by Gail Collins
“YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE IT, GEORGE.
SHE’S AN OLD MAID.”
Just after the war ended, that future Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life was released. It told the story of George Bailey, an average man who ran a small-town savings and loan. He was given the chance to see what life in his hometown would have been like if he had never been born, and everything was terrible. The town was a slum, his old friends were crooks or drunks, and a nice girl he’d befriended had become a prostitute. But the worst fate of all had befallen his wife. “You’re not going to like it, George. She’s an old maid. She never married,” his guardian angel says in tones that suggest, at minimum, leprosy.
The nation went to war against singleness in the postwar era. In one much-quoted survey, less than 10 percent of the public believed an unmarried person could be happy. The 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex urged that spinsters be barred from teaching children on the grounds of “emotional incompetence.” It was the ultimate example of the pendulum swinging—instead of prohibiting the employment of married women as teachers, society now wanted marriage to be mandatory. “A great many children have unquestionably been damaged psychologically by the spinster teacher who cannot be an adequate model of a complete woman either for boys or girls,” the authors argued. (The National Woman’s Party, Alice Paul’s old group that was still fighting the good fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, claimed that Modern Woman set the movement back ten years.) An editor at Mademoiselle told Betty Friedan that the college girls who came to work as guest editors no longer seemed thrilled at the chance to get into publishing. “The girls we bring in now…seem almost to pity us,” she said. “Because we’re career women, I suppose.” She added that not one of the twenty recent guest editors had planned to work at all.
The fear of winding up without a man was wildly out of proportion to reality. This was a time, after all, when more than 95 percent of the women who came of age got married—more than any other American generation. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry,” said the author of a college textbook on marriage. Still, the fear of not being chosen led teenagers to commit to one another—at least temporarily—at a very early age. “All the guys go steady ’cause it wouldn’t be right to leave your best girl home on Saturday night,” sang the Beach Boys in 1962, when most of America was still deep into the culture of the 1950s. Instead of a long stag line waiting to break in at the dance, or a string of “beaux” hoping for a date, the proof of a girl’s popularity was a pin or ring from one desirable teenage boy who was pledged to date her, and only her, and protect her against the horrors of homebound Saturdays. Some girls began going steady as early as twelve years old and started shopping around for a boyfriend much earlier. A study in one Pennsylvania school district in 1961 found that 40 percent of the fifth graders were already dating.
Girls in earlier generations had been able to keep sexual pressure at bay with a fast turnover of boyfriends. But for teenagers in the 1950s, who were engaging in necking and petting every weekend with the same person, the dangers were obvious. There was still a strong cultural bias in favor of girls keeping their virginity—Carol Cornwall, who grew up in the 1950s, recalled constantly being told “If you go all the way with someone, he’ll leave you and marry a ‘nice’ girl.” The girl was supposed to keep her boyfriend under control, and adult authorities continued to delude themselves that all she had to do was send out the right signals. “No boy—no matter whether he’s Head of the Wolfpack—will persist in affectionate attentions if he gets a positively negative response,” said Senior Scholastic assuredly. But in the real world, girls spent a great deal of their time in an exhausting and dispiriting battle to keep their steadies from going too far. “He’d push, push, push. I’d say stop, stop, stop,” said one veteran of the backseat wars. The goal, for many girls, was “technical virginity,” in which they managed to avoid penetration while allowing their boyfriends every other imaginable liberty. An obvious answer to the sexual pressures involved in going steady was the altar. In the end, it’s hard to say whether the desire for early marriage triggered the going steady or the going steady triggered the need for early marriage.
Women weren’t actually following different rules than they had in other recent generations—although the amount of activity the technical virgins put up with may have been a new wrinkle. Alfred Kinsey, a bookish and rather sweetly retiring biologist, had spent the war years conducting surveys on the sexuality of American men and women. In 1953, he released his second groundbreaking study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which reported that about half of white American women had sex before they married—mainly with the men who would become their husbands—and that a quarter committed adultery afterward. “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” said the Reverend Billy Graham. The thing that seemed to trouble critics most was that Kinsey reported his findings in dry academic prose without editorial outrage.
Birth control, mainly in the form of diaphragms, was readily available to married women in most states, but few doctors prescribed them for unmarried girls, and few unmarried girls would have asked. “To go out and actually get it would mean that I planned to do these things,” explained one woman who had been sexually active as a teenager. “Therapeutic” abortions had been reasonably easy to obtain in hospitals in the 1930s, under the theory that a pregnancy was dangerous to the woman’s mental health. But after the war, hospitals became much more rigorous in monitoring what their doctors were up to. As a result, an estimated 250,000 to 1 million illegal abortions were performed every year, in everything from doctors’ offices to tables in the back room of a mysterious man or woman with no medical training. (The numbers are actually not much more than educated guesses, although the Kinsey report estimated that 24 percent of married women had had an abortion at one time or another.)
“IT WAS…SO OUT OF CONTROL”
The physical ideal for 1950s women was Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate blond bombshell. (Americans developed a weird tendency to connect nuclear explosions with sexy women. A photograph of actress Rita Hayworth was attached to the hydrogen bomb dropped in a test on the Bikini Islands, and a swimsuit designer, inspired by the event, named his new skimpy bathing suit in honor of the site of the blast.) But women did not like Monroe nearly as much as men did. Teenage girls, who were among the most avid moviegoers, preferred actresses who were small and childlike—like Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and the Bachelor or Sandra Dee in Gidget, the movie in which a “gidget” is defined as part girl, part midget. They played perky young women who the leading man overlooked during the early action, when he lusted after a larger, older, and more aggressive seductress who failed to see his true inner worth. The audience waited for that moment of recognition in which the wealthy bachelor or the handsome fraternity boy suddenly realized that the little bit of a thing in the corner was really the right woman for him. This theme was replayed in the girls’ novels of the era, which went from being about sleuthing to being about dating.
In 1956, the average teenager had an income of $10.55 a week, mainly from her allowance and jobs like baby-sitting. It was the equivalent of an entire family’s disposable income in 1940, and it gave very young girls an unprecedented power as consumers. Record companies became obsessed with finding young male singers like Elvis Presley, who could cause teenage girls to scream and buy records. Presley was actually far from the first performer to send girls into fits of sexual sublimation. Back in the nineteenth century, when Ignacy Paderewski played the piano, one observer reported, “The women would leave their seats and press forward like a besieging army. They’d tear off their corsage bouquets and fling them, hundreds of bunches of violets, on the stage.” During World War II, teenage girls terrified their parents by writhing and screaming over Frank Sinatra; and in the early 1950s, Johnny Ray, a
slight young singer who had to wear a large hearing aid because of his partial deafness, became a sensation by weeping hysterically when he sang. (His hits tended to have names like “Cry.”) The more parents expressed outrage about these heroes, the more enticing the whole thing became. When Presley was drafted into the army, he was succeeded by a veritable army of housebroken boy singers with names like Ricky and Bobby and Frankie who were selected almost exclusively because of their ability to send young girls into paroxysms. The sixteen-year-old Fabian Forte was discovered while his father was being rushed to the hospital with a heart attack and a record promoter, attracted by the crowd and the ambulance, decided the boy looked like a teenage idol. His handlers produced his records by stitching together bits and pieces of Fabian’s singing until they got one recording in which he hit all the right notes. “I could hardly recognize my own voice,” he said later. The terrified teenager was transported from one appearance to another, where he lipsynched his current record in front of a room full of shrieking girls. “It was terrible,” the middle-aged Fabian recalled years later. “You’d think it would be flattering but it was…so out of control.”
“SOME VERY SENSIBLE GIRL FROM A NICE FAMILY”
Television was the single greatest cultural influence of the postwar era, and it invaded the country almost overnight. In 1946, there were only 7,000 TVs in use in the country, but by 1950, there were 4.4 million, and Americans were buying 5 million new sets every year. The great success of early television was I Love Lucy, which debuted in 1951 and quickly became such a hit that Marshall Field’s, the big Chicago department store, moved its sale night from Monday, when Lucy was broadcast. “We love Lucy, too,” the announcement conceded. The series starred Lucille Ball, a semisuccessful movie actress with a talent for physical comedy, and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, a Cuban American bandleader. Many of the plots turned around Lucy’s desire to work—to “be in the show” at Desi’s nightclub or to pursue a harebrained plan to make money. “I want a wife who’s just a wife,” her husband protested in the first episode. Lucy was virtually the only TV wife who didn’t seem entirely content at home. But her attempts at working always led to disaster, and by the final curtain she had learned her lesson, at least until next week. A few of the other early TV series involved single women who worked, in jobs like secretary or teacher, although it was always a given that they were hoping to get married, with varying degrees of desperation.
Television in the fifties was famously bland, particularly when it came to situation comedies. Married couples always slept in twin beds, with no suggestion that they ever had sex. When Lucille Ball became pregnant in real life, scriptwriters wrote her condition into the series, although the word pregnant was barred from the air. (Lucy was only referred to as “expectant.”) CBS got a panel of clergymen to vet the scripts, and in 1953, 44 million people watched the episode when Lucy had her baby—twice as many as watched Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day.
As the decade went on, the comedies all focused on families, and the mother never did much but help her children get out of innocuous jams. In Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver was famous for wearing high heels and pearls while she worked in the kitchen. When her husband asked June what kind of girl she would like to see their older son, Wally, marry someday, June replied: “Oh, some very sensible girl from a nice family…who’s a good cook and can keep a nice house and see that he’s happy.” In Father Knows Best, Kathy, the tomboy, discovered how to act dependent and helpless after Dad explained: “The worst thing you can do is try to beat a man at his own game.” Betty, the older daughter, learned that pretty girls aren’t hired for jobs with a future because they’ll leave soon to get married. She happily gave up her hopes for a career in marketing to model bridal gowns. The adventure shows hardly had any women in them at all. The great TV craze of the late 1950s was westerns, which were invariably about men who were unmarried or widowed—sometimes with a young son, but never a daughter. The hero occasionally acquired a girlfriend or fiancée, but she generally died suddenly before the final commercial. The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.
“WOMEN CAN STAND THE SHOCK AND STRAIN
OF AN ATOMIC EXPLOSION”
Jean Wood Fuller, one of the most enthusiastic members of the federal Civil Defense Administration, arranged to be one of several “female guinea pigs” when the military tested a nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert in 1955. “The normal feminine excitement prevailed amongst us all,” reported Fuller, who was sitting in a trench less than two miles from the blast. But the experience, she told reporters, “shows conclusively that women can stand the shock and strain of an atomic explosion just as well as men.” She praised the beauty of the mushroom cloud and called the experience “terrific, interesting and exciting.” Fuller’s mission in life was to carve out a role for women in nuclear preparedness. Church women who were used to putting on big dinners were “just perfect naturals for our mass feeding groups,” she theorized. She urged women to learn home nursing, to play civil defense games with their children, and to stock their bomb shelters with home goods like “grandma’s pantry.”
The Cold War and anti-Communism overshadowed almost every other aspect of public life in the 1950s. During his famous “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon equated social progress with kitchen appliances, and J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly reminded American women that the only good female was a domestic female. Partly as a result of the us-versus-them mood of the era, the country developed a very strong, and unpleasant, tendency to regard anything outside the norm as subversive. The national impulse toward marriage and family was coupled with a wild-eyed rejection of any different path. “You all know women who lack warmth, tenderness, delicacy and sweetness…. They do not want to be homemakers, they do not want to be mothers. They want to be presiding judges of the Supreme Court,” said a psychiatrist lecturing in New York, who went on to warn that such women were in danger of toppling into frigidity, homosexuality, and psychosis.
The worst side of the 1950s, the fear of being different or of anyone else who might look different, was epitomized by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who terrorized the country with his wildly imaginative claims of secret cells of Communists in every branch of the government. The other members of Congress were as frightened of McCarthy as the hapless public servants whose careers he ruined. The first elected official with the spine to stand up to him was Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine and the only woman in the U.S. Senate. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” she told the Senate. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.” Bernard Baruch, an adviser to several generations of national leaders, said if the speech had been made by a man, he would have been the next president.
Smith got into Congress in the normal way, succeeding her late husband in the House. She served during World War II, when the number of women in Congress was in single digits, and the men did most of their business in drinking sessions in the leaders’ offices, in the gym, and other places where women weren’t invited to go. During meetings of the Naval Affairs Committee, one of the staff members took Smith for a walk after dinner so that the other legislators could have a break from the discomfort of female company. She had to stand in line in the public bathroom on the floor below the Senate because she wasn’t allowed in the lounge off the Senate chambers. But she developed a reputation for meticulous preparation and unflappable grit. During a flight home from a fact-finding tour of Europe, when the plane experienced trouble and the legislators were given life jackets and told to prepare for the worst, Smith brought out harmonicas she had purchased for her nieces and nephews and persuaded the other congressmen to start singing. When the Maine newspapers went into raptures over the story of her bravery, Smith told them she had been as frightened as the others. �
��Only as a woman I couldn’t have the luxury of showing my fear.”
A widow with no children, Smith managed to soldier on through the fifties, but there was no popular sense that any other women should want to emulate her. The women’s magazines embarked on a twenty-year campaign dedicated to the proposition that American women were interested in absolutely nothing except housekeeping, child care, and their marital sex life and that they needed to protect all those good things by following a rule of utter submissiveness. These magazines had never been particularly profound, but never before had they reflected such a narrow view of what women were like. Betty Friedan theorized that they had been transformed when many women writers dropped out to have children after the war ended and were replaced by males who poured their own vision of domestic bliss into the copy. Ladies’ Home Journal’s celebration of a woman who said she “never tried to enter into a discussion when the men were talking” and “never disputed her husband in anything” echoed those early-nineteenth-century southern women who were taught to repress their own opinions and sit erect on a straight-backed chair in silence while the menfolk talked about crops. The heroine in one 1958 McCall’s story almost lost her husband to an attractive widow with a genius for looking helpless. The wife saved the day by becoming terrified of a noise in the night, and once she was clinging appropriately, marital harmony was restored. The magazines ran endless short stories about housewives who find themselves momentarily unhappy until they learn once again the lesson of docility, the same way that poor Lucy learned over and over that she was not allowed to be in the show.
