When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present Read online

  ALSO BY Gail Collins

  America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

  Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics

  The Millennium Book (WITH DAN COLLINS)

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Gail Collins

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07166-6

  For Danny

  Contents

  ALSO BY Gail Collins

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I: 1960

  1. Repudiating Rosie

  2. The Way We Lived

  3. Housework

  PART II: WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

  4. The Ice Cracks

  5. What Happened?

  6. Civil Rights

  7. The Decline of the Double Standard

  8. Women’s Liberation

  PART III: FOLLOWING THROUGH

  9. Backlash

  10. “You’re Gonna Make It After All”

  11. Work and Children

  12. The 1980s—Having It All

  13. The 1990s—Settling for Less?

  14. The New Millennium

  15. Hillary and Sarah… and Tahita

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  “DO YOU APPRECIATE YOU’RE IN A COURTROOM IN SLACKS?”

  On a steamy morning in the summer of 1960, Lois Rabinowitz, a 28-year-old secretary for an oil-company executive, unwittingly became the feature story of the day in New York City when she went down to traffic court to pay her boss’s speeding ticket. Wearing neatly pressed slacks and a blouse, Lois hitched a ride to the courthouse with her husband of two weeks, Irving. In traffic court, Magistrate Edward D. Caiazzo was presiding.

  When Lois approached the bench, the magistrate exploded in outrage. “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” he demanded, and sent her home to put on more appropriate clothes. Instead, the secretary gave the ticket to her husband, who managed to finish the transaction and pay the $10 fine—but not before the magistrate warned the newlywed Irving to “start now and clamp down a little or it’ll be too late.” When it was all over, Lois diplomatically told the courthouse reporters that “the way the judge thinks about women is very flattering” and promised to “go home and burn all my slacks.”

  Since Caiazzo had no known record of tossing out male petitioners who showed up in overalls or sweatshirts, it was pretty clear that the showdown was really about women’s place in the world, not the dignity of traffic court. “I get excited about this because I hold womanhood on a high plane and it hurts my sensibilities to see women tearing themselves down from this pedestal,” the magistrate told reporters. It was a convoluted expression of the classic view of sexual differences: women did not wear the pants in the family—or anywhere else, for that matter. In return, they were allowed to stand on a pedestal.

  “SHE HAS A HEAD ALMOST TOO SMALL FOR INTELLECT.”

  The idea that women were the weaker sex, meant to stay at home and tend to the children while the men took care of the outside world, was as old as Western civilization. The colonists who came over on the Mayflower believed that women were morally as well as intellectually and physically inferior, and that they should be married off as early as possible so their husbands could keep them on the straight and narrow. Their ministers enjoyed quoting St. Paul, who had urged the Corinthians to “Let your women keep silence in the churches…. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home.” But it was occasionally difficult to wring the proper degree of deference out of women who had crossed the ocean in small boats, helped carve settlements out of the wilderness, and spent their days alone in isolated farmhouses surrounded by increasingly ticked-off Indians. One early settler wrote with some irritation that his sister was “not so humble and heavenly as is desired.”

  The colonial farmwife actually enjoyed considerable status within her family, because she manufactured many of the things her husband and children needed to survive and contributed greatly to the family fortunes. (One New England Quaker remembered her colonial grandmother being busy with “candle making, soap making, butter and cheese making, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and of course all the knitting and sewing and dressmaking and tailoring and probably the shoemaking and the millinery” for her husband and fourteen children.) But in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution kicked in, and families began moving to cities. The middle-class housewife stopped spinning thread and making candles, and instead focused her considerable energies on household duties that had been given short shrift in the countryside: nurturing her children like tender little sprouts, cleaning, and cooking effortful dinners. It was all very important, everyone agreed. (And very difficult, considering that making a simple cake before the invention of the eggbeater required three-quarters of an hour of hand beating.) But it did not create wealth, and America was a society that had trouble taking anyone without an economic role seriously.

  To raise their stature, women were given the morality franchise. Middle-class society, with women’s eager cooperation, placed them on that pedestal. (It was a good metaphor—they got higher status but precious little room to maneuver.) If colonial women were thought to be rather lax and lascivious by nature, in need of correction by their fathers and husbands, Victorian women were elevated as the moral guardians of their families. Men, who used to have that job, could hardly afford to focus on virtue when they had to wring out a living in the dog-eat-dog marketplace. Their wives were going to have to be good enough for both of them. Women were supposed to protect that goodness by staying far away from the outside world of business and politics. “Our men are sufficiently money-making. Let us keep our women and children from the contagion as long as possible,” wrote Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the hugely popular Godey’s Lady’s Book.

  This new feminine portfolio was both empowering and humiliating. A woman’s impulse toward goodness was seen as instinctual, a God-given gift in a being who was still regarded as none too bright and weak in the face of the terrors of the outside world. “She reigns in the heart…. The household altar is her place of worship and service,” said Dr. Charles Meigs in a famous lecture to nineteenth-century male gynecology students. “She has a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.”

  The central point in the Western vision of sexual differences was that a woman’s place was in the home, leaving men to run everything that went on outside the front door. Men provided and protected; women served and deferred. It was an ancient and extremely durable theory but riddled with holes. For one thing, it ignored the problem of what happened to these dependent creatures if their husbands failed to live up
to their end of the bargain by dying, taking to drink, or abandoning the family. (Ladies’ Magazine, a popular periodical in the early nineteenth century, helpfully recommended that if a wife felt her husband was in danger of decamping, she should win him back with “increased anxiety to please.”) And, of course, the idea that women were meant to work only within their own homes was never applied to large chunks of the population. After the Civil War, ex-slaves who wanted to take care of their families full-time were hounded into domestic service or fieldwork amid white denunciation of black female “loaferism.” Most rural farmwives had to labor in the fields with their husbands rather than presiding over the hearth, and many urban women, black and white, had to earn wages to help feed their families.

  But for the middle class, the rule about women’s place endured. Remarkable women might, on occasion, merge marriage, motherhood, and work, or carve out a career for themselves in traditionally male occupations. But women who worked as doctors, architects, and politicians were always the rare exceptions, never the precursors of change. They were depicted in the media as strange mutations—“female physician” or “lawyer and grandmother”—whose achievements could never be mentioned except in the context of their femaleness. A 1960 story in the New York Times about Peggy Keenan, a mine operator in South Dakota, was headlined “Feminine Fashion Has a Place in the Mine.” When Betty Lou Raskin, a member of the Society of Plastics Engineers, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine on the shortage of young scientists, the editors’ subhead announced: “A Lady Chemist Argues That the Answer Is to Tap Female Brainpower.”

  “TALK OF AN AMERICAN SPACEWOMAN MAKES ME SICK TO MY STOMACH.”

  In 1960, when our story begins, although computers were still pretty much the stuff of science fiction, almost all the other things that make modern life feel modern—jet travel, television, nuclear terror—had arrived. But when it came to women, the age-old convictions were still intact. Everything from America’s legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were, in almost every way, the weaker sex. They were not meant to compete with men, to act independently of men, to earn their own bread, or to have adventures on their own. While circumstances varied by state, many American women lived under laws that gave their husbands control of not only their property but also their earnings. They could not go into business without their husbands’ permission or get credit without male cosigners. Women were barred from serving on juries in some states. The rest made it either very difficult for women to serve or very easy for them to avoid serving. (No one questioned why a movie about a troubled jury was called Twelve Angry Men.) Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was advised, in a memo from his clerk, that permitting women to serve “may encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.”

  At work, employers routinely paid women less than men for doing the same jobs. The National Office Managers Association found that a third of the companies it surveyed had dual salaries as a matter of policy. Many employers cited the extremely convenient assumption that working women were either single and living with their parents or married and bringing in extra “pin money” to supplement their husbands’ earnings. Maria K., a single mother working in upstate New York, remembered objecting to the fact that men doing the same things she did “made twice as much,” and being told in response that “they had families to support.”

  Given the assumption of male superiority in everything related to the world of work, the different pay scales made sense. So did simply refusing to hire women at all. (In 1961 there were 454 federal civil-service-job categories for college graduates, and more than 200 of them were restricted to male candidates.) To facilitate employers’ ability to discriminate, newspapers invariably divided their classified ads into HELP WANTED—MEN and HELP WANTED—WOMEN. Medical and law schools banned female students or limited their numbers to a handful per class. There was, for all practical purposes, a national consensus that women could not be airplane pilots, firefighters, television news anchors, carpenters, movie directors, or CEOs.

  Then, suddenly, everything changed. The cherished convictions about women and what they could do were smashed in the lifetime of many of the women living today. It happened so fast that the revolution seemed to be over before either side could really find its way to the barricades. And although the transformation was imperfect and incomplete, it was still astonishing. A generation that was born into a world where women were decreed to have too many household chores to permit them to serve on juries, and where a spokesman for NASA would say that any “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach,” would come of age in a society where female astronauts and judges were routine. Parents who hoped for a child to carry on the family business, or for another doctor in the family, or for a kid to play ball with in the backyard at night, no longer drooped with disappointment when the new baby turned out to be a girl. It was the liberation that countless generations of American women had been waiting for, whether they knew it or not. And it happened in our time.

  PART I

  1960

  1. Repudiating Rosie

  “SOME OF YOU DO WEAR A CAUTIOUS FACE.”

  In January 1960, Mademoiselle welcomed in a new decade for America’s young women by urging them to be… less boring. “Some of you do wear a cautious face,” the editors admitted. “But are you really—cautious, unimaginative, determined to play it safe at any price?” Mademoiselle certainly hoped not. But its readers had good reason to set their sights low. The world around them had been drumming one message into their heads since they were babies: women are meant to marry and let their husbands take care of all the matters relating to the outside world. They were not supposed to have adventures or compete with men for serious rewards. (“I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” said Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby book had served as the bible for the postwar generation of mothers.) Newsweek, decrying a newly noticed phenomenon of dissatisfied housewives in 1960, identified the core of the issue: menstruation. “From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman’s role,” the newsmagazine wrote. “As Freud was credited with saying: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ Though no group of women has ever pushed aside these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them in good grace.”

  Most girls grew up without ever seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver. Jo Freeman, who went to Berkeley in the early ’60s, realized only later that while she had spent four years “in one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world—and one with a progressive reputation,” she had never once had a female professor. “I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.” If a young woman expressed interest in a career outside the traditional teacher/nurse/secretary, her mentors carefully shepherded her back to the proper path. As a teenager in Pittsburgh, Angela Nolfi told her guidance counselor that she wanted to be an interior decorator, but even that very feminine pursuit apparently struck her adviser as too high-risk or out of the ordinary. “He said, ‘Why don’t you be a home-economics teacher?’ ” she recalled. And once Mademoiselle had finished urging its readers to shoot for the sky, it celebrated the end of the school year with an article on careers that seemed to suggest most new college graduates would be assuming secretarial duties, and ended with tips on “pre-job hand-beautifying” for a new generation of typists.

  Whenever things got interesting, women seemed to vanish from the scene. There was no such thing as a professional female athlete—even in schools, it was a given that sports were for boys. An official for the men-only Boston Marathon opined that it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.” When Mademoiselle selected seven “headstrong people who have made names for themselves lately” to comment on what the 1960s would bring, that magazine for young women managed to find only one headstrong woman to include in the mix—playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who did double
duty as the panel’s only minority.

  “WOMEN USED TO BE THE BIG STARS, BUT THESE DAYS IT’S MEN.”

  Nothing sent the message about women’s limited options more forcefully than television, which had just finished conquering the nation with a speed that made Alexander the Great look like an underachiever. In 1950 only about 9 percent of American homes boasted a set, but by 1960 nearly 90 percent of families had a TV, and those who didn’t were feeling very deprived indeed. Beverly Burton, a Wyoming farmwife, had been estranged throughout the 1950s from a mother who had once told her she was sorry Beverly had ever been born. When her mother decided to mend fences, she sent Burton a note saying, “I hope this will cover the past”—attached to a television set. And it did indeed become a turning point in the relationship.

  The postwar generation that was entering adolescence in the 1960s had grown up watching Howdy Doody, the must-see TV for the first wave of baby boomers. Howdy was a raucous puppet show in which the human performers interspersed broad physical comedy with endless pitches for the sponsors’ products. “But all the slapstick stopped when they brought out Princess Summerfall Winterspring,” remembered Stephen Davis, a childhood fan whose father worked on the show. The princess, played by a teenage singer named Judy Tyler, was the only long-running female character in Howdy Doody’s crowded cast. The role had been created when a producer realized “we could sell a lot of dresses if only we had a girl on the show,” and the princess spent most of her time expressing concern about plot developments taking place while she was offstage. Adults approved. “The harshness and crudeness which so many parents objected to in Howdy Doody now appears to have largely been a case of too much masculinity,” said Variety. But the stuff that made kids love the show—the broad comedy and bizarre plots—was all on the male side of the equation. Princess Summerfall Winterspring sang an occasional song—and watched.