Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Marriage counselors took a different tack in dealing with housewives’ unhappiness. Popenoe wrote dozens of marital advice books, pamphlets, and syndicated newspaper columns, and he pioneered the Ladies’ Home Journal feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?,” which was based on case histories from his Institute of Family Relations. The answer was almost always yes, so long as the natural division of labor between husbands and wives was maintained or restored.

  In one case history, “Marilyn” saved her marriage by giving up her “glamour girl” fantasies about becoming a movie star to do volunteer work with her local church. In another, Ava learned to control her bossiness. After therapy, she allowed “Chad to feel, as she now feels, that he is the head of the family.” In a third case, a couple had been unhappily married for six years. Diana complained that her husband constantly criticized her, while he resented his wife’s friendship with her boss. In this case, both partners were judged to be selfish and immature. The counselor had the husband read about women’s sexual needs and the wife focus on finding satisfaction at home, rather than at work. At the end of their counseling, Diana had given up her job and was pregnant with her second child, and the couple had found a shared interest in gardening at their new home.14

  In retrospect, the confidence these experts expressed in the stability of 1950s marriage and gender roles seems hopelessly myopic. Not only did divorce rates during the 1950s never drop below the highs reached in 1929, but as early as 1947 the number of women entering the labor force in the United States had begun to surpass the number of women leaving it.15 Why were the experts so optimistic about the future of marriage and the demise of feminism?

  Some were probably unconsciously soothed into complacency by the mass media, especially the new television shows that delivered nightly images of happy female homemakers in stable male breadwinner families. Some may have had their critical judgment impaired by the rigid Cold War atmosphere that associated questioning marriage or gender roles with support for communism. But on the whole, it was not unreasonable of social scientists and trend watchers to think that marriage and family life had stabilized in the 1950s and early 1960s. People tend to judge the seriousness of social trends by the direction in which things seem headed rather than by an absolute standard. By that criterion the problems that had plagued the sexualized, companionate marriage system during the first fifty years of the century seemed to be subsiding.

  Although divorce rates were higher in 1950 than they had been in 1929, they were falling each year, and at their low point in the 1950s they were 50 percent lower than they had been in 1946. Similar declines in divorce were seen in Canada, Britain, West Germany, and France. An eighty-year upward trend seemed to be coming to an end.16

  When divorce did occur, it was seen as a failure of individuals rather than of marriage. One reason people didn’t find fault with the 1950s model of marriage and gender roles was that it was still so new that they weren’t sure they were doing it right. Millions of people in Europe and America were looking for a crash course on how to attain the modern marriage. Confident that “science” could solve their problems, couples turned not just to popular culture and the mass media but also to marriage experts and advice columnists for help. If the advice didn’t work, they blamed their own inadequacy.17

  More puzzling was the complacency about the growing labor force participation rates of wives and mothers. By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II. Married women accounted for the majority of the growth in the female labor force throughout the 1950s, and there was a 400 percent increase in the number of mothers in the workforce over the course of the decade.18 Yet the image of the “emancipated woman” of the 1950s was not the working girl but the full-time housewife, armed with time-saving appliances that freed her from the drudgery of “old-fashioned” housework.

  This image too had a basis in reality. True, more wives were entering the workforce early in their marriages or after their children had grown up. But they were in fact devoting longer stretches of their lives to full-time child rearing and homemaking. Most of the wives and mothers who joined the workforce in the 1950s were older than forty-five. Their mothering duties were largely done. At the same time postwar prosperity allowed more younger mothers to stay home while their children were small. While they were home, they could devote more time to child rearing and their families’ comfort or recreation, because new appliances and convenience products had substantially lightened the chores involved in housekeeping.

  When wives and mothers did take paid employment, they tended to hold part-time or seasonal jobs that were unlikely to make paid work a central part of their identities. Furthermore, the huge boost that the GI Bill and similar policies gave young male workers meant that gender inequality in pay and jobs grew substantially during the 1950s and early 1960s.19 So even wives who worked were likely to feel they were doing so to bring in a few “extras” rather than helping to support the family.

  The focus of college women, who had led the feminist movement in the early years of the twentieth century, also turned toward marriage. This was the era when people first began to joke about women attending college to earn an MRS degree. Two-thirds of women who started college in the 1950s dropped out, usually to get married. In 1952 an advertisement for Gimbel’s department store wryly defined college as the place “where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing.”20

  African American wives and mothers were much more likely than whites to work outside the home, even while their children were young. And although they were less likely to go to college than white women, they were less likely to drop out once they got there. But black families were still below the radar screen for the mass media, whose picture of family life was one in which dads went off to work and moms took care of the home.21

  At every turn, popular culture and intellectual elites alike discouraged women from seeing themselves as productive members of society. In 1956 a Life magazine article commented that women “have minds and should use them . . . so long as their primary interest is in the home.” The author believed that it was good for women to have some work experience and for men to know how to dry dishes, so that they could understand and help each other. But they had to avoid “trading primary responsibilities or trying to compete with each other.” Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic Party candidate for president of the United States, told the all-female graduating class of Smith College that “most of you” are going to assume “the humble role of housewife,” and “whether you like the idea or not just now,” later on “you’ll like it.”22

  Under these circumstances, women tried their best to “like it.” By the mid-1950s American advertisers reported that wives were using housework as a way to express their individuality. It appeared that Talcott Parsons was right: Women were compensating for their lack of occupational status by expanding their role as consumer experts and arbiters of taste and style. First Lady Jackie Kennedy was the supreme exemplar of this role in the early 1960s.23

  Youth in the 1950s saw nothing to rebel against in the dismissal of female aspirations for independence. The number of American high school students agreeing that it would be good “if girls could be as free as boys in asking for dates” fell from 37 percent in 1950 to 26 percent in 1961, while the percentage of those who thought it would be good for girls to share the expenses of dates declined from 25 percent to 18 percent. The popular image was that only hopeless losers would engage in such egalitarian behavior. A 1954 Philip Morris ad in the Massachusetts Collegian made fun of poor Finster, a boy who finally found a girl who shared his belief in “the equity of Dutch treat.” As a result, the punch line ran, “today Finster goes everywhere and shares expenses fifty-fifty with Mary Alice Hematoma, a lovely three-legged girl with side-burns.”24

  No wonder so many social scientists and marriage counselors in the 1950s thought that the instabilities a
ssociated with the love-based “near-equality” revolution in gender roles and marriage had been successfully contained. Married women were working outside the home more often than in the past, but they still identified themselves primarily as housewives. Men seemed willing to support women financially even in the absence of their older patriarchal rights, as long as their meals were on the table and their wives kept themselves attractive. Moreover, although men and women aspired to personal fulfillment in marriage, most were willing to stay together even if they did not get it. Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky interviewed working-class couples at the end of the 1950s and found that “slightly less than one-third [were] happily or very happily married.” In 1957, a study of a cross section of all social classes found that only 47 percent of U.S. married couples described themselves as “very happy.” Although the proportion of “very happy” marriages was lower in 1957 than it was to be in 1976, the divorce rate was also lower.25

  What the experts failed to notice was that this stability was the result of a unique moment of equilibrium in the expansion of economic, political, and personal options. Ironically, this one twenty-year period in the history of the love-based “near-equality” marriage when people stopped predicting disaster turned out to be the final lull before the long-predicted storm.

  The seeming stability of marriage in the 1950s was due in part to the thrill of exploring the new possibilities of married life and the size of the rewards that men and women received for playing by the rules of the postwar economic boom. But it was also due to the incomplete development of the “fun morality” and the consumer revolution. There were still many ways of penalizing nonconformity, tamping down aspirations, and containing discontent in the 1950s.

  One source of containment was the economic and legal dependence of women. Postwar societies continued the century-long trend toward increasing women’s legal and political rights outside the home and restraining husbands from exercising heavy-handed patriarchal power, but they stopped short of giving wives equal authority with their husbands. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon points out that right up until the 1960s, “nearly every legislative attempt to regulate the family decision-making process gave the husband and father the dominant role.”26

  Most American states retained their “head and master” laws, giving husbands the final say over questions like whether or not the family should move. Married women couldn’t take out loans or credit cards in their own names. Everywhere in Europe and North America it was perfectly legal to pay women less than men for the same work. Nowhere was it illegal for a man to force his wife to have sex. One legal scholar argues that marriage law in the 1950s had more in common with the legal codes of the 1890s than the 1990s.27

  Writers in the 1950s generally believed that the old-style husband and father was disappearing and that this was a good thing. The new-style husband, said one American commentator, was now “partner in the family firm, part-time man, part-time mother and part-time maid.” Family experts and marital advice columnists advocated a “fifty-fifty design for living,” emphasizing that a husband should “help out” with child rearing and make sure that sex with his wife was “mutually satisfying.”28

  But the 1950s definition of fifty-fifty would satisfy few modern couples. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous parenting advice expert, called for men to get more involved in parenting but added that he wasn’t suggesting equal involvement. “Of course I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles, or change just as many diapers as the mother,” he explained in a 1950s edition of his perennial bestseller Baby and Child Care. “But it’s fine for him to do these things occasionally. He might make the formula on Sunday.”29

  The family therapist Paul Popenoe was equally cautious in his definition of what modern marriage required from the wife. A wife should be “sympathetic with her husband’s work and a good listener,” he wrote. But she must never consider herself “enough of an expert to criticize him.”30

  Many people recoiled from even the rhetorical assertion of equality. Mc-Call’s magazine campaigned for “togetherness” and partnership in marriage but repeatedly warned its readers not to go too far. Throughout the decade, calls for partnership and mutuality in marriage alternated with public hand-wringing about whether people were taking these ideas to extremes. “No one wants fathers to go back to acting like tyrants,” asserted one writer. “But they should wield more authority in their families than they are currently doing. The family needs a head.” Sociologist Ralph LaRossa examined magazine articles, TV shows, and child-rearing manuals of the 1950s and found that as the decade progressed, there was a reassertion of more traditional male dominance, perhaps reflecting a sense that even “near equality” must not be allowed to get out of hand.31

  The sexualization of mass culture continued in the 1950s. Playboy magazine was a huge commercial success from its first appearance in 1953. The Bob Cummings Show (1955-59) depicted the life of a swinging photographer who couldn’t keep his hands off the gorgeous models he photographed. Barbie, the first children’s doll to have breasts, came on the market in 1959. But girls who “gave in” to sexual temptation in real life were almost universally condemned. As one woman later recalled, there were “Stop-Go lights flashing everywhere we looked. Sex, its magic spell everywhere, was accompanied by the stern warning: Don’t do it.”32

  Plenty of women did “do it.” But the extent of the sexual revolution that had already resumed its 1920s progress was obscured by the falling age of marriage and the willingness of most young men and women to marry if the girl got pregnant. A 1950s woman who married at age seventeen told a student interviewer many years later, “I sometimes wish I hadn’t had to marry the first man I slept with, but that’s just what you did in those days.” Women who got pregnant out of wedlock and couldn’t get the father to marry them were encouraged—at least, if they were white—to give their children up for adoption and start over, pretending it had never happened.33 The penalties for defying these sexual norms were severe. This was a period when children born out of wedlock had “illegitimate” stamped on their birth certificates and school records.34

  Most women did not need the threat of external sanctions to get them to enter male breadwinner marriages and make homes of their own. A Canadian woman recollected that moving to the suburbs in the 1950s was not as stifling as some women later complained. Those were “good years,” she said. “My husband was getting ahead and I saw myself as a helpmate.” Suburbia “tended to narrow our vision of the outside world,” she admitted, but it “really worked” for children. “We thought we had the ideal life. . . . We knew little about the outside world of poverty, culture, crime and ethnic variety. We were like a brand new primer, ‘Dick and Jane.’ ”35

  These were the feelings of thousands of women in the United States as well. American historians are fortunate to have an exceptionally long-term study of families begun in the 1930s by the Institute for Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers followed the same group of individuals throughout their lives and continued by interviewing their children and grandchildren. Their interviews reveal that men did indeed become more domestic during the 1950s. Husbands and wives relaxed gender stereotypes in their division of grocery shopping, garden work, and household repairs. The majority of couples aspired to mutual decision making in the home, and nearly a third of the couples claimed that they regularly met that ideal.36

  Many 1950s men did not view male breadwinning as a source of power but as a burdensome responsibility made worthwhile by their love for their families. A man who worked three jobs to support his family told interviewers, “Although I am somewhat tired at the moment, I get pleasure out of thinking the family is dependent on me for their income.” Another described how anxious he had been to finish college and “get to . . . acting as a husband and father should, namely, supporting my family.” Men also remarked on how wonderful it felt to be able to give their children things their families had been una
ble to afford when they were young.37

  A constant theme of men and women looking back on the 1950s was how much better their family lives were in that decade than during the Depression and World War II. But in assessing their situation against a backdrop of such turmoil and privation, they had modest expectations of comfort and happiness, so they were more inclined to count their blessings than to measure the distance between their dreams and their real lives.

  Modest expectations are not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who expects that marriage will always be joyous, that the division of labor will always be fair, and that the earth will move whenever you have sex is going to be often disappointed. Yet it is clear that in many 1950s marriages, low expectations could lead people to put up with truly terrible family lives.

  Historian Elaine Tyler May comments that in the 1950s “the idea of a ‘working marriage’ was one that often included constant day-to-day misery for one or both partners.” Jessica Weiss recounts interviews conducted over many years in the Berkeley study with a woman whose husband beat her and their children. The wife often threw her body between her husband and the young ones, taking the brunt of the violence on herself because “I can take it much easier than the kids can.” Her assessment of the marriage strikes the modern observer as a masterpiece of understatement: “We’re really not as happy as we should be.” She was not even indignant that her neighbors rebuffed her children when they fled the house to summon help. “I can’t say I blame the neighbors,” she commented. “They didn’t want to get involved.” Despite two decades of such violence, this woman did not divorce until the late 1960s.38