I’ve learned the most about myself, these last few years, by looking back, not at my own life but at my place in the succession of women who came before me. For so long I sold them short. My mother, for instance. My mother was a housewife, a rather reserved person with a sweet nature and a powerful ability to control her children through the simple exigency of spontaneous and utterly sincere tears. That was how I pigeonholed her for many years, her and many others like her.
But the truth was that once upon a time my mother had been someone else. I know this because there are photographs of her, in Lana Turner shorts, wasp-waisted against a fence post on her honeymoon. There was the occasional story about a before-Bob boyfriend, terrifying in the implication that we might have never been born, or been born only half ourselves, passing the other half in Wanamaker’s at Christmastime.
But mainly I know this because of the drafting table in the basement. I wish I had it now, glossy wood, tilt top, talismanic. Apparently for a short time after high school my mother worked as a draftsman—that’s what she said, draftsman, not draftswoman—at General Electric. My father says she was the only woman there, that they erected something they called a maiden veil at the front of her drafting table, a modesty panel designed to safeguard her dignity because in those days all working women wore skirts. I wish I had asked her about it, if the guys gave her a hard time, if she rued trading the job in for marriage and multiple pregnancies. But I never did.
I thought of myself as a woman who had burst free of the circle of Avon Lady, Tupperware Party, and Fuller Brush Man that my mother inhabited, not someone who was the daughter of a woman who was the first or only of her profession. That version of my mother seemed less real to me than Jo March in Little Women. The mother I knew spent years in maternity smocks and seemed to iron incessantly. I don’t own an iron, never have, and that’s no accident. The combination of hot metal and a damp dress shirt seemed to me to be a sentence to a life of nothing much. I couldn’t imagine what my mother did all day, even when there was a new baby in the house to care for and stew on the table for dinner and clean uniform blouses in my closet. That’s the point of being a kid, the kind of magical thinking that suggests that the details of your existence just sort of happen. But sometimes I think that my entire generation of women adopted, for a time, that childlike point of view, that the women who raised us did things that were tedious and beneath notice.
You had only to listen to us to know that this was true, listen to our implied belief in our own singularity. We invented natural childbirth. Also toilet training and time-outs and open communication and story time. We invented balancing work and family, and spousal divisions of labor, and sexual harassment and equal pay for equal work. Or at least we behaved as though we had. Occasionally someone would call us on all this. Once, when I wrote a column about juggling writing and childrearing, a mother of six who had taught high school Spanish for fifty years wrote me a mildly peremptory letter suggesting that discussions by baby boomer women might occasionally reflect that they were not the first humans ever to have both a job and children. A Southern lady in her nineties sent me six pages of scented flowered stationery detailing all the ways in which we liked to imply that children before our own had been raised by wolves.
Ah, the interplay of the generations, part internecine warfare, part uneasy coexistence. How different it seems viewed from one end or the other. We have all been part of the great unbroken generational chain of younger people who believe they could do much better than those who came before them. And then one day we wake to discover that we are the older women we once discounted, and our perspective shifts. Younger people came along to criticize their elders, and their elders happened to be us.
From natural childbirth to discipline without corporal punishment, from sex education to gender equity, those of us of a certain age spent decades suggesting, even openly opining, that our mothers were a bit behind the curve. We sat in the living room and talked about how breast was best, how Lamaze breathing worked, how reading to babies would pay off. It is a tribute to the patience and the discretion of our aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, and mothers that, in the main, they did not reply, “Oh, girls, get over yourselves.”
Perhaps because of the changes in the lives of women during our formative years, we grew up thinking of ourselves as distinct, even special. The good news is that we outgrew this, one of the clearest benefits of getting older. It’s true that my mother fed her babies food from jars while I made the food for my own. It’s also true that she didn’t have a sitter five days a week, that she couldn’t call for takeout when all five of us were clamoring for dinner, takeout being one of the unexpected linchpins of female freedom in our time. The closest thing my mother had to a windup baby bouncer was her arm and hip.
What of my aunt Kay, who always seemed cool and composed and beautifully put together although she had eight children, or even my grandmother, whom I remember as slightly indolent and self-absorbed, a Manhattan at her dimpled elbow as she sat in the living room in a floral print dress and talked about Clover Day sales at Strawbridge and Clothier? One of her sons was taken prisoner during World War II. One of her daughters died as a toddler, on the same day, in the same hospital, as she was giving birth to yet another son, my father. She shopped. She endured. I was stopped cold by this description of the effects of World War II from the memoirs of the Duchess of Devonshire, a woman with blue bloodlines and a manor house that makes Buckingham Palace look like government offices: “Two of my brothers-in-law; my only brother; Andrew’s only brother; my four best friends—all killed within a month of each other.” How does a woman recover from that? I wonder now how we dared to criticize and condescend to a generation of women who soldiered on through the Depression, a world war, and a world without much in the way of family planning or job opportunities.
Of course we now accept that they were heroines, the ones who mothered so many. And so were the ones who worked when married women weren’t expected to work at all, and unmarried women who took jobs as secretaries and nurses and teachers, paid less and yet happy to be paid at all. When the doors busted open, the doors to medical and law schools, many smart women my age were contemptuous of what had been traditional female jobs. Medicine meant being a doctor. Education meant being a university professor. We wanted to have a secretary, not be one. Eventually we learned that that was shortsighted. The most pivotal figure in a birthing room is the labor-and-delivery nurse. Our children spent more time with their teachers on any given day than they did with us.
We were climbing on the shoulders of the women who had gone before us, but it was not just we who were elevated, but the entire enterprise. More women on the staffs and mastheads of the country’s largest publications, for instance, changed those publications for the better. In the beginning most female reporters were employed on the social pages, which featured recipes and dress patterns and fashion coverage and wedding announcements. One or two would slip through the net and cover Washington or City Hall, Paris or London. And eventually covering Washington led to covering the White House—the president, not the First Lady. The lives of women changed, and so did the women’s pages, and so did the women’s assignments, and the final product. Newspapers became more reflective of the world around them, and therefore better.
When we looked at the women who had preceded us, in law or medicine or business or education or most other fields, we realized that they had been engaged in an essential kabuki dance of gender and status. There was scorn attached to this, once it was safe to be female, employed, and ambitious: one of our older colleagues was “passing,” another had prospered by being “one of the boys.” In my office the woman who seemed to exemplify this other world, this world before us, was a woman named Charlotte Curtis, who had edited the women’s pages and then the opinion pages of The New York Times. Some of the young female reporters confused how she looked with who she was; she dressed like one of the women she had skewered in her sharp society coverage, i
n skirt suits, heels, heavy gold jewelry, her hair perfectly arranged, a hat of hair. It was understood that she was not one of us. She ran with the men of management, she would not rock the boat of careful gender arrangements, she had become the first woman on the Times masthead by going along to get along.
Which made it all the more surprising to me when she asked me to lunch at Sardi’s restaurant, when I had been appointed the first woman deputy metropolitan editor. She asked me politely about myself and at some point in the meal uttered a sentence that I will always remember: “You should never forget that you will only have as much power as they are willing to give you.” She recognized that I was full of myself, full of the gains and advances of my youth, full of the notion that women had progressed past the point of needing to be one of the boys. She wanted me to understand that men still set the agenda, that progress was relative, that the certainty of youth is often rooted in oversimplification. Surely my misunderstanding of Charlotte Curtis should have taught me something: Robin Morgan, in her memoir, Saturday’s Child, recounted the story behind the scenes of the feminist protest at the Miss America pageant in 1968 and of how Charlotte, of all people, had secretly provided the money to bail out those who had been busted for disrupting the live telecast. “She was what they used to call ‘a real lady,’ ” wrote Robin, revealing the secret. “But she was a real feminist, too.”
The writer Jane O’Reilly published a wonderful piece in Ms. magazine when I was in college titled “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” in which she detailed the indignities of being female that made a click! go off in our heads. I can barely count my own clicks over the years, although I’m particularly attached to the moment when I tried to persuade the registrar of the hospital that my surname was different from that of my husband and therefore different from that of our newborn child, and she tried to persuade me that I might as well just save everyone a lot of trouble and adopt my husband’s last name when I signed the birth certificate forms. “This is where most of you girls fold,” she’d said without malice as blind rage bloomed in my chest. Or maybe that was my milk coming in, combined with the blind rage.
But there’s another moment of truth I’ve learned to recognize, and it’s the moment when we realize that other people, often other women, often women of another generation, are not what we so conveniently expect them to be. It’s that moment when we realize that we—we!—were prejudiced, that we lapsed into stereotype based on sex. It’s what I felt when I learned about Charlotte Curtis paying the bail money. It’s what I felt when I talked with an eighty-year-old about her abortion, or discussed strategy with a woman who was once a union organizer. “I learned to play them like a violin,” she said of her male peers.
How did I forget for so many years about my mother’s drafting table? Where did it go? My father says my mother kept it because after she was done having children (was she ever done having children?) she intended to do freelance work from home. That never happened. She didn’t live long enough. If she had, maybe she would have been a draftsman again. Or, this time, a draftswoman. Or something else entirely.
Some of the women of my mother’s generation got married and had children and then eventually did go back to work. Some of them chose not to have families at all despite the standards of their time, brave enough to go up against the assumption that they would inevitably be incomplete, unhappy. Some of them were beaten down by societal expectations and bored to tears in the houses their husbands bought and paid for, and who can blame them? Others liked that life just fine, and they’ve gotten quite tired of hearing that they wasted their time.
It must tickle them to watch those of us who had the advantages they were denied suddenly finding the tables turned. Now, finally, we understand the challenges they faced; now, finally, we face some of the same disdain from younger women that they faced from us. At one college a smart young woman stood up and told me pugnaciously that she would be marrying early, having kids quickly, staying home to care for them in the way that only their mother could, entering the workplace afterward. She and her friends had heard enough about epidemic infertility, nanny horror stories, the difficulties of finding a partner later in life. They would not make the same mistakes we made, she said, to some applause.
Karma is a boomerang, and a bitch.
Some of my friends and colleagues are enraged by young women like this, who pick away at the lives that were so hard-won, who blithely say they know better. Maybe because I was once some facsimile of that selfsame self-satisfied girl, pontificating about refusing to do stereotypically female stories, inveighing against the barbarity of the obstetrical episiotomy even before I’d gotten pregnant (and then, in late-stage labor, begging for one), I have more patience. The young women who follow us have a point. I know many of my peers who feel they waited too long to have children, even know some who think they were too choosy about who and when and whether to marry. When I was helping to run the metro desk and female reporters would confide that they were pregnant and then rattle off what sounded like a travel itinerary of due date, maternity leave, and return to work, I would caution them to wait and see whether they wanted to come right back or take more time. We hadn’t realized yet that motherhood is a various thing.
But that student detailing her plans for the future, plans based on the imagined shortcomings of the lives lived by women like me, had yet to learn how various life can be. She, too, was making the mistake of bringing a cookie-cutter approach to the future, as other generations had done before her. It was just a different cookie. It didn’t seem useful to tell her that younger moms might have less patience and experience, that sometimes taking care of children full time felt like a cross between a carnival ride and penal servitude, that she would be surprised at how many potential employers would consider the resulting gap on her résumé to be a deal breaker. Often it feels as though generations shout at one another across a canyon with roaring water at the bottom, drowning out the words. Somehow, eventually, we find our way. When we are kids we craft that way in opposition to our elders. And then when we are older we look back at the opposition and think how foolish some of it was.
Somehow I think the canyon dividing the generations is deeper for women. And it’s not simply the young passing judgment on those of us who have gone before. We return the favor. Creeping codgerism is an inevitable effect of getting older, a variation of memory loss, the rich tradition of adults insisting that the younger generation has slalomed through an easy life while their generation pushed the rock of responsibility uphill. When I complain that my daughter’s skirt looks more like a belt, or that my sons keep vampire hours, those are the churlish carpings of a woman years removed from the days when her own hems were sky-high and her idea of a good time was sleeping until noon.
Yet if there has ever been an American generation that ought to know better than to trash the young, to question their clothes and their music and their work habits and their hair, it is we baby boomers. We single-handedly turned aging from a life cycle into a political and moral failing. When, almost half a century ago, the children of the United States embraced pacifism, civil rights, the liberation of women, and a sexual revolution, they did it largely by demonizing their parents’ generation as avatars of war, prejudice, and prudery. With what glee those parents, now in their eighties, could greet the sight of so many of us muting or abandoning our counterculture principles! Abbie Hoffman, nearing his fiftieth birthday, turned the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” on its head and criticized a new generation of college students for their lack of activism, saying that he’d learned not to trust anyone under thirty. Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of the band the Who, at least had the good sense not to sing the famous line “Hope I die before I get old” as, pushing seventy, he performed during halftime at the Super Bowl. We have become the older generation we once inveighed against. And we can, like generations before us, approach that in one of two ways. We can gracefully accept and embrace changing mores. Or we ca
n dig in our heels and pretend that we know best. We can be role models, or old coots.
Before we talk about how much easier the next generation has it, we might consider this: In 1974 I graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college. I’d paid my own way the last two years with jobs as a dormitory resident assistant and a newspaper summer intern. I rented a small, charming, cheap one-bedroom apartment in lower Manhattan and started work as a reporter the Monday after commencement. Only a fool would think that kind of experience is possible today. To earn the money to pay for a year at a fine liberal arts college, a student would have to have a summer job robbing banks. There are no cheap one-bedroom apartments in lower Manhattan. In fact, the monthly rent today on my former apartment is probably about the same as my total annual tuition in 1974. My youth seems not difficult but idyllic compared to what many younger people face. When I told my children that I had taken the SAT just once, without resorting to a prep class, and that I had done no community service to flesh out my college application, they were gobsmacked.
Given the fact that the American dream is that children outstrip their parents—ditch digger to cop to judge in three generations of an Irish immigrant family—and that that dream now seems out of reach, my children’s generation are remarkably good-humored. Given the pressures we’ve put upon them, they’re also savvy, and rightly skeptical about some of the choices we’ve made. If they’ve seen their elders laid off from a company to which they’d given the best years of their lives, young people may have concluded that loyalty to the corporation is a historical artifact. If they’ve watched marriages buckle and work tasks displace family time, they may vow to find jobs that accommodate them when they have their own kids. If they’ve been listening to the drumbeat of burnout, downsizing, and stress, the tom-tom of modern existence, maybe they’ve decided that they intend to try to have a life life as well as a work life. I, for one, can’t argue. My father traveled constantly on business. Is it coincidence that I’ve somehow finagled a job that allows me to work at home?