The World Split Open (13 page)

Some colleges and universities bowed to such pressure by altering parts of their curricula. Mills College fielded a “Marriage” major and introduced a course on “Volunteerism.” The University of Chicago, in a striking departure from its highly intellectual course of study, offered its students a course called “Parenthood in a Free Nation.” The New School in New York City offered a new course entitled “Modern Woman's Dilemma,” taught by a man, which emphasized individual rather than social solutions. Naturally, such an educational atmosphere affected women students. “We don't want careers,” explained one coed. “Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like, wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That's the important thing.”
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Veteran educators couldn't help but notice the change. In 1954, a retired female professor from the University of Illinois observed, “For these last ten years, I felt increasingly that something had gone wrong with our young women of college age.” Women faculty cringed when coeds characterized them as “bitter, unromantic old witches”—despite the fact that many had married and raised children. In 1959, Mabel Newcomer's book
A Century of Higher Education for Women
provided a devastating statistical portrait of how American society's ambivalent attitude toward women's education had eroded their educational progress. Though the overall number of women in college had soared, the percentage of college women had dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 34.2
percent in 1958. In 1920, women had earned half of all bachelor's degrees, one of every six doctorates, and by 1940 women had received 13 percent of all doctorates. Yet, by the mid-fifties, they received only 24 percent of the bachelor's degrees and 10 percent of the doctorates. Other signs of slippage worried those who cared about women's education. In 1956, three out of every five women in coeducational institutions were preparing for a future in nursing, home economics, and secretarial work. The United States was the only industrial country in which the percentage of women in universities had decreased over twenty years.
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Ironically, one of the many Cold War panics helped rescue young women from this downward spiral. The Soviet Union's launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, shocked the nation. Were Americans behind Russians in science and technology? It seemed inconceivable, but the evidence was overhead. Government and educational leaders knew that the Soviets educated both sexes in math and in the sciences. Reeling from the enemy's technological feat, the United States decided to educate not just boys but girls, too, in math and science. “A great national resource of feminine brain power is being lost,” officials now proclaimed, “because potential mathematicians, scientists, writers and artists marry early, have large families, and never put their higher education to public use.” To contain Communism, the nation suddenly needed women in the laboratory more than at home.

Girls quickly sensed the change. Guidance counselors suddenly pushed them into physics and calculus classes in high school. Such classes did a great deal to enhance young women's educational aspirations. But math and science still could not help them figure out how to escape the ghost who wore an apron. As they entered college, some young women imagined following in the footsteps of their fathers—even though, like their male counterparts, they often rejected the “compromises” associated with their fathers' lives. But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they felt they had no legitimate claim to “male” occupations, patterning themselves after adult men was simply not a viable option.

The rebellious young women who postponed marriage and childbearing tried on new identities found in teen culture or college life, and perhaps in “the movement”—but only, it seemed, by modeling themselves after their male counterparts. Within these various youth cultures, women could make an end run around marriage and motherhood, and
experiment with different kinds of independent identities. But assuming the garb of a male rebel simply postponed the day when young women would have to figure out how to mate and bear children, if at all,
and
still maintain an independent identity. This is one reason why the American women's movement became so engrossed with the question of female identity. As future feminists tried to escape the feminine mystique, they discovered solutions that addressed men's alienation, but not their own.

The female generation gap brought different issues to the surface, requiring different answers. These young women had long sensed “that underneath the busy dailyness of [our mothers'] lives, there was a deep and stagnant well of frustration and sorrow.” Sometimes, mothers had openly discussed their sorrows with their daughters. But nonverbal messages—sighing, psychosomatic complaints, unexplained weeping—communicated just as well what a conspiracy of silence often forbade: the expression of profound discontent.
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And many mothers, it turned out, wanted a different future for their daughters. In a 1962 Gallup poll, only 10 percent of mothers hoped their daughters would follow the pattern of their lives. In letters to Betty Friedan, women wrote of their dreams for their daughters. One mother, a self-described “drop-out from Oberlin College” who became “a victim of the Feminine Mystique and the mother of five,” hoped her daughter would never experience the “servile feeling” she had felt as a housewife. “How can we help our daughters to avoid making the mistake of following the crowd into early marriage? I would be heart-broken to see any of them make the mistakes I've made.”
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But mothers also worried about their daughters' future security and encouraged them to marry and have children as well. “Be like me, don't be like me,” was the confusing message a good many daughters imbibed along with their milk and cookies. The result was that many young women grew up with a pervasive sense of ambivalence about the future. They feared becoming like—or unlike—the cultural image of the fifties mother. It was an ambivalence felt even by women across (white) class lines. In her research on middle-class and working-class daughters of the era, Kathleen Gerson found that 79 percent of women's families had
stressed the importance of a domesticized future. Yet, 45 percent of these daughters developed an early aversion to such a life and had “looked on marriage and children with either indifference or disdain as children. Instead, they gave central importance to work,” emphasizing “the dangers of domesticity instead of its joys.”
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Young black women, in contrast, were more likely to feel empathy for their mothers, whom they admired as the foundation of their families and communities, and viewed as models for their future lives. But they sometimes wanted their mothers' lives to conform to what they saw on television. As a girl, Assata Shakur wished her mother were more “normal.”

Why didn't my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school? Why didn't we live in a house with a backyard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. “How disgusting,” I would think. Why didn't she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on television?
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Alix Kates Shulman's popular novel
Burning Questions
, published in 1978, created an unforgettable portrait of a future middle-class white feminist. Born before World War II, Zane, the heroine of the novel, grows up in Babylon, Indiana, where she restlessly passes her childhood digging holes to China in her backyard. In adolescence, she chafes at the shallow conformity and empty materialism of her middle-class suburban family. A misfit who devours biographies of revolutionaries and plays chess, Zane eventually escapes in the late fifties to MacDougal Street, in New York City's Greenwich Village, where she throws herself into the underground Beat culture. Soon disillusioned, Zane marries, bears three children, and rapidly descends into domestic drudgery. From the window of her Washington Square apartment, an envious Zane watches a slightly younger generation march for civil rights, demonstrate against the Vietnam War, and float to a new consciousness on the drugs and sex of an exuberant counterculture. At novel's end, Zane joins a women's group, where, for the first time, she feels free to explore the “burning questions” of a lifetime.
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As sociologist Wini Breines has observed, “coming of age” novels
written by such women often turned on fears of replicating the lives of their mothers. In Barbara Raskin's
Hot Flashes
, one character says, “None of us wanted to do any of the things our mothers did—nor the way they did it—during the postwar years.” In Lynn Lauber's
White Girls
, the heroine portrays her mother as a frustrated and disgruntled woman. Observing the wealthy WASP women of her childhood, the writer Annie Dillard wrote, “They coped: They sighed, they permitted themselves a remark or two, they lived essentially alone. They reared their children with their own two hands, and did all their own cooking and driving.” In each case, the writer focuses on some aspect of her mother's life that she vows not to repeat.
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Every generation of daughters is finely attuned to the source of their mothers' unhappiness. Daughters of the fifties instinctively blamed the feminine mystique for their mothers' compromises and disappointments. But not all young women felt a need to declare a generational war on adult women. Most daughters quietly embraced new opportunities in higher education, pursued jobs or careers, married, juggled work and children, or decided to forgo marriage and children altogether. But the young women who created the women's liberation movement both
politicized
and
publicized
their rejection of the feminine mystique.

Those who became feminists had learned to politicize what they observed. Some “Red-diaper babies” (children of Old Left parents) grew up learning the language of social and economic justice. Others, who grew up in conservative homes, often absorbed that language when they befriended young radicals in the civil rights or antiwar movements. Most importantly, a critical number of young women learned, through their experiences in other political movements, how to identify and politicize a personal sense of social and economic injustice.
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Those who become leaders, activists, or writers in the women's liberation movement early had observed the lives of their mothers or of other adult women, and, even when they admired their political visions or commitments, knew they didn't want an
exclusively
domestic life. Naomi Weisstein, a major theorist and activist in the movement, described herself as a “polka dot diaper” baby, the daughter of a mother who “had grown up in a Bolshevik family and had become the kind of feminist you could be in the 1920s, not sufficient to pursue her career [as well as] have kids.” Before having children, Weisstein's mother had been a concert pianist. With children, her career ended. As a teenager, Weisstein “vowed that I would never get married and that I would never
have kids. I was sure it ruined her life. And I still think so.”
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Perhaps it is not surprising that Weisstein, a well-known physiological psychologist, later founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock and Roll Band.

Barbara Ehrenreich, too, remembered how “you had to steel yourself as a girl if you didn't want to follow a prescribed role.” Her mother's expectations ran low. “Even at a young age, I could understand that the only good thing you could do as a woman was to be a housewife, but you would never have any respect that way. Because I don't think my father respected my mother. She was a full-time housewife, and that's what I did not want to be.”
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Middle-class girls were not alone in rejecting the feminine mystique. Phyllis Chesler, a product of a working-class home and author of
Women and Madness
, later wrote, “If I had wanted to be anything other than a wife and mother, perhaps an actress, I had absolutely no female role model or mentor. I knew nothing about my feminist history. My generation would not discover our feminist legacy until we were in our twenties, thirties, even forties.” Irene Peslikis, a feminist activist and artist, grew up in a Greek working-class family in Queens, New York. Her mother worked outside the home—as a hatcheck girl or as a factory hand—to help the family stay afloat. Still, by the time she reached adolescence, Peslikis had decided “I wasn't going to be a housewife. . . . I didn't think too much about marriage, and when I did I would cringe at the very idea.”
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Many young feminists grew up in such working-class homes. In fact, a disproportionate number of leaders and activists came from secular, working-class Jewish activist families. Later, the media would describe
all
feminists as white middle-class women, but appearances often deceive. The movement naturally grew from an educated and relatively privileged constituency, but many young women who joined the early women's liberation movement were raised by blue collar parents who wanted their daughters to be the first in their family to attend college. Higher education is what transformed these working-class adolescents into middle-class women. As they mingled with other students, they acquired the social confidence, verbal skills, and appearance that would mask their working-class backgrounds. By the late sixties, many feminists, including Gloria Steinem, Ellen Willis, Marge Piercy, Phyllis Chesler, Susan Griffin, Alta, and Alix Kates Shulman, to name but a few of the better-known activists, spoke, wrote, dressed, and otherwise acted like middle-class women. But they first crossed class lines,
gained a sense of middle-class entitlement from their education, and only then turned their attention to the “woman question.”
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