The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  Insecure in their separate worlds, women privately sniped at each other: housewives blasted activists as unpatriotic; working women derided housewives as spoiled and lazy; and housewives accused working women of neglecting their children. A local Girl Scout troop leader shocked one mother who worked as a civilian specialist for the Air Force by refusing to admit the daughters of “working women” to her troop. Housewives in one neighborhood decided to prevent their daughters from visiting the home of a high-school teacher who never greeted her own two teenage daughters with milk and cookies.69

  And yet, these adult women had a great deal in common: wherever they worked, whatever they did, they were treated as subordinates. Observing this fact in a 1960 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, the journalist Dorothy Thompson asked, “Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes but why, why, why don’t they take up their own causes and obvious needs?”70

  They would, but American women did not yet possess a common language with which to express their shared subordination. “I did not set out consciously to start a revolution,” Betty Friedan insisted. But she already knew that successful movements require group solidarity. She understood that labor struggles only flourished with broad class consciousness and that civil rights movements required race consciousness. To publicize their private and public injuries, women would need to expand their gender consciousness and find a language with which to express common grievances.

  This they were not yet ready to do. But the demands made by the feminine mystique paradoxically intensified their gender consciousness. By politicizing women’s lives in the battle to contain Communism, the 1950s deepened American women’s awareness of how their identity as females had become the basis for their exclusion. Within a decade, housewives, working women, women activists—whose experiences, disappointments, and hopes would set the agenda of the modern women’s movement—would launch a scathing attack on the very culture that had blamed them for everything. By then, they would know how to use their identity as women as a weapon in the battle against discrimination and in the struggle for equality.

  Chapter Two

  FEMALE GENERATION GAP

  “When I was growing up,” wrote Anna Quindlen, a New York Times columnist, novelist, and mother of three who was born in the 1950s, “motherhood was a kind of cage.”

  You stayed home and felt your mind turn to the stuff that you put in little bowls and tried to spoon into little mouths and eventually wound up wiping off of little floors. . . . By the time I was a grown-up, the answer, if you were strong and smart and wanted to be somebody, was not to be a mom. I certainly didn’t want to be one.1

  After she read The Feminine Mystique, another young woman picked up her pen and wrote Betty Friedan: “My mother has stayed at home for twenty-three years and raised four children. . . . The emptiness of her life appalls me; her helplessness and dependence on my father frightens me.”2

  Paula Weideger, a feminist who chose not to have children, later tried to explain why so many young feminists had feared marriage and motherhood: “The desire to have children, along with good feelings about motherhood, was buried because women were so scared.”

  They were afraid they would turn out like their own mothers, most of whom were housewives and housewives only. Women like me who grew up in the 1950s had been made edgy and claustrophobic by the narrowness of the life laid out for them from birth. To give mother-feeling any place in your heart might mean being lost to mothering forever—or at least “till the kids are grown.”3

  With one foot firmly planted in the world of their mothers, daughters of the fifties viscerally feared the constraints experienced by the adult women around them. Those daughters who were “war babies,” born between 1941 and 1945, became the leaders and shock troops of the women’s liberation movement, stamping its political culture with their specific experiences and fears. By the time the movement began, many had finished college, married, and borne children. Their younger sisters, baby boomers born between 1946 and 1950, joined the movement as college students. The youngest baby boomers, born after 1950, came of age in an atmosphere saturated with media images of protest, of the sexual revolution, and of the counterculture. Maturing while the women’s movement was a rising tide, they took for granted freedoms that had emblazoned their older sisters’ banners. Some spawned women’s groups in their high schools, but many became pioneers of a different sort: they would be the first women to shape adult lives amid the new opportunities and burdens created by the modern feminist movement.4

  As the new decade of the sixties began, social and cultural critics began worrying about a “generation gap” that suddenly seemed to have severed the connections of the young with their parents. But the media viewed the generation gap largely through the lens of the male experience. Life magazine’s 1968 cover story “The Generation Gap” typically concentrated on the tension-filled relationship between a nephew and his uncle. The New York Times repeatedly described it in terms of a young man’s alienation from the adult world. What everyone failed to notice was that two generation gaps existed, side by side, each with its own gender-specific fears and dreams.5

  Whatever created a male rebel, journalists and scholars assumed, also shaped his female counterpart. And they were partly right. On the surface, rebellious young men and women did seem strikingly similar. Both rejected the popular music of their parents, savored the riffs of jazz, and gyrated to the urgent, rhythmic beat of rock ‘n’ roll. Together, they criticized the excessive materialism and conformity of their parents’ world, feared the madness of nuclear deterrence, and denounced the anti-Communist obsession that led to proxy wars like the one in Vietnam. Both reproached America’s poverty and racism, condemned the hypocrisy of a democratic society that daily violated its own ideals, expressed contempt for the military and economic “establishment,” vowed to change “the system,” and favored direct action over the stodgy, hierarchical, bureaucratic ways of the adult world.

  But there was a profound difference as well: the belief in a single “generation gap” hid the quiet desperation experienced by daughters of the fifties. Sociologists Richard Flacks and Kenneth Keniston both discovered that a majority of young male activists, however strongly they rejected adult society, nonetheless sought to live out the ideals of their liberal parents. Instead of becoming a lawyer, banker, teacher, or businessman, a male rebel might choose to join the Peace Corps, or work as a community, labor, or movement organizer. A rebellious son might reject material success, but not his future as a father. Young male activists knew they could combine a life as an activist with fatherhood. Many did just that.6

  For activist daughters, the generation gap was far more complicated. The immediate past conjured up images of claustrophobic marriages, coercive motherhood, and constrained chastity. Whatever their age, these young women had personal acquaintance with the power of the feminine mystique, sometimes in the person of their mother, but definitely with the fifties’ cultural icon of the housewife. The ghost haunting these young women wore an apron and lived vicariously through the lives of a husband and children. Against her, the women’s liberation movement would be forged.

  Fear of becoming an “ordinary housewife”—in the words of feminist writer Susan Griffin—is what fueled the female generation gap. Could a woman in her twenties mate and bear children without turning into a domestic drudge? They didn’t know. As they rejected the world of their mothers—but not necessarily their mothers’ secret dreams—daughters searched for an identity based on something besides marriage and motherhood. And for that, there were precious few role models.7

  If critics detected a certain hostility toward men, marriage, and motherhood in the women’s liberation movement, little wonder. As feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler later explained, “Psychologically, we had committed matricide.” But critics did not understand the source of these fears. Ranting against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s,
the antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly charged that feminists

  hate men, marriage and children. They are out to destroy morality and the family. They look upon husbands as exploiters, children as an evil to be avoided (by abortion if necessary), and the family as an institution which keeps women in “second-class citizenship” or even slavery.8

  Schlafly (willfully) mistook symbols for substance. There are reasons why movements target certain enemies, flash particular symbols, choose to use particular metaphors, and set the goals they do. Activists’ images of the past naturally shape their view of the present and how they imagine the future. The ubiquity of the feminine mystique, which had politicized the lives of adult women, also politicized some young women’s resistance to a domestic life. The subject of motherhood shadowed the women’s movement. Sometimes young women talked incessantly about motherhood, but as an institution, rather than as part of their futures. Some feminists celebrated motherhood as a way to finesse the differences between straight and gay women or to create a basis for solidarity among women of all races and backgrounds.9 However they talked about mothering, they still sought something beyond a life devoted exclusively to domesticity. As Barbara Berg has observed:

  Surely this was not the first time in American history that daughters yearned to live lives different from their mothers, to forge new paths, to go in new directions. What was unique to us—the generation coming of age in the sixties and seventies—however, was that we had the opportunity to act on these dreams and inspirations and to make them a reality.10

  EDUCATED FOR WHAT?

  One of those opportunities was higher education. By the late fifties, liberal middle-class families expected that their daughters would attend college. But many girls felt confused about the purpose of their education. Experts warned that every year a girl spent developing her mind “reduced the probability of a woman marrying.” One critic suggested that women should not receive the same training as men. “Their place is in the home and their education should concentrate on homemaking and fitting them for their special roles as wives and mothers. It is more important that they put a good dinner on the table than that they talk Greek.”11

  In 1950, Lynn White, president of Mills College and the author of the widely read book Educating Our Daughters, announced that education actually “frustrated” women. Rather than straining to absorb science and philosophy, college women should, he proposed, learn the “theory and preparation of a basque paella, of a well-marinated shish-kebab, lamb kidney sauteed in sherry, an authoritative curry.” The president of Radcliffe College suggested that the college alter its regular curriculum because it only served to “equip and encourage women to compete with men.” In a 1955 commencement address at Smith College, the liberal Democrat and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson explained how much young women could accomplish during this “historical crisis” (the Cold War) by assuming “the humble role of housewife—which,” he added, “is what most of you are going to be whether you like the idea or not just now—and you’ll like it!” In 1956, Life magazine acknowledged “that [women] have minds and should use them . . . so long as their primary interest is the home.”12

  Some colleges and universities bowed to such pressure by altering parts of their curricula. Mills College fielded a “Marriage” major and introduced a course on “Volunteerism.” The University of Chicago, in a striking departure from its highly intellectual course of study, offered its students a course called “Parenthood in a Free Nation.” The New School in New York City offered a new course entitled “Modern Woman’s Dilemma,” taught by a man, which emphasized individual rather than social solutions. Naturally, such an educational atmosphere affected women students. “We don’t want careers,” explained one coed. “Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like, wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.”13

  Veteran educators couldn’t help but notice the change. In 1954, a retired female professor from the University of Illinois observed, “For these last ten years, I felt increasingly that something had gone wrong with our young women of college age.” Women faculty cringed when coeds characterized them as “bitter, unromantic old witches”—despite the fact that many had married and raised children. In 1959, Mabel Newcomer’s book A Century of Higher Education for Women provided a devastating statistical portrait of how American society’s ambivalent attitude toward women’s education had eroded their educational progress. Though the overall number of women in college had soared, the percentage of college women had dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 34.2 percent in 1958. In 1920, women had earned half of all bachelor’s degrees, one of every six doctorates, and by 1940 women had received 13 percent of all doctorates. Yet, by the mid-fifties, they received only 24 percent of the bachelor’s degrees and 10 percent of the doctorates. Other signs of slippage worried those who cared about women’s education. In 1956, three out of every five women in coeducational institutions were preparing for a future in nursing, home economics, and secretarial work. The United States was the only industrial country in which the percentage of women in universities had decreased over twenty years.14

  Ironically, one of the many Cold War panics helped rescue young women from this downward spiral. The Soviet Union’s launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, shocked the nation. Were Americans behind Russians in science and technology? It seemed inconceivable, but the evidence was overhead. Government and educational leaders knew that the Soviets educated both sexes in math and in the sciences. Reeling from the enemy’s technological feat, the United States decided to educate not just boys but girls, too, in math and science. “A great national resource of feminine brain power is being lost,” officials now proclaimed, “because potential mathematicians, scientists, writers and artists marry early, have large families, and never put their higher education to public use.” To contain Communism, the nation suddenly needed women in the laboratory more than at home.

  Girls quickly sensed the change. Guidance counselors suddenly pushed them into physics and calculus classes in high school. Such classes did a great deal to enhance young women’s educational aspirations. But math and science still could not help them figure out how to escape the ghost who wore an apron. As they entered college, some young women imagined following in the footsteps of their fathers—even though, like their male counterparts, they often rejected the “compromises” associated with their fathers’ lives. But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they felt they had no legitimate claim to “male” occupations, patterning themselves after adult men was simply not a viable option.

  The rebellious young women who postponed marriage and childbearing tried on new identities found in teen culture or college life, and perhaps in “the movement”—but only, it seemed, by modeling themselves after their male counterparts. Within these various youth cultures, women could make an end run around marriage and motherhood, and experiment with different kinds of independent identities. But assuming the garb of a male rebel simply postponed the day when young women would have to figure out how to mate and bear children, if at all, and still maintain an independent identity. This is one reason why the American women’s movement became so engrossed with the question of female identity. As future feminists tried to escape the feminine mystique, they discovered solutions that addressed men’s alienation, but not their own.

  The female generation gap brought different issues to the surface, requiring different answers. These young women had long sensed “that underneath the busy dailyness of [our mothers’] lives, there was a deep and stagnant well of frustration and sorrow.” Sometimes, mothers had openly discussed their sorrows with their daughters. But nonverbal messages—sighing, psychosomatic complaints, unexplained weeping—communicated just as well what a conspiracy of silence often forbade: the expression of profou
nd discontent.15

  MOTHERS’ MIXED MESSAGES

  And many mothers, it turned out, wanted a different future for their daughters. In a 1962 Gallup poll, only 10 percent of mothers hoped their daughters would follow the pattern of their lives. In letters to Betty Friedan, women wrote of their dreams for their daughters. One mother, a self-described “drop-out from Oberlin College” who became “a victim of the Feminine Mystique and the mother of five,” hoped her daughter would never experience the “servile feeling” she had felt as a housewife. “How can we help our daughters to avoid making the mistake of following the crowd into early marriage? I would be heart-broken to see any of them make the mistakes I’ve made.”16

  But mothers also worried about their daughters’ future security and encouraged them to marry and have children as well. “Be like me, don’t be like me,” was the confusing message a good many daughters imbibed along with their milk and cookies. The result was that many young women grew up with a pervasive sense of ambivalence about the future. They feared becoming like—or unlike—the cultural image of the fifties mother. It was an ambivalence felt even by women across (white) class lines. In her research on middle-class and working-class daughters of the era, Kathleen Gerson found that 79 percent of women’s families had stressed the importance of a domesticized future. Yet, 45 percent of these daughters developed an early aversion to such a life and had “looked on marriage and children with either indifference or disdain as children. Instead, they gave central importance to work,” emphasizing “the dangers of domesticity instead of its joys.”17