The World Split Open (58 page)

Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston was the author, most famously, of
The Woman Warrior
(1976) and
China Men
(1980). An activist, she helped Vietnamese veterans heal themselves through their writings. (Oakland, California, circa 1988)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

The author of many critically acclaimed collections of poetry and essays, Adrienne Rich inspired her readers to hear the magic of words and to stand up for their convictions in
Diving into the Wreck
(1973),
Of Woman Born
(1976), and
On Lies, Secrets and Silences
(1979). (San Francisco, 1978)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

Poet and essayist Audre Lorde taught her readers about being African-American, a lesbian, and a woman—but never a victim—in
Sister Outsider
(1984) and
The Cancer Journals
(1980). (Full Moon Coffeehouse, San Francisco, 1972)
Photo by Linda Koolish

Canadian author Margaret Atwood's chilling dystopian novel
The Handmaid's Tale
(1986) raised the specter of how an elected totalitarian, right-wing, American government might treat its female citizens. (San Francisco Bay Area, private reading, 1979)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

Novelist, poet, and essayist, Alice Walker received the Pulitzer Prize for
The Color Purple
(1982). Walker proposed “womanism,” rather than feminism, as more appropriate for African-American and other minority women. (San Francisco, KQED Radio Station, 1988)
Photo by Lynda Koolish

But it was the daily newspaper that developed the particular formulaic conventions that characterized “first woman” stories. These tales of individual success began to appear during the early 1970s, peaked around 1976, and practically vanished by the end of the decade. Caught off guard, fumbling headline editors frequently employed Cold War imagery—like “invasion”—to describe women's entry into a new profession. Patronizing language often accompanied the news of a woman's accomplishments. When San Francisco appointed the first woman to the position of port director, the local paper headlined the story, “New Port Director Is a Lady Lawyer.” When a famous female conductor replaced Seiji Ozawa as a guest conductor in San Francisco, the headline read, “Symphony Guest Gets to Do a Man's Job.”
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At first, reporters didn't do much better. Some journalists wrote their stories as if they had just learned of a deep, dark secret: “A gun-toting woman correction officer has been working inside the walls of San Quentin Prison for the past week, it was learned yesterday.”
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The “first woman” narrative almost always noted a woman's appearance, often through words, frequently with a photograph, and predictably described her marital and parental status. Invariably, the reporter asked the first woman whether she considered herself a “libber,” whether feminism had helped her secure her new position, and if she had encountered resentment from male coworkers or subordinates. The first women learned the right answers to these questions: No, being a woman had never harmed them, nor had it helped them. No, they had no connection with “women's libbers.” When asked how they “juggled” their domestic and work responsibilities, they rarely admitted to any difficulties. When asked whether men had expressed any hostility to their arrival in the workplace, they diplomatically described themselves as “good sports” and “one of the guys.”

Strangely, the term “affirmative action” never seemed to appear in these stories, and yet this policy and its guidelines had opened up all kinds of doors for women. The phrase “affirmative action” originated in a 1965 Executive Order issued by President Johnson and amended in October 1967 to include a ban on sexual discrimination. The newly renumbered Executive Order 11375 required that all institutions that did business with or received grants from the federal government should not only refrain from racial or sexual discrimination, but should also “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during their employment without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” During the early seventies, the government, universities, and even the private corporate sector made great efforts to find such qualified candidates. Instead of just relying on the old boys' network, employers now advertised jobs all over the country. Equally qualified women and minorities were supposed to be considered to make up for past discrimination.

Middle-class educated women, as it turned out, were undoubtedly best positioned to pounce on these new opportunities. As a result, women found many formerly all-male jobs and careers open to them for the first time. Yet none of the reporters or the interviewed first women seemed to know—or wished to publicize—that affirmative action had helped them. Perhaps this is one reason why so few women later understood that they owed their jobs to affirmative action.
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I still remember a feature story that made a great impression on me in this period. It profiled a “lady neurosurgeon” who rose at dawn to train for marathons, made breakfast for her children, operated on six or seven brains, returned home for a few “quality hours” with her children, cooked a gourmet dinner for her husband, and then, with her children asleep, enjoyed a few hours of intimacy with him.

The story contained all the first-woman elements I have since reread in newspapers from that decade. I remember the sinking feeling I had afterward. I knew I was not—and could not be—such a superwoman. Of course, there was no way to know whether this superwoman eventually succumbed to exhaustion, or how her marriage and children survived the stress of such a driven life. Nor did anyone know about any obstacles she had encountered during medical training or, later, in the operating room. It all seemed so simple. The “can do” American spirit, grafted onto a first female professional, had given birth to a somewhat unbelievable typecast character, the Superwoman, who, with her inexhaustible energy and talent, would be the dominant media image of the
feminist in the 1980s. From helpless housewife to bionic woman in one decade.

Consider the tale of Marion McAllister. In February 1973, the
New York Times
profiled McAllister, an African-American woman who had just entered a training program that promised to make her the first Transit Authority “motorwoman” in New York City's subway system. Alongside her photograph, the story described her as married and the mother of a fifteen-year-old daughter. The fact that affirmative action had created these new training opportunities was, as usual, ignored. Instead, the article cast McAllister as a female Horatio Alger, a hardworking, ambitious young woman who had begun her career as a counter girl in a restaurant and was heading ever upward toward her dreams. McAllister publicly credited her husband, a subway yardmaster, with encouraging her to apply for the position. To the reporter, she confided her long-range ambition to become a dispatcher, a position in which she would have matched her husband's salary.

Unlike the typical “first woman” narrative, this story revealed how McAllister had encountered sexual discrimination in her earlier attempt to enter an all-male occupation. Three years before, McAllister had applied to take a civil service exam to become an assistant dispatcher. To hide the fact that she was a woman, she had signed up under the name M. McAllister. When she arrived for the exam, the Transit Authority refused to permit her to take the exam, simply because she was a woman. They even called the police. Since no rules—simply custom—prevented a woman from taking the exam, McAllister—shaken and stunned—took it and failed. Now, having passed the exam, she was finally on the fast track to becoming a “motorman,” a short step to her real goal as a dispatcher.

Or so the reader assumed. Unlike most first women quoted in the press, McAllister openly admitted to some apprehension about entering the program. “Today in class,” she said, “I was just ‘one of the boys,' but I think quite a few train conductors will have a feeling about being ‘copilot' to a woman motorman.” Just three months later, in a tiny paragraph squeezed under “Metropolitan Briefs,” the
Times
reported that “citing ‘personal reasons,' Marion McAllister resigned from the Transit Authority motorman training program that would have made her the city's first subway ‘motorwoman.'” The newspaper now described her as the thirty-six-year-old mother of
two
children.
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What had happened? Had her coworkers hassled or harassed her with racist or sexist comments? Had her home life become intolerable?
Had she given birth to or adopted another child? Had she or one of her family members become ill? Readers had no way to know; most of those who read the initial article probably never even noticed the news of her resignation.

First women learned that they should be good sports, attribute their success to family or to meritocracy, and always show more interest in becoming one of the boys than in advancing other women's careers. When a woman became San Francisco's first “lady bartender,” she joked about the ribbing she received from male customers, adding, “I'm just one of the fellows—36-24-36.” When voters in Hayward, California, elected a woman as mayor, she quickly pointed out that “it was not a women's lib thing. I asked voters to judge me as a person, not as a woman.” When Bonnie Tiburzi became the first woman to pilot a commercial passenger plane, she attributed her success to her “strong father and two brothers.” “I guess,” she said, “I just considered myself one of the boys.” When Sally Ride, then a graduate student, was chosen to be one of the first American women astronauts, she emphatically stated at a press conference that it “was not a feminist breakthrough. . . . I don't think I was hired because I'm a woman, but because I'm a scientist.”
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