When Everything Changed (38 page)

The Nelsons left the air just as the image was beginning to crack.
In 1960, 62 percent
of American households were made up of a breadwinner dad and stay-at-home mom with one or more children.
By the middle of the ’80s
, only about 10 percent of American households were what people still referred to as “Ozzie-and-Harriet families.” The model was not even working for the Nelsons. Ricky, the little guy with a twinkle in his eye, became a rock musician, and by the mid-’70s he was in the process of divorcing the mother of his four children.

The traditional family model that the 1950s had celebrated was being transformed—or undermined, depending on your point of view—by divorce, cohabitation, and unwed motherhood. People were staying single longer. The birthrate was plummeting, as women deferred marriage for work. And once children came, married women were discovering they could not afford to stay home even if they wanted to.
The competition of
baby boomers for housing in the 1970s and ’80s tripled the cost of the average new home.
In 1977
BusinessWeek
said that a new house was “out of reach of blue-collar and nonprofessional, nonmanagerial heads of households whose spouses do not work.” A new generation of young adults did the math and presumed that when they married, their family’s future would have to be underwritten by two salaries.
While in 1970
less than a third of women with preschool children worked outside the home, in 1976 it was 43 percent. In another decade it would be half.

“We were in this big change,” said Walter Mondale, who was a U.S. senator from Minnesota, worrying about child-care issues. “Working wives had become a big thing in American life. It was sort of an unplanned change.”

“H
E HAS THREE CARS, AND
I
HAVE FIVE KIDS
.”

The divorce rate, which had been flat in the United States throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, had started to skyrocket. By 1980
the government would note
that the number of divorces was setting a record for the eighteenth consecutive year and was three times as high as it had been in 1962. There were a lot of theories about what made so many marriages collapse at once. The sexual revolution was one favorite culprit. It also seemed reasonable to assume that the rush to marry after World War II might be followed by a rush of divorces as the children left home. And a lot of people blamed the women’s liberation movement. When Wilma Scott Heide, the president of NOW in the early ’70s, agreed with her husband that it was time to divorce, Faith Middleton was one of the reporters dispatched to the Heide house to get an interview. “The editor’s feeling was that this was an indication feminists were angry people, that they had bad marriages—that this was living proof,” Middleton remembered.

And then there was the liberalization of divorce. In 1970 California became the first state to pass a no-fault divorce law that allowed couples to end a marriage by mutual consent. Over the course of the decade, all but three states instituted some variation on the no-fault theme. (Illinois, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota brought up the rear in the 1980s. Although New York liberalized its law, the state still had what were probably the most conservative rules, particularly if both parties did not mutually agree to end the marriage.) Defenders of the reforms pointed out that the divorce rates didn’t seem higher in states that had made the change. But whether it was new laws, new kinds of women, or a new culture,
by 1976 the number of divorces
had gone well past one million a year—more than double the number a decade earlier.

And getting divorced was no longer a cause for shame. The creators of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
originally intended to make their heroine a divorcée, but the networks felt viewers might not be able to relate to a woman with a failed marriage in her past. If the series had arrived a few years later, the original concept probably would have survived. By the mid-’70s it seemed almost every family had at least one member who was divorced. When Maria K. had her second baby, she moved to a larger city and told everyone that her boys were the product of a broken marriage. Once she had remade herself into “the gay divorcée” rather than a never-married mom, she said, “everyone loved me.”

The women’s rights movement had not been at the forefront of the drive to remake the divorce laws, but most feminists agreed that the idea of forcing unhappy people to stay married for the sake of propriety was outdated. And if you wanted equality, it seemed impossible to argue that women should automatically get custody of the children or that men should pay alimony forever to an ex-spouse who wasn’t working to support herself.

Alimony had never been awarded in a large proportion of divorces, but under no-fault, it virtually vanished, except as a kind of temporary subsidy that could help ease the ex-wife back into the job market. That, too, seemed fair on its face. “
It’s healthy for the
wife to become independent and self-supportive,” the California attorney Ted Akulian told
U.S. News and World Report.
But a woman in her 40s who had spent twenty years taking care of the children and house was in no way capable of matching the earnings made by a husband who spent that same time developing a dental practice or accumulating seniority at a unionized car plant. “
At that time we were
so concerned with principle—that equality of right and opportunity had to mean equality of responsibility… that we did not realize the trap we were falling into,” said Betty Friedan.

Younger women who might have embarked upon postdivorce careers were often hampered by the need to care for their children.
In California, the average
child-support award was barely enough to cover the cost of child care. Even that presumed the woman was part of the lucky minority whose ex-husbands actually paid.
One study found that
only a third of divorced men had alimony and child-support responsibilities that were greater than that of their car payments—and they were more likely to actually meet the car payments. In states where the laws called for a fifty-fifty split of community property, judges sometimes ruled that the family house had to be sold and the proceeds divided. That meant the mother had to move the children and pay for a new place to live.
Minnette Doderer, who was
a state senator when no-fault divorce was passed in Iowa, felt that in retrospect, the unfair old system had more virtues than people realized: “Women formerly used to use their kids to bargain for more money, or they bargained that they wouldn’t give a divorce unless they got something out of it. Now they have nothing to bargain with.” Doderer recalled one woman on welfare who told her that when she was married, “she had a husband who had a business. They had three cars and five kids. She said, ‘Now I’m divorced and he has a business and he has three cars, and I have five kids.’ ”
Lenore Weitzman, a sociologist
at Stanford University who produced a much-quoted study on the effects of no-fault, said the new rules were great for “young childless divorcées of 25, but they are being applied to women of 55 who have spent their lives as housewives, helpmeets, and mothers.”

The divorce surge and the no-fault laws combined to form a terrifying picture of husbands suddenly deciding that they were tired of their aging wives and walking out to start a new family with a younger woman. Men had been doing that for millennia without the help of liberal divorce laws, but there was something about the thought of a marriage being abruptly ended, just out of the blue, that haunted the era. The new idea that alimony was only a temporary subsidy was a pretty clear signal that all women had better be prepared to take care of themselves, and that ten, twenty, or thirty years of work as a full-time housewife was not seen as being worth very much at all.

Myrna Ten Bensel, the Minnesota doctor’s wife who had made her own diapers when her four children were small, thought that “people were married forever” until her husband suddenly decamped. The family was living in a three-story Victorian house in 1977, in a neighborhood where Myrna presided over PTA meetings and was active in her church. “He came home one evening, the evening of my son’s swimming banquet, and got us all together and said, ‘I’m moving out. I’m divorcing your mother.’ I did not know anything about it. He didn’t say the reason. I found out weeks later that there was another woman, which just destroyed me emotionally.” There were at least three million women in America in the same position in the late ’70s—full-time housewives who suddenly found themselves alone. Some estimates put the number at seven million. While Bensel’s husband provided adequate support to allow her to go to law school and start a new life, most of these women were left at sea. By 1978 they had been given a name—“displaced homemakers”—and various state and federal training programs. None of the government-funded counseling, however, could put things back the way they were—to a way of life the women had counted on. “
My rage centers
around being so poor suddenly,” said a middle-aged woman at a workshop on job hunting in New York City in 1979.

“You’ve got lots of company,” said the moderator.

“W
ELL
, I
LOVE YOU, TOO, BUT
I
DIDN’T PROPOSE
.”

Maria K., meanwhile, met the right man. “I think he loved my children before he loved me, to be honest with you,” she said. “God has sent me angels all my life, I swear that he has.” He bought a house for Maria and her children, and gradually moved in. They were a family, but they never married.

“He was also Italian and I think at first he thought his mother and father would have difficulty with him marrying a girl with two children. And I’m sure he was right,” she said. One night, “he told me he loved me, followed immediately by the words ‘but I don’t want to get married.’ So we just went along that way.” Later, while the two of them were at Mass, “he put his hand over my hand and he said, ‘I really do love you. But I don’t want to get married.’

“And I looked up at him and I said, ‘Well, I love you, too, but I didn’t propose.’ ”

The census-takers counted
about a million cohabiting couples in 1977, although the experts suspected that the real figure was much higher. (
They were right
. In 1986 a government study on single women would determine that a third of them had at some point lived with a man they weren’t married to.) In some parts of the country, unmarried partners were so common they were incorporated into the routines of daily life.
At Harvard Medical
School, Perri Klass reported that when the Married Students’ Association shunned medical students who were living together, one of her classmates came up with a Living-in-Sin Potluck Dinner for “those of us who are sharing these special years with someone to whom we are less formally bound.” The Bagehot program for journalists at Columbia University included dinners for the Bagehot fellows and their “spouse or spouse equivalents.” The 1970 census began counting Persons of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters (POSSLQ), and CBS commentator Charles Osgood came up with a poem that began “There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do/If you would be my POSSLQ.”

“I
KNOW
I
REALLY WANTED TO HAVE A BABY
.”

Unwed mothers were no longer being forced to choose between abortion and adoption. They were keeping their babies. In black communities, where the birthrate for married women had dropped dramatically, the proportion of children born out of wedlock soared.
In 1976, for the first
time, more than half of African-American babies were born to unmarried women. Forty percent of black children lived in a family headed by women. “We have very, very strong women in my family,” said Virginia Williams, the single mother and former post-office worker from New York, counting off her female relatives, from her aunts through her cousins to her daughter, who were left with the responsibility of supporting their children on their own.

Illegitimacy had historically carried a stigma—the children were branded “bastards,” and
it was not until 1968 that the Supreme Court
began issuing a series of decisions that would make it clear that they had the same basic rights under the law as children born in wedlock. Now it began to look routine in poor neighborhoods. Was that due to the increased availability of welfare, people asked, or the way welfare systems penalized families where the father remained in the house? As the trend continued, some experts wondered whether African-Americans were developing a different kind of family structure, an extended network of relatives rather than a nuclear family. Whatever the answer, black extended families did provide a critical safety net. Virginia Williams, who struggled mightily to support her daughter Denice, was constantly being helped by her relatives. “Even if you didn’t want to hear their mouths, even if you didn’t want to get the lecture, even if you didn’t want to hear ‘I told you so,’ yes, you could depend on them,” she said. “My cousin said, ‘Sis, I’ll watch your Denice for you,’ and my aunt said, ‘Well, Sis, with Denice being over here, why are you paying rent on that apartment? Why don’t you move back?’ ”