The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Among workingwomen, though, the optimism and confidence they learned in wartime jobs did not disappear. Over the next fifteen years, as women moved into the service and clerical sectors, they found that white-collar work did not deliver its promised dividend of higher pay and less monotony. But a psychological legacy remained, a sense of self-worth and untested potential that the women who were booted out of high-paying skilled jobs in 1946 passed on to the younger ones who joined them in the labor force over the next fifteen years. One consequence was that for the first time, women joined trade unions in huge numbers. By the late 1950s, eighteen million union members in America included three million women, twice as many as in 1940. While the great majority of women were stuck in nonunion jobs, the surge nonetheless represented an important change. Substantial numbers of African-American female factory workers entered unions for the first time. In sum, women were crowded into a low-wage, feminized sector, but the increase in numbers and the presence of some in the unions opened up possibilities that had been lacking.15

  In the professions, women were subject to the same downward pressures. Physicians and lawyers ended up pediatricians and estate attorneys; Ph.D.s in mathematics taught math to grade-schoolers. The numbers of women in learned professions—academics, medicine, and the law—declined slightly, the last two from proportions that were minuscule to begin with.16 African-American women were more likely to become professionals than whites, but they were clustered in lower-paid, lower-status echelons: nursing, secondary school teaching, and social work. The romance of the New Woman professional, once flush with excitement, vanished; professional ambitions were treated as weird, condemning a woman to spinsterhood. The workingwomen on television who left flickering imprints on the collective subconscious were inevitably single and comically lonely: the sardonic Eve Arden, high school teacher on Our Miss Brooks, or Ann B. Davis as long-suffering Schultzy, adoring secretary to the debonair photographer and World War II vet in Love That Bob. Professional women were objects of intense scrutiny, monitored for possible infractions against femininity—acting like a man—and at the same time prey to derision for acting “just like a woman.” On TV they were funny, or in real life they were sad: This was because they were alone. “The career woman is a statistical anomaly,” definitively pronounced two sociologists in an essay on modern women’s prospects.17

  It was workingwomen who felt the strains most acutely, the contradictions of a system that placed tremendous value on women’s labor in the family yet refused to support mothers with any social services; that encouraged lavish consumer spending yet remained sternly indifferent to families’ needs for two earners to maintain culturally sanctioned levels of home ownership and domestic abundance; that consigned determined, talented professionals to menial work despite an ideology of meritocracy. But working women’s grievances materialized only as grumbles and self-doubt.

  The portrait of the 1950s is familiar: social conservatism, sexual repression, and conformist culture. Feminism’s lost years. What few histories have noticed, though, is that underneath the surface, resistance stirred. With little space for women’s advancement, a small, loosely associated network of sympathizers gained footholds in labor unions, women’s organizations, and crevices in government bureaucracies. In the 1960s, when liberalism again gained force, their work came together and picked up speed. Then, for the first time since 1920, the rights and wrongs of women gained the attention of the public.

  Neo-domestic ideology strained to incorporate mental habits bred by a war effort that had depended on women’s full support. Unlike World War I, understood as a brother’s war, World War II was seen as a mobilization of siblings, an arduous effort that pressed most heavily on men at the front but also called on the courage and labor of women at home. During the war, historian Judith Smith reminds us, “citizens were asked to serve their country, to put aside personal dreams, to risk their lives in the fight for democracy.” Men and women encountered one another outside local and family contexts, new opportunities for friendships and sexual liaisons appeared, and “the scattering of families altered standards for male and female heroism.”18 The hardworking young woman—fiancée, recent bride—replaced the anxious mother-at-home as exemplar of domestic courage.

  At its most benign, postwar life preserved these ideals in a different domestic script, one that replaced the rule of the fathers with a reciprocal arrangement of peers. Now that the troops were home, men too could embrace family as a life goal and enter marriages that were supposed to be companionships, unions of the long-separated brothers and sisters who had defeated fascism. Playful modern heterosexual chemistry replaced pious Victorian domesticity. A touch of the screwball plot remained in popular fancies, although the heroines seemed muted: Doris Day taking over for Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball, once a comic actress of high standing, playing a dame in I Love Lucy who was still fast talking but really dumb.19

  True, the patriarchal dispositions of returning troops were evident, with veterans, pundits, and planners agreed on the need to reestablish normal male-headed families. Nonetheless, a discourse that valued women’s independence and civic participation persisted into the 1950s: threads drawn out from the fabric of the common cause.

  What Smith calls “visions of belonging,” the “racially and sexually expansive cosmopolitanism” of the war years, dissipated, but the idea of a new bond between the sexes, sealed by a national purpose, remained. As the Cold War intensified, the imperatives of mobilizing against Communism gave the enterprise a different import. Men and women had joint work to do building their lives and households and, on a grand scale, defending democracy. The sexes were separate, but they were also joined in the public sphere, one people working to promote American values around the world.

  Heterosexual amity presumptively allowed women to transcend the old grievances of women’s rights. The Women’s Bureau, for example, planning a conference in 1954, wanted to “avoid the old battle of the sexes idea and pitch a conference around the idea of men and women working together and maintaining the Nation’s economy.”20 Women were equal, as African-Americans were equal: separate but equal. The comparison hardly occured to anyone, however, so separate did the situations of the two groups seem. White women could vote, and all women had in theory an array of life choices: the ability to go to college, hold property, practice a profession, and work for money. So the most fortunate and clear-sighted supposedly chose to contribute to civic life by staying home. In light of the dangers that faced the Cold War nation, feminism was a selfish and narrow preoccupation.21

  This was a postfeminist ideology, an expression of a kind of antifeminism that was reconstructed on the basis of a superficial acceptance of sexual equality. Neo-domesticity did not set itself against feminism; it claimed to have surpassed feminism by building on what was substantial about women’s rights and jettisoning what was silly: That would be the proposition that women could live like men. An awareness of the feminist past lurked in 1950s culture, with allusions to women’s rights popping up in social commentary. The fight for suffrage was, after all, within living memory. But these were ghosts that bustling, voting, modern mothers would banish. The Nineteenth Amendment was continually bruited about as the ne plus ultra of modern womanhood, solvent of any residual stains of sexual inequality. “Wasn’t the battle for women’s rights won long ago?” sarcastically queried a reviewer annoyed by a book that hinted that there might still be problems. “Didn’t women have the vote? Didn’t they hold jobs in every imaginable human activity?”22

  The idea that women’s rights was passé came out of general agreement about “the end of ideology,” a consensus that economic growth and prosperity made social conflict and the doctrines that explained it unnecessary. Feminism was associated with old ideologies, such as Marxism, which had “lost their ‘truth’ and their power to persuade.”23 The women’s rights premise of conflict between the sexes no longer applied. Instead, women were “currently stressing a shoulder-to-shoulde
r stand with American men in a common enterprise and hope of the future,” a summary of the state of American women judged. Like other interest group ideologies—including the class-based politics of the New Deal—feminism was antiquated and “the very fervor of the pioneers has become somewhat ludicrous.”24

  True, not all deliberations were so equable. Harsh, misogynistic views battened on to the worry that women had gotten out of hand during the war and couldn’t adjust to normalcy. Women were said to choose homemaking, and undoubtedly many did; but those who tried to choose something else were condemned as selfish and maladjusted. Ladies’ Home Journal was the flagship magazine of the American housewife, devoted to examining sympathetically her burdens and strengths, yet in 1958 the editorial staff saw fit to publish an article grappling with the question of whether women really deserved the vote after all.25 Freudian psychologists, whose writings on child rearing, and marital problems were immensely influential, found evidence of a covert “sex war” waged by women who had not given up the worldly enticements of the war years. They were jealous of men’s roles and refused to accept their own. Marynia Farnham, a psychiatrist who dabbled in cultural punditry, lambasted American women for their refusal to accept their domestic identity, which led to rivalry with men and low self-esteem.

  Farnham made her name with a 1947 book, co-authored with journalist Ferdinand Lundberg, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. The title makes the point. Addled by feminist propaganda, women lusted after men’s jobs, competence, and orgasms (true women were supposed to ignore the clitoris) and lost sight of their existential mission, having babies. The jealous spinsters and ungrateful married women of the past bequeathed their penis envy to frigid juvenile-delinquent-producing housewives in the present. Farnham and Lundberg took a long detour through history to prove their case. They disinterred poor Mary Wollstonecraft and dragged her body through the mud. The founding of Vassar College, liberalized divorce laws, and the Nineteenth Amendment came in for baleful scrutiny.26

  Such severe anxieties, rampant in the immediate postwar years, settled in the 1950s into a more placid discourse of “sex roles,” which subdued the overt misogyny. While punitive portrayals of dissatisfied women persisted, popular writing stressed a more respectful acknowledgment of women’s value to their families and the nation. Even the sternest evangelists of women’s destiny as mothers agreed that domesticity wasn’t a natural effusion of female nature but rather the result of labor. Women worked hard, as hard as their husbands, and they liked to see themselves as working with husbands, in “lives of shared responsibilities and fun,” a journalist trilled about participants in a meeting staged by a women’s magazine where “103 Women Sound Off.” The role of wife and mother was ostentatiously roomy and companionable. “When my husband’s lumber business was failing, I drove the trucks myself.” “For a farmer’s wife like me, there is nothing more wonderful than following your husband on another tractor.” In turn, husbands pitched in around the house with dish washing, repairs, child care, and guests. Women’s magazines gave ample space to housewives’ complaints about their ceaseless round of cleaning, cooking, and tending children. Harried-housewives’ writing was an insistently merry genre, but it registered the point: This was no life of Riley, sunk in a lotusland of space-age kitchen appliances and soap operas.27

  To a nation obsessively calculating its assets and liabilities in the Cold War, the value given to women’s labor entered calculations about mobilizing human potential against the Soviets. The worth attributed to housewives’ work seeped across the line that separated them from workingwomen. Critical commentators scolded workingwomen for materialism—lust for consumer goods was said to drive them to abandon home and children for a paycheck’s seductions. Kindlier observers, however, tried to reconcile women’s jobs with the national interest. Working outside the home wasn’t ideal, but it was still a way for women to fulfill their democratic obligations. In this vein, novelist John Steinbeck pointed out proudly that while the Russians assumed that American prosperity bred indolent housewives—“overdressed, neurotic, kept women”—in truth, women ran farms, factories, and offices; in fact they helped run the country.28

  The fight against communism was said to depend on the work of all citizens in their appointed places. The old grounds of opposition to woman’s suffrage—that women would sully themselves with a dirty business—were gone. Now, when detractors of women in politics spoke out, they impugned their intelligence about the issues they were voting on. That was the gist of the Ladies’ Home Journal forum about whether the Nineteenth Amendment was a good idea.29

  Pundits’ and experts’ approbation reflected the fact that women of all classes and races took up small politics in the 1950s, continuing their customary roles in voluntary associations, involvements that sometimes led to more engaged action. They swelled the memberships of the League of Women Voters, the National Council of Negro Women (successor to the NACW), the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, the American Association of University Women, the Young Women’s Christian Association, civic groups, and federations of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women. At the lower levels of the Democratic and Republican parties, changes in rules after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women more positions on committees except for the key national nominating committees.30 A new kind of woman party worker appeared: vivacious, well informed, and eager to shape her party’s stand on the issues raised internationally by the Cold War and domestically by the civil rights movement. Phyllis Schlafly was such a person in the Republican Party, a self-described housewife who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952 and went on to a stellar career on the far right; Ann Richards, who later became a beloved figure of the Democratic Party in Texas (and one-term governor), started her career as a teacher helping in liberal Democrats’ state campaigns.31

  One place where women had a toehold in leadership was the labor movement, where a few worked at the top of the auto, electrical, garment, and packinghouse workers’ unions. The group included working-class daughters who had climbed up from the shop floor: Addie Wyatt, who started her working life in a Chicago meatpacking plant, took a national position in the union in 1954 as the first black woman (and later served as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s liaison to labor); Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers came from a poor Michigan farm and entered the workforce via a World War II bomber plant. Others were from elite backgrounds: Katherine Ellickson, who worked with the AFL-CIO, was a Vassar graduate from a well-to-do Manhattan family. Shared work, their frustrations with the men they worked with, and formal and informal attachments to the Women’s Bureau kept them in touch with one another.32

  The influx of working mothers into the unions in the 1950s pushed leaders to consider an agenda that combined women’s needs in their homes with improving conditions on the job. They were instrumental in state and federal campaigns for equal pay and fair labor standards; and in the unions they broached the issue of paid maternity leave and discussed ways to ameliorate the dilemmas of combining family obligations and paid work. Several proposed, for example, a variety of the mother’s pensions that had before been considered as help for impoverished women, but they recast the measure as a socially earned wage for domestic labor that benefited all. In the 1950s, they were the sole voices to call for government- and employer-funded child care. They staunchly defended women’s dignity and needs as family breadwinners, fighting policies that made female jobs contingent on being young or unmarried. Meeting with some success in the unions, they paved the way for bigger accomplishments in the 1960s: the 1963 Equal Pay Act, the groundbreaking Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the 1966 extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act to women’s jobs.33

  Outside the labor movement, there were extensive assemblages of women, but they lacked the ability to put their concerns on any political agenda. Usually heralded as benevolent volunteers, these groups took on civic roles virtually unchallenged, so long as they abided by unspoken rules that roped off leaders
hip for men. In the civil rights movement, for example, African-American women were involved at all levels, but their leadership was scarcely visible. “The movement of the fifties and sixties was carried largely by women,” Ella Baker, legendary civil rights leader, flatly stated.34 Montgomery, Alabama, is a well-known example. The local Women’s Political Council, a group of black professionals founded by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, organized and touched off the bus boycott in 1955 following the arrest of Rosa Parks. When the community rallied, however, the male clergy (including Martin Luther King, Jr.) moved to center stage.35

  It was a society that valued women’s civic involvements but barred them from power. To look squarely at the landscape was to confront frank expressions of male dominance, outcroppings of patriarchy supposedly abolished by post–Nineteenth Amendment modernity. Thickets of limitations, rooted in the law, job discrimination, goverment policies, men’s habits, education, children’s dependency, and what people thought was common sense, kept women from the promised luxuriance of full social engagement. The Supreme Court had yet to affirm women’s right to sit on juries. In any part of the country, you might never encounter a female veterinarian, police officer, surgeon, or judge. At most colleges you would never have a woman professor. There were housewives who didn’t know how to write a check because their husbands believed only men should handle the money. Outside the large industrial unions, a woman usually lost her job when she was pregnant; at the height of the baby boom—when American women were giving birth, on average, to three children—there was no guaranteed right to pregnancy or maternity leave, even unpaid.36 Neighbor women pounced on evidence that a workingwoman’s children were having trouble: a playground fight or a daughter’s looseness with boys was grist for the gossip mill.