The World Split Open (59 page)

First women rarely mentioned the women's movement. When they did, they took special pains to distance themselves from the “women's libbers” the media had so successfully created. One twenty-seven-year-old, who became the first woman to hold a high office in the FBI, broke with tradition when she announced that she intended to use Ms. rather than Miss or Mrs. When asked about women's liberation, she said that she didn't support that “part of the movement that says men are bad, who say that we should have a completely different society.” Equal pay for equal work. With these words, women could nod to feminism even as they distanced themselves from the media's hardly recognizable version of the movement itself.
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Men were the good guys in these narratives—not because of their willingness to embrace affirmative action and to search out female talent, but because they so warmly welcomed women into new occupations. The first woman story compulsively described male coworkers as generous and welcoming people. When San Francisco began assigning female officers to book prisoners at San Francisco City Prison, one of the female officers said, “When I first came here, I was a bit wary of how the men would treat me, but I've found them to be the nicest people I've ever worked with.” When Marjorie Downing became the first woman
president of Sonoma State College in California, she swore she never had difficulty with men. “I've been dealing with largely male faculties all my life and I've never had any trouble. I don't foresee any major problems, do you?” In marked contrast, the friends and families of these first women almost always mentioned how tough-minded they were and how capable they would be of handling whatever the “‘diehards' will dish out”—an implicit acknowledgment of the reality of resistance and resentment that these women undoubtedly did encounter.
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If affirmative action didn't help, and men didn't harm, good looks, of course, were irrelevant. In a
New York Times
feature about Stella Wilson, a woman who became the first female “salesman” for Xerox, the reporter wrote that “the blue-eyed, dark-haired former British model [had] marched into her boss's office two years ago and announced she wanted to become a salesman.” Given a two-week trial, she proved herself and finally wound up as the top “salesman” at Xerox's New York office. The former model assured her interviewer, “I don't think my looks helped.” Women, she explained, were simply “more intuitive” and “could evaluate the situation better.” Quick to disagree that she was a pioneer libber, she repeated the required mantra, “I'm all for equal pay for equal work,” adding, of course, “but I think a lot of the aspects of women's lib are rather bizarre. Like bra burning. I went to one women's lib meeting and all the women looked rather strange. Besides, I have all the liberation I can handle. And I think that a woman can get almost any job she wants—if she really
wants
it.” When asked if she ever encountered male resentment, she replied, “You get a few snide remarks,” but quickly added that “Men were charmed to be confronted by a woman sales representative.”

Unmarried Stella Wilson had embraced the narcissism of the age with a vengeance. When she said that she had all the liberation she could handle, she meant that she already led a life wholly devoted to herself. She lived alone in an expensive rented apartment, shared a summer house in wealthy Southampton, and spent her leisure time sky diving, skiing, swimming, and painting portraits of old people. “They have so much character,” she said. Wilson hoped to marry eventually but thought that children would limit her freedom. “The world is such an incredibly exciting place. There is so much to do and so many other ways in which I can use my energies. Motherhood is like childhood revisited. I've already had one childhood, and I don't want to go through another.” Many young feminists also harbored reservations and apprehensions about marriage and motherhood, but for quite a different
reason: they feared the feminine mystique's emphasis on exclusive domesticity. For Wilson, “liberation” meant the permission to consume whatever gave her greater “freedom.” Like other first women, she made no mention of trying to help other women or even of liking other women. Asked about supervising men and women, she ended the interview predictably: “Oh, I much prefer to work with men. I can't stand the pettiness of women.”
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Stella Wilson's story is a good example of the way that feminism came to be associated in the public mind with career women, single or married, who chose self-advancement and self-indulgence over hearth and home. Her avoidance of marriage and motherhood had little in common with the kinds of criticism feminists had raised about unequal power relations in traditional marriages and families. But such distinctions easily blurred in the minds of people whose only exposure to the women's movement was through media portrayals of the cool, manipulative, upwardly mobile woman, who chose career and consumption over family and children, which became the paradigmatic image of the feminist.

Although first woman narratives hid many truths about women's lives, they did help millions of women readers imagine themselves in new occupations and professions. The stories and photographs also provided female readers with a growing repertoire of images of blue, pink [clerical], and white collar workers.
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No longer just brides or mothers in the “family, food, fashion, and furnishings” section of the
New York Times
, or in the features section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, as well as other papers nationwide, women now appeared as gas station attendants, traveling salesmen, doormen, welders, truck drivers, steel-workers, members of a road gang, and pest exterminators. Photographs captured them hanging from ropes as they washed windows, receiving badges as California Highway Patrolmen, being sworn in as the first women police officers, hauling heavy weights as “roustabouts” on an off-shore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and descending into Kentucky coal mines as the first women miners.
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While newspapers created new “lifestyle” sections to appeal to women readers, women's magazines helped translate and transform American feminism into a universe of goods and services that promised liberation.
The traditional magazines—
Harper's Bazaar, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal
, and
Redbook
—maintained their usual staple of articles on diets, recipes, catching and holding men, sex and health.

But by creating sections devoted to the movement and by profiling feminists, mainstream magazines began to educate the nation's women (for men did not read these magazines) about what must have seemed to many of them like a sudden eruption of female rebellion. Many of these magazines also hired feminist writers to be columnists. In 1972, Letty Pogrebin began a regular column for
LHJ
, focusing on working women's issues. The column lasted until 1980 and publicized nearly every major feminist topic of the decade. In 1977, Mary Cantwell, the features editor of
Mademoiselle
, asked Judith Coburn to take over a regular column from Karen Durbin, another radical feminist. Cantwell insisted that the column keep its title, “The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Sex,” but allowed Coburn to write on any subject that addressed women's lives. For four years, Coburn wrote freely about such feminist issues as abortion, women and the draft, wages for housework, the coming of the superwoman, and critiques of the birth control pill.
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But the traditional magazines didn't only advertise feminism. During the seventies, they also tried to find a balance between femininity and feminism. They idealized domesticity even as they romanticized careerism. In 1979,
LHJ
began a new section called, “It's not easy to be a woman today!” which, over the course of a year, included such features as “How I Went from Ruffles to Hard Hat,” “I Learned to Love Myself after He Stopped Loving Me,” “I Won't Apologize for Being a Housewife,” “Can a [single] Woman Live Without a Man?,” “It Took Me a Long Time to Grow Up,” and “Will I Ever Find a Liberated Man?” In one short story a woman who had been analyzing cancer-producing environmental pollutants is forced by a mysterious dizziness to stay at home with her children. She discovers, much to her amazement, that she knows very little about their habits or abilities. In the end, she decides to stay at home, explaining:

I was right when I said Women's Liberation wasn't titles on the door or salary raises, but I was wrong when I said it didn't exist. It does exist, and I've just been liberated from leading two fragmented lives, liberated from doing a juggling act on a tight rope—keeping sitters, children, husband, employer and myself, almost, but not quite satisfied. I was confusing liberation with freedom, because of course I am not free . . . I am
liberated, but I am not free. With luck I will never be free, but bound forever.
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In short, the traditional women's magazines—filled with stories, editorials, ads, and columns that frequently contradicted one another—accurately captured the kaleidoscopic chaos of women's lives during the seventies.

As growing numbers of women entered the labor force, these magazines began refocusing their traditional self-help features on the problems faced by working women. They taught newly divorced women how to cope and instructed women on how to replace deferential behavior with a more assertive stance that would gain them raises and respect. They reassured working women that their children would survive their absence, and that they could keep their husbands by setting time aside for special “dates” and playing an active part in revitalizing their sex life.
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Millions of nonmovement women first learned about feminism, as well as the new occupations and opportunities that had opened up to women during the seventies, within the familiar pages of women's magazines. They also read articles that encouraged them to find themselves, to return to school, and to stand up to bullying husbands.
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“Barbara Shields,” a graduate of a northeastern college, married in 1964 at the age of twenty-two, and worked for three years as a high-school teacher to support her husband's study of law. Afterward, she quit her job, bore two sons, and spent the next sixteen years caring for her family in a Connecticut suburb. When asked in the late 1980s how she had learned about the women's movement, she pointed at the clutter of women's magazines that littered her bathroom floor.

It was the women's magazines. You know, they had all these articles about learning how to dress for work, how to ask for a raise, how to juggle your family's needs and your work. I began to realize that I had followed my mother's life without even questioning it. I wasn't sorry that I stayed home with my boys. But when they reached high school, I went back to graduate school.

During the late eighties, she began teaching at a local community college and confided, “I never understood how working outside the
house could really change your sense of self-esteem. But it really did. I get dressed everyday, people need me and appreciate me in a different way.” The women's movement, said this former housewife, had transformed her life, largely because she had read and heard about it so much in the magazines she had read.

I felt that I wanted to be more assertive. I know that my marriage is in some sense different than it was in the beginning because I felt that I wanted to be more central in it, instead of always following someone else all the time. I'm sure the women's movement was the influence. I read magazines and books; I heard people speak and I felt more important as an individual.
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When her husband of some three decades suddenly left her, she wondered whether her growing independence—or the simple fact of her aging—contributed to his abandonment.

The advertising industry scarcely missed a beat as they geared up to sell “liberation” as early as 1970. In addressing the Association of Industrial Advertisers in 1971, one NOW leader tried to convince her listeners to use advertising as a constructive vehicle for social change. They ignored her advice. In fact, some of the most popular pseudo-feminist ads appropriated the language of emancipation in order to sell women products that could harm their health. “The Virginia Slims Campaign,” launched in 1970, advertised a new cigarette that glamorized anorexic women as emancipated, rich, role models. Under the slogan, “You've Come a Long Way, Baby,” the ads offered parables of women's historic subordination and tried to persuade them that smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette had a contribution to make to their personal freedom. Similarly, Massengill's feminine hygiene spray reinforced the belief that women's bodies were dirty and that a new (and quite unnecessary) product was necessary to establish “freshness.” For its campaign slogan, the advertisers appropriated “Freedom Now,” trivializing language that had been chanted by activists in the civil rights movement of the sixties. A Dewars' Scotch campaign, designed to persuade women to drink hard liquor, previously considered unladylike, profiled mothers who had careers, yet still drank, a sure sign of their emancipation from traditional womanhood.
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It didn't take long for the business and advertising industry to
repackage feminism and try and sell it back to women. Appealing to the rejection of girdles and bras by the young, lingerie manufacturers came up with the “no bra” look, which allowed breasts to poke through sheer material and give a woman a “bra-less” look. Feminists had denounced artifice and cosmetics. Now, the cosmetics industry began to advertise all kinds of powder, lipstick, and eyeliner that promised “a natural look.”
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