UNNATURAL EQUALITY

the onset of her marriage — namely Women’s Work — which covers everything from enduring labor pains to counting laundry ... The siren song of “women’s liberation” is complicated and contradictory. Indeed, as soon as the vote was won, American suffragists split over a proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. Many women with a background in the social reform movement believed strongly in female differences, and feared that the ERA would preclude legislation protective of women.17 More than 50 years later, in 1972, the ERA was passed in the U.S. Congress, but then failed to receive sufficient backing from state legislatures to be adopted. “If the feminist revolution simply wanted to exchange one ruling class for another, if it aimed at outright female domination, the goal would be easier to visualize,” concluded Bonnie Angelo in her overview of American women’s status in 1972.18 “The demand for equality, not domination, is immensely complicated. True equality between autonomous partners is hard to achieve even if both partners are of the same sex. The careful balancing of roles and obligations and privileges, without the traditional patterns to fall back on, sometimes seems like an almost utopian vision. While nearly everyone favors some of the basic goals of the New Feminism — equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunity, equal treatment by the law — satisfying even those minimum demands could require more wrenching change than many casual sympathizers with the women’s cause have seriously considered. Should women be drafted? Ought protective legislation about women’s hours and working conditions be repealed? WOMEN INTO THE MARKETPLACE Complex currents of social change converged to produce the “new feminism” of the 1970s, but British historian and writer Arnold Toynbee identified an essential dilemma years earlier. Middle-class woman acquired education and a chance at a career, wrote Toynbee, at the very time she lost her domestic servants and the unpaid household help of relatives living in the old, large family; she had to become either a “household drudge” or “carry the intolerably heavy load of two simultaneous full-time jobs.”19 In 1972, though American women already made up more than one third of the national workforce, they were concentrated in lower­-skilled and lower-paying positions. An average woman employed in a full-time job earned only two thirds of the salary paid to a man with a similar job. Childcare facilities were few and far between, and often too expensive. The same number of women as men graduated from high school that year, but only 41 percent of the women compared to 59 percent of the men went on to college. There had never been a woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and less than 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers were women. The first five female agents for the U.S. Secret Service were only then