by Ruth Rosen
Although first woman narratives hid many truths about women’s lives, they did help millions of women readers imagine themselves in new occupations and professions. The stories and photographs also provided female readers with a growing repertoire of images of blue, pink [clerical], and white collar workers.27 No longer just brides or mothers in the “family, food, fashion, and furnishings” section of the New York Times, or in the features section of the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as other papers nationwide, women now appeared as gas station attendants, traveling salesmen, doormen, welders, truck drivers, steel-workers, members of a road gang, and pest exterminators. Photographs captured them hanging from ropes as they washed windows, receiving badges as California Highway Patrolmen, being sworn in as the first women police officers, hauling heavy weights as “roustabouts” on an off-shore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and descending into Kentucky coal mines as the first women miners.28
CONSUMER FEMINISM
While newspapers created new “lifestyle” sections to appeal to women readers, women’s magazines helped translate and transform American feminism into a universe of goods and services that promised liberation. The traditional magazines—Harper’s Bazaar, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook—maintained their usual staple of articles on diets, recipes, catching and holding men, sex and health.
But by creating sections devoted to the movement and by profiling feminists, mainstream magazines began to educate the nation’s women (for men did not read these magazines) about what must have seemed to many of them like a sudden eruption of female rebellion. Many of these magazines also hired feminist writers to be columnists. In 1972, Letty Pogrebin began a regular column for LHJ, focusing on working women’s issues. The column lasted until 1980 and publicized nearly every major feminist topic of the decade. In 1977, Mary Cantwell, the features editor of Mademoiselle, asked Judith Coburn to take over a regular column from Karen Durbin, another radical feminist. Cantwell insisted that the column keep its title, “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex,” but allowed Coburn to write on any subject that addressed women’s lives. For four years, Coburn wrote freely about such feminist issues as abortion, women and the draft, wages for housework, the coming of the superwoman, and critiques of the birth control pill.29
But the traditional magazines didn’t only advertise feminism. During the seventies, they also tried to find a balance between femininity and feminism. They idealized domesticity even as they romanticized careerism. In 1979, LHJ began a new section called, “It’s not easy to be a woman today!” which, over the course of a year, included such features as “How I Went from Ruffles to Hard Hat,” “I Learned to Love Myself after He Stopped Loving Me,” “I Won’t Apologize for Being a Housewife,” “Can a [single] Woman Live Without a Man?,” “It Took Me a Long Time to Grow Up,” and “Will I Ever Find a Liberated Man?” In one short story a woman who had been analyzing cancer-producing environmental pollutants is forced by a mysterious dizziness to stay at home with her children. She discovers, much to her amazement, that she knows very little about their habits or abilities. In the end, she decides to stay at home, explaining:
I was right when I said Women’s Liberation wasn’t titles on the door or salary raises, but I was wrong when I said it didn’t exist. It does exist, and I’ve just been liberated from leading two fragmented lives, liberated from doing a juggling act on a tight rope—keeping sitters, children, husband, employer and myself, almost, but not quite satisfied. I was confusing liberation with freedom, because of course I am not free . . . I am liberated, but I am not free. With luck I will never be free, but bound forever.30
In short, the traditional women’s magazines—filled with stories, editorials, ads, and columns that frequently contradicted one another—accurately captured the kaleidoscopic chaos of women’s lives during the seventies.
As growing numbers of women entered the labor force, these magazines began refocusing their traditional self-help features on the problems faced by working women. They taught newly divorced women how to cope and instructed women on how to replace deferential behavior with a more assertive stance that would gain them raises and respect. They reassured working women that their children would survive their absence, and that they could keep their husbands by setting time aside for special “dates” and playing an active part in revitalizing their sex life.31
Millions of nonmovement women first learned about feminism, as well as the new occupations and opportunities that had opened up to women during the seventies, within the familiar pages of women’s magazines. They also read articles that encouraged them to find themselves, to return to school, and to stand up to bullying husbands.32 “Barbara Shields,” a graduate of a northeastern college, married in 1964 at the age of twenty-two, and worked for three years as a high-school teacher to support her husband’s study of law. Afterward, she quit her job, bore two sons, and spent the next sixteen years caring for her family in a Connecticut suburb. When asked in the late 1980s how she had learned about the women’s movement, she pointed at the clutter of women’s magazines that littered her bathroom floor.
It was the women’s magazines. You know, they had all these articles about learning how to dress for work, how to ask for a raise, how to juggle your family’s needs and your work. I began to realize that I had followed my mother’s life without even questioning it. I wasn’t sorry that I stayed home with my boys. But when they reached high school, I went back to graduate school.
During the late eighties, she began teaching at a local community college and confided, “I never understood how working outside the house could really change your sense of self-esteem. But it really did. I get dressed everyday, people need me and appreciate me in a different way.” The women’s movement, said this former housewife, had transformed her life, largely because she had read and heard about it so much in the magazines she had read.
I felt that I wanted to be more assertive. I know that my marriage is in some sense different than it was in the beginning because I felt that I wanted to be more central in it, instead of always following someone else all the time. I’m sure the women’s movement was the influence. I read magazines and books; I heard people speak and I felt more important as an individual.33
When her husband of some three decades suddenly left her, she wondered whether her growing independence—or the simple fact of her aging—contributed to his abandonment.
The advertising industry scarcely missed a beat as they geared up to sell “liberation” as early as 1970. In addressing the Association of Industrial Advertisers in 1971, one NOW leader tried to convince her listeners to use advertising as a constructive vehicle for social change. They ignored her advice. In fact, some of the most popular pseudo-feminist ads appropriated the language of emancipation in order to sell women products that could harm their health. “The Virginia Slims Campaign,” launched in 1970, advertised a new cigarette that glamorized anorexic women as emancipated, rich, role models. Under the slogan, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” the ads offered parables of women’s historic subordination and tried to persuade them that smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette had a contribution to make to their personal freedom. Similarly, Massengill’s feminine hygiene spray reinforced the belief that women’s bodies were dirty and that a new (and quite unnecessary) product was necessary to establish “freshness.” For its campaign slogan, the advertisers appropriated “Freedom Now,” trivializing language that had been chanted by activists in the civil rights movement of the sixties. A Dewars’ Scotch campaign, designed to persuade women to drink hard liquor, previously considered unladylike, profiled mothers who had careers, yet still drank, a sure sign of their emancipation from traditional womanhood.34
It didn’t take long for the business and advertising industry to repackage feminism and try and sell it back to women. Appealing to the rejection of girdles and bras by the young, lingerie manufacturers came up with the “no bra” look, which allowed breasts to poke through sheer ma
terial and give a woman a “bra-less” look. Feminists had denounced artifice and cosmetics. Now, the cosmetics industry began to advertise all kinds of powder, lipstick, and eyeliner that promised “a natural look.”35
A flurry of new magazines—New York Woman, Self, Working Woman, to name just a few—appeared during the 1970s, aimed at selling to young working women. Such magazines repackaged feminism into products and services and targeted the working woman, who supposedly needed these things to prosper. This new consumer feminism tended to equate liberation with the purchase of things—liquor, tobacco, vacations, stereos, cameras, and clothes. New York Woman, for example, laced its traditional articles on shopping, theater, and fashion with “liberation articles” like “Sex Equality: The Secret Storm” (a piece on the Equal Rights Amendment) and an article about Representative Bella Abzug. But the real intention of the magazine was to instruct readers on chic ways to spend their money.36
These magazines, which Stella Wilson (Xerox’s new female wunderkind) might have devoured, had little to do with the 90 percent of women who worked in low-paid clerical service and sales jobs. Bernice Howe, a $4-an-hour clerical worker from Denver, picked up a copy of Working Woman the first time she saw it on the newsstand. “But the first article I turned to was on how to pick out an outfit for less than $200. They have to be kidding.” Many housewives also felt that this upscale consumer feminism excluded them. When asked what she thought of the feminist movement, Lucille Schlecting, a fifty-year-old housewife in Lindenhurst, New York, said, “I see it as important for the professional women, especially the young ones. It helps them get into administrative positions. But for someone like me, well, I guess I’m over the hill as far as getting ahead.” For such women, feminism came to be synonymous with professional women who could afford “liberation.”37
Still, for the growing numbers of “entry-level” managerial or professional women—or for those who dreamed of such a future—“Dressing for Success” (the title of a best-seller of the time) was actually important. Dresses, blouses, and skirts—the traditional attire of secretaries—simply didn’t establish the authority that men’s suits commanded. The new magazines chided women for wearing “inappropriate” outfits, even as they instructed them how to buy a new wardrobe. As New Woman magazine editorialized, “although most women can put together great outfits for leisure, sport or an evening on the town, they do not know how to dress for success in their careers. And that is part of what is keeping them down.”38
Magazines had always scolded women about their appearance. (How else to find and keep a man?) Cast as an individual problem, a working woman’s appearance now became as important as dressing for men’s approval had once been. The magazines warned women to give off no “sexual innuendos during working hours” and to avoid such feminine accouterments as “noticeable perfume, bouffant hairdos, tinted glasses, enormous shoulder bags, clanging or ornate jewelry or any kind of clothing without a jacket.” Instead, managerial women were to wear their hair simply styled (no longer than shoulder length), and “clear glasses with frames that matched their hair color and skirt suits.”
In other words, women were to adopt a pared-down and tailored male look, wear the same suit (but with a skirt) that had long conferred on men white collar status and distinguished managers from their employees. Such suits, which draped and hid men’s bodies, especially their sexual organs, signaled authority and power. Just in case women still didn’t get it, New Woman featured photographs of twins, side by side, one dressed in a skirt suit and one in a casual sweater and slacks. Beneath the photographs, the caption asked readers: “Which twin is the executive? Which twin is the secretary? Look at the executive (left) and see for yourself the power of clothing—how well she fits behind the desk of authority.”39
Women at work began to don what had formerly been men’s clothing. Unisex dressing also reflected the decade’s trendy fascination with the androgynous personality as a new indicator of psychological health. Responding to an onslaught of new women workers, designers pushed the “power” business suit with padded shoulders, worn over a silk blouse, matching skirt, and high heels. Until the 1990s, this remained the new business uniform for women. By then, some women, more confident of their positions, began to seek comfort, alongside their authority, in their everyday appearance.40
The emphasis on appearance reinforced the very nonfeminist idea that each woman was responsible for her own failure or success. Feminism was fast being turned into an individual project. What a woman purchased decided her fate. Only with the right clothes could she signal, through appearance and behavior, that she was not the secretary, but the lawyer or the corporate executive. It was up to her. When a woman dressed properly, she could establish her authority. But learning how to exercise that authority in the corporate male world was quite another matter: that was a psychological issue each woman had to address alone.
THERAPEUTIC FEMINISM
It was one thing to march for equality, but quite another to implement it at home or at the workplace. Across the nation, men and women struggled with a shrinking economy that, in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis in 1973, would make two-income families increasingly necessary to sustain a middle-class standard of living. With two parents at work, the perennial question, Who will take care of the children?, became more urgent. Attempts to share household work and child care threw frantic parents into a battle for leisure time, a scarce and precious resource in a two-income family.41
Marriage—already battered by growing divorce rates, the values of the counterculture, and new ideas about sexual freedom—began to seem like just one of many lifestyles that men and women might choose. Never before in American history had such ambivalent attitudes toward fidelity and commitment entered mainstream culture. To be sure, small groups of free love advocates had challenged marriage and family in nineteenth-century communes and in the bohemian enclaves of New York City’s Greenwich Village early in the twentieth century. But the sexual behavior of those communards and bohemians had never been regarded as a “lifestyle choice” by those in mainstream culture.
In contrast, the media of the seventies successfully popularized the new “human potential movement” and publicized sensational stories about sex-swapping couples, swinging singles, and sexual freedom parties. Aimed at an upscale elite, some of the media misled its audience into imagining that large numbers of adults had dropped out, or divorced, in order to spend time mingling with strangers at sexual orgies. Although the media vastly exaggerated adult behavior, bewildered older Americans could hardly ignore the frequency of divorce, the changing nature of gender relations and of sexual mores. The generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II had rarely divorced. During the sixties, however, divorce rates among this cohort began to rise sharply. By the end of the seventies, the human potential movement had redefined divorce as a “creative” act and some adults began to adopt the open marriage that became the title of another best-seller.42
Enough adults seemed bewildered and confused that John Silber, president of Boston University, felt compelled to tell the parents of three thousand incoming freshmen in the fall of 1977, “Every one of our students deserves a parent who is not going through an identity crisis. It is time that America faces up to the implication of having too many people aged forty and aged fifty asking questions that they should have answered when they were seventeen to twenty-five, ‘Who am I and what ought I to do?’”43
The human potential movement, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s use of the phrase during a lecture in 1960, grew out of the work of Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, and William Schutz, all psychological theorists who emphasized the realization of the self. The human potential movement presumed that individuals could best realize their true nature by engaging in a thorough psychological examination of the self. The implicit assumption was that mainstream culture kept people from realizing their deepest dreams and their greatest potential. Within the human potential movement, psychol
ogists thought of potential not in terms of careers, but as the discovery of emotional, sexual, and spiritual parts of the self. What Tom Wolfe would dub the “Me Decade” (the seventies) included not only widespread narcissism and consumerism, but also hundreds of spiritual and therapeutic practices that promised such self-invention and self-realization.44
Soon, feminism intersected with the human potential movement. The feminist challenge to the psychotherapeutic profession had contested nearly all former definitions of women’s mental health popularized by psychoanalytic theory. During the 1970s, feminist writers and therapists began creating a new kind of therapy, one that included a serious consideration of women’s subordinate status. But it was not feminist thought or therapy, in the short run, that attracted the public’s attention. The therapeutic books that would become best-sellers in the seventies—The Managerial Woman, The Assertive Woman, When I Say No I Feel Guilty—helped promote what I call “therapeutic feminism,” programs of self-help that ignored the economic or sociological obstacles women faced, and instead emphasized the way in which each individual woman, if only she thought positively about herself, could achieve some form of self-realization and emancipation.45