by Gail Collins
Few people believed the bill had been vetoed because of its cost—although the cost was high. “I don’t think it was an entitlement issue,” said Brademas. “It was a cultural issue, a values issue.” Elliot Richardson said later that he believed Nixon, who was preparing to leave for his famous trip to China, wanted to throw a bone to the right wing of his party, which was outraged by his efforts to establish diplomatic relations with the Communist government.
The child-care bill was passed during the same period that the Equal Rights Amendment was approved with such overwhelming support—that moment when the two parties were changing sides on so many social issues and spent a brief time together in a place we might now define as a kind of establishment liberalism. The New Right was still in its infancy, but some of the people who would lead the culture wars later in the decade were on the White House staff, and the destruction of the child-care bill was one of their first big victories. The veto was actually the work of Howard Phillips, who was perhaps the most conservative member of the administration. Phillips, who would later run for president as the candidate of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, was gunning for the child-care bill, and he enlisted the help of Pat Buchanan, then a special assistant to the president. Buchanan recalls that they had to overcome the White House’s preference to simply veto the bill on the basis of its cost. “We wanted to go at it philosophically. We didn’t want this in the United States of America. The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” he said.
The goal was not just to kill the bill but also to bury the idea of a national child-care entitlement forever. “I insisted we not just say we can’t afford it right now, in which case you get pilot programs or whatever,” Buchanan said. The veto message was actually a toned-down version of what Buchanan had suggested—he wanted to accuse the bill’s drafters of “the Sovietization of American children.” But it did the job Buchanan and Phillips had hoped it would do. It delivered the message that it was much more politically dangerous to work in favor of expanded child care than to oppose it. Meanwhile, the other side was sending no message at all. There was no outcry about the veto from the electorate—virtually no talk about it at all. The child-care community, which would have had to lead the charge, was actually divided over the bill. Some groups worried that the huge Child Development Act would drain money away from programs such as Head Start—those set up for the poorest children who needed help most.
Among the people who were not giving up was Margaret Heckler, the Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts. Heckler was determined to put an early-child-care plank in the Republican Party’s platform for the 1972 presidential election. One reporter noted, in wonder, that she “worked over a staggering total of ninety-six drafts on child care. For two hours she argued for the inclusion of a single word: ‘quality.’ ” Heckler won the battle of the platform but failed to get the hoped-for bill in the next session of Congress. Supporters went underground, fearing another veto.
After Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president, Brademas and Mondale resurrected their plan in 1975, renaming it the Child and Family Services Bill in order to make it clear that they were in favor of families, and starting it off with a modest appropriation of $150 million for the first year. But the economy was growing worse, the new administration was demanding budget cuts, and in the summer the two sponsors sat down for breakfast and agreed that they should withdraw the bill and wait until after the 1976 presidential election, when a more friendly Democrat might be in the White House.
“What happened next,” Brademas said, “was remarkable.”
Members of Congress started getting thousands of near-hysterical letters demanding that they kill the already-moribund legislation. “Seldom does a bill that is going nowhere, by all informed accounts, arouse such stridency,” reported the Chicago Daily News. Illinois senator Charles Percy, the story said, had gotten eight thousand letters in 1975. The writers appeared to believe that the Child and Family Services Bill would allow children to organize labor unions, to sue their parents for making them do household chores, and make it illegal for a parent to require their offspring to go to church. One letter writer said Brademas was trying to create “a breakdown in family order, increase in delinquency, and a godless Russian/Chinese type regimentation of young minds.” Another said that he “should be deported to Russia.”
Many of the letters had been inspired by a flyer, circulating around the Midwest and South, that confused the Child and Family Services Bill with a bill of rights for children that had been once proposed—but never seriously considered—in England, and which an opponent of Mondale’s original bill had referred to darkly during the debate in 1971. The leaflets were also picked up by conservative editorial writers and radio commentators; they created such a stir that a reporter for the Houston Chronicle tried to trace them back to the source. He found a retired director of a Bible camp in Kansas who said he had written the leaflet based on a pamphlet a relative had received at a revival in Missouri. He said that he was “sort of sorry” he had distributed it, since he had learned that virtually everything in it was untrue.
Although Jimmy Carter did bring Democratic control back to the White House, with Mondale as his vice president, the new administration had little interest in creating expensive new government programs. Brademas, who had become part of the Democratic leadership in the House, was busy on other projects. And, as Jack Duncan said, nobody really “wanted to go through that again.” Although Congress would keep fiddling with preschool programs to help poor children, there was never another serious attempt to create a national answer to the problem of who took care of the kids in an economy that now depended on women to work.
“I still hope we can get ourselves organized,” said Mondale recently, not sounding all that hopeful. “I tried everything.”
“People always think there will be another day,” said Duncan. “Well, there might be another day, but not in my lifetime.”
12. The 1980s—Having It All
“WAY TO GO, MOM!”
The 1970s ended badly for June LaValleur, the wife of a gas-station owner who was raising three sons in a small town in Minnesota. Wanting work more ambitious than her job as a lab technician, she had qualified to become a physician’s assistant but then lost her job. She and her husband were fighting all the time. Unsurprisingly, she felt depressed. “I went to a therapist. I felt like my whole world was caving in on me.”
When she tried to envision a way out of her dark hole, one idea that kept coming up was medical school. Working with doctors, she had often thought, “You know, I can do what they do. I just need to get trained to do it.” But it seemed like an impractical dream. It would take two more years just to get the necessary undergraduate credits. There was no medical school nearby, and even if she did somehow make it through, she would be 50 by the time she finished her training. Plus, her husband was totally opposed to the idea: “He thought it would ruin our marriage.”
But, she told herself, the marriage was in trouble anyway. She felt compelled to try.
Since both her husband and her sons regarded cities as alien territory—“too many people and too many cars”—there was no question of their moving. Instead, June began a Herculean effort to become a doctor at the medical school in St. Paul, 120 miles away, while taking care of her family back home. “I would drive to Twin Cities either late Sunday night or get up at three a.m. and go down Monday morning, then work very hard during the week,” she said. “I would go home on the weekends to be home with my family. I had a dual life. I just didn’t talk about one when doing the other.” On weekends, she tried to spend as much time as possible with her boys and do the household chores. “I did all the laundry, prepared food for the next week. I made pancakes and put them in bags so all they had to do was put them in the microwave. I made hot dishes that could be popped into the oven.” She also hired a woman to do “day-to-d
ay cleanup” and to be at the house between the time the boys came home from school and her husband’s arrival from work.
“Randy didn’t like that I was gone, but we didn’t talk about it…. I felt guilty. Terrible guilt,” she said. On the plus side, the boys eventually learned how to wash their own clothes and look after themselves.
Three times a year, when final exams arrived, June would spend the weekend at school, studying “twelve, fourteen hours a day.” The year her son Chris was in the sixth grade, she called home during a study break and listened to him tell her about what was going to happen at his last Sunday school class. Guilt-ridden, she told her husband she was “lonesome, feeling terrible,” and he retorted, “Well, you knew what it was going to be like.” She hung up the phone and began to sob. The hospital chaplain, who was walking by, stopped and patted her shoulder.
The first time Randy and the boys came to see June at her school was graduation. “I started walking to the middle of the stage, when my oldest son, John, who was at the time 18 or 19, stands up and hollers, ‘WAY TO GO, MOM!’ The audience was supposed to hold their applause, but everybody was applauding.”
“THE PROMISE IS DAZZLING.”
In the 1970s the nation came to grips with the fact that most women were going to work outside the home. But it was in the 1980s that the country got used to the idea that women would not only make money to help support the family but also have serious careers. It was perhaps the decade when women were most optimistic about the possibility of merging husband, children, and major-league jobs. Mademoiselle, which had given its readers tips on manicures for the well-groomed typist in 1960, offered up an analysis in 1981 on whether “men will still love us as much now that we dare to love ourselves and our work as much as we love them.” (The answer was yes.) A study prepared for the President’s Advisory Committee for Women found that most Americans felt—or at least said—that it would be fine by them if their doctor, lawyer, mayor, or boss was female.
The number of women attending college crept past the number of men, and more women like June LaValleur started to set their sights on professional training for careers such as medicine and law. (A third of the law students in 1981 were women—up from 10 percent in 1971.) The stubborn gap between women’s wages and men’s narrowed dramatically. In 1979 the average working woman made fifty-eight cents for every dollar a man made. By 1994 she made seventy-two cents. Younger women with college degrees averaged eighty-three cents.
Cosmopolitan, in a welcome-to-the-’80s feature, announced, “The promise is dazzling—new-style egalitarian marriage, professional parity with men, full sexual self-expression sans guilt.” The reality was somewhat less perfect. Some professions, such as construction, remained doggedly resistant to female incursion; most working women were still employed in traditionally low-salaried jobs, in clerical, sales, service, or factories. And in an ironic by-product of new opportunities, the great careers that had been open to women all along suffered a decline in prestige because they had, well, been open to women all along. Ellen Baer, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, complained that she was constantly being introduced as “almost a doctor” by people who were trying to assure her that they thought of her as more than just a nurse. Randi Weingarten, the future president of the United Federation of Teachers, joked that “feminism killed teaching.” While conditions in schools had always been poor, Weingarten felt, teachers had been buoyed by the company of terrific peers and the feeling that, despite bad pay, they were professional successes. Many saw educating the next generation as the most rewarding calling possible and would have taken the same path no matter how many doors were opened. However, once younger women started peeling off into other careers, the feeling of success began to dwindle a little. “We saw real disrespect for the profession,” Weingarten said.
Still, there was a sense of great opportunity in the air. A Gallup poll showed 88 percent of younger American women were satisfied with their lives, with 83 percent believing they would meet their goals. Those goals almost all involved personal careers, not social change. The political conservatism heralded by the cultural wars of the 1970s had taken hold in Washington with the Reagan administration. Government grants for women’s projects—especially ones that sounded radical in any way—dried up. The people who would have been applying for them five years earlier reinvented themselves as academics or entrepreneurs or journalists and made concessions that the traditional world seemed to require. “It really blew my mind that all of a sudden, everybody’s shaving their legs, all these people who were very hairy and very proud of it,” said one Ohio feminist who got a job as a university professor—and started shaving herself.
“WE WORE SUITS.”
Women who wanted to succeed in business followed the men’s lead in their clothing choices. “We wore suits,” remembered Laura Sessions Stepp. “We wore blouses and those horrid little ties. You’d tie them in a little bow at your neck…. I just look at them now and think that was so god-awful.”
John Molloy, a “wardrobe engineer” who had written a bestselling book on how men should dress if they wanted to be successful, followed up with The Woman’s Dress for Success Book. Molloy said he had scientifically studied the reaction of bosses, colleagues, and underlings to women in different kinds of clothes, and he determined that the best route to the top was a “uniform”: different variations of the same look every day, beginning with a dark-skirted suit and tailored blouse. The book also recommended a “feminine fedora,” shoulder-length hair, a scarf tied around the neck somewhat like a necktie, and hems that ended slightly below the knee. According to Molloy, it was a look designed to give women an aura of authority and a sense of confidence. His readers seemed to agree. Sales of variations on the “uniform” soared, and six million more women’s suits moved off the racks than in previous years.
Virtually every one of those suits and tailored dresses came with shoulder pads. A report on the 1985 fall fashion shows in Paris said top designers were featuring “clothes with shoulders so massive that the models appeared to have emerged from locker rooms instead of dressing rooms.” Declaring “shoulders forever,” the designer Claude Montana unveiled one coat with padding that extended the shoulder line six inches. While the padded shoulders undoubtedly sent a message of solidity and strength, their major attraction, in truth, was that they made clothes hang better and waists look smaller. But the pads also had a disconcerting way of slipping, and women spent a great deal of time realigning their shoulders. Friends gave friends a helpful tug on their jackets, and mothers drove daughters crazy by constantly pulling and poking at their shoulders.
At the same time, miniskirts had returned, to the dismay of many older women. “We’re trying to be taken seriously, and professional women find it’s a bad enough day-to-day battle without the mini,” protested Nancy Clark Reynolds, the president of a Washington lobbying firm, when the hems rose in 1987 to heights they hadn’t reached since the 1960s. And high heels were back with a vengeance. If anyone still wondered when American women were going to embrace sensible shoes, the ’80s suggested the answer might be: never. “Shoes have become the most important accessory…. Shoes are to the present generation what hats were to their mothers in the ’50s,” opined the New York Times.
Susan Brownmiller, who had converted to pants in the 1970s, was dismayed by the new developments. “When blue jeans became the emblem of hip sophistication, I didn’t understand I was riding a very short wave,” she wrote sadly. She had believed that women would never wear skirts again “in the way that friends of mine felt that the revolution was just around the corner. And here it is, well into the eighties, and a woman who wears nothing but pants is a holdout, a stick-in-the-mud, a fashion reactionary with no sense of style.”
“… ‘TOP OF THE WORLD.’ ”
The return of the miniskirt was a reminder of a dramatic change that had occurred in women’s attitudes toward their bodies. Worrying about ge
tting fat had been a preoccupation for most of the century, but now women began to feel responsible not only for maintaining the right weight but also for sculpting their figures through exercise. The work that girdles and bras had done for previous generations was now a matter for the gym (and another set of responsibilities for working mothers to add to their schedules). Aerobics—and the whole concept of exercise classes—arrived on the scene and quickly became a mass movement. The return of the miniskirt, the invention of the term “thunder thighs,” and the popularization of workout books and TV exercise tapes by Jane Fonda all occurred in the early 1980s.
Fonda, who was born in 1937, is given credit for linking the nation’s beauty culture to its burgeoning health culture. She was a well-known actress by the early 1960s and an international sex symbol after she made Barbarella, an erotic science-fiction satire in which the heroine undresses in zero gravity before the opening credits finish rolling. She then became an icon of the antiwar movement whose visits to North Vietnam remained a sore point with conservative Americans well into the twenty-first century. Fonda had taken dance classes for years to protect her figure, and as she moved into middle age, it occurred to her that millions of other American women wanted to achieve the same effect her fellow ballet classmates did. The workout program she came up with became the bestselling videotape of all time. “If you want to trace the changes in American culture over the past twenty years, all you have to do is look at her,” said the Washington Post. “She is a lightning rod for a generation whose rhetoric has evolved from Burn Baby, Burn to Feel the Burn.”