I have finally moved on from the world of bars, but I have to tell you about a cool side road I took a turn down en route to the softball diamond.
As I’ve mentioned before, in 2011, I interviewed Elaine Romagnoli, who spent many years operating lesbian bars, starting in the early 1970s. But she first worked in Manhattan straight bars, starting in the early 1960s. She told me that back then, New York law prohibited women from working behind the bar after midnight, so at that point she had to switch roles.
Even though there were no red flags that Romagnoli’s memory was faulty when we spoke or that she’d been giving me an air-brushed version of her biography, I knew I had to fact-check this detail.
I thought it would be pretty straightforward. A quick Google search involving words like “women,” “bar,” “New York,” “midnight,” and “1960s” would cough up the information I needed pretty quickly, I reckoned. Many days later, I was still trying to dream up appropriate search terms. (I had not been working full-time on this, I hasten to add, but it was something I returned to pretty frequently whenever I had a few minutes to spare between larger tasks.)
Finally, I found the magical combination that led me to a page from the transcript of a congressional hearing from 1965. The hearing wasn’t about gender-based rules and regulations governing New York workplaces with a liquor license, but a quick scan revealed a very cunning questioner at work.
The random page, No. 1061, featured a colloquy between a Mrs. Green and a Mr. Gettler. In one of the first lines, Mrs. Green got Mr. Gettler to state the fact that I’d been trying to track down.
I could’ve stopped there—and by the rules of time is money I probably should’ve. But Mrs. Green was so smart and shrewd and revealed such skill at the old cat-and-mouse questioning game, that I had to learn more.
With just a couple of brief questions, she managed to show that Mr. Gettler, who I learned was the general counsel of the Hotel & Restaurant Employees & Bartenders International Union, wasn’t demonstrating a great deal of concern for the women who worked in his industry. Rather, he and his organization appeared to be prioritizing the prospects of the men who got to take over the women’s spots at midnight, when the tips got fatter.
Mrs. Green didn’t dunk on Gettler. She made her point and moved on. On the next page of the transcript, I was impressed by the apparent patience with which she indulged a couple of male colleagues who took some sexist detours regarding the example she’d offered.
So, I had to know. Who was “Mrs. Green”?
Edith Starrett Green represented Oregon in the House of Representatives, serving 10 terms between 1955 and 1974. According to the Office of the Historian, she declined an invitation to run for the Senate on three occasions because she believed the House’s seniority system allowed women the chance to wield power in a way that wouldn’t be possible in the other chamber because of sexism.
Green’s big issue was education. Per the Office of the Historian, “Due in great part to her own experience with financial hardship that forced her to withdraw from college, Green dedicated herself to drafting and endorsing legislation to provide students of all economic backgrounds the opportunity to pursue higher education.” She helped pass the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (making sure the word “defense” was in the legislation’s name to ensure its success) and played a key role in the passage of Title IX. She was also a prime mover of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Fellow Oregonian Sen. Mark Hatfield called her “the most powerful woman ever to serve in the Congress.”
All of which is completely irrelevant to my book!
RECOMMENDATIONS: I’m currently listening to Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece. It took me four years to get to it, because I’m a wimp, and I don’t really enjoy luxuriating in the details of crime, BUT it’s as good as everyone says. I’m especially impressed by how Weinman writes about the challenges she faced in writing the book without making it about herself.
LISTEN TO ME: I really liked this episode of Working, in which I spoke with rural librarian Jessamyn West. She really expanded my sense of what librarians do—and what they should do. Plus, she’s just cool. And then in an episode of Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I responded to a listener voicemail about creating structure for unstructured work, and in doing so, I revealed that I am much more familiar with the productivity-industrial complex than any sane person should be!
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.
You just read issue #20 of Where Are All the Emails?. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.