A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz
Authors: Stephanie Coontz
Tags: Autobiography
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yes: “Are American Moms a Menace?”
Edward Strecker, a psychiatrist who studied soldiers found unfit for military duty, certainly thought so. He argued that unprecedented numbers of men were too “psychoneurotic” to cope with the rigors of military life, and he traced the problem back to the overprotective, smothering “mom and her wiles.” Society was “veering toward a matriarchy,” he claimed, in which mothers kept their sons “paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away . . . from the emotional maternal womb.”
These attacks on women’s influence inside the home coexisted and sometimes merged with the attacks on their power outside the home, so that women got it coming and going: They were blamed for devoting too much attention to their children as well as for devoting too little.
The end of the war spurred more efforts to get women out of the workforce and back into the home. During the war, the government’s Magazine War Guide had urged the editors of women’s magazines to encourage women to get involved in civilian defense efforts outside the home. However, historian Nancy Walker reports, once the war ended the War Guide publishers suggested that editors “replace discussions of child care with articles on juvenile delinquency.” This, they reminded the editors, was “one of the social ills blamed on working women.”
As the veterans came home and began readjusting to civilian life, women were advised to set aside any independent aspirations they had developed. Sociologist Willard Waller declared that women had “gotten out of hand” during the wartime emergency. It was time to reaffirm two rules: “women must bear and rear children; husbands must support them.”
Other experts argued that wives had a duty to rebuild their husbands’ self-esteem, which had been damaged when they came home to find that women had been successfully running their households. A wife should make a special point of deferring to her husband’s needs and wishes, they
advised. “He’s head man again,” the magazine House Beautiful reminded its female readers. “Your part . . . is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.”
Women had little choice but to comply. When the war ended, thousands of female war workers showed up at their jobs only to find their final paycheck waiting. By 1947, more than 3 million women had been laid off from their wartime work.
Many were outraged at being dismissed so cavalierly. They took to the picket lines, carrying signs reading “Ford Hires New Help. We Walk the Street,” “How Come No Work for Women?” and “Stop Discrimination Because of Sex.” Several unions, including the United Auto Workers, held discussions about how to balance the rights of veterans with those of women.
But the public was in no mood to back any serious initiatives on women’s behalf. In 1946, a Fortune magazine poll found that only 22 percent of the men they interviewed and barely 29 percent of the women thought women should have an equal chance at employment.
For many women, especially younger ones who had a family or planned to start one, regrets about losing good paychecks and the camaraderie of the workplace were outweighed by the relief of having their men home from the war. My own mother recalled forty years later how hurt and angry she had been at being let go with so little ceremony or thanks. “But we knew the veterans deserved their old jobs back,” she told me when I recorded her oral history back in the 1980s. “And I was looking forward to finding a better place to live and settling into family life for a while.”
At the beginning of the war there had been a surge in hasty marriages, and during the war sexual experimentation had been widespread, both at home and on the front. Not surprisingly, the end of the war saw a huge spike in divorces, which only led to new concerns about
Edward Strecker, a psychiatrist who studied soldiers found unfit for military duty, certainly thought so. He argued that unprecedented numbers of men were too “psychoneurotic” to cope with the rigors of military life, and he traced the problem back to the overprotective, smothering “mom and her wiles.” Society was “veering toward a matriarchy,” he claimed, in which mothers kept their sons “paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away . . . from the emotional maternal womb.”
These attacks on women’s influence inside the home coexisted and sometimes merged with the attacks on their power outside the home, so that women got it coming and going: They were blamed for devoting too much attention to their children as well as for devoting too little.
The end of the war spurred more efforts to get women out of the workforce and back into the home. During the war, the government’s Magazine War Guide had urged the editors of women’s magazines to encourage women to get involved in civilian defense efforts outside the home. However, historian Nancy Walker reports, once the war ended the War Guide publishers suggested that editors “replace discussions of child care with articles on juvenile delinquency.” This, they reminded the editors, was “one of the social ills blamed on working women.”
As the veterans came home and began readjusting to civilian life, women were advised to set aside any independent aspirations they had developed. Sociologist Willard Waller declared that women had “gotten out of hand” during the wartime emergency. It was time to reaffirm two rules: “women must bear and rear children; husbands must support them.”
Other experts argued that wives had a duty to rebuild their husbands’ self-esteem, which had been damaged when they came home to find that women had been successfully running their households. A wife should make a special point of deferring to her husband’s needs and wishes, they
advised. “He’s head man again,” the magazine House Beautiful reminded its female readers. “Your part . . . is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.”
Women had little choice but to comply. When the war ended, thousands of female war workers showed up at their jobs only to find their final paycheck waiting. By 1947, more than 3 million women had been laid off from their wartime work.
Many were outraged at being dismissed so cavalierly. They took to the picket lines, carrying signs reading “Ford Hires New Help. We Walk the Street,” “How Come No Work for Women?” and “Stop Discrimination Because of Sex.” Several unions, including the United Auto Workers, held discussions about how to balance the rights of veterans with those of women.
But the public was in no mood to back any serious initiatives on women’s behalf. In 1946, a Fortune magazine poll found that only 22 percent of the men they interviewed and barely 29 percent of the women thought women should have an equal chance at employment.
For many women, especially younger ones who had a family or planned to start one, regrets about losing good paychecks and the camaraderie of the workplace were outweighed by the relief of having their men home from the war. My own mother recalled forty years later how hurt and angry she had been at being let go with so little ceremony or thanks. “But we knew the veterans deserved their old jobs back,” she told me when I recorded her oral history back in the 1980s. “And I was looking forward to finding a better place to live and settling into family life for a while.”
At the beginning of the war there had been a surge in hasty marriages, and during the war sexual experimentation had been widespread, both at home and on the front. Not surprisingly, the end of the war saw a huge spike in divorces, which only led to new concerns about
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