Guestwords: Seeking A New Coalition

In the summer of 1994, I had lunch with a friend near her office in New York City. She happens to be the top woman there and she gets lonesome at lunchtime. The guys at her level all go out together and never have lunch with the women anymore.

Is this some new kind of sex discrimination? "Oh no," she says, "It's just that there's so much talk about sexual harassment suits these days. No one knows what it is or isn't, so they figure, 'Why risk it?'"

But my friend wasn't looking for feminist advice. Her husband, who was "downsized" at one of our biggest corporations three years earlier, hadn't been able to find a job and had almost stopped looking.

Women's Gains

That same week, I saw an item in The New York Times that reported that in the previous five years there had been a nearly 20-percent drop in income among college-educated white American men. Not minority, high-school educated, or blue-collar men, but white management men in their 40s and early 50s, the masters of the universe.

And while women on the whole still do not earn as much money as men, The Times noted that college-educated women in the same age group had seen their incomes rise slightly over the same period. Meanwhile, new national studies were indicating that women were now carrying half the income burden in half of all United States families.

Downsizing had not yet hit the headlines in 1994; the "angry white male" had not yet surfaced in that year's election campaign. But my inner Geiger counter had begun to click, the way it does when something foreign to definition, expectation, and accepted truth happens.

Need For Change

I trust that click; it set me on the search that led to the concept of "the feminine mystique," which led to the women's movement for equality. And now, though my and many other women's lives in the 30 years since had been conducted within that liberating frame of reference, I feel again that urgent change is required. My inner Geiger counter does not lie. I sense something that cannot be evaded or handled in the usual feminist terms.

I sense the need for a paradigm shift beyond feminism, beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics altogether - a new paradigm for women and men. Since then, the more I've thought about this and begun to try to make it happen, the more I realize that many other people from very different political persuasions than mine are moving in the same direction.

Unwritten Law

There's a mounting sense that the crises we are now facing, or denying, cannot be solved in the same terms that we used to conduct our personal, political, business, or family lives. They can no longer be seen in terms of gender. The old paradigm still shaping our thinking may keep us from seeing these problems for what they are, much less solving them.

For me, the unwritten, inviolable law against which all thinking about women must be tested is life itself. Does it open or close real life as women live it? Does it permit more choice, autonomy, freedom, and control: Does it empower or restrict?

For those of us who started the modern women's movement, the new paradigm was simply the ethos of American democracy - equality of opportunity, our own voice in the decisions of our destiny, but applied to women in concrete terms as the theory and practice of democracy had never been applied to us before.

Sexual Politics

But for the younger women who came from the 1960s student movement and who had not yet experienced the life that most women led, the paradigm was sexual politics: women as a whole rising up against men as a whole, the oppressed against the oppressors. While seeing women in these terms did open women's lives to new growth and development, I had trouble with this paradigm from the beginning. It didn't fit life - life as I and other women had known it, even scientific knowledge about life.

When I left the presidency of the National Organization of Women in 1970, sexual politics was already dividing our strength. I began putting my energy into teaching, lecturing, and writing again - all of it geared to what I saw as the need for feminist thought to evolve.

No-Win Choices

In my 1981 book "The Second Stage," I proposed going beyond the impossible dilemmas of the sexual politics paradigm and coming to new terms with family, motherhood, men, and careers. My views were bitterly attacked by the "politically correct" voices of feminism, as if I was betraying the women's movement.

Though deeply hurt, I had no desire to mount a divisive counter-feminist movement. I bowed out of feminist organizational politics altogether, except when asked for help.

In the 1980s, when feminist consciousness was supposedly at its apex, women of childbearing years were dividing into two antagonistic camps. They were being forced to make no-win choices that pit motherhood against career. The women's movement for equality was spreading throughout society; women in great numbers were graduating from law, medical, and business schools as well as community colleges and moving into jobs and professions.

Special Interest?

Yet polls began to show that younger women were reluctant to identify themselves as feminists, though they identified with every item of the women's agenda of equality.

A backlash was growing. Women, blacks, Latinos, gays, the handicapped - all were being labeled "special interests," with a moral claim on society no greater than that of the oil industry or the lumber barons.

Women, who constitute 52 percent of the American people, never should have let ourselves be defined this way. Had we weakened ourselves by increasingly organizing over separate, single issues? Did we cloud the vision of the common good by defining our cause in terms of women versus men?

The energy of the leading feminist organizations had been focused on abortion or on sexual politics - rape, date rape, pornography.

I have no doubt that the far right has deliberately focused on abortion as symbol and substance of a woman's independence, autonomy, control over her own body, and destiny. But did we somehow let those who opposed our rights, our very personhood as women, box us in and define the terms of our unfinished battle too narrowly?

Barriers Remain

Year after year we spend all our organizational energy and funds fighting for the right to an abortion, a battle we have already won in Congress and in the courts of law and public opinion. Shouldn't we put at least as much energy into breaking down the remaining barriers to women's advancing to equality with men in our economy?

The key to achieving that goal is changing the structures that make it difficult for American women to combine childbearing with the advancement in business and the professions.

Jobs Wanted

In the early 1990s, the Center for Policy Alternatives and the Ms. Foundation conducted a poll to discover the true concerns of women. To the amazement of the politically correct, it revealed that none of the sexual issues ranked among the main problems of women young or old, black or white. For the great majority of the women polled, the main problem was jobs - how to get them, keep them, and get ahead in them; and how to meet the responsibilities of family life while living the equality we'd fought for.

My sense of crisis came in the summer of 1994 as I prepared to go to Washington as a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. While packing up my papers, I stumbled across The Times article on income losses among middle-aged white male professionals and gains among similarly aged and educated women. Citing the same trend, another article published in The Economist posed this question: Have women driven men from the workplace?

Paradox Seen

At once, I saw the impossible paradox for women: We are achieving what begins to look like equality because the men are doing worse. Is their loss really our gain?

Women today enjoy more control over their lives than their mothers ever dreamed of. The great majority have jobs that may not be the greatest, but that give them a life in their 40s and 50s after their kids are off (though the juggling of children and job in their 30s is tough). Many women are doing as well as or better than those downsized men.

Studying the pattern in the news clippings, I sensed a truly serious backlash ahead. I had noticed the court rulings in which divorced women lost custody of a child because they had a demanding job or were pursuing a degree and placed their child in day care for part of the day. The fathers won custody because their new wives or mothers would stay home all day with the child.

New Coalition

I also noticed how the religious right marched under the banner of "family values" even as its zealots continued to bomb abortion clinics. Feminist groups have mobilized to defend those clinics. But who is mobilizing to confront the economic inequality and dislocation that threatens the survival and stability of families far more than abortion or pornography?

There has to be a paradigm shift in our thinking about women, not just from sexual politics but from the whole focus of our status vis-a-vis men. If women are winning while men are losing, since most women continue to live with men in families, how long can women really win? If jobs, work, and family are the issues that concern women most now, we have to mobilize to protect our children, our families, and ourselves in a new coalition with men.

Restructuring

Our economy is in need of basic restructuring - one that counters income inequality, confronts the needs of family that can't be ignored in a workplace where women now equal or outnumber men, and insists that more and more men share in the responsibilities of parenting. This restructuring can't be accomplished in terms of women versus men, blacks versus whites, old versus young, conservative versus liberal.

We need a new political movement in America that puts the lives and interests of people first. It can't be done by separate, single-issue movements now, and it has to be political, to protect and translate our new empowerment with a new vision of community, with new structures that open the doors again to real equality of opportunity for the diverse interests of all our children - a new evolution of democracy as we approach the new millennium.

Betty Friedan, who has a house in Sag Harbor, is an adjunct scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The author of "The Feminine Mystique" and "The Fountain of Age," she is working on a new book, "Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family." This article is excerpted from the journal of the Democratic Leadership Council.