Jennifer Colton, "Why I Quit Working," Good Housekeeping (September 1951)
In this 1951 magazine article, a housewife explains why she found work outside the home to be unsatisfying.
Topic: Women in a Conforming Culture
Please study this document and answer the following questions.
In this excerpt, a woman described both the positives and negatives of being a working mother in the 1950s. Like many women in her generation she eventually decided to quit working and to devote her time to her children, her home, and her husband. Carefully consider the positive and negative aspects of her decision. What kind of jobs did she assume women could get outside of their homes? Was that accurate for all women during this period? What kind of home and standard of living was assumed in her description of being a housewife? How many homes fit that ideal? Why did so many married women continue to work outside of the home despite cultural pressure?
Jennifer Colton "Why I Quit Working" Good Housekeeping, September 1951, 53.
Just over a year ago, I was suffering from that feeling of guilt and despondency familiar to most working mothers who have small children. During the hours I spent in the office, an accusing voice chanted continuously, "You should be home with the children." I couldn't have agreed more, which only created an additional tension: the frustrated anger of one who knows what is right but sees no way of doing it. Children need clothes as well as attention; they must be nourished with food as well as love.
Some mothers can eventually talk themselves out of this feeling; they conclude that the material advantages they can provide are worth more than their presence in the home. Some, unable to rationalize this way, gradually grow more despondent. Others try to find a compromise. For the fortunate ones, the problem is solved by a substantial increase in the husband's income.
One day in 1950, I finally worked out a compromise: a way to be at home with the children and still do some work for which I'd be paid. At that moment, I knew only two things: that I would never again rage against a delayed subway for costing me my painfully brief hour with the children, and that at last I would be able to serve a dinner that took more than half an hour to prepare and put on the table.
A year has passed, and I've had time to judge the advantages and disadvantages of leaving my office job. How they will total up ten years from now, I don't know. But here is my balance sheet of the results to date.
Lost
The great alibi: work. My job, and the demands it made on me, were my always accepted excuses for everything and anything: for spoiled children, neglected husband, mediocre food; for being late, tired, preoccupied, conversationally limited, bored, and boring.
The weekly check. And with that went many extravagances and self- indulgences. I no longer had the pleasure of giving showy gifts (the huge doll, the monogrammed pajamas) and the luxury of saying "My treat." And without the extra money, I couldn't rectify or camouflage such mistakes as an unbecoming hat, a too-big canasta debt, a too-small pair of shoes.
The special camaraderie and the common language. The warm but impersonal and unprying relationship among working people is one of the most rewarding things about having a job. People who work, even in unallied fields, speak rather the same language, which can't be translated for the uninitiated without going into the whole psychology of business. I missed the crutch of shoptalk when, later, I struggled to reach people through interests outside the business world.
One pretty fallacy. For some reason, most working mothers seem to think they could retire with perfect ease; that they could readily adjust themselves to their new role. I don't think so. When you start to devote all your time to homemaking, you run into a whole new set of problems. The transition from part-time to full-time mother is difficult to make.
One baseless vanity. I realize now (and still blush over it) that during my working days I felt that my ability to earn was an additional flower in my wreath of accomplishments. Unconsciously -- and sometimes consciously -- I thought how nice it was for my husband to have a wife who could also bring in money. But one day I realized that my office job was only a substitution for the real job I'd been "hired" for: that of being purely a wife and mother.
The sense of personal achievement. A working woman is someone in her own right, doing work that disinterested parties consider valuable enough to pay for. The satisfactions of housekeeping are many, but they are not quite the same.
The discipline of an office. The demands made on you by business are much easier to fulfill than the demands you make on yourself. Self-discipline is hard to achieve.
Praise for a good piece of work. No one can expect her husband to tell her how beautifully clean she keeps the house or how well she makes the beds. And other people take her housewifely arts for granted. But a business coup attracts attention.
Found
A role. At first I found it hard to believe that being a woman is something in itself. I had always felt that a woman had to do something more than manage a household to prove her worth. Later, when I understood the role better, it took on unexpected glamour. Though I still wince a lit- tie at the phrase "wife and mother," I feel quite sure that these words soon will sound as satisfying to me as "actress" or "buyer" or "secretary" or "president."
New friends and a wider conversational range. It was sad to drift apart from my office colleagues, but their hours and, alas, their interests were now different from mine. So I began to make friends with people whose problems, hours, and responsibilities were the same as mine. I gratefully record that my friendship with them is even deeper than it was with business associates. Although we share the same pattern of life, we are not bound by it. As for conversation, I had been brought up on the satirical tales of the housewife who bored her husband with tiresome narratives about the grocer and the broken stove. Maybe it was true in those days. But not any more. I've had to exercise my mind to keep up with these new friends of mine. They have presented me with that handsome gift of expanded interests.
Normalcy. The psychiatrists say there is no such thing, but that's what it feels like. My relationship with my children is sounder, for instance. I have fewer illusions about them. I have found I can get bored with them. Exhausted by them. Irritated to the point of sharp words. At first I was shocked, and then I realized that when I worked and we had so little time together, we had all played our "Sunday best." The result: strained behavior and no real knowledge of one another. Now I'm not so interesting to them as I was. I'm not so attentive and full of fun, because I'm myself. I scold, I snap, I listen when I have time. I laugh, I praise, I read to them when I have time. In fact, I'm giving a pretty good representation of a human being, and as the children are going to spend most of their lives trying to get along with human beings, they might as well learn right now that people's behavior is variable.
The luxury of free time. This is one of the crown jewels of retirement. The morning or afternoon that occasionally stretches before me, happily blank, to be filled with a visit to a museum or a movie, a chat with a friend, an unscheduled visit to the zoo with the children, the production of the elaborate dish I'd always meant to try, or simply doing nothing, is a great boon.
Leisure. The pleasure of dawdling over a second cup of coffee in the morning can be understood only by those who have, sometime in their lives, gulped the first cup, seized gloves and bag, and rushed out of the house to go to work.
Handwork. This may seem trivial, but making things at home is one of the pleasures the businesswoman is usually deprived of. Homemade cookies, presents, dresses, parties, and relationships can be worth their weight in gold. Intimacy. The discovery of unusual and unexpected facets in the imaginations of children, which rarely reveal themselves in brief, tense sessions, is very rewarding.
Improved Appearance. Shinier hair, nicer hands, better manicures, are the products of those chance twenty-minute free periods that turn up in the busiest days of women who don't go to business. Of course, such periods crop up in an office, too; but you're not allowed to make use of them for personal affairs.
Proof Positive. If I hadn't retired, I would have remained forever in that thicket of self-delusion called thwarted potentials. It was almost too easy: the shrug, the brave little smile, and the words "Of course, I've always wanted to write (or paint or run for Congress), but since I'm working, I never have time." And it's time that gives you proof positive of what you can and cannot do.
Relaxation. Slowly, I'm learning to forget the meaning of the word tension. While I was working, I was tense from the moment I woke up in the morning until I fell into bed at night.
There is no way of measuring or comparing unrelated work. I don't know whether I work harder or less hard now. I walk farther, but there are often free periods during the day to enjoy as I like. I do a greater variety of things, but at my own speed, and without the pressure common to all offices. I get sleepy instead of tired.
Sometimes I ask myself, "What would persuade me to go back?" And my answer is, "Barring big medical expenses or a real need for something for the children or my husband, nothing." And I mean it.
But I'm glad I had the experience of working. I can understand my husband's delight in his work, and I can still talk sympathetically with friends who work. And what else could make me so acutely conscious of every blessing and so humbly aware of the potentials of my new role?
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A Purpose for Modern Woman (1955), Adlai E. Stevenson
Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1952 and 1956, defended the traditional role of women in American society.
Topic: Women in a Conforming Culture
Please study this document and answer the following questions.
Adlai E. Stevenson (1900–1965) was the popular Illinois governor who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956. A brilliant, highly educated man, he held progressive opinions about many subjects. But as expressed in this commencement address at all-female Smith College, he harbored traditional notions about women's roles.
I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. The peoples of the West are still struggling with the problems of a free society and just now are in dire trouble. For to create a free society is at all times a precarious and audacious experiment. Its bedrock is the concept of man as an end in himself. But violent pressures are constantly battering away at this concept, reducing man once again to subordinate status, limiting his range of choice, abrogating his responsibility and returning him to his primitive status of anonymity in the social group. I think you can be more helpful in identifying, isolating and combating these pressures, this virus, than you perhaps realize.
Let me put it this way: individualism has promoted technological advance, technology promoted increased specialization, and specialization promoted an ever closer economic interdependence between specialties.
As the old order disintegrated into this confederation of narrow specialties, each pulling in the direction of its particular interest, the individual person tended to become absorbed literally by his particular function in society. Having sacrificed wholeness of mind and breadth of outlook to the demands of their specialties, individuals no longer responded to social stimuli as total human beings; rather they reacted in partial ways as members of an economic class or industry or profession whose concern was with some limited self-interest.
Thus this typical Western man, or typical Western husband, operates well in the realm of means, as the Romans did before him. But outside his specialty, in the realm of ends, he is apt to operate poorly or not at all. And this neglect of the cultivation of more mature values can only mean that his life, and the life of the society he determines, will lack valid purpose, however busy and even profitable it may be.
And here's where you come in: to restore valid, meaningful purpose to life in your home; to beware of instinctive group reaction to the forces which play upon you and yours, to watch for and arrest the constant gravitational pulls to which we are all exposed—your workaday husband especially—in our specialized, fragmented society, that tend to widen the breach between reason and emotion, between means and ends.
And let me also remind you that you will live, most of you, in an environment in which "facts," the data of the senses, are glorified, and values-judgments are assigned inferior status as mere "matters of opinion." It is an environment in which art is often regarded as an adornment of civilization rather than a vital element of it, while philosophy is not only neglected but deemed faintly disreputable because "it never gets you anywhere." Even religion, you will find, commands a lot of earnest allegiance that is more verbal than real, more formal than felt.
You may be hitched to one of these creatures we call "Western man" and I think part of your job is to keep him Western, to keep him truly purposeful, to keep him whole. In short—while I have had very little experience as a wife or mother—I think one of the biggest jobs for many of you will be to frustrate the crushing and corrupting effects of specialization, to integrate means and ends, to develop that balanced tension of mind and spirit which can be properly called "integrity."
This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great advantages. In the first place, it is home—you can do it in the living-room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you're really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he's watching television!
And, secondly, it is important work worthy of you, whoever you are, or your education, whatever it is, because we will defeat totalitarian, authoritarian ideas only by better ideas; we will frustrate the evils of vocational specialization only by the virtues of intellectual generalization. Since Western rationalism and Eastern spiritualism met in Athens and that mighty creative fire broke out, collectivism in various forms has collided with individualism time and again. This twentieth-century collision, this "crisis" we are forever talking about, will be won at last not on the battlefield but in the head and heart.
So you see, I have some rather large notions about you and what you have to do to rescue us wretched slaves of specialization and group thinking from further shrinkage and contraction of mind and spirit. But you will have to be alert or you may get caught yourself—even in the kitchen or the nursery—by the steady pressures with which you will be surrounded. . . .
Now, as I have said, women, especially educated women such as you, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy, and to play a direct part in the unfolding drama of our free society. But I am told that nowadays the young wife or mother is short of time for the subtle arts, that things are not what they used to be; that once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debates for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the Consumers' Guide. Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers. (Or do they any longer?)
Now I hope I have not painted too depressing a view of your future, for the fact is that Western marriage and motherhood are yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society. Their basis is the recognition in women as well as men of the primacy of personality and individuality. I have just returned from sub-Sahara Africa where the illiteracy of the African mother is a formidable obstacle to the education and advancement of her child and where polygamy and female labor are still the dominant system.
The point is that whether we talk of Africa, Islam or Asia, women "never had it so good" as you do. And in spite of the difficulties of domesticity, you have a way to participate actively in the crisis in addition to keeping yourself and those about you straight on the difference between means and ends, mind and spirit, reason and emotion—not to mention keeping your man straight on the differences between Botticelli and Chianti. . . .
In modern America the home is not the boundary of a woman's life. There are outside activities aplenty. But even more important is the fact, surely, that what you have learned and can learn will fit you for the primary task of making homes and whole human beings in whom the rational values of freedom, tolerance, charity and freeinquiry can take root.
[From Adlai E. Stevenson, "A Purpose for Modern Woman,"
Women's Home Companion (September 1955):30-31. Reprinted by permission of Adlai Stevenson III.]
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Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan
In this 1963 publication, Betty Friedan uses women's experiences in the 1950s to question the limitations placed on them.
Topic: Women in a Conforming Culture
Please study this document and answer the following questions.
The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home. The magazine surely does not leave out sex; the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine image, women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.
This was the image of the American woman in the year Castro led a revolution in Cuba and men were trained to travel into outer space; the year that the African continent brought forth new nations, and a plane whose speed is greater than the speed of sound broke up a Summit Conference; the year artists picketed a great museum in protest against the hegemony of abstract art; physicists explored the concept of anti-matter; astronomers, because of new radio telescopes, had to alter their concepts of the expanding universe; biologists made a breakthrough in the fundamental chemistry of life; and Negro youth in Southern schools forced the United States, for the first time since the Civil War, to face a moment of democratic truth. But this magazine, published for over 5,000,000 American women, almost all of whom have been through high school and nearly half to college, contained almost no mention of the world beyond the home. In the second half of the twentieth century in America, woman's world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home. And this was no anomaly of a single issue of a single women's magazine.
At this point, the writers and editors spent an hour listening to Thurgood Marshall on the inside story of the desegregation battle, and its possible effect on the presidential election. "Too bad I can't run that story," one editor said. "But you just can't link it to woman's world."
As I listened to them, a German phrase echoed in my mind—"Kinder, Küche, Kirche," the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why, then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to "one position, one role, one occupation"? Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?
In 1939, the heroines of women's magazine stores were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today. They were young in the same way that the American hero has always been young: they were New Women, creating with a gay determined spirit a new identity for women—a moving into a future that was going to be different from the past. The majority of heroines in the four major women's magazines (then Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion) were career women—who loved and were loved by men. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination—the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters, saleswomen—were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired, not unattractive to men, that men were drawn to them as much for their spirit and character as for their looks.
These were the mass women's magazines—in their heyday. The stories were conventional: girl-meets-boy or girl-gets-boy. But very often this was not the major theme of the story. These heroines were usually marching toward some goal or vision of their own, struggling with some problem of work or the world, when they found their man. And this New Woman, less fluffily feminine, so independent and determined to find a new life of her own, was the heroine of a different kind of love story. She was less aggressive in pursuit of a man. Her passionate involvement with the world, her own sense of herself as an individual, her self-reliance, gave a different flavor to her relationship with the man.
These stories may not have been great literature. But the identity of their heroines seemed to say something about the housewives who, then as now, read the women's magazines. These magazines were not written for career women. The New Woman heroines were the ideal of yesterday's housewives; they reflected the dreams, mirrored the yearning for identity and the sense of possibility that existed for women then. And if women could not have these dreams for themselves, they wanted their daughters to have them. They wanted their daughters to be more than housewives,to go out in the world that had been denied them.
As for not earning any money, the argument goes, let the housewife compute the cost of her services. Women can save more money by their managerial talents inside the home than they can bring into it by outside work. As for woman's spirit being broken by the boredom of household tasks, maybe the genius of some women has been thwarted, but "a world full of feminine genius, but poor in children, would come rapidly to an end. . . . Great men have great mothers."
The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.
But the new image this mystique gives to American women is the old image: "Occupation: housewife." The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women; it presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned. Beneath the sophisticated trappings, it simply makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence—as it was lived by women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children—into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.
Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother. As swiftly as in a dream, the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.
The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children.
Coined by the publishers of McCall's in 1954, the concept "togetherness" was seized upon avidly as a movement of spiritual significance by advertisers, ministers, newspaper editors. For a time, it was elevated into virtually a national purpose. But very quickly there was sharp social criticism, and bitter jokes about "togetherness" as a substitute for larger human goals—for men. Women were taken to task for making their husbands do housework, instead of letting them pioneer in the nation and the world. Why, it was asked, should men with the capacities of statesmen, anthropologists, physicists, poets, have to wash dishes and diaper babies on weekday evenings or Saturday mornings when they might use those extra hours to fulfill larger commitments to their society?
But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of women's loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?
In 1956, at the peak of togetherness, the bored editors of McCall's ran a little article called "The Mother Who Ran Away." To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. "It was our moment of truth," said a former editor. "We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy."
But by then the new image of American woman, "Occupation: housewife," had hardened into a mystique, unquestioned and permitting no questions.
By the time I started writing for women's magazines, in the fifties, it was simply taken for granted by editors, and accepted as an immutable fact of life by writers, that women were not interested in politics, life outside the United States, national issues, art, science, ideas, adventure, education, or even their own communities, except where they could be sold through their emotions as wives and mothers.
Politics, for women, became Mamie's clothes and the Nixons' home life. Out of conscience, a sense of duty, the Ladies' Home Journal might run a series like "Political Pilgrim's Progress," showing women trying to improve their children's schools and playgrounds. But even approaching politics through mother love did not really interest women, it was thought in the trade. Everyone knew those readership percentages. And editor of Redbook ingeniously tried to bring the bomb down to the feminine level by showing the emotions of a wife whose husband sailed into a contaminated area.
"Women can't take an idea, an issue, pure," men who eidted the mass women's magazines agreed. "It had to be translated in terms they can understand as women." This was so well understood by those who wrote for women's magazines that a natural childbirth expert submitted an article to a leading woman's magazine called "How to Have a Baby in a Atom Bomb Shelter." "The article was not well written," an editor told me, "or we might have bought it." According to the mystique, women, in their mysterious femininity, might be interested in the concrete biological details fo having a baby in a bomb shelter, but never in the abstract idea of the bomb's power to destroy the human race.
Such a belief, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1960, a perceptive social psychologist showed me some sad statistics which seemed to prove unmistakably that American women under thirty-five are not interested in politics. "They may have the vote, but they don't dream about running for office," he told me. "If you write a political piece, they won't read it. You have to translate it into issues they can understand—romance, pregnancy, nursing, home furnishings, clothes. Run an article on the economy, or the race question, civil rights, and you'd think that women had nevr heard of them."
This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for "something more" in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity.
[From Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1974; originally published 1963), pp. 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43–44, 47–48, 50–51, 67.]
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