A History of the Wife (48 page)

In contrast to the openness surrounding contraception, abortion remained a backstairs issue, and it remained so despite a dramatic rise in the number of abortions performed during the Depression. In 1931, Dr. Fred J. Taussig stated in
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gyne- cology
that abortions had been steadily increasing, especially among mothers who had borne three or four children. He estimated the num- ber of abortions at 700,000 per year, and the annual mortality of women from this cause at 15,000.
35

Numerous medical studies attributed the steep rise in abortion to the economic hardships experienced during the Depression by both single and married women. Married women were not only aborting their fourth or fifth child, but first pregnancies as well. One female doctor who interviewed almost a thousand women at a New York City birth control clinic in 1931 and 1932 concluded that wives resorted to abor- tion when they were the family breadwinners and could not afford to lose their jobs, or when they were simply unable to feed another mouth. Even white, middle-, and upper-class wives had a higher inci- dence of abortion than ever before.
36

Like their white counterparts, married black women also used abor- tion more during the Depression. An African-American surgeon in Cleveland commented in 1932 that “there has been a very definite increase in the numbers of abortions, criminally performed, among the married.” Black and white married women of the same class seem to have had abortions at the same rate, but unmarried white women were

more likely to abort than unmarried black women, probably because the latter were less ostracized by their communities in the event of an out-of-wedlock birth.

During the early thirties, physicians and hospitals began to see more women coming in for emergency care after a botched abortion. In 1935, the Harlem Hospital in New York opened a separate ward specif- ically for such women. In 1939, the Cook County Hospital in Chicago treated over a thousand women for abortion-related complications. Though a few physicians were so alarmed by the consequences of this trend that they spoke out in favor of legalizing abortion, the publishing world responded mainly with censure and silence.
37
Members of Sanger’s birth control movement were also unwilling to support legal- ized abortion, for fear they would be tainted through association with a criminal practice.

Despite the public taboo on abortion, quite a few members of the medical profession were willing to perform them, for monetary and/or humanitarian reasons. Historian Leslie J. Reagan, tracing the practice of Dr. Josephine Gabber, a well-trained, highly successful abortion spe- cialist in Chicago, figures that Gabber’s State Street clinic performed over 18,000 abortions between 1932 and 1941. The majority of the patients—a full 80 percent—were married. This matches the findings of other studies that suggest that the majority of women who had abor- tions before World War II were wives.
38
From a small subset of seventy patients records, Reagan was able to determine that most of the married women were homemakers, though about a fourth of them worked out- side the home.

The women were either referred by another doctor, or they found the abortionist’s name from personal contacts—a friend, a hairdresser, a pharmacist, or a nurse. Most of the wives came early in their pregnan- cies, which made the procedure easier and safer than if they had come after the first two or three months. The abortions, performed in Gab- ber’s clinic operating room, resembled any other surgical procedure undertaken by a skilled practitioner. Patients left with a list of instruc- tions, including an admonishment to call the office at any time in the event of a problem and to return for a checkup, either the next day or sometime in the next few weeks.

In other cities—New York and Baltimore, for example—reputable physicians were also willing to perform abortions. Reagan concludes

that “thousands of women obtained abortions from physicians in con- ventional medical settings and suffered no complications after- wards.”
39

But many other women, those without sufficient money or a referral source, were not so lucky as to obtain competent medical treatment in their time of need. The horror stories of back-alley treatments per- formed by quacks, and self-induced abortions with dangerous objects like coat hangers or bleach douches, came out into the open during the 1970s crusade to make abortion legal. Between the late 1920s, when abortion rates began to rise, and 1973, when abortion was decriminal- ized, tens of thousands of women every year needed emergency care following an illegal abortion.

In the decades preceding World War II, married women underwent considerable change in their sexual and contraceptive practices. By the 1930s it was a given, among liberal-thinking women, that they had a right to sexual pleasure in marriage and to birth control. The two were intricately related. It was a commonplace of reformist rhet- oric to argue that only a woman freed by reliable contraception from the consequence of childbearing could enjoy making love. Similarly, only a wife free to limit the number of her offspring and to space them according to her physical and economic needs could raise sound children. When Planned Parenthood was formed in 1942, mid-America had come to believe that birth control was an aid to the realization of marital happiness. Though abortion was not yet part of the legal repertoire, women could already enter marriage with a better chance at separating sex from reproduction than at any previous time in American history.

N I N E

Wives, War, and Work, 1940–1950

“Mrs. John Doe We Need You!”

Women’s Home Companion,
July 1942

“I’m Proud of My Wife’s War Job”

McCall’s,
September 1943

“I’m Proud... my husband wants me to do my part.”

World War II poster

E
velyn Guthrie, the wife of a navy officer, accompanied her husband “Hal” to Hawaii when he was sta- tioned there in 1941. While Hal spent his work hours aboard ship, Eve-

lyn devoted her days to the Honolulu Red Cross Motor Corps, taking military hospital patients out for drives and squiring about air corps trainees from Australia and New Zealand.

The Guthries saw the war coming and prepared for it. As she tells it in her unpublished memoirs: “On December 5, Hal and I went to a lawyer’s office and each signed our last will and testament.... I drove him to Pearl Harbor and his ship left port at 12:01 on December 6 to take planes to the marines at Midway, although at the time I did not know where the ship was headed.”
1

On the morning of December 7, as she was leaving her apartment, her landlady called out to her that Pearl Harbor was under attack. She quickly changed into her Red Cross uniform, grabbed her first-aid kit,

and headed toward her car. On the way, she picked up several naval officers who were also in a hurry to get to Pearl Harbor. What they found when they were finally able to reach the landing was a “sight of unbelievable horror.... Some of the ships were afire. There were men trying to swim through fiery oil in the water.”

Stunned by the spectacle of the surprise attack, Mrs. Guthrie barely escaped with her own life. Before her eyes, a Japanese plane zoomed down on the battleship Pennsylvania and managed to drop a bomb on a destroyer tied up in front of the ship. “The bomb blew off the bow of the destroyer and due to the repercussion, my car... careened back and forth across the dock.” When she was able to get it under control, she drove to Motor Corps Headquarters, where she picked up a few other Red Cross members, and then headed to Civilian Defense Headquarters.

Here we found great activity. Trucks of all types and sizes were being stripped for use as ambulances as a desperate call had come from Hick- ham Field. We were told help was needed at Tripler Army Hospital. Four of us using my car drove to Tripler and reported for duty in the hospital. As the wounded from Hickam Field were brought in on stretchers, we cut clothing from the area of their wounds and they were taken directly to an operating room. We then split up and each one was sent to a hospital ward in order to help in any way possible with the wounded.

. . . At infrequent periods, a nurse or a doctor of the regular hospi- tal staff would arrive to give them some attention but there was little that could be done for them. All of those who had lost an arm or leg died that day. From the hours of about ten in the morning when I arrived in the ward until late afternoon when some relief nurses arrived as volunteers, I felt completely helpless. I could only hold the hand of a dying man, give another a drink of water or keep the excited hospital corpsman busy wiping up the blood from the floor so no one would slip.

During the next few days, Mrs. Guthrie transported medical items to and from the naval and army hospitals. Another duty that became rou- tine was to help the civilian hospitals with the stream of blood donors who had responded to a radio appeal. She also had “the very sad duty of driving a navy chaplain who was detailed to make arrangements for the burial of the dead service personnel.”

Since the “service wives” had husbands aboard ships, they volun- teered to take night duty at headquarters so the “civilian wives” could be home with their families. For three weeks, Mrs. Guthrie heard noth- ing from her husband. Then an enlisted man came to her apartment and informed her that Hal was all right but had been too busy to come ashore even to phone.

“. . . Just before Christmas, one of the Matson liners arrived in port to evacuate service women and children. It was quite different from for- mer times when the band played Aloha and people left burdened with leis.”

After several months, when most of the service wives with children and many others had been evacuated, it was decided that no wives could stay behind unless they were employed by the government in some type of war work. In order to remain, Mrs. Guthrie took a job working six days a week censoring mail in the Honolulu Post office. She censored about 130 letters a day, removing any sensitive material that might give aid to the enemy.

Occasionally the work had its lighter moments, as in this memory. “One time I had two letters to censor both from the same man, one was to his wife and the other apparently to a girl friend. He enclosed a [war] bond for the girl friend and it was a real temptation not to switch it to the wife’s letter.”

During this time, for over a hundred days, she had no idea where her husband was. In May, his ship returned to Hawaii after the Battle of the Coral Sea, and a much thinner man came ashore. After a few days in port, he was off to sea again. Evelyn Guthrie celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary without him.

A month later an even thinner husband returned from the Battle of Midway. Friends came “to congratulate Hal on being alive rather than the usual type of celebration.” While he was recuperating, she kept working in the censor’s office. In early December, a year after Pearl Har- bor, she received a phone call from California informing her that her mother had suffered a heart attack and might not survive. “Being an only child and her sole relative, there was no other decision to make but return to the mainland. If I left Hawaii, I would not be allowed to return.... I said goodbye to Hal not knowing when or if I would see him again.”

Fortunately, her husband, too, was soon sent to the mainland, with a

promotion and a new assignment. The Guthries both survived the war and lived many years thereafter. Her experiences as a “service wife” were indeed marked by service in more than the limited sense of the term.

To have probably been the only woman at Pearl Harbor during the fateful 1941 attack was a significant milestone in Mrs. Guthrie’s life story. Characteristic of military wives, she worked as a volunteer in the Red Cross and served, it appears, with distinction. Uncharacteristic of wives of her class, she also took on a paid job in response to the demands of war. She was one of the millions of wives from every walk of life who contributed to the wartime rise in married women’s employ- ment—from 15 percent in 1940 to more than 24 percent in 1945.
2

World War II, one can argue, merely accelerated a trend that was already in progress, since the overall female workforce had been steadily increasing since the turn of the century. One can also argue that World War II acted as a catalyst for unprecedented change in female employment, especially for married women. Of the 6,500,000
new
women workers hired during the war, 3,700,000 were wives. For the first time in U.S. history, there were more married than single women in the labor force.

The preponderance of married women resulted, in part, from the sense of urgency that propelled brides and grooms to the altar through- out the war years. As streams of soldiers said good-bye to their loved ones or came home on leave, approximately one million more mar- riages took place than would have been expected at prewar rates. As one of the multitude of brides marrying in 1942 remembered fifty years later: “We would probably
not
have married so quickly if it had not been wartime.”
3
By 1944 there were 2,500,000 more married women than there had been in 1940.

Initially, the War Manpower Commission was reluctant to encour- age homemakers to seek employment, and stressed, instead, their responsibilities to their families. But many patriotic citizens, organiza- tions, and magazines urged wives, as well as single women, to take up the jobs left vacant by servicemen and to fill the new jobs required by the war industry. One of many posters published by the U.S. govern- ment printing office asked, “Should your wife take a war job?” The poster, ostensibly addressed to the husband, showed him reading a newspaper to his wife, juxtaposed beside photos of a woman at a

sewing machine and a woman in a factory. In answer to its bold-faced question, the poster answered, “Every woman over 18, who is physi- cally fit and has no children under 14, should be prepared to take a war job.”

A one-minute radio spot enlisted the voices of local women to broad- cast the following message: “This is (name)... speaking earnestly to the housewives of (city). I’m a housewife, too . . . never worked outside my home until this year. Feeding my family and buying war bonds just didn’t seem enough. So I got an 8-hour-a-day job, and managed to run my home besides.... My husband’s proud of me... and I’ve never been happier. I feel I’m
really
helping to make the war end sooner.”
4