The World Split Open (60 page)

A flurry of new magazines—
New York Woman, Self, Working Woman
, to name just a few—appeared during the 1970s, aimed at selling to young working women. Such magazines repackaged feminism into products and services and targeted the working woman, who supposedly needed these things to prosper. This new consumer feminism tended to equate liberation with the purchase of things—liquor, tobacco, vacations, stereos, cameras, and clothes.
New York Woman
, for example, laced its traditional articles on shopping, theater, and fashion with “liberation articles” like “Sex Equality: The Secret Storm” (a piece on the Equal Rights Amendment) and an article about Representative Bella Abzug. But the real intention of the magazine was to instruct readers on chic ways to spend their money.
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These magazines, which Stella Wilson (Xerox's new female wunderkind) might have devoured, had little to do with the 90 percent of women who worked in low-paid clerical service and sales jobs. Bernice Howe, a $4-an-hour clerical worker from Denver, picked up a copy of
Working Woman
the first time she saw it on the newsstand. “But the first article I turned to was on how to pick out an outfit for less than $200. They have to be kidding.” Many housewives also felt that this upscale consumer feminism excluded them. When asked what she thought of the feminist movement, Lucille Schlecting, a fifty-year-old housewife in Lindenhurst, New York, said, “I see it as important for the professional women, especially the young ones. It helps them get into administrative positions. But for someone like me, well, I guess I'm over the hill as far as getting ahead.” For such women, feminism came to be synonymous with professional women who could afford “liberation.”
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Still, for the growing numbers of “entry-level” managerial or professional women—or for those who dreamed of such a future—“Dressing for Success” (the title of a best-seller of the time) was actually important. Dresses, blouses, and skirts—the traditional attire of secretaries—simply didn't establish the authority that men's suits commanded. The new magazines chided women for wearing “inappropriate” outfits, even
as they instructed them how to buy a new wardrobe. As
New Woman
magazine editorialized, “although most women can put together great outfits for leisure, sport or an evening on the town, they do not know how to dress for success in their careers. And that is part of what is keeping them down.”
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Magazines had always scolded women about their appearance. (How else to find and keep a man?) Cast as an individual problem, a working woman's appearance now became as important as dressing for men's approval had once been. The magazines warned women to give off no “sexual innuendos during working hours” and to avoid such feminine accouterments as “noticeable perfume, bouffant hairdos, tinted glasses, enormous shoulder bags, clanging or ornate jewelry or any kind of clothing without a jacket.” Instead, managerial women were to wear their hair simply styled (no longer than shoulder length), and “clear glasses with frames that matched their hair color and skirt suits.”

In other words, women were to adopt a pared-down and tailored male look, wear the same suit (but with a skirt) that had long conferred on men white collar status and distinguished managers from their employees. Such suits, which draped and hid men's bodies, especially their sexual organs, signaled authority and power. Just in case women still didn't get it,
New Woman
featured photographs of twins, side by side, one dressed in a skirt suit and one in a casual sweater and slacks. Beneath the photographs, the caption asked readers: “Which twin is the executive? Which twin is the secretary? Look at the executive (left) and see for yourself the power of clothing—how well she fits behind the desk of authority.”
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Women at work began to don what had formerly been men's clothing. Unisex dressing also reflected the decade's trendy fascination with the androgynous personality as a new indicator of psychological health. Responding to an onslaught of new women workers, designers pushed the “power” business suit with padded shoulders, worn over a silk blouse, matching skirt, and high heels. Until the 1990s, this remained the new business uniform for women. By then, some women, more confident of their positions, began to seek comfort, alongside their authority, in their everyday appearance.
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The emphasis on appearance reinforced the very nonfeminist idea that each woman was responsible for her own failure or success. Feminism was fast being turned into an individual project. What a woman purchased decided her fate. Only with the right clothes could she
signal, through appearance and behavior, that she was not the secretary, but the lawyer or the corporate executive. It was up to her. When a woman dressed properly, she could establish her authority. But learning how to exercise that authority in the corporate male world was quite another matter: that was a psychological issue each woman had to address alone.

It was one thing to march for equality, but quite another to implement it at home or at the workplace. Across the nation, men and women struggled with a shrinking economy that, in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis in 1973, would make two-income families increasingly necessary to sustain a middle-class standard of living. With two parents at work, the perennial question, Who will take care of the children?, became more urgent. Attempts to share household work and child care threw frantic parents into a battle for leisure time, a scarce and precious resource in a two-income family.
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Marriage—already battered by growing divorce rates, the values of the counterculture, and new ideas about sexual freedom—began to seem like just one of many lifestyles that men and women might choose. Never before in American history had such ambivalent attitudes toward fidelity and commitment entered mainstream culture. To be sure, small groups of free love advocates had challenged marriage and family in nineteenth-century communes and in the bohemian enclaves of New York City's Greenwich Village early in the twentieth century. But the sexual behavior of those communards and bohemians had never been regarded as a “lifestyle choice” by those in mainstream culture.

In contrast, the media of the seventies successfully popularized the new “human potential movement” and publicized sensational stories about sex-swapping couples, swinging singles, and sexual freedom parties. Aimed at an upscale elite, some of the media misled its audience into imagining that large numbers of adults had dropped out, or divorced, in order to spend time mingling with strangers at sexual orgies. Although the media vastly exaggerated adult behavior, bewildered older Americans could hardly ignore the frequency of divorce, the changing nature of gender relations and of sexual mores. The generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II had rarely
divorced. During the sixties, however, divorce rates among this cohort began to rise sharply. By the end of the seventies, the human potential movement had redefined divorce as a “creative” act and some adults began to adopt the open marriage that became the title of another best-seller.
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Enough adults seemed bewildered and confused that John Silber, president of Boston University, felt compelled to tell the parents of three thousand incoming freshmen in the fall of 1977, “Every one of our students deserves a parent who is not going through an identity crisis. It is time that America faces up to the implication of having too many people aged forty and aged fifty asking questions that they should have answered when they were seventeen to twenty-five, ‘Who am I and what ought I to do?'”
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The human potential movement, inspired by Aldous Huxley's use of the phrase during a lecture in 1960, grew out of the work of Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, and William Schutz, all psychological theorists who emphasized the realization of the self. The human potential movement presumed that individuals could best realize their true nature by engaging in a thorough psychological examination of the self. The implicit assumption was that mainstream culture kept people from realizing their deepest dreams and their greatest potential. Within the human potential movement, psychologists thought of potential not in terms of careers, but as the discovery of emotional, sexual, and spiritual parts of the self. What Tom Wolfe would dub the “Me Decade” (the seventies) included not only widespread narcissism and consumerism, but also hundreds of spiritual and therapeutic practices that promised such self-invention and self-realization.
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Soon, feminism intersected with the human potential movement. The feminist challenge to the psychotherapeutic profession had contested nearly all former definitions of women's mental health popularized by psychoanalytic theory. During the 1970s, feminist writers and therapists began creating a new kind of therapy, one that included a serious consideration of women's subordinate status. But it was not feminist thought or therapy, in the short run, that attracted the public's attention. The therapeutic books that would become best-sellers in the seventies—
The Managerial Woman, The Assertive Woman, When I Say No I Feel Guilty
—helped promote what I call “therapeutic feminism,” programs of self-help that ignored the economic or sociological obstacles women faced, and instead emphasized the way in which each individual woman,
if only she thought positively about herself, could achieve some form of self-realization and emancipation.
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Naturally, the editors of women's magazines quickly latched onto the human potential movement. Self-help in its various forms was nothing new to them. For nearly a century, they had instructed women how to improve their domestic skills, enhance their appearance, beautify their homes, and, most importantly, how to catch and keep their men. But the human potential movement added the necessity for a new kind of therapeutic intervention. Society had changed and it was up to women to embrace the power of positive thinking.
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What were women supposed to change, then? Basically, themselves; women could never be perfect enough. In 1976, one typical magazine article urged women to write daily affirmations “to erase old thought patterns.” Like children kept after school, readers were to write—dozens of times—how much they loved themselves or how much they forgave their husbands.
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The human potential movement probably affected women even more through the popular books that crowded bookstore shelves. In
Super Self: A Woman's Guide to Self-Management
, Dorothy Tennov identified “time” as women's worst enemy. To overcome the burden of housework, child care, and jobs, women needed to discipline themselves and learn to manage their time. The author rightly assumed that working women would feel responsible for dinner, child care, and dirty floors at home. The idea that men might help or that the government might assist through child care facilities, flexible hours, and shared jobs had largely vanished. The path to individual success was not to share any of this, or to act in concert with others to change it, but to manage one's time well. Still others instructed women how to change their “scripts” and what therapeutic skills they needed to learn.
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The allure of “assertiveness training” was that it spoke directly to the learned passiveness that feminists had already identified as one of the most serious handicaps of (white) middle-class women. As one feelgood writer declared in the typical psychobabble of the day:

The question of identity is an important one: whether you identify yourself as a mother, a feminist, a student, a lover, an executive, a rebel girl, a socialist or a divorcee—if you can put the word assertive before any of those identities, you will feel and convey strength no matter who you are or what you are trying to accomplish.
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An entire industry of “assertiveness training” workshops began to sprout nationwide, devoted to teaching women how to assert themselves in a straightforward manner, rather than through deferential behavior or aggressive demands. In
How to Be an Assertive Woman
, author Jean Baer argued that the major reason women don't get what they want is that “they haven't yet learned how to communicate what they want.” When they learned new communication skills, they would see “the change in their self-esteem.” The fact that most workplaces allowed little or no assertiveness of any kind from their female employees was simply ignored. Asked about the new assertiveness-training workshops, a New York practical nurse replied sarcastically, “I don't know about assertiveness. Where I work it's called ‘insubordination.'”
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Arguably the most famous self-help (and antifeminist) book of the decade was Marabel Morgan's
Total Woman
, published in 1973. Morgan's title quickly entered the popular lexicon and in 1974 topped the nonfiction best-seller list, right above Carl Bernstein's and Bob Woodward's exposé of the Watergate scandal,
All the President's Men.
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Morgan spoke directly to the reader, in a chatty personal style. She addressed a topic that had been a staple of women's magazines—“How to Save Your Marriage.” The popularity of her book revealed how much women preferred to repair rather than forsake their marriages—and yet here was a book that could not have been written had the women's movement not existed. Morgan used her own life as an example. After a thrilling courtship and honeymoon with her husband, Charlie, Morgan had watched helplessly as communication began to break down. She became a nag; he withdrew behind the newspaper. Like the women interviewed by Betty Friedan, Morgan began to “feel trapped—work, the house, two little children, a husband who wouldn't talk to me. When I told him he was becoming a stranger to his children, he just pulled the paper higher.”