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

by Gail Collins

  By the time she reached 14, Dana had begun drinking and having sex. She became pregnant when she was 15. “Not to say that I got pregnant on purpose, but I kind of wished it would happen,” she said. She and her boyfriend Harry were both happy with the idea. She waited until the end of her first trimester before telling her mother. “I’ll never forget. She just started crying. It was a sad thing. I was very upset because everybody was in mourning and I just couldn’t understand it. We were happy…. I mean, nothing else was going right for me, so I just felt like, wow, that would be cool.” Gloria had become a Jehovah’s Witness, but she left when the congregation ostracized Dana over her pregnancy. “I got disfellowshipped from church,” Dana said. “ ‘Disfellowshipped’—that’s what they call it where you’re not allowed to be spoken to…. It’s a whole process. You have to sit in front of the council and talk about what you did.”

  In 1975 Dana gave birth to her daughter, Lynnette. She was 16, living at home with her mother, and still seeing Harry, who proposed that they get married and that Dana work while he went to medical school. But the image of the displaced homemaker suddenly ditched by her successful husband had already filtered down to an unhappy working-class teenager in New York: “You have your stories of guys going to become a doctor and all of a sudden they’ve outgrown the woman who was drudging, keeping it together. I was like, ‘Uh-uh, not me.’ ”

  Perhaps her own home life gave her a bleak image of marriage or perhaps her childhood weight and school problems had given her a low self-esteem, but Dana never imagined herself as a bride—only a mother. “I never had girlie fantasies about wedding dresses. I just didn’t…. I wanted a baby, I know I really wanted to have a baby…. I just loved children. Children and animals.” Remarkably, Dana successfully finished high school and began studying theater at City College of New York, leaving Lynnette with a babysitter and picking her up in the evening. She took motherhood seriously, reading Dr. Spock’s baby books and doing her homework while she tended Lynnette at night. “I really got into it. I was kind of shy anyway, and now I had a purpose.”

  “WE ALL CHIPPED IN…. I LOVED IT.”

  The big problem for America was not that working wives and single mothers were replacing the stay-at-home spouse in so many households. The world has seen a lot of different family models come and go over the centuries, and there is no real way to demonstrate that a nuclear family like Ozzie and Harriet’s is better than a small interknit tribe or a vast extended family. The problem was that the latest changes were taking place in a society where families tended to be far more isolated and autonomous than in the past. When the stay-at-home mother was removed from the scene, there was often nobody to step in and take her place.

  By the 1970s Barbara Arnold had finished nursing school, married, given birth to a daughter, and moved to Massachusetts. When her husband developed a drinking problem, they parted, to her family’s dismay. “Roman Catholics did not divorce,” she said. “I was the first one to so sin…. My mother really fought hard for me to stay in the marriage, that that was my duty…. My friends got me through it. My neighbors, my coworkers, my Al-Anon friends, that was my support system.” Arnold went to work at a hospice, and when she got an emergency call at night, one of her neighbors would come over to sleep on the couch and make sure her daughter was all right. “It was a truly wonderful neighborhood, they just helped me immeasurably. I never worried about Alex, I never worried about her… ,” she said. “And they really became part of my extended family. My neighbors across the street, there were three girls and they would come over and ask if they could take Alex for a walk when I got home from work…. It gave me, like, twenty minutes to decompress and start supper.”

  That supportive neighborhood was, in a way, what everybody seemed to be looking for. Baby boomers had gone to college in record numbers, then discovered either that they lived far away from their parents and siblings or that the experience of being off at school and living on their own had changed them and made it more difficult to fit back into the family circle. Long before Hillary Clinton wrote It Takes a Village, or the first episode of Friends appeared on TV, young people were dreaming of creating their own villages—extended families, only perhaps without relatives.

  In Baltimore, Vicki Cohn Pollard and her husband, Robert, lived within a few blocks of eight other couples who were all friends and fellow members of the antiwar movement. They wandered in and out of one another’s kitchens and took care of one another’s children. “It was an extraordinary time,” Pollard recalled. “We created a free medical clinic, an alternative school, a women’s bookstore. We were an amazing community.” Most people never managed to find a circle of friends that productive, but there was a growing sentiment, especially among younger people, that it was really friends who should be counted on for support in a pinch. “My friends are my family,” said the writer Jane O’Reilly. Television series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show idealized a network of friends and coworkers in much the same way programs such as Father Knows Best had idealized the nuclear family for the previous generation. Viewers seemed to yearn to be part of a community in which everybody knows your name—and understands you, cares about you, keeps you company, and steps in when you need help.

  For a while in the ’60s and ’70s, young people tried to formalize this kind of arrangement with communes. “I lived in this little hippie house,” recalled Alison Foster, who stayed on in Yellow Springs, Ohio, after she graduated from Antioch. “We all chipped in…. The rent was, like, a hundred dollars. We had one stereo, one TV. We combined our money to cook together, bought at the food co-ops. I loved it.”

  Vicki Cohn Pollard and her husband, Robert, had painfully scraped together enough money to purchase an old Baltimore row house, which they painted bright red. Eager to live out their belief that the nuclear family needed to be replaced by something larger, they invited another couple, Frank and Jean, to live with them and their 2-year-old daughter, Tanya. It was important to Vicki that Tanya not be raised by her mother and father alone. “I knew that I wanted her to be trusting rather than competitive,” Vicki wrote in the magazine she and her friends were devoting vast amounts of time to nurturing into success. “I wanted her to be able to love many adults, not just her parents, and I wanted her to grow up mostly with her peers rather than with family. I became convinced that the nuclear family was destructive for everyone in it. I feel that the more responsibility any one person bears for raising a child, the more anger that person will have for the child.”

  The four adults worked conscientiously at figuring out ways to share every part of the little girl’s upbringing. When the others pointed out that Vicki was always the one to put her to bed at night, the group decided that it should be everyone’s duty in turn. (Looking back thirty-five years later, Pollard could still remember the trauma of ceding the chore.) “We have moved slowly, but wonderful things are beginning to happen now,” she reported to her readers, detailing how Frank was reading books to Tanya and putting her to bed at night, while Robert “gets up with her, dresses and feeds her, and takes her to mini-school.”

  A great many young people had looked at the nuclear family and found it wanting. (Robin Morgan, living with her husband in Manhattan, referred to her house as a “two-member commune” in an attempt to convince herself and her friends that she wasn’t part of a traditional couple.) “We were all so dedicated,” Pollard said. “Really, we were giving our lives to what we believed in. Doing this living arrangement was a part of that…. That’s why the endless discussions, trying to figure it all out.”

  The estimates of the number of communes in the country ran to about a thousand. But those were larger groups, such as the thirty-member New World Collective in Des Moines, which had a rule that women were allowed to walk out of a meeting en masse if any female member detected a whiff of sexism in the air. No one ever tried to count small efforts such as the Pollards’ or the many, many less formal setups like Alison Foster’s “hippie house.”
Young people were coming out of college with the idea that they wanted to live differently than their parents did, with less emphasis on material goods and more on personal relationships. Living together in groups of friends who shared resources and chores seemed like a logical step, particularly since it also solved the problem of how to find cheap housing.

  The commune movement didn’t last long, but it is of particular note for this story because it was one attempt to answer the practical problem of who was going to change the diapers and do the dishes once women got jobs in the outside world.

  “WHAT WOULD SHOES BE LIKE IF EVERY MAN MADE HIS OWN?”

  The question of what happened to housework and child care if women were not automatically available to do it was not new. It had been discussed since the Civil War era. Even some social planners who did not worry deeply about feminist issues felt that evolution toward a just and more perfect world ought to involve the gradual extinction of housework. At the end of the nineteenth century, a novel called Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy made a huge stir with its story of a man who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000, when the United States has turned into a utopia. While Bellamy was most interested in describing how the economy could be reorganized to maximize personal happiness, his readers were fascinated with details of everyday life. In the perfect world of 2000, young people all spent a few years in the national “industrial army,” which performed all the civic and domestic chores, while their elders dropped off their clothes at public laundries and dined in magnificent community halls where each family had its own dining room. “The meal is as expensive or simple as we please, though of course everything is vastly cheaper as well as better than it would be if prepared at home,” explained the hero’s guide.

  The utopian writer who thought most about the housework issue was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who made the simple but radical argument that every person should be employed at the job he or she does best. (Gilman, whose own single-parent mother had dragged her to nineteen different homes in her first eighteen years, probably appreciated better than most people that every woman was not naturally gifted in the domestic arts.) Only the people who really enjoyed cooking and were really good at it should cook, she said. The people with a natural bent for child care should take care not only of their own children but of the children whose own mothers were better at art or architecture or landscape design. “What would shoes be like if every man made his own?” she demanded. Her book Women and Economics became a bible for the female college students of the early twentieth century.

  But Gilman’s ideas never took hold, and women continued to be expected to perform virtually all the household chores, whether they had any aptitude for them or not. And the commune movement never caught on either. The Pollards’ version did not last long before the second couple decided to split up and move on. Their own marriage was teetering, and they never tried to repeat the experiment. “I don’t think we had any societal support for people who are trying to make those kinds of changes in their lives,” said Pollard.

  More than thirty years later, Alison Foster still thinks wistfully of the days when she lived in a house where everyone accepted the fact that there were other people better equipped to do the cooking than she was. “There’s part of me that really misses that,” she said.

  “ONE OF THE IRONIES OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT…”

  While household chores were a problem, the biggest unanswered question was that of child care. Working women were patching together solutions as best they could. Maria K. joined forces with another mother who lived across the street. “She worked nights and I worked days, and she had two little girls. I had two little boys, so we took turns. She watched my children and I watched hers, and in that way we were able to make decent money.”

  Those who could afford it sent their children to as good a day-care program as they could find. The number of 3- and 4-year-olds in nursery school or kindergarten doubled between 1965 and 1970. Others hired help and undoubtedly came to appreciate why, when the first woman cabinet member, Frances Perkins, was honored at a testimonial lunch, she spoke warmly of her husband and daughter but reserved her most effusive praise for her nanny. Madeleine Kunin, whose political career had begun to get some traction, realized very fast that it was her babysitter that made her work possible. “Without her, my choices would have been much more narrowly circumscribed. At the very least, my political life would have had to wait until my children were older…. One of the ironies of the women’s movement is that women like me obtained our liberty because of other women who agreed to help us as our housekeepers, babysitters, and cleaning women.”

  Of course, most women couldn’t afford to pay for help, and communities made up of friends tended to break apart or fail to meet all the needs of young mothers struggling to balance work and child rearing. In Baltimore, when the Pollards divorced, Vicki was left alone in the row house with Tanya and a small son. Despite that network of neighbors, she felt she was struggling alone. “I remember one time when my little son and I were both incredibly sick,” she said. “I just didn’t know what was going to happen. I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.” She was deeply moved when a friend dropped by with some chicken soup. “It was one of the beginnings of our relationship,” she said of the man who later became her second husband.

  The poorer a woman was, the more fraught the child-care problem. “You learned how to manage, you learned how to scrape by,” said Virginia Williams, whose little girl once became ill and had to be hospitalized. “I would go to that hospital to see my baby every day. I would leave the hospital; I’d go to work. I’d come home, I’d take a nap, I’d go back to the hospital,” she recalled. “And they threatened me with taking my child away. They’re saying, ‘You don’t spend enough time.’ Well, hello, I work every day.” The social worker, she said, insisted that she was neglecting her maternal duties, so rather than risk losing her child, Williams went on welfare for the only time in her life.

  “… THE SOVIETIZATION OF AMERICAN CHILDREN.”

  While a number of developed countries provide early child care the same way they provide kindergarten, most Americans take it as a given that they are on their own; that the government has never seriously considered offering anything more than a patchwork system to help the very poor. But back in the early ’70s, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and representatives actually passed legislation that would make child care available to every family that wanted it. “My idea was first of all that it would be national,” Walter Mondale recounted. “Impoverished to middle class, and any others that wanted to participate. I was trying to avoid typing it as a poor person’s program.”

  Representative John Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana who had a long-standing passion for education issues, was the chief sponsor in the House, but the bill had strong Republican support as well. “We had to recognize that more and more married women were continuing to work,” said Martha Phillips, who worked for the Republican Research Committee in the House. “Having been a working mother, I knew what day-care problems were like.” The legislation aimed at establishing early-education programs in every community in the country, as well as after-school care for older children. The federal government would set standards and provide support services such as meals, medical and dental checkups, and counseling. There was money to train staff and acquire buildings. The services would be free for lower-income people, and most middle-class families would qualify for at least subsidized tuition. Households whose income was in the top 25 percent would be charged the full fee. No families were required to participate, but everyone would be eligible.

  Congress passed the bill in 1971, after what the people working on it felt was a great deal of discussion and a large number of hearings. But the general public actually knew very little about it. “The news media pulled away from covering social issues of that nature,” said Jack Duncan, who was the counsel for Brademas’s education subcommittee. “They went for big thin
gs—Vietnam, Watergate.” Actually, the child-care bill was pretty big in itself. It was budgeted at $2 billion for the first two years, the equivalent of about $10 billion today. That was a huge amount of money at a time when the economy was beginning to falter, but it was also far less than would have been required once the system was up and running. “We were hopeful,” said Duncan. “The first step was to make sure there was a program.” The bill passed the Senate easily and made it through the House by a narrow margin after fights over what kind of community groups should be able to participate. But there seemed to be far less disagreement about the basic concept. “It was the high-water mark for the notion that our country would be far better off if we gave children in the earliest years a chance to get the skills and emotional strength they need to make it later on,” said Mondale.

  The water receded very quickly. President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, claiming it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing” while undermining “the family-centered approach.” It was a slashing message, denouncing the act as “radical” and likely to “diminish both parental authority and parental involvement—particularly in those decisive early years when social attitudes and a conscience are formed and religious and moral principles are first inculcated.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” said Martha Phillips. “We all thought it would be signed. We had been working with the administration. They were helping draft it. There’s this disbelief that your own team had done it to you.”

  Mondale had been consulting “almost daily” with Elliot Richardson, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, in an effort to get the White House’s approval. It was generally known that Nixon had ordered up both a veto message and a signing message, keeping his options open until the last minute. But Congress was stunned by the president’s tone, which seemed to suggest that the legislative backers of the bill were in cahoots with the Communists to destroy the American family. “It was one of the most irresponsible and demagogic veto messages,” said Brademas, who kept the message in his office for a long time, along with the alternative one Nixon would have used if he had decided to sign the bill.