Betty Friedan is getting hostile phone calls from feminists, and Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor at Barnard College, is getting icy treatment from her fellow feminist historians. Both stand accused of deviating from orthodoxy on critical issues of women's employment: Friedan for opposing the National Organization for Women on a maternity-leave lawsuit, and Rosenberg for putting feminist scholarship at the service of Sears in a sex-discrimination case. Friedan is "under enormous pressure" to change her position, and Rosenberg has been denounced for "betrayal" and her "immoral act."
In March, Friedan joined a coalition that supported a 1978 California law requiring employers to grant as much as four months of unpaid leave to women who are disabled by pregnancy or childbirth. The law may sound innocuous, but it is a red flag to the many feminists and civil libertarians who say that singling out women for special benefits is discriminatory and dangerous. For this reason, NOW and the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union are in effect supporting a legal challenge to the California law brought by a Los Angeles bank. Friedan says it is "outrageous" for feminists to align themselves with an employer who is trying to evade offering important benefits to women. NOW and the A.C.L.U. say they do not support the bank and simply want the law's benefits for women extended to men. Says Joan Bertin, associate director of the A.C.L.U. women's group: "The question is, Should a woman with a pregnancy disability get her job back when other employees with disabilities get fired? You undermine your argument unless you say everyone is equally entitled to this benefit." The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case this fall.
The opposition, including Friedan, 9 to 5, labor unions and an ad hoc group called the Coalition for Reproductive Equality in the Workplace, offers an equality argument with a different twist: under the California law, women are made equal to men in the sense that both can now exercise their reproductive rights without risking their jobs. In fact, however, these advocates are proposing women-only benefits, like those routinely offered to working mothers in other industrialized countries. Says Christine Littleton, co-founder of CREW and an acting professor of law at UCLA: "Sometimes equal treatment is what is necessary for long-term equality. Sometimes it is not."
The problem is that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act seems to prohibit special benefits to either sex. Friedan, who has drawn most of the heat in a fairly calm debate, surprised many feminists by repudiating the equal-rights stance that the women's movement has taken for years. "The time has come to acknowledge that women are different from men," she says. "There has to be a concept of equality that takes into account that women are the ones who have the babies."
West Coast feminists have generally sided with CREW. Even the A.C.L.U. of Southern California supported the California law. In a Supreme Court case, the national A.C.L.U. pre-empts any position taken by an affiliate, so Gayle Binion, the regional executive director, joined CREW.