Once, they argue, the general practitioner had been “the friend, guardian and teacher” of his clientele:
With the priest or pastor, he stood as a bulwark against illegitimacy, abortions and divorce … Today, in the medical profession, obstetricians and gynecologists are perhaps best able to fill this position.…
Gynecologists should establish themselves as their patients’ counselors as early as possible, for example at the premarital visit, when “a girl … will undergo a pelvic examination without resentment.”25 Then, in the difficult task of achieving mature femininity, a woman would need the constant supervision of her doctor, helping her to accept her marriage and her lot as a mother. Without this guidance, the entire social fabric of the nation might come unraveled. Sturgis and Menzer-Benaron lamented that “it is unlikely that there ever will be sufficient numbers of trained workers” to guide each woman and hence each family to a successful adjustment.
Revolt of the Masochistic Mom
The medical perception that American women were massively rejecting their femininity helped to soothe masculine insecurity, and, of course, suggested endless possibilities for professional self-advancement. But it also contained a hard kernel of truth. Women simply would not flog themselves to live up to the masochistic ideal: they were rejecting their “femininity.” By the early sixties women would be reaching for a new feminine ideal—one which was so scornfully different from all previous psychomedical inventions—invalids, scientific housekeepers, libidinal mothers, etc.—that the old scientific authorities would never quite recover from the shock.
Even the ideology of female masochism had not been able to muffle the signs of real discontent among American housewives. In September 1960, Redbook ran an article called “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” (which, given its cautious tone, might have been titled “Why Young Mothers Sometimes Feel Conflicted”). Readers had been invited to send written responses to the article, drawn from their own experience. The editors expected to receive a few hundred manuscripts at most. But within one month a thousand manuscripts had arrived; within four years, there were fifty thousand. Most were “coping” stories—how I coped with depression, lack of money, or twins, etc.—cheerful, but with a faint undertone of disillusionment.26 A new genre of female literature developed out of the mounting domestic discontent. In the nineteenth century, women had relieved their despair with novels and diaries; in the mid-twentieth century, they wrote “humor.” There was Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book and Jean Kerr’s best-seller Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. (Erma Bombeck’s The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank is a later example.) It was a self-deprecating kind of humor, as befitted the essentially masochistic role of the housewife, with the author continually cast as straight man to devilish kids, nonchalant repairmen, and thoughtless neighbors. At the same time, the genre of domestic humor provided a furtive outlet for hostility to kids, husbands, and experts. Kerr recalled being “younger and full of Dr. Spock,” and starts her book with the assertion that her children will
never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. We’ll tell them why we rejected them. Because they’re impossible, that’s why.27
But this breezy cynicism never developed into a real critique of the housewife’s situation. At the end of every exhausting chronicle of domestic slapstick there was always some piece of childish gallantry—a sticky kiss or a love offering sculpted out of Mom’s best cold cream—that made it all worthwhile. Besides, the domestic-humor books implied, the woman who was warm and witty enough to squeeze a few laughs out of her daily trials really didn’t need much more compensation. “Our life may not be endlessly rewarding,” concluded one housewife-author, “but it can be very funny.”28
Not everyone could laugh her way through day after day of infant colic, malfunctioning refrigerators, whooping cough, and grape juice spills. Doctors and magazines began to identify a new female malady—“housewife’s syndrome.” It might take the form of neurotic behavior: one woman would wake up one morning and decide to stay in bed, permanently. Another woman would suffer from uncontrollable weeping. Or the syndrome might show up in the form of physical symptoms—exhaustion, insomnia, palpitations, headaches, trembling hands, drastic weight gain or loss, fainting. Gabrielle Burton, author, mother of five, and former housewife, writes of having flashes of inexplicable rage and periods of exhaustion:
I attributed these imbalances to various things. They were probably post-partum, pre-partum, or intra-partum depressions. The pill took responsibility for a while. I didn’t like to think about it too much because I was afraid that there was something wrong with me—some basic lack that kept me from being truly fulfilled …
I slept inordinate amounts. It made me very guilty, but it also made the day go away and that was more important … I asked a doctor once for some pep pills to keep me awake long enough so that I could change my pattern of afternoon naps … He laughed (kindly) and said (paternally), “Now don’t you worry about it. You’re normal.” I knew I was normal. My whole block was snoring. I just wanted to be vertical.29
Many women took their symptoms to a doctor, who prescribed uppers like Dexedrine or downers like Miltown along with instructions to cheer up and “buy a new hat” or to go home and “relax.” Other women coped in their own way, with alcohol—a mid-afternoon drink before the kids got home, martinis before dinner, and a few snorts with the barbiturates before bed. Sociologist Jessie Bernard concluded in the early sixties that “the housewife syndrome might well be viewed as public health problem number one.”30
In 1960, according to Betty Friedan, “the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.”31 There was a CBS-TV special on “The Trapped Housewife.” Magazine analysts speculated on whether the problem was overeducation, overwork, or maybe just incompetent appliance repairmen. Even the Ladies’ Home Journal, propagandist of domestic felicity for three generations of women, had to acknowledge that there was trouble brewing. In between the regular features like “Pat Boone’s Advice to Teenagers,” “Making Marriage Work,” and Dr. Spock’s column, some disturbing headlines began to appear: “Who Me? An Alcoholic?” and “How to Recognize Suicidal Depression.” Meanwhile, in the literary world, one best-seller after another was nurtured on the suburb’s “atmosphere of brooding sexual anxiety and frustration,” which by 1960 had already generated the middle-class diversion of “wife-swapping” and party games featuring inter-couple petting. Anyone who might have thought that the Woman Question was safely buried in a suburban dream house would have to acknowledge that there was, in author John Keats’s words, “a crack in the picture window.”32
It wasn’t only that the life of the full-time housewife was becoming psychologically untenable. It was also turning out to be financially untenable. There was a fatal catch in the mid-century domestic ideal. The picture of the “good life” included a house (Cape, ranch, or pseudo-colonial), three or four kids, and of course the full-time homemaker who held everything else together. The problem was the first two items (house and kids) turned out to be so expensive that the third (full-time mother) often had to go.
There were mounting psychological pressures to consume too. Between 1950 and 1960, television invaded nearly every American home, with its standardized image of how Americans should live, and how you too could be living right now. High school home ec courses promoted products from GE, Singer, General Foods, etc. Every woman’s magazine from Seventeen to Bride to Woman’s Day pushed a female lifestyle of relentless consumption. In 1961 a Gallup poll conducted for the Ladies’ Home Journal showed that young women already had a clear sense of what they wanted out of life by the time they were sixteen to twenty-one, and could define it with a catalog of future purchases:
… I want a split-level brick with four bedrooms with French Provincial cherrywood furniture.
… I’d like a built-in oven and range, counters only 34 inches high wit
h Formica on them.
… I would like a lot of finished wood for warmth and beauty.
… My living room would be long with a high ceiling of exposed beams. I would have a large fireplace on one wall, with a lot of copper and brass around and on the face of the fireplace, I would have Moroccan carpets, with some areas in cinnamon tones. My kitchen would be very like old Virginian ones—fireplace and oven.33
Fantasies like these—plus the inescapable new expenses of suburban life—guaranteed a lifelong pursuit of acquisitions. The Ladies’ Home Journal’s popular “How America Lives” department was a series of case studies in the financial struggles of couples caught between seven- or eight-thousand-dollar incomes and twenty-thousand-dollar a year dreams. There were all the small economies: macaroni dinners until the car payments were finished, handmade Christmas gifts, a moratorium on “going out.” And finally the agonizing decision—was it worth two or three thousand dollars a year for the wife to go out and get a job?
Increasingly, the answer was yes, and so, unnoticed by the woman’s magazines, child-raising experts, and psychoanalysts, women started sneaking out to work right after the postwar job shakedown in the late forties. Some women had been working right along, of course, despite every effort to dissuade them, from the experts’ theories of maternal rejection to the help-wanted ads that began “opportunity for ambitious young man.…” Half the nation’s black women, for example, held jobs in 1950; poor women, widows, divorcées, and a few die-hard professional women had always expected to work. But the women who began to pour into the labor force in the sixties had by and large grown up expecting to enter permanent retirement somewhere between the honeymoon and the first baby shower. They went out to work now because they needed the money and, in many cases, because they were “going nuts.”
Ads in the sixties continued to feature the full-time homemaker who had time to ponder her husband’s cholesterol intake, rethink the bedroom color scheme, and worry about kitchen odors. But the marketing men were falling in love with a different sort of woman: she was at least high school educated and usually more, mobile, possessed of a driver’s license, and, best of all, she made money. No one expected her (yet) to bring home the bacon, but she was certainly bringing home the “extras.” Discretionary income brought in by working wives was fueling unprecedented family spending, the business magazines exulted in articles like “The Ladies … Bless Their Little Incomes.”34
By the sixties, with close to thirty million women employed and a quarter of them not even married, the discrepancy between the domestic ideal and economic reality was getting out of hand. The contradiction was acute for the working “housewives,” torn between a domestic ideal that demanded masochistic servitude, and the reality of a double life that barely left time for an occasional laundry, much less memorable home cooking. The growing number of self-supporting single women could find even less to identify with in the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice. The times called for a new feminine image—one that would reflect the working woman’s new sense of independence and self-worth. It all happened so quickly that the psychomedical authorities were caught unprepared—with no time to revise their theories or rewrite their advice.
The Rise of the Single Girl
In 1955, or even 1960, no one looking for a likely new culture heroine would have thought of the single woman. For one thing, she was hard to find, appearing in the women’s media only as a short-lived premarital phase, or, in her later years (twenty-five plus) as a vexing problem for hostesses. She was the odd woman in a couple-oriented culture, an object of pity to her married sisters, something of a freak to the medical profession. She might be brilliant, famous, visibly pleased with herself, successful in every way—but the judgment hung over her that she had “failed as a woman.” The woman who remained single long enough for the condition to appear to be chronic was written off as a sexual cripple, a biological anomaly.
The “single girl” who burst out into the media in the early sixties corresponded to a new social reality: the single woman, divorced or never-married, who lived alone and supported herself. In the early sixties, a trend-setting minority of single women had begun to crowd into the “singles ghettos” of New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. They were secretaries, stewardesses, social workers, “gal fridays,” and “assistants” of various kinds in publishing houses, banks, department stores, etc. They wanted to get married sometime, but not to be “just a housewife.” They went to bars (the first “singles bar” opened in 1964 on New York’s Upper East Side) to meet men. They saved for ski weekends. They skipped meals so they could afford (and fit into) the latest clothes. They had “relationships.”
For many real-life “single girls,” the new sexual freedom that went with life in the big city was not exactly a libidinal romp. In the sixties most clerical jobs required women to look sexy—as if women’s entry into the marketplace had to be masked with an evermore determined facade of “femininity.” And it took a certain desperation for women to thrust themselves into the after-hours social scene: the successful singles bars soon became known cynically as “meat markets.” But from a distance it all looked glamorous enough: the big-city single girl wore the latest fashions from the pages of Cosmo or Glamour. She took the pill and lived in an apartment with a double bed. She spent her money on herself and men spent attention on her. She was the old feminist ideal of the independent woman with a new twist—she was sexy.
It was Helen Gurley Brown, more than anyone else, who was responsible for the transformation of the “spinster” of the forties and fifties into “the newest glamour girl of our times.” Her book Sex and the Single Girl announced the new woman in 1962; her magazine, Cosmopolitan, has promoted the single-girl image since Brown’s takeover as editor in 1965. An ex-single girl herself, who worked her way up from clerical jobs to the top of the publishing industry, Brown knew from personal experience what it took to create—and hold onto—a sexy image. “When I got married,” she confides in Sex and the Single Girl, “I moved in with six-pound dumb-bells, slant board, an electronic device for erasing wrinkles … and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue.” “I’m sure of this,” she exhorted her readers. “You’re not too fat, too thin, too tall, too small, too dumb, or too myopic to have married women gazing at you wistfully.”35
Brown’s message was more than a pep talk for insecure singles. She grasped the appalling fact that “magazines never deal with, that single women are too brainwashed to figure out, that married women know but won’t admit …” namely, that men didn’t like the suburban housewives of the romantic ideal. Expert ideology had so thoroughly knitted sex to reproduction that there was supposed to be one continuous blur of female regression linking sexual intercourse, childbirth, and Jimmy’s first Little League game. Brown understood how tenuous the links really were: who wanted to embrace a woman who had baby drool on her shoulder and chocolate fingerprints all over her blouse? Sex could be peeled away from the home and family scene as easily as clingy sweaters could be peeled off the willing starlets in James Bond movies. When the single girl walked away with female sexuality, then the housewife would indeed have nothing to do but gaze wistfully after her.
Brown, perhaps even more than feminist Betty Friedan, whose Feminine Mystique followed Sex and the Single Girl in 1963, sensed the profound misogyny which was spreading under the suburban “dream houses” like seepage from a leaky septic tank. Men resented their domestication, and hated the company of sexless “Moms.” Brown advised her single girls to avoid the Formica practicality of the suburbs and transform their apartments into lairs of erotic fascination. But the new single girl was not using her sexiness simply to drag a man down into a world of female “trivia.” Her world, like his, was the world of the Market:
… a single woman, even if she is a file clerk, moves in the world of men. She knows their language, the language of retailing, advertising, motion pictures, exporting, shipbuilding. Her world is a f
ar more colorful world than the one of P.T.A., Dr. Spock and the jammed clothes dryer.36
The single girl had the pizazz that came from facing the real world on the same terms as a man (though for only a fraction of the pay):
She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself … She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.37
The housewife, by implication, was a parasite, a dependent, a “bum.” While the single girl braved the rigors of the business world, the housewife lived a life of sheltered ease. To Brown, the wife deserved no quarter; the worst that could happen to her was that she too would get a taste of the single life. “I’m afraid I have a rather cavalier attitude about wives,” Brown wrote. Husbands were fair game for the single girl, who after all, had no desire to take the wife’s place behind a vacuum cleaner in Levittown. The new single girl was not just a sexy object; she needed male attention and she went after it—wives, children, mortgages, and the Ladies’ Home Journal notwithstanding.
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 33
