Marriage, a History (43 page)

My students are incredulous that people would actually sit and watch this corny stuff for a whole hour. But one day the grandmother of one student was visiting class when we watched the GE film, and she mentioned having seen it in the 1950s. To her, it had been not a cliché but a revelation.

An editor of a 1950s women’s magazine in Britain commented later that nowadays “you cannot imagine people buying a magazine to learn how to use a fridge.” But “that was the excitement of the 1950s. What is a washing machine? What is a steam iron? And how soon can I try one in my own home?”
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American women’s magazines too taught their readers how to use new home appliances and what the latest household gadgets did, how to decorate a home more tastefully, and what to do with the exotic new foods, such as artichokes and onion soup mixes, that could now be found in supermarkets.

As for women whose husbands couldn’t afford such wonders, there was always the dream of being chosen “Queen for a Day.” Premiering in 1955, this TV show was watched by thirteen million Americans each day, more than tuned in to the now-iconic
Ozzie and Harriet
or
Leave It to Beaver.
Each day five women, usually women whose husbands were dead, disabled, or unemployed, but occasionally single mothers, told their sad tales on the air. The one whose story elicited the strongest audience response, as measured on the “applause-o-meter,” received a cornucopia of new products for the home: furniture, silverware, household appliances, wardrobes. Losers took home a consolation prize, such as a new toaster.
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Today strong materialist aspirations often corrode family bonds. But in the 1950s, consumer aspirations were an integral part of constructing the postwar family. In its April 1954 issue,
McCall’s
magazine heralded the era of “togetherness,” in which men and women were constructing a “new and warmer way of life . . . as a family sharing a common experience.” In women’s magazines, that togetherness was always pictured in a setting filled with modern appliances and other new consumer products. The essence of modern life, their women readers learned, was “abundance, emancipation, social progress, airy houses, healthy children, the refrigerator, pasteurised milk, the washing-machine, comfort, quality and accessibility.”
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And of course marriage.

Television also equated consumer goods with family happiness. Ozzie and Harriet hugged each other in front of their Hotpoint appliances. A man who had been a young father in the 1950s told a student of mine that he had had no clue how to cultivate the family “togetherness” that his wife kept talking about until he saw an episode of the sitcom
Leave It to Beaver,
which gave him the idea of washing the car with his son to get in some “father-son” time.

When people could not make their lives conform to those of the “normal” families they saw on TV, they blamed themselves—or their parents. Assata Shakur, a young black girl growing up in this period, remembered how angry she was that her mother didn’t act more like Donna Reed: “Why didn’t my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school? Why didn’t we live in a house with a back yard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. ‘How disgusting,’ I would think. Why didn’t she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on television?”
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At this early stage of the consumer revolution, people saw marriage as the gateway to the good life. Americans married with the idea of quickly buying their first home, with the wife working for a few years to help accumulate the down payment or furnish it with the conveniences she would use once she became a full-time housewife. People’s newfound spending money went to outfit their homes and families. In the five years after World War II, spending on food in the United States rose by a modest 33 percent and clothing expenditures by only 20 percent, but purchases of household furnishings and appliances jumped by 240 percent. In 1961, Phyllis Rosenteur, the author of an American advice book for single women, proclaimed: “Merchandise plus Marriage equals our economy.”
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In retrospect, it’s astonishing how confident most marriage and family experts of the 1950s were that they were witnessing a new stabilization of family life and marriage. The idea that marriage should provide both partners with sexual gratification, personal intimacy, and self-fulfillment was taken to new heights in that decade. Marriage was the place not only where people expected to find the deepest meaning in their lives but also where they would have the most fun. Sociologists noted that a new “fun morality,” very different “from the older ‘goodness morality,’ ” pervaded society. “Instead of feeling guilty for having too much fun, one is inclined to feel ashamed if one does not have enough.” A leading motivational researcher of the day argued that the challenge for a consumer society was “to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to life is a moral, not an immoral, one.”
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But these trends did not cause social commentators the same worries about the neglect of societal duties that milder ideas about the pleasure principle had triggered in the 1920s. Most 1950s sociologists weren’t even troubled by the fact that divorce rates were
higher
than they had been in the 1920s, when such rates had been said to threaten the very existence of marriage. The influential sociologists Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke wrote matter-offactly that “the companionship family relies upon divorce as a means of rectifying a mistake in mate selection.” They expressed none of the panic that earlier social scientists had felt when they first realized divorce was a permanent feature of the love-based marital landscape. Burgess and Locke saw a small amount of divorce as a safety valve for the “companionate” marriage and expected divorce rates to stabilize or decrease in the coming decades as “the services of family-life education and marriage counseling” became more widely available.
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The marriage counseling industry was happy to step up to the plate. By the 1950s Paul Popenoe’s American Institute of Family Relations employed thirty-seven counselors and claimed to have helped twenty thousand people become “happily adjusted” in their marriages. “It doesn’t require supermen or superwomen to succeed in marriage,” wrote Popenoe in a 1960 book on saving marriages. “Success can be attained by almost anyone.”
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There were a few dissenting voices. American sociologist Robert Nisbet warned in 1953 that people were loading too many “psychological and symbolic functions” on the nuclear family, an institution too fragile to bear such weight. In the same year, Mirra Komarovsky decried the overspecialization of gender roles in American marriage and its corrosive effects on women’s self-confidence.
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But even when marriage and family experts acknowledged that the male breadwinner family created stresses for women, they seldom supported any change in its division of labor. The world-renowned American sociologist Talcott Parsons recognized that because most women were not able to forge careers, they might feel a need to attain status in other ways. He suggested that they had two alternatives. The first was to be a “glamour girl” and exert sexual sway over men. The second was to develop special expertise in “humanistic” fields, such as the arts or community volunteer work. The latter, Parsons thought, was socially preferable, posing less of a threat to society’s moral standards and to a woman’s own self-image as she aged. He never considered a third alternative: that women might actually win access to careers. Even Komarovsky advocated nothing more radical than expanding part-time occupations to give women work that didn’t interfere with their primary role as wives and mothers.
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Marriage counselors took a different tack in dealing with housewives’ unhappiness. Popenoe wrote dozens of marital advice books, pamphlets, and syndicated newspaper columns, and he pioneered the
Ladies’ Home Journal
feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?,” which was based on case histories from his Institute of Family Relations. The answer was almost always yes, so long as the natural division of labor between husbands and wives was maintained or restored.

In one case history, “Marilyn” saved her marriage by giving up her “glamour girl” fantasies about becoming a movie star to do volunteer work with her local church. In another, Ava learned to control her bossiness. After therapy, she allowed “Chad to feel, as she now feels, that he is the head of the family.” In a third case, a couple had been unhappily married for six years. Diana complained that her husband constantly criticized her, while he resented his wife’s friendship with her boss. In this case, both partners were judged to be selfish and immature. The counselor had the husband read about women’s sexual needs and the wife focus on finding satisfaction at home, rather than at work. At the end of their counseling, Diana had given up her job and was pregnant with her second child, and the couple had found a shared interest in gardening at their new home.
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In retrospect, the confidence these experts expressed in the stability of 1950s marriage and gender roles seems hopelessly myopic. Not only did divorce rates during the 1950s never drop below the highs reached in 1929, but as early as 1947 the number of women entering the labor force in the United States had begun to surpass the number of women leaving it.
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Why were the experts so optimistic about the future of marriage and the demise of feminism?

Some were probably unconsciously soothed into complacency by the mass media, especially the new television shows that delivered nightly images of happy female homemakers in stable male breadwinner families. Some may have had their critical judgment impaired by the rigid Cold War atmosphere that associated questioning marriage or gender roles with support for communism. But on the whole, it was not unreasonable of social scientists and trend watchers to think that marriage and family life had stabilized in the 1950s and early 1960s. People tend to judge the seriousness of social trends by the direction in which things seem headed rather than by an absolute standard. By that criterion the problems that had plagued the sexualized, companionate marriage system during the first fifty years of the century seemed to be subsiding.

Although divorce rates were higher in 1950 than they had been in 1929, they were falling each year, and at their low point in the 1950s they were 50 percent lower than they had been in 1946. Similar declines in divorce were seen in Canada, Britain, West Germany, and France. An eighty-year upward trend seemed to be coming to an end.
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When divorce did occur, it was seen as a failure of individuals rather than of marriage. One reason people didn’t find fault with the 1950s model of marriage and gender roles was that it was still so new that they weren’t sure they were doing it right. Millions of people in Europe and America were looking for a crash course on how to attain the modern marriage. Confident that “science” could solve their problems, couples turned not just to popular culture and the mass media but also to marriage experts and advice columnists for help. If the advice didn’t work, they blamed their own inadequacy.
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More puzzling was the complacency about the growing labor force participation rates of wives and mothers. By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II. Married women accounted for the majority of the growth in the female labor force throughout the 1950s, and there was a 400 percent increase in the number of mothers in the workforce over the course of the decade.
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Yet the image of the “emancipated woman” of the 1950s was not the working girl but the full-time housewife, armed with time-saving appliances that freed her from the drudgery of “old-fashioned” housework.

This image too had a basis in reality. True, more wives were entering the workforce early in their marriages or after their children had grown up. But they were in fact devoting longer stretches of their lives to full-time child rearing and homemaking. Most of the wives and mothers who joined the workforce in the 1950s were older than forty-five. Their mothering duties were largely done. At the same time postwar prosperity allowed more younger mothers to stay home while their children were small. While they were home, they could devote more time to child rearing and their families’ comfort or recreation, because new appliances and convenience products had substantially lightened the chores involved in housekeeping.

When wives and mothers did take paid employment, they tended to hold part-time or seasonal jobs that were unlikely to make paid work a central part of their identities. Furthermore, the huge boost that the GI Bill and similar policies gave young male workers meant that gender inequality in pay and jobs grew substantially during the 1950s and early 1960s.
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So even wives who worked were likely to feel they were doing so to bring in a few “extras” rather than helping to support the family.

The focus of college women, who had led the feminist movement in the early years of the twentieth century, also turned toward marriage. This was the era when people first began to joke about women attending college to earn an MRS degree. Two-thirds of women who started college in the 1950s dropped out, usually to get married. In 1952 an advertisement for Gimbel’s department store wryly defined college as the place “where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing.”
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African American wives and mothers were much more likely than whites to work outside the home, even while their children were young. And although they were less likely to go to college than white women, they were less likely to drop out once they got there. But black families were still below the radar screen for the mass media, whose picture of family life was one in which dads went off to work and moms took care of the home.
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