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

by Gail Collins

  Look back on a decade as fraught with change as the 1970s, and you can pick your own vision. Best of times or worst of times. Women who wanted to work often found it easier to get a job than men did, but the jobs they found still tended to pay much less. It was easier for them to end unsatisfactory marriages but sometimes harder to get spousal support. It was more difficult to keep life in balance but more possible to shoot for the stars.

  Gloria Vaz had been through it all. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend as a child and had a baby out of wedlock back when it was so frowned upon that she made up stories about a mythical husband to tell the staff in the hospital when she delivered. She married a man who never told her he loved her. (“I told him a lot…. He never said it back.”) He cheated on her, and his family, who were West Indian, looked down on her because she was African-American. “He was the authority in the home. He really was. No ifs, ands, or buts,” she said. “I didn’t say a lot sometimes, but it was inside, and it manifested itself. I started getting psychosomatic illnesses—heart, dizziness, all kinds of nonsense that there was no explanation for.” After years as a stay-at-home wife in New York, she got a job at a bank, and she had her first rebellion over the family car, which she loved and which her husband threatened to sell whenever he wanted to keep her in line. “Then something clicked in me… ,” she said. “I went out on my own and purchased a used car, without telling him…. I said, ‘Look out the window. You see that maroon Malibu? That’s mine. All mine. So you can sell the car if you want to.’ ”

  Years of struggle later, she got a job working for a nonprofit agency that recognized her abilities. “It was my blossoming time,” said Vaz, who eventually became the acting director at the agency and, before her retirement, a director at the Fund for the City of New York.

  AFTER A CHILDHOOD on Cherokee lands in Oklahoma, Wilma Mankiller and her family moved to San Francisco when she was 10, living in a housing project near the shipyards. None of them had ever used a telephone before or seen an elevator. “There were never any plans for me to go to college,” she recalled. “That thought never even entered my head. People in my family did not go to college. They went to work.”

  After high school she took a clerical job and met a handsome young college student whose family had emigrated from Ecuador. “I thought perhaps if I married Hugo all my problems would disappear,” she said. She became pregnant on their honeymoon. Before she was twenty-one, she had two daughters and an undefined restlessness. While her husband pulled toward traditional married life, Wilma pushed in the opposite direction. She started taking college courses. He took her to look at houses in the suburbs and bought her a washing machine. She got deeply involved in the Native American movement and began taking her daughters to tribal events throughout the area.

  Finally, Hugo told her she could no longer use the family car. Wilma went out and bought one of her own.

  “THEY WERE JUST THEMSELVES, STARTING OUT.”

  Catherine Roraback had gotten used to being the only woman in the courthouse during her first two decades of legal practice. Then, in the ’70s, that began to change. Women lawyers were becoming less unusual. Whenever Roraback saw one enter the courtroom, “I was so excited, I’d go over and talk to them. They didn’t have any idea how excited I was.” She laughed. “They were just themselves, starting out.”

  American history had been full of stories of amazing women who managed to become a doctor or lawyer or business executive against all odds and prejudices. But the new stories were different because they did not stop with a single heroic but lonely figure. This was the critical moment when the doors were opened for good. A small population of women working in traditionally male occupations pushed until there was room for a whole generation to walk through. The number of women in professional schools began to grow steadily. By the end of the ’70s, a quarter of the students in medical school were women, and a third of the students in law school. That first big wave was not always made to feel particularly welcome. In law schools, professors often refused to call on female students except on an annual Ladies’ Day, when women were supposed to answer all the questions. “In my criminal law class, the relatively young professor… announced that on his Ladies’ Day we would be discussing rape,” recounted Brenda Feigen, who went to Harvard Law in the late ’60s. “And when that day rolled around, the specific question for us women was: How much penetration constitutes rape?”

  In the 1970s women also began to apply for acceptance in the skilled trade unions, where the pay was often more than three times what they could make at a nonunion job. “I liked it right away,” said Brunilda Hernandez, who discovered that a local branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had opened its ranks to women in New York City and quickly signed up. “It was working with your hands. It was using your brain as you were doing these formulas and you were figuring out how electricity worked and how to hook up panels—just how it all worked.” The male union members, however, weren’t enthusiastic. When Hernandez began her four-year apprenticeship, she said, “I got all these stares from these guys just sitting around. It was really nerve-racking.” There were no bathrooms or changing rooms for women at her first construction site, and the men slapped up a makeshift plywood box for her in the middle of a line of toilets: “That was my little home, a toilet closet.” On the job, she was paired with a hostile mechanic who put cinder blocks in front of the box to keep her from getting in. Evan Ruderman, Hernandez’s best friend, worked at another site with an even more hostile partner. When she would leave her post to get something, he would urinate on the spot where she was working, “practically on my tools. Or I’d lay a ruler down when I was measuring pipe, turn around, cut it, turn back around—my ruler was gone.”

  Laura Kelber, another one of the first generation of female electricians in New York City, told her foreman that she was pregnant and was immediately transferred from a relatively light indoor assignment to a different site where the job involved heavy lifting, working in the cold, and no clean bathrooms. “It was the worst type of job,” said Kelber, who tried to stick it out so she could qualify for full disability benefits at the end of her pregnancy. But she miscarried during her third month.

  “I WAS SUCH A YOUNG NERD.”

  Sylvia Acevedo’s great-grandfather on her father’s side had been a wealthy man in Chihuahua, Mexico, who’d lost everything when Pancho Villa, the self-styled Mexican Robin Hood, rode into town. The family, impoverished, fled to El Paso. Meanwhile, Sylvia was told, her mother’s relatives were one of the poor families who got a bounty of silver coins from Villa’s loot. “I’m not sure how much of this is folklore,” she says. “But there’s a picture in the museum in Chihuahua of Pancho Villa and his right-hand man, which is my grandmother’s cousin.”

  Her father was born in the United States, the beleaguered child of a disappointed woman who had watched her older siblings grow up in luxury that had vanished by the time she was ready to enjoy it. He became a chemist, but he never recovered from the trauma of living with a woman who took her endless anger out on her son. Acevedo’s mother, an immigrant, had only an eighth-grade education but boundless ambition for her children. She dressed Sylvia in gloves and hats and lace, none of which her daughter really enjoyed. “She kept saying, when you’re 15, when you’re 16, it’s going to happen for you, and it didn’t,” Acevedo recalled. “But—I really love and honor this about her—she accepted me.” When Sylvia was in high school, she bought the first issue of Ms. as soon as it came on the market: “I was such a young nerd. I really got into that whole Gloria Steinem thing.”

  It was a given that Acevedo would do well in school and go to college. However, when she looked carefully through all the catalogs and decided she wanted to be an engineer, her father’s first comment was “But you have to be good in math and science.”

  “I thought, ‘I’ve always been good in math and science,’ ” she recalled.

  Her guidance couns
elor said, “Oh my goodness, you have to be really smart, really bright,” so often that when Acevedo arrived with trepidation at the University of New Mexico’s engineering school, she “thought I was going to be with Einsteins. And they were just the same guys I went to high school with.”

  “I HAD TO BE EDUCATED QUICKLY.”

  Suzan Johnson, who everybody called Sujay, had grown up in the Bronx, where her family was the first African-American household on their block. Her mother, a teacher, and her father, a motorman, came home from their day jobs and worked to build up a private security business in the evenings. They wanted not only to send their children to good private schools but to make sure that while they were there, they got all the trimmings—the tennis rackets, the summer trips to Spain, and everything else that would help them to fit into the virtually all-white world at the top.

  Sujay responded by being an empowered overachiever who graduated from college before her twentieth birthday and embarked on multiple careers. She enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, vaguely contemplating the ministry, while hedging her bets by becoming a television producer and working at a public-relations job for Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. On the day she preached a sermon for a final exam at the seminary, she raced out of the classroom before the other students took their turns and jumped into her car to make two closely scheduled appointments—one to tape a television appearance for the hospital, and the other a job interview with 60 Minutes. “And I got stuck on the 155th Street bridge.” She laughed. Trapped in traffic as the minutes ticked away, she realized it was time to make a choice. “I was like, ‘You can’t do it all!’ and I made a decision it was going to be full-time ministry.” A year later, as she was doing her internship at the office of the American Baptist Churches, she was offered her own parish—Mariners’ Temple, a church in lower Manhattan between Chinatown and city hall.

  The church, which seated eleven hundred, had only fifteen members, and the Baptist leadership had privately been planning to shut it down and give the building to a Chinese congregation that was already sharing the space for its services. “I was supposed to do the final benediction, and it was going to be closed under my leadership. I didn’t know that,” Johnson said. She reached out to the residents of nearby housing projects, starting after-school tutoring sessions. She also began what turned out to be a hugely popular midday service for the people who worked in the courts, city offices, and police department nearby. “We’d have five hundred people at lunchtime,” she recalled. “You’d see all these people converge, and the politicians were like, ‘What’s going on over there?’ ” She added on another job when the police department asked her to be one of its chaplains, and by her seventh year of ministry, she had been invited to be a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School.

  It was perhaps what Johnson had imagined when she was in the seminary but hardly what the male leaders of her church had planned. When she got to Mariners’, “and they made all this hoopla about my being the first woman,” she began to realize that the doors were not nearly as open as she had thought. That became even clearer when the women who had been her classmates started telling her they were unable to find positions as pastors or assistant pastors. “I really didn’t know what the worldview was. I had to be educated quickly,” she said.

  The Hampton Ministers’ Conference was helpful in the quick-learning process. The largest interdenominational gathering for black clergy, it attracted thousands of participants every year, and the first time Johnson attended, “there were, like, five women pastors” who were denied permission to get together for a meeting of their own.

  “The first year some of the men tried to take me to bed. They didn’t know how to relate to women,” Johnson said. “I’m like , ‘No, but I’ll play basketball with you. I did the sports thing.’ ” She felt keenly unwelcome. She has a crystal-clear memory of going up to a prominent minister, putting out her hand, and introducing herself. “And he hit my hand like, ‘I know who you are and I’m not even touching you.’ ” Humiliated, Johnson looked around to see who had witnessed her embarrassment. “I remember that moment. I remember where we were standing. He hurt my feelings really badly. But every year I’d come back and introduce myself again and say, ‘How are you doing, Doctor?’ ”

  “FLY ME.”

  While women were struggling to break into traditionally male professions, the flight attendants were fighting to prove that their jobs could be done by either sex. The attendants, who had been first at the door when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened for business, were also among the first in the courtrooms. Their battles began with Eulalie Cooper, who had been working for Delta for nearly six years when the airline discovered she was secretly married and fired her. (To add insult to injury, the Louisiana Unemployment Compensation Board denied her benefits on the grounds that she had left her job “voluntarily.”) Cooper sued, but a Louisiana judge agreed with the airline that serving food and ensuring safety on an airplane was a job that young single women were uniquely qualified to do, and therefore fell under the law’s exemption for “bona fide occupational qualifications”—the loophole NOW once argued should be applied only to sperm donors and wet nurses. In another case in Miami, Pan Am brought in the psychiatrist Eric Berne, author of a bestselling book called Games People Play, to explain that an apprehensive male passenger would feel resentment if another man tried to tell him what to do—unless that man seemed gentle, in which case the passenger would feel homosexual panic.

  While the flight attendants were fighting to establish their job as gender-neutral—including a war to get the airlines to stop calling them “stewardesses”—the airlines were going out of their way to make them international sex objects. Throughout American history, women who worked had to fight against the myth that because they were active in the public world, they were therefore promiscuous. Nurses had had a particularly difficult time, and the women who volunteered to serve during World War II suffered under malicious rumors that only a loose woman would willingly work in the middle of thousands of soldiers.

  In the ’70s it was the flight attendants’ turn, but in this case it was their employer who was doing the mythmaking. In 1971 National Airlines began its “Fly Me” campaign, in which lovely young women in flight attendants’ uniforms purred, “Hi, I’m Cheryl/Donna/Diane. Fly me.” Continental announced, “We really move our tails for you,” and Southwest introduced itself as the “love” airline, where passengers would be served “love bites” and “love potions,” otherwise known as snacks and drinks. Meanwhile the women who were dispensing the love bites, moving their tails, and (later) promising to “fly you like you’ve never been flown before” were being dressed in miniskirts, vinyl, hot pants, and—in the case of TWA—paper clothes, such as togas, cocktail dresses, and “penthouse” pajamas, that were supposed to match the entrées.

  Eventually, the same appeals court that had given Lorena Weeks her triumph over Southern Bell ruled that the business of an airline was getting people from one place to another and that men and women were equally capable of facilitating that process in the air. Finally, in 1973 a federal court in the District of Columbia wiped out the stewardess culture completely by ruling that Northwest Airlines had to do away with the appearance rules and any other restrictions that did not relate directly to safety duties.

  “GOD, IT WAS MEAN.”

  The National Press Club in Washington was the place where almost every prominent news maker who visited the nation’s capital came to speak and be covered by the alleged cream of the American media. The male reporters were happy to invite their old colleagues who had become lobbyists or public-relations men to come as guests, have lunch, and listen to the big-name speakers. They even invited their golfing buddies or next-door neighbors. But they refused to allow a woman reporter to set foot in the place. In 1955, in what was regarded as a great concession, club officials agreed that on days when an important guest came to dine and speak, their female colleagues could sta
nd in a narrow, hot, and crowded balcony and take notes for their stories. The women, of course, got no lunch. It was difficult to hear up there, and they were not permitted to ask questions. “In professional terms it couldn’t have been meaner, it couldn’t have been pettier. God, it was mean,” said Bonnie Angelo, who had been the Newsday Washington bureau chief and a Time reporter in those days.

  In 1971 one of the most outrageous instances of sexual segregation in the professions ended when the Press Club finally voted to allow women members. The walls fell at a time when women were declaring war in their own newsrooms, wiping out the ancient journalistic traditions that had kept most of them stuck covering weddings and recipes for generations. Newsweek’s women led the way—which wasn’t surprising considering the newsmagazine’s famous system in which women became researchers and men became writers. In 1970, when Newsweek decided to run its big cover story on the women’s movement, only one of the magazine’s fifty-two writers was a woman—Lynn Povich, who had benefited from the fact that none of the men were willing to cover the fashion beat. Trying to find a writer to assign the women’s cover to, the editors, after much churning and mind-changing, picked a freelancer, the wife of a staff member. They had figured out enough to know the article had to be written by a woman but not enough to realize their own female employees would be outraged that their bosses felt none of them were up to the job. “We thought, ‘That’s it,’ ” said Povich. “Being good media people, we knew the publicity would get them more than anything else.” So, on the day Newsweek appeared on the newsstands with the big cover that read “Women in Revolt,” the women of Newsweek announced they had filed a sex-discrimination suit against their employer.