by Gail Collins
Many women wanted a classic bouffant, which in its most effortful incarnation was an architectural wonder built around copious applications of hair spray. A serious bouffant was not something that could be created without considerable assistance from a girlfriend or hairdresser, and once constructed, the hairdo tended to be left in place for some time. Legends grew among ’60s high school girls about a teenager who left her bouffant untouched for so long that a nest of spiders set up residence, nibbling away at the girl’s scalp until she contracted a fatal case of blood poisoning.
For black girls, the hair issue was complicated by standards of beauty that valued white features such as light skin and straight hair. The battle to keep naturally frizzy hair looking straight and smooth went on forever. “You could wear it any way you wanted, as long as it was straightened within an inch of its life,” said Mary Helen Washington, who grew up in Cleveland. “When relaxers came in, we were in heaven! We could get it relaxed, and it stayed straight for months!” Until the advent of those chemical treatments, girls did their straightening with hot combs or irons, but their hair would betray them whenever it came in contact with moisture—a fact that made swimming classes extremely unpopular with many black teenagers of the era. “In Detroit you’d have those basement parties, right?” reminisced Valerie Chisholm. “It’d get really sweaty down there, so if you were dancing with somebody, your hair would be messed up on one side—it had gone back—and the other side would be looking good!”
“HE SQUEALED HIS TIRES!”
The typical teenage girl of 1960 was far less sexually sophisticated than girls of the same age are today, but she in no way resembled the demure Victorian young woman who spent every New Year’s Eve making resolutions about how to be a better person. Many girls embarked on the pursuit of a steady boyfriend when they were still in elementary school. That was a new phenomenon for a nation that had spent the previous decades extending childhood for as long as possible. But the race to premature adolescence seemed unstoppable. In the fall of 1960, an ad in the New York Times for little girls’ dresses was headlined: “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
One of the least-appealing characteristics of early ’60s adolescence was that there was little room for the idea that girls and boys could be friends. Laura Sessions Stepp recalled, “I had no male friends. Except boyfriends. You were a boyfriend or no friend.” Mary Helen Washington credited the rigid racial rules of the early ’60s with allowing her, in a backhanded way, to get to know men as people. As an African-American graduate student at the University of Detroit, she was in classes where all of the male students were white, and since “interracial dating was just something that wasn’t done,” she said, it provided an opportunity to relate to the opposite sex in a nonromantic context.
Girls’ real friends were other girls, but even those relationships were drowned in the obsession with dates. “We had a gang of girls, about six of us, that kind of hung out together,” said Gayle Lawhorn. “But most of the time we hung out together, we just talked about boys. Or we’d walk up and down the street, hoping our boyfriends would drive by. One guy I was really crazy about… he had a souped-up car and he’d drive by and make it squeal—the tires. And we’d go, ‘Oh, he likes me. He squealed his tires!’ We’d have pajama parties, and all we did was talk about, swoon about, whoever the boy was at the time that we cared about.”
While girls were obsessed with boys, they weren’t able to take much initiative beyond walking down the street and looking available. As the essayist Jane O’Reilly recalled years later, “The one absolutely unbreakable rule, guiding and controlling all contacts with the opposite sex, was never call a man.” Phoning a boy, any boy, was regarded as shockingly forward. If a girl called a boy in her math class to ask about an assignment, she left herself open to a misinterpretation of her motives. Only 26 percent of high school students surveyed in 1961 agreed that it would be good if girls “could be as free as boys in asking for dates.” The rules were so powerful that they lasted into adulthood. A woman who had reached the position of assistant vice president for personnel at a San Francisco bank told the author Caroline Bird, “I suppose I could be a branch manager if I really wanted the job. But then I would have to call up perfectly strange men and invite them to lunch.” Writing in the late 1970s, O’Reilly admitted that she still couldn’t shake the feeling “that if I pick up the phone and dial a man, my hand will grow warts and I may even go blind or insane.”
Teenage culture was distinctly separate from the world of adults. Once the transistor radio went on the market in the mid ’50s, young people could summon music anytime they wanted. And for the first time, no matter where they lived or how popular they were, they could learn the latest dances on American Bandstand, an after-school program broadcast from Philadelphia that featured local teenagers dancing to popular songs. “It was almost like a soap opera because the same kids were on, dancing every week, so we’d get to know them,” said Judy Riff, who was raised in New Hampshire. In public, girls danced with boys, but in private they could practice with each other, since unlike the dances of their parents’ generation, the new ones did not require them to follow a boy’s lead. In fact, the dance sensation of the early ’60s, the Twist, did not really require a partner at all—dancers just rotated their hips and swung their arms to the music. It was a great liberation for women, who had typically been the better dancers. Literally dancing by yourself was unthinkable—a girl always twisted with a boy. But she was no longer dependent on his skill to enjoy herself.
One of the great postwar social developments was the concept of going steady. Before, a popular girl had been the one with a long string of suitors—whether they were the gentlemen callers lined up at the front porch for Scarlett O’Hara or “stags” breaking in, one after another, to dance with the prettiest jitterbug during the war. “We dated three or four people at a time,” recalled Lillian Andrews, who was dating two other men while being courted by her future husband, John. (When she announced her engagement, she added, “I naturally told the other two fellows.”) But in the 1950s and early 1960s, playing the field was regarded as somewhat fast, or at least reckless. Harper’s bemoaned the fact that “young people often play with the idea of marriage as early as the second or third date, and they certainly think about it by the fifth or sixth. By the time they have been going steady for a while, they are apt to be discussing the numbers and names of their future children.”
“IT WAS NOT A MATTER OF CHOICE.”
Teenage girls in the early 1960s were as obsessed with matrimony as the young ladies in a Jane Austen novel. That was natural. While the twentieth-century girls might have understood that they were capable of getting a job that would bring in enough money to keep body and soul together, the vast majority had no more confidence in their ability to earn a good living than did Jane’s heroines. “The most important thing back then was finding a husband with a good job…. We never thought about having to provide for ourselves,” said Gayle Lawhorn. Lillian Andrews’s daughter, Pam, always planned to go to college, “but I was going to college to find a husband.”
In 1962 a former ad copywriter named Helen Gurley Brown created a sensation with a little book called Sex and the Single Girl, which argued that a single woman could not only support herself but have fun, independence, and a full sex life. That was a startling proposition at the time. Not getting married—as soon as possible—was regarded as almost unthinkable. In one much-quoted postwar survey, fewer than 10 percent of those interviewed believed an unmarried woman could be happy. “If fun in life is based on marriage, single women recognize the fact,” said George Gallup, whose 1962 Saturday Evening Post poll was an effort to draw a portrait of the typical American woman. When the participants were asked whether married or single women were happier, 96 percent of married women opted for marriage—and 77 percent of single women agreed.
Gurley Brown would turn out to be a prophet of a new era, but you’d never have seen it coming in 1960.
Marriage fever was in the air. “Almost all young women between 16 and 21 want to be married by 22,” said the indefatigable Gallup when he was commissioned by Ladies’ Home Journal to study “the young American woman’s mind.” (In fact, the median age of marriage was 20.) Gallup found that most of his respondents wanted four children. They intended to work until their first pregnancy. “Afterward, a resounding no!”
Even women who intended to have lifelong careers could not escape the sense of urgency to marry. Joan Bernstein graduated from Yale Law School in the 1950s and managed to land a job at a Wall Street firm by the time she was 25. Nevertheless, she was “nervous” about the fact that she had yet to find a husband. “Society dictated that a woman unmarried had no place and was a failure,” she said later. “It was not a matter of choice. If a woman, lawyer or not, was unmarried, it was assumed no one had asked her.” As much as Bernstein was interested in her career, she did not want “to be forever considered a slightly eccentric maiden lady lawyer who was never quite socially acceptable.”
“I CAN’T THINK OF ONE, TO BE HONEST.”
Once married, people were expected to stay that way. Divorce, though hardly unknown, was regarded dimly. “I just think back to when I was in high school and how unusual it was for anybody I went to school with to have divorced parents. I can’t think of one, to be honest. It was very unusual. I remember hearing stories of abuse, of fathers who drank, but divorce was almost never an option,” said Maria K., the single mother from upstate New York. Her own father was a devoted family man who provided his wife and child with a big house and servants. But he died when Maria was 6, and within a few years, her mother, who had never worked, was struggling. “My father didn’t think she needed to know how to drive a car, write a check, take care of money, and of course she had gone right from her father’s home to my father’s. She didn’t know how to do anything; she had an eighth-grade education…. So the first thing she did was put all her money into a dress shop, which went belly-up and left her with nothing. She didn’t have anyone to advise her, so she was just muddling around as best she could.” Facing penury, Maria’s mother got a job as a cook in a nursing home, and she and her daughter wound up “living in one room together, at the home for aging women in Homer, New York.”
The government could not keep husbands from dying, but it did try to make it as difficult as possible for a couple to divorce. Most states worked under the theory that divorce was not a right but a punishment that could be requested only by the innocent, aggrieved spouse when his or her partner had done something truly awful. In New York, adultery was the only grounds for divorce under a 1787 law that had resisted all attempts at amendment. Couples who wanted to end their marriage had to convince friends to testify that one of them—usually the husband—had been found in a “compromising” situation. (In the cynical can-do spirit that always marked New York City, some women set up small businesses playing “home wrecker” in scenes staged so that the witnesses would actually have something to witness.) In Chicago, which had very specific rules for what constituted cruelty, one study noted the “remarkable” number of spouses who “strike their marriage partner in the face exactly twice, without provocation, leaving visible marks”—the precise criteria for divorce. The idea that someone had to be “at fault” was so pervasive that in Oregon, a husband and wife who accused each other of “nearly every variety of cruelty for which descriptive words could be found” were not allowed to end their marriage because the state supreme court ruled neither one was innocent of blame.
“SOMETIMES YOU WONDER WHAT YOU’RE TEACHING THEM FOR.”
In colleges around the country, Christmas break was engagement time. When everyone returned to school, coeds would wait for their friends to reenter the dorm and would quickly scan their hands for the diamond. “It was understood that you’d be engaged for a year and then you’d get married as soon as you graduated,” said Judy Riff, who jumped the gun and got married in January of her senior year at Rivier College in New Hampshire. Harper’s claimed, “A girl who gets as far as her junior year in college without having acquired a man is thought to be in grave danger of becoming an old maid.” That wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Muriel Fox remembered a pregraduation class party at Barnard when “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those of us who weren’t.” (In the class of 1960, two-thirds of the seniors were corsage-material.)
Professors watched in frustration as their prize pupils raced from final exams to wedding showers. A science teacher told the New York Times that his pet student, a woman “who gave every indication of deep and original thinking in genetics,” had married six months after graduation and passed up a career to raise a family. “I hope she’s happy, but sometimes you wonder what you’re teaching them for,” he said. Many didn’t even wait for commencement. Newsweek reported in 1960 that 60 percent of the young women who entered college dropped out before graduation, “most to get married.”
There had always been a division on American campuses between the goal-oriented women who went to college to prepare for a career and those who regarded it as a sort of glorified finishing school where they could find a husband among the ranks of future high-earners. The young women who were intent on making careers for themselves were still on campus, but the flush economic times had allowed more and more families to feel they could afford to subsidize college for their daughters even if they never used their degrees, and many bright young women embarked on a college career with no more sense of mission than the sorority girls in movie musicals. Pam Andrews, who went to Wellesley, said the only students who put their energies into planning for a career were “people who had no social life.” At a soon-to-become-famous class reunion at Smith College, Betty Friedan asked a graduating senior what courses students were excited about these days and said she was told, “Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. You’re a social outcast at home if you don’t. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.”
“SUCCESS AND A WELL-DRESSED WIFE GO TOGETHER.”
If the popular culture was giving young women very few role models outside of marriage, there was a great deal of attention being paid to the duties of the wife of the striving young executive. “Success and a Well-Dressed Wife Go Together for Young Executives,” announced a headline in a New York Times story about a meeting in Miami of the Young Presidents Organization, a group of under-40 CEOs. “Five hundred young men of distinction met here this week and most brought positive proof of their business success—a presidential title and an attractively dressed wife.” The women, the reporter noted approvingly, had “outstanding personalities, meet strangers easily, and above all, are carefully gowned and groomed…. Almost every wife has an impressive diamond ring and a mink coat or stole.”
The postwar era produced a raft of novels and movies about the corporate wife who helped her husband with his climb to the top or—even more often—showed him the true joy that comes with staying in middle management and spending more time with his family. At her most sympathetic, the wife always seemed to be played by June Allyson. In the end, however, she had little to do but look supportive: the husband was always the star of the show. “It will make you very lonely at times when he shuts you out of his life,” Barbara Stanwyck, playing the mistress of a recently deceased CEO, says when June’s husband (William Holden) is named the successor in Executive Suite. “But he’ll always come back to you. And you’ll know how fortunate you are to be [short pause, as the mistress recognizes the superior attachment of the marriage license] his wife.”
In 1960 a new and far more thrilling model of wifely success arrived on the scene. During the year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s handlers had tried to keep Jackie Kennedy in
the background because they didn’t believe she fit the image of a proper first lady. Presidents generally had wives like Mamie Eisenhower, the middle-aged army spouse who painted the White House interiors “Mamie pink,” banned alcohol at social functions, and spent quiet evenings with her husband eating dinner off trays and watching TV. And at times it did seem as if Mrs. Kennedy might be a political liability. Her biggest campaign splash came when Women’s Wear Daily wrote that she spent $30,000 a year on Paris fashions—a sum far above the average income of middle-class Americans. She indignantly compared the story to attacks on her husband’s Catholicism.
But then Jackie arrived in the White House, leading a train of interior decorators and landscapers, and many young women saw a whole new vision of how glamorous the life of a wife could be. For the first time, young women wanted to resemble the first lady in ways that were not related to domestic or political virtue. Only 31, Mrs. Kennedy could enchant her husband’s business associates with witty repartee (in several languages), fill the house with silver bowls of flowers that looked both informal and spectacular, and throw parties that everybody would rave about for months afterward. “The food is marvelous, the wines are delicious… people are laughing out loud, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there…. You know, I’ve never seen so many happy artists in my life. It was a joy to watch,” said Leonard Bernstein after a famous dinner at which the great cellist Pablo Casals entertained. (Jackie was the sort of person who knew that Pablo Casals had been boycotting the United States since the Spanish Civil War and that getting him to the White House was a coup.) “What I learned from her is that life is not just politics or hard work; you needed something beautiful in your life,” said Sylvia Peterson, who was a working-class teenager in New Hampshire. In Connecticut, 18-year-old Carol Rumsey spent an idyllic afternoon at an amusement park with an about-to-be-married friend who was “an exact replica of Jackie Kennedy.” It was the day Rumsey realized, for the first time, that she was gay.
