by Linda Gartz
CHAPTER 36: Sexual Politics
Linda and Katy join in sing-fest, Austrian Alps, 1969.
Had I become pregnant, I would have been just as fearful of my mother’s wrath as I would of my own ruined future. From early childhood on, Mom taught me to preserve my virginity until marriage. However, Mom was no prude about sex after marriage. In one diary, she entered a section on sexual positions (written in shorthand); Billy was conceived in a moment of passion in the bathroom. When I was a toddler in the crib, Mom and Dad entertained me with their “bing bong” game, as they sat half-naked on their bed. In 1940s and ’50s photos, I‘ve seen the sexy looks they threw each other; their happy smiles, filled with sexual innuendo. I have every reason to believe that my parents had a robust sex life.
But I’d also seen how Grandma K had demonized women’s sexuality in her angry and psychotic rants. When Mom was a teen, her mother had screamed at her, calling her only daughter a streetwalker or a whore, ludicrous accusations. But these slanders against her character must have penetrated deeply into Mom’s psyche, creating a rigid sexual morality, where premarital sex was the domain only of prostitutes. I think I could have been convicted of murder, and she would have been less horrified than had I become pregnant without the sanctity of marriage.
And it wasn’t just Mom. In the 1950s and ’60s, society heaped opprobrium on unwed pregnant girls, who were whisked out of town “to visit an aunt in Kansas,” returning months later. Their babies had been placed for adoption, all records sealed.
In my Lutheran high school, as in most 1960s high schools, sex education didn’t exist. We girls were taught about our menstrual cycle and the process of pregnancy as part of physical education (girls moaned in embarrassment at even the mention of the word menstruate), but that was it. Any discussion of preventing pregnancy was out of the question. Abstinence was expected.
Except for condoms, which I hadn’t even heard of, when Bill and I met in 1965, birth control was still denied to unmarried couples in twenty-six states. That same year, the Supreme Court finally overturned a Connecticut law that had made it a felony for married couples to use birth control. Abortion was illegal, but I didn’t even know about such a procedure.
Bill, too, had been raised by a mother worried about premarital sex. She had warned him of girls who “trapped men into marriage” by getting pregnant. He and I weren’t sophisticated enough to talk on any level with each other about sexuality. On our first date, Bill kissed me goodnight. His lips were full and soft. But would he think I was loose for kissing him back so early in our relationship?
We went on several dates before our kisses turned passionate, deep, and long. We found privacy at drive-in movies, where we kissed, our tongues tangled and insistent. Bill’s hands roamed freely over my body and mine over his; a pulsing heat swarmed from my groin to my chest to my arms—until I was enveloped in desire. “I wish we were older,” Bill said one night, as we paused, panting from our heavy necking and petting. We were ready to go further, but the fear of pregnancy held us back. We somehow stopped ourselves before going all the way.
As Bill and I approached our fourth year together, we still hadn’t “done it.” My college friends were baffled, asking, “What’s holding you back?” Many of the young women said that their mothers had never even talked to them about sex, so they just followed their hormonal instincts and did whatever felt good. I was stunned. Didn’t their mothers want their daughters to be informed? To protect them? Mom had never portrayed sex to me as “evil” or “bad.” Just sex before marriage was immoral—and then there was the possible horror of a young girl becoming an unwed mother.
“You can get birth-control pills at the student health center,” Katy assured me when I explained our situation. Birth control was so new, only recently available to unmarried women, I hadn’t even considered it, but now a switch flipped. I visited a campus gynecologist, wearing a conservative skirt and button-up blouse, my hair tied in pigtails, all contrived so he wouldn’t think I was a trollop. I got my prescription for birth-control pills. I had shed my mother’s rigid sexual mores and feared only pregnancy.
On the fourth anniversary of the day we met, Bill and I drank champagne in his bedroom long after his mom had gone to sleep in a faraway part of the house. We kissed and petted and shed our clothes in marijuana-infused mellowness while Bob Dylan’s languorous, sexy “Lay, Lady, Lay,” played on a cassette tape.
“I didn’t know it would be like this!” I blurted out, returning his thrusts as we found perfect rhythm. Climaxing, we both cried out—grinning like fools, trying hopelessly between giggles to shush one another so as not to wake his mother. Breathless, we spread kisses over each other—face, neck, chest, breast, belly—laughing, crying, and declaring our love for each other, again and again and again.
Two months later, at the end of July, he would head into basic training, just a month before I would leave for Germany. The synchronicity was fortuitous; both of us would be away from Chicago at the same time. I also thought it would be good for us—for me, especially—to be apart for a while. I had transitioned directly from childhood and adolescence into my relationship with Bill. I loved him, but felt I needed to be independent from both my parents and the steady boyfriend I’d met when I was only sixteen. I wasn’t looking for a new romance, but a place where only I was responsible for my life and I could embrace adventure. I didn’t share these thoughts with Bill. For him, our separation held nothing but dread and loneliness. Four weeks after Bill left for Fort Benning, Georgia, I was on a ship to Europe with Katy.
The evening after arriving in Rotterdam, the entire Junior Year in Munich group boarded a train to Munich, jostling and squeezing ourselves in among the crowds. When we arrived in Munich, Katy and I settled into our respective dorms, but we didn’t explore the city. Katy had a much more ambitious plan. Within a couple hours, we had packed our bags, taken a bus to the autobahn, and thrust out our thumbs, taking turns holding up our cardboard sign with GRAZ, AUSTRIA emblazoned in huge letters.
Katy’s father, Duke University’s chemistry chair, had included the family on several yearlong sabbaticals, once to France and most recently to Graz, where Katy had attended her senior year of high school. Visiting her former school buddies was her highest priority, so off we went on day one. It was the first of many such forays. Fearless and experienced, Katy led the way on adventures I never would have considered on my own. Her blazing, long red hair, extending halfway down her back, blew wild in the wind as she leaned casually on one leg, stuck out her right thumb, and coolly dragged on the cigarette in her left hand. In Katy’s mind, nothing bad could possibly happen, and her confidence rubbed off on me.
With my book-learned German, I jabbered for hours at truck drivers, businessmen, and workers, amazed and thrilled that they understood me, as if I were breaking a code. At day’s end, my face muscles ached, sore from contorting my mouth to form a host of new sounds.
At University of Munich lectures, I learned to take notes in German. On the weekends, we explored the Bavarian countryside, riding buses on excursions to iconic castles like Neuschwanstein (the inspiration for Disney’s Fantasyland castle) or to small towns with tongue-twisting names like Garmisch-partenkirchen.
One weekend, Katy and I hiked in the Austrian Alps with a couple of Bavarian boys amidst clumps of wildflowers under an azure-blue October sky. We ended up at a farm, where the ruddy-faced farmer’s wife served us steaming leberknödel soup and hearty stew. After dinner, a toothless, sun-scorched farmer plucked a worn guitar, leading us and other hikers in Austrian folk songs around a rough-hewn wooden table. We downed hefty steins of beer, banging them together with ever-increasing gusto as the night went on.
Our bed was the straw-covered barn loft, where the heavy scent of animal manure and fodder wafted among the rafters. Clanking cowbells and dawn’s early rays, slicing through the planked walls, awakened us. I was having the best time of my life. Bill was having the worst.
His lette
rs arrived several times a week, each one filled with loneliness, longing, and love. He hated the army: belly-crawling for hundreds of yards in the red Georgia dirt, nettled by insects probing his sweat-soaked skin in the stifling heat—sweat so profuse that he could drink two gallons of water each day and seldom urinate. The recruits arose at four to run a mile before breakfast, followed by physical training while being harassed by their drill sergeant, who screamed at them: “Maggots, pussies, and ladies!”
“What’s the purpose of a bayonet?” The drill sergeant shouted at the young men. In unison, they chanted back, “To kill! To kill! With cold blue steel.”
“This is what they’re teaching us,” Bill wrote to me. We had to keep reminding ourselves how lucky he was not to be slogging through Vietnamese mosquito-infested swamps, shot to pieces, or captured. But that truth didn’t keep his heartache at bay. In one letter, he told me, “I want to eat with you, sleep with you, make love to you, and awaken next to you.” I was pricked by guilt—that his life was so miserable, he could think only of me, while I enjoyed my adventures. I wrote him at least weekly. I missed his ready laugh, his sweet kisses, and his warm hands across my skin, but I was giddy with my newfound independence.
Bill arrived in Munich on December 27, 1969. He had completed basic training just two days earlier. Waiting outside the jet bridge, I sat twirling my hair, biting at my cuticles, wondering if we’d still get along after five months apart. When I saw him striding through the airport gate in his familiar dark-brown winter coat, I leaped from my seat, ran up to him, and threw my arms around his back, pressing our chests together. I tilted my face up to his, and we gave each other a long kiss. His army-regulation buzz cut was a stunning change from the Beatles’ hairstyle he’d sported since I’d met him. “I’m so glad to see you!” I said, holding his arms and leaning back to get a good look at him.
Bill arrives in Munich, December 27, 1969.
“Me, too! I got my hair cut for the occasion.” A man with a sense of humor! He’d always made me laugh, unlike the men I’d met in Munich, who were obsessed with leftist politics and the upcoming “revolution.”
Bill stayed in my dorm room, its bed about three-quarters of a twin size. Of course, I didn’t tell my mother. “Now, don’t get carried away without a chaperone there,” Mom had written to me in all seriousness.
At the end of January, when Bill had to return to Chicago to finish law school, I went with him to the airport. We kissed and held each other until the flight attendant called for final boarding. I cried and waved to him before he disappeared into the walkway. My flight of freedom had paid off. He was the one.
Back in Chicago, Bill often dropped by my parents’ house to say hi, as a way of feeling connected to me. On a visit at the end of April, he unwisely told Mom that Katy and I were planning to get an apartment together when I returned in the fall. Then, in my mother’s words, he “expounded on the antiquity of the marriage system.”
Mom typed a five-page, single-spaced letter to me in response to Bill’s comments. “I am completely shook up about the false thinking of the young,” she wrote. “It seems that the one of our children who is falling by the wayside and not adhering to moral standards is the one where Dad has had his way in rearing her.”
What? Dad had traveled six months of every year, starting shortly after my birth until I was thirteen. In her letter, Mom dragged up (or made up) events from the past of which I had no recollection, as evidence of my spoiled and “immoral” nature.
Distraught by Bill’s ill-advised comments, Mom even quoted her much-despised motherin-law as a paragon of brilliance. “Grandma told me I shouldn’t send you to Europe because you hadn’t earned it and should be home helping your mother! I realize she was always right and actually my best friend. I just didn’t know it.” Mom ended her letter with, “I do hope when you return that you plan on living at home, even though there might be a few restrictions, which, in the end, is better for you.”
I wrote back saying that I had been studying for a big test when her letter arrived: “I couldn’t concentrate or think straight, I was so upset.” To her comment that if Bill didn’t want to marry me, I should just tell him to go to hell, I said, “That will never happen.” In the end, her letter was certainly persuasive—there was no way I’d be living at home.
When the University of Munich let out in mid-July, Katy, her roommate, and I borrowed a friend’s eleven-year-old Volkswagen and took to the road for six weeks of travel. We headed to Berlin for a few days, then Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and back south to Cologne, where we sold the car. After hitchhiking to Belgium’s coast, we ferried toward the chalky White Cliffs of Dover, and ended up in London for the last ten days of our trip.
In between attending plays with Katy, I picked up a copy of Time magazine. I lay on the narrow bed of our pension, reading the cover story about Kate Millett’s new book, Sexual Politics. Millett argued the radical notion that different rules and expectations controlled men and women in society; that women had been steered into specific roles and discouraged from seeking any meaningful work outside the home or beyond limited “female” career options.
It suddenly all fell into place. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before! I thought of Mom urging me to take typing and shorthand so I could make a living and “never be solely dependent on a man.” But I knew many girls who were told the only reason to attend college was to find a husband. Mom’s advice to be prepared to work was forward-thinking for the time, but what path might I have chosen had all been open to me? Secretary, teacher, or nurse—these were the big three career options for women in the 1950s and ’60s—all fine, upstanding professions, but basically considered to be the only work of which females were considered capable. A few extraordinary women broke free of these models, but they were the exception, not the rule.
My mother was a classic case of the thwarted career woman. “I’ve always hated repetitive ‘women’s work,’” Mom often said. She enjoyed the more interesting activities required to run our small business, so she ended up doing “men’s work” in addition to women’s.
Before we departed from Europe for America, Katy and I solidified our plan to share an apartment. Mom’s advice to learn typing and shorthand was serving me well—but not as she had anticipated. When I needed an immediate job to pay the rent for my apartment with Katy, my German degree was useless. It was the secretarial skills I had honed over years of summer employment that bestowed independence—not from a man, but from my mother.
I landed a job as a secretary to five managers at Arthur Andersen, at that time one the world’s top eight accounting firms. Only men were accountants. I tested well in the interview, despite my rusty shorthand and speedy but less-than-perfect typing. Mom, however, could pound out letters, leases, and income-tax forms, with multiple carbon copies, virtually error-free.
I now know what I never even thought to ponder at the age of twenty-one. She would have made a far better secretary than I, for more money, pleasure, and pride than she received for her work on their West Side properties. In 1970, I was making $7,800 a year at AA, more than double what my mother’s executive skills, combined with her and Dad’s hard labor, netted from the West Side buildings.
In January of 1951, when she had argued vehemently in letters to Dad against his insistence on creating basement apartments, she wrote, “Honey, if I have to work for a living, I think secretarial work is much more enjoyable.” Despite her cogent arguments against the basement plan, she had acquiesced to please my unrealistic father.
Now, after almost twenty years of managing their properties, she was trapped by their earlier decisions and couldn’t see her way clear to get out from under it all. With the kids mostly grown, she could have nabbed a secretarial job like mine and paid for a building manager, since Dad refused to even discuss selling the buildings. Such thinking never occurred to either of them.
How much happier they could have been had they been able to let go of old habit
s and recognize the toxic influence both their mothers had on their lives: Grandma K made our home unwelcome for my traveling dad; Grandma Gartz’s constant and belittling criticism drove Dad, and later, Mom, to relentlessly try to prove their worth through physical labor.
With today’s hindsight and understanding, I would have advised Mom to seek counseling for herself, from both a therapist and a lawyer, the latter to understand her options with the six-flat, so as not to let Dad’s choices and hang-ups control her.
CHAPTER 37: Moving On
“Oh, by the way, Mom,” I said, holding up her new gold drapes as she inserted pins into the pleats before hanging them, “Katy and I think it would be fun to get an apartment together. She’s finishing her last year at Northwestern and needs a roommate so she can afford a decent place.”
Pinching out the T-shaped pins from between her lips, Mom stepped down from the ladder and faced me, her face a bitter scowl. “You mean to tell me you’re not going to live here and pay me rent? Don’t you think you owe me that after a whole year living in Europe?”
I knew this was coming and tried to sound casual, matter-of-fact. But her guilt-inducing, accusatory tone churned my gut. I took a deep inner sigh and stood my ground. “Mom, I’m twenty-one years old. I spent all year living independently. Besides, Katy needs a roommate to share rent. I’ll still be close to home.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!” She jabbed at me with her index finger. “After all I had to contend with last year—the fire in the six-flat! Running back and forth to the West Side! When I finished high school, I gave my parents seventy-five percent of my salary when I got my first job. Aren’t you being just a little selfish here?”
“Mom, that was the Depression! Your parents couldn’t find work. Besides, it’s time I was on my own.”
“We’re barely squeaking by with those buildings. There’s always extra expenses and one headache after another.”