When Everything Changed (24 page)

Many women got reeducated by
Human Sexual Response.
The book, which was published in 1966 by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, was the product of eleven years of direct laboratory observation of nearly seven hundred people who had volunteered to have sex while the authors ran cameras and measured their heart and brain activity. Masters and Johnson found, among many, many other things, that women were capable of more intense and enduring sexual response than men, and that, contrary to what Jane Alpert’s best friend told her, vaginal orgasms were not the best kind. While the book itself was written in hard-to-read scientific terminology, it was interpreted, summarized, explained, and debated all over the mainstream media for the rest of the decade.

Women began to argue—out loud—that the right to satisfying sexual experience was important, perhaps right up there with equal pay.
In 1970 “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm
,” an essay by Anne Koedt, explained that the reason “the so-called frigidity rate among women is phenomenally high” was because men were looking for their mates’ orgasms in the wrong place. In a call to action that was copied, reprinted, and shared all around the country, Koedt urged, “We must begin to demand that if certain sexual positions now defined as ‘standard’ are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they no longer be defined as standard.”

American society had always given women only one big responsibility when it came to sex—stopping boyfriends from going too far. Now they seemed to be in charge of everything, from providing the birth control to making sure they had orgasms. A great deal of research was obviously required. Workshops sprouted up on college campuses, offering women tips on all sorts of hitherto-undiscussed matters. Arriving at Antioch as a freshman, Alison Foster showed up for a meeting of the campus women’s group. About half an hour into the proceedings, she recalled, “everybody was supposed to look at their cervix. We all got little mirrors.”
Nora Ephron, reporting on
similar gatherings in New York, commented, “It is hard not to long for the days when an evening with the girls meant bridge.”

“…
THIS VELVET BATHROBE
.”

The sexual revolution was only one part of an extraordinary era, when a large number of relatively privileged young people felt free to plan the reinvention of the world, confident that the world would pay attention. They had an unprecedented amount of time to devote to the task because the still-booming economy made it easy to drop in and out of the job market at will. The cost of living was very low, particularly for those who were willing to share space in a rural farmhouse or urban tenement. Travel was cheap, and airlines gave students special passes that allowed them to fly standby for cut-rate prices. When you got to wherever you were going, there was almost always a bed where you could crash for the night in the apartments of fellow members of the youth culture.

Political activists shut down their universities over the war in Vietnam, free speech, or the administration’s failure to accept their advice on matters ranging from how to invest the endowment to where to locate the new gym. And even the most apolitical took part in the cultural revolution—a ’60s watchword for everything from hippie communes to the Beatles. Standards for fashion and physical appearance underwent a drastic makeover. Clothes became comfortable, colorful, and dramatic. Girls tie-dyed everything, dipping knotted fabric into bright colors to produce psychedelic patterns. (“I ruined many a sink in the dorm,” recalled Barbara Arnold.) They bought long, loose-fitting peasant dresses and blouses and vintage clothes. “I was really part of that hippie, thrift-store, make-your-own-blouses-out-of-your-mother’s-linen-tablecloth scene,” said Alison Foster. She still has a very clear memory of the moment she stopped liking anything the department stores sold and gave her patronage to the secondhand shops downtown. “I’d go to the East Village and buy funky furs and velvet coats…. I loved that stuff.” When it was time to dress up for Sunday dinner at her boarding school, Foster donned “this velvet bathrobe—which I thought was the height of sophistication. It wasn’t even mine. It was my roommate’s, but I wore it as many times as I could get away with it.” The whole point, she concluded, was being creative “and not looking like our parents. That was very important to me. I look at kids now and I’m wearing very similar clothes to what a lot of the girls wear. But those days I didn’t want to look like my parents.”

It was nothing personal. Alison Foster got along very well with her mother, Anne Wallach. She had not minded being the only girl in her circle whose mother worked, “and I liked it that she didn’t hover.” Still, whether a young woman adored her mother or loathed her, if she grew up in the ’60s, she probably vowed that her life would be far different—more exciting, less concerned about what the neighbors would think, more in touch with her feelings, more
real.
(Or, as Wellesley College’s 1969 student commencement speaker, Hillary Rodham, put it: “A more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living.”) And no matter what else she did to align herself with the revolutions at hand, clothing marked her as part of the brave new world of change and adventure.

Everything was supposed to be natural. Some women stopped shaving their legs, which quickly turned into a political issue.
There was, recalled Anselma
Dell’Olio, “a tendency to gauge one’s feminist credentials by look, address, and degree of hairiness.” (
A letter writer to the
Times
denounced “arm-pit Feminists, women whose involvement with the ethic of body hair has overpowered other considerations.”) It was easy to wear shorter skirts because panty hose had arrived on the scene. Basically the same leotards that dancers had always worn, panty hose quickly displaced stockings as the undergarment of choice. (Wendy Woythaler’s mother was shocked at the idea of throwing out two legs’ worth of panty hose when only one had a run in it, so she cut off the offending legs and told her daughter to wear a pair with a good right leg over a pair with a good left. “Oh God, it was awful.” Woythaler sighed.) And it was easy not to bother with skirts at all, because by the end of the decade women had given themselves permission to spend their entire lives in jeans if they felt like it. “I used to have to go to an army/navy store to buy blue jeans,” recalled Alison Foster. “There was a point where nobody sold blue jeans. And then everybody sold blue jeans.”

Black women let their hair blossom out into Afros, and white college students let theirs fall straight down their backs, banishing the nighttime roller routine. Neither style, unfortunately, was always as easy to achieve in reality as in theory. Most white women did not actually have perfectly straight hair, and many resorted to ironing it. Some black women discovered that their hair, when left to its own volition, just hung there. “I decided I was going to show some of my blackness and have this Afro,” said Tawana Hinton. “My hair was long, and I did it by trying to roll it and wet it…. It didn’t work. It didn’t last but a minute, you know.” Josie Bass, who had given up trying to get her hair to cooperate, was invited to a dance at the University of Maryland by a student she fancied, who himself sported an impressive Afro, so she went downtown and invested in an Afro wig. She was so intent on her errand she didn’t really notice that one of the many urban riots of the era was beginning to break out. “The dance was canceled and I never wore that wig.” She laughed.

“I
THOUGHT
I
WAS THE ONLY PERSON LIKE THAT IN THE WORLD
.”

It looked for a while as though the sexual revolution applied to only heterosexuals. “
The whole idea of homosexuality
made me profoundly uneasy,” said Betty Friedan. The leader of the National Organization for Women had a tactical concern about the fact that opponents had tried to undermine the movement by depicting it as a lesbian cabal. But beyond that, it was pretty clear Friedan, like many Americans, was just uncomfortable with “the whole idea.”

For most of history, lesbianism was so little understood that it was actually pretty easy for gay women to live out their lives in peace and quiet. (
When Martha Peterson, the Barnard
president who fought the Linda LeClair wars, died in 2006 at the age of 90, the
Times
obituary surprised many alumnae when it reported that she was “survived by her companion, Dr. Maxine Bennett.”) Women had always slept together—the draftiness of most homes made cuddling up in bed extremely popular. And they had traditionally expressed their friendship for one another in intense terms that involved kissing and hugging and declarations of love. The shortage of men after major wars created a large population of unmarried women who often lived together. No one ever thought they were sharing their lives for any reason beyond companionship and convenience.

A woman who was attracted to members of her own sex thus had an easy time hiding it, if she chose to do so. But she probably had a hard time putting her feelings in any positive context. “I thought I was the only person like that in the world,” said Carol Rumsey, who was 18 in 1960 when she felt stirrings for her girlfriend, the Jackie Kennedy look-alike. They were spending a last day together before the friend’s impending marriage, “and we went to the movies and it was cold in Connecticut—and we got in the backseat and we snuggled up and we were just talking and all of a sudden we kissed and that was, you know, the first time that ever happened to me.” And like many other women in her circumstances, Rumsey responded to her discovery by pretending nothing had changed and getting unhappily married.

At the time, while conservatives saw homosexuality as a sin, liberals saw it as an illness. (
When
Ms.
began
publication in 1971, an early issue assured readers that letting their sons play with dolls would not lead them into homosexuality, since “boys become homosexual because of disturbed family relationships, not because their parents allow them to do so-called feminine things.”) No one had much of anything positive to say about it.
Time,
which had put
the author Kate Millett on the cover when it wrote a glowing article about the women’s liberation movement in 1970, rethought the whole issue when Millett acknowledged she was gay. The revelation about Millett’s sexuality,
Time
said, was “bound to discredit her as a spokesman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.”

Homosexuality was almost never referred to in the mainstream media, and when it was, the references were generally oblique—jokes that could go over the heads of more innocent readers and viewers. In the movies, gay characters were the cause of problems, if not disaster. In 1961
The Children’s Hour,
starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, tackled the subject of lesbianism with sensitivity and an ending depressing enough to make the
BUtterfield 8
finale look like a situation comedy. Hepburn’s and MacLaine’s characters, the owners of a boarding school for young girls, are falsely accused of having an “unnatural” affair by an extraordinarily unpleasant student. They sue unsuccessfully for libel, and the school is destroyed. Curiosity-seekers come to gawk outside the house, and MacLaine—who turns out to have been nursing a secret passion for her friend all along—hangs herself in the bedroom.

The first attempt by lesbians to organize publicly may have been the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1953 in San Francisco. (
By 1970 the editors
of their magazine,
The Ladder,
felt they had made enormous progress when they proudly estimated that each issue was read or at least seen by “approximately 1,200 people.”) Gene Damon, a writer for the magazine, said that to be a lesbian was to be regarded as “automatically out of the human race” and that she was constantly being asked questions such as “But what do you Lesbians do in the daytime?” Damon contributed an essay to the feminist book
Sisterhood Is Powerful
in 1970 that captured the feelings of persecution: “
Run, reader, run right
past this article, because most of you reading this will be women… and you are going to be frightened when you hear what this is all about. I am social anathema, even to you brave ones, for I am a Lesbian.”

“S
OCIETY HAS BEGUN TO MAKE IT AS ROUGH FOR VIRGINS
…”

The prophets of the sexual revolution had more in mind than simply eliminating the double standard. The big thought of the 1960s was that sex should become a perfectly natural part of everyday life, not much more dramatic and profound than a handshake. If people would just give up the idea of sex as a sacred act between a man and a woman eternally bonded together, the argument went, they could throw off their repressions and inhibitions. Sharing and good feeling would triumph over jealousy and negativism. The world could make love, not war. The other famous slogan of the ’60s—“If it feels good, do it”—might mean more than just an excuse for self-indulgence. It might mean a happier society or even world peace. The hippie movement in particular gave great credence to the idea that if people were busy taking off their clothes and coupling, they were not likely to be in the mood for more negative activity.

Alison Foster experienced that side of the sexual revolution very suddenly, after spending her first two years of high school at a private all-girls school in Manhattan with a very strong sense of decorum. “We had dances where they literally had a ruler—if you were dancing too close, the ladies would come and separate you.” She transferred in 1970 to a progressive boarding school, where she discovered a very different world. “Everybody was sleeping with everybody. Professors were sleeping with students. I had a poetry teacher sleeping with a tenth grader. We had professors modeling in the nude in our art classes. We had a lake that we would all skinny-dip in. So I went from what I thought was this very sophisticated New York girl to—oh my God, I am so over my head.” She loved the school. (“Everybody was talking about feelings. It was just the kind of thing I liked.”) But she saw the damage that the new theories about free love could do. “I had friends—they acted like it didn’t bother them, but they felt very bad the next morning when he didn’t call. I figured out pretty early on that I wasn’t going to do that. That I could figure out.”