by Ruth Rosen
This is where you women can be of tremendous help—by everlastingly teaching and preaching the values of individualism and of personal freedom, and by keeping alive a burning faith in our philosophy of incentive and free choice. . . . Socialists have tried to relieve the individual of all responsibility. . . . Only women, with their “independence,” can fight for individual liberty.18
Simply put, the nation needed women to fuel the growing consumer economy. Anita Colby, an author and consultant, lectured businessmen on how to decipher the mysterious ways of the female consumer:
She, too, gets restless . . . but unlike you, she can’t head for a bar alone at night to spend a few hours of relaxation. No, restricted to home and children, she takes it out in a new color of hair—or calls in a decorator to do over the house—and may even surprise you when you come home one day with a ripped-up lawn bearing all the ear-marks of a swimming-pool in embryo! At the very least, she’ll buy herself a new hat. This is bad, you think? Well, all you cosmetic manufacturers, makers of textiles, furniture, housewares, plumbing appliances, and millinery experts think about your annual sales-figures!! Honestly now, where would you be without the little woman’s rebellion?19
It didn’t take much to convince postwar men and women that the United States, and not the Soviet Union, offered the good life. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product leaped 250 percent. In 1955, with only 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States produced half the world’s goods. By 1960, 60 percent of Americans belonged to the middle class, and owned their own homes; 75 percent of farmers owned their own lands. The discretionary income of the middle class doubled: 87 percent owned televisions, 75 percent owned washing machines, and ten million citizens owned shares in American companies.20
The growing middle class had to ignore a great deal as they celebrated their material success. Racial segregation and discrimination still ruled the South. As the middle class expanded, the rich grew richer, while the poor slid further into grinding poverty. The nation’s wealth, moreover, rested, as one observer noted, “on Hydrogen bombs, B-52 bombers, a nuclear navy, guided missiles . . . the potential Armageddon . . . death supporting life.” The American Dream—a wife, children, ownership of a home, a car, and “the good things in life”—had finally come within reach of a critical mass of men.
After the political demise of Joseph McCarthy in 1954, Americans caught their breath and began to settle down to enjoy the domestic affluence they had purchased—or so they thought—through such extremities of vigilance. But McCarthyism had seeped deep into the culture, like toxic waste that poisons the earth long after officials declare a hazardous accident is over. Dissent—supposedly the touchstone of a democratic society—became linked in the popular mind with Communist sympathizers. Anti-Communism also cast a shadow of self-censorship across the intellectual landscape, destroying a credible non-Communist Left, squelching intellectual and political opposition, and forcing a political consensus that glossed over America’s simmering racial, gender, economic, ecological, and social problems.21
In such an atmosphere, even marriage and childbearing became politicized. A majority of Americans judged men or women who did not marry as “sick,” thinking them either immoral, selfish, or neurotic. As “difference” became synonymous with “deviant,” people began to regard such men or women with suspicion, their refusal to mate hinting at some “antisocial” secret like homosexual or Communist tendencies. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even encouraged women to marry early and have children to fight “the twin enemies of freedom—crime and Communism.”22
Young couples married and bore children with an enthusiasm that confounded demographers’ predictions of a falling birthrate. Fueled by a pent-up desire for family life after the Depression and war, they married earlier, slowed the rising divorce rate, and reversed a century’s decline in the fertility rate by producing the biggest baby boom in history (from 1946 to 1964). At its peak in 1957, American women gave birth to over four million babies a year. A parade of baby carriages and bulging profiles transformed the landscape of America’s parks, leaving one stunned foreign observer to note that “every other young housewife I see is pregnant.”23
The feminine mystique also had a profound influence on popular culture. An unmarried woman was an embarrassment. Hollywood scripts of the time required career women to acknowledge marriage as the source of all happiness. In the 1955 film The Tender Trap, Debbie Reynolds successfully auditions for her first big acting job. Dismissing congratulations from her agent, Frank Sinatra, she dutifully repeats the catechism of those years: “Marriage is the most important thing in the world. A woman isn’t really a woman until she’s been married and had children.” Later, the poet Adrienne Rich would express the pressure that so many actual women felt at the time.
As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial. This is what women have always done.24
Fashion played an important role in constructing and constricting the new feminine and maternal image of the postwar era. The simple, broad-shouldered, man-tailored clothing of the war years gave way to Christian Dior’s “New Look,” a style that exaggerated feminine curves and a womanly silhouette. Lacquered bouffant hairdos and starkly outlined eyes and mouths advertised an exaggerated if untouchable female sexuality. “Fifties clothes were like armor,” the writer Brett Harvey recalled:
Our clothes expressed all the contradictions of our roles. Our ridiculously starched skirts and hobbling sheaths were a caricature of femininity. Our cinched waist and aggressively pointed breasts advertised our availability at the same time they warned of our impregnability.25
“Experts” rushed to reposition homemaking as a profession. Life magazine praised the “increasing emphasis on the nurturing and homemaking values among women who might have at one time pursued a career.” Standards of cleanliness steadily climbed as industry redefined laborsaving devices as necessities rather than luxuries. Advertisements mercilessly attacked women’s insecurities as mothers, wives, and housekeepers. To protect their children, mothers had to scour and sanitize their homes. A professional homemaker sewed her own clothes, preserved her own fruits and vegetables, developed the arts of an experienced chef, and decorated her home with the skills of an interior designer. Add in the nearly eight hours a week that many suburban housewives spent in a car chauffeuring about their brood and doing errands, and it becomes clear why suburban housewives spent more time consumed by housework, broadly defined, than had their grandmothers.26
The professionalization of the housewife turned the act of consumption into a patriotic act and kept American industry humming. Industrial psychologists advised manufacturers on how to make a housewife feel professional: “When a housewife uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for Venetian blinds, rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer and more like an engineer.” Later, one disgruntled fifties woman quipped, “The Good Housekeeping seal of approval was the brand of the slave.”27
More important than her homemaking skills or her appearance was a woman’s role as a mother. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author of the 1946 best-seller The Common Sense Book of Baby Care, the child-raising bible of that era, insisted that babies needed constant attention. Without a mother at home, children languished or, worse, became juvenile delinquents. A good mother always greeted her children after school with affection and nourishment. “More important than any meal,” remembered one daughter of the fifties, “the after-school milk and cookies were akin to Eucharistic substance, symbolic of nurture and love.”28
Spock, a paragon of child permissiveness, strongly encouraged mothers to stay at home with their children. “If a mother realizes clearly
how vital this kind of care is to a small child,” he explained, “it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important after all.” When child care became too overwhelming, the distraught mother was advised to “go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get a new dress or hat.” But mothers, it turned out, could also do too much. Four years before Spock, Philip Wylie’s bestselling book Generation of Vipers set the tone for blaming mothers for everything that seemed wrong in the postwar era. Economic disaster, religious apathy, and the nervous breakdowns of soldiers during and after battle were all attributable to mothers’ overly protective domination of their sons, which he dubbed “Momism.” America’s mothers now had to walk the fine line between neglect and smothering overprotection. If they worked outside their homes, they risked creating a generation of juvenile delinquents. If they stayed home and smothered their children, they risked producing a generation of denatured, sissified young men.29
THE BIG LIE
After her children were asleep and her housework was done, it was hardly time for a woman to fall into bed, exhausted or depressed. A housewife still needed to exchange her apron for an outfit that would rekindle her husband’s sexual interest in her. The expanding consumer culture depended heavily on women’s repeated purchases of beauty products. But the formula didn’t always work. Behind closed doors, many marriages seemed deeply troubled, and at the heart of those troubles was the nature of female sexuality.
The war years had witnessed increased teenage prostitution, greater sexual activity among both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and escalating marital infidelity. After the war, Americans tried to “contain” such disorderly sexual behavior. But it turned out that sexual expectations had, in fact, changed. Panicked social critics encouraged early marriage, hoping it might put a brake on youthful sexual experimentation. And sometimes it did, but when it couldn’t, sexual hypocrisy became a way of life. Society still expected men to have experience and women to have none. The same culture that increasingly exploited sex to promote products still insisted on the appearance of virginal innocence in its girls and women.30
After the war, dating turned into a highly elaborate form of courtship in which male aggression and female passivity were carefully prescribed and encoded. “In the fifties,” one woman remembered, “the only thing worse than sleeping with a man was to telephone him.” Every step in male commitment permitted freer sexual activity, as kissing escalated into necking, necking slid into petting, and heavy petting stopped only a technical step before “going all the way.” “We started dating,” recalled one woman, “and we kept on dating until we got married my junior year. In between we did the whole bit. First, he gave me his class ring, then the lavaliere—the necklace with the letters of his fraternity. Next came the fraternity pin, until, da-dum, the engagement ring.” Although a bevy of experts and teen magazines strongly advocated “saving oneself for marriage,” one woman later admitted, “Everybody was doing it. But it was the Big Lie that nobody was.”31
Couples expected an “eroticized marriage” and looked for advice from experts. Eustace Chesser, the author of the widely read Love Without Fear (1947), kept in print in paperback through the fifties, popularized the idea that marital bliss required mutual orgasm. The most widely read marriage manual of the decade, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, written by the Dutch physician Th. H. Van de Velde in 1930 and reprinted thirty-two times between 1941 and 1957, went a step further, declaring, “Every considerable erotic stimulation of their wives that does not terminate in orgasm, on the women’s part, represents an injury, and repeated injuries of this kind lead to permanent—or very obstinate—damage to both body and soul.”
The growing popularity of the simultaneous orgasm, however doctrinaire, also presumed that women should experience orgasmic fulfillment. Yet, that was not what women’s magazines reported. They brooded about American women’s frigidity—the decade’s term for everything from sexual boredom to nonorgasmic sex. The medical and psychiatric community, heavily influenced by Freudian doctrine, blamed women for refusing to accept their true feminine identity. They insisted that two kinds of orgasms existed, vaginal and clitoral, but that only one was of value. For them, a clitoral orgasm was, by definition, the immature response of a neurotic and frigid woman who willfully refused to surrender to her feminine destiny. Achieved by male penetration, the vaginal orgasm demonstrated a woman’s true affirmation of her feminine maturity.32
No one knows how many women spent those years doubting their femininity because they had never experienced the much-touted vaginal orgasm. No doubt there were many. In one study of white middle-class couples, one-third of women claimed they had never achieved orgasm. Some of these women perhaps mistook emotional emptiness for sexual dissatisfaction. Betty Friedan grew bewildered when housewives gave her “an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all.” Could it be, she wondered, that they viewed sex as a substitute for a “forfeited self”?33
It was difficult to know. “Frigidity” probably had many causes, including guilt. Over 80 percent of the women Alfred Kinsey interviewed for his study of female sexuality expressed moral objections to premarital sex, but half of them nevertheless violated their own values. One divorced woman later explained the source of her sexual problems:
My experience being with my to-be husband succeeded in conditioning me to utter subservience to his satisfaction and he never thought mine could be other than automatic upon his (else I was “frigid” or wrong somehow). And he is and was a psychoanalyst! I remain as I was—unfulfilled.
After marriage, some wives who had engaged in premarital sex wondered if their husbands still “respected” them.
I feel this gradual introduction to the sex experience has advantages over being plunged into it suddenly on the wedding night. However, it carried with it for me a high sense of guilt, which still bothers me after all these years. I am forever grateful that we did finally marry because I probably wouldn’t have felt free to marry anyone else. This feeling of guilt may be why I am unable to respond sexually as I wish I could.34
Ignorance of anatomy and sexuality was also widespread. One woman, who had saved herself for marriage, wondered “whether or not the lack of sexual experience before marriage marred our early days of marriage . . . but I believe a better understanding of woman’s nature on the part of [my husband] . . . could have helped considerably. After seventeen years, this understanding is still lacking.” Another woman revealed that she “didn’t know anything about orgasms”:
The first time . . . we were in his room in his dorm. It was fast—he came in and he came out. It was a sharp, poignant pleasure that had no resolution. It stayed like that, it never got any better. He would come in and then pull out and come into a handkerchief. I was always left hanging. I used to come back to my dorm and lie down on the floor and howl and pound the floor. But I didn’t really know why I was frustrated. I felt so lonely.35
The truth is, it was difficult to switch from virginal bride to sexy wife. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs have argued, women—not men—made the sexual revolution. Between the fifties and the eighties, men’s sexual behavior changed very little. They still enjoyed premarital sexual experiences in their youth, married, and afterward perhaps strayed with other women. But during the same period, as Ehrenreich has pointed out, women moved “from a pattern of virginity before marriage and monogamy thereafter to a pattern that much more resembles men’s.”
Even before the sixties, a sexual revolution simmered, but it had not yet boiled over. Women received confusing messages from a culture in transition. Society still divided the female population into “good” and “bad” women. The spreading use of birth control—diaphragms and condoms—helped rupture the historic tie between sex and procreation, but they were for planning babies, not for pleasure. Despite the expectation of an “eroticized�
�� marriage, many people still felt shy about discussing sexual matters in public or, for that matter, in private. Advice manuals emphasized the desirability of female orgasm but assumed the woman would remain passive and stressed the man’s effort. Marriage manuals encouraged men to satisfy their wives but faulted women for being “frigid.” A Freudian-saturated culture promoted the crackpot notion that women achieved sexual satisfaction exclusively through vaginal penetration. Private behavior contrasted sharply with public pronouncements of marital fidelity and sexual innocence. Some women felt guilty if they had sex before marriage and guiltier still if they had too few orgasms afterward. Sexual advice had changed, but traditional attitudes had not. The fact is, women really weren’t sure what they were supposed to feel. Some women, not surprisingly, felt nothing at all. The result: too many women “faked it” and too few men noticed.
Many men, too, felt suffocated by the self-conscious “togetherness” demanded of the suburban family. By the mid-fifties, a few Beats and playboys began to search for escape routes from the traditional obligation to support families. But most men didn’t flee. As one husband explained, “You stayed with the decisions you made in your early twenties. You stuck with your job. You stuck with your wife. You stuck with everything.” And if life became too hard, men used liquor or other women to cope with their dissatisfaction.36
The manly courage so powerfully portrayed in the Westerns, detective stories, or war films of the era mocked the actual lives men led as suburban husbands. Growing numbers of them worked in industries and corporations that stripped them of autonomy, dictated the terms of their work, and rewarded conformity and teamwork more than personal initiative. Despite the popularity of a tough-fisted masculinity in the popular media, American men were also becoming more liberal and more open-minded. In 1959, a poll revealed that more men than women said they would vote for a woman president. And just as men were losing authority at work, growing numbers of mothers and wives were expanding theirs by joining men in the labor force.37