When Rosalind Russell took on the role of Mame Dennis, it had been more than fifteen years since her last iconic outing, as the bold, smart, glamorous “girl reporter” Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, trading machine-gun-fast banter with Cary Grant. At the end of the film, when Hildy decides to leave her dull fiancé and return to both her ex-husband and the grubby turmoil of the newspaper business, there’s no question that this is the only possible choice she could make and be happy.
The fate of the fast-talking dames of the screwball era looked uncertain in the 1950s. Those spiky, mysterious, and coolly independent stars like Russell and Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn were supplanted by busty yet childlike Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, and Brigitte Bardot. In magazine profiles these young actresses were encouraged to talk endlessly about men, romance, and babies, rather than their careers or their art.
The same year that the novel Auntie Mame appeared, Katharine Hepburn had her own solo vehicle in David Lean’s Summertime, playing Jane Hudson, an enthusiastic Midwestern spinster who travels to Venice for the trip of a lifetime. Swooning along with the audience at the gold-bathed buildings and picturesque bridges, Jane finds her plucky independent veneer cracked by the city’s beauty, exposing her own loneliness and envy of the romantic couples she sees everywhere. When she catches the eye of a handsome, untrustworthy antiques dealer, sitting alone in St. Peter’s Square, Jane lets her feelings rule her better judgment, at least for the length of a short affair. He’s a better souvenir than Venetian glass, he tells her. But in the end, Jane’s emotional and sexual awakening proves more tragic than triumphant.
Auntie Mame was not immune to romance, but she held on fiercely to her independence—even more so than the characters Russell and Hepburn played in the 1930s, who in the end were tamed back into marriage plots. Mame was an anomaly, both self-reliant and ultimately victorious. For Russell, who was fifty-one when she played Mame, the role was transformative, and she identified strongly enough with the character to title her memoir after the start of her character’s immortal line: “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Ironically, she lost the best-actress Oscar in 1958 to Susan Hayward playing an innocent woman sentenced to death for murder, in a drama whose title—I Want to Live!—sounds like a watered-down version of Mame’s other signature call to arms: “Live, live, live!
Russell’s performance as Auntie Mame, and the film as a whole, are masterpieces of camp, and it’s no coincidence that the film owes its spirit and visual style to gay men who spent their lives negotiating the limits of freedom within an atmosphere of extreme homophobia. Russell’s outlandish outfits were the creation of Orry-Kelly, the visionary designer who won a string of Oscars for the iconic costumes he designed for Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Born Orry George Kelly in small-town Australia, the designer moved to New York in his late teens, and according to his own account lived for almost a decade with a young English immigrant, Archibald Leach—before they both migrated to Hollywood and Leach became Cary Grant.56 Unlike other Hollywood talents, on and off screen, Orry-Kelly refused to enter a marriage of convenience, and lived as openly as it was possible to do as a gay man at the time, protected by powerful friends and his undeniable talent. Author Patrick Dennis, meanwhile, was the pseudonym of Edward Everett Tanner III, a respectably married man of letters who was also a fixture of the Greenwich Village gay underground in the 1950s. The experiences of these men, trying to live freely somewhere between the closet and the open air, infused the various incarnations of Auntie Mame with a knowing bravado. The film’s witty mockery of everyone who comes at the world straight, without culture or curiosity, are integral to its charm and subversive impact.
Gender Trouble
In February 1953, a woman in a fur coat landed at Idlewild Airport, arriving into a crowd of reporters with press cards tucked into their hat brims, thrusting microphones at her as she smiled and waved and descended the steps to walk across the tarmac. At the podium set up for a press conference, she answered questions graciously, adopting the mannerisms and somewhat fixed smile of a minor European royal or past-her-prime screen siren, and replied yes, she felt fine, and yes, she was looking forward to her new life. Christine was not her given name—she had named herself after her surgeon, a Danish pioneer named Dr. Christian Hamburger. Born George Jorgensen in the Bronx in 1926 and drafted into the army in 1945 after high school, Christine began researching gender reassignment surgery and taking estrogen, before traveling to Denmark, where she applied for special government permission to undergo surgery. On her return to America, Christine welcomed the spotlight and used it to control how her story was told and interpreted. She set the terms with a letter to her parents, published in a Daily News feature headlined “Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Beauty”—“Nature made a mistake, which I have had corrected, and I am now your daughter.”57
The contradictions of Christine Jorgensen make her a fascinating case study for the limits of femininity in the 1950s. The press treated her as a curiosity, but seemed reassured by her embrace of conventional feminine fashion and beauty. Jorgensen reveled in her femininity, performing on stage in Las Vegas and at Café Society in New York in a ballerina’s tutu. But when she and her male partner applied for a marriage license, they were refused, on the grounds that Christine’s birth certificate listed her as a man. Marriage between two men, even when one of them wore red lipstick and high heels, was not only illegal: it was unthinkable. The media fascination with Christine Jorgensen and the relative acceptance of her sex change may have been due to the fact that she did little to challenge the notion of extreme and fixed differences between the sexes. She went from army boy to nightclub singer, swinging all the way through the pendulum. Far more threatening was the suggestion that there might be space in the middle where men and women could happily live: hence the hysterical denunciations of “sissy” men and single career women.
Experts in the 1950s diagnosed the career woman with a range of neuroses, but usually returned to the idea that she was trying to be a man, and that the impossibility of this unnatural task would eventually send her mad. If she tried to have both a family and a career, she would soon discover that the latter was ruinous to her home, children, and sexual satisfaction. In 1956, Life magazine called the career woman “that fatal error that feminism propagated.” A few years later, Redbook opined that “Few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on their own.” (The rarity of the independent woman was frequently held up as evidence that she was unnatural—even though it was likely these relentless accusations of unnaturalness were what made her seem rare.) The magazine continued, “Those who do [go off alone] may be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women.”58
There had been nothing in Marjorie Hillis’s prescriptions for the Live-Aloner that suggested she had to be either a nun or a hermit, shunning community for isolation. On the contrary, true happiness was impossible without engagement with the world and a purpose in life that took her out of the house. But by the early 1960s, that vision of self-sufficiency was a vanished dream. The same year that Redbook drew a distinction between “individuals” and “women,” Betty Friedan wrote an article for Good Housekeeping magazine pointedly asking, “Are Women People?”
The book Friedan went on to publish in 1963, The Feminine Mystique, is often credited with being the book that ignited second-wave feminism and the women’s movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. Its impact reverberated forward in time, although the book itself looked backward, setting out to explain to readers what on earth had happened in the fifteen years since the end of the war to land them where they were now: educated women sitting alone in big houses tricked out with the latest appliances, feeling trapped, alone, and desperate.
Friedan is often criticized for her narrow focus on the plight of upper-middle-class white women, and it’s true that her le
ns is limited. In part, that limitation exists because much of her source material—magazines, newspapers, advertising, psychological studies—was concerned with this same narrow group of women, and particularly worried about their plight. But these women were also the ones who had seen their options shrink most dramatically. Well educated in the years before “career woman” became a dirty word, and alive to the possibilities of self-reliance, they knew that things had once been different.
The Feminine Mystique was accordingly steeped in nostalgia for the Live-Alone era, to which it looks back for clues as to what might help women regain a sense of self and fulfillment. A sophisticated synthesis of popular culture and sociological and psychiatric thought from the previous three decades, the book demonstrated how the career woman became a pariah, and how deep and strange and sudden was the postwar retrenchment into domesticity. It began as a survey Friedan conducted in 1957 of the classmates who had graduated with her from Smith College in 1942, asking what had changed for them over the past fifteen years. From there, it examined more broadly what had changed in the lives and expectations of women, and what they were now being told—by journalists, psychologists, and experts—about who they were and what they needed to be happy. “The feminine mystique” was her memorable name for the “image to which we were trying to conform” and for the gap between that image and the individual identities that women were struggling to hold on to.
In the pages of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan presented herself as primarily a housewife, a married mother of three just like her readers—albeit one who published freelance articles for major national magazines. Like them, she claimed to be struggling to understand how she had arrived at this place of suburban isolation, restlessness, and dissatisfaction, which she dubbed “the problem that has no name.” Her book, however, was no memoir. As a recent biography of Friedan revealed, in contrast to the mythology she herself created, the author had a long history of involvement in the labor movement and left-wing politics. In the early 1950s, when she lived in the racially integrated Queens development of Parkway Village, she had been closely engaged with her community and wrote regularly for union newspapers. Even after moving farther from the city, she remained active in education and mentoring initiatives in her neighborhood. However, she knew from painful personal experience how important it was to distance herself from this activist past, no matter how innocuous it might have been, as any accusations of Communist sympathies would sink her message.59
Friedan is therefore careful not to present her book as a political tract, but instead leads the reader along with her as she sifts through the evidence and makes her discoveries, like “a reporter on the trail of a story.” Looking over her shoulder at back issues of Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Home Companion from the 1930s and ’40s, we see for ourselves how these mass-market magazines used to feature heroines who were much more mature than the “childlike, kittenish” housewives in the modern stories. These heroines were “happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women,” Friedan writes, yet their careers did not make them unloving or unlovable—on the contrary, men were drawn to their independence of character. She highlights one Ladies’ Home Journal story from February 1949 as the swan song for these spirited women. “Sarah and the Seaplane” is about a young woman who secretly takes flying lessons, and at the climax of the story feels the thrill of a solo flight. Winning the love of the handsome flying instructor is a bonus, but not the central point. “No, she was not Henry’s girl. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient.” Leafing through these magazine archives, Friedan voices a powerful sense of loss: “It is like remembering a long-forgotten dream, to recapture the memory of what a career meant to women before ‘career woman’ became a dirty word in America.”60
Just after Sarah takes flight, Friedan spots the first of the “innumerable paeans” to housewifery as a multifaceted “career” that should be able to fulfill a woman’s every ambition. As Friedan reads further into the magazines of the 1950s, she no longer finds any heroines who have any discernible “commitment to any work, art, profession or mission in the world,” other than being a wife and mother. “I helped create this image,” Friedan admits, recalling a profile she wrote in 1949 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, which focused on the poet’s cooking. She interviews a female magazine editor who recalls working with female writers in the 1930s and ’40s, until the men who had been at war and “dreaming about home, and a cosy domestic life” returned home and wrote this fantasy into being. The editor describes talking to a group of college students who were shadowing the magazine’s staff—as Sylvia Plath had done, as a Glamour guest editor in 1952. When she asked them about their career plans, not a single girl raised her hand. “When I remember how I worked to learn this job and loved it,” the editor says, wistfully, to Friedan. “Were we all crazy then?”61
The power of Friedan’s book lay in her recognition that by the early 1960s, the women she was speaking to, both in and through the book, were genuinely confused by their unhappiness, and asking in all seriousness, “am I crazy?” The suburban housewife was used to being labeled, patronizingly, as “bored,” but really she was paralyzed by the mixed messages the era was sending. Once upon a time, domesticity had simply been a woman’s lot in life, but now it had been transformed into her privilege and her pleasure. If it didn’t fulfill her entirely, she was a failure as a woman. It was not that she was crazy, but that she was being held in her place by crazy, incompatible ideas: that on the one hand, as a woman, she was “naturally” passive, maternal, and domestic; but at the same time, she had to work relentlessly to fit herself to this mold, and quash her own unhappiness in the process. Unfolding her thesis slowly and dramatically, Friedan revealed this woman to herself: “The chains that bind her in her trap are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.”62 Writing about the wake-up call of The Feminine Mystique, one early reader recalled that it would have been much easier to fight back against overt misogyny, but the mystique “was like being enveloped in a big cloud of cotton candy, sweet and sticky. You couldn’t punch your way out.”63
Betty Friedan was far from the first person to recognize that there was something wrong with American housewives. Indeed, as Stephanie Coontz demonstrates in her study of the book’s impact and legacy, Friedan’s publisher, W. W. Norton, worried before its release that the book would “have to fight its way out of a thicket.”64 Friedan herself admitted that “by 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game.”65 Magazines regularly featured mothers who felt trapped and unsatisfied, and the question of “what women want” was widely discussed. But before Friedan, most experts tackling this issue never questioned the fundamental assumption that women could derive all their meaning from family life—instead, they asked why women undervalued their own domestic roles, and what could be done to boost their self-esteem. There were plenty of scapegoats to go around: higher education was making women dissatisfied and failing to prepare them for marriage and motherhood. The American gospel of success was still driving some poor women to seek careers. Their kitchen appliances were not yet efficient enough, and housework was still hard work. Or they were sexually maladjusted, and just needed a dose of psychiatric therapy. In July 1960, a male writer in Harper’s Bazaar suggested—with the defense of humor—that the problem might be solved by taking away women’s right to vote.66 These objections attacked women for their ingratitude, their privilege, or their refusal to accept that anatomy was destiny. Friedan’s revolutionary contribution was to show that something was wrong with society, not with women.
The Feminine Mystique has been called “the first modern self-help book for women,” as an acknowledgment of the way that women read and responded to it, flooding Friedan with letters about the shock of recognition they felt when they read it, and exp
ressing their profound relief that they were not alone.67 Coontz describes how reading through the archive of these letters, and talking to women who read the book as young wives and mothers, tempered her own skepticism about the book’s weaknesses—its sweeping historical generalizations, its class and race blinders, its refusal to acknowledge earlier feminist thinkers who had paved the way for the book’s thesis. Those readers repeatedly said that the book “transformed their lives, even that it actually ‘saved’ their lives, or at least their sanity.” Even if they did not see themselves reflected in the women Friedan described, readers responded as though someone had reached through the window and hauled them out of a building they didn’t even notice was on fire.
Yet despite its powerful afterlife, and Friedan’s later role as one of the founders of NOW and a figurehead of the mass movement for “women’s lib,” The Feminine Mystique was not a call to arms. It did not advocate that women rise up en masse and walk out on their families to find themselves, alone. It did not blame men for contributing to women’s unhappiness. Instead it took a pragmatic, rather than revolutionary approach, suggesting that the reader start with a thorough and honest reckoning of her own situation. Only then could she know what she needed to change. Friedan counseled unhappy women to begin with themselves, and to find happiness much as Marjorie Hillis had once advised: by figuring out what they valued and what interested them, and pursuing it with determination. She proposed a “GI Bill for Women” that would subsidize tuition, books, even household help, for women who had raised children and wanted to go back to school. It was only later that readers of the book, and Friedan herself, would come to acknowledge that women’s problems were large and systemic, and that it would take more to solve them than a part-time job and a husband who listened.
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