When Everything Changed (37 page)

“I
HAD TO BE EDUCATED QUICKLY
.”

Suzan Johnson, who everybody called Sujay, had grown up in the Bronx, where her family was the first African-American household on their block. Her mother, a teacher, and her father, a motorman, came home from their day jobs and worked to build up a private security business in the evenings. They wanted not only to send their children to good private schools but to make sure that while they were there, they got all the trimmings—the tennis rackets, the summer trips to Spain, and everything else that would help them to fit into the virtually all-white world at the top.

Sujay responded by being an empowered overachiever who graduated from college before her twentieth birthday and embarked on multiple careers. She enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, vaguely contemplating the ministry, while hedging her bets by becoming a television producer and working at a public-relations job for Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. On the day she preached a sermon for a final exam at the seminary, she raced out of the classroom before the other students took their turns and jumped into her car to make two closely scheduled appointments—one to tape a television appearance for the hospital, and the other a job interview with
60 Minutes.
“And I got stuck on the 155th Street bridge.” She laughed. Trapped in traffic as the minutes ticked away, she realized it was time to make a choice. “I was like, ‘You can’t do it all!’ and I made a decision it was going to be full-time ministry.” A year later, as she was doing her internship at the office of the American Baptist Churches, she was offered her own parish—Mariners’ Temple, a church in lower Manhattan between Chinatown and city hall.

The church, which seated eleven hundred, had only fifteen members, and the Baptist leadership had privately been planning to shut it down and give the building to a Chinese congregation that was already sharing the space for its services. “I was supposed to do the final benediction, and it was going to be closed under my leadership. I didn’t know that,” Johnson said. She reached out to the residents of nearby housing projects, starting after-school tutoring sessions. She also began what turned out to be a hugely popular midday service for the people who worked in the courts, city offices, and police department nearby. “We’d have five hundred people at lunchtime,” she recalled. “You’d see all these people converge, and the politicians were like, ‘What’s going on over there?’ ” She added on another job when the police department asked her to be one of its chaplains, and by her seventh year of ministry, she had been invited to be a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School.

It was perhaps what Johnson had imagined when she was in the seminary but hardly what the male leaders of her church had planned. When she got to Mariners’, “and they made all this hoopla about my being the first woman,” she began to realize that the doors were not nearly as open as she had thought. That became even clearer when the women who had been her classmates started telling her they were unable to find positions as pastors or assistant pastors. “I really didn’t know what the worldview was. I had to be educated quickly,” she said.

The Hampton Ministers’ Conference was helpful in the quick-learning process. The largest interdenominational gathering for black clergy, it attracted thousands of participants every year, and the first time Johnson attended, “there were, like, five women pastors” who were denied permission to get together for a meeting of their own.

“The first year some of the men tried to take me to bed. They didn’t know how to relate to women,” Johnson said. “I’m like , ‘No, but I’ll play basketball with you. I did the sports thing.’ ” She felt keenly unwelcome. She has a crystal-clear memory of going up to a prominent minister, putting out her hand, and introducing herself. “And he hit my hand like, ‘I know who you are and I’m not even touching you.’ ” Humiliated, Johnson looked around to see who had witnessed her embarrassment. “I remember that moment. I remember where we were standing. He hurt my feelings really badly. But every year I’d come back and introduce myself again and say, ‘How are you doing, Doctor?’ ”

“F
LY ME
.”

While women were struggling to break into traditionally male professions, the flight attendants were fighting to prove that their jobs could be done by either sex. The attendants, who had been first at the door when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened for business, were also among the first in the courtrooms.
Their battles began with Eulalie
Cooper, who had been working for Delta for nearly six years when the airline discovered she was secretly married and fired her. (To add insult to injury, the Louisiana Unemployment Compensation Board denied her benefits on the grounds that she had left her job “voluntarily.”) Cooper sued, but a Louisiana judge agreed with the airline that serving food and ensuring safety on an airplane was a job that young single women were uniquely qualified to do, and therefore fell under the law’s exemption for “bona fide occupational qualifications”—the loophole NOW once argued should be applied only to sperm donors and wet nurses.
In another case in Miami
, Pan Am brought in the psychiatrist Eric Berne, author of a bestselling book called
Games People Play,
to explain that an apprehensive male passenger would feel resentment if another man tried to tell him what to do—unless that man seemed gentle, in which case the passenger would feel homosexual panic.

While the flight attendants were fighting to establish their job as gender-neutral—including a war to get the airlines to stop calling them “stewardesses”—the airlines were going out of their way to make them international sex objects. Throughout American history, women who worked had to fight against the myth that because they were active in the public world, they were therefore promiscuous. Nurses had had a particularly difficult time, and the women who volunteered to serve during World War II suffered under malicious rumors that only a loose woman would willingly work in the middle of thousands of soldiers.

In the ’70s it was the flight attendants’ turn, but in this case it was their employer who was doing the mythmaking.
In 1971 National Airlines
began its “Fly Me” campaign, in which lovely young women in flight attendants’ uniforms purred, “Hi, I’m Cheryl/Donna/Diane. Fly me.” Continental announced, “We really move our tails for you,” and Southwest introduced itself as the “love” airline, where passengers would be served “love bites” and “love potions,” otherwise known as snacks and drinks. Meanwhile the women who were dispensing the love bites, moving their tails, and (later) promising to “fly you like you’ve never been flown before” were being dressed in miniskirts, vinyl, hot pants, and—in the case of TWA—paper clothes, such as togas, cocktail dresses, and “penthouse” pajamas, that were supposed to match the entrées.

Eventually, the same appeals court that had given Lorena Weeks her triumph over Southern Bell ruled that the business of an airline was getting people from one place to another and that men and women were equally capable of facilitating that process in the air. Finally, in 1973 a federal court in the District of Columbia wiped out the stewardess culture completely by ruling that Northwest Airlines had to do away with the appearance rules and any other restrictions that did not relate directly to safety duties.

“G
OD, IT WAS MEAN
.”

The National Press Club in Washington was the place where almost every prominent news maker who visited the nation’s capital came to speak and be covered by the alleged cream of the American media. The male reporters were happy to invite their old colleagues who had become lobbyists or public-relations men to come as guests, have lunch, and listen to the big-name speakers. They even invited their golfing buddies or next-door neighbors. But they refused to allow a woman reporter to set foot in the place. In 1955, in what was regarded as a great concession, club officials agreed that on days when an important guest came to dine and speak, their female colleagues could stand in a narrow, hot, and crowded balcony and take notes for their stories. The women, of course, got no lunch. It was difficult to hear up there, and they were not permitted to ask questions. “
In professional terms
it couldn’t have been meaner, it couldn’t have been pettier. God, it was mean,” said Bonnie Angelo, who had been the
Newsday
Washington bureau chief and a
Time
reporter in those days.

In 1971 one of the most outrageous instances of sexual segregation in the professions ended when the Press Club finally voted to allow women members. The walls fell at a time when women were declaring war in their own newsrooms, wiping out the ancient journalistic traditions that had kept most of them stuck covering weddings and recipes for generations.
Newsweek
’s women led the way—which wasn’t surprising considering the newsmagazine’s famous system in which women became researchers and men became writers. In 1970, when
Newsweek
decided to run its big cover story on the women’s movement, only one of the magazine’s fifty-two writers was a woman—Lynn Povich, who had benefited from the fact that none of the men were willing to cover the fashion beat. Trying to find a writer to assign the women’s cover to, the editors, after much churning and mind-changing, picked a freelancer, the wife of a staff member. They had figured out enough to know the article had to be written by a woman but not enough to realize their own female employees would be outraged that their bosses felt none of them were up to the job. “We thought, ‘That’s it,’ ” said Povich. “Being good media people, we knew the publicity would get them more than anything else.” So, on the day
Newsweek
appeared on the newsstands with the big cover that read “Women in Revolt,” the women of
Newsweek
announced they had filed a sex-discrimination suit against their employer.

It took endless negotiation, a memorandum of understanding that didn’t work out, frustration, and threats of a second suit, but in 1972
Newsweek
agreed to a plan that would not only open up writing jobs to women but also make sure a number of the researchers were men. The magazine promised to appoint a woman to a senior editor job, and in 1975 Povich became the first woman to enter the upper reaches of
Newsweek
management.

The saga of the
Newsweek
women inspired similar revolts at the TV networks and major newspapers.
At the
New York Times,
the last
straw came in the form of a memo from the publisher, announcing a series of top-level promotions and promising that there were more to come as the paper increased “the load of younger men who have demonstrated their capacity to carry it.” After several years of organizing and negotiating with a seemingly sympathetic yet unresponsive top management, the women filed a suit against the paper for sex discrimination in 1972.

At the time, aside from those in the family/style department, the only woman holding any kind of editor’s job was Betsy Wade, an editor on the foreign copydesk. Wade, who would become the first named plaintiff in the case under her married name, Boyland, had been a copyeditor since 1958—no small accomplishment, since the copydesk had always been considered a male preserve. On some papers, the copyeditors, like mine workers, claimed it was bad luck if a woman ventured into their territory.

It was a world Wade loved—like a lifeboat, she thought, “where you all had to pull on the oars and if one person didn’t make it, nobody made it. There was this coherence.” She had dreamed of working her way up to a top editing job. “I had finally opened this door no woman had passed through. I thought, ‘Hell, I’m Miss America. I’m Queen of the May.’ ” It took a long time for her to process the fact that she was not moving anywhere. “People being broken in by me were being promoted beyond me,” she recalled.

The fact that the
Times
suit had been filed was in itself a career-transforming opportunity—for younger women who had not been around for the battles. In 1973, 47 percent of the
Times’
new hires for reporters and editors were women, compared to 7 percent in the years immediately before. The newcomers got the jobs and promotions that the older rebels had missed out on. Wade remembers when the word arrived that several women had been brought in from other publications to work as editors at the
Times.

“Someone came tearing in and said, ‘For God’s sake, look what we’ve done. They’re hiring women from the outside,’ ” she recalled.

“You really didn’t think it was going to do
us
any good?” one of the suit leaders retorted.

The women who had stood up to management were hoping, of course, that the new opportunities they were creating might include some for themselves as well. Wade, at least, thought she would remain in place. “I thought I was going to slip through. I thought they’d find someplace, you know, maybe night foreign editor.” But for the most part, the generation that took the risks, filed the suits, held the press conferences, and made the demands were not the ones who benefited. Some of them received settlements for discrimination, but the amounts were extremely modest.
The women at
Reader’s
Digest
got an average of $244 each, those at NBC averaged $200, and the women at the
Times,
$454. And Betsy Wade Boyland wound up working as a writer in the quiet precincts of the travel desk.

11. Work and Children

“I
T WAS SORT OF AN UNPLANNED CHANGE
.”

T
here aren’t many people born after 1960 who remember
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,
an early situation comedy in which former bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his wife, Harriet, played a husband and wife with their real-life sons, David and Ricky. The show ran from 1952 to 1966 on television, but it doesn’t appear in endless reruns like
“I Love Lucy”
or
The Jackie Gleason Show.
That’s probably because it wasn’t all that entertaining. The dialogue was stunningly bland. “
They sure do
taste good, Mom,” said David in one episode as Harriet doled out the breakfast pancakes. “Yeah, they sure do, Mom,” said Ricky, who the announcer would dub “the little guy with a twinkle in his eye.” The action was nonexistent. (In the climax of the scene above, Ricky returns the pancake mix to the store and gets double the money back.) There was so little context to the plots—a chair is delivered to the wrong house, Harriet gets her hair done—that in fourteen years, the series never even revealed what the TV Ozzie did for a living. But the Nelsons were around so long that viewers—and the Census Bureau—came to think of them as the prototypical American family: breadwinner father, stay-at-home mom, and their kids, nestled in their comfortable suburban home, eating pancakes.