A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (13 page)

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.”