A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (20 page)

Nisbett ended up teaching reintroduction classes for other women who had been housewives for years, “and you could see it every year. They came back with no self-confidence at all, even those who had been National Merit scholars.”

Joyce Robinson, whose dreams included law school, didn’t know what she “was more scared of—not being able to do it, or being able to do it
and ruining my children’s lives as a result.” Robinson says that her self-confidence shot up as soon as she earned an A in her first class, “but the guilt didn’t go away, even when my twenty-year-old daughter sat me down and read me a three-page letter about how much she loved and respected me.”

Once women did go back to school or got jobs commensurate with their training—and many of them report that it was
The Feminine Mystique
that gave them the impetus to do so—they typically experienced a resurgence of self-confidence and self-esteem. Thanks to the book, “I got my mind back,” one woman told me. “My depression fell off in layers, month after month, after I took her advice and went back to work the way I’d always wanted to but never quite dared,” said another.

The difference that employment made in such women’s lives is confirmed by a long-term study of women who graduated from Mills College in 1958 and 1960. The researchers found that between ages twenty-seven and forty-three, “large increases in independence and assertiveness” took place among all the women who went on to work outside the home, married and unmarried alike. The only women who did not experience such increases were the full-time homemakers.

A study of women who graduated from various colleges between 1945 and 1955 found that, decades later, women who took paid work, whether married or single, displayed higher self-esteem than those who became full-time homemakers. The married professional women even assessed their child care skills more positively than did the housewives. But these studies came too late to alleviate the guilt and anxiety many middle-class women felt at the time about their discontent with being a full-time homemaker.

The comparative lack of guilt expressed by working-class wives who worked or wanted to work did not mean that women in blue-collar families were more psychologically secure than middle-class women, or conversely, that middle-class women were more sensitive than their more impoverished counterparts. A twelve-year study of women married to blue-collar workers and living in blue-collar neighborhoods reveals much about the
different patterns of pain and vulnerability working-class and middle-class wives experienced. The study, which came out in 1959, was commissioned by the publishers of
True Story
, a pulp magazine aimed at the wives of blue-collar wage earners. Its aim was to help advertisers and magazine editors better understand the distinctive values, motivations, and buying habits of working-class women.

The working women interviewed for this study experienced “pervasive anxiety,” according to the researchers, but their anxiety was based on long-term physical hardship and material want rather than on the self-doubt and guilt recounted by so many middle-class housewives. When shown a picture and asked to construct a story about it, the two groups of housewives reacted very differently. One picture showed a girl with many hands pointing at her. The working-class women made up stories in which the girl was being shamed, ridiculed, accused, or bossed around by others. The middle-class women were “more likely to see the pointing hands as symbolic of the girl’s inner state.” One suggested she was having a bad dream because she had “something on her mind.” Another speculated that she had “stolen something and the hands are her conscience eating at her.”

Interviewers also showed the two groups a picture where a woman had her hands at the neck or head of another person. The middle-class women tended to interpret the picture as a woman helping another person who was ill or who had tripped. The working-class women were more likely to interpret it as a fight or an attack and to provide a lot of detail, often related to their own lives, about what provoked it and what might happen next.

The academics conducting the survey attributed the high degree of anxiety that ran through the blue-collar housewives’ reactions to these simulated situations to an inability to manage strong feelings or see nuance in situations. “The volatility of the working class woman’s emotions,” they concluded, “contributes to her sense of the world as being chaotic.” But a more reasonable interpretation is that these women were reacting to a world that was in fact more chaotic, insecure, and threatening than that of their middle-class counterparts.

The responses illustrate two very different sources of stress in these women’s lives. The working-class women’s experience with want and hardship directed their attention to the external world and other people as the main threats to their happiness and security. The pain of middle-class housewives arose out of the contradictions between what they were told they should be feeling and what they actually felt.

It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another. And I say this as someone whose first reaction was to dismiss the pain of the middle-class housewives as less “real” than that of their working-class sisters. Early in my research for this book, I wrote to my literary agent, Susan Rabiner, expressing dismay at how few of the black and working-class women I interviewed had read Friedan. I was distressed that the book’s appeal seemed to be concentrated among such a relatively privileged section of women.

Rabiner responded by describing her own experience of trying to get a job in advertising during the 1960s and being told that a woman could only be a secretary to a male copywriter, not a copywriter herself.

“To me it doesn’t matter,” Rabiner wrote, “that this group of women wasn’t representative either in size or even aspirations of most American women of their time. It doesn’t matter that they represented a small privileged slice of American women. It doesn’t matter that there were other women who were working and not by choice.... What matters is that these women were being asked to deny what they were feeling.”

Many of these women were privileged, Rabiner conceded. “They were lucky enough to be raised into families that considered it important to educate women and therefore let these women go to college. Then they were fortunate enough to be married to ‘good earners,’ men who could let them stay at home and become full-time mothers and actually preferred that they do so.

“But they were also like the farm boys from World War I who passed through New York City on the way to the killing fields of France and then, when the war was over, couldn’t go back to the farm. We understood and accepted those soldiers who didn’t return to the farm.

“But it took Friedan to help us understand that there were women who, through their education, saw glimpses of the world of work and then didn’t want to go back to being housewives. Or they went back under enormous pressure from everyone, but spent the next years of their lives with their noses pressed against the proverbial glass—looking in at a world that they would never be part of.”

MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND WHITE WORKING-CLASS women did not relate to Friedan’s arguments in
The Feminine Mystique
because most of them already worked outside the home due to economic necessity and would have preferred to be full-time housewives. But the differences between these groups are actually more complex.

It is true that a black woman had far less chance than a white woman of marrying a man who earned enough to support a family. Black men earned, on average, 60 percent of white men’s wages throughout the 1950s, and the poverty rate of black families was close to 50 percent, making a male breadwinner-female homemaker marriage impossible for many black families, regardless of their preferences.

Even when African-American men earned a middle-income wage, they were typically much less economically secure than their white counterparts. Black families with the same annual income as whites had, on average, only one-tenth as many assets, and they were far less likely to receive the kind of government aid that subsidized upward mobility for white families during the 1950s. In his study of the fight to integrate the Levittown suburbs of New York and Pennsylvania, David Kushner points out that of the $120 billion in new housing underwritten by the federal government between 1934 and 1960, less than 2 percent went to minorities. By the latter date, fewer than 40 percent of black families owned their own homes, compared to more than 60 percent of whites, and on average their homes were worth much less.

In 1963, a white male high school graduate earned more than a female college graduate, white or black. A woman who married a white high school graduate could generally raise her children on his income alone, and she could almost certainly do so if she married a white college graduate. Such upward mobility through marriage was far less likely in the African-American community. Black male college graduates also earned less than white male high school graduates.

So even a college-educated African-American woman who expected to marry a man with equal education might well need, like her less-educated sisters, to work after marriage. As a result, black college women were less likely than their white counterparts to feel there was a contradiction between the professional roles they were being trained for in college and the future roles they would assume as wives.

In a study of 5,000 white college women in the 1950s, fewer than 40 percent reported that they were attending college to train for a future career. Most said they were in college to expand their cultural literacy, enjoy the social life, or acquire the prestige attached to a college degree. A study of white female freshmen and sophomores found that the majority viewed their college education not as a ticket to lifelong work but as something to fall back on in an emergency.

Black female college students, by contrast, saw education as a step toward establishing a future career. A 1956 study of black female college graduates found that nearly 90 percent reported having gone to college to prepare for a vocation.

Black women’s expectations of working outside the home were not simply a reluctant capitulation to financial necessity. The African-American women polled in 1956 were not interested in education solely as a way to earn money. They were more likely than the white college students to say that college should also train women to be “useful citizens,” concerned about matters beyond their immediate family.

Such attitudes reflected African-American women’s long-standing tradition of engagement outside the home. Historian Linda Gordon, studying female activists at the end of the nineteenth century, found that while only 34 percent of the white activists had combined marriage with life
as a public figure, 85 percent of black female activists had found marriage compatible with their activism.

It was black activists, not white feminists, who first referred to women and men as “co-breadwinners” and advocated that women make a “threefold commitment”—to family, career, and social movements. Long before Betty Friedan insisted that meaningful work would not only fulfill women as individuals but also strengthen their marriages, many African-American women shared the views of Sadie T. Alexander, an influential political leader in Philadelphia, who argued in 1930 that working for wages gave women the “peace and happiness” essential to a good home life.

This is not to say that black women were sheltered from the problems and prejudices facing women who tried to combine work with marriage. A study of African-American women who graduated from college in the 1930s found that many expressed anxiety about their relationships with men. Like their white counterparts, these women were concerned that their education might make them less attractive to potential mates. They worried about whether holding down a job would leave enough time for their family, although, far more often than white women, they also expressed concern about whether they would be able to devote enough attention to religious, cultural, and community affairs while managing both a job and a family.

As in the white community, many African-American men wanted to reserve the upper ranks of work and politics for their own sex. Black women were the backbone of the civil rights movement, but they were seldom its public representatives. Rosa Parks’s lawyer once told her that he believed women’s proper place was in the kitchen. Ella Baker ran the voter registration drives for the Southern Christian Leadership Council in the 1950s but was never considered for its most prestigious position, which was always held by a male. During the 1960s, as the Black Power movement gathered steam, Baker complained that some leaders were urging black women to step back to “bolster the ego of the male.”

Nor were black women exempt from the attacks of Freudians and social scientists who argued that female independence was bad for husbands, children, and the community at large. Psychologist John Dollard,
sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and psychoanalyst/anthropologist Abram Kardiner insisted that black men had been doubly emasculated—first by slavery and later by the economic independence of their women.

Frazier, a black sociologist, acknowledged that the female-centered kin networks of the rural South had helped protect black communities in the past. But he claimed that in the urban North, black women’s economic dominance and sexual aggressiveness had resulted in disorganized families and impoverished communities. And, like his white counterparts in sociology and psychiatry, he saw no contradiction in simultaneously attacking middle-class homemakers. “The life of many a ‘wealthy’ Negro doctor,” he wrote in 1962, “is shortened by the struggle to provide diamonds, minks, and an expensive home for his wife.”

In August 1960,
Ebony
magazine published an article by Lerone Bennett Jr. on “the problems and possibilities” inherent in black women’s traditional “independence and self-reliance.” Bennett noted that black women had played an important role in the fight for freedom but argued that their independence had not been “an unmixed blessing.” Reflecting the influence of Freudianism, he reported that many researchers believed that the traditional self-sufficiency of the Negro woman had placed her “more in conflict with her innate biological role than the white woman.” The black woman has “proved that women are people,” he concluded, but she “now faces a greater task. In an age when Negroes and whites, men and women, are confused about the meaning of femininity, she must prove that women are also women.”