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FRIEDAN PAINTED THE 1950S AS A TIME OF POLITICAL CONFORMITY, cultural conservatism, social repressiveness, and female passivity. Although this was true for many Americans, revolutionary changes were occurring below the surface in women’s behaviors and options. One puzzling question is why these changes, which were well under way by the mid-1950s, did not undercut the media definition of women as homemakers long before the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, and why so many of Friedan’s readers found her defense of women’s right and need to work a revelation.
Although women’s employment had fallen dramatically in the immediate aftermath of World War II, by 1947 it was growing again. And by 1955 a higher percentage of women worked for wages than ever had during the war. In fact, their employment rate grew four times faster than men’s during the 1950s. The employment of wives tripled and the employment of mothers increased fourfold.
The social acceptability of women working also increased during the 1950s. In the era’s romantic comedies and popular love stories, it was often the girl who worked at a fun job, not the “girl next door,” who got her man. Once she got him, she usually quit work. But polls showed enthusiastic approval of an engaged woman taking a job so the couple could marry sooner.
There was even growing acceptance of wives earning extra money for the family, as long as the husband did not object and the wife did not go back to work before her children were in school. Many opinion-shapers even encouraged women to take jobs once their children were grown, arguing that with the age of marriage and childbirth continuing to fall, most women were still healthy and active in their empty-nest years and should do something useful rather than fritter away their time in bridge parties and other idle pursuits.
In the 1930s, laws and policies had prohibited employers from hiring married women if their husbands were employed by the same company or government agency. By 1941, almost 90 percent of the nation’s local school districts refused to hire married women, and 70 percent required female teachers to quit work when they married. Married women were welcomed into the workforce during the war, but as soon as the war ended they were urged to go home and tend to their husbands’ needs. The government even reformed the tax law to give a special bonus to male-breadwinner families. Framers of the new provisions explicitly argued that this would encourage women to turn “to the pursuit of homemaking.”
But as the demand for service and retail workers soared in the postwar boom, politicians and business leaders began to see women as an untapped resource for filling labor shortages and making America more competitive with the rival Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the National Manpower Council exhorted employers to hire women and urged women to seek paying jobs, although it tended to favor policies that encouraged wives to withdraw from work after childbearing and reenter when the children were older.
In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower asked Congress to pass a bill requiring equal pay for equal work, something women’s lobbyists had long urged. The bill, which made no provision for equal access to jobs, didn’t pass. But Eisenhower’s approach represented a change from the attitude of President Truman, who in 1948 had labeled any talk of women’s rights in the public arena as “a lot of hooey.”
Women also made substantial gains in education during the 1950s. More girls completed high school in that decade than in any previous era, and a higher percentage of them went on to college. One study of young white women found that they were twice as likely to go to college as their mothers had been.
And yet even as ever more women joined the labor force, there was a concerted effort to define the limits of what was acceptable. Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, authors of the virulently antifeminist 1947 work Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, had conceded that there was some work women could do without violating their natures. But they insisted that pursuing a “career,” which they defined as work plus prestige, was antifeminine to its core and an assault on men’s self-respect. This theme, stripped of its antifeminist vitriol and sugarcoated as concern for women’s true happiness, became increasingly prominent in the 1950s.
Movies, Broadway plays, and popular literature depicted women who had prestigious or high-paying careers as ready to quit them the instant they landed a man. In All About Eve (1950), Bette Davis plays a successful, award-winning Broadway actress. But once she marries the man who has long loved her, she gives up an acting part she always coveted because “I’ve finally got a life to live” and something “to do with my nights.” In The Tender Trap (1955), Debbie Reynolds’s character gets picked for her first part on Broadway. But when Frank Sinatra asks her if she is excited, she responds halfheartedly that it’s “all right.” “A career is just fine,” she explains, “but it’s no substitute for marriage.”
It was acceptable for a woman to keep her job after marriage if her husband didn’t object and she didn’t like her work too much. It was not acceptable for a woman to want a job that would be satisfying enough to compete with her identity as wife or impinge on her husband’s sense that he was the primary breadwinner.
This point was made over and over in advice columns. In the March 1954 issue of Coronet, one expert held up the example of “Jacqueline M.” as a model for working women. Jacqueline had been earning more money than her husband when she married him, but she promptly “gave up her job, and took one that paid less, because she knew how important it was for her husband to feel he was unquestionably supporting her.” In Lena Levine’s 1957 advice book, The Modern Book of Marriage, Levine told women that they could work for pay and still have a happy marriage only “if they remember one important thing”: A woman must “let her husband know that her job is secondary, that her first interest is always the home.”
Popular culture encouraged wives and mothers who worked for pay in the 1950s to lead what film critic Brandon French has called a “double life” rather than a “full” one. They were urged to completely “dissociate their identities from their jobs . . . defining themselves entirely through their roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers, regardless of what else they did.” To the extent women were willing to do this, society was happy to have them fill the lower rungs of the occupational ladder, freeing up men for more important and remunerative jobs. The October 16, 1956, issue of Look magazine assured its readers that working women “gracefully conceded” the upper levels of the work world to men. A March 17, 1962, editorial in the Saturday Evening Post opined that society could welcome women into the workforce now that “they have finally outgrown their childlike need to compete with men.”
Even as more opportunities opened for men to move into middle-class or upper-middle-class professions and unionized blue-collar workers saw dramatic increases in their earnings power, women’s employment gains were mostly in the lower-echelon, nonunionized segments of the workforce. Between 1947 and 1966, the inflation-adjusted hourly wages of men increased by 50 percent, with men in their twenties making the greatest gains of all. Reflecting these income gains, home ownership rates of men in their thirties more than doubled between 1940 and 1960.
But the wages of young women remained relatively low and flat. Accordingly, historians Jordan Stanger-Ross, Christina Collins, and Mark Stern note, women’s “best opportunity to share in the wealth of their young male counterparts was to marry.”
From 1951 to 1955, female full-time workers earned 63.9 percent of what male full-time workers earned. By 1963, women’s pay had fallen to less than 59 percent of men’s. Meanwhile, the proportion of women in high-prestige jobs declined: Fewer than 6 percent of working women held executive jobs in the 1950s.
The experience of Sandra Day O’Connor illustrates the obstacles faced by women who aspired to a challenging career. In 1981, a decade after the women’s movement had begun to open up unprecedented opportunities to talented women, O’Connor became the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. But when she entered the job market in 1952, having graduated second in her class at Stanford Law School and served on the prestigious Stanford Law Review, she got only one job offer from all the major California firms to which she submitted a résumé. This firm explained that it did not employ women as attorneys but would be happy to hire her as a legal secretary.
For the typical single woman, such discriminatory attitudes and narrow opportunities made marriage look especially attractive. Polls conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan found that in 1957, single women were much more likely than their married counterparts to hold positive views about marriage and to regard it as their best option for self-fulfillment and happiness. Twenty years later, when single women had many more educational and occupational opportunities, their view of the benefits of marriage had dropped sharply.
The idea that marriage was the best possible investment in a woman’s future was heartily endorsed by parents. While many mothers and fathers did not think it worthwhile to invest heavily in their daughter’s education, by the end of the 1950s, the typical expenditure on a daughter’s wedding represented 66 percent, or two-thirds, of an average family’s yearly income—a higher proportion than in 2000, when the average wedding cost only 53 percent of median family income and the bride and groom often shared the cost with their parents.
Still, with almost a third of married women working for pay by the late 1950s, why didn’t their existence challenge society’s definition of women exclusively as wives and mothers? One reason was the demographic characteristics of the married women who entered the workforce. Most of the wives and mothers who got jobs did so when they were in their late thirties or older and their children were well along in school. One recent estimate suggests that no more than 250,000 women with small children were in the paid labor force, although this probably undercounts the numbers of African-American, Chicana, and Latina mothers working for pay. And the majority of working wives worked only part-time or seasonally.
Cultural perceptions were also skewed by the tendency of the press, then as now, to devote more attention to what was happening in new segments of the population than to the average experience. The explosive growth of suburbia preoccupied the media then, and people tended to move to the suburbs to start their families. The suburbs had not existed long enough to have many empty-nest families or opportunities for part-time employment. As a result, less than 10 percent of suburban wives worked for pay.
Finally, there is much truth in the common perception that the 1950s were the height of the male-breadwinner family. The total female labor force participation was growing, but the number of families where the wife did unpaid work on a farm or in a small business was falling and the number of families who relied on the labor of children and teens was sharply down. Add to that the falling age of marriage, the rising birthrate, and the expansion of male earning power, and it’s fair to say that never before had there been so many families where young children were being raised by full-time homemakers supported by their husband’s earnings rather than by a wider family labor force.
For all these reasons, most Americans believed that the “normal” life for a modern mother was to become a homemaker in a male-breadwinner family and live according to the cultural stereotypes about womanhood that Friedan described as the feminine mystique. If a woman with younger children did have to work, it was often at a job that was unsatisfying and poorly paid, with a husband unwilling to help her with the housework when she got home. So it is not surprising that many such women aspired to become full-time homemakers. And even though married women were more likely to express negative views of marriage than single women—or than their own husbands—most believed that they ought to be happy homemakers and that almost every other woman in the nation was.
Those assumptions and aspirations were reinforced by the mass media and advertising industries. Today the media makes a point of niche marketing, targeting diverse segments of the audience and trying to cater to their perceived needs and fantasies. But the opposite was true in the 1950s and early 1960s, when older local sources of knowledge, values, and even entertainment were displaced by a homogenized national culture that literally whited out America’s diversity.
The astounding growth of television was one potent disseminator of this national, homogeneous culture. In 1948, 500,000 homes had televisions. By 1952, the number was 19 million. By 1960, 87 percent of all households had a television, including 80 percent of rural households. Unlike radio, which featured some ethnic, regional, and class diversity in its programming, television portrayed an idealized white middle-class male-breadwinner family as the norm.
Another important influence in shaping women’s understanding of “normality” were women’s magazines, which reached a much higher percentage of female readers than they do today and accounted for a much larger segment of what women read. In 1964, McCall’s, which had invented the “togetherness” slogan of 1950s domesticity ten years earlier, had 21 million readers, mostly between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, in a population of about 37 million women that age. The Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping each had almost 15 million readers.
In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan claimed that during the 1950s these influential women’s magazines “printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret.” She reported that in 1958 and 1959 she “went through issue after issue of the three major women’s magazines . . . without finding a single heroine who had a career, a commitment to any work, art, profession, or mission in the world, other than ‘Occupation: housewife.’”
Friedan exaggerated the ubiquity of the happy housewife. In a survey of monthly magazines from 1946 to 1958, historian Joanne Meyerowitz found that the mass-circulation magazines of the postwar era frequently profiled women who combined marriage with careers or public service outside the home. Although the sharp critiques of Freudian antifeminism found in magazines of the late 1940s had faded by the early 1950s, leftist journalist Eve Merriam wrote witty dissections of the cult of the happy housewife in the pages of The Nation. In 1953, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, whose work Friedan relied on more than she acknowledged, wrote a well-reviewed book decrying society’s failure to understand the importance of work and education in women’s lives. And sociologists Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, anticipating many of Friedan’s points, argued in their 1956 book, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, that the “glorification” of homemaking and motherhood substituted flattery for respect. They noted that this exaltation of homemaking constituted “the cheapest method at society’s disposal of keeping women quiet without seriously considering their grievances or improving their position.”
But most of this discussion was confined to the pages of “highbrow” journals, such as Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly, and the academic press, both of which were suspect in the atmosphere of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Liberals and leftists had largely been driven out of the mass media by anticommunist blacklists, such as the 1950 publication Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which listed 151 composers, writers, announcers, singers, and actors whose support for liberal or left-wing causes, or even for the work of the United Nations, made them “potential subversives.” Allies of Senator Joseph McCarthy sat on the Federal Communications Commission, keeping their eyes peeled for shows that did not abide by such ever-widening blacklists.
In the political realm, the Civil Service Commission fired almost 3,000 people as “security risks” and reported that more than 4,000 others had resigned under the pressure of investigations into their political associations and beliefs. Feminists, and educated women in general, were particularly suspect. The House Un-American Activities Committee warned that “girls’ schools and women’s colleges contain some of the most loyal disciples of Russia. Teachers there are often frustrated females.”
In this atmosphere, most women who continued to focus on women’s rights during this period tended to do so behind the scenes. They were, in historian Linda Eisenmann’s words, “quieter, less demanding, and more accommodating than women’s advocates before 1920 and after 1965.”
Friedan may have overstated her case, but considerable evidence supports her contention that women’s magazines became more traditionalist on marriage and gender roles during the 1950s. Sociologist Francesca Cancian surveyed articles on marriage from high-circulation magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and The Readers’ Digest for each decade from 1900-1909 through 1970-1979 and found that during the 1950s there were fewer articles endorsing flexible gender roles than in the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s. She also found that advocacy of egalitarian marital values, such as communicating openly with one’s husband or expressing one’s own individuality, became less frequent, while there was more emphasis on women’s sacrifice of aspirations beyond the home. Another detailed examination of magazine articles, TV scripts, and child-rearing manuals of the 1950s found a marked reassertion of traditional gender roles and male dominance in marriage during the latter part of the decade.
A similar trend occurred in popular entertainment, according to historian James Gilbert’s analysis of scripts for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which began on the radio in the 1940s and then moved to television. In the years immediately after World War II, episodes often mocked Ozzie’s illusion that women were incapable of doing “men’s” tasks and found humor in setting up occasions for gender role switching. During the 1950s, however, the show abandoned these themes. In addition, the visual portrayal of Harriet in the TV series, where she was constantly holding a tray of cookies or running a vacuum cleaner, overshadowed the verbal give-and-take that had characterized the radio broadcasts.
In movies as well, the images of acceptable female behavior narrowed, especially when it came to portraying women and work. Friedan’s claim that during the late 1940s and the 1950s the career woman replaced the seductress as the femme fatale who must be punished for her sins is supported by film critic Peter Biskind, who argues that the “Scarlet Letter A,” symbol of the ultimate female transgression, increasingly stood for “ambition” rather than “adultery.”
Friedan was also correct in contending that the media paid less attention to women’s rights during the 1950s than in earlier decades. A study of how newspapers and popular magazines covered such issues between 1905 and 1970 found that coverage was highest during the suffrage struggle, between 1905 and 1920. It reached its lowest point between 1950 and the early 1960s and did not rise again until the late 1960s. Coverage by the New York Times was fairly high at the beginning of the 1950s but then declined steadily to a low point in 1960 before beginning a gradual recovery.
What the media did cover incessantly during the 1950s—along with the refrain that smothering homemakers created homosexuality, narcissism, and neurosis—was the drumbeat of claims from politicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and judges that working mothers were the cause of all other childhood ills, including delinquency, insanity, and all forms of criminality. Lynn Parker recalls that her mother “had been a career woman before she married my father” but then became a stay-at-home wife. Parker’s mother went back to work when Parker was in high school, and she noticed that this improved her mother’s depression. “I could see that it was very good for her to be working and I admired her for going to work,” she recalls. But Parker had also absorbed the tremendous social disapproval of working mothers, so she chose to “lie on school forms that asked for mother’s occupation. I continued to check the housewife box, because I feared my teacher would judge her poorly.”
Friedan blamed these conservative cultural trends on the growing influence of Freudianism. In the 1920s, she noted, Freud’s emphasis on freedom from sexual repression made his theories appear to support women’s emancipation. But from the 1940s on, Freudian ideas “became the ideological bulwark of the sexual counter-revolution in America.” Psychiatrists increasingly focused on Freud’s notion of “penis envy,” which, they declared, led many women to reject the passivity that women needed to reach true sexual fulfillment, thus dooming themselves and their families to maladjustment and misery. “Narcissism,” dependence, and even “masochism,” traits seen as pathological in men, were considered normal or healthy in women.
The most vicious psychoanalytical attacks on women began in the 1940s rather than the 1950s, with books such as Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, and Edward Strecker’s Their Mothers’ Sons. But during the 1950s Wylie and others continued to heap invective both on “castrating” career women and on overly controlling stay-at-home mothers. By 1955, Generation of Vipers had gone through twenty printings. In the early 1960s, Wylie was still finding a wide audience for his attacks on “The Womanization of America,” brought about, in his view, by an unholy alliance of career women and housewives who had established a “she-tyranny” over American men.
Perhaps even more damaging to women’s sense of self were the gentler, and hence more insidious, versions of these ideas that were endlessly recycled in the media during the 1950s. Studies of postwar culture show that Freudian notions of sexual difference permeated popular culture, becoming a major explanatory device for human behavior in movies, magazines, and news stories. As Friedan put it, Freudian antifeminism settled over the American landscape “like fine volcanic ash.”
In 1953, Collier’s ran an article whose banner headline asked: “Does Your Family Have a Neurosis?” If the family was “mother-fixated,” the answer was definitely yes, but even happy and devoted families could be neurotic, the article said. By the mid-1950s, it was scarcely possible to find a magazine that did not talk knowingly about one or another form of neurosis, usually caused by women’s failure to conform to their feminine “instincts.”
The assignment of women to a passive, secondary role in social life, which had once been ascribed to duty, social custom, God’s will, or innate differences in ability, was now declared to be a woman’s only route to personal fulfillment. Psychiatrist Helene Deutsch declared that the modern woman renounced “originality” and personal aspiration not out of coercion but “out of her own needs,” which were best met by identifying with her husband’s achievements. A normal woman found complete satisfaction in her role as homemaker, mother, and sexual companion to her husband. Any woman who did not find such complete fulfillment, psychiatrists explained in circular reasoning disguised as the latest scientific thinking, was clearly not normal.
Sociologists argued that unless society encouraged a clear differentiation of the sexes, everything from the nuclear family to the economy itself could disintegrate. The renowned Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons and his collaborator Robert Bales claimed that the most functional form of family for modern industrial society was one where the husband played the “instrumental” role, earning the family living, and the wife played the “expressive” role, providing emotional support to the wage earner and nurturing the children. From this it followed that boys must be reared to accept the masculine identity that would prepare them to be family decision-makers and breadwinners, and girls should be channeled into activities that would prepare them for homemaking and motherhood.
Farnham put it succinctly in a 1952 article in Parents magazine: Boys could not develop into successful men nor girls into fulfilled women if society made the mistake of regarding its citizens “not primarily as male and female, but as people.” Clearly the title of Friedan’s 1960 article, “Women Are People Too,” was not as self-evident as it now sounds.
In 1947, LIFE magazine’s June issue on the dilemmas facing women in the postwar world had taken a relatively neutral view about the choices women made concerning work and family. Revisiting the topic in December 1956, the magazine took a stronger stand against combining work with motherhood. The introduction to the issue, by “Mrs. Peter Marshall,” praised feminism for making women healthier and “more attractive than ever before” and for increasing the infant survival rate. But, she warned, feminism often led women to lose sight of their real source of fulfillment, and that was when “their troubles begin.” A normal woman’s most satisfying moments in life, Mrs. Marshall declared, occurred not when she got her first job or proved her intellectual abilities, but when she wore her first formal gown, was taken into the arms of the man she loved, or held her baby in her arms.
The same issue did feature one article by a husband who took the controversial stand that his wife’s full-time job was “good for her, good for him, good for their children—and good for the budget.” But his opinion could hardly compete with Robert Coughlin’s interviews with five psychiatrists, all of whom agreed that the primary cause of marital unhappiness, divorce, and disturbed children was “wives who are not feminine enough and husbands [who are] not truly male.”
In 1947, LIFE’s editors had balanced the antifeminist views of Farnham and Lundberg with acerbic criticisms of Freudian pronouncements by several well-known female authors, but in 1956, not one rebuttal of Coughlin’s experts was to be heard. Several of the psychiatrists conceded that some women had no choice but to work, but they were unanimous in telling Coughlin that those who wanted to work—especially at a full-time job—were “rejecting the role of wife and mother.” A woman who made this choice, as Coughlin summed up the consensus, “may find many satisfactions in her job, but the chances are that she, her husband and her children will suffer psychological damage, and that she will be basically an unhappy woman.”
Freudian ideas about gender difference even seeped into women’s colleges, the one arena where women had traditionally been encouraged to aspire to a life of the mind. Some educators used Freudian precepts to argue that traditional subjects such as physics, philosophy, and calculus were not relevant to women’s role in society and were causing “discontent and restlessness.” Friedan quoted Lynn White, president of Mills College from 1943 to 1958, who suggested in 1950 that colleges should educate women to be housewives rather than train them in skills they would never use. “Why not study the theory and preparation of a Basque paella, of a well-marinated shish-kebob, lamb kidneys sauteed in sherry, an authoritative curry?” asked White.
Not all educators took the ideas of “sex-directed education” as far as White, but in March 1962, psychiatrist Edna Rostow, writing in the Yale Review, chastised those who failed to put into practice what modern researchers now knew about the needs of “femininity.” It is a psychological fact, she contended, “that many young women—if not the majority—seem to be incapable of dealing with future long-range intellectual interests until they have proceeded through the more basic phases of their own healthy growth as women”—marriage, childbearing, and child rearing. Or as Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University from 1953 to 1968, put it, “It would be preposterously naive to suggest that a B.A. can be made as attractive to girls as a marriage license.”
“Ideally,” Rostow wrote, a woman’s life in the prime years of family-building “should contain no elements of competition with men in the world of work.” Instead, “it should reflect her full emotional acceptance of the role she is living: receptive, bearing, nurturing.” Encouraging a young woman to embrace any other goal “can adversely affect the development of her full identity.” Only after she has fulfilled her natural destiny as wife and mother should she consider what other occupations and identities she might wish to assume. Rostow recommended that women not even begin training for any profession until they were between the ages of thirty and forty (about ten to twenty years after most women in that era had their first child). That was “the natural starting point for serious professional study in the rhythmic pattern of modern woman’s life.”
All this did not mean, as Friedan claimed at one point in her book, that for more than fifteen years, “there was no word . . . in the millions of words written about women to challenge the myth of the happy housewife.” In fact, as Friedan acknowledged elsewhere in the book, the one women’s issue that regularly did make it into the mass media, right alongside the celebration of domesticity, was the puzzling question of why so many women seemed unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives. Young mothers felt exhausted and “trapped,” magazines lamented; older housewives were bored. As early as 1949, LIFE reported that “suddenly and for no plain reason” American women had been “seized with an eerie restlessness.” Under a “mask of placidity” and an outwardly feminine appearance, one physician wrote in 1953, some housewives were “seething” with resentment and anxiety. Long before Friedan labeled their discontent “the problem with no name,” doctors were puzzling over the mysterious “housewife syndrome.”
But until Friedan attributed women’s unhappiness to the contradictions between women’s needs and the precepts of the feminine mystique, there was no widely publicized alternative to the psychiatric explanation of female discontent as an individual problem of sexual or gender maladjustment. When women described being trapped in their homes, dominated by their husbands, or resentful of their economic dependence, this was taken as a symptom rather than a potential cause of their disturbance, something to be treated by analysis, medication, and even electroshock therapy. As sociologist Carol Warren notes in Madwives, a study of women hospitalized for schizophrenia in the 1950s, there was at that time, unlike today, “no legitimizing cultural vocabulary” for housewives who felt isolated in their homes, unhappy in their marriages, or damaged in their sense of self.
So the prescribed treatment for “the housewife syndrome” was not to figure out how a discontented woman could change her life to gain a stronger sense of self, but how she could change her feelings to reconcile herself to her role in the family. In 1963, psychiatrist Herbert Modlin described his success in dispensing such treatment to five “paranoid” women. Their “distorted perceptions” about male persecution disappeared, he reported, once he and his colleagues helped them learn to value their “feminine social role.”
The patients Warren studied were pronounced cured only when they admitted that their discontent had been unjustified. One woman reported in her discharge interview that she had been advised to enter the hospital in the first place because “I felt that I was dominated.” Since then, “I’ve had a chance to think things out.” Another wife described how her treatment had helped her: “I feel like baking cookies . . . and that’s because I’ve made up my mind to be a homemaker instead of always worrying about a career.”
Less extreme than commitment to a mental hospital but much more widespread was medication. When tranquilizers became readily available in the second half of the 1950s, they were initially prescribed for high-charging businessmen such as those portrayed in the TV series Mad Men. Yet by the second half of the 1960s, women were twice as likely as men to use tranquilizers, and most consumers of “mother’s little helper” were white and better educated than average.
NOT EVERYONE IN AMERICA CONSIDERED IT CRAZY FOR WIVES AND MOTHERS to have interests outside the home before they reached middle age. Many educators persisted in believing that women should be taught to use their minds and imaginations for something besides cooking. And the same popular magazines that disparaged “the career woman” as an ideal or goal often commended individual women who had successful careers. In many of the magazines she surveyed, historian Meyerowitz writes, “domestic ideals coexisted in an ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement.” She found many articles that celebrated both domestic devotion and public success—“sometimes in the same sentence.”
A 1953 Coronet article about the female mayor of Portland, Oregon, was titled “The Lady Who Licked Crime in Portland.” The mayor was described as “an ethereally pale housewife” who tipped “the scales at 110 pounds.” But she was also labeled a feminist, intensely concerned “with the status of women.” And no one suggested that she needed to be institutionalized or medicated.
So there were more mixed messages, exceptions, and contradictions in the media’s depictions of the ideal feminine life than Friedan admitted in her book. In the long run, these mixed messages, combined with the trends toward increased workplace participation and education for women, helped pave the way for a new women’s movement that would have happened with or without Betty Friedan. Indeed, by the time Friedan’s book appeared in 1963, many young women were already rejecting “the feminine mystique” without ever having heard it called that.
But many women never heard the exceptions and caveats to the feminine mystique that historians now recognize in retrospect. And the few who did hear them seem to have found them all the more confusing. “It would have been easier if everyone had been as negative as Philip Wylie,” Joan C. told me. “Then you could have gotten indignant. But it was like being enveloped in a big cloud of cotton candy, sweet and sticky. You couldn’t punch your way out.”
Anne Parsons, the daughter of sociologist Talcott Parsons, wrote to Friedan describing her sense of isolation and marginalization as an intelligent woman trying to build a research career in the 1950s. “I began to wish that someone would call me names or throw stones or threaten to send me to a concentration camp so that at least I would know for certain that the world was against me.”
A strong-minded woman determined to pursue a career could have cobbled together enough supportive quotes and celebrated role models to justify her resolve, and many did. But the individuals praised in women’s magazines for successfully reconciling family life with a career were painted in such heroic, larger-than-life terms that they could not possibly serve as role models for most women. The descriptions of how these women pulled off their successes underscored Dorothy Thompson’s 1939 warning that only one in a thousand could manage such a thing. Articles on successful women would invariably marvel at their “ceaseless activity,” “amazing” energy, and ability to “get along without sleep.” Many readers admired these women, and perhaps even envied them, but few could imagine emulating them.
Today women often resent the psychological pressures created by the pressure to “have it all.” But in the 1950s, women were firmly told that they could “have it or,” meaning they could be anything they wanted to be in the public world, or they could be happy.
You are free to choose, the prevailing ideology said. You can do anything you want and society will no longer try to stop you. But modern science has proven that if you do not first devote yourself to being a homemaker, you will probably end up desperately unhappy, and your choice may be a sign that you already suffer from a deep illness.
Prior to the 1940s and 1950s, a woman was condemned if she did not do what was expected of her. In the 1950s, she was pitied if she did not want what was expected of her.
For most of American history, a woman’s role as wife and mother had been seen as a sometimes painful duty. People talked about a woman’s lot, not a woman’s choice. And a woman’s lot involved self-sacrifice, not self-realization. But in the world of 1950s advertising, all that changed. One of the marketing research books Friedan accessed informed its clients that “the modern bride is deeply convinced of the unique value of married love, of the possibilities of finding real happiness in marriage and of fulfilling her personal destiny in it and through it.” She “seeks as a conscious goal that which in many cases her grandmother saw as a blind fate and her mother as slavery”—to “belong to a man . . . to choose among all possible careers the career of wife-mother-homemaker.”
Postwar ideology was particularly disorienting for many women because it often came in the guise of a forward-thinking rejection of “traditional” ideas about gender and sexuality. The new ideology of marriage promised women satisfaction in their home life that their mothers and grandmothers would never have dreamed possible. The modern woman would find joy and creativity in the housework that had been pure drudgery for her grandmother. She would experience sexual pleasures unimaginable to her repressed Victorian foremothers. And she would reach new heights of egalitarian intimacy with her husband, who would come home each evening eager to participate in the joys of togetherness.
In the long run, such heightened expectations about marriage helped make many women more assertive in their relationships and gave some women the courage to end empty and unsatisfying marriages. But in the short run, these expectations often added to a woman’s guilt and confusion, because they were not yet attached to any new expectations about men’s behavior. Women were encouraged to expect more than ever from marriage, but they were told that when a marriage fell short, it was almost invariably because they were not good enough wives. If a husband’s bad behavior threatened the marriage, it was up to the wife to figure out what she had done to trigger this behavior and how she must change to bring out her husband’s better side.
Studying the advice of marital experts in this era, historian Rebecca Davis found a widespread consensus that the path to marital happiness lay in the wife adjusting her own wishes to her husband’s needs, whims, and even neuroses. After four counseling sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, for example, a twenty-year-old pregnant wife dutifully concluded that her husband’s infidelities were probably due to her failure to take enough care with her own appearance and that of her home. She therefore resolved to be “better groomed, cleaner.” If such rededication to domesticity did not create the bliss that a true woman ought to find in marriage, “resignation,” one social worker remarked, could offer “protection from excessive frustration.”
Other mixed messages abounded. A woman was told that she should put nothing above her devotion to her children, her love for her husband, and her delight in her home, but she was sternly warned against devoting so much attention to her family that she smothered her children and emasculated her husband. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable to call a woman too devoted a wife or mother. But by the 1950s, the woman who focused too intensely on being a housewife and mother was deemed as big a menace to society—and to men—as the woman who rejected domesticity in favor of a paid career. The pursuit of domestic bliss—the one outlet for a woman’s dreams and aspirations—turned out to damage the men on whom women were supposed to rely.
And in the hierarchy of cultural concerns during that era, the dilemmas facing American women paled in comparison to the “crisis” facing American men. Pundits bemoaned the eclipse of the risk-taking entrepreneur by “the organization man.” They worried that men were losing their hard edge because they increasingly worked in impersonal bureaucracies where “feminine” characteristics such as teamwork, compromise, and concern for others’ opinions were more important than individual initiative and aggressiveness. Men, said sociologist David Riesman, were becoming “other-directed” instead of “inner-directed.”
The material comforts that were promised as the reward of a successful family were simultaneously feared as a threat to the nation’s moral fiber. Some commentators fretted that modern affluence had created a culture of leisure that was undermining the work ethic of yore. Others worried that “status-seeking” men were working too hard to amass material goods. But however contradictory the problems described, almost everyone agreed that they were the fault of women.
If a woman left home to get a job, she was threatening the last bastions of masculinity. But if she devoted all her attention to making her home a place of comfort and fulfillment, she was either overdomesticating her husband or putting too much pressure on him to keep up with the Joneses. If she left a child with a babysitter to take a part-time job, she was neglecting the next generation. But if she lavished too much attention on her children, she might produce a whole generation of homosexuals.
Even the mutually satisfying sex life that was supposed to be one of the rewards of conforming to the 1950s model of masculinity and femininity contributed to the sense of masculine crisis. Sociologist Riesman warned that as women became avid consumers of sexual and romantic advice, “the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the woman also grows.”
One of the quickest routes to a best-selling book in the 1950s was to explain how women’s behavior—whether as wives, mothers, or career women—was to blame for the “crisis of masculinity” that supposedly characterized the era. An issue of Look magazine titled “The Decline of the American Male,” reprinted as a book in 1958, squarely laid the blame for men’s problems on that same domesticity that was elsewhere being celebrated as women’s best hope for happiness and society’s best hope for stability.
The book described a litany of problems facing American men, all of them stemming from the power their wives supposedly exerted. “Women’s new rank in the family has encouraged her to make extraordinary and often frustrating economic demands on her husband.” Women were making new sexual demands as well, so that the poor man could no longer “concentrate on his own pleasure; he must concern himself primarily with satisfying his wife.” The upshot? “Men overwork themselves to supply their wives with material possessions” and then exhaust themselves trying to satisfy them sexually. Adding insult to injury, the “fad of togetherness” had led wives to ask husbands to do “things around the house that their fathers didn’t even know had to be done.”
Even critics of suburban domesticity in the 1950s, liberal as well as conservative, directed their anger not toward the system that kept women trapped in the mystique of housewifery and consumerism, but toward the wives themselves. In 1956, The Crack in the Picture Window gathered widespread attention for its searing indictment of suburbia. The author, John Keats, combined sociology and satirical fiction to chronicle the lives of two hapless suburban dwellers, Mr. and Mrs. John Drone. Keats quoted Dr. Harold Mendelsohn of American University’s Bureau of Social Research about the “terrifying monotony” of suburbia and the loneliness of wives whose husbands could at least escape during the day. But in the next breath he argued that suburbia was producing a “matriarchal society” that turned the average woman into a “nagging slob” and her husband into “a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter.”
Keats’s prescription for Mr. Drone was to throw off his domination by women and reject his wife’s attempts to domesticate him. But he advised Mrs. Drone to isolate herself even further in the lonely job of homemaking, becoming someone who “baked her own bread, painted her own pictures, and had as little to do with her neighbors as was humanly possible.”
ON A BREAK FROM COLLEGE IN THE EARLY 1960S, I WORKED FOR A WHILE at an institution for autistic and schizophrenic children. At that time, a leading psychiatric explanation of schizophrenia was that it was caused by mothers who subjected their kids to “double binds,” or conflicting messages. “Don’t be a sissy; be careful not to hurt yourself.” “Come kiss Mama; don’t muss my makeup.”
One day I watched a female television reporter drop off her child at the center on the way to work. She was trying to get him to let go of a glove he had taken from her during the car ride. Fearing she would be late to work, but not wanting to traumatize her child by grabbing the glove from him, and acutely aware that psychiatrists and aides were watching her every move, she followed him around the room with an anxious smile, saying, “Give Mommy the glove, honey. That’s a good boy. Give Mommy the glove. Mommy has to go now.”
When she left, a watching psychiatrist explained to me and another attendant that this was “a classic double bind.” The mother’s smile gave the boy permission to play the keep-away game with her even as she scolded him, while her use of the words “good boy” suggested that she wasn’t really serious about wanting the glove. “Magnify that by a thousand more incidents of the same nature, and voila—you have a schizophrenic,” said my fellow aide knowingly, and I blush to admit that I nodded in agreement, believing that I had gained a new insight into the dynamics of family life.
Today we know that the “double bind” theory does not explain schizophrenia. Mothers were not driving their children crazy by giving them mixed messages. But the double binds facing women in the 1950s made many believe they were going crazy. In fact, one of the phrases I heard most often from the women I interviewed for this book was “I thought I must be crazy.”