The World Split Open (8 page)

Anti-Communism also helped contain the storm brewing within the home. American women could be mobilized without a single woman leaving her suburban home for work. The belief that American superiority rested on its booming consumer culture and rigidly defined gender roles became strangely intertwined with Cold War politics. In 1959, at an American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev engaged in a bizarre
“kitchen debate.” As historian Elaine May has noted, “The two leaders did not discuss missiles, bombs, or even modes of government. Rather, they argued over the relative merits of American and Soviet washing machines, televisions, and electric ranges.”
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As they toured model American homes, Nixon boasted of the laborsaving devices that gave American women time to cultivate their charms as wives and to care for their children. “What we want is to make easier the life of our housewives,” said Nixon. Khrushchev testily retorted that the Soviet Union had little use for full-time housewives. Its women workers were busy building an industrial society. Tracking this bizarre debate, the American press compared the “bedraggled drudges” of the Soviet Union, who lost their looks at an early age and neglected their children, with the well-groomed American housewives whose leisure allowed them to care for themselves, as well as their families.
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The advertising industry quickly geared up to instruct new homemakers in the ways they could help fight Communism. In 1954, a
McCall's
magazine editorial coined the ideal of “togetherness,” a concept designed to slow the centrifugal forces that were already spinning members of the family in different directions. Speaking before the Wilmington City Federation of Women's Clubs, a director of Du Pont reminded his female audience that they were no longer just housewives. “You are ‘Managers of Destiny,'” he told them, “perfectly positioned to fight socialism.”

This is where you women can be of tremendous help—by everlastingly teaching and preaching the values of individualism and of personal freedom, and by keeping alive a burning faith in our philosophy of incentive and free choice. . . . Socialists have tried to relieve the individual of all responsibility. . . . Only women, with their “independence,” can fight for individual liberty.
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Simply put, the nation needed women to fuel the growing consumer economy. Anita Colby, an author and consultant, lectured businessmen on how to decipher the mysterious ways of the female consumer:

She, too, gets restless . . . but unlike you, she can't head for a bar alone at night to spend a few hours of relaxation. No, restricted to home and children, she takes it out in a new color of hair—or calls in a decorator to do over the house—and
may even surprise you when you come home one day with a ripped-up lawn bearing all the ear-marks of a swimming-pool in embryo! At the very least, she'll buy herself a new hat. This is bad, you think? Well, all you cosmetic manufacturers, makers of textiles, furniture, housewares, plumbing appliances, and millinery experts think about your annual sales-figures!! Honestly now, where would you be without the little woman's rebellion?
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It didn't take much to convince postwar men and women that the United States, and not the Soviet Union, offered the good life. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product leaped 250 percent. In 1955, with only 6 percent of the world's population, the United States produced half the world's goods. By 1960, 60 percent of Americans belonged to the middle class, and owned their own homes; 75 percent of farmers owned their own lands. The discretionary income of the middle class doubled: 87 percent owned televisions, 75 percent owned washing machines, and ten million citizens owned shares in American companies.
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The growing middle class had to ignore a great deal as they celebrated their material success. Racial segregation and discrimination still ruled the South. As the middle class expanded, the rich grew richer, while the poor slid further into grinding poverty. The nation's wealth, moreover, rested, as one observer noted, “on Hydrogen bombs, B-52 bombers, a nuclear navy, guided missiles . . . the potential Armageddon . . . death supporting life.” The American Dream—a wife, children, ownership of a home, a car, and “the good things in life”—had finally come within reach of a critical mass of men.

After the political demise of Joseph McCarthy in 1954, Americans caught their breath and began to settle down to enjoy the domestic affluence they had purchased—or so they thought—through such extremities of vigilance. But McCarthyism had seeped deep into the culture, like toxic waste that poisons the earth long after officials declare a hazardous accident is over. Dissent—supposedly the touchstone of a democratic society—became linked in the popular mind with Communist sympathizers. Anti-Communism also cast a shadow of self-censorship across the intellectual landscape, destroying a credible non-Communist Left, squelching intellectual and political opposition, and forcing a political consensus that glossed over America's simmering racial, gender, economic, ecological, and social problems.
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In such an atmosphere, even marriage and childbearing became politicized. A majority of Americans judged men or women who did not marry as “sick,” thinking them either immoral, selfish, or neurotic. As “difference” became synonymous with “deviant,” people began to regard such men or women with suspicion, their refusal to mate hinting at some “antisocial” secret like homosexual or Communist tendencies. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even encouraged women to marry early and have children to fight “the twin enemies of freedom—crime and Communism.”
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Young couples married and bore children with an enthusiasm that confounded demographers' predictions of a falling birthrate. Fueled by a pent-up desire for family life after the Depression and war, they married earlier, slowed the rising divorce rate, and reversed a century's decline in the fertility rate by producing the biggest baby boom in history (from 1946 to 1964). At its peak in 1957, American women gave birth to over four million babies a year. A parade of baby carriages and bulging profiles transformed the landscape of America's parks, leaving one stunned foreign observer to note that “every other young housewife I see is pregnant.”
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The feminine mystique also had a profound influence on popular culture. An unmarried woman was an embarrassment. Hollywood scripts of the time required career women to acknowledge marriage as the source of all happiness. In the 1955 film
The Tender Trap
, Debbie Reynolds successfully auditions for her first big acting job. Dismissing congratulations from her agent, Frank Sinatra, she dutifully repeats the catechism of those years: “Marriage is the most important thing in the world. A woman isn't really a woman until she's been married and had children.” Later, the poet Adrienne Rich would express the pressure that so many actual women felt at the time.

As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial.
This is what women have always done.
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Fashion played an important role in constructing and constricting the new feminine and maternal image of the postwar era. The simple, broad-shouldered, man-tailored clothing of the war years gave way to
Christian Dior's “New Look,” a style that exaggerated feminine curves and a womanly silhouette. Lacquered bouffant hairdos and starkly outlined eyes and mouths advertised an exaggerated if untouchable female sexuality. “Fifties clothes were like armor,” the writer Brett Harvey recalled:

Our clothes expressed all the contradictions of our roles. Our ridiculously starched skirts and hobbling sheaths were a caricature of femininity. Our cinched waist and aggressively pointed breasts advertised our availability at the same time they warned of our impregnability.
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“Experts” rushed to reposition homemaking as a profession.
Life
magazine praised the “increasing emphasis on the nurturing and homemaking values among women who might have at one time pursued a career.” Standards of cleanliness steadily climbed as industry redefined laborsaving devices as necessities rather than luxuries. Advertisements mercilessly attacked women's insecurities as mothers, wives, and housekeepers. To protect their children, mothers had to scour and sanitize their homes. A
professional
homemaker sewed her own clothes, preserved her own fruits and vegetables, developed the arts of an experienced chef, and decorated her home with the skills of an interior designer. Add in the nearly eight hours a week that many suburban housewives spent in a car chauffeuring about their brood and doing errands, and it becomes clear why suburban housewives spent more time consumed by housework, broadly defined, than had their grandmothers.
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The professionalization of the housewife turned the act of consumption into a patriotic act and kept American industry humming. Industrial psychologists advised manufacturers on how to make a housewife feel professional: “When a housewife uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for Venetian blinds, rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer and more like an engineer.” Later, one disgruntled fifties woman quipped, “The Good Housekeeping seal of approval was the brand of the slave.”
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More important than her homemaking skills or her appearance was a woman's role as a mother. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author of the 1946 best-seller
The Common Sense Book of Baby Care
, the child-raising
bible of that era, insisted that babies needed constant attention. Without a mother at home, children languished or, worse, became juvenile delinquents. A good mother always greeted her children after school with affection and nourishment. “More important than any meal,” remembered one daughter of the fifties, “the after-school milk and cookies were akin to Eucharistic substance, symbolic of nurture and love.”
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Spock, a paragon of child permissiveness, strongly encouraged mothers to stay at home with their children. “If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child,” he explained, “it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important after all.” When child care became too overwhelming, the distraught mother was advised to “go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get a new dress or hat.” But mothers, it turned out, could also do too much. Four years before Spock, Philip Wylie's bestselling book
Generation of Vipers
set the tone for blaming mothers for everything that seemed wrong in the postwar era. Economic disaster, religious apathy, and the nervous breakdowns of soldiers during and after battle were all attributable to mothers' overly protective domination of their sons, which he dubbed “Momism.” America's mothers now had to walk the fine line between neglect and smothering overprotection. If they worked outside their homes, they risked creating a generation of juvenile delinquents. If they stayed home and smothered their children, they risked producing a generation of denatured, sissified young men.
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After her children were asleep and her housework was done, it was hardly time for a woman to fall into bed, exhausted or depressed. A housewife still needed to exchange her apron for an outfit that would rekindle her husband's sexual interest in her. The expanding consumer culture depended heavily on women's repeated purchases of beauty products. But the formula didn't always work. Behind closed doors, many marriages seemed deeply troubled, and at the heart of those troubles was the nature of female sexuality.

The war years had witnessed increased teenage prostitution, greater sexual activity among both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and
escalating marital infidelity. After the war, Americans tried to “contain” such disorderly sexual behavior. But it turned out that sexual expectations had, in fact, changed. Panicked social critics encouraged early marriage, hoping it might put a brake on youthful sexual experimentation. And sometimes it did, but when it couldn't, sexual hypocrisy became a way of life. Society still expected men to have experience and women to have none. The same culture that increasingly exploited sex to promote products still insisted on the appearance of virginal innocence in its girls and women.
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After the war, dating turned into a highly elaborate form of courtship in which male aggression and female passivity were carefully prescribed and encoded. “In the fifties,” one woman remembered, “the only thing worse than sleeping with a man was to telephone him.” Every step in male commitment permitted freer sexual activity, as kissing escalated into necking, necking slid into petting, and heavy petting stopped only a technical step before “going all the way.” “We started dating,” recalled one woman, “and we kept on dating until we got married my junior year. In between we did the whole bit. First, he gave me his class ring, then the lavaliere—the necklace with the letters of his fraternity. Next came the fraternity pin, until, da-dum, the engagement ring.” Although a bevy of experts and teen magazines strongly advocated “saving oneself for marriage,” one woman later admitted, “Everybody was doing it. But it was the Big Lie that nobody was.”
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Couples expected an “eroticized marriage” and looked for advice from experts. Eustace Chesser, the author of the widely read
Love Without Fear
(1947), kept in print in paperback through the fifties, popularized the idea that marital bliss required mutual orgasm. The most widely read marriage manual of the decade,
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
, written by the Dutch physician Th. H. Van de Velde in 1930 and reprinted thirty-two times between 1941 and 1957, went a step further, declaring, “Every considerable erotic stimulation of their wives that does not terminate in orgasm, on the women's part, represents an injury, and repeated injuries of this kind lead to permanent—or very obstinate—damage to both body and soul.”