Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 73

DETROIT FREE PRESSTHURSDAY, JUNE 24, 1982 9 A I I U. JL if-: As women's suffrage succeeded, so will the ERA the next time began to argue that the ERA would help wives and mothers. For example, the ERA would correct flaws in tax, divorce and Social Security laws that now penalize married women. But these arguments came too late to save the ERA this time. By AMY SABRIN Kniuht-Ridder Newspapers EQUALITY is what pollsters call a "motherhood issue," as in "God, motherhood and apple pie." Who can admit to being opposed to equality for all? But the Equal Rights Amendment? That's a different issue entirely.

When pollsters ask Americans if they favor of-oppose guaranteeing equal rights under the law for men and women, an overwhelming 71 percent, according to an AP-NBC News poll favor equal rights. But when the question is rephrased, "Do you favor or oppose the Equal Rights Amendment?" support drops to 51 percent. Let's face it: The ERA has an image problem. The deadline for ratification is June 30, and barring a major miracle, 59 years of effort will end in defeat. That defeat will be largely attributable to the ERA's failure to become, literally and figuratively, a "motherhood issue." The amendment's supporters have failed to appeal to women who, whether they work or not, focus their lives on home and family.

to the whole morass of issues surrounding the changing role of women in an urbanizing, industrializing society. Just as suffrage became the front line of that battle 100 years ago, the ERA is where the battle lines are drawn today. A change of strategy Consciously or unconsciously, suffrage leaders understood they had to retreat from the front lines of that battle if they were ever to get suffrage passed. How they did so could be a vital lesson for proponents of the ERA. Around the turn of the century, the suffragists' rhetoric changed.

Instead of emphasizing the liberating effects voting would have on women, they began to talk about how women could use the vote to protect their homes and children. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) began distributing pamphlets explaining how women could use the vote to vin laws to regulate the sale of food, set safe building codes and improve public health and sanitation. "WOMEN ARE, by nature and training, housekeepers. Let them have a hand in the city's housekeeping," the pamphlets concluded. The new pitch for suffrage was clear: The vote was quite literally an extension of woman's domestic role.

This new approach converted many large, traditional women's groups to the suffrage cause, including the politically influential Women's Christian Temperance Union. At the same time, it alienated the more radical women in the movement, who believed the domestic role was the very source of women's oppression. The movement split between the moderate NAWSA and the militant National Woman's Party (NWP). Although the leaders regretted this split at the time, history shows it actually may have helped the cause. The split allowed women who differed on many issues, but who agreed on suffrage, to find their own niche in the movement.

It allowed suffrage to develop a mass base of support. It made it possible for pivotal male lawmakers to endorse suffrage without having to embrace its more radical elements. Furthermore, while the militant NWP concentrated on developing an ideology and raising women's consciousness, the moderate NAWSA focused on painstaking local political organization. THE IMPLICATIONS for the Equal Rights Amendment are these: The best way to develop a mass base of support for the ERA may be, ironically, to let the movement splinter. The history of suffrage teaches that two divergent groups can add renewed vigor to a dying movement.

A radical, pro-ERA group could engender national publicity through continued protest, while a moderate wing could work on district-level political organization, a necessity if the ERA is to make it through Congress and the state legislatures again. A militant wing could continue to point out the inequities women face in the United States, while the moderate group could shift its rhetoric to appeal to women who invest most of their emotional resources in their families. Women who say, "I'm for the and the but not the must be shown that the amendment is not a threat to their economic or emotional well-being. Many of these women feel the feminist movement in general and the ERA in particular are criticisms of the way they have chosen to live their lives. Opponents of the amendment have argued strenuously that the ERA is anti-family, anti-motherhood.

If the ERA is ever to become part of the Constitution, its supporters must begin to counter this image and reach these women. Like their suffrage foremothers, ERA leaders recently recognized the need to change their pitch. In the past few years, they desperately lawmakers when there were women giving speeches entitled, "Why Should Suffrage be Imposed on Women?" As historian Carl Degler notes, women are alone in the annals of American history in their organized opposition to the expansion of their own civil rights. One cannot imagine, for example, a substantial, organized group of blacks opposing the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act. Yet a sizable and vociferous number of women did oppose suffrage and do.

oppose the ERA. THE EXISTENCE of this opposition allows the opponents to control the debate over the ERA, by putting the burden of proof of the need for the amendment on its supporters. "How can it be a clear question of right or wrong," bewildered male lawmakers ask, "if a lot of women don't want it?" A similar objection "Women don't want the vote!" was raised to suffrage, and there was a lot of evidence to support that objection. In the few states where women could vote in local elections, female turnout was embarrassingly low. In 1895, Massachusetts permitted women to vote on the suffrage issue itself.

Only five percent of the eligible women bothered to cast ballots. It is difficult for most 20th Century Americans to understand this hesitancy to vote, but in its time the idea of extending the vote to women was understood by both supporters and opponents as a radical move. By voting as individuals rather than letting their husbands' votes represent them, "Women are brought into direct relation with the state independent of their 'mate' or stated 19th Century physician and suffragist Mary Putnam Jacobi. As an opponent put it, suffrage "brought the possibility of civil war to the door of every family." The debate over suffrage became the dividing line for where one stood on "the woman question," as 19th Century Americans referred The struggle continues The mere thought that there has to be a next time for the ERA is unspeakably depressing to those involved in the cause. The amount of time, talent and money committed by women to the campaigns for suffrage and equal rights over the last 150 years is staggering.

A frustrated Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, recently wondered how many other things women could be accomplishing if they did not always have to devote their energies to the struggle for equal rights. Years after the suffrage amendment was ratified, Carrie Chapman Catt, the last president of NAWSA, recalled the incredible amount of work that went into that effort. She noted that American women "were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referanda to male voters, 480 campaigns to urge legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to induce state constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions, 277 campaigns to persuade state party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses to get the federal amendment submitted and ratified." But, as Catt added, "One important reason why the struggle took so long and was so difficult was that most women were either hostile or apathetic." Unless leaders of the modern women's movement learn to deal with those hostile and apathetic women, the struggle for the ERA is doomed to be even longer than the struggle for the vote. What went wrong? The ERA was born in 1923, a stepchild of the suffrage movement. It had taken American women 72 years of official campaigning to win the vote.

By those standards, the ERA has some time yet to go. But ERA supporters can learn more than patience from the suffrage movement. Those who wonder where the ERA went wrong may benefit from examining how suffrage went right. "To men, it is only a side issue," said Susan B. Anthony of women's suffrage.

She could say the same today of the ERA. However, she realized that it was not the indifference of men but the apathy or outright hostility of women thai was most crushing to the cause of women's rights. Anthony and other suffragists found it almost impossible to win over indifferent male ofiEiGS1 voices iLv mi 1 If 4 I 1 Well, if you ask my expert psychiatric opinion, the defendant is as sane as you or me!" Bogus experts don't belong in court BY JOSEPH SOBRAN 1 f.ts Angeles Times Syndicate LET'S SEE if I have this straight: The government failed to prove that John Hinckley was sane, so John Hinck-: jey won't go to prison. But in order to confine John Hinckley in a mental hos-; pital, the government has to prove he is insane. All that re-l mains is for some federal judge to role that the gov- er nment, having "once argued that John Hinckley was Sane, is now estopped from sug-; gesting otherwise.

Constitutional rights, you know. expertise must be judged by its fruits at the bar of ordinary intelligence. This is the era of the expert, who is supposed to know more than we do. It is also the age of the fraud and the bogus science. "Scientific socialism" and "racial science" have claimed millions of lives because they have intimidated millions of minds.

Economic experts mangle the economies of whole nations. The experts of what Martin Gross has called the "psychological society" have confused traditional understandings of moral responsibility. Constitutional experts tell us to disregard the plain sense of the Constitution. YET WE still cower before our holy experts as if they were oracles. Our indiscriminate deference is unfair to those genuine experts who have a claim on our reason.

Some of them are psychiatrists, and some of these psychiatrists are embarrassed by the courtroom abuse of their discipline. Real scientists are not afraid of rational scrutiny by laymen; they welcome it. But the courtroom is not the place for the fascinating game of unraveling psyches. We shouldn't ask Dostoevski to do what the Hinckley jurors were required to do. Dostoevski would probably have the good sense to refuse anyway.

Hinckley's acquittal comes as a shock, but not a surprise. It will be no shocf, and only a mild surprise, if he is soon a free man. cution psychiatrists depicted a selfish, manipulative, lazy parasite What kind of science is this? Can you imagine a prosecution ballistics expert roaring that a scoundrel used a shotgun while a defense ballistics expert pleaded that the poor guy only used a Of what relevance is it whether Hinckley should be Many guilty people are pitiful. Neither jurors nor psychiatrists should be asked to judge a defendant's soul. That sort of question should be left to God and Norman Mailer.

The proper question for law and society is who did what. As a rule it can be presumed that people mean to do what they do. The chances of a man firing a gun at another man who happens to be president of the United States are very slight unless the assailant knows what he is doing just as the chances of playing a chess game are slight for a man who doesn't know the rules and moves the pieces at random. "THERE is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan." That is true. Those are sane words.

Yet they were cited not by the prosecution, but by the defense. Somehow they were made to prove that Hinckley should not be held responsible for his "attempt to get Reagan." What happened to common sense? "When speculation has done its worst," wrote Samuel Johnson, "two and two still four." This is not to disparage expertise; it is to say, however, that Sobran only 8.99 and 24.99 Catch Sasson at special purchase prices in That Guy Coming or going you'll always look great in Sasson. And here's your chance to save big on the looks you love to play in. Your favorite 5-pocket jeans done in all-cotton indigo denim, sizes 28 to 36, only 24.99. And topped off by a cropped T-shirt with the Sasson signature, in red, royal blue, white or black polyester cotton, S-M-L, only 8.99.

1200 units" in Hudson's That Guy, all metro Detroit stores. "Total units at all Hudson's stores. hudsoris The word "insane" seems to have acquired a meaning so elusive that only experts can define it for us. The funny I thing is that the experts disagree so Bitterly, so profoundly, so unintelligibly among themselves. Twelve laymen are supposed to listen to both sides and then adjudicate the controversy, soberly suppressing any yahoo suspicion that some or all of these experts are quacks.

EXPERTS? Here is the New York Times' partial summary of the expert testimony: "The defense psychiatrists portrayed a schizophrenic, deluded, psychotic prisoner of an 'inner world' who should be pitied, while the prose- if If i i it I I ill 5 I.