by Gail Collins
“AN OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD OF GOING TO WAR.”
The suffragists might have imagined that women would someday have a significant presence in Congress, but chances are very few thought they would also become a critical part of the armed services. The military had traditionally welcomed women’s participation only in times of crisis, and even then in very limited roles. Although Congress made women a permanent part of the armed forces after World War II, the number of female recruits was kept small. Besides being barred from combat, they were not supposed to serve on ships, and they could be discharged for getting married, getting pregnant, or having an abortion. The idea that the nation would come to depend on women in uniform did not really occur until after the war in Vietnam, when the military’s prestige was low, its leadership was in disarray, and the new volunteer army was finding it almost impossible to fill its ranks. Women who were willing to sign up had more education and tended to be better motivated than male volunteers.
In New Mexico, Sylvia Acevedo had dreamed of following her older brother to West Point when she graduated from high school in 1975. But she discovered that “it was against the law for me. It wasn’t ‘No, you can’t come.’ I couldn’t even apply.” She was a year too early. The armed forces’ increasing needs, combined with political pressure from the women’s movement, forced the military academies to go coed in 1976, to the howls of the old guard. “Maybe you could find one woman in ten thousand who could lead in combat, but she would be a freak and we’re not running the military for freaks,” said General William Westmoreland. Women were still barred from “combat-related” jobs—a rule that was as big a constraint on advancement as the rules against overtime and lifting heavy objects had been on women in the private sector. Combat-related assignments involved more than firing guns at the enemy; they included everything from flying jets to support services. In fact, they counted for 73 percent of all possible military occupations in 1980. The military gradually relaxed the rules and ignored some of the ones that still existed. And once American troops began fighting in Iraq, the line between combat and noncombat roles virtually vanished.
By the first Gulf War in 1991, 7 percent of the people deployed to Iraq were women, and besides tending the sick, they flew helicopters, delivered supplies to the front units, and filled other jobs that put them in the line of fire. Twelve women were killed, and two were taken prisoner. In the most famous incident, a Black Hawk helicopter carrying Rhonda Cornum, a 36-year-old flight surgeon, was shot down behind Iraqi lines. Most of the other soldiers in the helicopter were killed in the crash. Cornum had a bullet in her back, two broken arms, and a shattered knee when the Iraqis found her. Her arms, she wrote later, “were swinging uselessly beside me like sticks tied to my shoulders with string.” She was tied up and put into a truck, and as it was driven off, one of the Iraqis unzipped Cornum’s flight suit and began to molest her. “I remember thinking, ‘Hey, you could do better than this,’ ” she wrote. “I was not only repulsed by his advances, but amazed.” Although the Iraqi kept fondling her breasts, she wrote, “My screams and the fortunate impossibility of getting me out of my flight suit with two broken arms kept the molester at bay” until the truck got to its destination. After she was released, Cornum tried to downplay the story. It was, she said, “an occupational hazard of going to war.”
DENA IVEY’S QUEST to find herself involved a lot of different parts. Born in Alaska to a mother who was part Yupik—a local Eskimo tribe—and part Norwegian, she was told by her father to “tell people you’re Greek or Italian” while her mother “pretty much bombarded us with Norwegian.” She gradually came to embrace her identity as a Native American. She also realized she was gay. But her first romantic relationship was traumatic. “So I joined the military to get the hell away from her,” Ivey recalled. She had dreamed of being an FBI agent. (“The Silence of the Lambs had come out at that time. I wanted to be Jodie Foster.”) With that in mind, she enlisted in the air force and trained for the military police.
Most of the other women Ivey met in the air force were heterosexual, “very focused on their husbands and boyfriends,” she recalled. “These were tough gals…. We were all working. We were doing a tough job. I wasn’t trying to convert anybody or anything.” Ivey said she was “paranoid” about letting people know she was gay, and for good reason. The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule could be enforced in an arbitrary and irregular fashion; it did not stop Ivey’s supervisors from asking her about gossip that she had a relationship with another woman. In 2007 Pentagon statistics showed an extremely large proportion of the people discharged for being openly gay were women—46 percent in the army, where women made up 14 percent of the personnel, and 49 percent in the air force, where they made up 20 percent.
While many women resented the no-combat rule as a bar to their full participation in both the opportunities and the responsibilities of military life, Ivey thought some restrictions were a good idea—especially if they kept the sexes separate when soldiers were away from their home base. When her squadron was involved in war games, she fought for the right to keep her team in a different tent from the men’s. “These guys were piggy. They were making all kinds of sexist jokes,” she recalled. In the end, because of her protests, the nine women were indeed separated—and assigned to a leaky six-person tent of their own.
“BLACK AND WHITE KIDS RIDE TO THE DAIRY QUEEN TOGETHER.”
In 1990 a Fox TV comedy, True Colors, showed a black man and his white wife in bed together. That was a little thing, but maybe not quite so little when you considered that in 1968, the white singer Petula Clark made headlines when she unthinkingly touched the arm of Harry Belafonte on her television special. (A representative of the sponsor, who was watching the taping, said his employer’s car sales would be hurt if the shot aired and demanded a retake. Clark complied, then told a technician to erase everything but the original version.)
The idea of sex between a black man and a white woman was the source of unending racist hysteria in the segregated South, and it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry in most Southern states until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that the laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Even in the North, Americans seemed to have a hard time accepting the idea. It was not until 1991 that Gallup first reported more Americans saying they approved of interracial marriage than disapproved. (The margin was 48 to 42 percent.) That was down from more than 90 percent disapproval in 1958.
If the country needed a reminder of how fraught the issue still could be, there was Wedowee, Alabama, where in 1994 an unknown arsonist burned down the high school after the principal barred interracial couples from the prom. It was, in a weird way, actually in part a story about change. Alabama had been infamous in its resistance to integration, and it would be the last state to officially wipe its meaningless but symbolic laws against interracial marriage off the books in 2000. But for all that, interracial dating was not uncommon. “Black and white kids ride to the Dairy Queen together, they go to ball games, and most people don’t think anything of it…. The red lights don’t all quit working when an interracial couple drives through town. This is 1994,” said Terry Graham, the mayor of the small town of eight hundred residents. In fact, 17-year-old Revonda Bowen, whose plans to go to the prom with a white date helped spark the crisis, was the child of a marriage between a black woman and a white man.
DANA ARTHUR WAS DATING A WHITE MAN in the late 1980s, much to her daughter Lynnette’s dismay. “She was at that age when she was trying to fit in with everybody, and here’s her mom in Crown Heights with this white boyfriend coming to see her. She was, like, 14. She was just not having it,” said Dana. “She gave him a hard time, and he just hung in there.” The entire neighborhood seemed unhappy about an interracial relationship. When Dana and Tony Monteleone would walk down the street in her almost-all-black neighborhood, she said, “young boys would say stuff like, ‘Traitor!’ and ‘What are you doing with that white man?’… And
they said things to him, trying to engage him in some kind of argument…. It was weird, and Lynnette was very embarrassed by the whole thing.”
Tony, who had pulled himself up from a difficult youth, was willing to stick it out. They dated for eight years and, Dana said, “eventually, after years, people warmed up to us—warmed up to him, mostly—and didn’t treat me like a traitor.” When her relationship with Lynnette solidified, too, she felt it was time to move on to the next step. “We stayed engaged for a year and then we got married. We bought a house.” Lynnette, who was 21, got to keep the old apartment—a prize jewel in New York’s real estate–mad economy.
“AND YOU MIGHT FLOAT FROM DORM TO DORM.”
Nora Ephron once joked that “the major achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” But the matter of who paid for what on a date never did quite get worked out. The concept of sharing the bill may have hit its peak around the same time communal living did, then declined in popularity as time went on. (In 2005 Maureen Dowd would write with dismay that a younger woman told her sharing the cost of a date was “a scuzzy ’70s thing, like platform shoes on men.”)
What had perhaps changed the most was the dwindling of the whole concept of a date. Young people were much more likely to simply go out as a pack than have an organized night out at the movies or dinner as a pair. As a teenager, Alex Snider said, her crowd’s chief recreation was to “drive from one end of town to the other, or call people and try to track down everybody, and once we did that, we’d realize there was nothing to do anyway and we’d end up at the movie-rental store ten minutes before it closed. So really, if we’d had cell phones when we were in high school, we wouldn’t have had anything to do whatsoever.”
In college, dormitories generally had open visiting privileges, and many were less like the barren cubbyholes of yore and more like small apartments. Camara Dia Holloway remembers life in college in the early ’90s as a time when you didn’t so much date as “hang out…. You and a group of your girlfriends might go to another dorm, to a boys’ dorm, and hang out with a group of guys, but you would really be scoping out somebody. And you might float from dorm to dorm.”
“AND ONE DAY, IT HAPPENED.”
After she broke up with her boyfriend of three years, June LaValleur was “wondering why I can’t keep a relationship”—although perhaps she should have given herself more credit for that thirty-year marriage. It was at that point she met Jill, a lesbian, for whom she felt an immediate attraction. “I had never knowingly known anyone who was gay,” she recalled. Growing up in the 1950s, LaValleur had not even been aware that women could be attracted to other women. When she was in medical school, though, she had learned “about the Kinsey model of hetero-homosexuality, where there’s a continuum” and decided that she “was somewhere in between.”
Jill, who was twenty-two years younger, was different from June in many ways. But on the things that were most important to June—from a willingness to share, to liberal politics, to being a nonsmoker—they matched up. “I knew she was a lesbian because she was open about it. She was at the time breaking up with someone. I guess you could say one thing led to another. We had dinner, movies, coffee. We were friends. And one day, it happened.”
Being in a relationship with a woman, June found, was much different from being in a relationship with a man, “besides the obvious plumbing issues. That’s just a teeny thing. Being in a relationship with a woman is a much more emotional intimacy. We talked more about things. I felt less vulnerable. Jill likes women who are of generous size, which is amazing given her ninety-eight pounds. We just shared everything. We were both rabid Democrats. We were both avid readers. We both loved to travel.”
By the 1990s lesbianism was increasingly accepted, and in some parts of the country it seemed to be downright trendy. “What most lesbians remember as a major opening volley occurred on October 23, 1992,” wrote Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt in their book The Girls Next Door. On that night, 20/20 broadcast a segment on the lesbian community in and around Northampton, Massachusetts, with a teaser that announced, “Women are meeting, marrying, and raising families in the heart of New England!” After that, Van Gelder and Brandt wrote, “suddenly we were everywhere.” In the Washington Post, Kara Swisher wryly noted that “the new improved lesbian is a party girl of much sex, lingerie, and sophistication…. Straight women trendsetters like Madonna flirt with the lifestyle and make it chic. Travel to Santa Fe, dance with wolves, be a lesbian!” New York Magazine put K. D. Lang on the cover of a May 1993 issue on “Lesbian Chic.” Newsweek followed with a lesbian couple on the cover the next month, and in August Lang was back, on the cover of Vanity Fair, being shaved by Cindy Crawford. Dee Mosbacher, the daughter of a cabinet member in the first Bush administration, came out in her college commencement address, leading the way for so many other lesbian daughters and sisters of prominent men that it began to seem that a gay female relative was a prerequisite for political success. (In a reverse case, Phyllis Schlafly’s son John, who worked for her conservative Eagle Foundation, acknowledged he was gay in 1992. “He’s a good lawyer and very helpful. He is not a proponent of same-sex marriage,” said Schlafly, who made it clear this was not her favorite topic.)
For all the stories about lesbian chic, gay women could not give their partners the same rights and protections legally married spouses had, and if they had children from an earlier marriage, they had reason to worry about custody rights if their ex-husbands chose to make their sexuality an issue. (About 1.5 million lesbians were believed to be mothers, either from previous relationships or from artificial insemination.) In a famous case in 1995, the Virginia supreme court upheld a lower court ruling that Sharon Bottoms was unfit to have custody of her children. The fact that she was a lesbian would impose “social condemnation” on her child, the court said, as it gave custody to Bottoms’s estranged mother.
Still, a new generation of gay women were confident that they had full rights to the world’s opportunities. They had still been in school when Lang announced she was gay in 1992 and when comedienne Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997, both in real life and as the heroine on her TV situation comedy. Diane Salvatore, a gay novelist who would become a successful editor at women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping, told New York Magazine that she went to a Lang concert not long after the singer came out and “was amazed. Here was a superstar who no longer had to go off and marry a man and pay him off to pretend she was straight. That’s a huge break. I didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime, and I’m only 32.”
14. The New Millennium
“… COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.”
Betty Friedan died in 2006 at age 85. She had moved to Washington in her early 70s, happy to be “at the epicenter of politics and public policy,” and published a memoir, Life So Far, in which she continued settling scores. (“I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender,” said her ex-husband.) Looking back, she said she regretted “that I didn’t have a real career” and claimed she “would have loved to have been the editor of the women’s page of the New York Times”—a feature that had vanished years before, thanks to the movement she led. But Friedan had no second thoughts about what her generation had accomplished. “There’s a lot of silly talk that the women’s movement is dead. Well it’s not dead; it’s alive in society!” she wrote. “The way women look at themselves, the way other people look at women, is completely different, completely different than it was thirty years ago…. Our daughters grow up with the same possibilities as our sons.”
She was right on many counts. By the beginning of the new century, women were claiming almost half of the seats in the nation’s medical and law schools. They dominated some fields that used to be almost exclusively male, such as pharmacy and veterinary medicine. Forty percent of the new dental school graduates were women, although as late as 1970 the dean of the University
of Texas dental school had insisted on admitting no more than two women in every class of a hundred because “girls aren’t strong enough to pull teeth.”
There were very few fields in which women had not made major inroads. The number of women in science had risen to about 20 percent, up from 3 percent in the early 1960s. (More important, 40 percent of the undergraduate college students majoring in science were women, and girls were taking math and science courses in high school as frequently as boys.) Even in the small, exclusive world of symphony music, where they had traditionally been a rarity, women occupied more than a third of the chairs in top orchestras, thanks in part to a policy of blind auditions that kept judges in the dark about the sex of the competitors for new openings.
“BECAUSE YOUNG MEN ARE RARER, THEY’RE MORE VALUED.”
Girls were doing better academically than boys by almost every measure. More than 56 percent of undergraduate college students were female, and their rates of graduation were better. But few schools wanted a student body in which girls vastly outnumbered boys, and colleges were prepared to forgive inferior male grades and achievements in order to keep the sexes balanced. “The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants,” wrote Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions at Kenyon, in the New York Times essay “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected.” She wondered what messages the nation was “sending young women that they must, nearly twenty-five years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges,” then apologized “for the demographic realities.”
