A Silver Lining to 'Webster'

IT has been more than 20 years since Betty Friedan wrote her watershed work on women and their role in American society. The Feminine Mystique analyzed a series of ailments and injustices against women which raised the nation's public and political consciousness and helped initiate the Woman's Movement.

Since those days in the '60s, the Woman's Movement has been suffering from an image problem. Along the way, "feminist" became a dirty word. The daughters of the Woman's Movement benefitted from their mothers' hard work, but failed to carry the torch any further. The Woman's Movement stopped moving.

In her later book, The Second Stage, Friedan would call the syndrome suffered by this new generation of women the "I'm not a feminist but" disease. Women expected to be doctors, or CEOs, or astronauts, expected equal wages and compassionate employers, expected reproductive freedom as if that was the way it had always been. They believed that the setbacks they suffered as women were personal, not political.

The trouble within the Woman's Movement was that no issue galvanized feminist activity. The Equal Rights Amendment was not ratified because so few women saw the gains as being immediate or verifiable. Other issues like pornography pitted female civil libertarians against their allies when many argued that the ills of censorship far outweighed any gains.

WHO would have imagined that Ronald Reagan and Anthony Scalia would do for the Woman's Movement what the National Organization for Woman could never do? The Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which gave states more latitude in implementing abortion restrictions, has finally given gender politics a much needed shove.

The abortion issue will be the deciding and dominant factor in more than one statehouse. For the first time, elections will be decided on a woman's issue, in defense of a woman's right.

Once politicians commit to reproductive freedoms, they will find it difficult not to embrace other issues important to women. Abortion is as much an economic and political debate as it is a moral debate. Representatives will have to recognize the economic and political causes of the second class status granted to women in this country. Abortion freedoms will translate into economic and political gains so long denied or ignored by the past two administrations.

THIS is not the first case where the defense of one policy engenders other political action. Martin Luther King could not continue supporting desegregation without expressing his opinions on poverty and the Vietnam War. Blacks were poor and were fighting in the war as a result of their social standing.

The 300-600,000 people marching in Washington; the spontaneous rallies the day the decision was announced; the July Fourth protests that brought together thousands--women's organizations have not seen this kind of activity in years. Those who were expecting the Webster case to be a major setback for woman may find that it will become just the opposite.

A younger generation which took women's freedoms for granted has just been the patient of shock therapy. The abortion issue, in the end, may have finally gotten the Woman's Movement moving again.