A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (22 page)

Myra Marx Ferree has devoted most of her professional life to studying working-class women. Raised in the 1950s and 1960s by a mother who worked as a sales clerk in the lingerie section of a department store, she became the only one of seven children to graduate from college. She read
The Feminine Mystique
in graduate school and remembers thinking that “Friedan misrepresented my mother’s life and that of other working class women I knew. She seemed to think that women could only feel oppressed if they already had a college education that they were ‘wasting.’”

Ferree felt that all women, not just those with college educations, were subjugated by the idea “they weren’t people with aspirations and a sense of adventure or desire to make some sort of mark on the world, or that if they were, they had to renounce that self . . . when they got married.” It bothered her that Friedan “seemed to think that only some women wanted or needed meaningful work and that most jobs for non-college-educated women were ipso facto not meaningful.”

For her dissertation, Ferree interviewed 115 working-class women in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the experience reinforced her reservations about
The Feminine Mystique
. The women told her that working outside the home gave them a sense of self-reliance and worth, even when the job itself was far from ideal. “I will never forget the woman who worked in a mayonnaise factory, often in water up to her ankles in a refrigerated room,” Ferree recalls. “I expected her to say she would prefer not to be working.” Instead, the woman made a distinction between her specific job and her self-identity as a worker. “I sure would like to quit THIS job,” the woman told Ferree, “but I can’t imagine not working.”

In later studies Ferree found that working-class women who held jobs were more satisfied with their lives than those who stayed home. They had a greater sense of competence and self-esteem, and higher feelings of social connectedness and personal autonomy. Other surveys over the years have shown that women who earn an income also feel more entitled to a voice in family decisions.

Like Komarovsky, Ferree did find that less-educated housewives were happier staying home than educated housewives. But they were still less happy than women of the same education who had jobs. Whatever their degree of education, women who worked outside the home were more likely to be satisfied than comparable women who did not. Part-time workers were the most satisfied of all, perhaps because they had the benefits of employment without as much conflict between the time demands of work and family.

Another problem with the claim that
The Feminine Mystique
was irrelevant to working-class women, historian Ruth Rosen points out, is that many of the young college women attracted to the women’s movement in the 1960s “were raised by blue collar parents who wanted their daughters to be the first in their family to attend college. Higher education is what transformed these working-class adolescents into middle-class women.” As late as 1966, according to a Higher Education Research Institute Study, fewer than 30 percent of entering freshmen came from a family where the father had completed college, and only 20 percent had a mother who was a college graduate.

Rosen told me that in researching her book,
The World Split Open
, she was struck by how many such daughters, whose mothers
had
worked outside the home while they were growing up, were terrified that they themselves might become housewives. “The dominant image was that even if your mom was working, the right ‘step up’ into the middle class was to become a housewife. Only they didn’t want to.” For many of these upwardly mobile women,
The Feminine Mystique
provided welcome reinforcement for their desire to build a career rather than retire into full-time homemaking.

Jennifer Glass, now a sociology professor, reports that in their working-class neighborhood of Dallas, her mother was the only woman employed outside the home, “and she held it against my father, even though he worked two jobs.” For as long as Glass can remember, “my mother complained about having to work, probably because she got stuck with the second shift and was very tired all the time.”

But because the other neighborhood mothers often picked up a little extra cash by babysitting Jennifer, she “really got to know the other mothers on our block, watched their soap operas with them, and saw how their husbands treated them and how diminished their own lives were. It did not seem like a life I wanted to live, so I just discounted all my mother’s griping and complaining.”

Kathleen D. was the first in her family to go to college, and her working-class Irish grandparents were “already planning the wedding I was going to have and the house I was going to live in as soon as I met a nice college boy who would marry me and rescue me from the life that my mother had had to live. But I didn’t want to be rescued. I wanted a better job than she or my dad had, but becoming a full-time housewife was not the sort of occupational mobility I had in mind.”

Brigit O’Farrell, who came from a white working-class family in Ohio, was a college sorority girl when she read
The Feminine Mystique
in 1965. “The general expectation [in my family] was that I would be a teacher or work for the telephone company, then marry and have a family,” she recalls. Reading
The Feminine Mystique
“made me question the whole idea that the most important thing in life was to find the right man.” After
college she found a job at the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and devoted her entire career to battling sex discrimination, especially that faced by blue-collar and union women.

Elaine Ingalli, raised in a blue-collar Catholic family, was fascinated by biographies of famous women as early as the third grade. “Almost my whole childhood I wanted to be one of two things: an airline stew or president.” She read
The Feminine Mystique
“some time between 1970-74, as a newlywed, newly minted college grad. . . . About all I remember from the first reading of Friedan was the idea that housework expanded to fill the time/space one had for it—and that stayed with me for years.”

Maddy G., whose father was a blue-collar worker, reported that her mom, who had worked as a secretary for several years, had become depressed after quitting her job when her third child was born. She did not want to end up the same way, and reading Friedan in the late 1960s bolstered her resolve. “I became doubly determined not to let housework and marriage take over my life.”

Someone loaned Friedan’s book to Shirley Sandage when she was “a working-class young mother . . . with one son and another on the way.” Her immediate reaction was, “My God, she’s talking about me.” Sandage later founded the Migrant Action Program in northern Iowa in the 1960s and held down a variety of important government jobs. In 2008, at age eighty, she was still helping other women “understand their possibilities in this modern world.” She credits
The Feminine Mystique
for helping set her on this path.

Sherry Fisher’s father and mother, both factory workers, scrimped and saved to send her to college. “I was the first from my neighborhood to go to college, and I was so excited by the new possibilities in front of me. I could be a nurse, an accountant, a journalist. And then it dawned on me that even though my parents were really proud that I had been at the top of my class all through high school, now that I’d ‘made it’ into college, they wanted to marry me off to a man who could take care of me so I could stay home for the rest of my life.
The Feminine Mystique
gave me the arguments I needed to resist their pressure. I carried it around with me like a shield.”

 

THE MAJORITY OF YOUNG WOMEN FROM WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES IN THE late 1950s and early 1960s did not go to college. They took a job before marriage and expected to quit work soon after they wed. The ranks of such women swelled in this period, with growing numbers of young women heading out to work in the new “help wanted—female” jobs opening up in urban America.

In 1958,
The Best of Everything
, Rona Jaffe’s novel about work, sex, romance, and disappointment in the lives of these young women, hit the
New York Times
best-seller list and remained there for five months. It was soon made into a hit movie.

“You see them every morning at a quarter to nine,” the opening paragraph of the novel began, “rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their beds yet.... Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year’s but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money.”

Jaffe’s novel mixed erotic tension with cautionary tales about the dangers of “giving in” to predatory men. But however unconvincing some of her plot lines sounded to highbrow critics, Jaffe was describing a real sociological phenomenon: the explosion of white-collar jobs that brought huge numbers of young women into the workforce. Many, perhaps most, aspired to marry a man who would support them, but along the way they were exposed to the pleasures and risks of personal independence, as well as the growing prevalence, even emerging acceptability, of premarital sex.

Historian Elaine Tyler May argues that in the course of the 1950s, sexual repression gave way to “sexual brinksmanship.” As the
Ladies’ Home Journal
put it at the time, “sex suggestiveness” was now part of “the nicest girls’” repertoire. But it was still the woman’s responsibility to “draw the
line.” The balancing act this required created new sources of private guilt and public humiliation for women.

When
The Best of Everything
was reissued in 2005, Jaffe recalled: “Back then, people didn’t talk about not being a virgin. They didn’t talk about going out with married men. They didn’t talk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days.... I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile.”

In 1962 Helen Gurley Brown, later editor of
Cosmopolitan
, published an even more phenomenal best seller. Written in a style that was far more accessible for women without a college education than Friedan’s book, Brown’s
Sex and the Single Girl
advanced the provocative idea that women should not see marriage as “the best years of your life.” Rather, wrote Brown, marriage “is insurance for the
worst
years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the bunch.”

Brown insisted that women had the same sexual desires as men and the same right to satisfy them. She also thought women needed a job. “While you’re waiting to marry, or if you never marry, a job can be your love, your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do, your playpen, your family, your entrée to a good social life, men and money.” She advised women to try for “some kind of work that brings recognition. That can build more self-esteem than any psychiatrist, self-help book, or lecture.”

Like Jaffe, Brown recognized that working girls seldom earned enough money to live the good life she espoused. Since men made more money, women could use their sex appeal to even things up while getting their own sexual pleasure along the way. Brown encouraged them to make sure their sexual fun came with material perks. The single girl, she advised, should insist that the man pay for all dates, all trips, and all alcohol (even if it was consumed at her apartment). Periodically he should throw in some expensive gifts, or even cash.

Sex and the Single Girl
was an even bigger publishing sensation than
The Feminine Mystique
, selling more than 2 million copies in three weeks. Brown received so much fan mail that the post office told her they could not continue to deliver it and she would have to pick it up herself.

Jennifer Scanlon, a professor at Bowdoin College, argues that Brown was “a feminist trailblazer” who did for young white working-class women what Friedan did for middle-class suburban wives. Brown did identify as a feminist, even writing to Friedan to praise
The Feminine Mystique
. She vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment and the struggle to legalize abortion. And her rejection of the prevailing cant about virginity and female sexual passivity struck a chord with many young women.

Still, Brown’s advice to women was double-edged. She suggested that women use their femininity at work to get promotions and after hours to get treats and luxuries they could not otherwise afford. But although manipulating gender and sexual stereotypes to one’s own advantage may be satisfying, even empowering, to individual women, it can set back equality for other women by reinforcing those stereotypes. Brown’s strategy ultimately pitted working women against one another in competition for the favor of men rather than uniting them for collective goals.

Throughout the postwar era, however, some working-class women did come together to combat sexual discrimination. During the 1940s and 1950s, female workers in auto factories, the meatpacking industry, electrical plants, and other industrial jobs began challenging sex discrimination by employers as well as by fellow unionists. They campaigned for after-school programs and low-cost nurseries, along with tax exemptions for child care expenses. In the late 1950s, flight attendants began their campaign against being treated like sex objects.

Well before pay discrimination was made illegal in the 1960s, writes historian Alice Kessler Harris, working women were flooding government agencies with complaints about the practice. It was on their behalf that the National Organization for Women, which Friedan helped to found in 1966, mounted its first legal actions and legislative campaigns.