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

by Gail Collins

  In 1987 Garland’s case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6 to 3 that states could require employers to provide job protection for pregnant women. Time wrote a big story about Garland, and she was invited to Washington, where President Clinton signed her copy of the magazine, and a security guard, recognizing her, asked to shake her hand. “He says, ‘I gotta tell my wife that I met you. We just had twins. Because of you, she didn’t lose her job.’ ” Later, at a dinner, Garland was seated next to Rosa Parks, who told her, “Young sister, I have been following this case for years, and I am so proud of you.”

  “I said, ‘I’m sitting next to Rosa Parks, and you’re proud of me?’ And she started laughing and laughing.”

  “TOO OLD, TOO UNATTRACTIVE…”

  Garland was hardly the only woman to come crashing up against a barrier she imagined had long been eliminated. And she was not the only one to go to court. Throughout the ’80s, women in accounting and law firms fought to get a better chance to make partner—a status the top firms repeatedly argued was based on personal relationships rather than on any specific and quantifiable qualification. In 1982 Ann Hopkins was the only woman among eighty-eight candidates nominated for partner at Price Waterhouse, a giant accounting firm. Although she brought in more business than any other candidate, she was rejected. “It was only later, when we were in litigation, that I found out about the comments that I needed to go to charm school, that I was too macho, that I was overcompensating for being a woman,” she said. The partners said she would have a better chance if she dressed “more femininely” and wore more makeup and jewelry. It took the rest of the decade, but in 1990 a federal district judge ordered Price Waterhouse to make Hopkins a partner and give her $400,000 in back pay.

  In 1982 Christine Craft, of KMBC-TV in Kansas, sued her employers after she was demoted from anchor to reporter because she did poorly in a viewer focus group. The viewers, she was told, found her “too old, too unattractive,” and not sufficiently deferential to men. Craft said she was told by her boss, “We know it’s silly, but you don’t hide your intelligence to make the guys look smarter…. They don’t like the fact that you know the difference between the National League and the American League.” A 36-year-old California outdoorswoman, Craft said she was wooed to come to Kansas by the KMBC management, who assured her that they did not mind that she looked more like an “aging surfer” than a beauty queen. Once she joined the station, however, she was sent through makeup, clothes, and hair consultations that left her equipped with an endless supply of “polyester bowed blouses and blazers.” The station claimed the focus group showed the makeover wasn’t working, but testimony at the trial revealed that the consultant had opened up the focus group’s discussion by saying, “Let’s spend thirty seconds destroying Christine,” and “Is she a mutt? Let’s be honest about this.” The jury awarded her $500,000 in damages. Then the judge tossed out the verdict, saying it was “the result of passion, prejudice, confusion, or mistake on the part of the jury.”

  The job of TV news anchor had particular significance since the person reading the evening news had always been a figure of authority in American culture. “I have the strong feeling that audiences are less prepared to accept the news from a woman’s voice than from a man’s,” said Reuben Frank, the president of NBC News, in 1971. ABC made the first attempt to break the network men-only club in 1976, when Barbara Walters was hired to coanchor the evening news with Harry Reasoner. The pairing was not a success. “Harry Reasoner didn’t want a partner and he didn’t want a woman,” Walters said years later. “He did not talk to me off the air.” The on-air chemistry, unsurprisingly, was poor. Ratings did not go up, and eventually Reasoner and Walters went off to TV newsmagazines, while Peter Jennings claimed the anchor’s chair.

  While the networks would continue to wrestle with the anchorwoman issue for another quarter century or so, local news had less trouble adapting. In 1972 KING 5 in Seattle appointed Jean Enersen as evening news anchor, making her the first woman to hold that job permanently. (Her management had surveyed listeners and found the audience “very receptive” to the idea.) Others followed quickly, many of them women who would later become national household names: Judy Woodruff in Atlanta, Jessica Savitch in Houston, and Jane Pauley, who became the first anchorwoman at stations in Indianapolis and, later, Chicago. By the early 1980s, more than a third of local anchors were women. Only 3 percent of those women, however, were over 40, compared to almost half the men.

  “THEY’RE NOT LISTENING TO YOU FOR THE FIRST TEN MINUTES.”

  When Sylvia Acevedo decided to become an engineer, she embarked on a life in which she would almost always be the only one of her kind in every room. During a college internship, she worked on a weapons-testing range in the Nevada desert. The first time she headed for the bathroom, she was stopped, “and they said, ‘No—yours is over there.’ It turned out they had had much correspondence over where I would go to the bathroom. And there was this brand-new Porta Potti that said HERS.”

  When she got to graduate school at Stanford, there was only one other Latina in the entire engineering program: Ellen Ochoa, the future NASA astronaut. “There weren’t a lot of people like me. But I’ve always been a kind of social person, so I did sports, I hung out,” Acevedo said. After a stint with the national space program, she went to work for IBM in Palo Alto. The office next to hers was occupied by a former football player from Purdue (“not the sharpest crayon in the box”), and Acevedo watched as his IBM mentors came in to tell him how to make a presentation, what to wear, and what to watch out for. “No one was doing that for me or the other women who were there. I began saying, ‘I have to innovate.’ ” She carefully analyzed what skills IBM seemed to expect for the kinds of jobs she wanted to eventually have and then methodically went out to get the right résumé. When she discovered her many trips to Mexico didn’t count as international experience, she booked a trip to Hong Kong at her own expense and befriended the local sales team.

  Reflecting back on her IBM days, Acevedo recalled that she did have “one guy who was a good mentor,” who advised her not to begin her presentations in the normal way. “You have to start with how you’re like them,” he urged. “You need to tell them you’re a Stanford engineer and you’ve done this and that. Because they’re not listening to you for the first ten minutes. All they’re thinking is, ‘What is this Hispanic female doing in front of us?’ ”

  “THE WOMEN I SPEAK WITH… WANT TO KNOW THEIR PARTNERS.”

  At the height of the sexual revolution, college students were reading The Harrad Experiment, which described how the next generation could use free love to create an American utopia. By the late 1970s, they were reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which painted a picture of the new morality that was so dismal it’s a wonder the entire generation didn’t head for the convent. Goodbar was Judith Rossner’s fictionalized account of the 1973 murder of Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old teacher who spent her days working with deaf children in the Bronx and her nights reading novels in a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she picked up men for one-night stands that sometimes got rough. (Her accused killer, a drifter named John Wayne Wilson, hung himself in his jail cell.) The violent death of Rossner’s heroine, Theresa Dunn, became a byword for the terrible consequences of anonymous sex. The reviewers of Looking for Mr. Goodbar made it clear that they felt both Quinn’s murder and Rossner’s book said something sweeping about the way young people’s sex lives had gone astray. (“We know there are Theresa Dunns in our lives, in our offices.”)

  “The Revolution Is Over,” announced Time in 1984. In fact, what was over was not the dramatic change in women’s feelings about the double standard that had been at the heart of the sexual revolution. What ended was the to-the-nth-degree-ness of it—the group sex, the casual encounters at a rock concert or airport ticket line that led almost instantly to sex behind a tree or in a plane restroom. Swing clubs, where people came to trade partners, began to dwindle away.
The legendary suburban cocktail hours where couples dropped their car keys into a hat and chose the keys of their partner for the night seemed to disappear—if many had ever really existed in the first place. “The difference now is that things are not so casual. The women I speak with seem to want to know their partners,” said the director of the health center at Wheaton College.

  While a religious backlash against sexual permissiveness undoubtedly played an important part in the new attitude, there were very profound practical reasons that women wanted to “know their partners.” That brief window in which people could have sex at random without any serious safety concerns had closed. There was an epidemic of chlamydia, the “silent disease” that exhibited no symptoms but that led to sterility if it went untreated. By the mid-1980s, an estimated one-sixth of young women who were sexually active were infected. The disease hit hardest in the black community, and infertility rates in young black women tripled.

  The decade also ushered in an epidemic of genital herpes, the first widespread incurable sexually transmitted disease since the invention of penicillin. It was, Time said, “The New Scarlet Letter.” Although seldom life threatening, herpes caused painful sores that could erupt at any time, and it could be easily transmitted during unprotected sex. (Women suffered physically more than men, averaging more lesions with long-lasting pain.) The Centers for Disease Control estimated that twenty million Americans were infected, with up to half a million new cases each year. The media sounded the alarm with stories that usually centered around young women who were punished for promiscuity. (“They were just one-night stands, they deserved it anyway,” said one infected man of his unwitting partners.) Some of the cases cited were so horrific that the unnamed victims seemed to have stepped out of a Victorian novel. “A schoolteacher in Los Angeles developed herpes blisters on her genitals and legs a month before her scheduled wedding,” reported Time. “Her fiancé, who had given her the disease, walked out.”

  AIDS was identified and named in 1982, but it only really hit general American consciousness in 1985, when actor Rock Hudson announced the disease that was killing him was what people were beginning to call “the gay plague.” It quickly became clear that AIDS could be spread by heterosexual sex, too. Near panic ensued, and by 1986 an expert from the federal Centers for Disease Control was predicting that up to 10 percent of the population would contract AIDS within a few years unless there were revolutionary changes in sexual behavior. When Fatal Attraction became one of the hit movies of 1987, feminists worried that the tale of how Glenn Close beds a happily married Michael Douglas and then turns into a murderous stalker of her ex-lover and his wife was a parable about the evils of the unmarried career woman. But many people saw it as a metaphor for AIDS and how the classic one-night stand could become a death sentence not only to the casual adulterers but to their families as well.

  “RAPE ME, LUKE!”

  In 1981 Newsweek announced that General Hospital, a long-running afternoon soap opera, had suddenly become “Television’s Hottest Show”—not only “the highest rated daytime show in the history of television, but a genuine pop culture phenomenon.” In a pre-TiVo world, college students ditched classes and crowded in front of dormitory TV sets to watch, as did shoppers at department-store electronics sections and travelers in airport lounges. The drawing card was the romance of Luke and Laura, the fractious, sexually overcharged couple who were on the run from the mob, stranded on a tropical island with a mad scientist, and finally united in matrimony in one of the biggest events in the TV decade.

  Only the die-hard feminists had any complaints, it seemed, about the fact that the young lovers first got together when he raped her. Laura (played by 19-year-old Genie Francis) was married and working for Luke (played by 34-year-old Anthony Geary) when he declared his passion and forced himself upon her on the floor of an abandoned nightclub to a disco beat. Astonishingly few people seemed to object. “Rape me, Luke!” cried a fan at a Texas shopping mall. Another woman presented Geary with a homemade award for “America’s Most Beloved Rapist.”

  It was perhaps a moment of mass neurosis, but the fans should have known better. There had been a great deal of discussion of rape over the previous decade, beginning with Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, which had portrayed it as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Rape, feminists said, was not about sexual desire but power. They began holding “Take Back the Night” marches to protest the way the threat of rape overshadowed their lives, keeping them trapped in their homes because they were afraid of walking alone after dark. Self-defense classes and rape-crisis centers sprung up around the country, particularly in college communities.

  Many Americans living in the 1980s could remember a time when it was difficult—if not impossible—for a woman to bring rape charges against a man unless she had an eyewitness. In some states she had to prove she had been a virgin at the time of the attack. (Go back far enough in American history, and you will come to the point where people believed women could conceive a child only if she enjoyed the sex and that therefore there was no such thing as a rapist impregnating a victim.) In the ’80s the country had moved toward a far greater sympathy for women who claimed to be victims of sexual assault, and states had begun to pass rape “shield laws” that restricted defense lawyers’ ability to dredge up a victim’s entire sexual history in order to portray her as a tramp who “asked for it.”

  The concept of date rape, however, was controversial. The idea that a woman could seem to lead a man on and then have the right to say “no” was a relatively new concept, particularly for people who had been brought up to believe that women were supposed to pretend to be reluctant to have sex even when they were in fact eager. Susan Estrich, a Harvard professor of sex-discrimination law, argued that sex became rape whenever it was against the woman’s will, even if she had been tricked or bullied into it without the threat of violence. On the other side, “postfeminists” led by Katie Roiphe, a doctoral student at Princeton, retorted that by downplaying women’s ability to hold their own against psychological pressure or the effects of alcohol, “rape-crisis feminists reinforce traditional views about the fragility of the female body and will.”

  There were plenty of events that encouraged further debate, including a series of celebrity-rape trials. William Kennedy Smith, a physician and member of the famous political clan, was acquitted of charges brought by a woman who he had met in a Florida bar and taken for a walk on the beach. The trial was televised, and much of the nation watched Smith and his accuser (her head a white blur to conceal her identity) tell their dramatic and divergent stories. In the 1992 Mike Tyson trial, an 18-year-old contestant at the Miss Black America contest in Indianapolis said she had accepted a late-night date with the former boxing champion, believing she was going to meet celebrities—she showed up at her hotel lobby carrying a camera. But Tyson took her to his hotel room, where they chatted for a while, until she went to use the bathroom and emerged to find him stripped to his shorts. Tyson’s lawyers argued that the very fact that a young woman would go up to a man’s hotel room in the middle of the night proved that, as the boxer testified, she was a willing participant in consensual sex. But the jury felt otherwise, sending Tyson to jail and effectively ending his boxing career.

  LYNNETTE ARTHUR HAD A DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD. Her mother, Dana, had loved taking care of her as a baby but fell into a period of depression and substance abuse that left Dana incapable of raising the little girl. Lynnette lived for a long time with her grandmother, and when Dana reclaimed her life and brought her daughter back to live with her, the reunion was fractious. Lynnette was “hanging out with these two guys” one night, an angry 17-year-old sitting in the bleachers of a remote playing field in Brooklyn not far from her mother’s apartment, smoking and drinking and arguing. Suddenly, one of the men turned on Lynnette and raped her. The men walked away together. Then the second—who Lynnette had actually been dating—stopped an
d went back. “I thought he was going to help me, but he just did it, too,” she said.

  As she stood there crying, the man she did not really know started saying, “Yo, let’s kill the bitch.” She ran home with her attackers in pursuit.

  When she came in the door, her mother knew immediately what had happened, and when Lynnette tried to take a shower, Dana took her instead to a hospital, where the nurses took evidence. Lynnette picked the men out in a lineup, but after she had given a deposition, she decided not to press charges.

  “The lawyer was saying it would be a rough trial for me because it would be my word against theirs,” she said. “We were drinking… and their lawyer was definitely going to make me seem like I asked for it or I allowed it or something.”

  “I believe you and I believe a jury would believe you,” her lawyer said. “But you have to understand this is what we’re taking on.” Lynnette decided not to go forward.

  “Am I okay with that?” she asked herself afterward. Sometimes, she felt not. Once, she saw one of the men on the street. “I just remember my stomach kind of dropping and kind of feeling like—has he been punished enough?” There were no good answers. “I do believe in karma,” she said. “What goes around comes around.”

  “… THE LAUGHINGSTOCK OF THE TRIBAL WORLD.”

  In that poll for the President’s Advisory Committee for Women, the one that was so astonishingly positive about women having important careers, most people still said they did not believe the country was ready to elect a female president. Perhaps as a compromise, the majority said that the United States would probably be ready to elect a female vice president by the end of the century. In 1984 the Democrats tried to push the timetable ahead a bit faster, nominating Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman from Queens, New York, as the party’s vice presidential candidate. (Ferraro, who was married to John Zaccaro but used her maiden name, helped the cause of “Ms.” when she told reporters that if she couldn’t be referred to as “Ms. Ferraro,” she wanted to be called “Mrs. Ferraro” to reflect the fact that she was, indeed, a wife and mother. That was too much for the New York Times language columnist, William Safire, who couldn’t countenance “Mrs.” in front of a maiden name but knew he couldn’t demand that a vice presidential candidate change her professional name to Mrs. Zaccaro. “It breaks my heart to suggest this, but the time has come for Ms.,” he wrote. “We are no longer faced with a theory, but a condition.”)