When Everything Changed (28 page)

Like the Atlantic City demonstration, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
takeover was a small and exceedingly colorful protest about a very serious issue. Americans saw virtually everything through the lens of the mass media, and the newspapers, magazines, and television stations that did the communicating hired very few women, promoted even fewer, and broadcast a vision of what the American woman ought to be that was both trivial and stultifying. In the end, Carter—who impressed the protesters by lasting through an eleven-hour siege without ever going to the bathroom—agreed to give the women an eight-page supplement. It appeared in August 1970, and
the magazine said 34 percent
of its readers liked it, while 46 percent gave thumbs-down and 20 percent had a mixed response. The women thought Carter had stacked the numbers, but the supplement definitely did have the flavor of something written by a committee. Nora Ephron, who was supposed to do some of the editing, remembered sitting in “a gigantic circle” with twenty-four other women while the submissions were read out loud. The pieces, Ephron recalled, were for the most part “polemical and humorless,” but the editors were “not allowed to be critical in any way” since the code of the movement was to always offer support to other women’s efforts. And when the supplement was finally put together, the layout involved “just bundles of type next to one another. So if you wanted to read it, it was the unfriendliest layout imaginable and God help you.”

Looking back, Ephron thought that the real victory had been not the supplement but the demonstration itself. “They had gotten all this publicity, and it was really kind of great.” It was the pattern that would continue throughout the movement’s course. Things that seemed critical at the time, from the Commission on the Status of Women to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
supplement, would turn out to be important not in themselves but for the way they changed the women who worked on them, and the country that watched it all happen.

In what was perhaps the ultimate compliment to its growing influence, the women’s movement got an FBI tail in 1969.
When field officers
suggested that there might be better uses for the agents’ time than hanging around what the bureau liked to call the WLM, director J. Edgar Hoover responded, “It is absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish subversive ramifications of the WLM and to determine the potential for violence presented by the various groups connected with this movement as well as any possible threat they may represent to the internal security of the United States.”
One FBI report
from the early ’70s announced that “the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement had its origins in Soviet Russia,” and offered a “look at the red-hot mommas” of the movement leadership. “Most seemed to be making a real attempt to be unattractive…. One of the interesting aspects of the delegates’ dress was the extreme fuzzy appearance of their hair.”

“Y
OU’RE NOT WEARING A BRA, RIGHT
?”

Maria K. was initially pleased with all the talk she heard about a women’s rights movement, but then she felt that, “as often happens with good things, people got carried away.” When she and a friend went to New York City in the early 1970s, the women they stayed with, who had decorated their apartment with feminist posters, criticized Maria for wearing makeup. She lost interest in the cause when it appeared to equate trying to look attractive with subservience. “Of course I wanted more money and I didn’t want the director to have the right to slap me on the butt when he walked by, but at the same time, I really didn’t understand why I shouldn’t wear a bra.”

The declining popularity of foundation garments such as bras and girdles had as much to do with the general trend toward comfortable clothing as it did with feminism. But like the controversy about women in pants, the idea of women not wearing bras struck a deep chord and roused more public interest than many of the larger theories about equality of the sexes. “I remember walking down the sidewalk,” said Wendy Woythaler. “I was by myself and there was this couple coming toward me and I’m walking along and all of a sudden they said, ‘Would you stop just a minute?’ and the man goes, ‘You’re not wearing a bra, right?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not.’ I think he was trying to make a point to his girlfriend.”

The term “bra burners” stuck like a burr.
Betty Friedan once claimed
that the story about bra burning at the Miss America contest was “the work of agents provocateurs” who wanted to undermine the movement. (Friedan was not above using it herself when provoked.
She was quoted
in 1970 telling college students not to fall into “the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school” of women’s liberation.) People could point out every day that no bras had ever actually been burned, but it still resonated. To many women, going braless suggested a deeply personal kind of liberation—literally not being tied down. To others, it simply meant sloppy, and they equated feminism with unattractiveness. “I didn’t know what to make of them at first because I thought they were so militant and so unfeminine and so… too radical. Because it was, like, from one extreme to the other,” said Sylvia Peterson, a hairdresser in New Hampshire. “The only one I admired was Gloria Steinem because she kept her femininity… but at the same time, she had the fight, she did something.”

Gloria Steinem was the person America would come to identify most closely with the women’s liberation movement, and she was a relatively late arrival. She had been a successful journalist in the 1960s, best known for that exposé in which she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny (“
New York’s Newest
Young Wit,” announced
Glamour
magazine). She was a striking woman, with spectacular long hair and a great figure. (“
The miniskirted pinup girl
of the intelligentsia,” said a
Washington Post
columnist.) She dated some of the most attractive men on the intellectual side of the celebrity circuit. “She was so beautiful and smart and funny and went out with one amazing person after another,” said Nora Ephron. “If there was anyone in the world you wanted to go out with, she had gone out with them and they all had been in love with her.” When Steinem began to gravitate toward the women’s movement—first through journalism and then as a nearly full-time activist—she was the spokesperson every television show wanted to book. Betty Friedan, who was older, sharp-featured, and less charming, was overshadowed.

“Gloria is a very nice person, and of course beautiful and articulate,” said Muriel Fox. “So when the media latched on to her, they really did drop Betty. And of course Betty was furious. And it really was unfair because Gloria was not a founder, although she was a wonderful philosopher of the moment. But Betty was the one who had the vision, and the energy and drive that got us going.”

Looking back, it’s clear that the movement needed them both. Friedan had been the outspoken standard-bearer who got angry on behalf of a generation too constrained to make itself heard. Steinem translated the sometimes raucous and disturbing language of a movement in full bloom in a way the nervous nation could relate to. For instance, on the extremely touchy issue of
childbearing, which Ti-Grace Atkinson called
“the function of men oppressing women,”
Steinem would say
that every woman did not need to be a mother any more than “every person with vocal chords needs to be an opera singer.” It was a comment that attacked the idea of motherhood as women’s universal destiny while also complimenting the mothers. (Being an opera singer, after all, was something really special.) Her approachable style drew people to her; she made women feel that they were in the fight together. “
I knew that if
I ever met Gloria Steinem we would be best friends,” said Jan Schakowsky, a housewife who found herself feeling “totally trapped” by the long days alone with two small children.

Steinem’s soothing aura may have been a product of a childhood taking care of her mentally ill mother.
She spent an eighth-grade
Thanksgiving vacation reading
A Tale of Two Cities
for school while she hung on to the hand of her delusional parent, who believed there was a war outside the house and had “plunged her hand through a window, badly cutting her arm in an effort to help us escape.” It was the kind of upbringing that kills you or makes you very strong, and Steinem became both strong and self-contained—a unique figure who could constantly support other women activists while remaining a little removed from any particular cadre or faction.

While Steinem was courted by the media, she was also battered by the kind of dismissive treatment that is often meted out to beautiful women who insist on being something more than decorative. “
What Gloria needs
is a man… ,” said talk-show host David Susskind. “The whole thing is so boring—and ridiculous. Gloria comes on with that flat Ohio accent and goes on and on about women’s oppression—you feel like either kissing her or hitting her. I can’t decide which.” And her extreme visibility poked at a particularly sensitive issue. The radical arm of the women’s liberation movement, which wanted to go far beyond reforming laws into the realm of changing the basic rules of human relationships, had a natural concern with the question of appearance. There was obviously nothing more unjust than the fact that the shape of a young woman’s nose, the size of her waist, and the thickness of her hair were the things on which so much happiness and fortune hinged. Some women’s groups tried to call a halt to unfair, superficial standards by rejecting the entire tool kit of the beauty industry. They banished makeup, wore formless clothes such as overalls and men’s shirts. They not only tossed out their uncomfortable high heels but rejected feminine footwear altogether, showing up for television interviews in work boots. J. Edgar Hoover to the contrary, they did not strive for fuzzy hair, but they avoided any style that required an effort beyond washing and combing.

The sense that feminists were all homely had dogged every struggle for women’s rights in American history. (
In 1927 a
Harper’s
essay
said the very word “feminist” suggested people “who wore flat heels and had very little feminine charm.”) Angelina Grimké, the early-nineteenth-century crusader, thrilled her supporters by marrying the dashing abolitionist Theodore Weld, thus demonstrating that it was possible to both be a feminist and land a husband. “
I did not agree with the message
some were trying to push—that to be a liberated woman you had to make yourself ugly, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop wearing makeup or pretty dresses or any skirts at all,” said Betty Friedan, who turned out to be the chief standard-bearer for the personal-appearance wing of the movement.
She urged her followers
to be “as pretty as we can. It’s good for our self-image and it’s good politics.”
Roxanne Dunbar, a radical
feminist from Boston, said that when she and Friedan were guests on a TV show, Friedan harangued her from the moment she refused to let the makeup woman apply powder and lipstick. “I was dressed in my very best army surplus white cotton sailor trousers and a white man’s shirt. She said that I and ‘scruffy feminists’ like me were giving the movement a bad name,” Dunbar said.

Steinem never got into the fight, and she seemed uncomfortable when the issue of appearance came up. She loved wearing miniskirts and high heels—the heels, she admitted, were indeed a bit like the old Chinese practice of foot binding, but she felt that if men could wear something as meaningless and uncomfortable as ties, women might be forgiven for enjoying the feeling they got from wearing sexy shoes. Still, she worried that she would not be taken seriously because of her appearance. (And traditional women, she feared, might dismiss her because she did not have a husband or children.)
Trapped in an interview
on a local television station in New York with a host who called her “an absolutely stunning sex object,” Steinem responded irritably, “Well, I should comment on your appearance, but I don’t have time.”

Like Angelina Grimké and her wedding, Steinem served as a symbol—whether she liked it or not—that women could be both militant and sexually appealing. Other movement leaders rolled their eyes when the media reported on her lifestyle—camping out in the Badlands of North Dakota, being photographed at an A-level movie screening in Manhattan, then sitting in a circle of sari-wearing peasant women at a conference in New Delhi. But it was exactly the way millions of young women around the country felt that they, too, would like to live: standing up for their sisters and fighting for equal rights in a manner that also involved having adventures in exotic places, plus dates with unusually smart football players and unusually attractive playwrights. “
Every so often, someone
suggests that Gloria Steinem is only into the women’s movement because it is currently the chic place to be,” wrote Nora Ephron. “It always makes me smile, because she is about the only remotely chic thing connected with the movement.”

“B
LACKS ARE OPPRESSED
…
WHITE WOMEN ARE SUPPRESSED
.”

The younger and more radical women dismissed NOW and the reformist generation as middle-aged, middle-class white people, out of touch with the needs of poor and minority women. (
Ti-Grace Atkinson’s breakaway
group from NOW described themselves as “the young, the black, and the beautiful.”) But in fact the older reform movement was far more integrated. It had focused on justice in the workplace—something black women cared very much about. The more complicated social and personal demands left many of them cold. “
I’m not hung up on
this thing about liberating myself from the black man,” said Fannie Lou Hamer. “I’m not going to try that thing. I got a black husband, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds with a fourteen shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated from.”

Black critics said the women’s movement was too focused on the problems of suburbs and college campuses rather than on the issues of poverty and exclusion. “
Blacks are oppressed
… white women are suppressed… and there is a difference,” said Linda La Rue, a black commentator. And the traditional black press stressed that the important thing was for women to shore up the men, not to compete against them.
Essence
magazine in 1970
told its readers that, once wed, “you have discarded your independence and you must rely on him. Even if you don’t feel that way in the beginning, show him that you do. Make him feel ten feet tall!” (A decade later,
Essence
apologized.)