The End of Men and the Rise of Women (18 page)

It’s a mystery that Hannah’s mom, Dian, thinks she has figured out. She’s hired plenty of guys behind the bar who won’t go to college. She married one (Hannah’s father) and now she lives with another. “Lazy,” she calls them. “They don’t like to think too hard.” This experience has made her intent on pointing out to Hannah the practical problems with this upside-down life her daughter is getting herself into. “How’s he gonna hold up his half of the mortgage if you’re making, what, three times as much money as him?” she asks Hannah one afternoon. But Hannah is sticking to her vision. She wants a house by Lake Wisconsin with a path lined by ferns and hostas. She’ll pay the mortgage, he can cover utilities. Already she keeps a whiteboard where she writes down every week who is responsible for what bill and everything Billy owes her. “He has no opinion at all. He wants me to tell him what to do.”

But as women have known for a long time, that kind of domestic hierarchy starts to grate after a while, even on the most gentle of spouses. One night Hannah was watching a documentary about Cleopatra on the HISTORY channel. When she got up to check on a homework assignment, Billy changed it to Comedy Central to watch
Tosh.0
, a lad comedy show where Tosh does hilarious recaps of bad movies out on DVD, or uses giant swords to slice things
open—his lunch sandwich, a coffeemaker, a watercooler. Billy is compact in size and also in his speech; he never uses words when silence is acceptable. And at the end of a long day, whether spent working or fishing, he likes what he likes.

“Oh, that’s real educational,” she said when she came back from her study.

“Why would you need to know about Cleopatra?” he snapped back.

“He gets defensive, like I’m insinuating he’s stupid. I know he’s not stupid. He’s just not as educated as I am,” she told me later. “But sometimes I feel like because I spend all these years going to school, I should be shown a certain amount of respect. I did all this, so he should respect it.”

A
CENTURY AGO
pill-making required considerable physical labor and detailed handiwork. A pharmacist and his apprentice would have to haul fifty-pound bags of compounds, grind noxious substances in a giant mortar and pestle, and then carefully roll each pill using just the right pressure. The shaman factor for pharmacists came from mixing ingredients at the front counter, dazzling patients with a miniature magic show that ended with a personally tailored spell in the form of a pill. Magazines from that era are filled with letters from groupies, writing in for the “scientific secrets” of various potions and even the secret formula for various sodas—the other mainstay of the local pharmacy.

Then at the start of the twentieth century, just as Remington typewriters were infiltrating the market, pharmacists began to covet a piece of machinery manufactured by the Arthur Colton Company in Detroit, Michigan. Every year the moss green–covered catalogs
arrived, boasting the latest offerings: Automatic Pill Making Machine No. 2 Complete, an amazing Willy Wonka contraption with twelve rotary wheels turning in all different directions, or a pill-coating machine loaded with tubes and dipping plates, or the company’s gem, the rotary tablet machine that resembles a modern-day she-bot, with four elegant legs and rotary wheels for eyes and two funnels upraised like proud pom-poms. The machine, the catalog promised, is “practically noisless [
sic
], and pours out a continuous stream of tablets at the rate of 325 per minute.”

The machines promised considerable ease for pharmacists, but like all machines, they also stole some of the mystique. As novelist Sherwood Anderson would write in his bizarre 1931 tract,
Perhaps Women
, “The machines make me feel too small. . . . My manhood can not stand up against them yet. They do things too well. They do too much.” Men in the profession became nervous about the specter of women pharmacists, although at the time there were relatively few. In the pharmacy magazines, male writers insisted that women could still not carry heavy bags of equipment over to the machines, and that they could never answer the night bell—a traditional duty of pharmacists’ apprentices, who would sleep in the shop. Rumors began to recirculate about Civil War–era wives who had used rat poison mixed with butter to poison their disabled husbands—proof that women could not be trusted with chemicals. The magazine
Pharmaceutical Era
began running a series of fables in which one recurring character was a lady drug addict who kept coming into the shop begging for refills.

Here and there a few writers defended the profession as suitable for women, drawing on the mythology of Florence Nightingale as a saving angel and mother saint with an uncanny gift for organization. An 1893 article discussing the prospect of the “new woman
druggist” argued that prescriptions should not be filled by machines but rather by a “fresh complexioned young girl with delicate touch, glad eyes and gold braids of hair [that] has prepared them, and gives them to you with a bright glance, and a modest smile and a something about her manner which means that she is a business woman as well.” Around the same time, the
Druggists’ Bulletin
(1887) ran this love-struck and utterly condescending poem to the “girl pharmacist,” advertising her as the perfect wife:

But in the Louisville College of Pharmacy for Women, started in 1883 because the regular college would not admit women, the first commencement speaker opened the graduates’ eyes to a less romantic reality: “You have chosen to align yourselves with man. You have become his competitor for bread, his rival in work. Look for no other treatment than he gives his fellows.” Feminists began to take it up as a cause: “We [will not accept] the weakling cry of individuals affrighted for the safety of their own unstable positions who entreat that woman be kept out of the professions of pharmacy lest she cheapen it,” wrote Emma Gary Wallace. “No! A thousand times. No!”

In the twenties, “girls” started to flood white-collar jobs. Just as
they do today, they graduated high schools at higher rates than boys, and then went on to clerical schools. The aim was to get hired in white-collar jobs, which were described in the same terms Hannah and her friends describe pharmacy work: “clean, pleasant, respectable.” A woman could bring shame on her family by working in a factory; the enterprise had an air of danger and desperation. But as a secretary in one of the burgeoning new mechanized offices of America, she could brag about her career.

Before that era, secretaries had been of the Dickensian variety: gentlemen in black frocks and green shades who added columns of numbers in their heads. They were not functionaries but guardians of their firms’ treasured secrets, and apprentices to the boss. They could hope to rise quickly and even one day succeed him. Pamphlets for the new career woman at the time reminded her hopefully that “clerk” derives from the word “cleric.”

But once the secretary became female, she had no such hallowed role. In the rapidly expanding economy, she was a stenographer at the insurance firm or a PBX operator at the oil company or a switchboard operator at the bank. But she would never rise beyond that. In a 1939 survey of firms in five states, companies reported that certain jobs were set aside exclusively for women and certain jobs for men, who “would be dissatisfied” if they had “no chance for advancement,” as one firm wrote, explaining why men could not be stenographers. Jobs, economist Claudia Goldin explains, essentially acquired “secondary sex characteristics.” And even for college girls, says Goldin, a job interview centered on one question: Can you type?

A 1939 report on what was known as the “toilet industry,” comprising drugs, medicines, toilet waters, and creams, gives an account of the gender breakdown. In the grand new pharmacy manufacturing
operations, men did the “highly skilled” and specialized work, processing and mixing raw materials, supervising the “intricate machinery,” checking the identity, purity, and strength of each chemical mixture. Women, meanwhile, did what was called “finishing operations”: filling containers and labeling. The average salary for men was $27.60; for women, ten dollars less.

The culture was starting to accept the slow entry of women into the profession, but it still exacted a high cost. From 1934 to 1942, the magazine
Drug Topics
ran a weekly cartoon about a pharmacist named Betty Brown. Betty, although charming and attractive, served as a warning to girls who rose above their station. She is first hired by pharmacist Bob Steele as a “fancy goods sales lady” to boost his sales. Eventually she confesses that she is in fact a trained pharmacist herself, and then buys the store from him. After that bit of hubris, she turns into a Dick Tracy heroine who wins the small battles but never the game of life. She triumphs over counterfeiters, hoodlums, and thieves. (“I’ll fill her so full of holes she’ll look like a fishnet,” says one.) But her personal life falls apart. One love interest dies of a heart attack, and she loses another to her plain-looking cousin after she gives the cousin a makeover. “Love is like some prescriptions,” she concludes. “If it doesn’t cure you, all you get is a bad taste.”

After a brief wartime boost, the rise of the girl pharmacist, and the girl professional as a whole, came to an ominous halt as the men returned from war and the women moved back into the kitchen. Pharmacies were in the heyday of the mom-and-pop era. This was before the era of fast-food chains, and the local pharmacy almost always doubled as a soda fountain and lunch counter. People came mostly to eat and hang out, and only occasionally to get medicine. If they worked at all, women were relegated to roles that looked
a lot like wife: cooking, serving, helping their husband behind the counter. A new tradition was established among the state pharmacy associations of holding an annual beauty contest to decide on the next Miss Pharmacy, who would grace the covers of the trade magazines: “There’s a beauty in Birmingham!” reads the caption under the photo of the comely Margaret Jacks, a fresh-faced teen with natural curls.

In the sixties the rigid domestic facade starts to crack. Suddenly in the photos the girls are wearing the white lab coats normally reserved for men. They are not yet pharmacists, though; they are “cosmeticians,” usually engaged in intense conversation with customers about a new glue for press-on nails or home permanents or color charts designed to “scientifically determine a woman’s lipstick shade.” They stand in front of counter displays described as having “intriguing modern designs” with hundreds of white lipstick tubes tucked into holes like so many bottles of pills. They “beam” one another through intercoms that “relieve them of the embarrassment of not having immediate answers to their patrons’ queries.” But those white lab coats and the faux scientific authority must have given the women a taste for the real thing. Before long,
Miss
and other women’s magazines were running ads claiming that “thousands of pharmacy students in the next ten years will be women!” and inviting YOU to join the herd.

Soon civil rights would make it unacceptable to keep women out of certain colleges, or to reserve certain jobs for unmarried women, or for men. In the seventies women began to flood colleges and professional schools, training to be doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen. With objective measures and explicit credentials, women could easily make the case that they were just as qualified as their male counterparts; after all, they had the exact same knowledge
and degrees. By the 1980s women were graduating from college at about the same rate as men; for pharmacy school the tipping point was 1985.

If machines dealt the first blow to work as the exclusive realm of men, office life dealt the second. “Where would a sense of maleness come from for the worker who sat at a desk all day?” historian Elliott Gorn wrote. “Where was virility to be found in increasingly faceless bureaucracies?” Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his 1991 book,
Edge City
, which explores the rise of suburbs as home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls. Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable.

Pharmacy, too, was becoming more like office work, with all the same consequences. The mom-and-pops were disappearing and being quickly replaced by national chain stores, which split the old business model. Fast-food chains took over their old lunch-counter business, and a new distinct entity we now know as the pharmacy took over prescriptions, cosmetics, and toiletries. By the 1970s, Walgreens had more than six hundred stores around the country and employed fifteen hundred pharmacists. The image of the pharmacist was no longer an entrepreneur and community leader dishing up fizzy concoctions and cures. A pharmacist was increasingly
a salaried employee, and more and more often a woman. As one William S. Apple said at a 1971 gathering of a pharmaceutical group, “Once pharmacy shed the Victorian view that you had to ‘own a store’ in order to practice the profession,” it would unleash “a wave of woman-power into our profession.”