When Everything Changed (7 page)

It took all the children as well. Wilma Mankiller was born in Oklahoma, on land her family had owned since the Cherokee were driven out of their original homes in the southeast. (The family name had originally been a Cherokee military title, the equivalent of a major or a captain.) Her mother, who married at 15 and had eleven sons and daughters, relied on the children for endless assistance, including toting water from a spring a quarter mile away for the washing. “Everybody did it,” Wilma said. “Whoever was there did that job.” While she would later run into plenty of set ideas about women’s roles when she became involved in tribal politics, she recalls her childhood as gender-neutral: “I can’t remember anyone saying you can’t do this or that because you’re a woman. Maybe my parents had too many kids and were too busy.”

“I
T WAS SORT OF A FABULOUS TIME
.”

Farm life could be harsh and bleak; many young people fled as fast as they could to the more varied and colorful world of the cities. But for families that were both loving and reasonably successful, farming seemed—at least in retrospect—idyllic. “We would gather in the evening and sing hymns and that sort of thing,” recalled Mary Bell Darcus, who raised a large family on a modest farm in Virginia. “When I look back, it was sort of a fabulous time compared to now.”

But it was a life that was beginning to fade into history. Children who had gathered for singing hymns and playing Monopoly with their parents lost their attachment to simple pleasures when television moved into the neighborhood. “To me, television is one of the worst things that ever happened to the world,” said Louise Meyer, who believes her oldest children, who grew up pre-TV, “had a lot happier childhood, were a lot more contented.” Her older daughters seem to agree: they have clear memories of how much they enjoyed diversions that kids of the TV age would have found unfathomable. “Do you remember when Grandpa used to come down to the house and he and Mom would share the
National Geographic
s?” Jo Meyer Maasberg asked her older sister, Susan. “He would ask her, ‘Now, have you read this story about… ?’ and they would discuss it, and it was almost like we got to go around the world through their eyes.”

By 1960 the United States was no longer a farming country—only 30 percent of families lived in rural areas. The nation was booming, and its prosperity reached farther down into the working class than ever before.
Sixty percent of families
lived in a home they owned, and 75 percent had a car.
A quarter of all families
were living in the suburbs, the much-exalted fulfillment of the American dream—to own a nice house on a plot of land, with healthy children going to good schools and destined for even higher levels of prosperity.

In the beginning, the newly constructed dream houses were, by our current standards, very small. (
In the famous Levittown
development on Long Island, the basic house was a 750-square-foot, four-room Cape Cod with one bath and two bedrooms.) Their owners had, for the most part, only one car, which was taken to work by the husband. The wives were left behind in neighborhoods that were filled with other women of the same age and circumstances, whose lives revolved around their household chores and children. “I had a friend who had a date calendar with all the things she had to do. I thought that was the biggest show-off thing I ever saw,” said Edna Kleimeyer, who was living in a suburb outside Cincinnati with her husband and three small children. Some of the women who found themselves in a sea of similar-looking houses full of stranded housewives were appalled by the sameness, and never adjusted. But many were delighted to have a ready-made community. “The neighborhood was so new that immediately you became best of friends with the people who were buying the houses,” said Lillian Andrews, who moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, with her husband in 1958. “So the neighborhood became a social thing. Everybody had parties all the time. That was wonderful.”

The early suburbs were singularly unfriendly to the concept of a two-income family. Day care was virtually nonexistent, and relatives who might have been available for babysitting had been left behind in the cities or on the farms. The new housing developments were still remote from stores, offices, or almost anything that might have provided employment. Besides, many of the young couples setting up housekeeping were escaping hard times, and a stay-at-home wife was a kind of trophy—a sign that the family had made it to middle-class success and stability.

Josephine Elsberg was a secretary in Washington, DC, who had grown up in a family struggling to survive after the father deserted them. After she got married, she recalls, she sat her new husband down and told him, “Harold, you’re going to take care of me from now on. I’m not going to support myself any longer. That’s why I married you.”

“I was wondering how long you’d want to work,” said Harold.

“I never did want to work,” his new wife told him. “I always wanted to be stay-at-home.”

She was hardly alone, and thanks to the postwar prosperity and the easy mortgage credit of the GI bill, many couples found they could purchase a home and do very well on just the husband’s income. Black women, who had always worked in much larger proportions than white women, were eager for the opportunity to take care of their children full-time—particularly if they had been employed to look after someone else’s house and family. When the economic boom allowed many to do just that,
Ebony
celebrated with an article
titled “Good-bye Mammy, Hello Mom.” Joyce Ladner, growing up in a small black community in Mississippi, still recalls the day her father told her mother, “You’ll never clean another woman’s house.”

It’s a mistake to see the race to housewifery as a lack of enterprise on the part of the women who were so eager to marry and stay home. They knew that if they had a job, it would involve working under a boss—be it a housewife in need of cleaning help, a store owner, or a school principal. Ever since colonial days, the part of full-time homemaking that women treasured most was the ability to be in charge. “I guess I just liked the freedom of being at home and not having someone tell me what to do,” said Marylyn Weller, who gave up a job as a bookkeeper in Oklahoma to raise her three children.

“I
COULD NOT DO A SHIRT IN LESS THAN TWELVE MINUTES
.”

In the suburbs of 1960, nobody had to churn butter or boil water for the laundry on a woodstove, but homemaking was still more than a full-time job. Typically, the postwar wives had several youngsters to take care of—the birthrate for third children doubled in the postwar years, and that for fourth children tripled. And although the country was on a tear of appliance buying, the new suburbanites were still awaiting the arrival of conveniences such as disposable diapers. Betty Riley Williams, the wife of a marine, lived in a trailer in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with her baby daughter, Anita, in 1960, and she diligently followed her mother’s instructions on how to wash the baby’s clothes. “There was a diaper pail. It was white, enamel…. I put the diapers in that and the baby clothes,” she said. Williams then boiled water, and added the water and soap to the pail. “I had to stir it with a wooden spoon for fifteen minutes. Then I’d drain them and rinse them three times and then I’d hang them on the line until they were done.” Mae Ann Semnack, who was married to a steelworker in Boston, still remembers her struggle to wash the sheets in a big tub as a weekly wrestling match. “One time, I got in there with them.”

There were no permanent-press clothes yet, and even spray-on starch was still beyond the horizon. Edna Kleimeyer used packets of starch that had to be dissolved in water. “You dipped in the collars and cuffs and hung them up to dry. Then you would take them off the line and sprinkle them, roll them up, and put them in the wash basket and cover it with a towel. And you’d start ironing. I could not do a shirt in less than twelve minutes. If you didn’t finish, you’d put what was left in the refrigerator so the clothes didn’t dry out.” Automatic washing machines had begun to drive away the dreaded wringers, but most women still hung the clothes up on a line to dry. The Kleimeyers once went to a party at the home of a man who had connections in the appliance industry and was eager to show them a brand-new acquisition—an automatic dryer. “His wife brought out the towels, and we all had to feel them.”

The idea of being a good cook was intertwined with being a good wife. “Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven,” said an omnipresent Pillsbury ad. There was virtually no such thing as fast food, and while frozen meals had arrived, they were regarded dimly. (In
The Apartment,
which won the Academy Award for best picture of 1960, director Billy Wilder emphasized the pathetic loneliness of Jack Lemmon’s bachelor life by having him dine on a frozen dinner.) Women also tended to look down on desserts that weren’t made from scratch.
A doctoral student
who conducted a study on cake mixes in 1958 found that two-thirds of the housewives shunned them when baking for their families.

But the food industry, which knew that convenience foods would form its next generation of profit centers, was doing everything it could to eliminate the prejudice against shortcuts. With the help of cooperative women’s magazines, the industry stressed the idea that housewives were too busy to cook from scratch and that they could personalize a dish by taking a package of frozen vegetables or a cake mix and “glamorizing” the final product with a special touch such as a can of fried onions or a maraschino-cherry garnish. Pragmatic mothers began giving their newlywed daughters copies of
A Campbell Cookbook: Cooking with Soup
—perhaps with a bookmark on the recipe for the classic casserole, composed of cream of mushroom soup and frozen green beans. “In those days you did a lot of things with cream of mushroom soup,” recalled Angela Nolfi of Pittsburgh, who had given up her interior decorator ambitions to become a secretary and then a full-time housewife. “You would open up things like tuna fish and put them together.” And almost every social occasion, she added, involved Jell-O salad. “We were always looking for a new, interesting way to use Jell-O.”

“I
THOUGHT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE CLEANED EVERY DAY
.”

In the 1960s new time-saving appliances kept marching off the assembly lines and into American homes. Almost all the women who were using them could remember a time, barely twenty years in the past, when a great many people did not have running water and a third of the nation’s housewives cooked on wood- or coal-burning stoves. Many still referred to their purring refrigerators as the “icebox” because they had grown up in houses where food was chilled in boxes filled with ice, and the “iceman” was as regular a visitor as the milkman and the coal man. Now, the suburban kitchen refrigerators not only ran on their own but were beginning to defrost themselves and produce ice at the touch of a button. The dreaded laundry chores were tamed by the arrival of permanent-press clothing, better steam irons, and those automatic dryers. “Wash-and-wear clothing and the steam iron were the real liberation for women,” said Edna Kleimeyer. Once they were all in place, it was possible to get the basic household chores done relatively quickly.

Yet the housewives did not seem to be working any less. The amount of time spent on housework was very difficult to quantify.
A methodical study
by the sociologist Joann Vanek that used pretty much all the data available concluded that in the 1960s, the full-time homemaker spent fifty-five hours a week on her domestic chores. That was actually a little more than in the 1920s, when women were washing by hand and keeping their food cold in iceboxes. On the other hand, Vanek found that women who had outside jobs spent less than half as much time on housekeeping. That held true even when Vanek considered factors such as children and outside help. (Husbands’ contributions were so minimal at the time that they didn’t really figure into the equation.)

Clearly, women were responding to their time-saving appliances by raising the bar for housekeeping. They bought their family more clothes and washed them more often. (
In the 1950s the average
household laundry soared from thirty-nine pounds to sixty-five pounds a week.) Once they had acquired a second car, they became chauffeurs, driving their children around to lessons and sports. Vanek found that between shopping and ferrying children, “contemporary women spend about one full working day per week on the road and in stores.” They took up gourmet cooking or interior decorating. Myrna Ten Bensel, who had four children in St. Paul, decided to up the ante by making her own diapers: “You could buy diaper fabric in the dry-goods store, and I would cut them and hem them.”

Josephine Elsberg, who made it clear to her husband that she didn’t want to work outside the home, was a dynamo inside. “I thought everything should be cleaned every day,” she recalled. “Have to vacuum every day. Have to clean the bathroom every day. I was a fanatic.” When the family became prosperous enough to acquire a maid, Elsberg never allowed her to do the cooking or the laundry. She ironed everything herself, including the bedsheets, which she washed twice a week. She spent every winter personally repainting the entire house and every summer planting in the garden. The local beautification program gave her multiple commendations, and when her daughter went off to college, she wrote back about how much she missed the feel of freshly ironed sheets. “And I said, ‘That made it all worthwhile,’ ” Elsberg recalled.

“N
O ONE EVER DIED FROM SLEEPING IN AN UNMADE BED
.”

The very fact that there were so many women ready, willing, and able to purchase a new washer/dryer or self-cleaning oven made the nation’s advertising industry deeply interested in the suburban housewife. She was the consumer in chief who had to be flattered and assured that there was no human gratification greater than the sight of a perfect white load of laundry or a shiny kitchen floor. The women’s magazines—all edited by men—could not say enough about the glories of housekeeping or how enthusiastic husbands and children would be over a well-washed shirt or the cherries on that newly baked cake.