Women's Place

“When the working day is done

Oh, girls they wanna have fun”

         Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

In 1983 Cyndi Lauper, now 66 ,burst onto the American music scene with a debut solo album, “She’s So Unusual,” that contained four top-five hits, “Time after Time,” “She Bop,” “All Through the Night,” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “She Bob” gained notoriety from mention of “Blue Boy,” a gay porn magazine, and contained these lyrics:

Hey, hey they say I better get a chaperon
Because I can't stop messin' with the danger zone
Hey, I won't worry, and I won't fret
Ain't no law against it yet, oh she bop, she bop

An advocate for LGBT rights, Lauper won a Tony Award in 2013 for composing the score for “Kinky Boots,” which Toni and I enjoyed on stage in Chicago.

Grand Rapids, MI, was the latest venue for Trump’s rant-fest, as he baselessly claimed total exoneration of collusion charges and threatened to close the Mexican border totally due to yet another alleged caravan of immigrants from Central America seeking asylum.  Knowing no Lanes would be attending, I was curious when I received a jpeg from Alissa titled Trump rally.  She wrote: “So many hateful idiots in red hats out today. But proud so see the resistance is strong in Michigan.”  One sign greeting Trump read, “Keep your hate outta my state.”

For at least a hundred years American popular culture has been youth-oriented. During the 1920s high school girls emulated the Flappers and “It Girl” starlets in films and popular magazines. When women entered the work force in large numbers during wartime, government propaganda featured the slogan “For the Duration,” a double-edged message that implied they’d give up their jobs and become housewives once the war was won. Public health officials worried about unsupervised “latch Key” kids.  Teenage girls readily found work in pool halls, greasy spoon restaurants, and bowling alleys where  men, their elders feared, were liable to prey on them. According to William K. Klingaman’s “The Darkest Year: The American Home Front, 1941-1942,” V-Girls (Victory Girls) as young as 12 dressed to look older and sought excitement from men in uniform.  After  ajourney across America, British-born observer Alistair Cook, reportedon the V-Girl phenomenonin “The American Home Front: 1941–1942”:

   To their families they are often known as high-spirited daughters full of the joy of life.  To the soldiers they are  known as broilers, dishes, bed-bunnies, popovers, free-wheelers, touchables, Susies, teasers, [and] free-lancers.

Among the consequences were a rash of war babies and a venereal disease epidemic. Prostitutes complained that V-Girls were horning in on their business.

 lesbian gets tattoo during World War II

Jackie Gross and Catherine Borsch arrested in 1943 for violating Chicago's cross-dressing ban

In “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” Lillian Faderman wrote: “The social upheaval of the war threw off balance various areas of American life. Troubling questions of life and death confronted many young women directly for the first time, and ‘normality’ and concepts of sexual ‘morality’ were seen as far more complicated than they appear during more ordinary years.”  Geographical and social mobility enabled gay and lesbian experimentation and made easier opportunities for heterosexual relations as well. Wives whose husbands were overseas experienced loneliness but more freedom than any other time in their lives. Those who sought employment often, to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper, wanted to have fun after their working day was done. Some had been pressured into marrying their boyfriends before they went off to war and were not ready to settle down.

If war deprived servicemen of constant female companionship, it exposed them to fleshpots both stateside and abroad.  In his autobiography “Weasal” East Chicago native Louis Vasquez wrote about his amorous adventures with a hairdresser named Renee while in uniform in France. After I published the manuscript as a special issue of Steel Shavings,historian Archibald McKinlay embellished his adventures in a Timescolumn that infuriated me but that Vasquez apparently loved.  Titled “The Lamented Lover,” the article  revealed as much about the author’s imagination as the reality of Louis’ experiences.  McKinlay wrote:

 Renee had more on her mind than coiffures.  She helped him with his French and a great deal more.  Weasal became the war’s first literal P.O.L.: prisoner of live.  After de-flowering the over-age altar boy, Renee held Weasal virtually incommunicado for a solid week.  She gave him a crash graduate course in French, exploring empirically the complete etymology of the term amour, with special emphasis on lab work. While his friend Clark stumbled around Le Mans using hand signals, Renee plumbed the very depths of Weasal’s ability to learn.

 When Weasal finally broke loose from Renee, he became the second coming of Don Juan.  He tore a swath through Gaul that made Sherman’s march to the sea seem like a parade and inspired the French imploration “pour l’amour de Belette!” When he was shipped home,  throughout France grateful females paused for 30 seconds and lay motionless in their beds with arms outstretched in mute salute.

 Barbara Wisdom

Barbara Wisdom will report on “A Slave in the White House” during April’s book club meeting.  Employed in the White House beginning at age 10 during the James Madison administration, Paul Jennings wrote a memoir on which the book is based.    Jennings never mentioned his mother’s name, only that she was part native American and impregnated by a itinerant merchant. First Lady Dolley Madison’s father was a Quaker who sold his slaves, moved to Philadelphia, and subsequently went bankrupt.  A social climber, Dolley regarded him as a loser and had no scruples about exploiting slave labor when she married the much older Virginia politician regarded as the “Father of the Constitution.”

Anne Balay spoke at Smith College about her book on LGBTI long-haul truckers, “Semi Queer.”  She wrote:“I did my first book talk about Steel Closets, as a promising new scholar in the field of queer and labor studies, at Smith in 2014. This will then be my last talk as a scholar hoping to leverage myself into an academic career. I believe in the power and impact of my writing, and I will find a way to keep doing it, but academia can kiss my aging but always uppity ass.”  Anne is hoping to do a book about sex workers if she can find the time and resources. 

Leslie Mann and Megan Fox

What little I know about sex workers beyond the exploitation of immigrant women tricked into prostitution is that both in the past and the present there are those who turned tricks from time to time due to economic necessity or, more recently, worked for escort services to support themselves in college or to maintain a more affluent lifestyle.  In “This Is 40” (2012), one of my favorite movies, Megan Fox plays such a person, causing boutique owner Debbie (Leslie Mann) to believe her employee is stealing from her until Fox (Desi) admits that she admits to occasionally moonlighting as an escort.

Speaking to VU sociology professor Mary Kate Blake’s class about early Gary, I stressed that the “City of the Century” was both similar to other Calumet Region industrial cities undergoing rapid growth during the early twentieth century, such as Whiting, Hammond, and East Chicago, but that each had its own unique characteristics.  U.S. Steel’s half-planned “different type of company town” (from Pullman, Illinois) left unskilled immigrant laborers to fend for themselves on the southside, whose Red Light district, “the Patch,” contained over a hundred saloons, many with prostitutes on the second floor. A number of women began their path toward upward mobility by running boarding houses whose row-to-row cots sometimes were shared by two steelworkers on alternate12-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week shifts.

At least a half dozen students hailed from the Region. Being used to 75-minute classes at IUN, I was amazed how quickly the 50-minute class flew by.  I was peppered with questions about race-relations in the schools, mills, and neighborhoods. Someone asked about the Ku Klux Klan in Gary during the 1920s; students were familiar with its presence in Valpo and that the Klan almost purchased VU until the Lutheran Church rescued the nearly bankrupt institution. In Gary the hate group dared not operate openly but supported Republican mayor Floyd Williams, a segregationist.  I briefly discussed the 1927 Emerson School Strike and the 1974 steel industry consent decree, which compensated African-American workers for past discrimination and led to large numbers of women hiring in.  I promised to return in a week when they will have read my Eighties Steel Shavings.   In addition to discussing the drying up of industrial jobs, I’ll compare Hoosier stepchild Gary and Indianapolis under Mayor Richard Lugar (1968-1976), the lack of Gary home rule (weakening the power of mayors), and grapple with the role of race as an explanation for Gary’s decline.

James Wallace

  Toni Dickerson addresses group on lack of black IUN faculty, 2018; Times photo by Carmen McCollum

At a Diversity luncheon hosted by IUN director James Wallace I was seated next to one of the award recipients, Black Student Union (BSU) president Toni Dickerson.  A Social Work major, Toni (like my wife, named after her father) attended Marquette Elementary School in Miller, as did Phil and Dave until we became disgusted over the paddling of kids for minor offenses.  I told Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson how pleased I was that she will be speaking to Mary Kate Blake’s VU students next Friday when they tour Gary. It was great seeing former Arts and Sciences dean F.C. Richardson, honored for his role as BSU faculty adviser 50 years ago when a Black Studies program was established.  He gave me such a big hug that his name tag ended up on my sweater.  Ron Cohen nominated Richard Hatcher for an award and daughter Ragen, Second District state representative, made a pitch in support of an anti-hate crime bill that included gender identity.

left, Eric Degas; below, Chuck Degas

The featured speaker was NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, author of “Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation” (2012), the subject he chose to discuss.  An Andrean and IU graduate whose father Chuck Deggans wrote a Post-Tribcolumn and hosted a radio show on WWCA called “Deggans Den,” Eric excelled that eliciting audience participation after showing media associations of white as good and black as evil and examples of situational racism. One clip involved a Minneapolis TV station claiming that Mayor Betsy Hodges flashed a gang sign while posing with community activist Navell Gordon, identified as a convicted felon.  Hodges had been critical of her city’s police, some of whom circulated the bogus story.  It reminded me that some years ago a nearby school district considered banning paraphernalia showing the IU logo since it was similar to a gang sign. IU caps wore at a certain angle were especially suspicious.