The Description That Coontz Gives of the 1950s American Family.
"Leave It to Beaver" and "Ozzie and Harriet"
American Families in the 1950s
from The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Bones Books, 1992)
by Stephanie Coontz
Copyright 1992 past Basic Books
(This reproduction is used for academic purposes only.)
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Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are notwithstanding delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sit down-coms. When liberals and conservatives debate family policy, for instance, the issue is frequently framed in terms of how many "Ozzie and Harriet" families are left in
Since everyone admits that nontraditional families are now a majority, why this obsessive concern to plant a college or a lower effigy? Liberals seem to call back that unless they can prove the �Leave It to Beaver� family unit is on an irreversible slide toward extinction, they cannot justify introducing new family definitions and social policies. Conservatives believe that if they can demonstrate the traditional family unit is alive and well, although endangered by policies that reward two-earner families and single parents, they tin can pass measures to revive the seeming placidity and prosperity of the 1950s, associated in many people�s minds with the relative stability of marriage, gender
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roles, and family life in that decade. If the 1950s family existed today, both sides seem to presume, we would not accept the contemporary social dilemmas that cause such debate.
At kickoff glance, the figures seem to justify this assumption. The 1950s was a profamily period if there always was one. Rates of divorce and illegitimacy were half what they are today; wedlock was nearly universally praised; the family was everywhere hailed as the most bones institution in lodge; and a massive baby boom, amid all classes and ethnic groups, made America a �child-centered� society. Births rose from a low of 18.4 per 1,000 women during the Depression to a high of 25.three per 1,000 in 1957. �The birth rate for 3rd children doubled between 1940 and 1960, and that for fourth children tripled.�[ii]
In retrospect, the 1950s likewise seem a time of innocence and consensus: Gang warfare amongst youths did not atomic number 82 to drive-past shootings; the crack epidemic had not yet hit; subject problems in the schools were pocket-size; no �secular humanist� move opposed the 1954 addition of the words under God to the Pledge of Allegiance; and 90 percent of all schoolhouse levies were approved by voters. Introduction of the polio vaccine in 1954 was the most dramatic of many medical advances that improved the quality of life for children.
The profamily features of this decade were bolstered by impressive economic improvements for vast numbers of Americans. Betwixt 1945 and 1960, the gross national production grew by almost 250 pct and per capita income past 35 percent. Housing starts exploded after the war, peaking at 1.65 million in 1955 and remaining in a higher place one.5 meg a yr for the rest of the decade; the increase in single-family homeownership betwixt 1946 and 1956 outstripped the increase during the entire preceding century and a one-half. By 1960, 62 percent of the American families endemic their own homes, in contrast to 43 percent in 1940. Eighty-v percent of the new homes were built in the suburbs, where the nuclear family found new possibilities for privacy and togetherness. While middle-course Americans were the prime number beneficiaries of the edifice boom, substantial numbers of white working-class Americans moved out of the cities into affordable developments, such as
Many working-course families also moved into the middle class. The number of salaried workers increased past 61 percent between 1947 and 1957. By the mid-1950s, most 60 percent of the population had what was labeled a middle-class income level (between $3,000 and $10,000 in constant dollars), compared to only 31 per-
Page 25
cent in the �prosperous twenties,� before the Swell Low. By 1960, thirty-one million of the nation�south 40-iv million families possessed a car. The number of people with discretionary income doubled during the 1950s.[four]
For most Americans, the most salient symbol and immediate casher of their newfound prosperity was the nuclear family. The biggest boom in consumer spending, for case, was in household goods. Food spending rose by only 33 percent in the 5 years post-obit the Second Earth War, and clothing expenditures rose past 20 percent, but purchases of household furnishings and appliances climbed 240 percent. �Virtually the entire increase in the gross national product in the mid-1950s was due to increased spending on consumer durables and residential construction,� most of information technology oriented toward the nuclear family unit.[five]
Putting their mouths where their money was, Americans consistently told pollsters that home and family were the wellsprings of their happiness and cocky-esteem. Cultural historian David Marc argues that prewar fantasies of sophisticated urban �elegance,� epitomized by the high-rise penthouse apartment, gave fashion in the 1950s to a more modest vision of utopia: a single-family unit business firm and a car. The emotional dimensions of utopia, however, were unbounded. When respondents to a 1955 marriage written report �were asked what they thought they had sacrificed by marrying and raising a family, an overwhelming majority of replied, �Nothing.�� Less than x percent of Americans believed that an unmarried person could exist happy. As ane popular advice book intoned: �The family unit is the center of your living. If it isn�t, you�ve gone far astray.�[6]
In fact, the �traditional� family of the 1950s was a qualitatively new miracle. At the end of the 1940s, all the trends characterizing the rest of the twentieth century suddenly reversed themselves: for the showtime time in more than i hundred years, the historic period for wedlock and motherhood fell, fertility increased, divorce rates declined, and women�southward degree of educational parity with men dropped sharply. In a catamenia of less than ten years, the proportion of never-married persons declined by as much as it had during the entire previous half-century.[7]
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At the fourth dimension, most people understood the 1950s family unit to be a new invention. The Neat Depression and the 2nd World War had reinforced extended family ties, simply in ways that were experienced by most people as stultifying and oppressive. As one child of the Depression after put it, �The Waltons� television set series of the 1970s did not bear witness what family life in the 1930s was actually like: �It wasn�t a big family sitting around a table radio and everybody saying goodnight while Bing Crosby crooned �Pennies from Heaven�� On superlative of Low-era family tensions had come the painful family separations and housing shortages of the war years: Past 1947, six million American families were sharing housing, and postwar family counselors warned of a widespread marital crisis acquired past conflicts betwixt the generations. A 1948 March of Time motion picture, �Marriage and Divorce,� alleged: �No domicile is big enough to house two families, particularly two of unlike generations, with opposite theories on child training.�[8]
During the 1950s, films and television plays, such every bit �Marty.� Showed people working through conflicts between marital loyalties and older kin, peer grouping, or community ties; regretfully but decisively, these conflicts were about invariably �resolved in favor of the heterosexual couple rather than the claims of extended kinship networks,�homosociability and friendship.� Talcott Parsons and other sociologists argued that mod industrial society required the family to jettison traditional productive functions and wider kin ties in order to specialize in emotional nurturance, childrearing, and production of a modern personality. Social workers �endorsed nuclear family unit separateness and looked suspiciously on agile extended-family networks.�[9]
Popular commentators urged young families to adopt a �mod� stance and strike out on their own, and with the return of prosperity, most did. By the early 1950s, newlyweds non just were establishing unmarried-family homes at an earlier age and a more rapid rate than ever before but too were increasingly moving to the suburbs, abroad from the close scrutiny of the elder generation.
For the first fourth dimension in American history, moreover, such boilerplate trends did non disguise sharp variations by form, race, and ethnic group. People married at a younger historic period, bore their children before and closer together, completed their families past the time they were in their belatedly twenties, and experienced a longer menses living together as a couple afterwards their children left habitation. The traditional range of air-conditioning-
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ceptable family unit behaviors � even the range in the adequate number of timing of children � narrowed substantially.[10]
The values of 1950s families also were new. The emphasis on producing a whole world of satisfaction, amusement, and inventiveness inside the nuclear family unit had no precedents. Historian Elaine Tyler May comments: �The legendary family of the 1950s�was not, as common wisdom tells the states, the concluding gasp of �traditional� family life with deep roots in the past. Rather, it was the first wholehearted try to create a domicile that would fulfill nearly all its members� personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life.�[11]
Beneath a superficial revival of Victorian domesticity and gender distinctions, a novel rearrangement of family ideals and male person-female relations was achieved. For women, this involved a reduction in the moral aspect of domesticity and an expansion of its orientation toward personal service. Nineteenth-century center-class women had cheerfully left housework to servants, yet 1950s women of all classes created makework in their homes and felt guilty when they did not practice everything for themselves. The amount of time women spent doing housework actually increased during the 1950s, despite the advent of convenience foods and new, labor-saving appliances; child care absorbed more than twice every bit much time as it had in the 1920s. By the mid-1950s, advertisers� surveys reported on a growing tendency amidst women to find �housework a medium of expression for�[their] femininity and individuality.�[12]
For the first time, men as well every bit women were encouraged to root their identity and self-paradigm in familial and parental roles. The novelty of the family and gender values can exist seen in the dramatic postwar transformation of movie themes. Historian Peter Biskind writes that almost every major male star who had played tough loners in the 1930s and 1940s �took the roles with which he was synonymous and transformed them, in the fifties, into neurotics or psychotics.� In these films, �men belonged at home, not on the streets or out on the prairie,�not alone or hanging out with other men.� The women who got men to settle downward had to hope enough sex to compete with �bad� women, just ultimately they provided information technology only in the marital chamber and just in return for some help fixing up the business firm.[13]
Public images of
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speeches�to be given to civic groups around the land, emphasizing that the stars at present embodied the rejuvenated family life unfolding in the suburbs.� Ronald Reagan�s defense of actors� family values was especially �stirring,� noted one reporter, but female person stars, unlike Reagan and other male stars, were obliged to live the new values besides as propagandize them. Joan Crawford, for example, one of the brash, tough, independent leading ladies of the prewar era, was now pictured as a devoted mother whose sex appeal and glamour did not prevent her from doing her own housework. She posed for pictures mopping floors and gave interviews most her childrearing philosophy.[14]
The �good life� in the 1950s, historian Clifford Clark points out, made the family �the focus of fun and recreation.� The ranch house, architectural embodiment of this new platonic, discarded the older privacy of the kitchen, den, and sewing room (representative of dissever spheres for men and women) but introduced new privacy and luxury into the master bedroom. There was an unprecedented �glorification of self-indulgence� in family life. Formality was discarded in favor of �livability,� �comfort,� and �convenience.� A contradiction in terms in earlier periods, �the sexually charged, kid-centered family took its place at the heart of the postwar American dream.�[15]
On idiot box, David Marc comments, all the �normal� families moved to the suburbs during the 1950s. Popular culture turned such suburban families into commercialism�s answer to the Communist threat. In his famous �kitchen argue� with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, Richard Nixon asserted that the superiority of commercialism over communism was embodied not in credo or military might but in the comforts of the suburban home, �designed to make things easier for our women.�[16]
Acceptance of domesticity was the marker of centre-course status and upward mobility. In sit-com families, a centre-class homo�s work was totally irrelevant to his identity; by the aforementioned token, the problems of working-form families did non lie in their economic situation but in their failure to create harmonious gender roles. Working-class and indigenous men on television had one defining characteristic: They were unable to control their wives. The families of eye-class men, by contrast, were mostly well behaved.[17]
Not only was the 1950s family a new invention; it was also a historical fluke, based on a unique and temporary conjuncture of economical, social, and political factors. During the war, Americans had saved at a rate more than iii times higher than that in the decades before or since. Their buying power was farther enhanced past Amer-
Page 29
ica�s extraordinary competitive advantage at the end of the war, when every other industrial ability was devastated by the experience. This privileged economic position sustained both a tremendous expansion of middle-course direction occupations and new honeymoon between management and organized labor: During the 1950s, real wages increased past more than than they had in the entire previous half century.[18]
The impact of such prosperity on family formation and stability was magnified by the role of government, which could afford to be generous with education benefits, housing loans, highway and sewer structure, and job training. All this allowed most centre-grade Americans, and a large number of working-class ones, to adopt family unit values and strategies that assumed the availability of cheap energy, low-interest dwelling loans, expanding educational and occupational opportunities, and steady employment. These expectations encouraged early marriage, early on childbearing, expansion of consumer debt, and residential patterns that required long commutes to work � all patterns that would become highly problematic by the 1970s�.
A Complex Reality: 1950s Poverty, Diversity, and Social Change
Even aside from the exceptional and ephemeral nature of the conditions that supported them, 1950s family strategies and values offering no solution to the discontents that underlie contemporary romanticization of the �good old days.� The reality of these families was far more painful and complex than the situation-comedy reruns or the expurgated memories of the nostalgic would suggest. Contrary to popular stance, �Leave It to Beaver� was not a documentary.
In the first place, non all American families shared in the consumer expansion that provided Hotpoint appliances for June Cleaver�s kitchen and a vacuum cleaner for Donna Stone. A total 25 percentage of Americans, xl to fifty million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. 60 percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $ane,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $ten,000 level considered to correspond centre-class condition. A ma-
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jority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only one-half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Fifty-fifty when we consider only native-born, white families, one-tertiary could not go by on the income of the household head.[19]
In the second identify, real life was not then white as it was on telly. Boob tube, comments historian Ella Taylor, increasingly ignored cultural diversity, adopting �the motto �least objectionable programming,� which gave rise to those least objectionable families, the completely white and Anglo-Saxon that even the Hispanic gardener in �Father Knows Best� went by the name of Frank Smith. Just contrary to the all-white lineup on the television networks and the streets of bourgeoisie, the 1950s saw a major transformation in the ethnic composition of
These minorities were almost entirely excluded from the gains and privileges accorded white eye-class families. The June Cleaver or Donna Stone homemaker part was not available to the more than 40 percentage of black women with small children who worked outside the home. Twenty-five percent of these women headed their ain households, but even minorities who conformed to the dominant family unit grade faced weather quite unlike those portrayed on television. The poverty rate of ii-parent black families was more than than l percent, approximately the same every bit that of 1-parent black ones. Migrant workers suffered �near medieval� deprivations, while termination and relocation policies were employed against Native Americans to become them to give up treaty rights.[21]
African Americans in the South faced systematic, legally sanctioned segregation and pervasive brutality, and those in the Northward were excluded by restrictive covenants and redlining from many benefits of the economical expansion that their labor helped sustain. Whites resisted, with harassment and violence, the attempts of blacks to participate in the American family unit dream. When Harvey Clark tried to move into Cicero, Illinois, in 1951, a mob of four,000
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whites spent four days tearing his apartment apart while law stood by and joked with them. In 1953, the start black family moved into Chicago�s Trumball Park public housing project; neighbors �hurled stones and tomatoes� and trashed stores that sold groceries to the new residents. In Detroit, Life magazine reported in 1957, �10,000 Negroes work at the Ford plant in nearby Dearborn, [but] not one Negro can live in Dearborn itself.�[22]
More Complexities: Repression, Anxiety, Unhappiness, and Conflict
The happy, homogeneous families that we �call up� from the 1950s were thus partly a outcome of the media�due south denial of diversity. Just even amid sectors of the population where the �least objectionable� families did prevail, their values and behaviors were not entirely a spontaneous, joyful reaction to prosperity. If suburban ranch houses and family unit barbecues were the carrots offered to white centre-class families that adopted the new norms, there was too a stick.
Women�s retreat to housewifery, for case, was in many cases not freely chosen. During the state of war, thousands of women had entered new jobs, gained new skills, joined unions, and fought against job discrimination. Although 95 per centum of the new women employees had expected when they were first hired to quit work at the end of the war, by 1945 almost an as overwhelming majority did non want to give up their independence, responsibleness, and income, and expressed the desire to go on working.[23]
Afterwards the war, nevertheless, writes ane recent student of postwar reconstruction, �direction went to extraordinary lengths to purge women workers from the auto plants,� as well equally from other loftier-paying and nontraditional jobs. As information technology turned out, in near cases women were no permanently expelled from the labor force but were only downgraded to lower-paid, �female person� jobs. Even at the end of the purge, in that location were more women working than before the war, and by 1952 there were two 1000000 more wives at work than at the peak of wartime production. The jobs available to these women, however, lacked the pay and the challenges that had fabricated wartime piece of work and then satisfying, encouraging women to define themselves in terms of home and family unit fifty-fifty when they were working.[24]
Vehement attacks were launched confronting women who did not ac-
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cept such cocky-definitions. In the 1947 bestseller, The Modernistic Adult female: The Lost Sex, Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg described feminism as a �deep illness,� chosen the notion of an contained woman a �contradiction in terms,� and accused women who sought educational or employment equality of engaging in symbolic �castration� of men. Equally sociologist David Riesman noted, a woman�south failure to bear children went from existence �a social disadvantage and sometimes a personal tragedy� in the nineteenth century to beingness a �quasi-perversion� in the 1950s. The alien messages aimed at women seemed almost calculated to demoralize: At the same time equally they labeled women �unnatural� if they did not seek fulfillment in motherhood, psychologists and popular writers insisted that almost modern social ills could be traced to domineering mothers who invested also much free energy and emotion in their children. Women were told that �no other experience in life�will provide the same sense of fulfillment, of happiness, of complete pervading contentment� as motherhood. Only soon after delivery they were asked, �Which are y'all first of all, Wife or Mother?� and warned against the trend to be �too much mother, too footling married woman.�[25]
Women who could not walk the fine line between nurturing motherhood and castrating �momism,� or who had trouble adjusting to �artistic homemaking,� were labeled neurotic, perverted, or schizophrenic. A recent report of hospitalized �schizophrenic� women in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1950s concludes that institutionalization and sometimes electrical daze treatments were used to forcefulness women to accept their domestic roles and their husbands� dictates. Shock treatments also were recommended for women who sought ballgame, on the assumption that failure to want a baby signified dangerous emotional disturbance.[26]
All women, even seemingly docile ones, were securely mistrusted. They were frequently denied the right to serve on juries, convey holding, brand contracts, accept out credit cares in their ain proper noun, or establish residence. A 1954 article in Esquire called working wives a �menace�; a Life author termed married women�south employment a �illness.� Women were excluded from several professions, and some states even gave husbands total control over family finances.[27] In that location were non many permissible alternatives to baking brownies, experimenting with new canned soups, and getting rid of stains around the collar.
Men also were pressured into acceptable family roles, since lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a
Page 33
heart-class human being. Bachelors were categorized as �young,� �infantile,� �narcissistic,� �deviant,� or even �pathological.� Family unit communication expert Paul Landis argued: �Except for the sic, the badly bedridden, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity [and, by clear implication, a duty] to marry.�[28]
Families in the 1950s were products of even more direct repression. Common cold war anxieties merged with concerns about the expanded sexuality of family life and the commercial globe to create what one authority calls the domestic version of George F. Kennan�s containment policy toward the Soviet Marriage: A �normal� family unit and vigilant mother became the �front end line� of defense confronting treason; anticommunists linked deviant family or sexual behavior to sedition. The FBI and other authorities agencies instituted unprecedented state intrusion into private life under the guise of investigating subversives. Gay baiting was nigh equally widespread and every flake equally vicious equally red baiting.[29]
The Ceremonious Service Committee fired 2,611 persons every bit �security risks� and reported that 4,315 others resigned under the pressure of investigations that asked leading questions of their neighbors and inquired into the books they read or the music to which they listened. In this atmosphere, movie producer Joel Schumacher recalls, �No one told the truth�.People pretended they weren�t unfaithful. They pretended that they weren�t homosexual. They pretended that they weren�t horrible.�[30]
Even for people not straight coerced into conformity by racial, political, or personal repression, the turn toward families was in many cases more than a defensive movement than a purely affirmative act. Some men and women entered loveless marriages in order to forbid attacks nearly real or suspected homosexuality or lesbianism. Growing numbers of people saw the family unit, in the words of one husband, every bit the one �group that in spite of many disagreements internally always will confront its external enemies together.� Bourgeois families warned children to beware of communists who might masquerade equally friendly neighbors; liberal children learned to confine their opinions to the family for fright that their father�s chore or reputation might exist threatened.[31]
Americans were far more ambivalent near the 1950s than afterwards retrospectives, such every bit �Happy Days,� suggest. Plays by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O�Neill, and Arthur Miller explored the underside of family unit life. Movies such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955) expressed
Page 34
fears about youths whose parents had failed them. There was an most obsessive business organisation with the idea that the mass media had broken down parental control, thus provoking an outburst of �delinquency and youthful viciousness.� In 1954, psychiatrist Fredic Wertham�s Seduction of the Innocents warned: �The temper of crime comic books is unparalleled in the history of children�southward literature of any time or any nation.� In 1955, Congress discussed nearly 200 bills relating to delinquency. If some of these anxieties seem nearly charmingly na�ve to our more hardened age, they were no less real for all that.[32]
Many families, of grade, managed to hold such fears at bay � and it must be admitted that the suburbs and small-scale towns of
In her autobiographical account of a 1950s boyhood, Susan Allen Toth remembers growing upwardly �gradually� and �quietly� in a modest boondocks of the menstruum: �We were not seared by fierce poverty, racial tensions, drug abuse, street crimes.� Perhaps this innocence was �constricting,� she admitted, but it as well gave a child �shelter and space to abound.� For Toth, insulation from external issues meant that growing up was a procedure of being cosseted, gently warmed, transmuted by slow degrees.�[34]
For many other children, even so, growing up in the 1950s families was not then much a affair of beingness protected from the harsh realities of the outside globe as preventing the outside world from learning the harsh realities of family unit life. Few would have guessed that radiant Marilyn Van Derbur, crowned Miss American in 1958, had been sexually violated by her wealthy, respectable male parent from the time she was five until she was 18, when she moved away to higher.[35] While not all family secrets were quite so shocking, author Benita Eisler recalls a common eye-class experience:
As college classmates became close friends, I heard sagas of life at home that were Gothic horror stories. Behind the hedges and driveways of upper-middle-grade suburbia were tragedies of madness, suicide, and � virtually prevalent of all � chronic and severe alcoholism�.
Page 35
The real revelation for me was the role played by children in�keeping up appearances. Many of my new friends had been pressed into service early on as happy grinning fronts, emissaries of family normalcy, cheerful proof that �nothing was really wrong� at the Joneses.[36]
Beneath the polished facades of many ideal families, suburban as well as urban, was violence, terror, or simply grinding misery that only occasionally came to light. Although Colorado researchers found 302 dilapidated-child cases, including 33 deaths, in their state during one year alone, the major journal of American family unit sociology did not carry a single article on family violence between 1939 and 1969. Married woman battering was not considered a �real� criminal offense by most people. Psychiatrists in the 1950s, following Helene Deutsch, �regarded the dilapidated adult female as a masochist who provoked her husband into beating her.�[37]
Historian Elizabeth Pleck describes how one Family Service Association translated his psychological approach into patient counseling during the 1950s. Mrs. K came to the Clan because her hubby was an alcoholic who repeatedly abused her, both physically and sexually. The agency felt, however, that is was simplistic to blame the couple�s problems on his drinking. When counselors learned that Mrs. Yard refused her husband�south demands for sex activity subsequently he came from working the night shift, they decided that they had plant a deep difficulty: Mrs. K needed therapy to �bring out some of her anxiety about sex activities.�[38]
We volition probably never know how prevalent incest and sexual abuse were in the 1950s, merely we do know that when girls or women reported incidents of such abuse to therapists, they were frequently told that they were �fantasizing� their unconscious oedipal desires. Although incest cases were mutual throughout the records of caseworkers from 1880 to 1960, according to historian Linda Gordon�south study of these documents, the problem was increasingly redefined as one of female �sex delinquency.� By 1960, despite overwhelming prove to the contrary, experts described incest as a �1-in-a-one thousand thousand occurrence.� Non until the 1970s, heartened by a supportive women�s movement, were many women able to speak out nearly the sexual abuse they had suffered in silent agony during the 1950s; others, such as Marilyn Van Derbur, are only now coming frontwards.[39]
Less dramatic only more than widespread was the beingness of meaning marital unhappiness. Between one-quarter and ane-third of the
Page 36
Marriages contracted in the 1950s eventually ended in divorce; during that decade two million legally married people lived autonomously from each other. Many more couples simply toughed information technology out. Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky concluded that of the working-class couples she interview in the 1950s, �slightly less than one-third [were] happily or very happily married.�[40]
National polls found that 20 per centum of all couples considered their marriages unhappy, and another 20 percent reported merely �medium happiness.� In the middle-class sample studied by Elaine Tyler May, two-thirds of the husbands and wives rather their marriages �decidedly happier than average,� merely an exterior observer might well have scaled this back to a percentage much like Komarovsky�due south, for even the happiest couples reported many dissatisfactions and communication problems. �The idea of a �working union was ane that often included constant day-to-day misery for 1 or both partners.�[41]
A successful 1950s family, moreover, was often achieved at enormous cost to the married woman, who was expected to subordinate her own needs and aspirations to those of both her husband and her children. In consequence, no sooner was the ideal of the postwar family accepted than observers began to comment perplexedly on how discontented women seemed in the very roles they supposedly desired most. In 1949, Life magazine reported that �suddenly and for no obviously reason� American women were �seized with an eerie restlessness.� Nether a �mask of tranquility� and an outwardly feminine advent, one physician wrote in 1953, there was often �an inwardly tense and emotionally unstable individual seething with hidden aggressiveness and resentment.�[42]
Some women took this resentment out on their families. Surely some of the baroque behaviors that Joan Crawford exhibited toward her children, according to her daughter�southward bitter remembrance, Mommie Dearest, flowed from the frustration of being forced into a domestic role about which she was intensely ambivalent. Other women tried to dull the pain with alcohol or drugs. Tranquilizers were adult in the 1950s in response to a need that physicians explicitly saw as female: Virtually nonexistent in 1955, tranquilizer consumption reached 462,000 pounds in 1958 and soared to i.15 million pounds merely a twelvemonth later. Commentators noted a precipitous increase in women�southward drinking during the decade, even though many middle-grade housewives kept their liquor stash hidden and thought no one
Page 37
knew that they needed a couple of drinks to face up an evening of family unit �togetherness.�[43]
But non even �the four b�s,� equally the mother of a colleague of mine used to characterization her life in the 1950s � �booze, bowling, bridge, and colorlessness� � could entirely conceal the discontents. In 1956, the Ladies� Home Journal devoted an result to �The Plight of the Young Mother.� When McCall�southward ran an article entitled �The Mother Who Ran Away� in the same twelvemonth, the magazine ready a new record for readership. A old editor commented: �We suddenly realized that all those women at habitation with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.� By 1960, almost every major news journal was using the word trapped to draw the feelings of the American housewife. When Redbook�s editors asked readers to provide them with examples of �Why Young Mothers Experience Trapped,� they received 24,000 replies.[44]
Although Betty Friedan�s bestseller The Feminine Mystique did not appear until 1963, it was a product of the 1950s, originating in the discontented responses Friedan received in 1957 when she surveyed boyfriend college classmates from the class of 1942. The heartfelt identification of the other 1950s women with �the trouble that has no name� is preserved in the letters Friedan received afterward her book was published, letters now at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.[45]
Men tended to exist more than satisfied with marriage than were women, especially over time, but they, too, had their discontents. Even the most successful strivers later on the American dream sometimes muttered about �mindless conformity.� The titles of books such equally The Organisation Man, by William Whyte (1956), and the Solitary Crowd, by David Riesman (1958), summarized a widespread critique of 1950s culture. Male resentments confronting women were expressed in the only partly humorous diatribes of Playboy magazine (founded in 1953) against �money-hungry� gold diggers or lazy �parasites� trying to trap men into commitment.[46]
Contradictions of the 1950s Family Smash
Happy memories of 1950s family life are not all illusion, of form � in that location were skilful times for many families. But fifty-fifty the most positive aspects had another side. One reason that the 1950s family model
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was so fleeting was that it contained the seeds of its own destruction, a point I volition explore further in chapter vii. It was during the 1950s, not the 1960s, that the youth market place was first produced, and so institutionalized into the youth culture. It was through such innocuous shows equally �Hi Doody� and �the Disney Hour� that advertisers offset discovered the riches to be gained by bypassing parents and appealing directly to youth. It was also during this flow that advertising and consumerism became saturated with sex.[47]
In the 1950s, family life was financed by economic practices that were to have unanticipated consequences in the 1970s. Wives and mothers first started to work in cracking numbers during the 1950s in gild to supplement their families� purchasing power; expansion of household comforts came �at the cost of an astronomical increase of indebtedness.� The labor-direction accordance of the 1950s helped erode the matrimony motion�due south power to oppose the takebacks and delinquent shops that destroyed the �family unit wage system� during the 1970s and 1980s.[48]
Family and gender strategies also contained some fourth dimension bombs. Women who �played dumb� to catch a human being, every bit 40 per centum of Barnard College women admitted to doing, sometimes despised their husbands for not living upwards to the fiction of male superiority they had worked and so hard to promote. Commitment to improving the quality of family unit life past manipulating the timing and spacing of childbearing led to the social acceptability of family unit planning and the spread of birth-control techniques. Concentration of childbearing in early marriage meant that growing numbers of women had years to spare for paid work later on the majority of their child-care duties were finished. Finally, 1950s families fostered intense feelings and values that produced young people with a sharp eye for hypocrisy; many of the so-called rebels of the 1960s were simply acting on values that they had internalized in the bosom of their families.[49]
Teen Pregnancy and the 1950s Family unit
Whatever its other unexpected features, the 1950s family does appear, at least when compared to families in the last ii decades, to be a bastion of �traditional� sexual morality. Many modern observers, accordingly, expect back to the sexual values of this decade as a possible solution to what they see as the peculiarly modern �epi-
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demic� of teen pregnancy. On closer examination, however, the effect of teen pregnancy is a classic instance of both the novelty and the contradictions of the 1950s family unit.
Those who advocate that today�s youth should be taught abstinence or deferred gratification rather than sex education will observe no 1950s model for such restraint. �Heavy petting� became a norm of dating in this period, while the proportion of white brides who were pregnant at marriage more doubled. Teen nascency rates soared, reaching highs that accept not been equaled since. In 1957, 97 out of every 1,000 girls aged fifteen to nineteen gave birth, compared to only 52 of every i,000 in 1983. A surprising number of these births were illegitimate, although 1950s census codes made information technology impossible to place an single mother if she lived at home with her parents. The incidence of illegitimacy was as well disguised by the new emphasis on �rehabilitating� the white mother (though not the black) by putting her baby upward for adoption and encouraging her to �commencement over�; at that place was an lxxx percent increase in the number of out-of-marriage babies placed for adoption between 1944 and 1955.[l]
The main reason that teenage sexual beliefs did non issue in many more illegitimate births during this period was that the age of marriage dropped sharply. Immature people were non taught how to �say no� � they were only handed wedding rings. In fact, the growing willingness of parents to subsidize young married couples and the new prevalence of regime educational stipends and dwelling house ownership loans for veterans undermined the former assumption that a man should exist able to support a family before embarking on marriage. Among the eye grade, it became common for young wives to work while their husbands finished school. Prior to the 1950s, as David Riesman wrote of his Low-era classmates, it would non �have occurred to us to accept our wives back up us through graduate school.�[51]
Contemporary teenage motherhood, as we shall encounter in chapter 8, in some ways represents a continuation of 1950s values in a new economic state of affairs that makes early marriage less viable. Of form, modernistic teen pregnancy also reflects the rejection of some of those earlier values. The values that have cleaved down, however, have little to do with sexual restraint. What we at present think of as 1950s sexual morality depended not so much on stricter sexual command equally on intensification of the sexual double standard. Elaine Tyler May argues that sexual �repression� gave way to sexual �containment.� The new practice of going steady �widened the boundaries of permissible sexual practice-
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ual activity,� creating a �sexual brinksmanship� in which women bore the burden of �drawing the line,� but that line was constantly changing. Pop opinion admitted, as the Ladies� Home Journal put it in 1956, that �sex activity suggestiveness� was hither to stay, simply insisted that it was up to women to �put the brakes on.�[52]
This double standard led to a Byzantine code of sexual conduct: �Petting� was sanctioned and so long as ane didn�t get �likewise far� (though this was an elastic and ambiguous prohibition); a adult female could be touched on diverse parts of her body (how low depended on how serious the human relationship was) but �nice girls� refused to fondle the comparable male parts in return; common stimulation to orgasm was compatible with maintaining a �good� reputation as long as penetration did not occur.
The success of sexual containment depended on sexual inequality. Men no longer bore the responsibility of �saving themselves for marriage�; this was now exclusively a adult female�southward chore. In precipitous contrast to the nineteenth century, when �oversexed� or demanding men were considered to accept serious problems, it was now considered �normal� or �natural� for men to be sexually aggressive. The �average man,� advice writers for women commented indulgently, �will go as far as you permit him go.� When women succeeded in �belongings out� (a phrase charged with ambiguity), they sometimes experienced problems �letting become,� fifty-fifty later on marriage; when they failed, they were ofttimes reproached later by their husbands for having �giving in.� The contradictions of this double standard could not long withstand the menses�s pressures for companionate romance: By 1959, a more liberal single standard had already gained ground among older teenagers across
The Problem of Women in Traditional Families
People who romanticize the 1950s, or whatever model of the traditional family, are usually put in an uncomfortable position why they effort to proceeds popular support. The legitimacy of women�s rights is and so widely accepted today that merely a tiny minority of Americans seriously propose that women should go back to being full-time housewives or should be denied educational and chore opportunities because of their family responsibilities. Yet when commentators lament the collapse of traditional family commitments and values, they virtually
Page 41
invariably hateful the uniquely female duties associated with the doctrine of split up spheres for men and women.
Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, bemoans the fact that �workaholism and family unit dereliction have become equal-opportunity diseases, striking mothers as much every bit fathers.� David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values expresses sympathy for the needs of working women but warns that �employed women do not a family make. The goals of women (and of men, too) in the workplace are primarily individualistic: social recognition, wages, opportunities for advancement, and self-fulfillment. But the family is virtually commonage goals�building life�s most important bonds of amore, nurturance, common support, and long-term commitment."[54]
In both statements, a seemingly gender-neutral indictment of family irresponsibility ends up being directed most forcefully against women. For Blankenhorn, it is not surprising that men�south goals should be individualistic. This is parenthetical aside. For Zinsmeister, the problem with the disease of family unit dereliction is that it has spread to women. And then long as information technology was confined to men, manifestly, in that location was no urgency about finding a cure.
The crisis of commitment in America is unremarkably seen every bit a problem associated with women�s changing roles because women�s family functions have historically mediated the worst furnishings of competition and individualism in the larger gild. Near people who talk about balancing private advancement and individual rights with �nurturance, common support, and long-term commitment� practise not envision any serious rethinking of the individualistic, antisocial tendencies in our society, nor any ways of broadening our sources of nurturance and mutual assistance. Instead, they seek ways � sometimes through repression, sometimes through reform � of rebuilding a family in which women tin keep to compensate for, rather than challenge, the individualism in our larger economic system and polity�.
[1] Boston World,
[2] William Chafe, The American Adult female: Her Irresolute Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford Academy Printing, 1974), p. 217.
[3] Joseph Mason, History of Housing in the U.S. , 1930-1980 (Houston: Gulf, 1982); Martin Mayer, The Builders (New York: Gulf, 1978), p. 132.
[4] William Chafe, The Unfinished Journeying: America Since World War Ii (New York: Oxford University Printing, 1986), pp. 111-18; Stephen Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolution: A Social History of American Family unit Life (New York: Free Printing, 1988), pp. 182-83; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold State of war Era (New York: Bones Books, 1988), p. 165.
[5] May, Homeward Spring, p. 167; Clifford Clark, Jr., �Ranch-House Suburbia: Ideals and Realities,� in Recasting
[half-dozen] David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. fifty; May, Homeward Bound, p. 28; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 180.
[7] Steven D. McLaughlin et al., The Changing Lives of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 7; Donald Brogue, The Population of the United States (Glencoe, Sick.: Free Printing, 1959).
[8] Susan Ware, Belongings Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Ruth Milkman, �Women�southward Work and Economic Crunch: Some Lessons from the Bang-up Depression,� Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (1976): 84; �Marriage and Divorce,� a March of Time motion-picture show, vol. 14, no. vii, 1948.
[9] Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales, Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process (Glencoe: Complimentary Press, 1955); Judith E. Smith, �the Marrying Kind: Working Class Courting and Marriage in Postwar Popular Culture� (Newspaper presented at American Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, October 1990), p. 3; Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family unit Violence, 1880-1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 161.
[x] May, Homeward Bound, p. 137; Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983), pp. 271-72; Susan Householder Van Horn, Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900-1986 (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Landon Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Babe Boom Generation (New York: Ballantine, 1980), p. 34.
[11] May, Homeward Bound, p. 11.
[12] Glenna Mathews, �Just a Housewife�: The Rise and Autumn of Domesticity in
[13] Peter Viskind, Seeing Is Believing: How
[14] Lary May, �Movie Star Politics,� in Recasting
[15] Clifford Clark, The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Loma: Academy of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 209, 216; Clifford Clark, �Ranch-House Bourgeoisie: Ideals and Realities,� in Recasting
[16] Marc, Comic Visions, p. 81; May, Homeward Leap, p. 162.
[17] Lynda Glennon and Richard Bustch, �The Family as Portrayed on Television receiver, 1949-1978,� in Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, ed. David Pearle et al. (Washington, D.C.: U.Southward. Department of Health and Human Services, 1982); May, Homeward Bound, p. 146; Ella Taylor, Prime-time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
[xviii] Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf, Across the Wasteland: A Autonomous Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, Northward.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 66-67, 74; Chafe, Unfinished Journey, pp. 111-18; James A. Henretta et al., America�s History, vol. 2 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1987), p. 852; David Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: Academy of Chicago Printing, 1959).
[19] James Patterson,
[xx] Taylor, Prime-fourth dimension Families, p. forty; David Marc, �The Sit-Com Sensibility,� Washington Post, 25 June 1989; Eric Barnow, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American goggle box (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Richard Griswold del Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present (Notre Matriarch: University of Notre Dame Printing, 1984), pp. 113-fourteen; Henretta et al., America�southward History, vol. 2, p. 845.
[21] Glenda Riley, Inventing the American Woman (Arlington Heights, Va: Harlan Davidson, 1987), p. 240; Harrington, Other
[22] Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to
[23] Joan Ellen Trey, �Women in the World War 2 Economic system,� Review of Radical Political Economics, July 1972; Chafe, American Woman, pp. 178-179.
[24] Ruth Milkman, Gender at Piece of work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sexual activity During World War Two (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 102; Sheila Tobias and Lisa Anderson, �What Really Happened to Rosie the Riveter� MSS Modular Publications nine (1973); Steven D. McLaughlin et al., The Irresolute Lives of American Women (Chapel Colina: University of North Carolina, 1988), p. 24.
[25] Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 24; Susan Hartman, The Home Front and Across: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), pp. 173, 179-80; May, Homeward Spring, pp. 96-97.
[26] Carol Warren, Madwives: Schizophrenic Women in the 1950s (New Brunswick: Rutgers Academy Press, 1987); Hartmann, Abode Front end, p. 174.
[27] Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, pp. 164-65.
[28] Mintz and Kellog, Domestic Revolutions, p. 181; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Ballast Printing, 1983), pp. fourteen-28; Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, p. 154.
[29] Paul Boyer, Past the Flop�s Early Calorie-free: American Idea and Culture at the Dawn of the Diminutive Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Political leader (New York: Holt, 1990); Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Belfry: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978); Henretta et al., America�southward History, p. 867; May, Homeward Jump, pp. 13-14, 94-95.
[xxx] Benita Eisler, Individual Lives: Men and Women of the Fifties (New York: Franklin Watts, 1986), p. 342.
[31] May, Homeward Bound, p. 91.
[32] May, Homeward Bound, p. 109; James Gilbert, A Wheel of Outrage:
[33] For a defence force of the suburbs, see Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York: Columbia University Printing, 1969). Meet likewise John Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and E.W. Loosely, Crestwood Heights: A Study of Culture in Suburban Life (New York: Bones Books, 1956), and William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). Though Whyte criticized the lack of individualism in the suburbs he described, his description of irksome grouping life might audio rather comforting to many alienated modern Americans.
[34] Susan Allen Toth, Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood (Boston: Picayune, Chocolate-brown, 1978), pp. three, 4.
[35] Marilyn Van Derbur Atler, �The Darkest Secret,� People,
[36] Eisler, Private Lives, p. 170. Run across also Nancy Hall, A True Story of a Drunken Mother (Boston: south End Press, 1990).
[37] Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 194; C. Henry Kempe et al., �The Dilapidated Child Syndrome,� Periodical of the American Medial Clan (1962): 181; Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence fro Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Printing, 1987), pp. 169, 182.
[38] Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, pp. 162-63.
[39] Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, pp. 156-57; Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, pp. 206-22.
[twoscore] Mira Komarovsky, Blue Collar Marriage (New Haven: Vintage, 1962), p. 331.
[41] Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 194; May, Homeward Bound, p. 202.
[42] Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 195; Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, p. 174. The md reported that most of these women had fulfilled their wifely and motherly roles for years, in seemingly irreproachable means, only were however unfulfilled. Unable to accept the logic of his own evidence, the medico concluded that their bug were a result of their �intense strivings for masculinity.�
[43] Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest (New York: William Morrow, 1978), especially pp. 51-56, 82-88; Chafe, Unfinished Journey, p. 126; Edith Lisansky, �The woman Alcoholic,� Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (1958): 315.
[44] Eisler, Private Lives, pp. 209-10; Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, pp. 44, 59.
[45] Mathews, �Simply a Housewife,� pp. 219-220.
[46] Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men.
[47] Jones, Great Expectations, pp. 41-49; Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 250-51.
[48] Abrasion, Unfinished Journey, p. 144.
[49] Chafe, Unfinished Journey, p. 125; Eisler, Private Lives, p. 369; Chafe, American Woman, p. 218; Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 277; May, Homeward Jump, pp. 149-52; Joseph Demartini, �Change Agents and Generational Relationships: A Reevaluation of Mannheim�s Problem of Generations,� Social forces 64 (1985).
[50] Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts, pp. 304-5; May, Homeward Bound, pp. 117, 121, 127; Maris Vinovskis, An �Epidemic� of Adolescent Pregnancy?� Some Historical and Policy Considerations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 25; Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race in the Pre-Roe five. Wade Era (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
[51] Rothman, Hands and Hearts, p. 301; Eisler, Private Lives, p. 199.
[52] May, Homeward Jump, p. 101-2, 127-28; Andrea Sanders, �Sex, Politics, and Expert Taste in Nabokov�south Lolita and Ike�s America� (Paper delivered at �Ike�s America, a conference on the Eisenhower Presidency and American Life in the 1950s,� University of Kansas, Lawrence, iv-six Oct 1990), pp. xi-12.
[53] Beth Bailey, From Front end
[54] Paul Taylor, �Who Has Time to Be a Family unit?� Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 14-xx January 1991; David Blankenhorn, �American Family unit dilemmas,� in Rebuilding the Nest: A New Delivery to the American Family, ed. David Blankenhorn et al. (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1990), pp. 10-12.
Source: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/kelly/Distance_Learning/History_17B/Readings/Coontz.htm
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