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Women have usually defined the general culture of any nation—from the court of the king to the kitchen of the peasant. But no nation has seen such a new coloration given to a culture as American women have given to the U.S. They now share equally in the forum of television: woman anchor teamed with male anchor. Women's bar associations, women's alumnae associations, women analysts' associations form everywhere. Curiously, all-male organizations are now considered sexist, women's organizations praiseworthy.
Their political arms—the National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus—are shrewd and tough, and they have their own agenda. They demand passage of the Equal Rights Amendment as the seal of all equality, although it can be argued that the ERA might prove to be of dubious merit for it gives to men equal rights with women, such as the right to resist draft in wartime if women are not drafted, or the right to refuse combat duty if women may refuse. Women's agenda includes, as is long overdue, equal pay for equal work—but also includes equal pay for "comparable worth" in any job, a matter more difficult to define. Their agenda includes as well the "mop-up" of all discriminatory legislation against women and the severe patrol of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which grants women protection against any form of citizen discrimination. Where their agenda leads, no one knows—except that it is akin to the black agenda: always more and always in the name of equality.
There is far more than a simple redefinition of political equality in the shaping of women's push into U.S leadership. The old American way of work operates now in a world of foreign pressures, where the heavy-labor jobs, the lift-and-heave jobs, are being taken over by the Third World. Those are men's jobs being undermined. But women seek their share of the desk and managerial jobs. Their increasing share reduces men's share. If, as in England, the permanent jobs lost are usually so-called men's jobs and the new openings are increasingly filled by women, there is a harsh edge to the future that women seek to shape. An irrational sex struggle over jobs, with which politics must cope, lies just beyond the horizon. In 1984 women unwittingly placed that matter on the agenda of 1988 and the years to follow.
The clash of cultures in the campaign ended in the spurious debate on church and state.
Never did either candidate challenge the separation of church and state. An "establishment of religion" as known to the Constitution makers was an establishment akin to the Church of England, which could tax the general public for its support. The Constitution outlawed that kind of federal establishment. No one since, not even in 1984, suggested that any church be allowed to clothe itself with the authority of the state. What underlay the debate, however, was the role of religion in politics—or, rather, the contrary views of morality that differing clerics urged on a confused country, and what underlay that was simple fear of any state-enforced morality imposed by any religion.
The unsettling '80s, when rockets regularly sizzled off to space, when mind-expanding drugs became epidemic, when biotechnologies toyed with the