Our first purchased house during our 56 years of marriage was in a commuter town in New Jersey complete with a mortgage and a beautifully kept terraced yard. It cost us $16,000 in 1949.

It was what Realtors call a fixer-upper. My young wife got her first experience doing over a big old house. While the painters were doing the outside, she was on a ladder painting the kitchen and I was walking behind my push mower over those terraces. Our house's architecture was called "Feder al" and it was built in 1873.

As we met neighbors and were invited to social events in our little town, we got acquainted with an older couple we were very drawn to. He was a newly retired judge and she was the kind of wife a judge would be lucky to have. We got to know their married children and mingled with the family and they with us. She was a tall, magnificent wife, mother and grandmother.

Our house was not air conditioned in North Jersey. Nobody's was. On steamy nights, we'd drive the few blocks with our tiny daughter in our bathing suits and take a dip in their swimming pool and, still damp, drive home, go to bed cooled for the first hour or two.

One of those nights Mrs. Bates (I'll call her that) regaled us with an experience she'd had that day. That morning she'd driven into Manhattan for an appointment with a high-style hair dressing specialist, a Frenchman, in his beauty salon on Fifth Avenue. We were only a dozen miles or so from midtown New York City. He had a young woman assistant and he kept up a steady patter of abusive language as he ordered the frightened humiliated young woman about. Mrs. Bates protested, but he kept it up relentlessly as he worked away on her hair.

When she concluded her remonstrations were being ignored, Mrs. Bates leaped out of the chair and marched out onto the east side of Fifth Avenue and headed north with a large sheet-like cloth around her neck and trailing around her ankles. Her hair was parted in the middle with one side done, the other wet and disheveled. And there she was, a one-woman procession looking for another beauty parlor to get herself finished off. People were staring. She pretended not to give a damn. There were no alternative beauty parlors to be found on Fifth Avenue. Finally she came to the great woman's store, Saks Fifth Avenue, marched down their center aisle on to their elevator and up to their salon. They got to complete her comb out and got to keep the big sheet.

I believe Mrs. Bates may have been the actual founder of the woman's liberation movement in the United States in 1949 with her one-woman procession on Fifth Avenue that day.

Betty Friedan didn't write her book, "The Feminine Mystique" until 1966, 17 years later. It was that year that NOW was formed -- the National Organization for Women -- by Friedan Gloria Steinam and others. And to think that my wife and I learned about Mrs. Bates the launching of the feminist movement by Mrs. Bates that very night!

How many women patrons in the first beauty parlor and at Saks got on that bandwagon? Did the famous Frenchman learn something about American women and mend his ways? I intended to write this in a light vein but, hey, I might have blundered into a real morality play!

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

You must be logged in to comment.