by Gail Sheehy
Back in 1969, Gloria believed that Clay would like the idea of opposing us. News is conflict, after all. But Clay saw the larger shift that needed to take place in the culture: women would have to set aside our conditioning to compete with one another; we had to bond if we were ever going to coalesce around common goals for the women’s movement.
“I want you to sit down with Gloria and compose your differences,” Clay told me one night in his paternal voice. He wanted us to be allies. “You’re not that far apart, and you need each other.” He invited Gloria and me to have lunch with him at the Oak Room, no less. I squealed in protest. He looked smug. Whether or not the threat of a cover story in New York was responsible, the hotel had agreed to lift the ban on unaccompanied ladies having lunch. Clay had set the stage for a propitious conversation between two women he respected.
WITH AN ELABORATE FLOURISH the maître d’ beckoned Gloria and me through the French doors into an expanse of Old World luxury beneath an arched Gothic ceiling: the Oak Room. A men’s drinking room, a favorite haunt of Fitzgerald’s character Gatsby, was now open to women who were writing a new narrative for the New World. It felt good to be seated prominently at an oak table. Impishly, Clay pointed up to the chandelier. On it figures of lusty barmaids hoisted beer steins. While munching on bread sticks, Gloria and I began a friendly discussion only to discover that we had many points of agreement.
“I’m afraid the ball-busting faction seems to be getting all the attention,” I said, “after the bra-burning in Atlantic City. And I’m not anti-men. I don’t think you are either.”
“Some of my best friends are men!” Gloria gave one of her disarming chuckles. We both smiled at Clay. “But we were raised in a culture that taught us to expect the normal male-female relationship was 70-30. That has to change.”
“What makes you think I’m against that?” I asked.
“You wrote about a woman left by a man, in your book, Lovesounds. I gathered you see women as victims.”
“I wrote that novel to understand what I was living. Thank God, because it turned my head around.”
“Great! That’s why we have to keep writing.”
“And speaking out,” I added.
Gloria confessed that speaking in public terrified her. She had no stomach for confrontation. We agreed this was something we had to learn, like a new sport.
We agreed that we had Kate Millett to thank for defining Friedan’s “problem without a name.” Millett’s solution to women’s helplessness was to “demolish the patriarchal system.”
That would take something like the Peloponnesian Wars, I was thinking. Patriarchy was as old as civilization, older; Cro-Magnon man was not into power sharing. No dominant group shares power unless it is persuaded that being blindly autocratic could undermine its status. What weapons did we have?
Numbers, for starters, Gloria said. At the time, women were moving toward becoming a majority of the American population. As we talked, and traded experiences, we began to grasp the concept that writer Robin Morgan was popularizing: the personal is political. As women dared to tell our real-life stories in public, it would expose gender inequality in every aspect of daily life. We could change the culture without going to war against men. That was a breakthrough for me.
The lunch that Clay had arranged for us turned into a consciousness-raising occasion that was being duplicated all over the country as women came together in living rooms and basements and on picket lines and antiwar marches and began to share our common experiences and join forces.
IN AUGUST 1970 OUR WORLD began to change. Betty Friedan’s culture-busting book, The Feminine Mystique, had been passed around among millions of tranquilized suburban housewives over the seven years since it had been published. I had found a paperback copy of it hidden under my mother’s bed in 1964. It was the blueprint of my mother’s life, but when I tried to talk to her about it, she clammed up. She had to keep up the illusion that she was totally fulfilled by the wife and mother role, when we both knew she had the DNA of a businesswoman and desperately wanted to use her mind. She dulled that lively mind with alcohol. I was hell-bent on escaping her fate. But I was also afraid of being linked with the extremist feminists like Redstockings, Radical Mothers, BITCH, WITCH—no joke—these were angry women whose resentment was turning the sterling silver concept of equal rights into corrosive man-hating sexual warfare.
It was comical to read deadly humorless treatises elevating the clitoral orgasm to a sacrament that would free women from dependence on the male penis. The media loved sensationalizing the man-haters as the face of the movement. Friedan, too, was worried about this radical offshoot scaring off not only men, but the mainstream working-class and middle-class women who were needed for a broad grassroots movement. Women were already a majority—51 percent—of the population, yet we were still stuck in second-class status. Slow, incremental changes were not going to get us anywhere. But how could we show the world we were mounting nothing less than a revolution?
The brilliant stroke came in August 1970. Friedan called for a Women’s Strike for Equality to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the women’s suffrage amendment giving women the right to vote. Not just one march up Fifth Avenue, but marches all across the country.
Walking toward Fifth Avenue, I felt my heart palpitating for fear a feeble turnout would bring ridicule by the media. Male TV commentators would laugh us off as a bunch of hotheads. But as I turned the corner and was stopped by a police barricade, my heart swelled to see legions of women converging from all directions. Our good liberal mayor, John Lindsay, had denied Friedan a permit to close Fifth. But looking down the avenue, all one could see were hordes of female heads bobbing and signs waving.
“Stay on the sidewalks!” police shouted. The sidewalks could not hold us. Mounted police tried to corral us into a single-file line. One line could not contain us.
“Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” Betty shouted.
The police gave up. The women did not.
Like the full expanse of Fifth Avenue, the world began that day opening up for us, for women and for men. Sons could be raised as feminists, too. We were leading the second great social revolution of twentieth-century America—what a thrilling time to be a woman!
CHAPTER 13
Women Helping Women
WHEN I BECAME SINGLE AGAIN, I felt free to enjoy over a decade as a gay bachelorette, assuming the same prerogatives that single men had always enjoyed. But I was clear about adopting only selected aspects of the way Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem made their way in the world. In one core area, I was not at all like them.
Helen chose never to have children. Her Cosmopolitan magazine rarely mentioned children. Gloria chose never to have children. Her Ms. magazine rarely mentioned children. I loved having a child. And I longed to have another, but only if and when I was in love with a man worthy of being a husband and father. It might take years until all the pieces fell into place. I was prepared to wait. I was still a young woman. I wanted to walk up and down and around the world, free to invite adventures and write about them. Singlehood offered me a second chance.
But I had a child. Readers young enough to be part of the third wave of feminism may be shocked to learn how far the pendulum swung in the ’60s and ’70s. Married women with children sometimes bailed. Just like that. Up and left their husbands and children to seek the self-fulfillment they now saw as their political right. Some left to join communes. Lesbians came out for the first time, writing poetry and plays, proud of their new political identity. But none of those options was right for my daughter and me.
It was Margaret Mead who pulled me across the passage that I would come to call Catch-30. When I was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to graduate school at Columbia University, it allowed me to study for the year 1969–70 under the professor of my choice. I was thrilled to become a protégée of the renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead. She was already an iconic figure in academia, but with the e
xpansion of television, she was becoming a Socratic gadfly, popping up on talk shows and being invited to speak all over the country. She was the new American cultural prophet. It was when I came under her tutelage that my intellectual life began to take shape.
Short and solid as an oak stump, Mead planted her forked walking stick with an authoritative thump at each step and moved through time and place like a tribal elder who transcended cultural boundaries. I was in awe of her in our first classes. I soon learned that Margaret Mead was another model of hard work and self-discipline.
The new living space I’d found to be nearer to Columbia was a sunny sublet on the Upper West Side; serendipitously, it was only blocks from the Beresford where Dr. Mead lived. Just to know she was there inspired me to work twice as hard. On those mornings when I wanted to crawl away from a deadline or a decision and burrow under the pillow of self-doubt, sucking on some primal injustice of gender, I could almost hear the predawn engines of the Indomitable One. Curly head bobbing, she would already be pounding the portable electric on her dining room table. Getting the job done.
When she discovered that I lived near her, she offered to let me ride with her to and from school. It was the chance of a lifetime to be exposed to a great mind. She found our friendship useful as well. Mead was a general among the foot soldiers of feminism. She enlisted me as one of her grunts. As a journalist, I could investigate cultural trends that interested or troubled her. In a series on “The Fractured Family,” I wrote about women who were choosing to be “Childless by Choice” and about “Bachelor Mothers,” the earliest experimenters with a lifestyle that would grow to represent more than 40 percent of all births. The idea made Mead furious. “I am continually frustrated by the refusal of Americans to learn from the mistakes of their history!” she fumed when I showed her the issue of New York. She insisted that children would develop well only if they were nurtured by both a male and a female parent.
She was chillingly clear in her views: “One child does not necessarily interfere with a woman producing important work. One child can always be put to bed in a bureau drawer. It’s having two children that really changes a woman’s life.”
Our rides together led to a more personal conversation. Mead was then almost seventy and the consequences of her lifestyle choices were established. She admitted that her efforts to be a collaborating wife, trying to combine intensive research and an intimate private life, did not work. She and Gregory Bateson, a fellow anthropologist, divorced. Mead stayed on in a joint household where another man’s wife looked after her daughter until Catherine turned fifteen. Mead and her daughter, who became an esteemed published writer, subsequently became estranged.
This was definitely not a model I wanted to emulate. But while I rejected the pattern that Mead had worked out for her personal life, she gave me brilliant instructions for how to become a cultural interpreter.
“Whenever you hear about a great cultural phenomenon—a revolution, an assassination, a notorious trial, an attack on the country—drop everything and get on a bus or train or plane and go there, stand at the edge of the abyss, and look down. You will see a culture turned inside out and revealed in a raw state.”
I took her manifesto and ran with it.
CHAPTER 14
Redpants and Regrets
“YOU’RE GOING OUT IN THAT?!”
It was 10 P.M. Clay looked up from his reading chair and eyed my costume: blue suede hot pants that left a lot of leg showing before reaching the white vinyl go-go boots that sheathed my calves.
“I’m going out to follow the working girls.”
“They’ll think you’re a streetwalker.”
“That’s the point—I want them to talk to me.”
In the summer of 1971, a prostitution crisis was gripping New York and driving tourists away. I couldn’t wait to immerse myself in the subject. Saturation reporting is fun. It often requires taking on a false identity, like an actress playing a role, and there was a secret thrill in seeing what it was like to walk on the wild side.
“I knew you wanted to do a story about hookers, but this is a new breed,” Clay protested. “You told me yourself, they’re violent.”
I assured him that an off-duty cop had agreed to stroll with me, playing the part of my pimp. And I had found the perfect source: Bobby, the night guard on the Lexington Avenue door of the Waldorf Astoria. He was a natural-born sociologist who knew all the girls: the old ones, the new ones, the pecking order. Bobby would help me to understand the life cycle of a streetwalker.
“Don’t wait up, I won’t be back until four.”
“Four in the morning—that’s crazy!”
“Working girls’ hours.”
Considering the sudden proliferation of singles bars and coed dorms and all the willing divorcées with water beds, one might have thought that prostitution would become a dying art. On the contrary, prostitution was booming because of our so-called sexual liberation. Men were retreating from the free giveaway. Most of them didn’t know what to do with it.
“Mature” men in particular had learned the erotic gospel according to Playboy. To be good guilty fun, the bedmate must be a plaything, a depersonalized no-no. All these young girls who said yes-yes, but on their own terms, were, well, scary. A paid girl relinquishes all rights to make emotional or sexual demands. She would never call his office the next morning and leave an embarrassing message. It is her stock in trade to encourage men’s sexual fantasies and exploit them.
No surprise, then, that New York in the early ’70s was fairly swarming with prostitutes. The youngest and prettiest streetwalkers were migrating from the seamy doorways of porn parlors in Times Square to work more prosperous precincts on the Upper East Side. Every weeknight, at any one time, thirty or forty girls would be strutting their competitive stuff up and down Lexington Avenue between Forty-Fourth and Fiftieth Streets. The Waldorf Astoria was home plate.
They stood framed in the stone shallows of darkened office buildings like . . . cave art . . . fanning their quick, toxic eyes with double tiers of Black Spider lashes; teasing, taunting, flouting the public’s most tender mores by turning men on. They walked or ran some five miles a night on white gladiator boots with an apricot of flesh oozing through every peephole. Salesmen in town for a convention would dally with them for one mad capricious moment before their suburban wives draped in faux diamonds yanked them onward to their promised night in the Big Apple.
What intrigued me was that these working girls belonged to a violent new breed. They worked on their backs as little as possible. More often they worked in cars, with partners, sashaying through the theater district and parading around the grand hotels. The goal of their night’s work was not the dispensation of pleasure for simple cash payment. It was to maximize their profit by swindling, mugging, robbing, knifing, and occasionally even murdering their patrons.
I had become fascinated by the subculture of deviance among women while I was studying under Dr. Mead at Columbia. She told me that she’d learned from her anthropological research that when women disengage completely from their traditional role, they can be more ruthless and savage than men. Men and male animals fight for many reasons. They fight as a game. They fight to show off, to test their prowess, and to impress females. They have built-in rules that often inhibit their willingness to kill. Women and female animals, when they do fight, are fiercely defensive. There is no game about it. They kill for survival.
Statistics backed up the phenomenon of increased violence by women, who were then becoming major criminals at a much faster rate than men. (The steady rise in female criminality would continue into the next century.) As America was beginning to take notice of female discontent, the awakening assertiveness of women could be seen most starkly at the farthest distance from the conventional center—in the netherworld.
The old journalism with its who-what-when-where-why rigidity was inadequate to convey the wild gyrations of gender and politics, music and mind-blowing drugs in tha
t era. It would be like filming Woodstock in black and white.
For six weeks I followed and taped and sometimes befriended the streetwalkers, capturing their dialogue on my cassette recorder. I’d hired a bearded Christian brother to be my research assistant. An odd choice? Christian brothers belong to a scholastic order of the Roman Catholic Church and are trained as teachers. Brother Bernie was a redheaded Irishman who’d had enough of the ivory tower and was eager to see something of raw unsheltered life. Was he game to pose variously as a “john” or a peep-show operator or a pimp? Yes, he promised. We got pimps to brag about their exploitation of the girls and followed johns into hotels; we ran from police prostitution vans, developed blisters, and soon felt as degraded and defensive as the hustlers whose lives I wanted to chronicle.
We also had a lot of laughs. One evening, a prostitution hotel operator who called himself Jimmy Della Bella wanted to show off. He suggested I slip my tape recorder under the bed in room 3. He introduced us to his most prized girl, Suede, who was taking a new trick upstairs. She was tall and rawboned, recognizable on the street by her pink suede boots. She signed the register. A card at the desk stated that the management was not responsible for valuables. The preliminaries were always the same, as dull as preparing for the dentist’s chair.
SHE: You have to pay me first, okay? Twenty dollars.
HE: I have to pay you now? Got any change?
SHE: No change.
HE: This okay?
He peeled a fifty out of his money clip.
SHE: You get change, after, we see.
Through the open window the frantic loneliness of Times Square played back . . . gears stripping, kids yelling, the long hot scream of a police siren.