America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Friedan herself was worried on the day of the march, and she was almost late rushing to the start-off point in Central Park because traffic was tied up in a manner that was unusual even for Manhattan. “The reality dawned when I rounded the corner into the park and saw not hundreds but thousands of women and men and babies and grandmothers beginning to mass,” she wrote later. “When the march spilled out of the park onto Fifth Avenue I was in the front row between Judge Dorothy Kenyon, a suffragette veteran in her eighties…and one of the young radicals in blue jeans. We kept jumping up to look back at the marchers behind us, but we could never see where the march ended. The mounted police were trying to make us march on the sidewalk, but I saw how many we were. There was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little, thin line. I waved my arms over my head and yelled, ‘Take the street!’

  “What a moment that was.”

  EPILOGUE

  “DRAGGING THE WORD ‘HOUSEWIFE’

  THROUGH THE MUD”

  Alice Paul was still alive and kicking in 1970, when the New York Times called her one of “the founding grandmothers and maiden grandaunts who have languished for nearly half a century in the historical garret.” At eighty-five, she was still single-minded. Urged to reminisce about how women got the right to vote, Paul said, “I’d rather talk about now.” “Now” was the Equal Rights Amendment, which Paul had spent fifty years pursuing—with a short time out to earn three law degrees. The E.R.A. was an extraordinarily simple proposal, a constitutional amendment that would say: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States on account of sex.” Paul had lobbied for it through the Depression and World War II and through the long postwar era when her National Women’s Party had shrunk to a few dozen active members and the nation was debating whether it was safe to leave schoolchildren in the care of unmarried teachers. When a new generation of rebellious young women began worrying about the war in Vietnam and the sexual revolution, Paul continued arguing that they would never achieve full legal equality by repealing one discriminatory law after another. They needed a sweeping constitutional amendment, she said, just as they had needed one to secure their right to vote.

  The E.R.A. had been bottled up in Congress by a handful of powerful men—one of them, House judiciary chairman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, delighted in saying that women were no more the same as men than horses were the same as horse chestnuts, or, when the mood struck him, than lightning was the same as lightning bugs. Then suddenly in the 1970s women’s rights became all the rage and Alice Paul’s constitutional amendment was pried out of committee. It flew through the House and Senate in March 1972. A half hour after its final passage, the Hawaii state legislature became the first to ratify it. The sponsors predicted it would take only two years to get the necessary 38 states to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

  It never happened. While 22 states ratified the amendment in 1972, only 8 more joined in the next year. Momentum flagged and some states attempted to retract their earlier approval. When Alice Paul died in 1977 at the age of ninety-two, the movement had ground to a halt, 3 states short of ratification.

  The E.R.A. was meant to endorse women’s right to all the chances for careers, adventures, and choice that men had, and to promise that this time the opportunities won today would not be withdrawn tomorrow. It would have nailed down a revolution that was overturning nearly 400 years’ worth of ideology about what women’s place was supposed to be. But it turned out that many women saw it as a repudiation of everything they had devoted their lives to. “It’s time for housewives…to pull on the combat boots and battle those dragging the word ‘housewife’ through the mud,” said Jaquie Davison, who announced she was founding a group called Happiness of Womanhood (HOW) to combat the E.R.A. movement.

  Much of the fight over the E.R.A. was due to the jockeying of conservative ideologues for a place in the shifting world of American politics. But it was easy for the amendment’s backers to forget that for most American women throughout history, the goal had been getting into the house, not out of it. The vast majority never got a chance to reject the limitations of a career as a full-time housewife. Trapped in a world of endless work on the farm or in the factory, they yearned for a chance to exercise more control and creativity as wives and mothers. Susan B. Anthony had said that married women were only allowed to be dolls or drudges, but stay-at-home wives saw themselves as something else entirely—as domestic entrepreneurs whose accomplishments entitled them to some respect. When that status was threatened, both the women who had it and the ones who hoped someday to get it reacted with dismay.

  The idea that women—average women, not paragons like Lillian Gilbreth or Elizabeth Cady Stanton—should be able to combine the rewards of domestic and public life was still very new. Most people accepted it in theory and a great many women who would never have considered applying for a job themselves had sweet dreams about the day their daughters might become doctors or attorneys. But the status of traditional homemakers was a sore point. Young wives going to their husband’s business parties were at a social disadvantage if they had no occupation outside the house to talk about, and older women were wounded when their daughters behaved as though their domestic achievements were unimportant. The subject had to be approached with tact and sensitivity, and tact was generally not the strong suit of the women’s movement of the early 1970s. “Housewives have been called leeches, parasites and even legal prostitutes by some in the liberation movement,” said Jaquie Davison.

  Both sides in the fight over the role of American women were reacting to one very important fact: the rate of divorce was soaring, undermining everyone’s confidence in marriage as a secure harbor. There was only about a fifty-fifty chance that “till death us do part” would really come true. It seemed socially acceptable for men to walk away from their families, and the government wasn’t able to force them to support the wives and children they left behind. After divorce, a man’s financial situation generally improved, while the ex-wife’s plummeted. Obviously, women who weren’t able to earn their own living could wind up in a perilous situation. The traditionalists could not change the direction in which society was moving, but they could go down fighting, and take the Equal Rights Amendment with them.

  Fortunately, Alice Paul turned out to be wrong about how much the E.R.A. was needed. Even as it was foundering, virtually all the legal barriers that restrained women’s opportunities were being eliminated and their real political power was increasing. Congress banned discrimination in credit, and required schools that got public money to treat boys and girls equally. Medical schools and law schools, which often set a flat 5 percent cap on female students, were forced to open their doors. The number of women medical school graduates rose from 7.5 percent in 1969 to nearly 20 percent in 1976.

  “MY WIFE: I THINK I’LL KEEP HER”

  The early 1970s were a giddy time of testing possibilities. In 1973, 50 million Americans watched a televised “Battle of the Sexes” at the Houston Astrodome in which tennis star Billie Jean King out-psyched Bobby Riggs, a fifty-five-year-old hustler who had made a new career for himself by claiming he could beat any woman in the game. Riggs arrived in a chariot, wearing his trademark “Sugar Daddy” jacket, but King beat him to the hype, having herself carried in on a divan borne by men dressed as Roman slaves. She also beat him on the court, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, in an evening that was the making of women’s professional tennis, which soon had its own tour sponsored by Virginia Slims. (Virginia Slims was advertised as a cigarette especially for the 1970s version of the New Woman, with a commercial that enthused about the progress women had made, and concluded: “You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby!” It was one of a number of 1970s promotions that demonstrated how the advertising industry was impressed but somewhat at sea with what was going on with women. Geritol tonic had a huge national campaign starring an invigorated woman whose happy husband announces, “My wife: I think I’ll
keep her.”)

  By the middle of the 1970s, however, the country’s mood was soured by an economic tailspin that sent unemployment up to an unthinkable 9 percent. The women’s liberation movement splintered, the victim in part of its own success, and also crippled by an ideology so egalitarian that anyone who was identified as a leader was instantly pilloried. Radical feminists claimed Gloria Steinem was working for the CIA. Meanwhile, Betty Friedan said that publicity over lesbians in the movement was creating a “lavender herring” that threatened women’s progress.

  The country was moving toward the 1980s, a very different social, cultural, and political terrain in which feminism was once again consigned to the dust bin of history, women reembraced high-heeled shoes and dress-up clothing, and fear of spinsterhood reemerged as a popular pathology. (In 1986, Newsweek warned famously, if inaccurately, that a single forty-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than finding a husband.) But it all had precious little effect on what was happening on the ground. The economic crash in the 1970s simply encouraged more women to get jobs to help preserve their family’s standard of living. The teenage girls of the 1980s might never have met a self-described feminist younger than forty, but they were trotting off to college in their stiletto heels, anticipating careers as routinely as their brothers did. For the first time, most mothers of preschool children held down jobs. When young lovers built their castles in the air, they planned on two salaries to pay the mortgage.

  The nation had, over just two decades, accepted a radical new view of women’s place: that it was everywhere. Americans almost universally believed women should have complete financial and legal control of their lives, and that they should be able to do whatever they were capable of doing, even if it was putting out fires or playing Little League baseball or flying 500 passengers from New York to Miami. They felt women should be able to go to a movie alone without feeling self-conscious or have dinner with a male business colleague without anyone regarding it as a prelude to seduction. They believed women should be able to run for Congress without being a congressman’s widow. In the 1980s, there were women in space, women in the pulpit, and women in military academies. A woman was appointed to the Supreme Court and a woman was nominated by the Democratic Party for vice president of the United States.

  Much of this would never have happened—or it would not have happened nearly as fast—if the economy had not required it. Just as society suddenly embraced women as the ideal teachers and typists when there was nobody else to do the job, the idea of women working through their lives caught on when the information era succeeded the industrial age. The vast number of educated women was too valuable a resource to let go once they began to have children. Meanwhile, the consumer economy developed more and more things that families felt they needed, which they could no longer acquire on the salary of a single breadwinner.

  The unanswered question was whether the new economy had created yet another variation on the theme of an emergency. While society’s attitude toward women’s proper role had changed dramatically, there was a part of the old pattern that remained stubbornly in place: the new challenges and opportunities did not replace the old duties; they were just added on. Any girl had the right to try to become an astronaut or a neurosurgeon, but if she wanted to have a husband and children as well—and most women did—she was expected to figure out on her own how to make it work. Americans did not immediately redefine the obligations of husbands and fathers, and government did not completely rethink its responsibility to provide services like day care or after-school programs.

  It was a struggle that had been going on beneath the surface since Elizabeth Cady Stanton had fretted about the household help and Antoinette Brown had fantasized about a pleasant home full of orphans and servants who would greet her when she came off the road. The ability to work for decent wages was the factor most responsible for the change of women’s status in America. They were able to pursue marriage, motherhood, and careers with avidity and success, but with a continual rueful feeling that their plates are too full for anybody’s good.

  In the year 2000, the country was far from having worked out all the issues about gender and sex that had bedeviled it from the beginning. The abortion wars, which feminists thought had ended in the 1970s with the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, were still going strong. Although the nation had reached a level of acceptance of homosexuality that would have been unimaginable a few decades before, there were still many places lesbians were put at a disadvantage. And there had been losses with the gains. Neighborhoods missed the nonworking mothers who had time to raise money for the school or run the Brownie troop. Suburban neighborhoods cleared out in the morning when parents went to work, and not many people had time for the kind of chats over coffee in someone’s kitchen that once helped women form strong networks of friendship and support. Now that women could be anything they wanted to be, the country suffered because not enough of them wanted to be teachers or nurses. Parents who rejoiced that their little girl didn’t have to wait miserably by the phone for a boy to call may not have been thrilled to discover how many young women, barely in their teens, felt empowered not just to pursue the male they fancied but to initiate sexual encounters. (“They have more attitude,” a sixteen-year-old boy told Alex Kuczynski in the New York Times. “They have more power. And they overpower boys more. I mean, it’s scary.”) Nobody was happy that while teenage girls in 1900 made resolutions about how to become better people, a century later they almost always fixated on perfecting their bodies rather than their character.

  But it’s impossible, still, not to cheer. By the year 2000, America’s women received 55 percent of the nation’s college degrees and made up nearly half of most law and medical school classes. They owned more than a third of the nation’s businesses. Among two-income families, more than a quarter of the wives earned more than their husbands. There were sixty women in the House of Representatives and fourteen in the Senate, and the appearance of women candidates for governor or mayor was no longer worthy of much comment. Even the most conservative segments of society believed women should mate out of preference, not necessity, and that they should be able to get as much education as they desired.

  The country has been enriched, over the last half century, by the arrival of new generations of immigrants, many of them Latinas. They’re writing their own chapter in this story right now. Poor women and women of color struggle against odds middle-class whites have trouble appreciating or even imagining. But their chances in life are not dictated by Y chromosomes. Today, nobody believes being a girl disqualifies you from having adventures. When the hero of the spectacularly successful movie Titanic drowned, the heroine went on to have a life full of excitement and romance before being reunited with him after death. It was hard to avoid the impression that she wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun if he’d managed to keep his head above water. All those actresses who succumbed pathetically in TV westerns so the hero could continue to ride alone must have been cheering somewhere.

  Today, we live on the same continent that Eleanor Dare sailed into in 1587, carrying the child she would only have time to give birth to and name before both of them vanished from sight and history. You want to reach out and warn her to go back, just as you want to tell those tobacco brides who came to the new world in search of husbands and wound up dead in an Indian massacre that there really are worse things in life than failing to get married. There are so many brave and headstrong women who refused to do the prudent thing and died failures in their own time. Now we put their pictures on stamps and name roads and schools in their honor. We stand on their shoulders and tell our children their stories.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every error in this book is my own doing, but many of the facts were culled by researchers, particularly Karen Avrich, Daisy Hernandez, Carol Lee, Christina Lem, Sasha Soreff, and Jen Uscher. This book has been only a sidelight in their lives, which otherwise have been full of achievemen
t and adventure. Karen, the only professional researcher in the group, worked with me on my last book, Scorpion Tongues, and I was lucky enough to have her assistance again while she divided the rest of her time among other books-in-process and a movie script. Daisy, who undoubtedly learned more about the history of menstruation on this project than she necessarily wanted to know, coedited her own book, Colonize This, a collection of essays by young women of color. Sasha, who read and underlined books about everything from the history of waitressing to Amelia Earhart, pursued her career in choreography and teaching dance. One of her pieces, Tipping the Hourglass, was recently performed on public television. Christina has almost finished her own book about four generations of her family. Jen, among many other projects, got married and became famous as an expert on wild parrots in Brooklyn. Carol has finished graduate school, published her own journalism, and begun work as the researcher for the New York Times editorial department. One of the pleasures of doing this book was getting to share bits and pieces of all their lives. Others who assisted with research included Carolyn Brook, Melissa Henley, Latasha Quinones, Kam ChAn and Dean Cully Clark, and Lisa Daigle at the University of Alabama.

  My friends Gail Gregg and Trish Hall were loyal readers and advisers throughout, and I’m grateful for the help of Eleanor Randolph and Maureen Dowd. I’m also lucky to be related to a bunch of extremely smart and supportive women. My sister-in-law, Kathleen Collins, helped with the research and provided constant encouragement. My mother, Rita Gleason, gave me really good suggestions for editing. My father, Roy, and my siblings, in-laws, nieces, and nephew cheered me on and put up with my disorganization and sporadic inattention. Another pleasure of this project was getting to know the world of women’s historians. Without implicating them in the product, I want to thank Linda Kerber, Christine Stansell, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Carol Berkin, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Katherine Kish Sklar, Kathleen Barry, Mary Beth Norton, and Joan Brumberg for their kindness and courtesy to me or my researchers.