by Gail Collins
By the time she became secretary of labor, Perkins was her family’s sole support. Her husband, an economist named Paul Wilson, had become mentally ill, with what we would now probably diagnose as a bipolar disorder. “It was always up and down,” Perkins said in her usual matter-of-fact tone. “He was sometimes depressed, sometimes excited…. There was a great variety in the whole process.” When Perkins was honored at a testimonial lunch in 1929, she paid tribute to her husband’s “brilliant mind” and to her daughter “who has grown to girlhood without being a troublesome child,” but saved her fulsome praise for the family housekeeper and nanny.
Serving as labor secretary during the Great Depression turned out to be an endless crisis, and it was lucky that the first woman to hold the job knew how to keep her emotions in check. “Labor can never be reconciled to the selection,” said the president of the AFL, who eventually was. Her predecessor never spoke to her and left her a desk full of cockroaches. The Supreme Court rejected many of her attempts to establish minimum wage laws and maximum workweeks. Conservative congressmen resented Perkins’s support for collective bargaining and her lack of enthusiasm for deporting illegal aliens—a job her predecessor had embraced so avidly he sometimes wound up shipping off people who were American citizens. The lightning rod for dissatisfaction was Harry Bridges, a militant leader of the California dockworkers who had been born in Australia. Conservatives wanted Bridges deported because he was a suspected Communist. When Perkins refused, rumors started to float around that she, too, was a Communist, or perhaps even Bridges’s secret wife or mistress. (The Supreme Court eventually upheld the Labor Department’s ruling that Bridges could not be deported, and he became a U.S. citizen.) In a xenophobic Washington, many people believed Perkins was actually a foreign-born alien named Matilda Watski. In 1938, her opponents began a movement to forcibly remove her from office. “I didn’t like the idea of being impeached,” she understated. The effort failed, and in the meantime, Perkins had become one of the central figures in the creation of the Social Security Act. FDR rejected all her attempts to quit, and in the end, she served through his entire administration. On April 12, 1945, when the Cabinet learned that the president was dead, Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt went out in the hall together, and the stolid labor secretary and the First Lady “sat on a bench like two schoolgirls” and cried.
“A MENACE TO SOCIETY”
In 1932, Fortune, in a peculiar burst of public-spiritedness, urged housewives to hire servants instead of buying appliances. The price of 1 million refrigerators sold the prior year, the magazine said, would have employed thousands of maids and paid for “all the minor amenities of extra-clean corners, polished silver, punctiliously served meals….” Housewives still preferred the refrigerators, and workingwomen preferred jobs in the refrigerator-making factories to domestic service. A far more popular plan for increasing employment opportunities was to make all married women stay home. Pollster George Gallup said the opposition to married female workers was a conviction “on which the voters are about as solidly united as on any subject imaginable—including sin and hay fever.” (Usually, the issue was couched in terms of women whose husbands made decent salaries, but a 1936 poll asked if a woman should be able to keep a full-time job if her family needed the money, and only 35 percent said yes.) “I think the single girl is entitled to make a living more so than the married woman who has a husband to support her and mostly they work so they can buy a lot of luxuries,” a twenty-three-year-old woman wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor. Even Frances Perkins, when she was working for Governor Roosevelt in New York in 1930, joined in the outcry, denouncing any woman who worked merely for “pin money” as “a menace to society, a selfish and short-sighted creature who ought to be ashamed of herself.”
Very few women had the luxury of working for pin money—Perkins herself was supporting her unemployable husband and their daughter. But the issue of whether married women should work was chewed over constantly in the newspapers and women’s magazines, with the consensus coming down on the side of not. A federal law, passed during the Depression, prohibited the employment of “married persons” whose spouses also worked for the government. Of the people forced to quit, three-quarters were women. (Eleanor Roosevelt called the law “a very bad and foolish thing”—government salaries, she argued, were so low, a family needed two incomes just to get along.) Legislators in twenty-six states introduced laws completely banning the hiring of married women, although only Louisiana actually passed a law, and it was quickly declared unconstitutional. More than three-quarters of the nation’s public school districts refused to hire married teachers—unless they were male.
Despite all this, the number of married women who worked continued to increase throughout the decade. Although most of these women struggled to keep poor families above water, a number were middle class and were attempting to preserve the good things they had gotten used to since World War I—like electric lights and gas stoves, and the ability to keep their children in school. It was an important cultural shift that sent married women into the workforce in larger and larger numbers. And for all the endless debating about whether or not it was good for society, the issue was resolved not by social theorists but by the wives themselves, determined that they and their families would not only survive but also move up.
Replacing female workers with men also turned out to be harder than people imagined. The world was too clearly divided between male and female jobs. No man would work as a housekeeper or as a private duty nurse, just as no woman could get a job as a construction worker or airline pilot. (The hopes that female fliers had for becoming commercial pilots had fizzled out when the Commerce Department ruled a woman could not fly a plane carrying passengers in bad weather.) Men did take jobs as teachers and librarians and social workers, reducing the number of women in those professions. And with so many qualified applicants for almost every job, employers set any arbitrary standard they wanted. One hospital rejected an applicant for nursing school because her teeth were crooked. The New York City board of education rejected Rose Freistater for a teaching job because she weighed 182 pounds—arguing that she might have trouble moving fast in a fire drill.
“NOT A BIT OF DUST FOR THIS GREAT
4TH DAY OF FEB.”
A fifth of American families lived on farms in the 1930s, and their lives seemed different from the ones of the pioneer era only in the advantages of automobiles and window screens. In 1935, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms had no electricity. Only 20 percent of farms in Missouri had a kitchen sink with a drain; 7 percent in Kentucky had indoor bathrooms. A researcher visiting white tenant farm wives in the South found the women cooking from before dawn till long after dark on wood-burning stoves and toting water from a well or remote spring to perform the dreaded washing chores, which had to be done at least once a week because they had so few clothes. The wives bore their children at home with the help of a neighborhood “granny” and believed, like their colonial ancestors, that a woman could not conceive unless she had an orgasm. “It’s not my fault that I had so many children—I never enjoyed it one bit,” one told a visitor.
The New Deal program that had the greatest effect on the most women was probably rural electrification. When the hole-diggers, polemen, and axmen made their way across the Texas hill country, bringing wiring to the isolated farmhouses, the farm wives fed them dinner on their best plates—banquets by local standards, as much food as they could lay their hands on for the men who were bringing them electric power. Electricity split through the long, bleak nights on the farms, where women had sat in the darkness for much of their lives, while their children crowded around the kerosene lamp, squinting at their homework. And though most farm families did not have enough money to buy refrigerators or washing machines, they could often afford a fan, an electric iron, or a radio—a blessed radio bringing music and news and The Romance of Helen Trent.
The farm wives needed all the distraction they c
ould get. They had to cope not only with the Depression but environmental collapse as well, due to years of heavy farming in the thin prairie soil that was never meant to be used for anything but light grazing. A drought that began in 1932 and lasted through the decade turned the broken farmland into dust, and the wind turned it into terrifying dust storms. “Just at noon the air gradually thickened and became almost opaque,” said Joan Ostrander, who grew up in a South Dakota farming town. “A thick gritty blanket descended slowly, covered and lay suffocatingly over the land, leaving us in almost total darkness at mid-day—a blackout no light could penetrate. It was a tangible thing—we could feel it between our fingers and teeth and against our faces…. Toward the evening the black mass began to lift…. The maple, scarlet and splendid that morning, stood withered and ragged…. The asters and sun-flowers were gray, and so was the whole surrounding world.” Housewives stuck oiled cloth under the doors and in the window sashes, but the dust came in anyway. Chickens and wild birds died. Fences and sheds lay buried in dust. Mary Dyck, the Kansas farm wife who kept a family diary during the thirties, recorded nearly 100 days of dust storms during the first six months of 1937. The storms killed her garden and destroyed her orchard and kept her husband working round the clock, digging deep furrows in the land that would catch some of the dirt that otherwise would be blown away. It drove her into depression and a sense of futility. Any day without a storm was worth recounting: “Not a bit of dust for this great 4th day of Feb.,” she wrote in 1938.
“GOODNESS HAD NOTHING TO DO
WITH IT, DEARIE”
Besides the radio, Depression-era women were fixated on the movies. Films had learned to talk—clumsily at first, and then obsessively, in smart repartee between the hero and the sassy heroine. The man almost always won out over the spunky woman by the last reel—unless the woman died, which happened rather frequently. It was the beginning of the “woman’s movie,” a film that, on the high end, probably starred someone like Bette Davis and focused almost exclusively on her loves and travails. Women’s movies were tearjerkers that distracted the audience from their real sorrows—in the movies people lost their loves, and sometimes their lives, but very few ever lost their jobs. (In Dark Victory, Davis, having found bliss in marriage to a dedicated doctor, sits in the kitchen of her large Vermont house and explains the virtues of the simple life to her maid and cook. “Here we have nothing and yet we have everything,” she tells the staff.) The women in the audience weren’t looking for lessons on how to cope with hard times. They were looking for escape and glamour, and when the sultry vamps of the 1920s turned into the platinum blonds of the early talkies, women began to bleach their hair with peroxide and to cement it into rigid “permanent waves” like Jean Harlow.
Harlow, whose meteoric career began when she was nineteen years old, specialized in movies about tough, sexy, self-sufficient women. (It was ironic, since her real life was an archetype of helplessness, including marriage to a man who was probably both impotent and abusive and an unnecessary death at twenty-six, from untreated uremic poisoning.) She was one of a raft of actresses in the early 1930s playing characters who used sex to get the better of men rather than becoming victims of love. Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow trying on a new dress and asking the saleslady whether she could see through it. “I’m afraid you can, dear,” says the woman, and Harlow promptly decides to wear it home. After seducing her hitherto happily married boss, the heroine abandons him for an even richer, older man, who she cuckolds with the chauffeur. At the end, after her betrayals are exposed, Harlow drives off in triumph with a new, rich, ancient husband—in a car piloted by her old lover, the chauffer. By 1934, a new Hollywood production code made those kinds of characters extinct. Studio self-censorship ensured that on the big screen even married people slept in separate beds, that Tarzan’s chimpanzees wore body stockings for modesty, and that sexual experimentation led to death, disaster, or at least a life of perpetual chastity. The early Depression era was the last time for a long while that girls went to movies to express their rebellion, or sexual curiosity.
Mae West was a sort of marker for the shifting attitudes toward women’s sexuality in the country and in Hollywood. She was a product of the tougher side of the New York entertainment industry, where she made her name with a series of plays that she wrote and was repeatedly arrested for starring in. The first was called Sex. Another, Drag, was about a group of gay female impersonators. Her play Diamond Lil was her breakout success, both with the public and critics. People liked its humor and its setting in the 1890s Bowery—an era in which West, with her Lillian Russell–like figure, seemed very much at home. The nostalgic veneer made it easier for people to overlook the fact that West was playing a heroine who is the mistress of a mobster and the leader of a gang of shoplifters, who deals cocaine on the side and who stabs another woman to death in the second act with no serious repercussions.
West went to Hollywood in 1932 when she was already nearly forty, to play a role in a gangster movie starring her old friend George Raft. The part was a flat one, and West rewrote all the lines, including the immortal comeback when a woman said: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” and West retorted, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” She was enough of a hit that she persuaded Paramount Studios, which was teetering on bankruptcy, to produce a somewhat laundered version of Diamond Lil under the new name She Done Him Wrong. It was a huge hit—huge enough to save Paramount—and it made West the biggest star in Hollywood, despite the fact that her demeanor and delivery were very much like those of the female impersonators she had worked with in Drag. She earned the second-largest salary in the country, after the publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers were baying in outrage at West’s soaring career. Her biggest fans were young women—perhaps because neither sex nor men in general seemed nearly as intimidating when they were in West’s hands. One theater in Omaha held special women-only screenings of West’s second feature, I’m No Angel.
West’s ability to put sexual connotations to what seemed like completely innocent lines of dialogue drove the studios’ internal censorship system crazy, as well as conservative moral watchdogs in the country at large. She was probably the performer most responsible for the creation of the Legion of Decency, which was formed by the Catholic Church to combat immoral movies. The pressure from the censors eventually forced West into movies that didn’t suit her bawdy, ironic style, and her stardom dwindled away. Her successor as the hottest female in Hollywood was, appropriately enough, Shirley Temple, a curly-haired tot who sang, danced, and straightened out the problems of all the adults in her films.
“I HAD A WIFE ONCE BUT SHE VANISHED
INTO THE NBC BUILDING”
The women who captured the public’s notice in the thirties were almost always very competent, like Mae West—or even Shirley Temple. They wore fashions that broadcast the fact that they were much sturdier and more mature than the little flapper. (If they were going to carry the world on their shoulders, those shoulders had better be padded ones.) They could take care of themselves at a time when men couldn’t be counted on. The ultimate heroine of the decade, Scarlett O’Hara, could do anything except pick the right man—she was, as one critic pointed out, a flapper in reverse, a woman who broke all the rules except the ones about sex.
Gone with the Wind was perhaps the biggest fictional success story of the twentieth century, just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in the nineteenth. They were both novels that interpreted the greatest crisis in American history—slavery and the Civil War—through women’s concerns. Politically, Gone with the Wind was the ultimate anti–Uncle Tom tract—once again the reader was invited into an antebellum South where every decent black person preferred being a slave. (Margaret Mitchell, the author, was an Atlanta girl who had walked out of a history course at Smith College when an African American student was admitted to the class.) But most readers loved the book not for its politics but for the romance between willful Scarlett and Rhett
Butler, and the dramatic saga of Scarlett’s fight to preserve her home and family.
The message of Gone with the Wind at the time of its release in 1936 was that True Womanhood could no longer hold its own against the emergencies of the modern world. Melanie Wilkes, the yin to Scarlett’s yang, was a strong and practical and very, very good woman, but she was stuck in the traditional American pattern. Melanie understood as well as anybody that it would take a newer model, a Scarlett, to bring everyone safely through war and violent social upheaval. Gone with the Wind quickly sold a million copies when it was released at the then-astounding price of three dollars. Despite generally unfavorable reviews, the novel sold immediately to the movies, and as production was under way, a poll in 1939 showed that more than 56 million Americans were planning to see the film version.
