In the spring of 1972, two revolutions met in the same sentence. One had marched and shouted and chanted. One had done none of these things. By a vote of 84-8, the U. S. Senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment.
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
For the counterculture radical, it felt like a win. Another step in the long fight to change the system from the outside, like civil rights, like Vietnam. They were activists: young, hungry, energetic, a little bit aimless. They knew the symptoms but hadn’t yet lived long enough to see the roots. Being in your twenties is the best time of your lives explicitly because of that ignorance. The learning is the juice.
But it also means that there isn’t as much power behind the punch when they get together and protest, and, you can wait them out, especially if you are the Establishment, and those young protesters still need jobs, careers, mortgages, approval.
The counterculture grabbed headlines. It produced iconic images that would define a generation. But the wins were not all theirs. And many of the wins attributed to them came because someone else had carried the weight: The black churches in the civil rights movement. The veterans in the anti-war protests. Mothers. Clergy. Lawyers. Quiet professionals.
In this victory, the real credit belongs not to the radicals in the street, but to the women who were already inside the building. Not shouting, not marching, but working. Secretaries, bookkeepers, clerks, teachers. The ones who filed the permits, answered the phones, scheduled the meetings, kept the men organized enough to think they were in charge. They were not seen as revolutionary. They were seen as necessary.
This moment had been fifty years in the making—traced back to 1920, when the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote and then left them largely outside the structures of power that vote was supposed to give them access to. The organizers of the suffrage movement pivoted to new causes1, but the women who benefited stayed. They enrolled in teacher’s colleges. Took civil service exams. Earned nursing degrees and library science certificates. Slowly, they accumulated credentials—not flashy, but institutional.
This was the first women’s liberation—not televised, not marching, but integrated. As consumer culture expanded, these women became both hunter and hunted: the ones who sold the detergents and processed the invoices and stocked the shelves, and the ones to whom the ads were aimed. They managed the household budget and were simultaneously pressured to perfect the household itself. Labor-saving appliances, personal hygiene products, kitchen gadgets, wrinkle creams, bras that lifted and separated—the woman was the center of the economy, and also its most relentlessly optimized subject.
And while that work was happening in the private sphere, another transformation was taking place in the public one. New Deal programs—home economics bureaus, child welfare offices, state education departments—absorbed women into the administrative infrastructure of the modern state. They were caseworkers and lab technicians, social workers and school superintendents. Quiet, incremental visibility.
By the time the United States entered World War II, the idea of women working wasn’t novel—it was operational. The war just made it impossible to ignore.
When the war broke out, it wasn’t a question of whether women could help. It was a question of how fast they could scale up. They didn’t start from scratch. They expanded roles that women, especially the poor and women of color, already held. They were returning to the times, during the Great Depression, when they cleaned homes, took in the laundry, worked in fields and canneries, served in domestic roles too important to fail. They were returning to before The Crash, when they had retail and office jobs, worked in the arts and in schools and in hospitals. Women weren’t entering the economy for the first time. They were stepping back in.
Women stepped onto factory floors, into shipyards, onto assembly lines. They drove trucks, coded communications, built aircraft, loaded shells, farmed victory gardens, ran daycares, kept books, and managed payroll. Some wore uniforms. Some wore coveralls. All were essential.
The war effort proved that women, both at home and overseas, in uniform and out, were more than capable of running the system. They didn’t replace the men. They replaced the idea that men were required.
But at the end of the decade, most were pushed out so that returning GIs could take their place. But that GI was broken.
The man in the gray flannel suit – the stoic, dutiful, suburbanized veteran back on American soil was not well. He had not been treated for what he had seen, what he had done, or what had been done to him. Not at Normandy or Bastogne, or Dachau. Not on Guadalcanal or Okinawa or Iwo Jima. There was no language yet for those wounds. There was only work.
We gave him middle management and John Wayne. A pension plan and a two martini lunch. A Buick and a den. A family and a heart attack at fifty-two. The men who had marched across Europe or hopped through the Pacific were now commuting downtown with their ghosts, ulcers in one hand and medals in the other. He didn’t talk about it. He wasn’t supposed to. There were rules. Hierarchies. A mortgage. Kids. He put on the tie. He made the commute. He did the job. But he was held together by habit, not healing.
And above him, on the top floor, were men who never saw the carnage, never smelled the gun smoke. For them, the war was profits and taxes. Their medals were company shares and treasury bonds. They risked little. They didn’t win the war, they profited from it.
This was a fragile, brittle machine – broken men on the bottom, privileged men on top – that women, veterans of the home front, found when they re-entered the post-war workplace. They became the pink-collar workers. Secretaries, office managers, assistants, clerks. They were overlooked, taken for granted, treated like the help, but they were absolutely critical to keeping the process moving. They typed the memos. They opened the mail. They made the appointments, watered the plants, and kept the calendar. They maintained morale. They remembered birthdays, and the names, of children, wives, and mistresses. They knew where the real power was, and how and when to route around it.2
They were not revolutionaries, they were the glue.
And as the system frayed — from the weight of the trauma below and the arrogance above — they didn’t waiver. They adapted. They went to night school. They learned how to read a balance sheet. The studied for the bar. They didn’t burn anything down. They just stayed. They got better. They became visible. Not disruptive. Not defiant. Just present, undeniably present and essential to whatever the function of the firm was. They became undeniable. And that was unsettling.
And that, more than the chanting in the streets or the shouting on campus, was what made the order unstable.
The script was that a woman, even if she was from a good family and had her college degree, would always become a wife, and then a mother. The fuse was lit and it was only a matter of time. This wasn’t just sexist. It was structural. If a woman attracted a man, pregnancy was inevitable. And men, as it turns out, need very little provocation.
But in June of 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale and use of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive. A tiny tablet, swallowed in private, capable of dividing sex from reproduction with a reliability that no man could offer. It was the best kind of technology. Quiet, subtle, and utterly transformative. The fuse was snuffed out.
Women whose ambitions might have been moderated by biology could now decide. For themselves. If. And when. They wanted to become mothers. The line between “respectable” women and everyone else began to blur, not because morality changed, but because control did.
The Pill didn’t just liberate sex, it liberated sequence.
Now college didn’t have to be a detour on the way to the kitchen. Work didn’t have to be a temporary adventure. Marriage didn’t have to mean motherhood. It could be a decision. Her decision.
At first there were restrictions. It was expensive. It was banned. Your, typically, male doctor needed to prescribe it. But the genie was out of the bottle. An entire generation of women saw that they could write their own story.
Twelve years later, on March 22, 1972, while the Senate was approving the Equal Rights Amendment, out the East doors of the Capitol building and across 1st Street SE, the Supreme Court released their decision in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird confirming that unmarried couples had the same right to possess contraceptives as married couples, effectively legalizing premarital heterosexual sex in the United States. Pregnancy was no longer inevitable for any woman, anywhere.
And women everywhere were about to go off script.
And it was unsettling.
- Many of the same women and organizations that fought for the vote were instrumental in passing Prohibition. And yes, a big part of that was taking on drunk, violent, unreliable men – especially in domestic and working-class settings. And yes, prohibition wasn’t a moral accident, it was a tactical strike. After winning the vote in their state, many suffragists pivoted away from the Federal fight and to the next domestic threat: the drunk, violent, unstable man. If the courts wouldn’t protect them, and the state wouldn’t intervene, they’d just eliminate the saloon. ↩︎
- We’ve seen her before; Joan Holloway, the red-haired office manager from Mad Men. Not a radical. Not a rebel. Just indispensable. Joan doesn’t run the firm, but she keeps it from falling apart. She smooths egos, covers for breakdowns, knows where every body is buried, and which account needs rescuing before it walks out the door. She’s not trying to overthrow the system. She’s trying to operate within it, master it, survive it. And in doing so, she becomes something more threatening than the protester outside: a woman inside the machine, fluent in its language, better at it than the men who built it. She’s the glue. ↩︎