When Everything Changed (6 page)

Professors watched in frustration as their prize pupils raced from final exams to wedding showers.
A science teacher told
the
New York Times
that his pet student, a woman “who gave every indication of deep and original thinking in genetics,” had married six months after graduation and passed up a career to raise a family. “I hope she’s happy, but sometimes you wonder what you’re teaching them for,” he said. Many didn’t even wait for commencement.
Newsweek
reported in 1960
that 60 percent of the young women who entered college dropped out before graduation, “most to get married.”

There had always been a division on American campuses between the goal-oriented women who went to college to prepare for a career and those who regarded it as a sort of glorified finishing school where they could find a husband among the ranks of future high-earners. The young women who were intent on making careers for themselves were still on campus, but the flush economic times had allowed more and more families to feel they could afford to subsidize college for their daughters even if they never used their degrees, and many bright young women embarked on a college career with no more sense of mission than the sorority girls in movie musicals. Pam Andrews, who went to Wellesley, said the only students who put their energies into planning for a career were “people who had no social life.”
At a soon-to-become-famous
class reunion at Smith College, Betty Friedan asked a graduating senior what courses students were excited about these days and said she was told, “Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. You’re a social outcast at home if you don’t. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.”

“S
UCCESS AND A WELL-DRESSED WIFE GO TOGETHER
.”

If the popular culture was giving young women very few role models outside of marriage, there was a great deal of attention being paid to the duties of the wife of the striving young executive. “
Success and a Well-Dressed Wife
Go Together for Young Executives,” announced a headline in a
New York Times
story about a meeting in Miami of the Young Presidents Organization, a group of under-40 CEOs. “Five hundred young men of distinction met here this week and most brought positive proof of their business success—a presidential title and an attractively dressed wife.” The women, the reporter noted approvingly, had “outstanding personalities, meet strangers easily, and above all, are carefully gowned and groomed…. Almost every wife has an impressive diamond ring and a mink coat or stole.”

The postwar era produced a raft of novels and movies about the corporate wife who helped her husband with his climb to the top or—even more often—showed him the true joy that comes with staying in middle management and spending more time with his family. At her most sympathetic, the wife always seemed to be played by June Allyson. In the end, however, she had little to do but look supportive: the husband was always the star of the show. “It will make you very lonely at times when he shuts you out of his life,” Barbara Stanwyck, playing the mistress of a recently deceased CEO, says when June’s husband (William Holden) is named the successor in
Executive Suite.
“But he’ll always come back to you. And you’ll know how fortunate you are to be [short pause, as the mistress recognizes the superior attachment of the marriage license] his wife.”

In 1960 a new and far more thrilling model of wifely success arrived on the scene. During the year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s handlers had tried to keep Jackie Kennedy in the background because they didn’t believe she fit the image of a proper first lady. Presidents generally had wives like Mamie Eisenhower, the middle-aged army spouse who painted the White House interiors “Mamie pink,” banned alcohol at social functions, and spent quiet evenings with her husband eating dinner off trays and watching TV. And at times it did seem as if Mrs. Kennedy might be a political liability. Her biggest campaign splash came when
Women’s Wear Daily
wrote that she spent $30,000 a year on Paris fashions—a sum far above the average income of middle-class Americans.
She indignantly compared
the story to attacks on her husband’s Catholicism.

But then Jackie arrived in the White House, leading a train of interior decorators and landscapers, and many young women saw a whole new vision of how glamorous the life of a wife could be. For the first time, young women wanted to resemble the first lady in ways that were not related to domestic or political virtue. Only 31, Mrs. Kennedy could enchant her husband’s business associates with witty repartee (in several languages), fill the house with silver bowls of flowers that looked both informal and spectacular, and throw parties that everybody would rave about for months afterward. “
The food is marvelous
, the wines are delicious… people are laughing out loud, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there…. You know, I’ve never seen so many happy artists in my life. It was a joy to watch,” said Leonard Bernstein after a famous dinner at which the great cellist Pablo Casals entertained. (Jackie was the sort of person who knew that Pablo Casals had been boycotting the United States since the Spanish Civil War and that getting him to the White House was a coup.) “What I learned from her is that life is not just politics or hard work; you needed something beautiful in your life,” said Sylvia Peterson, who was a working-class teenager in New Hampshire. In Connecticut, 18-year-old Carol Rumsey spent an idyllic afternoon at an amusement park with an about-to-be-married friend who was “an exact replica of Jackie Kennedy.” It was the day Rumsey realized, for the first time, that she was gay.

Jacqueline Kennedy took the role of corporate wife far beyond the ability to wear a mink coat well and make small talk at parties. To the outside world, her marriage looked like a partnership of talented equals—an impression reinforced when she accompanied her husband to France, the country that made even the most self-confident American feel socially insecure. With her elegant look, her charm, and her perfect French accent, she created a sensation. When the president described himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” her triumph was complete.

It soon seemed as though almost every woman had a Jackie-type pillbox hat or a daring set of capri pants that resembled the ones Mrs. Kennedy wore. One day Georgia Panter, the flight attendant, was walking to work in Manhattan when a limousine pulled up at a light as she waited to cross the street. Inside the car was Jacqueline Kennedy. As the two women exchanged glances, Panter was very much aware that the uniform she was wearing was an obvious copy of one of Mrs. Kennedy’s suits. “I saw her and she saw me and I was thinking, ‘Does Jackie see how much we’re looking like her?’ ”

Jacqueline Kennedy was a transitional figure, like her era. When she wrote in her high school yearbook that her ambition was “never to be a housewife,” she didn’t mean that she wanted a career but rather that she wanted to be a woman wealthy enough never to have to think about the mundane aspects of housekeeping. She never finished college, bounding from one program to another and disappointing instructors who appreciated her keen intellect. She had been reared to know how to behave when one’s husband was having multiple affairs, but it would be much later that she would discover the capacity to live as something other than a wife. In the White House years, her aura of independence and marital partnership was part of the same calculated effect as her parties and clothes.

There was no policy-making “pillow talk” in the Kennedy White House.
During the Cuban
Missile Crisis, one of the junior assistants to the president’s staff told friends that he would come upon the first lady “wandering sadly around the halls and she would say to me, ‘Mike, what’s the news?’… Nobody took the trouble to tell her.” A family friend concluded, “I suppose the president didn’t want to talk about it…. He probably wanted a stiff martini and a little food and gossip. News about what the children’s day had been, that sort of thing.”

3. Housework

“I
MIGHT GET UP ABOUT FOUR THIRTY AND THEN
I’
D GO WEED UNTIL SIX O’CLOCK
.”

W
hen Louise Meyer and her husband were newlyweds in the 1950s, they lived in a two-room farmhouse in Eden Valley, Wyoming, that had no electricity or running water. There were no screens in the windows, and at night the moths swarmed over everything that moved, including the baby. (It has been only recently, historically speaking, that Americans have been able to obtain window screens as easily as handguns.) Instead of a refrigerator, the house had an icebox that was cooled with blocks of ice cut from the local reservoir. “It was kind of rough… but I loved it,” Meyer said.

In 1960 she was 27 and pregnant with her third child. Her house had two more rooms by then, and electricity. But she still baked her own bread, churned her own butter, and waited for the glorious day when an indoor bathroom would replace the family outhouse. Her chores were very similar to the ones that had exhausted women pioneers or even the early colonists. She was a farmwife, just as the vast majority of women have been for most of recorded history. If, like Louise, they had husbands who appreciated them and establishments that prospered, it could be a full and rewarding life. As to whether it was happy or unhappy, there was seldom much time to reflect on it.

On the farm, Bob Meyer would rise at four in the morning to begin his farm chores, and Louise would follow close behind: “If I had to weed in the garden, I might get up about four thirty and then I’d go weed until six o’clock.” They grew all the produce for the family table, including carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, beans, tomatoes, peppers, and rutabagas. “We used to raise a ton of potatoes,” she said. “In fact, that’s what we used to put our kids through school, was money from potatoes.” After the children woke up, Louise cooked breakfast—typically sourdough pancakes, eggs, and ham or bacon. At busy times on the farm, when workers came to assist with jobs such as branding the new calves, she cooked for everyone. Her husband, she recalled, laughing, “always branded on Mother’s Day.” After the family and hired help were fed breakfast, she began her household chores, helped her husband with the milking, and sewed clothes for her daughters. In the winter, she canned “anywhere from three hundred to five hundred quarts of food a year.” (In canning season, her workday continued until midnight.) Virtually everything the family ate came from their farm. “Basically the only thing we bought for years was spices and flour and sugar, coffee and rice,” she said. They raised their own pigs, cured their own ham and bacon, made their own sausage. When her children were grown and the Meyers sold the farm, “I said there’s five things I’m not going to do anymore. Raise a garden, render lard, butcher chickens, can—and I don’t remember the fifth.”

In early America, washing clothes was a chore so exhausting that most housewives simply didn’t do it. As a newlywed, Louise did laundry in much the same way colonial women did but with more determination to follow through. She heated water on a wood-burning stove and washed the clothes in a tub, scrubbing the soiled pieces against a washboard to loosen the dirt. The clothes were then wrung by hand and hung outside on a line. (In Wyoming, winter meant collecting stacks of stiff, frozen diapers and bringing them into the kitchen to thaw.) To eliminate wrinkles, she used a flatiron—basically a heavy piece of cast iron with a handle—that was left on the stove until it got hot. “Well, I’ll tell you, with flatirons it wasn’t a lot of fun,” she said. “Because you’d get them hot, and when they were really hot, they’d be too hot, and about the time they were just right, they’d get too cold.” She progressed from a tub and washboard to a washing machine with a gas motor, which used water that still had to be heated on the stove. The sopping-wet clothes were then wrung through a hand-turned wringer. That wringer could be a frightening presence. Remembering her childhood in rural Minnesota, June LaValleur recalled the day she did the laundry for her ailing mother: “My sister Sharon, who was about 8, wanted to help… and her hand got caught in the wringer. Instead of pushing the release button, all I could think of was to turn the reverse button, so it ran her hand back out again.”

“I
THRIVED ON HIS COLORFULNESS
.”

Wyoming calls itself the “Equality State” and takes pride in the fact that it was the first to give women the right to vote in 1869. (At the time, with only one woman for every six men in the state, legislators were hoping that suffrage would serve as a kind of advertisement. “
We now expect quite an immigration
of ladies,” editorialized the
Cheyenne Leader
hopefully.) There was a genuine sense of equal partnership embedded in traditional Wyoming farm life. To prosper, both husband and wife had to be good at their work. No matter how industrious the man, he needed his wife to sew the clothes and grow the vegetables, make the butter and sausage, and perform hundreds of other tasks on which the family’s comfort or even survival depended. And no matter how energetic the woman, she was dependent on her husband’s ability and initiative. Virginia McWilliams, who wed a Wyoming cowboy, said, “Back in those days, when they hired a man to work on the ranch, for the most part they hired the whole family. But if the man screwed up, then the whole family had no place to go.”

McWilliams’s husband, Ike, followed the rodeo as a bronc rider. “He was colorful and I was quiet. I thrived on his colorfulness,” she said. In 1961, when their fifth child was born, Ike and Virginia returned to Wyoming and began working on a large ranch. She says they shared the domestic duties. “When they were little, he got up at nights with the children and things like that. And he cooked a lot when there weren’t any men around to catch him.” And although Bob Meyer never helped with the indoor chores, Louise said he “always made me feel like what I did was just as important as what he did.” Life, she reflected, “was never easy… and it took both adults to keep a family going.”