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□ Supreme Court allows a widower who is dependent on his wife's income to collect survivor's benefits automatically, just as widows do.
□ Ohio women from LUNA (Loose Umbrella Network Association) as statewide political resource and talent bank for women office seekers.
□ Coalition of Labor Union Women leads consumer boycott of J.P. Stevens textile products as protest against the company's 14-year resistance to unionization of its plants.
□ Fifty-six states and territories hold International Women's Year (IWY) meetings, elect delegates to National Women's Conference in Houston, where more than 2,000 delegates adopt National Plan of Action and 20,000 people attend.
□ Women assigned as permanent shipboard crew members by Navy.
□ National Communication Network for Elimination of Violence Against Women is formed.
□ Seven Philadelphia women's groups form fund-raising coalition, Women's Way, to parallel the United Way, which funds few women's programs.
□ Women's Caucus of National Gay Task Force formalized.
□ Coalition of Women's Art Organizations vows to lobby for greater role for women in the arts.
□ NBC signs $1.7 million agreement with the EEOC for back pay and programs for women.
□ Dr. Ben Munson, the only doctor performing abortions in South Dakota, is acquitted of manslaughter charges in a death following an abortion he performed.
□ Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturns conviction of Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin for manslaughter in the death of a fetus after a legal abortion.
□ Women on staffs of foundations and corporate philanthropies form organization to work for more funding for women's programs (Women and Foundations / Corporate Philanthropy).
□ Virginia Dill McCarty nominated as first woman U.S. Attorney (Southern District of Indiana).
□ AT&T announces it's ready to allow dual listings of married people in phone books.
□ South Australia Parliament becomes first in the world to make rape within a marriage a criminal offense.
□ Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) sponsors nationwide boycott of Nestlé products to stop the company's promotion of infant formula in Third World countries where improper use had led to infant malnutrition and even death.
□ The Army restores Medal of Honor to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who was cited in 1866 for services as surgeon in the Union Army, but whose medal was revoked in 1917 for insufficient evidence of her "gallantry."
□ Supreme Court rules that states and cities may bar use of public funds and public hospital facilities for elective, nontherapeutic abortions. Carter endorses the decisions, saying that "there are many things in life that are not fair. . . ."
□ Gay Nurses Association holds first annual convention.
□ Women and minority employees of Crocker National Bank (San Francisco) win landmark settlement of a job-bias suit, with no limit on amount the bank may have to pay those filing claims.
□ Congresswomen's Caucus is formed by 15 women Representatives and one Senator.
□ Alice Paul, a leading suffragist who also drafted the ERA, dies.

By the end of the '70s, that term was at least identified as inaccurate: a way of excluding )and thus not rewarding with either money or respect) all the homemaking and human-support services that women have traditionally done at home. We began to speak carefully of work inside and outside the home. Obviously, people who did the former also needed money of their own, Social Security, pensions, disability benefits, and the protection of a partnership principle that the Equal Rights Amendment would bring. At the death or desertion of a spousal partner, homemakers might need as much help with job retraining as any other worker. Displaced homemakers, a term invented in the '70s by women who were exactly that, spread throughout the country as women organized into self-help groups, and pressured the federal government for special funding and legislation.
This breaking of boundaries between and among women by defining all socially worthwhile work as valuable and dignified was an important feminist step. It also underlined the double-role problem that had been identified in the '60s - that is, the double burden of millions of women who worked both inside and outside the home - and gave birth to such slogans as Wages for Housework and Every Mother Is a Working Mother.
Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the decade, turned out to fall short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto (another '70s term). What did "equal pay" do for the waitress or secretary, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? By the end of the '70s, equal pay for comparable work was the new goal, and comparability studies were going forward on the many blue-collar  jobs (done largely by men) that required less education, fewer skills but got more pay than pink-collar jobs (done largely by women). In the '80s, the research results are likely to be introduced in the courts.

This decade transformed many ideas by adding one crucial adjective: women's credit union, women's bank, women's rock group, women's studies, women's caucus. Most such groups also added a lot of new content: child care, different hours, new definitions of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics, sharing and learning from the textbooks of each other's lives. They also experimented with new structures. Whether out of a conscious belief that hierarchy was rooted in patriarchy or an unconscious discomfort with authority and giving orders, women's groups usually replaced vertical forms of organization with more lateral ones. Collective, communal, supportive, constituency, and skill-sharing were more likely to be heard than chain of authority, organizational chart, or credentials.
In short, all the truth-telling about women's lives and the creation of alternate institutions began to create a women's culture; a set of perspectives that differed from and could transform a masculinist value system.
The word culture was very important. Unlike 19th-century feminism, this first decade of the second

86/Ms./December 1979