A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (10 page)

Many women who had expected to be full-time homemakers were forced to join the workforce when their husbands were laid off. A study
of white working-class and middle-class men and women who grew up during the Great Depression found that children of both sexes associated such changes in parental roles with high levels of family tension. They saw their mothers’ work outside the home as a failure of their fathers rather than a success of their mothers. Compared to the previous two generations, youths raised in the Great Depression were more eager to marry early, start a family, and have a stay-at-home wife.

Articles by “reformed” feminists remained popular through the 1930s. Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of
Little House on the Prairie
fame, and a woman who had worked outside the home since she was eighteen, wrote the article “Woman’s Place Is in the Home” in the October 1936
Ladies’ Home Journal
. She claimed that thirty years earlier, she had been one of the young women fighting for the freedoms the younger generation now enjoyed. “You can hardly imagine the world as it was then,” she wrote. “You do not know how much you owe us.” But if you did realize how much you owe us, she continued, “you would slit our throats.”

By encouraging women to become “personally independent,” Lane declared, she and others like her had thrown away the “deep-rooted, nourishing, and fruitful man-and-woman relationship.” Lane was an economic libertarian who believed that the New Deal had undermined the manly self-reliance that made America great. But she believed that feminism had undermined the womanly dependence that was equally important to society, creating a “self-centered self-reliance” that, for females, was as “imprisoning as armor.” Give up such self-defeating independence, she urged women, and abandon the attempt to use any of your talents as anything more than “adornments . . . for your femininity.” Your true “career is to make a good marriage.”

Dorothy Thompson was another well-known and successful journalist who warned women against the hidden costs of “emancipation.” In her column “If I Had a Daughter” in the September 1939
Ladies’ Home Journal
, she claimed (with considerable overstatement) that “there is scarcely an occupation, whatever the intellectual requirements, that is not open
to women.” Thousands of women had therefore come to believe that they could “enter engrossing and demanding occupations . . . and at the same time have happy and productive marriages.” But, she declared, that is “an illusion. One woman in a thousand can do it. And she is a genius.”

If I had a daughter who wanted to be a novelist, Thompson wrote, I would tell her “that little talent of yours” is unlikely to produce anything truly worthwhile and urge her to abandon any dream of a career. She would do better to raise “a fine man” than to write “a second-rate novel.”

Most women who had been feminists in the early twentieth century did not renounce their views, but in the absence of a central unifying issue, such as the vote, the movement lost its momentum. And women who remained activists were deeply divided over where to put their energies. The National Woman’s Party devoted its efforts to lobbying for an Equal Rights Amendment that would prohibit politicians and employers from passing laws and work rules that applied to only one gender. Such rules, known as “protective” legislation, excluded women from jobs that required heavy lifting, included night shifts, or were thought to pose particular threats to health and safety.

Proponents of the ERA argued that many of these regulations kept women from well-paid work. Protective legislation allowed women to work as waitresses, where they rushed back and forth from kitchen to dining room balancing heavy trays of hot food, but prevented them from standing behind the bar and mixing drinks.

However, most activists, including most labor-union women, supported protective legislation, fearing that women’s health and economic prospects would suffer if they were put into direct competition with men in a social environment where health-and-safety regulations were minimal. So old allies went in separate directions, often in mutual animosity.

Women on both sides of the ERA issue increasingly worked behind the scenes to influence legislation rather than attempting to reach a mass audience. During the New Deal, an unprecedented number of female activists who supported protective legislation were appointed to policy-making positions, especially in the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department.
The networks they constructed later served as the organizational base for the revived feminist movement in the 1960s. But in the meantime, feminism lost its public face. And in the economic and political climate of the 1930s, activist women and men who might otherwise have supported campaigns to extend female equality turned their attention to building a social safety net for families and countering the growing threat of fascism.

 

WORLD WAR II INTRODUCED NEW ELEMENTS INTO THE DISCUSSION OF women’s place in the public sphere. The United States entered the war in December 1941, and before the war’s end in August 1945, the female labor force would increase by almost 60 percent, with married women making up three-fourths of those newly entering the workforce. As part of the war effort, women worked in jobs that had previously been unthinkable for their sex: They became pipe fitters, mechanics, welders, carpenters, and shipfitters, their efforts glamorized in the image of “Rosie the Riveter.”

Their war work renewed a national sense of pride in women’s capabilities. In 1943 a Senior Scholastic poll of 33,000 female high school students found that 88 percent aspired to have a career other than homemaking for at least a portion of their lives. And by May 1945, according to a Women’s Bureau survey in Detroit, 60 percent of female workers who had been housewives before the war said they wanted to remain employed once the war ended.

Nevertheless, national polls found that fewer than 20 percent of American women as a whole thought the ideal life should combine marriage and a career. Despite the patriotic approval of women who worked in the war industry, strong hostility was directed at wives who worked for any other reason.

Many people were suspicious even of temporary war work when it came to mothers. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, argued that paid jobs were not appropriate for mothers in any circumstance. A mother “already has her war job.... Her patriotic duty is not on the factory front. It is on the home front!”

The government’s creation of child care centers to accommodate working mothers stirred tremendous controversy, and a growing school of thought claimed that mothers’ war work was spawning an epidemic of juvenile delinquency. In 1943, Margaret Riddle wrote a widely cited book blaming modern mothers for not giving their children enough “Tender Loving Care.” An article in one women’s magazine suggested that such neglectful mothers be drafted by the government and assigned “to duty in their own homes.”

One survey of popular periodicals from the 1920s through the 1950s found that women portrayed in articles in the mid-1940s were more likely to hold jobs than in those from the 1920s, 1930s, or 1950s. But favorable attitudes toward such working women were confined to wives without children and mothers who worked from home or in their husband’s business. Women who worked in independent professions or sought careers for their own sake were actually vilified more often in 1945 than in 1925, 1935, or 1955.

Somewhat paradoxically, a new strand of hostility directed at stay-at-home wives and mothers also escalated in the early years of the war. Historian Rebecca Jo Plant notes that many “modern” thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s had criticized the nineteenth-century cult of domestic motherhood not because it limited women’s rights but because it gave women too much moral authority within the home. In 1942, building on this anti-maternalist sentiment, Philip Wylie published his vituperative
Generation of Vipers
, which blamed women for dominating the home front to the point that they emasculated their husbands and smothered their sons. Wylie drew on the writings of Freudian psychiatrists to support his attack on “momism,” and the Freudians in turn embraced his label as their own.

In the view of most psychiatrists and the writers who popularized their works, “momism”—whether it took the form of overly strict or overly indulgent behavior—was the cause of almost every social ill. It produced sissies, murderers, and homosexuals. It even produced Nazism. Had Adolf Hitler’s mother not coddled her son as a child, claimed medical author
Amram Scheinfeld in a November 1945
Ladies’ Home Journal
article, “history might have taken another course.” The title of the article posed a question that many Americans answered with a resounding yes: “Are American Moms a Menace?”

Edward Strecker, a psychiatrist who studied soldiers found unfit for military duty, certainly thought so. He argued that unprecedented numbers of men were too “psychoneurotic” to cope with the rigors of military life, and he traced the problem back to the overprotective, smothering “mom and her wiles.” Society was “veering toward a matriarchy,” he claimed, in which mothers kept their sons “paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away . . . from the emotional maternal womb.”

These attacks on women’s influence inside the home coexisted and sometimes merged with the attacks on their power outside the home, so that women got it coming and going: They were blamed for devoting too much attention to their children as well as for devoting too little.

The end of the war spurred more efforts to get women out of the workforce and back into the home. During the war, the government’s
Magazine War Guide
had urged the editors of women’s magazines to encourage women to get involved in civilian defense efforts outside the home. However, historian Nancy Walker reports, once the war ended the
War Guide
publishers suggested that editors “replace discussions of child care with articles on juvenile delinquency.” This, they reminded the editors, was “one of the social ills blamed on working women.”

As the veterans came home and began readjusting to civilian life, women were advised to set aside any independent aspirations they had developed. Sociologist Willard Waller declared that women had “gotten out of hand” during the wartime emergency. It was time to reaffirm two rules: “women must bear and rear children; husbands must support them.”

Other experts argued that wives had a duty to rebuild their husbands’ self-esteem, which had been damaged when they came home to find that women had been successfully running their households. A wife should make a special point of deferring to her husband’s needs and wishes, they
advised. “He’s head man again,” the magazine
House Beautiful
reminded its female readers. “Your part . . . is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.”

Women had little choice but to comply. When the war ended, thousands of female war workers showed up at their jobs only to find their final paycheck waiting. By 1947, more than 3 million women had been laid off from their wartime work.

Many were outraged at being dismissed so cavalierly. They took to the picket lines, carrying signs reading “Ford Hires New Help. We Walk the Street,” “How Come No Work for Women?” and “Stop Discrimination Because of Sex.” Several unions, including the United Auto Workers, held discussions about how to balance the rights of veterans with those of women.

But the public was in no mood to back any serious initiatives on women’s behalf. In 1946, a
Fortune
magazine poll found that only 22 percent of the men they interviewed and barely 29 percent of the women thought women should have an equal chance at employment.

For many women, especially younger ones who had a family or planned to start one, regrets about losing good paychecks and the camaraderie of the workplace were outweighed by the relief of having their men home from the war. My own mother recalled forty years later how hurt and angry she had been at being let go with so little ceremony or thanks. “But we knew the veterans deserved their old jobs back,” she told me when I recorded her oral history back in the 1980s. “And I was looking forward to finding a better place to live and settling into family life for a while.”

At the beginning of the war there had been a surge in hasty marriages, and during the war sexual experimentation had been widespread, both at home and on the front. Not surprisingly, the end of the war saw a huge spike in divorces, which only led to new concerns about the need to strengthen marriage. It also had the benefit of immediately weeding out many marriages whose endings might otherwise have been spread out over the 1950s, producing a deceptive appearance of marital stability in that decade.

Unmarried men and women were eager to settle down after the disruptions of depression and war, and the average age of marriage dropped sharply. In 1940, only 24 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old women were married. By 1950, 60 percent of women in that age group had tied the knot. Men also began marrying younger and in greater numbers ; by 1950, more than 40 percent of American males between twenty and twenty-four were married, compared to just 22 percent back in 1900. And the birthrate, which had been falling for most of the previous hundred years, soared after the war.

These changes were accompanied by a new romanticization of the nuclear family as the main source of security and happiness. The first half of the 1940s, historian William Graebner argues, was a time of social activism around such public issues as opposing fascism and supporting the war effort. But the second half of the decade was characterized by a “private, familial” culture, “committed to consumption and the consequent reversion to traditional gender roles.” It was now almost a patriotic duty, Americans were told, to become “blissfully domestic,” furnishing their homes, yards, and garages with the most modern goods and appliances the postwar economy could provide.