U.S. Women
by Yvette Moore
The lives of U.S. women have changed dramatically over the
last 100 years, littered with milestones in their struggles to
secure human and civil rights. Today, U.S. women can vote, own
property, get credit in their own names, determine the size of
their families, and have access to educational and career
opportunities -- basic human rights unavailable to their
foremothers in 1900.
Still, U.S. women must be vigilant and politically active if
they do not want to lose hard-won gains to the current backlash
against Affirmative Action and their right to control their
reproductive capacity.
These are some of the findings in The American Woman
1999-2000, the seventh volume in a series of books on the
status of U.S. women prepared every other year by the
Women’s Research and Education Institute. The book presents
a statistical portrait of U.S. women with data concerning their
health, wealth, educational and political status and essays by
women experts in these fields.
In the chapter on women and the law, noted civil-rights
attorney Sonia Jarvis says while a woman’s legal status is
no longer determined by her marital status, statutes and
policies, such as Affirmative Action, which have enabled women to
progress, are being debated. She writes:
"Most Americans would assume that the legal status of
women in the United States today is so well established that it
is not subject to significant challenges. However, American
women’s legal status is surprisingly fragile, as its
foundation rests on a handful of cases dating from the mid-1960s
and a few federal statutes....
"Cases at the state and federal level continue to
challenge a woman’s right to control her reproductive
process, to gain equal access to educational opportunities and to
be free from discrimination on the basis of sex in the
workplace."
Ms. Jarvis notes emerging legal issues that may affect
women’s lives and livelihood:
- Challenges to the Violence Against Women Act, which she
said represents the first federal attempt to regulate
domestic violence;
- Child-custody decisions against women who work or are
pursuing higher education; and
- The use of the criminal-justice system to punish
drug-addicted mothers and pregnant women.
Other trends noted in The American Woman 1999-2000
include:
- U.S. women of every race can expect to outlive their male
counterparts. The majority of women over 75 live alone.
- U.S. women, and men, are getting married for the first
time at an older age; the divorce rate has been gradually
declining since the early 1980s.
- U.S. women have delayed having children, give birth to
fewer children, and have a larger portion of them outside
of marriage. While U.S. women in the 1990s on average had
two children, childlessness is expected to be more
prevalent in the 21st century.
- Almost six in 10 adult U.S. women were in the workforce
in 1995, compared with less than four in 10 in 1960. The
dual-worker family has replaced the breadwinner-homemaker
model as the most common type of U.S. family. Most
mothers of school-age children work. Women are now the
majority in some professional and managerial occupations,
but there are still few women in blue-collar trades.
- The typical U.S. woman between 25 and 34 has more
education than her male counterpart. Undergraduates of
both sexes, but particularly women, were a more racially
diverse group in 1994 than in 1984. In 1995, 88 percent
of women age 25 to 34 had graduated from high school
–- a 60 percent increase since 1960. However, 40
percent of white women, ages 18-21, were enrolled in
college in 1994, compared with only 25 percent of black
women and 16 percent of Hispanic women.
- The ratio of women’s to men’s earnings, which
had been narrowing, widened slightly after 1993. In 1996,
women made 75 cents for every $1 men made, but there are
great variations by occupation.
- In one decade, the proportion of pregnant girls under 15
who gave birth increased by about 9 percent, and the
proportion who had abortions dropped by a similar amount.
- Breast cancer is more common among white women than black
women, but deadlier for black women; the reverse is true
of lung cancer.
- The incidence of AIDS among black and Hispanic women is
far out of proportion to their presence in the population
as a whole.
Yvette Moore is managing editor of Response.