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Post-Roe Feminism: Recharged or Discharged?
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20508 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
6,773 Words |
| Author
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Frederica Mathewes-Green
Frederica Mathewes-Green is vice president for communications
for Feminists for Life of America and is communications
director for the Pro-Life Education Foundation of Maryland. |
Major movements begin with dreams and end with mechanics.
The term feminism is almost inextricably bound up in the public mind with access to abortion, provided (as a recent Fund for the Feminist Majority mailing puts it) "without restrictions." A kind of red fury surrounds this demand, one that is presented as beyond negotiation and even beyond discussion.
Yet in 1970, when the six-hundred-page anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was published, only a portion of one essay focused on abortion. Similarly, the National Organization for Women's Bill of Rights, adopted at its first national conference in 1967, mentions abortion (with contraception) only at the end of its seven demands; "abortion" appears only as the last word in the document.
A great many other concerns were crowding for attentions in those days, as the movement struggled to establish women's true identity and free it from narrow role restrictions. It was an intoxicating time when anything seemed possible. Twenty years later, some of the more audacious ideas look silly, bad-tempered, or severely reactive; little is currently heard of the myth of the vaginal orgasm, the abolition of the nuclear family, or the revolutionary importance of not shaving one's legs. But these and a hundred other ideas were groping after a dream, a utopia where women would have freedom, safety, dignity, and opportunity that they had never known before.
Abortion Takes Center Stage
Dreams do not translate well into action; they evaporate in the light of day. The goal of transforming attitudes toward women was all but inexpressible. A movement needs concrete, measurable goals, and so it happened that, in the contest among the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay, and other contenders, abortion emerged as chief. And, of the other issues that remain important, it is abortion that provokes the most emotional defense.
Abortion is the little issue that grew, and it has devoured the feminist movement. This is not the first time such a process has occurred: The women's movement that began in the last century was increasingly consumed by the flight for the vote, particularly as success drew near. When this right was won in 1920, interest in the movement all but collapsed; it was defeated by its own success. The global vision of liberated womanhood had been reduced in the public mind to a lever in a voting booth,
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