When Everything Changed (49 page)

D
ANA
ARTHUR WAS DATING A WHITE MAN
in the late 1980s, much to her daughter Lynnette’s dismay. “She was at that age when she was trying to fit in with everybody, and here’s her mom in Crown Heights with this white boyfriend coming to see her. She was, like, 14. She was just not having it,” said Dana. “She gave him a hard time, and he just hung in there.” The entire neighborhood seemed unhappy about an interracial relationship. When Dana and Tony Monteleone would walk down the street in her almost-all-black neighborhood, she said, “young boys would say stuff like, ‘Traitor!’ and ‘What are you doing with that white man?’… And they said things to him, trying to engage him in some kind of argument…. It was weird, and Lynnette was very embarrassed by the whole thing.”

Tony, who had pulled himself up from a difficult youth, was willing to stick it out. They dated for eight years and, Dana said, “eventually, after years, people warmed up to us—warmed up to him, mostly—and didn’t treat me like a traitor.” When her relationship with Lynnette solidified, too, she felt it was time to move on to the next step. “We stayed engaged for a year and then we got married. We bought a house.” Lynnette, who was 21, got to keep the old apartment—a prize jewel in New York’s real estate–mad economy.

“A
ND YOU MIGHT FLOAT FROM DORM TO DORM
.”

Nora Ephron once joked
that “the major achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.” But the matter of who paid for what on a date never did quite get worked out. The concept of sharing the bill may have hit its peak around the same time communal living did, then declined in popularity as time went on. (
In 2005 Maureen
Dowd would write with dismay that a younger woman told her sharing the cost of a date was “a scuzzy ’70s thing, like platform shoes on men.”)

What had perhaps changed the most was the dwindling of the whole concept of a date. Young people were much more likely to simply go out as a pack than have an organized night out at the movies or dinner as a pair. As a teenager, Alex Snider said, her crowd’s chief recreation was to “drive from one end of town to the other, or call people and try to track down everybody, and once we did that, we’d realize there was nothing to do anyway and we’d end up at the movie-rental store ten minutes before it closed. So really, if we’d had cell phones when we were in high school, we wouldn’t have had anything to do whatsoever.”

In college, dormitories generally had open visiting privileges, and many were less like the barren cubbyholes of yore and more like small apartments. Camara Dia Holloway remembers life in college in the early ’90s as a time when you didn’t so much date as “hang out…. You and a group of your girlfriends might go to another dorm, to a boys’ dorm, and hang out with a group of guys, but you would really be scoping out somebody. And you might float from dorm to dorm.”

“A
ND ONE DAY, IT HAPPENED
.”

After she broke up with her boyfriend of three years, June LaValleur was “wondering why I can’t keep a relationship”—although perhaps she should have given herself more credit for that thirty-year marriage. It was at that point she met Jill, a lesbian, for whom she felt an immediate attraction. “I had never knowingly known anyone who was gay,” she recalled. Growing up in the 1950s, LaValleur had not even been aware that women could be attracted to other women. When she was in medical school, though, she had learned “about the Kinsey model of hetero-homosexuality, where there’s a continuum” and decided that she “was somewhere in between.”

Jill, who was twenty-two years younger, was different from June in many ways. But on the things that were most important to June—from a willingness to share, to liberal politics, to being a nonsmoker—they matched up. “I knew she was a lesbian because she was open about it. She was at the time breaking up with someone. I guess you could say one thing led to another. We had dinner, movies, coffee. We were friends. And one day, it happened.”

Being in a relationship with a woman, June found, was much different from being in a relationship with a man, “besides the obvious plumbing issues. That’s just a teeny thing. Being in a relationship with a woman is a much more emotional intimacy. We talked more about things. I felt less vulnerable. Jill likes women who are of generous size, which is amazing given her ninety-eight pounds. We just shared everything. We were both rabid Democrats. We were both avid readers. We both loved to travel.”

By the 1990s lesbianism was increasingly accepted, and in some parts of the country it seemed to be downright trendy. “
What most lesbians remember
as a major opening volley occurred on October 23, 1992,” wrote Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt in their book
The Girls Next Door.
On that night,
20/20
broadcast a segment on the lesbian community in and around Northampton, Massachusetts, with a teaser that announced, “Women are meeting, marrying, and raising families in the heart of New England!” After that, Van Gelder and Brandt wrote, “suddenly we were everywhere.”
In the
Washington Post,
Kara
Swisher wryly noted that “the new improved lesbian is a party girl of much sex, lingerie, and sophistication…. Straight women trendsetters like Madonna flirt with the lifestyle and make it chic. Travel to Santa Fe, dance with wolves, be a lesbian!”
New York Magazine
put K. D. Lang
on the cover of a May 1993 issue on “Lesbian Chic.”
Newsweek
followed with a lesbian couple on the cover the next month, and in August Lang was back, on the cover of
Vanity Fair,
being shaved by Cindy Crawford. Dee Mosbacher, the daughter of a cabinet member in the first Bush administration, came out in her college commencement address, leading the way for so many other lesbian daughters and sisters of prominent men that it began to seem that a gay female relative was a prerequisite for political success. (
In a reverse case
, Phyllis Schlafly’s son John, who worked for her conservative Eagle Foundation, acknowledged he was gay in 1992. “He’s a good lawyer and very helpful. He is not a proponent of same-sex marriage,” said Schlafly, who made it clear this was not her favorite topic.)

For all the stories about lesbian chic, gay women could not give their partners the same rights and protections legally married spouses had, and if they had children from an earlier marriage, they had reason to worry about custody rights if their ex-husbands chose to make their sexuality an issue. (About 1.5 million lesbians were believed to be mothers, either from previous relationships or from artificial insemination.) In a famous case in 1995, the Virginia supreme court upheld a lower court ruling that Sharon Bottoms was unfit to have custody of her children. The fact that she was a lesbian would impose “social condemnation” on her child, the court said, as it gave custody to Bottoms’s estranged mother.

Still, a new generation of gay women were confident that they had full rights to the world’s opportunities. They had still been in school when Lang announced she was gay in 1992 and when comedienne Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997, both in real life and as the heroine on her TV situation comedy.
Diane Salvatore, a gay
novelist who would become a successful editor at women’s magazines such as
Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook,
and
Good Housekeeping,
told
New York Magazine
that she went to a Lang concert not long after the singer came out and “was amazed. Here was a superstar who no longer had to go off and marry a man and pay him off to pretend she was straight. That’s a huge break. I didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime, and I’m only 32.”

14. The New Millennium

“…
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
.”

B
etty Friedan died in 2006 at age 85. She had moved to Washington in her early 70s, happy to be “at the epicenter of politics and public policy,” and published a memoir,
Life So Far,
in which she continued settling scores. (“
I am the innocent
victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender,” said her ex-husband.)
Looking back, she said
she regretted “that I didn’t have a real career” and claimed she “would have loved to have been the editor of the women’s page of the
New York Times
”—a feature that had vanished years before, thanks to the movement she led. But Friedan had no second thoughts about what her generation had accomplished. “There’s a lot of silly talk that the women’s movement is dead. Well it’s not dead; it’s alive in society!” she wrote. “The way women look at themselves, the way other people look at women, is completely different,
completely different
than it was thirty years ago…. Our daughters grow up with the same possibilities as our sons.”

She was right on many counts.
By the beginning
of the new century, women were claiming almost half of the seats in the nation’s medical and law schools.
They dominated some fields
that used to be almost exclusively male, such as pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
Forty percent of the new
dental school graduates were women, although as late as 1970 the dean of the University of Texas dental school had insisted on admitting no more than two women in every class of a hundred because “girls aren’t strong enough to pull teeth.”

There were very few fields in which women had not made major inroads. The number of women in science had risen to about 20 percent, up from 3 percent in the early 1960s. (
More important, 40 percent
of the undergraduate college students majoring in science were women, and girls were taking math and science courses in high school as frequently as boys.)
Even in the small
, exclusive world of symphony music, where they had traditionally been a rarity, women occupied more than a third of the chairs in top orchestras, thanks in part to a policy of blind auditions that kept judges in the dark about the sex of the competitors for new openings.

“B
ECAUSE YOUNG MEN ARE RARER, THEY’RE MORE VALUED
.”

Girls were doing better academically than boys by almost every measure. More than 56 percent of undergraduate college students were female, and their rates of graduation were better. But few schools wanted a student body in which girls vastly outnumbered boys, and colleges were prepared to forgive inferior male grades and achievements in order to keep the sexes balanced. “
The reality is that
because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants,” wrote Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions at Kenyon, in the
New York Times
essay “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected.” She wondered what messages the nation was “sending young women that they must, nearly twenty-five years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges,” then apologized “for the demographic realities.”

It was a much-discussed issue for young women and their parents. “The girls are so stressed,” said Alison Foster, who talked to students of both sexes at the private Manhattan high school where she worked. “Here we’ve taught girls to do well in school and be as good as boys, which they’ve done. Now the girls are better than the boys, and they can’t get into college the way boys can. So we’ve screwed them again.”

Instead of celebrating girls’ achievements, the nation started to worry.
Newsweek,
in a cover
story on “The Boy Crisis,” reported with alarm that there were only “44 percent of male undergraduates on college campuses: thirty years ago the number was 58 percent.”
In Milton, Massachusetts
, where there were twice as many girls as boys on the high school honor roll, 17-year-old Doug Anglin filed a civil rights complaint in 2006, claiming the school discriminated against male students.

If society were a person, it would complain that it just couldn’t win. There were only two sexes; one was going to have to be in the minority when it came to academic achievement. But while women’s failure to realize their potential had been regarded as a regretful shortcoming, the failure of boys seemed to be seen as a threat to civilization itself.
Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s
secretary of education, said the dominance of young women in higher education had “profound implications for the economy, society, families, and democracy.” Experts worried that all those tests they had imposed on schoolchildren in an effort to chart achievement had somehow encouraged the teachers to run their classes in a less boy-friendly way. “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” which the Ms. Foundation initiated to give girls a sense of possibility, evolved into “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.”

Yet anyone fearing that women were taking over the world needn’t have fretted. Their overrepresentation at the top ended with the classroom.
Only 17 percent
of the partners in major law firms were women in 2005—a figure that wasn’t much better than the 13 percent of a decade before.
While women held nearly half
of lower-level managerial jobs in American businesses, they represented only a handful of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies.
More than three-quarters
of the American workers making $100,000 to $200,000 a year were male.
By the time CBS
made Katie Couric the evening news anchor in 2006, most of the people working in TV news were women, including 58 percent of the reporters, 66 percent of the news producers, and 56 percent of the news writers. However, almost 80 percent of the news directors and 68 percent of the assistant news directors were men.