Why hasn’t COVID sparked a women’s movement? “Mrs. America” inspires a surprising insight
It has been clear for a while that the pandemic had a disproportionate effect on women. The closing of schools and childcare centers last March placed an added burden on women with young children, forcing many of them to leave the workforce. According to the National Women’s Law Center 2.2 million women left the labor force between February and October 2020. In September alone 865,000 women dropped out compared to 216,000 men. Women are also often a majority in K-12 education, care-work and food service, professions that are now on the front lines of COVID.
This situation, it seems, ought to call for a strong feminist response. Not too long ago, in the fall of 2017, revelations about pervasive sexual harassment and discrimination in Hollywood and elsewhere led to a global #MeToo movement. Earlier that year women took to the streets to protest Trump’s election, his rhetoric and treatment of women.
The injuries and inequalities we saw in 2020 are greater and more pervasive, and yet they did not lead to anything like a mass movement.
What’s more, there was a strange kind of silence around women’s issues. It wasn’t a complete silence — there was no shortage of opinion pieces about specific issues and profiles of women who were suffering — but there was no outcry, no manifesto demanding greater equality for women.
I’ll admit that I also found it difficult to write about the issue. I read the columnists, listened to the interviews, but when I sat down to write I found that I had little to say. After all, I wasn’t a front-line worker or a mother. I did not lose my job — though many of my colleagues did — and, to be honest, thanks to social distancing was experiencing less sexism in my everyday life.
I couldn’t understand the lack of a general outcry or my own silence until the TV show “Mrs. America” (FX on Hulu) reminded me of a moment in the history of the women’s movement that contemporary feminism often downplays.
When I first heard about the show, which focuses on the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, I was reluctant to watch it. The fact that the filmmakers chose to shine the spotlight on the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (played by the magnetic Cate Blanchett) put me off. Besides, I was sure that the show would tell a story that I already knew.
To my surprise much of the history of the 1970s women’s movement wasn’t really covered in my graduate education or my extensive reading. Watching the first episode, set in 1971 and 1972, I was astounded by the movement’s leaders’ confidence at their ability to ratify the ERA. In a fast-paced scene, we’re introduced to Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan as they celebrate the Senate’s approval of the ERA in a busy office. When an activist points out Schlafly’s newsletter, Abzug mispronounces Schlafly’s name, and then dismisses her opponent with a poignant phrase: “we don’t have to worry about stuff like that on the fringe.”
For the knowing viewer this scene is loaded with dramatic irony; and yet Abzug and her comrades have reason to be confident. Abzug has been able to bypass the hostile House Judiciary Committee
and bring the amendment to the House and the senate where it was approved by a strong majority. Within a year more than 30 states ratified the ERA. The women’s movement had gained enough momentum to wield real political power. It took an outsider like Schlafly to lead the opposition to the ERA because established politicians didn’t want to jeopardize their standing by going against it.
We don’t hear much about this moment in the history of the women’s movement today because its leaders were, for the most part, white straight women, some of whom were hostile to diversity. The show dramatizes this reality, but it also suggests that the movement’s leaders struggled over these issues. For instance, we see that while Abzug wants the movement to endorse McGovern in the 1972 democratic primary, Steinem wants to back Shirley Chisholm. Steinem also clashes with Friedan, who wanted to keep LGBT women out of the movement. By the end of the decade, though, the movement becomes more progressive, supporting anti-discrimination legislation based on sexual orientation, and trying to highlight Black women’s issues — though admittedly it remained weak on this issue.
The debate about the politics of the 1970s women’s movement is a long one, and today’s feminists are more likely to be familiar with its critiques than its achievements. But as I watched “Mrs. America” I was struck by the movement’s ideal of representing the majority of women, and of representing them in the political arena with the aim of achieving concrete gains: equal pay for equal work, access to safe and legal abortion, protection from harassment and discrimination. Yes, “the majority of women” was an ideal that the movement mostly fell short of, and they lost many of the legislative battles; but the movement was there and the goals were there.
Today, a comparable women’s movement does not exist. It’s a controversial thing to say, but when I think of a lack of a feminist response to COVID, and the journalistic silence about the pandemic’s devastating impact on women, this reality provides at least some of the answer. We cannot advocate for women’s equality because we’re afraid to speak about women as a group lest we offend someone or leave someone out. As a consequence, COVID, it seems, does not affect “women”: it affects working women with children, or women essential workers, or women of color — each as a distinct and separate group. If you don’t belong to one of these groups you cannot speak on their behalf and you cannot advocate for them, except with numerous caveats and apologies.
As someone who studies and teaches the politics of language and culture, I know that accuracy and nuance matter when you represent someone’s experience. I wouldn’t presume to write a poem or a story from an identity-perspective I know little about. But when it comes to gender-based inequality and discrimination I think that almost all of us can — and should — speak on one another’s behalf. We should do so because gender inequality is structural and not only cultural or sociological. The fact that women with children are given no alternative except to quit their jobs isn’t separate from the forms of inequality that I and almost all women experience at work. The fact that many women were forced to return to unsafe workplaces also clearly concerns us all.
It may be too late to start a movement in response to the pandemic, but maybe we can use it as a lesson that a women’s movement is still necessary. Contrary to common beliefs, it is most vital to the groups that an umbrella movement would presumably exclude. In 2021, a women’s movement need not repeat the mistakes of the 1970s, which were born out of prejudice and ignorance. On the other hand, such a movement can be much more effective in protecting the rights of working-class women, women of color, migrant care workers, and other groups that face extreme precarity and discrimination than the identity-based or issue-based strategies that are prevalent today.
