The failure of ERA points to the limits of what the feminist movement has achieved. Despite gains, far fewer women than men hold high elective office or sit on the boards of major corporations, and despite legislation, women continue to earn, on average, significantly less than men.
A Meeting of the Sheiks
Citizens of the United States, men and women, have always cherished their liberty, and after 1908, when Henry Ford introduced his Model T, they have increasingly identified a part of that liberty with the automobile. With six percent of the world’s population, the United States consumes a third of the world’s energy—much of it in the form of petroleum. Through the 1960s, this posed little problem. Gasoline was abundant and cheap. Indeed, at the start of the decade, U.S. and European oil producers slashed their prices, a move that prompted key oil nations of the Middle East—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, plus Venezuela in South America—to band together as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on September 14, 1960, to stabilize prices. (More nations joined later.) Beginning in 1970, OPEC began to press for oil price hikes, and on October 1.7, 1973, OPEC temporarily embargoed oil exports to punish nations that had supported Israel in its recent war with Egypt. Chief among the embargo’s targets was the United States.
The effects of the OPEC embargo were stunning. Not only did prices shoot up from 38.5 cents per gallon in 19 73 to 55.1 cents by June 1974, gasoline shortages were severe in some areas. Americans found themselves stuck in gas lines stretching from the pumps and snaking around the block.
Cruising full speed ahead since the end of World War II, Americans were forced to come to grips with an energy crisis, cutting back on travel and on electricity use. The public endured an unpopular, but energy-(and life-) saving 55-mile-an-hour national speed limit, in addition to well-meaning, if somewhat condescending lectures from President Jimmy Carter, who characteristically sported a cardigan sweater on TV appearances because he had turned down the White House thermostat as an energy-conserving gesture. In a modest way, Americans learned to do without, and oil consumption was reduced by more than 7 percent—enough to prompt some OPEC oil price rollbacks by the early 1980s. By this time, too, OPEC’s grip on key oil producers had slipped as various member producers refused to limit production.
Made In Japan
The energy crisis came on top of an economic crisis, characterized by a combination of inflation and recession christened stagflation (stagnant growth coupled with inflation). The crisis had begun during the Nixon-Ford years and continued into the Carter presidency. By the mid 1970s, the heady consumerism of the 1960s was on the wane, and the dollar bought less and less. To use a phrase popular during the period, the economy was in the toilet.
And so, it seemed, was the American spirit. Accustomed to being preeminent manufacturer to the world, American industry was losing ground to other nations, especially Japan. All but crushed by World War II, Japan had staged an incredible recovery, becoming a world-class economic dynamo. By the 1970s, Japanese automobiles especially were making deep inroads into the U.S. automotive market. Not only were the Japanese vehicles less expensive than American makes, they were more fuel efficient (which meant fewer dollars spent on increasing gasoline costs), and they were more dependable.
The Chrysler Corporation, smallest of the Big Three automakers (behind General Motors and Ford), found itself on the verge of bankruptcy and, in 1980, sought federal aid. The government-backed loan was ultimately paid back and the Chrysler recovery became a celebrated comeback story (the company’s CEO, Lee Iacocca, was elevated nearly to the status of American folk hero). However, the $1.5 billion bailout of America’s 17th largest corporation was as controversial as it was depressing. Patriotic Americans felt vaguely humiliated-even as more and more of them climbed behind the wheel of a Toyota or Mitsubishi.
Frightening Cities, Crumbling Bridges
Driving through an American city, circa 1975, in one of those Japanese imports could be a pretty depressing experience as well. The post-World War II building boom had developed suburban America, and throughout the 1950s, many middle-class families left the old cities for the new suburbs. The pace of this exodus accelerated following the racial violence that plagued many cities during the 1960s. Social commentators began to speak of white flight—though, in fact, the abandonment of inner city for suburb was as much a matter of economics as it was of race; middle-class blacks fled just as quickly as their white neighbors. The result was cities that rotted at their cores. With the urban economic base dramatically reduced, businesses followed residents to outlying areas, and once-vibrant downtown districts became ghetto ghost towns. Throw into this dismal mix the often-ineffective efforts of a chronically underfunded public education system plus a steady increase in the abuse of illegal narcotics, and it seemed that many U.S. municipalities had been reduced to forbidding urban jungles.
But deteriorating cities weren’t the only symptoms of a crisis in the national economy and spirit. The American infrastructure was in need of a general repair. The very roads that had carried the middle class out of the inner city were typically cratered with potholes. And a growing proportion of the nation’s bridges-physical expressions of the necessity and desire to join town to town and citizen to citizen-were failing inspection, too old, too neglected to bear the traffic for which they had been designed.
Meltdown
The single most terrifying event that suddenly and dramatically forced Americans to question their faith in U.S. technology, big business, and government regulation occurred on March 28, 1979. A nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island electric generating plant, near the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg, lost coolant water, thereby initiating a partial meltdown of the reactor’s intensely radioactive core.
Nuclear energy had long been a subject of controversy in the United States. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the peaceful use of the atom was seen as the key to supplying cheap and virtually limitless energy to the nation. But by the 1970s, environmentalists and others were questioning the safety of atomic power, which was also proving far more expensive than had been originally projected. By the end of the decade, a beleaguered nuclear power industry was on the defensive. By remarkable coincidence, just before the Three Mile Island accident, a popular movie dramatized the consequences (and attempted corporate cover-up) of a nuclear power plant accident. The movie was called The China Syndrome, an allusion to the theory that a full-scale meltdown of a reactor’s core would burn so intensely that the material would, in effect, sear its way deep into the earth—clear down to China, experts grimly joked.
The movie was very much on people’s minds when a shaken Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh appeared on television to warn residents to remain indoors and advised pregnant women to evacuate the area. The partial meltdown had already released an amount of radioactive gases into the atmosphere.