A Father’s Influence Fills In Where The Media Cannot

1957

We young women who reached puberty in the 1950s stood on a great divide between the tranquil domesticity of the Eisenhower era and the turbulent, liberating currents of the 1960s.

The Spokesman-Review of October 1957 reflects an America before women’s liberation, the biggest victories of the civil rights movement, birth control for unmarried women, sports equity and the battle for free speech on college campuses.

In October 1957 there are almost no women on page one, unless they are princesses - either real ones from Europe or smiling Royalty-for-a-Week at Whitworth’s homecoming. The words used in the paper to depict women are patronizing - and sometimes downright demeaning. A spouse is “the little woman,” “milady” and “the missus.”

An Associated Press story describes a pioneering woman attorney and legislator who’s trying to reform New York’s divorce laws. Adultery is still the only basis to dissolve a marriage, and she’s found that 90 percent of all divorces in her state are achieved through fraud - phony evidence to obtain “proof” of adultery. The Spokesman-Review headline? “Blonde Tackles Divorce Law.”

Flash forward 39 years to Oct. 27, 1996 - my 53rd birthday. The newspaper has changed - significantly.

Many women are on the front page. Ellen Craswell’s running for governor - on a Christian Right platform that often evokes the ‘50s family and women’s place as “helpmates” to men. Judy Olson, a Democrat and the first woman to head the National Association of Wheat Growers, is running for Congress. The Business Beat faces are 50 percent women, including a bank vice president and a top property manager. And on page one of the sports section, there’s a feature on Jennifer Stinson of Davenport, a former high school basketball standout who’s now sparking WSU’s volleyball team.

There are also signs that change comes slowly.

A Dan Webster story says too many young women are still judging their bodies by the impossible standards of actresses and supermodels. Those standards have changed, from Marilyn Monroe’s curves to a lean, sometimes dangerously anorexic look.

An ad catches my eye. It shows a smiling young black girl with braids and a frilly dress. “She’s a doctor today because her role models weren’t models,” it reads.

While media images of women have changed dramatically in four decades, they are not the only - or the most powerful - influences.

Those 1950s newspaper images of passive women and “cuties” didn’t resonate in my family. In 1948, when I was 5, my reporter dad took me to the Oregonian newsroom - where most reporters were male - and let me bang on his black Underwood. He took me fishing and to Indian powwows at Celilo Falls near Portland. When I was 13, he joined the Foreign Service and we went to Morocco - where I moved freely in a world of veiled and sequestered Muslim women. A 1958 letter I wrote to a Portland pal about life in Morocco was published in the Oregonian - my first freelance success. Early on, long before Stanford and graduate school at Berkeley, I knew I’d be a writer.

Some of the influences of the 1950s and the Foreign Service life that took us to Morocco and Europe have stayed with me. I still cringe to see people in sweats at the airport. I dress up to travel. I’ve always cooked a sit-down dinner for my family, with sterling silver and candles, like my mother did. My 1926 house on the South Hill is bursting with books. I love antiques and burnished copper pots properly lined with tin.

I have a daughter who will graduate from law school in May, and another who’s an accomplished writer. I raised them to develop their intellectual gifts.

But had my Dad not been a feminist before that word was in vogue, and had my mother not encouraged me to go to a tough French high school and to Stanford, those ‘50s images of models and princesses might have been more pernicious. I like to think I’ve taken the good from the family-oriented ‘50s and discarded the bad - the stereotyping of women and people of color that stunted our society. The “good old days” were only partially good.

We’ve made a lot of progress, and comparing the October 1957 and October 1996 editions of The Spokesman-Review helps show us how much.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: See main story under headline “Passing images”