by Gail Collins
“YOU CAN’T EVEN SAFELY ADVERTISE
FOR A WIFE ANY MORE”
When the landmark Civil Rights Act was being debated in 1963, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, the chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, moved to add “sex” to the part of the bill banning discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Legend had it he was joking, or just trying to kill the bill. It was easy to see how people got that idea, since during the debate, Smith had the male legislators in stitches when he expanded on his theories about sex discrimination by reading a letter from a woman protesting the shortage of prospective husbands. (Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, volunteered that he always had the last word in all domestic discussions, as long as the words were “Yes, dear.”) Actually, Smith was one of those politicians who expressed his opposition to blacks by pointing out that they were about to be treated better than white women. He was an ally of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party, a group that was not so much opposed to black civil rights as simply worried that it might get in the way of the women’s agenda. Once again, women and African Americans were both vying to make progress, and bumping up against one another in the process. But this time no one wound up being excluded. Martha Griffiths, a Democratic representative from Michigan, realized that Smith’s motion would draw heavy support from conservative southerners who simply wanted to make trouble for the Civil Rights Act. But if she could get 100 northern and western representatives, she calculated, the amendment could actually pass. “If I can’t argue enough to get that other hundred, I ought to leave Congress,” she told herself. Griffiths was the first woman to be a member of the committee that controlled tax laws, and she had accumulated a substantial number of chits in the legislative favor bank.
Thanks to an unlikely collection of female lawmakers, liberal northern men, and southern segregationists in the House, and with the help of the redoubtable Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate, the Civil Rights bill became law with a clause that made it illegal to discriminate against women in hiring, pay, or promotions. But most people didn’t take the idea of ending sex discrimination seriously. Instead, they asked jovially whether the law would require the Playboy clubs to start hiring men as bunnies—those waitresses who dressed up in rabbit ears and skimpy costumes. “Bunny problem, indeed!” editorialized the New York Times, which also playfully worried about male Rockettes dancing in the chorus line at Radio City: “This is revolution, chaos. You can’t even safely advertise for a wife any more.” Actually, the country had already learned in the Depression that there were very few men who regarded any traditionally feminine job as worth having, even the ones that women found relatively desirable. (Gloria Steinem had just written an article about her undercover experiences as a Playboy bunny that made it clear the job wasn’t very pleasant even for an attractive woman.) But most critics dismissed the entire idea of women’s rights in the job market by raising the specter of hairy male legs on the chorus line. Others had a clearer vision of the real dangers to the status quo. A personnel officer for an airline asked a reporter in horror: “What are we going to do when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify?”
When the law went into effect, the airline industry was indeed one of the first employers challenged. But it was the stewardesses, not would-be pilots, who filed the complaints. The airlines had originally hired nurses as flight attendants in order to emphasize passenger safety, but they had quickly switched over to glorified waitresses—“girls” who were trained in makeup and grooming and who had their scalps examined to make sure their hair was its natural color and their stomachs poked by supervisors to make sure they were wearing girdles. They were required to retire if they had the bad grace to gain weight, get married, or turn thirty-two. “It’s the sex thing,” an airlines executive told the head of the stewardesses’ union. If the person serving coffee and passing out pillows looks like “a dog,” he claimed, “twenty businessmen are sore for a month.” When several stewardesses appeared before a House Labor subcommittee to testify, Representative James Scheur of New York asked them to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.”
The newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, however, was not planning on using its limited resources to advance the cause of stewardesses or any other aggrieved women. The majority on the five-member commission, which included only one woman, felt their primary duty was to help African American workers—though the question of what they planned to do about African American women was never made entirely clear. The commission made its disinterest in the woman’s issue evident in 1965, when it ruled that newspaper help-wanted ads could no longer discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, but that it was okay to continue dividing them into “Male Help Wanted” and “Female Help Wanted” sections. Representative Griffiths angrily took to the floor of the House to remind the EEOC officials that “they took an oath to uphold the law, not just the part of it that they are interested in.”
The help-wanted ads were a particularly sore point because they had such a broad effect on women’s job opportunities. At a convention of various state commissions on the status of women in 1966, fifteen angry women met in Betty Friedan’s hotel room to talk about starting a new organization—a sort of NAACP for women. The meeting degenerated into a fight about tactics. (At one point, Friedan demanded that everyone who disagreed with her leave and locked herself in the bathroom.) But before the conference was over, even the more conservative women had to admit that their efforts to work from the inside had been useless, and the National Organization for Women (NOW) was born. Friedan thought up the name on the spur of the moment and wrote out a statement of purpose on a paper napkin. It was the beginning of the women’s liberation movement.
“SHE IS DISSATISFIED WITH A LOT THAT
WOMEN OF OTHER LANDS CAN ONLY DREAM OF”
Betty Friedan had been a celebrity since The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, and she was still being deluged with letters from fans who recognized themselves in the description of bored, frustrated housewives in her book. But Friedan had been writing most of all about herself. She was the prototype of the kind of woman who was doomed to be miserable as a suburban homemaker. Friedan had intended to have a career in psychology, but she turned down the chance for the kind of fellowship that would have put her on the fast track in academia. At the time she thought it was because a man she was interested in felt he could not compete with her success. But later she wondered if she had just been frightened of taking the plunge into the real world. At any rate, she married and gave up her work, and by the late 1950s there she was, rearing three children and trying to balance the family budget by writing freelance articles for women’s magazines, on topics such as breastfeeding and what it was like to be married to a millionaire. She was becoming strangely obsessed with her upcoming Smith college reunion, and she got a commission from McCall’s to write an article refuting that best-seller Modern Women: The Lost Sex, which argued that higher education got in the way of women adjusting to their natural role as wives and mothers. Friedan was planning a good-news piece about how college and domesticity went together. But she found her fellow graduates as restless as she was. When the distinctly bad-news article she wrote was rejected by both McCall’s and Redbook, Friedan turned it into a book. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States,” she began.
The Feminine Mystique was both powerful and a good read, full of anecdotes and surprising statistics, although Friedan’s conclusion tended to mirror her own experience. Women, she felt, were sticking to home and hearth because they were frightened of taking the plunge into the real world. Her all-purpose solution was for wives to get jobs—something about a third of them alre
ady had. But she had hit a nerve—both with the women who had never felt comfortable with suburban domesticity and those who were beginning to feel at loose ends once their children approached adulthood.
The women who got married after World War II usually spaced their babies close together, often telling each other they wanted to compress the exhausting years of caring for infants and toddlers—to “get it over with.” By 1963, the first wave of baby-boom children was getting ready for college. Their mothers were over “it,” without any clear idea of what came next. For the first time, the nation had a very large population of middle-aged women who had no children left at home, no particular need to work for money, household chores that weren’t demanding, and decades of life still ahead of them. “Usually, until very recently, mom folded up and died of hard work somewhere in the middle of her life,” wrote Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers, a postwar best-seller that was critical of virtually everything but reserved special rancor for “Momism.” To Wylie, the era when mothers seldom survived beyond childbearing years was a kind of Paradise Lost.
Some suburban housewives slid smoothly into volunteer work or jobs. But others ran into empty-nest life crises, made infinitely worse by the new national emphasis on personal happiness and sexual fulfillment that had doubled the divorce rate between the midsixties and midseventies. Although it was hard to tell who was leaving whom, being dumped by one’s spouse was certainly more frightening to women, many of whom had never worked or even handled a checkbook. The mass media had noticed the phenomenon of the unhappy housewife, although the general analysis was that women just didn’t appreciate how good they had it “She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of,” said Newsweek reprovingly.
“LADY JUROR BAN ENDED BY COURT”
At the beginning of the 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement was getting under way, the New York Times printed a story about a woman attempting to rent an apartment who was forced to get her husband, a mental hospital patient, to cosign the lease. A wealthy middle-aged divorcée who wanted to buy a co-op had to get her father’s signature on the contract. Mortgage lenders frequently refused to count a wife’s salary in determining family income under the theory that she would stop working and have babies—although some offered to make exceptions for anyone who could prove she’d had a hysterectomy. Divorced women were regarded as high risks by insurance companies, and they had trouble getting credit cards. Mary Tyler Moore, still shattering tradition, wanted to play a divorcée in her new series, but CBS felt the nation wasn’t ready for that and compromised on making her the survivor of an unhappy engagement.
There were ten women in the 435-member House of Representatives in 1970 and one in the U.S. Senate. In North Carolina, only a virgin could charge a man with rape. In Alabama, the idea of women serving on juries was still something of a novelty—the courts had only ordered the state to include them in 1966. (“Lady Juror Ban Ended by Court” announced the Huntsville Times. The Alabama Journal interviewed local attorneys who felt “women perhaps would be more sympathetic to a defendant…but on the other hand their sympathies could be with the aggrieved party.”) In newspaper stories women were all referred to as Miss or Mrs.; a reporter interviewing a witness to a traffic accident had to ask if she was married in order to refer to her by name in print.
In 1970, 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers, and 7 percent of the doctors, were women. A woman, on average, had to have a college degree to outearn a man with an eighth-grade education. There were virtually no women judges at any but the very lowest level courts. In the mass media, almost all the top editors were male, even at the women’s magazines. At Newsweek, one of the fifty-two writers was a woman and one of the thirty-five researchers was a man, and when the women filed suit under the Civil Rights Act, the editor said the setup was a “news magazine tradition going back almost fifty years.” There had been only one more woman in the president’s Cabinet since Frances Perkins.
There was obviously plenty to reform. As movements go, women’s liberation was going to be both extraordinarily ambitious and extraordinarily successful. And while it forced some women into tortured journeys through abuse and repression in their past, most of the people involved would have agreed with lawyer Flo Kennedy, who emerged from the famous Miss America protest of 1968 saying it was “the best fun I can imagine anyone wanting to have on any single day of her life.”
“DEGRADED MINDLESS BOOB-GIRLIE SYMBOL”
The Miss America demonstration was one of those small, but resonant moments in the national history of dramatic gestures—a twentieth-century successor to the day nine-year-old Susan Boudinot threw her cup of British tea out the governor’s window. It was the first time many people realized the women’s liberation movement existed, and it would permanently affect their perceptions of it, for good and ill.
Beauty pageants, particularly the one in Atlantic City, had evolved over the twentieth century from a fairly shocking display of female flesh to a wholesome part of Americana—President Nixon said the Miss America contest was the only program he ever allowed his daughters Julie and Tricia to stay up late to watch. Miss America was, as the song said, the national “ideal,” a young woman with a sunny personality who could proffer the kind of bland generalities about world peace and healthy children that got generations of middle-class wives through PTA teas and their husbands’ business functions. But she was also a person in her own right with a talent, like singing or baton twirling. She had a pretty face and looked good in a bathing suit. The idea that there could be something wrong with all this was new and rather shocking.
A group of women, led by former TV child star Robin Morgan, arrived in the afternoon, when the TV crews waiting for the judging to begin had relatively little to do. They set up a “freedom trash can” on the Atlantic City boardwalk and threw in bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes, and hair curlers. They crowned a sheep, waved placards, and shouted slogans. The New York Times story undoubtedly marked the first time the paper ever used the term “degraded mindless boob-girlie symbol” even inside quotation marks. But adhering to its stylebook, the Times referred to the demonstration’s leader as “Miss Morgan…a housewife who uses her maiden name.” (Morgan, who had spent her childhood starring in the beloved TV show I Remember Mama, was married to a gay man and later wrote a famous diatribe, “Goodbye to All That,” in which she announced, “We are the women that men have warned us about.”) Although the women virtuously abided by the Atlantic City fire regulations and refrained from setting the freedom trash can on fire, the demonstration saddled the movement forever with the all-purpose put-down “bra-burners.” At the end of the real Miss America pageant, as the eighteen-year-old Miss Illinois was walking down the runway, gingerly balancing her new crown, some of the demonstrators who had been smuggled into the auditorium unfurled a sign over the balcony that read “Women’s Liberation.” It was the first time most of the viewing public had ever heard the term.
But very soon the nation became the audience in a constantly evolving guerrilla theater of women’s protests. Demonstrators were swooping down on bridal fairs and marriage license bureaus to protest the imbalance of power in American marriages. They put a hex on the unsympathetic Justice Department and staged a sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal and plastered signs that said “This Ad Degrades Women” on particularly sexist advertisements. All around the country, women were spontaneously organizing themselves into “consciousness-raising groups” in which they discussed everything from faked orgasms and concerns about the size of their breasts to long-repressed rapes or black-market abortions. The entire postwar period, from suburbia to New Left communes, had encouraged them to focus on pleasing men, and American women were thrilled to discover the sisterhood of their own sex. Many of them had been as estranged as the unhappy pioneer wife who had sadly discovered “I cannot make a friend like mother out of Henry.” By reinventing something very old, they marched together into a new era.
But the
challenge of remaking the world so that the sexes could live as real equals was much more daunting, and more painful, than the old strategy of retreating permanently into the community of women. It was probably inevitable that one wing of the early liberation movement decided the answer to all problems was just to get rid of the men entirely. They were the equivalent of the early-twentieth-century saloon-smashers, and they formed groups with names like WITCH or BITCH or SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) whose leader, Valerie Solanas, became famous by trying to assassinate the artist Andy Warhol. They wrote pamphlets demanding that all men be killed, or at minimum that women leave their husbands and stop having sex with the enemy. Some of the extremists were reacting rather naturally to their own personal histories as victims of male abuse. Others were more cynical, responding to the media’s desire for sensational examples of bra-burning radicalism. Others were just carried away by the excitement.
Most American women obviously didn’t relate to the kill-the-men theory of liberation. It was hard sometimes to tell what most American women were thinking since things were happening so quickly, and since the publicity about the movement was such a mixture of sympathy and scorn. In the spring of 1970, Betty Friedan, who had become president of NOW, impulsively called for women across the country to demonstrate on August 26, the fiftieth anniversary of Tennessee’s final ratification of the Anthony amendment to the Constitution and the arrival of woman suffrage. No one, including Friedan, was sure that with just a few months of organization and publicity women in large numbers would feel compelled to show up to demonstrate on behalf of themselves. The mayor of New York was rather confident they wouldn’t, and he denied the women permission to march down Fifth Avenue, the traditional parade route; they were told to keep to the sidewalks.