The World Split Open (9 page)

The growing popularity of the simultaneous orgasm, however doctrinaire, also presumed that women should experience orgasmic fulfillment. Yet, that was not what women's magazines reported. They brooded about American women's frigidity—the decade's term for everything from sexual boredom to nonorgasmic sex. The medical and psychiatric
community, heavily influenced by Freudian doctrine, blamed women for refusing to accept their true feminine identity. They insisted that two kinds of orgasms existed, vaginal and clitoral, but that only one was of value. For them, a clitoral orgasm was, by definition, the immature response of a neurotic and frigid woman who willfully refused to surrender to her feminine destiny. Achieved by male penetration, the vaginal orgasm demonstrated a woman's true affirmation of her feminine maturity.
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No one knows how many women spent those years doubting their femininity because they had never experienced the much-touted vaginal orgasm. No doubt there were many. In one study of white middle-class couples, one-third of women claimed they had never achieved orgasm. Some of these women perhaps mistook emotional emptiness for sexual dissatisfaction. Betty Friedan grew bewildered when housewives gave her “an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all.” Could it be, she wondered, that they viewed sex as a substitute for a “forfeited self”?
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It was difficult to know. “Frigidity” probably had many causes, including guilt. Over 80 percent of the women Alfred Kinsey interviewed for his study of female sexuality expressed moral objections to premarital sex, but half of them nevertheless violated their own values. One divorced woman later explained the source of her sexual problems:

My experience
being with
my to-be husband succeeded in conditioning me to utter subservience to
his
satisfaction and he never thought mine could be other than automatic upon his (else I was “frigid” or wrong somehow). And he is and was a psychoanalyst! I remain as I was—unfulfilled.

After marriage, some wives who had engaged in premarital sex wondered if their husbands still “respected” them.

I feel this gradual introduction to the sex experience has advantages over being plunged into it suddenly on the wedding night. However, it carried with it for me a high sense of guilt, which still bothers me after all these years. I am forever grateful that we did finally marry because I probably wouldn't have felt free to marry anyone else. This feeling of guilt may be why I am unable to respond sexually as I wish I could.
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Ignorance of anatomy and sexuality was also widespread. One woman, who had saved herself for marriage, wondered “whether or not the lack of sexual experience before marriage marred our early days of marriage . . . but I believe a better understanding of woman's nature on the part of [my husband] . . . could have helped considerably. After seventeen years, this understanding is still lacking.” Another woman revealed that she “didn't know anything about orgasms”:

The first time . . . we were in his room in his dorm. It was fast—he came in and he came out. It was a sharp, poignant pleasure that had no resolution. It stayed like that, it never got any better. He would come in and then pull out and come into a handkerchief. I was always left hanging. I used to come back to my dorm and lie down on the floor and howl and pound the floor. But I didn't really know why I was frustrated. I felt so lonely.
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The truth is, it was difficult to switch from virginal bride to sexy wife. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs have argued, women—not men—made the sexual revolution. Between the fifties and the eighties, men's sexual behavior changed very little. They still enjoyed premarital sexual experiences in their youth, married, and afterward perhaps strayed with other women. But during the same period, as Ehrenreich has pointed out, women moved “from a pattern of virginity before marriage and monogamy thereafter to a pattern that much more resembles men's.”

Even before the sixties, a sexual revolution simmered, but it had not yet boiled over. Women received confusing messages from a culture in transition. Society still divided the female population into “good” and “bad” women. The spreading use of birth control—diaphragms and condoms—helped rupture the historic tie between sex and procreation, but they were for planning babies, not for pleasure. Despite the expectation of an “eroticized” marriage, many people still felt shy about discussing sexual matters in public or, for that matter, in private. Advice manuals emphasized the desirability of female orgasm but assumed the woman would remain passive and stressed the man's effort. Marriage manuals encouraged men to satisfy their wives but faulted women for being “frigid.” A Freudian-saturated culture promoted the crackpot notion that women achieved sexual satisfaction exclusively through vaginal penetration. Private behavior contrasted sharply with public
pronouncements of marital fidelity and sexual innocence. Some women felt guilty if they had sex before marriage and guiltier still if they had too few orgasms afterward. Sexual advice had changed, but traditional attitudes had not. The fact is, women really weren't sure what they were supposed to feel. Some women, not surprisingly, felt nothing at all. The result: too many women “faked it” and too few men noticed.

Many men, too, felt suffocated by the self-conscious “togetherness” demanded of the suburban family. By the mid-fifties, a few Beats and playboys began to search for escape routes from the traditional obligation to support families. But most men didn't flee. As one husband explained, “You stayed with the decisions you made in your early twenties. You stuck with your job. You stuck with your wife. You stuck with everything.” And if life became too hard, men used liquor or other women to cope with their dissatisfaction.
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The manly courage so powerfully portrayed in the Westerns, detective stories, or war films of the era mocked the actual lives men led as suburban husbands. Growing numbers of them worked in industries and corporations that stripped them of autonomy, dictated the terms of their work, and rewarded conformity and teamwork more than personal initiative. Despite the popularity of a tough-fisted masculinity in the popular media, American men were also becoming more liberal and more open-minded. In 1959, a poll revealed that more men than women said they would vote for a woman president. And just as men were losing authority at work, growing numbers of mothers and wives were expanding theirs by joining men in the labor force.
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Although the image of the American housewife dominated popular culture, “the most striking feature of the fifties,” as historian William Chafe has noted, “was the degree to which women continued to enter the job market and expand their sphere.” Between 1940 and 1960, the number of working women doubled, rising from 15 percent to 30 percent, and the proportion of married working mothers jumped 400 percent. By 1955, more women worked in the labor force than had during World War II, when women had been mobilized to support America's fighting men.
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This was not what government policy had intended. Even before the war's end, public planners had tried to wean American women from
their wartime jobs. A job manual written for female war workers reminded them that “the mother stands at the heart of family life. She it is who will create the world after the war.” Apparently, some working women disagreed. A survey conducted immediately after the war by the Bureau of Women Workers revealed that 75 percent of women workers preferred to remain employed outside their homes.
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But as military industries wound down, they laid off women who had earned high wages as skilled workers during the war. Newly converted civilian industries gave preferential treatment to demobilized veterans or simply refused to hire women for what was now redefined as “men's work.” Faced with shrinking opportunities and reduced pay, some working women looked forward to starting or resuming family life. One woman who worked six days a week during the war knew that “the idea was for women to go back home. The women understood that,” she said. “And the men had been promised their jobs when they came back. I was ready to go home. I was tired . . . I knew that it would be coming and I didn't feel any let-down. The experience was interesting, but I couldn't have kept it up forever. It was too hard.”
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But many women had no choice but to seek other work. Rosie the Riveter, the widely celebrated wartime heroine, put down her welding tools and resumed her work as a waitress, barmaid, dishwasher, salesgirl, or domestic.

A decade later, literate, educated housewives discovered that new opportunities had opened up to them. In 1956, the United States officially became a “postindustrial society,” with the number of white collar workers exceeding that of industrial laborers. As nonfactory, service-oriented jobs mushroomed, businesses and corporations began to search for single women to hire as secretarial and clerical workers. Since they were in short supply, educated middle-class married mothers, who turned out to be ideal employees, were sought out by business. With their children in school, mothers provided a cheap and fluid labor force whose willingness to accept low wages for part-time work without benefits substantially increased corporate profits.
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As a result, the most powerful challenge to the feminine mystique came not from women bored by domestic life, but from a corporate sector that successfully drew women out of their homes and into the workforce. By 1960, married women accounted for 52 percent of the female labor force (up from 36 percent in 1950), double-income families had jumped 222 percent since 1940, and a third of working women were mothers with children under eighteen years of age.
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An aspiring middle class had also changed its definition of “economic
necessity.” Couples now dreamed of a new home, two cars, a college education for their children—both boys and girls—with discretionary income left over for leisure pursuits and vacations. But rising inflation, coupled with higher expectations, meant that many men simply could not provide “the good life” on a single paycheck—although the myth was that they were doing just that. The great irony of the decade was that working mothers—those villains of popular culture—very likely contributed to the relative prosperity of the postwar years. The rise in women's wages (though still low compared to men's), according to some economists, may have even increased the cost of women staying at home. When mothers worked, countless families were able to climb into the middle class and assure their children a college education.
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Naturally, some of these working women worried about protecting their husbands' feelings. Children of the Great Depression, they knew exactly how to justify their work outside the home to men and their families; they were “helping out.” One working mother knew that “husbands feel bad enough about not being able to handle the whole job without our help.”

Do you think we're going to say right out, “My Joe just can't put five kids through college, and then Sue needed braces last year, and Johnny will need them too, and the washer had to be replaced, and Ann was ashamed to bring friends home because the living room furniture was such a mess, so I went to work”?
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Working women also tried not to disrupt family life. One woman recalled how carefully she tried to ensure “that there would be no disruption of the service . . . the cooking, the cleaning.”

We had our family evenings together every night . . . I could have taken a full-time job . . . with benefits and a better salary. I discussed it with my husband and I told him, if I take on this full-time job, I will be taking away something from you that you have to have. You are the breadwinner and . . . I will not take that away from you. To work full-time, I felt I would be taking away his manhood, his feeling of being the head of the household. I never regretted it. We had a good, loving relationship for thirty years.
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Although few women at the time admitted that they worked because they were bored, many later confessed that homemaking had left them desperate for greater stimulation and that, after the isolation of the home, they loved the camaraderie of working with other people. Estelle Shuster began working in 1950, when her daughters were twelve and eight. “I went to work, because I was bored in the house.”

My husband was a CPA, he was never home, and when he was, it was the nose in his tax papers or the newspaper over the face. My mother thought it was scandalous that I went to work. And my husband said, “What you're trying to do is make everyone feel as if I can't earn a living for you.” Belittling, that was the word he used, he said I was belittling him by working. I said, I don't care how anyone feels, I have to get out of the house.
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Some women viewed employment as an insurance policy against an impending empty nest. Women born in 1900 lived on the average 50.8 years. Without birth control, many women kept bearing children until the last decade of their lives. The baby boom, which reversed a century's decline in women's fertility, masked how much a longer life span and fewer children would change women's lives. Daughters born in 1957, who resumed the pattern of late marriages and fewer children, could expect to live 72.8 years, giving them thirty or forty years to reinvent their lives after their last child left home.
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Like housewives, working women faced formidable obstacles and problems for which there existed no language. At age twenty-five, Doris Earnshaw, a married graduate of Middlebury College, who had already taught in a French college, decided to apply to graduate school in French literature at the University of California, Berkeley.