By BARI WATKINS

This is a true story. During the Christmas holidays Betty Friedan and a local woman journalist appeared on a Boston TV talk show. Friedan, as is now usual, argued frantically that feminists have denigrated the family by encouraging women to desert the joys of home and motherhood for selfish careers. The local journalist managed to observe that feminists have in fact worked hard for a decade to foster better child care and family health and to help women shoulder the double burden of paid work and household labor. When the male moderator finally called on the all-female studio audience for comments, a young woman rose to her feet and angrily attacked Friedan. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice shook with fury as she said that the women's movement "couldn't make" her go to work "even if the ERA passed," that she loved her children and that Friedan was trying to destroy the family. The audience cheered and the moderator patted her shoulder approvingly. Friedan looked baffled; the local journalist was bemused.

This is another true story. During the 1980 presidential election campaign, the media's coverage generally indicated that the questions facing the nation were the economy, the cold war, the hostages, and the comparative blunders of Ronald Reagan and the Carter staff. Those were the issues discussed, for example, in Newsweek's colorful cover story on the Democratic convention. There was essentially no mention of women. Set aside from the main story, in a bordered box on the last page, was a short piece on women delegates and the "women's issues":

ERA and abortion. Women's politics, Newsweek apparently felt, were restricted to those two issues and were properly a peripheral concern, what journalists call a sidebar.

Yet, while given scant attention in the media, both the Republicans and the Democrats made women's issues the litmus test of party loyalty: The Republicans demanded judges who opposed abortion; the Democrats required support of the ERA in exchange for campaign funds. The only major defections came over those issues: Pat Crisp from the Republicans, the "right to lifers" from Carter.

It is hard to know what to make of all this. For the confused Boston audience, the women's movement apparently is equated with women's work outside the home and its presumed pernicious effects on family life. No one asked how relatively small and underfunded women's organizations (that have so far failed even to ratify the ERA) could force a young Boston housewife to desert her children. To Newsweek, the substance of women's politics are the ERA and abortion, neither of which are related directly to paid work. Further, Newsweek depicted the women's movement as less important than the experiences of both campaigns would suggest.

At the core of this social schizophrenia there seems to be a profound uncertainty about what the "women's movement" means, how it is related to women's work outside the home, and how to think about women in relationship to political life and social change.

Feminist scholars have lately built a persuasive framework for understanding what is really happening in women's lives and why the women's movement generates anxiety and misunderstanding. Every known society, they point out, has distinguished between the domestic space of women and private life and the public sphere of male lives outside the home. This domestic space appears consistently humane and is associated with children, nature, and the timeless and evanescent reproductive work of life. Yet that space is shown to be less important than the public sphere of men which includes formal hierarchies of power, economic relations and "society." This domestic/public dichotomy has been described in recent studies as the most fundamental of human social divisions and the foundation upon which all other relationships rest. It seems clear that human societies create separate orders for behavior in the two arenas: Domestic morality is contextual, personal, and concerned with an individual's responsibilities toward others while public morality is abstract, deductive, and concerned with conflicts between individual rights to resources or power.

Historians of the United States and Western Europe suggest that industrialization created an exaggerated domestic/public distinction in our own culture. The home was more radically separated from the public world when much productive labor was moved from the household to the factory. These historians now describe 19th century Europeans and Americans as so frightened by the destructive ravages of industrial development, class strife and urban conditions, that then vented the tranquility of the family and the transcendant morality of woman in the home as a necessary counterweight. Christopher Lasch aptly captured this new compensatory vision when he described the home as a "haven in the heartless world" of capitalism. The Victorian lady, with her purity, morality, and love for the weak and downtrodden was the balance to her husband, newly pictured as rapacious, greedy, and exploitatively entrepreneurial.

Since it was the public male world of capitalism that corrupted, the domestic space of women had to be more firmly separated than it had been before, the moral distinctions between the two more exaggerated, and women's interactions with the public more limited in order for civilization to survive. Thus the prohibition on women's work outside the home was not a minor or quaint pattern in our culture. That the woman had to "stay at home" was the moral center of, and product of, the industrial revolution. The radical dichotomy of home and work appeared not as a mere consequence of male wage labor, but as the social arrangement that made it possible. Victorian models of marriage and the family were not remote or metaphoric expressions of male dominance; they were its substance. And survival of civilized morality seemed to depend on the continued protection of women in and by family life from the presumed corruption of the public male world.

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With that cultural heritage, the young Boston housewife's fears about women's work outside the home is reasonable. If women go to work in the public world, then where will morality and love be preserved? So strong is the ieritage and so confusing the signals that the Boston woman missed hearing a sympathetic voice. The anxieties, however, are more muted for most Americans most of the time. They may show up in accusations that women bosses are cold and castrating or in perfume advertisments where women executives come home, let down their hair and become men's traditional sexual partners again. The first suggests deep-rooted fears that working women rill become corrupt and heartless, like the degraded male of Victorian imagination. The second assures us that despite her apparent independence, »oman's true orientation is toward sexuality and bonding with men in domestic life.

Perhaps these anxieties normally apear only in these peripheral or subtle contexts because by now — paradoxically — women's work outside the home is becoming normal and necessary. To most Americans, women's rapid entry into the workforce is certainly the most visible sign of women's new experiences and expectations. But the raw statistics about women's work are still startling. In 1955, 35.7 percent ot American women were employed full time, about the same proportion that had been working in 1945 at the end of the emergency mobilization of women workers. By 1966, the percentage had increased to 40.3 percent. Even lore rapid growth followed in the late '60s and through the '70s, as the percentage of women who work rose from 43.4 in 1970 to 50.1 in 1978 to an estimated 52.6 in 1980. The Urban Institute recently issued a conservative projection of a women's work rate of 54.8 percent in 1990.

More important is the dramatic change in the kinds of women who work outside the home and the work lives they may expect. From the 19th century through the early decades of the 20th, women workers shared four characteristics: They were poor, young, unmarried, and expected to be in the work force for only a limited time.

The crisis in domestic production of World War II shattered that pattern of characteristics by introducing the new woman worker to the American labor force. She was likely to be older, married and to have children. By the 1960s and '70s, the female pattern of temporary work eroded, and a new kind of woman worker began to dominate the female labor force.

In earlier times, women in the age group from 25 to 34 had been unlikely to work outside the home because those are the peak years for childbirth and child rearing. But between 1970 and 1978, the workforce participation rate of these women rose 17 percent, reaching 62 percent in 1978. Women with children under the age of six are the group who increased their workforce rate most rapidly in the 1970s, from 30 percent at the beginning of the decade to 42 percent in 1978. Most projections suggest that by the turn of the century, more than half of the mothers of pre-school children will be employed full time.

Further, a high proportion of working women are no longer members of male-headed households. Between 1968 and 1978, as the number of female-headed families increased by 54 percent to over eight million, the proportion of women workers who are divorced, widowed or separated reached 20 percent. Another eleven million women workers are single. Thus half of the women workers in America are the sole support of themselves and, often, others. Even in two-earner families, women's paid work is most often critical to survival. The earnings of full-time working wives in America contribute an average of 38 percent of the total family income. Most significantly, these new workers are not temporarily employed. The average working woman can expect a career of 25 years.

Yet women have found that the work world they entered does not provide opportunities or economic rewards commensurate with those men have experienced. Although progress has been made since the '60s by relatively small numbers of women who have entered well-paid and traditionally male-dominated fields, sex segregation of the labor force continues to hold down women's wages and impede their chances of making the money necessary to meet economic responsibilities. Most women workers work in low-wage, low-status, female-dominated fields where the doctrine of equal pay for equal work is meaningless insofar as there are virtually no men to be equal to. About 37 percent of women workers, for example, are clerks or secretaries; over 90 percent of that workforce is female. Or consider that about 80 percent of the women workers in the white-collar jobs classified by the Department of Labor as "professional, technical, or kindred" are actually low-paid noncollege teachers, social workers of some sort, or nonphysician medical workers. The average woman worker makes 59 cents for every dollar earned by the average male, but not because they do indentical work for which the male is better paid. Rather, the work into which women are channeled is paid at rates that presume its minimal value to society and reinforce the notion that women's wages are secondary in male headed domestic units.

Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that anger at simple economic injustice erupted in the 1960s and continues in the present. No large population group could be expected to suffer such a contradiction between need and experience or between ambition and limits without finally protesting.

Since that time, a large and visible segment of the women's movement has focused almost exclusively on removing the barriers to women's upward mobility in the paid labor force. Groups like NOW, WEAL (Women's Equity Action League) and the Business and Professional Women initially pushed for enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination in hiring, upgrading, salaries, fringe benefits and other employment conditions; encouraged the creation of Affirmative Action programs under Executive Orders 11246 and 11735; used the Office of Federal Contract Compliance and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to file suits against discriminatory employers; and so forth. All of these efforts were designed to help individual women climb the ladder of success.

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Without underestimating the hard work involved or the stubborn stereotypes that had to be overcome, it is still fair to say that these reforms fall within the general boundaries of American ideals of equality. Equal opportunity for individuals who will work hard is a persistent American belief, one that tends to create sympathy for the efforts of individual women to overcome barriers to success and for efforts to remove the obstacles before them. Public opinion polls reveal widespread support for equal opportunity for individual women workers and for "rights" protected by law. How many workplace or cocktail party discussions have summarized this situation: "Of course we would hire a well-qualified woman who can do the job. I just don't think women should get special privileges."

Lately, however, demands for the limited goal of individual economic opportunity have encountered the reality of a sex-segregated labor market. Even moderate reformers are beginning to see beyond individualistic notions of equality and recognize how cultural stereotypes have limited the work available to women. The bald fact is that college-educated women make, on the average, less than men who finish high school. Although the new logic of equality, expressed as "equal pay for comparable work," appears consistent with traditional American approval of a fair shake for those who try to better themselves, its meaning is far more radical.

At a kind of social bottom line, then, the growing desire of women for lifelong careers is encouraging a political movement — even if the actors may be unorganized and their protests relatively inchoate and unnoticed by the media. Every woman who protests she is "not a libber" but is nonetheless outraged at the opportunities open to male workers and not herself is a recruit to a movement for much more than simple economic justice. The demands of women for fair treatment in hiring and promotion are not, however, the only consequence of the barrier (now eroding) between the private domestic world and the public world of work. Nor are these demands the limits of the organized women's movement. Reproductive rights, including abortion, the women's health movement and child care services, demands that men share housework or stop calling women "girls": These and other disputes are flashpoints of change.

At the heart of these matters is a transformation of women's relationships to society from dependence to autonomy, from keeper of the domestic flame to fairly paid public worker. Paid work has played a vital role in this change by providing many women with the opportunity to support themselves — and their children, if necessary — without being part of a household headed by a male. At the same time, women's participation in public life has contradicted the cultural definitions of femininity that had upheld the Victorian balance between man's world and woman's place.

Perhaps the first national recognition of this evolving redefinition of women's status in society in the 20th century was the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In the 19th century, a woman had no civil rights: She could not vote, hold political office, or serve on juries. She had no direct relationship with the state. However, she was assumed to be represented in public life through the mediation of her husband and his defense of her interests as wife. Within that Victorian marriage it was understood that family decisions would be made by the husband in the best interests of the dependent family members, including his wife. The Victorian woman had no unmediated public persona and lived in a family space where her informal influence, and the bonds of love, were subservient to the formal authority of the man.

Suffrage signaled that women had begun to escape this nonperson status. With the vote, women were recognized as autonomous individuals in their political relationship to the state. Their interests were no longer assumed to be adequately protected by a male representative of the family. But suffrage did not mean a commitment to social or economic equality between the sexes, nor did many women possess the economic resources of males. Women got the vote, but little else.

But, by the late 20th century, access to the economic base is so widespread among women that the development of greater autonomy appears inevitable Women are now engaged in a constant and painful struggle in the home and the workplace, a struggle made more difficult by a contradictory cultural tradition. The pain is inescapable, for almost all women work with men or live in family groups with men or marry men.

Feminist social scientists have recently pointed out some of the more fascinating aspects of this struggle in everyday life. Women, they find, end spoken sentences on a rising (and questioning) tone far more frequently than men, and also complete statements with what are called tag questions, as in "It's a beautiful day, isn't it!" Women sit and stand in ways (hands in lap, knees together) that take up less space than conventional male postures and avert their eyes from strangers much more often than men. Women smile far more than men, are touched by men more often than they touch, and are interrupted in conversations twice as much as men. Even the great door-opening controversy has been examined: It turns out that high-status persons (physicians, professors) control door-opening for the low-status (patients, students) as a way of maintaining power over space and access. Men open doors for women.

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Taken one by one, these issues may appear individually irrelevant; they are only the stage business of life. But taken together, they add up to a texture of interactions in which women's subordinate status and need to please the dominant group are endlessly repeated and reinforced. The level of discomfort, irritation and anger that errupts when the rules are violated testifies to their significance in a social order that depends on unspoken but powerful rules to maintain male dominance and female dependence. A woman faculty member reports she deliberately did not smile excessively at a department meeting; her male colleagues reacted to her proposals and suggestions with uncharacteristic hostility.

These signs of dependence are small yet they accumulate into a pattern of devaluation. In ordinary family or work life, anger may erupt over the unfair division of labor in a household, as when husbands do not share household responsibilities fairly with a working spouse. Women workers have lately begun to complain publicly about subtle and unsubtle sexual harassment on the job. Nurses say that doctors treat them rudely; secretaries resent buying gifts for the boss's wife; and professional women burn quietly when no one at a party asks about their jobs. Women who contribute a substantial share of a household's income demand a real voice in how it will be spent.

Bringing attention to these and related issues was as much a part of the early feminism of the 1960s and '70s as were questions of work experience and access to power. In "consciousness-raising" groups, women began to compare notes on how they were treated. Their experiences led ultimately to an analysis of patriarchal society. What they found has become the most important unifying theme of a feminist politics of social relations: "The personal," they said, "is political."

The experiences of these early feminists have been replicated over and over in the past decade as ordinary American women come to feel the contradictions between their opportunities for growing independence and the restrictions of a society still presuming female dependence. The women's health movement is a perfect example. It began when women shared their complaints and anger about their personal experiences with gynecologists and obstetricians. Why, they asked, do those doctors treat us like children? Why are their procedures cold and impersonal? Why do they treat childbirth as though it were a disease to be cured rather than a normal process? Shared anger over specific humiliations and bad treatment soon escalated into generalizations about male medicine's view of women as helpless and ignorant, and ultimately about the nature of professional authority. When presented systematically, these complaints produced reforms in health care delivery to women and also the creation of new social institutions to meet women's needs. New books like the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves informed women about their own health; women's health centers were established as an alternative to male-dominated offices and clinics. In sum, a vigorous assault on the mystifying spell of expertise created by male medical professionals got underway.

The challenge to authority from health care reformers is paralleled in other areas. Seeing the world through female eyes assaults the assumptions of policymakers and social scientists who construct the world from a male perspective, either forgetting that women exist at all or presuming that women's lives only fit domestic patterns. In many cases, the changes feminists seek involve a radical redefinition of traditional demarcations between "private" matters and those seen to be part of the public world. In order for changes to occur, the traditional domestic/public arenas will have to be redefined and the roles in each of the areas shared. That can be accomplished only through careful planning by working partners and will need support from the state and business community.

Widespread demands for adequate child care, for example, arose when women compared their real experiences to the assumptions of policymakers. As we have seen, large and growing numbers of women with children find it necessary to work outside the home and need good care for their children. Meager public support makes such care scarce, especially for single-parent households where a woman's low wages are the sole income. The small number of affordable facilities rests on an assumption that being a mother and a full-time worker are mutually exclusive: If a woman chooses to do both, she is personally responsible for making the necessary arrangements and is expected to sacrifice her income to pay for them.

Feminists say that such a conclusion is patently unfair because it perpetuates the invidious distinction between private life and public matters and between men's and women's family responsibilities. To a mother of preschool children who must hold down a job, it is ridiculous to believe that domestic responsibilities are separate from public concerns. The commonly used phrase "working mother" reveals the contradictions in our beliefs. By linking work and motherhood, it contradicts the Victorian separation between domestic and public, but it simultaneously perpetuates the idea that women are solely responsible for child care. Why not say "working father"?

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The solutions to the child care crisis therefore must involve more than the efforts of individual working women. Fathers must assume equal child rearing roles within the family, while the state must create social institutions (child care centers, flexible working hours, parental leaves) that make it possible for men and women to be workers as well as parents.

The child care issue involves changes in the household division of labor and everyday relations between the sexes, but it also suggests new public solutions for problems previously considered to be private. State-supported child care facilities, while not wildly controversial, redraw the old line between the domestic and the public world. Debates about reproductive rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, while more acrimonious, also involve serious changes in the relationship of the state to women's lives. In these latter cases, the personal has become more traditionally political — witness Newsweek's coverage — because the debates concern questions of rights and power in the public arena.

The abortion debate, for example, has often been shrill, but it may be understood in the same terms. Feminists observe that the radical division between man's world and woman's place depended on an assumption that women were primarily mothers. Motherhood defined the domestic space and justified the isolation of women in the home. Hence, abortion rights are a rejection of compulsory motherhood. Even if unexercised, the right to an abortion breaks the equation between womanhood and motherhood. The right to an abortion also recognizes a woman's liberty in a fashion consistent with her varied social roles and responsibilities. Confusions arise because the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade phrased this notion of individual rights in the language of individual rights to privacy. The constitutional rights of privacy and the traditional notion of family privacy are often related, but they are not synonymous. Family "privacy" refers to the imagined separation of family matters from the state's control. That traditional ideal, now increasingly violated, subsumed women's individual autonomy to male dominance. The family's "privacy" in the Victorian domestic/public dichotomy necessarily involved female dependence. A woman's right to privacy in the matter of abortion protects her against the state's coercive power, but also against coercion to lead a life limited to the family. It allows the woman true liberty, for neither the state nor the family controls her reproductive functions.

By comparison, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) seems simpler, if more comprehensive. It guarantees that states cannot deny equality of rights under the law on the basis of sex and extends public and ritualistic recognition to women's social equality as suffrage recognized political autonomy. In 1923, when the ERA was first introduced, its upper middle-class professional women supporters were exceptions to the social code that limited women's authority and activities to the family arena. When the ERA finally passed the Congress and met with easy ratification in most states in the early 1970s, it seemed simply commonsensical to most American women and men to make it official that women are people, not just daughters, wives and mothers. Polls showing support for the ERA running over 70 percent nationally demonstrate that this is still true.

Yet the ERA also signals a genuine revolution in the public/domestic balance because it provides women with full autonomy in public matters. It will not, of course, destroy the family; men and women will still find satisfactions in private life. But it does suggest that the line between domestic and public will no longer coincide with a gender division. It is therefore no surprise that many Americans who applaud the ERA and new social arrangements between the sexes also harbor unspoken dread at its consequences. If women enter public life fully and drop the protective mantle of family life, then who will be responsible for the preservation of morality and humanity?

The answer will mean changes of huge cultural importance, changes which would permit the acceptance of an idea of marriage and the family that rests on the cooperation and mutual respect of two adults equally concerned with the fate of their children. The Boston housewife is quite right to see the ERA as the symbol of a transformed notion of womanhood, even if she is wrong to imagine it would directly coerce her to take an unwanted job as an office clerk.

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Newsweek's failure to treat women's issues as central to political debate in the U.S. may derive from the same cultural unease. Editors and writers seem to display reluctance to confront the erosion of the wall separating public and private matters. Apparently believing that there must be a private domain of life unaffected by political struggles, they end up preserving the gender specific lines between public and domestic issues when they isolate women's politics from "real" politics and limit women's political claims to the ERA and abortion rights.

The threatening radicalism of women's politics lies precisely in its recognition that gender can no longer be used to divide private lives from public concerns. Family relations and the rearing of children are public questions. Our equation of women and the domestic is so deep-rooted, however, that attempts to revise both arenas of life threaten our inherited and comforting certainty that only women can preserve a domain where human beings relate to each other humanely and where the morality of a natural state can be preserved. Our society does not want to hear that it cannot go home again.

Women also assault traditional culture when they insist that they have a history and culture of their own. In the traditional domestic/public dichotomy, it is assumed that history and culture are part of the male world, while the domestic world, like nature, is cyclical and timeless, the domain of reproduction. Literature, history, ideas and religion — the stuff of culture — are public matters because they are created, produced and accumulate to last perpetually. They often precede, if not dominate, the endless cycle of natural life. They are also masculine.

Feminists contradict these notions when they assert that women have produced their own characteristic culture. Such radical assertions now appear regularly in the world of scholarship, as when historians explore the changes in women's lives, relationships and accomplishments over time. To assert that women's lives changed in the past contradicts the idea that the domestic space is timeless, that all women are essentially alike. It also suggests that women's lives can change in the future. Literary critics have also rediscovered women's writing, sometimes but not always in the private forms of diaries and letters, that many say constitutes a separate tradition with its own characteric subject matter, concerns and voice. Such a literary culture, even if publicly subsumed to male traditions, adds to a sense that women form a historical community, accumulating wisdom and tradition over time, and standing in a dialectical and troubled relationship to dominant male culture.

Feminist poets, dramatists, musicians and novelists are part of this reclaiming and expansion of women's distinctive heritage when they introduce female experience, domestic events and aesthetics to male-dominated culture. As Olga Broumas, a young woman poet recently put it, the felt need for such change is so great that women poets must reclaim language from male voices "or burn."

Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" has come to be a symbol of this rediscovery of women's past and women's culture. Despite, or perhaps because of, severe attacks by some male critics, "The Dinner Party" draws huge predominantly female crowds wherever it is exhibited, apparently because Chicago revises the symbolism of power in the work. By presenting the flower-like open form of women's sexuality as a symbol of power on the plates around that table, she not so gently suggests that the characteristic phallic shape of monumental sculpture and public monuments is not inevitable. She places her 39 distinguished female guests in the most classically female and domestic social gathering: the dinner party. Recalling the Last Supper and the homely kitchen simultaneously, "The Dinner Party" attempts to shatter the illusionary wall between domestic life and power.

These events — a celebration of women's history week in March each year, a poem, a visit to "The Dinner Party" — may be the most radical feminism of all. Rooted, as we have seen, in the movement of women into the paid work force, social and cultural changes seem to open up endlessly, like a flower on one of Chicago's place settings, to touch one's deepest ideas about human life.

The author: Bari Watkins

Bari Watkins is director of the Program on Women at Northwestern University. She was an undergraduate at Rice University and received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1976. She has written on 19th century American women, the contemporary women's movement and on theories of women's studies. She helped found Northwestern's undergraduate women's studies program and is currently teaching an interdisciplinary survey course of new scholarship on women.

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By BARI WATKINS Party affiliation: Can it help the women's movement Susan Catania is a Republican who does not laugh if you refer to the Reagan administration as the "junta." She is also a feminist who has been a stalwart of women's rights in Illinois. She was the chief sponsor of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the state legislature, she initiated and sponsored many bills that have benefited women, and she served as the chair of III Illinois Commission on the Status of Women for more than seven years. She ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor with the support of almost every feminist in the state. To almost no one's surprise, she lost to George Ryan, a major opponent of the ERA and of women's rights. Nevertheless, she won more votes than Don Totten, who was endorsed by President Reagan. Susan Catania Catania's feminism is not a problem; il) is her Republicanism that raises questions for every feminist involved in politics. Nil one now seriously doubts that the Reagan administration has been a disaster for women who hope for freer lives. This is especially true for the low-income women Catania habitually thinks of first. Reductions in social services strike hardest at the "new poor," female heads of households and their children; reproductive freedom is under serious assault; equal opportunity and affirmaliv action are being undercut by the Justice Department; Title IX may be gutted; an the cunningly named Family Protection Act is a threat to virtually every hard-woi gain of the past decade. Add to that list the Republican's abandonment of the ERA and the image Nancy Reagan conveys, and it is no wonder that politica polls show a growing "gender gap." Female voters are abandoning Reagan at much faster rate than are men. 24/May 1982/Illinois Issues Catania's personal record stands in marked opposition to the new Republican policy most politely described as antiwoman. Her candidacy in a Republican primary, therefore, seemed an ideal moment for voters of both parties to register their opposition. More specifically, Catania's race also appeared as a referendum on the ERA, a chance for the 75 percent of Illinois voters whom polls report as pro-ERA to influence a recalcitrant state legislature. Catania counted on this support. Asked before the March 16 primary if she were a symbol or a candidate, she replied, "1 don't mind being both." Asked if the Thompson administration would shift its priorities if she won the nomination, she replied, "It would then have a mandate for change." Yet to cast that vote meant tacit support of a party that generally has insulted, maligned and injured women. What symbolism there? To let both parties know that deep hurts will be forgotten if they run a "good" woman in I particular race is too forgiving. Consider, for example, the power achieved by Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum because they have worked their way into the regular Republican party structure. Despite low statewide public support, they have stalled ratification of the ERA and infiltrated policymaking within the state and national party organizations. Schlafly faced a dilemma in the primary; she had to choose between Ryan, Gov. Thompson's man, and Totien, past chair of the Reagan campaign in Illinois. Ironically, her success in working with the Republican party forced her to risk either the state connections Ryan represents or the national interests of Totten and Reagan. Feminist groups, by contrast, have eschewed official alliance with the Democrats. They remain separate from everyday politics, relegated to the status of outsiders who may or may not be consulted depending on the expediencies of the moment. Jimmy Carter, after all, Midge Costanza because she tried to do more for women than simply win their votes. Regular Democrats can and do vote against the ERA and against women's interests without fear of retaliation from the one source that can really hurt them: the party. The success of the anti-ERA women in using the Republican party as a power base seems to argue for a change in Srategy for feminist organizations. Perhaps NOW and the Women's Campaign Fund would be justified in casting off their traditional receptivity to candidates of either party in order to become, like organized labor, a structural part of the Democratic party. Several concrete benefits might result. Rather than an outside pressure group, courted when convenient, women's organizations formally integrated into the party's coalition of interests might guarantee regular representation, reliable support and the policymaking power only insiders can wield. Further, alliance with the Democrats might signal that women as a group are a legitimate political force with priorities and needs that must be attended to in national politics. Such a stance would finally confound the false idea that women do not have interests as a sex, but instead are adequately represented as members of a class, race or other political category. It would also shatter the traditional image of women in politics as disinterested reformers concerned with the needs of others (children, the poor, beautification) rather than as citizens working for women's own mutual benefit. All of these consequences would also tend to reinforce women's own identification as women, strengthening the sense of commonality necessary for continued social change. Following the lead of labor and civil rights organizations and cementing a formal alliance with the Democrats would give women's groups some leverage, but there would be costs as well. Politics means trade-offs and compromise, and women's groups would have to forego absolute attention to issues of the greatest concern to them. In the touchy areas of job-training programs or attempts to force equal pay for comparable work, for example, where the relative poverty and poor wages of women and male minority workers might produce conflicting interests, who could guarantee that women's immediate needs would not be slighted? Even with female leadership absolutely resistant to being co-opted by the party's "larger" strategies, such losses would be inevitable. The examples of some male labor and civil rights spokesmen who have come to share the perspectives of middle-class white party leaders suggest that growing male identification among women party workers might be a real risk. Another and more serious problem apparently inherent in single-party affiliation might arise when women's causes were won by the party in the context or company of many other specific policies achieved by a male-dominated organization. It would not be as clear, even to women, that women's political strength was responsible for the victory. The origins of political change in the desires and frustrations of ordinary women would be disguised if issues moved through the opaque machinations of political negotiation in a group not specifically identified as feminist. Such an eventuality — victories appearing from coed smoke-filled rooms rather than directly from grass-roots women's organizations — would tend to destroy the belief in the power of ordinary women to reconstruct their lives fostered by an unofficial and unassimilated women's movement. Finally, and most tragically, the inevitable greater separation of rank-and-file women from leadership in a party organization would undercut the sense of shared experience and community among women that has made feminism possible in the first place. Susan Catania has apparently resolved these tensions by remaining in the Republican party — in order, she says, "to give Republicans in this state a choice." No doubt many feminists crossed over to vote for her in the Republican primary, as she hoped. After all, Catania ended an interview by assuring a lifelong Democrat that her right hand would not wither if she voted for a Republican. The appeal of sisterhood is powerful here; what kind of feminist would not vote for a fellow traveller? Yet, women's groups will doubtless be debating the merits of formal alliance with the Democrats, with its costs, over the next few years. It might be worth remembering that in 1916, when Alice Paul and her radical feminist friends faced the same dilemmas, they founded the National Woman's Party. By forming a party rather than a pressure group or reform organization, the National Woman's Party intended to enter national politics with both guaranteed attention to women's interests and political legitimacy. As a women's party, they could strive to participate in the political system as equals without the dangers of being absorbed by male-run parties. In retrospect, it may not have been such a bad idea. May 1982/Illinois Issues/25