A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Page B
Authors: Stephanie Coontz
Tags: Autobiography
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wife left every day at 8:30 A.M., returning between 5:30 and 6:30 P.M. He spent the day caring for their two daughters, cleaning, marketing, and cooking, while trying to find time to write. The result, he concluded, completely contradicted the “popular belief that children need the care of a mother, which cannot be replaced by a father.”
“After the first few days,” Duncan wrote, “I was accepted as the logical person to whom to turn in case of a skinned knee, a bumped head, or desire for a graham cracker. My wife has become the charming lady who returns home in the evening, listens to a recital of the day’s events, reads them a story, and assists in putting them to bed. The children hold her in considerable awe and proudly tell their playmates that their mother goes to work each day. When asked about their father, the reply is generally,
‘Oh, he just stays home and takes care of the house and sometimes writes on the typewriter.’”
A similarly modern note was struck in the June 16, 1947, issue of LIFE magazine, which featured a series of stories about “The American Woman’s Dilemma.” The typical young woman, the editors explained, was “just as interested in getting married and having children as she would have been a few decades ago. But housework and child care alone no longer seem interesting enough for a lifetime job.” Articles in this issue profiled several mothers who held down invigorating full-time careers, as well as a stay-at-home mother of three who worked one hundred hours a week. The magazine also described one mother in a dual-earner family who could not afford a nanny and had to board her child during the workweek. Remarkably, they did not imply that she was neglectful or unloving, merely noting that such separations are painful for parents and “sometimes breed insecurity in children.”
The dilemma, as LIFE posed it, was whether a woman should combine a full-time job with marriage and motherhood, which was “likely to be very hard when her children are young” but “will leave her well-rounded in interests and experience when she has reached the free years after 40,” or devote herself to full-time homemaking, which would ease the strain of raising a family but leave her “unprepared for what to do with her life once the children are no longer young.”
The magazine sympathetically explored the lives of women who made each of these choices, as well as a third choice that the editors seemed to favor: “to combine part-time work with housekeeping while she is young and to use this experience more fully when her children have left home.” This is exactly what Friedan suggested as a good option for most women in The Feminine Mystique .
But 1947 was also the year that journalist Ferdinand Lundberg and psychiatrist Marynia Farnham published Modern Woman: The Lost Sex , in which they described feminism as a “deep illness” and accused career women of seeking to symbolically castrate men. They calculated that two-thirds of Americans were neurotic and that most of them had been made
so by their mothers. They saw no contradiction in saying that overinvolved stay-at-home mothers were as great a problem as neglectful career women, explaining that this was because such women’s natural contentment with their domestic roles had been disturbed by “pernicious” feminist agitation.
In The Feminine Mystique Friedan quoted liberally from Modern Woman to illustrate the viciousness of postwar attacks on women. In fact, Modern Woman had more critics at the time of its publication than Friedan acknowledged. Still, it was an instant best seller and was featured in weekly news reports shown in movie theaters. And by the early 1950s, Farnham and Lundberg were quoted more often in popular magazines than their critics.
The antifeminist counteroffensive was reinforced by the political climate of the age. By the late 1940s America was in the midst of a massive anticommunist crusade that came to
“After the first few days,” Duncan wrote, “I was accepted as the logical person to whom to turn in case of a skinned knee, a bumped head, or desire for a graham cracker. My wife has become the charming lady who returns home in the evening, listens to a recital of the day’s events, reads them a story, and assists in putting them to bed. The children hold her in considerable awe and proudly tell their playmates that their mother goes to work each day. When asked about their father, the reply is generally,
‘Oh, he just stays home and takes care of the house and sometimes writes on the typewriter.’”
A similarly modern note was struck in the June 16, 1947, issue of LIFE magazine, which featured a series of stories about “The American Woman’s Dilemma.” The typical young woman, the editors explained, was “just as interested in getting married and having children as she would have been a few decades ago. But housework and child care alone no longer seem interesting enough for a lifetime job.” Articles in this issue profiled several mothers who held down invigorating full-time careers, as well as a stay-at-home mother of three who worked one hundred hours a week. The magazine also described one mother in a dual-earner family who could not afford a nanny and had to board her child during the workweek. Remarkably, they did not imply that she was neglectful or unloving, merely noting that such separations are painful for parents and “sometimes breed insecurity in children.”
The dilemma, as LIFE posed it, was whether a woman should combine a full-time job with marriage and motherhood, which was “likely to be very hard when her children are young” but “will leave her well-rounded in interests and experience when she has reached the free years after 40,” or devote herself to full-time homemaking, which would ease the strain of raising a family but leave her “unprepared for what to do with her life once the children are no longer young.”
The magazine sympathetically explored the lives of women who made each of these choices, as well as a third choice that the editors seemed to favor: “to combine part-time work with housekeeping while she is young and to use this experience more fully when her children have left home.” This is exactly what Friedan suggested as a good option for most women in The Feminine Mystique .
But 1947 was also the year that journalist Ferdinand Lundberg and psychiatrist Marynia Farnham published Modern Woman: The Lost Sex , in which they described feminism as a “deep illness” and accused career women of seeking to symbolically castrate men. They calculated that two-thirds of Americans were neurotic and that most of them had been made
so by their mothers. They saw no contradiction in saying that overinvolved stay-at-home mothers were as great a problem as neglectful career women, explaining that this was because such women’s natural contentment with their domestic roles had been disturbed by “pernicious” feminist agitation.
In The Feminine Mystique Friedan quoted liberally from Modern Woman to illustrate the viciousness of postwar attacks on women. In fact, Modern Woman had more critics at the time of its publication than Friedan acknowledged. Still, it was an instant best seller and was featured in weekly news reports shown in movie theaters. And by the early 1950s, Farnham and Lundberg were quoted more often in popular magazines than their critics.
The antifeminist counteroffensive was reinforced by the political climate of the age. By the late 1940s America was in the midst of a massive anticommunist crusade that came to
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