Longtime Career Woman Liz Carpenter Revels in Women’s Movement Success Stories
Those actively opposing it, she says, are betraying their sex and should be ashamed of opposing other women’s rights.
WASHINGTON, 1975: This is a Question and Answer interview with Liz Carpenter. She is a vice president of the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm and co-director of ERAmerica, a new organization working to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. She served as secretary to Lady Bird Johnson (1963–1969). She was interviewed by Washington Star Staff Writer Judy Flander.
Question: For many years, the women’s movement has been associated with the more radical women in our society who were its first leaders. Do you think they created a brassy image that will never wear off?
Carpenter: We had to shout to be heard. At the beginning nobody was really listening. It seems to me that the new thrust of the women’s movement really began on July 2, 1971, when the conveners of the National Women’s Political Caucus met here. It was noisy, it was strident, but it was also exciting because you were really seeing for the first time women of many incomes and backgrounds who were saying we’ve got to get political clout, we’ve got to elect some people. We’re really about five years behind the black movement and they got nowhere until they began to elect people. Now it’s a far different kind of woman who is in the woman’s movement.
Q: Who are these ‘new’ women?
A: A great variety. There’s the former civil rights worker who is now a new freshman in the state legislature who found her following among the women that she had helped lead in the civil rights movement. When I think who the new woman is in Congress, I think very much of a Pat Schroeder, 27 years old, two babies and a briefcase and a husband. I remember very well the day she came to Congress and some old Codger said to her, ‘But how can you be the mother of two small children and a member of Congress at the same time?’ and she looked him right in the eye and said, “Because I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”
Q: Do you find women are assuming leadership in many areas?
A: The big gains of women are being made on city councils and they’re everything from Junior Leaguer to civil rights worker. You find them in state legislatures, you find them in the judiciary, there’s a great sense of momentum. In every way, the women’s movement is the fastest growing, most alive movement today in the United States. The civil rights movement, of which we’re an extension, has not grown with the speed it did before because it’s achieved many successes. I’m delighted that the women’s movement is getting much assistance now from people who were active in the civil rights movement.
Q: There seems to be a movement against reform on many levels. There are some people who feel that all liberal progress is being threatened, especially the women’s movement.
A: I don’t buy that. I think the starch is out of George Wallace and the starch is out of Ronald Reagan. They aren’t moving. In many ways, the action has simply moved from the national scene to the local scene and you have many newcomers running for public office and running on a shoestring. Watergate opened the door for the low budget candidate. And that’s one thing that’s made it possible to elect women and elect minority candidates because they have been traditionally low budget candidates. I know a woman in Livingston, Ala., who ran for the city council with a mimeograph machine and a bicycle and got elected for $17.50. I know another woman in Tennessee who told me that the best way to run for office was to run on two charge cards, a telephone charge card and her American Express card. She said it’s a great way to keep track of expenses. Two things are happening. It’s been pretty popular to spend smaller amounts of money; big money and slick campaigns are not selling. And the second point is women themselves are writing bigger checks for their own. I find that I do that myself. It it’s a woman candidate I consider it more strongly and am more likely to write a check.
Q: What do you think of the women who are actively opposing the women’s movement?
A: Well, they betray their sex. I can’t imagine any woman opposing rights for other women without a tremendous sense of guilt. Any woman like that should feel bad because she is guilty of denying something to our daughters and granddaughters and which has been overlooked.
Q: But the women who feel that way don’t seem to feel particularly guilty about it. They feel justified because they believe they are preventing terrible things from happening.
A: I believe many of them are going to change their minds. I think that’s beginning to happen now. They’re taking a fresh look at the issues. Maybe even Phyllis Shlafly during her classes at law school might learn something about truth.
Q: What about the middle-aged woman in America. Is she becoming part of the movement?
A: Yes, and you know we live to be 75.9 years of age and the mobile society we have, the growing divorce rate, plus the very fact that we outlive men has shown us that most women are likely to spend about a third of their life alone, fending for themselves. Are you going to be shelved? Are you going to be left unable to support yourself? A strong women’s movement and equal rights written into the Constitution are the greatest insurance you have to be able to use that span of time that you have in a resourceful way and in a way of life and not just waiting out the years.
Q: Did you have a hard time getting started in your career?
A: Well, I came out of college at a time when you still had to decide between marriage and a career. I was fortunate in not having to make that decision. I was married to someone who was terribly supportive of my being active in the newspaper business. It was a great life and a great partnership and it grew with the years and grew with this great Washington scene that we feasted upon for 30 years of our life together.
Q: What made you become a feminist?
A: I always felt that if I did a good job I would leave the door open a little bit wider for the next woman to come along. Today I feel that unless I’ve tried to help some woman get a job I have lived in vain. Feminism wasn’t really a part of our vocabulary. Those of us who were interested in the achievement of women and wanted to achieve ourselves tried to conduct ourselves in a way that would help other women. But the process was too slow and as the movement got noisier, as the youth movement spilled out, our consciousnesses was raised and we did realize that we were going to have to work harder and perhaps be noisier, be pushier, than we had ever been before. I don’t mind a bit being called a feminist.
Q: You obviously find the women’s movement a comfortable place. What makes it so viable for you?
A: The exciting part of the movement is that women are really discovering each other. The excitement of a women’s seminar is meeting women who come from many, many walks of life, women that you would never meet in your normal way of doing business except for the women’s movement. That’s where we’re discovering, gosh, she’s a great speaker, wouldn’t she make a terrific candidate, well I’m willing to help her get elected and it’ll be a better country because of it. This must be the same kind of feeling that minorities felt as they came of age in the Constitution and I think that this is the thing that holds us all. There is a contagious excitement in discovering a great many new people who talk the same language you do and who come from many different walks of life.
Q: Men seem to react in different ways toward the whole concept of the women’s movement. What has your experience been?
A: My experience has been that the really perceptive men, the tall men, are the ones who are the most supportive of the movement often because of their daughters or wives who they recognize have real talent. I remember one morning at the White House when we had just announced Mrs. Johnson’s beautification plans. I got a call that morning from three different men almost within two hours, big men in this town, one was a cabinet member, another was the head of an agency and another was a Congressman and the words were almost the same from each. “My wife is shy, she needs to feel needed, is there any way you could use her?” I look back on those couples now and two of them are divorced. We tried to use all of them incidentally. Here were men who were really quietly behind their wives’ backs trying to shove them forward so they would create some kind of life outside the home where they, too, felt important.
Q: That’s very interesting but those are cases of men with wives who have no resources of their own.
A: And that is the reason for the growing number of suburban alcoholics. Believe me, the number of middle-and upper-income women who are becoming alcoholics is growing simply because they feel wasted away.
Q: Do you think their husbands are to blame?
A: Their husbands are just not aware. They must be insensitive to what the woman is really seeking and that’s something that belongs just to her.
Q: Does the woman herself know what she wants?
A: Not always. No, I think that often we were cast in an old Cinderella kind of world but that’s not what the world is. True happiness can only occur between two equals. Love, real love and the love that unites the mind as well as the heart, only happens between equals and when a man starts treating you as an inferior you can be sure that he no longer loves you, if indeed he ever did.
[This article originally appeared in The Washington Star, 1975 as Liz Carpenter On Variety of ‘New’ Women. #72 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]
