The Extra Woman

by Joanna Scutts

  The 1950s were not inevitable. American men and women had worked together to fight World War II in unprecedented solidarity. When men went overseas, they left their sisters and sweethearts to take their places in the workforce, from offices and shops where they were already comfortable, to light and heavy industry, which were for the most part entirely new arenas. Those wartime upheavals came on the heels of a Depression that had also shaken up traditional gender roles. By 1945, women had access to jobs, education, divorce, and birth control in unprecedented numbers—and to many observers, it looked as though “traditional” marriage and family life were doomed.

  The war years had also drawn black and white Americans of both genders together in the collective national effort. While this proximity hardly generated mass white support for the ongoing civil rights struggle, the “Double V” campaign exposed to many complacent whites the disconnect between the doctrine of liberty the country was spreading overseas, and the injustices of Jim Crow at home. One version of American freedom in the face of the Communist threat, therefore, might have embraced greater racial and sexual equality, a national commitment to giving all citizens an equal chance at education, work, upward mobility, and success. According to historian Elaine Tyler May, “Nothing on the surface of postwar America explains the rush of young Americans into marriage, parenthood and traditional gender roles.”23

  The 1950s were also not normal—even though “normal” was the defining virtue of the decade.24 The decade did not simply represent the return of “traditional” modes of living after the upheavals of the war, but something both old and new: half-buried Victorian family structures were resurrected in the fresh clothing of modern psychology. Men and women were hurried and prodded into earlier and earlier marriage not because it was “traditional”—it hadn’t been, for decades—but because cutting-edge science told them that the only way to be happy was to conform to rigid gender roles. Popular culture, meanwhile, held up a narrow slice of the population—a white family made up of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, and two or more children, in a suburban neighborhood—and pretended it was the whole pie. What made this suburban cliché so pervasive was the very fact that it was new. Just as journalists have been obsessed with the attitudes, beliefs, and failings of “millennials” for at least the past decade, so in the ’50s they wrote endless disquisitions on suburbanites and their discontents. Along the way, they turned “career woman” into an insult and made it clear that an unmarried woman was about as trustworthy and welcome in the community as a stray Soviet missile.

  The rate of marriage in the United States between 1920 and 1940 forms a neat U shape, dipping to all-time lows during the Depression, then steadily climbing back up. And it kept on climbing. At first, such a spike was unremarkable—weddings and births always rise after a war—but the post-World War II spike lasted so long that it started to look like the new normal.25 Thanks to the flurry of late-1940s divorces, marriage in the 1950s appeared deceptively stable. The baby boom lasted until 1957, twelve years after the end of the war, with an average 123 births per 1,000 women, compared with 79.5 per 1,000 in 1940 (and just under 60 per 1,000 today, the lowest rate since the government began keeping track in 1909).26 Despite the new availability of contraceptives, which had been gradually decriminalized and normalized since the mid-1930s, couples were having more children, sooner, and closer together. At the same time, the average age of marriage fell, so far and so fast that by 1960 fully half of all American women were teenagers when they made their vows. The generation that came of age during and after World War II was “the most marrying generation on record”—despite having more options not to be so than ever before.27

  If they were white, those couples had the opportunity to live better than they ever had before, in suburbs that looked like the way of the future. Under the New Deal, generous subsidies were awarded to developers who—openly or covertly—built segregated communities, in the belief that neighborhoods were more stable and prosperous if they were separated by race and class. So-called white flight from cities after the war was both push and pull—whites who wanted to escape ethnically diverse and economically starved cities received government help to buy their homes. Less than 2 percent of the $120 billion paid out in such subsidies by 1960 went to minorities.28

  The novel suburban family quickly became normal. Young and white, these families were almost always supported by a male breadwinner who commuted to a city office. Less than 10 percent of wives worked, and children and teenagers rarely lifted a finger, as they would have on the farm or in the family store in a previous generation. Instead, they watched television. A rarity in the late 1940s, by 1960, 87 percent of American households had a television—but this family, and this family only, saw itself reflected in the little curved screen.

  Although it was prosperous, the postwar period was hardly peaceful—or postwar. At the beginning of 1951, in an article promoting the forthcoming You Can Start All Over, Marjorie Hillis declared that “the live-alone ladies” could be of particular use to “Uncle Sam” in “the emergency days confronting the nation.” The emergency was the Korean War, ongoing since the previous summer, and Marjorie predicted that it would require a mobilization of women even greater than World War II. She suggested that older women could volunteer to organize play groups for children, so that their young mothers would be free to carry out war production work, and that for wives with husbands overseas, war work would give them something useful to do, so they wouldn’t have to “sit at home and just be scared.”29

  Useful war work or not, everyone was scared. The memory of Hiroshima and the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War era made the specter of total annihilation all too vivid—and the illusory security of domesticity all the more tempting. Just a decade before, Marjorie could gaily exhort her Live-Aloner to “be a Communist” as though it were just another hobby, equivalent to stamp collecting. By the 1950s, to “be something!” was to stand out, and to stand out was risky—any kind of nonconformity was tainted with a pink blush, deepening to red, that could get a person fired or arrested or worse.

  Suspicion landed particularly heavily on women who chose not to marry. The House Un-American Activities Committee warned in 1950 that teachers at girls’ schools and women’s colleges were “often frustrated” and likely to be “loyal disciples of Russia.” Even where she was not suspected of Communist sympathies, the self-directed career woman replaced the seductress as the scariest version of the “femme fatale” out there. In the 1950s, according to film historian Peter Biskind, the scarlet letter “A” came to stand for “ambition,” not “adultery.”30

  The Job of Marriage

  At the end of World War II, many women showed up for work to find their final paycheck and a pink slip waiting. By 1947 three million women had lost their jobs, sparking off union-led battles at several workplaces, including at the Ford plant in Highland Park, New Jersey, where 150 women successfully picketed the employment office to protest their firing on the grounds of sex discrimination.31 But in general, women found the public utterly unsympathetic to their cause. Less than 20 percent of Americans of either sex in the late 1940s believed married women had any right to a job, or that they deserved a chance to compete fairly with men for work. The steep decline in women’s wages made work even less appealing for those who could afford to choose. At the same time, the wages of white American men skyrocketed, making marriage the best shot most women had at a share of the country’s postwar prosperity.

  That prosperity was sharply limited by race. The aspirational male breadwinner–female homemaker model was out of reach even for most African American college graduates, who earned significantly less than a white man who had only finished high school. The majority of black middle-class families in 1960 therefore had two incomes and 64 percent of black mothers held jobs, compared with 27 percent of white middle-class women and 35 percent of white working-class women. Economic necessity was not the only force driving black women into the w
orkforce, however—in fact, middle-class black women were the most likely to work, in spite of the fact that they had even less access than white women to jobs carrying any prestige, creativity, or autonomy.32 They were not immune to the doctrine of the happy homemaker being pushed all around them, but they were less likely than their white counterparts to view their roles as students and workers as temporary and limited to the period before they could begin their “real” lives as wives and mothers. African American women who went to college did not see it as a husband-hunting ground, but as part of the route to a job and a role in the community—a 1956 study of these students found that all but a tiny handful of them intended and expected to forge some kind of career. The same young women believed that there were other claims on their time beyond wage work and family care: They saw themselves as active participants in their religious and political communities. They were less likely to let their husbands decide whether or not they could work, and saw no conflict between their identity as mothers and their roles in the wider world. As such, they have been called the “true pioneers of modern family patterns.”33

  What is most surprising is that despite the sneers and the smears directed at “career women,” across the spectrum of race and class, women’s participation in the labor force rose steadily during the domestic decade. By the late 1950s, fully a third of women—married and single—held jobs. But what did that really mean? They were doing jobs men did not want to do: hordes of secretaries and stenographers, young and on the hunt for a husband, like the characters depicted in Rona Jaffe’s bestselling 1958 novel The Best of Everything. Or they might be older and working out of necessity, but not in a role that brought them power, prestige, wealth, or the freedom to do as they pleased. In October 1956, Look magazine approvingly noted that women had “gracefully conceded” the upper rungs of the career ladder to men, even as its front cover blared “The American Woman: She’s Winning the Battle of the Sexes.”34 According to the widely quoted psychologists Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, authors of the virulently antifeminist 1947 book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, any career—which they defined as “work plus prestige”—was “antifeminine to its core” and “an assault on men’s self-respect.”35

  It was not for lack of an education. During the 1950s more girls completed high school and a higher percentage went to college than ever before. Yet their presence on campus was overwhelmed by men given new access to college by the GI Bill—from an almost fifty-fifty share in 1920, women made up only a third of undergraduates by the mid-1950s, and their needs and interests lost ground to those of their male peers. Further study moved out of reach: in 1920, women had earned 20 percent of all PhDs, but between 1950 and 1955, that proportion fell to a low of just 9 percent. In professional fields, their options had been shrinking for a while—almost 90 percent of school districts nationwide had bans on hiring already-married women, and almost as many required women to quit if they got married. These work restrictions combined with increasing cultural pressure to marry caused serious labor shortages in the traditionally female fields of teaching, nursing, and social work by the mid-1950s. The crisis was such that President Eisenhower urged Congress to pass an equal pay law, claiming in his January 1956 State of the Union Address that “equal pay for equal work without discrimination because of sex is a matter of simple justice.”36 There was, however, no move by the Republican government to act on the president’s sense of justice, nor did Eisenhower or anyone address the entrenched discrimination in hiring. Newspaper job ads were separated into “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female” until the late 1960s.

  In her 1957 advice book The Modern Book of Marriage, author Lena Levine urged women who worked to make sure that their husbands knew that the job was always secondary to the home. She approvingly discussed the “bright new trend” of young women dropping out of college in order to support their husbands’ study, earning them a “PhT,” for “Putting husband Through.”37 Women were repeatedly told that being married to a successful man was a career in itself; as advice author Emily Mudd put it, this “career” would require “the qualities of a diplomat, a businesswoman, a good cook, a trained nurse, a schoolteacher, a politician, and a glamour girl.”38 Like the wartime housewife, the 1950s homemaker also held seven jobs—but now, not a single one earned her any money or independence. In 1953, Dorothy Carnegie, the wife of success-guru Dale Carnegie, chimed in with her own book that was decidedly of its time, How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead, which promised to teach wives how to boost their husbands “up the ladder of success.”39 Winning friends and influencing people was for men; the only person a woman had to win and influence was her husband.

  Sex and the American Housewife

  The gender extremism of the 1950s held that a woman could only be truly happy and fulfilled performing the fundamentally biological role of mother. She was also supposed to be sexually active, desirable, and desiring—this was the aspect of suburban femininity that was supposed to make her modern, and distinguish her from her prudish Victorian ancestors. Time magazine’s 1960 cover story on “The Suburban Wife—an American Phenomenon” was typical of press coverage that raised the June Cleaver cliché to the status of a national icon. Although the modern stereotype of a housewife and stay-at-home mom leans more toward the frumpy and frazzled, the 1950s version was as glamorous as any ’30s career girl had been—far more so, as the once-aspirational independent woman was now seen as a miserable, unattractive spinster.

  But for all that she was supposed to find fulfillment in the private sphere of the home, the 1950s housewife was in no way a private figure. Journalists and politicians kept dragging her out from behind her lace curtains to hold her up to the world as a symbol of enviable American freedom. Her proxy political role reached its apogee in 1959 in the “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. As part of an effort to promote understanding between the two nations, exhibitions in New York and Moscow showcased the lifestyles and attitudes of the Cold War adversaries. In Moscow, touring the kitchen of a “typical” suburban house constructed as part of the American National Exhibition, the two leaders jockeyed for dominance in a conversation about the availability of new kitchen technologies, like dishwashers. Nixon pointed out the appliance as an example of how America was working to make life easier for housewives, to which Khrushchev countered that the Soviet Union did not share the “capitalist attitude toward women.” Nixon suggested that the housewife’s freedom to choose which washing machine to buy could stand in for the “right to choose” enjoyed as a cornerstone of American democracy—a phrase that had not yet become synonymous with reproductive choice. The implication was that the housewife could choose to stay home, unlike the Soviet working woman, whose obligation to work supposedly made her ugly and unfeminine.40

  Three years later, in December 1962, the Saturday Evening Post presented a cover story in praise of “the typical American woman,” underscoring her role as housewife. Based on the results of Gallup polls (and thus promoting the polling organization—the article was written by George Gallup), the typical woman was revealed to be in her mid-thirties, with two or more children, a full-time homemaker with a high school education and, although this wasn’t explicitly stated, white. She knew that she possessed all the rights of a man, but chose, freely, not to exercise them, understanding that men were naturally suited to business or politics just as she was naturally suited to cooking, cleaning, and ferrying her children from playdates to dance lessons. Gallup wrote that he was ignoring “the extremes” who lived at the margins of typical femininity: “old maids,” divorcées, childless women, and working mothers. These “unusual” women did exist in American society, the pollster grudgingly admitted, but they were curiosities, of interest only to sociologists. Mainstream society was not “geared” to them.

  Yet there were visible currents of unrest, even in this celebratory article, which was already on the defensive against other media portrayals of the
housewife that stereotyped her as “lonely, bored, lazy, sexually inept, frigid, superficial, harried, militant, overworked.” Despite having the comfort of knowing “precisely why they’re here on earth”—to be a good mother and a good wife—fully half of the “single girls” quoted, and a third of the married ones, complained about the inferior status of women.41 No matter how natural or typical her existence, somehow the apogee of American womanhood couldn’t just be quiet and submit happily to her so-called freedom.

  Perhaps when she peeked out from behind the curtains she had noticed that her “choice” to submit to male authority—and even her choice of dishwasher—was an illusion. Her husband’s authority was enshrined in law in big and small ways, restricting her freedom and overwriting her identity. She was dependent on him financially, and although he was required to provide “necessaries” for her and their children, it was up to him to determine what was necessary and what was a luxury. She had no right to any of the money he earned while she was keeping his house and raising his children. After they walked down the aisle, women in many states were still legally required to take their husband’s name, despite the efforts of the Lucy Stoners, and could not rent or buy a home alone. If a woman wanted to open a business by herself, she had to submit a petition attesting to her good character. An employer could fire her if she became pregnant, or not hire her at all based on her plans for a family, and job advertisements freely included attractiveness in the list of desirable attributes for a secretary or an office “gal Friday.”