The 1980s opened with a sense of uncertainty for feminists. Just years after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, the passage of Title IX and the near-ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Ronald Reagan swept into office backed by a newly energized religious right determined to reverse many of the gains women had won in the previous decade.
Across the country, antiabortion activists organized at the state level, the ERA's ratification deadline expired, and conservative leaders framed feminism itself as a threat to American values. What had felt like a period of rapid progress in the 1970s suddenly gave way to a fierce political and cultural backlash.
The decade was marked by escalating attacks on reproductive freedom. Reagan expanded antiabortion policies, implemented the global gag rule and sought to further entrench the Hyde Amendment's restrictions on abortion funding. Meanwhile, antiabortion extremists targeted clinics and providers with bombings, assaults and intimidation campaigns.
Throughout the decade, Ms. documented the real-world consequences of these policies, particularly for poor women and women of color, while warning that the fight over abortion was fundamentally about women's autonomy, equality and power.
Yet the 1980s were also a decade of feminist resilience. Women identified an emerging gender gap in voting patterns, rallied behind Geraldine Ferraro's historic vice presidential campaign and reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment year after year.
By the decade's end, a majority of women—and two-thirds of younger women—identified as feminists.
The lesson of the 1980s is that backlash is often a sign of a movement's success. Faced with powerful opposition, feminists did not retreat. They adapted, organized and laid the groundwork for the political breakthroughs that would follow in the decades ahead.
This essay is part of Feminist Lessons—part 2 of Ms.' our three-part FEMINIST 250 project—which explores what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change.
The post Feminist Lessons From the 1980s: Why Every Movement Faces Backlash appeared first on Ms. Magazine.
