A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (11 page)

Most wars and other historical events that destabilize family formation or result in couples being separated for long periods of time are followed by a brief bump in weddings and births, as people make up for delayed marriages and childbearing. Typically, however, the spike is followed by a quick reversion to preexisting trends, and this is what demographers of the 1950s initially expected to see. Instead, the postwar “adjustment” lasted long enough that it seemed to have established a new norm for family behavior in America. The age of marriage continued to fall for the next fifteen years: By 1960, half of all women were marrying while still in their teens. The postwar rise in fertility continued until 1957, when it peaked at 123 births per 1,000 women, up from 79.5 per 1,000 in 1940. The birthrate for third children doubled between 1940 and 1960, while the birthrate for fourth children tripled.

Looking back at the late 1940s and the 1950s from the late twentieth century, many observers mistakenly believed that the family norms of that
era were natural or traditional. For them the question was why the postwar family model disintegrated and diversified so rapidly after 1965. But it may be more instructive to ask why the postwar increase in marriages and birthrates was not the short-lived “correction” most demographers expected, and why the retrenchment into domesticity lasted so long.

Immediately after the war, many observers believed that the example of Rosie the Riveter had permanently shattered the idea that women’s place was in the home. The editors of the
Saturday Evening Post
predicted that millions of American women would now “sniff at postwar bromides about woman’s place.” And in fact, the postwar campaign to get women back into the home did not go unchallenged. Resistance to the reestablishment of older gender stereotypes was especially strong in 1946 and 1947, although it faded thereafter.

In 1946, Elizabeth Hawes published a vigorous defense of working women titled
Why Women Cry: or Wenches with Wrenches
. In the same year, Mary Beard issued a searing attack on Freudian theories about women. And the February 1947
Ladies’ Home Journal
featured the most unapologetic argument for gender-neutral marital roles that I found in any mainstream magazine published between 1945 and 1963. In “I Wear the Apron Now,” David Duncan reported that he and his wife had switched roles after their second child was weaned. His wife left every day at 8:30 A.M., returning between 5:30 and 6:30 P.M. He spent the day caring for their two daughters, cleaning, marketing, and cooking, while trying to find time to write. The result, he concluded, completely contradicted the “popular belief that children need the care of a mother, which cannot be replaced by a father.”

“After the first few days,” Duncan wrote, “I was accepted as the logical person to whom to turn in case of a skinned knee, a bumped head, or desire for a graham cracker. My wife has become the charming lady who returns home in the evening, listens to a recital of the day’s events, reads them a story, and assists in putting them to bed. The children hold her in considerable awe and proudly tell their playmates that
their
mother goes to work each day. When asked about their father, the reply is generally,
‘Oh, he just stays home and takes care of the house and sometimes writes on the typewriter.’”

A similarly modern note was struck in the June 16, 1947, issue of
LIFE
magazine, which featured a series of stories about “The American Woman’s Dilemma.” The typical young woman, the editors explained, was “just as interested in getting married and having children as she would have been a few decades ago. But housework and child care alone no longer seem interesting enough for a lifetime job.” Articles in this issue profiled several mothers who held down invigorating full-time careers, as well as a stay-at-home mother of three who worked one hundred hours a week. The magazine also described one mother in a dual-earner family who could not afford a nanny and had to board her child during the workweek. Remarkably, they did not imply that she was neglectful or unloving, merely noting that such separations are painful for parents and “sometimes breed insecurity in children.”

The dilemma, as
LIFE
posed it, was whether a woman should combine a full-time job with marriage and motherhood, which was “likely to be very hard when her children are young” but “will leave her well-rounded in interests and experience when she has reached the free years after 40,” or devote herself to full-time homemaking, which would ease the strain of raising a family but leave her “unprepared for what to do with her life once the children are no longer young.”

The magazine sympathetically explored the lives of women who made each of these choices, as well as a third choice that the editors seemed to favor: “to combine part-time work with housekeeping while she is young and to use this experience more fully when her children have left home.” This is exactly what Friedan suggested as a good option for most women in
The Feminine Mystique
.

But 1947 was also the year that journalist Ferdinand Lundberg and psychiatrist Marynia Farnham published
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, in which they described feminism as a “deep illness” and accused career women of seeking to symbolically castrate men. They calculated that two-thirds of Americans were neurotic and that most of them had been made
so by their mothers. They saw no contradiction in saying that overinvolved stay-at-home mothers were as great a problem as neglectful career women, explaining that this was because such women’s natural contentment with their domestic roles had been disturbed by “pernicious” feminist agitation.

In
The Feminine Mystique
Friedan quoted liberally from
Modern Woman
to illustrate the viciousness of postwar attacks on women. In fact,
Modern Woman
had more critics at the time of its publication than Friedan acknowledged. Still, it was an instant best seller and was featured in weekly news reports shown in movie theaters. And by the early 1950s, Farnham and Lundberg were quoted more often in popular magazines than their critics.

The antifeminist counteroffensive was reinforced by the political climate of the age. By the late 1940s America was in the midst of a massive anticommunist crusade that came to be known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, one of its most strident and shameless practitioners. Politicians built entire careers around identifying and attacking communists, communist sympathizers, “queers,” and “pinkos”—not to mention “liberals,” who were, one intelligence officer testified before a congressional subcommittee, “only a hop, skip, and a jump” away from being communists. When President Harry Truman established a Loyalty Review Board for government employees, its director explained that the government was entitled to fire any worker on any “suspicion of disloyalty . . . however remote,” without holding “any hearing whatsoever.”

Private companies, unions, newspapers, and the entertainment industry soon claimed the same right, and many industries compiled blacklists of people who were suspected of subversive beliefs or supported such supposedly un-American causes as racial integration or nuclear disarmament. When women in New York organized to pressure officials to retain the day-care programs instituted during the war, the
New York Times
declared that their actions had “all the trappings of a Red drive, including leaflets, letters, telegrams, petitions, protest demonstrations, mass meetings, and hat passings.” Readers were left to wonder why an organization supposedly funded by Moscow had to resort to passing the hat.

By the early 1950s, American culture was steeped in fear and suspicion. A 1953 poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed it was their duty to “report to the FBI relatives and acquaintances suspected of being communist.” My mother recalled that “it was a good time to keep your head down. There was plenty to do getting resettled as a family instead of trying to take on McCarthyism, and at first it was a full-time job because there were still so many scarcities. Gradually, we got things that had been almost impossible to get for so many years—from little ones like sweets and stockings to big ones like a home and car. Then I had another child. Before I knew it, it was the middle of the 1950s and everything I’d done and thought in the late 1930s and during the war seemed like another world. I wasn’t really happy with my life by then, but I could no longer imagine any other alternative.”

The seductions of consumerism and the silencing of dissidents by political suppression were certainly factors in encouraging people to hunker down into the nuclear family, but something more subtle was also at work. Friedan exaggerated when she argued that a postwar counterrevolution wiped out feminism, leaving the marketers and women’s magazines of the 1950s unchallenged in their campaign to instill the feminine mystique in women’s psyches. Yet she was right to remark that, more than in other eras, American housewives in the 1950s seemed especially likely to either forget they had ever had any other options or to believe they were no longer capable of exercising them.

Louise Beecher, born in 1922, spent the Depression in Flint, Michigan, where her father ran a small grocery and her mother helped out in the shop. Many of their friends and customers were factory workers in the auto industry, and Louise remembers sitting enthralled, at age fifteen, as members of the Ladies Auxiliary of the United Auto Workers recounted how they had braved tear gas and billy clubs to protect their husbands, brothers, and fathers, who had occupied several auto plants in a sit-down strike. One woman showed her how to fold a newspaper into a makeshift weapon for use in a clash with police or strikebreakers. Louise also babysat for a woman who worked in a printing company and was proud of her
skills. “I had lots of role models for independent women who weren’t the least bit neurotic,” she recalled. “But twenty years later, I could hardly remember that.”

Louise was nineteen when the war started. Her boyfriend immediately enlisted, and Louise spent the war working in her father’s store. She married her boyfriend in 1946, and they had their first child in 1948. For a couple of years, Louise worked part-time while her husband went back to school on the GI Bill. She quit when he graduated and landed a good job. Soon they moved into a new home, “with plenty of room for a family,” away from the working-class neighborhood where she’d grown up. By 1957 she had three children, ages nine, seven, and four, and was “not bored, exactly—the kids were too much work for that—but restive, dissatisfied.”

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, I got this urge to go to school and train to be a pharmacist. But I didn’t know what I’d do for child care. What kind of a bad mom would I be if I left my kids with a babysitter? Now it seems silly, because I had babysat all through my teens for a perfectly normal, well-adjusted family where the woman worked and the kids were doing fine and nobody thought there was anything wrong with her. But still, I was afraid the neighbors would look down on me. I thought there was something wrong with me for not being content with my nice home and my three kids and my weekly appointments at the hair salon.”

“And it wasn’t just like I felt I shouldn’t work. I was afraid I couldn’t handle the pressures. I worried it to death for the next six years, first deciding one thing, then another, wondering if I ought to see a psychiatrist. Then someone at the hairdresser’s—maybe it was the hairdresser herself—told me about this book I ought to read.
The Feminine Mystique
.”

For all of Friedan’s exaggerations and sometimes selective use of evidence, she was right that for many women there was something peculiarly disorienting about the postwar ideology of domesticity. The sources of that disorientation were more complex than Friedan’s account of feminist victories before the war and an antifeminist counterrevolution afterward suggests. And the cultural currents of the 1950s were not as monolithic
as she claimed in supporting women’s confinement to the home. But in many cases, rather than providing women with maneuvering room, the mixed messages and contradictory trends in that era actually contributed to their sense of paralysis.

During the late 1940s and the 1950s, many women—especially those in the middle class—came to internalize society’s ambivalence about women’s nature and role in postwar America as a personal shortcoming rather than a societal contradiction. And precisely because they recognized how much better off they were than their parents and many contemporaries, those who did feel discontented also felt deeply guilty about it. Until they read
The Feminine Mystique
, these women had no language to understand their conflicted feelings and no way to justify their inchoate desire to get “something else, something more, out of life.”

FRIEDAN PAINTED THE 1950S AS A TIME OF POLITICAL CONFORMITY, cultural conservatism, social repressiveness, and female passivity. Although this was true for many Americans, revolutionary changes were occurring below the surface in women’s behaviors and options. One puzzling question is why these changes, which were well under way by the mid-1950s, did not undercut the media definition of women as homemakers long before the 1963 publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, and why so many of Friedan’s readers found her defense of women’s right and need to work a revelation.

Although women’s employment had fallen dramatically in the immediate aftermath of World War II, by 1947 it was growing again. And by 1955 a higher percentage of women worked for wages than ever had during the war. In fact, their employment rate grew four times faster than men’s during the 1950s. The employment of wives tripled and the employment of mothers increased fourfold.

The social acceptability of women working also increased during the 1950s. In the era’s romantic comedies and popular love stories, it was often the girl who worked at a fun job, not the “girl next door,” who got her man. Once she got him, she usually quit work. But polls showed enthusiastic approval of an engaged woman taking a job so the couple could marry sooner.