Rebels in White Gloves (26 page)

It is ironic, then, that the galvanizing event for Cynthia at Pan Am revolved around the denial to the women pushing coffee carts the protections reserved for the men in the cockpit. When the airline added the 747-SP to its fleet for long flights, the pilots were provided bunks, while the stewardesses were given nothing. “We were also starting to learn about ozone poisoning on these higher-altitude-flying airplanes; there was no air quality control in the cabin. And flight attendants were not covered by OSHA. The FAA cared only about the cockpit.” The industry’s “Fly Me” sexism was so blatant that it served as a crucible for numerous feminists: Just a few years before Cynthia took to the skies, Pan Am flight attendant Patricia Ireland—who would serve as president of NOW in the 1990s—had also been “jolted into feminism” when the airline told her that her medical insurance did not cover her husband, though male employees’ wives were covered.

The Transport Workers Union was not much more sympathetic to its female members’ needs. “They called us ‘the girls,’ and ignored us,” Cynthia recalls. “When I suggested that we survey all the flight attendants about their concerns, they decided not to understand English. We almost outnumbered the other councils put together, and they didn’t want to see the girls have too much power. They finally expelled ‘the San Francisco Seven’—a group of women who were trying to form a new union just for flight attendants. I still wasn’t into radical change, and kept trying to work with the TWU, going to all their meetings. But it was short-lived. We finally had to take matters in our own hands.

“A lot of women at Pan Am wanted to strike just to hurt the company, they were so mad. It takes a lot to get women angry, but it also takes more to appease them. Men can get angry and blow it off, but women take it more personally. In the end we had a ‘blue flu,’ and I ended up being served the court papers, which we thought we’d dodged by not making me an official. I’d started taking labor-relations classes like mad, and found wonderful mentors at the School of Industrial Relations. I wrote our sixty-five-page contract opener. Fortunately, there was at Pan Am a more gentlemanly code than at United, where women were getting their tires slashed—though some of my colleagues were careful about checking their suitcases, in case illegal drugs were put in. But eighteen months of negotiation did teach me that those in power get to write the rules.”

Though they did not recognize it at the time, these women were preparing the future of a labor movement that was in mortal decline elsewhere. In 1970, 30 percent of all American workers in private industry were unionized; today just 11 percent are, and those troops are increasingly female and minority. Cynthia is proud of that legacy but has never quite shaken the feeling that she failed as a Wellesley grad. “While most of you sport your MBAs, L.L.D.’s, M.D.’s or Ph.D.’s,” she wrote to her classmates in 1994, “I have my union card, which may account for my metamorphosis from Goldwater Republican to liberal Democrat.” Later, she explains: “I thought maybe if I’d been president of a bank, the rest of the world would recognize me. At times I still imagine it would have been nice to have been born with a silver spoon, or married one. But then I think maybe you don’t get in tune with the rest of humanity by being removed from it.

“I do know that my life is better than my mother’s because I have more, not power exactly, but choice.” Even after the birth of her daughter in 1986, Cynthia continued to fly and maintain an income separate from her husband’s. She also kept control of the condo she’d bought in her early thirties. “My father didn’t want me to buy it, but I’d begun to think I might never get married and decided I needed roots. I also got a loan much larger than I should have on my paltry salary, from a bank officer who winked and said, ‘I imagine you don’t have to buy most of your dinners, dear.’ I’ve refused to refinance it because then it would become joint property, and I made my husband sign a quitclaim deed on it when we got married in 1981. I also insisted on keeping a flight fund, ten thousand dollars in my own separate bank account. My mother had always been trapped. To have no exit is hell. I wanted to always be sure I had an out.”

In 1969, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was using
his
to describe job functions for its directors and investigators and
her
for all clerks and secretaries. In many states, women could not establish a business, buy stocks, or get a loan without a male cosigner. At many professional schools, quotas were still in place—quotas of the old sort, which capped the numbers of admitted women (or Asians or Jews). Thirty years later, though white males comprise just 43 percent of the workforce, they hold 95 percent of senior management positions. Less than 6 percent of all law partners and less than .5 percent of top corporate managers are women. Male executives’ median earnings remain 57 percent higher than females’; male professors’, 41 percent higher; male economists’, 25 percent higher.

No surprise, then, that one in four women in the Wellesley class of ’69 says she was discriminated against in hiring and promotion and half say they would have earned more if they weren’t women. Mary Day Kent recalls personnel departments and help-wanted ads designating jobs open to women and those only for men: The former were typically clerical and specified that applicants should be young, single, and good-looking. Holmes Bridgers Ramsay, married two weeks after graduation, was asked what her family plans were, and when she admitted to wanting
children, was turned down for bank-management-trainee jobs. Nancy Brenner was turned away from Grey Advertising, despite her Harvard MBA, because Grey executives believed clients like General Foods would not work with a woman—a not unreasonable assumption, given that the Harvard Business School’s own survey of a thousand male executives that year found only a third in favor of women in management positions. When newlywed Pat Sinclair interviewed for her first job at Shawmut Bank, they asked what kind of birth control she was using. She told them. Lonny Laszlo Higgins was turned down by seven medical schools because “we don’t want to give you the place of a man who will support his family and waste a spot on someone who’ll just go out and get pregnant.”

A third of the class reports having been sexually harassed. After her work with the Poor People’s Campaign, Abby van Alstyne went to New York in the early 1970s to became a Medicare investigator for HEW. Several months after her arrival, one of her superiors in the Office of Civil Rights, a married man, told her that she had to join him on an overnight trip inspecting hospitals in Washington, D.C. After a dinner with colleagues, he asked her to step into his hotel room for a minute. Once behind closed doors, he pulled her toward him and tried to kiss her. She extricated herself “as tactfully” as she could. The next day, she was removed from cases she’d worked on for months; in the weeks thereafter, what had been consistently “excellent” performance evaluations of her work now consistently came up “poor.” She filed a complaint, a two-year investigation found probable cause, and the superior was reprimanded. But he made life so unpleasant for her—excluding her from meetings, interfering with her cases—that she finally left the organization.

For her classmates, the consequences have not often been so dire. Their education and relative affluence have buffered them from much of the worst. Few have worked in the environments where sexual harassment is most pervasive and aggressive—manufacturing, police work, the military. And unlike the majority of working women, most had the resources to walk away from a job. Nearly all of those who were harassed simply put up with it and—whether because they’d been taught as girls that they simply had to endure boys being boys or because they’d been tempered by the sexual revolution—remained relatively untraumatized
by the event. Elizabeth Michel simply laughed at an embryology professor at Yale who was clearly perturbed to have a woman in his class and taunted her with cartoons of breasts captioned as melons, peaches, and pears. At Dean Witter, Rosalie Kiki Clough ignored regular pats on the ass and requests from men to “Bring me some coffee, would you, doll?” When Constance Hoenk Shapiro was named chair of the Department of Human Service Studies at Cornell—where even now just 9 percent of full professors are women—she was asked by a dean during salary negotiations if she needed some time to get her husband’s approval. Several years earlier, an administrator had suggested that “we discuss your tenure review materials over a late dinner at my house.” In both cases, Connie declined.

Pam Colony had completed a Ph.D. in anatomy at Boston University and a postdoctorate at Harvard Medical School when she got her first faculty job offer at Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania. Despite warnings from colleagues that several senior faculty in the department were “antiwoman” and would be dead set against her getting tenure, she accepted. She knew job and tenure opportunities for women were scant in all institutions. Though in 1970 women composed 40 percent of the students at top universities, they made up just 10 percent of the faculty. At Columbia, just 2 percent of tenured faculty were women, and of six hundred tenured professors at Harvard, just three were women. The sciences were the worst, but so far Pam’s work experiences had been good. She had spent years running a lab for her mentor, whom she considered unwaveringly respectful and fair. Once in ten years, he had made an advance, but “when I said no, that was it, and we both let it go.”

As her advisers had warned, Pam’s difficulties at Hershey would prove neither so minor nor so easy to overcome. Her colleagues, she says, impeded her progress at every turn. Her orders for chemicals wouldn’t go out, her lab animals would disappear. After she waited four years for a computer critical to her work, when it finally arrived, it was given to a man who had just joined the faculty. Other department chairs—all of them men—did support her, giving her equipment and small grants, but there was only so much they could do. “There was little recourse. Each department was a fiefdom; if your chair was not supportive, you were up the creek. People told me I should document things, and I said, ‘Oh no, it will work out.’ I loved my work and had consistently
good reviews from students and funding from the National Institutes of Health and the respect of my colleagues: A number of professors had expressed admiration when I failed the chairman’s Ph.D. student, who was later thrown out of the program. At that point, I still believed that tenure wasn’t personal but professional.

“I was denied tenure on grievously erroneous grounds. I was supposed to review and sign my dossier, and never saw it: There were omissions on my bibliography, teaching assignments left out, miscalculations of my teaching evaluations. When I appealed it to the committee on the main campus, the problems were so transparent that I immediately won a new tenure review. But I knew it wasn’t going to change at Hershey, so I started looking for a job.” Pam accepted a position as premed adviser and researcher at Franklin and Marshall College. “I went with the highest expectations and did a good job. But I got burned there as well, this time by a woman dean, who felt I didn’t play by her rules. The day the grant that paid my salary ended, she gave me one day’s notice that I was fired.”

With hindsight, Pam recognizes the naïveté of her expectation that the workplace would reward, with perfect blind justice, dedicated teaching and innovative research. The dashing of such expectations was a common experience in the class. “In our world of women at Wellesley,” recalls Ann Sherwood Sentilles, “we were endowed with a sense that we could do anything. I spent a lot of time believing in a meritocracy—that if you’re good and a nice kid and work hard, you’ll be rewarded. I was woefully unprepared for the way the world still regarded women.” It was not just their belated encounter with the harsher realities of a coed world, however, that slapped these women out of their romantic notions of work. Though one admires Pam’s refusal to compromise her principles, it’s hard to say how much of her mistreatment was sexist and how much was the price exacted of lots of people, male or female, who refuse to play the political game.

Pam’s personal life no doubt fueled her enemies’ disapproval. Her first marriage, to a cab-driving Harvard Ph.D. unraveled painfully and somewhat publicly. “When I found myself sitting at work crying all day, I knew I needed to move on.” Throughout, she remained remote from her colleagues, spending her free hours riding horses in endurance competitions, a perfect solitary pursuit.

Pam married her second husband soon after joining the faculty at Franklin and Marshall. He was in law school after thirteen years as a social worker, and Pam supported him. “I didn’t mind. I decided how the money was spent, and he never crossed me.” After two miscarriages, Pam was forty-two and pregnant again when she was fired. “We were screwed. I was bleeding a lot and terrified I’d lose the baby and now we’d lost our health insurance. I got a job offer back at Hershey in surgery. They agreed to let me work half-time with flexible hours and run my own research lab, so I accepted, though because I’d quit once, I’d relinquished my rights to a new tenure review. The first six months were rough. The dean of the medical school didn’t allow me to be paid until the chief of surgery, a completely fair and honest man, went to him in support of me.

“To this day, I’m not sure if all that I went through was about me individually or would have been turned on any woman, but I would push a woman to do the opposite of what I did, which was to let it go by. I’m much too trusting. I either have to believe in people or give it all up. Our mothers had learned to acquiesce, to not expect to be on a par and to not demand anything. I had assimilated a lot of that. Way too much.”

That they are insufficiently bold in the world, still too much the deferential girls groomed at Wellesley, is a worry for many of the women of ’69. When Jan Krigbaum was hired by Family Planning International to be associate regional director in Bangladesh, she became paralyzed with fear that she would fail. She relived that feeling in 1992, when the Clintons asked her to go to Little Rock to assist in their transition into the White House. As a deputy assistant to the president, assigned to bring in diverse personnel, “I spent the whole first year waking up at two in the morning feeling terrified—literally physically terrified. I had this kind of lockjaw, where I couldn’t open my jaw all the way. I don’t think that would have happened to a man. Men are so audacious. They don’t seem to think twice about whether they can do something or whether they’re the best person for the job.”