When Everything Changed (14 page)

“
A Good Man
Is Hard to Find—So They Hire Women,” announced
Time
in November 1966.
That year, President Johnson
urged employers to consider hiring women (along with teenagers, the handicapped, and immigrants) to fill their openings. Large firms such as IBM and Texas Instruments targeted stay-at-home moms in recruiting campaigns. So did temporary-employment agencies. “First, we must overcome the married woman’s prejudice against returning to work, and this prejudice, in most cases, boils down to her conviction that a mother’s place is in the home so long as there are children there,” said Manpower’s public-relations counsel.

The idea of married women working was indeed hard for middle-class Americans to swallow. Their benevolent attitude toward women employed in department stores or business offices was limited, in the main, to young singles. Even during World War II, very few stay-at-home wives took off their aprons and signed up to become welders or streetcar conductors. But the ones who answered the call were proud. “
Darling—you are
now the husband of a career woman. Just call me your Ship Yard Babe!” wrote one new defense worker to her husband in the service. And after the fighting was over, as single women left the workforce in droves to start families, many of the older married women continued on the job. They were joined by other housewives who were attracted by the pleas of employers and the rising salaries they could earn—especially for part-time white-collar jobs. These working wives and mothers still tended to be below the top of the social scale, so it was easy to underrate the trend. That was particularly true since, as we’ve seen, the nation preferred to ignore the fact that they were working at all.

The fact that the percentage of married women in the workforce kept quietly going up was really the key to women’s liberation. The nation had to accept the idea that most women would work through their adult lives. That didn’t mean, of course, that every woman had to hold down a job all the time. But as a sex, they were not going to have standing in the public world unless men saw them as having an important economic role. If young women did not expect to work after marriage, most of them would not plan for serious careers. Most schools would not want to train them. The nation might honor them for their roles as wives and mothers, but they would not be taken seriously in business, academia, the arts, or politics.

Even within the family, women who made a substantial contribution to the household’s finances tended to have more power and respect. And, of course, the ability to support themselves gave them far more independence when it came to handling an unsatisfactory spouse, or filling in for one who vanished.

“A
DESIRE FOR ALL THE ADVANTAGES OF THE
‘T
WO
-INCOME’
FAMILY
.”

The consultant for Manpower who was trying to figure out how to lure married women into the postwar workforce had another suggestion beyond eliminating the prejudice against working wives. “
Second, we must
develop a desire for all the advantages of the ‘Two-Income’ family,” he proposed.

Business was not only offering women incentives to work; it was in overdrive when it came to wooing them to spend. American families were willing consumers, but before World War II their vision of what they should—and could—acquire was limited. A significant minority of households had no electricity to power modern conveniences. Louise Meyer of Wyoming was hardly the only housewife laundering clothes with boiled water and eliminating wrinkles with a piece of iron heated on a wood-burning stove.
During the war, the nation’s
premier washboard manufacturer churned out more than a million boards a year for housewives who were still doing their clothes by hand.
Half of American homes had
no central heating, and a quarter lacked flush toilets.
Even in the best times
most people could remember—the boom years before the Depression—less than a third of the country had a middle-class standard of living. But after the war, thanks to the stunning economic boom and generous federal spending in the 1950s, 60 percent of American families reached the middle class.
Family income, adjusted
for inflation, rose 42 percent in the 1950s and 38 percent in the 1960s.

For the economy to keep growing, consumers had to keep buying. Helped along by the new, mighty voice of television, advertisers were constantly expanding family visions of what the good life entailed. The number of families living in their own homes soared, and most of those new homes were in the suburbs. Family cars, then second cars, became necessities. So did—as far as most people were concerned—second televisions and summer camp for the kids. An entire middle-class generation grew up in the postwar era taking for granted a lifestyle of three-bedroom homes, washer/dryer combos, annual family vacations, and college education for their children.

Then the economy began to slow. Fewer and fewer families could afford to buy the things they had gotten used to having on one person’s salary.
Over the ’70s and ’80s
, the weekly earning of nonmanagement workers fell 19 percent. While women continued to drop in and out of the workforce, often taking time off when their children were young and working more when the kids went to school full-time, they no longer regarded their work as optional or as a matter of bringing home pin money.
In the 1970s wives who
worked provided, on average, a third of the family’s income.

“T
HAT DEFINED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
.”

Until the postwar baby boom, American women had been having fewer children for as long as the nation had been keeping population statistics. That was a rational response to the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy. An extra child on a farm was usually an unalloyed benefit—another little helper who, in relatively few years, would be available to work the fields or spin the thread or tend the chickens. But as people moved into cities and developed higher expectations for the next generation, children moved from being an economic plus to an economic drain. They had to be fed, clothed, educated, and—in a middle-class family—supported for eighteen or more years without any return on investment. Obviously, parents got their reward in other ways. But it was much easier to appreciate the pluses if there were only two or three little minuses to take care of.

The baby boom was an exception—an extraordinarily large exception—to the pattern of smaller families. The men and women who produced it had grown up in the Depression, fought World War II, and then returned home to a booming economy to have more children than any Americans since the beginning of the twentieth century, their reproductive enthusiasm rivaling countries like India. It was no wonder we called them the Greatest Generation, but their offspring had no intention of repeating the performance.

American women had always been fairly adept at limiting the size of their families when they wanted to, through means ranging from diaphragms to abstinence. However, all their strategies worked best when the goal was to reduce the odds of pregnancy rather than to prevent it entirely. A woman who wanted a family of two or three children rather than six or seven had good odds for success, but not a woman who wanted to be sexually active without reproducing.

The birth control pill was simpler and far more reliable than anything that came before. It had only a fourth the failure rate of condom use and a seventh of diaphragms. The Pill, which went on the market in 1960, not only gave women more confidence about their ability to plan a career; it gave employers more confidence that when a woman said she wasn’t planning to get pregnant, she meant it. “
There is, perhaps, one
invention that historians a thousand years in the future will look back on and say, ‘That defined the twentieth century,’ ” wrote
The Economist
at the end of 1999. “It is also one that a time-traveler from 1000 would find breathtaking—particularly if she were a woman. That invention is the contraceptive pill.”

Young unmarried women
did not have widespread access to the Pill until the early 1970s—which not coincidentally was the same time they began to apply to medical, law, dental, and business schools in large numbers. This was an enormous shift. American girls had always done better than boys in most subjects in high school, but those who went to college had been funneled into relatively low-paying careers such as nursing and teaching—professions that you could pursue for a few years before marriage, and return to when your children were grown.

Once young women had confidence that they could make it through training and the early years in their profession without getting pregnant, their attitude toward careers that required a long-term commitment changed. And the sexual revolution, which arrived at the same time as widespread Pill use, reassured them that even if they delayed marriage, they would have the same opportunities as unmarried young men for a satisfying sexual life.

“J
UST A HOUSEWIFE
.”

There were other social forces at work that, while perhaps not as sweeping, were combining to make the old patterns of women’s lives look less attractive. The first wave of the baby-boom generation grew up hearing their mothers describe themselves, self-deprecatingly, as “just a housewife,” and in truth, the status of homemakers was dwindling. Perhaps it was due in part to complaints from magazines such as
Playboy
about men being trapped in marriage, forced to support unproductive wives. Perhaps it had to do with changes in the homemakers’ jobs. Before the automated kitchen and laundry, running a house was a daunting responsibility. You needed to be a good manager and to have, particularly when it came to cooking, a lot of skill. But the postwar housewife’s duties were more about driving children to multitudinous activities, microwaving quick dinners for family members on different schedules, and constantly running washing machines and dryers. Once children were out of the nest, some mothers found new challenges in volunteer work or caring for the offspring of their working daughters. But many women, still in the prime of their lives, were left with no real role at all. The attractions of marriage and motherhood didn’t fade, but women felt an increasing need for a second string—a place in the working world that would provide them with a sense of identity and usefulness once the children had grown.

At the same time, the rising divorce rate was driving home the peril of trusting your future entirely to a spouse’s ability and willingness to support his family. Divorce, like the tendency toward smaller families, had been on an upward trend for a long time, until the postwar period disrupted the graph. But that dip was followed by a huge surge of divorce in the 1970s, along with an increase in unmarried couples living together and never-married mothers. The message to younger women was clear: marriage was an unreliable basket in which to put all of your eggs.

“T
HE WHOLE LAND SEEMS AROUSED
.”

The civil rights battles of the 1960s went to the core of the nation’s identity, forcing the country to grapple with the fact that it had never lived up to the standards it set for itself in the Declaration of Independence. White Americans who accepted the message of what had happened went through a moral shock, made all the worse for the realization that they and their leaders had not been all that eager to rectify the injustice when it was driven home to them. As a result, young people became more skeptical about the wisdom of traditional cultural rules. Americans grew extremely sensitive to questions of fairness, and that opened the way for other discriminated-against groups, including women, to demand their rights.

The effect of the civil rights movement was crucial for women, because their fight was unique.
It was, as the sociologist
Alice Rossi said, the only instance in which people being discriminated against lived in much more intimate association with the “enemy” than with other members of their own group. Women’s interests were bound up with those of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in every aspect of their lives. It was difficult for them to mount the kind of clear-cut fight that racial or ethnic minorities were able to make against an establishment that had discriminated against them. That was probably why the women’s movement always tended to ride on the wake of other fights for justice.

Fighting slavery had been the first moral issue so grave that housebound middle-class Victorian matrons felt compelled to go into the outside world and engage in politics. “
We have given great offense
on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of women, and I am glad of it,” said Angelina Grimké, the abolitionist lecturer who was one of the first to consider the plight of African-Americans and find similarities to the condition of white American women. The earliest women’s rights movement grew up out of antislavery actions, and in the twentieth century, the suffrage cause finally succeeded during the Progressive era, when the nation was focused on the evils of poverty and unbridled capitalism. In the 1960s women’s greatest legislative victory was an amendment tacked onto the Civil Rights Act.

Many of the young women who took the lead on the radical side of women’s liberation had been trained in confrontation by their involvement in the civil rights movement. All of them had learned from that struggle how injustice can run deep in a nation’s laws, traditions, and customs. They did not believe that the fact that things had always been done one way made them right. To the contrary, that made them suspect. And they could see, even by the late 1960s, that history was going to celebrate the people who had the strength to stand up against popular conventions and demand justice for black Americans. They had confidence from the beginning that women, too, would win.

So there it was: the postwar economy created a demand for women workers, and the postindustrial economy created jobs that they were particularly suited to fill. The soaring expectations of the postwar boom, followed by the decline in men’s paychecks in the 1970s, made wives’ participation in the workforce almost a requisite for middle-class life. The birth control pill gave young women confidence that they could pursue a career without interruption by pregnancy. The civil rights movement made women conscious of the ways they had been treated like second-class citizens and made them determined that their own status was one of the things they were going to change. It was, all in all, a benevolent version of the perfect storm.