When Everything Changed (58 page)

Dena Ivey left the air force in 1995 and returned to college in Fairbanks, where she decided that she wanted to become a lawyer. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder Law School, and after a stint working for the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights, she became an assistant district attorney for the state. “I see myself defending victims against a LOT of domestic violence. And I see myself as a defender of traditional Yupik values—which do not include smacking people around.”

June LaValleur and her partner Jill were together for ten years before they broke up, amicably, sharing custody of a dog that they are very careful not to quarrel in front of. “I’m looking for a partner now,” she said. “Gender is not as important as not being a Republican.”

(Later, in an update, June reported that she was engaged to a retired engineering professor. He’s a Democrat.)

Madeleine Kunin served three terms as governor of Vermont, during which she made a visit to the
New York Times
editorial board, cruising into the building where she had been offered a job in the cafeteria in lieu of an editing slot. (
Her delight at the turnaround
was not dimmed when a security guard approached the plainclothes policeman who was accompanying her and said, “Welcome to the
Times,
Governor.”) She announced in 1990 that she would not run for reelection, wrote her autobiography, and became ambassador to Switzerland, the country where she had been born, becoming what was surely the first U.S. ambassador in memory who was actually able to speak the local languages. Now a college professor, she finds her female students “kind of a puzzle.” The young women, she mused, seem to lack “bravado, or confidence. Of course there are lots of exceptions and it’s improving, but it’s creeping up so much more slowly than I’d have thought when I was elected governor.”

Georgia Panter Nielsen got married in 1968, after the airlines’ rules against married flight attendants were finally wiped off the books. When she ended her career in 2002, after forty-two years of flying, she was one of about only sixteen hundred flight attendants who had stayed on long enough to reach retirement age, out of the hundreds of thousands who started careers in the sky. Her generation had won their fight to make their jobs real careers rather than a brief interval between college and marriage for attractive young ladies. But what the women’s rights movement and union activism achieved, the decline of the airline industry helped take away. Mergers and bankruptcies, crammed planes and rapid turnovers, made it hard to envision enjoying the job for decades on end. “The hourly pay is back to 1990s pay, and staffing is down,” said Nielsen. “The work’s become so onerous and difficult, they’re saying this is again not viewed as a career opportunity so much as a short-term job.” When United went into bankruptcy, Nielsen helped organize the retired flight attendants to protect their health care and pensions. “We lobby, we picket, we go to Washington,” she reported.

Wilma Mankiller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. She and her husband live in a house in Mankiller Flats, Oklahoma, the traditional home of her family, “surrounded by my books, my art, my grandchildren, and the natural world.”
In her autobiography
, she recalled a meeting she had attended in the Midwest where a man approached her to say he had an important message. “He told me he was an Oneida, and one of the prophecies he had heard was that this time period is the time of the women—a time for women to take on a more important role in society. He described this as ‘the time of the butterfly.’ ”

In 2000, when she was 66, Gloria Steinem stunned many of her friends by getting married. She wed David Bale, a 61-year-old businessman and social activist from South Africa, in a ceremony at Wilma Mankiller’s home in Oklahoma. “
The bride wore
jeans and a white shirt; the groom, black clothes and an Indian belt,” reported the
New York Times.

“We had both spent our lives doing essentially what we weren’t supposed to do, and… we ended up in the same place,” said Steinem. “I thought to myself, we’ve spent thirty years equalizing the marriage laws, so why not? And besides, Wilma Mankiller offered us a Cherokee ceremony, so who can resist that?” It was not quite the same as the time when Angelina Grimké had thrilled all the women’s rights advocates in the early nineteenth century by proving that a feminist could find a husband. No one had ever doubted, after all, that Gloria Steinem had the option. But it was quite a moment when she decided to exercise it. She and Bale told each other it wasn’t such a big deal; that at their age “till death do you part” wasn’t really all that long.

It was, in fact, hardly any time at all. Bale soon developed fatal brain lymphoma and died in 2003 after a terrible decline into confusion and paranoia. “I hope my body goes before my brain and not the other way around. It was hard on him, hard on everyone around him,” said Steinem. She returned to a solitary life, to the degree that someone who was constantly traveling or entertaining visiting feminists at home could be alone. Steinem still writes and works full tilt for women’s causes, particularly in the developing world. She has given up high heels for boots but even now finds herself continually identified as the attractive feminist. “The part that’s hurtful is that having worked hard and continuing to work hard at 73, I still find accomplishments attributed to my appearance. I would have thought I could outgrow that by now.”

Martha Griffiths retired from Congress in 1974, spent several years becoming the first woman to serve on the boards of various corporations, and then accepted the offer to run for lieutenant governor of Michigan with James Blanchard, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. They were elected as a team in 1982 and 1986, but in 1990, when Griffiths was 78, Blanchard dumped her, citing her age and health. Griffiths, who had lost absolutely none of her feistiness, said that it was women and old people who had given Blanchard his victories and that he ignored them at his peril. Sure enough, he was defeated in a close election. “
I don’t know if
I feel vindicated, but I think it clearly shows that I won it for him the first two times,” Griffiths said. She died at 91 in 2003.

Nora Ephron, who was told by
Newsweek
that women couldn’t be writers, went on to write some of her era’s bestselling books and most popular movies. She is now a director, columnist, and blogger. “When the women’s movement began to fade, I used to do about ten speeches a year, in part about how not enough had happened,” she recalled. Now she thinks she was completely wrong. “It’s a gigantic change. It’s unbelievable what happened. It’s shocking. It’s amazing. And I just look back and think—you must not have been seeing something. Because look at this THING.”

Lois Rabinowitz, after being ejected from traffic court for wearing slacks, August 9, 1960.
(AP Images)