The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

Naturally, the editors of women’s magazines quickly latched onto the human potential movement. Self-help in its various forms was nothing new to them. For nearly a century, they had instructed women how to improve their domestic skills, enhance their appearance, beautify their homes, and, most importantly, how to catch and keep their men. But the human potential movement added the necessity for a new kind of therapeutic intervention. Society had changed and it was up to women to embrace the power of positive thinking.46

  What were women supposed to change, then? Basically, themselves; women could never be perfect enough. In 1976, one typical magazine article urged women to write daily affirmations “to erase old thought patterns.” Like children kept after school, readers were to write—dozens of times—how much they loved themselves or how much they forgave their husbands.47

  The human potential movement probably affected women even more through the popular books that crowded bookstore shelves. In Super Self: A Woman’s Guide to Self-Management, Dorothy Tennov identified “time” as women’s worst enemy. To overcome the burden of housework, child care, and jobs, women needed to discipline themselves and learn to manage their time. The author rightly assumed that working women would feel responsible for dinner, child care, and dirty floors at home. The idea that men might help or that the government might assist through child care facilities, flexible hours, and shared jobs had largely vanished. The path to individual success was not to share any of this, or to act in concert with others to change it, but to manage one’s time well. Still others instructed women how to change their “scripts” and what therapeutic skills they needed to learn.48

  The allure of “assertiveness training” was that it spoke directly to the learned passiveness that feminists had already identified as one of the most serious handicaps of (white) middle-class women. As one feelgood writer declared in the typical psychobabble of the day:

  The question of identity is an important one: whether you identify yourself as a mother, a feminist, a student, a lover, an executive, a rebel girl, a socialist or a divorcee—if you can put the word assertive before any of those identities, you will feel and convey strength no matter who you are or what you are trying to accomplish.49

  An entire industry of “assertiveness training” workshops began to sprout nationwide, devoted to teaching women how to assert themselves in a straightforward manner, rather than through deferential behavior or aggressive demands. In How to Be an Assertive Woman, author Jean Baer argued that the major reason women don’t get what they want is that “they haven’t yet learned how to communicate what they want.” When they learned new communication skills, they would see “the change in their self-esteem.” The fact that most workplaces allowed little or no assertiveness of any kind from their female employees was simply ignored. Asked about the new assertiveness-training workshops, a New York practical nurse replied sarcastically, “I don’t know about assertiveness. Where I work it’s called ‘insubordination.’”50

  Arguably the most famous self-help (and antifeminist) book of the decade was Marabel Morgan’s Total Woman, published in 1973. Morgan’s title quickly entered the popular lexicon and in 1974 topped the nonfiction best-seller list, right above Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s exposé of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men.51

  Morgan spoke directly to the reader, in a chatty personal style. She addressed a topic that had been a staple of women’s magazines—“How to Save Your Marriage.” The popularity of her book revealed how much women preferred to repair rather than forsake their marriages—and yet here was a book that could not have been written had the women’s movement not existed. Morgan used her own life as an example. After a thrilling courtship and honeymoon with her husband, Charlie, Morgan had watched helplessly as communication began to break down. She became a nag; he withdrew behind the newspaper. Like the women interviewed by Betty Friedan, Morgan began to “feel trapped—work, the house, two little children, a husband who wouldn’t talk to me. When I told him he was becoming a stranger to his children, he just pulled the paper higher.”

  Her solution was not to seek a career, or enter a consciousness-raising group, but to defer to her husband, who regularly described women’s liberation as “organized selfishness.” After all, it was all her fault. She had pushed him away by stating her opinions, asking for help, and demanding his attention. So Morgan studied the Bible, took self-improvement courses, read psychology books, and soon realized that the solution was embarrassingly obvious: give a man everything he wants and let him make all the decisions. The change in her marriage, Morgan gushed, was immediate and dramatic. As soon as she accepted her subordinate position in the marriage, Charlie began bringing her presents and “allowed” her to redecorate the house. The goal of her book, as she put it, was for “any wife to have her husband absolutely adore her in just a few weeks’ time.” The book itself was an odd hodgepodge of advice on time management, domestic tips, and the sort of positive thinking that would help people change their attitudes rather than the condition of their lives.52

  Unlike feminists, Morgan encouraged her reader to accept her husband as he was, “without nagging or trying to change him.” In a chapter titled “Admire Him,” Morgan urged her reader to “listen attentively to her husband, to admire his every trait, to pander to his every whim.” Ignoring the craze for assertiveness training, Morgan instead instructed women to learn age-old, tried-and-true methods of manipulating men. “Let your husband be President of the family business,” Morgan exhorted.

  A Total Woman is not a slave. She graciously chooses to adapt to her husband’s way, even though at times she desperately may not want to. . . . It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him. She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen.53

  Total Woman struck a nerve with many married (and unmarried) women. But it was not simply female surrender that catapulted Morgan into national celebrity. Morgan also offered titillating tales of domestic sexual encounters right out of the sexual revolution as the media had described it. Quoting Dr. David Reuben, the author of the 1970 bestseller Any Woman Can!, Morgan argued that “the inability of having an orgasm is simply the unconscious refusal to have one in order to get revenge on the husband.” In one of the most widely quoted—and remembered—passages of her book, Morgan urged wives to meet their husbands at the door, nude, draped only in Saran Wrap. Here was the feminine mystique in the wake of the women’s movement, updated through the highly sexualized and therapeutic culture of the seventies.54

  Morgan soon created a full-time career telling other women to stay at home, a long and dishonorable tradition in the history of American women. As her fame grew, her life became a series of interviews and appearances on television talk shows. Skeptical reporters asked her how working women—strained for leisure time—had any energy left to meet their husbands in little nighties and high heels, or in Saran Wrap. Morgan reluctantly conceded that she was just now learning about these problems. “I wouldn’t change one word in the book,” she insisted, “but if you have a career you have to scramble to be Total. You really have to hustle so you don’t let things slip in your marriage.”

  Most working women already knew that. But Morgan’s promotion of the Total Woman—a sexier and snazzier version of the housewife who dutifully devoted her life to home and hearth—highlighted a growing debate over whether it was possible or desirable for women to “have it all.” Probably no one better summed up the individualistic ethos of consumer and therapeutic feminism than Helen Gurley Brown. In Sex and the Single Girl (1962), Brown, the glamorous editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, had encouraged single women to enjoy sex before marriage. Twenty years later, in 1982, Brown now informed women that Having It All, as her new book was called, was within any woman’s reach.

  Brown’s recipe for success blended a traditional work ethic with ideas from the human potential movement and redefi
ned feminism as a program for self-advancement. Reflecting on her youth, the fifty-nine-year-old Brown described the strict discipline she had employed to gain fame and fortune. Anyone, she claimed, could get it all. In her chatty and breezy style, Brown recounted how far she had come from her “hillbilly” origins. “From a problem youth spent in Little Rock, Osage and Green Forest . . . through seventeen secretarial jobs in Los Angeles, to my present job at Cosmo in New York, I have applied myself almost daily.” Women not born into wealth no longer needed to marry a rich man or an upwardly mobile Horatio Alger. Any woman, she insisted, could pull herself up by her pumps and “have it all.” All it took was discipline, determination, and desire.55

  What did “it” mean to Brown? “Deep love, true friends, money, fame, satisfying days and nights—anything you want when you apply yourself seriously.” But notice that “it” did not include children. Although Brown offered an entire chapter on how to catch and keep a husband, she wrote only three and a half pages about children. Under “Children—Part of Having It All,” she portrayed them as more of a nuisance than a blessing. For those who had the poor taste to want children anyway, she supplied this advice: “Never waste time feeling guilt, never agonize too much, and have a lot of paid help at home, and never, ever, let them interfere with the long climb to the top.” Husbands, by definition, could not be counted on. “Although they probably wouldn’t do much housework,” Brown wrote, “they usually do something to make up for household imbecility—like love you and pay a lot of bills.”56

  Brown’s version of “having it all” was a far cry from the early vision of women’s liberation. In their passion to free themselves from exclusive domesticity, sixties feminists had argued that they could both work and have a family. But they had also insisted that men share family responsibilities and that the government provide child care services and other assistance to working parents. In contrast, Brown regarded having-it-all as the result of a thousand small individual choices. What were women without wealth to do? Poor women didn’t appear on Brown’s radar screen. If they were poor, after all, it was because they had not “applied themselves.” Like Marabel Morgan, Brown glamorized sex. But unlike Morgan, she forfeited family life. Neither woman really had it all. Nor could most women, unless they had abundant wealth or an inexhaustible amount of energy, two preconditions for living life as a superwoman.

  THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

  The film and television industries took more time absorbing the domestic turmoil and workplace confusion that feminism had brought into American life. But once both went into gear, they, too, began to recast “feminism” as a quest for individual identity, which indeed it was, for many middle- or upper-middle-class women.

  On television, as the cultural critic Ella Taylor has observed, viewers watched the “perfect family” comedies of the fifties and sixties replaced by new series that dramatized the ambiguities and tensions afflicting family and work life. Searching for “relevance,” the producers of these comedies hoped to explore the impact of women’s growing independence and men’s relative loss of authority in the family—without alienating those viewers who might resent such changes.57

  All in the Family, the classic example of such sitcoms, pitted a white, working-class, middle-aged couple, Archie and Edith Bunker, against their feminist daughter, Gloria, and her Polish-American liberal husband, Michael (or as Archie called him, “Meathead”). A bewildered but lovable bigot, Archie argued through every show with his daughter, son-in-law, and even finally his wife, Edith, who eventually got a job and began to defend her right to an independent opinion.

  Seeking a broad audience, the producers of All in the Family ridiculed feminist and antifeminist positions. Gloria spouted crude dogmatic feminism, while Archie regularly launched malapropistic tirades against minorities and women. Later studies showed that “although Archie may have lost the arguments, viewers took away whatever attitudes they brought to the show; racists felt confirmed in their racism, liberals in their broad-mindedness and sense of superiority.” In this way, the program provided comic relief, even as it seemingly confirmed all points of view.58

  Still, for all its conflicts, the Bunker family remained intact. The real change on television in the seventies was the appearance of new kinds of families. What Ella Taylor has dubbed “Prime Time Feminism” showcased newly formed families and dramatized the “domestic distress” of families fractured by divorce, two working parents, and changing sexual mores.59 In comedies like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) or Maude (1972), television also began to reflect some of the bewilderment and burdens created by a changing economy and by the growing numbers of women working outside the home. These were comedies, as Taylor noted, whose premise turned on the painful art of “learning to live without men. And the men, for their part, are either macho buffoons or effeminate wimps. It is the women who learn to create a new ad hoc family.”60

  Maude, a spin-off of All in the Family, starred a loud-mouthed, opinionated, middle-class New York suburbanite, an outspoken feminist who had been divorced three times, whose daughter had been divorced, and whose best friend, Vivian, had also been divorced. When Maude decided to have an abortion in middle-age, she plunged the nation into a heated debate. Under pressure from pro-lifers, sponsors of Maude began pulling their ads. Feminist organizations responded by launching a consumer boycott against those sponsors. Three hundred “Right to Life” activists circled CBS’s New York headquarters to protest Maude’s abortion; thirty-nine affiliates refused to show the episodes that dealt with it. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of Churches, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers joined together to charge the network with censorship of pro-choice perspectives.61

  To resurrect any believably intact family, television producers began creating “surrogate families” that supported women and men at the workplace, rather than at home. Most of the new “work-family” dramas and comedies of the seventies, in fact, featured women who were searching for familial support and feminist respect at the workplace. Work-families also reinforced the association of feminism with an identity based on something outside of home and hearth.62

  The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one of the most popular situation comedies of the seventies, revolved around a “work-family” that repeatedly demonstrated that the stability of Father Knows Best had been replaced—outside of work, at least—by precarious and transient relationships. In the blink of an eye, life could change and only the folks at work offered the kinds of connection and continuity that people once expected from their families at home. Mary Richards, the lead character, was a single career-minded woman in her early thirties. When a four-year relationship with a man dissolved, she moved to Minneapolis and took a job as assistant producer of a local television news show. Her behavior outside of work alternated between that expected of an old-fashioned spinster and that of a newly divorced working woman. Like other work-family comedies, The Mary Tyler Moore Show managed to offer glimpses of the country’s new feminist-influenced world while still endorsing traditional values. The show offered compassion for those who were blindsided by changing social and sexual mores—like Mary’s boss, Lou, who in the show’s fourth year found himself abandoned by his wife of twenty-six years so that she “could find herself.” In other famous “work-families” of the seventies, single women—though rarely the main characters—secured their identity within surrogate families. Margaret “Hotlips” Houlihan in M*A*S*H, or Billie in Lou Grant, forged their ties with the men of their work family. We, the audience, never knew very much of Margaret’s or Billie’s “home” life. Their life at work, not at home, is what defined them.

  Week after week, these prime-time working women faced uncharted territory as they tried to command respect from coworkers, learn how to date after thirty, or raise children without fathers. Unlike the “first woman” narratives in newspape
rs or the self-help therapeutic literature, television series offered a much more complicated picture of both the new opportunities and barriers women faced. Driven by plot, these television sitcoms sometimes confirmed women’s worst fear that they, too, might have to do it all, without a man. Tempered by comedy, these series often reminded viewers of just how precarious were the lives they led.

  Films also began to explore the domestic dislocations of the era. In 1977, the columnist Ellen Goodman wryly observed that in the love story of the seventies, “it’s gotten so that what passes for a happy ending is a no-fault divorce.” Goodman was right. Romance and marriage no longer fared well on the screen. Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973, viewed by a large American audience) offered an excruciating dissection of a disintegrating marriage. In The Way We Were (1973), we learned that love did not, in fact, triumph over political differences. Annie Hall (1977) offered viewers a grim (if hilarious) view of romance and love. As Ellen Goodman quipped, “They are movies about the people who survive romance, rather than romances that survive. . . . In the seventies, when one basket case meets another, you figure it will never work out.”63

  If romance didn’t “work out” in the seventies, women’s friendships found new life on the big screen. Alongside the predictable male buddy films appeared a new genre of film, dubbed by Goodman, the “Female Friendship” film.64 Feminism had encouraged women to seek support from and solidarity with other women. Now, filmmakers began to explore the complex nature of such relationships. In The Turning Point, Julia, and Girlfriends, the filmmakers dramatized the competition between women who had chosen different paths, the difficulty of ever having it all, and the connections that sustained and nurtured women’s love for each other.

  The more films focused on feminist issues, the more film critics noticed how little the film industry had ever explored the real experiences—or, for that matter, the fantasies—of women. Now, a new crop of films began to track the confusion feminism had injected into lives shaped by the fifties. Kramer vs. Kramer and An Unmarried Woman, two box office hits released at the end of the decade, captured some of the fallout from the diffusion of feminism. Both films ignited fiery criticism—from feminists who thought the films trivialized and distorted feminism and from traditionalists who believed they condoned a selfish feminist quest for an independent identity.