When Everything Changed (41 page)

“Randy didn’t like that I was gone, but we didn’t talk about it…. I felt guilty. Terrible guilt,” she said. On the plus side, the boys eventually learned how to wash their own clothes and look after themselves.

Three times a year, when final exams arrived, June would spend the weekend at school, studying “twelve, fourteen hours a day.” The year her son Chris was in the sixth grade, she called home during a study break and listened to him tell her about what was going to happen at his last Sunday school class. Guilt-ridden, she told her husband she was “lonesome, feeling terrible,” and he retorted, “Well, you knew what it was going to be like.” She hung up the phone and began to sob. The hospital chaplain, who was walking by, stopped and patted her shoulder.

The first time Randy and the boys came to see June at her school was graduation. “I started walking to the middle of the stage, when my oldest son, John, who was at the time 18 or 19, stands up and hollers, ‘WAY TO GO, MOM!’ The audience was supposed to hold their applause, but everybody was applauding.”

“T
HE PROMISE IS DAZZLING
.”

In the 1970s the nation came to grips with the fact that most women were going to work outside the home. But it was in the 1980s that the country got used to the idea that women would not only make money to help support the family but also have serious careers. It was perhaps the decade when women were most optimistic about the possibility of merging husband, children, and major-league jobs.
Mademoiselle,
which had
given its readers tips on manicures for the well-groomed typist in 1960, offered up an analysis in 1981 on whether “men will still love us as much now that we dare to love ourselves and our work as much as we love them.” (The answer was yes.)
A study prepared for
the President’s Advisory Committee for Women found that most Americans felt—or at least said—that it would be fine by them if their doctor, lawyer, mayor, or boss was female.

The number of women attending college crept past the number of men, and more women like June LaValleur started to set their sights on professional training for careers such as medicine and law. (
A third of the law students
in 1981 were women—up from 10 percent in 1971.)
The stubborn gap
between women’s wages and men’s narrowed dramatically. In 1979 the average working woman made fifty-eight cents for every dollar a man made. By 1994 she made seventy-two cents. Younger women with college degrees averaged eighty-three cents.

Cosmopolitan,
in a welcome
-to-the-’80s feature, announced, “The promise is dazzling—new-style egalitarian marriage, professional parity with men, full sexual self-expression sans guilt.” The reality was somewhat less perfect. Some professions, such as construction, remained doggedly resistant to female incursion; most working women were still employed in traditionally low-salaried jobs, in clerical, sales, service, or factories. And in an ironic by-product of new opportunities, the great careers that had been open to women all along suffered a decline in prestige because they had, well, been open to women all along.
Ellen Baer, an associate
professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, complained that she was constantly being introduced as “almost a doctor” by people who were trying to assure her that they thought of her as more than just a nurse. Randi Weingarten, the future president of the United Federation of Teachers, joked that “feminism killed teaching.” While conditions in schools had always been poor, Weingarten felt, teachers had been buoyed by the company of terrific peers and the feeling that, despite bad pay, they were professional successes. Many saw educating the next generation as the most rewarding calling possible and would have taken the same path no matter how many doors were opened. However, once younger women started peeling off into other careers, the feeling of success began to dwindle a little. “We saw real disrespect for the profession,” Weingarten said.

Still, there was a sense of great opportunity in the air.
A Gallup poll showed 88
percent of younger American women were satisfied with their lives, with 83 percent believing they would meet their goals. Those goals almost all involved personal careers, not social change. The political conservatism heralded by the cultural wars of the 1970s had taken hold in Washington with the Reagan administration. Government grants for women’s projects—especially ones that sounded radical in any way—dried up. The people who would have been applying for them five years earlier reinvented themselves as academics or entrepreneurs or journalists and made concessions that the traditional world seemed to require. “
It really blew
my mind that all of a sudden, everybody’s shaving their legs, all these people who were very hairy and very proud of it,” said one Ohio feminist who got a job as a university professor—and started shaving herself.

“W
E WORE SUITS
.”

Women who wanted to succeed in business followed the men’s lead in their clothing choices. “We wore suits,” remembered Laura Sessions Stepp. “We wore blouses and those horrid little ties. You’d tie them in a little bow at your neck…. I just look at them now and think that was so god-awful.”

John Molloy, a “wardrobe
engineer” who had written a bestselling book on how men should dress if they wanted to be successful, followed up with
The Woman’s Dress for Success Book.
Molloy said he had scientifically studied the reaction of bosses, colleagues, and underlings to women in different kinds of clothes, and he determined that the best route to the top was a “uniform”: different variations of the same look every day, beginning with a dark-skirted suit and tailored blouse. The book also recommended a “feminine fedora,” shoulder-length hair, a scarf tied around the neck somewhat like a necktie, and hems that ended slightly below the knee. According to Molloy, it was a look designed to give women an aura of authority and a sense of confidence. His readers seemed to agree. Sales of variations on the “uniform” soared, and six million more women’s suits moved off the racks than in previous years.

Virtually every one of those suits and tailored dresses came with shoulder pads.
A report on the 1985
fall fashion shows in Paris said top designers were featuring “clothes with shoulders so massive that the models appeared to have emerged from locker rooms instead of dressing rooms.” Declaring “shoulders forever,” the designer Claude Montana unveiled one coat with padding that extended the shoulder line six inches. While the padded shoulders undoubtedly sent a message of solidity and strength, their major attraction, in truth, was that they made clothes hang better and waists look smaller. But the pads also had a disconcerting way of slipping, and women spent a great deal of time realigning their shoulders. Friends gave friends a helpful tug on their jackets, and mothers drove daughters crazy by constantly pulling and poking at their shoulders.

At the same time, miniskirts had returned, to the dismay of many older women. “
We’re trying to be
taken seriously, and professional women find it’s a bad enough day-to-day battle without the mini,” protested Nancy Clark Reynolds, the president of a Washington lobbying firm, when the hems rose in 1987 to heights they hadn’t reached since the 1960s. And high heels were back with a vengeance. If anyone still wondered when American women were going to embrace sensible shoes, the ’80s suggested the answer might be: never. “
Shoes have become
the most important accessory…. Shoes are to the present generation what hats were to their mothers in the ’50s,” opined the
New York Times.

Susan Brownmiller, who had converted to pants in the 1970s, was dismayed by the new developments. “
When blue jeans
became the emblem of hip sophistication, I didn’t understand I was riding a very short wave,” she wrote sadly. She had believed that women would never wear skirts again “in the way that friends of mine felt that the revolution was just around the corner. And here it is, well into the eighties, and a woman who wears nothing but pants is a holdout, a stick-in-the-mud, a fashion reactionary with no sense of style.”

“… ‘T
OP OF THE
W
ORLD
.’ ”

The return of the miniskirt was a reminder of a dramatic change that had occurred in women’s attitudes toward their bodies. Worrying about getting fat had been a preoccupation for most of the century, but now women began to feel responsible not only for maintaining the right weight but also for sculpting their figures through exercise. The work that girdles and bras had done for previous generations was now a matter for the gym (and another set of responsibilities for working mothers to add to their schedules). Aerobics—and the whole concept of exercise classes—arrived on the scene and quickly became a mass movement. The return of the miniskirt, the invention of the term “thunder thighs,” and the popularization of workout books and TV exercise tapes by Jane Fonda all occurred in the early 1980s.

Fonda, who was born in 1937, is given credit for linking the nation’s beauty culture to its burgeoning health culture. She was a well-known actress by the early 1960s and an international sex symbol after she made
Barbarella,
an erotic science-fiction satire in which the heroine undresses in zero gravity before the opening credits finish rolling. She then became an icon of the antiwar movement whose visits to North Vietnam remained a sore point with conservative Americans well into the twenty-first century.
Fonda had taken
dance classes for years to protect her figure, and as she moved into middle age, it occurred to her that millions of other American women wanted to achieve the same effect her fellow ballet classmates did. The workout program she came up with became the bestselling videotape of all time. “
If you want to trace
the changes in American culture over the past twenty years, all you have to do is look at her,” said the
Washington Post.
“She is a lightning rod for a generation whose rhetoric has evolved from Burn Baby, Burn to Feel the Burn.”

The conviction that you could take things into your own hands, achieve your dream, be all that you can be, was deeply ingrained in the American psyche. But it was a relatively new idea to extend that can-do confidence to one’s body. For those who failed to achieve perfection at the gym, there was now liposuction. Plastic surgery, which had been seen as an option for only the very rich or those whose livelihood depended on looking young and pretty, was repositioned as a tool for everybody.
The American Society of Plastic
and Reconstructive Surgeons announced in 1983 that there was good reason to believe that small breasts “are really a disease” since they create “a total lack of well-being.”

This new expectation of physical perfection fell hardest, of course, on women. Anyone whose body or face didn’t live up to the current standards was no longer simply unlucky. Now she was an underachiever who failed to make the proper effort.
In 1982 the country heard about
the travails of Peggy Ward, a 16-year-old drum majorette at Ringgold High School in Pennsylvania who was threatened with expulsion from the band unless she lost weight. Peggy, who was five feet four, had started the season at about 138 pounds. In another era, that might have been regarded as ideal. Peggy was, in fact, about the same height and weight as Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate sex symbol of the 1950s. But that was then. Peggy’s band instructor claimed that audiences at football games had been jeering at the drum majorettes, and set a limit of 100 pounds for girls who were five feet tall, with an extra five pounds for every additional inch of height. Later, after Peggy began skipping meals and taking diuretics to try to meet the limit, he raised the weight for five feet four to 126. But when Peggy came in at 127 pounds before the game with Aliquippa High, the nation was informed that she had been sent to the bleachers.

The average American woman
weighed 143 pounds at the time. The difference between reality and ideal—and the expectation that everybody could bridge it—helped create an epidemic of eating disorders among young women.
By the late ’80s, there were estimates
that 5 to 10 percent of teenage girls had conditions such as anorexia or bulimia. The nation first focused on the problem in 1983, when the singer Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32 from the effects of a long battle with anorexia. Carpenter, who with her brother, Richard, had cheery hits such as “Top of the World” in the 1970s, had begun to exhibit symptoms during the height of her career, and by the early ’80s she was unnerving audiences with her wraithlike appearance. Her weight went as low as 80 pounds before she sought treatment, and although she began to improve, the stress on her body triggered a fatal heart attack.

“T
HAT WAS LIKE A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
.”

By the 1980s TV series structured around hospitals, law firms, and police precincts—the staples of prime-time drama—featured women working with men in a manner that seemed more and more like business as usual. The first television drama with two female leads,
Cagney and Lacey,
debuted in 1982, with its stories of policewomen who arrested the bad guys while handling stresses of family, loneliness, and friendship. It put a significant dent in the presumptions about women’s inability to carry long-running television series. So did the arrival, in 1988, of the hit comedy
Roseanne,
in which Roseanne Barr picked up the leading-woman baton that Lucille Ball had dropped so long ago. In another breakthrough, the film
Flashdance,
a huge moneymaker in 1983, featured a heroine who yearned to be a dancer but who made her living as a welder. However, the movie’s major contribution to youth culture was to spark a fad for wearing dancers’ leg warmers, not for construction work.

Madonna arrived on the scene in 1982, offering a whole new version of the strong American woman. She was the boss, totally in control of her work, her image, her sexuality, and she taught her female fans—to the despair of their mothers’ generation—that they could flaunt their bodies the way a male peacock uses his garish tail as a symbol of power. Young women claimed the right to take to the dance floor by themselves or with their girlfriends, using the kind of aggressive, sexy moves Madonna would have approved of. “We dirty-danced to Salt-N-Pepa and all of those songs like ‘Candy,’ ” said Camara Dia Holloway, laughing. “There was a group of us—and we all had our songs—that were girls. But also there were guys who would end up dancing with us. Two of us would sandwich one guy and rub all up and down him—just totally ridiculous and overtly sexual in a totally silly kind of way.” Just as the Twist had heralded the era when girls were freed from having to follow the lead of a less-skilled boy when they were dancing, the ’80s nailed down women’s right to forgo the struggle to get a man to dance at all. “Even as adults you find yourself more often dancing with other girls,” sighed April Chisholm, who was born in 1973. “I don’t know what it is socially… boys and men just do not get up and dance. From being 6 years old to 32 years old, you dance by yourself or with other girls.”