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MANY DIFFERENT WOMEN RECOGNIZED THEMSELVES IN FRIEDAN’S PORTRAIT of Americans brainwashed by the feminine mystique. Some were “ordinary housewives” or their daughters, who had never known a family that was not organized on the male breadwinner-female homemaker model and had never been exposed to the kind of social criticism they encountered in Friedan’s work. They often wrote to Friedan that until they read her book, they had never imagined any alternative to the lives women were living. Others were self-described “spinsters,” “divorcees,” or “neurotic malcontents” who said they had always thought of themselves as “freaks” because they didn’t fit the norm.
But many women I interviewed reported having gone through a puzzling evolution—or devolution—in their lives. They had attended college, worked at jobs they enjoyed, or been raised in families that supported women’s aspirations for education and equal rights. Over and over, women described having been honors students, community activists, political organizers, or competent “working girls” before they married and had children. But somewhere during the late 1940s or the 1950s, they had abandoned any dream of resuming their former pursuits and lost the sense that they had anything to contribute to the world aside from being wives and mothers.
Friedan argued that this collective loss of confidence and aspiration was part of a major transformation that occurred after World War II, when a social sea change wiped out the memory of what feminism had accomplished in the early twentieth century. One of her first tasks in the book was to remind women of what they had done in the past.
From the 1850s through the 1920s, Friedan explained, women had struggled to gain access to education, win the right to vote, and break down other barriers preventing them from entering the public world of work and politics. “The ones who fought that battle won more than empty paper rights,” she wrote. “They cast off the shadow of contempt and self-contempt that had degraded women for centuries,” finding a new confidence in their own capabilities.
Friedan described the “sense of possibility” that women felt in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The public was captivated by daring pilots Amelia Earhart and Elinor Smith Sullivan and by female athletes such as nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, who not only was the first woman to swim the English Channel but also did it faster than any of the five men who had previously made it across. The “spirited career girls” of those decades—from such widely admired real-life women to the feisty heroines portrayed in films by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell—were celebrated in popular culture, including by women’s magazines.
But after World War II, Friedan continued, “the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.”
How, asked Friedan, had the exhilarating embrace of individual identity and feminist ideals in the 1920s given way to a vision of feminine fulfillment that prevented a woman from using her capabilities, from “even dream [ing] about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife”? What produced the “strange paradox” of the 1950s and early 1960s, when just as professions finally were opening to women, the term “‘career woman’ became a dirty word”? How was it that in the space of little more than a decade, the feminine mystique had become “so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids”?
Friedan’s answer, described in painstaking detail in eight chapters packed with facts, figures, and quotations, was that the feminine mystique developed as part of a postwar backlash against the feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attempt to drive women back into the home, she argued, was spearheaded by Freudian psychiatrists, conservative social scientists, and educators who increasingly claimed that when women prepared themselves for anything other than marriage and motherhood they were turning their back on their true feminine nature.
Friedan acknowledged that women had not been forced into accepting the feminine mystique. The call for women to return to the home had tapped into pent-up desires for stability among people whose families had been disrupted by the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. Focusing on the family also seemed to alleviate the anxieties unleashed by Cold War tensions. Responding to these inducements, and misled by so-called experts who explained that it was abnormal to want anything else, women made the “mistaken choice” to retreat into domesticity. “What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face.”
In Friedan’s view, women withdrew from the responsibilities and challenges of independence in the 1950s “just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity.” It was easier and safer “to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb.... There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.”
Business interests enthusiastically promoted this retreat into personal life because they saw in it a tremendous opportunity to expand the consumer goods sector of the postwar boom economy. In an exhaustive review of 1950s advertising manuals and surveys, including studies provided by Ernest Dichter, the decade’s leading advertising guru, Friedan showed that manufacturers explicitly defined the ideal consumer as a homemaker who could be convinced to see housework as a way of expressing her individual creativity and affirming her femininity.
Friedan used the stunningly frank statements of the motivational researchers to reveal how they consciously tried to persuade women that buying household goods and foodstuffs would provide self-realization, sexual fulfillment, and a sense of eternal youthfulness. Advertisers became “the most powerful of [the mystique’s] perpetuators . . . flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness.”
The chapter titled “The Sexual Sell” still elicits a shock of recognition and resentment today, and it had a tremendous impact on readers at the time. In each of the original copies of the book that I reviewed, this was the most heavily underlined section. Following on the heels of Friedan’s trenchant critiques of psychiatrists, social scientists, educators, politicians, and popular magazines, this chapter provided the clinching piece of evidence for many readers that they had indeed been targets of a massive and cynical campaign to erase the feminist aspirations of the 1920s and turn women into mindless consumers.
In the years since The Feminine Mystique was published, historians have faulted Friedan’s account of the decline of feminism and the rise of the feminine mystique. They point out that she exaggerated the popular approval of feminism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as well as the novelty of the antifeminist propaganda of the 1950s. The feminine mystique was not a postwar invention, but rather a repackaging of old prejudices in more modern trappings in the aftermath of the suffrage movement. Indeed, the effort to convince the “New Woman” to turn her back on the rights she had gained during the first two decades of the twentieth century began before the ink was even dry on the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote. It is true that Freudian warnings about the sexual abnormality of the career woman gave antifeminists new weapons in the 1940s and that the blandishments of the sexual sell in the 1950s added the carrot of consumerism to the stick of antifeminism. But there was no golden age of feminism in the 1920s and 1930s.
Yet Friedan’s account rang true to many women who had raised families in the1940s and 1950s. Again and again, women told me there was “something different” about the postwar era, “something deadening.” By the 1950s, women were marrying at a younger age than at any time in the previous hundred years, and this may have made them more susceptible to the sexual sell. And three decades of relentless attacks on feminism as antimale and antifamily had taken their toll. Even women who had experienced other models of family life and female behavior said that during the 1950s they came to believe that normal families were those where the wife and mother stayed home, and that normal women were perfectly happy with that arrangement.
FRIEDAN WAS CERTAINLY CORRECT THAT IN THE FIRST DECADES OF THE twentieth century, the final push for female suffrage, along with the overturning of many restrictive conventions from Victorian days, stirred an excitement about female achievements and capabilities that had largely receded by the 1950s. Suffrage activists collected millions of signatures on petitions and held mass meetings that garnered enormous public attention. From street corner rallies organized by fiery labor orators to dignified delegations of middle-class “ladies” who gently lobbied small-town mayors and state legislatures, the suffrage movement was highly visible across the country.
Not everyone agreed with the women’s rights activists, but their opponents’ hostility often worked in the suffragists’ favor. In 1913, suffragists holding a mass march in Washington, D.C., two months after President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration were attacked by an angry crowd. The women were jeered at, pelted with burning cigars, and knocked to the ground. Some had their clothes torn off. The police and national guard refused to defend the women, and journalists reported that the suffrage marchers had to fight their way “foot by foot” up Pennsylvania Avenue, taking more than an hour to traverse the first ten blocks. But the incident became a national scandal that embarrassed opponents of women’s rights and galvanized more women into action.
By 1916 the National American Woman Suffrage Association had 2 million members, and the more militant National Woman’s Party had 50,000 members. During World War I, Women’s Party leader Alice Paul built a “watchfire” in an urn outside the White House gates. Every time Wilson made a speech that referred to the need for freedom abroad, Paul and her supporters burned a copy of the speech to dramatize the hypocrisy of condemning other countries for lack of freedom while more than half of America’s own citizens still were not allowed to vote.
When demonstrators were arrested, they went on hunger strikes, which prison authorities tried to break by forced feeding. Protests against the jailings and the prison treatment were held throughout the country. Eventually public outrage became so great that the suffragists were released and their sentences nullified. Feeling the heat, President Wilson pressed his allies in Congress to stop blocking the suffrage bill.
The campaign for the vote challenged the nineteenth-century image of women as passive and timid. Friedan quoted the memoir of an English feminist who recalled that women’s organizational capacities, courage, and solidarity “were a revelation to all concerned, but especially themselves.... We were often tired, hurt and frightened. But we . . . shared a joy of life that we had never known.” The dramatist Jesse Lynch Williams, a supporter of women’s rights, described the stunned reaction of hostile members of a Fifth Avenue men’s club to one of the massive suffrage demonstrations that periodically clogged New York City’s major thoroughfares:
It was a Saturday afternoon and the members had crowded behind the windows to witness the show. They were laughing and exchanging the kind of jokes you would expect. When the head of the procession came opposite them, they burst into laughing and as the procession swept past, laughed long and loud. But the women continued to pour by. The laughter began to weaken, became spasmodic. The parade went on and on. Finally there was only the occasional sound of the clink of ice in the glasses. Hours passed. Then someone broke the silence. “Well boys,” he said, “I guess they mean it!”
The constitutional amendment to approve women’s suffrage passed the Congress in 1919 and was ratified by the states in 1920. Jubilant women vowed that America would never be the same.
Changes in cultural mores about gender and sexuality during the first two decades of the twentieth century contributed to the heady sense that a revolution was under way, even among women who were not political activists. The World War I era saw the overthrow of nineteenth-century norms that had prevented respectable young women from going out in public alone or with a member of the opposite sex. The middle-class custom of “calling,” where a young man socialized with a young woman in her parents’ parlor or on the front porch, gave way to dating, where the man picked up the woman and then took her, without a chaperone, to a film, cabaret, dance hall, or amusement park.
His date often left the house wearing clothes that would have marked her as a prostitute just twenty years earlier. One authority has estimated that in the late nineteenth century a respectable middle-class woman wore more than thirty pounds of clothing when she went out in public. Now women were free to wear sleeveless dresses that ended at their knees, smoke cigarettes, drink liquor, bob their hair, and even talk openly about sex.
For most women, such personal freedoms merely opened up a new route to marriage and provided more opportunity to find sexual satisfaction within marriage. But for others they were part of an unprecedented insistence on the right to an independent identity. Many career women saw themselves as participating in a feminine revolution. They presented themselves as examples of what their gender could achieve rather than as exceptions or anomalies, as so many career women of the 1940s and ’50s were wont to do. Movie star Mary Pickford declared that she was “proud to be one of . . . the girls who make their own living” and delighted to see other members of her sex make good. Amelia Earhart was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The successes of the early-twentieth-century feminist movement permanently changed the discussion of women’s roles in society. Even defenders of traditional gender roles could no longer argue that women were innately incapable of physical heroism and political, professional, or athletic achievement. Few dared to maintain that society had any right to legally prevent women from exercising the same rights as men. Suddenly it was hard to find anyone who had been against the Nineteenth Amendment, even though the vote had been so close that one congressman refused to have his broken arm set for fear of missing the vote, while another left the deathbed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his vote for her cause.
The Roaring Twenties were indeed heady times. But Friedan exaggerated the extent of women’s gains. Equal rights may have been increasingly accepted in the abstract, but in practice acceptance of female independence did not gain much traction in the 1920s. Opponents of gender equality shifted tactics and changed their rhetoric, arguing that while the women’s movement had led to necessary reforms, it had gone too far. People who had initially condemned feminism because it encroached on men’s traditional prerogatives now presented themselves as the true defenders of the female sex, faulting the movement for taking away women’s traditional privileges.
In August 1920, the month the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the Ladies’ Home Journal printed a “Credo for the New Woman.” The editors offered a backhanded endorsement of women’s rights that stressed the limits to equality they felt American women should accept. “I believe in woman’s rights; but I believe in woman’s sacrifices too.” “I believe in woman’s suffrage; but I believe many other things are vastly more important.” “I believe in woman’s brains; but I believe still more in her emotions.” And “I believe in woman’s assertion of self,” as long as “through her new freedom [she] elects to serve others.”
In November 1923, the Ladies’ Home Journal printed an article by Corra Harris in which she remarked that modern women had been “acquiring a new set of adjectives, such as ‘able,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘influential,’ ‘distinguished. ’” Harris conceded that many of the activities of these “up-and-coming women of the present moment” were useful, and she even admitted to an “anxious hope” that they would stay in public service long enough to give “the national household a cleaning.” But Harris believed that women must and soon would once more embrace the old adjectives, such as “‘meek,’ ‘matronly,’ ‘maternal,’ ‘kind,’ ‘domestic.’” They would recognize, Harris predicted, that nothing was to be gained from reforming the world at the price of their “mental and spiritual” happiness, and they would return to “the ancient duties and pleasures” of home.
“We can amend the Constitution,” Harris concluded, “but it is my belief that we cannot change the nature of women by doing so. They belong to love, goodness, faith in all things.... They will never endure the revolting revelations of political life nor the fierce competitions of public life. They are only trying on a new-fashioned garment to see if it becomes them. It will not. Therefore they will not wear it or pay for it.”
Not everyone shared Harris’s confidence that American women would get over their infatuation with the new freedoms. As the 1920s progressed, warnings about the excesses of feminism became more strident. One especially popular ploy in agitating against further progress was to publish testimonies of purported former feminists, or daughters of feminists, about the costs of “too much” liberation.
Typical was “I Rebel at Rebellion” by Marian Castle in the July 1930 Woman’s Journal. Castle acknowledged that an older generation of women had become understandably “tired of being classed with children and imbeciles at the polls” and “ashamed of having to search their husbands’ pockets in the wee small hours for even smaller change.” But her generation, she claimed, had “carried the banner of freedom to unforeseen heights,” and these had become as oppressive as the old restrictions.
The freedom “to smoke, to drink, to sit up all night, to discuss the hitherto undiscussible, and to work like men with men,” Castle claimed, had become “desperately confining.” So, she announced, she had “become a rebel once more” and was fighting to “be free of this new freedom.” Castle described herself as now singing “paeans of joy over the fact that I may depend upon my husband for money instead of earning it myself.”
The onset of the Depression tilted the discussion of women’s place in society even further toward the antifeminist side. The persistence of high unemployment increased hostility toward working wives, who were thought to be double-dipping into an already shrinking pool of jobs. In a 1936 Gallup poll, 82 percent of people said wives should not work if their husbands had jobs. By 1939, the percentage had risen to almost 90 percent.
Women’s support for equality as an abstract principle did not disappear. In a 1938 poll conducted by the Ladies’ Home Journal, 60 percent of the female respondents disliked having the word “obey” in marriage vows, 75 percent favored joint decision-making between husband and wife, and a whopping 80 percent felt that an unemployed husband should keep house for his wife if she were working. In practice, however, 60 percent said they would not respect a husband who earned less than his wife, and 90 percent believed a wife should give up her job if her husband asked her to do so.
The Depression also undermined the allure of work outside the home for women. In the 1920s, joining the workforce had been an adventure for many young women, but in this gigantic economic catastrophe, more women were pushed into segregated, low-wage jobs. During the 1930s women lost ground in the professions and in the better-paid manufacturing work they had begun to enter in the previous decade.
Employed wives found themselves working a longer “double shift,” as they tried to save money at home by sewing more of their own clothes, canning their own preserves, and baking goods from scratch. Jenny L. reported that her mother often baked more than the family really needed because bulk flour came in cloth bags that could be used to make clothes. Her mom calculated that it was cheaper to purchase more flour and crowd some extra bread into the oven than to buy separate cloth for the girls’ dresses. Sometimes she traded the extra bread for fresh vegetables or sent Jenny to give it to other unemployed families.
Many women who had expected to be full-time homemakers were forced to join the workforce when their husbands were laid off. A study of white working-class and middle-class men and women who grew up during the Great Depression found that children of both sexes associated such changes in parental roles with high levels of family tension. They saw their mothers’ work outside the home as a failure of their fathers rather than a success of their mothers. Compared to the previous two generations, youths raised in the Great Depression were more eager to marry early, start a family, and have a stay-at-home wife.
Articles by “reformed” feminists remained popular through the 1930s. Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame, and a woman who had worked outside the home since she was eighteen, wrote the article “Woman’s Place Is in the Home” in the October 1936 Ladies’ Home Journal. She claimed that thirty years earlier, she had been one of the young women fighting for the freedoms the younger generation now enjoyed. “You can hardly imagine the world as it was then,” she wrote. “You do not know how much you owe us.” But if you did realize how much you owe us, she continued, “you would slit our throats.”
By encouraging women to become “personally independent,” Lane declared, she and others like her had thrown away the “deep-rooted, nourishing, and fruitful man-and-woman relationship.” Lane was an economic libertarian who believed that the New Deal had undermined the manly self-reliance that made America great. But she believed that feminism had undermined the womanly dependence that was equally important to society, creating a “self-centered self-reliance” that, for females, was as “imprisoning as armor.” Give up such self-defeating independence, she urged women, and abandon the attempt to use any of your talents as anything more than “adornments . . . for your femininity.” Your true “career is to make a good marriage.”
Dorothy Thompson was another well-known and successful journalist who warned women against the hidden costs of “emancipation.” In her column “If I Had a Daughter” in the September 1939 Ladies’ Home Journal , she claimed (with considerable overstatement) that “there is scarcely an occupation, whatever the intellectual requirements, that is not open to women.” Thousands of women had therefore come to believe that they could “enter engrossing and demanding occupations . . . and at the same time have happy and productive marriages.” But, she declared, that is “an illusion. One woman in a thousand can do it. And she is a genius.”
If I had a daughter who wanted to be a novelist, Thompson wrote, I would tell her “that little talent of yours” is unlikely to produce anything truly worthwhile and urge her to abandon any dream of a career. She would do better to raise “a fine man” than to write “a second-rate novel.”
Most women who had been feminists in the early twentieth century did not renounce their views, but in the absence of a central unifying issue, such as the vote, the movement lost its momentum. And women who remained activists were deeply divided over where to put their energies. The National Woman’s Party devoted its efforts to lobbying for an Equal Rights Amendment that would prohibit politicians and employers from passing laws and work rules that applied to only one gender. Such rules, known as “protective” legislation, excluded women from jobs that required heavy lifting, included night shifts, or were thought to pose particular threats to health and safety.
Proponents of the ERA argued that many of these regulations kept women from well-paid work. Protective legislation allowed women to work as waitresses, where they rushed back and forth from kitchen to dining room balancing heavy trays of hot food, but prevented them from standing behind the bar and mixing drinks.
However, most activists, including most labor-union women, supported protective legislation, fearing that women’s health and economic prospects would suffer if they were put into direct competition with men in a social environment where health-and-safety regulations were minimal. So old allies went in separate directions, often in mutual animosity.
Women on both sides of the ERA issue increasingly worked behind the scenes to influence legislation rather than attempting to reach a mass audience. During the New Deal, an unprecedented number of female activists who supported protective legislation were appointed to policy-making positions, especially in the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department. The networks they constructed later served as the organizational base for the revived feminist movement in the 1960s. But in the meantime, feminism lost its public face. And in the economic and political climate of the 1930s, activist women and men who might otherwise have supported campaigns to extend female equality turned their attention to building a social safety net for families and countering the growing threat of fascism.
WORLD WAR II INTRODUCED NEW ELEMENTS INTO THE DISCUSSION OF women’s place in the public sphere. The United States entered the war in December 1941, and before the war’s end in August 1945, the female labor force would increase by almost 60 percent, with married women making up three-fourths of those newly entering the workforce. As part of the war effort, women worked in jobs that had previously been unthinkable for their sex: They became pipe fitters, mechanics, welders, carpenters, and shipfitters, their efforts glamorized in the image of “Rosie the Riveter.”
Their war work renewed a national sense of pride in women’s capabilities. In 1943 a Senior Scholastic poll of 33,000 female high school students found that 88 percent aspired to have a career other than homemaking for at least a portion of their lives. And by May 1945, according to a Women’s Bureau survey in Detroit, 60 percent of female workers who had been housewives before the war said they wanted to remain employed once the war ended.
Nevertheless, national polls found that fewer than 20 percent of American women as a whole thought the ideal life should combine marriage and a career. Despite the patriotic approval of women who worked in the war industry, strong hostility was directed at wives who worked for any other reason.
Many people were suspicious even of temporary war work when it came to mothers. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, argued that paid jobs were not appropriate for mothers in any circumstance. A mother “already has her war job.... Her patriotic duty is not on the factory front. It is on the home front!”
The government’s creation of child care centers to accommodate working mothers stirred tremendous controversy, and a growing school of thought claimed that mothers’ war work was spawning an epidemic of juvenile delinquency. In 1943, Margaret Riddle wrote a widely cited book blaming modern mothers for not giving their children enough “Tender Loving Care.” An article in one women’s magazine suggested that such neglectful mothers be drafted by the government and assigned “to duty in their own homes.”
One survey of popular periodicals from the 1920s through the 1950s found that women portrayed in articles in the mid-1940s were more likely to hold jobs than in those from the 1920s, 1930s, or 1950s. But favorable attitudes toward such working women were confined to wives without children and mothers who worked from home or in their husband’s business. Women who worked in independent professions or sought careers for their own sake were actually vilified more often in 1945 than in 1925, 1935, or 1955.
Somewhat paradoxically, a new strand of hostility directed at stay-at-home wives and mothers also escalated in the early years of the war. Historian Rebecca Jo Plant notes that many “modern” thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s had criticized the nineteenth-century cult of domestic motherhood not because it limited women’s rights but because it gave women too much moral authority within the home. In 1942, building on this anti-maternalist sentiment, Philip Wylie published his vituperative Generation of Vipers, which blamed women for dominating the home front to the point that they emasculated their husbands and smothered their sons. Wylie drew on the writings of Freudian psychiatrists to support his attack on “momism,” and the Freudians in turn embraced his label as their own.
In the view of most psychiatrists and the writers who popularized their works, “momism”—whether it took the form of overly strict or overly indulgent behavior—was the cause of almost every social ill. It produced sissies, murderers, and homosexuals. It even produced Nazism. Had Adolf Hitler’s mother not coddled her son as a child, claimed medical author Amram Scheinfeld in a November 1945 Ladies’ Home Journal article, “history might have taken another course.” The title of the article posed a question that many Americans answered with a resounding yes: “Are American Moms a Menace?”
Edward Strecker, a psychiatrist who studied soldiers found unfit for military duty, certainly thought so. He argued that unprecedented numbers of men were too “psychoneurotic” to cope with the rigors of military life, and he traced the problem back to the overprotective, smothering “mom and her wiles.” Society was “veering toward a matriarchy,” he claimed, in which mothers kept their sons “paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away . . . from the emotional maternal womb.”
These attacks on women’s influence inside the home coexisted and sometimes merged with the attacks on their power outside the home, so that women got it coming and going: They were blamed for devoting too much attention to their children as well as for devoting too little.
The end of the war spurred more efforts to get women out of the workforce and back into the home. During the war, the government’s Magazine War Guide had urged the editors of women’s magazines to encourage women to get involved in civilian defense efforts outside the home. However, historian Nancy Walker reports, once the war ended the War Guide publishers suggested that editors “replace discussions of child care with articles on juvenile delinquency.” This, they reminded the editors, was “one of the social ills blamed on working women.”
As the veterans came home and began readjusting to civilian life, women were advised to set aside any independent aspirations they had developed. Sociologist Willard Waller declared that women had “gotten out of hand” during the wartime emergency. It was time to reaffirm two rules: “women must bear and rear children; husbands must support them.”
Other experts argued that wives had a duty to rebuild their husbands’ self-esteem, which had been damaged when they came home to find that women had been successfully running their households. A wife should make a special point of deferring to her husband’s needs and wishes, they advised. “He’s head man again,” the magazine House Beautiful reminded its female readers. “Your part . . . is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.”
Women had little choice but to comply. When the war ended, thousands of female war workers showed up at their jobs only to find their final paycheck waiting. By 1947, more than 3 million women had been laid off from their wartime work.
Many were outraged at being dismissed so cavalierly. They took to the picket lines, carrying signs reading “Ford Hires New Help. We Walk the Street,” “How Come No Work for Women?” and “Stop Discrimination Because of Sex.” Several unions, including the United Auto Workers, held discussions about how to balance the rights of veterans with those of women.
But the public was in no mood to back any serious initiatives on women’s behalf. In 1946, a Fortune magazine poll found that only 22 percent of the men they interviewed and barely 29 percent of the women thought women should have an equal chance at employment.
For many women, especially younger ones who had a family or planned to start one, regrets about losing good paychecks and the camaraderie of the workplace were outweighed by the relief of having their men home from the war. My own mother recalled forty years later how hurt and angry she had been at being let go with so little ceremony or thanks. “But we knew the veterans deserved their old jobs back,” she told me when I recorded her oral history back in the 1980s. “And I was looking forward to finding a better place to live and settling into family life for a while.”
At the beginning of the war there had been a surge in hasty marriages, and during the war sexual experimentation had been widespread, both at home and on the front. Not surprisingly, the end of the war saw a huge spike in divorces, which only led to new concerns about the need to strengthen marriage. It also had the benefit of immediately weeding out many marriages whose endings might otherwise have been spread out over the 1950s, producing a deceptive appearance of marital stability in that decade.
Unmarried men and women were eager to settle down after the disruptions of depression and war, and the average age of marriage dropped sharply. In 1940, only 24 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old women were married. By 1950, 60 percent of women in that age group had tied the knot. Men also began marrying younger and in greater numbers ; by 1950, more than 40 percent of American males between twenty and twenty-four were married, compared to just 22 percent back in 1900. And the birthrate, which had been falling for most of the previous hundred years, soared after the war.
These changes were accompanied by a new romanticization of the nuclear family as the main source of security and happiness. The first half of the 1940s, historian William Graebner argues, was a time of social activism around such public issues as opposing fascism and supporting the war effort. But the second half of the decade was characterized by a “private, familial” culture, “committed to consumption and the consequent reversion to traditional gender roles.” It was now almost a patriotic duty, Americans were told, to become “blissfully domestic,” furnishing their homes, yards, and garages with the most modern goods and appliances the postwar economy could provide.
Most wars and other historical events that destabilize family formation or result in couples being separated for long periods of time are followed by a brief bump in weddings and births, as people make up for delayed marriages and childbearing. Typically, however, the spike is followed by a quick reversion to preexisting trends, and this is what demographers of the 1950s initially expected to see. Instead, the postwar “adjustment” lasted long enough that it seemed to have established a new norm for family behavior in America. The age of marriage continued to fall for the next fifteen years: By 1960, half of all women were marrying while still in their teens. The postwar rise in fertility continued until 1957, when it peaked at 123 births per 1,000 women, up from 79.5 per 1,000 in 1940. The birthrate for third children doubled between 1940 and 1960, while the birthrate for fourth children tripled.
Looking back at the late 1940s and the 1950s from the late twentieth century, many observers mistakenly believed that the family norms of that era were natural or traditional. For them the question was why the postwar family model disintegrated and diversified so rapidly after 1965. But it may be more instructive to ask why the postwar increase in marriages and birthrates was not the short-lived “correction” most demographers expected, and why the retrenchment into domesticity lasted so long.
Immediately after the war, many observers believed that the example of Rosie the Riveter had permanently shattered the idea that women’s place was in the home. The editors of the Saturday Evening Post predicted that millions of American women would now “sniff at postwar bromides about woman’s place.” And in fact, the postwar campaign to get women back into the home did not go unchallenged. Resistance to the reestablishment of older gender stereotypes was especially strong in 1946 and 1947, although it faded thereafter.
In 1946, Elizabeth Hawes published a vigorous defense of working women titled Why Women Cry: or Wenches with Wrenches. In the same year, Mary Beard issued a searing attack on Freudian theories about women. And the February 1947 Ladies’ Home Journal featured the most unapologetic argument for gender-neutral marital roles that I found in any mainstream magazine published between 1945 and 1963. In “I Wear the Apron Now,” David Duncan reported that he and his wife had switched roles after their second child was weaned. His wife left every day at 8:30 A.M., returning between 5:30 and 6:30 P.M. He spent the day caring for their two daughters, cleaning, marketing, and cooking, while trying to find time to write. The result, he concluded, completely contradicted the “popular belief that children need the care of a mother, which cannot be replaced by a father.”
“After the first few days,” Duncan wrote, “I was accepted as the logical person to whom to turn in case of a skinned knee, a bumped head, or desire for a graham cracker. My wife has become the charming lady who returns home in the evening, listens to a recital of the day’s events, reads them a story, and assists in putting them to bed. The children hold her in considerable awe and proudly tell their playmates that their mother goes to work each day. When asked about their father, the reply is generally, ‘Oh, he just stays home and takes care of the house and sometimes writes on the typewriter.’”
A similarly modern note was struck in the June 16, 1947, issue of LIFE magazine, which featured a series of stories about “The American Woman’s Dilemma.” The typical young woman, the editors explained, was “just as interested in getting married and having children as she would have been a few decades ago. But housework and child care alone no longer seem interesting enough for a lifetime job.” Articles in this issue profiled several mothers who held down invigorating full-time careers, as well as a stay-at-home mother of three who worked one hundred hours a week. The magazine also described one mother in a dual-earner family who could not afford a nanny and had to board her child during the workweek. Remarkably, they did not imply that she was neglectful or unloving, merely noting that such separations are painful for parents and “sometimes breed insecurity in children.”
The dilemma, as LIFE posed it, was whether a woman should combine a full-time job with marriage and motherhood, which was “likely to be very hard when her children are young” but “will leave her well-rounded in interests and experience when she has reached the free years after 40,” or devote herself to full-time homemaking, which would ease the strain of raising a family but leave her “unprepared for what to do with her life once the children are no longer young.”
The magazine sympathetically explored the lives of women who made each of these choices, as well as a third choice that the editors seemed to favor: “to combine part-time work with housekeeping while she is young and to use this experience more fully when her children have left home.” This is exactly what Friedan suggested as a good option for most women in The Feminine Mystique.
But 1947 was also the year that journalist Ferdinand Lundberg and psychiatrist Marynia Farnham published Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, in which they described feminism as a “deep illness” and accused career women of seeking to symbolically castrate men. They calculated that two-thirds of Americans were neurotic and that most of them had been made so by their mothers. They saw no contradiction in saying that overinvolved stay-at-home mothers were as great a problem as neglectful career women, explaining that this was because such women’s natural contentment with their domestic roles had been disturbed by “pernicious” feminist agitation.
In The Feminine Mystique Friedan quoted liberally from Modern Woman to illustrate the viciousness of postwar attacks on women. In fact, Modern Woman had more critics at the time of its publication than Friedan acknowledged. Still, it was an instant best seller and was featured in weekly news reports shown in movie theaters. And by the early 1950s, Farnham and Lundberg were quoted more often in popular magazines than their critics.
The antifeminist counteroffensive was reinforced by the political climate of the age. By the late 1940s America was in the midst of a massive anticommunist crusade that came to be known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, one of its most strident and shameless practitioners. Politicians built entire careers around identifying and attacking communists, communist sympathizers, “queers,” and “pinkos”—not to mention “liberals,” who were, one intelligence officer testified before a congressional subcommittee, “only a hop, skip, and a jump” away from being communists. When President Harry Truman established a Loyalty Review Board for government employees, its director explained that the government was entitled to fire any worker on any “suspicion of disloyalty . . . however remote,” without holding “any hearing whatsoever.”
Private companies, unions, newspapers, and the entertainment industry soon claimed the same right, and many industries compiled blacklists of people who were suspected of subversive beliefs or supported such supposedly un-American causes as racial integration or nuclear disarmament. When women in New York organized to pressure officials to retain the day-care programs instituted during the war, the New York Times declared that their actions had “all the trappings of a Red drive, including leaflets, letters, telegrams, petitions, protest demonstrations, mass meetings, and hat passings.” Readers were left to wonder why an organization supposedly funded by Moscow had to resort to passing the hat.
By the early 1950s, American culture was steeped in fear and suspicion. A 1953 poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed it was their duty to “report to the FBI relatives and acquaintances suspected of being communist.” My mother recalled that “it was a good time to keep your head down. There was plenty to do getting resettled as a family instead of trying to take on McCarthyism, and at first it was a full-time job because there were still so many scarcities. Gradually, we got things that had been almost impossible to get for so many years—from little ones like sweets and stockings to big ones like a home and car. Then I had another child. Before I knew it, it was the middle of the 1950s and everything I’d done and thought in the late 1930s and during the war seemed like another world. I wasn’t really happy with my life by then, but I could no longer imagine any other alternative.”
The seductions of consumerism and the silencing of dissidents by political suppression were certainly factors in encouraging people to hunker down into the nuclear family, but something more subtle was also at work. Friedan exaggerated when she argued that a postwar counterrevolution wiped out feminism, leaving the marketers and women’s magazines of the 1950s unchallenged in their campaign to instill the feminine mystique in women’s psyches. Yet she was right to remark that, more than in other eras, American housewives in the 1950s seemed especially likely to either forget they had ever had any other options or to believe they were no longer capable of exercising them.
Louise Beecher, born in 1922, spent the Depression in Flint, Michigan, where her father ran a small grocery and her mother helped out in the shop. Many of their friends and customers were factory workers in the auto industry, and Louise remembers sitting enthralled, at age fifteen, as members of the Ladies Auxiliary of the United Auto Workers recounted how they had braved tear gas and billy clubs to protect their husbands, brothers, and fathers, who had occupied several auto plants in a sit-down strike. One woman showed her how to fold a newspaper into a makeshift weapon for use in a clash with police or strikebreakers. Louise also babysat for a woman who worked in a printing company and was proud of her skills. “I had lots of role models for independent women who weren’t the least bit neurotic,” she recalled. “But twenty years later, I could hardly remember that.”
Louise was nineteen when the war started. Her boyfriend immediately enlisted, and Louise spent the war working in her father’s store. She married her boyfriend in 1946, and they had their first child in 1948. For a couple of years, Louise worked part-time while her husband went back to school on the GI Bill. She quit when he graduated and landed a good job. Soon they moved into a new home, “with plenty of room for a family,” away from the working-class neighborhood where she’d grown up. By 1957 she had three children, ages nine, seven, and four, and was “not bored, exactly—the kids were too much work for that—but restive, dissatisfied.”
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, I got this urge to go to school and train to be a pharmacist. But I didn’t know what I’d do for child care. What kind of a bad mom would I be if I left my kids with a babysitter? Now it seems silly, because I had babysat all through my teens for a perfectly normal, well-adjusted family where the woman worked and the kids were doing fine and nobody thought there was anything wrong with her. But still, I was afraid the neighbors would look down on me. I thought there was something wrong with me for not being content with my nice home and my three kids and my weekly appointments at the hair salon.”
“And it wasn’t just like I felt I shouldn’t work. I was afraid I couldn’t handle the pressures. I worried it to death for the next six years, first deciding one thing, then another, wondering if I ought to see a psychiatrist. Then someone at the hairdresser’s—maybe it was the hairdresser herself—told me about this book I ought to read. The Feminine Mystique.”
For all of Friedan’s exaggerations and sometimes selective use of evidence, she was right that for many women there was something peculiarly disorienting about the postwar ideology of domesticity. The sources of that disorientation were more complex than Friedan’s account of feminist victories before the war and an antifeminist counterrevolution afterward suggests. And the cultural currents of the 1950s were not as monolithic as she claimed in supporting women’s confinement to the home. But in many cases, rather than providing women with maneuvering room, the mixed messages and contradictory trends in that era actually contributed to their sense of paralysis.
During the late 1940s and the 1950s, many women—especially those in the middle class—came to internalize society’s ambivalence about women’s nature and role in postwar America as a personal shortcoming rather than a societal contradiction. And precisely because they recognized how much better off they were than their parents and many contemporaries, those who did feel discontented also felt deeply guilty about it. Until they read The Feminine Mystique, these women had no language to understand their conflicted feelings and no way to justify their inchoate desire to get “something else, something more, out of life.”