A History of the Wife (56 page)

Yet nothing could turn back the tide of protest that was sweeping across the country—protest against racial and sexual discrimination, against antiabortion laws, and, increasingly, against the Vietnam War. Married women marched in countless antiwar demonstrations. Black and white, they marched in civil rights protests in the South. They clamored at the White House on Mother’s Day for “Rights, Not Roses.”

Not since the suffragist movement had so many women, single and married, taken to the streets.

A later cartoon captured the paradox of married women as political demonstrators. Wearing an “ERA NOW” T-shirt and holding an “ERA YES” sign, a middle-aged wife sits dejectedly on the front porch of her house. Her husband in bedroom slippers, with a newspaper in his hand and a dog at his side, speaks to her in two separate captions. “You have fought a good fight, Madeline.... You have finished the course.... You have kept the faith.... But now it’s time for you to get your carcass into the house and cook supper!”
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Whatever the extent of their wives’ political involvement and public activity, many men wanted them back in the kitchen.

Yet by 1970, 40 percent of wives and two-thirds of mothers with children under the age of six were in the labor force.
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The expanding female presence in the workplace was steadily contributing to a new picture of American womanhood, one that showed up in an early 1970s poll: nearly 70 percent of college women agreed with the state- ment that “the idea that a woman’s place is in the home is non- sense.”
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The seventies began with a spate of books that laid out controversial theories on women’s liberation. Shulamith Firestone’s radical
Dialects of Sex
(1970) argued that the only way to free women from male oppres- sion was to diffuse the burden of childbearing and child-rearing to soci- ety as a whole. She went so far as to propose test-tube babies maturing outside the female body—a
Brave New World
solution that even other feminists were not quick to embrace. Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
(1970) revolutionized the reading of certain male authors, such as

D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, by showing to what extent their depictions of sex were sadistically violent to women. Germaine Greer’s
Female Eunuch
(1971) turned men, rather than women, into sex objects. Women, she argued, would not be fully liberated until they adopted the same sexual freedom that men enjoyed, unencumbered by family and marriage.
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Gloria Steinem launched the magazine
Ms.
that was to play such a crucial role in consciousness-raising throughout the nation. Its preview issue of December 1971 included such stories as “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” “Raising Kids without Sex Roles,” “Women Tell the

Truth about their Abortions,” “Welfare is a Woman’s Issue,” and the classic essay “Why I Want a Wife.” The cover showed a pregnant woman with eight arms, each one holding either a frying pan, a clock, a duster, a typewriter, a steering wheel, an iron, a telephone, and a mir- ror. Like Friedan’s book eight years earlier, Steinem’s magazine pressed an alarm button in tens of thousands of American homes.

The most popular representation of liberated womanhood, and one that marked a turning point in women’s fiction, was Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
(1972). The novel’s married heroine wrestles with the two con- flicting imperatives of her age—to be a free sexual being and to be a wife. While she fantasizes (like a man) of sex on the run, she cannot free herself from notions of dependency and commitment. In the end, she returns to her husband . . . but not without titillating a whole generation of female readers who were asking similar questions about themselves. Alex Comfort’s
Joy of Sex
(1972), while neither feminist nor female- authored, offered a how-to manual that inspired men and women to experiment in lovemaking as if they were concocting a delectable meal. The Boston Women’s Health Collective’s
Our Bodies, Ourselves
(1973) not only taught women to look at themselves through their own eyes, instead of through the eyes of male doctors, but also launched a grass- roots movement that would bring to public attention women’s health issues, such as breast-feeding, breast cancer, and the underrepresenta-

tion of women in medical research.

The early seventies produced many significant changes affecting women, and none more significant than the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Roe v. Wade
that invalidated all state laws restricting abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. The decision to abort in the first trimester of pregnancy was to be left to the woman and her doctor. During the second trimester, the states could regulate the abortion procedure in the interest of protecting the health of the woman, and in the third trimester, they could even prohibit it. For the first time in American history, the highest court laid out legal guidelines permitting abortion. Although numerous conservative and right-wing individuals and organizations have since agi- tated against this decision and made abortion difficult to obtain,
Roe v. Wade
remains a landmark moment in the ongoing struggle for women to acquire reproductive control over their bodies.

The
Roe v. Wade
decision was related to the freer sexuality that had

been gaining ground in America since the revelations of the Kinsey reports. By the time that Masters and Johnson (Dr. William H. and Dr. Virginia E.) were amassing data for their books on sexuality in the six- ties, it was no longer a matter of interviewing subjects about their sex- ual proclivities, but of recording their arousal and climax in live performances.
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From their laboratory, where they monitored individu- als with sophisticated recording systems, Masters and Johnson studied the techniques that did or did not lead to male and female orgasm. For one thing, they thoroughly debunked the idea of two types of female orgasm: there was only one type, and that occurred most easily through direct stimulation of the clitoris. By deemphasizing penetration and the goal of simultaneous orgasm, Masters and Johnson gave many women permission to achieve orgasm in ways other than the missionary posi- tion. Moreover, if female orgasm was largely a matter of technique, then failure to orgasm was treatable. Like Kinsey and others before them, Masters and Johnson believed that sexual problems caused the majority of divorces, and that sex therapy—a field they helped to create—could help couples stay together.

Throughout the seventies, many surveys tracked women’s sexuality. The 1976
Hite Report,
instead of emphasizing heterosexual intercourse, counseled women to use whatever means best suited them—masturba- tion, a vibrator, oral sex, anything that brought about the elusive orgasm, with or without a male partner.

In response to the
Hite Report, Redbook
magazine conducted its own survey. It drew an amazing 100,000 responses from married women and painted a picture of overall sexual satisfaction: 63 percent of the
Redbook
respondents reported they experienced orgasm always or almost always with their male partners. Thirty-percent would have liked even more sex.

My own contribution to this type of investigation began in the late seventies at the Center for Research on Women (now the Institute for Research on Women and Gender) at Stanford University. With two graduate student researchers, I queried married women alumnae from the class of 1954 at Stanford University and Wellesley College, each of whom had at least one college-aged daughter.
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A total of 141 moth- ers—93 from Stanford and 48 from Wellesley—completed a question- naire that provided information about their sexual attitudes and behavior from their high school years until the time of the survey.

The mothers were typically forty-five- or forty-six-year-old home- makers who, in two out of three cases, worked part- or full-time out- side the house. They were, for the most part, still married to their first husbands, who pursued careers in business and the professions. They had on average three or four children, although some had as many as eight and some as few as one. This largely upper-middle-class white sample differed in one major respect from the Kinsey women: only 6 percent said they had experienced sexual intercourse before marriage, though they had engaged in kissing and petting to a considerable extent. Did this low incidence of premarital sex mean that the Wellesley and Stanford women were not telling the truth, or that they were more protected, or that they exercized more self-control than other women of their time? Their most positive experience was not of sex, but of the birth of their first child (91 percent), followed by their first love experi- ence (86 percent).

When they considered their present lives in early middle age, there were both losses and gains. On the negative side of the ledger, some women felt themselves “waning” as sexual beings. They expressed con- cerns around a sense of physical decline in appearance, in health, and in other premenopausal problems that contributed to a feeling of sexual inadequacy. They also felt vulnerable to the possibility of divorce, which had notably increased throughout America in the twenty-five years since they had left college. On the positive side, the majority of women indicated they were more comfortable with themselves. Their experience as wives and mothers had, for the most part, contributed to an overall sense of self-confidence and self-acceptance, including their sexual selves.

Seventy-four percent of the respondents believed their sexual atti- tudes had become more liberal since they were in college. They attrib- uted much of this change to their daughters. While expressing concerns that their daughters were too sexually free, they were inclined to accept the changing mores. For example, the large majority of moth- ers said they would assist their unmarried daughters in obtaining con- traception if they knew their daughters were sexually active. Half of the mothers said they would counsel their daughters to have abortions if they knew their daughters were pregnant and unmarried. Less than half of the mothers expected their daughters to remain virgins until mar- ried. Homosexuality, however, was the one area where increased sexual

liberality was not in evidence. While the mothers tolerated their daugh- ters’ premarital sexual experiences with males, they were not ready to accept lesbian relationships. Ninety percent responded “very negative” or “negative” to the question “How would you feel if your daughter had a homosexual experience?”

This picture of intellectually privileged, economically secure, mar- ried mothers who were in their late forties twenty years ago points to the adaptability of the American wife during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While they themselves had come of age in a period of relative sexual restraint, they had to adapt to the new sexual mores of their daughters. Most moved with the times and accepted for their daughters a mode of premarital freedom that they themselves had not known.

The world their daughters were facing was widely documented in the 1980 survey conducted by
Cosmopolitan
magazine. Outdoing even
Red- book
in numbers and shock value, the
Cosmo Report
was based on some 106,000 responses from sexually active single and married women. Their major findings confirmed the worst fears of those who believed the sexual revolution had gone too far. The great majority of women (95 percent in this survey) had sex before marriage. In comparison, Kinsey’s 50 percent now looked modest. Moreover, as Linda Wolfe noted in chapter one of the
Cosmo Report:
“there is little social stigma attached to premarital sex.”
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The overall findings reported in the
Cosmo Report
were not broken down into married and nonmarried, but a number of the letter writers identified themselves as wives. Anonymously, they spoke freely about their sexual experiences with their husbands and lovers. Oral sex? “Nothing could be better.” Anal sex? “Have enormous orgasms that way.” Solo sex? “Go to bed at night with Victor—my vibrator.” Faking orgasm? “Don’t see any harm in this, really.” Mate swapping? “We are doing it even in Virginia.”

Although most of the respondents were under forty, there were several older wives eager to share their most intimate activities. For example:

Seventy-two years. Best of health. Husband, 74. Also best of health. Married fifty years. Several children. All married. Very good sex life. At least five times a week until past 60. Now twice a week. Always

enjoyed sex but had first real orgasm at 69. A big thrill. As husband has slowed down some, he spends more time stimulating me. —A woman from Minnesota

Quite a few women wrote of extramarital affairs. One, a twenty-six- year-old market researcher from Connecticut, began an affair with a coworker that had lasted for three years. She mused: “I never thought when I kept working after I got married . . . that work was going to bring me such fringe benefits.”

A forty-one-year-old from Pennsylvania, married for twenty years, told a much grimmer story.

I grew up in a small steel town where almost everyone was Polish and everyone knew everyone else’s business . . . right after high school I made love in a car and got pregnant and got married. . . .

One day I met a telephone service repair man by accident and he started coming over for quickies in the afternoon. He wasn’t much warmer than my husband but still, it was quite a change from my drab life. Then some years later I met another man, different from the oth- ers. He brought me things, complimented me, wanted to take me places, and in bed he could hold out until I was completely satisfied. But he told his wife about us, and she in turn told my husband, and [he] threatened to kill us and that was the end of that. . . .

. . . We have three kids and two big dogs. I never get to go out with friends for an evening, never have sex, have no allowance or even much money to spend on groceries, am beginning to drink, am fifteen pounds overweight and have just about given up on life.