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Introduction

“Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?”

On a steamy morning in the summer of 1960, Lois Rabinowitz, a 28-year-old secretary for an oil-company executive, unwittingly became the feature story of the day in New York City when she went down to traffic court to pay her boss’s speeding ticket. Wearing neatly pressed slacks and a blouse, Lois hitched a ride to the courthouse with her husband of two weeks, Irving. In traffic court, Magistrate Edward D. Caiazzo was presiding.

When Lois approached the bench, the Magistrate exploded in outrage. “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” he demanded, and sent her home to put on more appropriate clothes. Instead, the secretary gave the ticket to her husband, who managed to finish the transaction and pay the $10 fine—but not before the magistrate warned the newlywed Irving to “start now and clamp down a little or it’ll be too late.” When it was all over, Lois diplomatically told the courthouse reporters that “the way the judge thinks about women is very flattering” and promised to “go home and burn all my slacks.” 

Since Caiazzo had no known record of tossing out male petitioners who showed up in overalls or sweatshirts, it was pretty clear that the showdown was really about women’s place in the world, not the dignity of traffic court. “I get excited about this because I hold womanhood on a high plane and it hurts my sensibilities to see women tearing themselves down from this pedestal,” the magistrate told reporters. It was a convoluted expression of the classic view of sexual differences: women did not wear the pants in the family—or anywhere else, for that matter. In return, they were allowed to stand on a pedestal.

“She has a head almost too small for intellect.”

The idea that women were the weaker sex, meant to stay at home and tend to the children while the men took care of the outside world, was as old as Western civilization. The colonists who came over on the Mayflower believed that women were morally as well as intellectually and physically inferior, and that they should be married off as early as possible so their husbands could keep them on the straight and narrow. Their ministers enjoyed quoting St. Paul, who had urged the Corinthians to “Let your women keep silent in the churches. . . . And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home.” But it was occasionally difficult to wring the proper degree of deference out of women who had crossed the ocean in small boats, helped carve settlements out of the wilderness, and spent their days alone in isolated farmhouses surrounded by increasingly ticked-off Indians. One early settler wrote with some irritation that his sister was “not so humble and heavenly as is desired.”

The colonial farm wife actually enjoyed considerable status within her family, because she manufactured many of the things her husband and children needed to survive and contributed greatly to the family fortunes. (One New England Quaker remembered her colonial grandmother being busy with “candle making, soap making, butter and cheese making, spinning, weaving, dyeing and of course all the knitting and sewing and dressmaking and tailoring and probably the shoe making and the millinery” for her husband and fourteen children.) But in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution kicked in and families began moving to the cities. The middle-class housewife stopped spinning thread and making candles, and instead focused her considerable energies on household duties that had been given short shrift in the countryside—nurturing her children like tender little sprouts, cleaning, and cooking effortful dinners. It was all very important, everyone agreed. (And very difficult, considering that making a simple cake before the invention of the eggbeater required three-quarters of an hour of hand beating.) But it did not create wealth, and America was a society that had trouble taking anyone without an economic role seriously. 

To raise their stature, women were given the morality franchise. Middle-class society, with women’s eager cooperation, placed them on that pedestal. (It was a good metaphor—they got higher status, but precious little room to maneuver.) If colonial women were thought to be rather lax and lascivious by nature, in need of correction by their fathers and husbands, Victorian women were elevated to be the moral guardians of their families. Men, who used to have that job, could hardly afford to focus on virtue when they had to wring out a living in the dog-eat-dog marketplace. Their wives were going to have to be good enough for both of them. Women were supposed to protect that goodness by staying far away from the outside world of business and politics. (“Our men are sufficiently money-making. Let us keep our women and children from contagion as long as possible,” wrote Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the hugely popular Godey’s Lady’s Book.)

This new feminine portfolio was both empowering and humiliating. A woman’s impulse toward goodness was seen as instinctual, a God-given gift in a being who was still regarded as none too bright and weak in the face of the terrors of the outside world. “She reigns in the heart. . . . The household altar is her place of worship and service,” said Dr. Charles Meigs in a famous lecture to nineteenth-century male gynecology students.  “She has a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.”

The central point in the Western vision of sexual differences was that a woman’s place was in the home, leaving men to run everything that went on outside the front door. Men provided and protected; women served and deferred. It was an ancient and extremely durable theory, but riddled with holes. For one thing, it ignored the problem of what happened to these dependent creatures if their husbands failed to live up to their end of the bargain by dying, taking to drink, or abandoning the family. (Ladies’ Magazine, a popular periodical in the early nineteenth century, helpfully recommended that if a wife felt her husband was in danger of decamping, she should win him back with “increased anxiety to please.”) And, of course, the idea that women were meant only to work within their own homes was never applied to large chunks of the population. After the Civil War, ex-slaves who wanted to take care of their families full-time were hounded into domestic service or fieldwork, amid white denunciation of black female “loaferism.” Most rural farmwives had to labor in the fields with their husbands rather than presiding over the hearth, and many urban women, black and white, had to earn wages to help feed their families. 

But for the middle class, the rule about women’s place endured. Remarkable women might, on occasion, merge marriage, motherhood, and work, or carve out a career for themselves in traditionally male occupations. But women who worked as doctors, architects, and politicians were always the rare exceptions, never the precursors of change. They were depicted in the media as strange mutations—“female physician” or “lawyer and grandmother”—whose achievements could never be mentioned except in the context of their femaleness. A 1960 story in the New York Times about Peggy Keenan, a mine operator in South Dakota, was headlined “Feminine Fashion Has a Place in the Mine.” When Betty Lou Raskin, a member of the Society of Plastics Engineers, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine on the shortage of young scientists, the editors’ subhead announced: “A lady chemist argues that the answer is to tap female brainpower.” 

“Talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.”

In 1960, when our story begins, although computers were still pretty much the stuff of science fiction, almost all the other things that make modern life feel modern—jet travel, television, nuclear terror—had arrived. But when it came to women, the age-old convictions were still intact. Everything from America’s legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were, in almost every way, the weaker sex. They were not meant to compete with men, to act independently of men, to earn their own bread, or have adventures on their own. While circumstances varied by state, many American women lived under laws that gave their husbands control not only of their property, but also their earnings. They could not go into business without their husbands’ permission, or get credit without male cosigners. Women were barred from serving on juries in some states. The rest either made it very difficult for women to serve, or very easy for them to avoid serving. (No one questioned why a movie about a troubled jury was called Twelve Angry Men.)  Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was advised, in a memo from his clerk, that permitting women to serve “may encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.”

At work, employers routinely paid women less than men for doing the same jobs. The National Office Managers Association found that a third of the companies it surveyed had dual salaries as a matter of policy. Many employers cited the extremely convenient assumption that working women were either single and living with their parents or married and bringing in extra “pin money” to supplement their husbands’ earnings. Maria K., a single mother working in upstate New York, remembered protesting that men doing the same things she did “made twice as much” and being told that “they had families to support.”

Given the assumption of male superiority in everything related to the world of work, the different pay scales made sense. So did simply refusing to hire women at all. (In 1961 there were 454 federal civil-service-job categories for college graduates, and more than 200 of them were restricted to male candidates.) To facilitate employers’ ability to discriminate, newspapers invariably divided their classified ads into HELP WANTED—MEN and HELP WANTED—WOMEN. Medical and law schools banned female students, or limited their numbers to a handful per class. There was, for all practical purposes, a national consensus that women could not be airplane pilots, firefighters, television news anchors, carpenters, movie directors, or CEOs. 

Then, suddenly, everything changed. The cherished convictions about women and what they could do were smashed in the lifetime of many of the women living today. It happened so fast that the revolution seemed to be over before either side could really find its way to the barricades. And although the transformation was imperfect and incomplete, it was still astonishing. A generation that was born into a world where women were decreed to have too many household chores to permit them to serve on juries, and where a spokesman for NASA would say that any “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach,” would come of age in a society where female astronauts and judges were routine. Parents who hoped for a child to carry on the family business, or for another doctor in the family, or for a kid to play ball with in the backyard at night, no longer drooped with disappointment when the new baby turned out to be a girl. It was the liberation that countless generations of American women had been waiting for, whether they knew it or not. And it happened in our time.

***

From Chapter 1

Repudiating Rosie

“Some of you do wear a cautious face.”

In January of 1960, Mademoiselle welcomed in a new decade for America’s young women by urging them to be . . . less boring. “Some of you do wear a cautious face,” the editors admitted. “But are you really—cautious, unimaginative, determined to play it safe at any price?” Mademoiselle certainly hoped not. But its readers had good reason to set their sights low. The world around them had been drumming one message into their heads since they were babies: Women are meant to marry and let their husbands take care of all the matters relating to the outside world. They were not supposed to have adventures or compete with men for serious rewards. (“I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” said Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby book had served as the Bible for the postwar generations of mothers.) Newsweek, decrying a newly noticed phenomenon of dissatisfied housewives in 1960, identified the core of the issue: menstruation. “From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman’s role,” the newsmagazine wrote. “As Freud was credited with saying: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ Though no group of women has ever pushed aside these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them in good grace.”  

Most girls grew up without ever seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver. Jo Freeman, who went to Berkeley in the early ’60s, realized only later that while she had spent four years “in one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world—and one with a progressive reputation,” she had never once had a female professor. “I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.” If a young woman expressed interest in a career outside the traditional teacher/nurse/secretary, her mentors carefully shepherded her back to the proper path. As a teenager in Pittsburgh, Angela Nolfi told her guidance counselor that she wanted to be an interior decorator, but even that very feminine pursuit apparently struck her advisor as too high-risk or out of the ordinary. “He said: ‘Why don’t you be a home-economics teacher?’ ” she recalled. And once Mademoiselle had finished urging its readers to shoot for the sky, it celebrated the end of the school year with an article on careers that seemed to presume most new college graduates would be assuming secretarial duties, and ended with tips on “pre-job hand-beautifying” for a new generation of typists.

Whenever things got interesting, women seemed to vanish from the scene. There was no such thing as a professional female athlete—even in schools, it was a given that sports were for boys. An official for the men-only Boston Marathon opined that it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.” When Mademoiselle asked seven “headstrong people who have made names for themselves lately” what the 1960s would bring, that magazine for young women managed to find only one headstrong woman to include in the mix—playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who did double duty as the panel’s only minority.

“Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men.”

Nothing sent the message about women’s limited options more forcefully than television, which had just finished conquering the nation with a speed that made Alexander the Great look like an underachiever. In 1950, only about 9 percent of American homes boasted a set, but by 1960, nearly 90 percent of families had a TV and those who didn’t were feeling very deprived indeed. Beverly Burton, a Wyoming farm wife, had been estranged throughout the 1950s from a mother who had once told her she was sorry Beverly had ever been born. When her mother decided to mend fences, she sent Burton a note saying “I hope this will cover the past”—attached to a television set. And it did indeed turn out to be a turning point in the relationship.

The postwar generation that was entering adolescence in the 1960s had grown up watching Howdy Doody, the must-see TV for the first wave of baby boomers. Howdy was a raucous puppet show in which the human performers interspersed broad physical comedy with endless pitches for the sponsors’ products. “But all the slapstick stopped when they brought out Princess Summerfall Winterspring,” remembered Stephen Davis, a childhood fan whose father worked on the show. The princess, played by a teenage singer named Judy Tyler, was the only long-running female in Howdy Doody’s crowded cast. The role had been created when a producer realized “we could sell a lot of dresses if only we had a girl on the show,” and the princess spent most of her time expressing concern about plot developments taking place while she was offstage. Adults approved. “The harshness and crudeness which so many parents objected to in Howdy Doody now appears to have largely been a case of too much masculinity,” said Variety. But the stuff that made kids love the show—the broad comedy and bizarre plots—were all on the male side of the equation. Princess Summerfall Winterspring sang an occasional song—and watched.

The more popular and influential television got, the more efficiently women were swept off the screen. In the 1950s, when the medium was still feeling its way, there were a number of shows built around women—mainly low-budget comedies like Our Miss Brooks, Private Secretary, and My Little Margie. None of them were exactly role models—Miss Brooks was a teacher who spent most of her time mooning over a hunky biology instructor and Margie lived off her rich father. But the shows were unquestionably about them. And the most popular program of all was I Love Lucy, in which Lucille Ball was the focus of every plotline, ever striving to get out of her three-room apartment and into her husband Ricky’s nightclub show.

But by 1960 television was big business and if women were around at all, they were in the kitchen, where they decorously stirred a single pot on the stove while their husbands and children dominated the action. (In 1960, the nominees for the Emmy for best comedy show were The Bob Cummings Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Phil Silvers Show, and Father Knows Best.) When a script did turn its attention to the wife, daughter, or mother, it was frequently to remind her of her place and the importance of letting boys win. On Father Knows Best, younger daughter Kathy was counseled by her Dad on how to deliberately lose a ballgame. Teenage daughter Betty found happiness when she agreed to stop competing with a male student for a junior executive job at the local department store and settled for the more gender-appropriate task of modeling bridal dresses.

In dramatic series, women stood on the sidelines, looking worried. When Betty Friedan asked why there couldn’t be a female lead in Mr. Novak—which was, after all, a series about a high school teacher—she said the producer explained:  “For drama, there has to be action, conflict. . . . For a woman to make decisions, to triumph over anything, would be unpleasant, dominant, masculine.” Later in the decade, the original Star Trek series would feature a story about a woman so desperate to become a starship captain—a post apparently restricted to men—that she arranged to have her brain transferred into Captain Kirk’s body. The crew quickly noticed that the captain was manicuring his nails at the helm and having hysterics over the least little thing.

Cowboy action series were the best-loved TV entertainment in 1960. Eleven of the top twenty-five shows were Westerns, and they underlined the rule that women did not have adventures, except the ones that involved getting kidnapped or caught in a natural disaster. “Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men,” said Michael Landon, one of the leads in Bonanza, the long-running story of an all-male family living on a huge Nevada ranch after the Civil War. Perhaps to emphasize their heterosexuality, the Cartwright men had plenty of romances. But the scriptwriters killed their girlfriends off at an extraordinarily speedy clip. The family patriarch, Ben, had been widowed three times, and his three sons all repeatedly got married or engaged, only to quickly lose their mates to the grim reaper. A rather typical episode began with Joe (Landon) happily dancing with a new fiancée. Before the first commercial, the poor girl was murdered on her way home from the hoedown.

“All the men become lawyers and all the women work on committees.”

TV created the impression that once married, a woman literally never left her house. If the viewers knew that really wasn’t true, many did accept the message that when matrimony began, working outside the home ended. In reality, however, by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been at the peak of World War II, and the vast majority of them were married. (Young single adult women were, as we’ll see, as rare as female action heroes at this point in history.) More than 30 percent of American wives were holding down jobs, including almost 40 percent of those with school-age children.

Yet to look at the way Americans portrayed themselves on television, in newspapers and magazines, you’d have thought that married women who worked were limited to a handful of elementary school teachers and the unlucky wives of sharecroppers and drunkards. Marlene Sanders, one of the very few women who managed to do on-the-air reporting for network television, left in 1960 to give birth to a son. “After about six weeks I thought: ‘I will go crazy’ ” she recalled. She hired a housekeeper and offered a male college student free room and board in return for filling in when she, her husband, and the housekeeper were all unavailable. It seemed to work, but Sanders had no idea whether the arrangement was normal or bizarre. She knew no other working mothers and there was, she said, “no public discussion of the child-care problems of working couples.” One of the first articles she ever saw on the subject, she added, was one “about how I had this male babysitter.”

If all the working women were invisible it was in part because of the jobs most of them were doing. They weren’t sitting next to Sanders in the network news bureaus. They were office workers—receptionists or bookkeepers, often part-time. They stood behind cash registers in stores, cleaned offices or homes. If they were professionals, they were—with relatively few exceptions—in low-paying occupations that had long been defined as particularly suited to women, like teacher, nurse, or librarian. The nation’s ability to direct most of its college-trained women into the single career of teaching was the foundation upon which the national public school system was built and American tax rates were kept low. The average salary of a female teacher was $4,689 at a time when the government was reporting the average starting salary for a male liberal-arts graduate fresh out of college was $5,400. (Women graduates’ salaries were significantly lower, probably in part because so many of them were going into teaching.)

Another reason the nation ignored the fact that so many housewives had outside jobs was that working women tended not to be well-represented among upper income families. The politicians, business executives, editors, and scriptwriters who set the tone for the public discussion usually felt that not working was simply better. After the war, Americans had a powerful and understandable desire to settle down and return to normal. Since they were doing so in an era of incredible economic growth, it was easy to decide that stay-at-home housewives were part of the package. Women could devote all their energies to taking care of their children and husbands (politicians, businessmen, and editors included). If some of them wanted a break from domestic routine, they could volunteer to work on the PTA or, if they were wealthy enough, the charity fashion show. (“It is a tradition in the Guggenheimer family that all the men become lawyers and all the women work on committees,” said a story in the Times about some well-to-do New Yorkers.) Men were supposed to be the breadwinners. A woman who worked to help support her struggling—or striving—family might want to downplay the fact rather than making her husband look inadequate. As late as 1970, a survey of women under 45 who were or had been married found that 80 percent believed “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

The limited options for women who did work, and the postwar propaganda about the glories of homemaking convinced the young women who were graduating from high school and college in the early 1960s that once you married, the good life was the stay-at-home life. Prestige lay in having a husband who was successful enough to keep his wife out of the workplace. Esther Peterson, the top-ranking woman in the Kennedy administration, asked an auditorium full of working-class high school girls in Los Angeles how many expected to have a “home and kids and a family” and the room was full of waving hands. But when Peterson wanted to know how many expected to work, only one or two girls signified interest. She then asked how many of their mothers worked and, she recalled later “all those hands went up again.” The girls were disturbed by the implicit message. “In those days nine out of ten girls would work outside the home at some point in their lives,” Peterson said. “But each of the girls thought that she would be that tenth girl.” 

“I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.”

Employers happily took advantage of the assumption that female college graduates would work for only a few years before retiring to domesticity. They offered up a raft of theoretically glamorous short-term jobs that were intended to end long before the young women would begin to care about things like health care or pensions or even salaries. Sociologist David Riesman noted that instead of contemplating careers in fields like business or architecture “even very gifted and creative young women are satisfied to assume that on graduation they will get underpaid ancillary positions, whether as a Time-Life researcher or United Nations guide or publisher’s assistant or reader, where they are seldom likely to advance to real opportunity.”

First and foremost among these mini–career paths was being a stewardess. Girls in the postwar era had grown up reading books such as Julie with Wings, in which beautiful and spunky young women beat out the massive competition to become flight attendants. Along with teenage fiction about Cherry Ames, the inexhaustible nurse, the stewardess novels were virtually the only girls’ career books around—unless you counted the girl detectives, who didn’t seem to get paid for their efforts. Winning your “wings,” readers learned, might require leaving behind an unimaginative boyfriend. (“Tug, there’s a whole world for me to discover before I marry and all its people for me to know. I must follow the silver path for a while. Alone.”) There would be difficult passengers and—according to the novels—an extraordinary number of airborne criminals. But the rewards were great. Within a few chapters, the heroine of Silver Wings for Vicki had attracted two new boyfriends, met a movie star, and helped the police arrest a smuggler. In the real world, the job was a lot more mundane, but it was still virtually the only one a young woman could choose that offered the chance to travel. As a result the airlines got more than a hundred applicants for every opening. Schools sprung up offering special courses that would improve the odds of getting into a flight attendant training program. (The Grace Downs Air Career School breathlessly asked potential clients to envision themselves being able to “greet oncoming passengers at lunch time in New York and say farewell before dinner in Minneapolis!”)

Despite the fact that the American experience was built around women who ventured off to create homes in an unexplored continent, there had always been a presumption that a proper woman didn’t move around too much, and there was certainly a conviction that sending a woman on a business trip raised far too many risks of impropriety. Georgia Panter, a stewardess for United Airlines in 1960, noticed that except for the occasional family, her flights were populated only by men. One regular run, the “Executive Flight” from New York to Chicago, actually barred female passengers. The men got extra large steaks, drinks, and cigars—which the stewardesses were supposed to bend over and light.

Women had been eager participants in the early years of flying, when things were disorganized and open to all comers. But any hopes they had for gaining a foothold in commercial aviation were dashed when the Commerce Department, under pressure from underemployed male pilots, exiled women from the field by prohibiting them from flying planes carrying passengers in bad weather. Instead, they got the role of hostess. The airlines originally hired nurses to serve as flight attendants, but by the postwar era, trained health-care workers were long gone and the airlines were looking for attractive, unmarried young women whose main duty would be serving drinks and meals.

Georgia Panter and her sister—who also became a United stewardess—grew up in Smith Center, Kansas, a plains town so remote “we used to run outside if a car went by to see who was in it.” When the Panter sisters joined United, they became celebrities back home, and the local paper ran a picture of them in their uniforms. They quickly learned the downsides of the job, from the very low salary to the indignity of constantly being weighed and measured by “counselors” watching to make sure they kept their slender figures. “We had inspections often,” Georgia said wryly. “Everybody seemed to think they should inspect us. Every department.” (Besides limits on weight and height, stewardesses were required, according to one promotion, to have hands that were “soft and white”—a hint as to how welcome African-American applicants were at the time.) But despite the appearance police and pay that was lower than she had received working as a clerk for the University of Denver, Panter loved having the chance to travel. She and her sister gradually accumulated enough seniority to allow them to fly around the world on their airline passes, and they found that single women tourists were about as rare as female businesswomen on airplanes. “People were fascinated. They’d come up to us, talk to us, invite us to their homes. They thought it was so unusual.”

The airlines tried to make sure their stewardesses didn’t stay around long enough to become dissatisfied with their benefits, or acquainted with their union. The average tenure when the Panter sisters arrived was about eighteen months, thanks to a rule requiring the women to quit if they got married. In an era that was breaking all records for early weddings, that was all it took to ensure very rapid turnover. If a stewardess was still on the job after three years, one United executive said in 1963, “I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.” Supervisors combed through wedding announcements looking for evidence of rule breaking. They discovered one stewardess was secretly married while the young woman was working with Georgia Panter on a cross-country flight. When the plane was making its stop in Denver, a supervisor met the flight. “He pulled that poor woman off,” Georgia said, “and we never saw her again.”  

From When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. Published by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2009 by Gail Collins. All rights reserved.