A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (12 page)

There was even growing acceptance of wives earning extra money for the family, as long as the husband did not object and the wife did not go
back to work before her children were in school. Many opinion-shapers even encouraged women to take jobs once their children were grown, arguing that with the age of marriage and childbirth continuing to fall, most women were still healthy and active in their empty-nest years and should do something useful rather than fritter away their time in bridge parties and other idle pursuits.

In the 1930s, laws and policies had prohibited employers from hiring married women if their husbands were employed by the same company or government agency. By 1941, almost 90 percent of the nation’s local school districts refused to hire married women, and 70 percent required female teachers to quit work when they married. Married women were welcomed into the workforce during the war, but as soon as the war ended they were urged to go home and tend to their husbands’ needs. The government even reformed the tax law to give a special bonus to male-breadwinner families. Framers of the new provisions explicitly argued that this would encourage women to turn “to the pursuit of homemaking.”

But as the demand for service and retail workers soared in the postwar boom, politicians and business leaders began to see women as an untapped resource for filling labor shortages and making America more competitive with the rival Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the National Manpower Council exhorted employers to hire women and urged women to seek paying jobs, although it tended to favor policies that encouraged wives to withdraw from work after childbearing and reenter when the children were older.

In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower asked Congress to pass a bill requiring equal pay for equal work, something women’s lobbyists had long urged. The bill, which made no provision for equal access to jobs, didn’t pass. But Eisenhower’s approach represented a change from the attitude of President Truman, who in 1948 had labeled any talk of women’s rights in the public arena as “a lot of hooey.”

Women also made substantial gains in education during the 1950s. More girls completed high school in that decade than in any previous era, and a higher percentage of them went on to college. One study of
young white women found that they were twice as likely to go to college as their mothers had been.

And yet even as ever more women joined the labor force, there was a concerted effort to define the limits of what was acceptable. Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, authors of the virulently antifeminist 1947 work
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, had conceded that there was some work women could do without violating their natures. But they insisted that pursuing a “career,” which they defined as work plus prestige, was antifeminine to its core and an assault on men’s self-respect. This theme, stripped of its antifeminist vitriol and sugarcoated as concern for women’s true happiness, became increasingly prominent in the 1950s.

Movies, Broadway plays, and popular literature depicted women who had prestigious or high-paying careers as ready to quit them the instant they landed a man. In
All About Eve
(1950), Bette Davis plays a successful, award-winning Broadway actress. But once she marries the man who has long loved her, she gives up an acting part she always coveted because “I’ve finally got a life to live” and something “to do with my nights.” In
The Tender Trap
(1955), Debbie Reynolds’s character gets picked for her first part on Broadway. But when Frank Sinatra asks her if she is excited, she responds halfheartedly that it’s “all right.” “A career is just fine,” she explains, “but it’s no substitute for marriage.”

It was acceptable for a woman to keep her job after marriage if her husband didn’t object
and
she didn’t like her work too much. It was not acceptable for a woman to want a job that would be satisfying enough to compete with her identity as wife or impinge on her husband’s sense that he was the primary breadwinner.

This point was made over and over in advice columns. In the March 1954 issue of
Coronet
, one expert held up the example of “Jacqueline M.” as a model for working women. Jacqueline had been earning more money than her husband when she married him, but she promptly “gave up her job, and took one that paid less, because she knew how important it was for her husband to feel he was unquestionably supporting her.” In Lena Levine’s 1957 advice book,
The Modern Book of Marriage
, Levine
told women that they could work for pay and still have a happy marriage only “if they remember one important thing”: A woman must “let her husband know that her job is secondary, that her first interest is always the home.”

Popular culture encouraged wives and mothers who worked for pay in the 1950s to lead what film critic Brandon French has called a “double life” rather than a “full” one. They were urged to completely “dissociate their identities from their jobs . . . defining themselves entirely through their roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers, regardless of what else they did.” To the extent women were willing to do this, society was happy to have them fill the lower rungs of the occupational ladder, freeing up men for more important and remunerative jobs. The October 16, 1956, issue of
Look
magazine assured its readers that working women “gracefully conceded” the upper levels of the work world to men. A March 17, 1962, editorial in the
Saturday Evening Post
opined that society could welcome women into the workforce now that “they have finally outgrown their childlike need to compete with men.”

Even as more opportunities opened for men to move into middle-class or upper-middle-class professions and unionized blue-collar workers saw dramatic increases in their earnings power, women’s employment gains were mostly in the lower-echelon, nonunionized segments of the workforce. Between 1947 and 1966, the inflation-adjusted hourly wages of men increased by 50 percent, with men in their twenties making the greatest gains of all. Reflecting these income gains, home ownership rates of men in their thirties more than doubled between 1940 and 1960.

But the wages of young women remained relatively low and flat. Accordingly, historians Jordan Stanger-Ross, Christina Collins, and Mark Stern note, women’s “best opportunity to share in the wealth of their young male counterparts was to marry.”

From 1951 to 1955, female full-time workers earned 63.9 percent of what male full-time workers earned. By 1963, women’s pay had fallen to less than 59 percent of men’s. Meanwhile, the proportion of women in high-prestige jobs declined: Fewer than 6 percent of working women held executive jobs in the 1950s.

The experience of Sandra Day O’Connor illustrates the obstacles faced by women who aspired to a challenging career. In 1981, a decade after the women’s movement had begun to open up unprecedented opportunities to talented women, O’Connor became the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. But when she entered the job market in 1952, having graduated second in her class at Stanford Law School and served on the prestigious
Stanford Law Review
, she got only one job offer from all the major California firms to which she submitted a résumé. This firm explained that it did not employ women as attorneys but would be happy to hire her as a legal secretary.

For the typical single woman, such discriminatory attitudes and narrow opportunities made marriage look especially attractive. Polls conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan found that in 1957, single women were much
more
likely than their married counterparts to hold positive views about marriage and to regard it as their best option for self-fulfillment and happiness. Twenty years later, when single women had many more educational and occupational opportunities, their view of the benefits of marriage had dropped sharply.

The idea that marriage was the best possible investment in a woman’s future was heartily endorsed by parents. While many mothers and fathers did not think it worthwhile to invest heavily in their daughter’s education, by the end of the 1950s, the typical expenditure on a daughter’s wedding represented 66 percent, or two-thirds, of an average family’s yearly income—a higher proportion than in 2000, when the average wedding cost only 53 percent of median family income and the bride and groom often shared the cost with their parents.

Still, with almost a third of married women working for pay by the late 1950s, why didn’t their existence challenge society’s definition of women exclusively as wives and mothers? One reason was the demographic characteristics of the married women who entered the workforce. Most of the wives and mothers who got jobs did so when they were in their late thirties or older and their children were well along in school. One recent estimate suggests that no more than 250,000 women with small children were in the paid labor force, although this probably
undercounts the numbers of African-American, Chicana, and Latina mothers working for pay. And the majority of working wives worked only part-time or seasonally.

Cultural perceptions were also skewed by the tendency of the press, then as now, to devote more attention to what was happening in new segments of the population than to the average experience. The explosive growth of suburbia preoccupied the media then, and people tended to move to the suburbs to start their families. The suburbs had not existed long enough to have many empty-nest families or opportunities for part-time employment. As a result, less than 10 percent of suburban wives worked for pay.

Finally, there is much truth in the common perception that the 1950s were the height of the male-breadwinner family. The total female labor force participation was growing, but the number of families where the wife did unpaid work on a farm or in a small business was falling and the number of families who relied on the labor of children and teens was sharply down. Add to that the falling age of marriage, the rising birthrate, and the expansion of male earning power, and it’s fair to say that never before had there been so many families where young children were being raised by full-time homemakers supported by their husband’s earnings rather than by a wider family labor force.

For all these reasons, most Americans believed that the “normal” life for a modern mother was to become a homemaker in a male-breadwinner family and live according to the cultural stereotypes about womanhood that Friedan described as the feminine mystique. If a woman with younger children
did
have to work, it was often at a job that was unsatisfying and poorly paid, with a husband unwilling to help her with the housework when she got home. So it is not surprising that many such women aspired to become full-time homemakers. And even though married women were more likely to express negative views of marriage than single women—or than their own husbands—most believed that they
ought
to be happy homemakers and that almost every other woman in the nation was.

Those assumptions and aspirations were reinforced by the mass media and advertising industries. Today the media makes a point of niche marketing,
targeting diverse segments of the audience and trying to cater to their perceived needs and fantasies. But the opposite was true in the 1950s and early 1960s, when older local sources of knowledge, values, and even entertainment were displaced by a homogenized national culture that literally whited out America’s diversity.

The astounding growth of television was one potent disseminator of this national, homogeneous culture. In 1948, 500,000 homes had televisions. By 1952, the number was 19 million. By 1960, 87 percent of all households had a television, including 80 percent of rural households. Unlike radio, which featured some ethnic, regional, and class diversity in its programming, television portrayed an idealized white middle-class male-breadwinner family as the norm.

Another important influence in shaping women’s understanding of “normality” were women’s magazines, which reached a much higher percentage of female readers than they do today and accounted for a much larger segment of what women read. In 1964,
McCall’s
, which had invented the “togetherness” slogan of 1950s domesticity ten years earlier, had 21 million readers, mostly between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, in a population of about 37 million women that age. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
each had almost 15 million readers.

In
The Feminine Mystique
, Betty Friedan claimed that during the 1950s these influential women’s magazines “printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret.” She reported that in 1958 and 1959 she “went through issue after issue of the three major women’s magazines . . . without finding a single heroine who had a career, a commitment to any work, art, profession, or mission in the world, other than ‘Occupation: housewife.’”

Friedan exaggerated the ubiquity of the happy housewife. In a survey of monthly magazines from 1946 to 1958, historian Joanne Meyerowitz found that the mass-circulation magazines of the postwar era frequently profiled women who combined marriage with careers or public service outside the home. Although the sharp critiques of Freudian antifeminism
found in magazines of the late 1940s had faded by the early 1950s, leftist journalist Eve Merriam wrote witty dissections of the cult of the happy housewife in the pages of
The Nation
. In 1953, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, whose work Friedan relied on more than she acknowledged, wrote a well-reviewed book decrying society’s failure to understand the importance of work and education in women’s lives. And sociologists Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, anticipating many of Friedan’s points, argued in their 1956 book,
Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work
, that the “glorification” of homemaking and motherhood substituted flattery for respect. They noted that this exaltation of homemaking constituted “the cheapest method at society’s disposal of keeping women quiet without seriously considering their grievances or improving their position.”