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

by Gail Collins

  The only woman in the Senate for most of her career, Smith had to stand in line at the public bathroom because she was barred from the senators’ lounge. When she served on the Naval Affairs Committee, one of the staff members took her for a walk during long sessions so the men would have a break from the burden of a female presence. Once, on a flight home from Europe with other lawmakers, the plane developed trouble serious enough that everyone was given a life jacket and told to prepare for a possible crash. In response, Smith pulled out some harmonicas she had purchased as presents for her nieces and nephews and persuaded everyone to start singing. Later, she told reporters she was as terrified as everyone else, “only as a woman I couldn’t have the luxury of showing my fear.”

  On the issue of women’s rights, Minority Leader Dirksen was no match for the senator from Maine. The Civil Rights Act passed with the amendment intact and was signed into law. Years later, the very elderly Howard Smith—retired and no longer the terror of liberal legislation in the House of Representatives—visited the Capitol and ran into Martha Griffiths. “You know, our amendment is doing more than all the rest of the Civil Rights Act,” she told him. Smith, Griffiths said, responded, “Martha, I’ll tell you the truth. I offered it as a joke.”

  “AN AIRLINE OR A WHOREHOUSE?”

  Howard Smith was not the only person who thought the idea of giving women workers equal protection under the law was hilarious. Once the Civil Rights Act was on the books, it looked as if the section protecting women from job discrimination was going to do nothing but spawn endless jokes about the “bunny law” that, wags predicted, would require the Playboy Club to give men equal opportunity to don puff tails and silk ears, and work as one of its scantily clad waitresses. The Wall Street Journal invited its readers to imagine “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen” while on the other side of town “a matronly vice president” was chasing her male secretary. “Bunny problems indeed!” giggled a New York Times editorial, which also raised the specter of male chorus-line dancers. The New Republic, a bastion of liberal commentary, said the sex provision should simply be ignored. “Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?” the magazine asked.

  Very few people involved with enforcing the act seemed to believe women should be a serious concern. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was set up to arbitrate complaints under the new law, and Aileen Hernández, the only woman among the five commissioners, said other members responded to sex-discrimination complaints with “boredom” or “virulent hostility.” The EEOC ruled that help-wanted ads could not mention a preferred race for applicants, but it did nothing to stop the newspapers’ practice of dividing the ads into HELP WANTED—MALE and HELP WANTED—FEMALE.

  Yet when the EEOC opened for business, its first complainants were neither oppressed black workers nor men hoping to break into the ranks of the Playboy Bunnies. They were stewardesses. The commission’s clerical staff, which had been told that their job was to help fight racial discrimination, was still unpacking when Barbara Roads, a union leader for the flight attendants, and another stewardess arrived. “We walked in and looked around at a sea of black faces. Their typewriters were still in boxes. This woman came up to us, two blondes in stewardess uniforms, and she said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Roads recalled. The two women helped the brand-new workers set up their typewriters and told them about the airline ban on marriage, the age discrimination, and the endless measurements to check for weight gain. “They couldn’t believe it,” she said.

  The black women behind the typewriters may have been sympathetic, but the flight attendants’ complaints brought out the same somber deliberation on the part of male officials that the Playboy Bunny theories did. When a House labor subcommittee held a hearing on the issue, Representative James Scheuer of New York jovially asked the flight attendants to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.” The airline industry continued to argue with a straight face that businessmen would be discouraged from flying if the women handing them their coffee and checking their seat belts were not young and attractive. “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?” Martha Griffiths demanded. The remark got into public circulation just as Griffiths was concluding a reelection campaign, and even her ever-supportive husband, Hicks, worried she had made a potentially fatal error. But the next morning he called from Michigan to report, “I am wrong. Everybody I have seen in Detroit is in hysterics. They are shouting at me from across the street, saying, ‘Tell Martha it was the greatest question ever asked.’ ”

  “AN NAACP FOR WOMEN.”

  Howard Smith’s decision to play games with the Civil Rights Act was an extraordinary example of unintended consequences. At the time he introduced his amendment, the idea of ending job discrimination against women was on almost no one’s radar. Only two states—Hawaii and Wisconsin—included women in their fair-employment laws. At the Commission on the Status of Women, Mary Eastwood and Pauli Murray had intended to sneak in a proposal that states should study whether women ought to be protected against job discrimination. It had seemed like a rather radical recommendation. But, of course, once the Civil Rights Act was amended, expectations rose. Nobody was going to settle for a study when the law of the land said that female employees could not be treated differently than men. And when it became clear that the EEOC had no intention of protecting women workers as the law required, it created instant militancy.

  Betty Friedan was among the frustrated. She was going to Washington for a few days every week in the mid-’60s, allegedly to research a book. Perhaps, given her fractious marriage, she was merely trying to get away from home. Perhaps, as she said later, she was networking with the small group of senior women government officials she had unearthed with the help of Pauli Murray—people who Friedan called the “underground network of women in Washington.” (The practical government women found the term wildly overdramatic, even though they secretly liked it.) They “maneuvered me into place all right,” Friedan wrote later, “recognizing that I, famous for writing a controversial book about women, could do publicly what they could only do underground: organize a women’s movement.”

  In the summer of 1966, at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, delegates, guests, and lookers-on arrived in Washington steaming about the way the new law against job discrimination was—or rather was not—being enforced. Friedan ran into Pauli Murray, and they agreed to invite “whomever we met who seemed interested in organizing women for action” to a strategy session that night. The meeting, in Friedan’s hotel room, is now famous as a turning point in the history of the women’s movement, but certainly no one at the time would have imagined she was taking part in a legendary event. It was crowded, the conversation disjointed and testy, and the women, who had spent a long day in nylons and girdles, must have been tired and a little uncomfortable. The radical forces called for “an NAACP for women” that would identify discrimination and fight it in the courts and in the legislatures. The moderates suggested proposing a resolution calling for the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act ban on sex discrimination in employment. Others just wanted to send a telegram to whoever was chairing the meeting the next day. At one point in the long, heated discussion, Friedan irately demanded that everyone leave and, when no one did, locked herself in the bathroom. The meeting went on anyway; Friedan eventually emerged, and a resolution was drafted. The next day it was introduced, then promptly ruled out of order.

  During the conference lunch, while various members of the Johnson administration gave utterly forgettable speeches, Friedan and a dozen or so other women seated at the front tables were buzzing among themselves, making a mini-spectacle as they talked, dashed notes on napkins, and passed them back and forth. They were creating, on the spot, a version of that long-awaited “NAACP for women.” They called it NOW, the N
ational Organization for Women, and agreed to ante up $5 each to get the ball rolling. As word of what was going on spread around the room—it would have been hard for the conferees to miss the fact that something was up—Friedan remembered that “those five-dollar bills kept coming at us, one from Eleanor Roosevelt’s granddaughter, Anna.”

  “THE MYTHICAL MARCHING MILLIONS.”

  Given the fruit it bore, NOW seems to have been a plant that required only a seed and a thimble of water before it sprouted into something terrific. Members joked about “the mythical marching millions” when in reality there were only about three hundred members. In the months right after its founding, NOW existed in one of those golden moments when the winds of change seemed to be virtually impelling it to success. “We were totally confident we were making history,” said Muriel Fox.

  During NOW’s first protest, a picketing of EEOC offices in cities around the country, Friedan was so carried away with the excitement and the news cameras that she decided to announce a legal action. Mid-demonstration, she dashed into a secretary’s cubicle in the New York EEOC and called Mary Eastwood, who was providing surreptitious support from her government perch in the Justice Department. “What do you call it when you sue the government for not enforcing a law?” Friedan asked.

  “A writ of mandamus,” said Eastwood.

  Friedan put down the phone, marched back out, and announced that NOW was “going into court for a writ of mandamus against the U.S. government” for not enforcing the Civil Rights Act when it came to sex discrimination. At the time, she recalled later, NOW had “only two members in Atlanta, six in Pittsburgh, a dozen in Chicago and California, and not much more in between.”

  It was not that people didn’t want to join. As soon as Jo Freeman, a young Chicago community organizer, read about NOW, she wrote asking to become a member but got no answer. “Over the next year I wrote a few more letters to NOW names in the news, including Betty Friedan, but again got no reply,” she remembered. Just finding NOW was a “little like trying to find the early Christians,” said one early liberationist. Martha Griffiths, who had naturally been enlisted as a charter member as well as a member of the advisory committee, said later she was never called to a meeting. “They weren’t organized well enough, you know.”

  The women on top of the very small pyramid that was the early NOW membership understood about the law and the media, but they were not necessarily prepared to grow a mass movement. “With no money, no office, no staff, it was impossible to answer all the letters and calls from women who wanted to join NOW,” Friedan wrote later. “When someone would get so impatient that she’d call long distance… I’d make her the local NOW organizer—if she didn’t sound too crazy.” Fox recruited a woman to serve as Friedan’s secretary, and for want of a better workplace, the new employee sat perched behind a typewriter table in Fox’s office at the public relations firm Carl Byoir. Much of the printing and phone calling was done in Michigan by NOW supporters in the United Auto Workers union. The mail drop for the infant organization was in Washington, and Friedan, the leader, was in New York. It was little more than a small cadre of far-flung acquaintances who suddenly discovered they had a tiger by the tail.

  “… AND MAKE UP FOR THE LACK OF HARRY AT HOME TO CARE.”

  Word started going around that there was, indeed, an “NAACP for women” that would champion the victims of sex discrimination and take their legal cases. NOW’s legal committee was exactly like that of the NAACP—except that the NAACP had a history of fighting racism through the courts, a veritable army of experienced attorneys at its disposal, and a long, although painfully acquired, list of financial backers. NOW had a handful of volunteer lawyers, most of whom worked for the government and were unable to take a public role. At the beginning only Marguerite Rawalt, who had retired, was able to treat NOW as a full-time—albeit unpaid—job. In 1966 she was newly widowed and eager to throw herself into the cause. “You have not heard from me because I have been so overwhelmed with work and travel and making talks that I can hardly keep myself going,” she wrote a friend. “I seem to lose myself that way, and make up for the lack of Harry at home to care.”

  But Rawalt was no match for the flood of letters NOW received from women looking for legal help. “I must have relief…. I can’t do it all,” she wrote Friedan. Many of the women who wrote were the victims of all the protective laws the labor unions and well-intentioned politicians had gotten passed in state legislatures, prohibiting businesses from asking women to lift heavy objects or work long hours. In the real world, companies used the weight rules to disqualify women from high-paying jobs, and the regulations restricting them to forty-hour workweeks cut them out of lucrative overtime. Companies also took it upon themselves to create rules for women’s alleged benefit. Some refused to employ women with preschool children under the theory that mothers with young sons and daughters should not have jobs that were too demanding. In Orlando, Ida Phillips applied for an assembly-trainee job at Martin Marietta and was rejected because she had preschool children. When she sued, the lower court rejected her claim, saying that employers had a right to consider job applicants’ outside responsibilities. But it was an illusion to imagine that the women who sought to be assembly workers had other options that would make it easier to take care of their families. While she fought her case in court, Phillips was forced to take a job as a waitress—for less money and longer hours.

  “WOMEN WORKED AND NEEDED A PLACE IN THE WORLD.”

  Lorena Weeks was 9 years old when her father was killed in a sawmill accident. Her mother was 29, with four children. “She had never worked and she did have a hard time,” Weeks recalled in her Georgia drawl. “That’s one thing I knew. All men weren’t breadwinners and women did have to work for what they got. So I always assumed I would work, and I did work. I went to work at a five-and-ten-cent store when I was 9 years old. I could hardly see over the counter because I was small in stature. I worked for one dollar a day.”

  Her mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage nine years later, leaving 18-year-old Lorena with a 9-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister to raise and support. She worked four hours a night as a waitress in her hometown of Louisville, then caught a bus to her overnight job as a telephone operator in Wadley, ten miles away. “I worked from eleven at night until seven in the morning and caught the mail carrier back to Louisville. I got home in time to fix breakfast. We had one room and a tiny kitchen. My brother and sister went to school during the day and I slept,” she recounted. “I was determined and I had the Lord on my side.”

  She also had a suitor—William Weeks, a part-time electrician and rural letter carrier who shared her last name. “All my life I knew I would marry a black-haired, blue-eyed man and I did,” said Weeks, who is now a widow. “When I was a little girl my daddy used to rock me on the porch and I’d say I wanted to marry him and he’d say, ‘Sissy, you can’t marry Daddy.’ And I’d say, ‘I want to keep my name, Daddy. I want to always be a Weeks.’ And he said, ‘You’ll just have to find a man who has the same name.’ So it just happened like that.” Billy Weeks courted Lorena by phone for three months before they ever met. “He called me every night. He said, ‘I saw you eating a piece of pie in the restaurant and I just wanted to talk with you.’

  “I loved him before I even knew him, really.”

  They married and set up housekeeping, and she continued to work for the telephone company, Southern Bell, with a five-year break when she had her three children in rapid succession. “When my little girl was old enough to call me on the phone to talk, I went back to work,” she said. “We needed the money.”

  The Weeks were determined that their son and two daughters would be able to go to college, and all their efforts were aimed at saving up for their schooling. Everything else—including the long-dreamed-of house Billy intended to build on some land they owned—was put on indefinite hold. At Southern Bell, Lorena was always on the lookout for a chance to make overtime or to move up to a be
tter-paying job. She was a phone-company clerk when a notice came out that a switchman’s job had opened up. The work involved making sure routing equipment in the central office was functioning properly, and Weeks felt confident she could do the job as well as anyone else. But when she applied, the phone company sent back her application. “They said they appreciated that I wanted to advance within the company, but it’s a job not awarded to women.” The head of her union told her she did not get the promotion because “the man is the breadwinner in the family and women just don’t need this type of job.”

  There was a large sign in the office informing employees that if they felt discriminated against, they could contact the EEOC, signed by the commission’s head, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. Weeks wrote to the late president’s son and eventually got a notification that a representative of the Atlanta office was coming to investigate. The company refused to bend, citing a Georgia rule that prohibited women from lifting anything heavier than thirty pounds. The switchmen used a piece of testing equipment that just qualified. But it was pushed around on a dolly, while the thirty-four-pound manual typewriter Weeks used as a clerk had to be lifted by hand onto her desk every morning and stored away every night.

  Weeks filed a legal appeal, to the dismay of her husband. “He called me Butch, and he said, ‘Butch, you’re not going to accomplish anything and we’re going to lose friends.’ Billy just loved people…. So I just kept quiet. I didn’t come home and talk about it at all. My children knew very little about it. I just didn’t want to upset them. This was a thing unheard-of.”