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Wisconsin women are first to be listed with their own names, not solely their husbands' names, in phone book. 

Janet Guthrie is the first woman driver to race at Indianapolis 500. 

Carter appoints Juanita Kreps (Commerce) and Patricia Harris (HUD) to Cabinet. 

Women's basketball included as an event at the Summer Olympics (Montreal). 

Article in American Psychiatric Association journal declares male chauvinism a certifiable psychiatric illness. 

Britain's Rhodes Scholarships program admits women applicants. The following year, 13 women (and 19 men) are named Rhodes Scholars. 

"...Remember the Ladies...: Women in America 1750-1815" makes national Bicentennial museum tour. 

Barbara Walters signs million-dollar contract with ABC. 

U.S. Department of Labor reports that, despite gains by women in employment (more entering the labor force, and more in better-paying jobs), the wage gap between men and women has actually increased in the past 19 years. Women earn 57 cents for every dollar earned by men. Of all full-time, year-round workers earning $15,000 or more, only 5 percent are women. 

New research gives hitherto unacknowledged credit to geneticist Rosalind Franklin for her work in solving the riddle of the DNA molecule. 

National Alliance of Black Feminists forms in Chicago. 

Radcliffe College starts oral history project on the lives of black women. 

French prostitutes stage nationwide strike. 

Los Angeles Women Against Violence Against Women begin nationwide protest over the release of pornographic film, "Snuff," which depicts the dismemberment and murder of a woman as sexual entertainment. Three years later, four Rochester, New York, WAVAW members are convicted for demonstrating outside a local theatre showing the film. 

Women in Iceland hold day-long strike to show their importance to the economy, virtually shutting down the country. 

National Association of Black Professional Women forms in San Diego, California. 

Chiang Ch'ing, Madame Mao Tse-tung, is denounced in China as one of the Gang of Four.

Dixy Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, is elected governor of Washington State.

Martha Mitchell, outspoken wife of Watergate-indicted Attorney General John Mitchell, dies of cancer.

1977

Two Austin, Texas, Girl Scout leaders burn their uniforms to protest their organization's endorsement of the ERA, but survey shows that sale of Girl Scout cookies is up due to ERA supporters.

Harris Poll finds that 55 percent of Americans find homosexuals most discriminated against group in the country.

Dade County, Florida, voters reject a resolution to protect lesbians and gay men from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations, after singer Anita Bryant leads an emotionally charged Save Our Children campaign.

NOW sponsors national ERA Walkathon.


the care of new babies. Homemaker replaced housewife as a way of making clear that women were not married to houses; that men could be homemakers, too. Household worker was chosen by women who had been called maids or domestics, and their efforts to put a decent monetary value on work done in the home was complementary to the efforts of homemakers as well as to the whole redefinition of work.

Pro-choice began to replace the adjective pro-abortion, the latter being a media-created term that implied women were advocating abortion as something more than a last resort. And a decade that had begun with the shocking necessity of proving the Freudian-dictated vaginal orgasm to be neurologically impossible--plus explaining the clitoral orgasm to be literally true--finally ended up more equally with just orgasm (no adjectives necessary) being both talked about openly and experienced by women and men.

It was also a time of reclaiming words, in a spirit of defiance, humor, and pride. Witch, bitch, dyke, and other formerly pejorative epithets turned up in the brave names of small feminist groups. Some women artists dubbed their new female imagery cunt art, and a few activists actually put Cunt Power! on political buttons. Women pinpointed the problem of being male-identified, of feeling like half-people without men, by calling ourselves man-junkies. More seriously the term woman-identified woman began to be used with significance and pride.

Click! turned up as a way of describing that instant of recognizing the sexual politics of a situation. (As in "May you have sons to take care of you in old age." Click!) Humor encouraged many such clicks, fro the invention of jockocracy to describe a certain male obsession with athletics and victory, to loserism as a rueful recognition of women's cultural discomfort with anything as "unfeminine" as success. Supermom and Superwoman were words that relieved us all by identifying the Perfect-Wife-and-Mother--plus or minus the Perfect-Career-Woman--as humanly impossible goals. Horizontal hostility explained the temptation of directing anger at each other instead of upward at those in positions of power. Ejaculatory politics made fun of the impatience of a certain masculine political style of the '60s and '70s. (As in "If the revolution doesn't happen this month, I'm going home to my father's business.") The machismo factor, particularly as applied to American foreign policy and the war in Vietnam, identified a dangerous attraction to aggression and violence on the part of policymakers who seemed to feel the need of proving "masculinity."

Women's Lib or Women's Libber was a trivializing term that feminists tried to argue against. (Would we say "Algerian Lib"? "Black Libber"?) By the end of the '70s, its use had diminished--but not disappeared.

The nature of work was a major area of new understanding--beginning with the word itself. When the '70s began, work was largely defined as what men did, and a working woman was someone who labored outside thr house and got paid for it, masculine style.

82/Ms./December 1979

Transcription Notes:
Not sure if I should transcribe the bullet points.