The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Pauli Murray, the moving force on the committee on the law, was another gifted professional wedged against a glass ceiling, the obstacles compounded in her case by race prejudice. Murray’s memory of herself in the years leading up to the PCSW resonated with the stories of all these women: “I was standing on the corner, waiting for a movement to come along.”60 Born into a modest African-American family in North Carolina, Murray had been working since the 1930s in civil rights causes and labor causes, and had been around Washington since she attended law school at Howard University. She was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and was admitted to Howard with a recommendation from Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP (and later an associate Justice of the Supreme Court). But despite her graduation as valedictorian of her class at Howard, an advanced degree from the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and influential connections, Murray was unable to land a job in a law firm for many years. At the one corporate firm where she worked in New York, she was the only black attorney and one of three women. In 1960–61, she went to teach law in Ghana, where Nkrumah’s socialist experiment was attracting African-American visitors and expatriates. Soon disillusioned, she returned to the United States; she was looking for a job when Peterson asked her to join the commission. For Pauli Murray, working on women and the law was a chance to turn a suppressed longing into tangible intellectual labor: a “kind of heaven,” she remembered, “like throwing Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, because you see it was the first time in my life that I really sat down and researched the status of ‘women.’ ”61

  The results surprised her. “By the same token, this is where we began to discover all of this horrible sexism in the the law.”62 Starting in on the project at a moment when there was exactly one article she could locate on women and constitutional law, she saw herself as setting out into uncharted territory. And indeed, so meager was feminist history that Murray and her colleagues would have known little or nothing of the vociferous protests about the law’s treatment of women that went back to 1848.

  You can imagine, though, as if on a scrim, another image flickering behind the PCSW women at a conference table in some federal office building, burrowing into the law books to uncover the colossal matter of women’s mistreatment at the hands of the law. That would be the tea table at Seneca Falls where Stanton, the lawyer’s daughter, poured out to the others “all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere.”63

  The committees piled up a mountain of data that showed that “horrible sexism” existed across American society. Copious statistics documented the prevalence of discrimination at work and in Social Security benefits, jury service, civil service positions, lack of representation in public office, and child-care burdens. Yet the commission took great care to avoid anything that smacked of feminist complaining. Two years in the making, the report, titled American Women, was released in October 1963, as well-mannered and supportive of American society as the female commissioners’ appearance in hats and white gloves at the official ceremony of presentation to President Kennedy.64 In calm, reasoned prose, the volume reiterated the consensual ideology that lay at the heart of postwar domestic hopes. Remedies for women’s difficulties—the commission never went so far as to cast them as wrongs or injustices—would enhance the well-being of all.65

  But the mild tone should not deceive us: Regardless of its prudence, American Women marked a turning point. It was, after all, the first comprehensive enumeration of women’s grievances to enter the discourse of national politics. The goals were twofold: to open opportunities to women in paid work and to bring social recognition and compensation to the work they did at home. A faith in the power of the federal government to identify and resolve problems, inherited from the New Deal, buttressed the willingness to propose big policy changes. The PCSW recommended publicly funded child care for all classes (not just the poor), which both workingwomen and homemakers could utilize; adult education so that women, as they grew older, could adapt to the requirements of a changing labor force; and income guarantees for the pregnant and unemployed.66 On the legal committee, Murray worked out a lucid proposal to circumvent the entire ERA question by using the Fourteenth Amendment to argue for women’s equal protection; the newly liberal, activist tilt of the federal courts and the NAACP’s successes in civil rights litigation made this strategy look appealing. Finally, American Women suggested that President Kennedy issue an executive order encouraging (but not requiring) equal employment policies from employers taking federal funds.67

  Despite its avoidance of the merest hint of protest, American Women wove demurral from neo-domesticity into the Great Society idiom by gesturing toward a more expansive, productive life for women. In the discussion of homemaking, for example, the report ramped up the consensus about the value of homemakers’ labor into a definition of marriage as an economic partnership. Full-time homemakers should not be considered dependents on their husbands but equal contributors to the family’s earnings. They deserved a fair share of family property in divorce and, if widowed, the full value of husbands’ pensions.68

  The commissioners’ optimism that the spirit and perhaps even the letter of the major reforms they advocated could really come about—an optimism so odd and amazing to encounter now, when liberal hopes are much more constrained—came from confidence in the administration’s policy of sustaining and improving upon the New Deal tradition: full employment, a stable working and middle class, and upward mobility through education. They wanted the federal government to provide services that would equip women to be effective citizens at every stage, whether as homemakers or full-time workers. Democracy in women’s lives coincided with their freedom to choose—an articulation of the doctrine of personal choice that would later become a mantra of mainstream feminism. “Each woman must arrive at her contemporary expression of purpose,” whether as homemaker, artist, thinker, scientist, or public servant.69

  Respect for women’s choices politely evaded the problems that choice entailed: How was a workingwoman to choose her work when she could get no child care; how was a homemaker to choose to stay home if her husband left her? But this early formulation was perhaps not so naïve as it sounds. In the background was an awareness, rooted in social feminism, that government must address women’s dual responsibilities as collective, not individual, problems. The report was adamant about “the gross inadequacy of present child care facilities.”70 Yet it did not only focus on wage earners. It also acknowledged that domestic values played a role in life ambitions: Women desired both a secure home and a satisfying job.71 The commission sought state services that would support a multiplicity of life patterns, all strengthened by education, job counseling and retraining, and optional child care. Hovering in the background was Sweden, where women could hire trained, well-paid “mother substitutes” and “homewatchers” from government agencies, augmenting their ability to combine work and family.72

  Behind the moderate, calm recommendations lay considerable conflict. The minutes of commission meetings show that most present assumed that women preferred to stay at home, “to rear their children, to entertain the husband’s boss, to have a nice home and to work in some volunteer committee activity,” as Maurine Neuberger, senator from Oregon, put it primly (she seems to have squared all that with taking her husband’s Senate seat when he died). Any hint that the recommendations, in easing working women’s difficulties, might actually encourage mothers to work set off alarm. Some participants recoiled from any mention of European social welfare arrangements to aid mothers. Wilbur Cohen, an assistant secretary of health, education, and welfare, even repeated the 1950s canard that workingwomen raised juvenile delinquents—though Esther Peterson squashed the remark.73

  Looking back, the PCSW’s good manners seem timid when placed against the flashy confrontational feminism that shortly emerged with NOW’s formation and the arrival of radical feminism. The commission held back from recommending direct go
vernment action in employment matters and instead urged voluntary compliance from private employers in egalitarian policies. They came nowhere near the sense of the urgent need for state intervention that gripped the civil rights movement. Even Peterson later described the commission apologetically as an exercise in “the art of the possible”: “We did not propose to restructure society. Rather, we strove to fit new opportunities into women’s lives as they were.”74 “Disappointing,” one historian concludes—as if the report was supposed to address the needs of women in the twenty-first century, not in 1963.75

  Regardless of its caution, though, the commission touched a nerve, simply by highlighting the gap between the much touted value of American women and the actualities of massive indifference to them. The challenge was not lost on the New York Times reviewer of American Women, Edward Eddy, president of Chatham, a women’s college in Pittsburgh. He laid into the commission’s “shocking” incapacity to honor women’s essentially maternal nature. The PCSW had capitulated to nasty money issues like equal pay, pension equity, and job benefits that presumably subverted women’s higher mission to love and nurture. The worst, he fumed, was the suggestion for paid maternity leave, a proposal beyond the pale that would put “the white adult American male in the disadvantaged group.”76 Thus in 1963 did the head of a women’s college, historic sanctuary of American women’s brains and ambition, fulminate in the nation’s leading journal of opinion against the very thought of job equity.

  The President’s Commission sketched a female population poised for great things: determined, hopeful, and blessed with superior capabilities and plans. They only needed direction and government support to contribute mightily to the national good. Discrimination was a problem, but with proper attention, Americans could overcome old habits. The report emanated the hopefulness of that early autumn, 1963, following the great triumph of the March on Washington in August, a mood blasted within weeks by the assassination of the president.

  High-level commissions always produce documents thick with compromises, not manifestos of logic and passionate purity. Peterson pulled together the existing forces for change inside the PCSW and consolidated disagreement into a set of recommendations that quietly challenged quietism. To see only the deficits is to neglect what was forward-looking and meaningful at the time: a high-profile discussion of women’s potential, challenges to marital coverture, and a clear statement of the structural limitations to achieving women’s equality. How different the country would look now, fifty years later, if those mild, sensible recommendations had come to fruition: publicly funded day care, universal paid maternity leave, equity in job benefits, and counseling for job retraining.

  If the commission’s American Women was the ego of women’s politics in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published the same year, was the id. The book’s muckraking indictment of women’s lives and family dysfunction in the suburbs was a sensation. Pitched as an exposé of hidden horrors, The Feminine Mystique purported to reveal “the problem that has no name,” an epidemic of malaise among masses of housewives imprisoned in the “concentration camps”—Friedan actually used the image—of the suburbs. Friedan portrayed a female population awash in anomie: depressed, drug-addicted, obsessed with sex, besotted with consumer goods. The President’s Commission pledged full integration of women into the common cause; Friedan blew open the whole scenario.

  The feminine mystique was Friedan’s term for neo-domestic ideology, a toxic blend of advertisers’ blather, Freudian pronouncements on female nature, magazine pablum, social scientists’ hokum theories on well-adjusted sex roles, and the baby boom mandate. Transposing the Cold War fascination with Communist brainwashing onto the psyche of the American housewife, Friedan depicted a mass of women who had fallen into catatonia or hysteria under the totalitarian pressures of neo-domesticity. The book trembled with premonitions of a national decline that originated with homemakers. Women were trapped in their wells tocked homes, isolated from real life, slaves to their appliances and children. Sons, subjected to domineering “mom-ism,” turned into homosexuals. Husbands shrank from wives’ insatiable sexual needs. It was a veritable holocaust of families: “If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, without a strong core of human values to pass on to their children, we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women and ending with the progressive dehumanization of their sons and daughters.”77

  Friedan knew her subject intimately. The mother of three and unhappily married (as she later confessed), she was living in the early 1960s in a suburb outside New York. She was not, though, a full-time homemaker. She carried on a busy although not especially lucrative career in New York as a freelance writer, churning out homilies on the gospel of femininity. But she was stranded, and her situation fell far short of her once-high ambitions and serious politics. An active antifascist student at Smith College, Betty Goldstein followed a left-liberal trajectory after graduating in 1942, traveling at the edges of Communist Party circles, working as a reporter for the United Electrical Workers News (published by a CIO union where women were gaining prominence), and marrying Carl Friedan, then a theater manager. In 1952, she left her union job to have a family. By the 1960s, she was one among many in the hustling (and sexist) world of New York journalism, looking to cash in with a big nonfiction book, her antennae out for a potentially bestselling subject.78

  The Feminine Mystique capitalized on the polemical skills and heavy-handed rhetoric Friedan picked up in her earlier life from the Marxist-Leninist line. The central concept of a “mystique” came from the idea that capitalism duped, or mystified, workers with cheap rewards into colluding with their own oppression. The book’s caustic account of domestic life drove home its points relentlessly, producing the most devastating portrait of women’s sphere a feminist writer had ever offered. Not since Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home had anyone spoken so baldly of the claustrophobia of domestic life, the tedium of full-time child care, and the housewife’s ennui. Even so, Gilman did not go as far as Friedan in her denunciations, partly because she wrote in the early century, when domestic servants did much of the work that Friedan’s suburban housewives performed. Friedan slashed away at the sentimentality that encrusted the subject of the home, substituting melodramatic tales of mental illness and social pathology for the fantasies of the postwar agenda. Housewives teetered on the edge of drug addiction, alcoholism, and eating disorders, according to Friedan. Everywhere she spied “the lack of vitality, the deadly sameness of their lives, the furtive between-meal snacks, drinks, tranquilizers, sleeping pills.”79

  Today, The Feminine Mystique reads like a period piece, with its drug-addled zombies, sexual vampires, and wily shopaholics acting out the very misogynist assumptions Friedan was denouncing.80 Friedan ignored the millions of women who were already at work—as if there were no one else living in America but suburban housewives and she, the truth teller. She offered no prospects for change, just a single-minded injunction to housewives to get a job. Women must refuse the seductions of the cushy suburban home and the sexy cocktail hour with their husbands. The solution? Nothing like the policy portfolio of the PCSW. There was one remedy and only one. Women had to go back to work—not just any work, but a “no-nonsense nine-to-five job, with a clear division between professional work and housework” (lest domesticity suck them back). The marching orders ignored patterns of discrimination and the lack of child care that made going to work hard or impossible for many. Hers was a thoroughly middle-class perspective: In one throwaway line, she suggested hiring a “cleaning woman” to do the housework, as if a cleaning woman did not count as an oppressed woman.81

  What explains the book’s instantaneous intellectual authority? For one, the earlier success of The Second Sex carved out a niche in postwar culture for champions of women who did not particularly like women, and Friedan was one (Margaret Mead was another). Yet unlike The S
econd Sex, The Feminine Mystique offered no architectonic theory. Nor did it probe the legal and political underpinnings of the gender order, as did Mill’s Subjection of Women, or inject feminism into political theory, as did Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. Rather, The Feminine Mystique succeeded by claiming to reveal the secrets of a hidden public. Packed with juicy testimonies from anonymous housewife-informants, the book articulated the gathering objections of college-educated women in the 1960s, as they looked to join working-class women in the labor force. By the end of the decade, Friedan’s intensely self-referential white, middle-class perspective would limit her appeal. But for the moment the simplistic account got her message across. She offered readers the incitements of an American tradition of self-help through education, hard work, and willpower, a way to ride changes in the labor force already taking place.

  The Feminine Mystique was a New York book, not a Washington book; it was geared to popular culture and media exposure, not policy and power. Later, Friedan dismissed the President’s Commission as “talk, that’s all it was, talk.”82 The habits of political analysis she took from her left-wing past underlay her disdain for government action as window dressing. But The Feminine Mystique, coming in the wake of American Women, marked out a new vantage point of criticism and dissent. It was a spirited intervention in a particular time and place, America 1963, a flag planted by an outrider on a battlefield where the armies were starting to assemble.

  In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, national grief flowed into support for his civil rights agenda. Although passage of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) was by no means certain, President Lyndon Johnson made the bill his overriding priority, understanding that it spelled the loss of the white South to the Democratic Party. In the months leading up to the vote, LBJ used his peerless legislative skills to maneuver, putting together a coalition of Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans. Segregationist forces tried every means to stop it.