Marriage, a History (46 page)

By the mid-1970s an organized campaign against the changes that had been effected in gender roles and sexual norms was in full swing. Right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly led a successful fight against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. When Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, former Miss America Anita Bryant and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, soon-to-be founder of the self-styled Moral Majority movement, campaigned to repeal all laws man-dating equal treatment for what Bryant called “this human garbage.” Falwell warned that “so-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.”
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New groups were founded to bolster “traditional” marriage, and at that time any article by a reformed or repentant feminist was virtually guaranteed publication.

Nevertheless, the pace of change in marriage behavior accelerated after the mid-1970s, though the majority of the people who adopted “radical” new behaviors had either never heard of or disagreed with the radical critics of marriage and gender roles. Most women changed their attitudes toward work, marriage, and divorce only after they themselves had already gone to work or experienced divorce. In 1980 even Anita Bryant, by then divorced herself, told the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
“I guess I can better understand the gays’ and the feminists’ anger and frustration.”
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It is impossible to sort out neatly in order of importance all the factors that rearranged social and political life between the 1960s and the 1990s and in the process transformed marriage as well. Sometimes it is even hard to say which changes caused the transformation and which were consequences. But the changes were not effected by a single generation or a particular political ideology.
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Such a simplistic view ignores the fact that even as early as the end of the eighteenth century there were people warning that making personal happiness the goal of marriage could end up destroying the stability of the institution. And in the 1920s the subversive potential of making intimacy and sexual fulfillment the criteria for a successful marriage became crystal clear. The crisis of the 1920s was relegated to the back burner by the Depression of the 1930s and the turmoil of World War II. But when peace and prosperity returned in the 1950s, aspirations for personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction returned to center stage and were adopted by larger sectors of the population than had ever dared harbor such hopes before. As psychologist Abraham Maslow predicted in 1954, once people’s basic needs for survival and physical security were met, “higher order needs,” such as self-expression and high-quality relationships, began to take priority over material needs.
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Men and women initially tried to find fulfillment at home. But when marriage did not meet their heightened expectations, their discontent grew proportionately. The more people hoped to achieve personal happiness within marriage, the more critical they became of “empty” or unsatisfying relationships.
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Looking back on their lives a few decades later, men and women who had been in male breadwinner marriages in the 1950s and 1960s told interviewers that the division of labor in which they’d hoped to find fulfillment had so divided their lives that intimacy had become difficult, if not impossible. Wives were especially likely to regret their choices. Of women interviewed during the late 1950s and 1960s, even those who were content with their marriages almost always wanted a different life for their daughters. When it came to her daughter, one woman told interviewers in 1957, “I sure don’t want her to turn out to be just a housewife like myself.” Another explained to the researchers in 1958 that she hoped her daughters would “be more independent than I was.” A third, interviewed in 1959, said nearly the same thing: “I want them to have some goal in life besides being a housewife. I’d like to see them make a living so the house isn’t the end of all things.”
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What an interesting pattern, with what interesting implications for the future! A 1962 Gallup poll reported that American married women were very satisfied with their lives. But only 10 percent of the women in the same poll wanted their daughters to have the same lives that they had. Instead they wanted their daughters to postpone marriage and get more education.

These sentiments were not conscious endorsements of feminism. The 1950s housewives who wanted something different for their girls did not expect them to choose lifelong careers. But they wanted their children to have more options for self-expression than their own lives had afforded. So they encouraged behavior in their daughters that, in combination with economic and political changes in the 1960s and 1970s, ended up overturning 1950s gender roles and marriage patterns.

Men had their own complaints about the typical family arrangement of the 1950s. In fact, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that it was men, not women, who first revolted against the male breadwinner marriage. Even before Betty Friedan voiced the discontents of the trapped housewife in her 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique,
men were detailing the discontents of the trapped breadwinner. In 1963, Friedan described the loneliness and alienation of housewives as “the problem that has no name.” But men had named the problem of the alienated
breadwinner
a decade earlier. They called it conformity. In his 1955 best seller
Must You Conform?,
Robert Lindner wrote that when a man tried to live up to all of society’s expectations at work and at home, he became “a slave in mind and body . . . a lost creature without a separate identity.” In his 1957 book
The Crack in the Picture Window,
John Keats described the suburbs as “jails of the soul.”
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In 1953 Hugh Hefner founded
Playboy
magazine as a voice of revolt against male family responsibilities. Hefner urged men to “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved”—or, worse yet, financially responsible. In
Playboy
’s first issue, an article titled “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953” assailed women who expected men to support them. Another article the same year lamented the number of “sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land.” By 1956 the magazine was selling more than one million copies a month.
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Dissatisfaction was as high among the many people who subscribed to 1950s ideals of marital intimacy as among those who dissented from them. Historian Eva Moskowitz argues that the very advice columnists who were trying to help women save their marriages were also teaching wives to articulate their grievances. Alongside lessons in femininity and homemaking, the women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s nourished a “discourse of discontent” by promoting intimacy and self-fulfillment as the purpose of marriage. It was by reading about what marriage
ought
to be that many women saw what their own marriages weren’t.
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As early as 1957 divorce rates started rising again in the United States and several other countries. In fact, one of every three American couples who married in the 1950s eventually divorced.
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This acceleration of divorce rates began well before no-fault divorce was legalized in the 1970s. By the end of the 1950s grounds for “fault” divorce had become so routine in many jurisdictions as to be laughable. Nearly every plaintiff testified in almost exactly the same words, describing behavior that included the exact minimum requirements and even the precise legal phrases needed for a fault-based divorce. “The number of cruel spouses in Chicago, both male and female, who strike their marriage partners in the face exactly twice, without provocation, leaving visible marks, is remarkable,” noted the author of one 1950s divorce study.
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By the 1960s divorce by mutual consent, “disguised as fault divorce,” had already become “routine legal procedure” in many countries. And when women’s heightened expectations of personal fulfillment interacted with their growing economic independence, divorce accelerated further. The spread of no-fault divorce in the 1970s and 1980s was more a result of the rising discontent with marriage than a cause.
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The movement of married women into the workforce was another trend that had its roots in the 1950s. Every single decade of the twentieth century had seen an increase in the proportion of women in the workforce, and the trend accelerated in the postwar economy, which had growing numbers of low-paid clerical, sales, and service jobs to fill. Women were considered ideal workers because they were not entrenched in the then heavily unionized industrial jobs and could be paid less than men with families to support.
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But because women were marrying so young in the 1950s, there simply were not enough unmarried women available to fill all the open jobs. In response, businesses reorganized their hiring policies to recruit married women, and the government relaxed legal barriers to women’s participation in the economy. As more wives entered the workforce, a new market opened up for such household conveniences as wash-and-wear clothes and prepared foods, which in turn made it easier for wives and mothers to participate and remain in the workforce.

As long as women were concentrated in low-paid jobs, they typically saw their work as just a supplement to their husbands’ income and they adjusted their time in the labor force to the schedules of their husbands and the rhythms of motherhood. Women got jobs in the early years of adulthood, quit their jobs during the child-rearing years, then went back to work again after the children had grown up.

But as women saw more opportunities in the workplace before and after marriage, their aspirations grew. More women postponed marriage to complete college. Many women who had no college plans followed their mothers’ advice and spent a few years enjoying the life of a single working girl before settling down to marriage. The year before Betty Friedan put a feminist spin on the boredom of housewives, Helen Gurley Brown, influential editor of
Cosmopolitan
magazine, told women that marriage was “insurance for the
worst
years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband,” she asserted. “You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the bunch.”
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As women stayed single longer, gaining experience at work and school, their personal aspirations and self-confidence grew. But so did their frustration at the remaining limits on their progress. This altered perspective paved the way for a broad-based women’s rights movement that would further accelerate women’s entry into the workforce and higher education, on better terms.
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The expansion of married women’s employment in the 1950s had been spearheaded by women with a high-school education or less. But the improvement of work opportunities and the declining challenge of full-time homemaking made work more attractive to educated middle-class wives. By the end of the 1960s college-educated wives were more likely to be employed than wives with only a high-school degree. The very women with husbands who earned enough to support a family were the ones most likely to reject full-time homemaking.
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Until women had access to safe and effective contraception that let them control when to bear children and how many to have, there was only so far they could go in reorganizing their lives and their marriages. That too was on the horizon by the 1950s, as Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates worked tirelessly to find a way for women to avoid conception without having to depend on their partners’ cooperation. Sanger helped fund the invention of the first oral contraceptive in 1951. But only in 1960 did a birth control pill, Enovid, become commercially available. The impact was instantaneous, forever altering the relationship between sex and reproduction.

The contraceptive revolution of the 1960s was a much more dramatic break with tradition than the so-called sexual revolution, which had actually been in the making for eighty years. Premarital sex increased gradually but steadily from the 1880s through the 1940s. During the 1950s there was an ideological backlash to the sexual permissiveness of the wartime era, but over the course of the fifties many women came to accept what some researchers have called a transitional sexual standard. Premarital sex came to be viewed as acceptable for men under most conditions and for women if they were in love.

Women in that decade clung to the notion that sex was acceptable only with someone they loved because they still had to worry about pregnancy. A woman had to be prepared to marry her sexual partner if she became pregnant, and she had to make sure that her partner knew this was her expectation. So women continued to be the ones who set the boundaries of sexual behavior in the 1950s, as they had in the 1920s. By the end of the 1950s, however, claimed American sociologist Ira Reiss in 1961, the typical teenage girl had become only a “half-willing guardian” of such boundaries.
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Even this hesitation disappeared after the invention of the pill.

“All these years I’ve stayed at home while you had all your fun,” sang the legendary country singer Loretta Lynn. “And every year that’s gone by another baby’s come. There’s gonna be some changes made right here on Nursery Hill. You’ve set this chicken your last time, ’cause now I’ve got the Pill.”
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For the first time in history any woman with a modicum of educational and economic resources could, if she wanted to, separate sex from childbirth, lifting the specter of unwanted pregnancy that had structured women’s lives for thousands of years. Within five years of FDA approval, more than six million American women were taking the pill. By 1970, 60 percent of all adult women, unmarried as well as married, were using the birth control pill or an intrauterine device or had been sterilized. Birthrates fell even lower than they had been during the Depression.
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