TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1372> <link 93XP0514> <link 93XP0506> <link 93XP0505> <link 93XP0504> <title> Women: A Gallery Of American Women </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Women Portrait </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> March 20, 1972 A Gallery of American Women </hdr> <body> [Since time immemorial poets and novelists have celebrated the diversity of woman, and U.S. society provides as varied an opportunity for richly individual life-styles and attitudes as any the world has known. Here are nine portraits of contemporary U.S. women and their views on why they live and work and love as they do. They do not, of course, begin to exhaust the possibilities, but they do indicate the range at a time of questioning of familiar roles and traditional assumptions.] Marcia Heuber's world is one of seasons and crops, dawn-to- dusk farm chores, the kitchen and children in a rambling farmhouse near Malta, Ill. She gets up at 4:30 a.m. most of the year, and by 10 a.m. she has prepared breakfast for her husband and four children, fed and watered the chickens, and washed the first of three loads of laundry. Then she puts in a full day in the fields, helping to sort pigs and cattle, unloading hay bales and gathering the six dozen eggs she sells daily. She drives a tractor, spreads manure, fills silos and hauls in grain. It is hard work, and Marcia, 34, loves every minute of it. It annoys her to no end, she says, that "although there is no doubt in my mind that women in farming are among American's greatest career women, I'm considered an unemployed housewife." Marcia insists that she is doing just what she had always wanted to do. She grew up just four miles south of her present home, and cheerfully admits that when she was in high school "my biggest goal was to get married." She married Roger Heuber shortly after they graduated from high school, had her first son a year later. Together she and Roger worked the farm and slowly began buying it from Roger's father. "I started helping with the chores no matter what the weather," she recalls. While she works as hard as her husband and handles the household accounts, she has no doubts about where she stands in relation to Roger. "I still feel the male sex should be dominant," she says firmly. "I want my husband to feel he is the head of the household. We decide things together, but I think the final word should mostly be his." Marcia also finds time to be one of the most active women in the community, teaching Sunday school, playing the church organ, working for the P.T.A. She conducts intense sessions with her high-school-level church classes on the war (which she hates) and abortion on demand (which she decidedly favors). She is deeply proud of the life she has carved for herself out of the rich Midwestern soil. "I'm still not sorry I don't have a college education," she says. "Being married and having a family were the most important things for me. I'm very happy with my profession." Lynn Young is 33, attractive, unmarried--and likes it that way. "I'd rather grow old alone than with some old creep," she says. "What's the point in marrying just not be lonely when you are old. When the children have grown up you just look at each other and get bored." A medical illustrator who makes an average of $20,000 a year, Lynn lives in a handsome house in Sausalito overlooking San Francisco Bay. Her work makes home little more than a pied-a- terre. She flies all over California and sometimes beyond, doing sketches for malpractice or insurance cases, like a drawing showing how an accident destroyed the vein structure in a crushed foot. She recently flew to India to observe surgical methods there. Then she made the same sort of trip to Japan and managed to squeeze in a side visit to the Olympics. "I'd rather go off by myself," she says, "than drag along some warm body I'm not interested in." Lynn decided on her unusual field even before her college years at Berkeley. "I wanted to be a surgeon," she admits, "but a friend at Stanford medical school discouraged me. He showed me how tough medicine is for a woman." So she added two years of art and medical-school training and took over the small medical art department at Berkeley. She then tried marriage to her high school boy friend. It lasted for three years. As Lynn puts it: "I got tired of our coming home from a day of sailing and finding we were looking at each other with that empty `what next?' feeling." While she sees several men regularly, Lynn is also wont to go out unescorted with married couples and never feels the least pressure to remarry. Says she: "I've come close a couple of times, but there simply aren't that many marriages I envy. A lot of women are just hanging in there for the security, but that's a dumb reason to get married. As for children, I'm too much of a perfectionist to put up with them. I'd be a rotten mother." Janet Sue Epperson's workday begins with a thorough reading of the Wall Street Journal. As a trust officer of the City National Bank and Trust Co. of Kansas City, Mo., Janet is only too aware that her good looks will not help her if her clients are taking a beating in the stock market. They rarely do; in the six years since she graduated from the University of Kansas, Janet has become one of the most respected bankers in Kansas City. "It's an ideal industry for a woman," she says. "You either make money for people or you don't. All you have to sell is your performance." Still, Janet would probably shuck it all for marriage and family. Indeed, it seems odd to her friends that Janet, who will be 29 next month and has been engaged several times, has not been married by now. Looking remarkably like Dinah Shore, as a high school senior she was elected Most Likely to Settle Down and Start a Family. "I guess that changed in college," she says. "Suddenly other challenges popped up." Now she has done so well that her career seems to hurt her chances for marriage. She points out that a number of men look at her apparently successful social and professional life and are afraid to enter the fray. On the other hand, she is more choosy, too. "Now, if a relationship doesn't look worth it, I just don't waste my time." The daughter of a retired Air Force officer, Janet is politically conservative and has little use for the basic goals of Women's Lib. She thinks equal pay for equal work is a non-issue. "Maybe most women don't work as hard as men do. I encounter more frustrated men than I do women in the course of a day. Everyone has his pay gripes, men as much as women, and just as legitimately so." Her solution for women's economic ambitions? "Pick a growing industry where everyone is overworked." "I used to call my husband A.B.--arrogant bastard," says Eleanor Driver. "And he was, but he was strong and dominant, and I liked that. But as the kids grew older and moved out, I got bored and depressed with Bill. He worked six days a week and brought home a briefcase every night. I kept talking about going back to school until finally Bill said, `Quit talking about it and do it.' A little later on when the university offered me a job he said, `Go ahead--but I want my socks washed.' Six months later he died of a heart attack." That was seven years ago. Today Eleanor, 53, mother of five grown sons, barely has time to wash her own socks. The director of Oakland University's Continuum Center in Rochester, Mich., she spends five days or more a week helping men and women define their roles in a program called Investigation into Identity. "My life is so different now, I don't believe it," she says. Neither do some of her old "uptight friends" who cannot understand why she moved out of her home in a fashionable Detroit suburb to live alone on a 43-ft. houseboat on Lake St. Clair. Eleanor's answer is simple and straight to the point: "I don't want a conventional old age." Her investigation into her identity was one of gradual awakening. "When Bill died," she explains, "I was a gloved, girdled and hatted upper-middle-class mamma. There was no need to work, but I could not tolerate sitting in that house being the `widow of...' or the `mother of...' What it finally came down to was the whole thing of being a person. I wanted to make it on my own. That's not to say that I was a leader in Women's Liberation. The whole atmosphere of the movement was almost forced on me. I didn't go looking for it. I remember saying women don't want Women's Liberation, they want to be loved. But when I started working at the center, I realized what a bill of goods is sold to women." Eleanor resumed an active social life three years ago, but she has no plans to remarry. "I'm not against marriage," she says. "I'm against what marriage does to people--that kind of ownership that two people put on each other. That's what is so exciting about these times. No one has to be locked in. It's fun not to worry about what people are thinking, or to have to conform to patterns. Feeling useful--outside of the family--that's what the movement is about. I've lucked out on Women's Liberation." Janie Cottrell, 24, sank into her sofa in a pair of dark blue hot pants, crossed her showgirl legs and said, "I wanted to be a certified welder more than anything in the world." Which is just what she is. Janie graduated from Robert E. Lee Institute in Thomaston, Ga., in 1965, decided to enroll in a business course at the local vocational school. "I didn't like any of it," she says, "especially the charm course. One day in the cafeteria the welding teacher walked by and said, `What's the matter? You look like you've lost your last friend.' When I told him how bored I was, he invited me to welding class. I was excited by all that fire and light, so I enrolled in the class." Janie was heartened by her instructor's insistence that he had taught women to weld during the war and that for some reason they made better welders than men. Naturally she had her problems. "One day I was welding with loafers on, and a spark went down into my shoes. I had to stick my foot into a nearby bucket of water. After that I wore boots with Kleenex stuck into the toes. They're awfully ugly, but they really protect you." Janie also mastered blueprint reading and mathematics, but when she applied for a job with an aluminum company in Newnan, she was greeted with the predictable, "Are you serious?" She talked her way into a job, for which she had to commute 110 miles a day. That forced her to quit after a year, but she remembers with pride, "When I left, the company vice president said I was probably the best aluminum welder he had ever employed." She had trouble finding another welding job, so she countered male reluctance with extreme measures. "This Women's Liberation thing was starting up then, and I just called Governor Maddox and asked him why I couldn't get a job if I was a qualified welder." The state labor department quickly arranged an interview with Scientific Atlanta, Inc., where Janie has worked for three years. She was such an attraction at the plant that the company provided her with curtains to hang around her station. After work she loves Atlanta night life, and her apartment is handsomely decorated with aluminum and steel designs created with her blowtorch. As a child in Suffolk, Va., Betty Jackson had dreams of being a singer or a nurse and some day, a wife. Instead, at 15 she had an illegitimate child and that, coupled with the death of her mother, was "the end of my hopes." Migrating to New York City in 1960, she worked for four years as a live-in maid until another pregnancy caused her to lose her job. She has been on welfare ever since. Presently living in a four-room ghetto apartment in The Bronx with four of her seven illegitimate children, Betty Jackson says, "I live in dope city and on one of the worst streets. The apartment has been robbed three times, and I've been cut once. We have no heat. We get hot water once in a while. The wall is coming apart from the leaks. I've had a broken window for the past year. The kids sleep in their clothes. I use the stove and oven for heat, but the gas the electricity bills are very high. I had an electric heater once, but it was stolen. Roaches are everywhere. The rats minuet and waltz around the floor." While welfare pays her monthly rent of $92.10, she says that the additional $128 she receives twice a month barely allows for the necessities, much less such luxuries as a telephone, radio, TV or vacuum cleaner. "I am a slave to my financial problems," she says, "and my life is meaningless as far as having things that people are supposed to have." Now 36, she says of the three men who sired her children that "I have never once come close to getting married." Though she has had a tubal ligation to prevent further pregnancies, the pattern remains. She says that whatever hopes she had of returning to work were dashed when her 19-year-old daughter gave birth to an illegitimate child two weeks ago. Survival, she explains, is her primary concern. Women's Lib? "I'm not interested." Religion? "I don't go to church. They're robbers. I can pray at home, and He'll hear me just the same, and I don't have to pay for it." Politics? "I have no hope in elections. I've written to Nixon, Rockefeller and Lindsay. They all say they can't do anything. I don't trust nobody." The future? "If things don't shape up, my children won't live for it. Society will kill them and put them in bondage too, and they won't be able to move either." Summing up her plaint, Betty Jackson says: "I just need some place to survive. I'm being crazied up in this Establishment." Five months ago, Norine O'Callaghan and her husband John, a milkman, made the last payment on their 18-year, $25,000 house mortgage. It was not, however, a cause for rejoicing. In recent years the O'Callaghans neighborhood, a former Irish Catholic enclave on Chicago's South Side, has been in a state of flux due to the incursion of black homeowners. Rather than pull up stakes, the O'Callaghans chose to stay on, and are now one of the last white families on their side of the street. For Norine O'Callaghan, a plumpish, red-haired housewife of 46, the influx of blacks is not a calamity but a challenge "to get out of the house and work for something you think matters." The president of her block association, she explains: "If blacks move in, you've got to get to know them too. That's the whole idea, to break down the fear of not knowing. How can you get to know someone if you run away?" More than a cause, her outside work is also a form of therapy. "I'm a very happy, contented person," she says. "I love being the way I am. But it's not that I haven't had burdens and hard knocks." Of the seven children she bore, one died at the age of 16, another is mentally retarded and institutionalized. Active in church and school work, she believes that "women need something besides kids. There's nothing more boring than women who talk about their babies, diapers and what they fix for dinner. If I couldn't get away, I know I'd end up in the nut house." Though she is against abortion ("It's murder") and worries that some mothers use day-care centers as a substitute for child rearing, she is in sympathy with most of the aims of Women's Lib. Her one reservation is that "in order to get into the system, a woman has to become like a man, and is, therefore, probably no better." To charges that block associations are racist, Norine answers that her sole aim is to stop block busting rather than prevent black families from moving in. She is quick to quash rumors of a black takeover, and has made the rounds of the real estate offices to demand a halt to scare tactics. Still, surrounded by more complainers than doers like herself, she wonders how long she can hold out. She suspects that "next summer, when my kids go out to play, they will have all the black playmates. That's going too far in the other direction, it seems to me." "Why should I have children?" asks Suzanne Sape, 23, who is happily married and upward bound in a management-planning career. "It isn't an automatic presumption--unless you accept the male- female roles generically." Suzanne clearly does not. For almost three years Suzanne has worked in the Internal Revenue Service, and is now deeply engrossed in management development, planning programs to train supervisors. She makes $13,309 a year and is studying for her Master's degree at George Washington University three nights a week. She and her husband George, a lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, enjoy such traditional young marrieds' projects as refinishing furniture and painting a mural on the bedroom wall of their modest walk-up apartment in Arlington, Va. "I'm glad I'm married," Suzanne says, "and I enjoy being feminine. I like to sew, and I was once really interested in fashion." But Suzanne's bent toward homemaking and shared joys does not extend to having children. "If I were to conceive," she says frankly, "I would have an abortion. I like children very much. I consider it an enormous challenge to raise them the way they should be raised. It takes an awful lot of time and energy and intellect to raise them to cope with the problems of a pretty crummy world. But I would rather deal with life directly than through a child." Suzanne has talked with doctors about sterilization, but has reached the conclusion that she does not want to risk the possible physical and psychological side effects. Nor does she want her husband to be sterilized, since he might some day want a child. Suzanne considers herself an aggressive feminist, and works hard for the newly organized Women's Legal Defense Fund. She says that the concept of zero population growth is important to her, but she acknowledges that her decision is much more personal. "If a woman has a child, it should be a full-time occupation for at least the first year, perhaps two or three. Three years is an awful big bite out of a career, and I've spent a long time preparing for my career." Soon after her marriage in 1944, Lauretta Galligan found herself alone most of the time when her husband's company assigned him a job that kept him away from home six days a week. To make friends and keep busy, Lauretta joined the women's auxiliaries of her husband's two alma maters and attended night school. As her household expanded to include five sons, she dropped her outside interests to spend more time at home, "making sure everyone is going in the right direction." This might seem like indentured housewifery to some women, but not to Lauretta Galligan, who at 52 still rises at 6:30 to prepare her husband's breakfast and get the two sons remaining at home off to school. She smiles happily when her husband Thomas, who is now president of Boston Edison Co., calls her his "greatest asset." Lauretta is not anti-Women's Lib. She believes in equal rights and equal pay, and that women should be well represented in big corporations, on boards of directors and in industry, "particularly when it comes to designing." She also believes that daycare centers are inevitable. But of her own life-style she says: "My first priority is my family and my husband's work, and then I work on other things." Lauretta never plays bridge and only occasionally goes to fashion shows or luncheons. Most of her social life revolves around her husband's business. When visiting executives bring their wives to town, she takes them sightseeing; she also goes to business dinners with her husband and entertains groups at home at least three times a month. What if she had her life to live over again? "I don't think I would change any part of it. Being a homemaker and mother is very stimulating. I realize there are many things about homemaking that are a little bit monotonous, but a lot of things about a woman's career or a man's career can be monotonous too." </body> </article> </text>