A History of the Wife (53 page)

Many military husbands and their wives, who had rushed into hasty marriages and then been separated for months and years, had real problems getting used to living together once they were finally reunited in peacetime. By 1946, the divorce rate rose to a new high of one in four marriages.
47

One issue that caused problems for some married women was their desire to continue working. They had experienced the independence that comes with a paycheck and were reluctant to exchange it for a hus- band’s largesse. Their husbands, however, feared they would be seen as inadequate providers if their wives continued to work. Many men were still marked by anxieties from the Depression years, when a successful breadwinning husband took pride in his ability to support a stay-at- home wife. And even with a husband’s consent, wives were not always able to hold on to their wartime jobs. They were laid off from obsolete, war-industry jobs and eliminated from other sectors of the economy in preference to returning veterans.

On the other hand, many previously employed women
chose
to join the ranks of the housewives, and devote themselves exclusively to home and hearth after the trials of the war years. Women born two or three decades before the war had been socialized to believe in well- defined roles for husbands and wives, and especially for mothers, as one of them recalled many years later: “I was totally into motherhood, completely into motherhood. I was never career minded, and women of my generation were always raised to be mothers. That was your goal in life.”
48

Another looked back with pride on how well she had performed her

role as wife and mother. “I never had to work... I raised the kids . . . I liked to be a homemaker. . . . A woman wants a lot of affection, she wants to know she’s important in the man’s life.... When he came home from work, I dolled up like I was going on a date. I always did that.”
49

Housewifely and maternal images propagated by government, busi- ness, and the ladies’ magazines continued to reinforce a domestic ideol- ogy. As early as June 1944 a
A Ladies’ Home Journal
article argued that most women workers wanted to be full-time homemakers after the war. The author, Nell Giles, summing up the results of a national study, wrote: “If the American woman can find a man she wants to marry, who can support her, a job fades into insignificance beside the vital business of staying at home and raising a family—three children is the ideal number... .”
50

The
Journal
repeated this message often, as in April 1945, when the “How America Lives” section featured the story of Mrs. Eck, who had given up her concert career for the sake of her husband and children. Whatever qualms she might have had about that choice were hidden under a rhetoric of consumeristic satisfaction: “The sooner a woman makes a real home for a man, the sooner he will became successful and can give her a better house, servants, lovely clothes and so on. . . . Few men ever amount to much when their wives work.”
51
Implicit in this and similar assessments intended for a female readership was the belief that a wife was responsible not only for her children’s well-being and her husband’s comfort, but for his career as well. If he didn’t succeed, it was undoubtedly her fault.

Five years later, in a September 1950
Journal
article titled “Making Marriage Work,” wives were advised “Cater to his tastes—in food, in household arrangements, even in your appearance. Indulging his wishes, even if they are whims, is a sure way of convincing him that you really want to please him.”
52
One wonders if any of the
Journal
’s readers were aware that this was the exact same message American and English wives had been fed a hundred years earlier.

There were, however, a few signs that American housewives were not all experiencing domestic bliss. For example, a 1947
Life Magazine
spread, “The American Woman’s Dilemma,” recognized that many wives and mothers who enjoyed their families still wanted to partici- pate in the outside world. How could they fulfill their domestic obliga- tions and simultaneously work or volunteer beyond the home?

Certainly society was not prepared to help them resolve this dilemma in any appreciable way. Although, as William Chafe points out, the con- flict may have been exaggerated and limited primarily to white, middle- class women, the
Life
editors had put their fingers on a problem that was not going to go away.
53

T E N

Toward the New Wife, 1950–2000

“I’ll have a husband, which, as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.”

Grace Paley, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” 1956

“Every working woman needs a Wife.”

Late–twentieth-century popular saying

I
t’s no secret that the American wife has been radically transformed during the past half century. Fifty years

ago, a white middle-class woman was likely to enter marriage with a man from her own region, ethnicity, race, and religion, hoping for three to four children, two cars, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Prior to marriage, she had probably engaged in some pretty heavy petting, but for fear of “losing her reputation” or, worse yet, of becoming pregnant, she would not have “gone all the way,” at least not until an engagement ring was on her finger. Marriage usually put a halt to her education, and a baby meant the end of paid employment. She knew few people who had been divorced, and had every good reason to expect her own marriage to endure until death. For the rest of her life, even if divorced or wid- owed, people would address her as “Mrs.,” which was considered an improvement over “Miss.”

Today, few women of any class or color enter marriage without hav- ing had sexual intercourse beforehand. It is so commonplace for single women to live with a lover—both before and in lieu of marriage—that

cohabitation has practically become the norm. If women become preg- nant while single, they do not necessarily hurry to the altar—a full 40 percent of first babies are born out of wedlock. When women marry, they do so on the average of five years later than the women of the fifties, at age twenty-five instead of twenty. Many marry men from dif- ferent religions, races, regions, or ethnic backgrounds. Most continue to work after marriage and the birth of their children. North American mothers now bear roughly two children which is also the average in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, but consid- erably less than the fertility rates in Latin America and Africa. One out of two American wives will see her first marriage end in divorce. This will not prevent many of them from becoming wives again in second, and even third, marriages. And in all of these cases, a married woman, like a single woman, may be addressed with the neutral term “Ms.”
1

Of course, these scenarios vary greatly according to one’s ethnicity, race, religion, and personal idiosyncrasies. For example, sexually active white women who become pregnant are more like to marry before giv- ing birth than either African-American or Hispanic-American women. Japanese-Americans intermarry more often than Chinese-Americans. Jews frequently marry non-Jews. Muslim men outmarry more often than Muslim women. Divorce is more common in big cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, than in rural locales. Children of divorce are less likely to marry than children of nondivorced parents, and divorced adults are more likely to live together in subsequent relation- ships than remarry. Yet despite significant differences between specific groups, overall trends point in the same direction for all American wives: more premarital and extramarital sex, more economic independ- ence, more divorce, more serial marriage.

These trends did not start yesterday, nor in the turbulent sixties or feminist seventies. They are rooted in historical changes that began more than a hundred years ago, most notably in the sexual attitudes and experiences of American couples, and in work opportunities for women outside the home. A long-term shift in the meaning of sex, from an emphasis on procreation to an emphasis on pleasure, and the increasing presence of women in the workforce have been key compo- nents in the making of the “New Wife.”

As we consider these changes, it is useful to remember that a wife is not a single photo, but a series of photos as one would find in a family

album. The women of the fifties were not frozen into perpetual domes- ticity, nor were their daughters—adults in the seventies and eighties— congealed forever in the molds of feminism and sexual freedom that were characteristic of those decades. People change with the times, both
with
and
against
the currents they encounter. They change because they interact with members of the next generation, who force them to confront new values and behaviors. And most of all, they change because they themselves age and reach different developmental stages. Studying wives of the past half century, I was, for the first time in this book, able to look at living examples. Many of the wives who confided their marital stories to me are today in their thirties, forties, fifties, six- ties, even a few in their seventies and eighties. I have been struck over and over again by the adaptability of the American wife. Older mothers have accepted behaviors for their daughters that were unthinkable for themselves, and they have sometimes even followed their daughters’ lead in changing their own lives. How many wives have gone back to school in middle age, taken jobs, had sexual encounters, divorced, remarried, or moved toward more egalitarian relations with their hus- bands because their daughters and other young people made them see

the world differently?

What follows is an all-too-quick run through the past half century, when married women have evolved so dramatically that the word “wife” has lost many of its past associations and taken on others that have not yet endured the test of time.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION:

FROM THE
KINSEY
TO THE
COSMO REPORT

From midcentury onward, American sexuality has been well docu- mented by numerous investigators. Alfred Kinsey’s books on male and female sexual behavior became best-sellers in 1948 and 1953 and established a baseline for all future sexologists.
2
His findings flew in the face of traditional religious and moral teachings. He found that almost all adult males had a history of masturbation, that 90 percent of them had engaged in premarital sex and half in extramarital sex, and that a third had experienced some form of homosexual encounter. Women, too, were no longer constrained by Victorian ideals. About three-fifths of Kinsey’s sample of 5,940 white women had masturbated, nearly 50

percent had sexual experience before marriage, and a quarter had engaged in extramarital relations. Between 3 and 12 percent of the sin- gle women were lesbians (depending on how you defined “lesbian”), and 20 to 25 percent of the married women had had criminal abortions. Kinsey’s women spanned four decades, from women born before 1899 to women born before 1929. While the frequency of marital intercourse remained fairly similar from one decade to the next, wives reported an increase in the incidence of orgasm starting with the gener- ation born between 1900 and 1909 and married in the 1920s. These women had responded to the growing consensus that the marital bed was made primarily for sexual satisfaction. Kinsey linked the greater frequency of orgasm to the sexual revolution that had taken place in the roaring twenties, and attributed its ongoing effects to the “franker atti- tudes and the freer discussion of sex which we have had in the United

States during the past twenty years.”
3

Although Kinsey’s hallmark was statistical data, he made it clear that numbers did not tell the entire story. For example, the “nearly 50 per- cent” of married women who had had premarital sex did not mean that American women were promiscuous. A “considerable portion of the pre-marital coitus had been had in the year or two immediately preced- ing marriage” and was confined to the fiancé.
4
Americans, traditionally rigid on the subject of sex outside marriage, had a history of looking the other way when couples were engaged.

Once married, there was considerable variety in what couples did or did not do in bed. The range of foreplay included kissing, practiced by

99.4 percent of spouses; manual and oral stimulation of the female breast by the male (95 and 93 percent); manual stimulation of the male genitalia by the female (91 percent); oral stimulation of the female gen- italia by the male (54 percent) and of the male genitalia by the female (49 percent). Some couples spent only three minutes in foreplay, others as long as half an hour, an hour, or more; most were in the four to twenty-minute range. Extensive foreplay seemed to be more prevalent “among the better educated groups.”
5
While the old-fashioned mission- ary position in intercourse with the man on top was still the most prevalent, the reverse position with the woman on top was becoming more common among younger women. Younger wives were also more prone to engage in sex in the nude, as opposed to women born before 1900, who were more likely to be clothed during intercourse.

Kinsey believed his study would be especially beneficial to those married persons, who need “additional information to meet some of the sexual problems which arise in their marriages.” He estimated that in “perhaps three-quarters of the divorces recorded in our case histories, sexual factors were among those which had led to the divorce,” and he invoked the authority of pastors, teachers, physicians, and other clini- cians to support the view that “improved sexual relationships might contribute to the improvement of our modern marriages.”
6
Kinsey added academic credibility to the increasingly popular belief that satis- fying sex was the cornerstone of an enduring marriage.

Though Kinsey was publicly hailed as a brilliant researcher who had brought together more data on human sexuality than had ever been amassed before, many critics were uncomfortable with his findings. Millicent McIntosh, president of Barnard College, feared that the wide distribution of his book “has added greatly to the confusion in the moral climate of our time.” She worried that young people would feel “trapped by these statistics” and try to emulate them in order to appear “normal.”
7
Other critics lamented Kinsey’s amoral stance or his failure to interpret the meaning of his large body of data. But “the important thing,” as University of Pennsylvania Medical School marriage coun- selor Emily Mudd wrote in 1954, is that “women emerge from all those pages of careful analysis with far more sexual drive than they have ever been given credit for.”
8
Significantly, sexual drive was now seen as something acceptable and even desirable in a woman.