A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (21 page)

Still, articles in
Ebony
from the 1950s and 1960s were less likely to interpret family behaviors through the lens of Freudianism than were articles in the middle-class white magazines of the period, and more likely to assume that black women would work outside the home and take an active role in community affairs.

Bennett’s 1960 article, which was reprinted in the September 1965 issue, described several successful marriages where husband and wife both worked. He quoted an African-American researcher, Dr. Angella Ferguson, who argued that black women should have the opportunity to
pursue a “career outside the home” and that even wives and mothers who didn’t want paid work “should participate in some civic or community activity in order that they may continue to grow throughout their married life.” The article also featured a sidebar by E. Franklin Frazier, who in this particular piece praised the “self-assertion” of black women and the egalitarian nature of modern African-American marriages.

Several black women I interviewed for this book said that in the 1950s and 1960s, they knew no families in which mothers dropped out of the labor force for more than a year or two at a time. White women raised in the 1950s often reported that their mothers and grandmothers criticized them when they later chose to combine motherhood with paid employment. But black women raised in that era often faced the opposite reaction when they or their friends considered becoming stay-at-home mothers in later decades. Their mothers and grandmothers made disapproving comments such as “I didn’t raise you to be dependent” or “You’ll never get any respect by just staying home.”

In 1960, almost 60 percent of black middle-class families were two-earner households, compared to less than 40 percent of white middle-class families. And a much higher proportion of black middle-class moms with children of preschool age were in the labor force than their white counterparts. Furthermore, sociologist Bart Landry points out, the black women most likely to work outside the home in this period were those
least
likely to need to do so.

In the 1950s and 1960s, white, college-educated, middle-class wives were already more likely to hold a job than the less-educated wives of blue-collar men, though such women rarely worked while their children were young. But those in the upper middle class were the least likely of all white mothers to work outside the home.

By contrast, upper-middle-class black mothers were the
most
likely among black mothers to hold outside jobs. Sixty-four percent of black upper middle-class mothers had jobs in 1960, compared to only 27 percent of white upper-middle-class mothers and 35 percent of white lower middle-class mothers.

Landry’s contention that black middle-class wives, not white feminists, were the true pioneers of modern family patterns is supported by his finding that black wives were less willing than white wives to let their husbands decide whether they would work. Among white middle-class families, when the husband expressed a preference for the wife to stay home, 89 percent of the wives did so, but this was true for only 56 percent of black wives whose husbands disapproved of their working.

In ignoring the experience of African-American women in
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan missed an opportunity to prove that women could indeed combine family commitments with involvement beyond the home. Friedan could have used their example to show that women need not feel guilty for engaging in work or community activism outside the home, even if they had the financial means to be full-time homemakers, and that working mothers could maintain strong family ties, inspiring both love and respect in their children.

Some black women did read
The Feminine Mystique
back in the 1960s and got something positive from it. Three African-American professionals e-mailed me to say that Friedan had been important to them as they struggled against male prejudices in graduate school or medical school. Gloria Hull, a black feminist scholar and poet, has written elsewhere that Friedan’s work affected her deeply when she read it in 1970 and that even today she remains “struck by its clear passion and radical persuasion.”

However, the content of
The Feminine Mystique
and the marketing strategy that Friedan and her publishers devised for it ignored black women’s positive examples of Friedan’s argument. So it is not surprising that
The Feminine Mystique
got little attention in the black community. Nor is it surprising that the black women who did read the book seldom responded as enthusiastically as did her white readers. African-American women had less need for outside reassurance to view themselves as strong and independent, and they felt less guilt about working outside the home. Their self-image as mothers coincided rather than conflicted with their identity as providers for the family.

Furthermore, black women were less likely than white women to have access to employment Friedan defined as fulfilling and creative. In 1950, 41 percent of all employed black women worked in private homes, almost invariably as domestic laborers. An additional 19 percent worked as cleaners or maids in offices, hotels, and restaurants. Working-class African-American women began to make their way out of domestic labor and into white-collar or manufacturing jobs in the 1950s, but given the low wages of African Americans in this era, few black women would have related easily to Friedan’s advice that women should hire a house-keeper or nanny to take over their household chores. And given her own experience—or her mother’s—any black working woman who read the book through to page 255 probably would have been offended by the suggestion that housework was especially suited to the “feeble-minded.”

Finally, many black women considered the struggle for racial equality more urgent than the struggle for male-female equality. They might resent the antifemale prejudices they encountered in the black community, but they did not feel the same sense of relative deprivation as white women. “Our menfolk weren’t doing all that well either,” Donna G. told me. “We didn’t feel much envy for their options. And most of the time—not all, but most—it felt like the racial stereotypes we faced were causing more immediate harm than the gender ones.”

 

THE ARGUMENT THAT MANY WOMEN WOULD HAVE ENVIED THE PROBLEMS of middle-class wives who felt trapped in suburban homes may apply in part to white working-class women. White working-class wives were not only less likely to work outside the home than college-educated women, but they also expressed more satisfaction with housework and more agreement with prevailing notions of women’s roles.

When sociologist Mirra Komarovsky interviewed working-class women in 1958 and 1959 for her book,
Blue Collar Marriage
, she found that the lower the educational level of the homemaker, the more likely she was to identify herself in terms of her family role and the less likely she was to disparage housework. College-educated housewives had the most
unfavorable attitudes toward housework, and high-school-educated housewives came next. Women who had not completed high school expressed the least disrespect for the job.

A 1959 study of women married to blue-collar workers found that working-class wives were more likely than middle-class wives to accept their husband’s dominance and to express fear of his disapproval. They expressed fewer expectations of intimacy and equality in their marriages.

But this acceptance of inequality meant that in some important ways femininity was less of a mystique for working-class than for middle-class wives. These women acquiesced to masculine privilege with a clear-eyed sense of their economic dependence. They had little illusion that embracing their “feminine role” would produce inner fulfillment and were therefore less likely to feel bewildered when it did not. Unlike middle-class housewives, most had no qualms about saying they found domestic chores monotonous.

The working-class women interviewed by 1950s sociologists saw the home as a place where women worked, not as a place where they might satisfy creative or intellectual needs. Market researchers discovered that working-class women and middle-class women had very different wish lists for the perfect home. Middle-class women wanted distinctive architecture and aesthetically pleasing designs that would express their individual tastes, making the home a place of self-realization. Working-class women wanted modern appliances that would save time and make their work easier.

Working-class housewives also had less exposure than middle-class housewives to Freudian prescriptions for marital relationships and parenting. They expressed fewer worries about whether their own feelings were normal or their child rearing practices up to date. When Komarovsky interviewed working-class wives who did work outside the home, she found that they felt much less guilt than middle-class mothers who did so.

Komarovsky commented that speaking with working-class wives transported her back to a “pre-Freudian” world where a woman did what she had to do without constantly examining her motives or second-guessing her choices. “The self-doubts raised by the spread of psychoanalytic theory
(‘What is wrong with me that motherhood and homemaking do not suffice? ’) do not plague our respondents,” reported Komarovsky. Blue-collar housewives who worked or wished to work at a paying job admitted their desire to “get out of the house” or away from the kids “without any embarrassment or defensiveness.”

The 1959 marketing study also found that the stay-at-home wives of blue-collar men were quite open about their full range of motives when they wanted to take a paying job. “I wish I was working,” one homemaker told the interviewers. “When you’re out working you make friends and it’s more fun. I hate housework.” Another volunteered: “I would like to get to work, and quit this housekeeping. This is monotonous.” A woman who had left a part-time job in a real estate office complained that at home all day, “I feel like I’m no use to anyone.” Not one expressed any guilt or ambivalence about wanting a job.

When working-class homemakers expressed a preference for staying home, it was often not because they didn’t want to work but because they recognized that few husbands in those days were willing to step up and share the housework. After the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, one woman wrote to Friedan to say, “Most working women don’t have careers. We have jobs, just like men. . . . If we’re lucky, we like our jobs, and find some satisfaction in doing them.” But as long as husbands refused to help around the house, she continued, most of us would be willing to “chuck the wage earning back in our husbands’ laps.”

She proceeded to explain why: “We don’t really like to throw the last load of clothes in the washer at 11:30 P.M., and set the alarm for 6:00 so we can iron a blouse for a school age daughter, fix breakfast and school lunches all at the same time, do as much housework as possible before bolting to the office, and face the rest of it, and the grocery shopping and preparing dinner when we get home. This isn’t our idea of fulfillment.”

Another woman wrote that she had held several jobs on and off since her marriage but the burden of a job plus caring for three children and a husband was too much. “It’s no fun to come home and see the sweet, dear, lazy bum asleep on the couch after being on my feet all day.” She
added that he “thinks he would lose some of his masculinity if anyone saw him hanging out the wash, or washing dishes.” So she was determined to stay home “until men get some of their Victorian ideas out of their heads” and become “willing to help with the housework.”

Many critics have since argued that Friedan oversold the benefits of employment in
The Feminine Mystique,
waxing eloquent about its role in building women’s self-esteem while ignoring the fact that few jobs available to women involved creative and satisfying work. But I believe the book suffers from the opposite flaw. Friedan did not appreciate the intangible rewards, such as a sense of self-confidence or independence, that women could gain from work she dismissed as unskilled or menial.

Friedan insisted that the only way for a woman “to find herself, to know herself as a person,” was to embark on “work of her own,” but she was also adamant that “a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap.” Friedan discouraged her readers from expecting any satisfaction from the jobs that were then employing most female entrants into the labor market, such as retail sales and clerical work. “Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training” are condemning themselves “to a non-existent future.”

Contrary to the claims of some critics, Friedan did not urge women to place the pursuit of money, fame, or power above all else. If faced with a choice between “serious volunteering” in connection with some “lifelong commitment” and taking a moneymaking job that was not part of a larger life plan, Friedan advised her readers to opt for volunteering.

But Friedan did not recognize that many women found a sense of satisfaction and confidence even in jobs that she assumed her readers would look down on. One woman who worked in a cafeteria told Komarovsky, “I’m strong and I do a good job. They like the way I put food on the plates without slopping it over.... They tell me I help digestion because I make cracks and laugh, and they like it.” Another said she liked being able to bring home stories from the job to tell her husband.

In interviews conducted in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Champaign-Urbana area of Illinois in the late 1950s, nearly 90 percent of working women said they valued the opportunity to interact with other people and the recognition they received for doing their work well. Other surveys found that even women whose primary reason for working was economic often mentioned the sense of independence and accomplishment they achieved as reasons they stayed on the job.

Marie B. describes working as a typist after graduating from high school in 1959. Despite her parents’ and in-laws’ disapproval, she kept her job after she married her high school boyfriend in 1961. “There wasn’t any ‘job ladder,’” she recalls, “except for moving out of the typing pool and becoming someone’s private secretary. Or marrying the boss, I guess. So it might sound funny to you professionals, but I really liked my job. It gave me a sense that I was ‘someone,’ more than being just a wife gave me. But my mother-in-law was always making catty comments about working. So I began to think there was something wrong with me for liking it and especially for not wanting to quit when I got pregnant. Not that I had a choice. As soon as I began to show, my boss ‘suggested’ I resign.”