that for more than a week the nation believed Susan Smith when she claimed that a black man had carjacked her and taken the boys.
But it was Smith who had driven to the boat ramp of John D. Long Lake in Union County, South Carolina, with 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex strapped into their car seats, had released the hand brake, opened her own door and had run for safety, covering her ears as her sons died.
She was convicted of two counts of murder but was spared the death penalty. After hearing testimony about Smith’s history of depression, suicide attempts, her father’s suicide and her molestation by her stepfather, a jury of her rural neighbors voted to sentence her to life imprisonment. She will be eligible for parole in 30 years, when her sons would have been 34 and 32.
Hear me roar at Wal-Mart: T-shirts reading “Someday a woman will be President” were pulled from Wal-Mart shelves in August because of customer complaints that the message was too radical. Their removal prompted boycott threats, and Wal-Mart returned the shirts, and empowerment at discount prices, to the shelves.
