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Professor Diane Sullivan interviews New York Times columnist Gail Collins on her book; When Everything Changed – The Amazing Journey Of American Women From 1960 To The Present. Professor Sullivan and Gail Collins discuss how much the world has changed for both women and men since the 1960′s from the era of the housewife to NOW, to equal rights and Title IV and to women’s successes and failures in politics, law, athletics, the sciences and journalism.

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Educational Video from The Massachusetts School of Law.

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hello and welcome to times square here in
new york city
I’m diane sullivan your host for today’s
program
we’re here in new york
to let new york times op ed columnist
and author gail collins
take us through five decades of women’s
progress as discussed in her new book
when everything changed the amazing
journey of american women from nineteen
sixty to the present close your
eyes and reflect back to 1960
what careers and jobs were
women engaged in
surprisingly only
six-percent of all doctors
there percent of all lawyers
and less than one percent of all engineers
were women women were banned from the boston
marathon
and on television
you found them principally
in the kitchen
women needed permission
from their husbands
to get a credit card
imagine that if you
look back at nineteen sixty
for instance
although they were certainly a
number of amazing women who were doctors
or lawyers or you know
did and there was one in the senate
and there were
um… a few in the house but
they weren’t a pattern they didn’t lead
to more people when margaret chase smith
was in the senate her work which was
amazing did not lead to there being a
lot more women senators they were always
exceptions to the rule
the women in world war two who
worked and who
then we’re able to do almost anything
because they were so few men around
were exceptions to the rule and society
is always kind of comfortable with saying
well yes but here’s the rule but this
person
is different but
at least our society is but the idea in
general was always that
women stayed at home that they
where the mothers and they were the
wives and they stayed in the house you make a
point very early on in your book to
follow up on this conversation
and it really made me think about my own
early years that most of us grew up
at a time where we never saw a female
doctor or lawyer bus driver police
officer
no women
that were visible in those particular
roles so talk a little bit about the
use of quotas and employment
discrimination and how that began to
change there were two ways that it
changed one
from the outside was that until the
nineteen sixties
uh
many schools were very up front that
they had quotas I remember one medical
school said yes we have a quota but
we don’t want our one woman doctor our
one-woman medical student to feel alone
so we always bring in two every year so
that they won’t be unhappy and law
schools the same way
dental schools there was the head of the
dental school i think the university of
texas in the the sixties said that uh…
women could not be dentists because they
weren’t strong enough to pull teeth
there was really strong sense that women
shouldn’t be doing this stuff they
didn’t really want them around and it
was all perfectly legal you know it’s
perfectly legal for businesses
to say as they often did that this wasn’t
a job for a woman
uh…
there is um… just so many
examples of women who went out
to apply for jobs and we’re just told
well we don’t have women for that you
you know nora ephron told me the first time
she went to newsweek and applied for a
job
they said well women don’t write here
they do research but they don’t write
and uh… many of the most famous female
writers of our time were told by newsweek that women
don’t write at that point in time
and all those things were legal it was
legal to say that women couldn’t be in
management because it was bad for the
men
all that stuff was ok or that
women got paid less for the
same job
that was people put that on lists that
that was not you know something that you tried
to hide and of course the help-wanted
ads were all help wanted men or
help-wanted women’s and you know the
receptionist jobs were over here
and the good stuff was in the other way
said the two ways that changed were one
in nineteen sixty four when the civil
rights act was going through
a representative from the south an eighty odd
year old very very
conservative guy added gender
to the things you could not discriminate
against in employment and it was a joke
on his part and i think also it was an
attempt to slow down the bill complicate
things
but martha griffiths who was the only
woman lawyer in the house at that time
grabbed hold of this and brought her people
and added them to the conservative
southerners and actually got it passed
and then it went to the senate whre they
were also going to take it out and
margaret chase smith grabbed hold of it
and ran through the touchdown
at that point there was virtually no
woman in this country who thought
there should be a law prohibiting
discrimination in employment because of
gender that seemed so far out in the
future sure
the women at the commission on the
status of women the most radical women
there were hoping that someday there’d
be a study commissioned on this nobody was
thinking about this
but then
suddenly it was in the law
and once it was in the law and women
realized that the government was not
planning on enforcing that part of
the law
then they went crazy and that’s when the
national organization for women was
founded thats when women started to go
to court to sue
and that was really the beginning on one
side
of all the changes the other thing that
happened was that the birth control pill
came on the market
and although people were discriminating
against women its also true that very few
women applied to law school or medical
school
or any kind of a job that required a
really long term commitment for
preparation back in the sixties and
before because they didn’t they all
believed you should marry very young as
cuz that was the average age of marriage was
twenty in nineteen sixty
and that once you got married you know
you there was not much you could do really to
prevent
to really prevent pregnancy you know so people
were very reluctant to make a commitment
to a long-term career at that time
that’s right you mention on early on in
your book
sylvia roberts show graduates from tulane
law school late fifties as i recall but
in nineteen sixty in the entire state of
louisiana
you cannot find one law firm that
will take an application from a female
so
why were
women even contemplating law school when
the likelihood of htem ever having
a career was
was pretty nonexistent i have to say
that throughout all the stuff i’ve
written about women in american history
the women who
most knock me out are the ones
stand up and say this is what i’m going
to be when there is nobody around them
who thinks it’s a good idea
we’re really used now to you know you
girl you get support to matter
what from somebody but
back them people like sylvia who just
said i want to be a lawyer and nobody
said ok do that’s a good idea she had
no role models
when she got out of law school she wound
up
for a while being a clerk to one of the
supreme court justices in louisiana but
they took the word clerk seriously she
was supposed to file and type and then
she became a secretary at a law firm because
there was just
no thought of anybody hiring a
woman lawyer
take us back to nineteen sixty when
women are now celebrating their
their constitutional right to vote
forty years rah rah rah but you take a
look in the senate you have two female
senators you look in the four hundred
thirty five seat house
you have seventeen women and as you
previously just stated only one of these
nineteen women have a law degree
how did they and up in congress
and when did that open up
there was really only one permanent
reliable career track for a woman who
wanted to be in congress before the
seventies really and that was you married a
congressmen and waited till he died and
you took over
lots of widows a lot of those those
women who were in the house in the
sixties and in the fifties and before
that
were widows
uh… and some of them were amazing
margaret chase smith was a widow but
um… and a lot of the others were not
amazing they were just sort of sitting
there sitting in the seat
holding out their time
but that was really the only way you got
in
and that the critical change was the
moment in which women actually became
politicians unto themselves and not
because of their husband the amazing
other thing about martha griffith who
was from michigan
was that she was part of a political
couple her husband hicks was the head of
the democratic party i think either in
detroit or in the state
and there’ve been many political couples
in america back to john and abigail adams
but i think they were the first ones in
which the political couple was working
on the woman’s career
rather than on the husband’s they were both
doing martha’s career he was totally
into it
totally supportive totally excited about
all the stuff she did and uh…
they were the first i think
well you mentioned later on in the book
that in nineteen seventy seven
a national opinion survey was done
in which it was still believed by most
people in america that women
ought to support their husbands career
more than you know strive to have a
career for themselves so that notion
that women put all their efforts into
their own career is really new
it’s very new and
uh…
the seventies was so interesting to me
because in the sixties you had this
period late sixties of intense
litigation and tons of laws being passed
in congress
there was this very very you look
how fast this all changed you go from
the world that i was describing when
anything went as far as discriminating
against women were concerned
from nineteen sixty four to seventy two
basically
legally that all changed in this country
and you had during that little
tiny period they abolished
discrimination in jobs
uh… title nine was passed abolishing
discrimination in education and also of
course that brought in women’s sports
they abolished discrimination in credit
they passed in congress the equal rights
amendment uh… they also passed a law
in seventy one providing
a bipartisan bill providing an
entitlement to quality early childhood
education for all the children of
working women in the country which was
then vetoed but
i think often part of that was there is
this moment in american history when the
republican party
which had always been the party that was
more socially liberal really when it
came to things like women’s rights
like um…
family planning things like that
republicans started to move to
the right and the democrats who had always
been more conservative on these things
started to move to the left
and there was really this little period
in the late sixties early seventies where
they kinda came together and
so much stuff got done it was just
incredible it was a very very fast time
and the seventies to me
were a time of digestion and the country
kinda dealing with this and
some things
the country
came to embrace really
rather easily and
became part of our lives and some
the country had a lot of trouble with
and were still having arguments about it
today talk a little bit about television
and the role that women played in drama
series as anchors as female
correspondents
back in the sixties and seventies in the
sixties
still it’s you know when
t_v_ began when anything new begins
any big new industry radio commercial
aviation any of that stuff
early on women often do very well because
its so disorganized it doesn’t pay all
that well it’s kind of messy and
you can just kinda jump in and do stuff
then when it becomes a very big deal
women tend to get or at least tended to get in
those days to get
pushed out
television in the very early days when
you go back to see the days of i love lucy
you can remember a lot of t_v_ shows
many of them kind of dumb i mean you
wouldn’t want my little margie to be your
sort of a role model but hahaha lots of
shows featuring women in important roles
then when you hit television became
a very big deal they all went away
and you really had no shows in which
women were the main characters
particularly in the sixties westerns
were the huge thing adventures
westerns and they were all about some
guy
usually riding alone out there in the
west and uh…
women never showed up except when they
were being kidnapped or in danger
in some way
really the message i got when i was a kid
watching all these shows i remember
bonanza so well you know you had this
guy who owns this big ranch and he’s a widower
in fact he’s a widower three times and
he has three sons one from each dead wife
and the sons are always falling in love
with somebody and instantly this girl
dies really you walk near the
ponderosa and you’re dead its all
like a toxic landline for women
and
the message you got from that if you
were a young girl watching was that girls
do not have adventures
girl stayed home and uh… they if you
watch the situation comedies they wander
around the kitchen and high heels with
pearls on stirring something a lot you know but
they hardly go out the door their
just sort of sitting there in the kitchen
all day long and it was a very repressive
and small vision about what women could be
discuss if you would
the introduction of the barbie doll and
the significance of the barbie image
yeah barbie was the you know dolls were
uh… little you know chunky baby
things you know and they were sort of
stocky like little girls little toddlers
and suddenly barbie came along and
barbie was
uh… the first
doll with sort of an adult kind of figure
that most little girls had ever seen
came along in the late fifties really hit
it big in the sixties and uh…
a lot of the women that i talked to in
the book really remember their first barbie
and you know she had breasts and
this teeny tiny waste and this totally
irrational figure that no human being
ever has
and um then ken came along i cannot tell
you how many women told me that
ken and barbie were having a lot more
sex then i though under the wash cloth usually
you write in the book that once couples
got married in the sixties it was
expected
that they would stay that way
so how did marriage change the option
for women
it was you know if you were
living in a society in which women got
married early and partly they got married
early because you had a double standard
that presumed that women should be
virgins
when they got married that was one of
the huge changes in the sixties was the
elimination of that double standard that
women should be virgins and men were
allowed to go out
and get as much sex as they could
so in order to protect your virginity
women tended to get married very very young
and
then if that thought is abroad in the
land
if you’re a woman and you plan to get
married you have to realize that by the
time you’re twenty-four there aren’t going to be any
man left you know already there was a
demographic problem ’cause women tended
to marry men who were a little older
so you had the women who were from that
big baby boom generation
looking for husbands among the men who
had been born during world war two when
things were when there was a much lower
birth rate so there were fewer guys
anyway
and then they’re all getting married very
early so if you once you get out
of college and go out into the world there
are hardly any unmarried guys around
so women had a good reason to be
kinda worried if they weren’t married by
the time they left college
and it was a huge thing back in the fifties
and early sixties that you had to be
engaged by your junior year or your
senior year at the latest or you were just
dead meat it was all over for you
so that was really important the idea of
getting married fast and not being an
old maid and not being an old maid so if
you’re gonna get married fast
and birth control until the sixties wasn’t very
so you know really in order to have
a career you had take a vow of chastity
I mean
perpetual taking of the veil in order to
make it and go through it because there
was all this stuff pushing you in the
other direction
so the close up the first part of your
book
let me ask you did women feel
happy or did they feel trapped in the
nineteen sixties as their role as a
housewife and as a mother sort of both
you know when i did the book before
this one when i talk about women earlier
in this country’s history it was
very liberating to me because there was
always this horrible vision that
women were such weenies and just never
gave in and stayed home and then
suddenly in the sixties and seventies
we got our power and took over
if you look at the choices that women
had
to become a full-time housewife was the
job where you chose management you know
that was the job where you were left
alone to run things by yourself
and the jobs in the outside world were
in general jobs where you had to either
obey some woman because you were a
domestic
or obey some man because you were in a
factory but there weren’t there were
no
visions for most women of this great job
in the outside where you’re going to become a brain
surgeon or something so to become a
full-time housewife was a very
reasonable and often empowering choice
for women right for most of our history
but once you get into
the sixties you have first of all got the
first generation of women
whose families could afford to send them
to college even if they weren’t planning
on a super career
so there was a whole generation of sort
of
post-world war two women who went to
college
’cause there was an economic boom there
families could afford it and they figured
their girls would marry guys who had
college degrees which is better for them so
a lot of women
went to college
took the same courses as the guys
learned the same stuff were interested in
the same things and then once they’re
out
everything turns around and they’re
supposed to be home hanging up the laundry
while their husbands are out and a lot
of them
were shocked to find they were not happy
it was a surprise to them as well
as the country when it turned out that
they were really not thrilled
you know that said they were still
millions of women who are very happy in
the sixties they felt like they were
doing better than their mothers
they’d never been taught to compare
their lives to guys they compared their
lives to other women
and it seemed to them they were doing
great so you had a combination of
economy’s booming people are moving up
everybody’s happy women are used to
their kind of lives they head
and then this
little group of women growing larger
every year who had
been raised to to do stuff but yet
then when the time came they were
supposed to go home
and they were
the betty friedan generation the
feminine mystique women who had this
problem they couldn’t identify and
suddenly realized oh yeah its cuz i’d like to
have a job
my favorite part of your book is
section two when everything changed
you see that the women are growing
restless you see that women are needed
in the workforce so
this combination of factors helps fuel
the women’s movement but let’s
talk a little bit about
the eeoc and when it opened its doors who were
the first complainants
you know the eeoc was the organizations set
up to enforce the civil rights laws
as far as employment was concerned
and everybody presumed that it would be
some black steel worker who would
be coming in you know waiting to get justice and
the first people in the door
were the stewardesses
who had long been aware obviously
they were the girls from their schools
who wanted to travel
we think of you know those early
stewardesses now as sort of coffee tea or me
but these were the adventurous
girls from their small towns or wherever
they came from
who wanted a job that involved getting out
excitement travel that was the only job
you could that involved travel if you were a
women back then
and once they got the job they realized that
they were going to be fired as soon as
they got married
and uh… most
places also laid them off when they turned
thirty
uh… and they’re being measured
every day and basically the whole job
was an invitation to sexual harassment
on a daily basis and they were all about
being attractive and cute
and serving men on the planes and
weighing in the morning and weighing in every morning
and thee was one of the famous flight the
executive flight from new york to chicago
every day that women were not allowed to
buy tickets for
you could only be a man on the executive
flight and they were served
roast beef and cigars and the
stewardesses lit the cigars
for them
it was it drove
working women completely nuts at time but
uh…
so they knew better than anybody
exactly
how deep discrimination ran and they were
the first ones in the door it
drives me nuts hearing about reading about it
in any event and its intereesting not to digress much i
once did television show with patricia
ireland who was then
the president of now and she said to me and
i did not know this in her background
she began as a as a stewardess at
the time and said to me can you just
imagine me saying coffee or tea which
shall it be you know
so really
you know it’s surprising some of the
roots of the early feminists
um…tell us a
little bit and introduce the
audience to lorena weeks who you
write about in her landmark decision
that really changed things for working
women
in the sixties once now was established
when when people first started
organizing the national organization for
women
they kept saying we want n_ double
a_c_p_ for women they envisioned something
that could go out and file lawsuits on
behalf of women
uh… the only problem was that the n_
double a_c_p_ by then was this great
huge respected thing with large
donations and many many lawyers and
now had you know
this one poor woman named marguerite rawalt
who was retired who was
a lawyer in washington who was kind of
organizing everything
getting letters and lorena weeks was was
very typical
of the women who were being undone by
earlier
good hearted attempts to protect women
by passing legislation that said that
there should be different working
conditions for men and women
many states had rules for instance that said
that women couldn’t lift anything that
more than like
thirty pounds or that
women couldn’t be forced to work
overtime the theory being that than
you know they need to be home with their
kids but in fact what happened was
they couldn’t get any overtime in some
states women um…
who he had small children
you couldn’t companies
didn’t hire them because the presumption
was that they should be home with small
children of course
the women didn’t have that option so
they became waitresses instead of
whatever but uh…
lorena i was working for the phone
company down in georgia and she uh…
was married and um…had always worked hard her
whole life had raised younger brother and
sister
and then by then was married and had
children and she and her husband were
desperate
that their kids should go to college
they saved everything for that and
anytime lorena could get any extra
money
at work she would put her hand up
because this was her obsession
and they posted for a job for
something called a router which
basically involved being inside the
office
making sure all the equipment
the routing equipment was working
and she looked into it and felt this was a
job she could do and she applied for it
and the company said no we only hire men
for that job
and uh…she went to her union and her union
said no that’s a job for a bread winner
so then she saw this little thing from the
eeoc saying franklin roosevelt junior
who was then the head of it says that uh… if you
are being discriminated against call him
she wrote a letter
and uh…
they came and investigated and the
argument from the phone company was that
there was a rule that said you couldn’t
lift anything
that was heavier than thirty pounds in
georgia and there was
some thing that you needed for this job
that weighed thirty one pounds of course it was
on a dolly that you pushed around the
office but it was still there
meanwhile poor lorena is going in every day and
lifting a forty pound typewriter onto her
desk and that doesn’t count
s she the union
was not sympathetic nobody wanted to
represent her and she found now and she
wrote to marguerite rawalt
who then found sylvia roberts the young
woman lawyer from louisiana who couldn’t
get a job because there were no women
lawyers in louisiana
who became her lawyer and they went to
court and it took years to get the thing
finally settled
but by the end of it
a landmark decision was issued out of
atlanta saying that you could not have
these irrational laws
that apply only to one sex
it was a huge huge decision and that
they think they said it’s very romantic
to say that you know women can’t lift
thirty pounds but its not the real world
and lorena once she told me when she
finally applied for social security and all
of her children went to college did very
well and uh…
when she went in to
put her papers in in her small town the woman
who processed them said
i have never seen a woman with such a
large salary in my entire life you
know she was
a ground breaker
take us to the time announcement in
nineteen sixty six where they write
headline article i believe
that a good me is hard to find
so hire women
at that time two thirds of the new jobs
were going to women most particularly
married woman
so how did that change things for the
country now the two-income couples
i am very big in the theory that it
really is the economy that drives so
many of these things uh…
back in the twenties when women got the
right to vote they thought that political
power was going to transform
everything in that their sex would make
all these differences great laws and
changes
nothing happened
and the reason was that they presumed
that women could stay home
not be part of the economic life of the
country
but still have power and
that’s really the the rub of all this
at least in this country unless
you’re part of the economic world
you don’t have any power
and what happened after world war two
was that there weren’t enough me to
fill all the jobs the economy is
exploding
they’ve got all these new jobs and there
aren’t that many guys you know there
not many guys to begin with they were
in the war and
they’re all used up and so
they started hiring women in
droves
at jobs that
were
better for women because sometimes they
weren’t
they weren’t in factories so much they tended
to be more white-collar jobs which more
women were comfortable with
you know working in office working in
stores
often part-time
because these were of course all married women there
were no single women there are fewer
single women than action figures for
women at this point in time
so ummm this was how women moved into
the job market they were working by
by the sixties in as large a
percentage as they had been during
world war two
you didn’t notice them so much because
they were working not as
conductors or steelworkers they were
working as receptionist and as store
clerks and things like that but had
gone back to work in huge numbers
and they never went away again
and they’ve were
part of this huge economic boom that
established a middle-class lifestyle in
this country in the sixties
that we had never seen in the planet
before you know that
that average families would own a
home
would own car maybe two cars
that they would expect to send their
kids if they could to college that that
was a hope and an expectation that they
would go on vacations
all this stuff was totally new after
world war two
but once it’d been established
people attach themselves to it very
quickly and when you get into the
seventies
you get into a period where suddenly
during the sixties and the fifties often
you could actually support this
lifestyle in one salary because
housing costs in particular were very
low
suddenly you get into the late sixties and
seventies costs are going up
we have problem with the oil embargo i
mean you remember the gas lines in the
seventies there’s all this stuff
happening people are being laid off
there are a lot of problems and you
could no longer if you were an average
family support that family in that
middle-class lifestyle on one salary
so
in droves the answer became women will work
and to me that’s
the real crux of this book
once you get to a point where young
women
going through their childhood in their
young adulthood
presume as a matter of course that
they’re gonna work
that they’re going to help support their
families whether or not they have
visions that they could take off for a
while when the kids are young and all
that but
that they’ll be working for ever to
support themselves and their families
just as the guys are expecting to
do once you get to that point
then everything is really changed
and it can’t go back because the economy is
structures in a way that it can’t go back
that’s exactly
and i never thought of it till just now
you know i i look back at my own life my
first job once it was clear to me that i
was going to work ok well
now how am i going to get to the top
how am i my going to get an education because
i’m not interested in continuing to work
for two dollars an hour everything is
different when you look upon yourself as
as a person whose going to work throughout
your life
i never thought of it till just now and here we are
yeah here we are
I want to go back for just a moment to the
women
the black women in the rural south
you write about something in the book i
had never heard of it uh… it is
particularly interesting that
black women in the rural south were
among the real
heroines of the movement and in fact
there’s this notion that
when they went to a protest they thought
they may end up in jail so they better
dress up
tell us what that’s all about the first
the early civil rights movement much like
you know when you go back and you talk
to the women
who were
not necessary partly in the women’s rights yeah
in the early women’s rights movement
and the now the early founders of now
they told me we always wore a hat
wherever we went
people
wanted so much to make it clear that
they were not communists that they were
not sort of strange outside agitator hippie
people they were really
respectable
that they always dressed up and this was
true of both the women’s movement and
the civil rights movement
early on you know all the young people
who sat in at restaurants in the
early mid sixties they always wore
their suits and their really good
clothes
and they went to jail in their heals
and their really
hair’s always done everything looks good
and the people it made a difference you
know i mean you he saw stories in the
paper about
even by people who opposed integration
saying wow you know you go out there and
you look at you see all of these young
black men and women
and they’ve got their suits on and their reding
their schoolbooks while they’re sitting at the
counter
and then you’ve got the other side this
real rabble of you know white teenagers
screaming in they’re badly educated and
badly dressed and
it was an important contrast and uh…
so that they went on for quite well in
the early civil rights movement and
uh… you know some of the women said
you’d go into a small town if you weren’t
wearing you know and a nice dress
the people the black people who came
to meet you sort of felt let down that
you know you weren’t they were not
really getting a serious person here
different topic we sit here today in the
new york times turn back the clock to
nineteen sixty eight
headline article oh my goodness people
are cohabitating
that
was one of my favorite stories because it
shows among other things that one of
the important things that happened
because of the civil rights movement
was that authority figures in many parts
of the country particularly in
government and academia
really lost confidence in their ability
to enforce
rules because
so many of them were being called into
question
beginning with the segregation rules but
then expanding on and on
the story of the cohabitation story was
a time was a great story i just love it
was like this huge announcement we’ve
discovered this new trend
young college students of opposite sexes
are living together in this very city
and they interviewed several couples
uh… and they all had pseudonyms ’cause
this was so shocking you would never
want the outside world to know this is
going on
and one of the couple’s the woman
said that she was from bernard at that
time at barnyard you had to live in the dorm
and the dorms had parietals, you had to be home
at like nine or ten at night and then you
had to stay in your room you couldn’t go out
any more and the guys meanwhile across
the street at columbia
are bounding all over the place doing
whatever they wanted
so she said she was at bernard and
she knew she couldn’t leave the dorm
that she got a friend to forge a letter
saying that she wanted to hire her as a
babysitter at her home and to live at
her home
and work part-time as a babysitter and
that’s how she got out of the dorm
this was way too much information
because barnard took about three seconds
to figure out that this was
a sophomore named linda leclair
and they called her in and linda leclair
was not repentant
she did not apologize in fact
she leafleted the campus that and uh… it
went on for awhile and then the alumni
heard about it the times started covering
this like it was a nuclear war really
they were so fascinated by this story
and uh… finally the alumni reading all
these stories are writing to the college
saying what are you doing this is a
immoral and the poor president is caught
between them and again has really
no sense
of confidence that she can enforce these
rules anymore because they did seem a
little strange
so she called a blue-ribbon commission
together of students and faculty and
administrators to decide what to do with
linda leclaire
and they had meetings and they finally came
up with a decree that unless linda
leclaire apologized and went back to the
dorm
she would be permanently banned from the
snack bar
this did not move linda eclair a great deal
she went on with her life but that was sort of the kind
of fights you were having right
then
and the interesting thing again was
how fast it changed i’ve talked to so
many women have said
good lord i was in college and you know
you had to be in by ten o’clock at
night and
you could not bring a guy onto the floor
unless there was a special day once a
month and then had to have the door open and
three feet on the floor you know if you
were sitting on the bed that was the
rule all this stuff you know these huge
rules and then i went back for my tenth
reunion and its a coed dorm and there are naked
guys running around all over the place
it’s changed very very very fast
you write in your book that at that time
and i will add that i still think it’s
currently true that women are
discouraged from math and science
and what impact do you think that had on
our nation
uh… will be lost a whole lot of great
women scientists and mathematicians and
i do think that’s changing i mean I see
so many now you know young women very young
women kids you know who are stupendous
in math and science and if you look at the
numbers
they’re changing and like everything
else it moves more slowly at the highest
levels so
when you’re talking about people at
n_i_h_ and at the very highest levels of
research there’s still a ways to go on
this but
uh…i know so many women scientist
who tell me a all these horror stories
about what life was like in the sixties
and seventies in the labs and uh… i think
i think we’re moving past that it’s a
great fight
can’t wait till the day that we’re there
hot three of your book following through
discuss if you would something
near and dear to my hot that really
gets my dander up and thats
something called ladies day in law school
ladies day in law school one of the
great
all the heroines or many of the heroines
in my book i think are women who
were the first pioneer women during
the years when you’re changing things
and
who had to go through all the grief
so that the next generation of women
could go in and say what’s the problem
here everything seems fine
they did all the work for the rest of us
and uh… in law schools the professors
were very very very reluctant on many campuses
to have women in their classes
and they would uh… they
would normally not call on them
but then they would have a thing called
ladies day on which on that day the women
in the class would be called on
and some particularly horrendous law
professors would use that day
to have a discussion about something
particularly embarrassing like rape laws
or stuff like that just make it very
very very clear how they felt about the
women in their classes
i had a law professor who is now a judge
but she took me aside
this is twenty plus years ago and talked
about her own experience going through
you know law school one day a
semester being allowed to speak she told me you
never lose sight of you know what it
used to be like and i think she was kind
of warning me not to talk so much in any event
I’ll always remember that there is a wonderful oral
history of catherine roraback
who was a great civil rights lawyer in
connecticut who
litigated the great griswold versus
connecticut case that made it that
threw out all the laws prohibiting the
sale of birth control
this is also in the sixties that these
things are being litigated and um… she
had been a lawyer she was one of those
remarkable women and she had been a
lawyer throughout the fifties and
sixties and she said that when these
young women started coming out of law
school
and going into the courtrooms and stuff
every time she’d see one she’d go
running up and say hello
hello hello hello and they looked at me like I
was crazy they were just
themselves going to work
and they couldn’t understand why she was
so excited to see them there
uh… but there was that whole
generation whenever I’m at a
uh… event and people ask questions
there’s usually somebody who
asks me
basically invites me to talk about the
struggles I have had overcoming obstacles
and so on and i always tell them I had
very little of that
because the women who were one
second ahead of me
filed the suits did the petitions did all the
confrontations with the editors went
through all the stuff you had to go
through
and they didn’t really benefit from
it… it was the ones who came after
them did
and they amazing thing is that i
know a lot of these women and they’re
not bitter well they may be bitter on paper
but they’re
really pleased
to see younger women coming up and
getting stuff and to me that’s whats the
definition of a great heart when you can do things
like that talk
a little bit about your own profession and
that is women in journalism
you write in your book that and you
mentioned this earlier that at newsweek
initially when there were fifty two
writers one was a female
you write about something i’ve never
heard of the uh… that takeover so to
speak at the ladies home journal
so talk a little bit about women in the
field of journalism you know you don’t
again you know unless you look back you
don’t really realize that some of the
stuff was going on the one that just drove me
crazy was the national press club in
washington
which is a place that often you know
politicians or other people if they wanna
make news would come and address the
national press club its still there
uh… and women were not allowed to belong
the guys in the mess could bring their
neighbor the insurance agent next door
but women could not belong to the
national press club and they couldn’t go to
these speeches
and sit there with the audience finally
they agree to let them stand in the
balcony they had this little tiny hot crowded
balcony
there was no food there everybody they’re
looking down on these people are eating
lunch
and its hard to hear and all the women and
nan robertson wrote this great book
called girls in the balcony which was
all about that period
and at newsweek the same thing you lynn
povich who was the one woman writer was
the fashion writer and she said there was no
guy who would do it so they let her do it
but uh…
then in nineteen seventy i think it was
newsweek covering the women’s movement
had this cover story on the women’s
movement
and they had nobody to assign it to
accept guys so they assigned it to a
freelance writer the wife of
one of the guys
rather than to any of the other women
who were working there as researchers
all hoping to move up some day
and that was the thing that
really broke the camel’s back and that
was when the newsweek women filed their
lawsuit which was kind of the beginning
of
a long series of lawsuits in
all the media
uh… that led to everything
everything changed
for all women have achieved in the area
of the law for example there are fifty
percent or more now of your incoming
class into law schools are female same
thing is true of medical school
you still do not see equality at
the top if you look at the big
law firms
only seventeen percent have female
partners
in medicine you don’t see women and
administration
what’s it like
in journalism you rose to the top
because of your exceptional skill
but generally speaking is it
equal in journalism uh…
i think it’s in general you know i
would never want to speak for the next
generation and how they feel about things
I found it
to be
not a big problem because as i said i
was in that generation where they were
really happy to have a woman coming in
because they wanted a woman here or there
uh… but
and and we sort of uh…
an industry in crisis so it’s not the
best industry in the world to judge new
hires on right now but uh…
in general that
that’s true of everyplace almost that
you have if you look at colleges
women are so way wiping men in
every aspect of higher education way
more girls go to college way more girls
finish college
they do better in college and you said
now in the professional schools they’re
becoming the majority
there are some entire
careers that they used to be barred from
like pharmacy and veterinary medicine
that they are just
they’re huge proportions
the thing that happens though is once you
get out of college
that slowly changes and once you look at
people ten years out of college
it’s the guys who are moving up much
faster and to me I mean part of that has
got to be discrimination i’m sure but
to me the big huge problem is the work
family conflict
it’s amazing to me that so much of
what’s happened i would not have guessed
when i was in college
and the late sixties but
if you had told me that
we would get to now and there would
still not be as a normal thing
quality
daycare and after-school programs for
everybody who needed them that
you didn’t naturally have things at all
companies where women could take time off
if they need to take care of their
families and then come back
and continue to move up
that guys would not be as natural about
taking time off and taking care of their
kids and stuff as women that it wouldn’t be
a fifty fifty deal
i would have been stunned and i really thought we
were gonna get that one
right away
and that’s
if you look at the women who do really
make it to the top in particular like in law
or business
most of them don’t have kids
they’re married often but they
don’t have kids and
and the ones who do are god bless them
incredible yet just
those kinds of jobs often demand such
a commitment of time
when you’re trying to become a partner
when you’re trying to get
the great
placement as a resident or whatever
and it’s so hard to do that if you give
primary responsibility for children at the same
time and i think that
explains
most
of the things that we look out there and
see why do women still make money
average less than men
uh… per hour why do why are there still
not
even a third of the house and senate
female
women start political careers later than
men do
and that’s i think primarily because
they wait till the kids are older
because its such a time commitment
and that’s the thing we haven’t fifty
percent of the work force now is female
we rely more on women’s labor than any
other developed country in the world and
yet we have not figured out who is
supposed to be taking care of the kids
while everybody’s at work it’s just amazing
to me yeah I mean that’s your point we have not
as women’s solved as a nation
the work family divide and the penalty
is for women because
you point out we do substantially
more than our husbands despite the fact
that you could say they do a lot more
than their fathers did
but it’s not enough so
women have the choice to delay
marriage
or to not have children if they
really want a good shot at that top job
or you can find a husband who is really
really really really supportive yeah where
i don’t have to i have one story i always tell when
i was on the editorial board
there was a guy on the board I should
pay him like a royalty for this story
because i tell is so often
named steve weisman he’s married he’s still
married to elisabeth bumiller who later
became our white house correspondent but at
that time she was on the metro desk
as a reporter and he was an
editorial writer
they had small children
and she during the war in kosovo
was sent off to cover the war it was a
big thing for her her and she went off
for a while and
i ran into steve one day and he lookedlike a
dead man
and I said what is wrong with you and he
said
with great tragedy in his voice
my wife’s in albania and the hamsters missing
and i always thought youcould write a book
about what’s happened to men called
my wifes in albania and the hamsters missing
because they have changed
you know this is not just a story about women you
know life for men and has changed so much
in this country to and we’vde
not at all resolved all the stuff
that’s come with that but um… you know
the guys that i see running around now are
so different from the guys that I
knew when I was in high school
nora ephron always said she really felt sorry for the
guys who got married before the rules
changed suddenly one day there like what
what
a whole different world
well two follow up questions to that is
women in the military
tell us a little bit about that
historically the ban on combat and now
the fact you point out in your book
i think three hundred and fifty thousand
women have gone in and out or
are serving in iraq
still that is invisible to most of the
american public yeah the changes in
the military and like all this stuff it
changed when it had to change
practical reasons uh…
women had served in the military
particulary during wars and of course
women had been nurses under fire taken
prisoner of war you know for you know
in world war two certainly and then
after
and um…
people for some reason people were
comfortable with the idea of nurses but
they were very uncomfortable with the idea
of women being in combat in some way and
uh…
there were lots of fights about what
women’s role would be women were really
discriminated against as to what they
could do within the military
and even as we went into this period of
huge change after the changes there were
still rules that said women could not
serve in combat positions
which most people in the country really
supported
uh… was just this huge big deal it was
hard on the women in the military in a
sense
that most of the jobs
this is the military for
heaven’s sake that’s what they’re
for for combat positions and
a lot of stuff you wouldn’t think of
counted as a combat position so they
were really their upward mobility was
really
reduced the
big huge change happened with the gulf war
because suddenly
the country was involved in a series of
conflicts in which you couldn’t really
say what the combat position was women
often drove trucks that was one of the
things they could do
suddenly you’re in iraq
driving a truck is a combat position
and suddenly you have always women being
killed
women being taken prisoner all the
things that happen to guys tend to
happen to women now
the country just sort of has rolled with
that i have not seen you know one
uprising oh my guide a woman was killed
in combat how could this happen and i
think those woman warriors so to speak
really resent coming home
as opposed to a man whose seen as a war
hero
most people don’t even realize what it
is they did where they were and so forth
and that’s particularly painful to
the women
yeah and it’s also as once again
we have the child issue many of
these women are single mothers or they have
husbands who are also in the military
and the army has been very slow in
dealing with what happens to the kids
when their mothers suddenly shipped overseas
you talk about the rules changing for
men one thing that i think is
interesting that you raise in your book
is
no-fault divorce
comes also comes the phenomenon of
man leaving their aging wives for the
young trophy wife
you know that was another
seventies thing they were like
basically in the seventies
you did see just sort of a breakdown of all of
all of these structures that had
existed before
women had one of the great problems
with the old rules on women stay at home
and are protected by her husband was that
they took no account whatsoever of the
women
who were protected by their husbands
whose husbands left them or abused them
or you know drank
drinking was a huge problem and
it was only really in the sixties and
seventies that you really start to
confront this and
in the name of fairness
you had to move toward
easier divorce laws because it had been very
very difficult to get a divorce the
presumption of divorce was that somebody
was at fault
but this was not something that
good-hearted people would agree on that
you know somebody had to be bad and
that person had to be identified and
punished in some way
so that was when new york for instance
which had terrible divorce laws into the
seventies
you would often have women who would
agree to serve as the mistress to
sort of be there in a bedroom with
the husband so that their friends could
come discover this and then testify in
court that they had seen evidence of
adultery so that the poor husband and
wife could get their divorce because
adultery was really the only good reason
to get a divorce in new york back then
so it was really hard
it was really difficult and it really didn’t
make any sense so in the seventies you
had a move toward no-fault divorce
where people could just go and say
okay this isn’t working
we’re done and they were done but
that led
along with all the other things that
were happening in the country all the huge
changes that were happening to a real
sense of panic
on the part of traditional wives about
their role
for which i had total sympathy with the
traditional wives the poor traditional
wives grew up
in a world where everybody told them
this was the best possible thing a
woman could do
this was the greatest job the most
important job in the world raising kids
they did it they took over their homes
they excelled as housekeepers they took
care of their kids
and then suddenly almost overnight
it’s like their unemployed they’re not
working hard theyer you know what’s
wrong with them and the women’s movement
was not at all good
in some of its forms about understanding
where these women were at there was a
lot of talk about marriage as slavery and
a lot of looking down on any woman who
had spent her life as a housewife so there was
all that sense of dislocation
there was a lot of unemployment a lot of
economic distress
a lot of women had to go to work who
didn’t want to go to work
and then there was this no-fault
divorce thing and i think
you know
divorce when up a lot i suspect that in
the most part it was women who were
relieved to be getting out of divorces but
you did he have this sense of fear that
suddenly the husband could walk i’m sure
if a husband had really wanted to walk he
walked out before but
that he would walk out and marry you know
some bimbo you know or something you know
and then you’d be left holding the bag
and the new divorce laws presumed that
the goal should be to have the woman
support herself
which makes perfect sense if
the woman is
another professional but
if the woman’s been at home for thirty
years and the husban meanwhile has been in
his dental practice or
something
it was totally
unfair to some of these women and also it
didn’t take into account daycare and
child care
a lot of sense of dislocation and i had one
woman in my
book who was
and young black woman who grew up in a
rather poor family in new york
who had a boyfriend by whom she had a
child the boyfriend then went off to
medical school wanted her to join him
and she refused saying you know she just
know that how it was about those
doctors would get their degrees and
they’d walk out on their wives even
all the way down to this poor kid in in
manhattan you know in on the
lower east side there was this vision
that men would betray you and run off
with a younger woman and you’d be left
there and i think that too
made younger women more intent on being
able to take care of themselves
so it has sort of a double wammy on
the one-side you had all these very angry
housewives who
destroy the equal rights amendment for
instance but on the other side you had
all of these children growing up
thinking well
if half of what they say is true
i’d better
get my degree and be prepared to earn a
living from myself in case i need it
that’s right
different question mary tyler moore
the theme changes you’re gonna make it
after all your comment on that
the big deal
with the first mary tyler moore
invasion of our household was on the
dick van dyke show and that was a huge
moment in which she wore pants
playing the housewife and she was laura
petrie was just a housewife just a housewife
she was a fine housewife but she was
at home with their child
didn’t work but
she didn’t wear the heels and
she wore capri pants and she was a
very attractive woman of course and that
was huge
i think it was not so much that you had
people objecting to it but the sponsors
were very nervous about the idea this
woman in pants running around the house
how would people react so
that was quite a big deal i think she
will be forever known as the first
woman who wore pants
and then when she did her second show
and just shows you that
transformation from bonanza
to mary tyler moore
in her first series her first year of the
new mary tyler moore show which became
so popular
she was a woman who had been dumped by
her fiance and she came to me minneapolis
very sad and rhoda was her next
door neighbor and they would talk all the
time that how hard it was to find a guy
and you know it was just the normal stuff and
as she progressed in the show and as the
show developed
this woman developed into a person who
clearly had not only had had dates but clearly had
sex with guys but
had a very full life with her work and
her friends and
never talked about getting married it
wasn’t a big deal it was a
huge first i think there were
other
shows before that like that girl that had
kind of
explored that but it was always in a sense
that you were this vulnerable child in the
city somehow and this mary tyler moore was must
even for now it was would be kind of
huge the sense of
a person who doesn’t
care about getting married even
marlo thomas in that girl was engaged yeah
forever oh my god i know all the episodes were about it looks
like she’s having sex with somebody else
but she really wasn’t
let’s mention women’s athletics
the boston marathon my god you can’t run
that your ovaries may fall out
for the longest time so many of the women
told me that
in the fifties in particular in the
early sixties it was not only you know
that you do you weren’t encouraged to do
athletics but
in some places it was thought that
the very idea of competition
was traumatizing for women and that if
they lost a game they might cry or
something so they really weren’t even
allowed to compete all of
athletics form women was seen as something you
did for health not
you know for the fun of competing
and women’s teams were treated
uh… oh so
patheticaly there was of a woman from
i think it was cedar rapids iowa who said they
started a women’s movement in cedar rapids
because
at the high school there was a boys
tennis team and a girls tennis team and
the boys played on the courts and the
girls had to play on the driveway
and they said they started a women’s
movement to keep the girls from being
run over basically but huge
that stuff was really huge
talk if you would about women getting into
politics
talk about the hillary factor and
whether
in the final analysis gender bias trumps
all other types of prejudice
you know um…
for the women in the
first generation of this women’s
movement
who did all the fighting in the sixties
and seventies
the idea of a woman in the white house
was just the holy grail that would be
the moment you really new
you’d won when there was a woman in the
white house
and they were
they all talked about you know would
there be one in their lifetimes and
they were so sure it was going to
be hillary
uh… hillary clinton was so sure it was
going to hillary and
when it wasn’t when suddenly out of
nowhere this guy came along and took
it all
they were shocked and angry and felt betrayed
and for about you know a month there
there was just enormous pain and
bitterness and then you know
now everybody’s fine i think
what hillary clinton
she there with a lot of sexism
surrounding her campaign
but if you work under my rule which is
that you presume that five percent of
the country is completely nuts and has
to be disregarded
and that you work about what the other
ninety five percent is doing the other
ninety five percent did not show any
signs that they were unwilling to accept
a woman as president and in fact in the
later primaries when she really caught
her her magic there she was fantastic and
she won a mean the
voters did not keep
hillary clinton from becoming president
and
she didn’t organize well in the early
caucus states
this is not a sexist issue it was unfortunate
for her but she didn’t and
obama won fair and square but what she
did
and that’s so important in america
people in america once they get used to
almost anything they’re good with it and
she made people used to the idea that a
woman could be commander in chief
and that’s
an incredible triumph
and some other woman
is going to get to be president
because of her
well there you have it
our journey through time
from housewife and homemaker to doctor to lawyer
senator vice presidential
candidate
to one day maybe a president
what’s next who knows
it depends on you
so until next time from Times Square
here in New York
you be well