Marriage, a History
Page 31
No longer did people postpone marriage until they could establish their economic independence, as had been the case for the middle classes in Western Europe and North America up to the late nineteenth century. Nor was marriage, as had been the case in so many peasant villages, something you entered only after a woman had gotten pregnant and showed that she could produce children to work on the family farm. Certainly it was not something you entered to set up a joint business enterprise, as had been the case for many craftsmen and artisans in the past. Nor was it an informal arrangement scarcely distinguishable from just living together, as it had been among many lower-class individuals of earlier days, of whom their neighbors often said they were “married, but not churched.”
Marriage in the long decade of the 1950s was simply the be-all and end-all of life. In a remarkable reversal of the past, it even became the stepping-off point for adulthood rather than a sign that adulthood had already been established. Advice columnists at the Ladies’ Home Journal encouraged parents to help finance early marriages, even for teens, if their children seemed mature enough. A common saying in Germany prior to World War II had been Ein Student verlocht sich nicht—“A student does not get engaged.” But across Europe and North America, marriages between college students became much more common during the 1950s, and universities built married students’ housing to accommodate them.32
The norm of youthful marriage was so predominant during the 1950s that an unmarried woman as young as twenty-one might worry that she would end up an “old maid.” American psychiatrist Sidonie Gruenberg was probably exaggerating when she wrote in 1953 that “a girl who hasn’t a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married.” But, says historian John Modell, in the 1950s “the ‘sorting’ of women into the marriageable and the future spinsters occurred early and vigorously.” The small, and suspect, minority of women who did not marry at the same age as their peers had less chance of ever getting married than their counterparts a hundred years earlier. They were what the Japanese called Christmas cake, likely to stay on the shelf after the twenty-fifth.33
Young couples also had babies at much higher rates than their parents and grandparents. After falling for most of the previous hundred years, the birthrate of married couples soared during the 1950s. By 1957, the peak of the U.S. baby boom, the fertility rate in the United States was 123 births per thousand women, compared with only 79.5 per thousand in 1940. The baby boom peaked later in Western Europe, but was just as dramatic. The birthrate for twenty-one-year-old West German women rose from 92.2 per thousand in 1950, to 120 per thousand in 1961, and then to 133.8 per thousand in 1969.34
But even as women, on average, were having more babies, there was a continuing decline in the number of very large families in the 1950s. The postwar baby boom was produced by a decrease in childless or one-child families and an uptick in the number of three-child families, so the ideal of the small, couple-oriented family continued to spread. Moreover, because women had their children younger and completed their child rearing at an earlier age, the proportion of a couple’s marriage that was devoted to childbearing and child rearing kept dropping.35
Remarkably, the golden age of marriage crossed socioeconomic and ethnic lines. In earlier centuries there had been huge class differences in the timing and organization of marriage and childbearing. Not so in the postwar era. People from all walks of life were moving, almost in lockstep, through a rapid sequence of transitions in the space of just a few years: Leave the parental home for work or school, get married in a more elaborate ceremony than ever, move into a home of one’s own, and have a baby.36
The ideal of the male breadwinner marriage had already spread beyond the middle classes by the 1920s. But that ideal was still unattainable for many families involved in farming or running family businesses and for the majority of workers whose wages were too low to support a family: As late as 1929, after more than a decade of unprecedented economic growth, more than half of American families lived at or below the minimum standard of subsistence. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, real wages rose rapidly across the population, fastest of all in the bottom half. More families than ever before could achieve a decent, if modest, standard of living on the wages of a single male breadwinner. In 1950 only 16 percent of children in the United States had mothers who earned income outside the home, and because child labor had been abolished in the 1930s, a higher percentage of children were growing up in one-earner families during the long decade of the 1950s than ever before or since.37
This unprecedented marriage system was the climax of almost two hundred years of continuous tinkering with the male protector love-based marital model invented in the late eighteenth century. That process culminated in the 1950s in the short-lived pattern that people have since come to think of as traditional marriage. So in the 1970s, when the inherent instability of the love-based marriage reasserted itself, millions of people were taken completely by surprise. Having lost any collective memory of the convulsions that occurred when the love match was first introduced and the crisis that followed its modernization in the 1920s, they could not understand why this kind of marriage, which they thought had prevailed for thousands of years, was being abandoned by the younger generation.
Chapter 14
The Era of Ozzie and Harriet: The Long Decade of “Traditional” Marriage
The long decade of the 1950s, stretching from 1947 to the early 1960s in the United States and from 1952 to the late 1960s in Western Europe, was a unique moment in the history of marriage. Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households. Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. And never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was “normal.”
The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage.
In Canada, says historian Doug Owram, “every magazine, every marriage manual, every advertisement . . . assumed the family was based on the . . . male wage-earner and the child-rearing, home-managing housewife.” In the United States, marriage was seen as the only culturally acceptable route to adulthood and independence. Men who chose to remain bachelors were branded “narcissistic,” “deviant,” “infantile,” or “pathological.” Family advice expert Paul Landes argued that practically everyone, “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective,” ought to marry. French anthropologist Martine Segalen writes that in Europe the postwar period was characterized by the overwhelming “weight of a single family model.” Any departure from this model—whether it was late marriage, nonmarriage, divorce, single motherhood, or even delayed childbearing—was considered deviant. Everywhere psychiatrists agreed and the mass media affirmed that if a woman did not find her ultimate fulfillment in homemaking, it was a sign of serious psychological problems.1
A 1957 survey in the United States reported that four out of five people believed that anyone who preferred to remain single was “sick,” “neurotic,” or “immoral.” Even larger majorities agreed that once married, the husband should be the breadwinner and the wife should stay home. As late as 1961, one survey of young women found that almost all expected to be married by age twenty-two, most hoped to have four children, and all expected to quit work permanently when the first child was born.2
During the 1950s even women who had once been political activists, labor radicals, or feminists—people like my own mother, still proud of her work to free the Scottsboro Boys from legal lynching in the 1930s and her job in the shipyards during the 1940s—threw themselves into homemaking. I
t’s hard for anyone under the age of sixty to realize how profoundly people’s hunger for marriage and domesticity during the 1950s was shaped by their huge relief that two decades of depression and war were finally over and by their amazed delight at the benefits of the first real mass consumer economy in history. “It was like a miracle,” my mother once told me, to see so many improvements, so quickly, in the quality of everyday life.
Up until 1950 most families’ discretionary income did not cover much more than an occasional meal away from home; a beer or two after work; a weekly trip to the movies, amusement park, or beach; and perhaps a yearly vacation, usually spent at the home of relatives. Few households had washing machines and dryers. Refrigerators had only tiny spaces for freezing ice and had to be defrosted at least once a week. Few houses had separate bedrooms for all the children.
But starting in the late 1940s, millions of new houses were built and furnished with conveniences and comforts that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier. Separate bedrooms suddenly became the norm. The number of Americans with discretionary income, money left over after the basic bills were paid, doubled during the 1950s. By the mid-1950s nearly 60 percent of the population had “middle-class” income levels, compared with only 31 percent in the “prosperous twenties.” By 1960 nearly two-thirds of all American families owned their own homes, 87 percent had televisions, and 75 percent owned cars.3 Progress was slower in war-ravaged Europe, but there too each year brought measurable gains in families’ living standards and conveniences.
This was the first chance many people had to try to live out the romanticized dream of a private family, happily ensconced in its own nest. They studied how the cheery husbands and wives on their favorite television programs organized their families (and where the crabby ones went wrong). They devoured articles and books on how to get the most out of marriage and their sex lives. They were even interested in advertisements that showed them how to use home appliances to make their family lives better.
I like to show my students an hourlong film put out by General Electric in 1956. In this long advertisement for electricity, mom discovers that her new clothes dryer gives her the chance to bond with her daughter and pick up some of the “groovy” slang of the expanding teen pop culture. Mom then shows her daughter how to use the family’s new freezer and self-timing oven to make a meal that will impress the cute roommate her older son has brought home from college. The visitor likes his oven-baked ham, frozen orange juice, and electrically whipped dessert so much that he skips the dreary lecture he’d planned to attend and takes the ecstatic daughter dancing. All this was achieved by living better electrically.
My students are incredulous that people would actually sit and watch this corny stuff for a whole hour. But one day the grandmother of one student was visiting class when we watched the GE film, and she mentioned having seen it in the 1950s. To her, it had been not a cliché but a revelation.
An editor of a 1950s women’s magazine in Britain commented later that nowadays “you cannot imagine people buying a magazine to learn how to use a fridge.” But “that was the excitement of the 1950s. What is a washing machine? What is a steam iron? And how soon can I try one in my own home?”4 American women’s magazines too taught their readers how to use new home appliances and what the latest household gadgets did, how to decorate a home more tastefully, and what to do with the exotic new foods, such as artichokes and onion soup mixes, that could now be found in supermarkets.
As for women whose husbands couldn’t afford such wonders, there was always the dream of being chosen “Queen for a Day.” Premiering in 1955, this TV show was watched by thirteen million Americans each day, more than tuned in to the now-iconic Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver. Each day five women, usually women whose husbands were dead, disabled, or unemployed, but occasionally single mothers, told their sad tales on the air. The one whose story elicited the strongest audience response, as measured on the “applause-o-meter,” received a cornucopia of new products for the home: furniture, silverware, household appliances, wardrobes. Losers took home a consolation prize, such as a new toaster.5
Today strong materialist aspirations often corrode family bonds. But in the 1950s, consumer aspirations were an integral part of constructing the postwar family. In its April 1954 issue, McCall’s magazine heralded the era of “togetherness,” in which men and women were constructing a “new and warmer way of life . . . as a family sharing a common experience.” In women’s magazines, that togetherness was always pictured in a setting filled with modern appliances and other new consumer products. The essence of modern life, their women readers learned, was “abundance, emancipation, social progress, airy houses, healthy children, the refrigerator, pasteurised milk, the washing-machine, comfort, quality and accessibility.”6 And of course marriage.
Television also equated consumer goods with family happiness. Ozzie and Harriet hugged each other in front of their Hotpoint appliances. A man who had been a young father in the 1950s told a student of mine that he had had no clue how to cultivate the family “togetherness” that his wife kept talking about until he saw an episode of the sitcom Leave It to Beaver, which gave him the idea of washing the car with his son to get in some “father-son” time.
When people could not make their lives conform to those of the “normal” families they saw on TV, they blamed themselves—or their parents. Assata Shakur, a young black girl growing up in this period, remembered how angry she was that her mother didn’t act more like Donna Reed: “Why didn’t my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school? Why didn’t we live in a house with a back yard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. ‘How disgusting,’ I would think. Why didn’t she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on television?”7
At this early stage of the consumer revolution, people saw marriage as the gateway to the good life. Americans married with the idea of quickly buying their first home, with the wife working for a few years to help accumulate the down payment or furnish it with the conveniences she would use once she became a full-time housewife. People’s newfound spending money went to outfit their homes and families. In the five years after World War II, spending on food in the United States rose by a modest 33 percent and clothing expenditures by only 20 percent, but purchases of household furnishings and appliances jumped by 240 percent. In 1961, Phyllis Rosenteur, the author of an American advice book for single women, proclaimed: “Merchandise plus Marriage equals our economy.”8
In retrospect, it’s astonishing how confident most marriage and family experts of the 1950s were that they were witnessing a new stabilization of family life and marriage. The idea that marriage should provide both partners with sexual gratification, personal intimacy, and self-fulfillment was taken to new heights in that decade. Marriage was the place not only where people expected to find the deepest meaning in their lives but also where they would have the most fun. Sociologists noted that a new “fun morality,” very different “from the older ‘goodness morality,’ ” pervaded society. “Instead of feeling guilty for having too much fun, one is inclined to feel ashamed if one does not have enough.” A leading motivational researcher of the day argued that the challenge for a consumer society was “to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to life is a moral, not an immoral, one.”9
But these trends did not cause social commentators the same worries about the neglect of societal duties that milder ideas about the pleasure principle had triggered in the 1920s. Most 1950s sociologists weren’t even troubled by the fact that divorce rates were higher than they had been in the 1920s, when such rates had been said to threaten the very existence of marriage. The influential sociologists Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke wrote matter-offactly that “the companionship family relies upon divorce as a means of rectifying a mistake in mate selection.” They expressed none of th
e panic that earlier social scientists had felt when they first realized divorce was a permanent feature of the love-based marital landscape. Burgess and Locke saw a small amount of divorce as a safety valve for the “companionate” marriage and expected divorce rates to stabilize or decrease in the coming decades as “the services of family-life education and marriage counseling” became more widely available.10
The marriage counseling industry was happy to step up to the plate. By the 1950s Paul Popenoe’s American Institute of Family Relations employed thirty-seven counselors and claimed to have helped twenty thousand people become “happily adjusted” in their marriages. “It doesn’t require supermen or superwomen to succeed in marriage,” wrote Popenoe in a 1960 book on saving marriages. “Success can be attained by almost anyone.”11
There were a few dissenting voices. American sociologist Robert Nisbet warned in 1953 that people were loading too many “psychological and symbolic functions” on the nuclear family, an institution too fragile to bear such weight. In the same year, Mirra Komarovsky decried the overspecialization of gender roles in American marriage and its corrosive effects on women’s self-confidence. 12
But even when marriage and family experts acknowledged that the male breadwinner family created stresses for women, they seldom supported any change in its division of labor. The world-renowned American sociologist Talcott Parsons recognized that because most women were not able to forge careers, they might feel a need to attain status in other ways. He suggested that they had two alternatives. The first was to be a “glamour girl” and exert sexual sway over men. The second was to develop special expertise in “humanistic” fields, such as the arts or community volunteer work. The latter, Parsons thought, was socially preferable, posing less of a threat to society’s moral standards and to a woman’s own self-image as she aged. He never considered a third alternative: that women might actually win access to careers. Even Komarovsky advocated nothing more radical than expanding part-time occupations to give women work that didn’t interfere with their primary role as wives and mothers.13