A Woman Lands a Man and a Woman in a Man’s Land 1977

January 1977 the Carter administration landed in our family like the soft thump of snow, falling off our Wellesley roof on a sunny winter day. Nixon and Ford were gone, a peanut farmer from Georgia had won the election.

My dad was definitely not a Carter guy but adapted via perfecting our new President’s Georgia accent, hilarious on a doctor from an upper middle class Connecticut family.

Mom, the civil rights and fair housing worker bee that she was, had been drafted by the new administration.

She had been appointed to the office of the Cabinet, as an Under Secretary to the Secretary of Transportation! Her exact job title: Director of the Departmental Office of Civil Rights.

This job was HUGE, encompassing the entire US, 250,000 jobs, and she had to keep a packed suitcase in the trunk of the car, including a passport, at all times.

This, we called “so jetsy”.

My stepfather the city planner wrangled a job in DC at HUD -Housing and Urban Development; so they ditched New England together with our Golden Retriever dogs, and moved to Washington DC.

I was still in art school in San Francisco, barely aware of the ramifications or the impact of mom’s new position, outside of the fact that during school vacations I had to add Washington DC four star General three shots of whiskey cocktail parties, and raving DC disco nights with the heir to Moët et Chandon to my travel schedule.

But mom was now the highest-ranking woman in the Federal Government in US history.

Those drunken DC cocktail parties were awesome. We’d be the only two women at lunch in the Capitol Building’s Officer’s Mess surrounded by Senators, Justices, Generals, Joint Chiefs; she in her four inch stilettoes, me in my punk rock princess regalia. This was truly the apex of political society and mom was making the most of it; I followed her lead no matter how absurdly dressed I was. Both of us charming and knowledgeable on every topic, sparklingly witty, smiling like mother/daughter Mona Lisas, these three-piece suited, uniformed old men turned beet red while drinking their lunch chatting with us. She was working the room as a woman for her man’s job as Under Secretary, I was working the room for… what I did not know, but I would not disappoint her as she was showing me off to this lot so sparkled like a diamond for them all, doing my best not to fall off my ridiculously high heels and fall out of my inappropriately tight blouse. Two fabulous women in the secret sky-high eagle’s nest of Men in Power.

As 1977 turned into 1978, up in New England, other exciting changes: my brother had decided to marry his brilliant Cambridge University educated English girlfriend!

This is notable because he had a propensity for strippers, which dismayed the entire family, so even though they were only twenty-two, which is sort of young to get married, the thought of this union relieved everyone- perhaps this wayward young man, firstborn of our family, would turn out alright after all. Up until now, between cocaine, partying, and associating with the Chinese mafia in Boston, this was definitely not assured.

Both he and she had been moonlighting bartending at the Naked i in Boston’s famous “Combat Zone”; he was slouching through BU Law School, she was trying to figure out how to succeed in the US without a green card, and they were both partying hard day and night in their fabulous luxury modern apartment building in Boston, known all over town for the glamorous rooftop pool and party hardy rec room… in a town that was mostly old crumbly buildings where most places barely had a decent bathroom.

The marriage would solve several problems all at once: my brother would stop screwing strippers (we hoped), his proper English girlfriend would get a US green card and therefore a real job; and my parents could check off one kid as a grown up in a disjointed family where it seemed everyone had scattered off to their own corners, on their OFP (Own Fuckin’ Program).

So the marriage was in planning and the English parents, all four of them plus additional relatives would be coming in from London! Soon I was flying home for this great event to late Fall New England. My dad dutifully gave me some cash and sent me to buy a nice dress at Jordan Marsh in downtown Boston. This was important- I somehow had run out of real clothes- partly because a huge suitcase packed with clothes and shoes had been stolen over the summer when I fell asleep on the NYC to Boston Amtrak train after too many Bloody Marys at brunch; and partly because I was reinventing myself via thrift store shopping into a 40’s or 50’s pin up Siren.

I needed a real dress so I wouldn’t look ridiculous in their wedding photos.

Meanwhile, a catastrophe.

Many men and women were not pleased to be working underneath my mom in Washington. At this position level, she was supposed to be a man, and there she was, a woman.

She was charming, yes, but also as a boss, typically bossy, even imperious, and often times so highly motivated by the success she found in pushing through her agenda that she stepped on more than a few toes and steamrollered more than a few underlings.

This is what it means to be in charge, and if she were male no one would have given it a second thought.

But she wasn’t male, and there came a very bad day of very bad blowback.

She fired one of her staff, a large Black man who had been a professional heavyweight boxer.

On his way out of the office, he exploded with rage at being fired by a woman, and in front of her entire office staff, he beat my mom to a pulp and sent her to the hospital.

Because our family was so scattered and she was so stoic, she didn’t really inform us.

A civil suit was filed quietly against her former employee, but she decided not to sue in court- her duties as Director of the Departmental Office of Civil Rights in the DOT was to assure worker civil rights, and her civil rights friends told her it would look really bad for the civil rights fight to have this white woman sue a Black man for battery at this time during the struggle. She’d have to suck it up.

We didn’t know any of this, and she arrived at the wedding of my brother looking strange and oddly frail for a woman as vital and powerful as she was. She wobbled in on a cane as she could barely walk, and was wearing about three pounds of make up on her face to disguise the bruises and swelling of the beating. She immediately sat down so no one would notice that she was infirm.

Knowing her as I did, I saw through the make-up to the battered face below; but she brushed aside my concern, and the wedding started.

It was a small, delightful affair, slightly awkward as my parents were both in the same room together for the first time since they’d split, eight years prior. My dad, greatly cheered by the English relatives- ruddy and exotic- was getting sloshed, and mom was subdued and quiet, not wanting to take away from the joyousness of the occasion with the two families meeting for the first time.

I was having a learning moment:

A woman must not rise, or she will be beaten into the ground by a man and sent to the hospital, and no one will help her. If she rises anyways, and gets beaten by a man, she must not object, but rather suck it up and carry on, and not make a big deal out of it. She will succeed nevertheless, in spite of this inequity. She will use other ways of assuring her success.

She will work, raise the children, keep the house, and lead the nation. Her wounds will not matter, her punishments will not be counted or remembered.

As a woman of the future, she will be warrior Joan of Arc burnt at the stake, immortalized forever; not housewife Jane Jetson assisted by a robot maid at home, relegated to reruns for kids on afternoon TV.

I did not comprehend the meaning of any of this yet, and therefore continued on my own blind stoic journey of tragedy and triumph.