New
Issues Come to the Fore
These various elements of the
re-emerging Women's Rights Movement worked together and
separately on a wide range of issues. Small groups of
women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots
projects like establishing women's newspapers, bookstores
and cafes. They created battered women's shelters and
rape crisis hotlines to care for victims of sexual abuse
and domestic violence. They came together to form child
care centers so women could work outside their homes for
pay. Women health care professionals opened women's clinics
to provide birth control and family planning counseling
-- and to offer abortion services -- for low-income women.
These clinics provided a safe place to discuss a wide
range of health concerns and experiment with alternative
forms of treatment.
With the inclusion of Title IX
in the Education Codes of 1972, equal access to higher
education and to professional schools became the law.
The long-range effect of that one straightforward legal
passage beginning "Equal access to education programs...,"
has been simply phenomenal. The number of women doctors,
lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals
has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually limiting
women's enrollment in graduate schools were outlawed.
Athletics has probably been the most hotly contested area
of Title IX, and it's been one of the hottest areas of
improvement, too. The rise in girls' and women's participation
in athletics tells the story: One in twenty-seven high
school girls played sports 25 years ago; one in three
do today. The whole world saw how much American women
athletes could achieve during the last few Olympic Games,
measured in their astonishing numbers of gold, silver,
and bronze medals. This was another very visible result
of Title IX.
In society at large, the Women's
Rights Movement has brought about measurable changes,
too. In 1972, 26% of men and women said they would not
vote for a woman for president. In 1996, that sentiment
had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for
men. The average age of women when they first marry has
moved from twenty to twenty-four during that same period.
But perhaps the most dramatic impact of the women's rights
movement of the past few decades has been women's financial
liberation. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married
women were not issued credit cards in their own name?
That most women could not get a bank loan without a male
co-signer? That women working full time earned fifty-nine
cents to every dollar earned by men?
Help-wanted ads in newspapers
were segregated into "Help wanted - women" and
"Help wanted- men." Pages and pages of jobs
were announced for which women could not even apply. The
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled this illegal
in 1968, but since the EEOC had little enforcement power,
most newspapers ignored the requirement for years. The
National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the
issue all the way to the Supreme Court to make it possible
for a woman today to hold any job for which she is qualified.
And so now we see women in literally thousands of occupations
which would have been almost unthinkable just one generation
ago: dentist, bus driver, veterinarian, airline pilot,
and phone installer, just to name a few.
Many of these changes came about because of legislation
and court cases pushed by women's organizations. But many
of the advances women achieved in the 1960s and '70s were
personal: getting husbands to help with the housework
or regularly take responsibility for family meals; getting
a long-deserved promotion at work; gaining the financial
and emotional strength to leave an abusive partner.
|
