The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Americans groped their way only slowly toward an understanding of what a liberated woman was. Everyone, no matter what his viewpoint, understood the stakes of civil rights. But the public didn’t get women’s lib. In 1968, the Philip Morris tobacco company brought out Virginia Slims, a brand that would pitch cigarette smoking as a component of the emancipation under way. “You’ve come a long way, baby” was its motto. With a financial stake in figuring out what women yearned for and (just as important) claimed to yearn for, the brand sponsored frequent polls. In October 1971, it asked women how often they felt that “being a woman has prevented me from doing some of the things I had hoped to do in life.” Only 7 percent said “frequently”; 12 percent said “occasionally”; 79 percent said “hardly ever.” As for what women thought of feminists, the results were chastening. Twenty-two percent respected the journalist Gloria Steinem, versus 4 percent who did not. But 65 percent had never heard of her. Sixty-three percent had never heard of the author Germaine Greer, and 64 percent had never heard of the theorist Kate Millett. For most women, the “problem that has no name” was not a problem.