When Everything Changed (56 page)

No social movement, no matter how liberating, can bring permanent happiness to the people it touches. We grow old; we lose loved ones. We fall short of our greatest goals and fail to live up to our most optimistic visions of our own character. When history opened up to American women in the late twentieth century, it did not offer them perfect bliss. It gave them the opportunity to face the dark moments on their own terms and to exalt in the spaces between. Here is an update on what it brought to some of the women in this story.

When the women’s liberation movement was beginning to erupt in New York and Los Angeles, Louise Meyer Warpness was living in a different world, pursuing a Wyoming farm life that was closer to the patterns of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. But in America, change always arrives eventually. Louise’s daughters worked outside the home, and the youngest lived with her future husband before they married. One of her granddaughters is married to an African-American, and another passed through a period of problems with drugs and men before she settled down to marry the father of her baby.

Warpness still lives in the valley where she raised her family. “As I’ve watched her grow older, I just appreciate her more,” says her daughter Jo. “She does her craft work, her needlework. She is such an artist with that. And still such a wise, wise woman. I still admire my mom to the utmost…. I can call her, and if I’m down, she’ll say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ after I’ve said hello. She just knows us inside. She’ll do anything for anybody. And still so intelligent. She has a brain.”

In 2002 Sujay Cook became the first woman elected president of the Hampton Ministers’ Conference, the largest gathering of black ministers in the world and the place where she had been once snubbed by the powerful minister who refused to shake her hand. (He, in fact, was the one who nominated her.) Coretta Scott King came to the installation. So did Dorothy Height, the revered leader of black women’s groups who had tried so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to get representation for women at the great March on Washington. So did Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. “I wouldn’t miss this,” Braun said.

When Reverend Suzan Johnson Cook was called onstage, King, Height, and Braun came on with her. “The place erupted!” she remembered. “They’re standing there holding hands with me and I’m like,
Oh my God.
”

Despite all those viewings of
Sleeping with the Enemy,
Barbara Arnold’s daughter, Alex, fell in love in college and decided she wanted to get married right after she graduated. Her mother didn’t fight the idea. “She told me that I’m a lot more independent and sure of myself, which is why she said she was okay with my getting married so young,” said Alex, who wryly noted that she had been exactly as old as Barbara had been when she wed. “I always see her as being really confident and capable, but I guess that was hard-won in her life—that’s coming from her report, not mine.”

Alex and her husband, David, moved to Washington, where she became the director of communications at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. They had a son in 2007. Soon Alex, who had never been sure how she would decide to handle the work/family divide, returned to her job part-time. “Our generation has backslid in some ways; our mothers really took it forward… ,” she said. “I hope the next generation finds a better balance. Maybe we’re on the verge of that.”

In 2000 Lynnette Arthur, the daughter of Dana Arthur-Monteleone and the granddaughter of Gloria Vaz who began her liberation by buying a maroon Malibu, went back to college. To her family’s surprise, she “did amazing. I got on the dean’s list and graduated with honors.” Her grandmother proudly framed her diploma and hung it in the living room. She was the first woman in her family to get a college degree. “They were so proud…. Any of my aunts, they probably could have done it, too, but I guess maybe it was a different time in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Lynnette. Now a single mother herself, she is a teacher at a private school in Manhattan, and she is studying for a master’s degree.

Lorena Weeks, who made legal history with her fight against the restrictions on the kinds of jobs women could do, lives in the house she and Billy built with the money from her Southern Bell settlement. “On
Barbara Walters
they called it the House That Bell Built,” Lorena said. “I wish they hadn’t done that, because it hurt my husband.” Billy Weeks died in 2000. “If you write anything, don’t put in that my husband was all against the suit,” Lorena added. “He wasn’t. Billy just loved people and he didn’t want to hurt people. He loved his friends and he was too good for his own good, bless his heart.” She has three granddaughters and eight great-grandchildren. “And isn’t it wonderful—five of them are right here within hollering distance.” Her son has his own business in back-to-work rehabilitation. One daughter is a bank officer, and the other is county tax commissioner.

Sylvia Roberts, Lorena’s attorney, is practicing family law in Baton Rouge. One particular passion, she said, “is preventing teenage dating violence because, boy, once a person gets involved in that, their life is over.” Another is displaced housewives: “Just trying to find a way to make use of women, wherever they are.”

While Sylvia Acevedo was working as an industrial engineer for IBM, she got word that her unhappy father had snapped completely, killed her mother, and then killed himself. “Now that I’ve done a lot of therapy and worked on it, I can see it went back generations…. I feel much more at peace about it, but for a long time I couldn’t talk about it. I was ashamed,” she said. IBM, she added, provided her with the equivalent of “a sheltered workshop” while she tried to heal. She eventually moved on to jobs in other software firms and started several businesses. Her current company, CommuniCard, creates tools to help employers communicate with Spanish-speaking workers and consults with large organizations on communications issues.

Not too long ago, Acevedo was helping a client make a pitch to potential investors—“venture capitalists from Northern California. They look at me and they can’t even pronounce my name.” Remembering the old IBM mentor who told her that businessmen would not listen to her until they were assured she was “like them,” Acevedo stopped her presentation and said, “I went to school down the street. You may have heard of it—Stanford? And I was a rocket scientist. So numbers don’t faze me.” After that, she recalled, “They were like,
Okay.
”