We’ve come a long way, women
Coontz’s book “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” has an academic title but reads like a sociological thriller.
The book looks back nearly 50 years to the publication of “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan’s 1963 examination of housewives who felt that something profound was missing in their lives.
Young people who find fascinating the TV series “Mad Men” – the smoking, pregnant women, the housewives numbing themselves with booze, the workplace sexism – will find in this book the reality behind the fiction.
And real it was, as Coontz’s research illustrates.
“So many people didn’t know – or even if they lived then, didn’t realize – how deep the prejudices and legal discriminations against women went, and how many women actually internalized the messages of self-blame,” Coontz said in an e-mail from her book tour in Washington, D.C.
Here’s a look at five “Feminine Mystique”-era realities:
• The country suffered from post-World War II amnesia.
Between 1941 and the war’s end in 1945, the percentage of women in the work force increased by 60 percent. Many women worked in traditionally male jobs, including as welders and mechanics.
These working women inspired younger women. In a 1943 poll of 33,000 female high school students, 88 percent “aspired to have a career other than homemaking for at least a portion of their lives,” Coontz reports.
But by 1947, more than 3 million women had been laid off. The day care centers established in their war working years closed. Younger women forgot career aspirations and married younger.
“By 1960, half of all women were marrying while still in their teens,” Coontz writes.
They had babies, lots of them. For instance, the birthrate for third children doubled between 1940 and 1960, Coontz reports, and the birthrate for fourth children tripled.
• The workplace shunned women.
At least five states required a court order for women wishing to open their own businesses. Airlines required women to retire in their early 30s.
The personnel officer of a major airline worried about the “horrifying prospect” that a “gal” might walk into his office and demand a job as an airplane pilot.
In 1963, the year Friedan’s book came out, only 2.6 percent of lawyers and only three of the nation’s 422 federal judges were women.
As late as 1970, “less than 8 percent of physicians were female,” Coontz reports.
And that same year, the dean of the University of Texas dental school limited women to 2 percent of all admissions. His reasoning? Girls weren’t strong enough to pull teeth.
• Women needed permission.
In many states, women had to take their husband’s surname. One reason given in the state of Illinois?
“Motel owners could not safeguard ‘public morals’ if married couples could register” under different names, Coontz explains.
A woman could have her driver’s license revoked if she didn’t change her name when married.
When banks issued mortgages and loans “a wife’s income was taken into consideration only if she was at least 40 years old or could present proof that she had been sterilized,” Coontz reports.
In New York in 1972, one woman couldn’t rent an apartment until her husband, a mental patient, signed the lease.
• Women went insane.
It’s little wonder that some women lost their minds living in a culture where it was illegal for them to wear men’s clothes, where 40 percent of college coeds reported playing dumb on dates, where a daughter’s wedding cost two-thirds of a family’s yearly income, where smothering mothers were blamed for their sons’ homosexuality and working mothers blamed for their children’s juvenile delinquency.
By the second half of the 1960s, “women were twice as likely as men to use tranquilizers, and most consumers of ‘mother’s little helper’ were white and better educated than average,” Coontz writes.
• Women didn’t complain – much.
Coontz said women kept their discontent quiet because white, well-educated housewives were living lives so much easier than their Depression-era parents.
Television shows and women’s magazines colluded in the housewife-only path to happiness.
In the “Feminine Mystique,” Friedan describes searching every issue of three major women’s magazines in 1958 and 1959 for a career-woman story. She found none.
Women who combined work with family life – and there were some – constituted a silent minority.
Friedan’s book didn’t start the women’s liberation movement, but it gave voice to the dissatisfaction that she labeled the “problem with no name.”
So much has changed for the better for women – and men – since 1963.
“My hope for 20- and 30-somethings is that when they feel overwhelmed by the stresses of balancing work, marriage and parenting, they realize how much worse it was when women and men were discouraged from such balancing, or penalized if they even attempted it,” Coontz said in her e-mail. “And once they realize that, they redouble their efforts to make it work, and to make sure this becomes seen as a man’s issue as well as a woman’s issue.”