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

by Gail Collins

  It also became one of those books that define an era. Whether Gurley Brown converted large numbers of people to a new way of thinking or simply announced a change that was already well under way, she captured the mood of the moment. Many American women were beginning to realize that they might be fated to be single for a long time, whether they liked it or not. Those who left school without a mate found the demographics stacked against them. Tradition dictated that they marry a man somewhat older than they were, which meant searching among the scanty population born during the war or competing with younger girls for the first wave of male baby boomers. Georgia Panter, who began a career as a stewardess at 23, said that even a job that put her in constant contact with planes full of businessmen didn’t produce many prospects: “It was rare that I met single men.” Gurley Brown suggested that her readers should just enjoy affairs with other people’s husbands: “The statistics merely state that there are not enough marriageable men to go around. Nobody said a word about a shortage of men.”

  Sex and the Single Girl announced that the single woman, “far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times.” Unlike her married sisters, Gurley Brown declared breezily, the single woman got to spend her life in the interesting public world of men. She could have almost all the fruits of marriage—financial security, a nice home in which to entertain, an active social life. Children could be put off till later or borrowed for the occasional day from a harried friend or relative. “Her world is a far more colorful world than the one of PTA, Dr. Spock, and a jammed clothes dryer,” Gurley Brown declared. It was the polar opposite of the conviction that George Gallup brought back from his surveys—that married women were much happier than their single sisters.

  The section of the book that really caused a stir was the one in which Brown gave her single girl the right to extramarital sex—lots of extramarital sex. (“You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.”) For the new breed of single girl, sex was simply another part of her full, exciting life, just like dinner parties and a well-decorated apartment. It was pretty much the same game plan that Playboy had been urging on its male readers with so much success and profitability—except that Sex and the Single Girl, with a keen eye to its audience, also promised that at the end of all this glamorous independence, there would still probably be a husband. A better husband, in fact. Gurley Brown warned the young women of the 1960s that the men who were real catches were not looking for innocence and submission anymore; they wanted a wife who was both interesting and capable of pulling in a good paycheck. She caught her “brainy, charming, and sexy” movie producer because she had spent seventeen years becoming the kind of woman a rich, fascinating man would want to live with. “And when he finally walked into my life I was just worldly enough, relaxed enough, financially secure enough… and adorned with enough glitter to attract him.”

  “WE WEREN’T OF THE MIND-SET OF SAVING IT FOR THE HUSBANDS ANYMORE.”

  The sexual revolution hit hardest and fastest in big cities and in campus communities. But no one who read a newspaper or went to the movies could miss that something new was going on. A series of court decisions had made it far more difficult to ban pornography of any stripe, and the nation’s ever-vigilant marketing community responded by churning out sexually explicit movies, books, magazines, and plays. On Broadway, audiences poured in to see the musical Hair, which featured onstage nudity and a cast that cheerfully sang, “Masturbation can be fun.” A well-known designer introduced a topless women’s swimsuit, and although only a few thousand customers actually bought one, the publicity and jokes made it seem as if everybody was going to the beach clad in just a bikini bottom. A fad for topless dancers in bars started in San Francisco, and everyone knew that at the fashionable Playboy Clubs, drinks were served by those glamorous “Bunnies” in their scanty costumes. (Before her incarnation as a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem was famous for her article “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” in which she went under cover to discover that the costumes were extremely uncomfortable, the pay low, and the turnover rapid.)

  There was certainly a lot more talk about sex, but it’s hard to tell how much of it translated into real-world activity. Women had never shared all that much information about their sexual behavior, even with friends. Marie Monsky, who was living on her own in Manhattan and working her way through night school in the early 1960s, hung out with a fairly sophisticated crowd. But she still doesn’t remember having a frank discussion about sexual experience. “There was a line you never crossed,” she said. “It was a privacy issue.” So it’s possible that what looked like a great deal of sexual freedom was actually just a great deal more sexual frankness.

  Alfred Kinsey had stunned the nation in 1953 with his famous study that found half of American women had had sex before they were married. (The study was limited to white women—Kinsey, like most of the nation, seemed indifferent to what African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, or other minorities were doing with their private lives.) His findings were denounced as absurd, unbelievable, and morally suspect—the American Medical Association accused him of setting off a “wave of sex hysteria,” and given the fact that Kinsey interviewed only people who had volunteered to talk about the most private aspects of their lives, there was reason to question whether the results were representative of the population as a whole. But his conclusions about women and premarital sex were probably close to the mark. Most of the sexually active single women he found had slept with the men they believed would be their future husbands, something that had always been common, if not readily admitted. (As far back as 1695, a minister visiting New York wrote home that young people there seldom married until “a great belly puts it so forward that they must either submit to that, or to shame and disgrace.”)

  But as the ’60s rolled along, it seemed clear that quite a few respectable middle-class young women had ditched the double standard completely. And the respectable middle-class young men responded enthusiastically. “There was a tremendous amount of sex,” said Barbara Arnold, who was a nursing student at the University of Bridgeport. “There was a tremendous amount of, literally, free love. There were just orgies all over the place…. It was a very crazy time, it really was.” Pam Andrews—whose mother, Lillian, was one of the postwar housewives who enjoyed the new suburbs so much—arrived at Wellesley in 1968 and quickly went to a Planned Parenthood clinic and got a diaphragm. “I think I was one of the early ones,” she said. But her classmates soon caught up with her, and when she transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1970, Andrews found that the spirit of free love was completely in bloom. “You could sleep with everybody. Everybody was very open. It was such an unreal world.” Sex in those days, she remembered, “was nothing special—just another way to get to know somebody.”

  In 1972 a survey of eight colleges found that less than a quarter of the women were still virgins in their junior year—the same proportion as men. “We weren’t of the mind-set of saving it for the husbands anymore,” said Tawana Hinton, who started college in 1970. “You know, it’s like, if it feels good, do it. That was the rule. I don’t have to be madly in love. It’s not all about love; it’s really just… no big deal. Pretty much everybody was on the Pill… and STDs and HIV wasn’t of concern. Your only concern back then was, don’t get pregnant.”

  “I PROBABLY WOULDN’T HAVE DONE THIS IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE PILL.”

  The young Americans who took part in the sexual revolution were living at a very particular moment in time, a brief window in which having sex with multiple partners posed very little physical peril. For most of human history, syphilis had been a scourge, and a good deal of the Victorian hysteria about sex—and prostitution in particular—had to do with women’s fear that their husbands would stray and infect them with an incurable disease that could put them in peril of sterility, insanity, and death. Parents who feared their children wou
ld not be impressed by the moral arguments against premarital sex had an excellent follow-up: the Victorian version of sex education involved lantern shows of pictures of the grisly effects of syphilis. Then penicillin, which became widely available during World War II, provided a cure. By the 1960s sexually transmitted diseases were being treated like a joke by middle-class people who, as the decade went on, began experimenting with group sex, wife-swapping, and other kinds of behavior that would have been regarded as near suicidal by earlier generations.

  And then there was the birth control pill, or—as the media called it in deference to its awesome powers—the Pill. The Times, in its survey of college cohabitation, noted that all the female roommates described in the story were taking it. “I probably wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t for the Pill,” said Joan, the student who wistfully noted that her parents still thought she was a good girl. The older generation tended to agree with Joan—they blamed the birth control pill for what they saw as a frightening upsurge in premarital sex. “I think that’s when morals started to deteriorate, because women weren’t afraid they were going to get pregnant anymore, so why not?” said Louise Meyer in Wyoming. Her youngest daughter, who was born in 1968, wound up living with her future husband before they were married, she noted. It was something she felt her older girls, who had been born in the early ’50s, “would never have done.”

  The fact that the birth control pill had been invented did not necessarily mean a woman could get it. In 1960, the year the Pill went on sale, thirty states had laws restricting the sale or advertising of virtually anything related to birth control. The most draconian was in Connecticut, where anyone convicted of using, buying, or helping someone to acquire a birth control device could be fined or sentenced to up to a year in prison. The law was not one of those moldy pieces of antique legislation that the lawmakers had simply forgotten to repeal. Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, had launched an attempt to eliminate it in 1923, and a bill to modify or repeal it had come up continually ever since. “It is a ridiculous and unenforceable law,” complained a state senator from Greenwich in 1953, one of the few years in which advocates for change ever managed to get as far as a full debate. (The repeal bill was defeated on a voice vote by what the Times reported as an “overwhelming” majority.)

  The law did not have much effect on middle-class married women, who could quietly get a prescription from the family doctor. But anyone who needed to go to a clinic—poor women or unmarried women seeking anonymity—was out of luck. Connecticut’s Planned Parenthood League ran a van service transporting women in need of birth control pills across the state line to clinics in Rhode Island or New York. (Driving to Massachusetts would have been no help for unmarried women, since the law there barred anyone—even doctors—from helping them obtain contraceptives.) In 1958 the head of Connecticut Planned Parenthood, Estelle Griswold, designed a plan of attack. Griswold, a gray-haired, middle-aged woman of eminent respectability and an equal amount of feistiness, invited Dr. Charles Lee Buxton, the chairman of Yale Medical School’s Department of Obstetrics, and Fowler Harper, a Yale law professor, to her home for cocktails. “Her martinis were always notorious,” said Catherine Roraback, a New Haven attorney. Soon after, Harper called Roraback and asked her to join the team that was going to challenge the law.

  “Are you calling me as an attorney or a single woman?” asked Roraback.

  Harper laughed and acknowledged that having a counsel who represented the people who suffered most under the Connecticut law would be a fine thing.

  “Well, I’m not taking it,” rejoined Roraback, who did not want to be a token. But she added quickly, “I’ll do it as an attorney.”

  Harper was both a Yale professor and a famous free-speech advocate who had been an outspoken critic of the anti-Communist witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. Roraback had defended some of the victims of McCarthyism for little or no fee, and it was for that reason that Harper wanted to invite her into what everyone believed might be a history-making, career-building case.

  “I think you deserve something like this,” he said.

  They brought their first case on behalf of a group of clients that included Dr. Buxton, who argued that he was being denied his right to practice medicine; a woman who had been warned that she would die from another pregnancy; and a couple who had had three disabled children. The case went up to the Supreme Court, which rejected it on the grounds that the laws were not actually being enforced.

  That was true only if you were a middle-class woman with a private physician. “All of us knew—and Lee Buxton especially knew—that poor women couldn’t get contraceptive advice,” said Roraback. The last family-planning clinic had closed long ago, and hospitals did not deal in birth control because they knew they would be prosecuted. But because there were no clinics to prosecute, there were no plaintiffs who had standing to bring a case. A Catch-22.

  So Griswold and Buxton opened a clinic. The Connecticut Planned Parenthood Center of New Haven immediately attracted customers, even though the women were warned that the police might arrive at any moment. “If they do that, we’ll just sit down here until we get the information we came for,” replied one patient. But Roraback was worried that the women’s privacy might be compromised during a raid. She went to see the local prosecutor and arranged for three volunteer clinic patients to testify that they had indeed received contraceptives. Griswold and Buxton were given the choice of appearing at the police station on their own or being dramatically arrested, handcuffed, and hauled off before the TV cameras. Representatives of an older, more discreet generation, they opted for the police station. They were fined $100—and given the legal grounding they needed to go to court to challenge the law.

  In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that Connecticut’s law violated married couples’ constitutional rights, and in 1972 the Court closed the circle by tossing out the Massachusetts law as well, making it clear that the right to use birth control belonged to everyone, not just to married couples. (In 1973, in the ultimate American benediction, the Internal Revenue Service declared that the Pill was a tax-deductible medicine.) All around the nation, women lined up to get prescriptions. “We had an option, so you took it,” said June LaValleur, who had always felt using a diaphragm “kind of broke up the spontaneity of things.”

  Unmarried women who did not have a personal physician—or whose family doctor might disapprove—continued to have a harder time, especially if they were not living in big cities with liberal attitudes toward sex. In the 1960s, in most states, the age of adulthood was 21, and it was illegal for a doctor to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman under that age without a parent’s consent. It was not until the 1970s that Congress, embarrassed by the fact that young men of 18 were being sent off to the war in Vietnam while they were still legally children, passed the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which reduced the age of majority to 18. Until then, even unmarried 20-year-olds generally had to claim they were engaged and on the verge of marriage to cadge a birth control prescription from a physician.

  College health services slowly began prescribing birth control pills for students who wanted them, and some parents made sure their children arrived on campus with a supply already in hand. When Tawana Hinton started college in 1970, her mother marched her off to the gynecologist. “It was like, ‘You will go to college on the Pill,’ ” Hinton recalled. “And I did.”

  Planned Parenthood clinics were another crucial source—Alison Foster remembered that her boarding school ferried interested students to the nearest clinic. “And when I was in college, it was like candy,” she said. “You just went to the health center and they gave them to you.” But only 4 percent of the women who were taking the Pill in 1969 got it through Planned Parenthood, and even those who had the name of a sympathetic doctor were sometimes too embarrassed to follow through. Wendy Woythaler got the Pill while she was at Mount Holyoke in the late ’60s, and when she looks back, she remembers se
arching for an office down a dark alley: “It was probably a fine, upstanding gynecologist somewhere in town. But when you’re thinking, ‘I’m not supposed to be doing this,’ it feels like you’re going down a dark alley.”

  “There was a stigma attached to it if you weren’t married,” said Maria K. “I didn’t want to go to the drugstore and buy birth control pills because everybody would know I was having sex. Oh, heavens!”

  “WHORES DON’T GET PREGNANT.”

  For every Linda LeClair, who seemed to have her finger right on the ’60s zeitgeist, there were many more young women like Maria K. Maria—whose mother had wound up cooking in a home for elderly women when her father died—walked into the new morality without the sophistication to protect herself from its consequences. She got the news she was pregnant while she was working as a secretary at a local college in a small town in upstate New York. “At that time, if you got pregnant, you either got married or you went away and came back unpregnant,” she said.

  In 1967, when Maria had her child, the idea that an unmarried woman would simply raise a baby herself was almost unheard-of, particularly in small towns. Most girls just married the father. Others got abortions or went off to homes for unwed mothers, where they gave the baby up for adoption and returned from what was generally described as a long stay with an out-of-town relative. Judy Riff remembered that one of her friends at their all-girls Catholic college got pregnant her sophomore year, “and one minute she was there and the next minute she was gone. It was like she was never there…. I don’t know what happened to her.” The very idea of having a baby out of wedlock “was just so awful… ,” Riff said, “that probably would have to be the worst thing that could have happened to any of us.”