by Gail Collins
Men, in their capacity as breadwinners, were presumed to be the money managers on the home front as well as in business, and women were cut out of almost everything having to do with finances. Credit cards were issued in the husband’s name. Loans were granted based on the husband’s wage-earning ability, even if the wife had a job, under the theory that no matter what the woman said she planned to do, she would soon become pregnant and quit working. A rule of thumb that banks used when analyzing a couple’s ability to handle a mortgage or car loan was that the salary of the wife was irrelevant if she was 28 or under. Half of her income was taken into consideration if she was in her 30s. Her entire salary entered the calculations only if she had reached 40 or could prove she had been sterilized. Marjorie Wintjen, a 25-year-old Delaware woman, was told her husband’s vasectomy had no effect on the matter “because you can still get pregnant.”
Even when a woman was living on her own and supporting herself, she had trouble convincing the financial establishment that she could be relied upon to pay her bills. The New York Times was still reporting horror stories in 1972, such as that of a suburban mother who was unable to rent an apartment until she got the lease cosigned by her husband—a patient in a mental hospital. A divorced woman, well-to-do and over forty, had to get her father to cosign her application for a new co-op. Divorced women had a particular problem getting credit, in part because of a widely held belief that a woman who could not keep her marriage together might not keep her money under control, either. (Insurance companies held to the same line of reasoning when it came to writing policies for car owners, theorizing that a woman who broke the marital bonds would also break the speed limit.) Joyce Westrich, a program analyst, wanted to buy a house in New Jersey for herself and her two children after she and her husband legally separated. All the banks she approached turned her down, to Westrich’s befuddlement, until her real estate broker “whispered… in the manner of a character in a deodorant commercial, ‘Maybe it’s your marital situation.’ ” Although her about-to-be ex-husband’s income was much lower than hers, once he agreed to cosign, Westrich had no further troubles.
“MEN NEEDED FASTER SERVICE THAN WOMEN.”
The presumption that women needed men’s protection in every aspect of life led to a kind of near-infantilization. Looking back on her life as a housewife in the 1960s, the writer Jane O’Reilly recalled that she had “never earned my own living, never taken a trip alone, never taken total responsibility for a single decision. The only time I tried to give a speech, I fainted. I had been divorced once, and lasted only four months before I remarried in a fit of terror. I had never gone to a party by myself, never gone to the movies by myself. I wanted to run away from home but I felt I had to ask permission.”
When women ventured into the outside world, they often felt tentative, unsure of their welcome. And it was no wonder. The Executive Flight to Chicago was not the only service that barred them at the gate. The world was full of men’s clubs, men’s gyms, and men’s lounges, where the business of business was conducted. Even places that were theoretically open to the public reserved the right to discriminate. The public golf course in Westport, Connecticut, would not allow women to play during prime weekend hours, claiming that men deserved the best spots because they had to work during the week. Heinemann’s Restaurant in Milwaukee banned women from the lunch counter because “men needed faster service than women because they have important business to do.” Many upscale bars refused to serve women, particularly if they were alone, under the theory that they must be prostitutes.
Early in the 1960s, a freelance writer from New York, traveling to Boston to interview a psychologist for a book she was working on, stopped by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and ordered a drink at the bar. “We do not serve women,” the bartender said, and whisked her off to a little lounge off the women’s restroom, where he brought her the whiskey sour. It was a moment Betty Friedan recalled with humiliation decades later, long after she helped spark a movement that made sure nobody ever got consigned to that lounge again.
2. The Way We Lived
“WE WERE THE GUILTY ONES.”
The previous chapter made American women circa 1960 sound very badly treated. But at the time, most of them would not have seen things that way. The economy was booming; their standard of living was, in general, at an unprecedented high. They expected to do much better than their parents and to have children who progressed even further. If their options were limited by their sex, it was due to social traditions that had existed for so long that few questioned or even noticed them. Most tended to compare their opportunities and achievements to those of other women, not men. And for those who did venture into the public world, the mere fact of being allowed to take part was so exciting that the details scarcely mattered.
When Anne Tolstoi Wallach graduated from Radcliffe, she talked to Time-Life Publishing about a job in magazines, which for a woman always involved a typing test. “I was a terrific typist, and they offered me a typing-pool job that might lead to research,” she recalled. In all the big newsmagazines, men were reporters and writers, and women were researchers, collecting information for reporters and fact-checking their final product without receiving any credit. When Nora Ephron graduated from college, she applied for a job at Newsweek and was told, “Women don’t become writers here.” At the time, Ephron recalled, “It would have never crossed my mind to say, ‘How dare you.’ ”
Wallach didn’t find this division of labor shocking, either. Just being offered a job, she thought, was “wonderful.” Her attitude was typical. In a survey for the Saturday Evening Post—at a time when it was both legal and common to declare some jobs off-limits for women, and to automatically pay them less in others—George Gallup found that only 19 percent of married women and 29 percent of single women said there was sex discrimination in the professions.
Wallach ultimately chose a career in advertising, which was, for all its discrimination, far more open to women than were most business fields. She began as a writer with the powerful J. Walter Thompson agency, which employed a Women’s Copy Group that handled products such as dish soap and fashions. The women’s group was segregated in a special part of the building that was staffed with maids who served the female writers their lunches on trays. (The men, Wallach recalled, had a fabulous dining room that had been brought over, brick by brick, from an English castle. The women were permitted to use it one day a week.) The management was apparently convinced that women were frail things, because their restroom was equipped like a hospital, with cots and a nurse. “You could go in and say, ‘I need to be up at two,’ and they would tuck you in and the nurse would wake you at two and you’d go back to work,” Wallach said.
Unlike the vast majority of upper-middle-class women, she kept working when her son and daughter were born. In one sense, juggling a job and children was less difficult for her than it is for professional working mothers today because the employers were less demanding. In the postwar era, when the United States had very little international competition, profits were high and pressure for productivity was low. “The whole time I worked, it was pretty much nine to five,” Wallach said. “And in Thompson’s women’s group, nearly everybody had a secretary. And when you were promoted you had two secretaries, and if you were really important you had three secretaries. There was a lot of make-work.” But on the downside, when Anne got home there was absolutely no expectation that her husband should help with housework or child care just because his wife had spent the day in an office. She and most of her female colleagues were working to support their families—many were married to artists or writers whose careers were more creative than profitable. Nevertheless, she said, “We were the guilty ones.” The women saw the fact that they went out to work as a kind of privilege, and Anne and her best friend used to swear to each other that their husbands would “never have to give up anything that a stay-at-home wife would give them.”
Most women who worked did so because their
families needed the money, and very few made enough to hire people to help with child care and cooking as Wallach did. But rich or poor, they had a shared sense that all domestic responsibilities were on their shoulders. When Gloria Vaz, an African-American mother of four in Brooklyn, got a nine-to-five job, her husband, a cab driver, agreed to be home when the children arrived from school. But that was the extent of his help, she said. “In fact sometimes as soon as I would get home, he would go out… to hang out with his friends and, I found out later, he had other women.”
June LaValleur had always intended to work—her father committed suicide when she was 16, and her mother told June that she “really needed to have an occupation in case my husband died.” So even though she was engaged to be married when she graduated from high school, she trained as a lab technician. She and her husband, a gas-station owner, lived in a mobile home in rural Minnesota. While they both worked full-time, “it was just assumed I did all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the baking, all the clothes shopping. He didn’t even buy his own underwear…. Over the years there was a lot of resentment.” But LaValleur, the product of a stoic farm culture, said there were few fights. “The heritage was, you didn’t talk much.”
“… COULDN’T WEAR PANTS AT ALL.”
When we look at how women lived day-to-day in 1960, it seems appropriate to go back to that matter of pants, so comfortable and so freighted with symbolism. Through most of American history, women’s clothing seemed to have been designed to make it difficult to move, let alone get any work done. In the nineteenth century, when middle-class women were weighed down with floor-length skirts and corseted within an inch of their lives, reformers had tried to popularize the bloomer dress—a short skirt over billowing Turkish-style trousers. But the women who dared to wear them were denounced by preachers and tormented by small boys, who threw pebbles at them when they ventured out in public. (Susan B. Anthony had to be rescued by police in New York City after she was surrounded by a “wall of men and boys” who jeered at her costume and refused to let her pass.) As time went on, pants became acceptable for golf or for some kinds of factory work. But even during World War II, four female pilots who had been ferrying new military fighter planes to an airport in Georgia were arrested as they walked to their hotel for violating a rule against women wearing slacks on the street at night.
In 1960 the old dress code was still holding firm. In advertisements, women were always shown wearing dresses—whether they were lab workers at the General Foods Kitchens, an older housewife bent over with arthritis, or a younger one pulling sheets out of the washer. Outside of factories, there was little room for slacks in the public world. Virginia Williams, who was a file clerk at a Social Security office in New York, recalled that women “couldn’t wear pants at all. If you wore pants in the dead of winter, you wore them to the office, but then when you got ready to start working, you had to have on a skirt.” Louise Meyer, a Wyoming farmwife whose list of daily chores would have made a stevedore quail, still wore a housedress and apron while she worked. Beverly Burton, one of Meyer’s neighbors, said she wore pants at home but nowhere else. “We didn’t even go to the post office in them.”
Women who held white-collar jobs wrestled with a demanding wardrobe that included nylon stockings, heels, gloves, and hats. For the women who worked on ad accounts at J. Walter Thompson, Anne Wallach recalled, the hats were particularly important. “They distinguished you from the secretaries,” she said. “The minute you stopped being a secretary and became a junior writer, you put a hat on. I wore glasses and had trouble juggling the hat and the glasses, but I never would have taken the hat off. Even in the bathroom.” Shirley Hammond, a Washington, DC, schoolteacher in the 1960s, remembers wearing high heels when she stood in front of her class every day. “I guess that’s why so many of us have problems with our legs and hips and knees now…. It all could very well have been from teaching in high-heeled shoes on those hard floors.” The students were required to dress up for school as well, and that was okay with many young women who liked pretty, very feminine outfits—matching skirt-and-sweater sets, worn over a girdle and nylon stockings. “Picture me in salmon-pink A-line skirts, little black collars with little floral patterns all over, and a little sweater that matched with a little pin with my initials,” said Margaret Siegel, a doctor’s daughter who grew up in New Jersey. “I had the salmon outfit and I had a powder-blue one.”
Hems had begun wandering above the knee, but parents and teachers waged a never-ending war to keep anything resembling a thigh out of sight. “My mother was the home-ec teacher, and the dress code was that your skirts could be no higher than one inch above your knee, and since she was in charge of enforcing the rule… my skirts were never higher,” said Barbara Arnold. In parochial schools, the nuns often employed the time-honored method of making the girls kneel, and sending home anyone whose skirt didn’t touch the floor.
Women generally wore sanitary napkins when they menstruated, and it took a remarkably long time for manufacturers to figure out that these could be attached to underpants with a strip of adhesive. In the ’60s they were still being secured by a small belt with tabs in the front and back, to which the pad could be attached. Female athletes were bedeviled by the bulkiness of the napkins—Wilma Rudolph, the Olympic track star, vividly remembered “how uncomfortable it was running with sanitary pads.” But while tampons existed—and were beginning to be promoted in advertisements filled with extremely clinical copy—many girls were dubious about their effects. The closest thing Margaret Siegel ever had to a discussion about sex was debating with her friends “whether you were going to lose your virginity if you used tampons.”
“I DREAMED I SANG A DUET AT THE MET IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA.”
The first Barbie dolls appeared in American toy stores in 1959, and they were a revelation. Dolls had always been shaped more or less like little girls, with a firm, stocky, and undefined body. But Barbie was built. Sylvia Peterson vividly remembered the family trauma when her little sister received her first Barbie. “My father saw that doll… and when he saw that she had boobs, he got really mad. It was at her birthday party, and he really exploded.” Anne Wallach’s daughter, Alison, was a Barbie fiend. “I was Career Barbie. I was Stewardess Barbie. And I had the Ken doll and the Dream House. Every time I could save up five dollars, I bought a new outfit. So I had a lot of outfits, and I mixed and matched clothes.” It took a while—and the civil rights movement—to prod Mattel to create African-American Barbies. But Yana Shani Fleming remembers that her grandmother created them herself. “She had painted lots of black Barbies. So I had these interesting Barbies whose skin would peel like a suntan.”
Even for grown-ups, the beauty ideal in 1960 was a Barbie-like woman with a small waist and large, firm breasts—the kind of figure that was difficult to achieve without a great deal of reinforcement. The bras of the era were serious pieces of underwear. “I dreamed I sang a duet at the Met in my Maidenform bra,” ran an ad in a long and successful campaign that showed well-endowed young women directing traffic, fighting bulls, or playing the cello with nothing on above the waist except a bra with cups so pointy they resembled lethal weapons. Women wore “panty-style” girdles that sometimes reached midthigh, with hooks to hold up their nylon stockings. (One book on dressing tips for wives proposed that they wear girdles even while scrubbing the floor.) Mademoiselle advised that when it came to Bermuda shorts, the best underwear was “a svelte panty girdle, long and leggy, in giddy pink and white or blue and white checked nylon power net.” Even the individual least in need of foundation garments—Barbie—had a girdle. Tawana Hinton remembers starting junior high school in the early ’60s “and I probably weighed all of eightysomething pounds, but you wore a girdle and hose that hooked to the girdle or garter belt…. It was just crazy.” Susan and Lorna Jo Meyer, living in rural Wyoming, wrestled with the local fashion dictate for pure white sneakers—which required the constant application of white shoe polish—at a time when th
e dress code required skirts and nylon stockings. “Oh, that was awful,” recalled Susan. “If you crossed your legs at your ankles, then that stuff would get on your nylons.”
The movies were full of voluptuous stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, and the nation still generally embraced the 1950s standard of beauty that held that it was definitely possible for a woman to be too thin. But a second model had already entered the consciousness of younger women. Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee were both among the top ten box-office stars of 1960, playing tomboys named Tammy/Gidget who were transformed into women by true love but hung on to their childlike figures. The new first lady, Jackie Kennedy, would cement the trend away from curves—a campaign she and her upper-class friends had been fighting since childhood. (When her 12-year-old sister, Lee, asked for advice on how to lose weight, the teenage Jackie suggested she take up smoking to curb her appetite.)
“HAIR WAS HUGE.”
The obsession with hair in the early 1960s was something that spanned all class distinctions. “Hair was huge,” said Laura Sessions Stepp, who went to high school in West Virginia. “We talked about hair. We didn’t talk about clothes because in West Virginia they didn’t have a lot of money. But hair was something you could do a lot with, and the boys loved hair.” The postwar approach to hair curling had been a fearsome rite of beauty-parlor “permanents” that often left their victims looking very much like the Bride of Frankenstein. “It looked bad!” recalled Verna Bode, a former teacher from Kansas. “Your hair would be so fuzzy. But it would last maybe half a year.” The 1960s required a different, smoother look that girls acquired by going to bed with a head bristling with instruments of torture. Stepp, who was striving for “the perfect flip,” rolled her hair around orange-juice cans. “And I slept on them every night. I don’t know how in the world.”
