by Ruth Rosen
WOMEN AT HOME
In 1963, a housewife and former labor union journalist named Betty Friedan published the results of interviews she had conducted with other women who had been educated at Smith College. In the privacy of their suburban homes, these housewives had revealed the depths of their despair to her. Blessed with good providers, nice homes, and healthy children, they puzzled over their unhappiness. Not knowing that other women shared their troubles, they experienced them as personal and blamed themselves for their misery. Friedan called this inchoate unhappiness “the problem that has no name.”
To quell their conflicts, some of the interviewees gulped tranquilizers, cooked gourmet meals, or scrutinized their children as though they were rare insects. In search of stimulation, some housewives had sought out sexual affairs or volunteered their time to churches, schools, and charitable organizations. Some women stuffed their houses with shiny new laborsaving devices. Yet, despite these material comforts, something still seemed to be missing. Many of these educated women, Friedan discovered, had nurtured dreams that were never realized, but also never forgotten. The postwar conviction that women should limit their lives exclusively to home and hearth had tied them to the family, closed other opportunities, and crushed many spirits. Friedan dubbed this powerful belief system “the feminine mystique,” and her book The Feminine Mystique became an instant best-seller.
In many ways, Betty Friedan’s background made her an ideal person to expose such domestic unhappiness to the American public. Born and reared in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein graduated from Smith College in 1942, already well versed in left-wing ideals of social justice and economic equality. After college, she joined the swirling intellectual and political world of leftist politics, worked as a journalist, and in 1947 married Carl Friedan. When she became pregnant with her second child, she was fired by her employer—not an unusual experience for working women at the time.
She and her husband then settled into a suburban life in which she experienced firsthand the isolation of a housewife. But even as she raised three children, she continued to write for mainstream women’s magazines. To ease her own burdens as a mother and a writer, she hired a housekeeper, but when other housewives described the isolation and narrowness of their lives, she clearly understood their frustration. She also had the political savvy to see the significance of their complaints and the skills with which to describe them movingly on paper. Readers of her book, in turn, imagined her as a sister housewife, trapped in the gilded cage of a suburban home, restless and impatient to lead a life of her own.
In fact, Friedan already had a life of her own, one far more politicized than that of the average housewife or magazine writer. As a longtime activist on the antifascist Left and in union struggles, and as an experienced labor journalist for the UE News, the newsletter of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Friedan had early targeted the plight of women workers. In 1952, she wrote a manual titled UE Fights for Women Workers, which described how one of the most Communist-influenced unions of the postwar era had fought against the discrimination of women workers.
Although she continued to write about women’s problems throughout the fifties, Friedan never thought of herself as a feminist. “By the time I got to college,” she explained, “the first century of struggle for women’s rights had been blotted out of the national memory and the national consciousness.” True enough. But to women in and around “the popular front” of the 1930s (the loose political alliance among Communist, Progressive, and labor groups against Fascism), the very word “feminist” conjured up images of spoiled bourgeois ladies who voted Republican. Women of the Left instead debated “the Woman Question” or the plight of female workers, but certainly not the problems of middle-class housewives.3
When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, she chose to omit her radical past from her account of her life. Early drafts of the manuscript reveal a far more daring vision, including a proposal for national legislation to create a “GI Bill” to promote women’s education. But in a country that had only recently passed through the violently anti-Communist convulsion known as “McCarthyism,” Friedan feared her ideas would be discredited if she focused on the problems of working women or advocated government intervention in the affairs of women. So she settled on a safer strategy, that of addressing middle-class white housewives as a sister suburbanite.4
Gerda Lerner, a longtime activist and future historian of women, worried about this decision: “I have just finished reading your splendid book and want to tell you how excited and delighted I am with it. . . . You have done for women . . . what Rachel Carson [author of the pioneering ecological exposé Silent Spring, 1962] did for the birds and trees.” But she also criticized Friedan’s exclusion of black, poor, and working women, anticipating what would become a widespread criticism of The Feminine Mystique, as well as of the contemporary women’s movement. But Friedan made a choice to be heard, not to be “Redbaited,” and in America, that meant addressing the middle class. So she concentrated on the power of the feminine mystique, creating a concept through which she then accused the entire society and culture—the media, science, psychiatry, education, and social sciences—of a mass conspiracy to limit the lives of women.5
Not surprisingly, Friedan’s accusations incited widespread hostility. “Many were violently outraged,” she later wrote, “at the charge that American women have been seduced back into the doll’s house, living through their husbands and children instead of finding individual identity in the modern world. I was cursed, pitied, told to get psychiatric help, to go jump in the lake and accused of being ‘more of a threat to the United States than the Russians.’” But many American magazines and journals also reviewed The Feminine Mystique positively. Excerpted in several women’s magazines, read by three million people, debated in the Boston Globe, the book reached a huge population of American women and men.6
Using the language of personal growth, Friedan challenged women to live an examined and purposeful life. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, each housewife, at last, knew she was not alone. “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’” With phrases as simple as that, Friedan opened a Pandora’s box and out tumbled the unnamed complaints that would mobilize one potential constituency of the modern women’s movement.
For some housewives, Friedan’s revelations came not a minute too soon. Letters arrived by the hundreds, as housewives poured out their confusion, despair, self-contempt, or determination to change. Readers came from backgrounds that bore little resemblance to the college-educated housewives whose complaints filled the book. Written by hand, sometimes in crayon or pencil, some letters were barely literate, and not the products of college graduates, but these women, too, knew that something was seriously wrong with their lives. They blessed Friedan, asked her for advice, described their despair, and begged for advice about how to change their lives. “Help!” pleaded one woman. “I have read your views on woman’s emancipation and thoroughly agree with you on all accounts—but—how does one go about it?” Some women painfully revealed their sense of hopelessness, the arrogance of psychiatrists they had consulted, the indifference of their husbands. Still others wrote of the changes they were in the process of making: the return to school; the search for a new job; even simple symbolic acts like the purchase of a toy stethoscope for a baby daughter.7
From Florida, a mother of four wrote Friedan, “I have been trying for years to tell my husband of my need to do something to find myself—to have a purpose. All I’ve ever achieved was to end up feeling guilty about wanting to be more than a housewife and mother.” A housewife from Massachusetts questioned the very meaning of her existence: “I have for the past ten years now been asking myself: ‘Is this all there is to life?’ I am a housewife and mother of five children. I have had a very poor education. I am 38 years old, and if this is all there is for me to loo
k forward to, I don’t want to go on.” A Wyoming woman wrote that “few books have had such an impact.” Wondering how to pull her life together at age thirty-seven, she confided to Friedan,
My secret scream as I stir the oatmeal, iron the blue jeans, and sell pop at the Little League baseball games is “Stop the World, I want to get on Before it’s too late!” I love my family dearly and wouldn’t trade them, or my life with them, for anything. But as they go out each day to meet, and get involved in this great big wonderful world, I yearn to tag along!
A female politician wrote that her career had blessedly kept her from feeling “trapped.” An unhappy housewife who described her daily obsession with changing her life wrote, “I owe you a debt of eternal gratitude.” Like many readers, she had passed her copy of the book on to friends. From one radicalized housewife arrived these encouraging words: “If you ever need partisans for your revolution or endorsements for your product, you can count on this ‘saved’ housewife for undying support.”8
For all its insights, The Feminine Mystique was not without shortcomings. Well-acquainted with social and economic analysis, Friedan nevertheless focused on the psychological search for a new identity outside the home. She ignored the different obstacles faced by working-class and minority women, championed careers as though women could easily find well-paid, meaningful work in a sex-segregated labor force, and failed to question the presumption that women bore responsibility for all domestic work. In short, her book, which emphasized the claustrophobic character of domesticity, was a call for self-realization, not a statement of feminist public policy. Still, she had broken the silence and had begun unmasking the reality of women’s lives.
COLD WAR CONTAINMENT
The fifties was an age of cognitive dissonance: millions of people believed in ideals that poorly described their own experience. The decade quarantined dissent and oozed conformity. On the pages of Life magazine, on the new television screens, Americans—the white and well-fed variety—radiated wholesomeness, cleanliness, fecundity, and fidelity. Liberated by shiny new appliances, apron-clad mothers played with their boisterous broods. Rosy-cheeked fathers jauntily swung their briefcases as they strolled off to work. On Sunday afternoons, families on television and in magazines gathered around their barbecues and celebrated their good fortune. It was as though someone had banished poverty, prejudice, and pain from public culture.9
But just beneath the surface, many real Americans, unlike their media counterparts, experienced anxiety and confusion. While the media painted a roseate portrait of suburban motherhood and the happy nuclear family, growing numbers of women actually entered the labor force, lesbians and gays cracked open the closet door as they created underground organizations, leftist activists brought a progressive agenda into mainstream organizations, domestic discontent simmered, urban poverty and racial segregation increased as whites began their flight to the suburbs, and the young quietly began crossing over an unbridgeable generational divide.10
Far from being a shelter from the storm of American life, the family proved to be the storm itself. Despite lip service to age-old verities, values had indeed shifted. The men and women who married in the late forties and fifties entered a changing culture as if they were sailors at sea in uncharted waters. Reared in the Depression, most had grown up in a culture that valued duty, thrift, long-term commitment, and an old-fashioned work ethic. But they married and bore children in a culture of abundance that prized planned obsolescence and disposability, glamorized leisure, and promised individual happiness through the purchase of products. Ironically, the very consumer culture that celebrated “togetherness” also addressed husbands, wives, and children as individuals with promises of personal freedom and autonomy.11
Though divorce was still rare, Americans began getting a bad case of the marital jitters. Ladies’ Home Journal regularly published a column titled “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Marital counseling became more popular in the late 1950s as couples tried to avoid the even worse stigma of divorce. Schools offered special programs on “marriage and the family.” The 1957 founding of Parents without Partners, an organization dedicated to providing emotional and social comfort for newly divorced parents, signaled the growing problem of familial disintegration.12
The setting for such family life, was, of course, the newly built suburbs that altered the social landscape, leaving the poor, minorities, singles, the childless, lesbians and gay men, and bohemian culture behind in the cities. The suburban population doubled in one decade from thirty-six million to seventy-two million people. By the end of the fifties, one-fourth of all Americans had found a small, sunny oasis of open space in the suburbs. Ironically, at the peak of anti-Communist fervor, few Americans seemed to realize that what made this exodus possible were public subsidies for higher education for veterans, low-interest home loans for GIs, the private automobile, and interstate highways, all paid for by the federal government in the name of containing Communism.13
If a storm was brewing unexpectedly within the sacred confines of the family, there was another storm out there in the world that directly endangered home and hearth. The Cold War pitted the United States against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, capitalism against Communism, one nuclear-armed superpower against the other. It was a “war” that could not be fought directly for fear of causing global nuclear extinction. To contain Communism and to win the “hearts and minds” of Third World and unaligned nations, the U.S. government threw a circle of strategic bases around the globe. The two superpowers settled into a policy of deterrence, which, if it worked forever, would prevent Mutually Assured Destruction, dubbed, appropriately enough, MAD. Then, instead of annihilating each other, the two countries embarked upon a series of “proxy” wars, some of which threatened to turn the Cold War into a scorching conflagration.
On the home front, demonic images of the Soviet Union unleashed a moral panic, a “great fear” that penetrated all aspects of American culture and society. Like the Devil, Communism seemed to lurk everywhere, capable of inhabiting the soul of any individual. Vigilance, the government insisted, was essential. The search for Communists in American life became an obsession. Loyalty oaths, indictments, and blacklists crippled thousands of lives. Fear of internal sabotage and subversion crushed dissent. In 1950, Joseph McCarthy rose to power on a tsunami of anti-Communist hysteria, proclaiming Communists to be in every nook and cranny of American life, and at the very highest reaches of the American government. He fell only when his futile attacks against the United States Army—broadcast to millions of Americans in their living rooms—exposed his hateful persecution of innocent people. But to true believers, political treason, like religious heresy, endangered the nation’s moral covenant with God. In the name of that covenant, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of espionage, were executed in 1953.
The red-baiting witch hunts that Joseph McCarthy came to symbolize and that took his name—McCarthyism—coincided with what might be characterized as a national emotional breakdown. The Cold War recruited everyone and all resources into the national battle against the Soviet Union. Like a colonial jeremiad, a 1950s civil defense pamphlet warned, “Our nation is in a grim struggle for national survival and the preservation of the world.”14 Americans mobilized the military, the civilian population, the economy, education, and even children for what seemed like an interminable war. My Weekly Reader, a scholastic news magazine, unleashed a barrage of anti-Communist propaganda at elementary-school students in order to produce another generation of Cold Warriors. The Boy Scouts, worried about American men’s growing “softness,” pledged to toughen boys’ physical and psychological strength to fight Communism. Universities shifted their attention to the kind of basic research and defense projects required to counter Soviet expansionism. The military sent families to join soldiers at strategic bases, as ambassadors for a superior way of life.15
Anti-Communism also helped contain the storm brewing within the home. American women could be mob
ilized without a single woman leaving her suburban home for work. The belief that American superiority rested on its booming consumer culture and rigidly defined gender roles became strangely intertwined with Cold War politics. In 1959, at an American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev engaged in a bizarre “kitchen debate.” As historian Elaine May has noted, “The two leaders did not discuss missiles, bombs, or even modes of government. Rather, they argued over the relative merits of American and Soviet washing machines, televisions, and electric ranges.”16
As they toured model American homes, Nixon boasted of the laborsaving devices that gave American women time to cultivate their charms as wives and to care for their children. “What we want is to make easier the life of our housewives,” said Nixon. Khrushchev testily retorted that the Soviet Union had little use for full-time housewives. Its women workers were busy building an industrial society. Tracking this bizarre debate, the American press compared the “bedraggled drudges” of the Soviet Union, who lost their looks at an early age and neglected their children, with the well-groomed American housewives whose leisure allowed them to care for themselves, as well as their families.17
The advertising industry quickly geared up to instruct new homemakers in the ways they could help fight Communism. In 1954, a McCall’s magazine editorial coined the ideal of “togetherness,” a concept designed to slow the centrifugal forces that were already spinning members of the family in different directions. Speaking before the Wilmington City Federation of Women’s Clubs, a director of Du Pont reminded his female audience that they were no longer just housewives. “You are ‘Managers of Destiny,’” he told them, “perfectly positioned to fight socialism.”