“I won't ask you to shed your bras and chuck them in a garbage bin, but aren't you curious?” Linda said. “Aren't you dying to see what's going on?”
There was some discussion about the children. Could we take them to a women's lib rally? Which might have been real worry over their safety: just ten days earlier a mass confrontation downtown had ended with riot police and Mace and more than 250 hippies under arrest. Palo Alto had seen more than its share of violence all through that summer. But I think there was more to it than that. The peace rally we'd gone to, that was pretty easy. It was in San Francisco, where we weren't likely to bump into anyone we knew who might frown on our being there, and no doubt peace was a better thing than war in any event. But this rally Linda was talking about was in our own town, where people we knew ate and shopped. And women's liberation was a little trickier. It was an effort to change the future for women, but we had husbands and homes and children. Too late for Brett to be an astronaut, or Linda an Olympic athlete. So if the future for women was to change in any dramatic way, where would that leave us? As the dinosaurs, the last of an unwieldy, dying breed of women who were left to depend on their husbands when that would be seen as weakness, as failure, as shame.
“What if the crowd gets out of hand?” I asked.
“Or the police overreact, like at Kent State,” Ally agreed.
“For goodness sakes!” Linda said. “It's Palo Alto!”
“‘For goodness sakes’ is a Frankie-ism, Linda,” Brett said. “You're stealing her line.”
“And Palo Alto isn't exactly some quiet little backwater,” I said, and even Linda couldn't argue that: in addition to the chaos downtown, there had been bombings at Kepler's Books, at the Free University, and at one of the coffee shops downtown. Still, before we knew it, we were pushing the children's strollers up Center Drive, admonishing everyone to hold hands and be careful as the long, untidy line of us crossed the street.
Hundreds of people had already gathered in the plaza when we got there. Speakers were demanding equal pay for equal work and child care centers and abortion rights. with four years of college, i can expect to earn $6,694 read the sign one woman carried, a woman in a cap and gown who worked, someone said, in the genetics department at Stanford. Half Danny's salary, I thought (though his job was looking more and more tenuous—his company had laid off twenty people at the end of its second quarter, a fact he shrugged off by saying he liked working in a place where the voice listened to was the one that knew the most rather than the one with the highest rank).
A man came out in a Playboy Bunny outfit—black bathing trunks and ears and a tail—unlike anything we'd ever imagined. He was prancing around to entertain women the way women pranced around to entertain men.
“I've got to get one of those for Danny,” I said, making a joke to cover my embarrassment.
Brett laughed. “Chip would hate the tail. It would draw attention to his ample derrière.”
“Jim's legs in high heels.” Ally gave a low wolf whistle, so incongruous that we all cracked up.
“Neither a whistling woman nor a crowing hen ever come to a very good end,” Kath declared. “My mama's advice—take it as you like.”
A speaker appeared on the podium, saying that the usual channels for women to earn more than ten thousand dollars a year included prostitution, being a Playboy Bunny or a topless waitress, or posing nude for male magazines. I stopped laughing. We all did. We stood soberly as Ava Pauling, Mrs. Linus Pauling, stepped up to the microphone. I'm quite sure I stood straighter after she was introduced, even with Maggie tugging on my skirt, saying how hungry she was. It wasn't so much what Mrs. Pauling said—that women had had the vote for fifty years but we hadn't changed the world as much as we should have—as the fact that she was here. Yes, it was her husband who'd won the Nobel Prize, not her, but being married to him granted her a stature we were unsure the other speakers possessed. It made us think, If Linus Pauling's wife is standing up for women's rights, who are we to be skeptical?
As we watched the rest of the rally, we found ourselves nodding in agreement, nudging Brett at the antics in a skit about a mother scolding her daughter for playing with her “dirty chemistry set,” laughing together at another skit, a “Miss 46-22-36” mock sobbing as she accepted her Miss America crown and thanking “the cosmetic industry and all those cute male photographers” for making her what she was. When the mock Miss America turned around to reveal a “U.S. Department of Agriculture Prime Grade” sign on her back, I whispered to the other Wednesday Sisters, “‘Round,’ and ‘Rib,’ and ‘Rump,’” remembering how I'd turned away from that BREAK THE DULL STEAK HABIT poster on the television the first time we'd gathered to watch the Miss America pageant, when I'd thought the protester carrying it must be so different from me even if her dress was just like mine.