ABSTRACT

The demise of the Equal Rights Amendment—technically in 1982 but already prefigured in the late 1970s—was only a symptom of the nation's careening toward the political Right. The analysis of poverty by gender represented a new way of looking at poverty in America. What began as occasional on-site harassment of abortion clinics in the 1970s and 1980s became a full-fledged, direct-action, and sometimes violent obstructionism in the late 1980s and 1990s. Abortion has generated public debate because it touches on deeply held personal values and religious beliefs. For more radical feminists, reproductive rights were never limited to the single issue of abortion. While feminists were kept busy putting out fires set by the Reagan and Bush administrations, they were inevitably distracted from the central policies of that administration, of which putting down women's liberation was but a side show.