The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  WOMEN AT WORK

  Although the image of the American housewife dominated popular culture, “the most striking feature of the fifties,” as historian William Chafe has noted, “was the degree to which women continued to enter the job market and expand their sphere.” Between 1940 and 1960, the number of working women doubled, rising from 15 percent to 30 percent, and the proportion of married working mothers jumped 400 percent. By 1955, more women worked in the labor force than had during World War II, when women had been mobilized to support America’s fighting men.38

  This was not what government policy had intended. Even before the war’s end, public planners had tried to wean American women from their wartime jobs. A job manual written for female war workers reminded them that “the mother stands at the heart of family life. She it is who will create the world after the war.” Apparently, some working women disagreed. A survey conducted immediately after the war by the Bureau of Women Workers revealed that 75 percent of women workers preferred to remain employed outside their homes.39

  But as military industries wound down, they laid off women who had earned high wages as skilled workers during the war. Newly converted civilian industries gave preferential treatment to demobilized veterans or simply refused to hire women for what was now redefined as “men’s work.” Faced with shrinking opportunities and reduced pay, some working women looked forward to starting or resuming family life. One woman who worked six days a week during the war knew that “the idea was for women to go back home. The women understood that,” she said. “And the men had been promised their jobs when they came back. I was ready to go home. I was tired . . . I knew that it would be coming and I didn’t feel any let-down. The experience was interesting, but I couldn’t have kept it up forever. It was too hard.”40 But many women had no choice but to seek other work. Rosie the Riveter, the widely celebrated wartime heroine, put down her welding tools and resumed her work as a waitress, barmaid, dishwasher, salesgirl, or domestic.

  A decade later, literate, educated housewives discovered that new opportunities had opened up to them. In 1956, the United States officially became a “postindustrial society,” with the number of white collar workers exceeding that of industrial laborers. As nonfactory, service-oriented jobs mushroomed, businesses and corporations began to search for single women to hire as secretarial and clerical workers. Since they were in short supply, educated middle-class married mothers, who turned out to be ideal employees, were sought out by business. With their children in school, mothers provided a cheap and fluid labor force whose willingness to accept low wages for part-time work without benefits substantially increased corporate profits.41

  As a result, the most powerful challenge to the feminine mystique came not from women bored by domestic life, but from a corporate sector that successfully drew women out of their homes and into the workforce. By 1960, married women accounted for 52 percent of the female labor force (up from 36 percent in 1950), double-income families had jumped 222 percent since 1940, and a third of working women were mothers with children under eighteen years of age.42

  An aspiring middle class had also changed its definition of “economic necessity.” Couples now dreamed of a new home, two cars, a college education for their children—both boys and girls—with discretionary income left over for leisure pursuits and vacations. But rising inflation, coupled with higher expectations, meant that many men simply could not provide “the good life” on a single paycheck—although the myth was that they were doing just that. The great irony of the decade was that working mothers—those villains of popular culture—very likely contributed to the relative prosperity of the postwar years. The rise in women’s wages (though still low compared to men’s), according to some economists, may have even increased the cost of women staying at home. When mothers worked, countless families were able to climb into the middle class and assure their children a college education.43

  Naturally, some of these working women worried about protecting their husbands’ feelings. Children of the Great Depression, they knew exactly how to justify their work outside the home to men and their families; they were “helping out.” One working mother knew that “husbands feel bad enough about not being able to handle the whole job without our help.”

  Do you think we’re going to say right out, “My Joe just can’t put five kids through college, and then Sue needed braces last year, and Johnny will need them too, and the washer had to be replaced, and Ann was ashamed to bring friends home because the living room furniture was such a mess, so I went to work”?44

  Working women also tried not to disrupt family life. One woman recalled how carefully she tried to ensure “that there would be no disruption of the service . . . the cooking, the cleaning.”

  We had our family evenings together every night . . . I could have taken a full-time job . . . with benefits and a better salary. I discussed it with my husband and I told him, if I take on this full-time job, I will be taking away something from you that you have to have. You are the breadwinner and . . . I will not take that away from you. To work full-time, I felt I would be taking away his manhood, his feeling of being the head of the household. I never regretted it. We had a good, loving relationship for thirty years.45

  Although few women at the time admitted that they worked because they were bored, many later confessed that homemaking had left them desperate for greater stimulation and that, after the isolation of the home, they loved the camaraderie of working with other people. Estelle Shuster began working in 1950, when her daughters were twelve and eight. “I went to work, because I was bored in the house.”

  My husband was a CPA, he was never home, and when he was, it was the nose in his tax papers or the newspaper over the face. My mother thought it was scandalous that I went to work. And my husband said, “What you’re trying to do is make everyone feel as if I can’t earn a living for you.” Belittling, that was the word he used, he said I was belittling him by working. I said, I don’t care how anyone feels, I have to get out of the house.46

  Some women viewed employment as an insurance policy against an impending empty nest. Women born in 1900 lived on the average 50.8 years. Without birth control, many women kept bearing children until the last decade of their lives. The baby boom, which reversed a century’s decline in women’s fertility, masked how much a longer life span and fewer children would change women’s lives. Daughters born in 1957, who resumed the pattern of late marriages and fewer children, could expect to live 72.8 years, giving them thirty or forty years to reinvent their lives after their last child left home.47

  Like housewives, working women faced formidable obstacles and problems for which there existed no language. At age twenty-five, Doris Earnshaw, a married graduate of Middlebury College, who had already taught in a French college, decided to apply to graduate school in French literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

  The Chairman of the Department said to me (in French), “I am sorry, madame, you are very well qualified, but we do not take married ladies.” The words still ring in my ears. I felt shut out (and effectively was shut out) of the academic career I felt ready for and now I wonder why I didn’t protest. . . . I took a job as a maid in a wealthy home; we lived over the garage; I had a day uniform and a party uniform, and in my spare time read through French literature in a thorough self-imposed course of study.

  A few years later, Earnshaw worked in the Library of Congress (“No discrimination there; an old-time woman martinet supervisor hired me to catalog Russian periodicals using my Russian language skills”) and then in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (“Again no discrimination”) while she raised her children. Looking back on these years, Earnshaw said:

  I think young women in the fifties were like the returning soldiers; eager to find new paths, but shunted into the domestic life while the men were helped to earn college degrees. The war had affected us, too, and we were frustrated by the clash of our ideals with the lids
placed on achievement. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique hit me with full force. I understood it immediately, and began my first steps of recovery. . . . Eventually, in a time of extreme frustration (screaming by myself when no one was around), trying to be the perfect fifties model wife and mother, I was invited into the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, which I was thrilled to start, and finished in 1981. During those ten years I was part of the group of women who pioneered the study of women poets of the world.

  A happy ending, but Earnshaw never forgot the decades she had lost.

  The initial discrimination when I was twenty-five (and my unthinking acceptance of it) resulted in a missed career, and a damaged sense of self-esteem, but not altogether; by age fifty-five I had the Ph.D. and then followed eighteen rewarding years of teaching at the lecturer level in the university that once turned me away.48

  Working women also commonly encountered predatory male supervisors and coworkers whose hands groped where they were not wanted. Here was another problem without a name. “That’s life,” women said to each other. Maria O’Connor, whose husband’s salary was insufficient to support their daughters, worked at a supermarket where she daily tried to avoid such roaming hands. “At work, everybody was always making a remark, or touching you,” she recalled.

  Now they call it harassment. We had a lot of harassment from the supervisors, the managers. One time I bent down to pick up something and the manager put his hand on me. You know, you couldn’t wear pants in those days, you had to wear a uniform, a dress. I was so mad, I had a cup of coffee in my hand and threw it. The man ducked and the cup hit another young guy, but I didn’t care. I yelled at him, “You just keep your goddamn hands off me.” He said, “If you don’t like it, work somewhere else.” So he fired me.

  O’Connor decided to take her grievance to her union. The man swore he had done nothing at all, and another woman employee backed him up. The union insisted he take her back, but O’Connor, completely disgusted, said, “Take your job and . . .”

  Then she worked for a butcher. “Those years, it was tough to be a woman on the job.”

  If you didn’t want to go out with them, they’d say you were a tramp, you were no good. Some of the girls, they’d feel like they had to go out with them. [The supervisors] used to say, come on Maria, we have to go upstairs and get something from the storeroom. And moron that I was, I would go up there and first thing I know he’s got me crushed up against the wall. So I say, stop it, take your hands off me and he says, oh you can go work at the other store. Spiteful. You know, he was going to transfer me because I wouldn’t let him get near me.

  Meanwhile, Maria had to deal with an extremely jealous husband who resented the fact that she worked with men all day. Then, when she returned home, “he would start in on me about the guys at work. I’d say to him, ‘If I leave the store at six and I’m home at twenty after six, when am I gonna have an affair?’”49

  The nightmare for working mothers was finding adequate child care. Eighty percent of them relied on the vagaries of relatives, friends, and sitters. One out of thirteen children turned into an unsupervised “latchkey” child. Social critics blamed working women for creating an “epidemic” of juvenile delinquency, but stubbornly refused to consider the idea of government-sponsored child care. In the United States, as opposed to the Soviet Union, patriotic American women raised their own children.

  Working women naturally returned home to the same tasks of cooking, shopping, and cleaning expected of a full-time housewife. “Believe me,” explained one disgruntled wife,

  a modern woman of today would have to be four women to be everything that is expected of her. My husband wants me to work not for the satisfaction I might get out of working, but for the extra money he will have for himself. . . . But, how about the extra burden it would put on me. I would go out to work if possible, but I cannot do that and come home to a house full of screaming kids, dishes piled in the sink, and mountains of laundry to do. It is no fun to come home and see the sweet, dear, lazy bum asleep on the couch after being on my feet all day. He still likes his home-made pies, cakes and appetizing meals. He thinks he would lose some of his masculinity if anyone saw him hanging out the wash, or washing dishes. And if he had to give up any of his fishing or hunting or running around visiting his buddies to keep an eye on the kids, well, I’m not killing myself for the almighty dollar.50

  In fact, American men were helping out more than ever. In 1954, Life magazine announced in an article titled “The Domestication of the American Male” what many social commentators already suspected. But there were limits. As the authors of Modern Mothers’ Dilemma warned, men “can’t be asked to take over much. It is more than unfair to expect him to do half the housework as well as carry the load of a full-time job; it prevents him from doing his best work and keeps him from enjoying his home as he should.”51

  Working women also encountered a sex-segregated labor force. Discrimination in wages and jobs was so common that many didn’t even notice. A woman opening the daily newspaper found the help-wanted ads divided by sex. On one page were jobs open to men. On the opposite page were jobs that funneled women into domestic service, waitressing, sales, and the expanding world of “pink collar work,” where they shuffled, typed, and filed the avalanche of paper required by bureaucratic organizations. By 1960, 59 percent of women employees worked in occupations defined as “women’s work.”

  Even when women did the same work as men, they received substantially lower wages. Though few working men had ever earned an adequate family wage, employers insisted that women simply worked for “pin money.” While her children were in high school, one mother worked in a travel agency where she accidentally discovered that her boss paid her far less than men who did the same work. Like many women of the time, she griped privately but said nothing, grateful for the money she did make for her children’s college educations.52

  Where could women find help? They mostly worked in nonunionized jobs. With few exceptions, weakened labor unions in any case refused to deal with women’s employment problems. By the end of the fifties, not surprisingly, women’s wages had even decreased. In 1960, women earned 61 percent of men’s wages, a drop of 3 percent since 1955. In 1959, a white male with a high-school education earned on average $4,429, while his female counterpart earned only $3,458. For blacks, it was worse: black college-educated men earned $4,840; black college-educated women, $3,708.

  Meanwhile, a small army of social critics blasted working women for many of America’s ills: alcoholic husbands, homosexual children, and juvenile delinquency. In their influential anti-Communist best-seller, The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), Ferdinand Lundberg and Marya Farnham typically laid society’s problems on women’s defiant determination to pursue outside interests and careers. The authors argued that an “independent” woman was an oxymoron, single women were sick, and childless women were “emotionally disturbed.” “All spinsters,” they concluded, “[should] be barred by law from having anything to do with the teaching of children on the ground of emotional incompetence.”53

  “Only in America,” noted a foreign observer as late as 1962, “is ‘Career Woman’ an obscene phrase.” Caught between the myth of the happy housewife and the reality of their working lives, some working women refused to acknowledge that they worked. Alice Quaytman, a leftist political activist before, during, and after World War II, raised her family and worked as a child psychologist during the fifties. But when anyone asked what she did, she elusively described herself as a “mother who works with children.” Another mother, a salaried president of a national philanthropic organization who put in eighty hours a week, explained her full-time housekeeper and lengthy absences from home as the result of her “volunteer” work. Many suburban women worked full-time, without pay, as part of the female voluntary army that created the libraries, schools, charities, and religious organizations that turned suburban developments into communities. This, they could brag about.54

>   Fearing social and political ostracism, career women downplayed their independence. Frances Perkins, former secretary of labor, denounced feminism and argued that the “happiest place for most women is in the home.” Journalist Dorothy Thompson argued that women who engaged in demanding intellectual work cheated their husbands and children. Even Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist who had introduced Americans to the very idea that gender roles were flexible, publicly worried about women who searched for status in a “competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth.”55

  Even without an organized women’s movement, a virulent strain of antifeminism saturated the culture. Psychiatry pitted the healthy, submissive, patriotic mother and wife against the neurotic and strident feminist, whose determination to ruin other women’s lives originated from her own sick unwillingness to surrender to feminine fulfillment. Critics associated feminism with an un-American godless Communism that forced women to work outside the home. A few former suffragists—like the repentant ex-Communists of the time—publicly recanted their youthful ways, belatedly took their husbands’ last names, and dutifully bowed to the idea of man’s natural superiority.56

  WOMEN’S POLITICAL LIFE

  At the same time, a very small circle of former suffragists, members of the conservative National Woman’s Party (NWP), did keep alive the dream of an Equal Rights Amendment, which they had first submitted in 1923, soon after women gained the right to vote. The ERA would have given women equality in every arena of public life, but was opposed by labor and working women who feared it would destroy the protective legislation women enjoyed. Still, the NWP exerted very little influence on the dominant culture.57