America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Within a few years, with McCormick nagging him all the way, Pincus had developed an oral contraceptive. It was one of the most critical moments in the history of American women, the arrival of a drug that was so important it became known simply as the Pill. (“There’s gonna be some changes made right here on Nursery Hill,” sang Loretta Lynn. “You’ve set this chicken your last time, cause now I’ve got the Pill.”) But in 1960 no one knew that. The pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle, which applied for permission from the FDA to market the contraceptive, was edgy. “It was not an easy decision. Open association with ‘contraception’ and its positive promotion was…regarded as unseemly by the vast majority of academicians and the practicing profession itself,” recalled Irwin Winter, Searle’s medical director. And many men doubted that women would want to take it. One stock analyst who followed pharmaceuticals recalled people arguing that women would never commit to a regimen of daily medication unless they were sick. Others knew better. The staff physician at Georgetown University Medical Center, who was put in charge of assessing the FDA application, pondered buying stock in Searle, but decided it would be unethical. “I knew that birth control pills would be flying out the windows,” he said. “Everybody and her sister would be taking it.”

  That he was right is a tribute to the desperation women felt about avoiding unwanted pregnancies. The early Pill was hard to tolerate—women suffered from headaches and weight gain, and they had to worry about the danger of blood clots. Most of the side effects were due to estrogen, and the amount in the early version turned out to be far more than necessary. The first contraceptive pill released in 1960 had ten times as much as versions that came along later. The sale of C-cup bras increased 50 percent during the sixties, as all that estrogen caused women’s breasts to swell.

  “ONE VAST, ALL-PERVADING SEXOLOGICAL SPREE”

  Many people were more worried about the effect of the Pill on women’s morals than their bodies—Readers Digest fretted that an end to the threat of illegitimate children might trigger “one vast, all-pervading sexological spree.” They were prescient, in a way. The sixties saw the onset of a real revolution in the way Americans looked at sex, and at its heart was women’s rejection of the double standard. “I told a date nice girls don’t, but he just laughed, and he’s right. Nice girls do,” a college student told Gloria Steinem, who wrote all about it in her first magazine article, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” in 1962. The double standard had been a target of feminist outrage since the eighteenth century, off and on, but reformers thought the answer was to make men accept the same ground rules that women were required to follow. Even in the periods of social upheaval, there had been an almost universal social agreement that women should not have extramarital sex, with possible exceptions for fiancés.

  The birth control pill was a critical factor in spurring on women to demand the same sexual freedom men enjoyed. Things still might have moved more slowly if the civil rights movement had not sensitized people to issues of fair play and evenhandedness. But once sexual liberty was added to the agenda of the rebellious younger generation, it was embraced with much more across-the-board enthusiasm than civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or opposition to the war in Vietnam. Nobody had to organize demonstrations or picket lines on behalf of free love.

  Even before the Pill took hold, Hollywood started to do battle against a double standard that, along with its other disadvantages, severely limited the options for film romance plots. Producers started churning out what author Susan Douglas called “pregnancy melodramas”—films like A Summer Place and Susan Slade and Blue Denim in which the heroine goes all the way, gets in trouble just as the unfeeling adults warned her she would, and then winds up getting the guy and living happily ever after anyway. The unforgivable sin in these movies was hypocrisy, not lust. “Are you antipeople and antilife? Must you suffocate every natural instinct in our daughter, too? Must you label young lovemaking as cheap and wanton and indecent? Must you persist in making sex itself a filthy word?” Sandra Dee’s sympathetic dad asks his frigid wife in A Summer Place. In Splendor in the Grass, the moviemakers demonstrated the terrible danger of not losing one’s virginity when Natalie Wood went stark raving mad out of sexual frustration.

  The opening salvos in the sexual revolution had been fired in the early 1960s by people like Helen Gurley Brown. Her book Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962 and quickly became the first mass-market best-seller in American history to urge young women to have affairs with married men. Brown told her single female readers to start demanding the same kind of rewards single males can get, including a satisfying career, a healthy savings account, and lots of lovers. They could sow wild oats and then marry late. Marriage, she told her public, “is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband.” In a brilliant stroke of packaging, Brown also confided that in her late thirties she had landed a “brainy, charming and sexy” movie producer, with whom she resided in a “house overlooking the Pacific” with “a full-time maid and a good life.” Her readers, she suggested, could do exactly the same thing by becoming confident, interesting women who were successes at work and in bed. The single woman, Brown earnestly admonished her readers, “is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times,” someone who “moves in the world of men”—a “far more colorful world than the one of P.T.A., Dr. Spock and the jammed clothes dryer.”

  It was quite a shift in message, but a good chunk of the country was ready to hear it. The age of marriage had begun to rise again, starting in 1957, and the birthrate had begun to fall. Women were no longer quite as eager to forgo that period of independence between school and marriage. Partly it was because low-cost mortgages and free college tuition for married men were no longer as readily available. But the terror of sterile and possibly unnatural singlehood was also losing its hold. Sex and the Single Girl virtually monopolized the cultural debate—until the next year, when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came along and brought a similar, if much more somber, message to the women who had already dedicated the best years of their lives to the very things Brown was now telling their daughters to avoid at all costs.

  In the growing political turmoil in the Vietnam War years of the late sixties and early seventies, sexual liberation came to be connected with everything from environmentalism to opposition to the war. “Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals, rewarded in a war of aggression,” argued Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist and hero of the New Left. Antidraft protesters marched with signs that announced “Girls say yes to men who say no.” The younger generation—trailed by the enthusiastic media—was well ahead of the rest of the nation when it came to unleashing their libidos; as late as 1969, 68 percent of the American population was opposed to premarital sex. But the majority caught up pretty fast, and by 1973, the same pollsters reported that most respondents felt sex before marriage was okay. In the same year, a survey of eight colleges determined that 76 percent of female students had had intercourse by their junior year—about the same proportion as the male students. (In his report in 1953, Alfred Kinsey had found about a quarter of women in college were sexually active.) The double standard was, if not completely dead, certainly fading fast. In 1975, TV reporter Morley Safer asked First Lady Betty Ford what she would do if her unmarried daughter Susan told her she was having an affair. “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think she’s a normal human being like all young girls,” said Mrs. Ford.

  “MOVE ON, LITTLE GIRL”

  In the wild swing of the historical pendulum of the 1960s and early 1970s, the sexual liberation movement preceded the women’s liberation movement, and many girls felt free to say yes before they figured out that they had the right to say no. Refusing a date’s demand for sex had been difficult enough when both parties grudgingly accepted the idea that women should remain virgins until they married. Now, as one
conservative intellectual complained, the new morality was giving women “the obligations of an impersonal lust they did not feel but only believed in.” Even women who were charter members of the political rebellion felt they were being used; the double standard still seemed to rule when it came to everything but sex. Jane Alpert, a fugitive radical who had helped her lover, Sam Melville, set bombs in eight government and corporate buildings in New York City in 1969, wrote later that when Melville thought the house needed to be cleaned, he wrote “Wash Me” on the side of a dirty refrigerator in black magic marker. During a climactic meeting of New Left leaders in 1968, one of the men patted activist Shulamith Firestone on the head and said, “Move on, little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.” The Yippees, the free-wheeling counterculturists who described utopia as “free grass, free food, free shelter, free chicks” had a saying: “Shake a chick’s tit instead of her hand.”

  Young men seemed much more ready to accept marriages in which each partner could have outside sex than marriages in which each partner did an equal share of the housework. And neither the black leaders of the civil rights movement (like Stokely Carmichael, who said that the proper position for women was “prone”) nor the white students who ran the protests against the war were particularly eager to bring women into the decision-making process. While some women got their first taste of leadership in organizing opposition to the war, many of them were identified as the wife or girlfriend of a male leader. In 1965, at a meeting of student radicals in Michigan, one man said that “women made peanut butter, waited on tables, cleaned up, got laid. That was their role.”

  For young middle-class whites, the core of American political and cultural activity in the later sixties and early seventies was the war in Vietnam. The growing disillusionment with the conflict, even among many people with fairly traditional political outlooks, did more than create bad feeling toward the politicians in Washington. It cast a cloud of illegitimacy over authority in general. If the people in charge could be so wrong about something as important as a war, why should anyone assume that they were right about the necessity of maintaining one’s virginity, avoiding drugs, or obeying a school dress code? And if everything was focused on the war, young men were at the center of the war issue. They were the ones, after all, who were in danger of being drafted and sent to die in a jungle in Southeast Asia. They were the ones who had to decide whether to join the service or burn their draft cards or escape to Canada. Women were on the periphery, supporting the men in their great moral and political crisis. The slogan about girls saying yes to men who said no was an echo of those young ladies in the Revolutionary and Civil War eras who were supposed to reject any suitor who failed to enlist. And it seemed to suggest that Stokely Carmichael might have been right about women’s position in the movement after all.

  “NOWADAYS, WOMEN WOULDN’T STAND

  FOR BEING KEPT SO MUCH IN THE BACKGROUND”

  The March on Washington took place in March 1963 and is still remembered for Martin Luther King’s amazing “I Have a Dream” speech. A quarter million people flooded into the capital to urge Congress to pass the pending Civil Rights Act—college students who had formed the shock troops of the drive for integration and voter registration projects in the South, the black ministers who were the most recognizable leaders of the movement, the white politicians, and movie stars and union leaders who had provided money and publicity and political muscle. Rosa Parks was there, and Pauli Murray, who had staged that first sit-in at a Washington restaurant during World War II, and Daisy Bates from Arkansas. But they were not included on the lengthy speakers’ list. Instead of marching with the male leaders, up front where the TV cameras and newspaper reporters were recording every minute of the event, they were directed to walk with those men’s wives. There was not a single woman scheduled to speak at the march, and when the lone woman on the nineteen-member planning committee protested, the organizers threw together a last-minute “Tribute to Women” in which A. Philip Randolph introduced Parks and other female dignitaries, like the dancer Josephine Baker and the actress Lena Horne, while they sat there silently. (Randolph, the venerable union leader, had begun the week’s activities by giving a speech at the all-male National Press Club luncheon, in which female reporters were consigned to a small balcony, denied the right to ask questions.) “Nowadays, women wouldn’t stand for being kept so much in the background, but back then women’s rights hadn’t become a popular cause yet,” said Parks later.

  African Americans had always celebrated the virtues of strong women who kept families going under extraordinary political and economic pressures. But they also wanted to see black men take the leadership role they had been systematically denied in American history. Almost as soon as slavery came to the colonies it was established that black women could be more outspoken than their husbands and brothers and fathers. The sharp-tongued Charleston market women of the eighteenth century and the sassy “mammy” of the plantation South were only two of the models for black women who could, under certain circumstances, give white people a piece of their mind. The liberties were greater for older women than younger, and for large, maternal-looking women than pretty girls. But there was no model for a black male being permitted to put white people in their place. It was probably because of that legacy that civil rights workers, who went into the small towns of the Deep South hoping to register black voters, found women more willing to step forward and take risks. “There is always a ‘mama,’” said one organizer. “She is usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding, and willing to catch hell, having already caught her share.”

  Black men generally could assert themselves only by ordering around black women, and they were not any readier than white men to cede authority to the opposite sex. Even Rosa Parks’s lawyer told her that he believed the proper place for women was in the kitchen. At church, the center of black communities, the minister was always a male, and the congregation was mainly female, doing his bidding. “All of the churches depended, in terms of things taking place, on women, not men. Men didn’t do the things that had to be done,” said Ella Baker, a veteran organizer. Baker was asked by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to run its voter registration drive and work as the de facto executive director. But for all her skills, she was never considered for the permanent executive director’s job, which always went to a man.

  Many black women were willing to defer to the men simply because they felt there was a need for strong male role models in their community. “Around 1965 there began to develop a great deal of questioning about what is the role of women in the struggle. Out of it came a concept that black women had to bolster the ego of the male…. I personally have never thought of this as being valid.” said Baker, who became the guiding spirit of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the preeminent civil rights group of the younger generation.

  The women often wound up taking the public role of victim—the heroines who were beaten, or arrested, or chased by mobs and were honored for their courage and endurance. In Americus, Georgia, two dozen girls, most of them not yet teenagers, were taken off to jail where they were beaten, burned with cattle prods, and left for weeks in a cell awash in urine and feces. When a rattlesnake slithered into the cell, the girls had to call for half an hour before a guard came in to kill it. In Albany, Georgia, Carolyn Daniels, a black single mother who ran the local beauty shop, gave rooms to several organizers, and as a result Daniels was shot and her house firebombed. Fourteen-year-old Joanne Christian was arrested thirteen times, beaten, kicked, and dragged by her hair. Her eleven-year-old sister, Dear, was jailed seven times, remaining in prison forty-seven days. In Indianola, Mississippi, Irene Magruder allowed voter registration workers to use her house as an office. It was set on fire, and white firemen stood watching, their hoses turned off, until it burned to the ground, destroying everything she owned.

  The most famous example of the brave loc
al “mamas” was Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children of a Mississippi sharecropper. She volunteered to register to vote when the civil rights organizers came to her town of Ruleville, Mississippi. She was rejected because she was unable to correctly interpret a section of the state constitution on de facto laws. But for merely attempting, she and her husband were put off the plantation where they worked. As Hamer continued her civil rights activity they were constantly harassed—the couple once received a $9,000 water bill for a home that had no running water. In 1963, Hamer and some other civil rights workers were arrested at a bus station in Winona, Mississippi, and she was beaten so severely she suffered kidney damage and blood clots for the rest of her life. She told her story at the 1964 Democratic convention, where she was part of a Freedom slate attempting to unseat the all-white regular delegation. “All this on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” she said, in testimony that was broadcast on television across the country. It was one of the most arresting moments in modern political history, but when the time came for the Freedom slate to negotiate with the party leaders, Hamer was excluded from most of the meetings.

  The tension of divided loyalties was not limited to black women. Lesbians found themselves in danger of being frozen out by both the early gay rights movement, which was mainly run by men, and the women’s liberation movement, which proved to be surprisingly homophobic. Mexican American women were torn between the desire to fight for Hispanic rights and the need to assert themselves against the paternalistic power structure of the Chicano movement. At the Mexican American National Issues Conference in Sacramento in 1970, the women broke away and formed their own organization, saying they had been excluded from leadership opportunities by both Anglo society and Mexican American males. But they were very conscious that they were leaving themselves open to being branded as “man haters” or traitors to their race. When 600 Chicana activists met in Houston in 1971, arguments immediately broke out between those who defined themselves as “loyalists” and the more feminist majority. In the end, the gathering passed a resolution saying that “traditional roles are, for Chicanas, no longer acceptable,” and the loyalists walked out in protest.