Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 8, 1992 TAG: 9203080317
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Ireland, the new and much-discussed president of the National Organization for Women, has ambitious plans for leading NOW and its 250,000 members into their second 25 years. Her ideas are intended to make both Republicans Patricia Ireland NOW's new leader and Democrats squirm.
For starters:
A million members by the end of this century.
Endorsement of a third major political party to "shake things up . . . get people excited about politics again" and to promote a feminist agenda.
Weekly NOW-sponsored TV docudramas in which real people would tell real stories about sexual harassment, battering and job discrimination and NOW would tell viewers how to fight back.
But Ireland takes over at a time when some feminist leaders are questioning whether NOW, having set the feminist agenda and having opened doors for women, is still in tune with their needs.
And, indeed, whether the movement itself will rebound from the backlash of the 1980s that saw women losing ground gained over two decades.
NOW was born in response to the shared anger of women at a conference on the status of women in Washington in the summer of 1966.
Although sex-based job discrimination had been outlawed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was not enforcing the law. Newspapers, for example, listed "Help Wanted-Male" and "Help Wanted-Female."
The women found an ally in EEOC Commissioner Richard Graham. He told Betty Friedan, the most visible of the new feminists, "What we need is a political force for women's rights."
At NOW's organizing conference that October, he was elected vice president. Today, semiretired and living in Washington, Graham is frankly critical of the group's direction: "The perception is that NOW is more interested in the issue of sexual preference than it is in sexual injustice. That's the way it's perceived in the political world and by most of the women I know.
"NOW stands for issues that ought to be stood for, but NOW can't understand the importance of accentuating the issues on which everyone can agree," such as health care and child care, rather than abortion and sexual harassment.
Harriett Woods, president of the National Women's Political Caucus, says, "I think women are ahead of the movement. They don't see themselves as outsiders who have to picket to get attention. They see themselves as players in the system. We have to catch up with them."
NOW's agenda is shared by women's groups once thought of as very traditional, who are themselves shaking things up. Among them: the American Association of University Women and Business and Professional Women.
"If NOW weren't the radical edge, AAUW might look like radicals in the eyes of the public. We agree on most issues," says Sharon Schuster, president of AAUW. She notes that when AAUW was formed in 1891, "college was thought to be detrimental to women's health."
Such groups as AAUW have worked quietly, keeping a low profile. But as NOW has changed women's thinking, the quiet voices have grown louder.
Over the past decade, another voice has become louder, that of the backlash.
In her recent book, "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," Susan Faludi spells out how politicians, the media, the fashion industry, TV and films - together with the New Right - have conspired to put women back in their place. "The feminist revolution has petered out," she writes. "The possibility for real progress has been foreclosed." Women, she concludes, feel "paralyzed."
But Faludi now says she has changed her mind, in light of recent events. "It's not so much that feminists have lost their resolve," she says. "It's just that in the face of so much hostility and antagonism, women sort of went underground."
The specter of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas face-off and of losing legal abortion, she believes, have "served to jolt women to action." They have come to see that they weren't paranoid, after all.
In Ireland, NOW has a new leader - its eighth - who is forthright, politically savvy and both fervent and funny.
Titillating headlines have plagued Ireland, 46, as she settled into her $90,000-a-year job, heading an organization with a $10 million annual budget and 750 chapters.
She has acknowledged having both a husband of 25 years, artist-businessman James Humble in Florida, and an unidentified woman "companion" in Washington. That's all she'll say.
Ireland knows that these are "hard times" for the women's movement. The enemy is declaring once again that feminism is dead. NOW, with its visibility, is the target.
At its core, she says, the backlash is motivated not by religious fundamentalists but by the economic interests of entrenched leaders of business and industry.
In a recent Gallup poll, only one-third of women identified themselves as feminists. This does not mean they are not for women's rights, says Ireland, who blames a calculated campaign to portray feminists as undesirables: "The image that comes to people's minds is ugly, hairy, man-hating, humorless and, probably, a dyke - a dyke on a bike, with leather.
"Physically and style-wise I look much more like a corporate attorney [which she was] than a wild-eyed radical feminist, and I think somehow that's disarming to people," she says.
Rather than lobbying on Capitol Hill for NOW-backed legislation, she will be probing the records, finding out "who is paying the professional lobbyists, who's pulling Congress' strings, who's pulling the strings at the White House" - so NOW can let everyone know.
But NOW still will march in Washington April 5 for women's reproductive rights. Ireland says, "People in power will not give us what we need because we're nice, because they like us."
NOW has won some battles, lost some. Failure of the federal Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 was a major blow.
But women can attend once-male schools, get credit on their own and hold once-male jobs. Yet there are few women in the highest echelons of industry.
One statistic defines political power at the top: There are two women in the U.S. Senate. Women are 5 percent of Congress.
by CNB