A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (5 page)

Abortion was still illegal everywhere, except to save a woman’s life. In 1962, local Phoenix television celebrity Sherri Finkbine, a married mother of four and pregnant with her fifth child, discovered that thalidomide, the sleeping pill she had been prescribed, was known in Europe to have caused crippling and life-threatening fetal disorders. Her doctor recommended a therapeutic abortion, but when Finkbine went public with the news about the risks of thalidomide, the hospital canceled her appointment. Finkbine was forced to go to Sweden for the abortion, where doctors determined that the fetus was too deformed to have survived.

Few women had the resources to get around the laws by flying to Europe. Experts estimated that a million or more illegal abortions a year were performed on American women, with between 5,000 and 10,000 women dying as a result. Such abortions accounted for 40 percent of maternal deaths.

Unmarried women who became pregnant and gave birth faced extreme social stigma, especially in white communities where the new but still tenuous prosperity of the 1950s had created a burning desire, as one woman told me, to “fit in so you could move up.” In her words, “having an unwed child in the family just shut you right out of respectable society.”
When her own daughter got pregnant, this woman pressured her to go away, have the baby in secret, put it up for adoption, and come back pretending that she had been visiting relatives.

That this was common is confirmed by the testimony Ann Fessler recounts in
The Girls Who Went Away
. More than 25,000 babies a year were surrendered for adoption in the early 1960s, many because young women were persuaded they had no other option. As one later told Fessler: “You couldn’t be an unwed mother.... If you weren’t married, your child was a bastard and those terms were used.” “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options,” said another. “I went to the maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not
allowed
to keep the baby. I would have been disowned.”

Before World War II, maternity homes had encouraged unwed mothers to breast-feed after birth and did not pressure them to give away the child, but in the postwar era the philosophy had changed. While young black women who had babies were considered immoral, young white ones were considered neurotic or immature, and by the 1960s many homes put tremendous pressure on them to give up their children. One woman recalled, “I was not allowed to call the father of my child. Even when we would write letters, they would read them. They would either cut out things they didn’t like in them, or they would cross through what they didn’t like. If the letter really upset them, they would throw it away in front of us or tear it up.”

If a woman did keep a child, she and her child faced legal as well as social discrimination. Many companies refused to hire unwed mothers. Children born out of wedlock had the word “illegitimate” stamped on their birth certificates and school records. They had no right to inherit from their fathers, to collect debts owed to their mother if she died, or even to inherit from the mother’s parents should the mother predecease them. Until 1968, the child of an unwed mother could not sue for wrongful death if the mother was killed by medical malpractice or employer malfeasance. Until 1972, “illegitimate” children who lived with their
father could not collect workers’ compensation death benefits if he died on the job.

There was seldom justice for women who were raped. Most state penal codes permitted defense lawyers to impeach a woman’s testimony by introducing evidence of previous consensual sex or claiming she had “invited” the rape by wearing “revealing” clothes or “tight” dresses. Many judges required corroboration that was almost impossible to achieve, such as having an eyewitness testify to the rape. In North Carolina, an older man could not be convicted of the statutory rape of a young girl if he could convince a judge or jury she had not been a virgin.

The law did not recognize that a married woman could be raped by her husband. Once a woman said “I do,” she was assumed to have said “I will” for the rest of her married life. The courts held that the marriage vows implied consent to intercourse. Not until 1975 did the first state—South Dakota—make spousal rape a crime. North Carolina did not do so until 1993.

Many states also did not take domestic violence seriously, often requiring police officers to see a man assault his wife before they could make an arrest. In some places, the police used the “stitch rule,” arresting an abusing husband only if the wife’s injuries required more than a certain number of sutures. Until 1981, Pennsylvania still had a law against a husband beating his wife after 10 P.M. or on Sunday, implying that the rest of the time she was fair game.

A 1964 article in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
, published by the American Medical Association, reported on a study of thirty-seven women whose husbands had physically abused them. The authors observed that the wives typically did not call the police until more than a decade after the abuse began, often following an incident where a teenage child intervened in the violence. But rather than lamenting the women’s long delay in seeking assistance, the psychiatrists explained that the child’s intervention disturbed “a marital equilibrium which had been working more or less satisfactorily.” To hear them tell it, most problems in such marriages were the fault of the wives, whom they described as “aggressive, efficient,
masculine, and sexually frigid.” In many cases, the psychiatrists suggested, the violent incidents served as periodic corrections to the unhealthy family role reversal, allowing the wife “to be punished for her castrating activity” and the husband “to re-establish his masculine identity.”

Prejudice and discrimination were pervasive in small things as well as big. Elementary schools did not allow girls to be crossing guards or to raise and lower the American flag each day, nor could girls play in Little League sports. Many universities still required female students to wear dresses to class, even in bitterly cold weather. Women in dormitories faced curfew restrictions that men did not, and college sports were heavily skewed toward men. Often, women couldn’t even use school athletic facilities.

Only two of the eight Ivy League schools accepted female undergraduates, while graduate departments often capped the number of women they would admit. Unions routinely kept separate seniority lists for men and women, while professional associations limited the number of female members. In 1963, only 2.6 percent of all attorneys were female, and among the 422 federal judges in the nation, just 3 were women. Not until 1984 did the Supreme Court rule that law firms could not discriminate on the basis of sex in deciding which lawyers in the firm to promote to partner.

Clubs such as the Jaycees could legally refuse to admit women on the grounds that it abridged their male members’ “freedom of intimate association.” In 1963, the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., was still entirely male. Female reporters who went there to hear a talk by black union leader A. Philip Randolph just before the August 1963 rally where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech had to sit in a small balcony away from the rest of the audience, where they were not able to ask questions. And at that historic rally for equality, not one woman was among the ten speakers, although “Mrs. Medger Evers” did introduce a tribute to six “Negro women fighters for freedom,” who stood silently on the stage.

In 1957, the federal government finally passed an act ensuring women’s right to serve on federal juries, but when
The Feminine Mystique
came off the press six years later, only twenty-nine states allowed women to serve equally with men on city and state juries. In 1963, women, who
were 51 percent of the population, composed just 2 percent of U.S. senators and ambassadors and 2.5 percent of U.S. representatives.

Advice books for girls and women hammered home the idea that a woman’s greatest goal should be to get married and that she should bury her own interests and impulses in order to please and flatter a man into proposing. Even today some advice books for females are based on this idea, but such books stand out today precisely because they are out of step with mainstream mores. In 1963, Helen Andelin self-published
Fascinating Womanhood
, which became a runaway best seller when it was picked up by a mainstream publishing house in 1965. Andelin counseled women that the way to a happy marriage was to become “the perfect follower.” She urged them to cultivate a “girlish trust” in their man and never to “appear to know more than he does.” A woman should never let her voice exhibit such qualities as “loudness, firmness, efficiency, boldness.” While it was okay to get angry, she told them, you should be sure to display only “childlike anger,” which included “stomping your feet” and scolding your man in terms that flattered his sense of masculinity, such as “you big hairy beast.”

An article in the January 1960
McCall’s
, “Look Before You Leap,” presented a list of questions for prospective brides to answer before they married. The magazine urged the woman to be sure she would be able to press her husband’s trousers, iron his shirts, and cook meals he liked. It also asked: “Has he pointed out things about you that he doesn’t like, and have you changed because of what he’s said?” The correct answer, of course, was yes, but women’s magazines and advice books were unanimous in warning women against pointing out anything
they
didn’t like in their mates.

Once they were married, women’s work was truly never done. Typical of the advice to wives at the dawn of the 1960s was a piece in the December 18, 1960, issue of
Family Weekly
magazine, inspired by the fact that the student council of New York University’s college of engineering regularly presented “Good Wife” certificates to “worthy” wives whose “encouragement, collaboration, and understanding” had helped their husbands complete their degrees. “Could You Win this ‘Good Wife’
Certificate?” asked the author, a noted marital advice authority of the day. He proceeded to enumerate what it took to make the grade: A good wife makes her husband “feel that he is the boss at home.” She “shares her husband’s goals, fitting them to her own. She is willing to wait patiently for the ultimate rewards.” She understands that “physical love is a symbol of devotion rather than an end in itself, and she is aware that such physical need is usually greater in the male.” For this reason, she “never makes him feel inadequate.” In conversations, the good wife permits her husband “to take the lead” without interrupting. “She follows an open door policy” for his friends, “even if she finds them dull or sometimes disagreeable.” But she also respects her husband’s need for privacy, so “she learns when to keep quiet.... If he’d rather read or watch a ball game on television, she avoids disturbing him with idle chatter.”

Above all, like the women described in the December 1962
Saturday Evening Post
article, a “good wife” considers “homemaking her profession.” “She makes every effort to keep their home . . . a restful haven.” And “she does not insist” that her husband share in household chores or child care: “her mate isn’t converted into a ‘mother substitute.’” Finally, if “she has a part-time career or full-time job, it doesn’t take priority in her life, and her own work should not become more important to her than his.”

Although advice books often emphasized the tremendous intellectual effort required to manage household chores, the expectations for housewives’ intelligence were pretty low. Many newspapers had columns such as the
Washington Post
’s “Anne’s Readers’ Exchange,” where women sent in helpful hints about organizing housework more efficiently. On October 17, 1963, the
Post
printed a letter from one reader who had devised what Anne labeled “a tricky chore combination”: “this homemaker claims she can iron and telephone at the same time.”

As late as 1969, famed parenting advice author Dr. Benjamin Spock was still reiterating the opinion of most medical and psychiatric authorities that “women were made to be concerned first and foremost with child care, husband care, and home care.”

Even well-educated women who themselves worked outside the home joined the chorus. Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist who had traveled
the world and was highly unconventional in her own personal life, wrote several articles expressing concerns about women who sought status or fulfillment in the “competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth.” Frances Perkins, who had been secretary of labor for twelve years under Franklin D. Roosevelt, insisted that “the happiest place for most women is in the home.” And although the 1963 report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women decried the extent of inequality in political life, it too affirmed the centrality of women’s identity as wives and mothers, noting that women’s employment might threaten family life.

It is hard for women today to realize how few role models were available to women who came of age in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. Black female civil rights leaders spoke out, faced down mobs, and braved jail, but the only women regularly featured in the news were movie stars and presidents’ wives, who were always described by their outfits. Jo Freeman, who would become a leader of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recalled that during the four years in the early 1960s she studied at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the country’s largest institutions of higher education, “I not only never had a woman professor, I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.”

In 1964, the same year Friedan’s book came out in paperback, the most blatant discriminatory practices of the era should have come to a halt. In that year the Civil Rights Bill passed, with a last-minute amendment to prohibit discrimination by sex as well as by race, color, religion, and national origin. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was set up to enforce the law. But while the EEOC immediately ruled that job ads specifying a particular race violated the act, it balked at concluding the same for ads segregated by sex. The
New York Times
did not abolish gender-segregated ads until 1968.