A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (19 page)

One 1952 advice book for teenage girls warned that studying could be a “dating handicap.” Another advised young women to go far enough in school to be good companions to their husbands, but not so far as to compete with them. And a 1957 advice manual approvingly remarked on the “bright new trend” of women dropping out of college to help finance their husbands’ more timely graduation. This gave a woman the “joy of being a part of her husband’s preparation for a career” and of achieving her PhT, “Putting husband Through.”

Coeds of the 1950s took this advice seriously. Komarovsky noted that 40 percent of them reported playing dumb on dates. And although a higher proportion of women entered college than in the early decades of the century, a lower proportion of women who entered college actually completed their degrees. In 1920 women composed 47 percent of all college students and earned fully half of all degrees, which meant they were
less
likely to drop out than men. In 1960, more than 60 percent of female college students dropped out before graduation, usually to get married.

Women who did graduate from college seemed less inclined to strive for excellence or aspire to nontraditional fields than in the prewar period. A study of female students at Vassar College at the end of the 1950s found that the percentage of physics and chemistry majors fell by more than half in the decade following World War II. Graduates became more likely to turn down a research job or forgo graduate work because it might hurt their marriage prospects.

A study of U.S. college seniors in 1961 found that almost 70 percent of the men who placed in the top 20 percent of their class planned to go on to graduate school, while only 36 percent of the equally high-achieving
women had similar plans. A report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation pointed out that one in thirty of the highest-scoring male high school students went on to get a PhD, but only one in three hundred of the highest-scoring girls did. In 1920, women had earned 20 percent of all PhDs. That dropped to a low of 9 percent from 1950 to 1955, and had recovered to only 11 percent by 1963.

Some educators who remembered the commitment and drive of the earlier generation of female college students were appalled by the changes they saw in the postwar period and greeted
The Feminine Mystique
with tremendous enthusiasm. One woman, who had graduated in the first wave of women’s education in the early twentieth century and then become a professor at the University of Illinois, wrote to Friedan that in the ten years before she retired in 1954, she had increasingly felt “that something had gone wrong with our younger women of college age.” A Vassar professor expressed his frustration that female students “just won’t let themselves get interested. They feel it will get in their way when they marry.”

Even when young women did take their education seriously and wanted to pursue it further, many parents refused to support these aspirations. When anthropologist Sherry Ortner interviewed fellow female graduates of her 1958 high school class in Newark, New Jersey, several noted that their parents had steered them away from the better colleges where they sent their sons. One woman recalled that her parents had been willing to spend more on her brother’s education than her own, even though she had been the better student. Another said that her father refused to help her attend graduate school because she would be “pricing herself out of the [marriage] market.”

Parents also pressured their daughters to major in traditional women’s fields such as teaching or nursing, even if their interests lay elsewhere. “They kept saying that ‘if something happens to your husband, which God forbid,’ I would need a ‘respectable’ occupation ‘to fall back on,’” reports Rosalind F. “The assumption was that I wasn’t going to work anyway, so why should I care what I majored in.”

And women who harbored intellectual aspirations continued to fear that these were incompatible with a satisfying family life, except perhaps vicariously. When Peta Henderson, now a retired college professor, was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Swarthmore in the mid-1950s, she babysat to earn extra money. One evening she was working at the home of a humanities professor at her college. It wasn’t a fancy home, and it certainly wasn’t as well kept as the pictures of houses she had sometimes admired in women’s magazines, but she found it tremendously appealing. After she put the children to bed, she walked through the house looking at all the books and papers, “and I distinctly remember saying to myself, ‘I want to marry a college professor.’”

Six years later, still unmarried, she had completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees. But when her adviser praised her work and suggested that she go on to earn a PhD, Henderson grew anxious. “I can’t get a PhD,” she told her adviser. “I want to get married someday.”

Another factor that may have dampened women’s aspirations was the relative decline in their representation within colleges. Although women were entering colleges and universities in higher numbers than in the past, they were overwhelmed by the massive influx of male veterans. Even as the absolute numbers of women in college rose, their proportion decreased dramatically. Women were 47 percent of college students in 1920, and still a full 40 percent in 1944, but by the mid-1950s they were only a third.

In historian Linda Eisenmann’s view, women became “increasingly incidental” on campus as administrators focused on meeting the needs of returning veterans. To accommodate the flood of male students, many schools limited the number of women they would admit. Some medical and engineering schools capped female admissions at 5 percent of their total enrollment.

Several political scientists have argued that the reason the women’s movement of the 1960s appealed to white middle-class women, especially those with a college education, was that they experienced the most “relative deprivation” compared to the progress their male counterparts were
making. The wage gap between men and women widened during the 1950s, and college-educated men gained more ground in the professions and other high-paying occupations than college-educated women. A survey of white women who graduated from college between 1946 and 1949 found that only half had been able to find the kind of work for which they had trained. Even at women’s colleges, traditionally the largest employer of female academics, the proportion of women on the faculties declined substantially during the 1940s and 1950s.

The frustration and anger triggered by women’s relative deprivation may have fueled the women’s movement in the mid-1960s, but initially that relative decline merely discouraged many women from taking their education seriously. Women who went to college for the sake of ideas or to train for a career felt outnumbered, overshadowed, and to some extent silenced by the much larger group of coeds who harbored no such “unfeminine” ambitions. Many were intimidated by the cultural insistence—which grew even more shrill as its basis in reality eroded—that a normal woman would cheerfully sacrifice her intellectual and occupational aspirations for the more satisfying achievement of getting a husband and helping
him
to succeed.

The prevailing expectations of educated women in this era were epitomized in the commencement address delivered to the graduating class of Smith College in 1955 by Adlai Stevenson, two-time Democratic presidential candidate. Stevenson began by observing that the new technological economy hampered man’s pursuit of larger ends, such as finding a greater meaning and purpose in life. The task of woman, said Stevenson, was to help her own particular man become “truly purposeful” and “to keep him whole.” That, in his view, was how woman could play her “part in the unfolding drama of our free society.”

Stevenson went on to explain to the Smith graduates the two main benefits of accepting this “assignment.” First, “it is home work—you can do it in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand.” Second, it is “worthy” work, because by countering the male breadwinner’s “contraction of mind and spirit,” wives
could help America defeat “totalitarian, authoritarian ideas” and “frustrate the evils of vocational specialization.”

Like Friedan, Stevenson noted that the “mundane” nature of housework could be frustrating for women who had been exposed to “the great issues and stirring debates” fostered by higher education. “Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the
Consumers’ Guide
. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list.

“Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night,” Stevenson continued. “Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.”

Unlike Friedan, however, Stevenson called on women to embrace this “contraction” in their lives as “yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society.” Across the world, “women ‘never had it as good’ as you do,” Stevenson proclaimed. And regardless of whether you like the idea of becoming a housewife just now, he assured the graduates, once it happens, you
will
like it.

Many women who switched from Baudelaire to baking did like being full-time housewives. But those who failed to experience homemaking as the ultimate expression of their “individual freedom” were beset by feelings of self-doubt and guilt to a degree that is difficult for contemporary women to grasp—not despite their education but precisely because of it.

Women who attended college in the 1950s were especially likely to have been taught the “scientific” findings of Freudian psychiatrists and functionalist sociologists that any woman who wanted more meaning in life than she found in the kitchen and nursery suffered from psychological maladjustment. The magazines targeted to housewives of their race, income, and educational level promoted the views of Freudian psychiatrists and other human behavior “experts” about “healthy” and “unhealthy” gender roles more often and in more detail than did the periodicals aimed at white working-class or black middle-class women. The result was that
educated housewives who did not feel what they knew they
should
be feeling experienced a special kind of self-doubt.

Certainly the pain of a frustrated stay-at-home housewife or a young middle-class woman contemplating her future as a homemaker was different than that of a low-paid clerk or a factory worker struggling to combine an exhausting job at work with an equally exhausting job at home. It was different from the stress facing a black woman in a marriage where even two incomes were not enough to raise the family out of poverty or protect her children from racial discrimination. But using the word “boredom” to describe the doubts and insecurities of these middle-class women unfairly trivializes their pain. While their distress may have been less rooted in material deprivation than that of working-class and minority women, it was in some ways more bewildering. And it was more frequently turned inward, because most of Friedan’s readers recognized their privileges and acknowledged their own complicity in creating the life that was now making them unhappy. Many felt terrible because they
did
have the choice not to work and thought there was something wrong with themselves for not being properly grateful for that advantage.

Sharon V., who was thirty-four when she read
The Feminine Mystique
in 1964, explained the sense of unworthiness that had been haunting her: “There were Negroes being beaten in the South. There were children with bellies swollen from hunger in Appalachia. And here I was with comforts my mother would have given her eye-tooth for. What right did I have to be so miserable?” But telling herself that she had “no right” to these feelings didn’t help. “I still had the feelings, but I felt guilty for having them, which made me feel even worse. Until I read
The Feminine Mystique
.”

Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s mother was another such woman, and Julie found that reading
The Feminine Mystique
helped her make sense of her mother’s life. “She was of that generation of housewives that did not have much outlet for their intelligence, but also felt they couldn’t complain because, generally speaking, they had it so good.... At the same time,
knowing
that you ‘should’ be happy because you had what all women were ‘supposed’ to want really didn’t help.”

This combination of insecurity in the face of experts and guilt about their discontent explains why so many of these comparatively privileged women gradually lost the self-confidence of their early years. In oral histories of and surveys from the 1950s, it is striking how frequently middle-class white women, especially those with some college education, expressed guilt, self-doubt, and inadequacy about their family behaviors.

Educated white middle-class women in the 1950s were more likely to feel guilty when they went to work—or even when they just
wanted
to work—than comparably educated black women or white working-class women with less education. And numerous sociological studies in the 1950s and early 1960s found that educated housewives, even those who enjoyed being homemakers, tended to devalue or second-guess their own child rearing more than working-class women did.

Constance Ahrons felt guilty about wanting to go back to school when all her friends were happy to stay home with their families. “I just assumed I’d be punished in some way,” she told me. “That’s what happens to women who are selfish. My friends said, ‘You’re so selfish.’”

Sandie Nisbett, a college graduate who was married with three children in the 1950s, loved her husband and kids immensely. “But I was totally wrapped up in that. I thought it was my responsibility to fix all the emotional issues in the household, and I gradually lost my sense that I could fix anything else.” When Sandie finally decided she had to get out of the house, she felt “so insecure that I remember picking up a shorthand book at the library, thinking maybe I could be a secretary. It had nothing to do with my interests or my former training, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything bigger. Women had jobs, not careers. The job would give me something to do, but I didn’t dream higher.”