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

by Gail Collins

  Kunin, Mason, and Patterson had supportive husbands, but many of the women who were trying to raise children and carve out a career were doing it as single mothers. Sherri Finkbine’s marriage broke up in 1973, when the youngest of her six children was only 4. “I was supposed to get a hundred fifty dollars a month in child support, total,” she recalled. “Some months, if I begged or cried enough, I would get it. Nobody helped me but me, myself, and I.” With only $750 in her savings account, she left Phoenix and moved to La Jolla, California, with her youngest three children and rented a house on the beach. A woman she knew who was a real estate saleswoman in town suggested Finkbine try it, too. “I went with her company and started selling,” she said. It all worked out, but looking back, Finkbine can’t quite imagine how. “I had more luck than sense, I guess.”

  Perri Klass, who’d had a baby while she was a 26-year-old medical student at Harvard, was called “Superwoman” by her classmates, but she was feeling anything but super. Klass was “totally frazzled, frequently irritable, chronically sleep-deprived… depending for my survival on the support and patience of others—Larry, especially, but also my parents.” Larry, meanwhile, got praise for being the primary parent, “but frequently there was an undertone there, too, and it was, you miserable wimp….”

  A life as an American working mother was hardly the planet’s worst fate. Some women really did feel as if they were having it all. It depended on so many variables: the personality of the mother; the number, ages, and temperaments of the children; the helpfulness of the father; and the demands of the job. When it was good, it could be very good. Even as a divorced single mother, Tawana Hinton felt working as a speech pathologist and raising her daughter, Tiffany, made for a rewarding mix: “Coming home… I wasn’t tired, it was exciting to see her and do what she needed.” Tiffany still remembers how “she picked me and my friends up from school every day. She always had dinner ready at five o’clock…. And I can see now, how the structure she gave me, how it helped me out.”

  Alison Foster, who got married a few years after college and quickly became pregnant, settled into a life in which job and family seemed to merge together seamlessly. She and her husband, a photographer, lived in a loft in downtown Manhattan, and while he worked out of their home, she brought the baby to her job at a studio that sold designer wallpaper for a California decorator. Since Foster ran the studio and the decorator was half a continent away, there was no one to object.

  But when Justin was about 3 months old, the boss arrived in town, took a look around, and said, “You are breast-feeding a baby in a design studio!”

  “I realized the writing was kind of on the wall,” Alison said. “So I got my old portfolio together.” She went job hunting and found an entry position at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency—her mother’s old stomping ground. It was also her introduction to the frazzling routine of home, to day care, to work, to day care, to home.

  “… FOREVER SINGLE.”

  Rather than take on the burdens of being a superwoman, many women began to delay marriage. In 1980 half of American women ages 20 to 24 were unmarried—up from a little more than a quarter in 1960. The idea that it was fun to be single—so shocking when Helen Gurley Brown proposed it—had become conventional wisdom. The college where members of Muriel Fox’s graduating class had been given corsages if they were engaged and lemons if they weren’t had become the place where, the New York Times reported, a senior was introduced by her friends as “the only girl at Barnard who’s getting married.” The number of people who told pollsters that they thought those who failed to marry were somehow “sick” or immoral had dropped to about 25 percent.

  Nevertheless, most women expected that their lives would eventually include a husband and children. And the media started to question whether women’s search for self-fulfillment at work would wind up cheating them out of the chance. Betty Friedan, of all people, led the way. In 1981, in The Second Stage, Friedan raised the specter of “the insatiable demands of female machismo” that could leave the liberated woman alone in the bedroom with her computer, frightened and depleted. A raft of articles about spinster panic followed, most of them opening with an anecdote about a beautiful, lonely career woman. A headline for New York Magazine in 1984 asked, “Born Too Late? Expect Too Much? Then You May Be… FOREVER SINGLE.” In it, Patricia Morrisroe introduced readers to people such as “Mary Rodgers,” a beautiful 33-year-old executive who had been having terrible dreams and waking up in need of comfort, only to find that there was “no husband, no children, only me.”

  In 1986 a Yale sociologist told a newspaper reporter searching for a Valentine’s Day feature that he had a study that seemed to show women with a college education were losing out in the “marriage market.” Female college graduates who remained unmarried until 30, he said, had only a 20 percent chance of finding a husband. At 35, their chances dropped to 5 percent, and at 50, down to about one in a hundred. Things were even worse if she was black. It became the story heard round the world. Newsweek ordered up a cover on the plight of the unmarried career woman, and while it was being prepared, one of the bureau reporters began joking that an older woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married. “The next thing we knew,” the reporter told Susan Faludi, “one of the writers in New York took it seriously and it ended up in print.” Long before anybody in the United States really worried about being killed by a terrorist, conventional wisdom held that this scenario was more likely than an over-35 college graduate finding a husband. Newsweek’s cover showed a graph that looked like the slide on the world’s most dangerous water-park ride, with the legend “If you’re a single woman, here are your chances of getting married.” Perhaps, the stories suggested, women were being too picky. Newsweek came up with a prize example: a 28-year-old Bostonian who said she wanted a husband “who likes all the things I like. Like if they hate sailing, that’s really a deterrent. I like to experience everything in life. So if they hate sushi, I can’t stand that.” Readers undoubtedly started downsizing their own wish lists as they made their way through stories such as that of the 38-year-old pediatrician whose biological clock was “striking midnight,” of the 30-year-old Chicagoan whose date taunted her about her dwindling chances, and of the 32-year-old real estate appraiser who said finding a man had “become an obsession.”

  As time went on, it would become clear that the marriage study was flawed. In fact, the career-driven ’80s featured the smallest proportion ever of women ages 45 to 54 who had never been married—5 percent. But the corrections never really caught up with the story. It was as if the world, having read all those surveys in which women said they didn’t think you needed to marry to be happy, was intent on bringing them up short.

  Sujay Johnson had a very clear memory of that Newsweek cover. By the time she was 33, she had built her own church congregation, taught at Harvard, and preached at Martin Luther King Jr.’s old pulpit in Atlanta when the Democrats came there for their presidential convention. She was still single, the veteran of a series of unhappy relationships that she had expected would lead to marriage but that had fallen apart in the homestretch. And the quality of the pool of prospects, she could see, was diminishing. At one point, Johnson said, she answered an ad in a magazine for black professionals that looked promising. The return letter had the address of a local correctional facility and began, “Dear Suzan, I’m accused of murder but I’m dying to meet you….”

  After several more “Mr. Wrongs,” Johnson was still looking. “I never felt like I wasn’t going to get married—it was so much a part of what I needed to do to make me, me. I wanted a family too much,” she said. Still, when 1991 rolled in, she decided to embark on a special fast before Easter and prayed, “Jesus, send me a husband or help me deal with the singleness.” On Easter Monday, she went to Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem to hear a friend preach. After the service she was preparing to go out to dinner with a girlfriend when she noticed a man work
ing in the back of the church. “That’s Ron Cook,” said her friend. “Do you want to meet him? I think he’s single.” He joined them for dinner, and she discovered that Cook was an administrator at Convent Avenue and just finishing a fast of his own, during which he had been praying for a wife. They were married and had two sons. Sujay, not much changed by motherhood, successfully applied for a White House fellowship while she still had stitches from her first delivery.

  “HAVING A BABY IS A VERY 1980S THING TO DO.”

  Children were the second big issue confronting women who threw themselves into their work with all the ardor of the most ambitious men. The national fertility rate leveled off at an average of 1.8 children per woman, less than half of the 3.8-children-per-woman peak in 1957. While there was a spurt of antichild sentiment among women who were getting tired of being asked when they were going to get down to the business of producing the next generation, for most, the expectation that sooner or later a baby would come never really changed.

  Little girls practiced their maternal skills on Cabbage Patch Kids, soft baby-size dolls that were supposed to be “adopted” by their new owners (after their parents plunked down the “adoption fee”). Meanwhile, Barbies ran afoul of many conscientious mothers who worried about unrealistic body images and gender-typing. Ellen Miller and her husband, who had two young daughters in the ’80s, banned the dolls from their household. “It was very upsetting,” remembered her daughter Annie. “They were very clear on how they felt about Barbies…. My sister and I wanted them anyway.” Instead, Annie and her sister got long-maned My Little Ponies (which combined little girls’ fascination with horses and hair) and early versions of the history-related American Girl dolls. But Barbies retained their popularity despite their sinking social status. Dana Arthur’s daughter, Lynnette, had both a Barbie and a Cabbage Patch doll. She treasured the Cabbage Patch but followed what seems to be an extremely popular route of turning Barbie into a sex object. “When I did play with Barbies, it was, like, Barbie and Ken would be making out. They’d be in bed under the washcloth. The Barbie and Ken soap opera.”

  While women’s expectations of having children hadn’t much changed, their timetables had. Those who hoped to combine a career with a family were definitely waiting longer. The fertility rate for women ages 18 to 24 declined, while the Census Bureau reported a jump in the rate of childbearing for women in their early 30s. (Among women who graduated from Harvard/Radcliffe and had children, the median age for the first birth was between 31 and 32.) The women who pioneered the American suburbs in the 1950s had often completed their childbearing before they were 30. Now, 30 seemed more like the starting gun than the finish line—especially in urban areas where well-educated careerists congregated. When Perri Klass got pregnant at 26, she imagined that when a lecturer in one of her medical school classes mentioned teenage pregnancy, “my classmates were turning to look at me.” Her friend, a corporate lawyer in New York, assured Klass that “having a baby is a very 1980s thing to do” but added, “You and Larry are much too young.”

  In 1982 Time had a cover story celebrating motherhood after 30, awash with anecdotes about actresses, doctors, writers, literary agents, having “it all” by adding a healthy baby to a list of achievements that already included professional success and happy marriages to supportive husbands who were eager to help with the child care. It arrived on the stands the same week the New England Journal of Medicine announced that a new study showed women’s chances of becoming pregnant dropped more precipitously after 30 than experts had believed. Georgia Dullea of the New York Times interviewed a 32-year-old woman who complained darkly that building a career as a single professional was tough enough. “Now we’re being told, ‘By the way, you’re over the hill.’ ” Medical experts responded soothingly that the odds were still not bad, but suddenly stories on infertility seemed to be everywhere. A government study reported in 1983 that three million married American women who wanted babies were physically unable to get pregnant.

  Fertility clinics began to proliferate. There were 2 in vitro fertilization programs in the United States in 1980; by 1990 there were 192, offering increasingly elaborate options. Almost as quickly, a new cautionary tale arose in the form of Baby M, a blond, blue-eyed little girl who was the biological daughter of William Stern, a New Jersey biochemist, and Mary Beth Whitehead, the 30-year-old wife of a sanitation worker. Whitehead had signed a contract agreeing to be inseminated with Stern’s sperm and carry a baby for him and his wife, Elizabeth, a 40-year-old pediatrician who suffered from multiple sclerosis. When word came that Whitehead was pregnant, William Stern, whose family had almost been obliterated in the Holocaust, turned to the stranger sitting next to him on a flight home and said proudly, “I’m going to be a father.”

  But once the baby was born, Whitehead decided she could not bear to give her up. She refused the $10,000 payment, convinced the Sterns to let her take the baby (who she called Sara) home for a short time, and then had her spirited off to Florida. When detectives found the child (who the Sterns called Melissa), both couples went to court for a seven-week trial, during which Whitehead’s lawyer said the baby would do better with a full-time mother like Mary Beth rather than “a career woman” like Elizabeth Stern. The Sterns’ lawyer played the tape of Mary Beth hysterically threatening to kill herself and the baby, and pointed to the Whiteheads’ periods of separation and financial trouble. Outside the courthouse, Whitehead supporters displayed an empty crib. Mary Beth posed with a baby, holding a NOT FOR SALE sign.

  The country debated the case, with Mary Beth’s supporters arguing for the rights of motherhood and claiming class bias. “I will never feel quite the same about dyeing my hair now that Dr. Marshall Schechter, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has cited this little beauty secret as proof of Mrs. Whitehead’s ‘narcissism’ and ‘mixed personality disorder,’ ” said Katha Pollitt, who championed the natural mother in The Nation. The Sterns’ supporters said they could offer a more stable home, and anyway, a deal was a deal. A New Jersey Superior Court judge agreed, calling Whitehead “manipulative, impulsive, and exploitive” and awarding the baby to the Sterns. Another judge later ruled that Mary Beth still had the right to visitation.

  “Bill and I are very, very sorry that what started out as a very nice thing had to end up like this,” said Elizabeth Stern, who legally adopted Melissa years later when the girl turned 18 and had the right to terminate her relationship with her natural mother.

  “WE HIRED THE PERSON YOU TRAINED.”

  Lillian Garland was raised by her great-grandmother, a former showgirl who had married a black man and ended up on a farm in Finleyville, Pennsylvania. “She had long black hair, a tiny little waistline, and she was built bigger than Marilyn Monroe. So when she married my—well, her husband, like I said, was black. Can you imagine her grief way back then before the ’20s? So I’d be sitting on the floor and she’d be brushing my hair, and one of the things she would always say… , ‘Remember that word.’ And she would say it, she said ‘nigger.’ And she would point at me and she’d say, ‘It only has as much power as you give it. It’s only a word. Don’t give it any power.’ ”

  A tomboy who dreamed of being Annie Oakley, Garland grew up to be a pretty young woman who dreamed of being an actress. In 1976 she left for California with her eyes on Hollywood. But she wound up on the run from an abusive marriage, working as a security guard in Los Angeles. Things started looking up when she landed a job as a receptionist at a California Central Savings and Loan Association office. “I’m sitting answering phones, giving everybody messages, fussing at the bosses for not answering their wives’ calls…. I was having a ball, like I was mothering everybody.” When she got pregnant, Garland trained someone to fill in while she was gone and returned after a three-month unpaid leave.

  “We hired the person you trained… ,” she was told. “If something comes available, we’ll give you a call.”

  Garland, who was sear
ching for a new job with her baby in her arms because she couldn’t afford a sitter, contacted the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which told her that California had a law requiring employers to offer pregnant women unpaid leaves of up to four months. Her ex-employer challenged the law, claiming it discriminated against men, who could not claim such a benefit. By the time the court ruled in her ex-boss’s favor, Garland had lost her apartment and custody of her daughter, Kekere, to the child’s father.

  As the appeal wound its way through the courts, her former employer offered to take her back, and her lawyer told her she had to accept in order to maintain her status as plaintiff. “They did things to me—they stuck pins in my chair…. They had me doing really demeaning things. They were putting in new computers, and they said, ‘We want you to get on your hands and knees underneath all the desks on this floor and write down how many blue cables, white cables, and what the numbers are on the cables.’ ”

  She told herself, “They want to force me to quit, because they figure if I quit this, I’ll quit the case, too. But they don’t know I’m my grandmother’s granddaughter.”