Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (53 page)

N
O ASPECT OF LIFE
in the 1950s seemed more clearly to expose the durability of traditional cultural norms than the images and status of women. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
(1963), while overdrawn in various ways, struck a nerve by sketching the outlines of a world that assigned women to decorative and supportive roles in a rampantly materialistic consumer culture.
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A look at the evolution of women's fashions begins to reveal the groundings of this world. In the war years, when unprecedented numbers of women had gone to work, it had been thought acceptable for women to wear slacks. In 1947, however, the designer Christian Dior introduced a "new look" that stressed femininity. Women's styles henceforth accentuated narrow waists to draw eyes to shapely hips, and tight tops to focus attention on the bosom. An extreme in the 1950s was the "baby doll" look that featured tightly cinched-in waists and bouffant skirts fluffed out by crinolines. Women's shoes, as one historian has said, "ushered in a bonanza for podiatrists." The toe shape got pointier and the heels so high that it seemed almost risky for women to walk. Women's fashions, largely prescribed by men who had an image of how the opposite sex should look, had hardly been so confining since the nineteenth century.
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The trend in fashions sent a much broader message: the place of women in society was as accessory, chiefly in the home as housewife and mother. No one made this more clear than Benjamin Spock, whose
Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
(1946) continued to sell extraordinarily well—almost a million copies every year of the 1950s. Spock was later chastised by conservatives for what they considered to be his "permissive" advice about child-rearing. Young people became radicals in the 1960s, they contended, because parents (mainly mothers) had failed to establish discipline in the home. That was at best an overwrought accusation. And it was ironic, for it overlooked Spock's much more traditional message: that children needed the love and care of mothers who devoted all their time to the effort, at least until children were three years of age. Fathers, Spock said, had a much smaller role in child-caring.

Women who tried to combine homemaking and career had to struggle, for "labor-saving" devices proclaimed as the deliverance of housewives stopped well short of such a rescue. The expanded availability of frozen and packaged foods, to be sure, enabled women to prepare meals more quickly. Central heating provided a good deal more comfort. Gas-powered ranges were much easier to manage than coal-burning stoves. Heavily physical demands eased for most urban and suburban housewives. But the more the conveniences, the more time it seemed to take just to keep things clean, especially for women who had (as many did) large families. Keeping the conveniences fixed and in good running order took lots of time and trips. Men, moreover, showed little inclination to take on these uninspiring chores. "Modern" housewives in the 1950s therefore had little more time for careers, even if they had been encouraged by the culture to undertake them.

Magazines offered career women of the 1950s especially cold comfort. Women's magazines, as Friedan emphasized later, printed story after story extolling motherhood and domesticity. Titles of stories revealed the pattern: "Femininity Begins at Home," "Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," "Cooking to Me Is Poetry." In 1954
McCall's
left no doubt that women should be subservient: "For the sake of every member of the family, the family needs a head. This means Father, not Mother."
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Seventeen
advised women in 1957, "In dealing with a male, the art of saving face is essential. Traditionally he is the head of the family, the dominant partner, the man in the situation. Even on those occasions when you both know his decision is wrong, more often than not you will be wise to go along with his decision. "
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A major role of the wife, these stories said, consisted of helping the husband get ahead. Articles such as "The Business of Running a Home" explained that women should focus on freeing men from domestic concerns, including shopping, diapering, and other essential duties. In 1954
McCall's
coined the neologism "togetherness," a word that nicely captured the ideal: the woman should be a helpmate so that the man could rise in the world. Mrs. Dale Carnegie, wife of a well-known expert on how to make friends and influence people, explained in 1955, "Let's face it girls. That wonderful guy in your house—and in mine—is building your house, your happiness and the opportunities that will come to your children." Split-level houses, she added, were all right, "but there is simply no room for split-level thinking—or doing—when Mr. and Mrs. set their sights on a happy home, a host of friends, and a bright future through success in HIS job."
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Many movies offered similar prescriptions, none more pointedly than
All About Eve
(1950), a powerful film about Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), an aspiring young actress who feigns humility in order to ingratiate herself with Margo Channing (Bette Davis), the then first lady of the stage. By the end of the movie Eve's selfish machinations pay off; she rises to the top of her profession and receives a big award for her acting. As Margo realizes that Eve is taking her place, she becomes bitter and jealous. But then she sees the light and marries the man she loves. "A funny business, a woman's career," she muses. "You forget you'll need [men] when you start being a woman again." Giving up a major role (which Eve lands), she says, "I've finally got a life to live. . . . I have things to do with my nights." The message was hard to miss: career women like Eve were evil schemers who did not understand the much more satisfying blessings of love and marriage.
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Within a few years career women like Eve seemed to disappear from the screen. A special example of this trend was
The Tender Trap
(1955), starring Debbie Reynolds in a characteristically feminine role. Reynolds, like Baxter, plays an aspiring actress, and she gets a much-sought-after role. Frank Sinatra, whom she really wants, congratulates her. Reynolds, however, replies, "The theater's all right, but it's only temporary." Amazed, Sinatra asks, "Are you thinking of something else?" Reynolds replies, "Marriage, I hope. A career is just fine, but it's no substitute for marriage. Don't you think a man is the most important thing in the world? A woman isn't a woman until she's been married and had children." In the end Reynolds gets her man.

It was a sign of the times that even radical intellectuals largely ignored the wider aspirations of women. One was Paul Goodman, a caustic critic of American institutions whose essays were collected in
Growing Up Absurd
in 1960. As this title indicated, Goodman was appalled by the consumerist world in which young people were trying to mature in the 1950s. But he worried only about males. "A girl," he explained in his introduction, "does not
have
to . . . 'make something' of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act."
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In the essays that followed Goodman ignored the needs of women.

To amass so many traditional, anti-feminist images from the era is of course to be selective and therefore to leave the impression that American culture in the 1950s was monolithic, or even virtually misogynist, on the subject of gender relations. That would be an exaggerated conclusion. Images in television, for instance, offered some variety and provoked different reactions among viewers. "Our Miss Brooks," a popular series, featured an unmarried schoolteacher—a non-threatening stereotypical role for women. But while Brooks resorted to silly (and unsuccessful) feminine wiles to attract a male colleague, she was generally a far more intelligent and worthy person than the pompous men who dominated the school Establishment, which kept her down. Alice Kramden, the wife of Ralph (Jackie Gleason) on "The Honeymooners," was obviously the brains of the family. She paid little attention to Ralph's bluster or to his crackpot ideas. Lucy, while wacky, was also shrewd: many women appeared to delight in the way that she manipulated her husband. This is another way of repeating the obvious: people emerge with individual understandings of what they see and hear in the media.

Movies, too, could offer a slightly more ambiguous view of the sexes than met the eye. Some leading men—Montgomery Clift, Tony Perkins, Dean—were shown to be soft and sensitive. Dean cried unashamedly in
East of Eden
(1955). Women, meanwhile, could be decisive. Elizabeth Taylor in
Giant
(1956) played a strong-willed eastern bride who gradually tamed her rancher-husband (Rock Hudson). Even Debbie Reynolds, having caught Sinatra in
The Tender Trap
, let him know that she would henceforth assert herself. "Listen to me," she told him. "From now on, you're gonna call for me at my house, ask me where I want to spend the evening, and you're gonna meet my folks and be polite to them and bring me candy and flowers. . . . I've got to make a man out of you."

It is inaccurate, finally, to assume that all American women in the 1950s embraced the feminine mystique. Some were restless and unhappy. As Friedan put it in an article in
Good Housekeeping
in 1960, "There is a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women." What the searchers wanted, she added, was the chance for greater self-fulfillment outside the home. "Who knows what women can be," she asked, "when they finally are free to become themselves?" In the same month
Redbook
started a contest offering a $500 prize for the best account of "Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped." To the surprise of the editors, an avalanche of entries—24,000 in all—arrived at their office.
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The varied messages about gender roles in the mass media and the dissatisfaction of some mothers and housewives suggest an undercurrent of change, especially toward the end of the decade. It is difficult, however, to know whether these manifestations of discontent amounted to widespread feminist feeling. The people whom Friedan surveyed, for instance, tended to be upper-middle-class white women. More highly educated than average, they were better placed than most to act on the deprivations that they felt. The majority of messages in the media, moreover, remained conservative. With some exceptions they did not directly challenge dominant cultural values, which assigned women to a secondary and domestic sphere.

It seems, indeed, that most American women in the 1950s did not chafe very strongly against the roles that were assigned to them. Friedan and others like her, to be sure, began to do so. But what of the millions of women who were delighted to move to the Levittowns and other suburban areas where at last they had decent housing and conveniences? Welcoming the consumer culture, they lived much more comfortably than their parents had, and they imagined that their children would do still better in life. Later, a number of developments—including still greater affluence and rising rights-consciousness, which excited expectations—helped to arouse a women's movement, especially among the young and the middle classes. As late as 1963, however, that movement remained hard to predict.
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It was difficult, moreover, for the majority of American women in the 1950s to expect very much in the way of advancement outside the home. Institutional barriers reflected and reinforced cultural prescriptions. Witness politics. President Eisenhower made a few highly touted appointments of women to governmental positions, notably Clare Boothe Luce as Ambassador to Italy and Oveta Culp Hobby, a Texan, to head the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In all he named twenty-eight women to positions requiring Senate confirmation, as opposed to twenty during the Truman years. But these appointments were token. And leading politicians of both parties had no intention of getting the Equal Rights Amendment approved. When Eisenhower was asked about ERA at a press conference in 1957, he responded, laughing, "Well, it's hard for a mere man to believe that a woman doesn't have equal rights. But, actually, this is the first time that this has come to my specific attention now, since, oh, I think a year or so. . . . I just probably haven't been active enough in doing something about it." Women activists were upset, but they should not have been surprised, to learn that the President had been paying no attention to their efforts.
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Witness, too, the world of education. Females, as in the past, actually stayed in high school on the average about a year longer than males—in 1950 through the tenth grade as opposed to the ninth grade for males (through the eleventh and tenth, respectively, by 1960). A slightly higher percentage of women than men graduated from high schools. But thanks in part to the blessings of the GI Bill, men were much more likely to go on to colleges and universities. In 1950 there were 721,000 women enrolled in higher education, compared to 1.56 million men. By 1960 the ratio (but not the gap) had narrowed a little: 1.3 million women attended colleges or universities compared to 2.26 million men. Only 37 percent of women graduated, compared to 55 percent of the men. Many of the women who dropped out did so, people joked, to get their M.R.S. degree and to work on their Ph.T.—"Putting Hubbie Through." Of those women who graduated, relatively small numbers went on for higher degrees, in part because graduate and professional schools had quotas limiting the percentages of women they would admit. A total of 643 women received doctorates in 1950, compared to 5,990 men. Ten years later the numbers were 1,028 for women and 8,800 for men.