One forty-four Constitution Avenue, a lovely red brick Georgian known as the Alva Belmont house, sits right on top of Capitol Hill. Mrs. Alva Belmont gave the house to the National Women’s Party. Alice Paul, two years older than God (actually she was eighty-four), lived there.
Although she couldn’t walk easily, her mind flew ahead of her feet. In fact, her mind grew stronger even as her body failed her.
In 1968 I had met her as part of a delegation with Anselma dell’Olio, Jacqui Ceballos and Susan Vannucci. The New Feminist Repertory ladies had descended on Washington.
Seeing her again, shortly after I moved to D.C., it was apparent that time was running out for this grand old lady of feminism. Alice Paul had inherited the mantle of leader of the party from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Impeccably mannered—you had to be in her day—well groomed, well spoken and wise in the ways of Capitol Hill, she was a natural leader for legislative change.
The big blow came for Alice when her cohorts accepted winning the vote in 1920 in exchange for dropping the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. If you remember Abigail Adams’s letter to John in 1776 concerning women’s rights, “Remember the ladies … all men would be tyrants if they could,” the struggle for the vote consumed 140 years. Those girls were tired and they wanted to sit down.
Alice and the radical wing soldiered on, trying to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. While she managed to get this introduced each session, it would die in committee. The Democratic Party gave lip service only.
My hour with Alice involved listening to her tell me how a bill gets through the legislature. I knew the process, but one doesn’t interrupt an old lady when she’s on her pet subject.
Alice paid attention to bloodlines, another feature consistent with her generation. Mine passed muster. I was a WASP and a Buckingham to boot.
The few new female faces in Congress, Bella Abzug, for one, gave her hope. She wanted to live to see that amendment tacked on to the Constitution. She didn’t.
I agreed with Mrs. Paul. And I worked for the amendment in those early years.
But the longer I thought about Alice Paul’s life work, and the longer I roamed around Washington, the surer I felt that the timing was wrong, not the amendment itself.
I was supporting myself with freelance editing jobs and I’d mow your lawn for you, too. Sometimes I wonder that I didn’t go into the gardening and lawn care business—I’d been doing it since I was big enough to push a mower.
The feminists in New York and the other big cities talked to one another. I talked to my neighbors, working-class black women. I talked to my mother and Aunt Mimi. When I bummed a ride into Virginia or Maryland to visit a stable, I’d talk to the “barn rats,” the stable help.
Most of them had never heard of the Equal Rights Amendment. When I explained it they weren’t violently opposed, but their primary concern was being able to make a living.
The more I knew of Washington, the more I saw how out of touch the government was with the people. The war threw that into high relief, but the Nixon administration was out of touch on so many issues. I doubt any administration could have survived the tidal wave of change sweeping the country. It wasn’t just the war, it was the Pill, it was television intruding into people’s consciousness in ways no one quite fathomed. It was a generation in their late teens and twenties who said, “You told me this was the greatest nation on earth. Why, then, do we have racial suffering? Why is there an undeclared war in Indochina?”
The sainted Jack Kennedy couldn’t have weathered this sea of change any more than Nixon did.
There have been other times in history when a generational gulf has created desperate problems. In Weimar Germany, the generation that fought World War I was more liberal than their sons, who dragged Germany into World War II. The French Revolution was fueled, for the most part, by young men, which also explains the hideous excesses. Youth may be brilliant, but experience is worth as much as brilliance and a society needs older people for balance. Our own revolution was better balanced by age, which may explain the stability of the process. True, the Articles of Confederation fell flat, but no one lost their heads over it. No one was hanged during the Constitutional Convention.
Compromise saved us, and compromise is the work of mature people.
The women’s movement was a force of young women. Apart from Alice Paul and Betty Friedan, the burgeoning ranks were women from their late teens to their early thirties. It’s difficult for women with young children to be politically active, so once people settled down many of them dropped back—not necessarily out, but back.
The other drawback was also peculiar to women. Since we had been denied participation in the political process up to 1920, we had no one to help us. Margaret Chase Smith, the great senator from Maine, was nearing the end of her distinguished career. We had maybe four women in government who could show us the ropes.
Our mothers and grandmothers couldn’t help us. They weren’t hardened in political wars. Even my mother, who had a keen understanding of the political process, had never held elected office. She could give me the benefit of her experience but she couldn’t tell me what happens once you’re inside the system.
We might as well have been standing in the middle of the Mojave asking for rain.
The mistakes of the feminist movement in the seventies and eighties were the mistakes of youth. And thank God, they weren’t mean-spirited mistakes.
My chilling realization about the ERA’s bad timing first swept over me as I watched Fairfax Hunt take off one crisp October morning in 1970. Children, adults and older folk trotted off as the sun turned a light frost to dew.
Three generations. We had one. That’s when I knew the Equal Rights Amendment couldn’t be passed at that time. I gave the benefit of my illumination to everyone, including Gloria.
This is the only issue on which Gloria and I have disagreed publicly. The disagreements we have in private are more in the nature of a city person’s view of life versus a country person’s.
Gloria, Bella, Betty, all of them, were married to the damned Equal Rights Amendment.
My argument, simply put, is that you can’t work for a constitutional amendment without years, decades of local organizing, paying special attention to state legislatures, which are usually more conservative than Congress.
And you can’t expect women to rouse themselves across the land without delivering services to them, whether it’s in the form of child-care centers, rape crisis centers or legal services for those in need. You’ve got to give in order to get.
The South was the key to passage of the amendment. Too many feminists held the attitude that southerners are backward, so why bother with them? Then, too, coming from me the argument was seen as special pleading for my region.
The rest of the country mistakes the South’s deep hostility to legislation, national or state, as backwardness. Old, silly laws are left on the books, and some are plain horrible, but the point is, they’re not enforced. The South’s attitude is “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
We should know. When our state legislatures passed radical laws for secession, we southerners paid with our lives, our fortunes, our futures.
The easiest way to explain the War Between the States is that the South was right in the beginning and wrong at the end. We were constitutionally correct in our right to secede and we were right in our resistance to the industrial North’s attempt to destroy our agrarian economy. But we, especially the Delta, clung to slavery. For that we deserved to get our asses kicked.
Anyway, I knew those old boys needed attention. By virtue of being southern men, they were not automatically opposed to the amendment, contrary to what the Yankee girls thought. But by virtue of being southern men, they needed lots of female attention on this issue and perhaps on issues that might be important to them.
You can’t just blow people off and then expect them to come around when you need them.
Another factor is that in our political history, Americans have only amended the Constitution twenty-seven times and two of those amendments involved the Volstead Act, Prohibition. An amendment is the largest political action that our nation can take, and feminists wanted to start with an amendment.
Gloria conducted herself with grace, as she always does, but I was riddled with blasts from other women.
First they’d accuse me of splitting the movement over lesbians in the ranks. Right, let’s accuse the oppressed of causing the oppression. Now I was going to ruin the movement by opposing the Holy Grail, the Equal Rights Amendment.
I understood their need for a show of solidarity. I promised to be silent on the issue—and silence is usually assumed to be assent—in exchange for fighting openly for gay women to be part of the feminist movement.
I was right about the Equal Rights Amendment even though I wish I had been wrong.