The Extra Woman

by Joanna Scutts

  The most intimate aspects of a woman’s life were the most tightly regulated. She could not say no to sex with her husband. No state acknowledged, much less outlawed, marital rape until decades later, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that it was made illegal nationwide. The use of contraceptives was restricted in many states until the mid-1960s, even for married couples, and their use was a misdemeanor in Massachusetts until 1963. A middle-class girl who was unlucky enough to get pregnant out of wedlock was expected to hide away until the birth and give the baby up for adoption immediately. Abortion, of course, was illegal, although common enough to cause injury and death to thousands of women. Amid these restrictions, double standards, and violations, women in the 1950s were expected to exude sexual pleasure and availability, and discuss intimacy more openly than ever before.

  The Freudian Mystique

  Marjorie Hillis had little interest in either sex or psychology, despite bolstering her theories, in Live Alone and Like It and its sequels, with “case studies”—a term that carries the veneer of clinical practice. She never probed the depths of Miss C.’s happiness or Mrs. M.’s disappointment, but relied on straightforward emotional language that was easily correlated to circumstances. Even in Work Ends at Nightfall, her most emotionally sophisticated book, the characters feel regret, envy, loneliness, satisfaction, or joy, but they are never at the mercy of subconscious desires or repressed urges. Marjorie paid no attention to sex as distinct from a relationship, and wrote about it only in coy or roundabout ways, focusing more on heartbreak than therapeutic orgasm. It was one more way in which her books no longer sounded modern.

  Postwar America has been called “the era of the expert,” in thrall to mostly male authority, from baby care guru Dr. Spock to positive-thinking popularizer Norman Vincent Peale.42 But more than any other guru in the 1940s and 1950s, America was in the grip of Sigmund Freud. According to one historian of psychoanalysis, Freud’s appeal connected with a collection of distinctly American traits: “our love for all things modern, ambivalent feelings about sex, pronounced streak of individualism, and entitlement to happiness.”43

  Freud’s work had first been translated into English at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Viennese doctor’s only visit to America was in 1909. During the 1920s his theories of sexuality and human development entered highbrow and progressive circles, carrying the glitter of illicit knowledge. Yet he did not fully enter the American mainstream until after World War II, when his ideas migrated from the realm of science into popular culture. In a paranoid era obsessed with hidden threats and lurking evils, novelists and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock seized on the idea that characters could be driven to act by secret psychosexual urges. Trickling down from academies and institutes to magazines and therapists’ couches, Freudian theories about the role of sex and sexual difference in human happiness were inescapable. Many Freudians held that marriage and children offered women the pinnacle of happiness, and argued that any resistance to this model was evidence of neurosis, hysteria, sexual repression, penis envy, or some complex or other—terms that had entered the national vernacular recently enough to still sound reassuringly scientific. Even though Freud’s writing never reached a wide readership, and few Americans underwent analysis according to his precise methods, the ability to discuss Oedipal desire and feminine hysteria over highballs became a sign of sophistication. As feminist leader Betty Friedan would later put it, Freud’s antifeminist convictions settled over the country in this period “like fine volcanic ash.”44 In this climate, feminism, living alone, or any other rejection of the prevailing ideology was treated as a pathology.

  In the Live-Alone heyday of the late 1930s, not far from the home base of Marjorie’s Indianapolis publisher, another man who would have an outsized influence on 1950s attitudes to sex and relationships was just getting started. Alfred Kinsey, a straitlaced professor of zoology at Indiana University, rocked the small academic world of Bloomington in 1938 with the announcement that he would be teaching a new course in the fall semester on human sexuality.45 Up to that point, Kinsey’s research had focused on the minute variations that could be observed within a particular species of wasp—which led him to the conclusion that members of an apparently identical group were vastly more diverse than a casual glance might reveal. This began to fuel his theory that human sexual behavior, similarly, might be more fluid and variable than society sanctioned. At the time, most sexual behavior outside the heterosexual marriage bed was not only impossible to discuss publicly, but was actually illegal. Sodomy was outlawed in every state before 1962, punishable by imprisonment or hard labor, and in numerous states those laws also extended to ban oral sex. Even within marriage, sexual behavior was tightly regulated, so a college course that shared with undergraduates the basics of their biology in a frank and scientific way was revolutionary. The class was restricted to seniors and married students, leading to a rash of fake wedding rings and a flurry of early-September weddings. On the first day, Kinsey gave the class a new definition of “sexual dysfunction” that inverted the moralistic nonsense they’d grown up with. Abstinence and celibacy, far from being admirable, were, in Kinsey’s view, the only true forms of dysfunction.

  Kinsey immediately faced pressure from the conservative faculty to shut down the class. But the professor, who had been traumatized by his inexperience and discomfort on his wedding night as a twenty-seven-year-old virgin, was determined that students deserved and could handle the truth about their bodies, detached from moral terrors. By the second year of the class, Kinsey found himself counseling troubled students during his office hours, and he and his wife Clara began to invite them instead to their home, where they could ask for advice on sex and relationships over cups of tea. The professor even began to lend out his car, with its capacious backseat, to amorous young couples who had nowhere else to go. Along the way, he became curious about the varieties of experience among the students, and started to take their sexual histories in conferences after class. In a nonjudgmental and straightforward way, he asked them questions that would have been unthinkable anywhere else: about masturbation, premarital sex, homosexuality, and the presence or absence of desire. Eventually, the protests against Kinsey and his course gained enough strength that even the university’s supportive president was forced to act. Given an ultimatum between giving up the course and giving up his academic post, Kinsey left the university and began to widen his net of inquiry beyond students to men in prison, men in Chicago’s underground gay scene, and as many groups as possible, always with a goal of diversity in age, race, and social status. The questions that Kinsey first asked his students in his Bloomington living room became the basis of a groundbreaking research project into human sexuality that would span the next decade and more. When the results of his studies were published as books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), they were enduring bestsellers, and no modern-minded American could ignore them.46

  Kinsey’s books might have offered some readers a prurient thrill, but for many they were a lifeline, offering the reassurance that normality “was merely a statistical concept.”47 In the midst of a culture that insisted on a healthy sex life as a prerequisite for marital happiness, but refused to discuss what that really meant, the studies were revelatory for both men and women. A new wave of self-help was already emerging in the late 1940s and ’50s to spread sexual knowledge to an eager audience, and was bolstered by Kinsey’s findings. The days when the family “marriage manual” was shamefully stuffed under the mattress were over, along with the idea that it was women’s fate merely to endure, never enjoy, a man’s attentions. But the idea that sex was frightening and filthy was deeply ingrained, as the title of one of the most popular new sex guides, published in 1947 by a British doctor named Eustace Chesser, suggests. Love Without Fear: How to Achieve Sex Happiness in Marriage advocated birth control and attacked the “absurd, and sometimes hysterical, campaign against masturbation.”48
It also operated as a practical workbook, including lists, question-and-answer sections, and “score cards” for husbands and wives to improve their sex lives—all evidence that attitudes toward sex within marriage had profoundly changed. Sold under the tagline of “The Modern Manual for the Modern Husband and Wife,” the book could not have been more emphatic in its insistence that it was a harbinger of a more enlightened era.

  Can This Marriage Be Saved?

  During the 1930s, American popular culture had largely concurred with Marjorie Hillis’s forgiving vision of divorce, which saw it as arising out of a dispute between equals, and offering a relatively harmless way out of a bad situation. Norma Shearer’s Oscar-winning role in the pre-code drama The Divorcee set the pattern, which Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Irene Dunne would refine. Shearer’s character, Jerry, a “quintessential New Woman” believes in marital equality to the extent that when she discovers that her husband has cheated on her, she immediately cheats back, telling him she has “settled their accounts.” The marital breakdown is averted when Jerry, inspired by a self-sacrificing married friend, decides to give up her other man and recommit to her husband. No lasting damage has been done by anyone’s bad behavior, and infidelity is easy to fix.49

  Twenty years on, such a plot would be unthinkable without some serious, possibly tragic punishment coming down on the cheating woman. Sex-advice writer Eustace Chesser labeled “female promiscuity” a profound threat to family life, and a perversion championed only by “misguided feminists.”50 Like most of his peers, he insisted that divorce was a mistake and those who undertook it always regretted it—therefore, it had to be avoided at all costs. The experts who lined up in magazines and self-help books insisted that no marital problem was too severe to be overcome. Paul Popenoe’s popular column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in Ladies’ Home Journal was only one plank in the platform of the man they called “Mr. Marriage,” since he had first established his pioneering American Institute of Family Relations in in 1930.

  A horticulturalist by training, Popenoe’s background hardly sounds relevant to becoming the nation’s leading marriage guidance counselor, any more than Kinsey’s study of wasps made him a likely human-sexuality expert. But in fact there was a grim logic to it, as Popenoe proved all too eager to transfer what he’d learned about selectively breeding plants to human beings. A committed eugenicist, Popenoe had advocated sterilizing the “unfit,” and “believed with an evangelical fervour” in preserving marriage between couples of the “better type”—white, middle class, and able-bodied.51 Historian Kristin Celello charts the “phenomenal growth” of marriage counseling from a handful of isolated clinics in the early 1930s to cultural ubiquity in the 1950s. She demonstrates that over the same period, the idea that a successful marriage took sustained effort became ingrained in American culture—a typical Ladies’ Home Journal column, “Making Marriage Work,” debuted in 1947. Despite the racist basis of Popenoe’s theories, the idea of marriage as work also proved popular in media aimed at African American women, and Ebony and Jet magazines ran similar columns, often citing the same experts. These columns rarely gave couples advice on navigating concrete, external challenges—like finances and families—that were likely to cause real problems. Instead, they focused on the psychological “adjustment” necessary for a happy marriage—an adjustment that fell disproportionately on women.52

  The notion that women had to change themselves in marriage to accommodate a man’s more rigid habits and beliefs was widespread—even Marjorie Hillis made it clear that her own adjustment to marriage took so much work that she never wanted to repeat it. Self-help for single women in the 1940s and ’50s therefore focused on the changes that they could make to themselves in order to attract a mate. Celello describes another Ladies’ Home Journal column, beginning in 1954, titled “How to Be Marriageable,” which focused on twenty-nine-year-old “Marcia,” a schoolteacher who moved to Los Angeles in the hope of finding a man. Marcia gave readers first-person accounts of her sessions in the Marriage Readiness course at Popenoe’s American Institute of Family Relations, and by lowering her expectations and changing her appearance, she eventually landed her “Dick.” But as Celello shows, the real story of this project was fraught—it took a long search for AIFR to find a student for whom the Marriage Readiness course actually worked, and Marcia kept her participation a secret from her new husband.53

  Marcia’s subterfuge was small potatoes compared with the kind of tricks that 1950s self-help books encouraged women to try, in order to achieve the all-consuming goal of marriage. At the very least, a girl had to pretend to be whoever the man wanted her to be, suppressing her own personality in order to “please and flatter a man into proposing.”54 She had to be sexually alluring, but not sexually available, doing everything she could to guarantee that a flirtation got a ring on her finger, rather than a notch on his bedpost.

  Reading these advice guides gives an exhausting sense of the effort it took for women to win the dubious, high-stakes game of marriage, and it’s hard not to feel how futile it all was, aimed at at a form of family life that made so many of them so unhappy. Men, too—the founding of Playboy magazine in 1953 presented a glamorized image of bachelor life that made marriage look less appealing than ever, for all its cultural ubiquity. Through it all, despite the efforts of the magazines, the experts, the sex manuals, and the advertisers, Americans kept getting divorced—one in four marriages, or nearly four hundred thousand per year, broke apart during the 1950s, more than twice as many as during the previous divorce-panic era of the 1920s. Maybe Marjorie Hillis was right—marriage wasn’t the only way to be happy, and there was life after the death of the union.

  Life’s a Banquet

  Given the vilification of unmarried women and feminists during the 1950s, it’s surprising that one of the most popular heroines of the decade was a defiant throwback to the Live-Alone era, and proof that Marjorie’s vision maintained a powerful appeal, even if it had now moved to the realm of fantasy. Auntie Mame leaped like a flame from page to stage to cinema beginning in 1955, when Patrick Dennis’s loosely autobiographical novel arrived on the bestseller list, where it remained for more than two years, selling one thousand copies a day at its peak. Dennis’s heroine, based on his freethinking aunt, was a bon vivant and artist whose medium was other people’s lives. Immortalized in the stage adaptation and 1958 film by Rosalind Russell, Mame became an unlikely icon, offering audiences a thrill that was a blend of nostalgia, fantasy, and the hope that there might be a way to live happily and well outside the boundaries of the white picket fence. Her story showed that nonconformity and living alone could still be desirable options—at least if the trappings were sufficiently glamorous and the heroine safely upper class.

  The film opens in 1928 with the reading of a will, leaving orphaned, nine-year-old Patrick to the care of his father’s sister, Mame, on the condition he not be brought up to be anything like her. The boy is duly delivered to his aunt’s apartment at 3 Beekman Place, on the eastern edge of midtown Manhattan, just below Dorothy Draper’s transformed row houses on Sutton Place, and a little above Marjorie Hillis’s Tudor City. The model for Mame, Patrick Dennis’s aunt Marion Tanner, lived in less refined and more reliably bohemian Greenwich Village, where she turned her townhouse into “a haven and salon for struggling artists, writers, freethinkers [and] radicals.”55 In the film, Mame’s elegant domain is likewise a place of restless creativity, where the decor changes at regular intervals, cocktail parties are constant, and the bedrooms are full of their owner’s abandoned artistic passions—when they aren’t occupied by her worse-for-wear friends. Patrick is plunged into a world of curiosity and ideas; instructed to fill a notebook with words he doesn’t understand, he comes back with a list that encapsulates Mame’s world, including “stinko,” “blotto,” “Cubism,” and “Karl Marx.”

  Riding a seemingly endless economic upswing, 1950s audiences could laugh at the clichés when the Wall Street crash
crashes Mame’s party: the stockbroker who calls to say goodbye just before he jumps out the window, and the wealthy characters’ faith that their bank is safe, two minutes before it, too, goes under. After failing to make it as an actress, Mame tries to claw back her social status with a whirl through the typical single-girl employment options of the 1930s, including switchboard operator and Macy’s salesgirl—in which role she meets her savior, a Southern oil tycoon who doesn’t have to worry about the Depression, as his oil “just keeps on gushin’!” He marries Mame, restores her wealth, and they set off on a round-the-world trip, which is cut short only when he accidentally falls off the Matterhorn while taking a photograph of his bride.

  Back in New York, a Live-Aloner once more, Mame redecorates her house and reconnects with her old friends—just as Marjorie Hillis advised—and is inspired to write her memoirs. But soon a more urgent project interrupts, when the adult Patrick brings home his fiancée to meet his aunt. Patrick has been turned into a straitlaced bore by his years at boarding school and college, and his girl, Gloria, is a nasal, dimwitted snob—despite her resemblance to Grace Kelly, whose televised wedding two years earlier had been a high point of the marriage-obsessed decade. When Mame visits Gloria’s parents in Connecticut, they confide their fear that the parcel of land next door will be sold to one “Abraham Epstein”—who Mame, of course, identifies as a famous cellist. Exacting her revenge on the couple and their desire to keep their property “restricted,” she buys the land and establishes it as a home for refugee Jewish children. Mame’s machinations to stop Patrick’s wedding work out just as neatly. When she assembles a “family dinner,” introducing Gloria and her parents to all the offbeat bohemian characters who previously attended her cocktail parties, it is an opportunity to remind her angry nephew that these people raised him, even if they don’t look like a conventional family. By the time the film ends, Patrick has married Mame’s former assistant, and Mame is poised to take their young son with her to India—her curiosity and open-mindedness passed on as a gift for the next generation.