Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  * * *

  The 1960s’ most important philosopher of freedom was a Jewish Marxist named Herbert Marcuse. Often hailed as the “father of the New Left,” he fled Nazi Germany and eventually took a position as a professor at Berkeley, where his teaching and writing made him a hero to the student radicals.

  Marcuse’s 1955 book Eros and Civilization anticipated the second sexual revolution, saying that technological progress would soon make sexual repression obsolete. Following Marx, Marcuse argued that increasing automation would eliminate the need for work and expand the opportunities for leisure. Freed from labor, people would soon escape what Marx called the “realm of necessity” and enter the “realm of freedom.” This meant that everyone would have more time to do what he or she wanted—including experimenting with sex.

  To make the most of this new freedom, Marcuse wanted people to unlearn the Freudian psychology that had become so popular in the preceding decades. For Freud, sexual repression was an essential ingredient of human civilization. If we all had as much sex as we wanted all the time, Freud said, our species would never have discovered fire or made the wheel or figured out how to grow food or build houses or develop medicines.

  Although this may have been true at an earlier stage of human history, Marcuse argued that sexual repression was no longer necessary. The new leisure would liberate sexuality, and transform society in the process. Laws governing sexual behavior would be repealed. Traditional institutions like marriage and monogamy would be overthrown.

  Marcuse’s message resonated with the partisans of the second sexual revolution. In his 1965 book The Erotic Revolution, the Beat poet Lawrence Lipton hailed the emancipation of sexual pleasure that technology and prosperity would soon make possible. “‘The New Leisure’ is already presenting new opportunities for orgiastic recharging of the life-force,” he wrote.

  Like other figures of the counterculture, Lipton demanded an end to all legal restraints on sexual behavior: “Repeal all the laws and statutes regulating premarital sex. Repeal all laws making homosexuality, male or female, illegal … Repeal all laws making any sexual act, the so-called ‘unnatural acts,’ illegal.”

  These laws had tried to contain sexuality within the conventions of marriage. They said that individuals should be allowed to invest their sexual energy only in particular kinds of relationships—the ones that would create new nuclear families and produce children. Lipton disagreed. He said that private relationships were like private property. Individuals should be able to spend their own sexual desires, and whatever desire they attracted from others, however they saw fit.

  The ways that sexual revolutionaries spoke about sex often echoed the ways that free-market advocates were beginning to speak about the economy. Both wanted to maximize individual liberty. Both agreed that a laissez-faire approach was best.

  While Marcuse was in Berkeley demanding sexual liberation, the economist Milton Friedman was in Chicago arguing for market liberalization. Friedman wanted to make markets as “free” as possible, by shrinking the state and slashing social protections. He believed that removing all barriers to economic activity was the fastest way to create a wealthy society.

  The sexual revolutionaries said the same things about sexuality. Even though Friedman and Marcuse came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, each wanted to liberate individuals from all external restraints. The second sexual revolution is often cited as the moment when dating died. Dating did not die; it was simply deregulated. “Free love” turned the meet market of dating into a free market.

  * * *

  Laissez-Faire Love took many different guises. Before Marcuse and Lipton wrote about eros and the orgiastic life force, Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine. The first issue hit the newsstands in 1953. The centerfold showed a stark-naked Marilyn Monroe, sitting on folded knees and tilting back with one arm crossed behind her head. A wall of scarlet fabric is unfurled behind her. Her eyes are closed but her ruby lips are parted. They match the fabric.

  Alongside nudes, Playboy brimmed with photos of “bachelor pads,” well appointed with barware and stereo equipment. The magazine allowed readers to enjoy a fantasy life of pure leisure, where having sex would be just like drinking a cocktail or listening to a record. Afterward, a man could smoke a cigarette and forget about the whole thing as quickly as he would the details of a James Bond paperback.

  The life of ease that Playboy promised not only freed men from the constraints of marriage or monogamy. By turning female bodies into consumer objects, it also freed men from the burden of having to have feelings about the women they slept with. The editors promised readers that in the new age of abundance, they could “enjoy the pleasures that the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.” The architectural spreads promised men that they, too, could have rooms of their own.

  Playboy said that sex was ideally a form of recreation. The vision clearly appealed to people. At least, some people. The first issue sold out in two weeks, and Playboy quickly became a cultural fixture. By the early 1970s, each issue sold millions of copies and one in four male college students in the United States subscribed. By then, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the oral contraceptive pill for use. The availability of reliable birth control seemed to make it possible for women as well as men to at least daydream about treating sex as harmless fun.

  When Cosmopolitan hired Helen Gurley Brown to rebrand it in 1965, after a decade of falling circulation, they created a national spokeswoman for the Playboy point of view. With Brown as editor, Cosmopolitan became a Playboy for girls—sort of. Like Playboy, the magazine was all about consumer pleasures, of which sex was the most important. Like Playboy, the covers featured scantily clad, conventionally beautiful white women. But while Playboy presented its readers with images of women they could enjoy and then dispose of, Cosmo told women how to make themselves enjoyable and disposable—the kinds of girls playboys desired.

  The magazine called the ideal reader it imagined the Fun Fearless Female. Fun Fearless Feminism promised young women that they could have the same freedoms that their brothers and boyfriends did when it came to enjoying sex. It said that all these pleasures would come to them along with the other formerly masculine privilege they were suddenly claiming: the right to work outside their homes.

  * * *

  When a census taker arrived at the front door of the Friedan household in 1960, Betty was having a coffee with her friend and neighbor Gertie. Gertie overheard the man asking Betty what her occupation was, and Betty answering “housewife.”

  Gertie interrupted. “You should take yourself more seriously.”

  Betty corrected herself. “Actually, I’m a writer.”

  It took her two more years to finish the book she was then struggling to finish, The Feminine Mystique. By the time it came out in 1963, Friedan was already used to giving interviews and appearing on television; the excerpts she had been publishing were garnering widespread attention. Over the next few years, she would be widely hailed for having helped launch the second-wave feminist movement in the United States.

  The Feminine Mystique opened with a chapter describing the sense of entrapment and discontentment that Friedan herself experienced as a full-time housewife during the 1940s and ’50s, despite leading a life that closely resembled the ideals she saw on television, in movies, and in women’s magazines. Friedan attested that her peers were suffering, too. She called what afflicted them “the problem that has no name.” By the end of the first chapter, she had diagnosed it. The housewives suffering from anxiety and depression and the alcohol they used to self-medicate were all struggling to come to terms with a voice in their head that said: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

  For hundreds of pages, The Feminine Mystique investigates the forces that conspired to convince American women that they should want this life—and that if they were unhappy in it, there was something wrong with them. In the final chapter, Fried
an laid out the necessary steps women could take to emancipate themselves.

  The first thing they needed was work. Women, Friedan said, must make a “lifetime commitment … to a field of thought, to work of serious importance to society. Call it a ‘life plan,’ a ‘vocation,’ a ‘life purpose’ if that dirty word career has too many celibate connotations,” she joked.

  Friedan devoted many pages to the importance of systematic reforms in order to help women meet these goals. She called for a national program similar to the GI Bill for women who wanted to continue their education, which would cover tuition fees, books, travel expenses, and even household help, while they pursued higher degrees that might enable them to reenter the workforce.

  She was optimistic that the first lucky women who broke through into male professions would help their sisters. “When enough women make life plans geared toward their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals … they will [not] have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution any more than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood.”

  Yet in the popular version of the call to women to develop life plans, the serious and systematic elements of Friedan’s argument faded out. The popular feminism Helen Gurley Brown pioneered at Cosmo sold well because it turned the life plan of the Career Girl into another glossy product.

  * * *

  Before she took over Cosmo, Brown had become a national celebrity for her advice book Sex and the Single Girl. It was hugely successful. One point of comparison: To date, The Feminine Mystique has sold three million copies. Sex and the Single Girl sold two million within the first three weeks. Sex and the Single Girl told female readers that they should feel just as free as the men they worked with to date around. They should ignore all the concerned friends and relatives urging them to get married and enjoy casual sex while focusing on their careers.

  Like Playboy, Helen Gurley Brown constantly described sex as a form of “play” and “fun.” In her bestselling follow-up book Sex and the Office, Brown even refers to her male coworkers as “playmates.” Yet if a Single Girl could collect lovers, just as a playboy would, a big difference remained between them. Hugh Hefner constantly appeared in photographs in his bathrobe. He presented a vision of the life of Playboy as a life of leisure. Helen Gurley Brown, always pictured in neatly tailored skirt suits, knew that the women she wrote for could expect no such luck.

  “There is a catch to achieving single bliss,” she warned. “You have to work like a son of a bitch.”

  Despite her breezy prose, Brown’s descriptions of the life of the Single Girl make it sound exhausting. “Why else is the single woman attractive?” she asked. “She has more time and often more money to spend on herself. She has the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make her face up for their date.”

  At the dawn of dating, Charity Girls had turned to men to treat them because the pittances they earned hardly allowed them to support themselves otherwise, much less afford any leisure. But Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl does not aspire to rest.

  “Your most prodigious work will be on you—at home,” Brown instructed. “You can’t afford to leave any facet of you unpolished.”

  In asides that are no doubt meant to be endearing, she hints at the rigors of her own beauty routine. “When I got married, I moved in with six-pound dumbbells, slant board, an electronic device for erasing wrinkles, several pounds of soy lecithin, powdered calcium and yeast-liver concentrate, for Serenity Cocktails and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue,” she says.

  Brown encourages Single Girls to treat their jobs as opportunities to meet men, just as the working-class Shopgirls who came before them did. However, Brown tells readers that ideally they perform this work with no end in sight. Shopgirls aspired to find husbands to save them from the sales floor. But the ambitious Single Girl reverses their priorities. She sees her desire for men as a kind of engine to make herself work harder.

  “Managements who think that romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls,” Brown exclaimed. “A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and wish there were more days.”

  Sex and the Office also extolled work as the highest moral virtue. It is through work on her person, as well as her professional image, that a Single Girl comes to deserve the delights that come her way. “Your goal is a sexy office life with marvelous things happening to you,” Brown says, “and these don’t accrue to girls who are slugs.”

  In an earlier era, Shopgirls had aspired to attain the glamour of a life of ease. Brown made doing endless labor look like the most glamorous thing imaginable. The highest goal, in this worldview, is not actual companionship but desirability. The Single Girls Brown writes about work hard to accrue the attraction of men like currency. The men themselves seem interchangeable.

  “Use them,” Brown exhorts her reader, “in a perfectly nice way just as they use you.”

  Playboy was all for it. Hugh Hefner ended up being one of Brown’s biggest advocates. Her insistence that regular gals were interested in sex encouraged Playboy readers that “the pulchritudinous Playmates” they admired were not “a world apart.” They were everywhere.

  “Potential Playmates are all around you,” the editors wrote. “The new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals, and back copy orders.”

  Brown promised that if you just worked hard enough, you might be the girl lucky enough to get plucked up by the powers that were, to become the ultimate Sex and the Office success story—a nationally recognizable pornographic star.

  * * *

  It is easy to imagine why a young woman facing down a lifetime spent making beds and sandwiches and grocery shopping and watching the light change until dinner and then getting drubbed nightly by the same man in missionary position might find the life Helen Gurley Brown described appealing. But as a solution to the problems that Friedan had diagnosed, it was shortsighted.

  On the surface, The Feminine Mystique and Sex and the Single Girl seem like very different books. One is set in suburbia; the other takes place in the city. The narrator of one is a bored housewife; the heroine of the other is a sexually liberated career girl. Yet the two books share more in common than it seems. Both embraced the idea that once individual women took paid work outside their homes, all women’s problems would be solved.

  Both also shared the same blind spot. They imagined that “allowing” women to work would eliminate gender inequality.

  The opportunities that certain women gained in the 1960s to work outside their homes and earn money did give them choices. As Brown emphasized, Single Girls could now support themselves. They had the income to buy all kinds of things—particularly if they opted not to have children. But this freedom to choose how they spent their time and money did not end gender inequality. It simply gave women a chance to work harder trying to break even in a system that was rigged against them.

  Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backward and in high heels, the saying goes. The Single Girl was told to do everything a Playboy did while making herself into a Playmate as well.

  To put it slightly differently, the sexually liberated woman whom Brown describes does not get out of the predicament of having her worth defined by men. In the end, the Cosmo girl was not so different from the Steady who desperately fended off her boyfriend in the backseat of his car. The one was told that she had to parry male desire. The other was told that she had to attract it constantly. Neither convention produced any model of what a woman who was an agent of desire might look like.

  Black feminists and working-class feminists tended to be much more perceptive than their white middle-class counterparts about the limitations of Fun Fearless Feminism. Because African Americ
an women had always worked outside their homes, ever since their ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, they did not mistake the “opportunity” to work as an adequate solution to all the problems that women had to deal with.

  To work or not to work had only ever been a choice for a very limited part of the population. The rest knew that earning a wage was not a fix-all. In fact, many black feminists attested that in their homes was the only place that they felt respite from a racist world.

  When the young black writer Gloria Watkins published her first book, Feminist Theory, in 1984 under the pen name bell hooks, she faulted Betty Friedan’s school of feminism for its obliviousness of the majority of American women.

  “Friedan’s famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,’ … actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life,” hooks wrote. “The one-dimensional perspective on women’s reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement.”

  The new feminine mystique that Brown hyped has also persisted. Cultural icons from Britney Spears to Sheryl Sandberg still tell young women that, for them, the prerequisite to a good life is an insatiable appetite for effort.

  As a teen, the pop star entreated an imaginary boyfriend to “hit her one more time” and panted that she was “a slave 4 him.” But after marriage, children, divorce, and a very public nervous breakdown, her comeback album celebrated Single Girl self-reliance. “You’d better work … work … work … work…,” she intoned in her hit single “Work, B*tch.” Sandberg offers the same advice to young female professionals in Lean In. When the going gets tough, she says, “keep a foot on the gas pedal.” If working does not work, work harder. A worthy girl always has more to give.