Aackt 5: Cathy and the Boomer Paradox

The Cathy comic takes a look at the trials and tribulations of boomer women of the middle class, from their early days navigating women's liberation through the 2008 recession, when the cracks in the boomer on facade were on full display. This week, Jamie traces the boomer legacy by speaking with women who were there -- yes, including her mom.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you think your lower management job, which is on
the brink of extinction, is your ticket to a lifelong
career at that same company? Yes? Okay, okay. Do you
think our social programs, which are already crumbling, will be
there to support you fully in your old age? Yes?

(00:21):
Do you think that, in the face of potential financial catastrophe,
buying it another pair of chunky waffles old sneakers was
the best use of your life savings? Yes? The classic
baby boomer heart in the fifties wallet in the nineties. Yeah,
Cathy is a boomer. I know, I know, because you

(00:43):
might be liking her a lot more than you used to.
But yeah, she is extremely so. That was a strip
from the nines with a cheery dough eide Kathy talking
to her tax accountant about her financial history, then walking
away from him in blissful a narrance. In the final panel,
it's sharp satire from Kathy guys White. Her generation was

(01:05):
notorious for being bad spenders, worst savers, and aggressive holders
onto the reins of power while the earth shrivels to
a crisp before our very eyes. There are a generation
that began with a gasp of social change, who went
on to ditch progressivism for an aggressive cultural conservatism that
still holds the United States and their generation to this day.

(01:29):
Like most people my age, I'm a late millennial. I
don't like boomers, and so going into researching this episode,
I found the generation at large to be aggressively, selfish,
deflective when confronted, and just the epitome of wealth. That's
just the way things are. And to interrogate the ideas,

(01:50):
I found the Cathy character to be a pretty solid
usher to guide us through how the boomers got to
where they started to where they are now. Because most
of what I find frustrating about the Kathy comic strips
are the same things that I find frustrating about my parents,
my aunt's, my uncle's. While yes, no generation is a monolith,

(02:11):
there are through lines, and this commentary was something that
Kathy guys White was doing very deliberately, along with many
other comic artists of her generation like Gary Trudeau with Doonesbury,
like Alison Bechdeal with Likes to Watch out For, like
Keith Knight with the k Chronicles, and on and on.
So in this episode, we're going to take a look

(02:32):
at what Kathy's work said about her generation, who she represented,
what issues Kathy, guys, whites were tackled, and how it
resonated with a wide swath of boomer women across race
and class lines. So let's get into a baby. This
is Oh. Can I cue the song? God damn it?
Three days of no Cathy, sleep, paralysis, demon streak and

(02:52):
it's and it's broken. What do you want? Why the song? Fine?
She paced into the world in the nineteen seventy six.
She's at what, She's out on dates and she don't
like politics. From mama and herban to with feminist friends.
She's fighting all the stands it with chocolate and hand Kathy,

(03:14):
She's fighting back to stressed with success. Let's go slack,
Oh Cathy, Bakathy Cathy, She's gotta like go in all. Okay,

(03:43):
boomers get it. Okay, we're gonna drop that, but let's
get acquainted. I'm a millennial. Zoomers hate us both, so
we have that in common. Right, and in ten years,
people who are currently in kindergarten will hate zoomers. That's
the generational circle of life. And sure generational divides were

(04:04):
designed and sort of siloed for the benefit of predatory
advertisers more than anything else, but they do provide some
sort of order and Jesus Christ, Boomers, there are a
lot of you, the Baby Boomer generation, and for this episode,
I'll define them as people born in the US between
nineteen and nineteen sixty four, grew up in the post

(04:27):
World War two economic boom, and either came of age
or had their earliest memories shaped by things like the
Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement, and second wave feminism.
Bruce Givney wrote a book called A Generation of Sociopaths,
How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, and described the generation

(04:48):
like this in an interview with Box. I focus on
the first two thirds of boomers because their experiences are
pretty homogeneous. They were raised after the war and so
have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression,
or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never

(05:09):
experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during wartime and that
helped produce the New Deal. But it's really the white
middle class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and
behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority
of the electorate in the early nineteen eighties, and then
they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January nine,

(05:34):
and they've basically been in charge ever since. Boomers, He
is not wrong. This is more or less accurate, and so,
with all due respect, I think the best way to
get started here would be to recap the events of
your generation so far anyways, because you don't seem interested
in giving up power anytime soon. Do you take it easy? Millennial?

(05:55):
You're not my mommy, You're fictional. We'll talk to my
mommy later in the episode. Bruce Givney said in this
same box interview that boomers quote were born into great
fortune and had a blast while they were on top.
But what have they left behind? This is a generation
that is dominated by feelings, not by facts. The irony

(06:17):
is that boomers criticize Millennials for being snowflakes, for being
too driven by feelings. But the Boomers are the first
big feelings generation. So what are these big feelings that
Gibney's talking about. Let's go back to the source. Boomers
were raised by either the Silent or the Greatest generations

(06:38):
born anywhere between nineteen hundred and ninety five, generations that
had survived two world wars and a Great Depression, and
hadn't been born into the relative economic stability and the
global superpower that American boomers had. In the Kathy Comics,
our look into this previous generation is through Mom, Cathy's

(06:59):
overbearing mother whose old world values constantly chafed with Kathy's
struggle to balance a career and a satisfying personal life.
You might remember from episode two. Mom is both a
character built on stereotypes about her generation, who also drew
from Kathy, guys White's real life kick ass mother and
Guys White Anne emigrated to the US as a young

(07:21):
girl and went on to get a degree in journalism,
only to be forced to give that career up when
her husband, Kathy's father returned from World War Two. She
went on to get her master's but didn't tell anyone
until years later. This story reflected the realities of many
women of the Silent generation. They were welcomed into the
workplace while men were away at war, then forced out

(07:43):
when those men returned, and the issues they faced definitely
influenced the politics of the liberal mainstream second wave feminist movement,
and while the Mom character is mainly remembered as a loving,
if kind of naggy old world presence guys. White found
opportunities to satirize her generation's predicament in the storyline from

(08:04):
the late seventies in which Kathy's mom has a crisis
of faith in herself. So here's a strip from that series.
Kathy is on the phone with her mom. Mom, you
just can't be depressed about being a mother and a housewife.
People like you are the heart and soul of the world.
You're the creator of life, the keeper and nurisher of life.

(08:25):
You're at the beginning, the home, the foundation, the reason
behind everything else anybody ever does. In the final panel,
Mom is standing in her kitchen. She's holding a broom
and she's surrounded by housework. She says, how can something
so important be so boring? In the next trip, Kathy
and her mother are together in her mom's kitchen, continuing

(08:48):
the same discussion. Did you like being a housewife when
you were first married? Mom? No, Kathy, I used to
cry every morning when your dad went off to work
because he had someplace important to go, and all he
had to do was wait for him to come home. Yeah,
but you got over crying every morning, didn't you never.
Just about the time I quit crying about him, I
discovered soap operas. Kathy guys White sticks the landing on

(09:12):
a joke, as she always does, but the message here
is clear. The expectations put on Mom to be a
housewife aren't ones that she invited or even enjoyed. They
were just ones that the culture she lived in forced
her to accept. This is hinted at in other storylines
later in the comic, when Mom begins a series of
small businesses to provide structure and meaning to a life

(09:34):
that she wasn't supposed to derive those things from. This
was the way that many mothers of the boomer generation
came up, and as Kathy's trips explore, these old school
values and constructs conflicted with the social movements that boomers
were growing up around. When the oldest boomers were in
their early twenties and the youngest were in grade school,
social movements of in eighteen sixties brought a great deal

(09:55):
of American trauma to the forefront, from the Civil rights
movement to Second Way feminism to anti Vietnam War protests.
The boomers often take credit for these movements, but there's
a strong argument that there is a case of kind
of stolen valor going on there. I got a chance
to interview writer Jill Philippovic, author of Okay, Boomer, Let's
talk how my generation got left behind? On the mythos

(10:18):
that surrounds early boomer activism. You know, whenever critiques of
boomers come up, I think, especially in progressive spaces, what
I hear from a lot of boomers themselves is, you know, well,
wait a minute, We're not all these kind of reactionary
boomer Trump conservatives. Where the people who are on the
front lines of the civil rights movement, Where the people

(10:40):
who were on the front lines of the second wave
feminist movement. Um. But when we think of who were
the leaders of the second way feminist movement, um, you know,
people like Gloria Sinum for example. Um. Those folks from
are older than boomers. Um Sum I believe was a
member of the silent generation. Um. So it's not it's

(11:02):
not that baby boomer women were not feminists. They they
certainly were. Um, they just weren't necessarily the folks that
we think of leading the movements in the nineteen sixties
and nineteen seventies. Our idea of what the nineteen sixties
and seventies were UM, which is very focused on the
activism and the very successful activism UM of many progressive

(11:25):
baby boomers, does not encompass the fact that the vast
majority of Americans, the vast majority of Baby Boomers, were
not participants in these movements. Right. Most boomers were not
going to anti war protests. UM. Most boomers were not
going to civil rights marches or feminist marches. As much
as every single boomer I'm sure we'll say they were there, um,

(11:47):
most of them were not, and many of them opposed
those movements as they were happening. So Boomers are and
have long been an incredibly politically divided generation. UM. Millennials
are much more politically cohesive. We are, as a generation,
much more politically progressive. UM. Boomers have always had this

(12:07):
kind of not always right down the middle, you know,
it shifts a bit from from decade to decade, but
a half that is a rough half that is very progressive,
in a rough half that is pretty conservative. A lot
of critics say that the boomers did not experience any
national trauma in their young lives. This is a point
that's invoked pretty often. Oh, the boomers grew up in

(12:30):
this cushy, leave it to beaver environment. The silent generation
had the Great Depression in World War two, millennials had
draconian nine eleven policies, the Iraq War, the Great Recession.
And this is true enough. Boomers grew up in a
nation with more financial and environmental stability than the ones
before or after. But consider how the Vietnam Draft affected

(12:50):
a great deal of male boomers. The draft ran from
nineteen sixty four to nineteen seventy three, from men eighteen
to twenty five, and a Duke University paper from two
thousand and for stated that a third of early male
boomers served in the Vietnam War. That said, there is
some dissonance with how the boomer generation tends to characterize itself.
There were some older boomers, or cuspy boomers, that were

(13:14):
instrumental in these social movements because they got involved very young.
Chairman Fred Hampton was a boomer. Ruby Bridges is a boomer.
And I don't want to discredit the effective youth organizing
that went on during that time, but the majority of
leaders that we associate with this era are from the
previous generation, the silent generation. Your glorious Steinem's You're Angela,

(13:35):
Davis's The Chicago Seven, Malcolm X. The list goes on
all silent generation. Marcia Johnson was a CUSP, So we'll
give the boomers that one. And while these generational divides
are deeply arbitrary, to say that the Boomers were an
inherently anti establishment group is kind of a stretch. But
they definitely grew up around and often benefited from the

(13:57):
progress made from these movements. So the leaders of the
sixties and early seventies weren't boomers. Who are the boomers?
I asked Jill to give me an idea of what
the demographics of boomers were and whether the popular interpretation
of them as suburban nights who grew up on TV
and prosperity was actually accurate. As we said, baby Boomers,

(14:21):
especially when they were younger, were an overwhelmingly white generation.
Boomers have gotten less white through time, um, in large
part because of immigration. UM. So they're and reationally have
become more diverse UH as they've aged, because more folks
from other countries have gotten into the US and helped

(14:41):
to diversify the baby boomers. But you know, the sort
of defining characteristic of Baby boomers, So being born into
post war prosperity, UM, living in the kind of single
families suburban home that you know, perhaps you're that your
parents owned, and we're perhaps the first generation of people

(15:03):
in your family to ever be able to own a
home thanks to the federal government. UM. That's a very
white boomer story, right, because the all of the laws
that we're setting out UM where investment in building new
suburban homes were who could live in those homes, who

(15:25):
qualified for government backed mortgage. UM, how certain neighborhoods were
assessed about you for whether or not uh they would
qualify for these government back mortgages, and at what rates.
All of that was highly highly racialized. So you probably
heard the term redlining. UM. That was what was happening.

(15:45):
You know, majority black neighborhoods during the Keeno neighborhood as well.
We're getting redlines in nine UM, while majority white neighborhoods
were getting blue lines, which essentially invent these are good investments.
We will give preferential mortgages to these areas, uh, enabling

(16:05):
the parents of white the white parents of hype baby
boomers to set their kids up for successful adulthood. Boomers
aren't as diverse as the generations that came after them,
but it is very common for the experiences of marginalized
boomers to be kind of cast aside. These issues still

(16:25):
persist now. Non white boomers were faced with persistent racist
policy being made by a government whose officials barely represented them,
and these days black and brown boomers are retiring later
and have less access to consistent healthcare. According to a
paper called Baby Boomers of Color by Melvin Delgado, that
Duke University study from two thousand and four highlights and

(16:49):
challenges the tendency to homogenize the Boomers as a completely
white block or a completely progressive block. The study highlights
a strong streak of conservatism and Boomers from a very
early age, saying that quote in nine, many of George
Wallace's supporters were young, southern, and rural unquote. So while

(17:09):
there is this popular narrative that the boomers started as
radicals and gradually sold out, some just started there. Early
boomers were a much more diverse group than the white
dominated pop culture and TV of the time indicated twelve
percent of Early Boomers and nearly fifteen percent of Lake
Boomers were immigrants and one third of later boomers aren't white.

(17:32):
Boomers in the l g B, t q I A
plus community were frequently erased from the narrative as well,
a generation that was antagonized by anti queer policies, a
cultural intolerance of coming out, and being disproportionately affected by
the AIDS epidemic. So there's no typical boomer really, like

(17:52):
any group, they differ in political leanings and by race
and gender and sexuality, but there was a specific lack
of Boomers that were drawn to Kathy comics. Working Boomer women.
I asked Jill Philipovic who the average boomer woman was.
Boomers generally, and Boomer women in particular surged into institutions

(18:15):
of higher education, their generation to college in astounding numbers, um,
and women particularly were, uh, we're surging into college. Um.
Boomer women also were a huge new and emergent force
in the paid workforce. Uh. So, what I'm looking for

(18:36):
running into these really unfair structures, whether that was the
glass ceilings, or not being promoted given your gender, whether
that was sexual harassment at work, whether that was realizing
that as life for American women was changing really radically,
and women themselves were changing and so coming up against
that tension both in the workplace and in the home. Um,

(19:00):
you know, Boomer women really were on the front lines
of all those cultural, social, and political shifts. They were
living them. The average boomer woman, I think, is somebody
who probably entered early adulthood with a lot of optimism
about how things were changing in her favor because they were, um,

(19:24):
only to encounter a whole bunch of roadblocks. Um that
you know indelibly shaped her personal and family life. UM. Yeah,
I think there's a reason why Boomer women were the
ones who have put words on what a lot of
even women of our generation now faced, you know, things

(19:45):
like sexual harassment, um, things like domestic violence. Right, that
was not particularly well understood concept until Boomer women were
coming into adulthood. And so I do think, you know,
the average boom or a woman could probably look at
who she would be if she had been born in

(20:06):
the eighties or the nineties or the two thousands and
see your wife for herself, um, you know, but can
also be in a position to look at her mother's
life and see all the ways in which she lived
with much more freedom and many more opportunities and kind
of any generation of women before her, and if this

(20:28):
description doesn't exactly match up with Queen Cathy guys White.
She was born in nine fifty to an immigrant parent,
went to college, but wasn't encouraged to dream too big,
and she tried to build her own career in life
for herself instead of getting married and having kids right away.
Here's a bit of my interview with her from this
spring to that effect. You know, I think for me

(20:50):
it was a gradual awareness of of a different world
for women than the one I had grown up expecting.
And my mom, who I've also written about is who
is just remarkably a remarkable traditionalist and feminist. At the
same time, working boomer women loved Kathy comics, but the

(21:13):
idea of women in the workplace wasn't a Boomer invention.
Working class women had been doing it for millennia, and
women across class lines were expected to contribute labor during
World War Two, but the idea of women entering the
workplace and staying there was a newer concept, and so
the girl Boss pipeline was introduced. Beginning in the seventies,

(21:36):
American women had increased access to capital and capitalism without
having to be married The Kathy strips were well equipped
to comment on this through Kathy the reluctant middle class feminist,
Andrea the hardline feminist determined to work at the highest
level possible, Girl Waltz, and Charlene the underpaid, overworked secretary.

(21:59):
Here's a strip from the late nineteen seventies. Kathy is
on the phone with Andrea. Hi, Andrea, it's Kathy. I'm
real sorry if I woke you up, but I've been
thinking about what you said. Just let me see if
I have this straight, Andrea. If I've become a housewife
and cook meals, I'll be a subservient slave. But if
I were a chef in a restaurant, I'd bring dignity

(22:20):
to all of womanhood. If I spend my days cleaning
bathtubs and toilets, my status as a female is equal
to a groveling worm. But if I go work for
the sewer company, I'll make headlines as a feminist star.
What's the difference, Andrea? What makes the same masly job
an insult if you do it at home, but an
honor if you can make it a career. There's a pause.

(22:42):
Andrea answers money, especially once the nineteen eighties and the
Reagan administration hit. This emphasis on capital for the individual
and proving one's worth through labor and consumption became a
huge emphasis of the boomers. Here's another strip from this
AM era showing Kathy running around doing her daily tasks

(23:03):
and thinking to herself. And I want to be specific
about the fact that she is thinking this to herself,
because so much of the criticism of Kathy comics relies
on the assumption that she's just saying all of this
out loud to anyone who will listen. In this trip,
she's thinking, I got up at seven and showered and
dressed for work, just like a man. I shoved down

(23:25):
a cup of coffee and charged in a rush our traffic,
just like a man. I worked all day, I thought
the evening traffic, and now I'm home, just like a man.
She sits on the easy chair in her apartment, looking confused.
I thought I was supposed to feel fulfilled by now.

(23:57):
Cathy's critics felt that her issues were redundant in whiny,
and I had to ask myself, is there any angle
where I can see their point? You're kidding? I thought
we were cool. We are cool. Kathy I just have
to consider the full picture here. I thought you weren't
a both sides, sir, I thought that was your thing, Kathy.
Could you give me the benefit of the doubt. This

(24:17):
is going somewhere. I am so sick of being called
a whiner when women who love the comic felt the
same way I did, but couldn't say it out loud.
I totally agree with you. I and the fact that
men disliked it so much just proves my point. If
you said any of it out loud, you were called
a loser. You were pathetic, Kathy. I know I was

(24:37):
just setting up the next segment. Say what you will
about boomer women. But Kathy, you were not real. You
were my sleep paralysis demon. And I swear I know
a lot of women resonated with you. I talked to them.
You you talked to them, I did. I spoke with
ten boomer women from a variety of different backgrounds in
class and race who Kathy comics had resonated a bit

(24:58):
specifically about their experience asas in the workplace. Oh that
sounds nice, it is, Please leave my room, jeez. I
interviewed boomer women about their early experiences in the workplace
after being raised by Silent generation parents, and I found
that even the exaggerations in the Kathy strip were for

(25:18):
many people based in real experiences. Particularly during the Reagan
and Bush senior years. These were the backlash years, where
the games that the women's liberation movement made in the
seventies was met with strong retaliation both systemically and an
individual workplaces. The nineteen eighties were a critical turning point

(25:40):
for boomers. With the Reagan presidency came a wave of
American conservatism. We're talking policies that widened the gap between
the rich and the poor, with declining wages and a
lower standard of living for the working class. We're talking
rampant deregulation and tax breaks to the finance industry that

(26:00):
made Wall Street ridiculously rich and would end in a
recession that really and truly fucked everyone over in two
thousand and eight. These were years where Reagan claimed to
want to scale government down all well, increasing government spending,
slashing programs that supported the environment and the working class,
and increased the military budget. He put the US into

(26:21):
debt all well, saying government is not a solution to
our problem. The government is the problem. This was a
time where American rugged individualism was stressed. If you didn't succeed,
it was inconceivable that a system had failed you. It
was your fault and your fault alone. Uh. I need
to stop talking about Ronald Reagan. I needed, I need
to dissociate. I need a Mike's Hard. Here are my

(26:43):
talks with boomer women, and to be clear, I am
changing their names for privacy reasons. Here's a conversation I
had with Amelia, who grew up in a working class
Hispanic family in the nineteen seventies, became a first generation
college graduate, and eventually went to work for a T
and T. Amelia got her start as a toll operator
for the phone company, which was then called Mountain Bell,

(27:06):
and then worked her way up to secretary and then
into the low executive level in the engineering department. She
didn't work around many women or people of color at all,
and told me how she would bond with the women
in her office in particular. So when I was in
high school, I remember thinking, Oh, I'm gonna be like mom,

(27:27):
I'm just gonna graduate from high school and I'll get married,
and I'll have two boys and two girls, and I'll
be a secretary. That was my career goal. I'll just
be a secretary. That was. And that then in the
late sixties, certainly somebody who was in high school could
aspire to having a career as a secretary, you know,

(27:50):
totally reasonable. Um. And then my high school counselor encouraged
me to go to college. And that was something that
if you were born and raised in Colorado of Hispanic
origin in the fifties and the sixties, not many people
encouraged you to do. The particular group that I fell into. Actually,

(28:13):
I'm still friends with one of the women that was
in that group day Um. And that was nineteen seventy
three and four. Um. Yeah. A couple of the women
were married, and they were a little bit older, maybe
ten years older than me. Um. Couple of them were single.

(28:36):
One was a single mom. So we had a variety
of women. They were all Anglo. There weren't very many
Hispanics at all at all, engineering maybe a handful. I
am curious about. Yeah, your experiences in that space as
a as a Hispanic woman as well. It sounds like
there were not many other Hispanic women to talk to.

(29:00):
Is that correct? What was I guess what was what
was your experience from that perspective. I'm trying to remember
if there were any, and I'm going back. I'm going down.
Probably through the seventies, there were a handful of Hispanic
and black men who were in the engineering department, but

(29:25):
there weren't many Hispanic women. Again, maybe a handful in
the various groups. And I'm talking a building of probably
a thousand people, and I have to work with engineers
to get that done. Electrical engineers, Anglo male engineers. I

(29:49):
can remember their names. And there were a couple of
them that were particularly fun to work with because they
would refuse to get view the information that you needed.
And I don't I I never really thought that their
refusal was because I was his fanic. I always felt

(30:12):
it was because I was a woman, okay. And of
course in those days, you didn't want to just go
to your boss and say, Joe won't work with me.
Go talk to his boss, because now you're whining, you know.
Amelia told me that beginning around the late nineteen eighties,
there were more efforts to educate employees on sexual harassment

(30:33):
and racism in the workplace, but these didn't move the
needle by much. While she worked at a T and T,
she told me while pulling out some notes, very much
still in executive mode. While into retirement, she told me
that for every white male executive, the employee breakdown was this.
White men were in the workplace two to one, men

(30:53):
of color were in the workplace one to forty eight.
White women were one to one three, and women of
color were less than one and two hundred employees. And
even when people of color and women were promoted, it
was rarely past a certain point. Top brass remained very
wide and very male. Amelia left the company when her

(31:14):
son was six. We'll get back to that, and she
was adamant that while the inclusivity training was a workplace shift,
the only way to actually change things is on a
systemic level. Here's what she had to say. Well, we
would promote you all if you were qualified. We will
promote you if you had the experience. Well, we would

(31:35):
put you in those positions. But you've never been in
those positions. Well, don't you have to raise your families.
Well how can you travel like executives do and take
three year developmental positions in another state? If you have
children at home, you can't just up and leave for
three years, can you. So you started getting all of

(31:57):
those kinds of things thrown back at you, just like yeah, yeah,
they're all excuses and and so there was a period
of time, I would say in the in the early
two mid eighties where the company did try with different
programs and training programs. Always called him programs and programs

(32:20):
don't work. What works is systemic change. I also spoke
with Susie, who started her career working as one of
a handful of women in a mind. She had been
raised by a firmly feminist mother who brought her to
women's groups when she was a kid, but when she
came of age, she felt her only options for careers
were as a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, or

(32:43):
a secretary. So she decided to go a different way.
Here's a little bit of our conversation. I'll add a
quick trigger warning here. This interview does describe an incident
of sexual harassment. So you made this decision to go
into mining. How old were you when you did that?
And um, what what what was the experience of being
in I was turning twenty when I went into the

(33:05):
first mine, and that is I mean, you kind of
alluded to this in your email as well, but that
that's a very male dominated space. Yes, there was very
few women working there. It was probably a town of
two thousand, and although I don't know exactly how the
women got hired. When I did work there, there were

(33:26):
other women working there, and they tended to be wives
of the men that worked there. Uh. And they may
have gotten the job because they needed the staff, they
needed the employee the employees, and it may have been
you know, if there's what else are you going to
do there? There's not much to do in a little
town of two thousand, so you might as well get

(33:47):
everybody working. So it may have been that as well.
So it all in in all of the Like, I
worked in two minds and one oil finery and this
will only happened to me once that somebody sexually harassed me. Um,
and it was under the guise of res housing and
tickle fighting. Yeah, So they were like, this guy was

(34:09):
rough housing and tickle fighting with me, and the woman
that I worked with, she was a little more aggressive
and out there, and I'm like, I'm just not like that. Anyways,
this guy is tickling me, and you know, of course
he's going to grab my breass. So he grabbed my
breass and I was like, what the you know? And
then and then like it happened kind of quickly and
then it was over with. But everybody in the room

(34:30):
knew what was going on. There was like four or
five guys there and me and Judy, and this patty
guy was the one that grabbed me and grabbed my breast.
So okay, so here's the big revenge. There was always
a dance in the local dance hall, and he was
there with his wife and all of those buddies all

(34:51):
sitting at a big table, and Judy and I, twenty
year old women dressed to the nines, We went over
there and just come completely flirted with them in front
of his wife. Wow. The guys looked like they were
going to die, and she looked like she was going

(35:11):
to kill her husband. Complete revenge. Nobody ever went near
us again. Many women I spoke with had stories like this,
experiencing harassment at work and then with the understanding that
there would never be repercussions for a male coworker, finding
a way to reconcile the experience these moments of revenge.

(35:34):
Susie went on to leave the mind to work at
an oil refinery, where she once had to put out
a chemical fire and threw up green flegm while pregnant.
I know she and the baby were fine, luckily, but
Susie left the industry to be a stay at home mother.
Shortly after that, she started her own small business from
home and then later became a Somalia. She's pretty cool.

(35:57):
One thing that does really interest me was the seventies,
being married was not. You almost aspired not to be married.
You know, it was cool. You you live together, you know,
you do the hippie thing. You live together, and the
institution of marriage was in jeopardy at that time, although
people were still getting married, and I would certainly say

(36:19):
that being married. I pretty much had to get married
to get the job at sin Crude. The Kathy character's
frustrations in the workplace was the point that most women
I spoke with connected with her on. For every Bilbert
comic strip into a cubicle wall, there was one where
Kathy was venting to Charlene or putting one over on

(36:40):
Mr Pinkley and again, guys. White is directly pulling from
the experiences of her own life and her friends in
a way that really struck a nerve. Here's a strip
from the nineties where Kathy is arguing for a raise
with Mr Pinkley. I'm happy to discuss your raise, Kathy.
Know why you have what I call the executive attitude.

(37:00):
You have a real knowledge of the financial strain this
company has been under. You have the vision to see
past a quick cash fixed to the long term rewards.
And you have something even more important, a list of
the salaries of all the other employees. Accurly Abbott, Thousand, Bailey,

(37:24):
and like the women I spoke with, the Cathy character
never achieves pay equity. For all of the complaints about
the futility of the Canthy characters existence, what most critics
didn't admit is that these futile efforts were reflective of
most women working in and outside of office environments at
this time. Here's Melanie, a retired California ad executive, discussing

(37:48):
the pay equity issue that led to her leaving a
long time position. And I'm like, wait a minute, wait
a minute, this isn't right. So I go to the
head boss, who was the head of the entire corporation.
So he's the head of talent payments central casting. Um,
he's not my Uh, he's not. He's what he's above her. Um,

(38:12):
he's the one who is basically setting setting more of
the salaries. Um. And I said, I don't understand why
Mark is making more than I am. He's like, because
I asked. I said, can I come in and talk
to you about salary? And he's like, oh, I just
thought you're the cute blonde that works down the hall. Wow.

(38:36):
I said, I'm the cute blonde who's building you three
million dollars a year, who subsidizes them. And I, this
isn't fair. I supervise eight people. I have a huge
budget and he's paid twenty dollars more and he has
a lot less responsibility. And his answer was, well, you know,

(38:56):
maybe in a little bit, we'll see what we can do.
And while the Kathy character wasn't raising kids during the
comics run, Kathy guys White was and speaks extensively about
the struggles of single parenting on top of a thriving
career in her twenty nineteen essay collection Fifty Things that
Aren't My Fault. In the Kathy comics, Andrea was the

(39:19):
character who advocated for working mothers. After the high powered
girl boss had her first kid, Zenith in the eighties
and later her son Gus in the nineties, andreas given
an extremely hard time by the company she had built
her career up at for a decade. Boomers are widely
considered to be the last American generation where it's common

(39:39):
to stay with one company your entire career. And while
Andrea comes armed with information, she's still spoken down to
when asking for parental benefits. These strips are some of
the best of Geistwaite satire. I think. Here's a strip
from the eighties following Zenis birth, Andrea is talking to
an HR person. If businesses to support parental leave policies,

(40:01):
it's because we hold the old fashioned family units so sacred.
Only ten percent of the families in this country live
in an old fashioned family unit. We hold motherhood sacred.
Sixty percent of mothers with children under age three work
full time. We hold the male breadwinner sacred. The woman
who work are married to the men who earned less

(40:21):
than fifteen thousand dollars a year, and one fifth of
all families have no male breadwinner at all. We hold
the days of no statistical analysis sacred. Andrea makes great
and very real points in these strips, but Kathy Guyswhite
doesn't give her a win. In her fictional world. Andrea
was advocating for herself to get parental leave and flex

(40:42):
hours at work and was denied them by her workplace.
As we've covered in past episodes, Andrea is eventually forced
out of her job and has to build her career
from the ground up. Every single woman I spoke with,
even though they were from a wide variety of backgrounds
and industry and classes, described issues like Andreas when starting

(41:04):
families of their own and reference this pay exorbitant child
care fees or get out of the workplace altogether. System
that had a stronghold on the American workplace during the
Reagan era and yes still to an extent now. Amelia,
the a T and T executive, like Kathy and her cohort,
postponed marriage and motherhood until her career was already well established.

(41:27):
She got married at thirty seven in the late eighties,
had her son in and left the company when her
son was six. And here's what she told me about
that experience. You just keep taking on more, you know.
I I loved my career. I was single, I was free.
I owned my own home, I had, you know, I

(41:48):
was unencumbered. Um, so I could come and go and
do what I wanted and balance it and manage it.
And then I got married and then pretty quickly, Francisco
was born a year and a half after we got married.
And and your life changes completely because now you have
this little person that you have to care for and

(42:14):
train and mentor and feed, and you know, all of
those things have to be done. Here's Susie, the former
miner who left the office to work from home and
be with her kids. She shared that prior to leaving
her job, this happened. Yeah, I was pregnant. Wow, you did.

(42:35):
I was just like a few days pregnant. They had
to do a blood chest to find out, Oh my goodness.
And then they did a big study on me because
how many women are pregnant on an all refinery. So
I was a good Yeah, so hygiene did a big
study on me. Wait, tell me about that. That's fascinating.
You know, they just took about eight vows of blood
out of me and then you know, started just you know,

(42:56):
there was never any real follow up. They you know,
they would ask me questions and I did have a
healthy pregnancy and everything was fine. And they said, because
my pregnancy was so early that there was really not
much there yet. You know, it's just a few cells really,
So then it was a stay home mom. Uh and uh,
I did businesses out of my house. So okay. So

(43:21):
I I, you know, I just could never worked in
an office. Like the whole idea of sitting at a
desk just drove me crazy. So you know, I was
just a really active person and very tactile. I'm a
very tactile learner. So I just I just, you know,
decided I was going to stay home with my kids
and figure something out. And here's Melanie, the retired AD executive,

(43:44):
discussing how she eventually left the workforce for motherhood. Once
I had two kids, it became more difficult to um
to keep doing. How I remember is breastfeeding the middle wild.
Julia Spencer is two and a half hanging on me.

(44:05):
I'm on the phone at home, talking to a client
in New York, trying to keep everybody quiet, and all
I can think of is I can't do this. I
can't do this. How do I do this? One kid
was okay? Um, two kids became harder. I want to

(44:35):
acknowledge that the ability to leave the workforce for motherhood
is a degree of privilege. Parents working paycheck to paycheck
or don't have a partner earning additional income wouldn't even
be able to consider this, But consider these options to
leave the choice for American mothers of this era to
work and patch together affordable childcare solutions with family and friends,

(44:57):
or work and go for broken child care, or not
work at all and be the child care. Let's the
American system of labor off the hook entirely. These are
not individual failures of parenting or professionalism. Every woman I
spoke with was successful in her line of work, but
it was the organizations they worked within that made it

(45:19):
impossible to meet the mark professionally and parentally without either
additional income or sheer luck. Kathy Strips addressed this frustrating
split all the time. And then there's the boomer to
end all others. My mommy, Seriously, this was very much
the story of my own boomer mom. She was a

(45:41):
first generation college graduate who worked at the Massachusetts Treasury
as a low ranking bond accountant through her twenties, then
became a full time mom and the runner of an
extremely illegal day care center in our house while I
was growing up. We were very fortunate that my dad's
income was enough to supplement this, but the day care
that she ran was born out of this community necessity

(46:03):
within our pretty big family. My mom took care of
eight cousins and me during the day because my aunts
and uncles couldn't afford expensive child care and needed to work. Later,
she would go back to school, get her masters, and
become a teacher, where she's been working for twenty years now.
But it wasn't really until I was an adult that
I heard much about her career at the Treasury at all.

(46:26):
So I decided to ask her what those years before
I existed in the eighties in the early nineties were like,
and she, in her typical way, did not hold back.
When I went into Boston, I I learned the hard
way that I was goddamn. I was going to look good,
and I was going to drag them along, and I

(46:49):
was going to meet my own goals, giving up my
morals because I wasn't a player. I never, you know,
slipped my way to the top. I never did anything
like that. Hair, the hair, the makeup, definitely the accessories,
everything had to match. It was very um you know,

(47:10):
a fashion forward idea. Your body entered the room before
you did. Your brain wasn't a part of the room.
Your body was a part of the room. And if
you didn't look good, it didn't get the attention. And
if it didn't get the attention, you didn't get the opportunity.
This office madonna whore complex was commented on in a
lot of nineties Kathy strips. Here's one of my favorite.

(47:33):
Mr Pinkley is talking to Kathy and Charlene. If women
want to be respected in the office, they have to
stop wearing short skirts. That does it, Mr Pinkley, When
we wore pants and didn't respect us because we looked
too militant. When we were long skirts, men didn't respect
us because we were too frumpy. For fifteen years, we've

(47:55):
been buying a discarding clothes, trying to find a respectable
balance between femininity and professional As a man, we're sick
of it. If you can't keep your eyeballs where they belong,
it is not our problem. Charlene says, very eloquent, Kathy,
never underestimate the fury of a woman who just paid
to have all of her clothes shortened. My mom's experience

(48:15):
in her office years also mirrored the Kathy character's experience
with Mr. Pinkley from when she is sexually harassed and
forcibly kissed, and the character is only able to cope
with this by discussing it with other women in her
office and beginning a whisper network. It was so not

(48:35):
you and Caitlin, because it was just understood that either
you took the path to play the game the game
to sweep to the top, or you could play the
game to flirt towards your goal. I chose to flirt
toward my goal, and I flirted mercilessly towards my goals.

(48:59):
And I will say that hearing something like this from
your mom is um interesting and also kind of difficult
to imagine in practice. Fortunately and unfortunately I didn't have
to imagine it. Last year, I found some old VHS
tape from when my mom worked at the Treasury when
she was my age, and I was pretty horrified by

(49:22):
the way I saw men treating her on camera, So
I asked her if she would be willing to watch
these tapes back with me over zoom with my aunt
and her former co worker, So it took us a
few seconds to all get on the same page over zoom.
Now what she's doing, Mary, is she's taping us while
with showing Well, she's showing this to us. But we

(49:44):
figured it out, and I asked my mom and my
auntie Mary, who is technically my mom's friend, but your
mom's friends or your aunts, that's just how it works.
I asked them both whether this treatment I was seeing
ever bothered them, because the way that the older men
in their workplace spoke to them is, well, here's a clip,

(50:05):
I'm going to see this, Lee, I'm gonna grab your
other guys happen through at a Christmas party here, and

(50:34):
the men talking to them are at least twice their age,
And so I was a little surprised to find that
they didn't seem bothered by this. Now, I understand why
you thought we'd be shocked, But we felt so safe.
That's interesting to me. Was only one time that I
did not feel safe, and I don't even remember who

(50:55):
it was. I mean, to think that would come on
to me for real, Um wasn't even a thought. I
don't know. I mean, it's not like their feelings are
wrong or my feelings are wrong, but they're certainly different,
because I would be curious if someone talked to me

(51:17):
like that at work. I mean, the guy who's talking
like this, Mr, I'm going to grab you he wants
threatened to kill my dad. And apparently he didn't even
work at that office. This could also very much be
a Boston in the nineteen eighties thing. But to me,
there was absolutely misogyny going on in this workplace, as
well as possible mob activity. Here's my mom reacting to

(51:41):
a different work party tape from that's what we would
hide his desk, and he had doing other business. He
wasn't just doing trait repy to this god. He was
running from that quarter. Whatever's going on there is another
podcast altogether, and I wash my hands of it, but

(52:04):
they're accepting this behavior as a part of what the
workplace was. Lines up with the other boomer woman I
spoke with, and with an interview with Kathy guys White herself.
This came up in episode two when I asked Kathy
about a convention from early in her comic strip career
when she and a few other women were asked to
parade around wearing sashes that read women Cartoonist. This lovely

(52:28):
group of very supportive men declared at the Year of
the Woman Cartoonist, it wasn't a big graving thing. It
was an honor. But I'm going to say it was
an honor in um in a product like a little
a bit oblivious away. So they did have a skirt
up in front the women who were doing commis roofs.

(52:50):
They did have a skirt up in front of everybody,
and they did place banners on us that said woman cartoonist.
So God. And of course this is an extremely small
sample size of women I spoke to. In no way
as this a comprehensive view of boomer womanhood, but I
hope it does serve to demonstrate that the Cathy characters

(53:12):
prolific anxiety about thriving in the workplace as a part
of the first American generation of women to be expected
to do so really wasn't much of an overreaction at all.
The workplace was the intersection of a lot of issues,
financial inequity, the need to postpone parenthood for career because
companies expected but did not support parenthood, extreme pressures to

(53:37):
look and act a certain way, and the acceptance that
your coworkers. Usually men were just that way. I understand
why the that was just how it was. Mentality could persist,
but it's so frustrating. I had to google that guy
who was harassing my mom to make sure he had died,
and she wasn't even bothered by it. So as the

(53:59):
boomers and to their thirties and forties and the nineteen nineties,
the first boomer president, Bill Clinton, was elected, breaking the
decade plus of Republican administrations. Liberal voters were initially hopeful.
Clinton said this while campaigning for the election. The Reagan
Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special

(54:23):
interests over the common good, wealth, and fame over work
and family. The nineteen eighties ushered in a gilded age
of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.
But what happened when he was elected, Clinton, a credibly

(54:45):
accused sex offender, began his first term by pushing for
a gun and healthcare reform, and while there were economic
and job gains, including taxes on wealthier Americans during his presidency,
many Reagan era issues remained an even worsened by the
end of his two terms. The Clinton administration had slashed
welfare benefits and continued the War on drugs, which claimed

(55:08):
to increase public safety, all while perpetuating the mass incarceration
of Black Americans. Clinton introduced the Don't Ask, Don't Tell
policy that suppressed queer identity in the military and encouraged discrimination.
He didn't provide any military assistance during the Civil War
in Rwanda, and his legacy has been increasingly called into

(55:30):
question as the years go on. And Cathy comics remained
extremely popular throughout the Clinton years, having huge success in
syndication and merchandizing throughout the nineties. The Cathy character resonated
with women across the country, even from her position of
relative privilege as a middle class, white CIS woman, because
her concerns and anxieties generally mirrored that of many others

(55:53):
in the boomer generation. Did Dilbert do that he did not?
Dilbert was a creep and his dog was a fascist.
Let's keep things moving, shall we. A major characteristic of
American boomers is their status as some of the biggest
consumers in our country's history, and not particularly ethical consumers.

(56:16):
This is a burden shared with their parents as well
as the silent generation definitely benefited from the post war
economic boom in the US, but these extreme consumption habits
continued long into boomer adulthood, peaking in the eighties and nineties.
As someone with a boomer mom who spent the first
decade of my life compulsively buying woven baskets and putting

(56:38):
them on credit cards, the Cathy comics document this consumption
habit triggeringly. Well. Here's Jill Philipovic of Okay Boomer to
unpack that. There's really no question that boomers are America's
kind of first major consumer class. Boomers spend a ton

(57:00):
of money. They spent a ton of money. They're kind
of the first generation of children to be advertised to. UM.
So they are a generation that has been on the
receiving end of advertisements their entire life. UM. I'm not
sure it was quite true for their parents. That it's
certainly not to the same degree. UM. And when you

(57:21):
look at consumer spending habits now, I mean, boomers still
spend a tremendous amount of money on consumer goods. It's
also because boomers have disposable income. UH. Boomers have long
been and remain a very spending generation. UM. You know,
I think it's interesting that you point to the eighties

(57:42):
as the kind of turning point there, because I just
I think that's right. I'd be curious. I don't know
the answer to this, but I'd be curious if you
looked at American consumers spending, what kind of shifts happened
in the nineteen eighties, What did this spending look like
in practice. Let's go back to one of the boomer
woman I spoke with who is uniquely suited to comment

(58:04):
on this phenomenon. Melanie, the ad executive. She's now retired
and living in the Northwest, but grew up in Santa Monica, California,
raised by a feminist single mother who got a degree
in social work after her divorce, Melanie began her career
at an attorney's office, where it was quickly made clear
to her that she was not being judged for her

(58:25):
competence at the job. The main thing I remember in
applying for the job was how fast you type? And
in the newspaper was written front office appearance. What do
we think that means? I don't know what. What does
it mean? You had to be attractive? Okay? Melanie was

(58:46):
not having it and she pivoted to advertising at a
big deal California ad agency in the nineteen eighties, just
as the concept of the supermodel was really taking off.
And I was especially interested to hear about this because
Melanie literally had a hand in shaping some of the
ads that the Kathy character is constantly comparing herself to

(59:06):
in this trip. The same ad that Kathy guys white
was very often satirizing. So what was that job? Like,
we were and we were at the forefront of the supermodel,
the Sheryl Tigues, the Christie Brinkley's the that generation of woman. Interesting. Okay,
I did do Virginia Slims casting, which was one of

(59:28):
the biggest accounts, which my mother was horrified at because
it started young women smoking. Right. I promised her when
I worked for myself, which I did eventually, that I
wouldn't accept that account. But since I didn't work for myself,
I could not say no. Um. And I think that's
when it started because the women and they were called girls,

(59:49):
they were not called women. Um. I took ballet for
about twelve years and we all were all called girls
and boys too, so it wasn't you know. It depends
upon the context when we were using that term. So
it was like I was always we were all girls
and boys in ballet um. But the models certainly were
called girls. Um they had to. But they wanted them

(01:00:12):
to look eight team. They didn't want any wrinkles, they
didn't want you know, any I mean, they wanted them
to look pristine. Um. It was brutal. Melanie was very
frank with me about what the expectations were for models
at this time, not beauty standards that she had invented,

(01:00:33):
but ones that it was part of her job to reinforce.
She told me about the racism, colorism, and featurism that
came into this industry, the rampant body issues that models
developed in order to remain competitive, and confirmed a lot
of what we knew. Eight supermodel culture was extremely rigid
and its beauty standards and, as Melanie describes in that

(01:00:56):
smoking anecdote, morally bankrupt in a way that only American
advertising can be. After doing her time at the ad agency,
Melanie started her own company, where she was thrilled to
turn down any and all cigarette ads and was able
to set a higher standard of how her models were
treated and, as she described earlier in this episode, Melanie

(01:01:18):
became overwhelmed running her own company while raising her kids
and elected to shutter the business and become a full
time mom. It's a distinctly boomer story. The women in
the comic are aggressively marketed to being told to optimize themselves,
to constantly spend on fashion and beauty to achieve that

(01:01:39):
front office look that Melanie was speaking about earlier, and
Boomer men were aggressively pursued by advertisers as well, and
boy did Insecure Irving fall for it every goddamn time.
Here's a strip from the nineties where he and Cathy
are talking about their new expensive hall of useless things.

(01:02:00):
Anodized aluminum multi lens three B mini excavation spotlight that
will live its life in the junk drawer with dead batteries,
high tech epoxy finished heavy gage steel grid hanging unit
for home repair tools that require two carpenters to install
and is now used as a scarf wreck safari clothes
that will never be near a jungle, aerobic footgear that

(01:02:20):
will never set foot in an aerobics class deep sea
dive watch that will never get damp. Keys to a
four wheel drive vehicle that will never experience a hill.
Professional designs magnifying drafting lamp that will never be in
a room with an idea industrial stainless steel pasta vat
that will never see a noodle, or a group architectural
magazines we don't read, filled with pictures of furniture we

(01:02:43):
don't like. Ten function answering machine with an anti tapp
device for a telephone that never rings, twenty seven time
zone international clock in an indestructible molded alloy briefcase that
will never leave our zip code, financial strategy software, key
to a checkbook that's lost somewhere under a computer. No
one knows how to work. Art bolster from an art
exhibit we never went to of an artist we never

(01:03:05):
heard of. Abstract materialism has arrived. We've moved past the
things we want in need, and are buying things that
have nothing to do with our lives. Oh boy, guys,
Waite isn't just commenting on materialism at large. Here, She's
referring to how boomers of different genders were aggressively targeted
by marketers in different ways. And yeah, what Irving and

(01:03:28):
Cathy are being pressured to buy are rigidly binary. But
keep in mind what the marketing from this era sounded like.
You can feel the anticipation in the pit of your
stomach because you're about to take the first real drive
and your new Firebird transamp. Your pulse quickens as the
exhilarating five Leader of the eight comes to life. Now

(01:03:54):
the road beckons and freedom is just a few miles away.
That's safe. That's safe. That cover girl thing, it glows,
it shows for skin them. It's fresh and natural. There's
nothing like cover go clean makeup. It's sacks him up,

(01:04:16):
pure stays fresh, stays natural, stays that stays point taken.
Before settling down with Irving, Cathy also subscribed to every
dating trend in the book. She did personal ads in
the newspaper video dating, when that searched, in the online

(01:04:39):
dating when that started in the nineties, and surprise. She
was routinely frustrated by the constantly changing landscape of technology.
It's all turned up to an eleven for the comics,
But every one of these things were cultural trends. The
video dating, especially Oh my God, Hi, my name's Mike,

(01:04:59):
and it you're sitting there watching this tape smoking your cigarette, Well,
hit the fast forward button because I don't smoke, and
I don't like people who do smoke. Okay, Mike Jesus.
Even when Irving isn't in Cathy's life romantically, he's a
tool to comment on boomer men. Irving has a couple
different midlife crises throughout the strip, and mostly deals with

(01:05:20):
it through consumption. In the strip you just heard, he's
channeling insecurity about aging and his own masculinity by buying
this entirely new hyper masculine image. He does the same
thing again when the Y two K late nineties era
comes along. He shows up on Cathy's doorstep with a
new persona yet again, like wearing these sunglasses. After he's

(01:05:43):
decided that he's going to become an Internet millionaire, which
didn't work, God, Irving. Here's the strip from It's the
New met Cathy, Millennium man Net Savvy, HDTV Ready, Why
do K compliant? I got my lease at eight percent,
my mortgage at six, and my Amazon dot Com stock
at sure Irving. Another way that Irving reflected trends among

(01:06:10):
boomer men was his resistance to accept Kathy's career, particularly
towards the beginning of the comic. It's his frustrations with
her career that causes him to have a meltdown and
force a breakup between the two of them. It became
such a popular plot point in their relationship that it
appeared in one of the animated Kathy specials that aired
on CBS in the late eighties. So the comic does

(01:06:33):
a pretty solid job of tracking the consumption habits, the
political apathy, and the emphasis on finding a job where
you can be financially comfortable over a job you're passionate
about that defined the boomers as they entered middle age.
As I was talking to people listening to Boomers described
their careers can feel kind of dissonant. A lot of

(01:06:55):
them were young feminists who ended up becoming executives for
multi billion dollar companies. They were against rigid beauty standards,
but also worked to enforce them. They were strong proponents
that their daughters not be harassed in the workplace, but
sometimes recalled their own harassment with defensiveness in favor of
the harasser. The Clinton years gave way to the George W.

(01:07:18):
Bush years, and Kathy Strips didn't comment quite as often
on the issues of the day. By this time, Cathy
was very settled in her job and was trying to
navigate if that notion that she should put her career
over all else was actually what she ever wanted. We
also get some commentary on aging, and of course, an

(01:07:39):
obligatory nine eleven remembrance strip. Throughout these years, the cast
of the Kathy Strip navigates their world and problems with
the same attitude that a generation of white Americans that
didn't feel the need to worry about politics did until
late in the strips run in the mid to late
two thousands, where the cracks in the Boomer legacy began

(01:08:01):
to show hard. Kathy in Irving get married in two
thousand five, and a lot of strips are devoted to
their trying to find a house together, right in the
middle of a housing bubble that would prompt the Great Recession.
Here they are talking to a real estate agent in
the mid two thousand's. For Baby Boomers, the biggest challenge
in house hunting is, of course, the factor, the factor entitlement,

(01:08:27):
what you think you're entitled to versus what you can
actually afford. I mean, she's good. And when the recession
hit the US, it hit the Kathy Strip as well.
Because nothing makes one act like the realization that the
comfortable world they grew up in and took for granted
could be completely dismantled by a couple of Wall Street

(01:08:49):
buck boys in the space of a couple of months.
This is a strip from two thousand and eight featuring
Kathy panicking as she looks at the news in the
papers and on TV on a emloyment. Articles are eating
away my sense of security. Aging baby boomer stories are
eating away at my illusion of youth, and every other
thing I see on TV is eating away at my

(01:09:09):
peace of mind, my trust, my hope, and my schwadeviva
in general. The strip ended its run in papers in
two thousand and ten, so we don't get a full
look at the cultures hard turn on the boomer generation.
What we do get is a big chunk of their journey.
Kathy begins as an aspiring women's liber and ends as

(01:09:31):
a woman who postponed marriage and kids for a career.
She hadn't been fulfilled by in the way she'd expected,
with no savings because of the mass consumption that the
culture had encouraged and sometimes demanded, and was living in
a world that her generation had irrevocably damaged. Act no

(01:09:51):
number of Kathy comics over twelve thousand that I read
to be exact could endear me to the Boomer generation's legacy,
as it is unquestionably a bleak one. Boomer policies have
a dark legacy. They're the creators and purveyors of triple
down economics. They are the accruers of massive national debt.

(01:10:11):
They are pushers of the war on drugs. The Boomer
block at large routinely voted against taking action on climate
change and still do. They eroded national safety nets like
social Security and Medicare, and repeatedly failed to tax the
massively wealthy, allowing mega billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Gates

(01:10:32):
Gate keep wealth and privatize the ability for the average
person to live. And today we have our fifth consecutive
Boomer president in office, long after the center liberal policies
of that generation have revealed themselves to be largely capitalistic
and unsustainable. These policies aren't the fault of any one Boomer,

(01:10:53):
particularly ones that don't hold massive influence, power, and capital.
But what I did notice in researching this episode was
this there was a cultural shift in the Boomer generation
to the well being and survival of the individual and
proving oneself through labor and consumption that had a net harm.
Most boomers I spoke with didn't choose a job they

(01:11:14):
were necessarily passionate about, but one that would allow for
them to thrive in a society that was structured like this.
Kathy strips reflect this. We know that the character is
proud and aware that she's good at her job, but
at no point are we led to believe that Product
Testing Services Incorporated is something that she's passionate about. As

(01:11:35):
Jill Philip Povic explains in her book, the millennial generation
is far more likely to take a pay cut in
order to do something that they feel good about. Like
a lot of people from her generation, the Kathy character
was trying her best to live up to what she
was told her potential was, at first because of the
Women's liberation movement, but eventually just to keep up. It

(01:11:57):
is within Gen X, Millennials and Gen z's power to
vote boomers out of office, but it is a slow
and arduous process. Congress is currently sixty eight percent boomers,
the House of Representatives is fifty three percent Boomers, so
all those of voting numbers exist for boomers to not
be in power. And this doesn't even take voter suppression

(01:12:18):
into account. Jesus Christ, are boomers still holding a lot
of power for a generation of their sorry age? And
if any one of you boomers launches into my mentioned
saying I'm being aged on this point, I will launch
myself into the sun with a circus cannon. For this
large and complicated generation, Kathy Comics provide a pretty solid mirror.

(01:12:43):
So I want to close this episode with another classic
strip from the nineties. It features Kathy in her office,
sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper in
this hulking early desktop computer, with her hands on her
temples and her tongue out. She is alone, thinking and panicking.
I can't believe I'm here? Why am I here? What

(01:13:04):
am I doing? What was I thinking? Is this? It?
Is this? Am I going to spend the rest of
my life in this office? Am I worthy? Aren't I superior?
What about my big dreams? Who am I? Why? This

(01:13:25):
is the essence of Cathy Comics. Something that looks like
it's prosperous or a sign of progress from the outside
women in the workplace, but the interior reality is panicked
and insecure, falling short of what she thought life was
going to be. Like boomers as a generation were given
a lot, those in power, squandered it to the benefit

(01:13:48):
of select few, and not as much changed as many
would like to think. Like most generations, white boomers tend
to deflect the blame for this falling short on younger
generations and marginalized people instead of scrutinizing the systems and
power structures that enabled it. And oh my god, I
really hope I don't listen back to this episode from
a climate bunker in a decade and think, Oh no,

(01:14:10):
my generation did the same fucking thing. I guess we'll see.
Kathy guys White showed the daily life of a working
boomer woman trying to have it all, and how having
it all was this myth that both offered women more
options and ways to be than ever before, while also
presenting a whole new slew of impossible expectations to make

(01:14:31):
her feel bad. While definitely not a comprehensive one, it's
a lighthearted chronicle of a generation that did wrong by
their own and by their children's generation, and the periods
of mass consumerism that distracted from cultural moments that weren't
harnessed for social change, because while the Boomers may have
come of age in the hippie days of focusing on

(01:14:52):
the collective, they became a generation of individuals fully embracing
good individualism that prioritized consumption, optimization, looking and being the
right way over all else. They lived in a society,
and it's here in this struggle to look the right way,

(01:15:16):
both in fashion and with her body image, that the
Kathy Strips might spend the majority of their time panicking
in the changing room, trying every crash diet under the sun,
and failing to be cool. That's who the Kathy character is,
and the story it tells was reflected in the lives
of millions of American women. So you know what's happening,

(01:15:38):
right Cathy Wicked Bodies, Bodies Baby. Next week on ac Cast,
I want to send an extra special thank you to
the women who share their time and their experiences with
me for this episode. We're going to be hearing more
from them and others later in this series, so thank

(01:16:01):
you so much for trusting me with your stories. Back
Cast is an I Heart Radio production hosted, written, and
researched by me Jamie Loftus. The show is executive produced
by the wonderful Sophie Lichterman, edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor.
Music is from Zoe Bladed and The Slapper That is
Our themes song Keep the Compliments Coming comes from Brad Dinkert.

(01:16:24):
Voices who heard today include Ben Loftus, my brother, I'm
home for the summer and my whole family is working
on this. Miles Gray is Irving and Mr Pinkley, Melissa
Lozada Oliva is Andrea and Jackie. Michelle Johnson is our Kathy.
We'll see you next week.