The Conservative Revolution 315to undergo abortions legally, and this right became a rallying cry in the
women’s liberation movement, which really picked up steam in the
1980 s. There had been a women’s rights movement as early as the Jack-
sonian era, if not earlier, and with slow progress many notable achieve-
ments had been won after a long, hard fight. But the movement now
went beyond such matters as women’s suffrage and legal recognition of
their rights as citizens. Women wanted equality with men in employ-
ment, in educational, cultural, and athletic activities, and in many
other areas of activity and opportunity. In March 1972 , Congress passed
and sent to the states for ratification an equal rights amendment (ERA)
to the Constitution which said that the “equality of rights” shall not be
denied or abridged on the basis of sex. In the House of Representatives,
Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan, led the fight for the
amendment and insisted that women were discriminated against in
employment, property rights, divorce proceedings, pensions, and inheri-
ta nce. A lt hough some t went y state s rat i fied the ERA in the early months,
an opposing and more conservative group protested against it, insisting
that traditional family values would be undermined if the amendment
was ratified. And that ended the ERA. The amendment went down to
defeat when the time limit for ratification expired in 1982.
But women did make headway in many fields, not just as nurses,
secretaries, clerks, and grade school teachers. They broke through the
glass ceiling, as it was called, and became business executives, police
officers, lawyers, governors of states, members of Congress, and leaders
in many other important fields of endeavor. In 2007 , Nancy Pelosi, a
Democrat from California, was elected Speaker of the House of Rep-
resentatives, the first female Speaker in the history of the House. As
such she became one of the most powerful politicians in the country,
after the President. By her election she had crashed through a “marble
ceiling,” as she labeled it.
Of monumental importance in changing the way Americans con-
ducted their lives was the introduction of the personal computer by
International Business Machines (IBM) in the 1960 s. Computers of
gargantuan size had been in use de cades earlier, but the invention of
the microchip in 1971 made it possible to create, fi nd, organize, and
store information on much smaller machines operated in the home and
in businesses. Data and word processing became possible when the