Creeping progress for women.

• Position: United Nations Conference on Women; 75th anniversary of U.S. women's suffrage - Editorial

Seventy-five years ago, women in the United States finally won the right to vote, and in the last Presidential election, women cast 54 percent of the ballots. President Clinton, who possesses both a burning desire to be reelected and a grasp of basic math, celebrated the recent anniversary of women's suffrage. He also took the opportunity to endorse the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, which Hillary Rodham Clinton attended after much debate.

If the celebrations had a depressingly muted quality, it's because this is not the most auspicious historical moment for women around the world--or in this country for that matter. In many ways, our national feminist consciousness hasn't improved much since the suffragists faced jeering crowds in Washington early this century.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spent the last year making herself over in the image of a nonthreatening homemaker, has responded to conservative attacks on the "radical, anti-family agenda" of the international women's movement by downplaying feminism and emphasizing motherhood and family. The President has been meekly defensive on the subject of women's rights-describing the U.S. delegation to the Beijing conference as "true blue to families."

(The Republicans' professed concern about human rights in China--the reason they originally gave for demanding a U.S. boycott of the international women's conference--is no more credible than their professed concern about families. On both human rights and family policy, the Republicans are about as compassionate as Vlad the Impaler. But their sanctimoniousness knows no bounds.

The more politicians genuflect at the altar of family values, the more it seems that women and children get the shaft. This has been true throughout the history of the women's movement. "Motherhood cannot be amended and we're glad they didn't try," The New York Times wrote in response to a failed drive for equal rights in 1948. Fast forward to 1995. The Wall Street Journal contended that the Beijing conference features "the American quarrel between ardent feminists and equally ardent defenders of family values." Yet feminists continue to be the ones who call for better family policies, parental leave, health care and nutrition for mothers and children, and high-quality, affordable day care--issues that were current in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's time.

Despite American politicians' saccharine sentimentality about family, our elected officials are making...