IN AMERICA
Focus on Women
By BOB HERBERT
The most extensive analysis of women's views in this campaign season has shown that as the economy has improved, American women have been taking a much closer look at the quality of their lives, and not liking a great deal that they see.
The new economy has bolstered the incomes of millions of families, but it has also exacerbated the sense of estrangement between the haves and have-nots, and has left many women with the feeling that they have less and less time to spend with their families and properly care for their children.
The analysis was drawn from a series of focus groups and a bipartisan national poll conducted for Lifetime Television and the Center for Policy Alternatives. The joint project was called Women's Voices 2000.
The findings suggest it won't be easy for politicians of either party to fashion a "women's message" because the women's vote is far from monolithic, and some of the issues of concern to large numbers of women are so tough and so complex they will require very creative solutions.
For example, two of the major issues of concern to poll respondents were the ever-tightening "time crunch" (more time at work, less time with family) and what was perceived by many respondents as a decline in the nation's moral values. The best way to reverse the decline in moral values, according to the poll, was for parents to spend more time with their children. But the ever-increasing demands of work have made that virtually impossible for most families.
According to the poll, 59 percent of women with children under 6 said they were finding it harder to balance the demands of work and family now than they did four years ago, when the last Women's Voices analysis was conducted. And 30 percent said it was "much harder."
The poll also found:
• That a large majority of women — 72 percent — would like their health insurance to be independent of their employment. This was not even one of the issues the pollsters had intended to ask about, but it came up repeatedly in the focus groups that preceded the polling. Politicians should take notice.
• That 93 percent of African- American women, 91 percent of Latinas, 90 percent of Asian-American women and 87 percent of white women said equal pay and benefits for women should be one of the top policy priorities in the United States.
• That retirement is a major worry for many women. Some 85 percent of Democratic women and 77 percent of Republican women want pension benefits that can be transferred from one job to another.
• That nearly half of all women — 48 percent — feel they will eventually be responsible for the care of a parent or other elderly person.
The polling appeared to show that, more than ever, class distinctions among women are being shaped by whether a woman is college-educated and married. Women who are neither are frequently in a woeful economic state.
"Unmarried women feel so much more economically marginal than married women," said Celinda Lake, who conducted the polling with Linda DiVall, Linda Williams and Anna Rivera.
At the same time, like men, women are finding a big economic divide between those who have a college education and those who do not. And the awareness of these distinctions is increasing, Ms. Lake said.
"Women are now more likely to say they are concerned about the growing divide between the rich and the poor," she said. "The new economy, the new prosperity, has made the class differences more dramatic, because while everyone agrees the economy is better and offers more opportunity, one side of America tends to feel it has benefited much more than the other half of America."
While these concerns do not all lend themselves to government solutions — and some, like the time crunch, offer difficulties that approach the level of paradox — there is a noticeable sense among women that government should try to do what it can.
The good times are seen as pretty good, not great. And many of the poll's respondents, with little in the way of savings and troubling memories of the job crunch of a few years ago, look to the future warily.