As conservatives mobilized to roll back feminist gains, the women’s movement spent the 1980s fighting backlash, defending hard-won rights and laying the groundwork for future victories.
One of the enduring lessons of feminist history is that progress rarely goes unchallenged. The gains won by social movements often provoke organized resistance from those invested in maintaining the status quo. The 1980s demonstrated this lesson in dramatic fashion, as a decade of feminist advances gave way to a powerful political backlash that sought to reverse many of the movement’s hard-won victories.
This essay is part of Feminist Lessons, a series from Ms.’ FEMINIST 250 project exploring what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change. Drawing on more than 50 years of reporting, organizing and activism, the series examines how feminists transformed American life—and what those victories and setbacks can teach us today.
In the Spring 1972 Ms. preview issue, Jane O’Reilly wondered what would come from the “click” moments spurring women nationwide to reimagine their own lives. “What if we succeed?” she asked. “What if we become liberated women…?”
The 1980s offered an abrupt answer to those questions. Ronald Reagan’s election at the top of the decade marked a turning point in U.S. politics, solidifying the power of the religious right and threatening decades of gains that had emerged from the civil rights, feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements.
Alongside his disastrous economic policies, Reagan, who was vocally anti-ERA and antiabortion, also presided over the expiration of the ERA’s arbitrary ratification deadline and a broad expansion of antiabortion policies nationwide. In 1981, Reagan slashed the social safety net. And in 1982, the ERA deadline expired three states short of ratification, although this would not be the end of the story.
Reagan leveraged the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid funding for abortions, to deny abortion care to service members, veterans and federal employees; he even attempted to make the Hyde Amendment a federal law toward the end of the decade.
In 1984, Reagan enacted the global gag rule, which prohibits any organizations receiving global health funding from the U.S. from even mentioning abortion to their patients, even if they do so with their own funds.
Shortly after Reagan’s election, congressional lawmakers tried to outright ban abortion nationwide and otherwise invalidate the Court’s decision in Roe; when their efforts failed, antiabortion organizations turned to the states, passing a slew of policies that restricted access.
In 1989, the Supreme Court—stacked at that point with three Reagan-appointed justices—ruled that restrictions on the use of state resources put in place to limit abortion were not unconstitutional. Anti-abortion extremists targeted clinics and providers in a string of kidnappings, bombings, assaults and shootings, and militant groups like Army of God and Operation Rescue took hold.
Ms. writers throughout the decade chronicled the ways antiabortion policies hurt women, particularly poor women and women of color. They also rang the alarm about the threat of “a scarifying agenda that seeks to deny women our personhood, sexuality, and power over procreation; to divert the all-too-slow march of women of all colors toward self-determination and equality; and to reestablish state power to dictate who is an eligible reproducer and sexual partner,” as lawyers Rhonda Copelon and Kathryn Kolbert described in the April 1989 issue of Ms.
Feminists rose up against Reagan’s economic policies, which included slashing funding for food stamps, welfare and Medicare; cutting taxes for the rich and spurring decades of growing wealth inequality; presiding over U.S. economic development overseas that led to worker exploitation; and deregulating the oil, banking and airline industries.
“We have a government now which…is not accountable economically, so it cannot be called democratic,” social welfare expert Frances Fox Piven told Ms. in 1983. “And if a government is not democratic, well, then it should be changed.”
… If a government is not democratic, well, then it should be changed.
Frances Fox Piven, social welfare expert, 1983
Despite the myriad challenges of the 1980s, the feminist movement still made some critical advancements in doing just that. In 1980, Eleanor Smeal, now the publisher of Ms., observed and named the gender gap—finding that women supported Reagan by eight points less than men and voted as a distinct bloc; the discovery was a major step toward forcing candidates to address the concerns of women voters.
In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman candidate for vice president on a major party ticket, and while carefully not declaring herself a candidate for women’s issues, ran on feminist causes.
In 1985, the ERA was reintroduced in Congress and would be each year for the rest of the decade.
By 1986, a Newsweek/Gallup poll found that 56 percent of all women, and an even larger two-thirds of younger women, identified as feminists.
At the end of the 1980s, Ms. switched hands between three different publishers in just two years and temporarily suspended publishing in 1989. But in the 1990s, Ms. would come back swinging—fighting on with as much determination as the feminist movement had throughout the Reagan years.
The lesson of the 1980s is not that feminism failed. It is that progress often generates opposition precisely because it is effective. The backlash of the Reagan era was a reaction to the movement’s growing influence—and feminists responded not by retreating, but by organizing, adapting and laying the groundwork for the political breakthroughs that would follow in the decades ahead.
Feminist Lessons: Keep Reading the Series
At a moment when hard-won rights are being challenged, and fundamental questions about democracy, equality and freedom are once again at the center of American politics, there is much to learn from the recent past and modern women’s movement. Explore the rest of Feminist Lessons to see how feminists transformed American life in the 1970s, confronted organized backlash in the 1980s, emerged as a powerful political force in the 1990s, built a feminist majority in the 2000s, turned mass resistance into political power in the 2010s, and continue fighting for democracy in the 2020s. Together, these essays draw on more than 50 years of reporting, organizing and activism to recover the hard-won lessons of the modern women’s movement—and to illuminate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
