A History of the Wife (54 page)

When the Kinsey report on female sexuality first appeared in 1953, there was already a new generation of wives born after 1930, who would marry at an early age, bear their children when they were young, and generally finish childbearing by the end of their twenties.
9
Their adult identities would be largely determined by their marital and maternal situations. As the distinguished sociologist Talcott Parsons stated boldly: “The woman’s fundamental status is that of her husband’s wife, the mother of his children.”
10
Indeed, according to polls of the time, young women aspired first and foremost to become the wives of prominent men and the mothers of successful children. Their own sense of self was dependent on their husbands’ careers and their chil- dren’s accomplishments.

In becoming wives and mothers, these women of the fifties also

depended heavily on their gynecologists and obstetricians, who were almost always male. In the doctor’s office, they went through routine fittings for a diaphragm to prevent conception and urine tests that would determine if they were pregnant. Once a women knew she was pregnant, she counted on her doctor to sustain her through the months ahead and to be available when she went into labor. Trained with the latest obstetrical methods, American doctors were generally not inter- ested in the new ideas of “natural childbirth” that were gaining ground in Europe, especially in England under the influence of London obste- trician Grantly Dick-Read. Instead of encouraging women to be active participants in the childbirth process, they told their patients to leave things in professional hands. Many women went into childbirth know- ing nothing about proper breathing techniques, or the eventualities of anesthesia, epesiotomies, and Cesarean section. There were no classes for pregnant women, no Lamaze groups, no midwives, only Dr. Ben- jamin Spock’s
Common Sense Book of Baby Care
(1946), republished in paperback as
Baby and Child Care
(1954), to give practical advice to the novice mother.

When it came to breast-feeding, most American doctors were indif- ferent, if not hostile, to the idea. With the introduction of baby formula in the 1930s, most American women stopped nursing their babies; only 25 percent did so between 1940 and 1970. The medical establish- ment saw little need for women to nurse their infants, since formula was considered a perfectly adequate substitute. It would take another generation before American women rediscovered the benefits of giving their babies mother’s milk.
11

America took pride in the health record of its postwar mothers and children. From 1940 to 1949, maternal mortality and infant deaths dropped dramatically. Women who gave birth in the hospital—that is, close to 90 percent of mothers in the fifties—had every reason to expect a safe delivery and a healthy baby.
12

The popular media of this period projected images of women deter- mined to catch and preserve a husband. Gone were the career-women films of the thirties and forties, where stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell triumphed as confident airplane pilots, lawyers, and journalists. Instead, cute coeds and spunky wives, played by Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, incarnated the American ideal—upbeat,

earnest, and coyly sexual. Even such superstars as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, who exuded polymorphous sexuality, were generally crowned with wedding veils by the end of the film. (Significantly, Mar- ilyn Monroe was to have three husbands in her short life, and Elizabeth Taylor had seven, one of whom—Richard Burton—she married twice.) The 1950s television sitcoms featured families of the
Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy,
and
Ozzie and Harriet
variety. Lovable stay-at-home wives sparred with breadwinning husbands, usually besting the men with a lighthearted touch. Lucy, however, was unsuccessful in overrid- ing her TV husband’s refusal to let her work in show business. But in real life, the star was a top moneymaker—she even managed to con- tinue working throughout her pregnancy at a time when CBS would not even allow the word “pregnant” to be used on TV—and she gave

birth to Little Ricky as a part of the television drama.
13

Spotless TV moms reigned over superclean homes and superclean children. That artifical image projected into the living rooms of rich and poor was bound to make some people question their own less than per- fect homes. As a child, the black writer Assata Shakur asked herself:

Why didn’t my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when I came home from school. Why didn’t we live in a house with a backyard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her raggedy housecoat with her hair in curlers. “How disgusting,” I would think. Why didn’t she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist dresses like they did on televi- sion?
14

Television, Hollywood, and advertisements catered to the fantasy of the beautifully dressed, perfectly coiffed, nonharried housewife. After all, with the many labor-saving appliances and packaged foods avail- able in the postwar years, housekeeping was supposed to be practically effortless. But in fact, the new products did not reduce the amount of time women devoted to housework: full-time housewives averaged between fifty-one and fifty-six hours per week on household tasks from the 1920s to the 1960s, while women with jobs outside the home still spent thirty-four hours a week on housekeeping.
15
Higher standards of household cleanliness and personal attractiveness, promoted by TV, the women’s magazines, domestic advice literature, and consumer ads gave

homemakers more to do and more to worry about. One wife com- plained in
Redbook
magazine (September 1960) that after ten years of marriage, her husband still expected her to be “a combination of Fanny Farmer and Marilyn Monroe.” Another, with her finicky spouse in mind, confessed: “I get terribly defensive if I serve dinner late or he comes home early and my hair’s still in curlers.” Domesticity was back in fashion, and was expected to fulfill a wife’s fundamental needs. If it did not, the assumption was that something was wrong with her.

Psychologists and psychiatrists following Freud (for this was the golden age of Freudians in America) believed that women should be able to find fulfillment in their roles as wives and mothers, without the extra burdens of paid employment. In this respect, little had changed in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud had written to his own fiancée in the 1880s denouncing the feminist views of John Stuart Mill. Freud found it “unrealistic to send women into the struggle for existence in the same way as men” and was determined to transfer his bride from “the competitive role into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my home,” where she could enjoy being “a beloved wife.”
16

Seventy years later, in the early 1950s, British analyst John Bowlby followed Freud’s line of thinking in developing his influential attach- ment theory. Bowlby argued that the mothers of small children should devote themselves exclusively to nurturing their offspring and that employment at this time of life was inadvisable. In his words: “The mother of young children is not free, or at least should not be free, to earn.”
17

Women with an acute case of “penis envy” (an obsolete Freudian idea that hung on well into the seventies) obviously wanted to compete with, rather than nurture, the men in their lives, be it coworkers, hus- bands, or sons. Although a few iconoclastic psychoanalysts, namely Karen Horney and Clara Thompson, understood penis envy symboli- cally as women’s desire to acquire the privileges that traditionally accrue to men, most psychiatrists accepted Freud’s formulations literally.

Sylvia Plath’s portrait of an obtuse male psychiatrist in her 1963 novel
The Bell Jar,
based on her experience of mental breakdown ten years ear- lier, was only an exaggerated version of contemporary psychiatric lan- guage and practice. With the photo of his beautiful wife and two children on his desk, Dr. Gordon was totally incapable of understanding the anxieties that had driven
The Bell Jar
’s protagonist, Esther Green-

wood, to the verge of madness. Esther’s collapse (like Sylvia’s) was related to her father’s early death, leaving her vulnerable for the rest of her life, and to conflicts she experienced at a very deep level between her desire to be a writer and social imperatives for her to become a wife and mother.
18
Dr. Gordon’s prescription of shock treatment, instead of improving her condition, pushed her over the edge into a suicide attempt. Esther had better fortune in the choice of her second psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, a woman. Yet she, too, could not get away from the psycho- analytic clichés of her day. She rewarded Esther for being able to say that she hated her mother. It was the heyday of mother vilification, which had found popular expression in Philip Wylie’s best-selling
Gen- eration of Vipers
(1942) and in psychiatrist Edward Strecker’s theory that overprotective mothering was responsible for the 2 million men who had been turned down by the draft in World War II. With little understanding of the genetic nature of schizophrenia, psychiatrists embraced the term “schizophrenogenic mother” to account for schizo-

phrenic children, and for any number of family and social ills as well.

Wives were seen as key to the success or failure not only of their children, but also of their marriages. If a marriage went bad, it was pri- marily
her
fault, not his. A senior Harvard psychiatrist could write with impunity in the early sixties: “Just as the fate of personality develop- ment hangs largely on the effect of mother on child, so, I believe, the fate of a marriage hangs largely on the effect of wife on husband. . . . overwhelmingly the flow of crucial influence is from the woman to the man, requiring adaptation or defense on his part.... It is the woman who ‘makes or breaks’ a marriage.”
19
Consciously and unconsciously, most married women knew they would be blamed more than their hus- bands if the marriage broke down, and most did not want to resemble the bitchy wives, dissatisfied with their lives and intent upon destroy- ing their husbands, pictured in such popular fiction as Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1938) and Sloan Wil- son’s
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(1955).

A totally different picture of women appeared in Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex,
published in France in 1949 and translated into English in 1953. This work, the longest and most incisive French study of women’s situation, can be credited with the beginning of what was sub- sequently called the second wave of feminism. De Beauvoir took a dim

view of marriage—she and Jean-Paul Sartre, her companion from 1929 until 1980, rejected it outright as a bourgeois institution incompatible with existential freedom. She was even harder on motherhood, which she believed made women passive vessels of procreation rather than active creators of their own destinies. In some ways her analysis seems dated, but she was right on the mark in at least two respects: her under- standing that gender is almost entirely socially constructed, as she phrased it in the now famous statement, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” and her conviction that women would always be the second sex as long as they depended on men for economic support. Both of these positions became credos of the feminist movement in the decades to come.

But neither de Beauvoir in France nor Sylvia Plath in America could be considered “representative” women of their time and place. A more likely candidate in America might be the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, depicted in the July 1953 issue of
Woman’s Home Companion
as “no bluestocking feminist” and praised by
Better Homes and Gardens
for not attempting “to become an intellectual.”
20
Implicity, she was being com- pared with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had allied herself with several liberal causes, including the Equal Rights Amendments (ERA).

Throughout the fifties, liberals and conservatives opposed each other on numerous women’s issues, some of which are still with us today. The legality of contraception was still being debated in Connecti- cut in the early fifties, and an unwritten ban on contraceptive counsel- ing in New York public hospitals was not removed until the end of the decade. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved an oral contraceptive (Enovid and Norlutin) for the subsequent year. Hence- forth the pill would be the preferred mode of contraception for Ameri- can females. It was easier to use than the clunky diaphram and provided almost 100 percent protection. Whatever health risks it entailed for long-term users were not yet known. In many ways, the introduction of the pill marked the end of the fifties, both literally and figuratively.

In her aptly titled book,
The Way We Never Were,
Stephanie Coontz revealed the underside of the mythical fifties.
21
Alcoholism, suicide, madness, family violence, and wife and child abuse were all known to

social workers, psychiatrists, ministers, priests, and rabbis, but they were, for the most part, hidden from the general public. Even the pro- fessionals did not take some of these subjects seriously. In fact, there was virtually no scholarly research into domestic violence until the late seventies; previously it had not only been ignored by social scientists, the medical profession, and police officers, but “explained away” as the inevitable consequence of wives who relentlessly goaded their hus- bands. Psychiatrist Helene Deutsch gave credence to this blame-the- victim view with her elaborate theories of female passivity and masochism. Similarly, psychoanalysts were wont to understand incest as provoked by a “seductive” girl child. Marital unhappiness caused by these and other sources would result in the eventual divorce of between one-quarter and one-third of all couples married in the 1950s.

Some inkling that a significant number of American wives were dis- satisfied with domesticity was beginning to seep into the popular press. In 1956,
McCall’s
ran a piece titled “The Mother Who Ran Away,” and
Ladies’ Home Journal
devoted an issue to “The Plight of the Young Mother.”
22
In September 1960, a
Redbook
article entitled “Why Mothers Feel Trapped” painted a picture of “desperately anxious” homemakers who felt “pushed and pulled” by the multiple demands of their roles as wives, mothers, and community members. One
Redbook
housewife described her typical morning as resembling an old Marx Brothers comedy.