The Assertive Woman

by Darlene Frank

The beauty of Santa Barbara captivated me from the start, and I settled happily into this coastal California paradise, where a college friend had guided me after four blustery winters in Buffalo. A hang-loose attitude prevailed at the methadone clinic where I worked as a mental health assistant, and I adored the cottage my partner, Ted, and I shared in a quiet canyon. I baked bread and made yogurt, filled our sunny kitchen with plants, and enjoyed our comfortable hippie lifestyle. I felt a satisfaction in my life, a warmth and ease I had never known.

Yet I also felt socially awkward and uncertain about my career. Conflict with co-workers sometimes kept me awake at night, and junkies were not the most promising population to work with. What was next?

It was then, in the mid-1970s, that I discovered assertiveness training for women.

Curious, I enrolled in a class on this subject at a local college, where week after week my classmates returned with stories of how they’d broken long-held habits, talked back to ex-husbands, and stood up for themselves on the job and at home. I wanted on board.

This topic would never have blossomed in the 1950s. But the Vietnam War, student protests, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s had broken barriers, raked the cultural soil with a vengeance, and fertilized any dormant seeds of rebellion. The 1970s saw the flowering of the feminist movement; women were feeling the strokes of their power and the restlessness it stirred inside them when it wasn’t expressed.

Just three years earlier, in 1972, fresh out of college and stranded at a two-week temp job in St. Louis on my cross-country trip to California, I’d witnessed a historical moment. On my last day of work at Zinsco Electrical Products, word came down from on high that women employees would henceforth be permitted to wear pants to the office.

Women would no longer listen in silence as others dictated their lives, or their wardrobes.

Before I took the assertiveness class, I had not thought much about what it meant to be feminine or a woman. My heroes were men, I preferred male over female friends, and I believed that art and literature were far more worthy than women’s traditional domestic pursuits. I believed this despite the fact that my weekends were consumed with just the kind of cooking and decorating projects that Martha Stewart would refine in the 1990s, and in the ‘70s were hallmarks of a countercultural lifestyle: I sewed patchwork pillow covers and a dress, baked my own bread, even crocheted an entire lace curtain, an interminable feat I will never repeat.

Discovering assertiveness training gave me the motivation and means to remake myself, and I set about it in earnest. I would distance myself further from the Mennonite women I grew up with who complied so readily with the church and their husbands. I would sound as confident as others in staff meetings or when I made a request of my boss. I soon cut off the waist-length, flower-child hair I’d worn since college and sported a shoulder-length style that needed a blow dryer every morning. There was no turning back—an underused and long-silenced part of myself was about to step into expression.

To my surprise, and against my initial objections, I was soon teaching others what I had learned. I taught assertiveness skills to the clinic staff (at their request), to the junkies (at my boss’s request) and, eventually (at yet another’s request), to inmates at the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane (it was as bizarre as it sounds). I didn’t teach anything original, just parroted what my teacher had taught to our class, in hopes I’d absorb the techniques through the drill of repetition to others. I, who had trouble delivering the rent check to the landlord for fear I might have to engage in a few words of conversation, was teaching assertiveness training.

I even managed to get hired to teach in a local adult education program, where the usual pattern was for a throng of students (99 percent of them female) to show up on the first night of class expecting, I’m sure, a strong, savvy, confident teacher, only to find timid, ill-at-ease me. Attendance on night two always dropped dramatically and, by the end of the training, what remained was a small group of people somewhat like myself, grateful, I imagined, to have found the instructor was not the loudmouthed pack leader of their imagination, but barely more assertive than they. All of us with no need to learn how to curb our verbal aggression, but how to give ourselves some small voice at all. I think they felt safe with me, though that in no way claims I was an adequate teacher.

The process of remaking yourself, however, is neither straightforward nor simple, and the following story reveals my stumbling foray into this promising venture. Early on in my learning, before I was teaching others and when I’d only begun trying out these new behaviors, I signed up for a weekend workshop with Stanlee Phelps, co-author of The Assertive Woman, a popular book that helped launch the women’s assertiveness movement.

Just gazing at Phelps’s lovely picture on the back of the book, I knew I wanted to be like her, have what she had—that indisputable bone of confidence that would give me a beautiful bearing and let me weave my way seamlessly through the world and my life.

The workshop was held in an elegant historic house in Santa Barbara rented out for such occasions; the front door opened onto a spacious lobby with a wide curving staircase that swept to the second floor. A crowd of women as eager as I to take charge of their lives assembled there on a Saturday morning. To the right of the entrance was a large room filled with chairs—our classroom. I slipped into a seat near the back, not wanting to be too visible to the teacher in case a close view revealed some deep flaw in my ability to ever be as assertive as she. Several women milled around the table at the front of the room, talking casually with a woman who was laying out books and papers on the table, who I assumed was Stanlee Phelps’s assistant.

In the book jacket photo of Phelps, her hair was full and smooth and set in a neat pageboy, her lipstick carefully applied to accent her mouth. Her eyes were large and bright. To me, her picture seemed not only that of an assertive woman, but the perfect woman, and I wanted to meet (and become) such a woman.

The assistant called the group to order and began her opening remarks. I imagined Phelps had been upstairs getting ready for the class and by now she was standing on the sweeping staircase, just around the corner and out of our view, waiting for her assistant to introduce her. “Now let me present Stanlee Phelps, the Assertive Woman we all aspire to be,” she’d say, and Phelps would step off the staircase and into the room wearing an elegant formal dress, to our applause.

We were probably ten minutes into the workshop when I awoke, very slowly, to the truth: The woman speaking was Phelps, and the women milling around the table before class started had been talking informally with the Assertive Woman herself.

I was shaken by this revelation, and spent a few stunned moments readjusting my mental construct. First of all, Phelps did not look like her picture. This might have been the first live author I’d seen compared to her photo, which I later realized was one of those PR shots that shows a person as they look for the picture-taking only, an image that can bear little resemblance to how they look in everyday life or even at public appearances. The Phelps I saw in person wore her hair in a more casual, less-combed style, and wore less makeup. The shape of her face even looked different, likely due to the hairstyle.

But what shook me even more was facing up to the mental image I had created of the Assertive Woman. I realized that Phelps’s photographed face had reminded me of the small dolls I had seen in the homes of Mennonite women when I was a girl. The dolls were a fad for a while, used as decorations in the bathroom. They were the size of a Barbie doll, and each one wore a large crocheted or taffeta skirt that fit over and concealed a spare roll of toilet paper on top of the toilet tank. It seemed wherever we went on our Sunday afternoon visits, there was another doll with a different colored skirt sitting on top of the toilet. What had struck me about the dolls was that they looked so unlike the women who owned them. Their faces were painted with red lips and rouged cheeks; they were fancy dolls with bouffant blonde or auburn hair, and their dresses unlike anything a Mennonite woman wore or owned. It struck me as odd that women who wore long hair, head coverings, and no makeup would have these alien creatures in their bathrooms. It also struck me as odd that grown women liked dolls.

Never having owned a formal dress myself, but believing, I suppose, that “normal” women wore them, I had put the photo of Phelps’s face on top of such a dress and imagined her wearing it to make her grand entrance. I saw her coming down the stairs and into the room in a similarly wide taffeta skirt, a kind of ball-gown dress, elegantly formal, with elbow-length white gloves, with her porcelain, picture-pretty face atop it all. As decked out as a doll.

Did I actually believe a teacher might show up in a gown? Among all of us in our ‘70s pantsuits and bell-bottom jeans? Apparently so. What I thought she might do after being introduced is another question—I hadn’t gone beyond her magnificent entrance.

The doll of course was the image I held not only of Phelps, but of the Assertive Woman as well, an image so far removed in style or substance from any woman I knew or could hope to become that it was ludicrous. A woman so unreal and fairy-like she would stop the proceedings in any room by stepping inside the door.

In the moments during which my fantasy image unraveled, I learned the only lesson I recall from the entire weekend: The original Assertive Woman was ordinary in looks and manner, approachable and unintimidating, unassuming in style. She was any one of us who would simply become herself.

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© 2013 Darlene Frank. All rights reserved. This story was first published in the anthology Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the ‘60s & ‘70s, edited by Kate Farrell, Linda Joy Myers, and Amber Lea Starfire, and published by She Writes Press. Please ask permission of the author if you would like to reproduce or use this work in any form.