When Everything Changed (44 page)

The country debated the case, with Mary Beth’s supporters arguing for the rights of motherhood and claiming class bias. “
I will never feel
quite the same about dyeing my hair now that Dr. Marshall Schechter, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has cited this little beauty secret as proof of Mrs. Whitehead’s ‘narcissism’ and ‘mixed personality disorder,’ ” said Katha Pollitt, who championed the natural mother in
The Nation.
The Sterns’ supporters said they could offer a more stable home, and anyway, a deal was a deal. A New Jersey Superior Court judge agreed, calling Whitehead “manipulative, impulsive, and exploitive” and awarding the baby to the Sterns. Another judge later ruled that Mary Beth still had the right to visitation.

“
Bill and I
are very, very sorry that what started out as a very nice thing had to end up like this,” said Elizabeth Stern,
who legally adopted
Melissa years later when the girl turned 18 and had the right to terminate her relationship with her natural mother.

“W
E HIRED THE PERSON YOU TRAINED
.”

Lillian Garland was raised by her great-grandmother, a former showgirl who had married a black man and ended up on a farm in Finleyville, Pennsylvania. “She had long black hair, a tiny little waistline, and she was built bigger than Marilyn Monroe. So when she married my—well, her husband, like I said, was black. Can you imagine her grief way back then before the ’20s? So I’d be sitting on the floor and she’d be brushing my hair, and one of the things she would always say… , ‘Remember that word.’ And she would say it, she said ‘nigger.’ And she would point at me and she’d say, ‘It only has as much power as you give it. It’s only a word. Don’t give it any power.’ ”

A tomboy who dreamed of being Annie Oakley, Garland grew up to be a pretty young woman who dreamed of being an actress. In 1976 she left for California with her eyes on Hollywood. But she wound up on the run from an abusive marriage, working as a security guard in Los Angeles. Things started looking up when she landed a job as a receptionist at a California Central Savings and Loan Association office. “I’m sitting answering phones, giving everybody messages, fussing at the bosses for not answering their wives’ calls…. I was having a ball, like I was mothering everybody.” When she got pregnant, Garland trained someone to fill in while she was gone and returned after a three-month unpaid leave.

“We hired the person you trained… ,” she was told. “If something comes available, we’ll give you a call.”

Garland, who was searching for a new job with her baby in her arms because she couldn’t afford a sitter, contacted the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which told her that California had a law requiring employers to offer pregnant women unpaid leaves of up to four months. Her ex-employer challenged the law, claiming it discriminated against men, who could not claim such a benefit. By the time the court ruled in her ex-boss’s favor, Garland had lost her apartment and custody of her daughter, Kekere, to the child’s father.

As the appeal wound its way through the courts, her former employer offered to take her back, and her lawyer told her she had to accept in order to maintain her status as plaintiff. “They did things to me—they stuck pins in my chair…. They had me doing really demeaning things. They were putting in new computers, and they said, ‘We want you to get on your hands and knees underneath all the desks on this floor and write down how many blue cables, white cables, and what the numbers are on the cables.’ ”

She told herself, “They want to force me to quit, because they figure if I quit this, I’ll quit the case, too. But they don’t know I’m my grandmother’s granddaughter.”

In 1987 Garland’s case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6 to 3 that states could require employers to provide job protection for pregnant women.
Time
wrote a big story about Garland, and she was invited to Washington, where President Clinton signed her copy of the magazine, and a security guard, recognizing her, asked to shake her hand. “He says, ‘I gotta tell my wife that I met you. We just had twins. Because of you, she didn’t lose her job.’ ” Later, at a dinner, Garland was seated next to Rosa Parks, who told her, “Young sister, I have been following this case for years, and I am so proud of you.”

“I said, ‘I’m sitting next to Rosa Parks, and you’re proud of me?’ And she started laughing and laughing.”

“T
OO OLD, TOO UNATTRACTIVE
…”

Garland was hardly the only woman to come crashing up against a barrier she imagined had long been eliminated. And she was not the only one to go to court. Throughout the ’80s, women in accounting and law firms fought to get a better chance to make partner—a status the top firms repeatedly argued was based on personal relationships rather than on any specific and quantifiable qualification. In 1982 Ann Hopkins was the only woman among eighty-eight candidates nominated for partner at Price Waterhouse, a giant accounting firm. Although she brought in more business than any other candidate, she was rejected. “
It was only later
, when we were in litigation, that I found out about the comments that I needed to go to charm school, that I was too macho, that I was overcompensating for being a woman,” she said. The partners said she would have a better chance if she dressed “more femininely” and wore more makeup and jewelry. It took the rest of the decade, but in 1990 a federal district judge ordered Price Waterhouse to make Hopkins a partner and give her $400,000 in back pay.

In 1982 Christine
Craft, of KMBC-TV in Kansas, sued her employers after she was demoted from anchor to reporter because she did poorly in a viewer focus group. The viewers, she was told, found her “too old, too unattractive,” and not sufficiently deferential to men. Craft said she was told by her boss, “We know it’s silly, but you don’t hide your intelligence to make the guys look smarter…. They don’t like the fact that you know the difference between the National League and the American League.” A 36-year-old California outdoorswoman, Craft said she was wooed to come to Kansas by the KMBC management, who assured her that they did not mind that she looked more like an “aging surfer” than a beauty queen. Once she joined the station, however, she was sent through makeup, clothes, and hair consultations that left her equipped with an endless supply of “polyester bowed blouses and blazers.”
The station claimed the focus group
showed the makeover wasn’t working, but testimony at the trial revealed that the consultant had opened up the focus group’s discussion by saying, “Let’s spend thirty seconds destroying Christine,” and “Is she a mutt? Let’s be honest about this.” The jury awarded her $500,000 in damages. Then the judge tossed out the verdict, saying it was “the result of passion, prejudice, confusion, or mistake on the part of the jury.”

The job of TV news anchor had particular significance since the person reading the evening news had always been a figure of authority in American culture. “
I have the strong
feeling that audiences are less prepared to accept the news from a woman’s voice than from a man’s,” said Reuben Frank, the president of NBC News, in 1971. ABC made the first attempt to break the network men-only club in 1976, when Barbara Walters was hired to coanchor the evening news with Harry Reasoner. The pairing was not a success. “
Harry Reasoner didn’t want
a partner and he didn’t want a woman,” Walters said years later. “He did not talk to me off the air.” The on-air chemistry, unsurprisingly, was poor. Ratings did not go up, and eventually Reasoner and Walters went off to TV newsmagazines, while Peter Jennings claimed the anchor’s chair.

While the networks would continue to wrestle with the anchorwoman issue for another quarter century or so, local news had less trouble adapting. In 1972 KING 5 in Seattle appointed Jean Enersen as evening news anchor, making her the first woman to hold that job permanently. (Her management had surveyed listeners and found the audience “very receptive” to the idea.) Others followed quickly, many of them women who would later become national household names: Judy Woodruff in Atlanta, Jessica Savitch in Houston, and Jane Pauley, who became the first anchorwoman at stations in Indianapolis and, later, Chicago.
By the early 1980s
, more than a third of local anchors were women. Only 3 percent of those women, however, were over 40, compared to almost half the men.

“T
HEY’RE NOT LISTENING TO YOU FOR THE FIRST TEN MINUTES
.”

When Sylvia Acevedo decided to become an engineer, she embarked on a life in which she would almost always be the only one of her kind in every room. During a college internship, she worked on a weapons-testing range in the Nevada desert. The first time she headed for the bathroom, she was stopped, “and they said, ‘No—yours is over there.’ It turned out they had had
much
correspondence over where I would go to the bathroom. And there was this brand-new Porta Potti that said
HERS
.”

When she got to graduate school at Stanford, there was only one other Latina in the entire engineering program: Ellen Ochoa, the future NASA astronaut. “There weren’t a lot of people like me. But I’ve always been a kind of social person, so I did sports, I hung out,” Acevedo said. After a stint with the national space program, she went to work for IBM in Palo Alto. The office next to hers was occupied by a former football player from Purdue (“not the sharpest crayon in the box”), and Acevedo watched as his IBM mentors came in to tell him how to make a presentation, what to wear, and what to watch out for. “No one was doing that for me or the other women who were there. I began saying, ‘I have to innovate.’ ” She carefully analyzed what skills IBM seemed to expect for the kinds of jobs she wanted to eventually have and then methodically went out to get the right résumé. When she discovered her many trips to Mexico didn’t count as international experience, she booked a trip to Hong Kong at her own expense and befriended the local sales team.

Reflecting back on her IBM days, Acevedo recalled that she did have “one guy who was a good mentor,” who advised her not to begin her presentations in the normal way. “You have to start with how you’re like them,” he urged. “You need to tell them you’re a Stanford engineer and you’ve done this and that. Because they’re not listening to you for the first ten minutes. All they’re thinking is, ‘What is this Hispanic female doing in front of us?’ ”

“T
HE WOMEN
I
SPEAK WITH
…
WANT TO KNOW THEIR PARTNERS
.”

At the height of the sexual revolution, college students were reading
The Harrad Experiment,
which described how the next generation could use free love to create an American utopia. By the late 1970s, they were reading
Looking for Mr. Goodbar,
which painted a picture of the new morality that was so dismal it’s a wonder the entire generation didn’t head for the convent.
Goodbar
was Judith Rossner’s fictionalized account of the 1973 murder of Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old teacher who spent her days working with deaf children in the Bronx and her nights reading novels in a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she picked up men for one-night stands that sometimes got rough. (Her accused killer, a drifter named John Wayne Wilson, hung himself in his jail cell.) The violent death of Rossner’s heroine, Theresa Dunn, became a byword for the terrible consequences of anonymous sex. The reviewers of
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
made it clear that they felt both Quinn’s murder and Rossner’s book said something sweeping about the way young people’s sex lives had gone astray. (“We know there are Theresa Dunns in our lives, in our offices.”)

“
The Revolution Is Over
,” announced
Time
in 1984. In fact, what was over was not the dramatic change in women’s feelings about the double standard that had been at the heart of the sexual revolution. What ended was the to-the-nth-degree-ness of it—the group sex, the casual encounters at a rock concert or airport ticket line that led almost instantly to sex behind a tree or in a plane restroom. Swing clubs, where people came to trade partners, began to dwindle away. The legendary suburban cocktail hours where couples dropped their car keys into a hat and chose the keys of their partner for the night seemed to disappear—if many had ever really existed in the first place. “The difference now is that things are not so casual. The women I speak with seem to want to know their partners,” said the director of the health center at Wheaton College.

While a religious backlash against sexual permissiveness undoubtedly played an important part in the new attitude, there were very profound practical reasons that women wanted to “know their partners.” That brief window in which people could have sex at random without any serious safety concerns had closed. There was an epidemic of chlamydia, the “silent disease” that exhibited no symptoms but that led to sterility if it went untreated.
By the mid-1980s
, an estimated one-sixth of young women who were sexually active were infected. The disease hit hardest in the black community, and infertility rates in young black women tripled.

The decade also ushered in an epidemic of genital herpes, the first widespread incurable sexually transmitted disease since the invention of penicillin.
It was,
Time
said
, “The New Scarlet Letter.” Although seldom life threatening, herpes caused painful sores that could erupt at any time, and it could be easily transmitted during unprotected sex. (Women suffered physically more than men, averaging more lesions with long-lasting pain.) The Centers for Disease Control estimated that twenty million Americans were infected, with up to half a million new cases each year. The media sounded the alarm with stories that usually centered around young women who were punished for promiscuity. (“They were just one-night stands, they deserved it anyway,” said one infected man of his unwitting partners.) Some of the cases cited were so horrific that the unnamed victims seemed to have stepped out of a Victorian novel. “A schoolteacher in Los Angeles developed herpes blisters on her genitals and legs a month before her scheduled wedding,” reported
Time.
“Her fiancé, who had given her the disease, walked out.”