Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

238 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?that vocational opportunities for women are wider today than they werefor Jane Eyre. "No!" wrote his instructor in the margin. "Even todaywomen only make 59 percent of what men make!" (I was later to see thisprofessor on one of the panels at the Heilbrun conference.) The nextsemester, in another course and for another English professor, Tamler"erred" again by saying of one female character that she had a moresatisfying job than her husband did. Again, his teacher expressed herirritation in the margin: "How would you rationalize women earning 49percent of men's salaries in all fields?" As monitored by Pennsylvania'sEnglish department, the condition of women seemed to have grown appreciablyworse in less than a year!We have all seen these angry figures. But there is not much truth inthem. By most measures, the eighties were a time of rather spectaculargains by American women—in education, in wages, and in such traditionallymale professions as business, law, and medicine. The genderfeminist will have none of this. According to Susan Faludi, the eightieswere the backlash decade, in which men successfully retracted many ofthe gains wrested from them in preceding decades. This view, inconveniently,does not square with the facts.Since any criticism of Faludi's claim of a wages backlash is apt to beconstrued as just more backlashing, one must be grateful to the editors ofthe New York Times business section for braving the wrath of feministideologues by presenting an objective account of the economic picture asit affects women. Surveying several reports by women economists onwomen's gains in the 1980s, New York Times business writer Sylvia Nasarrejected Faludi's thesis. She pointed to masses of empirical data showingthat "Far from losing ground, women gained more in the 1980s than inthe entire postwar era before that. And almost as much as between 1890and 1980." 38Today more than ever, economic position is a function of education.In 1970, 41 percent of college students were women; in 1979, 50 percentwere women; and in 1992, 55 percent were women. In 1970, 5 percentof law degrees were granted to women. In 1989, the figure was 41 percent;by 1991 it was 43 percent, and it has since gone up. In 1970,women earned 8 percent of medical degrees. This rose to 33 percent in1989; by 1991 it was 36 percent. The giant strides in education arereflected in accelerated progress in the professions and business. DianeRavitch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, reports that women havemade great advancements toward full equality in every professional field,and "in some, such as pharmacy and veterinary medicine, women have