When Everything Changed (21 page)

SNCC finally voted to expel all its white members, much to the dismay of some of the veterans, such as Fannie Lou Hamer. (“
I am not fighting
for an all-black world, just like I am not going to tolerate an all-white world,” she told one writer.) Ella Baker, who would never turn her back on the young people she had nurtured, nevertheless began to drift away. She spoke to the SNCC leaders less and less, and they seldom reached out to her for advice.

The task that Baker had imposed on the early SNCC members required humility and a willingness to continually compromise. By working with local men and women on the ground and following their lead, the young organizers were forced to bow to the ideas and needs of people with very different histories and interests. When SNCC gave up on grassroots organizing and gave up on working with whites, compromise went out the window. The leaders began to splinter into factions based on ideology or history or personality. And they began arguing that black women’s chief duty in life was to follow and support black men. Having dropped the discipline required to live and work in close harmony with whites, some of the leaders had stopped bothering to try to work with women as well.

Ruby Doris Smith had been elected executive secretary of SNCC in 1966—the only woman who ever had held, or ever would hold, such an important office. But she came to power just as the organization was slipping toward irrelevance and her own health was beginning to fail. Tragically, in 1967 she fell ill and died at the age of 25 from cancer.
Shortly before her death
, she told
Ebony
magazine that while in the past black women had to “assert themselves so the family could survive,” now that more men were joining the movement, “the day might come when women aren’t needed for this type of work.” It was a surprising statement from someone as independent as Smith, although it might have been understandable for an ailing woman juggling the demands of a husband, a small child, and an all-consuming job to dream about not being needed quite as much. However, if Smith was simply responding to the changing tenor of her organization, she wasn’t giving too much away. The day that men would actually be ready to totally take over that desired role of all-purpose leader, she added cannily, “can’t even be foreseen—maybe in the next century or so.”

7. The Decline of the Double Standard

“T
HEY THINK
I’
M A GOOD GIRL
.”

I
n 1968 the
New York Times
took note of a startling new trend: “cohabiting.” A feature story introduced readers to several couples, mainly New York City college students, who were living together without the benefit of a marriage license. Everyone’s identity was disguised in deference to the controversial nature of the subject. “Joan,” whose parents believed she was rooming with a girlfriend, said even the mailman was conspiring with her to hide the truth from her family. “It’s funny… my parents have a lot of confidence in me. They think I’m a good girl,” said Joan, who clearly believed that if her parents got a load of her real roommate, “Charles,” they might change their minds.

The lead anecdote, however, belonged to “Peter” and “Susan,” who were part of a youthful counterculture that the
Times
was still slowly introducing to its readers. The couple was sharing a four-room apartment with “no bed in the bedroom—just six mattresses for their use and that of fellow students who need a place to sleep.” And the paper reported that although Peter and Susan had been together for two years, they “had no plans for a wedding because they regard marriage as ‘too serious a step.’ ” Susan was a student at Barnard College, which generally prohibited off-campus living arrangements. But she had gotten around the rule by having a friend tell the college employment bureau she wanted to hire Susan as a live-in nanny.

That was a little too much detail, as it turned out. It didn’t take the Barnard administration long to figure out that “Susan” was actually Linda LeClair, a 20-year-old sophomore. When confronted, LeClair admitted she had deceived the housing administrator and broken school regulations. Rather than apologizing, she and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, a junior at Columbia, began leafleting the campus, asking students to demand changes in the rules. Endless debate and newspaper headlines ensued. A student-faculty committee was called to consider the case. After five hours of deliberation, the committee announced that as punishment for deceiving the administration about where she lived, LeClair would be “denied the privilege of using the following college facilities: the snack bar, the cafeteria, and the James Room,” a student lounge.

A snack-bar ban was clearly not the kind of penalty likely to deter future cohabitation, and the alumnae wrote to complain. Barnard’s president, Martha Peterson, seemed torn between respecting the committee’s decision and showing the college’s donors that she was not going to let the matter drop. So she sent an open letter to LeClair, asking her opinion on “the importance of integrity among individuals in the college” and “the importance of respect for regularized procedures.” She also wanted a letter from LeClair’s parents stating whether they approved of their daughter’s behavior. The result of all this was another
Times
story, titled “Father Despairs of Barnard Daughter,” and an editorial noting that Barnard could have saved itself a lot of grief “by letting sleeping coeds lie.”

By May, Peterson was hinting very strongly that Linda LeClair ought to go away (“… no useful purpose can be served by your continued enrollment in Barnard College”). Yet she insisted that the final judgment would be based neither on sex nor on failure to follow procedures, but on the final grades of a student who, it appeared, had been spending more time passing out leaflets than attending classes.
The
Times,
which had been
covering the story as if it involved the threat of nuclear war, tracked down LeClair among “a student group flying paper airplanes on the Columbia campus” and found her rather indifferent to her future as an undergraduate. The next time she made an appearance in the paper would be as one of hundreds of students arrested during sit-ins and protests over Columbia’s plan to build a gym in Harlem. Ultimately, LeClair dropped out at the end of the semester, went off with Peter Behr to live in a commune in Vermont, hitchhiked to the West Coast, and returned to New York so her boyfriend could refuse induction into the army.
On her arrival, LeClair
told a
Times
reporter that she had a certain sympathy for President Peterson. “She is aware… that recognizing sexual intercourse would cause embarrassment to the ladies that give money to the college.”

“…
WHILE
I
WASN’T ALLOWED OUT AFTER NINE THIRTY
.”

Of all the social uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, none was more popular than the sexual revolution. And while men took an enthusiastic part, it was basically a story about women. Most of the world had always operated under a double standard in which girls were supposed to remain chaste until marriage while boys were allowed—sometimes encouraged—to press for whatever sex they could get. But Linda LeClair’s generation had learned from the civil rights movement that just because something had always been the rule did not mean it was right—particularly if that rule gave some people more privileges than others. Even the authority figures had lost some of their confidence in the old morality. The Barnard administration, while trying to get a handle on the LeClair situation, skirted any suggestion that it was wrong for a young woman to shack up with a man she did not intend to marry. Instead, President Peterson focused on the fact that LeClair had lied about where she was living. Even in 1968, everyone on campus tended to agree that lying was bad.

Colleges had always given their unspoken endorsement to the double standard by setting far stricter regulations in girls’ dormitories. In her precohabitation days, LeClair would get back to her room in time for curfew, then look out the window to watch her boyfriend walking away. “I can still see the image,” she said recently, “of him going across Broadway to do whatever the heck he wanted to do while I wasn’t allowed out after nine thirty at night.” It was a tradition as old as women’s higher education. But by the late 1960s, Barnard was hardly the only college on the defensive. Within a few years, many schools were in full-scale retreat. When Nora Ephron returned to Wellesley for the tenth reunion of the Class of 1962, she heard that one of her old classmates had gone into a dormitory bathroom and seen “a boy and a girl taking a shower together.” No one, Ephron said, could believe it. “Ten years ago we were allowed to have men in the rooms on Sunday afternoons only, on the condition the door be left fourteen inches ajar.” And Anne Wallach, visiting her daughter at Antioch, prided herself on not reacting when she passed a naked man on her way to Alison’s room.

“…
THE
T
ECHNICAL
V
IRGINS
A
SSOCIATION
.”

The female warriors of the sexual revolution had been born into a world where the importance of remaining a virgin until marriage was seldom questioned. Nothing was worse than being suspected of casual sleeping around. Ellen Miller, who grew up in Kentucky, remembers that adults were extremely tolerant of their children smoking and that parents routinely chaperoned parties in which underage boys and girls drank alcohol. But permissiveness went only so far. Nobody wanted to hang out with a girl who had “a reputation,” Miller said. “I guess the social mores accepted smoking, accepted drinking, but did not accept early sex.”

There were, of course, many women who had clear-cut religious reasons for avoiding sex outside wedlock. But for a great many others, virginity had become a social convention without any real ethical roots. Rather, they saw it as a commodity that made women more valuable in the marriage market, and they tried to divert their boyfriends into sexual activity that would leave them satisfied without risking penetration. “We called it the TVA—the Technical Virgins Association,” said one coed of the mid-’60s. The task was made all the more challenging because many women of the era found oral sex disgusting. “
Now don’t turn
up your nose and make that ugly face,” warned the author of
The Sensuous Woman
in 1969 before embarking on a discussion of oral sex.

The country had been wedded to the old Victorian belief that women had a much lower sex drive than men and that women were the ones responsible for drawing the line. For a boy, manliness meant pressing his dates to go farther, ever farther. It was the girl’s duty to call a halt. “
A man will go
as far as a woman will let him. The girl has to set the standard,” a college student told George Gallup. It was the girl who had to decide whether French-kissing on the second date was too fast, how much touching could take place and where. Advice columnists doled out leaflets with titles such as “Necking and Petting and How Far to Go,” and boys reported to their friends whether they had gotten to second base or third.

If a home run had been hit, a gentleman never told—unless, of course, the girl in question had a reputation and was therefore fair game. Girls with reputations got asked out on dates for only “one thing,” and most people believed they forfeited their chance of a good marriage. In the movies, unmarried women who were sexually active were punished with a life of lonely solitude or sudden death. (Elizabeth Taylor won the 1960 best actress award for
BUtterfield 8,
in which she played a “party girl” whose decision to reform wasn’t enough to save her from a fatal car crash.) The most popular actress of the early 1960s was Doris Day, who specialized in playing a working woman protecting her virtue against handsome men who schemed to deflower her. Since Day was well into her 30s at the time, the films drove home the point that a woman was never too old to resist extramarital sex.

The virginity rule was a reason for early marriage—any delay would increase the chances of straying from the path of virtue. And it was an excellent argument against training women for serious careers. If unmarried women—even those as old as Doris Day—were expected to avoid sex, and if married women were not supposed to work, pursuing a career became something very close to taking the veil.

“…
A LOT MORE FUN BY THE DOZEN
.”

In 1961
Ladies’ Home Journal
offered its readers an essay that asked, “Is the Double Standard Out of Date?” In it, writer Betsy Marvin McKinney answered her own question with a definite no. Sex for the sake of sex, without the chance of procreation, could be satisfying for a man, she conceded. His only job, after all, was to release some sperm. But a woman was built to have babies, and for her, sex for pleasure alone was far more frustrating than simply remaining chaste. Doris Day knew what she was doing, and once women started behaving like men in the bedroom, life tilted out of balance. “The end of the world would come as surely as atomic warfare could bring it,” McKinney warned grimly.

One reader who came away less than convinced was Helen Gurley Brown, an ad-agency executive in her late 30s who had worked her way up from typist to secretary to a high-salaried copywriter in Los Angeles, all the while sleeping with whatever men took her fancy. She paid her own way in the world, supporting her widowed mother and disabled sister back in Little Rock and plunking down cash for an expensive, if used, Mercedes-Benz. That car impressed David Brown, a film producer who had been burned in the past by extravagant women who expected him to pay the bills. They married, and Brown urged his new wife to write an advice book for young women on how to live a modern single life. McKinney’s article got Gurley Brown focused, and her response,
Sex and the Single Girl,
was published in 1962. It became a bestseller “that torpedoed the myth that a girl must be married to enjoy a satisfying life,” as the cover bragged in bright yellow letters.