When Everything Changed (33 page)

“A
S SOMEONE WHO HAS LOVED MEN TOO WELL
…”

In 1977 the International Women’s Year Conference was held in Houston (with a competing Pro-Family Rally sponsored by Phyllis Schlafly across town). A resolution supporting abortion rights passed easily, but sponsors were a little more concerned about one being offered on behalf of gay rights. Speaking in support, to many people’s surprise, was Betty Friedan. “
As someone who has loved
men too well, I have had trouble with this issue,” said the recently divorced Friedan. “Now my priority is passing the ERA. And because there is nothing in it that will give any protection to homosexuals, I believe we must help the women who are lesbians.”

Friedan was delivering two messages: one was in favor of the resolution (which passed), and the other was to remind the world that the Equal Rights Amendment was not about gay liberation. The idea that it was had crippled progress for the ERA in those critical final states. “
I thought we had it made
until Phyllis Schlafly came into the state with those films of the San Francisco gay parade,” said Minnette Doderer, the former president pro tempore of the state senate in Iowa. “She spent twenty-five thousand dollars to put those on television and to say, ‘This will happen in Iowa if you get the Equal Rights Amendment.’ ”

The women in Houston had already watched the antigay forces flex their muscles in Florida.
Miami-Dade County had been
in what the
Miami Herald
called “hysteria more appropriate to the seventeenth century than the twentieth” over an ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment. The improbable leader of the opposition was Anita Bryant, a 37-year-old former Miss America runner-up who was best known as the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, chirping, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine,” on TV commercials. Suddenly, there she was on the barricades, warning Floridians that gays were out to seduce their kids into a decadent lifestyle: “
Since homosexuals cannot reproduce
, they must freshen their ranks with our children. They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.”

Bryant sang, quoted the Old Testament, and hinted that Florida’s ongoing drought might be a punishment from God. One interesting part of the controversy was the low profile of gay women. “Most of the time, Bryant has concentrated her fire on male homosexuals, rather than lesbians, partly because her biblical texts deal with men,” wrote
Newsweek.
“In addition, lesbians seem less of a threat to the foes of gay rights. Fewer in number than male homosexuals, lesbians are generally less visible in Miami and other cities—and they are playing only a modest role in the gay coalition that [leader Jack] Campbell has assembled.” It was not unusual for gay women to be left on the fringe of the early gay rights movement. Many women claimed that homosexual men behaved like men first and fellow gay rights activists second, and marginalized women when they tried to work together. However, the fact that gay women weren’t seen as a major target of Bryant’s crusade did not mean they were not affected. After the antidiscrimination ordinance was defeated by an enormous margin,
Newsweek
reported that a lesbian
who had worked as an executive secretary in the county government for fifteen years lost her job the morning after the vote. And with Bryant’s help, the antigay alliance successfully lobbied to bar gay Floridians from adopting children.

While other towns followed Miami’s lead, a backlash against the backlash was also under way. Voters in Seattle refused to repeal their city’s gay rights ordinance, and California voters defeated an initiative that would have led to the firing of gay teachers. Bryant’s career, which had been based on her pleasant persona more than any extraordinary talent, floundered.
A few years later
, she divorced her husband and told the
Ladies’ Home Journal
that she felt a new kinship with feminists: “I can see how women are controlled in a very ungodly way.” As far as homosexuality went, Bryant said, “I’m more inclined to say live and let live.”

“T
HIS WASN’T GOING TO BE THE WHOLE THING, WAS IT
?”

The women’s movement that was fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment at the end of the 1970s was much different from the one that carried the banner at the beginning. Activists who had cheerfully deferred all thoughts of jobs or money or security in order to devote themselves to the cause were suddenly confronted with the need to think about salaries and pensions and housing costs. “
It became much more difficult
to live on virtually nothing—the lifestyle that had prevailed in the movement,” said Barbara Epstein, who had been active with California leftist and feminist groups.

Great social uprisings have a short life span. “Essentially it’s a stage of naming reality,” said Gloria Steinem. “It’s the great ‘Aha!’ ” Fixing the reality, of course, takes longer, and the women’s movement would continue in many forms—from national groups such as NOW, to local battered women’s shelters or antirape programs, to women’s bookstores and women’s history departments. But there was no longer that ecstatic sense of being part of a united force mobilized to change the world. Just as some of the young people who had worked in SNCC in the South never got over the sense of loss when the Beloved Community evaporated, women who had come of age in their movement experienced an emptiness. “
Life felt good
then… ,” wrote the essayist Vivian Gornick.

As long as I had a roomful of feminists to come home to I had built-in company for life. I’d never be alone again. The feminists were my sword and my shield—my solace, my comfort, my excitement. If I had the feminists I’d have community…. Then the unthinkable happened. Slowly, around 1980, feminist solidarity began to unravel…. One day I woke up to realize the excitement, the longing, the expectation of community was over.

“I
CAN’T PREDICT PASSAGE NOW
.”

The Equal Rights Amendment had been the cause that held the fraying movement together for most of the 1970s, but by the end of the decade, the time limit on ratification was running out, while some state legislatures were attempting to withdraw votes they had made earlier in favor of putting the ERA in the Constitution. In New York and New Jersey, where the state legislatures had approved the ERA long before, supporters pressed for similar amendments to their state constitutions, which would require voter ratification. The show of popular support, they presumed, would give a boost to the national drive. But both amendments, stunningly, went down in defeat. In New York, the results weren’t even close. The amendment lost by more than 400,000 votes. “
There was such anxiety
,” said Carol Bellamy, a state senator from Brooklyn. “So many women I talked to had a sense that we wanted to take something away from them, some privilege or benefit that in most cases they don’t really have.”
One widely distributed
flyer in the state claimed the ERA was the product of a “militant women’s group” that wanted to “make it difficult for the wife to remain home with the children and instead push her into the work market.”

In state after state, polls showed that the public favored the amendment, but voters who went to the polls rejected it. There were different explanations in different places, but it was apparent that anxiety was triumphing over hope. Although Congress granted an extension until 1982, the cause had simply run out of steam. Advocates could only theorize that things would improve in the future.

“
I can’t predict
passage now,” admitted Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1978. “But I can predict passage by the year 2000.”

10. “You’re Gonna Make It After All”

“Y
OU WALK INTO A MEETING
…
AND NOW
T
HERE’S ANOTHER WOMAN
.”

I
n September 1970 Mary Tyler Moore—the actress who had broken television’s no-pants rule on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
—returned with a new show in which she played Mary Richards, a thirtysomething single woman living alone and working for a local TV station. In the first episode, she fled from a broken engagement, driving tearily down the highway to Minneapolis, renting an apartment, and meeting neighbors and fellow workers who would become her surrogate family in the years to come. “You might just make it after all,” the theme song promised. (It was changed after the first season to the more optimistic “You’re gonna make it after all.”) The show became one of the best-loved situation comedies of all time, and it ran through the decade. Mary, who spent much of the first year sitting around with Rhoda bemoaning their single state, became more assertive as time went on, proficient at her job, comfortable with her life, and more clearly engaged in sexual relations with her various boyfriends—who came and went without making any long-term impact. In a fractious decade, she became a cheerful symbol of the fact that a woman did not require a husband or children or a glamorous career to be happy, as long as she had people and work to care about and a healthy sense of humor.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was, of course, only one program. TV in general was still a man’s world—three-quarters of the characters in prime-time dramas in 1973 were men, and the women who did show up on the screen usually seemed to be in charge of answering telephones. But it’s interesting to chart the difference between
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and an earlier television series about a single woman living on her own. In 1966 ABC had unveiled
That Girl,
starring Marlo Thomas, which followed an aspiring actress named Ann Marie through her adventures in New York City, many of which involved funny jobs (Ann wears a chicken suit, Ann is a meter maid) or mistaken identities. Ann lived in a residential hotel—one step beyond a college dorm—while her parents hovered in a nearby suburb. She spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to her worried mother and father that despite evidence to the contrary (dual hotel-room occupancy, pants in her closet), she was certainly not sleeping with her boyfriend, Donald. Ann was spunky and good-hearted, but she was not really a grown-up.

Like Mary Richards, American women in the 1970s were figuring out how to use their new powers to craft a good life. When viewed from above, it might have seemed that the big story was the backlash against the women’s liberation movement. But on the ground, things looked much different. It was in the 1970s that American women set off on a new course. They went to college thinking about what work they wanted to do, not what man they wanted to catch, and flooded professional schools with applications. After graduation, they no longer marched right off to the altar, and the median age of marriage rose rather dramatically—particularly for women with college diplomas. No matter what their political perspective, they could feel new possibilities. “
You walk into a meeting
in one of the departments and now there’s another woman,” said Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski in 1978. “You see each other, maybe you wink, and you know you’re both glad to see each other there.”

“D
O YOU PREFER THEM ACTUALLY
?”

At a presidential bill signing in 1973, Richard Nixon turned to Helen Thomas, the veteran wire service reporter. “
Helen, are you
still wearing slacks?” he asked. “Do you prefer them actually? Every time I see girls in slacks, it reminds me of China.” The remark may have been intrusive, but it was still an improvement from Washington a decade or so earlier,
when Ruth Bader Ginsburg applied
for a Supreme Court clerkship and Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected her after asking, “Does she wear skirts? I can’t stand girls in pants.”

The clothes women wore to work had changed dramatically, and that was no small matter for a generation that had grown up wrapped in heavy girdles and fragile nylons.
The arbiters of fashion
were suddenly “making it easier to be a woman,” wrote Susan Brownmiller. “Lipstick color had lightened to a mere touch of gloss. Thanks to the wonders of Lycra, panty hose and a bra slip had replaced wires, garters, and girdles, allowing me to breathe normally for the first time since high school. Wobbly heels, the bane of my existence, were ‘out’ and flats were ‘in.’ Nails were permitted to be short and unpolished, hair didn’t need to be teased and lacquered, the pantsuit had come into vogue, and skirts were completing their startling climb from below the knee to mid-thigh.”
Jane O’Reilly, recalling
the first time she “stepped out on the streets of downtown New York City wearing blue jeans,” said, “To my astonishment, no lightning bolt struck me down because I was not ‘dressed for town.’ The world had changed. I could put away the dark cotton, white gloves, and black pumps. The era of pin curls, waist cinchers, and girdles had ended.”

Shoes were a feminist issue for some women, who loathed stiletto heels for their artificiality and discomfort.
A “Stamp Out
High Heels” movement blamed them for everything from “leg ache” to “inability to run from rapists.” During the ’60s the shoe reformers seemed to be getting their wish, as chisel-toed shoes with modest heels and thigh-high boots became the favored style for dressy occasions. (
A fashion report
in 1966 had announced that one of the loftiest shoe designs of the season was a “Pilgrim-buckled pump with a one-inch heel.”) However, by the early ’70s younger women had embraced another style that was an outright invitation to leg fractures: platform shoes with enormous soles that could reach four inches or more.
And by the end
of the decade, the high heel had inched back, although politically sensitized designers suggested that women wanted to wear them “to please themselves, perhaps, rather than to attract attention from men, as in the past.”

“G
ET THE HELL OUT OF MY RACE
.”

For all the moments that symbolized the changes for women in the 1970s, one of the most famous was also one of the cheesiest—the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973. It was on one level an extremely silly contest to settle the question of whether one of the world’s greatest athletes in her prime could beat an out-of-shape 55-year-old man. But it was also a master course in how to disarm the most powerful weapon against women’s fight for equality—ridicule.