In 1963, a 20-year-old American woman could not expect to run a marathon or play varsity sports in college. She could only dream of becoming a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer, labor leader, factory foreman, college professor, or elected official. She couldn’t get a prescription for birth control, have a legal abortion, come out as a lesbian, or prosecute her rapist. She almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm or women’s history. She could not get a credit card, let alone a mortgage, without the imprimatur of her husband or father. By 1973, the doors to these options and opportunities had cracked open, and a woman turning 20 in that year faced a future of possibilities that no generation before had ever experienced.
The following vignettes from that transformative decade shed light on the many different faces of the women’s liberation movement in America.
THE AIRLINE HOSTESSES
UNITED AIRLINES PRINT ADVERTISEMENT: “Old Maid.” That’s what the other United Airlines stewardesses call her. Because she’s been flying for almost three years now. (The average tenure of a United stewardess is only 21 months before she gets married.) But she’s not worried. How many girls do you know who can serve cocktails and dinner for 35 without losing their composure? And who smile the whole time like they mean it? (They do.) Not too many, right?
That’s part of the reason why only one of every 30 girls who apply for stewardess school becomes a United stewardess. But still, since United invented the stewardess back in 1930, we’ve trained over 15,000 smiling reasons to fly the friendly skies. Maybe that’s why more people fly United than any other airline. Everyone gets warmth, friendliness and extra care. And someone may get a wife.
MARY PAT LAFFEY, AIRLINE STEWARDESS: I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am one of five children, Irish-Catholic family. I always wanted to travel. That’s why I really wanted to become a stewardess, at that time. I thought, “Gee, the world could be my oyster.” So Northwest Airlines sent me a ticket to come and be interviewed and I was accepted, and that was it. I was based in Minneapolis. This was in 1958. I was 20 years old.
“How many girls do you know who can serve cocktails and dinner for 35 without losing their composure? And who smile the whole time like they mean it?”
When I started, we had to wear white gloves with our uniform. We had to wear a girdle, and of course have our nails done and our hair above the collar.
I didn’t have a weight problem, but for my colleagues who did have weight problems, it was horrible for them. If they didn’t maintain a certain weight, they would be grounded, and if you’re grounded, your salary is gone.
There was more money if you flew the international runs. There were girls who were secretly married, and one flight attendant who was on the cusp of being able to hold the international runs turned in the married flight attendants.
So that was the awakening of “Good Lord. This is not right. We’re working with men who are married and have families. They’re our same age, and page 15 of our contract says that when there is a man on board, he is in charge.”
In September 1965, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) initially ruled that airlines had the right to fire stewardesses (but not other women who worked for the airline in different jobs) because they considered sex a “bona fide occupational qualification” for stewardesses, and therefore they could be treated differently than male employees. But in 1966, United Airlines fired stewardess Mary Sprogis for getting married. Sprogis filed a complaint that year with the E.E.O.C. charging sex discrimination.
In August 1968, the commission changed its earlier ruling and found probable cause that United violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating on the basis of sex. Sprogis then filed a federal discrimination suit in November 1968, and in early 1970 a U.S. district court judge ruled that the no-marriage provision was illegal and ordered Sprogis be rehired. The groundbreaking case Sprogis v. United Airlines became an important precedent for future sex-discrimination cases, and it inspired 475 flight attendants to sue United Airlines in a class action in 1970.
THE PRO-CHOICERS
BILL BAIRD, REPRODUCTIVE-RIGHTS ACTIVIST: I was hired by a drug company called Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. They’re best known for headache drugs, but they’re also very well known for drugs for women after childbirth, like Methergine. It was a drug that will cause the uterus to contract to minimize bleeding.
I found out when I worked for this company—I was Medical Man of the Year for them—that women would say to me, “I will give you my favors, so to speak, if you would let me have some Methergine, because sometimes I’m late with my period.”
FAYE WATTLETON, REPRODUCTIVE-RIGHTS ACTIVIST (AND THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD): I went to Ohio State at age 16 and graduated in 1964 with a B.S. degree in nursing. In 1965, I was at Columbia getting my master’s in child and maternal care, and nurse-midwifery. At Harlem Hospital I worked in the prenatal clinics, where women were often coming in quite late in their pregnancy, or on the labor and delivery floor, where I had to deliver at least 50 babies to qualify for my certificate in midwifery.
I remember walking into a ward one afternoon while a group of doctors were discussing the prognosis of a pretty teenager. Her condition was terminal, the doctors said. I looked over at her, lying so quiet against the white sheets in a room separated from the large ward of mothers recovering from delivery. It struck me that she was only a few years younger than I. She looked as healthy as any normal teenager, her eyes bright and her skin clear, showing no obvious sign of pain or distress. Though the tubes in her body gave witness to the fact that she was dying, it was hard to believe.
Unable to afford the services of an abortionist, the girl and her mother had concocted a solution of Lysol and bleach and injected it into her uterus. The potent mix of chemicals had been absorbed by her bloodstream, badly damaging her kidneys. Her other vital organs were shutting down and there was nothing that could be done. She was so pretty, so young, and had it not been for one fatal mistake, the world could have been hers.
“I will give you my favors, so to speak, if you would let me have some Methergine, because sometimes I’m late with my period.”
The year that I was there, approximately 6,500 women entered Harlem Hospital suffering from the complications of incomplete abortion. One nurse remembered, “There was this one woman … she told me she was picked up on a street corner and put in a car blindfolded so she would never know where she had gone. The blindfold stayed on throughout the procedure. Afterwards, she was dropped off, still bleeding, on the same street corner where the whole ordeal had begun. She wound up here with a temperature of a hundred and five degrees, but she made it. We had to call the police, but she wouldn’t say anything to them.”
In some states like Connecticut, puritanical laws from the late 19th century were still on the books, rendering all birth control illegal. In 1965, the Supreme Court legalized contraception for married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut, yet it remained widely unavailable for unmarried women in many states.
WATTLETON: Griswold came down while I was teaching labor and delivery nursing. Our encounters with the other side of it in terms of pregnancy termination were when women were miscarrying. There was always the inquiry as to whether it was a natural abortion or whether it was an induced abortion. During those years, there was a consciousness about the rounding up of doctors who were accused of conducting illegal abortions; they were in danger of losing their medical licenses.
Commonly, the illegal abortionist, using a crude instrument or surgical dilator, would open a woman’s cervix until contractions and bleeding started, and then send her to the hospital to be “cleaned up.”
“We couldn’t break the law and risk losing our licenses, so we refused to perform D and Cs [dilation and curettage] unless blood and fetal tissues had already been passed and the suspect ‘miscarriage’ was already under way when the patient was admitted,” one doctor recalled. “This meant that the woman hemorrhaged, and went through a lot of humiliation and pain before she could receive medical treatment, but what could we do?”
HEATHER BOOTH, CIVIL-RIGHTS AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST: The person who contacted me was a former boyfriend. He said his sister was pregnant and wanted an abortion, and could I help find a doctor?
I responded, thinking, this is a good deed I can do for a person in need. I got the name of this doctor, Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who had a clinic on 63rd St. Dr. Howard and I never met, but we talked by phone. On the initial call, all I did was find out, would he do this? What was involved? And I told him the name of the person I was going to give his information to.
Apparently, the abortion was successful. I really didn’t think that much more about it. But then someone else must’ve talked to someone, because I got another call, and then I made that arrangement, and then I got another call. At that point I realized we need to do something about this, and I set up a system. People would come and I would consult with them.
I found out what was involved in the procedure, what to look out for, and what follow-up to provide the women. I’d talk with Dr. Howard and ask him about how the procedures went, and we would negotiate the price. It was initially $500, then I got two for the price of one; we sometimes would get three for the price of one if someone didn’t have any money. We developed a trusting relationship over time.
MARGERY TABANKIN, POLITICAL ACTIVIST: I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, and had come from this very sort of Stephen Sondheim Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. All of a sudden, I’m on this huge campus and I’m no longer living at home and being told what to do.
It was the spring of ’66 when I met this young woman who was pregnant and freaked out. She was a little bit younger than us but not much, and I just didn’t know how to help her.
So I started asking people on campus, because I knew there were underground abortions being done: “Is there a safe thing you can recommend?” And I can’t remember who it was, but it was somebody who was older than me who said yes, I do know, but it’s kept under wraps. There’s a woman in Chicago named Jane who basically has this very effective underground ability to take care of people and make sure they get safe abortions.
I’m calling this phone number and this woman answers and I ask for Jane. It turns out, it was Heather Booth. At the time I had no idea who she was. We later ended up becoming incredibly close friends over the years. She asked me a million questions, but she made it happen and it was successful, and the lesson was, the minute you do something like this, somehow you just become the go-to person that people hear about.
I’d say three other people came to me over the few years I was in Madison, and I put them through the Jane network. Having no idea who these people were, except that I trusted them, and they were using very adept health professionals, and I wouldn’t worry that she would be on some street corner dying from sepsis.
THE ATHLETES
BOBBI GIBB, RUNNER: The first marathon I ever saw was in 1964. At that time, I had been running with my boyfriend, Will, and the father of one of my high-school friends said, “Well, since you like running so much, why don’t you go out and watch the marathon?”
“What’s that?”
“Twenty-six miles.”
“Twenty-six miles? They run twenty-six miles without stopping?” I couldn’t believe it. So I went with my dad to Wellesley and we watched the marathon and I just fell in love with it. I wasn’t thinking men or women. I was thinking, Wow, here are people who feel the same way I do about what it is to be human, the kind of endurance that it takes to run like this.
I was lucky enough to go to college and I loved school. Harvard, Yale, I mean the Ivy League universities were closed to women. Most of the professions were too—you couldn’t be a lawyer, you couldn’t be a doctor.
Later when I tried to apply to medical school, that was in the 60s, they told me I was too pretty. I’d upset the boys in the lab. They had to save the places for men who would actually practice medicine. And obviously I was just going to get married and have kids. I’d graduated from undergrad, I’d taken premed classes, and I got good marks. I mean, there’s no reason I couldn’t get in.
What could you do as a woman? You could be a telephone operator, you could teach school, probably primary school, until you got married, and then you’re expected to leave.
I was a woman, therefore I was weak, I was stupid, I was incompetent, I was lesser, I couldn’t do anything powerful, like be a doctor. I certainly couldn’t run a marathon.
“When I tried to apply to medical school … they told me I was too pretty. I’d upset the boys in the lab.”
KATHRINE SWITZER, RUNNER: When I was 12 years old [in 1959], I came home one day and said to my dad I was going to be a cheerleader in high school. And he said, you don’t want to do that, cheerleaders cheer for other people, you want people to cheer for you. Life is for participating, not spectating. Your school has a field-hockey team and you’d be a great field-hockey player. I said I can’t do that. I’ve never held a stick in my hand. And he said listen, all you have to do is run a mile a day and you’ll be one of the best players. I know you can do it.
He helped measure off a mile in our yard and it was seven laps, and I went out every day in the Washington, D.C. hot summer and struggled through the mile. When I tried out for the field-hockey team, I was one of the best players because I had conditioning. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been running for 55 years and I still think it’s magic.
The most amazing thing about that experience was that it wasn’t the running, and it wasn’t the conditioning, it was the empowerment that it gave me. Every day I ran, I had that sense of victory.
“I was thinking, Wow, here are people who feel the same way I do about what it is to be human, the kind of endurance that it takes to run like this.”
GIBB: I just took it for granted that this was a man’s sport. At that point, when I started to train, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I’m going to make a women’s statement.” I was thinking, I’m following this inner directive that has, for some mysterious reason, told me that I’m going to run the Boston Marathon. I started training the next day.
By then, I had a boyfriend who had a motorcycle. We’d ride out three miles, five miles, whatever, and he’d drop me off and then I would run home. So he helped me measure out the miles, and I would run in the woods with the dogs. The idea was to try to run farther and farther every day. I was absolutely committed. I was out there every day, rain, snow, storm, heat.
I was running in nurse shoes. Because of course they didn’t have running shoes then, especially for women. It was very hard to get a woman’s shoe that wasn’t flimsy with a pointed toe and a heel. But nurse shoes were flat. They had broad toes. They were made of leather. They were sturdy. So that was the one shoe I could run in.
The Boston Marathon was the only marathon that I knew of in the country. There were only two or three hundred men from all over the world who came to Boston to run it. There was no New York City Marathon, no Chicago, there were no books on running that I knew of. I didn’t know anyone who had run a marathon. There was no running movement.
Certainly, for a grown woman to run in public was thought improper. God forbid that she should perspire! And so, I was just going into the unknown, not knowing if my heart would take it, or if I could do it.
“I was running in nurse shoes. Because of course they didn’t have running shoes then, especially for women.”
SWITZER: There were all these myths that surrounded women who wanted to be athletes—you might get big legs, get hair on your chest, or your uterus would fall out. That was one of the things that set women’s running and women’s sports back so far, because women themselves were afraid of these myths and were often teased by guys who thought that we were doing something socially objectionable.
Women runners could run only short distances in the Olympic Games, but in 1960 women were allowed to run the 800-meter race for the first time since 1928, when it was banned because of false health concerns. The Olympics didn’t allow women to run the marathon until 1984.
GIBB: In February 1966, I wrote for my application [to the Boston Marathon] and I didn’t hide my gender or anything. I wrote my married name, and I got a letter back from Will Cloney, who was the race director, who said women are not physiologically able to run marathon distances, and furthermore, it’s a men’s-division race. Women are not allowed.
At that time I was running 40 miles at a stretch, and I get this letter that says women are not physiologically able to run 26.2 miles. That was the last straw. I knew at that point I was going to make a social statement. I saw that I had a chance to change the way people thought about women. Because if I could run this race that was thought impossible for women to do, it would call into question all the other prejudices and false beliefs that had been used for centuries to keep women subjugated.
So I took a bus back to Boston from California and I arrived the day before the race. I arrived in Boston and my parents actually thought I had lost my grip on reality. I convinced my mother to drive me to the race start, which was an amazing miracle because she had spent her entire adult life trying to get me to conform to the same deadening social norms that made her so miserable. I told her, “Mom, don’t you see this is going to help set women free?” Tears came to her eyes. She finally got what I was trying to do and she said, “I’ll help you.”
I didn’t want them to know I was a woman right away, so I also wore a blue hooded sweatshirt. I tied my hair back, pulled the hood up over my hair, and I was wearing new boys running shoes, which a friend of mine in San Diego, who was a runner, had suggested. I wish I had worn my nurses shoes because these new boys running shoes gave me horrible blisters. I didn’t know you were supposed to break them in.
I was thinking to myself, if they see I’m a woman, they’re going to arrest me or put me in jail. The most important thing was that I actually demonstrated that a woman can run a marathon, and run it well. I thought, if I fall down, or if I don’t finish, it’s going to set women back 50 years.
“For a grown woman to run in public was thought improper. God forbid that she should perspire!”
The starting gun fires and I wait till about half the pack leaves, and I jump into the middle and I start running. Within a few minutes the guys behind me are studying my anatomy from the rear and I can hear them talking, “Is that a girl? Is that a girl?”
I wanted to keep it upbeat and end this stupid war between the sexes and show that we can all do everything together. So I smiled and turned around and they said, “Oh, it is a woman.” Then to my great delight, they said, “Oh, I wish my wife, or I wish my girlfriend would run.” They were friendly.
And then I said, “I’m getting hot. I’d like to take off this sweatshirt, but I’m afraid if they see I’m a woman, they’ll throw me out.” And they said, “We won’t let them throw you out. It’s a free road.” So they were very protective.
I was probably still somewhere near the border of Hopkinton and Ashland when I threw off my hoodie, never to be seen again. People started to clap and applaud and the women on the sidelines were screaming. One of the reporters saw me running and he phoned ahead. Pretty soon it was being broadcast on one of the local radio stations.
Then I get to Wellesley [which was on the marathon route]. Well, the women at Wellesley College knew I was coming because it was on the radio, so they were waiting for me. In those days the Wellesley students made a tunnel and two lines of women would line up facing each other and they joined their hands and you had to squinch down and run between the women.
I could hear these women screaming up ahead of me. When I got closer … they just went crazy. They were crying and leaping into the air and screaming. And one woman was going, “Ave Maria, Ave Maria.” I really felt at that moment that the world would never be the same again.
Soon enough, I got these horrible blisters and my pace dropped off because my feet were hurting so bad. I was just tiptoeing along. So the last three miles I felt sort of disappointed because I knew I could have run faster if I had my nurses shoes on.
But anyway, I still did well. I finished in about three hours and 21 minutes and 40 seconds. I think they figured that was ahead of two-thirds of the pack.
I came down the last stretch and the press was there taking pictures and everybody was screaming and yelling and the governor of Massachusetts, Governor [John] Volpe, shook my hand, and the front-page headlines the next day said Hub Bride First Gal to Run Marathon. This went out by wire all over the world, and my parents had friends in Malaysia who saw the article.
It was like a pivotal moment where people saw things in a different way. And to me, that is the key thing, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do my whole life, is change people’s consciousness. Once the consciousness is changed in 1 person, then 2 people, then 10 people, then a million people, it becomes a social movement and then you can get the laws changed and then you can get the social system changed and so forth. But it has to start with that change of consciousness.
THE ACADEMICS
MARILYN WEBB, FEMINIST ACTIVIST: I came back to school in January 1967; I had worked the whole vacation on the proposal for my [University of Chicago Ph.D.] dissertation. I had finished all my graduate coursework and had passed my prelim exams. My dissertation plan was to compare the outcomes of these two preschools I was the director of.
So I went to the person who had been my mentor, Herbert Thelen. He’s dead now. He was a big guru in group dynamics, and chairman of the Educational Psychology Department. At the time, he was 54 years old. I was 24.
He said he wanted to come over to my apartment. I said, “Well, O.K.” So he came over and he said, “I’d like to give you baths.” And I said, “I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t feel very comfortable right now.” I basically said, “Could you leave?” I said, “So are you saying you don’t want to be on my committee?” And he said, “I want to give you baths.” And I said, “Then that’s all we have to talk about.”
I was devastated. I needed three people on my dissertation committee, and I went to the next professor I had in mind, who was Larry Kohlberg. His field was the moral development of children.
So, I went into Larry Kohlberg’s office and as soon as I got there, I gave him my papers and I said, “I really would like you to be on my committee.” Then he jumped up, loosened his tie, and ran around the desk. I was terrified. I jumped up, and all my papers fell on the floor. He pinned me to the wall and he started slobbering on my face, and he said to me, “It’s quid pro quo.”
I don’t even remember if I picked up the papers or not. I pushed him away and I ran out the door, and I don’t remember anything after that. All he could see was a pretty girl. That’s all any of them saw. Pretty girl and then assault.
“He pinned me to the wall and he started slobbering on my face, and he said to me, ‘It’s quid pro quo.’”
These were professors. I admired them. It shocked my worldview. All the time I spent trying to be pretty, even though you’re trying to be smart and learn and be a professional, it made me feel dirty and like I got the whole thing wrong.
There was a third professor I would have asked, but my classmates said, “There are rumors about him too.” I didn’t have any options. So I just left. I was humiliated. I was embarrassed for having been a fool, for deluding myself into thinking this was possible.
I thought it was my fault. What was I wearing? Did I look too sexy? What was wrong? And of course that was bullshit. It didn’t matter what I was wearing. It was just that’s how it was. And who was I to think I could be something different? Maybe if I was Hannah Arendt, who was one of the only women on the university faculty then, but I wasn’t.... I’m getting upset again.
Encouraged by the #MeToo movement, Marilyn Webb wrote the president of the University of Chicago in 2017, told her story, and asked the university to remedy her past injustice. After rewriting her previously published book to fit a dissertation committee’s requirements, Webb was awarded her Ph.D. at age 76 and walked in the graduation ceremony with the class of 2019.
THE WRITERS
LYNN POVICH, JOURNALIST: When Newsweek started in ’33 as the alternative to Time, it wanted to be much more politically liberal. Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, bought Newsweek in ’61 and hired Oz Elliott, who came from Time, to be the editor in chief.
NORA EPHRON, WRITER: I worked on the school newspaper in high school and college, and a week before graduating from Wellesley in 1962 I found a job in New York City. I’d gone to an employment agency on West 42nd Street. I told the woman there that I wanted to be a journalist, and she said, “How would you like to work at Newsweek magazine?” and I said fine.
POVICH: We were postwar women raised in that culture of yes, you’ll go to college, yes, you’ll get married, and yes, you’ll raise a family. You may have a job, but not a career. The word “career” was never mentioned.
EPHRON: The man who interviewed me asked why I wanted to work at Newsweek. I think I was supposed to say something like, “Because it’s such an important magazine,” but I had barely read Newsweek; in those days, it was a sorry second to Time. So I responded by saying that I wanted to work there because I hoped to become a writer. I was quickly assured that women didn’t become writers at Newsweek.
It would never have crossed my mind to object, or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule. I was hired as a mail girl, for $55 a week.
There were no mail boys at Newsweek, only mail girls. If you were a college graduate (like me) who had worked on your college newspaper (like me) and you were a girl (like me), they hired you as a mail girl. If you were a boy (unlike me) with exactly the same qualifications, they hired you as a reporter and sent you to a bureau somewhere in America. It was unjust but it was 1962, so it was the way things were.
“I hoped to become a writer. I was quickly assured that women didn’t become writers at Newsweek.”
LUCY HOWARD, JOURNALIST: Then there was the Elliott girl. The Elliott girl was someone who worked for Oz Elliott. You had to be smart, be pretty, have good legs, know how to make a martini, and not be turned off by any of the jokes that the top editors were telling. They wanted somebody that they found charming and entertaining and decorative.
EPHRON: I was the Elliott girl. This meant that on Friday nights I worked late, delivering copy back and forth from the writers to the editors, until it was very late. We often worked until three in the morning on Friday nights, and then we had to be back at work early Saturday, when the Nation and Foreign departments closed.
PETER GOLDMAN, JOURNALIST: It was the first time in my life, or first time since grade school, when I had actually had female pals.
POVICH: In the mid-60s when the sexual revolution was in full swing, the magazine was a cauldron of hormonal activity. Women felt as sexually entitled as men, and our short skirts and sometimes braless tops only added to the boil. It was post-pill, and there were a lot of young people. Married or single, it didn’t matter.
HOWARD: Some of the stuff that went on then, you’d be fired for in a split second today. Sometimes people would come up and rub your back, and they would flirt and say they liked your dress, or somebody would call you Dolly. A correspondent from Los Angeles who’s movie-star handsome stands right by your desk and says, “I had a great fuck last night. Wanna join me tonight?” That’s what it was like.
POVICH: Many guys looked at us as people they wanted to cheat on their wives with—and many women were happy to accommodate them. The infirmary, two tiny rooms with single beds, was the assignation place of choice. Often a writer would go there to “take a nap” for an hour or two, albeit with a female staffer.
Then Nora left Newsweek and went to the New York Post because she wanted to be able to write.
In a single decade, thousands of years of human custom and behavior were upended. It was not just political or legal, social or cultural disruption—it was all of that and more. It was a bedroom and a boardroom and an assembly-line revolution—a restructuring of how women and men in America saw each other, a re-invention of roles, and a fundamental identity shift.
Clara Bingham is a New York–based author, journalist, and documentary-film producer. Her previous books include Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress and Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul
