When Everything Changed (2 page)

PART I

1960

1. Repudiating Rosie

“S
OME OF YOU
DO
WEAR A CAUTIOUS FACE
.”

I
n January 1960,
Mademoiselle
welcomed in a new decade for America’s young women by urging them to be… less boring. “
Some of you
do
wear a cautious face,” the editors admitted. “But are you really—cautious, unimaginative, determined to play it safe at any price?”
Mademoiselle
certainly hoped not. But its readers had good reason to set their sights low. The world around them had been drumming one message into their heads since they were babies: women are meant to marry and let their husbands take care of all the matters relating to the outside world. They were not supposed to have adventures or compete with men for serious rewards. (“
I think that when women
are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” said Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby book had served as the bible for the postwar generation of mothers.)
Newsweek,
decrying a newly noticed
phenomenon of dissatisfied housewives in 1960, identified the core of the issue: menstruation. “From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman’s role,” the newsmagazine wrote. “As Freud was credited with saying: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ Though no group of women has ever pushed aside these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them in good grace.”

Most girls grew up without ever seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver.
Jo Freeman, who went to Berkeley
in the early ’60s, realized only later that while she had spent four years “in one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world—and one with a progressive reputation,” she had never once had a female professor. “I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.” If a young woman expressed interest in a career outside the traditional teacher/nurse/secretary, her mentors carefully shepherded her back to the proper path. As a teenager in Pittsburgh, Angela Nolfi told her guidance counselor that she wanted to be an interior decorator, but even that very feminine pursuit apparently struck her adviser as too high-risk or out of the ordinary. “He said, ‘Why don’t you be a home-economics teacher?’ ” she recalled.
And once
Mademoiselle
had finished
urging its readers to shoot for the sky, it celebrated the end of the school year with an article on careers that seemed to suggest most new college graduates would be assuming secretarial duties, and ended with tips on “pre-job hand-beautifying” for a new generation of typists.

Whenever things got interesting, women seemed to vanish from the scene. There was no such thing as a professional female athlete—even in schools, it was a given that sports were for boys.
An official for the men-only
Boston Marathon opined that it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.”
When
Mademoiselle
selected seven
“headstrong people who have made names for themselves lately” to comment on what the 1960s would bring, that magazine for young women managed to find only one headstrong woman to include in the mix—playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who did double duty as the panel’s only minority.

“W
OMEN USED TO BE THE BIG STARS, BUT THESE DAYS IT’S MEN
.”

Nothing sent the message about women’s limited options more forcefully than television, which had just finished conquering the nation with a speed that made Alexander the Great look like an underachiever.
In 1950 only about 9 percent
of American homes boasted a set, but by 1960 nearly 90 percent of families had a TV, and those who didn’t were feeling very deprived indeed. Beverly Burton, a Wyoming farmwife, had been estranged throughout the 1950s from a mother who had once told her she was sorry Beverly had ever been born. When her mother decided to mend fences, she sent Burton a note saying, “I hope this will cover the past”—attached to a television set. And it did indeed become a turning point in the relationship.

The postwar generation that was entering adolescence in the 1960s had grown up watching
Howdy Doody,
the must-see TV for the first wave of baby boomers.
Howdy
was a raucous puppet show in which the human performers interspersed broad physical comedy with endless pitches for the sponsors’ products. “
But all the slapstick
stopped when they brought out Princess Summerfall Winterspring,” remembered Stephen Davis, a childhood fan whose father worked on the show. The princess, played by a teenage singer named Judy Tyler, was the only long-running female character in
Howdy Doody
’s crowded cast. The role had been created when a producer realized “we could sell a lot of dresses if only we had a girl on the show,” and the princess spent most of her time expressing concern about plot developments taking place while she was offstage. Adults approved. “
The harshness and crudeness
which so many parents objected to in
Howdy Doody
now appears to have largely been a case of too much masculinity,” said
Variety.
But the stuff that made kids love the show—the broad comedy and bizarre plots—was all on the male side of the equation. Princess Summerfall Winterspring sang an occasional song—and watched.

The more popular and influential television became, the more efficiently women were swept off the screen. In the 1950s, when the medium was still feeling its way, there were a number of shows built around women—mainly low-budget comedies such as
Our Miss Brooks, Private Secretary,
and
My Little Margie.
None of the main characters were exactly role models—Miss Brooks was a teacher who spent most of her time mooning over a hunky biology instructor, and Margie lived off her rich father. Still, the shows were unquestionably about
them.
And the most popular program of all was
“I Love Lucy,”
in which Lucille Ball was the focus of every plotline, ever striving to get out of her three-room apartment and into her husband Ricky’s nightclub show.

But by 1960 television was big business, and if women were around at all, they were in the kitchen, where they decorously stirred a single pot on the stove while their husbands and children dominated the action. (In 1960 the nominees for the Emmy for best comedy series were
The Bob Cummings Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Phil Silvers Show,
and
Father Knows Best.
) When a script did turn its attention to the wife, daughter, or mother, it was frequently to remind her of her place and the importance of letting boys win.
On
Father Knows Best,
younger daughter
Kathy was counseled by her dad on how to deliberately lose a ball game. Teenage daughter Betty found happiness when she agreed to stop competing with a male student for a junior executive job at the local department store and settled for the more gender-appropriate task of modeling bridal dresses.

In dramatic series, women stood on the sidelines, looking worried.
When Betty Friedan asked why
there couldn’t be a female lead in
Mr. Novak
—which was, after all, a series about a high school teacher—she said the producer explained, “For drama, there has to be action, conflict…. For a woman to make decisions, to triumph over anything, would be unpleasant, dominant, masculine.”
Later in the decade
, the original
Star Trek
series would feature a story about a woman so desperate to become a starship captain—a post apparently restricted to men—that she arranged to have her brain transferred into Captain Kirk’s body. The crew quickly noticed that the captain was manicuring his nails at the helm and having hysterics over the least little thing.

Cowboy action series were the best-loved TV entertainment in 1960. Eleven of the top twenty-five shows were Westerns, and they underlined the rule that women did not have adventures, except the ones that involved getting kidnapped or caught in a natural disaster. “Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men,” said Michael Landon, one of the leads in
Bonanza,
the long-running story of an all-male family living on a huge Nevada ranch after the Civil War. Perhaps to emphasize their heterosexuality, the Cartwright men had plenty of romances. But the scriptwriters killed their girlfriends off at an extraordinarily speedy clip. The family patriarch, Ben, had been widowed three times, and his three sons all repeatedly got married or engaged, only to quickly lose their mates to the grim reaper.
A rather typical episode began
with Joe (Landon) happily dancing with a new fiancée. Before the first commercial, the poor girl was murdered on her way home from the hoedown.

“A
LL THE MEN BECOME LAWYERS AND ALL THE WOMEN WORK ON COMMITTEES
.”

TV created the impression that once married, a woman literally never left her house. Even if the viewers knew that this really wasn’t true, many did accept the message that when matrimony began, working outside the home ended. In reality, however, by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were married. (Young single adult women were, as we’ll see, as rare as female action heroes at this point in history.)
More than 30 percent of American
wives were holding down jobs, including almost 40 percent of wives with school-age children.

Yet to look at the way Americans portrayed themselves on television, in newspapers, and in magazines, you’d have thought that married women who worked were limited to a handful of elementary school teachers and the unlucky wives of sharecroppers and drunkards. Marlene Sanders, one of the very few women who managed to do on-the-air reporting for network television, left in 1960 to give birth to a son. “After about six weeks, I thought, ‘I will go crazy,’ ” she recalled. She hired a housekeeper and offered a male college student free room and board in return for filling in when she, her husband, and the housekeeper were all unavailable. It seemed to work, but Sanders had no idea whether the arrangement was normal or bizarre. She knew no other working mothers, and there was, she said, “no public discussion of the child-care problems of working couples.” One of the first articles she ever saw on the subject, she added, was one “about how I had this male babysitter.”

If all the working women were invisible, it was in part because of the jobs most of them were doing. They weren’t sitting next to Sanders in the network news bureaus. They were office workers—receptionists or bookkeepers, often part-time. They stood behind cash registers in stores, cleaned offices or homes. If they were professionals, they held—with relatively few exceptions—low-paying positions that had long been defined as particularly suited to women, such as teacher, nurse, or librarian. The nation’s ability to direct most of its college-trained women into the single career of teaching was the foundation upon which the national public school system was built and a major reason American tax rates were kept low.
The average salary of a female teacher
was $4,689 at a time
when the government was reporting
the average starting salary for a male liberal-arts graduate fresh out of college as $5,400. (Women graduates’ salaries were significantly lower, probably in part because so many of them were going into teaching.)

Another reason the nation ignored the fact that so many housewives had outside jobs was that working women tended not to be well-represented among upper-income families. The male politicians, business executives, editors, and scriptwriters who set the tone for public discussion usually felt that wives not working was simply
better.
After the war, Americans had a powerful and understandable desire to settle down and return to normal. Since they were doing so in an era of incredible economic growth, it was easy to decide that stay-at-home housewives were part of the package. Women could devote all their energies to taking care of their children and husbands (politicians, businessmen, and editors included). If some of them wanted a break from domestic routine, they could volunteer to work on the PTA or, if they were wealthy enough, the charity fashion show. (“
It is a tradition in the Guggenheimer
family that all the men become lawyers and all the women work on committees,” said a story in the
Times
about some well-to-do New Yorkers.) Men were supposed to be the breadwinners. A woman who worked to help support her struggling—or striving—family might want to downplay the fact rather than make her husband look inadequate. As late as 1970, a survey of women under 45 who had been or were currently married found that 80 percent believed “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

The limited options for women who did work, and the postwar propaganda about the glories of homemaking, convinced the young women who were graduating from high school and college in the early 1960s that once you married, the good life was the stay-at-home life. Prestige lay in having a husband who was successful enough to keep his wife out of the workplace.
Esther Peterson, the top-ranking
woman in the Kennedy administration, asked an auditorium full of working-class high school girls in Los Angeles how many expected to have a “home and kids and a family,” and the room was full of waving hands. But when Peterson wanted to know how many expected to work, only one or two girls signified interest. She then asked how many of their mothers worked, and, she recalled later, “all those hands went up again.” The girls were disturbed by the implicit message. “In those days nine out of ten girls would work outside the home at some point in their lives,” Peterson said. “But each of the girls thought that she would be that tenth girl.”

“I’
D KNOW WE WERE GETTING THE WRONG KIND OF GIRL
. S
HE’S NOT GETTING MARRIED
.”