by Gail Collins
Most women had no idea how to obtain an abortion, which was illegal everywhere until the late 1960s. Maria, who was Catholic, never considered the option. Consulting her parish priest, she went to a home for unwed mothers in a nearby city. She was interviewed on arrival by a “kind, compassionate, and practical” woman who told her that the baby’s chances of being adopted would be low. The man who fathered Maria’s baby was blind, and at a time when adoptive parents had a large supply of illegitimate babies to choose from, any hint of a possible imperfection could be disqualifying. “She said even though it couldn’t be genetically passed on to my son, that he would be very difficult to adopt if it was known that one of his parents was not sighted. And she told me that I seemed like a nice girl and she believed… that I would make a good mother.”
When Maria decided to keep her son, her mother told her that a baby is always a wonderful thing and behaved “like an angel,” her daughter recalled. But otherwise, “I became an outcast.” She had trouble finding a landlord who would rent to an unmarried mother, and she lost her job. “I think they probably thought I was a bad example in the college atmosphere and so forth.” And far worse trouble was around the corner. “About a year and a half later, I was pregnant again. And I was really up a creek.”
When she got the news, Maria broke down in the doctor’s office. “Everybody’s going to think that I’m a whore,” she cried.
“Whores don’t get pregnant,” the doctor said. “They’re smarter than that.”
“REMEMBER, ALL OF US HAD TAKEN THE PILL.”
The Pill had been developed by Dr. Gregory Pincus, a biologist recruited by Margaret Sanger, who was more successful in revolutionizing medical contraception than she was in lobbying the Connecticut state legislature. It posed unique questions when it came to safety. Unlike most medication, it was intended to be taken over long periods of time by healthy women. Risks that might seem acceptable if you were, say, controlling diabetes loomed a lot larger if there was no disease to cure. Cases of blood clotting were reported, and women began to worry that they were being put at risk of heart attacks or strokes. The Food and Drug Administration began research, and in 1970 a Senate committee headed by Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin held hearings on the Pill’s safety. Some women immediately noticed that all the senators doing the investigating were male—no small surprise, since 99 percent of the Senate was of one gender and Margaret Chase Smith couldn’t be everywhere. But all the people invited to speak were men as well. Barbara Seaman, the author of the powerful book The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, had not been invited. There were no women scientists or consumers who had experienced bad effects. “Remember, all of us had taken the Pill, so we were there as activists, but also as concerned women,” said Alice Wolfson, who led a protest that disrupted the proceedings.
The FDA eventually ordered that birth control pills come with an insert describing possible health risks, and a Gallup survey found that 18 percent of those who had been taking the Pill stopped. Many turned to intrauterine devices (IUDs)—until the most popular model, known as the Dalkon Shield, had to be pulled from the market due to questions about its own safety. Meanwhile, researchers were discovering that the Pill was far stronger than necessary. Gradually, the amount of estrogen dropped to less than a third of what was in the earliest versions, and progesterone to less than a tenth. The controversy over the Pill died away, but it turned out to be only the first shot in what would become a long-running feud between American women and the traditional medical community.
For generations, women had been American doctors’ best clients and abused guinea pigs. When physicians learned how to use a hypodermic syringe in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the first things they did was to inject opium or morphine into their patients, sometimes on a daily basis, creating legions of addicted housewives. Surgeons removed reproductive organs in women who showed signs of promiscuity or masturbation, and castrated more than 100,000 around the turn of the century. And although those abuses were long over by the 1960s, there was still a widespread presumption that a woman’s uterus became useless once she passed childbearing age and should be removed—often along with her ovaries—for minor problems or as a precaution against disease developing in the future. When a doctor discovered a lump in a patient’s breast, it was standard procedure to have the woman sign a form consenting to have the entire breast removed even before the biopsy was performed. (Susan Ford, whose mother, Betty, saved many American women’s lives by being open about her mastectomy when she was first lady, noted that in those days, the patient woke up to discover she “either had a Band-Aid or no breast.”)
Doctors, who were overwhelmingly male, had an authoritarian attitude toward all patients in the postwar era, but they saw more women, and they were particularly inclined to treat female patients as children who panicked easily and were better off knowing as little as possible. When 23-year-old Barbara Winslow of Seattle found a lump in her breast, she and her husband went to a doctor. He told them that he would do a biopsy and that if it proved malignant, he would immediately perform a complete mastectomy. He then handed a consent form to her husband to sign. When Winslow asked why she was not the one asked to give permission, the doctor said, “Because women are too emotionally and irrationally tied to their breasts.” Nora Ephron wrote that it seemed every week brought “a new gynecological atrocity tale. A friend who specifically asks not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect of penicillin. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: ‘Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?’ ”
In 1969 a small group of women in Boston decided to get together and share their “feelings of frustration and anger toward… doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgmental, and noninformative.” As time went on, the group felt it was on to something worth sharing. The members created a course on women and their bodies that in turn became the basis for Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book that talked simply and explicitly about sex, birth control, venereal disease, lesbianism, childbirth, and menopause. Lessons on anatomy and basic biology were interspersed with personal testimony, offering the reader the comforting sense that whatever she was feeling or was worried about had happened to somebody else before. “I will tell you that a book we all had was Our Bodies, Ourselves,” said Kathy Hinderhofer, who went to college in the early ’70s. “You had to have that.” Other women started medical self-help projects, some focusing on informal classes that trained students in basics such as breast examinations, and others evolving into full-blown medical clinics. (A few went over the deep end and began urging women to extract their monthly menstrual flow and perform do-it-yourself abortions with a syringe.) By 1975 nearly two thousand projects were scattered across the United States.
“IT IS AS EASY AS BEING THE LOG ITSELF.”
The sexual revolution was about more than whether women should be able to feel as free as men to have sex before marriage. It was also about whether women—single or married—had as much right to enjoy sex. Most postwar manuals on how couples could improve their physical relationship centered on the man. The woman’s role pretty much involved lying there. The experts did not generally go as far as the authors of Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, an influential postwar diatribe against the nontraditional female that decreed that for a woman, having sex was “not as easy as rolling off a log…. It is easier. It is as easy as being the log itself.” But they almost all seemed to disapprove of too much aggressive activity on her part. And there was a virtual consensus that women should attain satisfaction from conventional penetration.
Many women had little information about what went on in other people’s bedrooms. The popular magazines were vague, and what specifics they did impart were about how to make husbands happy, not how to give wives sexual satisfaction. In a 1957 article
called “How to Love Your Husband” in Coronet, for instance, author Hannah Lees approvingly described an interview with an “unselfish” wife who admitted, in the language of the era, to faking orgasms:
“I have never had that feeling,” she said, “that wild emotion that many other women have. But my husband, he expects it. I love him. So I try to make him happy.” She spread her hands and shrugged, and her face was soft and tender…. Maybe her husband was missing something by not having a wife who could match his strong physical need with hers. But I had an idea it made no difference.
Even Helen Gurley Brown, so eager to encourage her readers to have affairs, was silent about what a single girl should do if she didn’t enjoy the sex—except to suggest seeing a psychiatrist. And less than half of married women and 38 percent of single women said they talked frankly about sex with their friends or female relatives, according to that famous Gallup survey. Even if they did share confidences, what they learned could often be misleading. Jane Alpert, a high school student in the early ’60s, was part of a cool bohemian crowd in Queens. Her role model, Beatrice, “the first girl I knew who claimed not to be a virgin,” bragged to Alpert that she had had vaginal orgasms, “which were the best kind.”
While their mothers had not necessarily been reared to expect real physical pleasure from lovemaking, the postwar generation wanted intimacy and partnership in every aspect of marriage. Many women who failed to get much pleasure themselves found solace in creating the illusion of success by writhing, moaning, and simulating orgasm. (Robin Morgan said that when she confessed to her husband that she often faked orgasm with him, she was convinced “I was the only woman in the world sick enough to have done this.”) It was no wonder that experts suspected more than half of American women were “frigid.”
Many women got reeducated by Human Sexual Response. The book, which was published in 1966 by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, was the product of eleven years of direct laboratory observation of nearly seven hundred people who had volunteered to have sex while the authors ran cameras and measured their heart and brain activity. Masters and Johnson found, among many, many other things, that women were capable of more intense and enduring sexual response than men, and that, contrary to what Jane Alpert’s best friend told her, vaginal orgasms were not the best kind. While the book itself was written in hard-to-read scientific terminology, it was interpreted, summarized, explained, and debated all over the mainstream media for the rest of the decade.
Women began to argue—out loud—that the right to satisfying sexual experience was important, perhaps right up there with equal pay. In 1970 “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” an essay by Anne Koedt, explained that the reason “the so-called frigidity rate among women is phenomenally high” was because men were looking for their mates’ orgasms in the wrong place. In a call to action that was copied, reprinted, and shared all around the country, Koedt urged, “We must begin to demand that if certain sexual positions now defined as ‘standard’ are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they no longer be defined as standard.”
American society had always given women only one big responsibility when it came to sex—stopping boyfriends from going too far. Now they seemed to be in charge of everything, from providing the birth control to making sure they had orgasms. A great deal of research was obviously required. Workshops sprouted up on college campuses, offering women tips on all sorts of hitherto-undiscussed matters. Arriving at Antioch as a freshman, Alison Foster showed up for a meeting of the campus women’s group. About half an hour into the proceedings, she recalled, “everybody was supposed to look at their cervix. We all got little mirrors.” Nora Ephron, reporting on similar gatherings in New York, commented, “It is hard not to long for the days when an evening with the girls meant bridge.”
“… THIS VELVET BATHROBE.”
The sexual revolution was only one part of an extraordinary era, when a large number of relatively privileged young people felt free to plan the reinvention of the world, confident that the world would pay attention. They had an unprecedented amount of time to devote to the task because the still-booming economy made it easy to drop in and out of the job market at will. The cost of living was very low, particularly for those who were willing to share space in a rural farmhouse or urban tenement. Travel was cheap, and airlines gave students special passes that allowed them to fly standby for cut-rate prices. When you got to wherever you were going, there was almost always a bed where you could crash for the night in the apartments of fellow members of the youth culture.
Political activists shut down their universities over the war in Vietnam, free speech, or the administration’s failure to accept their advice on matters ranging from how to invest the endowment to where to locate the new gym. And even the most apolitical took part in the cultural revolution—a ’60s watchword for everything from hippie communes to the Beatles. Standards for fashion and physical appearance underwent a drastic makeover. Clothes became comfortable, colorful, and dramatic. Girls tie-dyed everything, dipping knotted fabric into bright colors to produce psychedelic patterns. (“I ruined many a sink in the dorm,” recalled Barbara Arnold.) They bought long, loose-fitting peasant dresses and blouses and vintage clothes. “I was really part of that hippie, thrift-store, make-your-own-blouses-out-of-your-mother’s-linen-tablecloth scene,” said Alison Foster. She still has a very clear memory of the moment she stopped liking anything the department stores sold and gave her patronage to the secondhand shops downtown. “I’d go to the East Village and buy funky furs and velvet coats…. I loved that stuff.” When it was time to dress up for Sunday dinner at her boarding school, Foster donned “this velvet bathrobe—which I thought was the height of sophistication. It wasn’t even mine. It was my roommate’s, but I wore it as many times as I could get away with it.” The whole point, she concluded, was being creative “and not looking like our parents. That was very important to me. I look at kids now and I’m wearing very similar clothes to what a lot of the girls wear. But those days I didn’t want to look like my parents.”
It was nothing personal. Alison Foster got along very well with her mother, Anne Wallach. She had not minded being the only girl in her circle whose mother worked, “and I liked it that she didn’t hover.” Still, whether a young woman adored her mother or loathed her, if she grew up in the ’60s, she probably vowed that her life would be far different—more exciting, less concerned about what the neighbors would think, more in touch with her feelings, more real. (Or, as Wellesley College’s 1969 student commencement speaker, Hillary Rodham, put it: “A more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living.”) And no matter what else she did to align herself with the revolutions at hand, clothing marked her as part of the brave new world of change and adventure.
Everything was supposed to be natural. Some women stopped shaving their legs, which quickly turned into a political issue. There was, recalled Anselma Dell’Olio, “a tendency to gauge one’s feminist credentials by look, address, and degree of hairiness.” (A letter writer to the Times denounced “arm-pit Feminists, women whose involvement with the ethic of body hair has overpowered other considerations.”) It was easy to wear shorter skirts because panty hose had arrived on the scene. Basically the same leotards that dancers had always worn, panty hose quickly displaced stockings as the undergarment of choice. (Wendy Woythaler’s mother was shocked at the idea of throwing out two legs’ worth of panty hose when only one had a run in it, so she cut off the offending legs and told her daughter to wear a pair with a good right leg over a pair with a good left. “Oh God, it was awful.” Woythaler sighed.) And it was easy not to bother with skirts at all, because by the end of the decade women had given themselves permission to spend their entire lives in jeans if they felt like it. “I used to have to go to an army/navy store to buy blue jeans,” recalled Alison Foster. “There was a point where nobody sold blue jeans. And then everybody sold blue jeans.”
Black women let their hair blossom out into Afros, and white col
lege students let theirs fall straight down their backs, banishing the nighttime roller routine. Neither style, unfortunately, was always as easy to achieve in reality as in theory. Most white women did not actually have perfectly straight hair, and many resorted to ironing it. Some black women discovered that their hair, when left to its own volition, just hung there. “I decided I was going to show some of my blackness and have this Afro,” said Tawana Hinton. “My hair was long, and I did it by trying to roll it and wet it…. It didn’t work. It didn’t last but a minute, you know.” Josie Bass, who had given up trying to get her hair to cooperate, was invited to a dance at the University of Maryland by a student she fancied, who himself sported an impressive Afro, so she went downtown and invested in an Afro wig. She was so intent on her errand she didn’t really notice that one of the many urban riots of the era was beginning to break out. “The dance was canceled and I never wore that wig.” She laughed.
“I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY PERSON LIKE THAT IN THE WORLD.”
It looked for a while as though the sexual revolution applied to only heterosexuals. “The whole idea of homosexuality made me profoundly uneasy,” said Betty Friedan. The leader of the National Organization for Women had a tactical concern about the fact that opponents had tried to undermine the movement by depicting it as a lesbian cabal. But beyond that, it was pretty clear Friedan, like many Americans, was just uncomfortable with “the whole idea.”
For most of history, lesbianism was so little understood that it was actually pretty easy for gay women to live out their lives in peace and quiet. (When Martha Peterson, the Barnard president who fought the Linda LeClair wars, died in 2006 at the age of 90, the Times obituary surprised many alumnae when it reported that she was “survived by her companion, Dr. Maxine Bennett.”) Women had always slept together—the draftiness of most homes made cuddling up in bed extremely popular. And they had traditionally expressed their friendship for one another in intense terms that involved kissing and hugging and declarations of love. The shortage of men after major wars created a large population of unmarried women who often lived together. No one ever thought they were sharing their lives for any reason beyond companionship and convenience.