The twenties roared, until they didn’t. The stock market crash of 1929 put an end to Jazz Age frivolity and, for a time, kept people from severing their relationships and the security those relationships provided. Pragmatism had always lurked in the wings, but the desperation of the Depression thrust it to centre stage.
The century leading up to the crash was one of pure momentum. Technology advanced and cities grew; slavery ended and women across racial lines became legally recognized as individuals. Circumstances were far from perfect – far, for many, from satisfactory (it’s worth noting, for one, that Black women were blocked from voting in some southern states through the 1960s). But, by and large, women gained rights that cleared a culturally unprecedented plane of legal and logistical autonomy. The redistribution of capital across gender lines was its primary driver. With the scarcity of Depression came precaution. The divorce rate, which had risen steadily for the last half-century and spiked over the 1920s, dropped by 25 per cent in the US between 1929 and 1933. The rate of marriage correspondingly plummeted by 22 per cent, as a lack of employment disincentivized the creation of new families. And then the Great Depression was followed immediately by war. Women again surged into the workforce, some by supplanting newly appointed servicemen in traditionally male industries like aviation and munitions. An estimated 40 per cent of American women went to work. Women who had never before imagined themselves in the position of supporting their families as wage-earners got a taste of economic agency, which historian Alice Kessler-Harris has pointed out remains an enduring legacy of World War II. Then the war ended, and the servicemen came home. All but a few of the women who had taken wartime jobs left their positions. The rate of marriage climbed to new heights.
On the whole, the 1950s were a complete aberration in demographic trends before or since. The average age at first marriage fell to a record low, and the divorce rate levelled off for the first time since the Civil War nearly a century prior. Eighty per cent of couples who married in the 1950s stayed together, and many of them were genuinely happy. My own paternal grandparents married in 1952 and proceeded, almost immediately, to have seven children with whom my grandmother stayed home while my grandfather worked long hours as a well-respected obstetrician and hospital chief of staff, serving a prolifically reproductive Catholic community through the height of the baby boom. My grandmother, now in her late eighties, still regards those years of family life as her happiest. A gentle woman of resolute faith, she found comfort and purpose, I imagine, in the cultivation of a united, worshipful clan. And maybe that was a part of it; while Western European houses of worship saw their flocks dwindling throughout the postwar era, American church attendance in the 1950s reached an all-time high.
In 2009’s The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin writes that churches and synagogues of the era tended to offer services that were specially designed to appeal to married couples with children. ‘The style emphasized being together in a holy place, much as family life emphasized being together at home,’ he writes. ‘It was not a style that encouraged introspection or questioning of one’s personal life.’
There are parallels in my family’s narratives; whatever the glue, my grandparents were inseparable and deeply devoted to one another for sixty-three years of marriage. A poster-sized photograph of the pair dancing at my cousin’s wedding four months before my grandfather’s death sits in the living room of the condominium they shared in their final decade together, after downsizing from their palatial family home. My grandmother continues to reside there. I am told that she talks to my grandfather’s beaming, two-dimensional likeness every day.
My grandmother, of course, was lucky. I’ve heard from friends over the years of family matriarchs whose marriages were not so filled with love – smart and slightly mad women whose spark was extinguished by the monotonies of domestic duty coupled with a lack of intellectual stimulation or community purpose beyond the household. Addiction, depression, and suicide are the tragic epitaphs of so many of my grandmother’s contemporaries, women who struggled to conform to the 1950s ideal of the happy housewife. Prior decades had offered women an inkling of what independence might look like, with expanded access to education and civic participation. The momentum that had propelled womankind for at least three generations seemed suddenly to have stalled.
The white, middle-class trend toward suburban settlement that emerged postwar had the perhaps unintended effect of isolating the wives and mothers left at home. Though automobile ownership was becoming increasingly common throughout the 1950s, two-car households remained rare. The car-dependent design of new community developments, which aimed in large part to keep out racialized city dwellers who relied on public transit, also kept the women living inside from leaving.
Suburban motherhood was a trip. And yet, women’s memory of what once had been wasn’t lost. The wives and mothers of the mid-twentieth century were the daughters of women who had fought for the right to vote, had themselves taken men’s jobs during the war and gotten university degrees. Amid the baby boom and suburbanization of the family, married women began to re-enter the workforce almost immediately – a reality that’s sometimes lost behind the dominant residual memory of the 1950s housewife.
Of course, whether conflicted or content, the housewife did occupy an outsize role in the culture of the time. As the age of postwar domesticity developed, a long-held feminist mistrust of marital convention was thrust back into the fore of a reawakened women’s movement that would expand the discussion of women’s equality into the workplace and home. In The Second Sex, first published in 1949 and widely considered to have laid the foundation for feminism’s second wave, Simone de Beauvoir positions the contemporary marriage as a near-inevitable force for women’s spiritual annihilation. A housewife’s contribution to the household served not to instill her with the fortitude of duty or satisfaction over useful contribution, but to highlight the degree to which she was dependent on others for validation.
‘[A housewife’s work] becomes meaningful and dignified only if it is integrated into existences that go beyond themselves, toward the society in production or action,’ de Beauvoir wrote. ‘Far from enfranchising the matron, it makes her dependent on her husband and children; she justifies her existence through them: she is no more than an inessential meditation in their lives.’
In some ways, de Beauvoir’s trapped housewife presented a new iteration of a classic trope of bourgeois preoccupation. The cloistered madwoman, made desperate by the constraints of domesticity, had ached her way through gothic literary narratives from Brontë to Gilman nearly a century prior. The difference, perhaps, was that the domestic malaise of the mid-twentieth-century middle class became enshrouded in the kinds of material comforts that can make existential strife more complicated to pin down. Life, on the whole, wasn’t necessarily all that bad for the dependent housewife. She was provided for; the chores she attended to were made breezy by an assortment of new housekeeping technologies, like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner. Practically speaking, the desperate housewife’s mother had likely had it much worse.
Then again, ennui thrives in stillness. The very appliances that had come to rescue the 1950s wife and mother facilitated moments of dangerous quiet. In lieu of back-breaking labour, she could be introspective. Women instinctively knew this; so, too, did the companies that profited from them. ‘The hidden attitude of women toward labor-saving devices is decidedly surprising,’ writes journalist Vance Packard in ‘The Ad and the Id,’ a feature in a 1957 Harper’s Bazaar.
Working wives can accept them, but the full-time housewife is liable to feel that they threaten her importance and creativity. The research director of an ad agency sadly explained the situation as follows: ‘If you tell the housewife that by using your washing machine, drier or dishwasher she can be free to play bridge, you’re dead! – the housewife today already feels guilty about the fact that she is not working as hard as her mother.’
Despite being tasked with the unpaid labour that kept the household running, the housewife did not want to diminish her own sense of usefulness. She wanted to matter.
The restless unease of many middle-class housewives was crystalized in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963); reading Friedan marked, for these housewives, the first glimmer of recognition that they were not uniquely broken. According to Friedan, the housewife’s quiet turmoil was felt equally among women whose husbands were struggling at low-paying jobs and those who brought home hefty salaries. ‘[T]he problem that has no name,’ Friedan wrote,
stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity … We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’
Friedan’s feminist hand grenade had developed from a years-long journalistic investigation, but the frustrations that her case studies vocalized hit close to home. Friedan herself had turned down a graduate fellowship in the mid-1940s to preserve a relationship with a boyfriend who’d felt threatened by her academic success. She would later explain that she’d chosen as she had to avoid ‘becoming an old maid college teacher.’ The boyfriend became her husband and, by the end of the 1960s, her ex-husband.
Many of Friedan’s early critics, both male and female, derided the author’s implication that being a housewife was a somehow inadequate occupation of a woman’s time. In A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz reports that the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal received hundreds of letters from readers after publishing an excerpt from The Feminine Mystique in advance of its publication, 80 per cent of them angry. In the decades since, Friedan’s elitism – evidenced through her specific prescription of creative, intellectually stimulating work – and homophobia have garnered detractors of their own.
Nevertheless, some readers of the era would argue that The Feminine Mystique had infused in them the fortitude to leave marriages already in distress. Coontz reports how eye-opening Friedan’s argument had been for many of its middle-class, white women readers. One married mother of two who, in 1963 and 1964, read the book ‘in pieces and parts when time permitted,’ credits Friedan for allowing her to envision a life beyond her cramped domestic bubble. By arguing that women could claim an identity beyond their miserable marriages, the reader credits Friedan for giving her ‘the right to divorce.’ She later remarried a long-time friend whom she’d known since high school, ‘who is and was the love of my life.’ The blissful remarriage, Coontz writes, is a common narrative thread among the post- Mystique divorcees she’s surveyed. Once granted the informal permission to become active participants in their own relationships – and, by extension, the daily structure of their own lives – many women found themselves in relationships that fulfilled them.
The Feminine Mystique never makes an argument against marriage, per se. Unlike The Second Sex – in almost every respect the more anti-establishment work and almost certainly intended for an audience of like-minded intellectuals – The Feminine Mystique was as much self-help manual as manifesto. Friedan’s book remains the touchstone of the era precisely because its readers were not activists or academics. They were, instead, the middle-class women who gathered housekeeping advice from women’s magazines and swore by the guidelines of paperback parenting guru Dr. Spock.
The book gives voice to a specific feeling, and supplies evidence that the feeling is widely shared. Before Friedan, nobody had quite articulated the precariousness of crafting an entire adult identity on the bases of marriage and motherhood, nor offered a potential curative (in this case, personal goals and a path to pursuing them). Its first printing alone sold 1.4 million copies.
The alternative to what Friedan had identified as ‘the problem with no name’ was women’s participation in traditionally male spheres – more precisely, secured status as equal actors in the workforce and marketplace. It’s easy to see why Friedan’s abridged prognosis took hold among Anglo middle- and upper-class readers – her solution doesn’t destabilize the capitalist mechanics of class and wealth; it just provides a certain cohort of women with the right to desire to participate as fully as the men they’d known their entire lives. As many have pointed out in the decades that followed The Feminine Mystique, Friedan’s tome erased not only the economic and structural forces that guaranteed women’s ongoing oppression, but the author’s own history as a labour organizer and radical leftist journalist.
Friedan had spent the decade from 1942 to 1952 working for union publications, first as a reporter for the labour-news syndicator Federated Press, and then for seven years as a staff writer with the magazine of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. Decades later, the historian Daniel Horowitz would lament The Feminine Mystique’s omission of both Friedan’s past and the movement she’d spent ten years covering: ‘[I]t was a loss to American history that a remarkable journalist and feminist leader failed to bring forward the seminal contributions that labor ideals and struggles had made to feminism in the twentieth century.’
Loss or no, the individual rather than collectivist focus of The Feminine Mystique was likely by design. It may have been for the benefit of her intended audience that Friedan centred her critique on the pursuit of individual happiness, as opposed to the economic freedom required to buttress such a lofty objective. The blame for mid-century familial discord was often placed squarely on wives – a consequence, Friedan argued, of the so-called feminine mystique. The wife of an unhappy husband needed only to will his happiness into being, and it would be so; the husband whose sexual appetites had wandered outside of his marriage could refocus his interests on marital satisfaction, and in turn he’d be cured of temptation. As Cherlin’s study points out, however, the mounting pressure to be happy in marriage would come to outweigh the potential costs of leaving behind a relationship that wasn’t.
On New Year’s Day of 1971, a new law went into effect that would completely change the nature of divorce in the state of California. Signed by then-governor Ronald Reagan, the legislation narrowed the litany of potential grounds for marital dissolution to just two: ‘incurable insanity’ and something called ‘irreconcilable differences.’ The latter provision removed the requirement for a divorce petition to argue spousal wrongdoing on behalf of either partner, eliminating the likes of adultery, cruelty, and desertion from the would-be divorcee’s repertoire of requisite suffering.
For the century that preceded Reagan’s new law, divorce had been a years-long legal hassle contingent on proving, through evidence provided and argued before a state court, a narrative of victimhood and perpetration. Reagan himself was divorced; ex-wife Jane Wyman (memorable as the stern, unmarried Aunt Polly in the classic 1960 Hayley Mills film Pollyanna) had filed in 1949 on grounds of ‘mental cruelty.’ The husband or (usually) wife petitioning for divorce had to state and defend his or (usually) her persistent suffering of physical or mental cruelty to a (certainly) male judge, who had to then believe it. For Jane Wyman to obtain her divorce, she would have had to convince a judge that Ronald Reagan was emotionally abusive.
And a judge presiding over a divorce might have compelling reasons for doubting a female claimant. He might, for instance, be familiar with the decades of widely accepted pop-psychological literature that cogently argued against women’s ability to decide for themselves what it meant to suffer (cf. the notion of ‘hysteria’). Freudian psychiatrists reasoned that gender-role confusion was deluding growing numbers of women into wanting more options in life, when the (male-authored) literature suggested persuasively that their only feasible source of pure fulfillment was in nurturing a family.
In the context of a society where a woman’s marital unhappiness was quite literally pathologized, it is understandable that the introduction of the ‘no-fault’ divorce in 1971 freaked some people out, especially since it happened to coincide with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement that appeared bent on shattering the gendered conventions around which all of history’s legal partnerships had revolved. This new type of divorce was so purposefully stripped of causal acrimony that lawmakers had dropped the word ‘divorce’ altogether and breezily rebranded the process a ‘dissolution’ instead. A legal recognition that had previously taken many months and dollars and carefully constructed cases to acquire was suddenly available to 20 million residents of the most populous state in the US – as the New York Times would nervously put it – ‘virtually on demand.’
And yet, the change was popular. A day before the legislation would go into effect, the Times detailed the tremendous support that the new law had received during its incubation period. Even church groups, which a person might reasonably assume would react poorly to threats against the family structure, were reportedly in favour. ‘Lengthy court fights,’ the Times explained, ‘often left a residue of hostility between parents that placed a tremendous burden on their offspring.’
Between 1968 and 1971, versions of the no-fault divorce became standard across governing bodies within Canada, the US, and the UK. While California’s divorce legislation took the prize for most sweeping, most other jurisdictions recognized that a period of post-marital separation prior to a divorce suit was as good as provable culpability. In turn, divorce rates soared; in the first two years following New York State’s own liberalized matrimonial law, divorces there more than quadrupled from 4,000 cases a year to 18,000. Only 11 per cent of American children born in the US during the 1950s had parents who were divorced, as opposed to roughly half of American kids born two decades later.
And as the rate of divorce surged, so shifted the cultural perception of how children fit into the equation. Throughout the 1950s and into the early years of the following decade, bad marriages were likely to be met with an ethos of ‘stay-together-for-the-kids.’ William Strauss and Neil Howe’s 1991 demographic compendium, Generations, reports that in 1962, half of adult women held the stoic belief that unhappy marriages ought to be toughed out until the children had flown the nest.
But the rising belief that success and happiness were self-driven outcomes, which so shaped family life of the 1950s, also fostered a cultural climate that would make the divorce revolution possible. The social-hygiene preoccupations that had dogged the well-to-do at the turn of the century had been replaced, post–World War II, by a self-improvement bent that primed the public for a deluge of psychobabble. Self-help books sold by the millions and helped to support the belief that nothing couldn’t be solved with the application of a little elbow grease and a good Protestant work ethic.
The Power of Positive Thinking, a 1952 pop-psychology bestseller written by Norman Vincent Peale (a Methodist-ordained minister who had no formal background in psychology and would later go on to spiritually advise the Trump family), argued that couples who were tempted to part ways needed only to approach their relationship with new resolve. If they obsessively meditated on a concrete image of shared happiness, eventually that vision would materialize as though their collective denial had been cosmically repurposed as an incantation.
Peale gave the example of a woman whose husband wanted a divorce. After setting aside her private inner ‘hysteria’ at the thought, she asked that her dissatisfied husband allow for a ninety-day grace period in which to reconsider. During that time, she worked diligently to conjure images of their happy golf outings together, to imagine him sitting in a favourite chair that seemed to be a stand-in for their marriage itself. It worked! After ninety days, he forgot he’d wanted a divorce at all – an outcome Peale assured readers he had seen many times in his role as a spiritual advisor. It was a compelling message for mid-century Americans, who were swallowing en masse the postwar illusion that their material successes were the product of individual labours – of opportunity and hard work – rather than a confluence of economic forces that had momentarily parted the curtains onto a window of growth that, by the early 1970s, would be shut forever.
Friedan’s emphasis on labour as a means toward self-actualization ironically set up The Feminine Mystique as the housewife’s answer to Peale’s happiness how-to. In so doing, the book alienated many working-class and non-white women who had never been allotted the luxury of housewifehood to begin with. Non-white feminists have incidentally spent the past half-century pointing out the ways in which their ongoing economic participation has fallen short of white feminists’ emancipatory promise. As the ground-breaking Black feminist theorist bell hooks points out in her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Friedan had effectively universalized the experience of ‘a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women – housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life.’ hooks continues:
[Friedan] did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.
hooks is right that the unsatisfied housewife occupied a space of historically unprecedented privilege, though none of the mothers I know would describe the work of child-rearing and tending house as anything resembling ‘leisure.’ But hooks likely didn’t mean to make that point, exactly; the implicit question she poses isn’t whether working outside the home might level the playing field between the sexes if every woman somehow were offered that opportunity (the answer anyway is that no, it can’t) but that the housewife’s work, which would still have to get done, would simply be outsourced to other human workers yet lower on the cross-notched ladder of race, gender, and class.
And yet, by the 1990s most demographers had reached an understanding that the liberalized divorce laws of two decades prior did not account for the surging divorce rates of the 1970s. Sure, making divorce easier succeeded in, well, making divorce easier. There were other factors, too – for instance, the proliferation of birth control and passage of Roe v. Wade. But the single most influential driver in the soaring divorce rates of the 1970s was the corresponding rate at which women who might have otherwise been housewives were entering the workplace. Where only 15 per cent of married women in the US worked outside of the home in 1940, by 1979 a full 50 per cent of married women earned their own wages. But thinking about who these women were, and what their precise circumstances, sheds better light on the trajectory of relationship unions and dissolutions from that point forward. It also inserts, as a footnote to the phrasing of ‘women’s liberation,’ the question of precisely whose.
‘By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class and age,’ Black poet and activist Audre Lorde would tell a crowd gathered at Amherst College in the spring of 1980. ‘There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.’ Though we’re all inheritors of a history, some of us have longer threads on the rope’s frayed end.
In a 2010 radio documentary broadcast by American Public Media, reporter Sasha Aslanian recalls the moment she realized that nearly everyone, including herself, in her book club was a child of the 1970s divorce wave. One, a woman named Amy, would later share a darkly funny anecdote about an old photograph she’d uncovered from around the time her parents separated. It displayed a family of Barbie dolls lined neatly along a dollhouse, with a half-naked Ken doll suspended upside down beneath them. ‘I thought it was like teams,’ Amy remembers. ‘And we were part of the losing team. And we got dumped by the captain.’
Kids of the 1970s were being raised to believe that marriage was a worthwhile pursuit for love and partnership and not just a duty of life ‘because it’s what people do’; as such, journalists and experts helped circulate the idea that divorce could actually be good for them, insofar as they strengthened a mother’s independence. A 1979 article in the Marriage & Family Review argued that divorce and subsequent remarriage might even hold ‘capacities for growth and development’ for mothers and create ‘a larger network of effective kin ties’ that would distribute the burden of emotional and economic caregiving.
During my research for this book, I’d punch ‘divorce’ into digital periodical databases and note what turned up – or, specifically, how it was different from what had turned up before, when my results had been confined within a different chronological window. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the search yielded consistent hits beyond the occasional alarmist short story. I pulled up an excerpt from a children’s non-fiction book about divorce reprinted in a 1971 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, wherein a Dr. Richard Gardner introduces himself to young readers as a ‘special kind of doctor who tries to help children who have trouble and worries.’ The book is clearly meant to help children address their feelings about parental divorce head-on, rather than pretend nothing’s the matter. ‘If you’ve been doing this,’ Gardner cautions underaged would-be stoics, ‘now’s the time to stop!’ (Gardner later became obsessed with the idea that false accusations of child sexual abuse were a new social hysteria akin to the Puritan witch trials; his 2003 New York Times obituary would be notable in its verbatim reprint of a pro–Woody Allen screed against Mia Farrow during the couple’s high-profile 1992 custody dispute, which hinged on Allen’s alleged abuse of the pair’s daughter Dylan. But that’s a whole other story.)
Then and still today, women were, on the whole, much likelier than men to instigate divorce proceedings, which contemporary sociologists attribute to asymmetrical rates of marital dissatisfaction. Women are typically still disproportionately expected to carry the brunt of uncompensated – that is, mental, emotional, and domestic – labour, and it turns out that that’s exhausting. (That a scant 20 per cent of married women keep their own surnames, as of a 2015 study commissioned by Google and the New York Times, might be cited as evidence of said exhaustion – not because women shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves whatever they like, but because, according to Stanford sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld, it’s apparently not uncommon for men to pressure their fiancées into making the switch.)
But while the women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum alongside these legislative changes, women’s increased social and economic autonomy were not likely its primary drivers. The fact was, as the nature of marriage itself continued its evolution from a religiously binding property agreement to comprising one of a few more facets of self-actualization, there was less incentive to stay in one that was unhappy. And, if there were children involved, the no-fault divorce placed less onus on the male partner to fork over the bulk of his assets to care for his estranged family. It was mutually beneficial for both partners involved; wives no longer had to deliver a judicial play-by-play of their suffering, and husbands were relieved of the financial burden the former system would have placed.