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

by Gail Collins

  Alice Paul died in 1977, without ever knowing that the Equal Rights Amendment was doomed. Her birthplace in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, is now designated a National Historic Landmark.

  Sherri Finkbine’s real estate career put her six children through college; now her oldest daughter is a lawyer, the senior counsel for the appellate court in San Diego. Her oldest son has followed his mother into real estate. “My next son is a doctor,” she said, ticking them off. “The next daughter is a teacher. The next does sports on the radio and does a TV show in Idaho. My baby daughter is a documentary filmmaker. She’s making a trilogy of abortion movies. I told her I was passing the torch to her because I was sick of it.” Sherri, who has reclaimed her maiden name of Chessen, has embarked on another career as an author of children’s books.

  “If anything, the thalidomide experience brought us closer,” she said of her family. “People said I was going to be doomed. I wasn’t. I’ve been blessed.”

  Pat Lorance never again had a job as good as the tester position she lost in the 1970s. One employer told her when she applied for work that she was qualified but undesirable because she had filed suit against her former company. “I started crying,” she admitted. Lorance ended up working in shipping and receiving. “Actually, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve done,” she said cheerfully.

  But her body gave out. Crippling back problems left her on disability. She lost her home and wound up in public housing, so immobilized by back pain that she was unable to make the bed: “I slept without sheets for four weeks, but I had a place to sleep, honey.” Eventually she was able to move into a better apartment that was more accessible to the handicapped. “God’s been good to me. He really has,” she insisted. “It’s been a long haul, but everything’s working out good now.”

  In 1991 Congress responded to Lorance v. AT&T Technologies by passing an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that made it clear an employee who was hurt by a discriminatory seniority system could file a court challenge when she was injured by the system, as well as when it first went into effect. Pat Lorance still remembers being told, “I would never come off the law books. That I’d made a place in history. And I thought, ‘Ooooh.’ ”

  After nearly fifty years as little girls’ favorite playmate (and endless naked encounters with Ken under the washcloth), Barbie had a midlife crisis in 1999 when she was challenged by the Bratz dolls, with those racy clothes that drove older Americans crazy when they saw them on their granddaughters. In the panic that ensued, Barbie dumped Ken and took up with an Australian surfer named Blaine, who still failed to bring back her popularity. Ken returned to reclaim her in 2006, with cooler clothes, better hair, and a different nose.

  Anne Tolstoi Wallach had been too happy about having a job in advertising to think about discrimination when she started her career in the 1950s and ’60s. But she hardly failed to notice the changing times. In fact, she wrote advertisements for NOW in the early 1970s. (“Womanpower, it’s much too good to waste.”) She also kept moving up, to creative director and vice president at Grey Advertising. And as the 1970s ebbed away, she took stock in the most profitable way conceivable. Wallach wrote a novel, Women’s Work, about a snobby, sexist advertising firm whose authority figures sounded a lot like some of the people she had dealt with earlier in her career. The book brought in a stunning advance of $850,000 in 1980—the equivalent of more than $2 million now. She eventually left advertising to concentrate on her writing and published two other novels and a book of nonfiction. She is working on another novel.

  Alison Foster, Anne’s daughter, remarried while she was getting her training in counseling psychology. She and her husband work at the same private school in Manhattan that her youngest son still attends and where Alison is dean of students. Occasionally, she says, they fantasize about starting a school of their own, or working together at a boarding school. It’s the closest thing she can think of to the communal life she liked so much when she was young.

  Maria K. says she tried to raise her sons to understand “a girl’s point of view so that they would respect women and know what it felt like to be on the other end. They saw how cruel it could be when a guy hits and runs.” Now she has a teenage granddaughter, and she’s trying to give different lessons: “When I went to school, you got to be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, a homemaker. Those were your choices of what you wanted to be. There was nothing else. And now, whether it was the sexual revolution, whether it was the women’s rights, whether it was just the passage of time, there are all kinds of things that are available to her that I didn’t even know about—being a food scientist, being a journalist, there’s just a myriad of things that she can do with her life.”

  Dena Ivey left the air force in 1995 and returned to college in Fairbanks, where she decided that she wanted to become a lawyer. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder Law School, and after a stint working for the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights, she became an assistant district attorney for the state. “I see myself defending victims against a LOT of domestic violence. And I see myself as a defender of traditional Yupik values—which do not include smacking people around.”

  June LaValleur and her partner Jill were together for ten years before they broke up, amicably, sharing custody of a dog that they are very careful not to quarrel in front of. “I’m looking for a partner now,” she said. “Gender is not as important as not being a Republican.”

  (Later, in an update, June reported that she was engaged to a retired engineering professor. He’s a Democrat.)

  Madeleine Kunin served three terms as governor of Vermont, during which she made a visit to the New York Times editorial board, cruising into the building where she had been offered a job in the cafeteria in lieu of an editing slot. (Her delight at the turnaround was not dimmed when a security guard approached the plainclothes policeman who was accompanying her and said, “Welcome to the Times, Governor.”) She announced in 1990 that she would not run for reelection, wrote her autobiography, and became ambassador to Switzerland, the country where she had been born, becoming what was surely the first U.S. ambassador in memory who was actually able to speak the local languages. Now a college professor, she finds her female students “kind of a puzzle.” The young women, she mused, seem to lack “bravado, or confidence. Of course there are lots of exceptions and it’s improving, but it’s creeping up so much more slowly than I’d have thought when I was elected governor.”

  Georgia Panter Nielsen got married in 1968, after the airlines’ rules against married flight attendants were finally wiped off the books. When she ended her career in 2002, after forty-two years of flying, she was one of about only sixteen hundred flight attendants who had stayed on long enough to reach retirement age, out of the hundreds of thousands who started careers in the sky. Her generation had won their fight to make their jobs real careers rather than a brief interval between college and marriage for attractive young ladies. But what the women’s rights movement and union activism achieved, the decline of the airline industry helped take away. Mergers and bankruptcies, crammed planes and rapid turnovers, made it hard to envision enjoying the job for decades on end. “The hourly pay is back to 1990s pay, and staffing is down,” said Nielsen. “The work’s become so onerous and difficult, they’re saying this is again not viewed as a career opportunity so much as a short-term job.” When United went into bankruptcy, Nielsen helped organize the retired flight attendants to protect their health care and pensions. “We lobby, we picket, we go to Washington,” she reported.

  Wilma Mankiller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. She and her husband live in a house in Mankiller Flats, Oklahoma, the traditional home of her family, “surrounded by my books, my art, my grandchildren, and the natural world.” In her autobiography, she recalled a meeting she had attended in the Midwest where a man approached her to say he had an important message. “He told me he was an Oneida, and one of the prophecies he had heard was that this time period is the t
ime of the women—a time for women to take on a more important role in society. He described this as ‘the time of the butterfly.’ ”

  In 2000, when she was 66, Gloria Steinem stunned many of her friends by getting married. She wed David Bale, a 61-year-old businessman and social activist from South Africa, in a ceremony at Wilma Mankiller’s home in Oklahoma. “The bride wore jeans and a white shirt; the groom, black clothes and an Indian belt,” reported the New York Times.

  “We had both spent our lives doing essentially what we weren’t supposed to do, and… we ended up in the same place,” said Steinem. “I thought to myself, we’ve spent thirty years equalizing the marriage laws, so why not? And besides, Wilma Mankiller offered us a Cherokee ceremony, so who can resist that?” It was not quite the same as the time when Angelina Grimké had thrilled all the women’s rights advocates in the early nineteenth century by proving that a feminist could find a husband. No one had ever doubted, after all, that Gloria Steinem had the option. But it was quite a moment when she decided to exercise it. She and Bale told each other it wasn’t such a big deal; that at their age “till death do you part” wasn’t really all that long.

  It was, in fact, hardly any time at all. Bale soon developed fatal brain lymphoma and died in 2003 after a terrible decline into confusion and paranoia. “I hope my body goes before my brain and not the other way around. It was hard on him, hard on everyone around him,” said Steinem. She returned to a solitary life, to the degree that someone who was constantly traveling or entertaining visiting feminists at home could be alone. Steinem still writes and works full tilt for women’s causes, particularly in the developing world. She has given up high heels for boots but even now finds herself continually identified as the attractive feminist. “The part that’s hurtful is that having worked hard and continuing to work hard at 73, I still find accomplishments attributed to my appearance. I would have thought I could outgrow that by now.”

  Martha Griffiths retired from Congress in 1974, spent several years becoming the first woman to serve on the boards of various corporations, and then accepted the offer to run for lieutenant governor of Michigan with James Blanchard, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. They were elected as a team in 1982 and 1986, but in 1990, when Griffiths was 78, Blanchard dumped her, citing her age and health. Griffiths, who had lost absolutely none of her feistiness, said that it was women and old people who had given Blanchard his victories and that he ignored them at his peril. Sure enough, he was defeated in a close election. “I don’t know if I feel vindicated, but I think it clearly shows that I won it for him the first two times,” Griffiths said. She died at 91 in 2003.

  Nora Ephron, who was told by Newsweek that women couldn’t be writers, went on to write some of her era’s bestselling books and most popular movies. She is now a director, columnist, and blogger. “When the women’s movement began to fade, I used to do about ten speeches a year, in part about how not enough had happened,” she recalled. Now she thinks she was completely wrong. “It’s a gigantic change. It’s unbelievable what happened. It’s shocking. It’s amazing. And I just look back and think—you must not have been seeing something. Because look at this THING.”

  Lois Rabinowitz, after being ejected from traffic court for wearing slacks, August 9, 1960. (AP Images)

  One of the duties of flight attendants on the all-male Executive Flight between New York and Chicago was to light their passengers’ cigars. (United Airlines)

  The seventeen women who served in Congress in the late 1950s, including Margaret Chase Smith, eighth from left, stand on the Capitol steps for a group portrait. (AP Images)

  Betty Friedan, shown here in her apartment in 1981, founded the National Organization for Women by passing notes around a government luncheon in Washington. (Neal Boenzi / New York Times)

  Pauli Murray, lawyer, educator, minister, and civil rights leader, said her work for the Commission on the Status of Women was a “memorial” to her friend and mentor, Eleanor Roosevelt. (Frank C. Curtin / AP Images)

  Marian Anderson during her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. (Thomas D. McAvoy / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

  Ella Baker, who the student civil rights activists called “our Gandhi.” (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  Fannie Lou Hamer speaks to supporters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1965. (AP Images)

  Muddy tracks show the path made through the grass by the car in which Viola Liuzzo and Leroy Moton were traveling when Liuzzo was shot to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.

  (Liuzzo and car photographs: © Bettmann / Corbis; Moton photograph: AP Images)

  Nothing represented the evolution of beauty standards for black women in the 1960s better than the change in hair styles. Willie Mae Johnson kept to the traditional straightened style when she was crowned Miss Tan America in 1965. (AP Images)

  Angela Davis (right) wore her trademark Afro when she showed up for a court appearance in 1972. “The hair thing made a huge difference,” said Mary Helen Washington, then a Detroit graduate student. (AP Images)

  Members of Women Strike for Peace picket the White House in 1967. “We’d get dressed in mink coats and hats and gloves to look like the woman next door,” said an organizer. (© Bettmann / Corbis)

  Women protesting the Miss America pageant at the breakthrough demonstration in 1968. (AP Images)

  Gloria Steinem. (AP Images)

  Phyllis Schlafly, head of the “Stop ERA” movement, with a young fan. (AP Images)

  Anita Bryant, leader of the gay rights opposition movement. (AP Images)

  Betty Friedan reacts to an Equal Rights Amendment defeat in 1977. (AP Images)

  Television’s willingness to show women doing something besides housework began to evolve with Marlo Thomas’s That Girl in 1966. Thomas portrayed an unmarried woman who lived on her own while pursuing an acting career, but her worried parents were never far away. (© American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.)

  In 1970 Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards arrived and became a real grown-up whose claim to happiness was much more about work and friends than finding the right man. Moore is shown here with Valerie Harper, who played her best friend, Rhoda. (CBS / Landov)

  Billie Jean King is carried onto the court for her “Battle of the Sexes” with Bobby Riggs in 1973. (© Bettmann / Corbis)

  Bella Abzug first began wearing her trademark hats because her mother told her it would send people the message that she was not a secretary. Abzug marches here at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1978. Billie Jean King is on the left, and Betty Friedan is on the right. (Teresa Zabala / New York Times)

  Women at the Houston Chronicle broadcast their demands for equal pay in 1970. (© Bettmann / Corbis)

  Phylicia Rashad and Bill Cosby played the Huxtable parents in the ’80s hit The Cosby Show. Clair Huxtable seemed to manage a law career, a large family, and a home with effortless grace, and American women hoped that they could Have It All—just like Clair did. (NBC Universal Photo Bank)

  Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to be inseminated with the sperm of a childless biochemist whose wife had health problems. But when the child was born, Whitehead wanted to keep the infant, sparking national debate and a long court suit. (Fred R. Conrad / New York Times)

  Sandra Day O’Connor with her husband, John, just after President Ronald Reagan announced he had nominated her to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. (© Bettmann / Corbis)

  Lori Piestewa was the first American woman to die in the Iraq conflict. (Rudy Gutierrez / El Paso Times)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book aims to tell the story of what happened to American women since 1960 by combining the public drama of the era with the memories of regular women who lived through it all. To get the second part, my team of interviewers and I sat down with more than one hundred women from around the country, ranging
in age from late 80s to their early 20s, who generously agreed to talk about their lives. It breaks my heart that only a few of their stories could be told in any detail. Others are mentioned fleetingly or not at all. But all of them educated me, and the things they told us are, I hope, reflected in the book.

  My thanks to interviewees Sylvia Acevedo, Lillian Andrews, Pam Andrews, Michele Araujo, Barbara Arnold, Lynnette Arthur, Dana Arthur-Monteleone, Judy Baker, Josie Bass, Myrna Ten Bensel, Verna Bode, Valerie Bradley, Roberta Brooks, Barbara Jo Brothers, Beverly Burton, Ruth Chesnovar, April Che Chisholm, Valerie Chisholm, Suzan Johnson Cook, Tish Johnson Cook, Rita Coury, Madene Cox, Mary Bell Darcus, Josephine Elsberg, Adelaide Farrell, Yana Shani Fleming, Alison Foster, Lillian Garland, Diane Gilbert, Noella Goupil, Sheri Zoe McWilliams Griffin, Jeannie Gross, Shirley Hammond, Della Taylor Hardman, Joanie Hawkinson, Anna Hay, Alyce P. Hill, Kathy Hinderhofer, Tawana Hinton, Tiffany Hinton, Camara Dia Holloway, Dena Ivey, Dorothea Janczak, Jaime Jenett, Djassi Camara DaCosta Johnson, Emma Jordan, Maria K., Donna Poggi Keck, Edna Kleimeyer, Annemarie Kropf, Joyce Ladner, June LaValleur, Gayle Lawhorn, Florence Lee, Barbara Lewis, Jo Meyer Maasberg, Linda Mason, Linda McDaniel, Virginia McWilliams, Connie Meadows, Annie Miller, Ellen S. Miller, Marie Monsky, Lucy Murray, Georgia Panter Nielsen, Angela Nolfi, Jennifer O’Connell, Elizabeth Patterson, Susan Meyer Pennock, Sylvia Peterson, Judy Pinnick, Tanya Pollard, Vicki Cohn Pollard, Gloria Pratt, Joanne Rife, Judy Riff, Georgia Riggs, Flori Roberts, Carol Rumsey, Frances Russell, Serena Savarirayan, Frances Sego, Mae Ann Semnack, Margaret Siegel, Jennifer Maasberg Smith, Alexandria Dery Snider, Laura Sessions Stepp, Katherine Stewart, Alice Stockwell, Lenora Taitt-Magubane, Althea Tice, Kimberly Tignor, Barbara Tyler, Gloria Vaz, Anne Tolstoi Wallach, Louise Meyer Warpness, Jane Washington, Mary Helen Washington, Marylyn Weller, Betty Riley Williams, Virginia Williams, Arlene Dent Winfield, Charlotte Wong, and Wendy Woythaler.