The World Split Open (12 page)

It took far longer for working women to puncture the official reality that American women didn't work outside the home. In 1957, the National Manpower Council seemed positively stunned to “discover” that an invisible army of working women, many with children, had entered the labor force. Two books published by the council,
Womanpower in Today's World
and
Work in the Lives of Married Women
(1958), first publicized the hidden realities of working women's lives. Shocked by the statistics they uncovered, the authors repeatedly described the situation as a “revolution.”
⁶⁸

It was. By the end of the decade, before Betty Friedan wrote about it, the feminine mystique—as a description of women's actual lives—was becoming more myth than fact. But myths die slowly, especially when they serve a useful purpose. For war-weary women and men, the feminine mystique, with its illusion of clear gender roles, brought with it a sense of social order. But the feminine mystique also crippled the lives of many American women. Rather than face social ostracism, some women gave up their dreams and lashed themselves to home and hearth. Millions of women learned to interpret their dissatisfaction as evidence of individual madness. Millions more—whose lives never began to resemble that of a middle-class housewife—suffered unnecessary guilt as they worked around the clock to ensure the survival of their families.

Insecure in their separate worlds, women privately sniped at each other: housewives blasted activists as unpatriotic; working women derided housewives as spoiled and lazy; and housewives accused working women of neglecting their children. A local Girl Scout troop leader shocked one mother who worked as a civilian specialist for the Air Force by refusing to admit the daughters of “working women” to her
troop. Housewives in one neighborhood decided to prevent their daughters from visiting the home of a high-school teacher who never greeted her own two teenage daughters with milk and cookies.
⁶⁹

And yet, these adult women had a great deal in common: wherever they worked, whatever they did, they were treated as subordinates. Observing this fact in a 1960 issue of
Ladies' Home Journal
, the journalist Dorothy Thompson asked, “Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes but why, why, why don't they take up their
own
causes and obvious needs?”
⁷⁰

They would, but American women did not yet possess a common language with which to express their shared subordination. “I did not set out consciously to start a revolution,” Betty Friedan insisted. But she already knew that successful movements require group solidarity. She understood that labor struggles only flourished with broad class consciousness and that civil rights movements required race consciousness. To publicize their private and public injuries, women would need to expand their gender consciousness and find a language with which to express common grievances.

This they were not yet ready to do. But the demands made by the feminine mystique paradoxically intensified their gender consciousness. By politicizing women's lives in the battle to contain Communism, the 1950s deepened American women's awareness of how their identity as females had become the basis for their exclusion. Within a decade, housewives, working women, women activists—whose experiences, disappointments, and hopes would set the agenda of the modern women's movement—would launch a scathing attack on the very culture that had blamed them for everything. By then, they would know how to use their identity as women as a weapon in the battle against discrimination and in the struggle for equality.

“When I was growing up,” wrote Anna Quindlen, a
New York Times
columnist, novelist, and mother of three who was born in the 1950s, “motherhood was a kind of cage.”

You stayed home and felt your mind turn to the stuff that you put in little bowls and tried to spoon into little mouths and eventually wound up wiping off of little floors. . . . By the time I was a grown-up, the answer, if you were strong and smart and wanted to be somebody, was not to be a mom. I certainly didn't want to be one.
¹

After she read
The Feminine Mystique
, another young woman picked up her pen and wrote Betty Friedan: “My mother has stayed at home for twenty-three years and raised four children. . . . The emptiness of her life appalls me; her helplessness and dependence on my father frightens me.”
²

Paula Weideger, a feminist who chose not to have children, later tried to explain why so many young feminists had feared marriage and motherhood: “The desire to have children, along with good feelings about motherhood, was buried because women were so scared.”

They were afraid they would turn out like their own mothers, most of whom were housewives and housewives only. Women like me who grew up in the 1950s had been made edgy and claustrophobic by the narrowness of the life laid out for them
from birth. To give mother-feeling any place in your heart might mean being lost to mothering forever—or at least “till the kids are grown.”
³

With one foot firmly planted in the world of their mothers, daughters of the fifties viscerally feared the constraints experienced by the adult women around them. Those daughters who were “war babies,” born between 1941 and 1945, became the leaders and shock troops of the women's liberation movement, stamping its political culture with their specific experiences and fears. By the time the movement began, many had finished college, married, and borne children. Their younger sisters, baby boomers born between 1946 and 1950, joined the movement as college students. The youngest baby boomers, born after 1950, came of age in an atmosphere saturated with media images of protest, of the sexual revolution, and of the counterculture. Maturing while the women's movement was a rising tide, they took for granted freedoms that had emblazoned their older sisters' banners. Some spawned women's groups in their high schools, but many became pioneers of a different sort: they would be the first women to shape adult lives amid the new opportunities and burdens created by the modern feminist movement.
⁴

As the new decade of the sixties began, social and cultural critics began worrying about a “generation gap” that suddenly seemed to have severed the connections of the young with their parents. But the media viewed the generation gap largely through the lens of the male experience.
Life
magazine's 1968 cover story “The Generation Gap” typically concentrated on the tension-filled relationship between a nephew and his uncle. The
New York Times
repeatedly described it in terms of a young man's alienation from the adult world. What everyone failed to notice was that
two
generation gaps existed, side by side, each with its own gender-specific fears and dreams.
⁵

Whatever created a male rebel, journalists and scholars assumed, also shaped his female counterpart. And they were partly right. On the surface, rebellious young men and women did seem strikingly similar. Both rejected the popular music of their parents, savored the riffs of jazz, and gyrated to the urgent, rhythmic beat of rock ‘n' roll. Together, they criticized the excessive materialism and conformity of their parents' world, feared the madness of nuclear deterrence, and denounced the anti-Communist obsession that led to proxy wars like the one in Vietnam. Both reproached America's poverty and racism, condemned the hypocrisy of a democratic society that daily violated its own ideals,
expressed contempt for the military and economic “establishment,” vowed to change “the system,” and favored direct action over the stodgy, hierarchical, bureaucratic ways of the adult world.

But there was a profound difference as well: the belief in a single “generation gap” hid the quiet desperation experienced by daughters of the fifties. Sociologists Richard Flacks and Kenneth Keniston both discovered that a majority of young male activists, however strongly they rejected adult society, nonetheless sought to live out the ideals of their liberal parents. Instead of becoming a lawyer, banker, teacher, or businessman, a male rebel might choose to join the Peace Corps, or work as a community, labor, or movement organizer. A rebellious son might reject material success, but not his future as a father. Young male activists knew they could combine a life as an activist with fatherhood. Many did just that.
⁶

For activist daughters, the generation gap was far more complicated. The immediate past conjured up images of claustrophobic marriages, coercive motherhood, and constrained chastity. Whatever their age, these young women had personal acquaintance with the power of the feminine mystique, sometimes in the person of their mother, but definitely with the fifties' cultural icon of the housewife. The ghost haunting these young women wore an apron and lived vicariously through the lives of a husband and children. Against her, the women's liberation movement would be forged.

Fear of becoming an “ordinary housewife”—in the words of feminist writer Susan Griffin—is what fueled the female generation gap. Could a woman in her twenties mate and bear children without turning into a domestic drudge? They didn't know. As they rejected the world of their mothers—but not necessarily their mothers' secret dreams—daughters searched for an identity based on something besides marriage and motherhood. And for that, there were precious few role models.
⁷

If critics detected a certain hostility toward men, marriage, and motherhood in the women's liberation movement, little wonder. As feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler later explained, “Psychologically, we had committed matricide.” But critics did not understand the source of these fears. Ranting against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, the antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly charged that feminists

hate men, marriage and children. They are out to destroy morality and the family. They look upon husbands as exploiters, children as an evil to be avoided (by abortion if necessary),
and the family as an institution which keeps women in “second-class citizenship” or even slavery.
⁸

Schlafly (willfully) mistook symbols for substance. There are reasons why movements target certain enemies, flash particular symbols, choose to use particular metaphors, and set the goals they do. Activists' images of the past naturally shape their view of the present and how they imagine the future. The ubiquity of the feminine mystique, which had politicized the lives of adult women, also politicized some young women's resistance to a domestic life. The subject of motherhood shadowed the women's movement. Sometimes young women talked incessantly about motherhood, but as an institution, rather than as part of their futures. Some feminists celebrated motherhood as a way to finesse the differences between straight and gay women or to create a basis for solidarity among women of all races and backgrounds.
⁹
However they talked about mothering, they still sought something beyond a life devoted exclusively to domesticity. As Barbara Berg has observed:

Surely this was not the first time in American history that daughters yearned to live lives different from their mothers, to forge new paths, to go in new directions. What was unique to us—the generation coming of age in the sixties and seventies—however, was that we had the
opportunity
to act on these dreams and inspirations and to make them a reality.
¹⁰

One of those opportunities was higher education. By the late fifties, liberal middle-class families expected that their daughters would attend college. But many girls felt confused about the purpose of their education. Experts warned that every year a girl spent developing her mind “reduced the probability of a woman marrying.” One critic suggested that women should not receive the same training as men. “Their place is in the home and their education should concentrate on homemaking and fitting them for their special roles as wives and mothers. It is more important that they put a good dinner on the table than that they talk Greek.”
¹¹

In 1950, Lynn White, president of Mills College and the author of the
widely read book
Educating Our Daughters
, announced that education actually “frustrated” women. Rather than straining to absorb science and philosophy, college women should, he proposed, learn the “theory and preparation of a basque paella, of a well-marinated shish-kebab, lamb kidney sauteed in sherry, an authoritative curry.” The president of Radcliffe College suggested that the college alter its regular curriculum because it only served to “equip and encourage women to compete with men.” In a 1955 commencement address at Smith College, the liberal Democrat and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson explained how much young women could accomplish during this “historical crisis” (the Cold War) by assuming “the humble role of housewife—which,” he added, “is what most of you are going to be whether you like the idea or not just now—and you'll like it!” In 1956,
Life
magazine acknowledged “that [women] have minds and should use them . . . so long as their primary interest is the home.”
¹²