Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...need only $ look at Detroit's gracious response to Japan's economic success. But when the issue is the status of American womanhood, this line of argument follows a swollen stream of trend stories that declare feminism shuddered and died sometime during the Reagan era. Many headlines of the '80s called feminism THE GREAT EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED and announced that America had graduated to a postfeminist age of Mommy Tracks, garter belts and men beating drums in the woods. Only in 1991, a year defined by date-rape trials, harassment hearings, abortion battles and gender wars, did the popular media...
...1980s that understanding of the term seemed to disappear. In the decade's dismissive shorthand, feminism came to mean denigrating motherhood, pursuing selfish goals and wearing a suit. Whereas feminism was hip and fashionable in the '70s, antifeminism became socially acceptable in the '80s. First the fundamentalist right, then the White House -- and ultimately Hollywood, television and many journalists -- held feminism responsible for "every woe besetting women," Faludi writes, "from mental depression to meager savings accounts, from teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexions...
...raise their children, the Good Housekeeping ads of the New Traditionalist, the notion of the Mommy Track; to her, they all implied that the postfeminist woman was the one who had sampled having it all and preferred to give most of it up. In fact, the pattern of the '80s was dictated by economic reality: 69% of women 18 to 64 work today, in contrast to 33% in 1950. "There may be women being laid off, but they are not going home because they want to," says Karen Nussbaum, executive director of 9 to 5, an advocacy group for working...
...makes an interesting parlor game for contrarian readers to provide the counterimages, ones that dispute Faludi's thesis by showing that women were also often portrayed as strong and fulfilled. Was Hope Steadman any more an archetype of the '80s than Murphy Brown? The fashion press may have lauded Christian Lacroix's baby-doll dresses, but real women ignored them in favor of Donna Karan's comfortable professional clothes, or the Gap's gender-neutral everyday wear. For every virulent misogynist, such as Andrew Dice Clay or rappers with songs about mutilating "bitches," there was a Sandra Bernhard, a Lily...
Abortion has been illegal in Ireland since the 1860s. When pressure to moderate the law began rising in the 1970s and early '80s, the Catholic Church and antiabortion activists pushed the government to hold a 1983 referendum incorporating the ban into the constitution. After a bitter campaign, the pro- lifers won the vote by a two-thirds majority. The resulting constitutional amendment obliges the government "to respect . . . defend and vindicate" the right to life of the unborn. No exceptions are allowed except in some cases where the mother's life is in danger...