Sources on Friedan and The Feminine Mystique include: Judith Adler Hennessee, Betty Friedan: Her Life (New York: Random House, 1999); Jannan Sherman, ed., Interviews with Betty Friedan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); Rachel Bowlby, “‘The Problem with No Name’: Rereading Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,” Feminist Review 27 (September 1987): 61-75; Sandra Dijkstra, “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission,” Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980): 290-303; Susan Oliver, Betty Friedan: The Personal Is Political(New York: Pearson Longman, 2008); Betty Friedan, “It Changed My Life”: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976; New York: Dell Publishing, 1991); Justine Blau, Betty Friedan: Feminist (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990).
On the impact and reception of Friedan’s book, see Elizabeth Long, “Mobilizing Texts: A Consideration of Silent Spring and The Feminine Mystique,” keynote address, “Beyond the Book” Conference, Birmingham, UK, September 1, 2007, and Patricia Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). For a comparison of The Feminine Mystique and modern self-help books, see Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For an analysis of the hostile responses Friedan received from readers of McCall’s, see Jessica Weiss, “‘Fraud of Femininity’: Domesticity, Selflessness, and Individualism in Responses to Betty Friedan,” in Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America 1945-1965, ed. Kathleen G. Donohue (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming).
On how the mass media has misread the central tenets of The Feminine Mystique, see Kathryn Cady, “Labor and Women’s Liberation: Popular Readings of The Feminine Mystique,” in Women’s Studies in Communication 32 (2009): 348-379. For an article celebrating Friedan’s contributions after her death, see Marlene Sanders and Lorraine Dusky, “Betty Friedan Woke Women from Mystique of Sleep,” Women’s E-News, February 7, 2006, www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2628, retrieved March 15, 2008. For conservative assessments of Friedan, see: Kate O’Beirne, Women Who Made the World Worse (New York: Sentinel, 2006); Betty Steele, The Feminist Takeover: Patriarchy to Matriarchy in Two Decades (Gaithersburg, MD: Human Life International, 1987), p. 3; Jane Crain, “The Feminine Mistake,” Chronicles, March 1990, p. 36; Christina Hoff Sommers, “Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique,’” New York Sun, September 17, 2008.
The most important primary sources I use in this book come from the 188 interviews I did with women and men who read The Feminine Mystique shortly after its publication, the oral histories my students and I have taken over the years, and the letters and personal papers in the Friedan archives in the Schlesinger Library. All references to letters received by Friedan and written by her, unless otherwise noted, come from the Betty Friedan Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Information about the book’s publishing history came from the W. W. Norton and Co. Inc. papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; and from back issues of Publishers Weekly.
Aside from the 1959 classic study of the women’s suffrage struggle, Gerda Lerner, Century of Struggle (1959; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), most of the sources for my historical discussion of women are drawn from the rich and extensive literature on women’s history and gender issues that has blossomed since the mid-1960s, much of it written by women who were inspired by Friedan. Among the many useful overviews of U.S. women’s and family history are: Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); Nancy Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); S. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki Ruiz, eds., The Practice of U.S. Women’s History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); John Modell, Into One’s Own (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jordan Stanger-Ross, Christina Collins, and Mark Stern, “Falling Far from the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-Century America,” Social Science History 29 (2005): 625-648; Francesca Cancian, Love in America: Gender and Self-Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Mary Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men Through American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). More references are available in the endnotes of three of my own works: The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families (London: Verso, 1988); The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Press, 2005).
For the history of women from the suffrage struggle though World War II, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Lois Banner, Women in Modern America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974); Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Glen Elder, Children of the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
Jessie Bernard, American Family Behavior (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), was a useful source into the sociological thinking of the early 1940s, while William Graebner’s The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1990), provided excellent background on the cultural changes that occurred during and after the war. For a little-known feminist polemic from the 1940s, a book that Friedan knew but never cited, see Elizabeth Hawes, Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (Cornwall, NY: Reynal & Hitch-cock, 1943).
The literature on postwar culture and gender roles is immense. For a fascinating year-by-year study of a family whose history and dynamics illustrate many of the wartime and postwar trends described in this book, see Donald Katz’s five-decade saga of the Gordon Family, Home Fires(New York: HarperCollins, 1992). The now-classic critique of Friedan’s characterization of the postwar era as uniformly quiescent is found in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). See also Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and the many sources I cite below on the history of labor-union women.
Other sources on postwar America that I found especially useful for this book include: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); William Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff, eds., A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Gambone, The Greatest Generation Comes Home (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Shelley Nickles, “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 582-622; Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Andrea Tone, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Basic Books, 2009). I received Rebecca Jo Plant’s Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), too late to fully incorporate it into my account, but her perceptive analysis of anti-maternalist thought in the United States is worth seeking out.
For the views and influence of psychoanalysis in the postwar era and on into the 1960s, see Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kyle Cuordileone, Manhood and Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors (New York: Norton, 2008); Carol Warren, Madwives: Schizophrenic Women in the 1950s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Richard Levinson, “Sexism in Medicine,” American Journal of Nursing 76 (1976): 426-431; Herbert Modlin, “Psychodynamics and Paranoid States in Women,” cited in Robert Roth and Judith Lerner, “Sex-Based Discrimination in the Mental Institutionalization of Women,” California Law Review 62 (1974): 789-815.
Primary sources for this section of the book include Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehard, 1955); Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947); Edward Strecker, Their Mother’s Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1946); and Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New York: William Morrow, 1949), along with the many popular magazines I cite.
Kristin Celello discusses the advice that twentieth-century “marriage experts,” most of them influenced by psychoanalysis, offered husbands and wives, in Making Marriage Work (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Rebecca Davis reveals how psychoanalysts reinforced the feminine mystique during and after World War II, but also how in the late 1960s and 1970s, the clients of marital counselors challenged therapists’ assumptions, gradually forcing them to recognize problems such as domestic violence, in More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
For more insight into the 1950s in particular, see: Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Sherry Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Ralph LaRossa, “The Culture of Fatherhood in the Fifties,” Journal of Family History 29 (2004): 47-70; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in a Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker and Co., 2008); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005); Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000); Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992); Lary May, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Brandon French, On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1978); Abigail Stewart, “The Women’s Movement and Women’s Lives,” in Exploring Identity and Gender, ed. Amelia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994); Andrea Tone, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Many of these works discuss McCarthyism, but see also Elizabeth Pontikes, Giacomo Negro, and Hayagreeva Rao, “Stained Red: A Study of Stigma by Association to Blacklisted Artists During the ‘Red Scare’ in Hollywood, 1945-1960,” American Sociological Review 75 (2010): 456-478.
An interesting sample of primary sources, illustrating the complexity and contradictions of that decade, would include: Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953); Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (1958; New York: Penguin, 2005); Lena Levine, The Modern Book of Marriage (New York: Bartholomew House, 1957); John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay Co., 1957); Eve Merriam, “Are Housewives Necessary?” The Nation, January 31, 1959.
I also read extensively in the Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, McCall’s, Ebony, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and Good Housekeeping . When I quote specific issues I give the date in the text. The Gallup poll article that opens Chapter 2 is George Gallup and Evan Hill, “The American Woman: Her Attitudes on Family, Sex, Religion and Society,” Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1962. My quotations from Adlai Stevenson come from the reprint of his commencement address, “A Purpose for Modern Women,” Women’s Home Companion, September 1955.
A good guide to the women’s magazines of the era can be found in Nancy Walker, ed., Women’s Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998). See also Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). The readership figures for women’s magazines come from Politz Research, Main Report: 1964 Politz Magazine Study; the Audiences of Eleven Magazines, Advertising Page Exposure of Five Magazines (New York: Alfred Politz Media Studies, 1965).
Many of the polls I cite can be found in George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), and Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka, The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
On the social and legal climate of the 1960s, see Margaret Mead and Frances Kaplan, eds., American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (1963; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965); Nancy MacLean, The American Women’s Movement, 1945- 2000: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009); Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Leo Kanowitz, Women and the Law: The Unfinished Revolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters (New York: Scribner’s, 2001); Joan Hoff-Wilson, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991); Nancy Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law (Boston: Beacon, 2008); Lis Wiehl, The 51% Minority (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007); Victor Brooks, Boomers: The Cold War Generation Grows Up (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Lorraine Dusky, Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth About Women and Justice in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996); Jack Demarest and Jeanette Garner, “The Representation of Women’s Roles in Women’s Magazines over the Past 30 Years,” Journal of Psychology 126 (1992): 357- 369; Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Herstory Web site has good information on discrimination against women in the 1960s: www.cwluherstory.com. See also http://feminist.org/research/chronicles.
Primary sources from the 1960s that illustrate the continued prevalence of what are sometimes thought of as “1950s” ideas about gender include: Edna Rostow, “The Best of Both Worlds: Feminism and Femininity,” Yale Review, March 1962; Editorial, “Some Gentle Observations About Women,” Saturday Evening Post, March 17, 1962; Helen Andelin, Fascinating Womanhood (New York: Bantam, 1965); Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Random House, 1962). My discussion of the Ridgely Hunt case in Chapter 2 is based on “The Masculine Mystique,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1963, and Nancy Hunt, Mirror Image: The Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978). Due to a misleading set of dates on the copyright page of Eve Merriam, After Nora Slammed the Door: American Women in the 1960s (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1964), this feminist book is often said to have preceded The Feminine Mystique. Merriam’s book did not appear until a year after Friedan’s, although it drew on three of Merriam’s previously published articles, of which Friedan was probably aware.
For a lively and wonderfully informative account of how much has changed since the 1960s, see Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009).
My discussion of women’s educational trends and experiences was informed by: Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women(New York: Harper, 1959); U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Trends in Educational Attainment of Women (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969); Jessie Bernard, Academic Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964); William Chafe, “The Challenge of Sex Equality,” in The Challenge of Change: Perspectives on Family, Work and Education, eds. Matina Horner, Carol Nadelson, and Malkah Notman (New York: Plenum Press, 1983); James Davis, Great Aspirations: The Graduate School Plans of American College Seniors(Chicago: Aldine, 1961); Eli Ginzberg and Associates, Educated American Women: Life Styles and Self-Portraits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for Women (New York: Harper, 1959); Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Marion Cuthbert, Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate (1942; New York: Garland, 1987); Jeanne Noble, The Negro Woman’s College Education (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1956); Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953); Abigail Stewart and Joseph Healy Jr., “Linking Individual Development and Social Changes,” American Psychologist 44 (1989): 30-42; Kathleen Hulbert and Diane Schuster, Women’s Lives Through Time: Educated American Women of the Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993); Ravenna Helson, “The Mills Classes of 1958 and 1960,” in Hulbert and Schuster, Women’s Lives Through Time; Trends in the Educational Attainment of Women, U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, January 1965; and Lynn Peril, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now (New York: Norton, 2006). The figures on the educational attainment of parents of entering freshmen came from Alexander Astin, et al., The American Freshman: Thirty-Five-Year Trends, 1966-2001 (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, 2002).
Scores of wonderful books have been written on the origins and history of the “second wave” of the women’s movement. If you have to choose just one, you can’t go wrong with Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). But I found many others useful for this book: Toni Carabillo, Feminist Chronicles, 1953-1993 (Los Angeles: Women’s Graphic, 1993); Rachel Blau DuPlessos and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998); Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay, 1975); Estelle Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002); Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle, 1971); Robert Jackson, Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Georgia Duerst-Lahti, “The Government’s Role in Building the Women’s Movement,” Political Science Quarterly 104 (1989): 249-268; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979); Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Gerda Lerner, “Midwestern Leaders of the Modern Women’s Movement: An Oral History Project,” Wisconsin Academy Review41 (1994): 11-15; Susan Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (New York: Knopf, 1989); Blanche Linden Ward and Carol Green, American Women in the 1960s: Changing the Future (New York: Twayne, 1993); Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992); Sheila Tobias, Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement (Boulder, CO: West-view, 1997); Lisa Baldez and Celeste Montoya Kirk, “Gendered Opportunities: The Formation of Women’s Movements in the United States and Chile,” in The U.S. Women’s Movement in Global Perspective, ed. Lee Ann Banaszak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dell, 1999); Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1987); Sara Evans, “Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,” American Historical Review (April 2009): 332-347; Anne Costain, Inviting Women’s Rebellion: A Political Process Interpretation of the Women’s Movement(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Leila Rupp, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Judith Lorber, “Beyond Gender: The Feminine Mystique,” Signs 26 (2000): 328; Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Dorothy Shawhan and Martha Swain, Lucy Somerville Howorth: New Deal Lawyer, Politician, and Feminist from the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2006); Judith Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002); Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
On the controversy over whether NOW would recognize lesbians as a legitimate part of the women’s movement, see Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Readers of my chapter on African-American women and white working-class women will recognize my immense debt to Bart Landry, Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Primary sources on educated African-American women in the 1940s and 1950s include Marion Cuthbert, Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate (1942; New York: Garland, 1987), and Jeanne Noble, The Negro Woman’s College Education (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1956).
Many of the books on women’s history and the women’s movement cited above pay attention to diversity among women by race, ethnicity, and class, but for more detailed studies of African-American women and other racial-ethnic groups, see: Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol Debois, eds.,Unequal Sisters, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008); Vicki Karen Anderson, Changing Woman: A History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ann Valk, Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, DC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Bruce Fehn, “African-American Women and the Struggle for Equality in the Meatpacking Industry, 1940-1960,” Journal of Women’s History 10 (1998): 45-69; Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-65 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28 (2002): 337- 360; Jane Dabel, A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Denise Segura, “Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Employment,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988); Gloria T. Hull, “History/My History,” in Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (New York: Routledge, 1993); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Riché Jeneen Daniel Barnes, “Black Women Have Always Worked,” in The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class, ed. Elizabeth Rudd and Lara Descartes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008); Stephanie Gilmore, Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Donna Franklin, “African Americans and the Birth of Modern Marriage,” in Families as They Really Are, ed. Barbara Risman (New York: Norton, 2010).
For a review of trends in African-American inequality, see Michael Katz, Mark Stern, and Jamie Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History (June 2005): 75-108.
The detailed surveys of wives of blue-collar workers in the 1950s appear in Lee Rainwater, Richard Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Working-man’s Wife: Her Personality, World and Life Style (New York: Oceana Publications, 1959).
Works dealing with the history of working-class women, both whites and minorities, and their role in the struggle for gender equality, include: Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Mirra Komarovsky, Blue Collar Marriage (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, “The Major Myth of the Women’s Movement,” Dissent (Fall 1999): 83-86; Dennis Deslippe, Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Myra Marx Ferree, “Working-Class Jobs: Paid Work and Housework as Sources of Satisfaction,” Social Problems 23 (1976): 431-444; Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Portions of Chapter 9 appeared previously in my article “Sharing the Load,” in The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, ed. Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2009). For the classic arguments favoring specialization within marriage and warning of the dangers of “the independence effect” see: Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Gary Becker, “Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labor,” Journal of Labor Economics 3 (1985): S33-S58; and Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” American Sociological Review 7 (1942): 604-616.
For current trends in marriage dynamics and marital satisfaction, see: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2007): 27-52; Zvika Neeman, Andrew Newman, and Claudia Olivetti, “Are Career Women Good for Marriage?” Institute for Economic Development Discussion Paper 167, April 2007; Adam Isen and Betsey Stevenson, “Women’s Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility,” November 24, 2008, http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Marriage-divorce-education.pdf; Heather Boushey, “Baby Panic Book Skews Data,” Women’s E-News, July 3, 2002, www.womensenews.org/story/commentary/020703/baby-panic-book-skews-data-misses-actual-issue; Lynn Prince Cooke and Janeen Baxter, “Families in International Context,” Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming; John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Christine Whelan, Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Christie F. Boxer and Christine B. Whelan, “Changing Mate Preferences 1939-2008,” unpublished working paper, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2008; Robert Schoen, Stacy Rogers, and Paul Amato, “Wives’ Employment and Spouses’ Marital Happiness,” Journal of Family Issues 27 (2006): 506-528; Paul Amato, Alan Booth, David Johnson, and Stacey Rogers, Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Lynn Prince Cooke, “‘Doing Gender’ in Context: Household Bargaining and the Risk of Divorce in Germany and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 112 (2006): 442-472; Lynn Prince Cooke, “‘Traditional’ Marriages Now Less Stable than Ones Where Couples Share Work and Household Chores,” www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=LynnCooke; Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works, He Works (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); E. Wethington and R. Kessler, “Employment, Parental Responsibility, and Psychological Distress,” Journal of Family Issues 10 (1989): 527-546; Janet Hyde, John DeLamateur, and Erri Hewitt, “Sexuality and the Dual-Earner Couple: Multiple Roles and Sexual Functioning,” Journal of Family Psychology 12 (1998): 354-368; Constance Gager and Scott Yabiku, “Who Has the Time? The Relationship Between Household Labor Time and Sexual Frequency,” Journal of Family Issues31 (2009): 135-163; Neil Chetnik, Voicemale (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, Getting to 50/50 (New York: Bantam Books, 2009).
For changes in the household division of labor and time with children, see Oriel Sullivan and Scott Coltrane, “Men’s Changing Contribution to Housework and Child Care,” Discussion Paper on Changing Family Roles, briefing paper prepared for the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, April 25-26, 2008, www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=menshousework, and Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson, and Melissa Milkie, Changing Rhythms of Family Life (New York: Russell Sage, 2006).
On the complex determinants of gender equity at home and work, see Lynn Prince Cooke, Gender-Class Equality in the Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2011). On the attitudes of young men and women toward gender equality and family arrangements, see Kathleen Gerson, The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
On the continuing mystiques of gender, sexuality, and consumerism, see: Barbara Risman and Elizabeth Seale, “Betwixt and Be Tween: Gender Contradictions Among Middle Schoolers,” in Families as They Really Are, ed. Barbara Risman (New York: Norton, 2010); Susan Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work Is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010); Sharon Lamb and Lyn Brown, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006); Margaret Talbot, “Little Hotties,” New Yorker,December 4, 2006; Peggy Orenstein, “Playing at Sexy,” New York Times, June 7, 2010; Stephen Hinshaw with Rachel Kranz, The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures (New York: Random House, 2009); Deborah Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005). On the motherhood mystique, see Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005) and Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Good sources on the continuing discrimination against working women, especially mothers, include: Shelley Correll, Stephen Barnard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” American Journal of Sociology 112 (2007): 1297-1338; Catalyst, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” July 2007, www.catalyst.org/publication/83/the-double-bind-dilemma-for-women-in-leadership-damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t; and Ann Crittendon, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001). Also see Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
For research on women’s employment trends and the debate over “opting out,” see: Claudia Goldin, “The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” American Economic Review 96 (2006): 1-21; Heather Boushey, “Are Women Opting Out? Debunking the Myth,” Center for Economic and Policy Research Briefing Paper, 2005; Linda Hirshman, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World (New York: Viking, 2006); Leslie Bennetts, The Feminine Mistake (New York: Hyperion, 2007); David Cotter, Paula England, and Joan Hermsen, “Moms and Jobs,” in American Families: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Stephanie Coontz, Maya Parson, and Gabrielle Raley (New York: Routledge, 2008); Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela Stone, “The Media Depiction of Women Who Opt Out,” Gender & Society 22 (August 2008): 497-517; Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007); Pamela Stone, Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Work and Head Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Joan Williams, Jessica Manvell, and Stephanie Bornstein, “Opt Out” or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict: The Untold Story of Why Women Leave the Workforce (San Francisco: University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Center for WorkLife Law, 2006); Joan Williams, “The Opt-Out Revolution Revisited,” American Prospect, March 2007; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, “Transitions: Career and Family Life Cycles of the Educational Elite,” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 98 (2008): 363-369.
For information on work-family issues, see: Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling, The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Heather Boushey and Joan Williams, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle,” Center for American Progress and the Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of the Law, January 25, 2010; all the articles in Susanne Bianchi, Lynn Casper, and Rosalind King, eds., Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005); Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007); E. Wethington and R. Kessler, “Employment, Parental Responsibility, and Psychological Distress,” Journal of Family Issues 10 (1989): 527-546; Rosalind Chait, “On Multiple Roles: Past, Present, and Future,” and other chapters in Karen Korabik, Donna Leto, and Denise Whitehead, eds., Handbook of Work-Family Integration (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008); Deborah Carr, “The Psychological Consequences of Midlife Men’s Social Comparisons with Their Young Adult Sons,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67 (February 2005): 240-250; Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time-Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aurmann, and James T. Bond, National Study of the Changing Workforce, 2008, “Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home” (New York: Families and Work Institute, 2009).