The World Split Open (10 page)

The Chairman of the Department said to me (in French), “I am sorry, madame, you are very well qualified, but we do not take married ladies.” The words still ring in my ears. I felt shut out (and effectively was shut out) of the academic career I felt ready for and now I wonder why I didn't protest. . . . I took a job as a maid in a wealthy home; we lived over the garage; I had a day uniform and a party uniform, and in my spare time read through French literature in a thorough self-imposed course of study.

A few years later, Earnshaw worked in the Library of Congress (“No discrimination there; an old-time woman martinet supervisor hired me to catalog Russian periodicals using my Russian language skills”) and then in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (“Again no discrimination”) while she raised her children. Looking back on these years, Earnshaw said:

I think young women in the fifties were like the returning soldiers; eager to find new paths, but shunted into the domestic life while the men were helped to earn college degrees. The war had affected us, too, and we were frustrated by the clash of our ideals with the lids placed on achievement. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
hit me with full force. I understood it immediately, and began my first steps of recovery. . . . Eventually, in a time of extreme frustration (screaming by myself when no one was around), trying to be the perfect fifties model wife and mother, I was invited into the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, which I was thrilled to start, and finished in 1981. During those ten years I was part of the group of women who pioneered the study of women poets of the world.

A happy ending, but Earnshaw never forgot the decades she had lost.

The initial discrimination when I was twenty-five (and my unthinking acceptance of it) resulted in a missed career, and a damaged sense of self-esteem, but not altogether; by age fifty-five I had the Ph.D. and then followed eighteen rewarding years of teaching at the lecturer level in the university that once turned me away.
⁴⁸

Working women also commonly encountered predatory male supervisors and coworkers whose hands groped where they were not wanted. Here was another problem without a name. “That's life,” women said to each other. Maria O'Connor, whose husband's salary was insufficient to support their daughters, worked at a supermarket where she daily tried to avoid such roaming hands. “At work, everybody was always making a remark, or touching you,” she recalled.

Now they call it harassment. We had a lot of harassment from the supervisors, the managers. One time I bent down to pick
up something and the manager put his hand on me. You know, you couldn't wear pants in those days, you had to wear a uniform, a dress. I was so mad, I had a cup of coffee in my hand and threw it. The man ducked and the cup hit another young guy, but I didn't care. I yelled at him, “You just keep your goddamn hands off me.” He said, “If you don't like it, work somewhere else.” So he fired me.

O'Connor decided to take her grievance to her union. The man swore he had done nothing at all, and another woman employee backed him up. The union insisted he take her back, but O'Connor, completely disgusted, said, “Take your job and . . .”

Then she worked for a butcher. “Those years, it was tough to be a woman on the job.”

If you didn't want to go out with them, they'd say you were a tramp, you were no good. Some of the girls, they'd feel like they had to go out with them. [The supervisors] used to say, come on Maria, we have to go upstairs and get something from the storeroom. And moron that I was, I would go up there and first thing I know he's got me crushed up against the wall. So I say, stop it, take your hands off me and he says, oh you can go work at the other store. Spiteful. You know, he was going to transfer me because I wouldn't let him get near me.

Meanwhile, Maria had to deal with an extremely jealous husband who resented the fact that she worked with men all day. Then, when she returned home, “he would start in on me about the guys at work. I'd say to him, ‘If I leave the store at six and I'm home at twenty after six, when am I gonna have an affair?'”
⁴⁹

The nightmare for working mothers was finding adequate child care. Eighty percent of them relied on the vagaries of relatives, friends, and sitters. One out of thirteen children turned into an unsupervised “latchkey” child. Social critics blamed working women for creating an “epidemic” of juvenile delinquency, but stubbornly refused to consider the idea of government-sponsored child care. In the United States, as opposed to the Soviet Union, patriotic American women raised their own children.

Working women naturally returned home to the same tasks of cooking,
shopping, and cleaning expected of a full-time housewife. “Believe me,” explained one disgruntled wife,

a modern woman of today would have to
be four
women to be everything that is expected of her. My husband wants me to work not for the satisfaction I might get out of working, but for the extra money
he
will have for himself. . . .
But
, how about the extra burden it would put on me. I would go out to work if possible, but I cannot do that and come home to a house full of screaming kids, dishes piled in the sink, and mountains of laundry to do. It is no fun to come home and see the sweet, dear, lazy bum asleep on the couch after being on my feet all day. He still likes his home-made pies, cakes and appetizing meals. He thinks he would lose some of his masculinity if anyone saw him hanging out the wash, or washing dishes. And if he
had
to give up any of his fishing or hunting or running around visiting his buddies to keep an eye on the kids, well, I'm not killing myself for the almighty dollar.
⁵⁰

In fact, American men
were
helping out more than ever. In 1954,
Life
magazine announced in an article titled “The Domestication of the American Male” what many social commentators already suspected. But there were limits. As the authors of
Modern Mothers' Dilemma
warned, men “can't be asked to take over much. It is more than unfair to expect him to do half the housework as well as carry the load of a full-time job; it prevents him from doing his best work and keeps him from enjoying his home as he should.”
⁵¹

Working women also encountered a sex-segregated labor force. Discrimination in wages and jobs was so common that many didn't even notice. A woman opening the daily newspaper found the help-wanted ads divided by sex. On one page were jobs open to men. On the opposite page were jobs that funneled women into domestic service, waitressing, sales, and the expanding world of “pink collar work,” where they shuffled, typed, and filed the avalanche of paper required by bureaucratic organizations. By 1960, 59 percent of women employees worked in occupations defined as “women's work.”

Even when women did the same work as men, they received substantially lower wages. Though few working men had ever earned an adequate family wage, employers insisted that women simply worked for
“pin money.” While her children were in high school, one mother worked in a travel agency where she accidentally discovered that her boss paid her far less than men who did the same work. Like many women of the time, she griped privately but said nothing, grateful for the money she did make for her children's college educations.
⁵²

Where could women find help? They mostly worked in nonunionized jobs. With few exceptions, weakened labor unions in any case refused to deal with women's employment problems. By the end of the fifties, not surprisingly, women's wages had even decreased. In 1960, women earned 61 percent of men's wages, a drop of 3 percent since 1955. In 1959, a white male with a high-school education earned on average $4,429, while his female counterpart earned only $3,458. For blacks, it was worse: black college-educated men earned $4,840; black college-educated women, $3,708.

Meanwhile, a small army of social critics blasted working women for many of America's ills: alcoholic husbands, homosexual children, and juvenile delinquency. In their influential anti-Communist best-seller,
The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(1947), Ferdinand Lundberg and Marya Farnham typically laid society's problems on women's defiant determination to pursue outside interests and careers. The authors argued that an “independent” woman was an oxymoron, single women were sick, and childless women were “emotionally disturbed.” “All spinsters,” they concluded, “[should] be barred by law from having anything to do with the teaching of children on the ground of emotional incompetence.”
⁵³

“Only in America,” noted a foreign observer as late as 1962, “is ‘Career Woman' an obscene phrase.” Caught between the myth of the happy housewife and the reality of their working lives, some working women refused to acknowledge that they worked. Alice Quaytman, a leftist political activist before, during, and after World War II, raised her family and worked as a child psychologist during the fifties. But when anyone asked what she did, she elusively described herself as a “mother who works with children.” Another mother, a salaried president of a national philanthropic organization who put in eighty hours a week, explained her full-time housekeeper and lengthy absences from home as the result of her “volunteer” work. Many suburban women worked full-time, without pay, as part of the female voluntary army that created the libraries, schools, charities, and religious organizations that turned suburban developments into communities. This, they could brag about.
⁵⁴

Fearing social and political ostracism, career women downplayed their independence. Frances Perkins, former secretary of labor, denounced feminism and argued that the “happiest place for most women is in the home.” Journalist Dorothy Thompson argued that women who engaged in demanding intellectual work cheated their husbands and children. Even Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist who had introduced Americans to the very idea that gender roles were flexible, publicly worried about women who searched for status in a “competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth.”
⁵⁵

Even without an organized women's movement, a virulent strain of antifeminism saturated the culture. Psychiatry pitted the healthy, submissive, patriotic mother and wife against the neurotic and strident feminist, whose determination to ruin other women's lives originated from her own sick unwillingness to surrender to feminine fulfillment. Critics associated feminism with an un-American godless Communism that forced women to work outside the home. A few former suffragists—like the repentant ex-Communists of the time—publicly recanted their youthful ways, belatedly took their husbands' last names, and dutifully bowed to the idea of man's natural superiority.
⁵⁶

At the same time, a very small circle of former suffragists, members of the conservative National Woman's Party (NWP), did keep alive the dream of an Equal Rights Amendment, which they had first submitted in 1923, soon after women gained the right to vote. The ERA would have given women equality in every arena of public life, but was opposed by labor and working women who feared it would destroy the protective legislation women enjoyed. Still, the NWP exerted very little influence on the dominant culture.
⁵⁷

After the passage of the Susan B. Anthony amendment in 1920 that granted suffrage to women, the activists who worked together in a successful coalition—now called the First Wave of Feminism—scattered to work on a variety of different issues—child labor protection, prenatal care for mothers, and peace. In the international arena, as historian Leila Rupp has shown, Jane Addams and others founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and organized a women's global movement dedicated to universal disarmament. But, domestically, these activists had ceased to exist as a single mass-based
social movement. During the thirties, women activists made unionization, the fight against poverty, and Fascism their highest priorities. In the early forties, activists organized radical industrial unions, joined the anti-Fascist Left, enlisted in the burgeoning civil rights movement that fought tenant evictions, and demanded jobs and health care for urban African-Americans.
⁵⁸

After the war, many of these female activists resumed their political work. On May 8, 1946, International Women's Day, a group of leftist women founded the Congress of American Women (CAW). It was to be the U.S. branch of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a global organization that included tens of millions of women in forty-one countries whose goal was to achieve peace and gain full political, economic, social, and legal rights for women.
⁵⁹

CAW's members successfully linked women's issues, social justice, and peace with racial equality and economic justice. At its peak, CAW boasted 250,000 women members and prided itself on its progressive and interracial social agenda. Their feisty slogan was “Ten women anywhere can organize anything.” CAW's agenda prefigured much of the modern women's movement that emerged in the sixties. It called for a Commission on the Status of Women, federal training programs for poor women, national health insurance and child care for working women, equal pay for equal work, and access to professional schools. Members also protested negative stereotypes of women.

CAW never hid the fact that some of its leaders were members of the Communist Party. In 1950, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) required CAW to register as an agent of a foreign organization. In fear, many liberal and union members promptly fled the organization. Faced with a protracted and costly legal fight, CAW dissolved and its history remained invisible for nearly four decades.