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

by Gail Collins

  Hillary Clinton declined to say much about Palin except vague congratulations on her nomination, but the sudden ascent of another very different female politician must have been a torture piled on the already enormous disappointment of losing the Democratic nomination. Saturday Night Live aired a hilarious sketch that depicted Clinton and Palin issuing a joint statement against sexism in the campaign. “You know, Hillary and I don’t agree on everything,” began Tina Fey, playing Palin.

  “Anything,” interjected Amy Poehler, playing Clinton.

  The skit ended with Palin sweetly stating that, whatever their politics, everyone agreed “it’s time for a woman to make it to the White House,” and Hillary shouting, “I didn’t want a woman to be president! I wanted to be president!”

  “THESE GUYS ARE JERKS.”

  As the campaign moved into its final stretch and voters became frightened by the collapsing economy, Palin’s appeal dwindled. Her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric may have marked the beginning of the end for the Republican ticket—as well as the resurrection of Couric’s reputation as a great television interviewer. People began to notice that the Republican vice presidential candidate had a penchant for run-on sentences that trailed off into incomprehensibility. And the sentences, when deconstructed, suggested a minimal grounding in major issues. On the famous question of why she felt Alaska’s proximity to Russia counted as foreign-policy experience, Palin told Couric, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s just right over the border, it is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to our state.” The McCain campaign’s insistence that Palin’s strength lay in her connection to average voters began to look patronizing. When she was unable to name any Supreme Court decision she had ever disagreed with except for Roe v. Wade, a McCain adviser told Newsweek, “The Court is very important, but Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans.”

  In the end, women voters stuck to their old pattern of voting the candidate, not the gender. There was no Palin Effect: Obama won with a 7 percent gender gap, as women favored the Democratic ticket 56 to 43, while men gave McCain a narrow edge. Some of the McCain staffers angrily leaked stories intended to blame the defeat on Palin: She had spent $150,000 of the party’s money on clothes for herself and her family. She had refused to prepare for the Couric interview. She was so uninformed she thought Africa was a country, not a continent. Palin, back in Alaska, said the leaks were “cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and these guys are jerks.”

  The clothes issue was always a tender point for female politicians. (Reporters on Hillary Clinton’s plane had posted a chart tracking the color of her pantsuits, which some claimed became almost as reliable as a calendar.) But the treatment Palin got for the wardrobe story wasn’t much worse than the scorn heaped on John Edwards, a liberal Democrat, for his expensive haircuts. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine a campaign trashing any male vice presidential candidate the way Palin was vilified, with complaints about “diva” behavior, “wacko” comments, and the anecdote about her letting male aides into her hotel room wearing nothing but a bath towel.

  “MAYBE IT’S TIME WE LET A WOMAN LEAD US.”

  Palin wound up the only one of the four national candidates of whom the majority of voters said they had an unfavorable view. But the failure of her candidacy was not a failure for women. At the very minimum, it was a triumph that voters did not seem to regard her floundering as a commentary on anything but Palin herself. On a more positive note, she won over many voters who had tended in the past to be hostile to the whole concept of a woman in the White House. She had a special affinity with younger working-class men. They liked the way she talked about hunting and hockey, and introduced her husband as first dude. They saw her as one of their own, rather than as an outsider parachuting in to tell them how to behave. Younger men with no college education were the people who had always been most threatened by women in the workplace and often the ones most resistant to any idea of being bossed by a woman anywhere. In a somewhat roundabout way, Palin made many of them converts to a new way of thinking. “They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,” a former truck driver told a reporter during a Palin rally in North Carolina.

  People spent nearly two years talking about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and while both women lost, their races had transformed the political conversation. By the time the campaign was over, the idea that women could hold any governmental post, no matter how powerful, was so ingrained that people hardly bothered to take note of the fact that in 2009 the Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line of succession after the vice president, was a woman, Nancy Pelosi. And the secretary of state, fourth in succession, would turn out to be Clinton herself. Forty years after the Nixon administration had been so deeply unenthusiastic about the idea of trying to put a woman in the cabinet, the country had seen women running virtually every segment of the federal government. When Barack Obama began selecting his administration, there was no speculation about whether it would include any women in the most powerful posts because it was inconceivable that it would not.

  “YOU WEAR SLACKS EVERYWHERE NOW.”

  Meanwhile, Tahita Jenkins, 33, was fired from her job as a New York City bus driver because she refused to wear slacks. “I said, I’m not going to change my religious beliefs just to be a bus driver,” she told the media. Jenkins, a single mother, was a member of a Pentecostal church that prohibited women from wearing men’s clothing. She brought in a note from her pastor, but transit officials insisted that wearing pants was a safety matter. There was, they said, a danger that a skirt “could get caught on something.”

  It seems only fair to finish where we started. It had been half a century since American women were publicly humiliated for offenses such as trying to pay a traffic ticket while wearing slacks, and Jenkins is a good reminder that there’s no one story to show what that journey meant. So is Edna Kleimeyer, the Cincinnati housewife who had never managed to break her twelve-minute record for ironing a shirt. Kleimeyer was moving on to a retirement home in 2007 when she went through her pile of clothing and realized she owned only one skirt. “You wear slacks everywhere now,” she mused. “Everywhere.” If the changes in women’s lives over the last century had gone no farther than the right to wear pants, it would still have made a practical day-to-day difference. And some people would still have felt things had gone too far.

  So there you are. American women had shattered the ancient traditions that deprived them of independence and power and the right to have adventures of their own, and done it so thoroughly that few women under 30 had any real concept that things had ever been different. The feminist movement of the late twentieth century created a new United States in which women ran for president, fought for their country, argued before the Supreme Court, performed heart surgery, directed movies, and flew into space. But it did not resolve the tensions of trying to raise children and hold down a job at the same time. Women demolished the sexual double standard and reared new generations of men who appreciated the concept of equal rights for both sexes, even if they did not always act on it. But women did not figure out how to keep marriage from crumbling into divorce, and they were not particularly successful in making their lovers grow into dependable husbands. They had not remade the world the way the revolutionaries had hoped. But they had created a world their female ancestors did not even have the opportunity to imagine. And they still wore silly, impractical shoes.

  EPILOGUE

  Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved into the new century at the peak of her power and influence. At 75, she was healthy and energetic, and in love with her work, which she pursued with a vigor that continued to exhaust her youthful clerks. When the nation’s highe
st court took up a critical constitutional issue, the outcome depended, more often than not, on her opinion. But her husband, John, was failing. A victim of Alzheimer’s disease, he had been stable for a number of years, continuing to accompany his wife on their nightly rounds of the Washington social scene and spending his days in her office, chatting with the staff and visitors. Then in 2005 he began to decline. Determined not to turn his care over to outsiders, Justice O’Connor resigned at the end of the court term in June, going overnight from the most influential woman in the nation to a retiree, alone with a husband who was slipping away. “In those first days after her announcement she didn’t answer the phone too often,” reported Jeffrey Toobin. “She sat in her office and cried.”

  Her sacrifice could not save John from the curtain that was falling on his mind. In 2007 she was no longer able to care for him. He was moved into an assisted-living center, where he was miserable and talked of suicide—until he met another Alzheimer’s patient and fell in love. It was not unusual, doctors said, for people whose memories of their former life had vanished to suddenly find romance with someone new, and it was often a terrible trauma for the loved ones they had forgotten. But O’Connor regarded it as a blessing. Her son told a Phoenix television station that his mother was “thrilled” that his father was happy, and would visit with John while he sat on the porch swing, holding hands with his new love, blissfully unaware that the stranger he was chatting with was his wife of fifty-five years, and the woman who had given up a Supreme Court seat for him.

  No social movement, no matter how liberating, can bring permanent happiness to the people it touches. We grow old; we lose loved ones. We fall short of our greatest goals and fail to live up to our most optimistic visions of our own character. When history opened up to American women in the late twentieth century, it did not offer them perfect bliss. It gave them the opportunity to face the dark moments on their own terms and to exalt in the spaces between. Here is an update on what it brought to some of the women in this story.

  When the women’s liberation movement was beginning to erupt in New York and Los Angeles, Louise Meyer Warpness was living in a different world, pursuing a Wyoming farm life that was closer to the patterns of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. But in America, change always arrives eventually. Louise’s daughters worked outside the home, and the youngest lived with her future husband before they married. One of her granddaughters is married to an African-American, and another passed through a period of problems with drugs and men before she settled down to marry the father of her baby.

  Warpness still lives in the valley where she raised her family. “As I’ve watched her grow older, I just appreciate her more,” says her daughter Jo. “She does her craft work, her needlework. She is such an artist with that. And still such a wise, wise woman. I still admire my mom to the utmost…. I can call her, and if I’m down, she’ll say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ after I’ve said hello. She just knows us inside. She’ll do anything for anybody. And still so intelligent. She has a brain.”

  In 2002 Sujay Cook became the first woman elected president of the Hampton Ministers’ Conference, the largest gathering of black ministers in the world and the place where she had been once snubbed by the powerful minister who refused to shake her hand. (He, in fact, was the one who nominated her.) Coretta Scott King came to the installation. So did Dorothy Height, the revered leader of black women’s groups who had tried so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to get representation for women at the great March on Washington. So did Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. “I wouldn’t miss this,” Braun said.

  When Reverend Suzan Johnson Cook was called onstage, King, Height, and Braun came on with her. “The place erupted!” she remembered. “They’re standing there holding hands with me and I’m like, Oh my God.”

  Despite all those viewings of Sleeping with the Enemy, Barbara Arnold’s daughter, Alex, fell in love in college and decided she wanted to get married right after she graduated. Her mother didn’t fight the idea. “She told me that I’m a lot more independent and sure of myself, which is why she said she was okay with my getting married so young,” said Alex, who wryly noted that she had been exactly as old as Barbara had been when she wed. “I always see her as being really confident and capable, but I guess that was hard-won in her life—that’s coming from her report, not mine.”

  Alex and her husband, David, moved to Washington, where she became the director of communications at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. They had a son in 2007. Soon Alex, who had never been sure how she would decide to handle the work/family divide, returned to her job part-time. “Our generation has backslid in some ways; our mothers really took it forward… ,” she said. “I hope the next generation finds a better balance. Maybe we’re on the verge of that.”

  In 2000 Lynnette Arthur, the daughter of Dana Arthur-Monteleone and the granddaughter of Gloria Vaz who began her liberation by buying a maroon Malibu, went back to college. To her family’s surprise, she “did amazing. I got on the dean’s list and graduated with honors.” Her grandmother proudly framed her diploma and hung it in the living room. She was the first woman in her family to get a college degree. “They were so proud…. Any of my aunts, they probably could have done it, too, but I guess maybe it was a different time in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Lynnette. Now a single mother herself, she is a teacher at a private school in Manhattan, and she is studying for a master’s degree.

  Lorena Weeks, who made legal history with her fight against the restrictions on the kinds of jobs women could do, lives in the house she and Billy built with the money from her Southern Bell settlement. “On Barbara Walters they called it the House That Bell Built,” Lorena said. “I wish they hadn’t done that, because it hurt my husband.” Billy Weeks died in 2000. “If you write anything, don’t put in that my husband was all against the suit,” Lorena added. “He wasn’t. Billy just loved people and he didn’t want to hurt people. He loved his friends and he was too good for his own good, bless his heart.” She has three granddaughters and eight great-grandchildren. “And isn’t it wonderful—five of them are right here within hollering distance.” Her son has his own business in back-to-work rehabilitation. One daughter is a bank officer, and the other is county tax commissioner.

  Sylvia Roberts, Lorena’s attorney, is practicing family law in Baton Rouge. One particular passion, she said, “is preventing teenage dating violence because, boy, once a person gets involved in that, their life is over.” Another is displaced housewives: “Just trying to find a way to make use of women, wherever they are.”

  While Sylvia Acevedo was working as an industrial engineer for IBM, she got word that her unhappy father had snapped completely, killed her mother, and then killed himself. “Now that I’ve done a lot of therapy and worked on it, I can see it went back generations…. I feel much more at peace about it, but for a long time I couldn’t talk about it. I was ashamed,” she said. IBM, she added, provided her with the equivalent of “a sheltered workshop” while she tried to heal. She eventually moved on to jobs in other software firms and started several businesses. Her current company, CommuniCard, creates tools to help employers communicate with Spanish-speaking workers and consults with large organizations on communications issues.

  Not too long ago, Acevedo was helping a client make a pitch to potential investors—“venture capitalists from Northern California. They look at me and they can’t even pronounce my name.” Remembering the old IBM mentor who told her that businessmen would not listen to her until they were assured she was “like them,” Acevedo stopped her presentation and said, “I went to school down the street. You may have heard of it—Stanford? And I was a rocket scientist. So numbers don’t faze me.” After that, she recalled, “They were like, Okay.”

  Unable to find work in Montgomery after the bus boycott, Rosa Parks moved to Detroit, where she supported her mother and disabled husband by sewing and working in a cl
othing factory until Representative John Conyers discovered her plight and hired her as a receptionist. When she died in 2005, her body lay in state in Washington in the Capitol Rotunda—the first woman so honored.

  Linda LeClair, the star of the Barnard cohabitation scandals of the late 1960s, changed her name to Grace LeClair a few years later. “It was like—my name got worn out,” she says. She worked as a community organizer, an anti–nuclear power activist, a founder of a social investment fund, and an advocate for food issues and housing availability. She is now the executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League in New Hampshire. She and Peter Behr, her partner in that famous New York Times story on cohabitation, are still friends. As to her parents, she said, “We’ve always been close. They were not happy about that period at all, but we were never out of a relationship.” A while ago, LeClair was given a copy of a documentary on the sexual revolution that had a whole section on the Barnard protests. She showed it to her two daughters. “It was really exciting for them to see it,” she said. “They’ve heard the story before, in folklore. But it’s like when there were horseless carriages.”