Female passengers were banned from United Airlines’ “executive flights” from New York to Chicago, and in some states women were barred from jury duty lest time spent in the courtroom “encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.” “Hell, yes, we have a quota,” admitted a medical school dean. “We do keep women out, when we can.”
Giant Steps for Womankind, but Still Miles to Go
By
One conclusion that could be drawn from the popular TV series “Mad Men” is that the early 1960s were a great time to be an American male. How the show’s strivers and schemers relish their rowdy bonhomie, as well as the gladiatorial power games conducted in the near-total absence of female contenders. And what a solace it is for these harried executives to return home to wives who exist solely to cook their dinners, raise their children and look stunning at parties. Meanwhile, viewers can enjoy the joke of understanding, as the characters do not, that this idyll of testosterone-fueled entitlement is about to end forever.
Gail Collins’s “When Everything Changed” points out what the women on “Mad Men” know: that period in our history was less enjoyable for the ladies. Ms. Collins, who edited the editorial page of The New York Times (the first woman to have held that position) from 2001 to 2007 and who now writes an Op-Ed column for the paper, begins her informative survey with a panoramic look at how women lived in 1960 — recent history, we might think, until we note how many practices then in fashion seem, by current standards, positively medieval.
Female passengers were banned from United Airlines’ “executive flights” from New York to Chicago, and in some states women were barred from jury duty lest time spent in the courtroom “encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.” “Hell, yes, we have a quota,” admitted a medical school dean. “We do keep women out, when we can.”
The practice of paying women less for doing the same jobs as men was not only accepted but routine; a wife’s credit card was issued in her husband’s name; and women had trouble securing bank loans to buy a house or even a car. The National Press Club was off limits to women until 1971.
No one much questioned these regulations and customs — the dress codes requiring women to wear skirts instead of pants, the firing of airline stewardesses who gained too much weight — nor was there vocal opposition to the sort of prohibitions that we decry when they appear in dispatches from some benighted emirate or sheikdom.
To read the rest of this review, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/books/21change.html?_r=1&hpw