As Farah Jasmine Griffin has detailed, Pearl Primus was herself symbolic of the conflicting constraints and opportunities of black life during World War II. A Caribbean immigrant and a brilliant student, when she graduated from Hunter College in 1940 with a degree in biology, Primus found that no lab would hire her. She took a series of jobs that shuttled her between Kitty Foyle and Rosie the Riveter—switchboard operator, riveter, clerk, shipyard welder. The frustration of trying to build a scientific career led her to switch paths, and she returned to dance, which she’d studied as a student but hadn’t considered a worthwhile career. But coupled with her interest in and study of anthropology, as well as the progressive political circles she moved in, she began to discover that her art could become something more than decorative. After she was invited to become a regular performer at the integrated downtown nightclub Café Society, she began to find ways to meld the African dance traditions she had studied overseas with a political sensibility born of her experiences and observations of a still unjust and unequal America. 17
Despite the anti-discrimination orders, many black women were held back in menial jobs, and it took luck and grit for them to fight their way through to higher-status, higher-paying jobs. Yet for many of them, the mere fact of working in the factories side by side with white women, for a common cause, was empowering. Griffen writes that the war represented a remarkable “flowering of opportunity” for all American women, not merely in the literal provision of a paycheck but in the expansion of their understanding of their place in the world and their capabilities.18 For many, it was the arrival of choice, that great privilege, for the first time.
Selling the Women’s War Effort
For most women during the war, living alone—often by necessity and wracked by anxiety for absent loved ones—was hardly a glamorous project. It was a hardship to be endured, rather than a freedom to be enjoyed. The authorities guiding Americans in how to live well were no longer the self-appointed success gurus of the 1930s. Instead, the can-do spirit of self-help was co-opted by the government, through the messaging of the new Office of War Information. Operating from June 1942 until the end of the war, the official mandate of the OWI, under Executive Order 9182, was to use the press, radio, and movies to create and disseminate information that would “facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, activities, and aims of the Government.”
In practice, that meant selling America to itself and to the world. Abroad, the OWI hoped to showcase the wealth, peace, and superiority of American life under democracy, and at home, to ensure that its citizens—especially women—understood their role in that project. It sent regular bulletins to the editors of magazines and newspapers to suggest ways they should handle war-related topics, and attempted to coordinate these messages in print and on air, so that each medium would reinforce the message. It made and distributed short films, including those that celebrated women’s factory work, and collaborated with the newly formed War Advertising Council on a series of public service messages. This forerunner to the Ad Council created campaigns promoting war bonds, victory gardens, and above all, women’s work—pushing the message that female employment was a patriotic responsibility. The Ad Council touts this program as “the most successful advertising recruitment campaign in American history,” bringing some two million women into the workforce, and breaking down cultural prejudices against women’s labor. The campaign rhetorically collapsed the boundaries between soldiers and civilians, home front and war zone, by insisting that “in this war, every civilian is at the front.”19
The huge increase in women working meant that the government was paying attention to the practicalities of that life for the first time: the thorny subject of what we now call work-life balance. Despite the dearly held notion that women were physically incapable of hard labor, the real obstacles to factory jobs for women during wartime proved to be logistical: how would they get to work, and who would watch the children while they were away? Official efforts to provide child care to the country’s female labor force were slow, haphazard, and dogged by lingering prejudice against mothers leaving their children to go to work. At first, the government pushed the message that mothers who stayed home with their young children were performing “an essential patriotic service,” and should not go out to work. Alarming newspaper stories about the fate of latchkey children, meanwhile, reinforced the idea that absent mothers would damage their children and, by extension, the fabric of the society they were at war to defend.
But the country was in desperate need of labor, and couldn’t afford to exclude mothers for long. Women with children made it work, relying on family and neighbors: carpooling, swapping favors, and pitching in together. It wasn’t until 1943 that any kind of systematic, federally funded child care system was in place, patched together from Depression-era programs and local efforts, and it was far from adequate. By 1944, only a fraction of an estimated two million required child care slots were available, and those were often in understaffed and poorly run facilities. But when stories surfaced of children sleeping in cars in factory parking lots while their mothers worked the night shift, blame settled on the women, not the government. What child care there was available was permitted strictly for the duration of the war—the only way that Congress would agree to fund this essential tool of women’s liberation.20
Although women working was a widespread new reality during World War II, the official messages associated with it anticipate the powerful domestic push of the postwar years. Women who worked outside the home were not let off the hook of high domestic standards, but were expected to understand their housework as part and parcel of their wartime labor. A 1944 advertisement in Good Housekeeping for Swift’s beef trumpets not one or two but seven wartime “jobs” for women, beginning with “Wife!”—“a loving and lovable person, doing a fine job of home-making”—and followed by other roles mixing the domestic and the public: “Mother!” and “Cook!” then “Purchasing Agent!” “Salvage Expert!” “War Worker!” and “War Bond Buyer!”21 In this list, the woman’s actual paid work is far down the list, and it is her role as a household manager and thrifty consumer that makes up the bulk of her responsibility. A woman might be forgiven for wanting to enlist in the military for a little peace.
The advertising industry was still a fledgling business in the early 1940s, and had struggled to survive the Depression. The war proved to be its salvation, sowing the seeds of the postwar Mad Men boom era. Thanks to the OWI’s positioning of women as consumers for the common good, and their buying decisions as part of the job of “purchasing agent,” there was no end to the potential manipulation of their formerly private lives as housewives into some semblance of a public role (without, of course, any wages). In an ironic reversal of the Live-Alone era—now that a great many more women did find themselves, at least temporarily, living without husbands—single women seemed to disappear from public view. Instead, women’s roles as wives and mothers were emphasized all the more, and it was clear that there was no space in either household budgets or popular culture for a woman’s individual desires. Everything she did, bought, and thought was for the war effort.
Just to be sure, a series of national programs set out to absorb any extra money or time that a wartime Live-Aloner might suddenly possess as a result of her well-paid job or absent husband. She was encouraged to buy war bonds, plant a victory garden, and maintain vigilance around the tasks of rationing and recycling, which were turned into quasi-military operations. A Life magazine headline summed up the expected attitude: “Think War, Buy Little, Maintain Our Ideals.”22 The strenuousness with which American advertisers, the OWI, and the War Advertising Council worked to convince the domestic population to “think war” reflects the ironic reality that the fighting itself still lay at a physical distance. In contrast to the other Allied countries that were enduring physical bombardment, the Unite
d States home front was a relative haven of peace and security, for those who were not forced into detention camps. Many of its citizens were better off, materially, than they had been during the Depression, despite rationing, and the industrial boom that would fuel postwar prosperity was well under way.
The Domestic Turn
The years of her marriage turned Marjorie Hillis Roulston’s focus inward. She made an attempt at an autobiography, Before and After, using her wedding to frame the story of how she had arrived at her comfortable perch. She had not, however, been married long enough to take a measured view of her new state, and appears to have written her own story under an extremely flattering honeymoon glow, starting out each chapter with a description of the beauty of the birds or flowers at High Lindens, and occasionally digressing into rhapsodies over the perfection of her husband. She might be forgiven this rosy view of married life, given how convinced she had been for half her life that she would never get to enjoy it, but the readers’ reports on the manuscript were savage. “I don’t remember ever reading an autobiography by a more serenely complacent and well satisfied person,” wrote one, going on to say that she had “better look out: the Greeks had a word for it.”
The draft offered idyllic accounts of summers spent with her maternal grandparents in Marengo, Illinois, which resonated with Bobbs-Merrill’s Indiana-based readers: “circuses, the Opry House, Wild West shows, band concerts on Saturday night, the barn, the big house, the big yard—how many of us Midwestern children can match those summers.” Her stories of Brooklyn were hardly less magical, as she described the pride she and her siblings felt hearing their beloved father preach, and how they looked forward to Sunday dinners, fried chicken and all the fixin’s, and lots of company. Her school days, she did admit, were “slightly clouded” by her bad clothes, “but gilded by [her brother] Dick and Dick’s friends who rallied round her bravely for dances and other parties.”
A second reader concurred, agreeing that while the story of Marjorie’s Live Alone success was entertaining, there weren’t enough juicy anecdotes about the well-known names, like Dorothy Parker, who appeared in the story. And it was particularly disappointing that the real story readers wanted—of her unlikely romance—was missing. Despite all these flaws, both readers agreed that with substantial revision, the book might still hold enough appeal to Marjorie’s fans to be worth publishing.23 But for whatever reason, she abandoned the project, dropping the personal examinations in favor of bird-watching, and volunteering with the local branch of the Red Cross to help the war effort.
In January 1944, as if cruelly bearing out the threat of hubris that first reader had warned about, the Roulston household experienced a sudden tragedy. Harry’s son, Henry, collapsed at his Long Island home and died, aged just thirty-seven, leaving behind his wife, Marjorie, and two children, thirteen-year-old Heather and eleven-year-old Tom. Henry had been a senior executive in the family business, and had been expected to take it over—now, Harry and his younger brother William had to keep things going rather than ease into retirement. The grief of Henry’s death was no doubt intensified by the war, which seemed no closer to ending.
The following summer, however, brought peace—under the cloud of the atomic bomb. Shock and relief were intermingled, so perhaps in an effort to give their families happier news, the next generation of Hillises rushed to the altar. Like thousands of young women across the country who had served in the women’s auxiliary forces, Marjorie’s young nieces quickly swapped their uniforms for wedding gowns. First, two of Dick’s four daughters, his youngest, Ann, aged nineteen, in 1945, and his eldest, Elizabeth, twenty-seven, in 1946, and then Nathalie’s daughter Polly, twenty, in 1947.
Then suddenly, in the late summer of 1949, five years after the death of his son, and just days after his and Marjorie’s tenth wedding anniversary, seventy-five-year-old Thomas Roulston suffered a fatal heart attack at High Lindens. Like her mother twenty years before, Marjorie found herself in the exhausting position of collecting other people’s outpourings of shock and sympathy. Her Brooklyn-bred husband’s funeral was held at her father’s old seat, Plymouth Church, in the afternoon of Saturday, August 20, and he was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery. By coincidence, his obituaries shared column space with an account of the funeral of Margaret Mitchell, the author of that other 1936 bestseller Gone with the Wind, who was killed in a car accident the same week in August. Roulston’s hometown Daily Eagle glowed with patriotic pride in describing him as “a typical American success story” as it traced his immigrant roots and his hard work in building up his father’s single grocery store into a citywide chain. As an employer and an active member of various charities and community organizations, his story made him, the paper reiterated, “typical of what is possible under the American system.”24
8
STARTING ALL OVER
To illustrate how her life changed after she married, Marjorie Hillis Roulston told two stories. In the first, before her wedding, she’s in the midst of a lecture tour in the Midwest when her travel arrangements suddenly change, and she’s forced to take a train after midnight. With nothing for it but to walk to the station in the dark, with the night clerk of the hotel carrying her bags, she then finds the train delayed by several hours. The hotel clerk hightails it, leaving the touring author to spend several hours alone in a musty waiting room, with only “a trio of drunks” for company. It’s not pleasant, but nothing “crucial” occurs, as she puts it. It’s just one of those things that an independent woman learns to take in stride.
The second story takes place after she has married Roulston and moved out to his palatial Long Island home. She tells him she needs to drive into Brooklyn for some errands, and the protective husband asks about her plans down to the last detail. He then proceeds to write out correspondingly lengthy instructions for the chauffeur, which makes his wife burst out laughing—does he think she’ll get lost in the neighborhood where she grew up? He explains that he trusts her sense of direction, but wants to protect her from having to cross busy Fulton Street by herself. He has plotted out the route perfectly, so that the car will be waiting on the right side of the street for each errand, and Marjorie won’t have to risk stepping into traffic. The former bachelor girl is amused—and decides to be flattered, not offended, by this assumption of helplessness. Thus begins the long unlearning of everything Marjorie Hillis taught herself the hard way: “efficiency, looking out for myself, earning my own martinis.” Instead she finds herself, in marriage, “wrapped comfortably in cotton wool.” She comes to enjoy this coddling, and eventually to depend on it. “At the end of ten pretty perfect years, I thought I was a fragile creature,” she admits.1
Among the friends to write to Marjorie expressing their shock and sorrow was her friend and former boss at Vogue, Edna Woolman Chase. Still at the helm of the magazine, where she would remain until 1954, Chase soon invited her old colleague back to contribute an article called “Who Is the Older Woman?”2 Betraying no trace of grief or specific advice to widows, this article, which appeared in October 1950, instead celebrated the ascendency of older women. It anticipated what would become the dominant theme of Marjorie’s late career, that women in their fifties and beyond had just as much right to the independence, glamour, and pleasure that younger women enjoyed. She would insist, too, that they had plenty to contribute to society, through their expertise and experience, longevity, and wealth—even after they were no longer the center of male attention.
The former editor began her article by poking fun at her own youthful self, recalling the captions she would write, thirty-odd years ago when she was in her twenties, “on the rare occasions when we published clothes for the doddering old dear.” She would “pityingly” describe how the cut of a dress or “the soft fold of white chiffon at the neckline” might flatter an older wearer. But today, a woman in her forties could wear whatever she liked: “You can find her in her garden in slacks, on the tennis court in shorts, and on the beach in something almos
t as abbreviated as her daughter’s bathing costume.”
The new prominence of older women, Marjorie continued, extended beyond fashion to culture. Older heroines in plays could have a romantic life—she gave the example of The Wisteria Trees, an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that had enjoyed a hit run on Broadway through most of 1950, starring the fifty-year-old Helen Hayes in the lead role. What was more, these older characters were allowed to be sexually active—their romance did not have to end “with them sitting cozily before the fire.” In magazine stories—nearly all mass-market magazines at the time published fiction, often by highly respected authors—the female heroines were no longer exclusively younger than twenty-two. By contrast, in modern fiction, “our best heroines have daughters, if not granddaughters.” Those former leading ladies, the “sweet young things,” were no longer taken so seriously—or, alternatively, taken much too seriously, and presented as “Social Problems.” This was a prescient observation—the publication of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was a few months off, which would inspire an outcry at the behavior and attitudes of modern American youth.3
The Extra Woman Page 20