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

by Gail Collins

  For the economy to keep growing, consumers had to keep buying. Helped along by the new, mighty voice of television, advertisers were constantly expanding family visions of what the good life entailed. The number of families living in their own homes soared, and most of those new homes were in the suburbs. Family cars, then second cars, became necessities. So did—as far as most people were concerned—second televisions and summer camp for the kids. An entire middle-class generation grew up in the postwar era taking for granted a lifestyle of three-bedroom homes, washer/dryer combos, annual family vacations, and college education for their children.

  Then the economy began to slow. Fewer and fewer families could afford to buy the things they had gotten used to having on one person’s salary. Over the ’70s and ’80s, the weekly earning of nonmanagement workers fell 19 percent. While women continued to drop in and out of the workforce, often taking time off when their children were young and working more when the kids went to school full-time, they no longer regarded their work as optional or as a matter of bringing home pin money. In the 1970s wives who worked provided, on average, a third of the family’s income.

  “THAT DEFINED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.”

  Until the postwar baby boom, American women had been having fewer children for as long as the nation had been keeping population statistics. That was a rational response to the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy. An extra child on a farm was usually an unalloyed benefit—another little helper who, in relatively few years, would be available to work the fields or spin the thread or tend the chickens. But as people moved into cities and developed higher expectations for the next generation, children moved from being an economic plus to an economic drain. They had to be fed, clothed, educated, and—in a middle-class family—supported for eighteen or more years without any return on investment. Obviously, parents got their reward in other ways. But it was much easier to appreciate the pluses if there were only two or three little minuses to take care of.

  The baby boom was an exception—an extraordinarily large exception—to the pattern of smaller families. The men and women who produced it had grown up in the Depression, fought World War II, and then returned home to a booming economy to have more children than any Americans since the beginning of the twentieth century, their reproductive enthusiasm rivaling countries like India. It was no wonder we called them the Greatest Generation, but their offspring had no intention of repeating the performance.

  American women had always been fairly adept at limiting the size of their families when they wanted to, through means ranging from diaphragms to abstinence. However, all their strategies worked best when the goal was to reduce the odds of pregnancy rather than to prevent it entirely. A woman who wanted a family of two or three children rather than six or seven had good odds for success, but not a woman who wanted to be sexually active without reproducing.

  The birth control pill was simpler and far more reliable than anything that came before. It had only a fourth the failure rate of condom use and a seventh of diaphragms. The Pill, which went on the market in 1960, not only gave women more confidence about their ability to plan a career; it gave employers more confidence that when a woman said she wasn’t planning to get pregnant, she meant it. “There is, perhaps, one invention that historians a thousand years in the future will look back on and say, ‘That defined the twentieth century,’ ” wrote The Economist at the end of 1999. “It is also one that a time-traveler from 1000 would find breathtaking—particularly if she were a woman. That invention is the contraceptive pill.”

  Young unmarried women did not have widespread access to the Pill until the early 1970s—which not coincidentally was the same time they began to apply to medical, law, dental, and business schools in large numbers. This was an enormous shift. American girls had always done better than boys in most subjects in high school, but those who went to college had been funneled into relatively low-paying careers such as nursing and teaching—professions that you could pursue for a few years before marriage, and return to when your children were grown.

  Once young women had confidence that they could make it through training and the early years in their profession without getting pregnant, their attitude toward careers that required a long-term commitment changed. And the sexual revolution, which arrived at the same time as widespread Pill use, reassured them that even if they delayed marriage, they would have the same opportunities as unmarried young men for a satisfying sexual life.

  “JUST A HOUSEWIFE.”

  There were other social forces at work that, while perhaps not as sweeping, were combining to make the old patterns of women’s lives look less attractive. The first wave of the baby-boom generation grew up hearing their mothers describe themselves, self-deprecatingly, as “just a housewife,” and in truth, the status of homemakers was dwindling. Perhaps it was due in part to complaints from magazines such as Playboy about men being trapped in marriage, forced to support unproductive wives. Perhaps it had to do with changes in the homemakers’ jobs. Before the automated kitchen and laundry, running a house was a daunting responsibility. You needed to be a good manager and to have, particularly when it came to cooking, a lot of skill. But the postwar housewife’s duties were more about driving children to multitudinous activities, microwaving quick dinners for family members on different schedules, and constantly running washing machines and dryers. Once children were out of the nest, some mothers found new challenges in volunteer work or caring for the offspring of their working daughters. But many women, still in the prime of their lives, were left with no real role at all. The attractions of marriage and motherhood didn’t fade, but women felt an increasing need for a second string—a place in the working world that would provide them with a sense of identity and usefulness once the children had grown.

  At the same time, the rising divorce rate was driving home the peril of trusting your future entirely to a spouse’s ability and willingness to support his family. Divorce, like the tendency toward smaller families, had been on an upward trend for a long time, until the postwar period disrupted the graph. But that dip was followed by a huge surge of divorce in the 1970s, along with an increase in unmarried couples living together and never-married mothers. The message to younger women was clear: marriage was an unreliable basket in which to put all of your eggs.

  “THE WHOLE LAND SEEMS AROUSED.”

  The civil rights battles of the 1960s went to the core of the nation’s identity, forcing the country to grapple with the fact that it had never lived up to the standards it set for itself in the Declaration of Independence. White Americans who accepted the message of what had happened went through a moral shock, made all the worse for the realization that they and their leaders had not been all that eager to rectify the injustice when it was driven home to them. As a result, young people became more skeptical about the wisdom of traditional cultural rules. Americans grew extremely sensitive to questions of fairness, and that opened the way for other discriminated-against groups, including women, to demand their rights.

  The effect of the civil rights movement was crucial for women, because their fight was unique. It was, as the sociologist Alice Rossi said, the only instance in which people being discriminated against lived in much more intimate association with the “enemy” than with other members of their own group. Women’s interests were bound up with those of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in every aspect of their lives. It was difficult for them to mount the kind of clear-cut fight that racial or ethnic minorities were able to make against an establishment that had discriminated against them. That was probably why the women’s movement always tended to ride on the wake of other fights for justice.

  Fighting slavery had been the first moral issue so grave that housebound middle-class Victorian matrons felt compelled to go into the outside world and engage in politics. “We have given great offense on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism. The whole land seems aro
used to discussion on the province of women, and I am glad of it,” said Angelina Grimké, the abolitionist lecturer who was one of the first to consider the plight of African-Americans and find similarities to the condition of white American women. The earliest women’s rights movement grew up out of antislavery actions, and in the twentieth century, the suffrage cause finally succeeded during the Progressive era, when the nation was focused on the evils of poverty and unbridled capitalism. In the 1960s women’s greatest legislative victory was an amendment tacked onto the Civil Rights Act.

  Many of the young women who took the lead on the radical side of women’s liberation had been trained in confrontation by their involvement in the civil rights movement. All of them had learned from that struggle how injustice can run deep in a nation’s laws, traditions, and customs. They did not believe that the fact that things had always been done one way made them right. To the contrary, that made them suspect. And they could see, even by the late 1960s, that history was going to celebrate the people who had the strength to stand up against popular conventions and demand justice for black Americans. They had confidence from the beginning that women, too, would win.

  So there it was: the postwar economy created a demand for women workers, and the postindustrial economy created jobs that they were particularly suited to fill. The soaring expectations of the postwar boom, followed by the decline in men’s paychecks in the 1970s, made wives’ participation in the workforce almost a requisite for middle-class life. The birth control pill gave young women confidence that they could pursue a career without interruption by pregnancy. The civil rights movement made women conscious of the ways they had been treated like second-class citizens and made them determined that their own status was one of the things they were going to change. It was, all in all, a benevolent version of the perfect storm.

  6. Civil Rights

  “I DON’T CARE IF SHE SINGS FROM THE TOP OF THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT.”

  In the late 1950s, Virginia Williams was traveling to South Carolina for a family funeral. When the bus passed near Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a black soldier got on and tried to take a seat near the front. Williams can still remember her astonishment as the driver insisted that a man serving his country in the military go to the rear of the bus. “This was fifty years ago, and it’s still right there,” she said, pointing to her heart.

  In the postwar era, if you had asked average black Americans such as Williams about injustice, they probably would have talked about the soldiers who risked their lives in World War II and came back to be told they did not deserve either fairness or respect. But if you had asked an average white American for an example of “injustice to Negroes,” chances are the answer would have been Marian Anderson, the singer who was denied the right to perform in the nation’s capital because of her race.

  Anderson had been blessed with an astonishing voice that was the pride of her poor Philadelphia neighborhood. Her first direct contact with racism came when she applied to a local school of music and was told coldly, “We don’t take colored.” Members of her church scraped together money to pay for private lessons instead. She eventually went to study in Europe and became a world-renowned contralto with a voice that the conductor Arturo Toscanini said “is heard only once in a hundred years.” Yet in 1939 she was prohibited from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the building, cited shadowy rules and regulations, but it was clear that the problem was Anderson was black. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest and lobbied her husband. “I don’t care if she sings from the top of the Washington Monument as long as she sings,” Franklin Roosevelt told his aides, and Anderson was invited to give a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday.

  At least 75,000 people came to hear the concert, while millions more listened over the radio. With the great statue of Abraham Lincoln behind her and a crowd stretching beyond her vision in front, Anderson was almost paralyzed when she approached the microphone. “I sang, I don’t know how,” she wrote later. When it was over, she was nearly overrun by the adoring crowd. She had gone from being a little-known concert singer to an icon who reminded Americans not just of the evils of segregation but of their capacity to do better. She had created what her agent, Sol Hurok, called “as nearly spontaneous an arising of men and women of goodwill… as there can be in our times.”

  Marian Anderson’s story had two very different lessons. One was that if the nation’s attention was fixed on the evils of segregation, Americans would probably draw back in disgust and do the right thing. The other was that when it came to getting that attention, the bar was very, very, very high. Preventing an internationally acclaimed American singer from performing in the nation’s capital struck even many die-hard conservatives as outlandish. And Anderson was both the most sympathetic and least threatening victim imaginable. A woman of extraordinary dignity and impeccable reputation, she was always the best-behaved person in any room. She was also reluctant to make a scene or to remind her white supporters that when it came to injustice against black people, singing venues were the least of the problem.

  Her sex was also very important. White Americans had always found it easier to relate to the black struggle for equal rights when it was framed around the saga of a good, abused woman. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that drew so many Northern whites to the cause of abolition, was about mothers separated from their children and innocent young girls left at the mercy of lascivious slave owners. (Along, of course, with the extremely deferential Tom.) In the twentieth century, the stories about racial injustice that whites found most compelling were not generally about black men being lynched or black soldiers being welcomed home with discrimination and abuse. Rather, whites were moved by images of black women—mainly very young or middle-aged black women—who were both powerless and noble in the face of vicious racism.

  Civil rights organizations were well aware of white America’s feelings, and as the NAACP went looking for test cases to challenge segregation, the targets were new versions of Marian Anderson. That was never more true than in Montgomery, Alabama, where black working people were being tormented by a bus system that consigned them to the back, required them to relinquish their seats to whites, and left the enforcement of the rules to the drivers—who often carried guns and seemed to get particular pleasure in tormenting their black passengers. “I felt like a dog,” said Jo Ann Robinson, a newcomer to Montgomery who inadvertently sat in the wrong place and was shrieked at by the driver, who leaped up and advanced on her with a raised fist. During the 1950s a number of black riders had rebelled, refused a driver’s order to relinquish their seats, and suffered arrest. But to the NAACP, none of them seemed perfect test cases. Some were men. One of the women, a teenager, had a slightly disreputable family. Another seemed too confrontational. Another, a minister’s wife, lacked the requisite coolness needed to face the city’s angry white power structure without being flustered. Like Goldilocks wandering through the bears’ bedrooms, the civil rights leaders rejected one possibility after another—until they found Rosa Parks just right.

  Parks, an old schoolmate remembered, was “self-sufficient, competent, and dignified” even as a child, a student who always wore a clean uniform, planned ahead, and never sneaked over to the boys’ side of the school like some of the other girls did. Even in defiance, she was a perfect lady. When the Montgomery bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white man or be arrested, the petite, middle-aged seamstress calmly replied, “You may do that.” Later, when her husband begged her not to allow herself to be turned into a test case, she coolly went ahead. (“He had a perfect terror of white people,” recalled a friend. “The night we went to get Mrs. Parks from the jail, we went back to her apartment and he was drunk and he kept saying, ‘Oh, Rosa, Rosa, don’t do it, don’t do it…. The white folks will kill you.’ ”) When she appeared for her court date, she wore a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and a small v
elvet hat with pearls across the top. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” cried out a black teenager, who turned out to be absolutely correct. “My God, look what segregation has put in my hands,” extolled the local NAACP leader, E. D. Nixon.

  “YOU ALL ARE TOO SCARED TO STAND ON YOUR FEET.”

  Rosa Parks’s simple act of defiance in 1955 marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Black Americans had always staged personal acts of rebellion and challenged segregation in court—a year earlier, the NAACP had won the landmark Supreme Court ruling on public schools, Brown v. Board of Education. But it was in Montgomery, after Parks’s arrest, that an entire black community rose up to express solidarity, boycotting the city bus system for more than a year. The sight of elderly women walking in foul weather, of clerks and maids struggling with makeshift car pools, broadcast to the world that Southern blacks were not, as the white community had always insisted, perfectly happy with things the way they were.

  The boycott was not spontaneous. It operated on two levels: a public leadership of male ministers, headed by the charismatic young pastor Martin Luther King Jr., and an organization of women volunteers, who did the behind-the-scenes work. The women, although unsung, were not simply following the directions from above. They had long ago thought up the idea for the boycott, and they had been preparing for it for almost nine years.