movement did not make a major dent in the childcare problem, and low-wage women workers cannot
usually afford high-quality daycare centers providing children with safe and stimulating play
environments.
Meanwhile, women pushed their way into professions that discriminated or even excluded them: law,
medicine, and the university professoriate most visibly, and even the ministry. In 1970, Barbara Andrews,
a woman disabled from cerebral palsy who used a wheelchair, became the first pastor ordained in an
American Lutheran church. In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first female rabbi, but only after being
repeatedly rejected by a rabbinical school; she finally earned her degree as the lone woman among thirty-
five men, many of whom claimed she was only there to find a husband. When the Episcopal Church
refused to accept female ministers, a group of women deacons and bishops conducted an “irregular”
ordination in 1974, and just two years later the official church capitulated. Evangelicals started a feminist
journal. Seminaries filled with women. Major denominations began rewriting liturgies, changing
“mankind” to “humankind” or “people of faith” and even removing “He” for God and replacing it with
“Our Lord” or the like.
Culture
Cultural change happens particularly slowly, with few precise milestones, so we may not notice it or what
created it. In fact, feminism transformed popular culture, though often it took decades for everyone to see
the results.
The influence of women’s liberation was most visible in clothing. Before the 1970s, working women
had to wear stockings, garter belts or girdles, high heels, and dresses. By 1980, a generation of feminists
had legitimated comfortable low-heeled shoes, rejected girdles, and made pants acceptable for all
occasions. Many women still love heels and skirts, but they have a choice. The 1970s radicals tended
also to reject makeup and the carefully coiffed hair of the 1950s, but this by no means meant a rejection of
beauty; it merely changed standards of what was beautiful. Civil rights had similarly made “natural” black
hair beautiful and fashionable, and white women with curly hair adopted a version for themselves.
Feminist influence likewise affected attitudes toward female bodies, for which delicacy had once
been the norm. Much of the credit for this transformation should go to Patsy Mink, congresswoman from
Hawaii, who brought us Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in
schools. Title IX drew tens of thousands of women into active sports, and they then redefined strong,
muscled bodies as beautiful. Of course, merchants soon capitalized on these new norms, and, as always in
a consumerist society, styles that were once rebellious and countercultural soon became new standards,
sometimes as conformist or even coercive as the old.