“ROMANCE CAN BEGIN AT THIRTY-FIVE”
When NBC radio moved into the vast new Rockefeller Center in 1932, Margaret Cuthbert, the head of the women’s division, outlined the “great possibilities” she imagined might be achieved at the new address. Daytime radio, she wrote hopefully, “might become a great national headquarters for women,” bringing improving lectures, university extension courses, and cultural programs to the housewives of America. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The daytime hours were devoted to women, but in the form of soap operas—fifteen-minute daily serials that investigated whether Our Gal Sunday, “a girl from a little mining town in the West,” could find happiness “as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman.” (Not usually.) They followed Mary Noble, Backstage Wife, and Helen Trent’s attempt to prove “what so many women long to prove, that because a woman is thirty-five, or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance can begin at thirty-five.” By 1936, more than half of the daytime programming was made up of long-running melodramas, in which the characters wrestled with domestic woes and occasionally commented on the fine quality of the sponsor’s laundry detergent.
That soap operas became a central feature in the lives of millions of American women so quickly was a tribute to how lonely and boring housework had always been. Mary Knackstedt Dyck, a Kansas farm wife who kept a family diary at her windswept Depression-era home, included the developments in the lives of soap opera characters as faithfully as she did those of her husband, who was always at work, and her children, who had moved away. In October 1936, after recording that she was mending her husband’s trousers, she added, “Bob is making plans to get his Marriage Lisense tomorrow”—an apparent reference to a development on Betty and Bob, a radio drama about a secretary who marries her boss. Mrs. Dyck knew the characters weren’t real (although some women never grasped that and sent wedding gifts or baby presents whenever a soap opera heroine got married or pregnant). But they were a central part of her existence, more reliable company than her grown offspring or preoccupied husband. Though her life in the center of the Depression-era Dust Bowl had plenty of sorrows, nothing seemed to bring Mrs. Dyck down like static on the radio.
Critics were as appalled by the soap operas as they had been by the women’s novels of the pre–Civil War period, even though in this case many of the scripts were written by men. (Echoing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complaint about the “scribbling women,” William Faulkner wrote crankily from Hollywood: “I seem to be out of touch with the Kotex Age here.”) The radio soaps did have some similarities with the weepy fiction of that earlier era, only one of which was a lack of immortal prose. Many soap opera heroines had careers they had begun in response to a crisis—like the ever-wise Ma Perkins, who took over the family lumberyard when her husband died, or Mary Marlin, who assumed her husband’s Senate seat when his plane disappeared over Siberia. In the more action-oriented soaps, the emergencies could reach epic proportions. The actress who played Stella Dallas recalled that when Stella’s daughter was kidnapped by a sheik, “I had to go to the Sahara Desert and try to save her. On the way I saved a lot of people from a train wreck. Then I was trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the Suez Canal.”
Mainly, the soap operas reworked over and over again a single theme—the men had failed to live up to their duties, and women had to pick up the pieces. The heroines were strong in the face of male weakness. The men in their lives were handsome but unreliable. They had affairs—Senator Marlin’s itch for philandering was cooled only by his crash into the arctic tundra. They failed in business or made everybody miserable with their irrational jealousy. Or they were left helpless by blindness, amnesia, or some crippling trauma. “The man in the wheelchair has come to be the standard Soapland symbol of the American male’s subordination to the female and his dependence on her greater strength of heart and soul,” complained James Thurber. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Depression was under way. The men at the top had somehow run the economy into the ground, and the ones at the bottom had lost their jobs and were unable to pay the mortgage. The women had to soldier on, holding the family together and sympathizing with the woes of Helen Trent and Stella Dallas.
“DOING IT YOURSELF THESE DAYS?”
The Great Depression lasted from the fall of the stock market in October 1929 to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The country had faced other huge economic crises, but this was the first to arrive since America had developed a large urban middle class, families who were dependent on wage income and who believed that the necessities of life included not only food and shelter, but electricity, indoor plumbing, and an automobile. Few of those people went hungry or homeless during the Depression, but they lived in a constant state of fear and diminished expectation. Diana Morgan, a North Carolina college student, felt “the world was falling apart” when she came home for Christmas vacation and found the phone had been disconnected. Children were shocked by seeing their fathers put on overalls instead of a suit for work, or a mother trying to sell door-to-door products. The writer Caroline Bird said her worst memory was seeing a friend of the family, who she remembered as a proud captain in the U.S. Navy, taking tickets at the neighborhood movie theater.
The average family income dropped 40 percent between 1929 and 1933, and while men took second jobs or searched for better-paying employment in an oversaturated market, most of their wives stayed home and struggled with what Eleanor Roosevelt called “endless little economies and constant anxieties.” At the bottom of the middle class, women worried about losing their homes and falling back into the class of renters—in Indianapolis, more than half the families with mortgages had defaulted on them by 1934. Those higher on the economic ladder simply had to figure out how to keep up appearances without the help of servants. (An ad for bleach showed a pair of elegant hands in a tub of dirty laundry and asked: “Doing it yourself these days?”)
Of course, there were people on the very top who kept their fortunes intact during the crash, and they didn’t always have the good grace to keep a low profile. Sally Rand, a touring ballet dancer stranded in Chicago, was outraged when she read about women spending thousands of dollars to buy gowns for the exclusive Beaux Arts Ball. She hired a horse and rode into the hotel (un)dressed as Lady Godiva, the legendary tax protester who rode naked through the streets of London. She created a sensation and became the star of the Chicago World’s Fair, playing peekaboo with the audience behind a set of big fans. (Rand claimed she invented her fan dance—a less naughty version of the striptease—because she couldn’t afford a costume.) “I got my first $1,000 a week…and the first thing I bought with it was a tractor for my stepfather,” she said later.
Looking back on the Depression decades later, some people got nostalgic about the way hard times produced family solidarity. The thirties-era media also claimed to see a silver lining. “Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul,” editorialized a paper in Muncie, Indiana. But most women remembered a vague unease or a larger sense of crisis. The marriage rate dropped. The nation declared a truce in its war against spinsterhood, and magazines once again ran articles about women who found happiness in life without a husband. Live Alone and Like It was a best-seller. “Do you realize how many people in my generation are not married?” asked Elsa Ponselle, who was working as a teacher when the Chicago school system ran out of money and started paying its staff with IOUs. Her own boyfriend, a commercial artist, vanished when he was laid off from his job. “It hit him like a ton of bricks,” she told journalist-historian Studs Terkel.
Society’s fight against contraceptives came to a virtual halt as well, partly because of national outcries against women on the dole who continued to have babies. In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries. By 1940, only Massachusetts and Connecticut completely prohibited the dissemination of birth control. The birthrate plunged so low that for the first time in American history, the nation was not replacing itself. (The birthrate was about 3 million babies a year lower than it had been before the Crash.) In the 1930s, Caroline Bird recalled, the first thing friends asked a newly pregnant woman was “whether she had considered ‘doing something about it.’” Studies found high incidences of impotence in unemployed men—an easy metaphor for all those crippled husbands on radio series. The rate of divorce dropped, but abandonment soared. Lillian Wald’s visiting nurses in New York discovered a woman, the wife of an unemployed teacher, who had gone to the hospital to give birth to her first child and arrived home to find an eviction notice, no husband, and no furniture. He had emptied out the apartment before decamping.
The people who suffered most during the Depression had generally been poor all along, and now they quickly got poorer. “I have watched fear grip the people in our neighborhood around Hull House,” wrote Jane Addams. Of all the terrible signs of the Depression, she felt, “That clutch of cold fear is one of the most hideous aspects.” In New York, Meridel LeSueur, writing an article for New Masses, said it was “one of the great mysteries of the city where women go when they are out of work and hungry.” Few women were actually on the breadlines, she noted, and there were no cheap flophouses for women as there were for men. A single woman, she concluded, “will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her.” (The New Masses, although it printed LeSueur’s impassioned essay, added an editor’s note criticizing the piece for being “defeatist in attitude, lacking in revolutionary spirit and direction.”)
Certainly some single women slept in city parks and even traveled as hoboes on the rails—“dressed in slacks like men, you could hardly tell ’em,” one male itinerant said. Bertha Thompson, who called herself “Boxcar Bertha,” estimated that 500,000 to 2 million people were hoboes in the 1930s, and that perhaps a tenth of them were women. Most traveled in pairs, Thompson said, either with a man or another woman. “A few women traveled about with a mob or gang of men. These were of the hard-boiled bossy type usually, who had careless sex relations with anyone in their own group.” But mainly, the women who took to the road went with their families. Peggy Terry, who traveled as a migrant worker, remembered seeing a “Hooverville” in Oklahoma City. “Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe ten miles wide and ten miles long.” The sense of solidarity among the poor was often—although certainly not always—strong. Housewives with very little still fed hungry tramps who came to their back doors. Pauline Kael, a teenager during the Depression who grew up to be a famous film critic, remembered her mother vowing: “I’ll feed them till the food runs out.” One of Lillian Wald’s visiting nurses went to teach a young woman how to give her firstborn baby a bath and found not one new mother and baby but two. The other girl had been in the next bed in the maternity ward, and when she confided she had no place to go, she was invited to the tiny tenement, where the husband gave up his half of the bed to the guest. “I can’t do much for her, but I can put a roof over her head,” said the first mother.
“THE MOST LIBERATED WOMAN OF THE CENTURY”
For Americans in the 1930s, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt loomed over everything. Times had been tough before, but people had never felt such a personal connection to the president who was trying to pull the nation out of its economic spiral. And the closest the country had come to an activist First Lady before Eleanor was probably when Dolly Madison saved the White House furnishings from the British during the War of 1812. Americans generally loved—or hated—the Roosevelts as a team. Eleanor was the most important woman in the Depression era, and possibly in the country’s history. During her husband’s administration, particularly in the early years before the threat of war, she was the great symbol of the left wing of the New Deal, the side that wanted not only to get the economy moving again, but also to lift up the majority of the population that had never gotten a share of the Roaring Twenties wealth. Eleanor’s people wanted to improve the housing of tenant farmers, give black people equal access to government services, and create model communities for impoverished coal mining families. They wanted to bring the ethic of the settlement houses into the federal government.
Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it “the grimmest childhood I had ever known.” Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as “kindly and indifferent,” died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (“I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you,” Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.) During World War I, Eleanor discovered that Franklin had been having an affair with her social secretary. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she later told her friend Joseph Lash. Eleanor had a gift for intense friendships with both men and women, and one of the hallmarks of her confidence was the moment when she would sit down with a new friend and confide the story of Franklin and the social secretary.
Although Eleanor had been growing increasingly active and independent, and showed a surprising taste for politics, she was released to become the woman we know in history when Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921 and crippled from the waist down. From then on, her primary duty, as she would famously explain, was to serve as his legs, to go where he could not go. She was no longer expected to live at home with her unfaithful spouse and his difficult mother and a houseful of children who she loved but never seemed to feel entirely comfortable with. Her job, as a wife and a woman, was to travel around—first through New York, and later through the entire country. She turned out to be one of those peripatetic women, heir to the restless spirit of Catharine Beecher, Clara Barton, and Susan B. Anthony. (“Mrs. Roosevelt Spends Night at White House,” jibed one newspaper headline.) She laid the political groundwork for her husband’s quick ascent from invalid to governor to president, then became the heart of the Roosevelt administration’s assault on the Depression, delivering news to her husband about what was happening around the country, pestering him about the things she had discovered, and introducing him to people she felt he needed to know. She averaged 100,000 pieces of mail a year, most from people who felt they had a personal connection with her from the movie newsreels, the radio, her lectures, her syndicated column, and her myriad articles for the national magazines. She answered up to 100 letters a day, sometimes enclosing personal checks.
She was far ahead of her time when it came to things like civil rights, and she befriended people who were too controversial for her husband to associate with. (The FBI’s secret file on her eventually reached 4,000 pages.) But she took the edge off her radicalism by putting everything she did in the context of her role as a loyal wife. She went down into coal mines or flew off to the Pacific to visit American troops because her husband needed her to go on his behalf. She presented herself as the equivalent of the eighteenth-century Yankee merchant’s spouse, or the nineteenth-century plantation mistress, running the family business while her husband was far away. When she wrote and spoke, she made constant references to her role as mother and wife.
The people accepted her work as the president’s substitute, just as they accepted all those widow-congresswomen who kept going to Washington to fill their husbands’ seats. A 1939 Gallup poll showed 67 percent of the public approved of Eleanor’s performance as First Lady, more than supported her husband at that time. “Eleanor, I think she’s the greatest thing that happened to anybody,” said Elsa Ponselle, the Depression-era Chicago schoolteacher. “I think of the way they talked about her, about her looks, about her voice. I used to get rabid.” Eleanor was no beauty, as she very well knew herself. “My dear, if you haven’t any chin and your front teeth stick out it’s going to show on the camera plate,” she told a friend who tried to coach her on how to pose for the photographers. And her high, fluty upper-class voice was an eager target for mimics. The gossip about her was vicious. The same people who spread rumors that Franklin was a syphilis-ridden madman locked up in a padded room in the White House claimed that Eleanor had a black lover, or that the Roosevelts were both part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the American government. But remarkably, her many enemies never seemed to notice the reality of her extremely unconventional personal life. In Eleanor’s time the White House was stuffed with her friends of both sexes, and Franklin’s friends of both sexes, who sometimes lived with them for months, or even years. Many of these friendships had an intense sexual undertone. Historians have never figured out whether Franklin was able to have sexual relations with anyone after his illness, or whether Eleanor ever had an actual affair with Lorena Hickok, the wire service reporter who gave up her career rather than give up her relationship with the First Lady. But they saved their strongest and most intimate feelings to share with people other than each other.
Eleanor was generally unconcerned about physical comfort, clothes, or good food, much to the dismay of her husband and their dinner guests. (She happily set an example for the nation by serving 7-cent meals in the White House that any Depression-era family could eat, although few would have wanted to.) She never really forgave Franklin for the social secretary, and he often bridled at her nagging about political causes. But she had an extraordinarily fruitful political partnership with the most powerful man on earth. And she had learned how to live the life that suited her. She never let anyone, including the Secret Service, keep her penned up. She went flying with Amelia Earhart. She carried her own bags from the train if no one happened to be around to grab them away from her. She drove by herself and, when her guards protested about the danger, took target practice and carried a gun. One historian called her “the most liberated woman of the century.”
“I DIDN’T LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING IMPEACHED”
Once women got the right to vote, almost every president made it a point to give at least one woman a federal post. But until Franklin Roosevelt those jobs were not very important or very numerous. “Twelve appointments by five presidents in 24 years was not an exhilarating record,” said Molly Dewson, an official of the Democratic Party who was the chief lobbyist for female candidates for jobs in the Roosevelt administration. Dewson was very successful. Frances Perkins, who had been Roosevelt’s chief labor adviser when he was governor of New York, became the secretary of labor—the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet-level position. Nellie Tayloe Ross, that reluctant governor of Wyoming, resurfaced as director of the Mint. Businesswoman Josephine Roche was named assistant secretary of the Treasury. The Roosevelt appointees were generally middle-aged, overachieving products of the turn-of-the-century woman’s culture. (Florence Allen, who became the first woman federal appeals court judge in 1934, wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memory was sitting on her father’s lap while he taught her a sentence in Greek.) The Roosevelt administration women dined together, sent each other notes, and supported each other in times of trial. When the Gridiron Club of Washington journalists invited all the Cabinet members except Frances Perkins to their annual dinner, Eleanor Roosevelt organized a counterevent at the White House for female government officials—and female reporters, who weren’t invited to the Gridiron, either.
The women’s network was above all Eleanor’s network. “When I wanted help on some definite point, Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup,” said Dewson. Mary McLeod Bethune, the Negro Affairs Director for the National Youth Administration, had a medium-level post but she used Eleanor’s access to carve out a powerful role as the emissary between black Americans and the White House. Bethune, the founder of a college in Daytona, Florida, was one of the most gifted organizers in American women’s history—a Frances Willard with far less money and a needier constituency. While she lobbied for jobs and programs for her people, she gave as well as took, boosting the Roosevelts among black voters, and, later, mobilizing African American support for the war.
Frances Perkins, the labor secretary, was the highest-ranking woman to serve in the federal government and a lightning rod for conservative opponents of the Roosevelt administration. She rarely showed much emotion, having been trained to a certain stolidity by her parents, who made it a point to warn their small daughter that she was not pretty, so she would learn to face unpleasant facts squarely. As she became more influential, she began to wear rather old-fashioned black dresses, under the theory that men responded best to powerful women who reminded them of their mothers. She was singularly unflappable. Early in her career, a Philadelphia brothel owner named Sam Smith decided that Perkins’s reform work interfered with his business and followed her home one night with some of his thuglike associates. Perkins ducked down a dark alley, opened her umbrella, and let the men turning the corner walk into it while she screamed “Sam Smith!” as loudly as she could. The men ran away, and Smith was eventually put out of business. When Perkins worked for Roosevelt, she repeatedly calmed down labor crises by getting government officials to withdraw their police and state troopers and let the employers and strikers work out things on their own. On one of those occasions, the grateful workers took her to a house where she watched men emerge from the basement with sacks and suitcases full of dynamite they had been planning to use to blow up their factory. They dumped it into a nearby canal instead.
By the time she became secretary of labor, Perkins was her family’s sole support. Her husband, an economist named Paul Wilson, had become mentally ill, with what we would now probably diagnose as a bipolar disorder. “It was always up and down,” Perkins said in her usual matter-of-fact tone. “He was sometimes depressed, sometimes excited…. There was a great variety in the whole process.” When Perkins was honored at a testimonial lunch in 1929, she paid tribute to her husband’s “brilliant mind” and to her daughter “who has grown to girlhood without being a troublesome child,” but saved her fulsome praise for the family housekeeper and nanny.
Serving as labor secretary during the Great Depression turned out to be an endless crisis, and it was lucky that the first woman to hold the job knew how to keep her emotions in check. “Labor can never be reconciled to the selection,” said the president of the AFL, who eventually was. Her predecessor never spoke to her and left her a desk full of cockroaches. The Supreme Court rejected many of her attempts to establish minimum wage laws and maximum workweeks. Conservative congressmen resented Perkins’s support for collective bargaining and her lack of enthusiasm for deporting illegal aliens—a job her predecessor had embraced so avidly he sometimes wound up shipping off people who were American citizens. The lightning rod for dissatisfaction was Harry Bridges, a militant leader of the California dockworkers who had been born in Australia. Conservatives wanted Bridges deported because he was a suspected Communist. When Perkins refused, rumors started to float around that she, too, was a Communist, or perhaps even Bridges’s secret wife or mistress. (The Supreme Court eventually upheld the Labor Department’s ruling that Bridges could not be deported, and he became a U.S. citizen.) In a xenophobic Washington, many people believed Perkins was actually a foreign-born alien named Matilda Watski. In 1938, her opponents began a movement to forcibly remove her from office. “I didn’t like the idea of being impeached,” she understated. The effort failed, and in the meantime, Perkins had become one of the central figures in the creation of the Social Security Act. FDR rejected all her attempts to quit, and in the end, she served through his entire administration. On April 12, 1945, when the Cabinet learned that the president was dead, Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt went out in the hall together, and the stolid labor secretary and the First Lady “sat on a bench like two schoolgirls” and cried.
“A MENACE TO SOCIETY”
In 1932, Fortune, in a peculiar burst of public-spiritedness, urged housewives to hire servants instead of buying appliances. The price of 1 million refrigerators sold the prior year, the magazine said, would have employed thousands of maids and paid for “all the minor amenities of extra-clean corners, polished silver, punctiliously served meals….” Housewives still preferred the refrigerators, and workingwomen preferred jobs in the refrigerator-making factories to domestic service. A far more popular plan for increasing employment opportunities was to make all married women stay home. Pollster George Gallup said the opposition to married female workers was a conviction “on which the voters are about as solidly united as on any subject imaginable—including sin and hay fever.” (Usually, the issue was couched in terms of women whose husbands made decent salaries, but a 1936 poll asked if a woman should be able to keep a full-time job if her family needed the money, and only 35 percent said yes.) “I think the single girl is entitled to make a living more so than the married woman who has a husband to support her and mostly they work so they can buy a lot of luxuries,” a twenty-three-year-old woman wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor. Even Frances Perkins, when she was working for Governor Roosevelt in New York in 1930, joined in the outcry, denouncing any woman who worked merely for “pin money” as “a menace to society, a selfish and short-sighted creature who ought to be ashamed of herself.”
Very few women had the luxury of working for pin money—Perkins herself was supporting her unemployable husband and their daughter. But the issue of whether married women should work was chewed over constantly in the newspapers and women’s magazines, with the consensus coming down on the side of not. A federal law, passed during the Depression, prohibited the employment of “married persons” whose spouses also worked for the government. Of the people forced to quit, three-quarters were women. (Eleanor Roosevelt called the law “a very bad and foolish thing”—government salaries, she argued, were so low, a family needed two incomes just to get along.) Legislators in twenty-six states introduced laws completely banning the hiring of married women, although only Louisiana actually passed a law, and it was quickly declared unconstitutional. More than three-quarters of the nation’s public school districts refused to hire married teachers—unless they were male.
Despite all this, the number of married women who worked continued to increase throughout the decade. Although most of these women struggled to keep poor families above water, a number were middle class and were attempting to preserve the good things they had gotten used to since World War I—like electric lights and gas stoves, and the ability to keep their children in school. It was an important cultural shift that sent married women into the workforce in larger and larger numbers. And for all the endless debating about whether or not it was good for society, the issue was resolved not by social theorists but by the wives themselves, determined that they and their families would not only survive but also move up.
Replacing female workers with men also turned out to be harder than people imagined. The world was too clearly divided between male and female jobs. No man would work as a housekeeper or as a private duty nurse, just as no woman could get a job as a construction worker or airline pilot. (The hopes that female fliers had for becoming commercial pilots had fizzled out when the Commerce Department ruled a woman could not fly a plane carrying passengers in bad weather.) Men did take jobs as teachers and librarians and social workers, reducing the number of women in those professions. And with so many qualified applicants for almost every job, employers set any arbitrary standard they wanted. One hospital rejected an applicant for nursing school because her teeth were crooked. The New York City board of education rejected Rose Freistater for a teaching job because she weighed 182 pounds—arguing that she might have trouble moving fast in a fire drill.
“NOT A BIT OF DUST FOR THIS GREAT
4TH DAY OF FEB.”
A fifth of American families lived on farms in the 1930s, and their lives seemed different from the ones of the pioneer era only in the advantages of automobiles and window screens. In 1935, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms had no electricity. Only 20 percent of farms in Missouri had a kitchen sink with a drain; 7 percent in Kentucky had indoor bathrooms. A researcher visiting white tenant farm wives in the South found the women cooking from before dawn till long after dark on wood-burning stoves and toting water from a well or remote spring to perform the dreaded washing chores, which had to be done at least once a week because they had so few clothes. The wives bore their children at home with the help of a neighborhood “granny” and believed, like their colonial ancestors, that a woman could not conceive unless she had an orgasm. “It’s not my fault that I had so many children—I never enjoyed it one bit,” one told a visitor.
The New Deal program that had the greatest effect on the most women was probably rural electrification. When the hole-diggers, polemen, and axmen made their way across the Texas hill country, bringing wiring to the isolated farmhouses, the farm wives fed them dinner on their best plates—banquets by local standards, as much food as they could lay their hands on for the men who were bringing them electric power. Electricity split through the long, bleak nights on the farms, where women had sat in the darkness for much of their lives, while their children crowded around the kerosene lamp, squinting at their homework. And though most farm families did not have enough money to buy refrigerators or washing machines, they could often afford a fan, an electric iron, or a radio—a blessed radio bringing music and news and The Romance of Helen Trent.
The farm wives needed all the distraction they could get. They had to cope not only with the Depression but environmental collapse as well, due to years of heavy farming in the thin prairie soil that was never meant to be used for anything but light grazing. A drought that began in 1932 and lasted through the decade turned the broken farmland into dust, and the wind turned it into terrifying dust storms. “Just at noon the air gradually thickened and became almost opaque,” said Joan Ostrander, who grew up in a South Dakota farming town. “A thick gritty blanket descended slowly, covered and lay suffocatingly over the land, leaving us in almost total darkness at mid-day—a blackout no light could penetrate. It was a tangible thing—we could feel it between our fingers and teeth and against our faces…. Toward the evening the black mass began to lift…. The maple, scarlet and splendid that morning, stood withered and ragged…. The asters and sun-flowers were gray, and so was the whole surrounding world.” Housewives stuck oiled cloth under the doors and in the window sashes, but the dust came in anyway. Chickens and wild birds died. Fences and sheds lay buried in dust. Mary Dyck, the Kansas farm wife who kept a family diary during the thirties, recorded nearly 100 days of dust storms during the first six months of 1937. The storms killed her garden and destroyed her orchard and kept her husband working round the clock, digging deep furrows in the land that would catch some of the dirt that otherwise would be blown away. It drove her into depression and a sense of futility. Any day without a storm was worth recounting: “Not a bit of dust for this great 4th day of Feb.,” she wrote in 1938.
“GOODNESS HAD NOTHING TO DO
WITH IT, DEARIE”
Besides the radio, Depression-era women were fixated on the movies. Films had learned to talk—clumsily at first, and then obsessively, in smart repartee between the hero and the sassy heroine. The man almost always won out over the spunky woman by the last reel—unless the woman died, which happened rather frequently. It was the beginning of the “woman’s movie,” a film that, on the high end, probably starred someone like Bette Davis and focused almost exclusively on her loves and travails. Women’s movies were tearjerkers that distracted the audience from their real sorrows—in the movies people lost their loves, and sometimes their lives, but very few ever lost their jobs. (In Dark Victory, Davis, having found bliss in marriage to a dedicated doctor, sits in the kitchen of her large Vermont house and explains the virtues of the simple life to her maid and cook. “Here we have nothing and yet we have everything,” she tells the staff.) The women in the audience weren’t looking for lessons on how to cope with hard times. They were looking for escape and glamour, and when the sultry vamps of the 1920s turned into the platinum blonds of the early talkies, women began to bleach their hair with peroxide and to cement it into rigid “permanent waves” like Jean Harlow.
Harlow, whose meteoric career began when she was nineteen years old, specialized in movies about tough, sexy, self-sufficient women. (It was ironic, since her real life was an archetype of helplessness, including marriage to a man who was probably both impotent and abusive and an unnecessary death at twenty-six, from untreated uremic poisoning.) She was one of a raft of actresses in the early 1930s playing characters who used sex to get the better of men rather than becoming victims of love. Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow trying on a new dress and asking the saleslady whether she could see through it. “I’m afraid you can, dear,” says the woman, and Harlow promptly decides to wear it home. After seducing her hitherto happily married boss, the heroine abandons him for an even richer, older man, who she cuckolds with the chauffeur. At the end, after her betrayals are exposed, Harlow drives off in triumph with a new, rich, ancient husband—in a car piloted by her old lover, the chauffer. By 1934, a new Hollywood production code made those kinds of characters extinct. Studio self-censorship ensured that on the big screen even married people slept in separate beds, that Tarzan’s chimpanzees wore body stockings for modesty, and that sexual experimentation led to death, disaster, or at least a life of perpetual chastity. The early Depression era was the last time for a long while that girls went to movies to express their rebellion, or sexual curiosity.
Mae West was a sort of marker for the shifting attitudes toward women’s sexuality in the country and in Hollywood. She was a product of the tougher side of the New York entertainment industry, where she made her name with a series of plays that she wrote and was repeatedly arrested for starring in. The first was called Sex. Another, Drag, was about a group of gay female impersonators. Her play Diamond Lil was her breakout success, both with the public and critics. People liked its humor and its setting in the 1890s Bowery—an era in which West, with her Lillian Russell–like figure, seemed very much at home. The nostalgic veneer made it easier for people to overlook the fact that West was playing a heroine who is the mistress of a mobster and the leader of a gang of shoplifters, who deals cocaine on the side and who stabs another woman to death in the second act with no serious repercussions.
West went to Hollywood in 1932 when she was already nearly forty, to play a role in a gangster movie starring her old friend George Raft. The part was a flat one, and West rewrote all the lines, including the immortal comeback when a woman said: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” and West retorted, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” She was enough of a hit that she persuaded Paramount Studios, which was teetering on bankruptcy, to produce a somewhat laundered version of Diamond Lil under the new name She Done Him Wrong. It was a huge hit—huge enough to save Paramount—and it made West the biggest star in Hollywood, despite the fact that her demeanor and delivery were very much like those of the female impersonators she had worked with in Drag. She earned the second-largest salary in the country, after the publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers were baying in outrage at West’s soaring career. Her biggest fans were young women—perhaps because neither sex nor men in general seemed nearly as intimidating when they were in West’s hands. One theater in Omaha held special women-only screenings of West’s second feature, I’m No Angel.
West’s ability to put sexual connotations to what seemed like completely innocent lines of dialogue drove the studios’ internal censorship system crazy, as well as conservative moral watchdogs in the country at large. She was probably the performer most responsible for the creation of the Legion of Decency, which was formed by the Catholic Church to combat immoral movies. The pressure from the censors eventually forced West into movies that didn’t suit her bawdy, ironic style, and her stardom dwindled away. Her successor as the hottest female in Hollywood was, appropriately enough, Shirley Temple, a curly-haired tot who sang, danced, and straightened out the problems of all the adults in her films.
“I HAD A WIFE ONCE BUT SHE VANISHED
INTO THE NBC BUILDING”
The women who captured the public’s notice in the thirties were almost always very competent, like Mae West—or even Shirley Temple. They wore fashions that broadcast the fact that they were much sturdier and more mature than the little flapper. (If they were going to carry the world on their shoulders, those shoulders had better be padded ones.) They could take care of themselves at a time when men couldn’t be counted on. The ultimate heroine of the decade, Scarlett O’Hara, could do anything except pick the right man—she was, as one critic pointed out, a flapper in reverse, a woman who broke all the rules except the ones about sex.
Gone with the Wind was perhaps the biggest fictional success story of the twentieth century, just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in the nineteenth. They were both novels that interpreted the greatest crisis in American history—slavery and the Civil War—through women’s concerns. Politically, Gone with the Wind was the ultimate anti–Uncle Tom tract—once again the reader was invited into an antebellum South where every decent black person preferred being a slave. (Margaret Mitchell, the author, was an Atlanta girl who had walked out of a history course at Smith College when an African American student was admitted to the class.) But most readers loved the book not for its politics but for the romance between willful Scarlett and Rhett Butler, and the dramatic saga of Scarlett’s fight to preserve her home and family.
The message of Gone with the Wind at the time of its release in 1936 was that True Womanhood could no longer hold its own against the emergencies of the modern world. Melanie Wilkes, the yin to Scarlett’s yang, was a strong and practical and very, very good woman, but she was stuck in the traditional American pattern. Melanie understood as well as anybody that it would take a newer model, a Scarlett, to bring everyone safely through war and violent social upheaval. Gone with the Wind quickly sold a million copies when it was released at the then-astounding price of three dollars. Despite generally unfavorable reviews, the novel sold immediately to the movies, and as production was under way, a poll in 1939 showed that more than 56 million Americans were planning to see the film version.
Depression-era girls who were too young to identify with Scarlett gobbled up Nancy Drew mysteries, the most popular of a horde of girl detective novels that made their appearance in the 1930s. Nancy was about eighteen years old and was free of the constraints of school. She did not have a regular job, although she did assist her father, a wealthy lawyer, when his clients required a mystery solved. She was strong and mind-bogglingly competent. As novelist Bobbie Ann Mason pointed out in a tribute to the “Girl Sleuth,” Nancy could, on a moment’s notice, perform as a bareback rider in a circus, take over the part of the leading lady in a play, assist a doctor doing brain surgery, and “lie bound and gagged in a dank basement or snowed-in cabin for as much as twenty-four hours without freezing to death or wetting her pants.”
One of Hollywood’s stock heroines was the girl reporter, tough as nails on the outside but with a secret romantic streak. Perhaps 15,000 women actually worked for newspapers in the era—fewer, possibly, than could be found riding the rails as hoboes. But the reporters were a lot more fun to think about. In 1940, Howard Hawks introduced the ultimate gal reporter, Hildy Johnson of His Girl Friday. Hawks took the venerable script of The Front Page, a comedy about a manipulative editor and his (male) star reporter and cast Rosalind Russell in the reporter’s role. It worked perfectly. Meanwhile, Brenda Starr, ace reporter, took her place on the comic strip, and in the ultimate B-movie fusion, Hollywood made a movie called Nancy Drew, Reporter.
Most of the women who worked in journalism were confined to the women’s department, or small-town community papers. But reporting was still one of the professions where, early on, a few women had been able to have adventures in full public view. Dorothy Thompson became an incredibly influential columnist in the 1920s after she went to Europe and sold freelance stories on the German political situation. At the time, international reporting was a new field, not particularly prestigious or well paid—fertile territory for ambitious women. Thompson’s analysis of what was going on in Germany and Eastern Europe was must-reading in the years before World War II, and when she married novelist Sinclair Lewis she also became half of one of the nation’s top celebrity couples. She wrote her three-times-a-week newspaper column out of a New York apartment with nine telephones and three secretaries. She also lectured all around the country and made frequent radio appearances. “I had a wife once but she vanished into the NBC building and has never been heard of since,” grumbled Lewis. (The marriage didn’t last.)