by Gail Collins
“I THOUGHT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE CLEANED EVERY DAY.”
In the 1960s new time-saving appliances kept marching off the assembly lines and into American homes. Almost all the women who were using them could remember a time, barely twenty years in the past, when a great many people did not have running water and a third of the nation’s housewives cooked on wood- or coal-burning stoves. Many still referred to their purring refrigerators as the “icebox” because they had grown up in houses where food was chilled in boxes filled with ice, and the “iceman” was as regular a visitor as the milkman and the coal man. Now, the suburban kitchen refrigerators not only ran on their own but were beginning to defrost themselves and produce ice at the touch of a button. The dreaded laundry chores were tamed by the arrival of permanent-press clothing, better steam irons, and those automatic dryers. “Wash-and-wear clothing and the steam iron were the real liberation for women,” said Edna Kleimeyer. Once they were all in place, it was possible to get the basic household chores done relatively quickly.
Yet the housewives did not seem to be working any less. The amount of time spent on housework was very difficult to quantify. A methodical study by the sociologist Joann Vanek that used pretty much all the data available concluded that in the 1960s, the full-time homemaker spent fifty-five hours a week on her domestic chores. That was actually a little more than in the 1920s, when women were washing by hand and keeping their food cold in iceboxes. On the other hand, Vanek found that women who had outside jobs spent less than half as much time on housekeeping. That held true even when Vanek considered factors such as children and outside help. (Husbands’ contributions were so minimal at the time that they didn’t really figure into the equation.)
Clearly, women were responding to their time-saving appliances by raising the bar for housekeeping. They bought their family more clothes and washed them more often. (In the 1950s the average household laundry soared from thirty-nine pounds to sixty-five pounds a week.) Once they had acquired a second car, they became chauffeurs, driving their children around to lessons and sports. Vanek found that between shopping and ferrying children, “contemporary women spend about one full working day per week on the road and in stores.” They took up gourmet cooking or interior decorating. Myrna Ten Bensel, who had four children in St. Paul, decided to up the ante by making her own diapers: “You could buy diaper fabric in the dry-goods store, and I would cut them and hem them.”
Josephine Elsberg, who made it clear to her husband that she didn’t want to work outside the home, was a dynamo inside. “I thought everything should be cleaned every day,” she recalled. “Have to vacuum every day. Have to clean the bathroom every day. I was a fanatic.” When the family became prosperous enough to acquire a maid, Elsberg never allowed her to do the cooking or the laundry. She ironed everything herself, including the bedsheets, which she washed twice a week. She spent every winter personally repainting the entire house and every summer planting in the garden. The local beautification program gave her multiple commendations, and when her daughter went off to college, she wrote back about how much she missed the feel of freshly ironed sheets. “And I said, ‘That made it all worthwhile,’ ” Elsberg recalled.
“NO ONE EVER DIED FROM SLEEPING IN AN UNMADE BED.”
The very fact that there were so many women ready, willing, and able to purchase a new washer/dryer or self-cleaning oven made the nation’s advertising industry deeply interested in the suburban housewife. She was the consumer in chief who had to be flattered and assured that there was no human gratification greater than the sight of a perfect white load of laundry or a shiny kitchen floor. The women’s magazines—all edited by men—could not say enough about the glories of housekeeping or how enthusiastic husbands and children would be over a well-washed shirt or the cherries on that newly baked cake.
“Togetherness” was the McCall’s magazine watchword for the new American family partnership, in which the stay-at-home wife took an interest in her husband’s job while the husband took a deep interest in issues such as interior decor and family fun. One New York Times columnist, commenting on the “extraordinary” new emphasis on shared family lives, quoted a male friend as saying, “If my wife had her way, I think we’d all breathe in unison.” The housewives often were equally skeptical of the magazines’ romanticism, having spent years experiencing just how much reaction a load of clean clothes really got. They fell in love with a generation of female humorists who wrote about families and homemaking with wry realism, like the columnist Erma Bombeck (“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed”). Jean Kerr’s chronicles of her move to the suburbs with a husband and three sons, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, was so popular it was made into both a movie and a TV series. “I know that small children have a certain animal magnetism. People kiss them a lot,” wrote Kerr in an essay that questioned why etiquette books were written for grown-ups rather than 3-year-olds. “But are they really in demand?… No. For one thing they bite, and then they keep trying to make forts with mashed potatoes. It holds them back, socially.”
“THE OTHER HALF ARE FREE IN SPIRIT ONLY.”
While the women’s magazines went into ecstasy over the accomplishments of the new suburban housewife, the rest of the mass media were somewhat less enthusiastic. Playboy, which would open its first, much-touted Playboy Club in 1960, was a center of rebellion against the new postwar order of domesticity. It celebrated the freedom of the cool bachelor, who had jazz on the stereo, martinis at the bar, and a long line of playmates who were willing to provide sex without commitment. “Approximately half of Playboy’s readers are free men,” the magazine noted in 1958, “and the other half are free in spirit only.” Popular magazines began theorizing that the pressure on men to provide well for their families might be sending them into premature heart attacks. Women’s life expectancy, it was noted repeatedly, was outstripping men’s. “You can hardly pick up a paper, a magazine, a book, go to a play, movie, or watch TV without discovering what the American wife is doing to the ego, the maleness, the very essence of her man,” complained Margaret Taylor Klose in McCall’s.
The national move to the suburbs had changed things for men, too. They lost the old urban patterns of nights out with male friends or visits to neighborhood bars. Social life revolved around couples at cocktail parties or families watching movies at drive-in theaters, with the children bouncing around in their pajamas in the backseat. Most of the husbands seemed to like their new lives, but the American decision makers and commentators who were based in big cities found it hard to believe they were really happy. The prototypical suburban husband, as many editors and writers saw it, was going off to work at a white-collar job that often entailed a great deal of psychological stress. And where did his salary go? To pay for more work-saving appliances for his nonworking wife! There was a great deal of talk about the emasculation of men who had to labor at stultifying jobs in the city and then come home to a demanding wife who had spent the whole day doing—whatever it was women did. And in the black press, the rising number of female-headed households was being blamed on black women who, the editors charged, failed to respect their husbands properly and made too many material demands. “The life of many a ‘wealthy’ Negro doctor is shortened by the struggle to provide diamonds, minks, and an expensive home for his wife,” claimed the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.
“IT DOES NOT LAST VERY LONG.”
Whether they were being overpraised or underestimated, most of the women who had raced to marry after World War II were plenty busy in the 1950s and early ’60s, inundated with the responsibilities of rearing offspring they had borne quickly and close together. A typical woman married at 20 and had three children, completing her family before she was 30. Anyone with two or three preschoolers in the house generally does not have much leisure time to wonder about the meaning of life, let alone the long-term sociological impact of washer/dryers and microwave ovens. But by 1960 the first wave of the baby-boom generation was already in h
igh school. Many housewives would still be in their prime when the nest emptied out entirely, and without children, mothers would likely find that housekeeping was not all that challenging. What would happen then?
It was a question remarkably few women seemed to ask themselves, even though almost everyone who paid attention saw what was coming. “Whether one finds it richly rewarding or frustrating, there is one trouble with motherhood as a way of life. It does not last very long,” wrote the editors of Harper’s in a special issue on American women in 1962. George Gallup, conjuring up his average American woman for the Saturday Evening Post in the same year, had much the same thought: “One real problem shows clear in the silhouette we have cut: the empty years to be faced by the typical American woman—perhaps half her lifetime—after the children are grown and gone. She has not prepared for them, and is not preparing now…. In fact, throughout the whole study, few women seemed aware of the lonely years ahead.” Even Newsweek, in its cranky feature about dissatisfied housewives who failed to understand that biology is destiny, mentioned that the average housewife had “forty-five years of leftover life to live” when her last child entered school.
It was not a problem previous generations had faced. The average woman born in 1900 could expect to live to be only around 50. She would have continued to have children until menopause—leaving the nest stuffed until she died. If she did survive to old age, she would probably finish her life in the home of a son or daughter, as a live-in babysitter. That pattern was as old as memory, and although it had been changing gradually over the century, a country distracted by two world wars and a massive depression had failed to notice.
“I WAS HANGING CLOTHES ON THE LINE WITH TEARS JUST STREAMING DOWN MY FACE.”
Even those short-lived days of full-time motherhood in the nation’s suburban homes didn’t satisfy every woman who found herself living the new American dream. Some young housewives discovered, to their shock, that they didn’t really like the existence they had been groomed from childhood to believe would make them fulfilled. In 1960 Redbook magazine ran an article called “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” and invited readers to write in, with a $500 prize for the best description of the feeling. The editors were stunned with the avalanche of mail: 24,000 replies.
Housewives who felt trapped were not a new phenomenon, even if nobody had done a poll or requested reader responses on the topic in earlier eras. But personal happiness had not been regarded as an entitlement then. And it surprised the nation—or at least the media—that the women who had acquired better homes and more conveniences than any previous generation should seem to be particularly miserable. “She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of,” said Newsweek.
Many of the most unhappy—and vocal—housewives were college graduates who had gone to school under the peculiar conditions of the postwar era. For most, it was a given that they would marry in their early 20s, start families almost immediately, and dedicate their lives to homemaking. Yet as students they had taken the same courses the career-bound men had, passed the same tests, and researched the same papers to prepare for a future they never actually intended to have. Inevitably, many of them wound up feeling disoriented. “It was odd when you think about it. You didn’t think about it, though,” said Joanne Rife, who graduated from Occidental College, married the same year, and moved to Santa Barbara County in California with her husband, a rancher. By 1960 Rife was pregnant with her third child. She felt exhausted all the time, even though the housework wasn’t physically challenging and she enjoyed her children. “I think it was mental fatigue more than physical…. It was not a fulfilling kind of thing,” she recalled. “The kids were fulfilling but not the house.” Within another few years, “I was really at the end of my rope. I felt trapped by my situation…. I was hanging clothes on the line with tears just streaming down my face.”
“… HUNCHED OVER THIS PAPERBACK, FROWNING.”
Since the phenomenon of the unhappy homemaker seemed to center around the college-educated women, then perhaps it was the fault of… college. Rather than questioning why so many of their graduates were being cut off from any chance of using their education in the outside world, college presidents had spent the 1950s striving to prove that their curriculum was designed to create competent and happy housewives. The (male) president of all-female Radcliffe celebrated the beginning of every school year by telling the freshmen that their college education would “prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers and their reward might be to marry Harvard men.” The (male) head of Mills College in California proposed that female students be schooled in the “theory and preparation of a Basque paella, of a well-marinated shish kebab, and lamb kidneys sautéed in sherry.”
Betty Friedan, a freelance writer in suburban New York, got a commission from McCall’s magazine to write a defense of the kind of well-rounded education she had gotten at Smith fifteen years earlier—a piece that was supposed to depict college as the perfect preparation for life as a “togetherness” wife and mother. A psychology degree from Smith had not actually kept Friedan from becoming a pretty unhappy housewife herself. The mother of three, she lived with her family in a restored Victorian house on the Hudson River. While she passed as a stay-at-home housewife in the neighborhood, she was in fact an accomplished writer whose work had been published in a number of national magazines. But she was restless and dissatisfied, and it was not—at least not entirely—because her marriage had plummeted to the stage where Friedan’s fights with her husband left her trying to conceal the bruises.
Before her fifteenth Smith reunion, Friedan spent an entire year preparing an alumnae questionnaire “of inappropriate and unnecessary depth” that was going to form the basis of her McCall’s article. Her former classmates were stunned by the length and specificity of Friedan’s questions, but many of them plunged ahead gamely and provided information that sparked one of the most influential books in American history. Rather than revealing that college-educated women had been given the ideal preparation for their careers as full-time housewives, the survey responses showed Friedan that a number of her peers were slowly going crazy in their well-appointed homes, just as she felt she had been doing. The material formed the basis of The Feminine Mystique, in which Friedan wrote about a kind of vague despair that left women asking themselves, “Is this all?” One young mother of four told Friedan, “There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”
The Feminine Mystique was like an earthquake compared to the tremors about unhappy housewives that had registered before. Friedan described the problem in scorching prose that made it seem much worse than anyone had previously suggested. “You’d be surprised at the number of these happy suburban wives who simply go berserk one night, and run shrieking through the street without any clothes on,” she quoted an unnamed doctor as saying. And unlike most of the other panels and probing essayists, Friedan told the American housewife (specifically the well-educated, middle-class suburban one) that she was absolutely right to feel dissatisfied. There were, according to Friedan, no “happy housewives”—or scant few. Women were being forced to waste their lives on meaningless household chores in order to create profits for the manufacturers of household goods. They were being duped into believing homemaking was their natural destiny by gushy, unrealistic articles in women’s magazines—all edited by men. It was natural to want marriage and children, she wrote, but housekeeping was no full-time job for a smart, well-educated woman. “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future,” she concluded in a call to arms—or at least to outside em
ployment.
The power of Friedan’s writing, the wealth of statistics and anecdotes (after years of freelancing, she was especially devastating on the subject of women’s magazines), and the fact that she was writing from the same place as her audience made The Feminine Mystique a sensation when it was published in 1963. Madeleine Kunin, the rejected journalist, argued about it with her book club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her husband was at Harvard Medical School: “Some of the women were outraged that The Feminine Mystique had placed their choices into question, and others, like myself, felt at last they had been understood.” Joanne Rife, who had been hanging the family laundry with tears running down her cheeks, picked up a paperback copy, and “it really got me fired up…. I mean, like, ninety-five percent was true to my experience.” She gave the book to a good friend, she recalls, “and she read it and got a divorce. She should’ve. He was a jerk.” Anna Quindlen, the novelist and columnist, says she remembers few specific details from her childhood, but one of the most vivid is seeing her mother “hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows.”