Women's issues

Let’s call this post “The Pill, the Pope, promiscuity, and PAGEANT.”

Pageant was a popular small-format magazine published from 1944 to 1977.  It went somewhat against the grain in publishing, since it carried no advertising.  To judge from this issue, it was a little on the low-brow side, a little on the salacious side.  There is a remarkable number of articles about sex here– premarital sex on campus (describing the by-now famous Barnard co-ed Linda LeClair as “one of that growing body of ‘value rebels’ who will lead us into a more hopeful future”); post-marital sex (couples should get an annual sex “check-up”); a photo feature on “Glamazons” in the movies (Barbarella and her cinematic sisters); and an article about teen promiscuity by a Unitarian minister (he thinks it’s OK).

The cover image–a pregnant woman holding a protest sign reading “Who says the Pill is perfect!”– has, oddly, no direct connection to anything inside the issue.  But flaunting a kind of j0key hipness about “the Pill” in 1968 was a way of attracting attention on the newsstand.  The first FDA-approved oral contraceptive had been on the market only since 1960, as historian Elaine Tyler May has written about recently in her wonderful book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010).   In 1968, the Pill, as Prof. Tyler May points out, was still considered something only for married women.  Prescribing oral contraceptives for single women was still banned in several states.

But there was another reason that 1968 was a signal year in the history of birth control: the publication (”promulgation”) on July 25th of the encyclical letter “Humanae Vitae” by Pope Paul VI.  It was the long awaited official response by the Catholic Church to the recently transformed landscape of birth control, and it proved a massive disappointment for advocates of liberalization.  The Pope–speaking “ex cathedra,” that is, infallibly– condemned all “unnatural” forms of contraception,” including new pharmaceutical contraceptives, which went against “the moral order which established by God.”

As for some of the other claims on the cover of this issue–for example, that falsetto-crooner Tiny Tim was “1968’s answer to John Wayne” or Ronald Reagan’s belief that “young Hitlers” were running our colleges–we will have to wait for another time to investigate those.

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Rachel, Rachel, starring Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman

Another one of the best movies of 1968, and I’m just now catching up with it (thanks again to Turner Classic Movies).  Rachel, Rachel, released exactly 42 years ago on August 26, 1968, was one of the nominees for the Best Picture Oscar in 1969 (nominated with Funny Girl, Lion in Winter, and Romeo and Juliet, and the year’s winner, Oliver!. Notice, by the way, that the mind-blowing 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t make the cut, although its director, Stanley Kubrick,  received a nomination.)

Rachel, Rachel is a quiet, small character study, a hybrid of an “art movie” and a mainstream “star” picture.  Rachel Cameron is a New England spinster, age 35, who feels life passing her by, rapidly.  ”Nothing’s real, nothing is now,” she confesses to her friend Calla.  ”If somebody pinched me, I wouldn’t even hurt.  I’ve only got one life.  I say to myself, maybe next time, this or that comes around, I’ll grab it, but nothing ever comes around, does it?”  She falls for (and has sex with) an old high school chum, who of course turns out to be a cad who dumps her when she gets too close.   There are things about Rachel, Rachel that mark it as a “contemporary” (1960s) movie–a lesbian subplot (Rachel’s fellow teacher, played by Estelle Parsons, comes on to her); some flashes of fantasizing by Rachel (she has lurid flashbacks to her childhood–she’s the daughter of the town undertaker–and she imagines overdosing her overbearing mother); a short dream sequence; a surprising scene of a somewhat countercultural religious awakening; and what must have seemed at the time to be some fairly explicit sex scenes.

The movie attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the press for one key reason:  its producer and director, Paul Newman (left off the list of Best Director nominees that year).  At age 43, Newman was one the biggest Hollywood stars of 1968, the blue-eyed heartthrob who commanded the Sixties box office with Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Hustler, Sweet Bird of Youth, Exodus and other less memorable flicks.   Rachel, Rachel was his first directorial effort, and this — far more than the picture itself or its star, Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward– was The Story for numerous magazine and newspaper articles, beginning months before the film’s release.

In this article in Saturday Evening Post in February 1968, when the movie was being filmed and was then called A Jest of God, reporter Jane Wilson gets the obvious fact about Newman out of the way quickly:  “In person he is so astonishingly handsome that it is impossible not to stare at him, and everybody does, all the time–men, women, children.”  Newman is reported to be “tired of playing superstar, feeling ‘burned out’ as an actor.”    In an October story in LIFE, Newman said about Rachel, Rachel:  ”I wanted to prove to Hollywood that you can make a motion picture about basic, simple people without violence and a band of Indians scalping settlers.”  (Newman shared this cover with his wife, but he had already been on LIFE’s cover once in 1968–for a May article about Hollywood stars getting involved in the political campaigns, mostly for McCarthy and Kennedy.)

Although Joanne Woodward still lives in Connecticut, Paul Newman died in 2008–a fact one would not be able to glean from websites for “Newman’s Own” food products.  Paul and daughter Nell Newman (who appeared in this movie as young Rachel) still grace the packaging of a line of organic foods.  He may have become a “brand,” but he’s still better looking than Orville Redenbacher.

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At 4:51 PM on this day 42 years ago, the pop artist Andy Warhol was declared clinically dead.

He had been shot a few hours earlier in the studio/offices known as “the Factory” in lower Manhattan.  The shooter was Valerie Solanas, an unhinged radical feminist who had written a pornographic play that she wanted Warhol– then at the peak of his notoriety–to produce as a film.  (A virtually minute-by-minute chronology of the incident has been compiled, and is available on the Warholstars website.)  In spite of severe injuries to multiple organs, Warhol somehow survived, though he never completely recovered.  He died after gall-bladder surgery in 1987 at the age of 58.

Valerie Solanas was arrested some hours after the shooting, after turning herself in to a policeman on a beat.  She was later quoted as saying that the reason she shot Warhol was that she “just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair.”  A movie based on the incident, with a terrific performance by Lili Taylor as Solanas, was released in 1996.

Besides the 1966 play that Warhol turned down, the only other literary product of Valerie Solanas that survives is the virulently anti-male “SCUM Manifesto,” written in 1967 and then mimeographed and distributed by Solanas in 1968 on the streets of New York.   A portion of the single-spaced document (with obscenities removed) is reproduced here (courtesy of Cabinet magazine,

Summer 2005).   SCUM may (or may not) stand for the “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the manifesto lists a “few examples of the most obnoxious and harmful types [of men]:  rapists, politicians . . . ; lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak . . . . ; cops; tycoons; scientists . . . ; liars and phonies . . . ; all men in the advertising industry . . .; all members of the armed forces. . . .”

After the shooting and conviction, Solanas served a three-year prison term.  In the 1970s, she was hailed by some leading feminists as a victim and martyr, and as “an outstanding champion of women’s rights.”  She died in 1988 at the age of 52.

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Shacking up, 1968-style

It’s unlikely that New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud envisioned the hornets’ nest she was poking exactly 42 years ago, on March 4, 1968, with this article about cohabitation at U.S. colleges.  ”College administrators dryly refer to it as ’student cohabitation.’  But to the students themselves, it’s better known as ’shacking up,’ ‘the arrangement’–or, more commonly, just plain ‘living together.’”  That lead paragraph  packs in a lot euphemisms for what is left unsaid, that is, it’s about “young people having sex.”  Klemesrud (already carving out a reputation as the Times‘ most incisive reporter on women’s issues) reassuringly writes:  ”Some view an ‘arrangement’ as a necessary prelude to marriage; very few say it is primarily for sex.”   Students offered a long list of factors that led to their choice to live together: “birth control pills, alienation from parents, new liberal student housing rules, drugs, the love philosophy of the hippies, liberal-minded landlords, and the influence of such musicians as The Beatles and Bob Dylan.”

Sex and women’s rights

The issue might have gone away, dismissed with a little tsk-tsking about “those kids today,” had it not been for the ill-advised revelations made by one of the couples, here identified as “Susan and Peter,” a Barnard sophomore and a Columbia junior, both 20.  The article says that “Susan is supposed to be living in a dormitory,” but she had gotten a waiver because she told the school she was taking a (fake) job as live-in maid.  Barnard officials quickly tracked down the perpetrator — real name: Linda LeClair–and called her before the college’s judicial council, where she was charged with lying about her housing arrangements.  Meanwhile, LeClair had written letters in the school newspaper, arguing that women were being discriminated against, since Columbia men were not obliged to live on campus in single-sex dorms (the only kind of dorms there were in 1968).   The council found her guilty, but called for reconsidering the college’s housing regulation.  Her punishment was being banned from the school cafeteria.  The Barnard president, Martha Peterson, rejected the council’s decision as too mild, and put pressure on LeClair to drop out, which she eventually did.

Moralism and salaciousness

As historian Beth Bailey writes in her book Sex in the Heartland:  ”The media were quick to take up a story that offered such potential for twinned moralism and salaciousness.  And so LeClair’s conduct and her fate became the focus on what amounted to a national referendum on the sexual mores of the nation’s youth.”

“Linda LeClair, the issue”

Nearly two months after the Times story, LIFE carried a photo story about the same phenomenon, also called “The Arrangement.”  The  photo at the top of this post is the story’s title spread, and Linda and her boyfriend are depicted upper left.

It also included an interview with Linda, who said that, in the intervening weeks, she was finding it “hard to think of myself as a person any more.  I have ceased to exist.  I am Linda LeClair, the issue.”   The LIFE reporter writes: “A sexual anthropologist of some future century, analyzing . . .the artifacts of the American Sexual Revolution, may consider the case of Linda Le Clair and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, as a moment when the morality of an era changed.”

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Ladies Home Journal was not, to put it mildly, a political magazine.  Not in the 1960s, not now.

But for the first issue of 1968, that most “political” of years, the chief editors at Ladies Home Journal–every single one of them men, by the way–decided to take a different tack.  As the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, wrote in his “Dear Reader” column, this was because “there are more and more problems in our world and fewer and fewer answers– not only national and international problems, but increasing friction about community, family and personal matters.”  LHJ announced that each issue would “be consciously planned not only to entertain and inform you better than ever before, but to be used–to solve your problems, to help improve your life.”  Readers would be offered “the opportunity to participate in the making of each issue . . . to put you in touch with the triumphs and defeats of 13 million other Journal women.”  New features were added:  a “Journal Board of Experts,” who would answer readers’ questions.  The Board included personal finances advisor Sylvia Porter, TV journalist David Brinkley, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and etiquette maven Amy Vanderbilt.   A new monthly readers’ poll, “The Voice of Women,”  was begun, surveying thousands of readers by mail.

Reaching for relevance

The Journal was, in short, reaching for the most 1960s of goals:  Relevance.  Henceforth, the magazine would serve their readers in new, meaningful ways, to help them make sense of a world that–suddenly– seemed a lot more complicated.   Naturally, the covers would need to reflect this more engaged identity.  Ladies Home Journal “cover girls” in 1967 had been the usual lineup:  Mia Farrow, Jacqueline Kennedy (pre-Onassis), Twiggy and other fashion models, cute kids and Moms.  This one doesn’t feature a celebrity at all, but rather an unidentified woman in a sweater festooned with an array of slogan or campaign-type buttons.  The words announce the issue’s contents: an excerpt from Bobby Kennedy’s new book, To Seek a Newer World, which came out just before he entered the presidential race; a true story, “My Son is On LSD. Is Yours?”; an article by an obstetrician, writing under a pseudonym, confessing that he prescribes birth control pills for unmarried “girls”; and an article on how “We Can Close the Generation Gap.”  The new poll feature concludes that “We’re Scared of Our Kids,” revealing that “many parents are so tyrannized by their children that they are not altogether sure that adults are still running the world.”

A story in need of revision

My personal favorite story in this issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming (1968) biography of Charles A. Lindbergh, The Last Hero, by Walter S. Ross (one of many unauthorized biographies that had appeared since 1927, all of them despised by Lindbergh).   The introduction to the excerpt here says that Lindbergh–who turned 66 in 1968–was “scarred by tragedy [i.e., the kidnapping of his son in 1932], and retreated into a shell of secrecy.  Inside it, however, Lindbergh raised five children to be responsible, self-reliant young men and women.  To him, the Generation Gap was just another Atlantic–and he spanned it with an unusual mixture of fatherly love and iron discipline.”   The cover “button” that calls Lindbergh “America’s Most Remarkable Father” is richly ironic, of course, since we now know that the 1960s were exactly the years that Lindbergh was carrying on three separate extramarital affairs in Europe, and fathering no fewer than seven additional illegitimate children.   Remarkable.

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On this day, February 10, in 1968,  Peggy Fleming won the gold medal in figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France–the only gold won that year by an American athlete at the competition.  A few weeks later,  this “Olympic Charmer” showed up on the cover of LIFE magazine, wearing her gold medal and her memorable chartreuse skating outfit.  Fleming, who came into the Olympics as the three-time World Champion, was expected to win, but her triumph  galvanized the American figure-skating world, still recovering from the catastrophic plane crash seven years earlier that had killed the entire U. S. figure-skating team.  (Another American skater, Tim Wood, won silver at Grenoble.)  Fleming’s win was the first in an unbroken string of medals (not all of them gold)  for American women in skaters at the Olympic Games that extends down to the last games in 2006, and includes such well-known names as Dorothy Hamill, Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, and Nancy Kerrigan.

Peggy Fleming’s performance at the 1968 Games is the stuff of legend, and it is of course available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw9XZAA72lw). Watching it, one is struck again by the contrast between her style–classic, balletic, and graceful–and that of the women in the sport today, when the competition has come to be dominated by speed and jumping.  Fleming was– and remains, at age 61–a class act.

It’s not surprising that a youthful and triumphant image was chosen for the cover of LIFE this week.  Fleming’s gold was just about the only good news around.   Inside this issue, the Olympic Games take a back seat to a huge photo spread and a depressing article on the Marines at the seemingly endless battle for Khe Sanh in Vietnam (announced on the cover next to Peggy’s saluting arm).  LIFE’s editorial in this issue is headlined: “Wherever we look, something’s wrong.”    It begins: “The American people . . . unexpectedly find themselves mired in frustration, self-doubt, and even impotence. . . . America is in a multiple crisis: military, monetary, social, constitutional, and moral,” and the editors call for an “honest rethinking of our purpose in the world.”

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In one of its first issues of the new year in 1968, LIFE magazine tackled one of the day’s most widely discussed issues:  America’s “drug problem.” But here–for a change–the narrative about drug abuse was not about hippies going on “acid trips,” but about co-eds and housewives popping diet pills.  And they were doing so armed with prescriptions from doctors.

“Filling-station operations” dispensing speed

The drugs–mostly some form of amphetamines, or “speed”–were not contraband, and did not involve shady cartels or exotic locales.  They were dispensed by white-coated, licensed, mostly male doctors to — at the time– most female “patients.”  LIFE reported that the FDA estimated that there were 5,000 to 7,000 “fat doctors” working in the U.S. at that time.  Most of them were “osteopaths” (not M.D.’s), but maybe a third were board-certified medical doctors.  Many of them, LIFE reported, “run filling-station, cash-and-carry operations, see 100 patients or so a day, give only cursory physical exams or none at all, and carelessly send off their ‘customers’ with sacks of potent–and possibly deadly–pills.”  The longest feature in the magazine  was the report by “slender LIFE reporter” Susanna McBee (5′5″, 125 pounds), who visited ten “fat doctors” in various parts of the country to discuss her concerns about her weight, and was given diet pills by “every last one of them– a ‘haul’ of 1,479 pills.”  Another article documented the collusion of pharmaceutical companies bent on pushing their “weight-control products” with greedy and unethical doctors, some of were said to be making $1 million dollars a year (!)

Who was getting fat in 1968–and why?

The LIFE series–in focusing on unethical medical practices and the “industry”–missed the larger contours of this phenomenon, which perhaps we can see clearly now only with hindsight.  The increasing willingness of people to place their trust in “science” (especially in the form of little rainbow-colored pills); the spiking social/pop cultural pressure on women to be “slim” (the favored word of the day); the increased affluence and leisure time–much of it spent sitting on couches watching television–which led almost inevitably to more eating and drinking by both men and women.

But amidst so much else that was happening in 1968, it is amazing how clearly diets and dieting stand out as cultural obsessions that year.

Diet books:  A banner year in 1968

A glance at Publisher’s Weekly non-fiction bestseller list for 1968 — and “Covering 1968″ has been there before– reveals a couple of remarkable trends:  a relatively new vogue for poetry (well, at least poetry written by the warm and sensitive Rod McKuen, who had three books on the list that year), and the popularity of diet books.  ”Popularity” is an understatement:  three of the top ten bestsellers were diet books, a phenomenon unmatched before or since.  (In recent years, the New York Times Book Review and other lists have begun separating out cookbooks, diet books, and other advice manuals from general non-fiction, making comparisons harder.)  Cookbooks–as opposed to diet books–had been big sellers consistently for years.  In fact the number-one book that year was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.  The top diet books of the year were The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet, by Erwin Stillman, which popularized the “Stillman water diet;” the Weight Watcher’s Cookbook; and Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim (BHG seems to have figured out how to do this; the year before, their Fantastic Ways with Chicken was tied with Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual for tenth place.)

More on those cookbooks and dieting later– It would be great to hear thoughts from readers!

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One of the most famous covers of the 1960s:  the spectacular Naomi Sims appears on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal.

In November 1968, Ladies’ Home Journal-- ”The Magazine Women Believe In”–featured  the first black “cover girl” in the history of this long-lived and influential magazine, the first, actually, on any “mainstream” (i.e., white) women’s magazine.  The cover was in the news very recently, illustrating the New York Times obituary for Sims who died August 1, 2009, at the age of 61.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/fashion/04sims.html?_r=1

When she appeared on this cover in 1968, Sims was not an unknown: she had appeared the year before on the cover of a Times fashion supplement, and by the next year was seen nationwide in an AT&T ad campaign on television and in print.  But still, the LHJ cover was big news, coming toward the end of a turbulent year in American race relations. The Journal had been the most prestigious women’s mag since the turn of the 20th century, far outpacing rivals McCall’s, Redbook, and Women’s Day, if not in circulation then certainly in cultural significance and influence.

A complete woman

And it’s a great cover shot:  She’s wearing a crocheted outfit–very much of the moment, but something that “even a beginner could finish in eight hours.”   Sims’ dark skin is amply revealed, and her long (5′10″) body is curled up and perfectly fitting into the rectangular outline of the cover:  ”This is a complete woman,” the photo seems to say: “Black is Beautiful.”  She was 21 years old.

More than just a pretty face

The LHJ editors knew what they were doing when they hired her.  She was not going to be just a mannequin for that crocheted ouftit, assigned the usual mute role for cover girls.  No, this was a Culturally Significant Moment, and the editors gave her not only the cover but a huge spread inside, and an “exclusive interview” with editor Diana Lurie.  The interview begins slowly, cruising around details about what’s it’s really like being a model, then it gets to the elephant in the room:  race.  ”My mother felt that the Negro was inferior, and she lived in poor white neighborhood [in Pittsburgh].  In kindergarten, I can remember being the only Negro in an all-white school. . . I get questions all the time about being Negro.  I hate having to be made aware and always having to use my brain about being Negro.  After Martin Luther King’s assassination, somebody said, ‘Now you’re really going to work, baby.’ . . . Beauty does surpass prejudice at a point, yet sometimes the effort people are making to assimilate us seems contrived.”

Stereotypes don’t go away overnight

If Sims’ cover appearance was history-making, the rest of the magazine seemed still to be treading the water of racial stereotypes.   African Americans appear in exactly two other places in the entire 200-page issue, both of them advertisements: An ad for Samsonite, in which a black luggage porter is helping a white damsel-in-distress at JFK Terminal; and an ad for Calgonite dishwasher detergent with the caption “The prettiest dishes in America use Calgonite,” and 34 headshots of apparently “average” pretty American women (the “dishes” of the caption, one assumes), four of whom, remarkably, are black.

And finally, how many people, I wonder, in 1968 noticed the stunning, almost perverse, contrast presented by the BACK cover of this historic issue of Ladies’ Home Journal?  Here it is, without comment.

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