A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (14 page)

But until Friedan attributed women’s unhappiness to the contradictions between women’s needs and the precepts of the feminine mystique, there was no widely publicized alternative to the psychiatric explanation
of female discontent as an individual problem of sexual or gender maladjustment. When women described being trapped in their homes, dominated by their husbands, or resentful of their economic dependence, this was taken as a symptom rather than a potential cause of their disturbance, something to be treated by analysis, medication, and even electroshock therapy. As sociologist Carol Warren notes in
Madwives
, a study of women hospitalized for schizophrenia in the 1950s, there was at that time, unlike today, “no legitimizing cultural vocabulary” for housewives who felt isolated in their homes, unhappy in their marriages, or damaged in their sense of self.

So the prescribed treatment for “the housewife syndrome” was not to figure out how a discontented woman could change her life to gain a stronger sense of self, but how she could change her feelings to reconcile herself to her role in the family. In 1963, psychiatrist Herbert Modlin described his success in dispensing such treatment to five “paranoid” women. Their “distorted perceptions” about male persecution disappeared, he reported, once he and his colleagues helped them learn to value their “feminine social role.”

The patients Warren studied were pronounced cured only when they admitted that their discontent had been unjustified. One woman reported in her discharge interview that she had been advised to enter the hospital in the first place because “I felt that I was dominated.” Since then, “I’ve had a chance to think things out.” Another wife described how her treatment had helped her: “I feel like baking cookies . . . and that’s because I’ve made up my mind to be a homemaker instead of always worrying about a career.”

Less extreme than commitment to a mental hospital but much more widespread was medication. When tranquilizers became readily available in the second half of the 1950s, they were initially prescribed for high-charging businessmen such as those portrayed in the TV series
Mad Men
. Yet by the second half of the 1960s, women were twice as likely as men to use tranquilizers, and most consumers of “mother’s little helper” were white and better educated than average.

 

NOT EVERYONE IN AMERICA CONSIDERED IT CRAZY FOR WIVES AND MOTHERS to have interests outside the home before they reached middle age. Many educators persisted in believing that women should be taught to use their minds and imaginations for something besides cooking. And the same popular magazines that disparaged “the career woman” as an ideal or goal often commended individual women who had successful careers. In many of the magazines she surveyed, historian Meyerowitz writes, “domestic ideals coexisted in an ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement.” She found many articles that celebrated both domestic devotion and public success—“sometimes in the same sentence.”

A 1953
Coronet
article about the female mayor of Portland, Oregon, was titled “The Lady Who Licked Crime in Portland.” The mayor was described as “an ethereally pale housewife” who tipped “the scales at 110 pounds.” But she was also labeled a feminist, intensely concerned “with the status of women.” And no one suggested that she needed to be institutionalized or medicated.

So there were more mixed messages, exceptions, and contradictions in the media’s depictions of the ideal feminine life than Friedan admitted in her book. In the long run, these mixed messages, combined with the trends toward increased workplace participation and education for women, helped pave the way for a new women’s movement that would have happened with or without Betty Friedan. Indeed, by the time Friedan’s book appeared in 1963, many young women were already rejecting “the feminine mystique” without ever having heard it called that.

But many women never heard the exceptions and caveats to the feminine mystique that historians now recognize in retrospect. And the few who did hear them seem to have found them all the more confusing. “It would have been easier if everyone had been as negative as Philip Wylie,” Joan C. told me. “Then you could have gotten indignant. But it was like being enveloped in a big cloud of cotton candy, sweet and sticky. You couldn’t punch your way out.”

Anne Parsons, the daughter of sociologist Talcott Parsons, wrote to Friedan describing her sense of isolation and marginalization as an intelligent
woman trying to build a research career in the 1950s. “I began to wish that someone would call me names or throw stones or threaten to send me to a concentration camp so that at least I would know for certain that the world was against me.”

A strong-minded woman determined to pursue a career could have cobbled together enough supportive quotes and celebrated role models to justify her resolve, and many did. But the individuals praised in women’s magazines for successfully reconciling family life with a career were painted in such heroic, larger-than-life terms that they could not possibly serve as role models for most women. The descriptions of how these women pulled off their successes underscored Dorothy Thompson’s 1939 warning that only one in a thousand could manage such a thing. Articles on successful women would invariably marvel at their “ceaseless activity,” “amazing” energy, and ability to “get along without sleep.” Many readers admired these women, and perhaps even envied them, but few could imagine emulating them.

Today women often resent the psychological pressures created by the pressure to “have it all.” But in the 1950s, women were firmly told that they could “have it
or
,” meaning they could be anything they wanted to be in the public world,
or
they could be happy.

You are free to choose, the prevailing ideology said. You can do anything you want and society will no longer try to stop you. But modern science has proven that if you do not first devote yourself to being a homemaker, you will probably end up desperately unhappy, and your choice may be a sign that you already suffer from a deep illness.

Prior to the 1940s and 1950s, a woman was condemned if she did not do what was expected of her. In the 1950s, she was pitied if she did not
want
what was expected of her.

For most of American history, a woman’s role as wife and mother had been seen as a sometimes painful duty. People talked about a woman’s lot, not a woman’s choice. And a woman’s lot involved self-sacrifice, not self-realization. But in the world of 1950s advertising, all that changed. One of the marketing research books Friedan accessed informed its clients
that “the modern bride is deeply convinced of the unique value of married love, of the possibilities of finding real happiness in marriage and of fulfilling her personal destiny in it and through it.” She “seeks as a conscious goal that which in many cases her grandmother saw as a blind fate and her mother as slavery”—to “belong to a man . . . to choose among all possible careers the career of wife-mother-homemaker.”

Postwar ideology was particularly disorienting for many women because it often came in the guise of a forward-thinking rejection of “traditional” ideas about gender and sexuality. The new ideology of marriage promised women satisfaction in their home life that their mothers and grandmothers would never have dreamed possible. The modern woman would find joy and creativity in the housework that had been pure drudgery for her grandmother. She would experience sexual pleasures unimaginable to her repressed Victorian foremothers. And she would reach new heights of egalitarian intimacy with her husband, who would come home each evening eager to participate in the joys of togetherness.

In the long run, such heightened expectations about marriage helped make many women more assertive in their relationships and gave some women the courage to end empty and unsatisfying marriages. But in the short run, these expectations often added to a woman’s guilt and confusion, because they were not yet attached to any new expectations about men’s behavior. Women were encouraged to expect more than ever from marriage, but they were told that when a marriage fell short, it was almost invariably because they were not good enough wives. If a husband’s bad behavior threatened the marriage, it was up to the wife to figure out what she had done to trigger this behavior and how
she
must change to bring out her husband’s better side.

Studying the advice of marital experts in this era, historian Rebecca Davis found a widespread consensus that the path to marital happiness lay in the wife adjusting her own wishes to her husband’s needs, whims, and even neuroses. After four counseling sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, for example, a twenty-year-old pregnant wife dutifully concluded that her husband’s infidelities were probably due to her failure to take enough care with her own appearance and that of her home. She
therefore resolved to be “better groomed, cleaner.” If such rededication to domesticity did not create the bliss that a true woman ought to find in marriage, “resignation,” one social worker remarked, could offer “protection from excessive frustration.”

Other mixed messages abounded. A woman was told that she should put nothing above her devotion to her children, her love for her husband, and her delight in her home, but she was sternly warned against devoting so much attention to her family that she smothered her children and emasculated her husband. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable to call a woman
too
devoted a wife or mother. But by the 1950s, the woman who focused too intensely on being a housewife and mother was deemed as big a menace to society—and to men—as the woman who rejected domesticity in favor of a paid career. The pursuit of domestic bliss—the one outlet for a woman’s dreams and aspirations—turned out to damage the men on whom women were supposed to rely.

And in the hierarchy of cultural concerns during that era, the dilemmas facing American women paled in comparison to the “crisis” facing American men. Pundits bemoaned the eclipse of the risk-taking entrepreneur by “the organization man.” They worried that men were losing their hard edge because they increasingly worked in impersonal bureaucracies where “feminine” characteristics such as teamwork, compromise, and concern for others’ opinions were more important than individual initiative and aggressiveness. Men, said sociologist David Riesman, were becoming “other-directed” instead of “inner-directed.”

The material comforts that were promised as the reward of a successful family were simultaneously feared as a threat to the nation’s moral fiber. Some commentators fretted that modern affluence had created a culture of leisure that was undermining the work ethic of yore. Others worried that “status-seeking” men were working too hard to amass material goods. But however contradictory the problems described, almost everyone agreed that they were the fault of women.

If a woman left home to get a job, she was threatening the last bastions of masculinity. But if she devoted all her attention to making her home a place of comfort and fulfillment, she was either overdomesticating her
husband or putting too much pressure on him to keep up with the Joneses. If she left a child with a babysitter to take a part-time job, she was neglecting the next generation. But if she lavished too much attention on her children, she might produce a whole generation of homosexuals.

Even the mutually satisfying sex life that was supposed to be one of the rewards of conforming to the 1950s model of masculinity and femininity contributed to the sense of masculine crisis. Sociologist Riesman warned that as women became avid consumers of sexual and romantic advice, “the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the woman also grows.”

One of the quickest routes to a best-selling book in the 1950s was to explain how women’s behavior—whether as wives, mothers, or career women—was to blame for the “crisis of masculinity” that supposedly characterized the era. An issue of
Look
magazine titled “The Decline of the American Male,” reprinted as a book in 1958, squarely laid the blame for men’s problems on that same domesticity that was elsewhere being celebrated as women’s best hope for happiness and society’s best hope for stability.

The book described a litany of problems facing American men, all of them stemming from the power their wives supposedly exerted. “Women’s new rank in the family has encouraged her to make extraordinary and often frustrating economic demands on her husband.” Women were making new sexual demands as well, so that the poor man could no longer “concentrate on his own pleasure; he must concern himself primarily with satisfying his wife.” The upshot? “Men overwork themselves to supply their wives with material possessions” and then exhaust themselves trying to satisfy them sexually. Adding insult to injury, the “fad of togetherness” had led wives to ask husbands to do “things around the house that their fathers didn’t even know had to be done.”

Even critics of suburban domesticity in the 1950s, liberal as well as conservative, directed their anger not toward the system that kept women trapped in the mystique of housewifery and consumerism, but toward the wives themselves. In 1956,
The Crack in the Picture Window
gathered widespread attention for its searing indictment of suburbia. The author,
John Keats, combined sociology and satirical fiction to chronicle the lives of two hapless suburban dwellers, Mr. and Mrs. John Drone. Keats quoted Dr. Harold Mendelsohn of American University’s Bureau of Social Research about the “terrifying monotony” of suburbia and the loneliness of wives whose husbands could at least escape during the day. But in the next breath he argued that suburbia was producing a “matriarchal society” that turned the average woman into a “nagging slob” and her husband into “a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter.”

Keats’s prescription for Mr. Drone was to throw off his domination by women and reject his wife’s attempts to domesticate him. But he advised Mrs. Drone to isolate herself even further in the lonely job of homemaking, becoming someone who “baked her own bread, painted her own pictures, and had as little to do with her neighbors as was humanly possible.”