A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (4 page)

Nevertheless, the complaints were mild, and these women were certainly not feminist militants. Asked whether they thought it would be a
good thing if America someday might have a female president, two-thirds said no.

We often look back on the 1960s as a decade of liberation. By the time
The Feminine Mystique
was published in 1963, the civil rights movement had reached new heights in its long struggle against segregationist laws and practices. McCarthyism still cast a long shadow over American political life, with many people afraid to acknowledge associations or ideas that might expose them to charges of being “subversives,” “pinkos,” or “fellow-travelers.” But the tide of public opinion had begun to swing against the televised hearings where congressmen waved lists of suspected “reds” and demanded under threat of jail time that witnesses name everyone they knew who might ever have attended a left-wing meeting. On the nation’s campuses, student groups were beginning to protest the strict rules set up by administrators acting
in loco parentis
. When it came to women, however, the laws, practices, and attitudes of 1963 had more in common with those of the first fifty years of the century than what was to come in the next twenty years.

The homemakers in the
Saturday Evening Post
article may have thought they were
choosing
to defer to their husbands, but they actually had few alternatives. Many states still had “head and master” laws, affirming that the wife was subject to her husband. And the expectation that husbands had the right to control what their wives did or even read was widespread. Many husbands forbade their wives to return to school or to get a job. In 1963, Marjorie Schmiege heard about
The Feminine Mystique
from her local librarian and showed the book to her closest friend, Jan, who lived down the block. The next day, Jan’s husband told Marjorie’s husband, “Tell Marj never to bring that book into my house again.”

In many states, according to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which issued its report on October 11, 1963, a wife had “no legal rights to any part of her husband’s earnings or property during the existence of the marriage, aside from a right to be properly supported.” The bar for what constituted proper support was set quite low. In one case that made it to the Kansas Supreme Court, a wife whose comfortably
well-off husband refused to install running water in her kitchen was rebuffed when she tried to make the case that this constituted less than adequate support. In community property states, a wife did have a legally recognized interest in the commonly owned property, above and beyond the right to receive basic support from it, but the husband generally had exclusive rights to manage and control that property.

Only four states allowed a wife the full right to a separate legal residence. When a woman married, most courts ruled, she “loses her domicile and acquires that of her husband, no matter where she resides, or what she believes or intends.” If a female student in California married a fellow student from out of state, for example, she would lose her in-state tuition. The husband had the right to determine the couple’s joint residence, so if he moved and she refused to follow, she could be said to have deserted
him
if he sought a divorce. Even when a wife lived apart from her husband, she could seldom rent or buy a home on her own. In 1972, the
New York Times
carried a story about a woman who could not rent an apartment until her husband, a patient in a mental hospital, signed the lease.

In many states, a woman was obliged to take her husband’s surname. In some, she could not return to her maiden name after divorce unless, under the fault-based divorce system, she had proven that he was “at fault.” A woman who did not change the name on her driver’s license or voter registration upon marriage could have it revoked until she did. In 1971, an Illinois bill to allow married women to use a different surname for legal purposes was defeated, partly on grounds that motel owners could not safeguard “public morals” if married couples could register as Miss Jane Doe and Mr. John Smith.

At least five states required women to receive court approval before opening a business in their own name. In Florida, a married woman who wished to operate a business independently of her husband had to present a petition that attested to “her character, habits, education and mental capacity for business” and explain why her “disability” to conduct a business should be removed. In 1966, an enterprising Texas woman turned this disability into an advantage, claiming that she shouldn’t be required
to repay a loan she’d taken from the Small Business Administration, because she did not have a court decree removing her disability to enter contracts and therefore shouldn’t have been granted the loan in the first place. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld her claim.

Married or single, women had a much more difficult time than men in getting financial credit. Banks and credit card companies discriminated against single women, and if a single woman with her own credit card got married, they insisted that her husband become the legal account holder. In Illinois, Marshall Field’s department store would allow a woman to use her first name with her husband’s surname if she could prove she had an independent source of income. But in no case could she use her maiden name, explained a credit department spokesman, because “she no longer exists as a person under her maiden name.”

In issuing a mortgage or a loan, a wife’s income was taken into consideration only if she was at least forty years old or could present proof that she had been sterilized. Until 1967, if a married female veteran applied for a Veterans Administration loan, her own income was not considered in determining the couple’s credit risk.

The economic security of housewives who were not employed outside the home depended largely on a husband’s goodwill. Some states allowed husbands to mortgage their homes or dispose of jointly owned property without consulting their wives. Others held that rental income belonged solely to the husband. Still others permitted husbands, but not wives, to bequeath their share of the community property to someone other than their spouse. As of 1963, forty-two states and the District of Columbia considered earnings acquired during marriage to be owned separately. This meant that if a couple divorced and the wife had been a homemaker, she was not entitled to share the earnings her husband had accumulated.

The legal definition of marital duties made the man responsible for providing “necessaries” for his wife and children but allowed him to decide whether those included running water or new clothes. A wife’s legal duties were to rear the children and provide services around the home. This is why, if a man’s wife was injured or killed, he could sue the responsible
person or corporation for loss of consortium, but a woman could not do so, because she was not legally entitled to such personal services from her husband.

Such double standards were found throughout the law. Almost all states allowed females to marry at a considerably younger age than men, on the grounds that the responsibilities of a wife did not require the same level of maturity as those of a husband. In Kentucky, a husband could win a divorce if he could prove that his wife committed a single act of adultery, but a wife could not be granted a divorce unless she discovered that her husband was regularly cheating on her. If she had sex with him after finding this out, he could argue that she had forgiven him, and the judge could deny her petition for divorce. Several states allowed a man to divorce a woman if she was pregnant at the time of marriage, “without his knowledge or agency,” but no state allowed a woman to divorce her husband if she discovered that he had impregnated another woman prior to their marriage.

The sexual double standard even extended to murder. New Mexico, Utah, and Texas were among states that had statutes codifying the so-called unwritten law that a man was entitled to kill someone he discovered in the act of sexual intercourse with his wife. Such a circumstance could be introduced as “a complete defense” against the charge of homicide. No state allowed a wife to kill a woman she caught having sex with her husband.

It was perfectly legal to ask prospective female employees about their family plans and to make hiring decisions based on the answers. When author Susan Jacoby applied for a reporting job in 1965 as a childless nineteen-year-old, she was asked to write an essay on “How I plan to combine motherhood with a career.” There were no laws preventing employers from firing female employees if they married or got pregnant, or from refusing to hire married women or mothers at all.

One man I interviewed noted that his wife had had experience working with early computers before they married, and when she tried to go back to work at the end of the 1950s, she sought a similar job with IBM.
“After taking IBM’s specialized exam, she was told that no one had previously scored that high. However, they could not hire her, they said, because they did not place women in the kind of position she qualified for.”

One seemingly glamorous job for women in the early 1960s was that of stewardess, but many airline companies required women to quit work upon marriage, and all insisted that they could not work after having a child. Women were expected to resign as soon as they became pregnant. When one airline discovered that a stewardess had kept her child a secret for three years while she continued working, they offered her the choice of resigning or putting her child in an orphanage. Another airline in the 1960s had a unique form of maternity leave: If a woman had a miscarriage or if her child died within a year, she could return to her job with no loss of seniority.

In 1963 and 1964, newspapers still divided their employment ads into two separate sections, “Help Wanted/Female” and “Help Wanted/Male.” The advertisements in the Sunday
New York Times
of April 7, 1963, are typical. The “Help Wanted/Female” section was filled with ads such as: “Secretary (attrac) . . . good typ & steno”; “Pretty-looking, cheerful gal for Mad Ave agcy”; “poised, attractive girl for top exec” in a law firm; “Exec Secy . . . Attractive please!” A particularly demanding employer stipulated “you must be really beautiful.” One company atypically sought a “career minded college educated” candidate for an executive secretary but specified that she must be single. A few sought Ivy League grads, but the main job requirement for such prospective employees was “good typing skills.”

The male section included 281 ads for accountants and 153 for chemists, while the female section had just 9 ads in each of those job categories. Eleven ads sought men for attorney positions, but none sought women. There were 29 columns of “Sales Help Wanted/Male” but only 2 columns of “Sales Help Wanted/Female.” The “Help Wanted/Male” section had 94 ads for management trainee positions, while only 2 such ads appeared in the women’s job section.

On the other hand, the female section of the want ads contained 162 ads for gal Fridays and girl Fridays, 459 for secretaries, 159 for receptionists,
and 122 for typists. Similarly, there were 119 ads for “Household Help Wanted/Female,” but just 5 for “Household Help Wanted/Male.” One ad, reflecting the racialized as well as gendered nature of job opportunities, touted dependable, live-in maids from the “Miss Dixie Employment Agency,” catering to the many white middle-class families that imported African-American servants from the South. Another ad, however, specified that the “Waitress-Parlor maid” they wanted to hire must be “White, well experienced.”

Once hired, working women, single or married, were discriminated against in pay, promotion, and daily treatment on the job. In 1963, women who worked full-time earned only 60 percent of what men earned; black women earned only 42 percent. On average, a woman with four years of college still earned less than a male high school graduate.

Women could lose their jobs if their employer no longer considered them “attractive.” Airline officials forced flight attendants to retire in their early thirties because, as one company official explained, “the average woman’s appearance has markedly deteriorated at this age.” Another matter-of-factly explained the business considerations behind the policy: “It’s the sex thing, pure and simple. Put a dog on a plane and 20 businessmen are sore for a month.”

There was no recourse against what we now call sexual harassment. One high school boy who worked a summer job in a newspaper room in 1964 wrote in his diary that when he entered the compositing room with Doris, the copy girl, “all of the printers and linotype operators started screaming and howling. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, but then I figured it out: They were doing it to Doris.” When he asked Doris what it meant, she responded, “It’s just how they act around women.” The boy found the incident startling, but once it was explained to him, he simply accepted it, as Doris had to do, as the way work was conducted in those days.

Women also had little control over their sexual and reproductive destinies in 1963. In 1958, New York City had finally prohibited its hospitals from denying contraceptive counseling to patients, after a newspaper reporter
discovered that the city commissioner of hospitals had ordered the chief of obstetrics at Kings County General Hospital not to fit a diaphragm for a diabetic mother of three who had already had two cesarean section deliveries. But in 1963, seventeen states still restricted women’s access to contraceptives. Massachusetts flatly prohibited their sale and made it a misdemeanor for anyone, even a married couple, to use birth control. Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court rule that it was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy to deny married women access to contraceptives. It took several more years for unmarried women to obtain equal access to birth control.

In many states, it was illegal for a woman to wear men’s clothing, and every state in the union had “sodomy” laws that criminalized sexual relations other than heterosexual intercourse. In California, oral sex, even between a married couple, carried a potential jail term of fourteen years.