When Everything Changed (36 page)

Madeleine Kunin, who was living in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and four children, followed the threads of new possibilities. She joined a small women’s political caucus that was formed to get the state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. (The ERA’s lasting impact, at least in the twentieth century, would turn out not to be on the Constitution but in its effect on the generation of political women who fought for it.)
One afternoon in 1972
, when Kunin and another member were talking about how to get more women to run for public office, “Esther and I looked at each other, laughed, and exclaimed, ‘Why don’t
we
do it?’ That November, she was elected to the Vermont senate and I was elected to the Vermont house.” Arriving at the capitol in Montpelier as a newly minted legislator, Kunin felt for the first time that she was herself rather than someone’s wife, mother, sister, or daughter. But she and her female colleagues still struggled against the perception that they were unusual creatures—not regular legislators but women-lawmakers.
When some of them were invited
to appear on public television to discuss weighty topics from drug laws to highways to juvenile offenders, Kunin and the other women got together to view the program with a certain amount of excitement. After their part was finished, they watched as the host turned to the camera and concluded, “Well, you can see that brains and beauty do mix; they’re legislators, they’re ladies, and they’re lovely.”

The women sat in front of the TV in silence. Then the evening was saved, Kunin recalled, by a deeply refined Republican lawmaker, a retired schoolteacher, who got in the last word.

“Oh, shit!” she said.

“H
ELLO, GIRLS
!”

In 1974 Kunin went
to a midterm Democratic convention in Kansas City, traveling with another woman who was one of the state’s Democratic leaders. Their governor was waiting to greet them when they arrived.

“Hello, girls!” he said cheerfully.

One of the most energetic reeducation efforts of the 1970s involved teaching men not to automatically refer to groups of two or more women as “girls,” even if they happened to be grandmothers or lawyers or police officers. The difference between “girls” and “women” became the “Maginot Line of feminism,” Kunin felt. It was particularly important in areas such as politics, where rather than being beaten down by resistance, the women tended to be drowned in paternalism.

Words mattered. It was an enormous victory in 1970 when Ben Bradlee, the editor of the
Washington Post,
told his reporters to stop using words such as “blond” or “divorcée” or “grandmother” to describe women in news stories. (“The juror, a blond schoolteacher…”) At the
New York Times,
Barbara Crossette spent her years on the news desk running a rearguard battle against those same unnecessary descriptions: “Like ‘a short, trim woman . . .’ where you knew there would never be ‘a tall, slightly overweight man.’ ” McGraw-Hill outlined an eleven-page policy in 1974 that warned editors about everything from use of the term “the weaker sex” to clichés about nagging mother-in-laws. But the longest, hardest battle involved the term “Ms.” There were few things that more vividly reflected the philosophy that women were important only in their relationship to men than the fact that they had to be identified as either “Miss” or “Mrs.” If a reporter didn’t know whether a woman was married, it was necessary to ask—even if the person in question was lying dead of a gunshot wound or being awarded the Nobel Prize.

“Ms.” had been employed in some business correspondence when a marital status wasn’t known, and women lobbied to make it the one-size-fits-all equivalent of “Mr.” But the
New York Times,
which many people saw as a particularly critical standard for language style, held out. “
To our ear, it still
sounds too contrived for newswriting,” said the paper’s language guru, William Safire, in 1984. (
In the same year
, the
Times
ran a story about Gloria Steinem’s fiftieth birthday party that reported proceeds from the dinner “will go to the Ms. Foundation… which publishes
Ms.
magazine, where Miss Steinem works as an editor.)”
In 1986 Paula Kassell
, a veteran journalist, bought ten shares of
Times
stock and went to the annual stockholders’ meeting to plead the “Ms.” issue with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. (It was a measure of the importance Kassell put on the issue that she went to the meeting even though her husband had died the previous week.) Shortly after, Sulzberger wrote back, thanking her for raising the question and informing Kassell she need not press further; the women had won.

“Y
OU SEE THAT MAROON
M
ALIBU
?”

Look back on a decade as fraught with change as the 1970s, and you can pick your own vision. Best of times or worst of times. Women who wanted to work often found it easier to get a job than men did, but the jobs they found still tended to pay much less. It was easier for them to end unsatisfactory marriages but sometimes harder to get spousal support. It was more difficult to keep life in balance but more possible to shoot for the stars.

Gloria Vaz had been through it all. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend as a child and had a baby out of wedlock back when it was so frowned upon that she made up stories about a mythical husband to tell the staff in the hospital when she delivered. She married a man who never told her he loved her. (“I told him a lot…. He never said it back.”) He cheated on her, and his family, who were West Indian, looked down on her because she was African-American. “He was the authority in the home. He really was. No ifs, ands, or buts,” she said. “I didn’t say a lot sometimes, but it was inside, and it manifested itself. I started getting psychosomatic illnesses—heart, dizziness, all kinds of nonsense that there was no explanation for.” After years as a stay-at-home wife in New York, she got a job at a bank, and she had her first rebellion over the family car, which she loved and which her husband threatened to sell whenever he wanted to keep her in line. “Then something clicked in me… ,” she said. “I went out on my own and purchased a used car, without telling him…. I said, ‘Look out the window. You see that maroon Malibu? That’s mine. All mine. So you can sell the car if you want to.’ ”

Years of struggle later, she got a job working for a nonprofit agency that recognized her abilities. “It was my blossoming time,” said Vaz, who eventually became the acting director at the agency and, before her retirement, a director at the Fund for the City of New York.

A
FTER A CHILDHOOD
on Cherokee
lands in Oklahoma, Wilma Mankiller and her family moved to San Francisco when she was 10, living in a housing project near the shipyards. None of them had ever used a telephone before or seen an elevator. “There were never any plans for me to go to college,” she recalled. “That thought never even entered my head. People in my family did not go to college. They went to work.”

After high school she took a clerical job and met a handsome young college student whose family had emigrated from Ecuador. “I thought perhaps if I married Hugo all my problems would disappear,” she said. She became pregnant on their honeymoon. Before she was twenty-one, she had two daughters and an undefined restlessness. While her husband pulled toward traditional married life, Wilma pushed in the opposite direction. She started taking college courses. He took her to look at houses in the suburbs and bought her a washing machine. She got deeply involved in the Native American movement and began taking her daughters to tribal events throughout the area.

Finally, Hugo told her she could no longer use the family car. Wilma went out and bought one of her own.

“T
HEY WERE JUST THEMSELVES, STARTING OUT
.”

Catherine Roraback had gotten used to being the only woman in the courthouse during her first two decades of legal practice. Then, in the ’70s, that began to change. Women lawyers were becoming less unusual. Whenever Roraback saw one enter the courtroom, “
I was so excited
, I’d go over and talk to them. They didn’t have any idea how excited I was.” She laughed. “They were just themselves, starting out.”

American history had been full of stories of amazing women who managed to become a doctor or lawyer or business executive against all odds and prejudices. But the new stories were different because they did not stop with a single heroic but lonely figure. This was the critical moment when the doors were opened for good. A small population of women working in traditionally male occupations pushed until there was room for a whole generation to walk through. The number of women in professional schools began to grow steadily. By the end of the ’70s, a quarter of the students in medical school were women, and a third of the students in law school. That first big wave was not always made to feel particularly welcome. In law schools, professors often refused to call on female students except on an annual Ladies’ Day, when women were supposed to answer all the questions. “
In my criminal law
class, the relatively young professor… announced that on his Ladies’ Day we would be discussing rape,” recounted Brenda Feigen, who went to Harvard Law in the late ’60s. “And when that day rolled around, the specific question for us women was: How much penetration constitutes rape?”

In the 1970s women also began to apply for acceptance in the skilled trade unions, where the pay was often more than three times what they could make at a nonunion job. “
I liked it right away
,” said Brunilda Hernandez, who discovered that a local branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had opened its ranks to women in New York City and quickly signed up. “It was working with your hands. It was using your brain as you were doing these formulas and you were figuring out how electricity worked and how to hook up panels—just how it all worked.” The male union members, however, weren’t enthusiastic. When Hernandez began her four-year apprenticeship, she said, “I got all these stares from these guys just sitting around. It was really nerve-racking.” There were no bathrooms or changing rooms for women at her first construction site, and the men slapped up a makeshift plywood box for her in the middle of a line of toilets: “That was my little home, a toilet closet.” On the job, she was paired with a hostile mechanic who put cinder blocks in front of the box to keep her from getting in. Evan Ruderman, Hernandez’s best friend, worked at another site with an even more hostile partner. When she would leave her post to get something, he would urinate on the spot where she was working, “practically on my tools. Or I’d lay a ruler down when I was measuring pipe, turn around, cut it, turn back around—my ruler was gone.”

Laura Kelber, another one of the first generation of female electricians in New York City, told her foreman that she was pregnant and was immediately transferred from a relatively light indoor assignment to a different site where the job involved heavy lifting, working in the cold, and no clean bathrooms. “It was the worst type of job,” said Kelber, who tried to stick it out so she could qualify for full disability benefits at the end of her pregnancy. But she miscarried during her third month.

“I
WAS SUCH A YOUNG NERD
.”

Sylvia Acevedo’s great-grandfather on her father’s side had been a wealthy man in Chihuahua, Mexico, who’d lost everything when Pancho Villa, the self-styled Mexican Robin Hood, rode into town. The family, impoverished, fled to El Paso. Meanwhile, Sylvia was told, her mother’s relatives were one of the poor families who got a bounty of silver coins from Villa’s loot. “I’m not sure how much of this is folklore,” she says. “But there’s a picture in the museum in Chihuahua of Pancho Villa and his right-hand man, which is my grandmother’s cousin.”

Her father was born in the United States, the beleaguered child of a disappointed woman who had watched her older siblings grow up in luxury that had vanished by the time she was ready to enjoy it. He became a chemist, but he never recovered from the trauma of living with a woman who took her endless anger out on her son. Acevedo’s mother, an immigrant, had only an eighth-grade education but boundless ambition for her children. She dressed Sylvia in gloves and hats and lace, none of which her daughter really enjoyed. “She kept saying, when you’re 15, when you’re 16, it’s going to happen for you, and it didn’t,” Acevedo recalled. “But—I really love and honor this about her—she accepted me.” When Sylvia was in high school, she bought the first issue of
Ms.
as soon as it came on the market: “I was such a young nerd. I really got into that whole Gloria Steinem thing.”

It was a given that Acevedo would do well in school and go to college. However, when she looked carefully through all the catalogs and decided she wanted to be an engineer, her father’s first comment was “But you have to be good in math and science.”

“I thought, ‘I’ve
always
been good in math and science,’ ” she recalled.

Her guidance counselor said, “Oh my goodness, you have to be really smart, really bright,” so often that when Acevedo arrived with trepidation at the University of New Mexico’s engineering school, she “thought I was going to be with Einsteins. And they were just the same guys I went to high school with.”