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

by Gail Collins

  It was the same year Madeleine Kunin was running for governor of Vermont, and Ferraro arrived to campaign with her. Thousands of people turned out to greet them. “Fathers brought their daughters to see us, carrying them on their shoulders, holding them in their arms, leading them by the hand. ‘I want her to see this, to know this, so she’ll remember,’ a man said as he asked a bystander to snap our picture together: Gerry Ferraro, Daddy, the baby, and me.” Kunin was elected that November. Ferraro lost. Her campaign had been dogged by questions about her husband’s finances, but some said it had been a hopeless cause from the beginning, that her nomination had been a desperate Hail Mary pass for the Democrats, struggling against a popular president in Ronald Reagan with a qualified but hardly electric presidential candidate in Walter Mondale. Mondale’s record as an advocate of early child care certainly did him little good. Championing the child-care needs of working mothers was then, and is now, something that pays very few dividends for politicians at the polls.

  WILMA MANKILLER HAD GOTTEN A DIVORCE and a college degree, and had moved with her daughters back to Oklahoma, where she began working for the Cherokee tribal government. By 1981 she had been named director of the Cherokee Nation’s Community Development Department and met Charlie Lee Soap, the strong, quiet man she would marry a few years later. In 1983 the chief of the nation, Ross Swimmer, asked her to run for deputy chief on his ticket in the upcoming election. “Because our tribe is so large, running for tribal office is much like running for Congress or even a national political post,” Mankiller said. “It is very much a mainstream process, complete with print and broadcast advertising, campaign billboards, rallies, and all that sort of thing.” In this case it was also complete with rancor. Some of her fellow Cherokee claimed a woman running for such a high office was an affront to God. Others, she remembered, “said having a female run our tribe would make the Cherokee the laughingstock of the tribal world.”

  She was shocked. “Everybody liked me. I was the person who helped them get electric lines built, water lines built. I was the person who helped everybody…. The female issue was very, very hurtful. Nobody seemed to be listening to the issues I cared about—housing, health care, services for children. They were more interested in debating whether a woman should be principal chief or not. People said some very hurtful things.”

  They did not, however, defeat her. She won the election, and in 1985, when Swimmer moved to Washington to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Ronald Reagan, Wilma Mankiller became the first Native American woman ever to serve as a chief of a major American tribe. At the next election, she easily won in her own right.

  “IT MUST BE A SECRETARIAL POSITION, IS IT NOT?”

  Exit polls in the 1980 presidential election showed that 55 percent of male voters had supported the winner, Ronald Reagan, but that only 47 percent of the women had voted for him. Women—especially single women—were tending to favor the Democratic candidate, while men leaned toward the Republicans. The gender gap would widen during the Reagan years, then shrink when George H. W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, then widen again when Bush ran against Bill Clinton. The meaning of the gap would be debated over the next quarter century, but one clear factor was women’s higher support for safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and for government spending in areas such as education and social services.

  Reagan had noticed the gap from the beginning of his presidential campaign and, in an effort to reduce it, had promised to try to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. In 1981, when Justice Potter Stewart decided to retire, then-president Reagan asked for a short list of female potential nominees. As a result, Attorney General William French Smith placed a call to Sandra Day O’Connor, a 51-year-old appeals court judge in Arizona, to tell her she was being considered for a “federal position.”

  “It must be a secretarial position, is it not?” she joked. O’Connor knew that Smith was from the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher—one of many she had applied to when she graduated from Stanford Law in 1952. The only job she was offered was as secretary. The attorney general pretended he hadn’t heard her.

  It was very typical that O’Connor never pressed the point. It was also typical that when Smith and his assistant, Kenneth Starr, arrived at her home to interview her, they found her “clearly prepared” as well as ready to serve them a salmon mousse lunch she had fixed before their arrival. Finally, it was very typical that O’Connor never mentioned that she was recovering from surgery, having just undergone a hysterectomy.

  Sandra Day was a rancher’s daughter, reared on an isolated cattle spread by a mother who treasured her subscriptions to Vogue, House Beautiful, and The New Yorker, and a gruff but doting father who had little tolerance for whiners. Her parents seemed to have no doubts that Sandra would go to college and no reservations about sending her on to law school. (Her father, who felt he had been tormented by lawyers all his life, liked the idea of having one in the family.) She was only 19 when she started at Stanford Law, one of only five women in the class, but utterly uncowed by her position. She was a star student, a member of the law review, and also a perfect lady who, the men remembered, would draw them out about their accomplishments and interests without ever letting on that she had plenty of accomplishments herself.

  It was at law school that she met and married John O’Connor. She was sworn into the Arizona bar three days before their first son was born. After the family moved to Phoenix, she started a law practice, but when her second son was born, O’Connor faced the crisis every working mother dreads: her babysitter moved away. Unable to find a suitable replacement, she worked part-time from home and greatly stepped up her volunteer work in local politics. She was a Republican of the old school, enthusiastic about women’s rights and disturbed that only 300 of the nation’s 8,750 judges were women. She had written to Richard Nixon, urging him to put a woman on the Supreme Court, apparently unaware that Nixon had no intention of doing any such thing. (“I’m against it, frankly…. I don’t want any of them around,” he told an aide.) When she was appointed—and then elected—to the Arizona state senate, one of her first successful pieces of legislation removed an Arizona statute prohibiting women from working more than eight hours a day. But she always dressed her beliefs—literally—in a manner her male colleagues found appealing. She never wore pants, and she made it clear she was not a militant. “I come to you wearing my bra and my wedding ring,” she often told audiences. It took a while, one of her state senate colleagues recalled, to discover that “this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise.”

  O’Connor beat out an incumbent judge for the appeals court post and was working there when she got the call from Smith. She seemed an unlikely possibility, since justices usually came from the federal court, but the shortage of Republican women on the bench had limited Reagan’s options considerably. The liberal magazine The Nation congratulated the president for picking a woman when he released O’Connor’s name but added that she seemed to have been chosen “almost entirely because of her sex and not on the basis of individual merit.” And social conservatives angrily pointed out that O’Connor’s record as a state senator suggested she supported abortion rights. But a Gallup poll found 86 percent of the public approved the idea of a woman justice, and virtually all of those who had an opinion about O’Connor thought she was a good candidate. She was confirmed 99 to 0.

  O’Connor would live as a Supreme Court justice much as she had lived as an Arizona housewife and part-time lawyer—intensely. She took exercise classes three mornings a week with her female clerks (some of them under duress) and marched her staff, friends, and family through art exhibits, cherry-blossom-time picnics, and holiday celebrations while working six days a week. With her husband, she was a regular on the Washington social scene. She kept to her identity as a moderate and a former politician. Her opinions did not wow the legal world with their scholarship or theory, but as time went on and the division betw
een the older liberal justices and the newer conservatives on the bench grew deeper, she was the person best equipped to knit together opinions out of fractious dissent. Eventually, she became the swing vote in a Court that was perpetually divided, 5 to 4. O’Connor employed her leverage to fashion a series of opinions on hot-button issues, such as abortion and affirmative action, that reflected her own pragmatic instinct for what made sense. The fact that she took her opportunity, shouldered it, and used it in a way that commanded so much respect turned the Supreme Court into the O’Connor Court and made Sandra Day O’Connor into a jurist so influential that the legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin called her “the most important woman in American history.”

  13. The 1990s—Settling for Less?

  “THE THINGS I FOUGHT FOR ARE NOW CONSIDERED QUAINT.”

  Lynnette Arthur’s adolescence had been tumultuous, but she came out the other end as a strong and solid young woman. Her family, she said, “was like, ‘Whew, thank God. We’ve got Lynnette back again.’ But it was a better version of Lynnette.” She was an heir to the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and even while she wrestled with family troubles, neighborhood troubles, and personal troubles, she never felt that she was constrained in any way by her sex. “I guess that was my generation’s way of thinking…. There’s nothing intellectually that men can do that we can’t.”

  The first generation of American women who had not been told that their only place was in the home had come of age. On TV, heroines such as Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were saving the world on a weekly basis. To their young fans, the complaints and concerns of their elders sounded like ancient history. “I must have been about nine years old when my babysitter explained to me that feminists burned their bras,” wrote AnnJanette Rosga, who was born in 1966. “Since this was also the first time I gave any thought to the notion of a bra, I was especially confounded by the image.” Rosga was aware that there had been a time when young women saw no role models for themselves in the outside world, but it was nothing to which she could relate personally. “Before I went to college, I had a series of jobs—this was in the mid-’80s—in which my direct supervisors were always women; often, the highest authority in the workplace was a woman,” she said. “I went to college from 1986 to 1990, during which time I believe I had a total of three male professors. During both college and graduate school, my mentors and advisers were among the leading feminist scholars in this country. If I can help it, and I almost always can, I only go to women doctors… and it’s never occurred to me at rallies to wonder where the women speakers are, because they’re everywhere.”

  It was, in one way, exactly what their elders had been hoping for—American women who had grown up confident that they were entitled to all the educational and career opportunities that boys got, who played sports in school with as fierce a competitive spirit, and who expected to have success and love and adventure in equal measure. All that was a point of pride for the older generation. But there was also the disappointment of realizing that the younger women took it all for granted. “The things I fought for are now considered quaint… ,” the novelist Erica Jong told Time. “They say, ‘We don’t need feminism anymore.’ They don’t understand graduating magna cum laude from Harvard and then being told to go to the typing pool.”

  The young women often responded with impatience or mystification. “We don’t feel we have to fight the battles women were fighting ten years ago, that Ms. still thinks we’re fighting,” said Claire Gruppo, an editor at Savvy. Talking with young Hispanic women, Sylvia Acevedo got blank looks when she brought up gender discrimination. “I’m saying, ‘You guys just don’t know what it was like!’ But it’s a moot issue.” She shrugged. “It’s like talking about dinosaurs.” While surveys showed that young women believed the women’s movement had helped—and was in fact still helping—to improve things for their sex, they shied away from calling themselves “feminists.” (“Feminist” simply means someone who supports equal rights and opportunities for women. But there have been very few periods in American history when it didn’t wind up being linked to images of cranky man-haters in unfashionable footwear.) While young women freely referred to themselves as “Ms.,” they were more likely to take their husbands’ names after they married than their older sisters had been.

  When the new generation of women got into medical school or won a promotion, they were proud of themselves, but they did not think of it as a victory for their sex. Work was not something you fought for the right to do; it was something you just did. In 1991 two-thirds of married women with children worked, and the economics of family life made it inevitable that most of them would continue to do so. The two big-ticket expenses for middle-class families—home buying and a college education—were almost impossible to pay for without two paychecks. The cost of college was going up almost three times faster than household income. Married women who worked provided, on average, 41 percent of a family’s income, and in almost a quarter of families with working wives, the woman earned more than the husband.

  There was also the matter of self-preservation. Even if their husbands were capable of supporting the family on their own, younger women were, in general, clear about how fragile an institution marriage could be. “I always wanted the independence of being able to support myself and, if it ever came down to it, to be able to get away and take care of myself, having watched Sleeping with the Enemy too many times and having a divorced family,” said Barbara Arnold’s daughter, Alex Dery Snider.

  “MY POINTS TOUCHED A RAW NERVE.”

  In 1989 Felice Schwartz, a consultant on women’s careers, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on how companies could avoid losing valuable employees to motherhood. Along with familiar suggestions such as job sharing and flexible hours, Schwartz tossed another on the pile: corporations could divide their female employees into “career-and-family” women and “career-primary” women. The “career-primary” women could be put on the fast track, with the same demands as upwardly mobile men, while the “career-and-family” women would get a less-demanding schedule. No one would pressure them to work late or on weekends, and in return they would not pressure the company for big raises or promotions.

  “My points touched a raw nerve,” Schwartz understated.

  By 1990, 60 percent of mothers with children under 5 were working—up from 30 percent two decades earlier. As more and more women tried to balance jobs and child raising, they became painfully aware that it was a whole lot harder than Clair Huxtable had made it seem on TV. Perhaps Schwartz’s article would have gone unnoticed if the New York Times had not dubbed her proposal “the mommy track.” The image of motherhood as a ticket to a slow ride to nowhere at work created an enormous, long-running controversy. A coalition of forty-four national women’s groups quickly denounced the concept. They demanded to know why Schwartz assumed it would always be the mother who would want to work less and spend more time with the children. Why did everyone presume it should always be the woman—never the father or the employer—who would make the compromises?

  It was a debate that would continue into the twenty-first century. Some women really did yearn for a less-demanding path, at least while their children were young, and found themselves downsizing their ambitions. Others figured out ways to juggle all the balls and make everything work. And some became angry—angry with their employers for expecting so much, angry with their husbands for helping so little, angry with themselves for not getting “it all” the way they had planned.

  “I HATE RUG RATS.”

  Laura Sessions Stepp had every reason to think the sky was the limit in 1981, when she was working for the Charlotte Observer and won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories about lung diseases and textile workers. The Washington Post offered her an editing job; her husband, who landed a teaching post at the University of Maryland, encouraged her to go for it. “I was so ambitious,” she recalled. “I thought I wanted to be a managing editor or an editor of
a major newspaper in this country.” But after she had a child, she began rethinking: “I looked around and I saw how much commitment it took to really be a top editor at a paper like that,” she said. She was coming home exhausted at night and “going into the newsroom in tears because I missed my little boy so much that I wasn’t doing anything very well.”

  She decided to give up editing and go back to writing, with its more flexible schedule. And while she says she’s never regretted it, Stepp did feel for a while that she had let down the team, that it was her duty to shoot for the top, that “I had to do that for all women.”

  FOR ALL ITS ACHIEVEMENTS, the women’s movement had not managed to solve the work/family divide. “You second-guess yourself at work, you second-guess yourself at home, and you second-guess yourself in terms of your own personal time,” said Kathy Hinderhofer, a Boston bank executive with two daughters. “That’s one thing the women’s movement may not have foreseen.” The children themselves were generally not shy about expressing their opinions. Jo Meyer Maasberg says that when her daughters were growing up, they told her that “I spent too much time with other people’s kids,” teaching and grading papers. “They said they would never be teachers. So I guess I didn’t know I was causing tensions, but yet I guess I did.”