by Gail Collins
Despite the universal desire to return to “normal,” things had changed. The old pattern, in which women worked until they married and then never again, was broken. And the women who went back to their homes, never to enter the job market again, were different, too. “They realized that they were capable of doing something more than cook a meal,” concluded Dellie Hahne, the music teacher, who remembered decades later when she went to Sunday dinner at an older woman’s home and listened while “she and her sister…were talking about the best way to keep their drill sharp in the factory. I had never heard anything like this in my life. It was just marvelous. I was tickled.”
18
The Fifties:
Life at the Far End of the Pendulum
“I DREAMED I STOPPED TRAFFIC IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA”
In the era after World War II, American women embraced discomfort in a big way. Their full skirts came to midcalf and were held out with stiff petticoats made of taffeta or some equally itchy fabric. Or they wore equally long formfitting sheathes that constrained the wearer to take only tiny steps as she tottered along in her 4-inch stiletto-heeled shoes. Their hair had to be set on huge rollers, and girls went to sleep wearing what must have felt like a helmet full of tin cans. Hairstyles kept getting bigger and stiffer, requiring tons of spray to keep them in shape. There were legends—possibly invented by exasperated mothers—about girls who died of blood poisoning when insects made nests inside their overly lacquered mounds of hair.
Breasts were supposed to be large, high, and pointy, which for all but the most anatomically gifted meant either a lot of padding or a lot of bra. Women thought quite a lot about bras in the fifties; even undeveloped preteens wanted to wear them, and manufacturers readily complied by inventing the utterly useless but extremely popular “training bra.” Strapless evening gowns required strapless bras, an engineering challenge for the well-endowed women who were the fashion ideal. Industrialist Howard Hughes put some of his aircraft engineers to work on a cantilevered bra that lifted and separated the breasts, which his friend actress Jane Russell wore to great effect. Russell became a big star in the fifties, just when the breast was beginning its career as the most important part of the female anatomy. One of the era’s most famous ad campaigns showed women clad only in bras from the waist up, engaged in all sorts of activities from bullfighting to dog-walking. “I dreamed I stopped traffic in my Maidenform bra,” announced the copy below a picture of a half-clothed policewoman. The bras in question were such formidable foundation garments that the impact was anything but sensual. Nevertheless, students in some Catholic girls schools, under vigorous encouragement from their teachers, started letter-writing campaigns protesting that the Maidenform ads gave teenage boys impure thoughts.
Girdles, which had been in short supply during the war years, came back in force, along with the merry widow, a boned, laced corset. The idea was to be both curvy and armored. “In order to wear the sheath dresses of the fifties without a bulge we sweltered in Playtex tubes and zipped and hooked ourselves into the iron virgins that would have daunted any Victorian maiden,” wrote Benita Eisler, who came of age in the fifties and recalled seeing “the red welts and grooves on the willowy torso of my roommate” as she unbound herself after a date.
Looking back, it’s easy to see the clothes as a metaphor for everything else that happened to women in postwar America. (The experiences we equate with the fifties actually stretched, for most people, from 1945 to the mid-1960s—a twenty-year decade.) After the eras of the settlement house workers and the flappers, after having survived the Depression and kept the economy running in World War II, women seemed to have been catapulted back in time to the nineteenth century, to the cult of the True Woman and the corset that went with it. They dropped out of college, married early, and read women’s magazines that urged them to hold on to their husband’s love by pretending to be dumb and helpless. They were isolated in the suburbs, marooned in a world of women and children while their husbands drove off every day to careers in the city. They came down with mysterious ailments, like the ladies in the pre–Civil War period. TV ads warned of a disease called “tired blood,” which only a daily dose of Geritol could cure. Women looking for a more modern remedy took to the new wonder drug called tranquilizers.
But plenty of women worked outside the home during the postwar era. Within a few years of the end of hostilities in 1945, employment of women was just about back to its wartime peak, and still climbing. However, the jobs they were holding down were not, for the most part, careers. Women were typists and sales clerks and telephone operators and receptionists, doing the low-paying and unglamorous work no returning veteran would want to snatch. The housewives who moved to the suburbs felt, for the most part, that they were escaping a slavery to the time clock and setting up their own shops in brand-new houses filled with new conveniences. They might have resembled Victorian True Women, but they were also a little like those Pilgrim wives who yearned to get out of the fields and into the kitchen.
The explosive economy, combined with the generous benefits the government doled out to returning veterans, made it possible for very young couples to marry while the husband was still in school, buy a house without any savings, have several babies right away, and continually ratchet up their standard of living, all on the income from a single salary. It was a phenomenon that couldn’t be repeated by the generations that followed, whether they wanted to or not. But when people in the fifties said everybody was doing it, they really did mean almost everybody. Until World War II, only a relatively small slice of the population actually had any options except toiling endlessly on a farm or factory. Then suddenly, 60 percent of American families managed to become home-owning members of the middle class. Ebony enthused “Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom” as it celebrated the ability of African American women to stay in their own kitchens rather than cleaning someone else’s. It all seemed almost too good to be true; nearly everybody wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to create families fast, before another disaster overtook the country, like the war or the Depression. And if anybody wondered what that new disaster might be, all they had to do was look at the magazine articles that showed how to construct a do-it-yourself bomb shelter.
The pendulum of modern American social history has a tendency to swing wide. In the 1950s, people were reacting against those editorial writers in the 1930s who felt doing without was good for your soul, and the government propagandists in the war years who expected women to work in steel mills and paint lines down the back of their legs instead of wearing stockings. People wanted large cars, large appliances, and large families. The number of couples with four children or more tripled, and the nation’s population growth rate was suddenly rivaling India’s. The very young wives and mothers of the postwar era flung themselves into homemaking, trading recipes for green bean casserole made with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, worrying about the whiteness of their laundry and the greenness of their lawns, and consulting Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care several times a day.
“I MADE TERRIFIC FRIENDS RIGHT AWAY”
The suburbs were a new phenomenon. Never before, anywhere on the planet, had so many people had the opportunity to buy their own homes, each attached to a little plot of land, averaging a fifth to a tenth of an acre. Everything was new—even the trees looked raw and unfinished, hardly more than gangly twigs sprouting hopefully from newly seeded front lawns. In the early days, the suburbs were nothing but houses, as far as the eye could see, and most families had only one car, which the husbands took to work, leaving the wives stranded in a vast sea of Cape Cods, ranches, or colonials. In an area west of Cincinnati, an entrepreneurial merchant gutted an old school bus, put in shelves, and stocked them with groceries, painted “Art’s Rolling Food Store” on the side, and brought the corner deli to the homebound wives.
The new neighborhoods were generally racially and sometimes religiously homogeneous. That had some terrible socia
l consequences over the long run—African Americans and other minorities were cut off from the chance to buy that first low-cost, low-interest home which formed the basis of the economic fortune of so many white families. But over the short term, the lack of diversity made it easy for the suburban wives to form quick friendships. “Our lives are held closely together because most of us are within the same age bracket, in similar income groups, live in almost identical houses and have common problems,” said the first issue of a community newspaper in Levittown, the famous 17,000-home development in Long Island. The basic Levittown house became a model for developments around the country and it was far from opulent—a four-room Cape Cod with one bathroom and about 750 square feet of living space. But it looked like a castle to women who had been stuck living with relatives or struggling to find an apartment in the postwar housing shortage.
The 1950s suburbs gave birth to a new community of women, as rich in its own way as the ones that preceded it during the war, or around the turn of the century. The housewives looked after each other’s children, fed each other’s dogs, talked endlessly over coffee in the afternoon or highballs at the end of the day, and entertained each other at neighborhood backyard barbecues or more formal cocktail parties. “I made terrific friends right away through the children,” said Carol Cornwall, a suburban housewife in the 1950s who was interviewed by Benita Eisler. But there were few escape routes for those who failed to fit in. “I was as miserable there as I’ve ever been in my life,” another woman told Eisler. There were few organizations except the PTA and the churches, and it was a dicey time politically, when fear of the Communist menace made it dangerous for people to hold anything but the most pedestrian views about public affairs. For the excluded or unsociable, the enforced sameness of the suburbs could be mind-bending. (In Levittown, outdoor clothes drying was permitted only on specially designed, collapsible racks.) The heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Main Street who had been driven over the edge by the lack of stimulation in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, had nothing on the unhappy housewife who landed in Orange County, California, or Green Township, Ohio, and discovered she didn’t fit in.
“IF MY WIFE HAD HER WAY
I THINK WE’D ALL BREATHE IN UNISON”
A century had passed since middle-class families needed to work together as a unit to support themselves. But in the 1950s, husbands, wives, and children were urged to do everything together except work. People who wanted to see a movie bundled their children into the car and went to the drive-in. Family restaurants specialized in child-friendly menus, and the opening of Disneyland in 1955 drove home the idea that vacations were meant to be taken as a group. “Emphasis on family members’ sharing every aspect of one another’s lives has risen to an extraordinary pitch in the last year or so,” noted Dorothy Barclay, a columnist for the The New York Times Magazine in 1956. She quoted one male friend complaining that at his house “we already read, wash dishes, clean the car, paint, go hiking and fix the furnace together…. If my wife had her way I think we’d all breathe in unison.”
It was what McCall’s magazine loudly and insistently referred to as “Togetherness.” Wives were supposed to take an interest in their husband’s work, and the men were also supposed to get involved in household matters that had always before been designated as womanly concerns. The ideal father went shopping for furniture with his wife, and discussed the color schemes of the house and the menu plans for dinner parties. He changed babies’ diapers—at least in emergencies—and listened to children’s homework lessons. Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, surveying the changing scene in Parents magazine, worried that children would get the impression that their fathers didn’t have to work hard to bring home the bacon. “When the father comes home and is tacitly expected (or openly asked) to take over the care of the children…the impression is conveyed to the child that he has been more or less loafing all day and Mother now expects him to start on the serious tasks.”
In reality, few suburban fathers really shared the household duties. Generally the role celebrated for Dad was that of recreation director. “Adventure is a father’s meat. Poor mother is so loaded down with seeing that clothes are clean and food is cooked, she doesn’t have much head for thinking up exciting things for the family to do. Here’s where father can be of help,” wrote the director of the Louisiana Society for Mental Health in The New York Times Magazine. However illusory the husbands’ real contribution was, however, it was a huge shift for men to be expected to get involved at all.
All this was happening at the same time that another big change was under way: Housekeeping was getting easier. Manufacturers had finally perfected the automatic washing machine and the dryer—the long-awaited inventions that would soak and wash and rinse and dry clothing all by themselves. Ever since humans developed an interest in clean clothing, women had been forced to devote at least one full day a week to the laundry. Suddenly, it became less of a project than something you did any old time, sort of with the back of your hand. The washboard, along with the icebox and the handheld eggbeater, were consigned to the farmhouses or to the old urban tenements you might revisit for fun on the Honeymooners TV series. Americans spent a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on appliances in the 1950s—everybody wanted the biggest and the best, preferably in the new colors that were suddenly available, like avocado. Betty Furness, who became a celebrity due to her talent for demonstrating refrigerators and dishwashers on television, noticed that the appliances kept getting larger. When she made the much-heralded Westinghouse commercials that ran during coverage of the 1952 presidential conventions—Furness was on the air three times an hour, more than the candidates—the refrigerators only came up to her shoulder. But by the time the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower for a second term in 1956, the new models were looming over her. All of them featured bigger freezers, the better to store all the new frozen foods that could be turned into full dinners with only a bit of reheating.
“ALL THE GANG HAS STARTED
THEIR OWN SETS OF STERLING”
In 1950, Elizabeth Taylor, the beautiful child star of the 1940s, married for the first time at age nineteen. Like almost half of the American women of the period, she was a bride before her twentieth birthday—although Taylor had to have her first baby before the movie magazines would decree her “A Woman at Last.” People had begun marrying earlier during the war years, but after 1945, the trend really picked up steam. “Not so long ago girls were expelled from college for marrying; now girls feel hopeless if they haven’t a marriage at least in sight by commencement time,” wrote Sidonie Gruenberg, a psychiatrist, in The New York Times Magazine. Citing the postwar shortage of males, Gruenberg added chillingly: “A girl who hasn’t a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married.” Esquire reported that senior college women “talk about a career but they don’t mean it. Let them have six dates with one boy—they’ll have him talking about compatibility and the names of their five children.” (The undercurrent of male resentment throughout the 1950s was mined most successfully by Playboy, which was founded in 1953. Its theme was that women were unproductive leeches plotting to trap unsuspecting men into a life of white-collar servitude and deprive them of their natural right to life as free and swinging bachelors.)
Postwar women broke a century-long American trend toward later marriages and fewer children. The stampede to the altar was so intense that junior high school students had already chosen their silverware pattern. “All the gang has started their own sets of sterling. We’re real keen about it,” one teenager told a marketing researcher. Suzie Slattery, a seventeen-year-old California girl chosen by Life as the typical teen consumer, liked to spend her summer days wandering through department stores with her mother “picking out frocks or furnishings for her room or silver and expensive crockery for the hope chest she has already started.” Once married, they usually had their children—an average of 3.2—quickly, completing their
family before their thirtieth birthday.
The proportion of women in college plummeted, dwarfed by the arrival of 6 million male veterans whose tuition was paid on the GI bill. Soon, only 35 percent of the college population was female, and many of the girls who arrived as freshmen dropped out before graduating. Those who did finish school generally married before the ink on the diploma was dry—a professor at Smith complained that he had to cancel his final seminar for the senior honors students because it conflicted with too many bridal showers. The major point of attending college, for most white women at least, was not earning a degree or getting a marketable skill, but finding a husband who had a degree or skill. (This wasn’t true of black women. Although relatively few went to college, virtually all who went graduated. “The thing you didn’t do was quit college or quit work. You were not going to raise a family on one black man’s salary,” said a woman who later became a school principal in New Jersey.) Male students, although intensely focused on preparing for a career, were not particularly interested in intellectual pursuits, either. A survey in 1958 found that 72 percent of college students felt the main purpose of their education was to acquire well-rounded personalities.
Coeds seemed bent on avoiding anything that would interrupt their fast transition from school to matrimony. The wife of a college sociology professor found that when she and her friends urged her husband’s female students to get a little life experience before settling down, they were “characterized as bitter, unromantic old witches, in an affectionate kind of way.” The female professors who had survived the shock of trying to teach flappers in the 1920s were horrified once again. “I felt increasingly that something had gone wrong with our young women of college age…. I noted it with anger and alarm,” said a professor of English at the University of Illinois. But college administrators were willing to go with the flow. The male president of Radcliffe greeted freshmen by telling them their years of college “would prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers and their reward might be to marry Harvard men.” Lynn White Jr., the president of a women’s college in Oakland, California, proposed in 1950 that the curriculum be adapted to reflect the students’ new, postwar interests by including courses in clothing, interior decorating, and “the theory and preparation of a Basque paella, a well-marinated shish-kebab and lamb kidneys sautéed in sherry.”