A History of the Wife (55 page)

I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help my youngest child build a block- house, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well informed, then scamper down to the washing machine where my thrice- weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I’m ready for a padded cell.

In contrast to the middle-class readers of
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Redbook,
working-class women accepted their roles as housewives more easily, according to Mirra Komarovsky in her groundbreaking 1962 book. Kamorovsky found “little evidence of status frustrations” and “hardly a trace... of the low prestige that educated housewives some- times attach to their role.”
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Gender roles were clear-cut: men were

expected to be “good providers” and women to be full-time wives and mothers. For the most part, the men did not want their wives to work outside the home, since it reflected badly on the husband’s earning power. He, in turn, considered it inappropriate to pitch into house- keeping once he came home from work. In about four-fifths of the families, cooking, laundry and cleaning were exclusively feminine occupations. About a third of the husbands sometimes helped with the dishes. One wife remarked that she didn’t ask her husband to partici- pate in that daily chore because of the cartoons showing henpecked husbands doing the dishes. About 20 percent of the couples had argu- ments over the failure of the husband to help with what he perceived to be a feminine task. When it came to the father’s involvement in child- care, the husbands were divided into three nearly equal groups: one third hardly ever helped, another third helped occasionally, and the others helped frequently or regularly.

Typically, a working-class wife’s day started very early, when she rose to make breakfast for her family and send the children off to school. Then she cleaned house and took care of the laundry and ironing. If there were small children and the weather permitted, she might take them to the park or to a shopping area. Sometimes she would stop in on a friend for a cup of coffee. She would need to be home in time to prepare and serve supper soon after her husband returned from work, around 5:00 or 5:30.

While the majority of spouses believed that a woman’s place was in the home, a small group of wives were employed. Some of these were clearly overburdened by their double jobs, and would have gladly stayed at home, if the family didn’t need their salary. This situation could be compounded by the negative attitude of the husband, who resented the fact that his wife
had
to work because of his insufficient income. On the other hand, about a third of the full-time homemakers would have liked to work for pay, preferably part-time, just to get out of the house.

Middle- and upper-class wives had various time-honored ways of get- ting out. There was volunteer work to be done in local churches, syna- gogues, hospitals, museums, and such organizations as the League of Women Voters, Planned Parenthood, and the upper-crust Junior League. Many wives belonged to auxiliaries supporting male organiza-

tions, like the Masons, the American Legion, and various professional groups. Such volunteer work provided a sense of purpose and a social community outside the home. At the same time, membership in a bridge, garden, or book club offered an outlet for one’s cultural and intellectual interests.

Some wives entered paid employment, even when they did not have to. The proportion of working wives continued to rise after the war: by 1960, 30 percent of married women were in the labor force, double the percentage of 1940. Interestingly, the greatest growth took place among well-educated wives from families where the husband earned from $7,000 to $10,000 a year, a comfortable income for the times.
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One woman, married in 1940, recalled with pleasure her work as a teacher. “I was gonna work for a year, and I lasted twenty-five years. I loved it. I loved every bit of it. It was not easy.... He didn’t like it in the beginning, but he saw that I enjoyed it.”
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Some worked because they were simply too unhappy staying at home. This is how one wife described her decision to reenter the workforce.

“My youngest . . . was about ten years old.... I found myself screaming my head off at her, because she left a finger mark on the wall. And it kind of brought me up short.... I wasn’t running a house, the house was running me.”

She told her husband she wanted to go back to work. “I’m gonna go get a job, because my life has closed in on me to the point where I’ve lost my sense of values. I have to get out of this house! I have to be with other adults.”

His reaction was to put his hand in his pocket, and he said “Here’s money. What is it you want to buy? Go buy it.” And I tried to explain to him that it had nothing to do with money. . . . All I can talk about is when I washed the floor last or the best buy in the supermarket. I felt stupid. I was beginning to feel as though my brains were drying up. . . . And when I made him understand that, he was not thrilled, but he agreed that if that’s what I wanted to do, then he would support me in whatever way he could.
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Husbands, like this one, who loved their wives and wanted to see

them happy, had to accept a very different lifestyle from the one they had expected in marriage.

A study of some 900 wives in Detroit and the nearby farm country con- ducted at the University of Michigan and published in 1960 under the title
Husbands and Wives
examined prevailing marital mores at different levels of society.
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The findings pointed in the direction of more egali- tarian decision making between husbands and wives, with the balance still slightly in the husband’s favor. Debunking the myth of “momism,” the survey showed that the domination of husbands and children by wives and mothers had been greatly exaggerated. Not surprisingly, white-collar men possessed more authority at home than working-class men: the more money a man made and the higher his prestige in the community, the more decisions he controlled in the home. Yet these same prestigious husbands did more chores around the home than hus- bands with lesser status. It’s as if the successful white-collar men had enough confidence to dismiss the fear that “women’s work” would taint them.

As wage earners, few husbands were rivaled by their wives. Although one out of three wives in low-income families worked for pay, only one out of twenty did so at the other end of the scale. The wives in high-income families believed that their support, advice, and domestic skills contributed substantially to their husbands’ suc- cess.

When asked to list the benefits of marriage in order of importance, the wives answered: 1) companionship; 2) the chance to have children;

3) understanding and emotional support; 4) love and affection;

5) financial benefit. While the wives may have been reluctant to give financial benefit a higher priority for fear of appearing crass and mate- rialistic, it is surprising that love and affection ranked only fourth. These Michigan women seemed to have been a practical and realistic lot: companionship and children were what they appreciated most in being wives.

Yet children were by no means seen as an unadulterated blessing. However much children added to marriage, they also put strains on it. A common pattern emerged of children diverting attention away from the couple per se, causing spousal conflict, as well as worries about child-rearing, illness, and finances. Nearly all wives were less satisfied

with the companionship of their husbands after a few years of marriage than they formerly were. With the advent of children, many husbands felt the necessity to work harder and longer, and many wives com- plained of a loss of spousal intimacy. This dissatisfaction reached a low point when the children were adolescents. In statistical terms, in the first two years of marriage, 52 percent of the wives were very satisfied with their marriages and none notably dissatisfied, as compared to twenty years later, when only 6 percent were still very satisfied and 21 percent were conspicuously dissatisfied.

Even though the course of marital satisfaction ran downhill for the first two decades, the survey indicated that eventually it turned upward again. Once the children had been launched, marital problems dimin- ished. Having weathered the
Sturm und Drang
of the child-rearing years, the couples who survived experienced what the researchers called a second honeymoon. This is exactly the same marital trajectory that some researchers would find forty years later.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the baneful expression “just a housewife” reflected the diminished status of the stay-at-home wife.
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One sixties’ housewife from a Chicago suburb candidly described her situation in an interview with radio personality Studs Terkel: “A housewife is a housewife, that’s all. Low on the totem pole.... Someone who goes out and works for a living is more impor- tant than somebody who doesn’t.... I don’t like putting a housewife down, but everybody has done it for so long.” Nonetheless, she added: “Deep down, I feel what I’m doing is important.... I love being a housewife.” This woman expressed the ambivalence many housewives felt about their lot: because they incorporated into their self- assessments society’s low regard for homemakers, they felt “guilty” for not working for pay, even if they enjoyed cooking and cleaning and car- ing for their families, as this woman obviously did.
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A General Mills ad picturing a wife making Christmas cookies was titled “Just a housewife?” Underneath that rhetorical question, a lengthy text tried to make the much maligned housewife feel better about her- self, and, not incidentally, keep her baking cookies.

. . . her career is the most important one a woman can choose. . . . Her job is to keep her family well fed and patched and clean behind the

ears. Her ambition is to build good citizens . . . to make them happy and comfortable and proud of the way they live. . . . Her working day often begins before dawn and may last right up until bedtime—seven days a week. Her pay? The pay she values the most is the loving appre- ciation of her family.

Despite such efforts to bolster up the housewife’s self-esteem, in real life, many housewives resented the monotony, drudgery, and iso- lation of their daily lives. All the consumer products intended to make their work easier and their lives more pleasant (according to the marketing mavens of their day), all the newly fabricated mood pills like Dexedrine prescribed by indulgent doctors, all the talk of woman’s biological destiny and sacred place in the family could not hide the sense of frustration and alienation that some wives were feel- ing in their suburban cages. Little wonder that Betty Friedan’s
Femi- nine Mystique
(1963), with its passionate exposé of the housewife’s plight, hit a nerve among thinking Americans and sold more than a million copies.

Friedan’s naming of “the problem that has no name” has been cred- ited with relaunching the American feminist movement. And, indeed, unlike de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex,
which had appeared fourteen years ear- lier in France,
The Feminine Mystique
led to political action. Whereas de Beauvoir’s France in 1949 was still licking its war wounds, Friedan’s America in 1963 was ripe for social change.

Nineteen sixty-three was the year of the civil rights march in Birm- ingham, Alabama, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which included a prohibition against dis- crimination in employment on the basis of sex. In 1965, 15,000 stu- dents marched in Washington to protest the war in Vietnam.

It was within this context of heightened political awareness that the women’s movement was born. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, with Betty Friedan as its first president. The event was by no means headline news, although the conservative
National Observer
published a front-page article that began:

Warning to all American husbands: the days of male supremacy are numbered. Your wives, victimized and degraded by a double stan-

dard in law and custom, have found a new champion. It is NOW— the National Organization for Women—a militant new women’s rights movement envisioned as becoming a mass-based pressure group capable of fulfilling the dream of emancipation of womanhood held out by the Nineteenth Century suffragettes.
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NOW had learned from the civil rights movement how to lobby and litigate on behalf of women, so as to bring them into employment and public life on a more equal footing with men. Among other initiatives, it inaugurated a campaign to end the practice of advertising jobs on the basis of sex. It supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). And it endorsed the legalization of abortion.

NOW’s agenda was too radical for most Americans. Journalist and publisher’s wife Clare Booth Luce in a 1967
McCall’s
article titled “Is It NOW or Never for Women?” expressed the public’s general reluctance to share NOW’s concerns “about the so-called overall ‘inferior’ status of women in economic and social life.” Luce maintained that most women would be satisfied with their lot, if their spouses just showed a little more appreciation: “Husbands, praise your wives! and marvel at how quickly they stop complaining about discrimination.”
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Nineteen sixty-eight was a tumultuous year for the women’s move- ment, as it was for the entire nation. Martin Luther King was assassi- nated in Memphis. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Women’s liberation groups demonstrated against the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City.

Conservatives, appalled by these threats to traditional values, fought back on all fronts. In 1968 the Pope’s encyclical
Humanae Vitae
ruled against the use of artificial methods of birth control, including the pill. In 1969, the John Birch Society called for active opposition to programs for sex education in the schools. In 1970 the National Right to Life Committee was established to try to block the liberalization of abor- tion.