by Gail Collins
Jacqueline Kennedy took the role of corporate wife far beyond the ability to wear a mink coat well and make small talk at parties. To the outside world, her marriage looked like a partnership of talented equals—an impression reinforced when she accompanied her husband to France, the country that made even the most self-confident American feel socially insecure. With her elegant look, her charm, and her perfect French accent, she created a sensation. When the president described himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” her triumph was complete.
It soon seemed as though almost every woman had a Jackie-type pillbox hat or a daring set of capri pants that resembled the ones Mrs. Kennedy wore. One day Georgia Panter, the flight attendant, was walking to work in Manhattan when a limousine pulled up at a light as she waited to cross the street. Inside the car was Jacqueline Kennedy. As the two women exchanged glances, Panter was very much aware that the uniform she was wearing was an obvious copy of one of Mrs. Kennedy’s suits. “I saw her and she saw me and I was thinking, ‘Does Jackie see how much we’re looking like her?’ ”
Jacqueline Kennedy was a transitional figure, like her era. When she wrote in her high school yearbook that her ambition was “never to be a housewife,” she didn’t mean that she wanted a career but rather that she wanted to be a woman wealthy enough never to have to think about the mundane aspects of housekeeping. She never finished college, bounding from one program to another and disappointing instructors who appreciated her keen intellect. She had been reared to know how to behave when one’s husband was having multiple affairs, but it would be much later that she would discover the capacity to live as something other than a wife. In the White House years, her aura of independence and marital partnership was part of the same calculated effect as her parties and clothes.
There was no policy-making “pillow talk” in the Kennedy White House. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the junior assistants to the president’s staff told friends that he would come upon the first lady “wandering sadly around the halls and she would say to me, ‘Mike, what’s the news?’… Nobody took the trouble to tell her.” A family friend concluded, “I suppose the president didn’t want to talk about it…. He probably wanted a stiff martini and a little food and gossip. News about what the children’s day had been, that sort of thing.”
3. Housework
“I MIGHT GET UP ABOUT FOUR THIRTY AND THEN I’D GO WEED UNTIL SIX O’CLOCK.”
When Louise Meyer and her husband were newlyweds in the 1950s, they lived in a two-room farmhouse in Eden Valley, Wyoming, that had no electricity or running water. There were no screens in the windows, and at night the moths swarmed over everything that moved, including the baby. (It has been only recently, historically speaking, that Americans have been able to obtain window screens as easily as handguns.) Instead of a refrigerator, the house had an icebox that was cooled with blocks of ice cut from the local reservoir. “It was kind of rough… but I loved it,” Meyer said.
In 1960 she was 27 and pregnant with her third child. Her house had two more rooms by then, and electricity. But she still baked her own bread, churned her own butter, and waited for the glorious day when an indoor bathroom would replace the family outhouse. Her chores were very similar to the ones that had exhausted women pioneers or even the early colonists. She was a farmwife, just as the vast majority of women have been for most of recorded history. If, like Louise, they had husbands who appreciated them and establishments that prospered, it could be a full and rewarding life. As to whether it was happy or unhappy, there was seldom much time to reflect on it.
On the farm, Bob Meyer would rise at four in the morning to begin his farm chores, and Louise would follow close behind: “If I had to weed in the garden, I might get up about four thirty and then I’d go weed until six o’clock.” They grew all the produce for the family table, including carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, beans, tomatoes, peppers, and rutabagas. “We used to raise a ton of potatoes,” she said. “In fact, that’s what we used to put our kids through school, was money from potatoes.” After the children woke up, Louise cooked breakfast—typically sourdough pancakes, eggs, and ham or bacon. At busy times on the farm, when workers came to assist with jobs such as branding the new calves, she cooked for everyone. Her husband, she recalled, laughing, “always branded on Mother’s Day.” After the family and hired help were fed breakfast, she began her household chores, helped her husband with the milking, and sewed clothes for her daughters. In the winter, she canned “anywhere from three hundred to five hundred quarts of food a year.” (In canning season, her workday continued until midnight.) Virtually everything the family ate came from their farm. “Basically the only thing we bought for years was spices and flour and sugar, coffee and rice,” she said. They raised their own pigs, cured their own ham and bacon, made their own sausage. When her children were grown and the Meyers sold the farm, “I said there’s five things I’m not going to do anymore. Raise a garden, render lard, butcher chickens, can—and I don��t remember the fifth.”
In early America, washing clothes was a chore so exhausting that most housewives simply didn’t do it. As a newlywed, Louise did laundry in much the same way colonial women did but with more determination to follow through. She heated water on a wood-burning stove and washed the clothes in a tub, scrubbing the soiled pieces against a washboard to loosen the dirt. The clothes were then wrung by hand and hung outside on a line. (In Wyoming, winter meant collecting stacks of stiff, frozen diapers and bringing them into the kitchen to thaw.) To eliminate wrinkles, she used a flatiron—basically a heavy piece of cast iron with a handle—that was left on the stove until it got hot. “Well, I’ll tell you, with flatirons it wasn’t a lot of fun,” she said. “Because you’d get them hot, and when they were really hot, they’d be too hot, and about the time they were just right, they’d get too cold.” She progressed from a tub and washboard to a washing machine with a gas motor, which used water that still had to be heated on the stove. The sopping-wet clothes were then wrung through a hand-turned wringer. That wringer could be a frightening presence. Remembering her childhood in rural Minnesota, June LaValleur recalled the day she did the laundry for her ailing mother: “My sister Sharon, who was about 8, wanted to help… and her hand got caught in the wringer. Instead of pushing the release button, all I could think of was to turn the reverse button, so it ran her hand back out again.”
“I THRIVED ON HIS COLORFULNESS.”
Wyoming calls itself the “Equality State” and takes pride in the fact that it was the first to give women the right to vote in 1869. (At the time, with only one woman for every six men in the state, legislators were hoping that suffrage would serve as a kind of advertisement. “We now expect quite an immigration of ladies,” editorialized the Cheyenne Leader hopefully.) There was a genuine sense of equal partnership embedded in traditional Wyoming farm life. To prosper, both husband and wife had to be good at their work. No matter how industrious the man, he needed his wife to sew the clothes and grow the vegetables, make the butter and sausage, and perform hundreds of other tasks on which the family’s comfort or even survival depended. And no matter how energetic the woman, she was dependent on her husband’s ability and initiative. Virginia McWilliams, who wed a Wyoming cowboy, said, “Back in those days, when they hired a man to work on the ranch, for the most part they hired the whole family. But if the man screwed up, then the whole family had no place to go.”
McWilliams’s husband, Ike, followed the rodeo as a bronc rider. “He was colorful and I was quiet. I thrived on his colorfulness,” she said. In 1961, when their fifth child was born, Ike and Virginia returned to Wyoming and began working on a large ranch. She says they shared the domestic duties. “When they were little, he got up at nights with the children and things like that. And he cooked a lot when there weren’t any men around to catch him.” And although Bob Meyer never helped with the indoor chores, Louise said he “always made me feel like what I did was just as important
as what he did.” Life, she reflected, “was never easy… and it took both adults to keep a family going.”
It took all the children as well. Wilma Mankiller was born in Oklahoma, on land her family had owned since the Cherokee were driven out of their original homes in the southeast. (The family name had originally been a Cherokee military title, the equivalent of a major or a captain.) Her mother, who married at 15 and had eleven sons and daughters, relied on the children for endless assistance, including toting water from a spring a quarter mile away for the washing. “Everybody did it,” Wilma said. “Whoever was there did that job.” While she would later run into plenty of set ideas about women’s roles when she became involved in tribal politics, she recalls her childhood as gender-neutral: “I can’t remember anyone saying you can’t do this or that because you’re a woman. Maybe my parents had too many kids and were too busy.”
“IT WAS SORT OF A FABULOUS TIME.”
Farm life could be harsh and bleak; many young people fled as fast as they could to the more varied and colorful world of the cities. But for families that were both loving and reasonably successful, farming seemed—at least in retrospect—idyllic. “We would gather in the evening and sing hymns and that sort of thing,” recalled Mary Bell Darcus, who raised a large family on a modest farm in Virginia. “When I look back, it was sort of a fabulous time compared to now.”
But it was a life that was beginning to fade into history. Children who had gathered for singing hymns and playing Monopoly with their parents lost their attachment to simple pleasures when television moved into the neighborhood. “To me, television is one of the worst things that ever happened to the world,” said Louise Meyer, who believes her oldest children, who grew up pre-TV, “had a lot happier childhood, were a lot more contented.” Her older daughters seem to agree: they have clear memories of how much they enjoyed diversions that kids of the TV age would have found unfathomable. “Do you remember when Grandpa used to come down to the house and he and Mom would share the National Geographics?” Jo Meyer Maasberg asked her older sister, Susan. “He would ask her, ‘Now, have you read this story about… ?’ and they would discuss it, and it was almost like we got to go around the world through their eyes.”
By 1960 the United States was no longer a farming country—only 30 percent of families lived in rural areas. The nation was booming, and its prosperity reached farther down into the working class than ever before. Sixty percent of families lived in a home they owned, and 75 percent had a car. A quarter of all families were living in the suburbs, the much-exalted fulfillment of the American dream—to own a nice house on a plot of land, with healthy children going to good schools and destined for even higher levels of prosperity.
In the beginning, the newly constructed dream houses were, by our current standards, very small. (In the famous Levittown development on Long Island, the basic house was a 750-square-foot, four-room Cape Cod with one bath and two bedrooms.) Their owners had, for the most part, only one car, which was taken to work by the husband. The wives were left behind in neighborhoods that were filled with other women of the same age and circumstances, whose lives revolved around their household chores and children. “I had a friend who had a date calendar with all the things she had to do. I thought that was the biggest show-off thing I ever saw,” said Edna Kleimeyer, who was living in a suburb outside Cincinnati with her husband and three small children. Some of the women who found themselves in a sea of similar-looking houses full of stranded housewives were appalled by the sameness, and never adjusted. But many were delighted to have a ready-made community. “The neighborhood was so new that immediately you became best of friends with the people who were buying the houses,” said Lillian Andrews, who moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, with her husband in 1958. “So the neighborhood became a social thing. Everybody had parties all the time. That was wonderful.”
The early suburbs were singularly unfriendly to the concept of a two-income family. Day care was virtually nonexistent, and relatives who might have been available for babysitting had been left behind in the cities or on the farms. The new housing developments were still remote from stores, offices, or almost anything that might have provided employment. Besides, many of the young couples setting up housekeeping were escaping hard times, and a stay-at-home wife was a kind of trophy—a sign that the family had made it to middle-class success and stability.
Josephine Elsberg was a secretary in Washington, DC, who had grown up in a family struggling to survive after the father deserted them. After she got married, she recalls, she sat her new husband down and told him, “Harold, you’re going to take care of me from now on. I’m not going to support myself any longer. That’s why I married you.”
“I was wondering how long you’d want to work,” said Harold.
“I never did want to work,” his new wife told him. “I always wanted to be stay-at-home.”
She was hardly alone, and thanks to the postwar prosperity and the easy mortgage credit of the GI bill, many couples found they could purchase a home and do very well on just the husband’s income. Black women, who had always worked in much larger proportions than white women, were eager for the opportunity to take care of their children full-time—particularly if they had been employed to look after someone else’s house and family. When the economic boom allowed many to do just that, Ebony celebrated with an article titled “Good-bye Mammy, Hello Mom.” Joyce Ladner, growing up in a small black community in Mississippi, still recalls the day her father told her mother, “You’ll never clean another woman’s house.”
It’s a mistake to see the race to housewifery as a lack of enterprise on the part of the women who were so eager to marry and stay home. They knew that if they had a job, it would involve working under a boss—be it a housewife in need of cleaning help, a store owner, or a school principal. Ever since colonial days, the part of full-time homemaking that women treasured most was the ability to be in charge. “I guess I just liked the freedom of being at home and not having someone tell me what to do,” said Marylyn Weller, who gave up a job as a bookkeeper in Oklahoma to raise her three children.
“I COULD NOT DO A SHIRT IN LESS THAN TWELVE MINUTES.”
In the suburbs of 1960, nobody had to churn butter or boil water for the laundry on a woodstove, but homemaking was still more than a full-time job. Typically, the postwar wives had several youngsters to take care of—the birthrate for third children doubled in the postwar years, and that for fourth children tripled. And although the country was on a tear of appliance buying, the new suburbanites were still awaiting the arrival of conveniences such as disposable diapers. Betty Riley Williams, the wife of a marine, lived in a trailer in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with her baby daughter, Anita, in 1960, and she diligently followed her mother’s instructions on how to wash the baby’s clothes. “There was a diaper pail. It was white, enamel…. I put the diapers in that and the baby clothes,” she said. Williams then boiled water, and added the water and soap to the pail. “I had to stir it with a wooden spoon for fifteen minutes. Then I’d drain them and rinse them three times and then I’d hang them on the line until they were done.” Mae Ann Semnack, who was married to a steelworker in Boston, still remembers her struggle to wash the sheets in a big tub as a weekly wrestling match. “One time, I got in there with them.”
There were no permanent-press clothes yet, and even spray-on starch was still beyond the horizon. Edna Kleimeyer used packets of starch that had to be dissolved in water. “You dipped in the collars and cuffs and hung them up to dry. Then you would take them off the line and sprinkle them, roll them up, and put them in the wash basket and cover it with a towel. And you’d start ironing. I could not do a shirt in less than twelve minutes. If you didn’t finish, you’d put what was left in the refrigerator so the clothes didn’t dry out.” Automatic washing machines had begun to drive away the dreaded wringers, but most women still hung the clothes up on a line to dry. The Kleimeyers once went to a party at the home of a
man who had connections in the appliance industry and was eager to show them a brand-new acquisition—an automatic dryer. “His wife brought out the towels, and we all had to feel them.”
The idea of being a good cook was intertwined with being a good wife. “Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven,” said an omnipresent Pillsbury ad. There was virtually no such thing as fast food, and while frozen meals had arrived, they were regarded dimly. (In The Apartment, which won the Academy Award for best picture of 1960, director Billy Wilder emphasized the pathetic loneliness of Jack Lemmon’s bachelor life by having him dine on a frozen dinner.) Women also tended to look down on desserts that weren’t made from scratch. A doctoral student who conducted a study on cake mixes in 1958 found that two-thirds of the housewives shunned them when baking for their families.
But the food industry, which knew that convenience foods would form its next generation of profit centers, was doing everything it could to eliminate the prejudice against shortcuts. With the help of cooperative women’s magazines, the industry stressed the idea that housewives were too busy to cook from scratch and that they could personalize a dish by taking a package of frozen vegetables or a cake mix and “glamorizing” the final product with a special touch such as a can of fried onions or a maraschino-cherry garnish. Pragmatic mothers began giving their newlywed daughters copies of A Campbell Cookbook: Cooking with Soup—perhaps with a bookmark on the recipe for the classic casserole, composed of cream of mushroom soup and frozen green beans. “In those days you did a lot of things with cream of mushroom soup,” recalled Angela Nolfi of Pittsburgh, who had given up her interior decorator ambitions to become a secretary and then a full-time housewife. “You would open up things like tuna fish and put them together.” And almost every social occasion, she added, involved Jell-O salad. “We were always looking for a new, interesting way to use Jell-O.”