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Women's Rights | |
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Milestones from 150 years of women's rights in America 1848 1855 1870 1896 1917 1920 1921 1923 1924 |
Carol
Norberg, 73, calls herself a latecomer to the movement. Born just four years after women
won the right to vote, the Roseville resident was raised when most girls didn't go to
college and those who did generally looked forward to jobs teaching or nursing -- if they
worked outside the home at all. Sally Roesch Wagner, 55, was on the front lines of activism, picketing beauty pageants, lobbying for women's civil rights and helping found the women's studies program at Sacramento State. Melissa Bagwell, 16, leads a weekly gathering of Auburn girls who spruce up parks, paint children's faces at carnivals and organize dances. The teenager believes that women are "pretty much equal" under the law, but need to boost their confidence through community service. Last week, these three generations of local women -- a retired teacher, a traveling historian, a high school senior -- converged on upstate New York with thousands of others to celebrate today's 150th anniversary of the modern women's movement in America. Each of the three brings a different perspective to a movement that traces its roots to a small Seneca Falls chapel in 1848, where 300 men and women gathered to make the first formal demands for the basic rights of education, suffrage and property ownership. Since then, the movement has expanded and shifted in subject and scope, shaped by the experiences and concerns of successive eras of American women. What "women's rights" means to people now varies with their political bent, age and economic status -- from poor mothers who worry they can't feed their kids to middle-class professionals searching for adequate child care to elderly women trying to survive on their Social Security checks. The evolution of the movement can be gauged through the words and interests of successive generations of women. Norberg, a retired teacher, worries that women still haven't achieved some of the basic rights sought early on, such as equal access to education. "Girls have to know that they're as important as boys. We've accomplished a lot through athletics, and of course some girls aren't afraid to use their brains, ... but it's happening slowly," she said. A generation younger, Wagner acknowledges gains, but said many of the issues facing women when she took to the streets to protest -- from access to abortion to sexual assault -- remain unresolved. "Options were so limited to women when I was growing up," said Wagner, who works as a traveling historian, donning a wig of white curls to assume the personae of early suffragists. "I see that I was part of the generation of women that opened doors, and it was a push to open those doors. The women's movement has been a revolution, but it isn't over yet." Diann Rogers, at 37, wouldn't call herself a feminist, but identifies with the movement. A founder of the Seneca Network, a group that raises money to support Republican women candidates in California, she recalls registering for the draft when she turned 18, because she didn't think it fair that the requirement only applied to males. "Do I think there should be equal pay for equal work? Absolutely. Do I think there's a glass ceiling out there? Yes," she said. Younger women say their struggle isn't as political as it is personal. Bagwell, who leads a group of girls called Independent Minds Actively Gaining Equality, or IMAGE, said problems like domestic violence can be solved if women build self-esteem and nurture their talents, in part through volunteering. "Women need to go out and look for something that will build confidence in themselves," she said. "I want the girls to bring out their insides, what they really think about and what they really want to do." |
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member Monique Ritcherson, 16, who wants to become a firefighter, calls their approach
"quiet activism." She described how the group cleaned up a park known as
"Crack Corner," proving that "we can achieve something without other
people, without guys or adults." "We're not on the streets protesting," she said. "But we still feel strongly for (women's rights)." As perspectives have shifted -- and the number of elected women has increased -- so have trends at the political forefront. "The issues we deal with now are basically the same as the ones we've dealt with in the past, but the slant is a little bit different," said Vicki Atwood,legislative coordinator for the California Commission on the Status of Women. "In the 1970s, a child-care bill may have addressed the availability and quality of child care in California. Now the issue of dependent care has broadened to include elder care," she said. When Atwood joined the commission in 1975, gender-specific laws covered pregnancy and housing discrimination, pregnancy leave, displaced homemakers and access to credit. Fast forward to 1998, and pending legislation addresses sexual harassment, child support, duration of hospitalization after a mastectomy and more than 10 bills on domestic violence. The commission monitors about 300 bills annually. Over the last five years, it has tracked 20 to 30 bills a year involving violence against women, making it the No. 1 women's issue by volume, Atwood said. The upswing in domestic violence legislation and other laws targeting issues specific to women is due partially to the increase in female politicians, say political observers. In the California Legislature, seven of the 40 senators and 20 of the 80 Assembly members are women. At the federal level, there are 54 women in the 435-seat House of Representatives and nine female senators out of 100 -- a record high. "You can see in the legislatures around America that there's a greater sensitivity to education and issues of child and spousal abuse," said Phil Isenberg, a former Sacramento mayor and Democratic assemblyman. "You can arguably suggest that the civilizing of domestic relations laws is almost entirely attributable to the women's rights movement, and it isn't just liberal women." |
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| 1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination based on sex. 1966 1972 1973 1976 1981 1986
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Assemblywoman
Barbara Alby, a Fair Oaks Republican who says she was physically abused in her first
marriage, has turned a personal issue into a political one, authoring bills to address
domestic violence. Alby said she wouldn't call herself a feminist, but supports "things that women care about," ranging from tax policy to reforming health maintenance organizations -- issues, she points out, that are of interest to men as well. "Terms like 'women's issues' tend to isolate you rather than build support," Alby said. "Most women are worried about tomorrow and feeding the kids, making sure they can go back and forth to school safely and making sure they have a car to drive and that it'll work." Assemblywoman Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, has authored laws to fund research on gender-specific cancers, such as prostate, testicular, ovarian and uterine, legislation she introduced after her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. "I don't know if I would be able to do ovarian cancer on its own. As a political reality, it had to be blended with prostate cancer," she said. There's disagreement about whether gender-blind laws make for effective public policy, said Kate Karpilow, executive director of the Institute for Research on Women and Families at CSUS. "The question is, can you legislate thoughtfully on sexual harassment and not acknowledge that it's almost always men who harass women?" she said. "Can you craft child care policy without the recognition that most single parents are women who earn far less than men?" Similar questions are being asked in the business world. Women have made tremendous gains in pay and status, but those victories themselves have raised new issues. In 1996, there were 7.95 million women-owned businesses, or one-third of all firms in the country, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. That's up significantly from 1987, when there were 4.5 million women-owned businesses. "There was a time when people might note that the boss was anything other than a man. But people don't comment on it anymore," said Bernard Bowler, chairman of the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. Women now make up one-third of the students working toward an MBA at the University of California, Davis; 20 years ago the proportion of women in business schools generally didn't top 10 percent, said Robert Smiley, dean of the school's Graduate School of Management. At the same time, only a few women head major firms. "I can't tell you why," he said. "It's just a matter of time, is one hypothesis, or there is something inherently discriminatory about the process." |
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the numbers don't reveal is one of the major workplace issues facing women today: how to
balance a job and family. "It's very difficult to need to be at work on a particular day and to leave a sick child at home, even when someone is looking after him," said Karen Diepenbrock, shareholder in the Diepenbrock law firm. "Sometimes, you're forced to make choices you would rather not between a child and work." While juggling family and work is emerging as a primary concern for young, professional women, it's not a universal women's issue. If there is one thing that distinguishes the present from 1848, it's that there's no longer one women's movement. Sister Catherine Connell, co-founder and director of Wellspring Women's Center in Oak Park, said child care is just a part of the struggle for poor and homeless women. "Welfare reform affects poor women who don't have adequate child care, who don't have the education to get the jobs that provide for family needs," said Connell, who also believes that women should be ordained as priests of the Catholic Church. For Ruth Kletzing, 74, board member of the Older Women's League of California, issues such as age discrimination, older women's dependence on inadequate pensions and elder abuse top the list. |
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Delores Johnson, 59, of Antelope belongs to the Sacramento Valley section of the National Council of Negro Women. Johnson, who retired from the Internal Revenue Service as chief of the Collection Division in Sacramento, recalls attending meetings on women's rights in the 1960s and '70s and feeling like the movement was only for white women. Now her group is working to bring women's organizations in the area together to address issues important to all of them, such as education, homelessness and child care, she said. "We all need help. Maybe if we all get together, we can provide baby-sitting (and other services), not just lip service," she said. And there are still women who believe that full equality won't be achieved without a constitutional change such as the Equal Rights Amendment, which was three states shy of victory when the 1982 ratification deadline passed. "Your rights are just one legislature away from being overturned," said Helen Grieco, president of the California arm of the National Organization for Women. She said women's groups will launch the campaign for an amendment in 2000, and in the interim will pursue some kind of equality statute that would eliminate gender inequalities in federal law. Whatever their perspective, the thousands who made the pilgrimage to Seneca Falls last week came together to celebrate the activists who ignited the movement. "Every time women grouse about working in the movement ... I think of those women who sloshed though the snow in high-button boots and long skirts," said Norberg. "I wish we could somehow put that in some kind of video with virtual reality so young women today could know what women have gone through in the past to secure their rights." It is a lesson that Wagner, who curated two exhibits at the events, went to teach. On Wednesday, she joined Hillary Rodham Clinton on a bus tour, answering the first lady's questions on the early suffragists. "She asked me, 'What is it about these women that most engages you?' ... I said it was the way they addressed all of their work to the future. They knew they would not see results of their labor in their own lifetime," Wagner said. "Her eyes lit up when I said that."
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Copyright © 1998 -- The
Sacramento Bee |
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 Source: U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics |
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| Source: National Committee on Pay Equity and National Foundation for Women
Business Owners |
