A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (9 page)

The chapter titled “The Sexual Sell” still elicits a shock of recognition and resentment today, and it had a tremendous impact on readers at the time. In each of the original copies of the book that I reviewed, this was the most heavily underlined section. Following on the heels of Friedan’s trenchant critiques of psychiatrists, social scientists, educators, politicians, and popular magazines, this chapter provided the clinching piece of evidence for many readers that they had indeed been targets of a massive and cynical campaign to erase the feminist aspirations of the 1920s and turn women into mindless consumers.

In the years since
The Feminine Mystique
was published, historians have faulted Friedan’s account of the decline of feminism and the rise of the feminine mystique. They point out that she exaggerated the popular approval of feminism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as well as the novelty of the antifeminist propaganda of the 1950s. The feminine mystique was not a postwar invention, but rather a repackaging of old prejudices in more modern trappings in the aftermath of the suffrage movement. Indeed, the effort to convince the “New Woman” to turn her back on the rights she had gained during the first two decades of the twentieth century began before the ink was even dry on the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote. It is true that Freudian warnings about the sexual abnormality of the career woman gave antifeminists new weapons in the 1940s and that the blandishments of the sexual sell in the 1950s added the carrot of consumerism to the stick of antifeminism. But there was no golden age of feminism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Yet Friedan’s account rang true to many women who had raised families in the1940s and 1950s. Again and again, women told me there was “something different” about the postwar era, “something deadening.” By the 1950s, women were marrying at a younger age than at any time in the previous hundred years, and this may have made them more susceptible to the sexual sell. And three decades of relentless attacks on feminism as antimale and antifamily had taken their toll. Even women who had experienced other models of family life and female behavior said that during the 1950s they came to believe that normal families were those where the wife and mother stayed home, and that normal women were perfectly happy with that arrangement.

 

FRIEDAN WAS CERTAINLY CORRECT THAT IN THE FIRST DECADES OF THE twentieth century, the final push for female suffrage, along with the overturning of many restrictive conventions from Victorian days, stirred an excitement about female achievements and capabilities that had largely receded by the 1950s. Suffrage activists collected millions of signatures on petitions and held mass meetings that garnered enormous public attention. From street corner rallies organized by fiery labor orators to dignified delegations of middle-class “ladies” who gently lobbied small-town mayors and state legislatures, the suffrage movement was highly visible across the country.

Not everyone agreed with the women’s rights activists, but their opponents’ hostility often worked in the suffragists’ favor. In 1913, suffragists holding a mass march in Washington, D.C., two months after President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration were attacked by an angry crowd. The women were jeered at, pelted with burning cigars, and knocked to the ground. Some had their clothes torn off. The police and national guard refused to defend the women, and journalists reported that the suffrage marchers had to fight their way “foot by foot” up Pennsylvania Avenue, taking more than an hour to traverse the first ten blocks. But the incident became a national scandal that embarrassed opponents of women’s rights and galvanized more women into action.

By 1916 the National American Woman Suffrage Association had 2 million members, and the more militant National Woman’s Party had 50,000 members. During World War I, Women’s Party leader Alice Paul built a “watchfire” in an urn outside the White House gates. Every time Wilson made a speech that referred to the need for freedom abroad, Paul and her supporters burned a copy of the speech to dramatize the hypocrisy of condemning other countries for lack of freedom while more than half of America’s own citizens still were not allowed to vote.

When demonstrators were arrested, they went on hunger strikes, which prison authorities tried to break by forced feeding. Protests against the jailings and the prison treatment were held throughout the country. Eventually public outrage became so great that the suffragists were released and their sentences nullified. Feeling the heat, President Wilson pressed his allies in Congress to stop blocking the suffrage bill.

The campaign for the vote challenged the nineteenth-century image of women as passive and timid. Friedan quoted the memoir of an English feminist who recalled that women’s organizational capacities, courage, and solidarity “were a revelation to all concerned, but especially themselves.... We were often tired, hurt and frightened. But we . . . shared a joy of life that we had never known.” The dramatist Jesse Lynch Williams, a supporter of women’s rights, described the stunned reaction of hostile members of a Fifth Avenue men’s club to one of the massive suffrage demonstrations that periodically clogged New York City’s major thoroughfares:

The constitutional amendment to approve women’s suffrage passed the Congress in 1919 and was ratified by the states in 1920. Jubilant women vowed that America would never be the same.

Changes in cultural mores about gender and sexuality during the first two decades of the twentieth century contributed to the heady sense that a revolution was under way, even among women who were not political activists. The World War I era saw the overthrow of nineteenth-century norms that had prevented respectable young women from going out in public alone or with a member of the opposite sex. The middle-class custom of “calling,” where a young man socialized with a young woman in her parents’ parlor or on the front porch, gave way to dating, where the man picked up the woman and then took her, without a chaperone, to a film, cabaret, dance hall, or amusement park.

His date often left the house wearing clothes that would have marked her as a prostitute just twenty years earlier. One authority has estimated that in the late nineteenth century a respectable middle-class woman wore more than thirty pounds of clothing when she went out in public. Now women were free to wear sleeveless dresses that ended at their knees, smoke cigarettes, drink liquor, bob their hair, and even talk openly about sex.

For most women, such personal freedoms merely opened up a new route to marriage and provided more opportunity to find sexual satisfaction within marriage. But for others they were part of an unprecedented insistence on the right to an independent identity. Many career women saw themselves as participating in a feminine revolution. They presented themselves as examples of what their gender could achieve rather than as exceptions or anomalies, as so many career women of the 1940s and ’50s were wont to do. Movie star Mary Pickford declared that she was “proud to be one of . . . the girls who make their own living” and delighted to see other members of her sex make good. Amelia Earhart was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

The successes of the early-twentieth-century feminist movement permanently changed the discussion of women’s roles in society. Even defenders of traditional gender roles could no longer argue that women were innately incapable of physical heroism and political, professional, or athletic achievement. Few dared to maintain that society had any right to legally prevent women from exercising the same rights as men. Suddenly it was hard to find anyone who had been against the Nineteenth Amendment, even though the vote had been so close that one congressman refused to have his broken arm set for fear of missing the vote, while another left the deathbed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his vote for her cause.

The Roaring Twenties were indeed heady times. But Friedan exaggerated the extent of women’s gains. Equal rights may have been increasingly accepted in the abstract, but in practice acceptance of female independence did not gain much traction in the 1920s. Opponents of gender equality shifted tactics and changed their rhetoric, arguing that while the women’s movement had led to necessary reforms, it had gone too far. People who had initially condemned feminism because it encroached on men’s traditional prerogatives now presented themselves as the true defenders of the female sex, faulting the movement for taking away women’s traditional privileges.

In August 1920, the month the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
printed a “Credo for the New Woman.” The editors offered a backhanded endorsement of women’s rights that stressed the limits to equality they felt American women should accept. “I believe in woman’s rights; but I believe in woman’s sacrifices too.” “I believe in woman’s suffrage; but I believe many other things are vastly more important.” “I believe in woman’s brains; but I believe still more in her emotions.” And “I believe in woman’s assertion of self,” as long as “through her new freedom [she] elects to serve others.”

In November 1923, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
printed an article by Corra Harris in which she remarked that modern women had been “acquiring a new set of adjectives, such as ‘able,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘influential,’ ‘distinguished. ’” Harris conceded that many of the activities of these
“up-and-coming women of the present moment” were useful, and she even admitted to an “anxious hope” that they would stay in public service long enough to give “the national household a cleaning.” But Harris believed that women must and soon would once more embrace the old adjectives, such as “‘meek,’ ‘matronly,’ ‘maternal,’ ‘kind,’ ‘domestic.’” They would recognize, Harris predicted, that nothing was to be gained from reforming the world at the price of their “mental and spiritual” happiness, and they would return to “the ancient duties and pleasures” of home.

“We can amend the Constitution,” Harris concluded, “but it is my belief that we cannot change the nature of women by doing so. They belong to love, goodness, faith in all things.... They will never endure the revolting revelations of political life nor the fierce competitions of public life. They are only trying on a new-fashioned garment to see if it becomes them. It will not. Therefore they will not wear it or pay for it.”

Not everyone shared Harris’s confidence that American women would get over their infatuation with the new freedoms. As the 1920s progressed, warnings about the excesses of feminism became more strident. One especially popular ploy in agitating against further progress was to publish testimonies of purported former feminists, or daughters of feminists, about the costs of “too much” liberation.

Typical was “I Rebel at Rebellion” by Marian Castle in the July 1930
Woman’s Journal
. Castle acknowledged that an older generation of women had become understandably “tired of being classed with children and imbeciles at the polls” and “ashamed of having to search their husbands’ pockets in the wee small hours for even smaller change.” But her generation, she claimed, had “carried the banner of freedom to unforeseen heights,” and these had become as oppressive as the old restrictions.

The freedom “to smoke, to drink, to sit up all night, to discuss the hitherto undiscussible, and to work like men with men,” Castle claimed, had become “desperately confining.” So, she announced, she had “become a rebel once more” and was fighting to “be free of this new freedom.” Castle described herself as now singing “paeans of joy over the fact that I may depend upon my husband for money instead of earning it myself.”

The onset of the Depression tilted the discussion of women’s place in society even further toward the antifeminist side. The persistence of high unemployment increased hostility toward working wives, who were thought to be double-dipping into an already shrinking pool of jobs. In a 1936 Gallup poll, 82 percent of people said wives should not work if their husbands had jobs. By 1939, the percentage had risen to almost 90 percent.

Women’s support for equality as an abstract principle did not disappear. In a 1938 poll conducted by the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
60 percent of the female respondents disliked having the word “obey” in marriage vows, 75 percent favored joint decision-making between husband and wife, and a whopping 80 percent felt that an unemployed husband should keep house for his wife if she were working. In practice, however, 60 percent said they would not respect a husband who earned less than his wife, and 90 percent believed a wife should give up her job if her husband asked her to do so.

The Depression also undermined the allure of work outside the home for women. In the 1920s, joining the workforce had been an adventure for many young women, but in this gigantic economic catastrophe, more women were pushed into segregated, low-wage jobs. During the 1930s women lost ground in the professions and in the better-paid manufacturing work they had begun to enter in the previous decade.

Employed wives found themselves working a longer “double shift,” as they tried to save money at home by sewing more of their own clothes, canning their own preserves, and baking goods from scratch. Jenny L. reported that her mother often baked more than the family really needed because bulk flour came in cloth bags that could be used to make clothes. Her mom calculated that it was cheaper to purchase more flour and crowd some extra bread into the oven than to buy separate cloth for the girls’ dresses. Sometimes she traded the extra bread for fresh vegetables or sent Jenny to give it to other unemployed families.