Those who completed the survey in the cubicle with the latter poster were more likely to view a women’s workplace departure as a choice, skipping right over the complex underpinnings of that decision. And if that’s what happens after being exposed to one poster for three minutes, you can imagine how the deluge of opt-out media stories has influenced our collective thinking. (One exception to the second control group: women who identified as feminists were more likely to acknowledge workplace discrimination as a factor in opting out.)
The nostalgia narrative just keeps feeding itself, growing bigger and more powerful, defiantly blotting out the complicated diversity of women’s experiences. As for the implications of this, researchers suggested that seeing women’s interrupted careers as a personal, empowered choice, rather than one based on many underlying factors, could “prevent women from advocating for each other as they navigate their professional lives.” Such biases, agreed the WorkLife Law researchers in their report, can often pit women against each other, ultimately giving the impression that working women with children, working women with no children, stay-at-home mothers, unemployed women and mothers, and even working women across job types and industries have no common goal.
What we’re left with is a converging narrative in which both anti-feminists and post-feminists argue that feminism has done its job by securing women the “choice” to stay at home. To them, fighting for better treatment, more representation, and increased family-friendly policies in the workplace are tipping the scales too far the other way. Feminism is seen as turning women into men; as disparaging stay-at-home mothers; as forcing women into roles they don’t necessarily want. Women see or experience firsthand the stress that comes from juggling work and life and blame feminism for putting them there. It doesn’t help that modern feminism has largely chosen to address the stay-at-home issue by pretending it doesn’t exist at all, pointing to studies that show there is no mass exodus of working mothers. “This response is convincing as far as it goes,” wrote the “‘Opt Out?’ or Pushed Out?” authors, “but it overlooks the elephant in the room: the effect of children on women’s employment may not have increased over time, but it is substantial.” Substantial enough for some women to feel like staying at home is the best option—if not exactly their unencumbered choice.
We all stand to gain from addressing the complexities of family work-life balance. But anti-feminists and men’s rights activists don’t deal in complex; they deal in simple. The worst lie that anti-feminists have sold isn’t that feminism has brainwashed women into wanting careers and spurning motherhood, though that one’s still pretty bad. Did ya hear? Feminists hate kids and their own mothers, too! No, the worst lie—the one that hurts everybody, and the one that New York and the New York Times before it sold as a fantasy—is that staying at home is the simple solution that most women want, for which they are even biologically programmed. And the longer we believe and promote the narrative that most women all want the same thing, and in particular the thing they’re most traditionally supposed to want, the harder it will be for us to gain the social and structural support to achieve whatever “having it all” means to us, whether it’s at work, at home, or both.
In our collective imaginations, the 1950s are often painted as a bucolic wash of gingham dresses, carefully set hairdos, and baked-from-scratch brownies. The happiness of nuclear families is implied, if not entirely believable. “Contrary to popular opinion, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary,” historian Stephanie Coontz quipped in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, a book that was first published in 1992 and, tellingly, updated and rereleased in 2016. That year’s vitriolic presidential election plucked at many modern-era hell-in-a-handbasket fears. On T-shirts, ball caps, hoodies, and buttons, Trump promised to “Make America Great Again” (in fact, Trump trademarked the phrase six days after Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election). Trump implied, and sometimes even outright stated, that the golden time of “greatness” was in the 1950s—that time when, as Trump told the New York Times in March 2016, “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do, yeah around that period.” But, as Coontz warns, invoking this nostalgia is dangerous, and not in ways you might expect. Though critics of the nostalgic urge often nod to the restrictiveness of the 1950s Mommybot role, the problem runs deeper: we’re extolling a lifestyle that never existed.
The resurgence of feminism in the 1960s is often blamed—or cheered—as the catalyst that ended the happy housewife but, in truth, women found the strict gender divisions suffocating long before women’s libbers marched the streets. The idea of a successful nuclear family was often predicated on the wife’s ability to be the nurturing organizational hub of the home. Contrary to the 1950s myth, however, many women did work, both because they wanted to and because a second income then, like now, was needed to buy the “extras” that every happy family was supposed to have: the suburban house, the car, and the TV. At the same time, women found their roles outside the house drastically, and forcibly, minimized. When women entered the workforce by the thousands during the war effort in the early 1940s, a full 95 percent of those who were undertaking their first jobs said they expected to quit at the end of the war. But, as Coontz notes in her book, that figure had nearly flipped by 1945, at which point almost an equal majority wanted to stay at work and not abandon their independence, responsibility, and income. Many of them did.
Well, they tried.
After WWII ended, and men resumed regular employment, management purged women from high-paying non-traditional jobs, essentially relegating them to the labor-force version of “women’s work.” And while two million more wives worked in 1952 than at peak wartime production, writes Coontz, those jobs were designed to encourage women to define themselves in terms of home and family. Think low-paying, low-responsibility work that mirrored their wifely expectations at home. The media called married working women a “disease” and a “menace.” Say bye-bye to ambition, aspiration, and your own needs. “In consequence,” writes Coontz, “no sooner was the ideal of the postwar family accepted than observers began to comment perplexedly on how discontented women seemed to end up in the very roles they supposedly desired most.” Talk about immediate nostalgia. Historical research reveals the cracks showed in the nuclear family myth even as it was being created, but we just kept building. What’s that, Bob? There’s a crack as big as the Grand Canyon in the foundation? JUST CEMENT OVER IT! NOBODY WILL NOTICE!!!
Essentially, women gamely attempted to cement over their anxieties and fears. From 1958 to 1959, women’s consumption of tranquilizer pills, colloquially known as “mother’s little helpers,” jumped to 1.15 million pounds from (a still astonishing) 462,000 pounds. A few years later, the Rolling Stones would riff on the concept in a song of the same name, ridiculing the widespread use of tranquilizers among housewives and, rather richly considering the messenger, warning of overdoses. Advertisements for the drugs themselves better revealed the clashing tensions between the expectations for a happy home and the realities for women. One ad for the popular drug Dexamyl, both an amphetamine and a barbiturate, showed a woman happily vacuuming in what appeared to be rays of sunshine. Just one capsule, it promised, provided day-long therapeutic effects. Vacuuming would become transcendent! Another showed a woman peacefully sewing but addressed the prescribing physician: “To help you transform a tense, irritable, depressed patient into a woman who is receptive to your counsel and adjusted to her environment.” A third was more clear-cut: “To help the depressed and anxiety-ridden housewife who is surrounded by a monotonous routine of daily problems, disappointments, and responsibilities.” “That’s Dexamyl,” a housewife might have said affectionately, “always helping!”
In her book Modern Motherhood: An American History, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves quotes from the diaries of a woman who had seven children between 1950 and 1960. Bright, lonely, and overwhelmed with gui
lt that she was “not a very good mother” because she “seem[ed] to put almost everything before her children,” the woman went on Dexamyl in 1959. “Took a pill,” she wrote, “and made the work fly.” Even softer drugs like Anacin got in the game. In a 1968 ad, a woman looked vacantly off page over the words “Making beds, getting meals, acting as the family chauffeur—having to do the same dull, tiresome work day after day—is a mild form of torture.” Right on, Anacin! But then: “These boring yet necessary tasks can bring on nervous tension, fatigue and what’s now known as ‘housewife headache.’” A pill would make women “feel better” and have “a brighter outlook.” So just so we’re clear: contemporary 1950s and ’60s popular culture and mainstream media readily acknowledged the drudgery of the roles it expected women to perform. Its solution to these unachievable, misery-making expectations? Drug the women. It’s enough to make me want to say, “Pass the Dexamyl, please.”
It seemed that women couldn’t win. Expert advice reminded mothers that the future of their children and the actual world depended on their ability to mother well and keep their families content. Bad mothers were blamed for a whole host of things, including communism, juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, men who raped women, anorexia, various mental illnesses (including schizophrenia), and even autism—the last of which spawned the term “refrigerator mothers.” What made a bad mother? Everything, pretty much. For a role that was seemingly venerated as women’s “natural” place, women were told a hell of a lot that they were getting it all wrong. Bad mothering, or “momism,” as it was called, was attributed to both too much motherly love and too little. Betty Crocker, God of Cakes, help the woman if she spent too much time taking care of her kids at the expense of taking care of her husband, too. To make it more unachievable—because, of course, yes, it can get worse—women were also warned against being too wifely. In modern parlance: they shouldn’t be so thirsty for it. Playboy warned men against gold-diggers and parasites. Revealingly, while 60 percent of women told a 1960 Gallup poll that they deemed their marriages happier than that of their parents, 90 percent of them also said they hoped their daughters’ lives would be different than theirs.
Now their daughters want their lives. Or, more precisely, what they think their lives were. “We are tired of the moniker of ‘housewife’ being a derogatory word,” writes Bethany Herwegh on her website, The Glamorous Housewife. “There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your family and home and it is high time we take this word back.” Rules of her new definition include a woman who not only “takes pride in her role as the CEO of her household” but also “understands perfection is boring.” Herwegh has credited feminism with giving her the choice to be a housewife (more on that in a minute) and said she was inspired to start her website (which now has several staff) after “letting herself go.” Meanwhile, New England-based Holly Connors, the woman behind the blog Modern Day ’50s Housewife, told me that she believes “parts of the feminist movement have hurt our society” and she wants women to know they can leave their careers to be mothers and housewives. Her goal is to re-teach the “lost art of being a family matriarch,” and while her feelings on the f-word are mixed, she largely blames feminism for the supposedly tarnished view of housewives now, asserting that women had to rescue the term not only from the past but also from the backwater trenches of the women’s movement.
I’d stumbled across Connors’s blog while researching the “modern housewife” concept. While she didn’t bill herself as an anti-feminist, the blog’s rhetoric felt like a less profanity-laced, more buttoned-up cousin of Bloomfield’s JudgyBitch. (Indeed, Connors told me her Facebook group is like “afternoon tea time,” whereas Bloomfield’s online community has more of a UFC cage match vibe.) On her manifesto page, Connors refers to an italicized “they” as the people who very nearly ruined her life by turning her into a successful career woman. To Connors, “they” included her teachers, school counselors, and “the women who came before me, who fought hard for equal rights and for the freedoms that I would never have had if it weren’t for them.” All of them, she wrote in her manifesto, convinced her she couldn’t be what she wanted to be: “an amazing wife and a mother.” At seventeen, when she became pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, they admonished her, telling her to keep pushing forward with her career.
A list of other things Connors seemed to blame the catchall “they” for: her first divorce, her failing second marriage, her long hours and general unhappiness at work, her eventual dabbling in drugs and drinking, and her thoughts of suicide. Only defying supposed expectations, quitting her job, and becoming a housewife fixed these things, she wrote. Elsewhere on her blog, she echoed the philosophy of Laura Doyle’s “surrendered wife” movement (Doyle published a book of the same name in 2000): the idea that to achieve marital bliss a woman must relinquish “control” of her husband (i.e., stop nagging him) and also hand over decisions on household finances, etc.
I needed to know more—and to also maybe barf a little bit, I wasn’t sure—and so I asked Connors how empowerment, feminism, and being a housewife all fit together. “I am glad feminists exist and have made my life as a woman easier, in some ways,” she told me. “The right to not be abused, for example, is huge. The right to say no and not be raped by a husband is also huge. Those things and other examples like them are all human rights that should have always existed. They fought for them and for that I am appreciative. And I appreciate the option to be able to choose to work outside of my home. So, so, so important. Having rights is huge. Yes. But there is also a part of me that still resents that feminism has changed the world in many other ways. It used to be possible for a woman to choose to stay home and be the one to raise her own children.”
That’s not possible now, she contended, largely because for many people two-income households are now necessary, something, she suggested, for which feminism is also at fault. For Connors and others, like Bloomfield, this particular blame-it-on-feminism criticism is built more on personal conviction and sworn-to anecdotes than it is on fact. The general lack of structural support for mothers, and more broadly speaking, women, points to definite discrimination. It seems counterintuitive to blame feminism—at least to me—but not to Connors. “For many, staying home is simply not an option and they are forced to have their children raised in daycare centers. That would never have happened before. Our country just wasn’t programmed that way. In their attempt to help, [feminists] hurt. But what bothers me most is that they don’t care. They look at women who want to be stay-at-home moms with disgust. How is that right? How does that jive with their fight for a right to pursue any path they choose? Why is my choice not okay?”
When I asked Connors how popular her blog is, she told me that when she’s posting regularly, she gets between sixty thousand and eighty thousand hits every month. When she’s not posting at all, it settles to twenty-five thousand hits per month. I’m not surprised. Her “Back off, judgy pants” views are common among many of the women I spoke to who are ambivalent about feminism, or outright hostile. She resents women who question her decision and often tells others that her husband “rules the roost.” Things would be better, she added, if feminists stopped speaking out for all women and went on their merry way.
Ah, the power of nostalgia. Coontz told me that she has sympathy for those who yearn for their cherry-picked versions of the past. The same year The Way We Never Were debuted, US vice president Dan Quayle made national headlines when he slammed fictional character Murphy Brown’s single parent lifestyle: “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent and highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” Media soon styled Coontz as something of an anti-Quayle. “I spent the next year doing two or three radio interviews a day. It was just wild,” she told me. “And I learned something in a hurry on those talk shows. The show would start and
the interviewer would ask me, ‘Should we go back to the 1950s?’” And Coontz would tell the interviewer no and list everything that was wrong back then. Inevitably, she would then field callers who would berate her for not knowing anything. So she sat down and listened to the tapes, and she soon realized that people must have thought she was discounting their pain, that her mind knew better than their hearts. Basically, they thought she was a snob.
She changed her tactic and began opening her interviews with a story in which her mother tore a strip off a librarian for refusing to loan a young Coontz Of Mice and Men, ending with, “You let my daughter check out anything she wants!” But in 1992 would Coontz herself have said that if her son wanted to check out anything at the video store? No way. So yes, some things about the 1950s she missed, too. Yet if you weren’t one of the few who benefitted from that time, turning back the clock was a very bad idea indeed. “I’m more sympathetic than I used to be to what makes people pick and choose something from the past that they think they can hang on to,” she told me not too long after Trump won the 2016 election. “They actually do miss it, but they often forget that if you actually went back to that, you’d have to take the whole package deal, much of which they’ve rejected.” She now believes that our modern era’s mid-century nostalgia—the sentiment that Trump capitalized on in his election win—is as much a critique of the present as it is a romanticization of the past. But here’s the bottom line: “It’s a dangerous critique that leads us into thinking that we can recapture the past”—and then trying to do just that.
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