When Everything Changed (3 page)

Employers happily took advantage of the assumption that female college graduates would work for only a few years before retiring to domesticity. They offered up a raft of theoretically glamorous short-term jobs that were intended to end long before the young women would begin to care about things like health care or pensions or even salaries.
The sociologist David Riesman
noted that instead of contemplating careers in fields such as business or architecture, “even very gifted and creative young women are satisfied to assume that on graduation they will get underpaid ancillary positions, whether as a
Time-Life
researcher or United Nations guide or publisher’s assistant or reader, where they are seldom likely to advance to real opportunity.”

First and foremost among these mini–career paths was being a stewardess. Girls in the postwar era had grown up reading books such as
Julie with Wings,
in which beautiful and spunky young women beat out the massive competition to become flight attendants. Along with teenage fiction about Cherry Ames, the inexhaustible nurse, the stewardess novels were virtually the only girls’ career books around—unless you counted the girl detectives, who didn’t seem to get paid for their efforts. Winning your “wings,” readers learned, might require leaving behind an unimaginative boyfriend. (“
Tug, there’s a whole world
for me to discover before I marry and all its people for me to know. I must follow the silver path for a while. Alone.”) There would be difficult passengers and—according to the novels—an extraordinary number of airborne criminals. But the rewards were great. Within a few chapters, the heroine of
Silver Wings for Vicki
had attracted two new boyfriends, met a movie star, and helped the police arrest a smuggler. In the real world, the job was a lot more mundane, but it was still virtually the only one a young woman could choose that offered the chance to travel. As a result, the airlines got more than a hundred applicants for every opening. Schools sprang up, offering special courses that would improve the odds of getting into a flight-attendant training program. (
The Grace Downs Air Career School
breathlessly asked potential clients to envision themselves being able to “greet oncoming passengers at lunchtime in New York and say farewell before dinner in Minneapolis!”)

Despite the fact that the American experience was built around women who ventured off to create homes in an unexplored continent, there had always been a presumption that a proper woman didn’t move around too much, and there was certainly a conviction that sending a woman on a business trip raised far too many risks of impropriety. Georgia Panter, a stewardess for United Airlines in 1960, noticed that except for the occasional family, her flights were populated only by men. One regular run, the “Executive Flight” from New York to Chicago, actually barred female passengers. The men got extralarge steaks, drinks, and cigars—which the stewardesses were supposed to bend over and light.

Women had been eager participants in the early years of flying, when things were disorganized and open to all comers. But any hopes they had for gaining a foothold in commercial aviation were dashed when the Commerce Department, under pressure from underemployed male pilots, exiled women from the field by prohibiting them from flying planes carrying passengers in bad weather. Instead, they got the role of hostess. The airlines originally hired nurses to serve as flight attendants, but by the postwar era, trained health-care workers were long gone and the airlines were looking for attractive, unmarried young women whose main duty would be to serve drinks and meals.

Georgia Panter and her sister—who also became a United stewardess—grew up in Smith Center, Kansas, a Plains town so remote “we used to run outside if a car went by to see who was in it.” When the Panter sisters joined United, they became celebrities back home, and the local paper ran a picture of them in their uniforms. They quickly learned the downsides of the job, from the very low salary to the indignity of constantly being weighed and measured by “counselors” watching to make sure they kept their slender figures. “We had inspections often,” Georgia said wryly. “Everybody seemed to think they should inspect us. Every department.” (Besides limits on weight and height, stewardesses were required, according to one promotion, to have hands that were “soft and white”—a hint as to how welcome African-American applicants were at the time.) But despite the “appearance police” and pay that was lower than she had received working as a clerk for the University of Denver, Panter loved having the chance to travel. She and her sister gradually accumulated enough seniority to allow them to fly around the world on their airline passes, and they found that single-women tourists were about as rare as female businesswomen on airplanes. “People were fascinated. They’d come up to us, talk to us, invite us to their homes. They thought it was so unusual.”

The airlines tried to make sure their stewardesses didn’t stay around long enough to become dissatisfied with their benefits or acquainted with their union. The average tenure when the Panter sisters arrived was about eighteen months, thanks to a rule requiring the women to quit if they got married. In an era that was breaking all records for early weddings, that was all it took to ensure very rapid turnover.
If a stewardess was still on
the job after three years, one United executive said in 1963, “I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.” Supervisors combed through wedding announcements looking for evidence of rule breaking. They discovered one stewardess was secretly married while the young woman was working with Georgia Panter on a cross-country flight. When the plane was making its stop in Denver, a supervisor met the flight. “He pulled that poor woman off,” Panter said, “and we never saw her again.”

“H
ELL YES, WE HAVE A QUOTA
.”

Women were vigorously discouraged from seeking jobs that men might have wanted. “
Hell yes, we have
a quota,” said a medical school dean in 1961. “Yes, it’s a small one. We do keep women out, when we can. We don’t want them here—and they don’t want them elsewhere, either, whether or not they’ll admit it.” Another spokesman for a medical school, putting a more benign spin on things, said, “Yes indeed, we do take women, and we do not want the one woman we take to be lonesome, so we take two per class.” In 1960 women accounted for 6 percent of American doctors, 3 percent of lawyers, and less than 1 percent of engineers.
Although more than half a million
women worked for the federal government, they made up 1.4 percent of the civil-service workers in the top four pay grades. Those who did break into the male-dominated professions were channeled into low-profile specialties related to their sex. Journalists were shuttled off to the women’s page, doctors to pediatric medicine, and lawyers to behind-the-scenes work such as real estate and insurance law.

Since it was perfectly legal to discriminate on the basis of sex, there was no real comeback when employers simply said that no women need apply.
A would-be journalist
named Madeleine Kunin, looking for her first reporting job, applied to the
Providence Journal
and was rebuffed by an editor, who said, “The last woman we hired got raped in the parking lot.” She applied to the
Washington Post
and was told she was a finalist, then later was notified that “we decided to give the job to a man.” After going to Columbia Journalism School for further training, she applied to the
New York Times,
hoping to become a copyeditor. “We don’t have anything in the newsroom for you, but I could see if we could get you a waitressing job in the
Times
cafeteria,” said the personnel director.

Sylvia Roberts graduated in the late 1950s from Tulane Law School, intent on having a legal career in her beloved home state of Louisiana. But the placement officer was opposed to women lawyers, Roberts recalled. Furthermore, “there weren’t any firms in New Orleans that would allow a woman to apply.” She eventually did find a job that the Louisiana legal community considered particularly suited to a woman—the clerk to the chief justice of the state supreme court. These days, we think of a law clerkship as a high-prestige post, but back then in Louisiana, people took the word “clerk” literally. “My judge felt all women lawyers should take shorthand and should type,” Roberts recalled. She lasted a year and then embarked on another job search, which landed her a starting position with a small law firm—as a secretary.

The belief that marriage meant an end to women’s work life provided an all-purpose justification for giving the good opportunities to young men. Joanne Rife, a college graduate in California who was interested in industrial psychology, had a job interview in which she was pitted against a man with an inferior college record. “They asked me very pointedly if I was going to get married… and you know I probably waffled around a little,” she recalled. In the end, the male student got the opening and Rife was offered a secretarial job.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg
, the future Supreme Court justice, went to Harvard Law School, the dean held a dinner for the handful of women in the class. He jovially opened up the conversation by asking them “to explain what we were doing in law school taking a place that could be held by a man.”

Once hired, women had virtually no hope of moving up.
A report on women in management
by
Harvard Business Review
in the 1960s said there were so few such women that “there is scarcely anything to study.” The idea that men were supposed to be in charge went beyond conventional wisdom; it was regarded by many as scientific fact.
A federally funded study
of college students’ career objectives concluded that the typical coed “most easily finds her satisfaction in fields where she supports and often underwrites the male, such as secretarial work or nursing, or in volunteer work which is not paid and is clearly valued by the sentimental side of community attitudes.”

“M
Y NAME WASN’T EVEN ON IT
.”

Not long ago Linda McDaniel, a Kansas housewife, came across the deed to the house she and her husband had purchased when they were married in the 1960s. “It was made out to ‘John McDaniel and spouse.’ My name wasn’t even on it,” she said.

Men, in their capacity as breadwinners, were presumed to be the money managers on the home front as well as in business, and women were cut out of almost everything having to do with finances. Credit cards were issued in the husband’s name. Loans were granted based on the husband’s wage-earning ability, even if the wife had a job, under the theory that no matter what the woman said she planned to do, she would soon become pregnant and quit working. A rule of thumb that banks used when analyzing a couple’s ability to handle a mortgage or car loan was that the salary of the wife was irrelevant if she was 28 or under. Half of her income was taken into consideration if she was in her 30s. Her entire salary entered the calculations only if she had reached 40 or could prove she had been sterilized.
Marjorie Wintjen, a 25-year-old
Delaware woman, was told her husband’s vasectomy had no effect on the matter “because
you
can still get pregnant.”

Even when a woman was living on her own and supporting herself, she had trouble convincing the financial establishment that she could be relied upon to pay her bills.
The
New York Times
was still reporting
horror stories in 1972, such as that of a suburban mother who was unable to rent an apartment until she got the lease cosigned by her husband—a patient in a mental hospital. A divorced woman, well-to-do and over forty, had to get her father to cosign her application for a new co-op. Divorced women had a particular problem getting credit, in part because of a widely held belief that a woman who could not keep her marriage together might not keep her money under control, either. (Insurance companies held to the same line of reasoning when it came to writing policies for car owners, theorizing that a woman who broke the marital bonds would also break the speed limit.) Joyce Westrich, a program analyst, wanted to buy a house in New Jersey for herself and her two children after she and her husband legally separated. All the banks she approached turned her down, to Westrich’s befuddlement, until her real estate broker “whispered… in the manner of a character in a deodorant commercial, ‘Maybe it’s your marital situation.’ ” Although her about-to-be ex-husband’s income was much lower than hers, once he agreed to cosign, Westrich had no further troubles.

“M
EN NEEDED FASTER SERVICE THAN WOMEN
.”

The presumption that women needed men’s protection in every aspect of life led to a kind of near-infantilization.
Looking back on her life
as a housewife in the 1960s, the writer Jane O’Reilly recalled that she had “never earned my own living, never taken a trip alone, never taken total responsibility for a single decision. The only time I tried to give a speech, I fainted. I had been divorced once, and lasted only four months before I remarried in a fit of terror. I had never gone to a party by myself, never gone to the movies by myself. I wanted to run away from home but I felt I had to ask permission.”

When women ventured into the outside world, they often felt tentative, unsure of their welcome. And it was no wonder. The Executive Flight to Chicago was not the only service that barred them at the gate. The world was full of men’s clubs, men’s gyms, and men’s lounges, where the business of business was conducted. Even places that were theoretically open to the public reserved the right to discriminate. The public golf course in Westport, Connecticut, would not allow women to play during prime weekend hours, claiming that men deserved the best spots because they had to work during the week.
Heinemann’s Restaurant
in Milwaukee banned women from the lunch counter because “men needed faster service than women because they have important business to do.” Many upscale bars refused to serve women, particularly if they were alone, under the theory that they must be prostitutes.