Yeah, No. Not Happening.

by Karen Karbo

  Psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall, writing in a 1905 treatise on the tortures of being female, quoted a Dr. Engelmann, the president of the American Gynecology Society and my personal favorite for winner of the Most Overwrought Extended Metaphor of the Twentieth Century Award: “Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it cross these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and, lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the reach of sexual storms.”

  Medical “research” supported this seagoing conclusion. Women were tossed about by the mountainous ocean waves of completely normal lady biological business because it was believed we were ruled by the uterus. “It is as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it,” proclaimed a professor M. L. Holbrook, in a speech to a medical society in 1870. Dr. G. L. Austin completely disagreed. He believed the ovaries reigned as maximum overlord of the female body, “giv[ing] woman all her characteristics of body and mind.”

  Every ailment was attributed to a woman’s reproductive system, and thus demanded treatment. Got a sore throat? Must be related to some lady-bits malfunction. Too opinionated, too independent-minded, too interested in sex, or, conversely, not at all interested? Let’s take a look at your vajayjay. Leeches placed on the vagina was a popular first step to curing whatever (sometimes they got lost in there). Various concoctions were injected into the uterus—water and milk, linseed oil, marshmallow infusion—and when that didn’t work, cauterization of the cervix, often with no anesthetic save a nip of whiskey. As doctors became more adept at surgery that too became an option. By 1906, 150,000 women had had their ovaries removed.

  I will pause to allow this to sink in.

  In the same way that Botox and other spendy injectables are the domain of the wealthy and well-off determined to “cure” aging today, these “treatments” were administered to upper- and upper-middle-class women, because they could afford them. And in any case, lower-class women, whose lives were harder by any measure, weren’t particularly sickly. They got sick. Pneumonia, flu, and tuberculosis, lowbrow diseases, could kill them as well as anyone, but their overall robust health did nothing to dissuade the doctors from their beliefs; rather, it proved what the upper and middle classes had long suspected: that poor women were vulgar, coarse, and unrefined, more like oxen than the Angel in the House.

  Side note: a handy test to see if you should spend your time chasing the latest self-improvement trend is whether people without much disposable income are doing it, or should be doing it. Smoking is a good example. That shit will kill you, rich or poor. Eating more vegetables? A head of broccoli is a better investment in your health than a bag of Funyuns. Paying a personal nutrition and wellness coach to text you to make sure you’re including enough antioxidant-rich superfoods in your açai bowl? Yeah, no, not happening.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the expansion of consumerism-as-lifestyle propelled women off their collective fainting couches and into a new role. It was as good an answer to the Woman Question as any. What should we do with women? Convince them their life’s mission was to purchase all the stuff factories were turning out by the megaton. The market economy was booming, and to ensure continued growth, someone had to do it. Who better than women, who could be so easily conned into believing a bar of soap could land them a husband?*

  At the same time, the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud was making its way across the Atlantic. The teachings of Freud set the record straight: it turned out female behavior was a matter of psychology and not gynecology. Oops! Doctors, ever reluctant to admit they were wrong, stopped insisting on treating these untreatable lady ailments and looked elsewhere for new clientele.

  The era of female invalidism as a way of life was over. The neurasthenic woman with her mysterious debilitating illnesses became as passé as power suits are today. The Woman Question did not go away. It never does. The only thing that changes is the answer, and in the early 1900s, the answer was homemaking, which—hallelujah!—requires purchasing a lot of stuff. Miraculously, middle-class women arose from their sickbeds, threw off their corsets, stripped the bed, washed the sheets, and took a feather duster to the place. There were still underpaid servants to do the bulk of the work, but there was a new role for wives in the domestic sphere: they would herewith devote themselves to the myriad tasks of keeping a house clean, organized, well-run, and did I mention clean?

  The new woman was a domestic scientist in her own right. Magazines, newspapers, and books encouraged her to work endlessly to improve both her cleaning technique and, more important for our discussion, the way she thought about it. She was expected not only to do the work but also to tame any wayward thoughts she may have had about it. Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder of home economics, wrote, “It is not a profound knowledge of any one or a dozen sciences which women need, so much as an attitude of mind which leads them to a suspension of judgment on new subjects, and to that interest in the present progress of science which causes them to call in the help of the expert, which impels them to ask, ‘Can I do better than I am doing?’ ‘Is there any device which I might use?’ ‘Is my house right as to its sanitary arrangements?’ ‘Is my food the best possible?’ ‘Have I chosen the right colors and the best materials for clothing?’ ‘Am I making the best use of my time?’”

  The italics are mine, as is the irritation that Ellen Swallow Richards believed her own gender was not up to the task of reading a booklet or magazine article and figuring out how to clean her own fucking house.* You, Ellen Swallow Richards, may have been the first woman admitted to MIT, where you studied chemistry—something that was made much of, I’m sure, that a woman could excel in science!—but that doesn’t mean other women are so dim they must call in experts to judge them on their ability to mop the floor. This one-two punch should come as no surprise by now: create a scenario in which a woman must do something correctly, or else suggest she call in an expert, because without someone to “help” she will undoubtedly fail.

  Around the same time, popular science embraced the new Germ Theory of Disease. Now, keeping house wasn’t simply something for a woman to do, while also keeping her ensconced at home and away from the corrupting influences of the public arena; it was a matter of life and death. Her decisions over what cleaning products to purchase, the way she managed her family hygiene, and her self-discipline in the face of routine tasks that were insanely boring were no less important than those of a general on the battlefield. Suddenly, the health of her family was at stake. Silent killers lurked. You could not pick up a woman’s magazine from 1902 without reading an article about how germs were invading the home via library books, postage stamps, doorknobs, and baby bottles. A single mote of dust contained over three thousand germs.* Not only that, if you left your (sparkling-clean) windows open, germs might float on over from the tenements on the other side of town and infect your entire family.

  Women needed to up their game so they didn’t kill everyone in the house. For then and now, it was presumed we were never doing it right. There was always a better method, a more expensive cleanser, a better way to manage our household priorities, a way to improve. By 1920, high schools and colleges were offering home economics courses. In 1929, a household efficiency expert named Christine Frederick wrote a book called Selling Mrs. Consumer, a nearly four-hundred-page advice book aimed at advertisers, advising them how they could manipulate the fears and anxieties of the average homemaker.*

  Everything that is once new gets old. World War I came and went. Just as female invalidism had gone out of style, so did the notion that keeping a clean house was a higher, holy calling. Housework itself didn’t go away—the fetishizing of it had only created more chores—but women began to see it for what it was: no more interesting than what the servants used to do. They still d
id it—of course they did—and so do we.

  Before the baby boomers arrived, no one thought much about children. They dropped out of your vagina, and after they got themselves together (walking, talking, able to button their trousers) they went to work, helped on the farm, or cared for the ones who came after them. During the Industrial Revolution, kids shared the same advantage as women; their small size made their presence in factories and coal mines a boon because they could squeeze into nooks and crannies. The economic realities of the Great Depression caused people to rethink this. Adults needed whatever work they could get. Those nooks and crannies suddenly didn’t seem so small after all.

  In 1938, after a federal law was passed prohibiting child labor in factories, kids were—how shall I put this—underfoot. I’m guessing it was around this time that men discovered what women had always known, that children were lovable, maddening, entertaining, and downright adorable. They were more than tiny contributors to the family economy, it turned out: they were actual human beings with their own personalities. Children also had their own needs, different from those of an adult, and those needs could only be met by their mothers. Young people began to enjoy what seemed to be a very long childhood, during which their mothers were expected to scurry around tending to them, just as they did their husbands.

  In 1946 Dr. Benjamin Spock published a volume that would become one of the bestselling books in history: The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. The message to mothers was refreshing and empowering: “You know more than you think you do.” Dr. Spock was the first pediatrician to study the psychology of children and to encourage their parents to treat them as individuals. The book was huge, selling fifty million copies at the time of Dr. Spock’s death in 1998.

  Spock proposed two radical notions: that maternal instinct was innate, and that women had the common sense to follow it. Spock further believed that in mothering your baby, the best course of action was to be yourself. Motherhood, once just a part of life, became a woman’s highest calling. She, and she alone, was tasked with raising the new generation. Notice, please, the flip side: it also saddles mom with all the work, and all the responsibility when something goes wrong.

  Let’s hit pause for a moment. You may see where this is going.

  A pattern began to emerge. As the decades rolled past, the answer to the Woman Question changed in response to the needs of capitalism and the market economy. Women were tossed a bone, something that they were told only they could do—clean the house, manage the household, take care of the kids, etc. They were allowed to go about their menial business undisturbed until some new earthshaking theory came along. Public intellectuals, op-ed writers, marketers, and advertisers would stir the pot. The mass media, including women’s magazines, did their part by contributing incendiary headlines. This would cause men to sit up and take notice; on second thought, maybe this woman-only occupation was far too important to be left in the hands of women, giving rise to a new class of experts (usually men, except gender traitor Ellen Swallow Richards, mentioned above) who scooped up money, prestige, and power writing books and giving seminars and lectures and in general holding forth, telling women how to improve the thing they’d been doing just fine all along.

  As Dr. Spock’s fame grew, and as the children he helped raise began to come of age, other experts started to wring their hands. A woman may be brimming with maternal instinct, but could it really be trusted? More to the point, could a mere woman, with her sketchy “instinct,” really be trusted to raise men? I think you know the answer.

  Around the same time Spock was remaking American parenting, Austrian psychologist René Spitz began studying the effect of material deprivation on infants. He came to the conclusion that every mental disorder in an adult could be directly traced to a corresponding disorder in the mother. A baby whose mother deprived him of appropriate and continuous emotional connection would become depressed. A baby whose mother alternately pampered him and treated him with “hostility” would be a son prone to hypermotility, also known as rhythmic rocking. (I am not making this up.) A decade or so later, Harvard Medical School professor Joseph Rheingold decided the news was even worse, that all mothers were one step away from tossing their babies off a bridge. He posited that every woman subconsciously wanted to kill her child, because in giving birth to a baby, she could no longer live in denial of the greatest tragedy of her life, being born female. His theory, developed during a dozen years of clinical experience and so-called inductive inference, resulted in the publication of The Fear of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness in 1964.* Clearly mothering was far too serious an occupation to be left to mothers. Spock had liberated them, but that liberation could be disastrous! Mothers could be overpermissive, but also too strict. They could be affectionate, but also cold and withholding. It turned out that there was more to a woman than dubious maternal instinct. There was an entire, complex human being wearing that apron, making those cookies, folding that laundry, soothing that fever; could that human being be trusted? Answer: no. Every year nine gazillion parenting books are published. There are also apps—you knew there would be—including one to remind you your baby is in the car with you.

  Not every girl went straight from her father’s house to her husband’s. Young women from the upper classes, and often the daughters of progressive or intellectual fathers, went to college. Betty Goldstein attended Smith in 1938. She won a scholarship for her top grades and edited the school newspaper. After she graduated summa cum laude in 1942, Goldstein received a graduate fellowship to study at Berkeley. She was an avowed leftist, articulate, and mouthy. She left academia to write for labor union publications, and it was while working for the United Electrical Workers’ UE News that she met and married Carl Friedan, with whom she would have three children. While pregnant with their second, Betty Friedan was fired, and returned home to take care of the house and raise their kids. She continued to freelance from home.

  Friedan surveyed her fellow Smithies for their fifteen-year reunion, and was dismayed, though probably not surprised, to find a universal sense of dissatisfaction among the women. Had they really gone to college to make beds, vacuum, scrub toilets, and burn pork chops? Was comparison shopping for laundry detergent really going to be the best use of their educations?

  In 1963, she published The Feminine Mystique, an investigation into why housewives were tired and miserable. The Problem That Had No Name did have a name, of course. The boredom felt by upper- and upper-middle-class housewives was perhaps one of the original first-world problems. But that realization doesn’t solve the issue. Nor does feeling guilty because you don’t feel grateful for a roof over your head and a pan of lasagna in the fridge. This sense of being limited and labeled, of being battered by hundreds—no, thousands—of articles, essays, books, speeches, advertisements in magazines and newspapers, and television and radio commercials instructing you how to improve upon tasks you could already do with your eyes closed, was yet another iteration of Wollstonecraft’s gilt cage.

  The Feminine Mystique doesn’t really hold up. The introduction is bracing, and some of Friedan’s riffs could and should be transformed into a rap by Missy Elliott: “A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.” Then you get to chapter 12, where she compares being a suburban housewife to living in a comfortable concentration camp, and the whole thing goes off the rails.*

  Even so, the book sold over a million copies; it was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1964. It’s hard to say how many read it to the end, but no matter. It was the right message for the right time. Women were getting restive. Advertising, mass media, and popular culture had overplayed their hand. A 1960s ad for Dormeyer appliances features a row of small appliances, including an “automatic toaster.” The copy reads: “WIVES. Look this ad over carefully. Circle the items you want for Christmas. Show it to your hu
sband. If he does not go to the store immediately, cry a little. Not a lot. Just a little. He’ll go, he’ll go. Husbands: Look this ad over carefully. Pick out what your wife wants. Go buy it. Before she starts to cry.”

  Let us return to women who worked, or “worked outside the home,” as we’ve been trained to say. In the early sixties, not all women were safely tucked into their split levels, grinding their teeth while dusting the end tables. In 1960, 31 percent of all married women and 80 percent of all single women worked. That’s a lot of women who didn’t live perfect lives as portrayed on television and in the media, a lot of women for whom reality was not wall-to-wall carpets in the suburbs but a sack lunch in the steno pool.

  Helen Gurley was one of these girls. Born in Arkansas in 1922, Gurley had none of the advantages of Betty Friedan’s Smithie classmates. Her father died when she was ten, and her mother dragged Helen and her sister to Los Angeles, rather than allow neighbors to witness their descent into poverty. Helen was smart, and a hard worker, but she couldn’t afford college and enrolled in secretarial school. For the next eighteen years she worked as a secretary, then as a copywriter. Think Peggy Olson, who was Gurley-esque with her smarts, ambition, and average looks.

  Sex and the Single Girl, published after Helen Gurley married David Brown in 1959 at the age of thirty-seven, was the culmination of everything she knew about life as a woman on her own. “I think a single woman’s biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off,” she wrote. She felt marriage was for when you were old, that in your twenties and thirties you should make the most of your youth by working hard and maybe having a nice affair with the boss. She was a cheerful can-do radical with a hair-sprayed flip and an A-line dress. She thought wives were boring, and she thought husbands thought their wives were boring. “The sexiest women are the achievers, for they are the most interesting and exciting. They challenge a man by being as desirable, sought after, and respected as he is.”