Free When Everything Changed by Gail Collins Page B

equivalent of “a sheltered workshop” while she tried to heal. She eventually moved on to jobs in other software firms and started several businesses. Her current company, CommuniCard, creates tools to help employers communicate with Spanish-speaking workers and consults with large organizations on communications issues.
    Not too long ago, Acevedo was helping a client make a pitch to potential investors—“venture capitalists from Northern California. They look at me and they can’t even pronounce my name.” Remembering the old IBM mentor who told her that businessmen would not listen to her until they were assured she was “like them,” Acevedo stopped her presentation and said, “I went to school down the street. You may have heard of it—Stanford? And I was a rocket scientist. So numbers don’t faze me.” After that, she recalled, “They were like, Okay. ”

    Unable to find work in Montgomery after the bus boycott, Rosa Parks moved to Detroit, where she supported her mother and disabled husband by sewing and working in a clothing factory until Representative John Conyers discovered her plight and hired her as a receptionist. When she died in 2005, her body lay in state in Washington in the Capitol Rotunda—the first woman so honored.

    Linda LeClair, the star of the Barnard cohabitation scandals of the late 1960s, changed her name to Grace LeClair a few years later. “It was like—my name got worn out,” she says. She worked as a community organizer, an anti–nuclear power activist, a founder of a social investment fund, and an advocate for food issues and housing availability. She is now the executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League in New Hampshire. She and Peter Behr, her partner in that famous New York Times story on cohabitation, are still friends. As to her parents, she said, “We’ve always been close. They were not happy about that period at all, but we were never out of a relationship.” A while ago, LeClair was given a copy of a documentary on the sexual revolution that had a whole section on the Barnard protests. She showed it to her two daughters. “It was really exciting for them to see it,” she said. “They’ve heard the story before, in folklore. But it’s like when there were horseless carriages.”

    Alice Paul died in 1977, without ever knowing that the Equal Rights Amendment was doomed. Her birthplace in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, is now designated a National Historic Landmark.

    Sherri Finkbine’s real estate career put her six children through college; now her oldest daughter is a lawyer, the senior counsel for the appellate court in San Diego. Her oldest son has followed his mother into real estate. “My next son is a doctor,” she said, ticking them off. “The next daughter is a teacher. The next does sports on the radio and does a TV show in Idaho. My baby daughter is a documentary filmmaker. She’s making a trilogy of abortion movies. I told her I was passing the torch to her because I was sick of it.” Sherri, who has reclaimed her maiden name of Chessen, has embarked on another career as an author of children’s books.
    “If anything, the thalidomide experience brought us closer,” she said of her family. “People said I was going to be doomed. I wasn’t. I’ve been blessed.”

    Pat Lorance never again had a job as good as the tester position she lost in the 1970s. One employer told her when she applied for work that she was qualified but undesirable because she had filed suit against her former company. “I started crying,” she admitted. Lorance ended up working in shipping and receiving. “Actually, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve done,” she said cheerfully.
    But her body gave out. Crippling back problems left her on disability. She lost her home and wound up in public housing, so immobilized by back pain that she was unable to make the bed: “I slept without sheets for four weeks, but I had a place to sleep, honey.”