by Gail Collins
Congress finally passed a ban on sex discrimination in lending in 1974, under the mysterious title of the Depository Institutions Amendments Act. By 1980 single women were buying one-third of all condominiums and one-tenth of all homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. One of them was Sylvia Peterson, the hairdresser in New Hampshire who had such conflicted feelings about the women’s movement. “I thought that their values were mixed up. But at the same time, if it wouldn’t have been for them, I wouldn’t have been able to buy a house on my own,” she said. Peterson was 30 at the time, and she had a struggle with the local bankers, who “didn’t even want to talk with me… even one that was my age that I went to high school with.” But she finally did an end run around them and applied to the government for an FHA loan. “I said, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat,’ ” she remembered with some satisfaction.
A little while later, Peterson noticed that one of her regular customers was starting to cold-shoulder her. “She would come and have her hair done every week and she would hardly speak to me…. So finally I said, ‘Did I hurt you in any way, or did I offend you?’ ”
“Yes, you did,” said the customer. “You got married and you never told me.”
“What makes you think I got married?” Peterson asked.
“Well, you bought this house,” her client retorted. “You can’t buy a house without being married.”
Recalling the story recently, Peterson said that the conversation occurred in 1980 and that her client was not “the only woman who thought that way.”
“Weird, huh?” she concluded.
“NOBODY OFFERED TO SCROUNGE UP ANOTHER CHAIR.”
The Ninety-second Congress (1971 to 1973) had only thirteen women in the House, and one of them was a congressman’s widow sent to Washington by sympathetic voters for one year via a special election. There were two women in the Senate, one of them appointed by the governor of Louisiana, who happened to be her husband. The redoubtable Margaret Chase Smith was coming to the end of her career, and by 1973 the Senate would be all male. But if the quantity was disappointing, the quality was something else. The dozen women members of the House at the beginning of the decade included Martha Griffiths as well as Edith Green and Patsy Mink, who were about to sponsor the Title IX legislation. (Mink, a relatively new arrival from Hawaii, made news during her first year in Congress when she and two other women members tried to crash the men-only congressional gym.) There was Ella Grasso of Connecticut, who would soon become the first woman to be elected governor in her own right, and Margaret Heckler of Massachusetts, a champion of quality child care who had taken on a forty-two-year incumbent to win her seat. (In 1972, in a good demonstration of the way history repeats itself, Heckler made headlines with her discovery that the body armor being sent to American soldiers fighting an unpopular and frustrating war overseas was defective.) There was Shirley Chisholm, who would soon take on her Democratic Party by running for president.
And, of course, there was Bella Abzug, who had been a liberated woman long before there was women’s liberation. She had worn her big, colorful trademark hats since she was a young woman, when her mother told her that a hat was a surefire sign that she was not a secretary. People tended to see Abzug as the ultimate representative of the women’s movement—whether you believed that meant brash bossiness, or passion, energy, and bravery. Gloria Steinem remembered Abzug as the first woman she had ever met who succeeded in a male-dominated world without ever adopting the traditional ladylike trappings: “She expanded the way women can come to the public.”
As a young lawyer in 1950, Abzug worked for civil rights in Mississippi—long before that kind of commitment was anything but immensely controversial and terribly dangerous. She was once threatened with lynching for defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. In Congress, she felt no need to spend her first term observing the traditional quiet deference of freshmen legislators, who were supposed to listen and pass minor proposals to rename buildings for departed politicians. On Abzug’s first day, she introduced legislation demanding the withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam.
Most of the new generation of congresswomen came equipped with a high degree of outspokenness. When Chisholm was appointed to the powerful Rules Committee in 1977, she noted that the presiding officer, Representative James Delaney of Queens, called her “Shirley” while every other member was referred to as “Mr.”
When she objected, Delaney asked, “Shirley, what’s the matter? You and I have been intimate for years.”
“Jim, we don’t have to let the public know it,” she retorted. She was “Mrs. Chisholm” from then on.
As the decade went on, the still-tiny House women’s caucus would include Millicent Fenwick, the inimitable pipe-smoking WASP who surprised herself with her decision to run for office—the Equal Rights Amendment, she concluded, might have “affected me more than I realized.” (It may be an indication of how much the nation’s attitude toward age has evolved—or how different the attitude was regarding age in men as opposed to age in women—that when Fenwick was first elected at 64, the media called her victory “a geriatric triumph.”) A principled, idiosyncratic politician, Fenwick drove her staff crazy by answering the office phones herself. When the caller would ask for a member of the staff, Fenwick often said, “They are too busy. Talk to me.”
There was Geraldine Ferraro, the representative from Queens, who would make history later when she was chosen as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984. Yvonne Braithwaite Burke became the first member of Congress ever to give birth; her daughter Autumn became a veteran flier before she could talk, as she and her mother shuttled between California and Washington. Burke, who had gotten married during her congressional campaign, wanted to start a family quickly without shortchanging her constituents. She managed to have the baby on the day after Thanksgiving, “which gave me until the session started on January fifteenth to adjust.”
Barbara Jordan, who arrived in 1973, was already famous in her home state of Texas. Only the third black woman lawyer in Texas history, she became the first African-American to work in her county’s courthouse in any job other than janitor, and the first black state senator since Reconstruction. In a giddily joyful moment in 1972, Jordan, who had been elected president pro tem of the chamber, became governor for a day under an old annual Texas tradition in which the governor and lieutenant governor both leave the state and put the legislators in charge. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis the same year she arrived in Washington, Jordan would serve only three terms. But she impressed herself into the nation’s consciousness as a great speaker. No one who watched the Judiciary Committee hearings into the Watergate scandal and the impeachment of Richard Nixon would forget Jordan’s deep, precise voice as she recalled how, when the Founding Fathers wrote “We the People” at the beginning of the Constitution, she was not included.
But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in “We the People.” Today, I am an inquisitor…. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Molly Ivins, the great chronicler of Texas politics, remembered the trajectory of Jordan’s political career—from her arrival in the state senate, where a few of her colleagues privately referred to her as “that nigger bitch” or “the nigger mammy washerwoman,” through their growing respect, to the night of the impeachment speech, when all her old colleagues clustered around a television set. “ ‘Give ’em hell, Barbara!’ they crowed,” Ivins wrote. “As she lit into Richard Nixon, they cheered and hoorahed and pounded their beer bottles on the table as though they were watching U.T. pound hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.”
The range of talents and intensity of the personalities of the handful of women who served in Congress in the 1970s made many of them national celebrities. “The wh
ole world adopted you as their spokesperson,” said Pat Schroeder. “You represented all the women. You got so much mail and so many requests and everybody who came to Washington wanted to see you. They would bring in baskets of mail from all over the country.” Schroeder, who became another one of the best-known women politicians of the decade, was recruited by a group of liberal Denver Democrats—including her husband, Jim—to run against the local Republican congressman in 1972. It seemed like a hopeless race, and when Schroeder stunned everyone by winning, the family bought a house in Washington over the phone, had it furnished with whatever they could get delivered quickly, and “ended up with bright-red shag carpet throughout the house and avocado kitchen appliances.”
The institution she was entering turned out to be astonishingly up front about its sexism, a liberty its male members had awarded themselves by exempting Congress from the antidiscrimination laws they had been passing. Given the small number of women in Congress, it was perhaps not surprising that so many members thought Jim Schroeder was the newly minted representative from Denver. But it seemed a bit excessive when, upon discovering that he was the congressional spouse, some retorted, “Why didn’t you run?” The Schroeders were given tickets to a black-tie dinner at the prestigious Touchdown Club, then stopped by a guard who told them no women were allowed and that if she didn’t leave quietly, “You’ll be carried out.” The worst part, she wrote later, was seeing the faces of her House colleagues “laughing as we were shown the door.” When Schroeder got her hoped-for slot on the Armed Services Committee, the despotic chairman, F. Edward Hébert, was so outraged that he decreed Schroeder and Ron Dellums, the second-term black congressman from California, would have to share a chair since they were worth only half of a “regular” member. When she and Dellums were forced to each perch on one side of the same seat, Schroeder said, “Nobody else objected and nobody offered to scrounge up another chair.”
“THEY’RE LEGISLATORS… AND THEY’RE LOVELY.”
The fact that the makeup of Congress didn’t reflect the increasing political involvement of women in the 1970s isn’t surprising. A seat in Congress is a big political prize, and the men who had been waiting for a chance to win one weren’t likely to just step aside in the name of gender equity. Most of those congressmen-in-waiting had earned their places in line by winning elections on the state and local level. To elbow them out of the way, women were going to have to join the same farm team. That was the problem. In 1971 there were only forty-six women serving as state senators, and three hundred in state houses—fewer than 5 percent of the total. No woman had ever been elected governor in her own right. (Early in the century, two had been elected as stand-ins—one for a husband who had died suddenly and one for a spouse who had been impeached.) When it came to other statewide offices—often the best stepping-stones to the U.S. Senate—only three women had ever held jobs such as secretary of state or lieutenant governor. None had ever served as state attorney general.
The numbers were about to change, and by 1991 women would be edging toward 20 percent of the total number of state lawmakers. That was hardly earthshaking, but it was still significant progress in bodies that tended to have very little turnover. Another 323 women had won a statewide elective office, including ten who had become governor in their own right.
Like the women in Congress, the female newcomers on the state level weren’t necessarily made to feel welcome. Many of them were pioneers in hostile territory, struggling to carve a place for themselves in political cultures that made Congress look idyllic. When Diane Watson was elected to California’s state senate in 1978, she was not only the first African-American woman but the second woman. The first, Rose Ann Vuich, had arrived just two years before and had become famous for sitting through senate debates with a little bell, which she would ring every time a speaker addressed his colleagues as “Gentlemen.”
Vuich, a conservative from an agricultural district near Fresno, and Watson, a former school board member who had been the point person in integrating the Los Angeles school system, had little in common politically. But they shared stony resistance from their colleagues. “They’d say, ‘You’re taking the seat of a man. There should be a man in that seat,’ ” Watson said. (The sole African-American man in the senate, Watson said, “was the first to say we had nothing to talk about.”) The two women presented a united front when they discovered that a $40 million renovation of the capitol that was under way did not include a women’s restroom off the senate like the one the men had always had. “We pointed it out to the architect, and he said, ‘My gosh, I forgot all about it,’ ” Watson recalled. The women’s room was added on and named “The Rose Room” in Vuich’s honor. For a while, the senators seemed to be taking the name literally. “I had to go to Rose to get the key,” said Watson.
Madeleine Kunin, who was living in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and four children, followed the threads of new possibilities. She joined a small women’s political caucus that was formed to get the state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. (The ERA’s lasting impact, at least in the twentieth century, would turn out not to be on the Constitution but in its effect on the generation of political women who fought for it.) One afternoon in 1972, when Kunin and another member were talking about how to get more women to run for public office, “Esther and I looked at each other, laughed, and exclaimed, ‘Why don’t we do it?’ That November, she was elected to the Vermont senate and I was elected to the Vermont house.” Arriving at the capitol in Montpelier as a newly minted legislator, Kunin felt for the first time that she was herself rather than someone’s wife, mother, sister, or daughter. But she and her female colleagues still struggled against the perception that they were unusual creatures—not regular legislators but women-lawmakers. When some of them were invited to appear on public television to discuss weighty topics from drug laws to highways to juvenile offenders, Kunin and the other women got together to view the program with a certain amount of excitement. After their part was finished, they watched as the host turned to the camera and concluded, “Well, you can see that brains and beauty do mix; they’re legislators, they’re ladies, and they’re lovely.”
The women sat in front of the TV in silence. Then the evening was saved, Kunin recalled, by a deeply refined Republican lawmaker, a retired schoolteacher, who got in the last word.
“Oh, shit!” she said.
“HELLO, GIRLS!”
In 1974 Kunin went to a midterm Democratic convention in Kansas City, traveling with another woman who was one of the state’s Democratic leaders. Their governor was waiting to greet them when they arrived.
“Hello, girls!” he said cheerfully.
One of the most energetic reeducation efforts of the 1970s involved teaching men not to automatically refer to groups of two or more women as “girls,” even if they happened to be grandmothers or lawyers or police officers. The difference between “girls” and “women” became the “Maginot Line of feminism,” Kunin felt. It was particularly important in areas such as politics, where rather than being beaten down by resistance, the women tended to be drowned in paternalism.
Words mattered. It was an enormous victory in 1970 when Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, told his reporters to stop using words such as “blond” or “divorcée” or “grandmother” to describe women in news stories. (“The juror, a blond schoolteacher…”) At the New York Times, Barbara Crossette spent her years on the news desk running a rearguard battle against those same unnecessary descriptions: “Like ‘a short, trim woman . . .’ where you knew there would never be ‘a tall, slightly overweight man.’ ” McGraw-Hill outlined an eleven-page policy in 1974 that warned editors about everything from use of the term “the weaker sex” to clichés about nagging mother-in-laws. But the longest, hardest battle involved the term “Ms.” There were few things that more vividly reflected the philosophy that women were important only in their relationship to men than the fact that they had to be identified as either
“Miss” or “Mrs.” If a reporter didn’t know whether a woman was married, it was necessary to ask—even if the person in question was lying dead of a gunshot wound or being awarded the Nobel Prize.
“Ms.” had been employed in some business correspondence when a marital status wasn’t known, and women lobbied to make it the one-size-fits-all equivalent of “Mr.” But the New York Times, which many people saw as a particularly critical standard for language style, held out. “To our ear, it still sounds too contrived for newswriting,” said the paper’s language guru, William Safire, in 1984. (In the same year, the Times ran a story about Gloria Steinem’s fiftieth birthday party that reported proceeds from the dinner “will go to the Ms. Foundation… which publishes Ms. magazine, where Miss Steinem works as an editor.)” In 1986 Paula Kassell, a veteran journalist, bought ten shares of Times stock and went to the annual stockholders’ meeting to plead the “Ms.” issue with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. (It was a measure of the importance Kassell put on the issue that she went to the meeting even though her husband had died the previous week.) Shortly after, Sulzberger wrote back, thanking her for raising the question and informing Kassell she need not press further; the women had won.
“YOU SEE THAT MAROON MALIBU?”
