Thanks to women like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, we female baby boomers came of age educated, braless, and emboldened to become politicians, playwrights, CEOs or, in my case, journalists. But things changed when some of us lost our jobs.
As young women, we were determined to be more than someone’s pretty plaything, and we certainly weren’t going to starve ourselves to please men. We looked down on the chauvinistic construction workers who greeted our morning commutes with catcalls.
Most of my female Yale classmates did become successful. We had prestigious jobs, often along with marriages and children. It’s not that we didn’t care about our looks, but we defined ourselves by our work. Still, as the years passed, the time came when a particularly beautiful friend called me and said, “It happened. I was in exercise class and there were these women who looked better than I did. Not because they were born prettier, but simply because they were younger, and their waistlines were trimmer.” The construction workers whistled less often. We wore cover-ups by the pool, even in the shade.
We told ourselves that our expanding waistlines were the inevitable result of having children and entering middle age. We tried to distance ourselves from the media onslaught of ever slimmer women smiling at us everywhere we looked. As Americans got fatter, it became even more desirable to be thin. But that didn’t matter: We boomers had our work — our important work — and that was a truer measure of our worth than our weight.
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