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

by Gail Collins

  The conviction that you could take things into your own hands, achieve your dream, be all that you can be, was deeply ingrained in the American psyche. But it was a relatively new idea to extend that can-do confidence to one’s body. For those who failed to achieve perfection at the gym, there was now liposuction. Plastic surgery, which had been seen as an option for only the very rich or those whose livelihood depended on looking young and pretty, was repositioned as a tool for everybody. The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons announced in 1983 that there was good reason to believe that small breasts “are really a disease” since they create “a total lack of well-being.”

  This new expectation of physical perfection fell hardest, of course, on women. Anyone whose body or face didn’t live up to the current standards was no longer simply unlucky. Now she was an underachiever who failed to make the proper effort. In 1982 the country heard about the travails of Peggy Ward, a 16-year-old drum majorette at Ringgold High School in Pennsylvania who was threatened with expulsion from the band unless she lost weight. Peggy, who was five feet four, had started the season at about 138 pounds. In another era, that might have been regarded as ideal. Peggy was, in fact, about the same height and weight as Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate sex symbol of the 1950s. But that was then. Peggy’s band instructor claimed that audiences at football games had been jeering at the drum majorettes, and set a limit of 100 pounds for girls who were five feet tall, with an extra five pounds for every additional inch of height. Later, after Peggy began skipping meals and taking diuretics to try to meet the limit, he raised the weight for five feet four to 126. But when Peggy came in at 127 pounds before the game with Aliquippa High, the nation was informed that she had been sent to the bleachers.

  The average American woman weighed 143 pounds at the time. The difference between reality and ideal—and the expectation that everybody could bridge it—helped create an epidemic of eating disorders among young women. By the late ’80s, there were estimates that 5 to 10 percent of teenage girls had conditions such as anorexia or bulimia. The nation first focused on the problem in 1983, when the singer Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32 from the effects of a long battle with anorexia. Carpenter, who with her brother, Richard, had cheery hits such as “Top of the World” in the 1970s, had begun to exhibit symptoms during the height of her career, and by the early ’80s she was unnerving audiences with her wraithlike appearance. Her weight went as low as 80 pounds before she sought treatment, and although she began to improve, the stress on her body triggered a fatal heart attack.

  “THAT WAS LIKE A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.”

  By the 1980s TV series structured around hospitals, law firms, and police precincts—the staples of prime-time drama—featured women working with men in a manner that seemed more and more like business as usual. The first television drama with two female leads, Cagney and Lacey, debuted in 1982, with its stories of policewomen who arrested the bad guys while handling stresses of family, loneliness, and friendship. It put a significant dent in the presumptions about women’s inability to carry long-running television series. So did the arrival, in 1988, of the hit comedy Roseanne, in which Roseanne Barr picked up the leading-woman baton that Lucille Ball had dropped so long ago. In another breakthrough, the film Flashdance, a huge moneymaker in 1983, featured a heroine who yearned to be a dancer but who made her living as a welder. However, the movie’s major contribution to youth culture was to spark a fad for wearing dancers’ leg warmers, not for construction work.

  Madonna arrived on the scene in 1982, offering a whole new version of the strong American woman. She was the boss, totally in control of her work, her image, her sexuality, and she taught her female fans—to the despair of their mothers’ generation—that they could flaunt their bodies the way a male peacock uses his garish tail as a symbol of power. Young women claimed the right to take to the dance floor by themselves or with their girlfriends, using the kind of aggressive, sexy moves Madonna would have approved of. “We dirty-danced to Salt-N-Pepa and all of those songs like ‘Candy,’ ” said Camara Dia Holloway, laughing. “There was a group of us—and we all had our songs—that were girls. But also there were guys who would end up dancing with us. Two of us would sandwich one guy and rub all up and down him—just totally ridiculous and overtly sexual in a totally silly kind of way.” Just as the Twist had heralded the era when girls were freed from having to follow the lead of a less-skilled boy when they were dancing, the ’80s nailed down women’s right to forgo the struggle to get a man to dance at all. “Even as adults you find yourself more often dancing with other girls,” sighed April Chisholm, who was born in 1973. “I don’t know what it is socially… boys and men just do not get up and dance. From being 6 years old to 32 years old, you dance by yourself or with other girls.”

  There has never been an era in America in which popular culture faced one direction for more than five minutes, and women who saw the ’80s less optimistically pointed to programs such as Dallas and Dynasty—two extremely popular expressions of the decade that made Donald Trump a household word and “Greed is good” a popular slogan. Both told the stories of super-rich families who might have been descendants of the Cartwrights of Bonanza. This time the women got to survive past the final commercial, but their chief duties seemed to involve wearing extremely expensive clothes to dinner and trying very hard to produce an heir. Dynasty did, however, give women their defining fashion of the decade—those padded shoulders. Linda Evans, who played the beautiful, beleaguered Krystle, may not have had much power on the home front, but her dresses and suits gave her the aura of a lovely linebacker.

  The biggest hit of the decade was The Cosby Show, and for black families, Yana Shani Fleming said, “that was like a religious experience. Every Thursday you had to watch The Cosby Show” as well as A Different World, which followed one of Cosby’s TV children off to college. Growing up, Lynnette Arthur loved Bill Cosby and his handsome family, where “no one has any issues…. I think the worst one was Vanessa got drunk. They never did an episode where, like, Theo decides to try crack. And then I loved A Different World, when Lisa Bonet did her spin-off. I used to love the beginning credits, where she’d be dancing with her friends. I would be like, ‘Oh, I want to be older and live free and dance on trucks while my friend plays the piano in the back of the pickup.’ ”

  “SHE WAS VERY FLY!”

  Clair Huxtable, the TV matriarch of the Cosby clan, was an attorney, but the audience saw very few signs of stress from the demands of holding down a job, raising five children, maintaining a large but warm and cozy home, and being an attentive, sexy wife. She was the embodiment of the ideal 1980s woman: She Had It All.

  One of the best-known television ads of the era was for Enjoli Perfume, “the new eight-hour perfume for the twenty-four-hour woman.” Singing to the tune of “I’m a Woman,” a gorgeous woman struts toward the camera in a business suit, announcing:

  I can put the wash on the line,

  Feed the kids, get dressed,

  Pass out the kisses

  And get to work by five of nine….

  In the famous final stanza, a woman morphs from business suit to housedress to sexy night wear while singing:

  I can bring home the bacon

  Fry it up in a pan

  And never let you

  Forget you’re a man….

  It was a new vision of the good life for middle-class young women. Nothing their mothers had wanted had been subtracted. There was just more. Much, much more. In 1943 the sociologist Mirra Komarovsky surveyed sophomore women at one college and found that most of them said they did not want to work after marriage. When Komarovsky did a similar poll at the same college in 1979, only 5 percent said they preferred to forgo work and focus on “home and family.” But their new attitudes toward work had not changed their attitudes about marriage. The idea of a career and single life appealed to only 2 percent of the respondents—the same number as in 1943. They wanted to have it all, like
Clair Huxtable.

  Striving for “it all” was not for sissies. Zoe Cruz, an up-and-coming executive at Morgan Stanley, maintained a work schedule that had her talking to the trading desk while she was in labor with her daughter. Although Cruz was at work by six every morning, New York Magazine reported, “she found time to do traditional motherly tasks. When her daughter needed to bring cookies to school, for instance, Cruz got up at four a.m. and made them herself before going to the office.” Linda Mason was executive producer of the CBS weekend news and doubling as the producer of the network’s Sunday morning news programming while she and her husband were raising their daughters. “I was a mother and I was a producer, that’s all,” she said. “I gave a hundred percent to CBS and a hundred percent to my family.” When her older daughter learned how to dial the phone, Mason encouraged her child to call her at work. “The instructions were, no matter what I was doing—talking to Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather—it didn’t matter. It was always only about thirty seconds, but I felt she knew she was connected to me.”

  It was a little more frantic than Clair Huxtable made it seem on TV. While the Huxtables did not appear to have a maid or nanny, many women trying to mix high-powered careers with child rearing did. Camara Dia Holloway remembers her mother, who worked for the United Nations, as “probably a proto-idea of the superwoman of the ’80s… because she worked full-time and wore hip little pantsuits—she was very fly! And she had kids and a family. We had a babysitter who took care of us in the afternoons into the early evening. And we had a cleaner who came into our apartment in Washington. So my mom managed to have two young kids, get a PhD, work full-time… but she had help.”

  Only a tiny sliver of the population had that option. Most women were working not because they were pursuing a career but because they had to make money to help support their families. One of the reasons women’s wages were coming closer to those of men was because men were getting less. While pay for women working full-time rose 12 percent on average between 1979 and 1989, men’s dropped more than 4 percent. And for men with high school diplomas but no college education, the average drop was a chilling 11 percent. For the first time, more than half of American women with children under 1 were working or looking for work.

  “MY DAD WAS A GOOD BABYSITTER.”

  The most obvious answer to the overwhelmed working woman was a spouse who shared the chores and child care. Polls showed that people thought this was a good idea, but there’s very little hard information on how much it actually happened. There was some indication that men began doing more at home in the 1980s, whether their wives worked or not. But that extra effort doesn’t seem to have been very significant—about an hour and a half a week, according to one study. In her book The Second Shift, Arlie Russell Hochschild concluded that women suffered from a “leisure gap” of fifteen hours a week when it came to the amount of time they devoted to either paid work or household chores compared to what their husbands did. In one of the most optimistic conclusions, a professor at Wheaton College estimated that husbands did 30 percent of the work at home, up from 20 percent two decades earlier. “I don’t predict that we’ll be seeing fifty-fifty anytime soon, but a jump of ten percent in a national sample is a big change,” said Joseph Pleck.

  On the plus side, the era when men would routinely come home and expect to be waited on like weary warriors resting from the day’s battles was pretty much over. June LaValleur’s marriage ended after medical school, and when she was a hospital resident, she began a new relationship. “We bought this house together,” she said. “He was the same age and had been divorced. We talked about marriage at one point. Then I came home one night at seven p.m. I had been on call since seven a.m. He was sitting in the chair with his feet up, reading the paper. I came into the room, and he said, ‘What’s for dinner?’ That was it. I wasn’t going to do that again.”

  In an increasing number of homes, fathers worked the day shift while mothers worked nights (or vice versa) so that one parent would be home to take care of the kids and keep the domestic front under control. In 1983, the New York Times told the story of Patricia Cremer, a reservations agent for Delta Airlines, who finished work in the middle of the afternoon, at almost exactly the same time her husband, Richard, a Delta mechanic, was arriving. Halfway between their home and the airport, the paper reported, the Cremers would rendezvous every day “for the changing of the guard—he would hand her the baby.” No one knew how common that kind of arrangement was, but Harriet Presser, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, produced a study in the late 1980s showing that, among families where the mother worked part-time, two-thirds of the child care was done by the fathers in their wives’ absence.

  Jennifer Maasberg Smith, Louise Meyer Warpness’s granddaughter in Wyoming, remembers that when she was young, her mother, Jo, would go off to school to teach while her father, a rancher, “would babysit us. She’d come home and we’d have the house torn apart and have built a fort. My dad was a good babysitter. When we ran out of Kool-Aid, he’d make Jell-O water.” As fathers began taking more responsibility for their children, some mothers banged up against the issue of different expectations. If a husband was in charge of dressing the kids for school, did that mean the wife had no right to demand they wear matching clothes and not show up for the bus in plaid pants and striped T-shirts? In a great many households, plans to evenly divide the chores collapsed when women found themselves unable to compromise their standards. “My mom wanted a girl to wear dresses,” said Jennifer. “I didn’t want to wear dresses, but she made me, and I would insist on wearing my hiking boots with my dresses. Well, my dad thought that was just fine. So it would become a war when I was getting ready for school.”

  When the young activists of the ’60s and ’70s had imagined what life would be like for the liberated woman, they did not think of either the Enjoli Perfume model or the husband and wife living on different shifts. The vast majority might not really have expected that there would be a “revolution” in terms of a complete social and economic upheaval. But they did truly believe that the structure of society would change to accommodate their new ways of living. They thought the humanistic corporations of the future would offer flexible schedules so both the husband and wife would be able to pursue success on the job while having time to take care of the responsibilities at home. They expected that men would automatically do their share of household chores. And they believed the government would start providing early child care the same way it provided public education.

  They had not considered the possibility that society might remain pretty much the same as always, and simply open the door for women to join the race for success while taking care of their private lives as best they could. Congress walked up to the line and decided not to make child care for working mothers anything approaching an entitlement. Economists who believed in the magic of the marketplace had predicted that once businesses realized how important child care was to working women, they would offer programs of their own to attract and retain good employees. But by 1987 the Bureau of Labor Statistics said only 2 percent of the 1.1 million American workplaces it studied offered child-care services to their employees, and only about 3 percent helped pay for it elsewhere. In fact, the bureau said, any kind of family-friendly options such as flexible leave, part-time work for mothers, work at home, and job sharing were exceptions to the rule. The columnist Ellen Goodman expressed a common sentiment about the way things were turning out: “The only equality she’s won after a decade of personal and social upheaval is with the working mothers of Russia.”

  “LIFE WAS MESSY.”

  After six successful years in the legislature, Madeleine Kunin decided to run for lieutenant governor in 1978. (When she won, her local paper’s headline was “She’s Somebody’s Wife, She’s Somebody’s Mother, and She’s Our Lieutenant Governor.”) When she moved up, she also moved from a part-time legislative job to a full-time political career. Kunin’s husband, a doctor, became th
e family’s gourmet cook, but she found herself making “long lists at night,” with domestic and political chores all mixed in together. “Never did I get everything done. Always there were piles of paper to be sorted, lost socks to be found, dirty dishes to put in the dishwasher, and clean dishes to take out. Life was messy.”

  Women who got good jobs felt lucky to have them, and the ethos of the ’80s called for them to make balancing home and work look easy. Twenty years earlier, Anne Wallach and her friend had vowed that their husbands would have all the comforts the men would have gotten with stay-at-home wives. Now, working women tried to give their employers the illusion that they had no concerns whatsoever except making them happy. They tried not to mention their domestic responsibilities and sometimes even refrained from putting family pictures on their desks, for fear they would be seen as less than serious professionals. “I never talked about it,” said Linda Mason. “If I had a bad night, that was my problem.” Elizabeth Patterson, who was working as a lawyer in Washington, DC, found law firms were particularly unsympathetic to the idea of families. She remembers a partner in one firm who invited the staff to a picnic with a memo ending, “No children and no dogs, please.”

  Patterson and her husband had two small children, and one weekend early in her career, she had to leave on Sunday to catch a plane to Minneapolis, where she and a male senior associate had a meeting first thing Monday morning. “I think Malcolm maybe was 9 months old and Sala would have been a little over 3 years old. I remember getting up in the morning while my husband stayed with the children; getting to the supermarket to be there by eight a.m. when the doors opened; doing the shopping; getting the food home. I may have cooked something before I left. And by the time I got on the plane, which was maybe one or two in the afternoon, I was absolutely exhausted.” The senior associate was waiting for her, sitting and looking relaxed. “I asked him how his day had gone, and he said, ‘Oh, I spent the morning reading the paper.’ I wanted to strangle him. I was panting, you know.”