When Everything Changed (57 page)

Unable to find work in Montgomery after the bus boycott, Rosa Parks moved to Detroit, where she supported her mother and disabled husband by sewing and working in a clothing factory until Representative John Conyers discovered her plight and hired her as a receptionist. When she died in 2005, her body lay in state in Washington in the Capitol Rotunda—the first woman so honored.

Linda LeClair, the star of the Barnard cohabitation scandals of the late 1960s, changed her name to Grace LeClair a few years later. “It was like—my name got worn out,” she says. She worked as a community organizer, an anti–nuclear power activist, a founder of a social investment fund, and an advocate for food issues and housing availability. She is now the executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League in New Hampshire. She and Peter Behr, her partner in that famous
New York Times
story on cohabitation, are still friends. As to her parents, she said, “We’ve always been close. They were not happy about that period at all, but we were never out of a relationship.” A while ago, LeClair was given a copy of a documentary on the sexual revolution that had a whole section on the Barnard protests. She showed it to her two daughters. “It was really exciting for them to see it,” she said. “They’ve heard the story before, in folklore. But it’s like when there were horseless carriages.”

Alice Paul died in 1977, without ever knowing that the Equal Rights Amendment was doomed. Her birthplace in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, is now designated a National Historic Landmark.

Sherri Finkbine’s real estate career put her six children through college; now her oldest daughter is a lawyer, the senior counsel for the appellate court in San Diego. Her oldest son has followed his mother into real estate. “My next son is a doctor,” she said, ticking them off. “The next daughter is a teacher. The next does sports on the radio and does a TV show in Idaho. My baby daughter is a documentary filmmaker. She’s making a trilogy of abortion movies. I told her I was passing the torch to her because I was sick of it.” Sherri, who has reclaimed her maiden name of Chessen, has embarked on another career as an author of children’s books.

“If anything, the thalidomide experience brought us closer,” she said of her family. “People said I was going to be doomed. I wasn’t. I’ve been blessed.”

Pat Lorance never again had a job as good as the tester position she lost in the 1970s. One employer told her when she applied for work that she was qualified but undesirable because she had filed suit against her former company. “I started crying,” she admitted. Lorance ended up working in shipping and receiving. “Actually, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve done,” she said cheerfully.

But her body gave out. Crippling back problems left her on disability. She lost her home and wound up in public housing, so immobilized by back pain that she was unable to make the bed: “I slept without sheets for four weeks, but I had a place to sleep, honey.” Eventually she was able to move into a better apartment that was more accessible to the handicapped. “God’s been good to me. He really has,” she insisted. “It’s been a long haul, but everything’s working out good now.”

In 1991 Congress responded to
Lorance v. AT&T Technologies
by passing an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that made it clear an employee who was hurt by a discriminatory seniority system could file a court challenge when she was injured by the system, as well as when it first went into effect. Pat Lorance still remembers being told, “I would never come off the law books. That I’d made a place in history. And I thought, ‘Ooooh.’ ”

After nearly fifty years as little girls’ favorite playmate (and endless naked encounters with Ken under the washcloth), Barbie had a midlife crisis in 1999 when she was challenged by the Bratz dolls, with those racy clothes that drove older Americans crazy when they saw them on their granddaughters.
In the panic that ensued
, Barbie dumped Ken and took up with an Australian surfer named Blaine, who still failed to bring back her popularity. Ken returned to reclaim her in 2006, with cooler clothes, better hair, and a different nose.

Anne Tolstoi Wallach had been too happy about having a job in advertising to think about discrimination when she started her career in the 1950s and ’60s. But she hardly failed to notice the changing times. In fact, she wrote advertisements for NOW in the early 1970s. (“Womanpower, it’s much too good to waste.”) She also kept moving up, to creative director and vice president at Grey Advertising. And as the 1970s ebbed away, she took stock in the most profitable way conceivable. Wallach wrote a novel,
Women’s Work,
about a snobby, sexist advertising firm whose authority figures sounded a lot like some of the people she had dealt with earlier in her career. The book brought in a stunning advance of $850,000 in 1980—the equivalent of more than $2 million now. She eventually left advertising to concentrate on her writing and published two other novels and a book of nonfiction. She is working on another novel.

Alison Foster, Anne’s daughter, remarried while she was getting her training in counseling psychology. She and her husband work at the same private school in Manhattan that her youngest son still attends and where Alison is dean of students. Occasionally, she says, they fantasize about starting a school of their own, or working together at a boarding school. It’s the closest thing she can think of to the communal life she liked so much when she was young.

Maria K. says she tried to raise her sons to understand “a girl’s point of view so that they would respect women and know what it felt like to be on the other end. They saw how cruel it could be when a guy hits and runs.” Now she has a teenage granddaughter, and she’s trying to give different lessons: “When I went to school, you got to be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, a homemaker. Those were your choices of what you wanted to be. There was nothing else. And now, whether it was the sexual revolution, whether it was the women’s rights, whether it was just the passage of time, there are all kinds of things that are available to her that I didn’t even know about—being a food scientist, being a journalist, there’s just a myriad of things that she can do with her life.”