432 ChaPter^8
Backs and, later, Ms. Magazine appeared, while feminists such as Gloria Steinem,
Angela Davis, Germaine Greer, Robin Morgan and others wrote best-selling
books and became nationally known. An underground group of Chicago
health care activists, calling themselves “Jane,” made safe abortions available
to thousand of women who, before the procedure was legalized, could not
control their reproductive lives and who had illegal “back alley” abortions at
great risk. In Boston, a group of women appalled at the lack of knowledge
and care given to female health issues by male doctors published a self-help
pamphlet, Our Bodies, Ourselves which became an internationally recognized
guide for women’s health care. Women’s issues were being taken more seri-
ously by the late 1960s and both their cultural images and political agenda
were shifting.
Politically, women were in fact gaining ground. In 1968, NOW had
decided to get involved in electoral politics by backing candidates who sup-
ported feminist issues and by calling for ratification of the Equal Rights
Amendment [ERA] to the constitution which would outlaw any discrimina-
tion based on sex. In 1971, NOW, along with feminist leaders like Steinem,
Friedan, and Representatives Shirley Chisolm and Bella Abzug, supported the
establishment of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a bipartisan group
formed to increase women’s participation in politics. By 1972—as Helen
Reddy’s song “I Am Woman” was becoming an anthem for the movement and
moving to #1 on the pop charts—women were playing a vital role in the
political process. During the national conventions that year, 40 percent of
Democratic and 30 percent of Republican Delegates were female, up from 13
and 17 percent in 1968. That same year, Shirley Chisolm, the first Black
woman elected to congress, ran for president. Congress also passed the ERA
in 1972 and by the end of the year 22 states had ratified it, with the prospects
of getting the three-fourths of states needed to pass it seemingly bright. The
Higher Education Act of 1972 also passed, and it included Title IX outlawing
sex discrimination in schools that received federal funding. Despite opposition
from alumni groups and male athletes, Title IX was the catalyst for the tre-
mendous growth in women’s intercollegiate sports in the 1970s.
Along with Title IX, a 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion,
in the Roe v. Wade case, constituted the greatest successes of the first phase of
the Women’s Liberation Movement. Millions of American women had been
illegally terminating pregnancies for years [in the 1940s Alfred Kinsey found