America's Women

by Gail Collins

  “THEY’VE MESSED WITH THE WRONG ONE NOW”

  Black communities that had sent their sons to die in two world wars were losing patience with the rigors of the Jim Crow South, and they started to fight back, with court suits and, later, direct action in which they dared officials to arrest them for exercising their rights as Americans. It was fitting that the first of the civil rights struggles to capture the nation’s attention involved a woman on a bus. Ever since the Civil War, the humiliation of boarding a train in one’s best clothes, only to be herded off to a dirty and smelly segregated car, and the frustration of having to wait for a “colored-only” trolley while cars for whites sailed by, had caused black women to explode in acts of defiance. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells-Barnett, and dozens of less famous names had gone to court—or to jail—over their right to equal use of public transit. It was the sorest of sore points, and if there was a perfect example of the way segregated transportation demeaned black patrons, it was the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Two-thirds of its patrons were black, and most of them were women who traveled to and from jobs as domestic workers. The first ten rows of seats were reserved for whites. Beyond that, the bus driver made up the rules, backed by the authority of a gun. “Some drivers made black passengers step in the front door and pay their fare, and then we had to get off and go around to the black door and get on,” said Rosa Parks. “Often before the black passengers got around to the back door, the bus would take off without them.” If the bus was crowded and a white passenger was forced to stand, the drivers made one of the black riders give up a seat, even if an elderly woman was giving way to a white teenager.

  The arbitrariness of it all made degrading incidents inevitable. Jo Ann Robinson, a teacher at the local black college, Alabama State, was one of the lucky people who owned a car and never had to ride the bus. But she decided to leave her car home when she went to catch a flight to Cleveland for the 1949 Christmas holidays. She was “happy as I had ever been in my life” when she dragged her two suitcases on the bus, which had only two other passengers, and unthinkingly walked back and took a seat in the fifth row. The driver stopped the bus and screamed at her to get up, sending her, weeping, out the door. The experience haunted her for the rest of her life. Robinson became a member of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of middle-class black Montgomery residents that had been pressing the city to end some of its most hated practices. By 1955, the women were ready to take on the bus system, mobilized by the arrest of two black teenage girls who had been dragged off to jail for refusing to obey drivers’ dictates. They organized for a bus boycott, preparing fliers and press releases, but Montgomery’s black male leaders found the girls too socially downscale to qualify as proper test cases. Then in early December, Rosa Parks, an eminently respectable seamstress, the kind of lady who wore white gloves and rimless glasses, was riding home from work when the white section of the bus filled up and the driver told her to move. She stayed where she was and the driver threatened to have her arrested.

  “You may do that,” Parks said.

  The legend that built up around the incident, which would turn out to be one of the critical events in the American civil rights movement, was that Parks, a simple woman exhausted from a hard day at work, took her stand because she was tired. In truth, she had been moving toward that moment of defiance all her life. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she explained later. Parks was the product of everything that had happened to black women in American history, and one of the results was that she may have had as many white ancestors as black. Her family tree included a Yankee soldier and at least one Indian. Her grandmother’s father was a Scotch-Irish indentured servant who married an African American slave. Her grandfather was the son of a white plantation owner and a mixed-blood slave, both of whom died when he was young. The overseer treated the orphan boy with particular brutality, beating and starving him until Parks’s grandfather developed an intense resentment of white people, even though he could easily pass for white himself. Under his influence, she chafed at facts of black life in the South that many of her friends simply tried to ignore. Her husband, Raymond Parks, won her by telling her about his efforts to raise money for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths who had been sentenced to die in a trumped-up rape case. She began trying to register to vote in 1943, when only a few dozen blacks in Montgomery had managed to overcome the hurdles of shifting office hours, complicated qualification tests, and poll taxes that had been set up for the very purpose of excluding them. She had also attended the Highlander Folk School in Mississippi, where civil rights organizers were trained.

  The petite, tidily dressed middle-aged lady on the bus in Montgomery was, in a word, more of a powerhouse than she seemed. Parks said later that she had no intention of challenging the system that day when she started the ride on the Cleveland Avenue bus and wound up in a jail cell, listening to the romantic problems of a cellmate until her husband and friends came to bail her out. But the leaders of the black community knew they had found in her the perfect test case. “My God, look what segregation has put in my hands,” said her euphoric lawyer. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council began mimeographing 35,000 handbills, calling for a one-day boycott on the day of Parks’s court appearance.

  The perfect client went to court on Monday, December 5, 1955, wearing a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and collar and a small velvet hat with pearls across the top. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” trilled a girl in the crowd. At a mass meeting that night, local black residents packed the Holt Street Baptist Church, where a reporter for the city’s white daily found a crowd with “almost military discipline combined with emotion” listening passionately to a local minister who the reporter did not recognize, but would learn later was Martin Luther King Jr. They voted to boycott the city bus system indefinitely, sang hymns, and scrambled for the chance to put money in the hats that were being passed around. Rosa Parks was given a standing ovation, but she was not given a chance to speak on a night in which virtually every black man in Montgomery wanted a moment in the spotlight. “You’ve said enough,” one of the leaders assured her.

  The boycott lasted for more than a year, as the blacks of Montgomery stunned the nation, and probably themselves, with the depth of their determination. It made Martin Luther King a national name. In later years Reverend King always acknowledged that the boycott was actually organized by other people, although he never went out of his way to identify them. He rose on the shoulders of women like Jo Ann Robinson, who risked losing the university teaching job she loved in order to get the boycott under way, and the thousands and thousands of black women who walked to work rather than break the strike, braving not only the elements but also white motorists who pelted them with water balloons, rotten eggs, and vegetables. King urged one old lady to go back to riding the bus because he felt she was too frail to keep walking, but the woman insisted she would honor the boycott like everyone else. “Yes, my feets is tired, but my soul is rested,” she said. Many years later, E. D. Nixon, the black Montgomery lawyer who represented Rosa Parks, met a woman on an airplane who told him she couldn’t imagine what would have happened to black people if Martin Luther King had not come to Montgomery. “I said, ‘If Mrs. Parks had got up and given that white man her seat you’d never aheard of Rev. King.’”

  Although de facto segregation held sway in the entire nation, it had been codified in law and blood in the South—Ruby Hurley, a black New Yorker who moved to Birmingham in 1951, discovered a city ordinance that banned blacks and whites from playing checkers together. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that the concept of segregated school systems was unconstitutional, a few young southern African Americans—mainly women—attempted to enroll in the far superior white schools in their towns. The result was a series of violent images that shocked the rest of the nation. Autherine Lucy, who became the first black student ever to enter the University of Alabama, had to
be driven from one class to the next through a crowd of people yelling, “Let’s kill her.” They shattered the car window and threw things at her when she jumped out to run into the building. She prayed, she said later, “to be able to see the time when I would be able to complete my work on the campus, but if it was not the will of God that I do this, that he give me the courage to accept the fact that I would lose my life there….” Neither came to pass—the university administration suspended her, saying it was for her own safety, and then expelled her for insubordination when her lawyer criticized the suspension.

  Daisy Bates, the head of the NAACP in Little Rock, Arkansas, recruited black students to enroll in the city’s all-white high school, and in 1955 she and some local ministers escorted five girls and three boys through a howling crowd to the steps of Central High School, where a federal judge had ordered that they be admitted. A ninth student, tiny fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, came by herself due to a mixup in arrangements. She struggled through a crowd of angry whites waving bats and screaming, “Lynch her!” A photographer caught a picture of Eckford, looking stolid behind her glasses, clasping her books with her thin arms, while behind her a young woman named Hazel Bryan shrieked, “Go back to Africa.” The students eventually attended the school under the protection of federal marshals, and when they were not ignored and snubbed, they were assaulted and harassed. Every morning they met at Daisy Bates’s home to prepare themselves for the day, and every evening they went back to discuss what had happened. Bates, the daughter of a woman who had been raped and murdered by a group of never-identified white men, was the heroine of the Little Rock story, an integration effort that Harry Ashmore, editor of the Arkansas Gazette, said often depended almost entirely on her “raw courage.” It cost her the newspaper business that she and her husband had spent sixteen years building. She was jailed and threatened, and the Ku Klux Klan burned an eight-foot cross on her front lawn.

  Years later, the country would look back on those battles of the 1950s as a time when people fought for such obvious justice—the right to sit on a public bus or to go to a public school. But neither Rosa Parks nor Autherine Lucy nor Daisy Bates and the Little Rock students knew that the victories they sought against what seemed like almost universal white opposition would be won so completely. Years later, Montgomery officials honored the day a forty-two-year-old seamstress refused to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus by changing the street’s name to Rosa Parks Boulevard. Autherine Lucy would return to the University of Alabama to lecture to a history class, and her presence on campus seemed so natural that the local papers never even noticed it occurred. In 1999, the Little Rock students received congressional medals from President Bill Clinton, a former Arkansas governor. Elizabeth Eckford, who had a career in the army, exchanged salutes with her commander in chief. On the fortieth anniversary of her walk to school through the shrieking crowd, Eckford posed for newspaper photos outside the school with Hazel Bryan Massery, her former tormenter. Massery had called Eckford in 1962 “to apologize for my hateful actions.” Later, the two women became friends.

  The only person absent from the ceremony was Daisy Bates, who had died a few days earlier at age eighty-two and been buried only a few hours before. Ernest Green, one of the students she had nurtured and counseled, who had grown up to become a managing director at a Washington brokerage firm and a confidant of the president, laid a wreath on behalf of the Little Rock Nine at the foot of her coffin, which lay in state in the Arkansas capitol.

  19

  The Sixties: The Pendulum Swings Back with a Vengeance

  “YOU SHOULD SEE MY LITTLE SIS”

  In 1960, Ernest Evans, an aspiring singer who took the stage name Chubby Checker, became famous with his version of the dance tune “The Twist.” The song was so popular it hit number one twice—in 1960 when teenagers started twisting, and again in 1962 when adults discovered the pleasures of a dance that you could perform without any lessons or even much sense of rhythm. It also produced a sort of social liberation for American girls because the Twist was the first universally popular dance in which a couple never touched. You rotated your hips, swung your arms, and moved your feet in time to the music. Theoretically your partner was somewhere nearby, but he was not leading, or even necessarily dancing the same steps. “Oh you should see my little sis,” Chubby Checker sang. “She really knows how to rock. She knows how to twist.” Throughout the twentieth century, girls had been better at dancing than boys, but they had always been trapped by the necessity of following the man. The Twist, which was succeeded by many, many other variations on the same theme, freed girls to enjoy themselves without having to match what they were doing with their partner. They actually didn’t even need a partner, and as time went on it became easier and more socially acceptable for a girl who wanted to get up and dance to simply go and do it.

  Outside of the dance floor, the cultural revolution everyone associates with the sixties was slow to arrive. A Ladies’ Home Journal poll in 1962 found that among the young women it surveyed, almost all “expect to be married by 22. Most want four children…many want…to work until children come; afterward, a resounding no!” The respondents, between sixteen and twenty-one years old, said they felt a “special responsibility” for holding the line when it came to sex.

  Girls were being warned in sex education classes that using tampons was the equivalent of a loss of virginity. When they had their periods, most wore rather bulky sanitary napkins that were kept in place with pins or a suspension belt. They were still sleeping on oversized hair rollers, shopping for hope chest linen while they were in braces, and watching TV housewives cook while wearing what appeared to be party dresses. It would be a few more years before Mary Tyler Moore caused a sensation when she showed up on The Dick Van Dyke Show as Laura Petri, who wore pants while she ran the vacuum cleaner. But Laura and her husband still slept in twin beds.

  When things changed, they changed fast. Only a few years after Mary Tyler Moore’s sartorial breakthrough, middle-class audiences were flocking to see Hair, the musical that arrived on Broadway in 1968 with its celebration of nudity, draft card burning, and oral and anal sex. White women threw away their curlers and wore their hair long and straight, or cut in a helmetlike bob; African American women competed with the men to see who could adopt the biggest and most natural-looking Afro. Tights, which had always been reserved for dancers, became the most basic item of underwear for many young women, replacing stockings and girdles. Tights were not only more comfortable, they were critical for a modicum of modesty, because the miniskirt had arrived, and kept getting minier by the hour. “Every week the skirts seemed too long again until we had them so high they barely covered our behinds,” wrote Sara Davidson in her memoir Loose Change. “With our legs swinging loose and exposed to the air, we felt frisky and reckless.” It’s hard not to keep making comparisons to the 1920s, when rising hemlines were also a bid for freedom and comfort. And in both eras, most women had difficulty getting in the proper shape for those liberating fashions. A fashion article that Davidson read equated the ideal leg with “a round little pole…with absolutely no calf. To be stuck with legs and calves is just too crass for words.” Even the willowy Davidson found she “had to diet manicly” to look right in the minis. “Twiggy was the standard,” she said. Twiggy was Leslie Hornby, a 90-pound British teenager who had been discovered while working as a shampoo girl in a London beauty shop and turned into the world’s most famous model by the time she was seventeen. Her sticklike figure (31-22-32), pale skin, and huge eyes defined the sixties look. While American teenagers had been obsessed with dieting long before Twiggy hit the magazine covers, her status as the ideal of the era made it certain that virtually nobody was ever going to be happy with the shape of her body again. (Twiggy wasn’t particularly happy with hers, either. Asked once whether she had the figure of the future, the model replied, “It’s not really what you call a figure, is it?”)

  “GREGORY, CAN’T YOU DEVISE
SOME SORT OF PILL FOR THIS PURPOSE?”

  Margaret Sanger had traveled quite a route since the days when she got arrested for passing out birth control literature to the working-class housewives of Brooklyn. She had moved to the right, fallen in with the eugenics movement, married a millionaire, and been widowed. But she never lost sight of her consuming goal of giving women the power to decide if and when they wanted to be pregnant. Sanger’s passion was finding more efficient forms of birth control, and in 1951 she had a get-acquainted dinner with Gregory Pincus, a brilliant research scientist who shared her interest. They talked about the difficulty of finding a family planning method that could be used effectively in India. “Gregory, can’t you devise some sort of pill for this purpose?” Sanger asked.

  “I’ll try,” responded Pincus.

  Sanger eventually put Pincus in touch with Katharine McCormick, the widow of the heir to the McCormick reaper fortune. She was a remarkable woman, who had come from a wealthy Boston family but found herself less interested in society than in science. She obtained a B.S. from MIT in 1904, and then married Stanley McCormick, a childhood friend. When her husband began to show signs of schizophrenia, McCormick devoted much of their money and her energy in attempting to find a cure. She was convinced that the problem was medical, and possibly hereditary, and her own decision to avoid having children may have led to her interest in family planning. She became friends with Sanger and helped her smuggle diaphragms from Europe to New York. When Stanley McCormick died and Katharine received control of his vast fortune, she told Sanger she was interested in helping support contraceptive research. She pledged $10,000 a year to underwrite Pincus’s work, which quickly grew to hundreds of thousands, and finally a total of $2 million.