During the 1992 presidential campaign, whenever the polls showed George H. W. Bush slipping against his rival Bill Clinton, the Republicans threw darts at Clinton’s wife. Their long list of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s deficits included using her maiden name, her failure to bake chocolate chip cookies, and her outspoken independence. But what really enraged them? According to Alessandra Stanley, writing in the New York Times on August 21, 1992, it was her career. She had worked full-time while being a mother. “An unwifely feminist,” a Cruella de Vil with a law degree. It not only set her apart from other first ladies, it just about disqualified her for the role.
Many women—a good chunk of them among the 56 percent in the workforce—apparently rejected these slurs; they gave more votes to Clinton than to Bush, if only by a small margin.
For a lot of feminists the election signaled a new era of tangible political power. “More than half a century after women were granted the vote, a female block emerged; women were more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, favoring a greater governmental role in social services, men wanting less,” reported historians Carole Ellen DuBois and Lynn Dumneil in Through Women’s Eyes. Carol Moseley Braun took her seat as the first African American female senator, and women gained representatives in both the House and the Senate.
Initially, Bill Clinton didn’t disappoint. Women played conspicuous and important roles in his government: Janet Reno, attorney general; Madeleine Albright, secretary of state; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, second female member of the Supreme Court. More than 40 percent of his appointments went to women, and his administration oversaw record funding for women’s health programs.
I remember the excitement when my colleague Kirsten called to say, “He did it!” The “it” referred to passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the first piece of legislation Clinton signed.
The most prominent of the new act’s several clauses made it mandatory for companies of a certain size to give both men and women at least twelve work weeks of unpaid time off from their jobs each year for the birth or adoption of a child or the addition of a foster child to a family. Our next push would be for paid leave, but this constituted a good first step to becoming a country acknowledging, understanding, and even supporting the needs of mothers in the workplace.
Other successes followed. Clinton rescinded Ronald Reagan’s Global Gag Rule and signed the Violence Against Women Act, finally recognizing domestic violence as a major public policy concern.
Then his agenda hit the skids.
His pledge to allow openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the armed forces collapsed like a poorly made soufflé. The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy effectively said to servicemen and -women, “It’s OK to be gay, just keep quiet about it,” and proved unappetizing to both the military and homosexual communities. The armed forces thought the policy was insensitive to their needs, and gays criticized it as too cautious.
As for health care reform, with its much-needed provision of universal coverage? The plan, spearheaded by Hillary’s task force, ultimately went belly up under the well-coordinated attack from conservatives, the American Medical Association, and the health insurance industry. While pundits and policy wonks dissected the failed proposal, the number of uninsured Americans rose from 34.7 million to 42.6 million by the end of the 1990s. The human faces behind these staggering numbers will haunt anyone who reads through the transcripts of the regional hearings the American Cancer Society conducted during those years. For those lacking insurance, the words second opinion and early detection are little but cruel taunts from an exclusionist world. At forty-one, Anna had stage four cervical cancer, a disease easily diagnosed by a pap test, if only she could have afforded one. And Marge, terminally ill with breast cancer, had worried for years about the lump she’d found, but the money for a biopsy, surgery, maybe chemo—where would she get that with three children to feed?
Next came welfare—a topic so demonized by Republican rhetoric by the time of Clinton’s presidency that any meaningful debate on its merits became impossible. Once he signed the reform bill in 1996 under the who-could-criticize-it title “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” the sixty-year-old safety net for the poor fell apart. However fair the bill attempted to be, there’s no way to see its first sentence—“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society”—as anything other than a swipe at many of those it presumed to help.
Welfare and work programs now became the responsibilities of individual states, with financial incentives to reduce their caseloads. Recipients had to find work—thirty hours of it per week for parents with children over age six—within two years or be cut off from aid. No one could receive cash assistance for more than five years, and states could deny benefits to women who had additional children while receiving welfare. A patchwork of provisions helped ease the transition for welfare recipients, and the vigorous economy did its part to enable some women to find moderately well-paying jobs. Others stayed poor, desperately poor. With so much likely to be stacked against them—little education, few employable skills, abusive partners, limited access to child care—it’s no wonder many women reported cutting back on or skipping meals so they wouldn’t run out of food before the next paycheck.
That Clinton had a bellicose Republican Congress hurling a wrecking ball into all his social policies didn’t give him a pass in the eyes of many feminists. His welfare “reforms” signaled a betrayal. “He was the man we hoped would bring back social responsibility, a sense of community to our country,” one of my colleagues said, her voice filled with disappointment. Instead, he’d taken a page from the GOP handbook with unfettered individualism written all over it. Patricia Ireland, then the president of NOW, led a hunger strike protesting the new law. NOW activists joined hundreds of others picketing in front of the White House in what they called a Hungry for Justice campaign.
Clinton’s veto of a bill outlawing dilation and extraction, a type of rare late-term abortion approved by numerous organizations including the American Nurses Association, helped to redeem his image with many women, but it set him on a crash course with Republicans who vowed to end this kind of abortion in any way they could. And though few of us realized it at the time, Clinton, with his sexual escapades, had as much as tied himself to the train tracks.
THROUGHOUT 1998 WE began hearing about an alleged relationship between Clinton and a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The steamy media spectacle that ensued refused to budge; it squatted like a toad on the public consciousness, kept there by a press wallowing in the smutfest.
But even when the president confirmed the validity of reports, most of the women I knew abstained from judgment, taking an “If Hillary doesn’t care, why should we?” attitude. Interestingly, at the time, Hillary, in the role of the poor deceived wife standing by her man, won far greater support than Hillary the would-be policy maker. Her approval ratings soared.
Of course many of us responded with outrage, deploring Bill’s womanizing, his appalling inappropriateness, his inability to “keep it zipped”—but impeach him for it? You’ve got to be kidding! One of my friends hung a sign in his office reading It’s the Nation’s Welfare, Stupid. Still, Newt Gingrich, House speaker and determined foe of everything Clintonian, steamrolled ahead, putting substantial resources into the search for snippets of titillating evidence against the president.
Known feminists and women politicians whose opinions hadn’t been sought on any number of issues, from gun control to minimum wage, suddenly became grist for the media mill. The press hammered high-profile women who refused to call for Clinton’s impeachment, calling them hypocrites, opportunists, and worse. When former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, appearing on Chris Matthews’s Hardball, wouldn’t label Clinton’s behavior as sexual harassment because Lewinsky was a consenting adult, another guest, Michael Barone, senior Washington editor for Reader’s Digest, likened the women’s movement to prostitution. And Larry King invoked Hitler’s name when Patricia Ireland, on CNN, argued against overturning the election—especially one determined by women—because of Clinton’s irresponsible behavior.
Feminist theorists Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and Barbara Ehrenreich all spoke out against the president. But many other advocates of women’s rights, while condemning his actions, expressed deep concern about an ultraconservative agenda. Numerous leaders of the women’s movement put out a joint press release in 1998:
We are witnessing a relentless campaign—both inside and outside the government—to hound President Clinton out of office. . . . And some of those who are leading the charge . . . are among the worst foes of women’s rights. The opponents of the President have a political agenda that will harm women long after the scandal has faded from the front pages.
For certain, Clinton’s scorecard on women’s issues hadn’t been perfect, yet he’d done more for us than any president in recent memory. His unfinished program, including raising the minimum wage, ensuring pay equity, giving twenty-one billion dollars to child care initiatives, expanding health services for women, and numerous antipoverty remedies, lay fallow in a Congress totally preoccupied with reaping the political rewards of the revelatory semen-stained dress.
And it was preoccupied. And partisan—splashing the secret grand jury testimony all over the news, rushing to publish the report of independent counsel Kenneth Starr well before the decision to proceed with impeachment hearings had been reached. The moralizing right, wringing its hands over Clinton’s salacious behavior, simply couldn’t get enough of it. Peculiarly, they wanted the public to join in their voyeuristic orgy—445 pages filled with sexually explicit language and X-rated descriptions.
When Hillary Clinton, in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal, claimed “a vast right-wing conspiracy” had been against her husband since his election, most Americans shrugged it off. And while there was no coordinated, top-to-bottom plot, she wasn’t that far off the mark.
The reports of numerous esteemed journalists described a well-financed, organized, conservative attack machine bent on destroying progressive candidates and policies. David Brock’s bestselling tell-all Blinded by the Right revealed how he received huge sums from firebrands of the right to trample truth in a brazen but highly successful smear campaign against Bill Clinton. And Anita Hill. And Hillary. (That Brock’s exposé of A-list conservative participation in these nefarious schemes didn’t result in any slander or libel suits against him goes far to affirm the validity of his charges.)
Still in the future were the damning disclosures about Clinton’s leering enemies: Henry Hyde, head of the Judiciary Committee, responsible for deciding whether to refer Clinton’s case to the House for impeachment proceedings, had a long affair with a mother of three, ending her marriage, although not his own. And Newt Gingrich took time out from self-righteously megaphoning his disgust at Clinton’s behavior to have sex with a young congressional aide. Quite likely, the Peeping Toms on the right went after Clinton as a way to expiate their own guilt.
The disproportionate attention given to l’affaire Lewinsky—the formal impeachment ceremony, the public shaming of the president—was a definite and deliberate attempt to draw the public together by casting Clinton as a deviant. Clinton’s serial womanizing became a wonderfully suited launching pad from which to rocket off a newly fueled “family values” agenda. See what happens in a marriage when a wife works outside the home? See what happens to a country embracing debauchery instead of morality? demanded the outraged and often hypocritical voices of Washington.
When the Senate voted against convicting Clinton in 1999, the majority of Americans—according to the polls—expressed relief. More than forty million taxpayer dollars had been spent, attention to important issues diverted, precious legislative time squandered.
Most of us didn’t realize at the time how much all the brouhaha surrounding the impeachment hearings emboldened and played into the hands of the political right and their champions in the media. But we were going to find out soon enough.
As the new century turned, Americans felt optimistic and secure about their futures. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, never evoking deep feelings of vulnerability, had begun to fade in memory. The U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa five years later, while horrific, didn’t seem a direct threat to U.S. citizens, and the attack on the Cole was still ten months away.
As much as Clinton’s detractors had painted dire scenarios of a nation plunged into ruin, by the end of the 1990s life had improved considerably for the majority of Americans. Daring to raise taxes, Clinton had helped close the budget deficit. He left a budget surplus of $127 billion, projected to swell to $5 trillion over the next ten years.
America had more jobs than we’d had for decades. “Between 1992 and 2000 U.S. companies added 32 million workers to their payrolls, driving unemployment to a 30-year low. Productivity—the amount produced per worker—responsible for higher wages, soared. By the end of Clinton’s term it was rising faster than ever before in our history,” according to economist Paul Krugman.
For the first time since the 1960s, poverty rates declined. Families finally had a chance to break free of the generational stranglehold keeping them down. Two especially vulnerable groups—children under eighteen and single mothers, particularly those with young children—saw a substantial increase in their standard of living from 1989 to 1999.
More jobs and more money translated into a healthier society. Serious crime, including sexual assault, dropped dramatically. The availability of new treatments for breast cancer resulted in a higher survival rate for women with the disease, although better outcomes for white women than black pointed to the need for more funding. The death rates from lung, prostate, and colorectal cancers also dipped.
Not surprisingly, there were fewer teen pregnancies occurring in all states and among young women of all ages, races, and ethnicities. This trend, as a study on youth risk behavior from 1991 to 2001 made clear, resulted from improved contraceptive availability and practices.
High school sex education was at an all-time high. Those of us who taught adolescents told them straight out: there’s only one sure way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases—no sexual intercourse. But being realists, we spent hours in workshops learning how to talk with teens about sex and how to teach contraception. Then we took our show on the road, meeting with small groups of students, excusing those whose families opted out of the program. With plastic models at the ready, we demonstrated how to use both male and female condoms. The bravehearts among the faculty play-acted ways to say no and ways to say yes safely. Our mantra: “Don’t die from embarrassment.” And similar scenarios played out all over the country.
Women’s groups scored impressive victories in getting more insurance companies to cover contraception, making it widely available to those who wanted it. And in what might have served as a public policy lesson for future administrations, abortion rates plunged under the watch of our first pro-choice president. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, 180,000 fewer abortions were performed nationwide than when he took office.
By the mid-1990s mothers of young children accounted for more than 59 percent of the workforce, and longitudinal studies of how everyone was doing began to roll in. One, by the Society of Early Child Care, following over a thousand children from birth to three years of age at ten different locations in the country, confirmed earlier findings: these children benefited from their mothers’ involvement in the outside world. Good child care experiences—whether in a center or with relatives—had a positive impact on emotional and social development.
Still, lack of a comprehensive federal policy regulating child care facilities meant far too many children spent time in centers exceeding the recommended ratio of five children to one adult, but the narrowing of the wage gender gap and a drop-off in the number of divorces (on the uptick until the Clinton years) meant many more families would be able to afford quality child care than previously.
Not surprisingly, households with a better financial outlook, no matter the source, enjoy a better quality of life. A compilation of some twenty-odd analyses showed no difference in marital happiness of couples with employed and nonemployed wives, and, all other factors being equal, a woman was generally more satisfied if she had an income. The old adage—men don’t want their wives working—just didn’t hold up.
Even television began to reflect an increasing acceptance of female independence. After the feisty detective-friends Cagney and Lacey were yanked off the air in 1988 because, as one CBS executive told TV Guide, the heroines “were too harshly women’s lib,” viewers in the 1990s hunting for female characters with some oomph found two.
Roseanne, the overweight, tart-tongued working wife and mother in the Emmy Award–winning show by the same name, struck a responsive chord with women across the country as a welcome alternative to the typical saccharine sitcom heroine. Even with her string of jobs—cashier, telemarketer, waitress, clerk—Roseanne and her husband, Dan, struggled constantly. Financial difficulties dogged them as they did so many working families. But more than that—the series showed us a world where life happened. In the face of the gritty realities of abortion, domestic violence, and infidelity, the female characters supported one another. They weren’t afraid to speak up, sometimes at an ear-splitting pitch, and when they did—miraculously for TV—they got respect, not rejection.
To link Buffy, the slender, young, blond vampire slayer, with Roseanne seems, at first glance, odd. But like Roseanne, Buffy, who vanquished the forces of darkness, also defied existing gender stereotypes. The show’s writer, Joss Whedon, set out to invert the Hollywood formula of “the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie.” He wanted his character to personify the “joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.” Back in 1997, executives at Channel WB (now home to such female-undermining series as America’s Next Top Model, The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll, and Beauty and the Geek) had been looking for a series empowering young women, and they picked up the show.
Buffy’s age—she was a high school student—made her a bit young for a superhero, but it also created a lot of her appeal. Some of her monsters had real faces and names: Spike, Drusilla, Oz. But other demons she had to conquer were far more pervasive and elusive: the harrowing obstacles confronting adolescent girls.
Sunnydale High, Buffy’s new school, may have been perched on top of a “Hellmouth,” an entryway to evil’s domain, but every high school can be a dangerous place for teenage girls as they try to negotiate the risky complexities of their own sexuality and autonomy.
Film critic Hannah Tucker, then seventeen years old, described Buffy’s appeal. “For some . . . [it’s the] brutal portrayal of high school . . . for others, it’s the pop culture references . . . and for some, the lure of a Wonderbra’d blond chick fighting vampires, and that’s fine with me. Because the basic truth about Buffy herself is known to all who appreciate her: She’s the intelligent, youthful hope.”
Tucker’s words could well be part of the mission statement for third-wave feminism. The movement began in the 1990s, largely among women in their twenties. Some took their inspiration from the activities of riot grrrls, the music movement of punk bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Others wanted to accomplish the unfinished work of the second wave: raising the minimum wage, gaining affordable, accessible child care, fighting rape and domestic violence.
But however they began, third-wavers have concerns unique to their generation. In Manifesta, the wave’s quasi-bible, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards list “equal access to the Internet and technology, HIV/AIDS awareness, child sexual abuse, self-mutilation, eating disorders, body image and globalization” as priorities. The movement calls attention to the treatment of women in the army and women in prison, two significant and often overlooked sites of inequity.
Accepting and expanding upon much accomplished by my generation, third-wavers can be gently (and not so gently) critical of the movements before theirs. To distance themselves from what many see as the white middle-class centricity of the second wave, they ask: Whose Personal? Whose Political? Their movement is widely inclusive, battling all forms of discrimination simultaneously: sexism, racism, classism, ageism, and homophobia. They may not have any clear-cut icons, but neither are they a few lone cheerleaders twirling the baton of change. Over five thousand members form the Third Wave Foundation alone, raising money for women’s organizations around the world.
Third-wavers call to mind the chant arising from the march against the imminent invasion of Iraq, in New York City, February 13, 2003, a month before the spectacularly wrong-headed Shock and Awe campaign. Protesting the high-handed tactics of the Bush administration, tens of thousands, representing all races, classes, ethnicities, and ages, cried out, “This is what democracy looks like.”
In much the same way, third-wavers working to give a better life to the gray-haired and the bottle-blond, the sexy and the wallflower, the stay-at-home mom and the lesbian mother, the Hollywood producer and the factory worker, are saying loud and clear, “This is what a feminist looks like.”
They remind us again: there is no one-size-fits-all feminism, but a uniting of all politically conscious women in their quest, to use bell hooks’s phrase, for “gender justice.”
So that was where we were at the dawning of the new millennium: second-wavers still strong, the third wave pushing after us, all gaining momentum, when we came crashing into something huge and formidable, something that was, without doubt, one of the most bizarre and prophetic episodes in American history—the election of George W. Bush.