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Bombeck turned out zingers in the wilderness, earned her $3 a week and tried not to spend it all in one place. Then in 1965 things began to move fast. The merged Dayton Journal Herald offered her a twice-a-week column, and only three weeks later, the Newsday syndicate took her up. The phrase is exact; in journalistic terms, syndication is equivalent to ascending to heaven on a pillar of cloud. By the end of her first year, she had 36 papers, including Newsday, the Denver Post, the Minneapolis Star and the Atlanta Constitution. She began to be recognized in supermarkets. One day in 1967, Bombeck remembers, she was kneeling on the floor of the bathroom in Centerville, laying a piece of shag carpet around the toilet, when she heard Arthur Godfrey talking about her first book, At Wit's End, on his radio program. This lady probably lives in an apartment in New York City, Godfrey said. Bombeck wrote to him, confessing the grisly truth, and soon became a regular guest on his program.
By this time the women of Bomburbia were changing. The housewives of Cushwa Drive had divorced or taken jobs, and Bombeck, somewhat ironically, was almost the last stay-at-home mom left on the block. The winds of feminism had swept through town, ruffling feathers. One evening, Bombeck recalls, she drove into town with some other women to hear a lecture by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. "She started talking about yellow wax buildup and all that, and all of us started laughing." Friedan shook her finger and scolded them; these were supposed to be demeaning concerns, not funny ones. Bombeck remembers thinking, "God, lady, you can't make it better tonight. What more do you want from us?" Bombeck's feeling was that "first we had to laugh; the crying had to come later." She still has not entirely forgiven Friedan and other militant feminists. "These women threw a war for themselves and didn't invite any of us. That was very wrong of them."
Vexation at poor tactics and abrasive personalities was one thing; conviction was another. Bombeck knew which side she was on. Her success had allowed the Bombecks to move to Phoenix. But in 1978 she gave up her $15,000-a-shot lecturing sideline and began a two-year stump tour in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. She hit senior citizens' centers, parking lots and Laundromats. Some of her fans wanted to hear her jokes but not her political views. The Lieutenant Governor of one Southern state patted her on the head and said she should be home having babies. "My babies were old enough to vote against him," she says, still burning. One store in Salt Lake City took her books out of the window, "and just before Mother's Day too."
Bombeck took the ERA defeat hard, and still does. She has little respect for younger women who opposed the amendment. "The young ones are coming up with an attitude that says we got it all," she reflects. "The older women know we don't. My mother's generation still remembers when women didn't think it was respectable to drive alone at