As centuries of repression began to give way, reformers took up the fight to make contraception more accessible. That sex might be a pleasurable option for women without the high risk of pregnancy created room for both married and extramarital sexual liberty, the possibility of trying out multiple partners, of blissfully inconsequential experimentation, or simply of bearing fewer children and enduring fewer dangerous pregnancies.
The fight to exert control over reproduction drew the attention of anarchist activists including the Russian-born Emma Goldman. Married twice herself, Goldman was a believer in free love and an early proponent of gay rights; she was also a vociferous critic of marriage, which she felt condemned women “to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social.” As a nurse and midwife on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, Goldman had waged war on the Comstock Laws that barred the distribution of information about contraception and abortion. By the early twentieth century, she was smuggling diaphragms and cervical caps into the United States from Europe. She was also mentoring a young nurse and bohemian, Margaret Sanger.
Sanger, a married mother whose own mother had been pregnant eighteen times in twenty-two years and had died early of cervical cancer and tuberculosis, began writing pieces about sexual education for the socialist magazine New York Call in 1912. The next year she began work at the Henry Street Settlement and soon separated from her husband. In 1914 she published a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, which proclaimed that every woman should be “absolute mistress of her own body” and as such, should avail herself of contraception, which Sanger referred to as “birth control.”
In 1916, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn; it was raided by police after ten days and Sanger spent thirty days in prison. Five years later, the same year that Sanger and her husband finally divorced, she would found The American Birth Control League, which would later become the Birth Control Federation of America, and, in 1942, would be renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The slow reveal of female flesh, the lightening of a limiting wardrobe, the early acknowledgements of female sexual drive, the push for more accessible means of preventing pregnancy . . . together they began to send a popular message: that abstinence from marriage no longer necessarily meant abstinence from sex, or from fun. The popular press in the early twentieth century called the educated, politicized, wage-earning, sexually liberated female “the new woman.”
She wasn’t popular with everyone.
“In our modern industrial civilization, there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs,” President Theodore Roosevelt said at the beginning of a 1905 speech to the National Congress of Mothers.54 One of these dangers was the existence of women “who deliberately forego . . . the supreme blessing of children.”
Roosevelt had become fretful after the 1890 census showed a declining birthrate55 and began to worry about “race suicide,” the idea that a white Anglo-Saxon failure to reproduce would damage the nation. Roosevelt, who supported suffrage and women’s involvement in labor, nonetheless blamed the declining fertility rate on those white women whose professional, political, and other nondomestic commitments were leading them to start families late and not at all. “A race is worthless,” Roosevelt railed, “if women cease to breed freely.”
After Roosevelt left office, he continued to express his anxiety, clarifying that it was not over “pauper families with excessive numbers of ill-nourished and badly brought up children” but rather with “voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down.” Roosevelt’s distinctions were rooted in the readily expressed racism of his time and in animosity toward Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, whose comparative fecundity seemed to threaten the whiteness of the nation. But they were also an expression of judgment against the women exercising new forms of public autonomy. “It is the bare truth,” Roosevelt continued, “to say that no celibate life approaches such a life in point of usefulness, no matter what the motive for the celibacy—religious, philanthropic, political, or professional.”
Roosevelt’s concerns were an inversion of the racial politics that would be echoed fifty years later by Moynihan, and mirror the arguments made more recently by population agonistes, including Jonathan Last and Ross Douthat. Different iterations of these anxieties, shaped by era and prevalent racial attitudes, share close ties: They home in on a resistance by women to wifeliness and motherhood as not simply a problem, but the problem imperiling their nation or race.
“The race, the race! Shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest,” wrote Emma Goldman in 1911, “The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine . . . and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex awakening of woman.”
At the end of the nineteenth century, writes Chambers-Schiller, “the singlehood of women became a politically charged issue from which it was clearly understood that spinsterhood and independence were linked.” This recognition, she continues, “inspired a political and cultural backlash which, in the 1920s, returned women to marriage and domesticity.”
Marriage Dislodged
In 1924, the Yale Review posthumously published a piece by the sociologist William Sumner, who argued that the industrial age’s new opportunities for women had “dislodged marriage from its supreme place in their interest and life plan. This is the greatest revolution in the conditions of the marriage institution . . . in all history . . . the importance of the fact that for great numbers of [women] it is no longer the sum of life to find husbands can easily be appreciated.”56
The dislocation of marriage as the single path for women—not to mention the impact that these unmarried women, independently and in concert with each other as colleagues and activists, were having on politics, professions, and populations—was a threat that drew further cultural blowback.
The reverberations were sometimes hilariously obvious: Suffragists had often staged political “pageants” in which they wore sashes emblazoned “Votes for Women.” But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this display: the debut of the Miss America pageant, in which unmarried women showed off their decidedly apolitical attributes in competition against, as opposed to collaboration with, each other.57
The growing field of psychology provided a new, credentialed venue for the pathologizing of unmarried women. One of Sigmund Freud’s adherents, Austrian physician and psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, claimed in a 1926 book, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to Her Love Life, that “Marriage dread and aversion to childbearing afflict particularly our ‘higher’ social circles; increasing numbers of girls belonging to the ‘upper strata’ remain single. . . . They are ‘emancipated;’ they are growing self-reliant, self-sufficient and, economically, too, they are becoming more and more independent of the male.”
Rates of singlehood were dropping from their turn-of-the-century highs and, with them, marriage ages. While the fertility rate would dip during the Depression, the 1930s would include a widespread backlash not just against the sexual liberties of the Jazz Age, but against the politics of independent female reformers of the progressive age.
These attacks were sometimes lodged, as they are today, by women who had managed to see the domestic light from their own professional, political perches. Rose Wilder Lane, the Libertarian journalist and daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Baby Rose!), had worked outside the home throughout her adult life, but wrote a Ladies Home Journal article in 1936 called “Woman’s Place Is In The Home.” In it, she argued that feminist agitation had dangerously diminished the importance of the “deep-rooted, nourishing and fruitful man-and-woman relationship.” A woman’s real career, wrote Lane, the journalist, “is to make a good marriage.”58
Marry Early and Often
The back-to-back cris
es of the Depression and World War II drove many women, married and single, into the workforce. For some white middle-class women who had never before had to work for wages, this was new. For the many black women who had always worked, the opportunity for skilled jobs, albeit for less money than their white counterparts, expanded.
But the patriotic step back, as soon as the economy rebounded and soldiers returned, was harsh, and brought with it a whole new brand of enforced domesticity.
Thanks to the GI Bill, veterans (or at least white veterans, who were far more likely to be admitted to universities) were eligible for college educations that could propel them into the coalescing white middle class. Meanwhile, the federal government underwrote loans and built up a suburban infrastructure that would house the millions of children women were busy making, in what could become America’s enormous baby boom. It was a neat, elliptical system. Advertisers sold women and men on an old, cult-of-domesticity-era ideal: that the highest female calling was the maintenance of a domestic sanctuary for men on whom they would depend economically. In order to care for the home, these women would rely on new products, like vacuum cleaners and washing machines, sales of which would in turn line the pockets of the husbands who ran the companies and worked in the factories that produced these goods.
The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about the power of women’s sexuality run amok. Historian Elaine Tyler May reports that “non-marital sexual behavior in all its forms became a national obsession after the war,” and marriage, in tandem with the repudiation of women’s recent advances, was the cure.59
The mid-twentieth century push for white women was not simply to marry, but to marry early, before gaining a taste for independent life. A 1949 American Social Hygiene Association pamphlet advised, sixty years in advance of Mitt Romney’s touting of youthful wedlock, that “Marriage is better late than never. But early marriage gives more opportunity for happy comradeship . . . for having and training children . . . promoting family life as a community asset, and observing one’s grandchildren start their careers.”60
By the end of the 1950s, around sixty percent of female students were dropping out of college, either to marry or because the media blitz and realignment of expectations led them to believe that further education would inhibit their chances of finding a husband. Secondary education, which had expedited women’s autonomy in the previous century, now worked, in part, to abrogate it. In his 1957 Harpers piece, “American Youth Goes Monogamous,” Dr. Charles Cole, president of Amherst College, wrote that “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.” Cole sadly compared his female students, now in search of fiancés, to the women he’d taught in the 1920s, who he recalled attended college in hopes of launching a career, not finding a mate.61
In Barnard’s graduating class of 1960, two-thirds of seniors were engaged before graduation and, as Gail Collins reports, at pregraduation parties, betrothed students were given corsages while singles were offered lemons.62
In these years, around half of those brides were younger than twenty63 and 14 million women were engaged by the time they were seventeen.64 Gloria Steinem, born in 1934, recalled to me that, in her heavily Polish neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, most women got married in high school. “I just didn’t know that you could live without getting married, unless you were crazy,” Steinem said of her youth, recalling a cousin who had never married, worked with the Red Cross in Europe, and had been regarded as mentally unstable. “That was my image of the alternative,” Steinem said.
She remembered going to a Polish wedding reception at a bar where, “even though I was a very young teenager, I noticed that the bride was very depressed.” Steinem finally approached and asked what was wrong, to which the sad bride replied, “You don’t understand. I’m twenty.” The expectation, Steinem explained, was that “you were supposed to get married at sixteen or seventeen and she’d been unable to find a proper husband. Now she was twenty, and they had married her off to some guy who was younger, which was terrible.”
Women who were educated, thanks to the propulsive victories of a previous generation, were sometimes left confounded by the regressive pressures of the society in which they lived. Author Judy Blume has described how, as a college student with literary ambitions, she gave in to the expectation to marry young. Pregnant by the time she earned her degree, Blume recalled the dismay with which she “hung [her] diploma over the washing machine.”65 And as writer Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.”
Both Ephron and Steinem wound up engaged before graduation. Ephron would write of her betrothal as “an episode that still embarrasses me” and describe her once-affianced as “a total fool. . . . who ran the hero-sandwich concession at Harvard Business School and whom for one moment one December in New Hampshire I said—as much out of politeness as anything else—that I wanted to marry.” She did not marry him.
Steinem explained that she, in fact, loved her college fiancé, with whom she would remain friends and enjoy a decades-long on-and-off affair. But she found the idea of marriage “profoundly depressing,” and realized that “as wonderful as he was, it was a really bad idea. He hunted, he skied. All these things that I never wanted.” She accepted his proposal, she said, because she simply “didn’t know what else to do.” Finally, as graduation and marriage loomed, Steinem escaped to another continent. “Part of the reason I went to India,” she said, “was because I was trying not to get married to this extremely tempting man and I knew I had to go very very far away. So I left my engagement ring under his pillow and left. Not very wonderful.”
Recontainment
The domesticity of the 1950s has long been understood both as a reaction to the Depression and the World Wars, especially World War II, and the flooding into the working world of women in wartime. But it wasn’t just about nudging women off factory floors and selling them blenders; it was also about forcing marriage back down the throats of women who had spent a century purging it as the central element of their identity.
Or, rather, it was about forcing marriage back down the throats of some women.
While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66
However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 1950s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb.67 By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts.
It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish.
Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-World War II years, did not extend to African-Americans. Social Security, created in 1935, did not apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be African-Americans, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and th
e persistent (if slightly narrowed68) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.69
Then there was housing. The suburbs that bloomed around American cities after the war, images of which are still summoned as symbols of midcentury familial prosperity, were built for white families. In William Levitt’s four enormous “Levittowns,” suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident.70 Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families. Urban historian Thomas Sugrue reports that, in Philadelphia, between the end of the war and 1953, “only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks.” As Sugrue writes, this disparity created a demand for housing that exceeded the supply, prices shot up for black buyers, and African-American residents were forced to live “crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods” that had been abandoned by white residents moving out to the suburbs. Banks routinely refused mortgages to residents of minority neighborhoods, or offered loans at prohibitively usurious rates meant to reflect the imagined risk of lending to African-Americans.71
The new freeways that threaded the suburbs to the urban centers where residents made their livings were often built by razing black neighborhoods; those roads regularly cut off black residents from business districts and the public transportation that might connect them to jobs and public services. Postwar “urban renewal” projects purportedly intended to create public housing for poor Americans often involved the dismantling of nonwhite communities and the relocation of minorities to poorly served areas.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 8
