ERA WHEN WOMEN FOUGHT FOR THEIR RIGHTS; CALIFORNIA BABY BOOMERS TOOK ADVANTAGE OF UNIVERSITIES.

Byline: Marla Matzer Staff Writer

Think of the quintessential California girl of the '60s and '70s, and the first image that comes to mind is probably of a blond and tanned young woman. She leads a carefree life, tooling around to parties and beach cookouts in her snappy Mustang or cute VW Bug.

While that may have been the surface image, the reality was that those young women born into the baby boom generation found themselves in the middle of one of the greatest sea changes in history in terms of women's place in society.

By the early '70s, that California girl may have been driving her little car to a women's lib rally or a bra burning - or a job interview to start her career.

Flashback to 1960: The classified ads in newspapers were broken down between men's jobs and women's jobs. Women's jobs were mainly low-paying, with little prospect for advancement. Working was considered something a girl did for a couple of years out of school, before she found a husband and settled down to become a wife and mother. In one of the most striking examples of this mind-set in a female-dominated field, stewardesses often had written into their contracts that they had to quit if they got married or pregnant, or reached the ripe old age of 35.

Birth control had been available for decades, but it wasn't until 1959 that the American Medical Association finally sanctioned it. Oral contraceptives were approved for sale in 1960 by the Food and Drug Administration (they went on sale in 1961), but abortion remained unobtainable for most women, even in cases where their health or the health of the unborn child was potentially compromised.

John F. Kennedy was elected president in a very close race, receiving strong support from women voters. However, he became the first president since Herbert Hoover to have no women in his cabinet; overall, women held only 2.4 percent of all executive positions in the Kennedy administration, the same percentage as in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

Even within groups that supposedly championed political change, women would often receive little help from men in their struggle for equal rights. At a 1964 meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, Ruby Doris Smith presented a paper on the position of women in the group. SNCC leader Stokley Carmichael was said to have declared, ``The only position for women in the SNCC is prone.''

The change in women's status required educational attainment. Nationwide, the percentage of women who had completed four or more years of college more than doubled from 1960 to 1980, from 5.8 percent to 12.8 percent. Women's advancements in the professions of medicine and law were even more dramatic: In 1960, women earned only 5.5 percent of medical degrees and 2.5 percent of law degrees. By 1980, those figures would be 23.4 percent and 30.2 percent, respectively.

Young women in Southern California particularly took advantage of the excellent state university system. Already in 1961, women's undergraduate enrollment at UCLA was just 21 percent less than men's. From 1980 onward, women would actually outnumber men. Last year, there were 13,119 female undergrads at UCLA, compared to 10,984 males.

Though many women in the '60s still hoped to meet a mate at college and most still married young, by the latter part of that decade it would no longer be a foregone conclusion that women went to college just to get their ``MRS.'' degree. It started to become acceptable for women to pursue independent careers. By the late '70s, in fact, many mothers frowned on their daughters getting married and starting a family ``too early,'' before they'd had a chance to be out on their own for a few years, to travel, to date, to pay their own way.

Such massive changes often come with a price. In 1963, only about eight children out of 1,000 under the age of 18 would see their parents divorce. By 1980, that figure would more than double, to 19. A significant number of women who chose fast-track careers - those who defied the odds to become top attorneys or executives in large corporations, for example - would forgo marriage or having children to do so.

But oh, what a trip it was, one that gave young women today a myriad of choices. The Equal Rights Amendment became a rallying cry, led in part by a woman, who in 1963 published an expose titled ``I Was a Playboy Bunny'' and nine years later published the first Ms. magazine to reflect the emerging feminist consciousness.

Through all of this, of course, women's greater physical mobility through cars paralleled their greater societal mobility through education and the fight for equal rights. So that little car wasn't just a fun buggy; it was another tool in the women's revolution.

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Photo: (1--2) Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy bunny, left, at the beginning of her writing career; at left, Steinem today.

Associated Press