“I DREAMED I STOPPED TRAFFIC IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA”
In the era after World War II, American women embraced discomfort in a big way. Their full skirts came to midcalf and were held out with stiff petticoats made of taffeta or some equally itchy fabric. Or they wore equally long formfitting sheathes that constrained the wearer to take only tiny steps as she tottered along in her 4-inch stiletto-heeled shoes. Their hair had to be set on huge rollers, and girls went to sleep wearing what must have felt like a helmet full of tin cans. Hairstyles kept getting bigger and stiffer, requiring tons of spray to keep them in shape. There were legends—possibly invented by exasperated mothers—about girls who died of blood poisoning when insects made nests inside their overly lacquered mounds of hair.
Breasts were supposed to be large, high, and pointy, which for all but the most anatomically gifted meant either a lot of padding or a lot of bra. Women thought quite a lot about bras in the fifties; even undeveloped preteens wanted to wear them, and manufacturers readily complied by inventing the utterly useless but extremely popular “training bra.” Strapless evening gowns required strapless bras, an engineering challenge for the well-endowed women who were the fashion ideal. Industrialist Howard Hughes put some of his aircraft engineers to work on a cantilevered bra that lifted and separated the breasts, which his friend actress Jane Russell wore to great effect. Russell became a big star in the fifties, just when the breast was beginning its career as the most important part of the female anatomy. One of the era’s most famous ad campaigns showed women clad only in bras from the waist up, engaged in all sorts of activities from bullfighting to dog-walking. “I dreamed I stopped traffic in my Maidenform bra,” announced the copy below a picture of a half-clothed policewoman. The bras in question were such formidable foundation garments that the impact was anything but sensual. Nevertheless, students in some Catholic girls schools, under vigorous encouragement from their teachers, started letter-writing campaigns protesting that the Maidenform ads gave teenage boys impure thoughts.
Girdles, which had been in short supply during the war years, came back in force, along with the merry widow, a boned, laced corset. The idea was to be both curvy and armored. “In order to wear the sheath dresses of the fifties without a bulge we sweltered in Playtex tubes and zipped and hooked ourselves into the iron virgins that would have daunted any Victorian maiden,” wrote Benita Eisler, who came of age in the fifties and recalled seeing “the red welts and grooves on the willowy torso of my roommate” as she unbound herself after a date.
Looking back, it’s easy to see the clothes as a metaphor for everything else that happened to women in postwar America. (The experiences we equate with the fifties actually stretched, for most people, from 1945 to the mid-1960s—a twenty-year decade.) After the eras of the settlement house workers and the flappers, after having survived the Depression and kept the economy running in World War II, women seemed to have been catapulted back in time to the nineteenth century, to the cult of the True Woman and the corset that went with it. They dropped out of college, married early, and read women’s magazines that urged them to hold on to their husband’s love by pretending to be dumb and helpless. They were isolated in the suburbs, marooned in a world of women and children while their husbands drove off every day to careers in the city. They came down with mysterious ailments, like the ladies in the pre–Civil War period. TV ads warned of a disease called “tired blood,” which only a daily dose of Geritol could cure. Women looking for a more modern remedy took to the new wonder drug called tranquilizers.
But plenty of women worked outside the home during the postwar era. Within a few years of the end of hostilities in 1945, employment of women was just about back to its wartime peak, and still climbing. However, the jobs they were holding down were not, for the most part, careers. Women were typists and sales clerks and telephone operators and receptionists, doing the low-paying and unglamorous work no returning veteran would want to snatch. The housewives who moved to the suburbs felt, for the most part, that they were escaping a slavery to the time clock and setting up their own shops in brand-new houses filled with new conveniences. They might have resembled Victorian True Women, but they were also a little like those Pilgrim wives who yearned to get out of the fields and into the kitchen.
The explosive economy, combined with the generous benefits the government doled out to returning veterans, made it possible for very young couples to marry while the husband was still in school, buy a house without any savings, have several babies right away, and continually ratchet up their standard of living, all on the income from a single salary. It was a phenomenon that couldn’t be repeated by the generations that followed, whether they wanted to or not. But when people in the fifties said everybody was doing it, they really did mean almost everybody. Until World War II, only a relatively small slice of the population actually had any options except toiling endlessly on a farm or factory. Then suddenly, 60 percent of American families managed to become home-owning members of the middle class. Ebony enthused “Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom” as it celebrated the ability of African American women to stay in their own kitchens rather than cleaning someone else’s. It all seemed almost too good to be true; nearly everybody wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to create families fast, before another disaster overtook the country, like the war or the Depression. And if anybody wondered what that new disaster might be, all they had to do was look at the magazine articles that showed how to construct a do-it-yourself bomb shelter.
The pendulum of modern American social history has a tendency to swing wide. In the 1950s, people were reacting against those editorial writers in the 1930s who felt doing without was good for your soul, and the government propagandists in the war years who expected women to work in steel mills and paint lines down the back of their legs instead of wearing stockings. People wanted large cars, large appliances, and large families. The number of couples with four children or more tripled, and the nation’s population growth rate was suddenly rivaling India’s. The very young wives and mothers of the postwar era flung themselves into homemaking, trading recipes for green bean casserole made with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, worrying about the whiteness of their laundry and the greenness of their lawns, and consulting Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care several times a day.
“I MADE TERRIFIC FRIENDS RIGHT AWAY”
The suburbs were a new phenomenon. Never before, anywhere on the planet, had so many people had the opportunity to buy their own homes, each attached to a little plot of land, averaging a fifth to a tenth of an acre. Everything was new—even the trees looked raw and unfinished, hardly more than gangly twigs sprouting hopefully from newly seeded front lawns. In the early days, the suburbs were nothing but houses, as far as the eye could see, and most families had only one car, which the husbands took to work, leaving the wives stranded in a vast sea of Cape Cods, ranches, or colonials. In an area west of Cincinnati, an entrepreneurial merchant gutted an old school bus, put in shelves, and stocked them with groceries, painted “Art’s Rolling Food Store” on the side, and brought the corner deli to the homebound wives.
The new neighborhoods were generally racially and sometimes religiously homogeneous. That had some terrible social consequences over the long run—African Americans and other minorities were cut off from the chance to buy that first low-cost, low-interest home which formed the basis of the economic fortune of so many white families. But over the short term, the lack of diversity made it easy for the suburban wives to form quick friendships. “Our lives are held closely together because most of us are within the same age bracket, in similar income groups, live in almost identical houses and have common problems,” said the first issue of a community newspaper in Levittown, the famous 17,000-home development in Long Island. The basic Levittown house became a model for developments around the country and it was far from opulent—a four-room Cape Cod with one bathroom and about 750 square feet of living space. But it looked like a castle to women who had been stuck living with relatives or struggling to find an apartment in the postwar housing shortage.
The 1950s suburbs gave birth to a new community of women, as rich in its own way as the ones that preceded it during the war, or around the turn of the century. The housewives looked after each other’s children, fed each other’s dogs, talked endlessly over coffee in the afternoon or highballs at the end of the day, and entertained each other at neighborhood backyard barbecues or more formal cocktail parties. “I made terrific friends right away through the children,” said Carol Cornwall, a suburban housewife in the 1950s who was interviewed by Benita Eisler. But there were few escape routes for those who failed to fit in. “I was as miserable there as I’ve ever been in my life,” another woman told Eisler. There were few organizations except the PTA and the churches, and it was a dicey time politically, when fear of the Communist menace made it dangerous for people to hold anything but the most pedestrian views about public affairs. For the excluded or unsociable, the enforced sameness of the suburbs could be mind-bending. (In Levittown, outdoor clothes drying was permitted only on specially designed, collapsible racks.) The heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Main Street who had been driven over the edge by the lack of stimulation in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, had nothing on the unhappy housewife who landed in Orange County, California, or Green Township, Ohio, and discovered she didn’t fit in.
“IF MY WIFE HAD HER WAY
I THINK WE’D ALL BREATHE IN UNISON”
A century had passed since middle-class families needed to work together as a unit to support themselves. But in the 1950s, husbands, wives, and children were urged to do everything together except work. People who wanted to see a movie bundled their children into the car and went to the drive-in. Family restaurants specialized in child-friendly menus, and the opening of Disneyland in 1955 drove home the idea that vacations were meant to be taken as a group. “Emphasis on family members’ sharing every aspect of one another’s lives has risen to an extraordinary pitch in the last year or so,” noted Dorothy Barclay, a columnist for the The New York Times Magazine in 1956. She quoted one male friend complaining that at his house “we already read, wash dishes, clean the car, paint, go hiking and fix the furnace together…. If my wife had her way I think we’d all breathe in unison.”
It was what McCall’s magazine loudly and insistently referred to as “Togetherness.” Wives were supposed to take an interest in their husband’s work, and the men were also supposed to get involved in household matters that had always before been designated as womanly concerns. The ideal father went shopping for furniture with his wife, and discussed the color schemes of the house and the menu plans for dinner parties. He changed babies’ diapers—at least in emergencies—and listened to children’s homework lessons. Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, surveying the changing scene in Parents magazine, worried that children would get the impression that their fathers didn’t have to work hard to bring home the bacon. “When the father comes home and is tacitly expected (or openly asked) to take over the care of the children…the impression is conveyed to the child that he has been more or less loafing all day and Mother now expects him to start on the serious tasks.”
In reality, few suburban fathers really shared the household duties. Generally the role celebrated for Dad was that of recreation director. “Adventure is a father’s meat. Poor mother is so loaded down with seeing that clothes are clean and food is cooked, she doesn’t have much head for thinking up exciting things for the family to do. Here’s where father can be of help,” wrote the director of the Louisiana Society for Mental Health in The New York Times Magazine. However illusory the husbands’ real contribution was, however, it was a huge shift for men to be expected to get involved at all.
All this was happening at the same time that another big change was under way: Housekeeping was getting easier. Manufacturers had finally perfected the automatic washing machine and the dryer—the long-awaited inventions that would soak and wash and rinse and dry clothing all by themselves. Ever since humans developed an interest in clean clothing, women had been forced to devote at least one full day a week to the laundry. Suddenly, it became less of a project than something you did any old time, sort of with the back of your hand. The washboard, along with the icebox and the handheld eggbeater, were consigned to the farmhouses or to the old urban tenements you might revisit for fun on the Honeymooners TV series. Americans spent a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on appliances in the 1950s—everybody wanted the biggest and the best, preferably in the new colors that were suddenly available, like avocado. Betty Furness, who became a celebrity due to her talent for demonstrating refrigerators and dishwashers on television, noticed that the appliances kept getting larger. When she made the much-heralded Westinghouse commercials that ran during coverage of the 1952 presidential conventions—Furness was on the air three times an hour, more than the candidates—the refrigerators only came up to her shoulder. But by the time the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower for a second term in 1956, the new models were looming over her. All of them featured bigger freezers, the better to store all the new frozen foods that could be turned into full dinners with only a bit of reheating.
“ALL THE GANG HAS STARTED
THEIR OWN SETS OF STERLING”
In 1950, Elizabeth Taylor, the beautiful child star of the 1940s, married for the first time at age nineteen. Like almost half of the American women of the period, she was a bride before her twentieth birthday—although Taylor had to have her first baby before the movie magazines would decree her “A Woman at Last.” People had begun marrying earlier during the war years, but after 1945, the trend really picked up steam. “Not so long ago girls were expelled from college for marrying; now girls feel hopeless if they haven’t a marriage at least in sight by commencement time,” wrote Sidonie Gruenberg, a psychiatrist, in The New York Times Magazine. Citing the postwar shortage of males, Gruenberg added chillingly: “A girl who hasn’t a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married.” Esquire reported that senior college women “talk about a career but they don’t mean it. Let them have six dates with one boy—they’ll have him talking about compatibility and the names of their five children.” (The undercurrent of male resentment throughout the 1950s was mined most successfully by Playboy, which was founded in 1953. Its theme was that women were unproductive leeches plotting to trap unsuspecting men into a life of white-collar servitude and deprive them of their natural right to life as free and swinging bachelors.)
Postwar women broke a century-long American trend toward later marriages and fewer children. The stampede to the altar was so intense that junior high school students had already chosen their silverware pattern. “All the gang has started their own sets of sterling. We’re real keen about it,” one teenager told a marketing researcher. Suzie Slattery, a seventeen-year-old California girl chosen by Life as the typical teen consumer, liked to spend her summer days wandering through department stores with her mother “picking out frocks or furnishings for her room or silver and expensive crockery for the hope chest she has already started.” Once married, they usually had their children—an average of 3.2—quickly, completing their family before their thirtieth birthday.
The proportion of women in college plummeted, dwarfed by the arrival of 6 million male veterans whose tuition was paid on the GI bill. Soon, only 35 percent of the college population was female, and many of the girls who arrived as freshmen dropped out before graduating. Those who did finish school generally married before the ink on the diploma was dry—a professor at Smith complained that he had to cancel his final seminar for the senior honors students because it conflicted with too many bridal showers. The major point of attending college, for most white women at least, was not earning a degree or getting a marketable skill, but finding a husband who had a degree or skill. (This wasn’t true of black women. Although relatively few went to college, virtually all who went graduated. “The thing you didn’t do was quit college or quit work. You were not going to raise a family on one black man’s salary,” said a woman who later became a school principal in New Jersey.) Male students, although intensely focused on preparing for a career, were not particularly interested in intellectual pursuits, either. A survey in 1958 found that 72 percent of college students felt the main purpose of their education was to acquire well-rounded personalities.
Coeds seemed bent on avoiding anything that would interrupt their fast transition from school to matrimony. The wife of a college sociology professor found that when she and her friends urged her husband’s female students to get a little life experience before settling down, they were “characterized as bitter, unromantic old witches, in an affectionate kind of way.” The female professors who had survived the shock of trying to teach flappers in the 1920s were horrified once again. “I felt increasingly that something had gone wrong with our young women of college age…. I noted it with anger and alarm,” said a professor of English at the University of Illinois. But college administrators were willing to go with the flow. The male president of Radcliffe greeted freshmen by telling them their years of college “would prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers and their reward might be to marry Harvard men.” Lynn White Jr., the president of a women’s college in Oakland, California, proposed in 1950 that the curriculum be adapted to reflect the students’ new, postwar interests by including courses in clothing, interior decorating, and “the theory and preparation of a Basque paella, a well-marinated shish-kebab and lamb kidneys sautéed in sherry.”
“YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE IT, GEORGE.
SHE’S AN OLD MAID.”
Just after the war ended, that future Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life was released. It told the story of George Bailey, an average man who ran a small-town savings and loan. He was given the chance to see what life in his hometown would have been like if he had never been born, and everything was terrible. The town was a slum, his old friends were crooks or drunks, and a nice girl he’d befriended had become a prostitute. But the worst fate of all had befallen his wife. “You’re not going to like it, George. She’s an old maid. She never married,” his guardian angel says in tones that suggest, at minimum, leprosy.
The nation went to war against singleness in the postwar era. In one much-quoted survey, less than 10 percent of the public believed an unmarried person could be happy. The 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex urged that spinsters be barred from teaching children on the grounds of “emotional incompetence.” It was the ultimate example of the pendulum swinging—instead of prohibiting the employment of married women as teachers, society now wanted marriage to be mandatory. “A great many children have unquestionably been damaged psychologically by the spinster teacher who cannot be an adequate model of a complete woman either for boys or girls,” the authors argued. (The National Woman’s Party, Alice Paul’s old group that was still fighting the good fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, claimed that Modern Woman set the movement back ten years.) An editor at Mademoiselle told Betty Friedan that the college girls who came to work as guest editors no longer seemed thrilled at the chance to get into publishing. “The girls we bring in now…seem almost to pity us,” she said. “Because we’re career women, I suppose.” She added that not one of the twenty recent guest editors had planned to work at all.
The fear of winding up without a man was wildly out of proportion to reality. This was a time, after all, when more than 95 percent of the women who came of age got married—more than any other American generation. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry,” said the author of a college textbook on marriage. Still, the fear of not being chosen led teenagers to commit to one another—at least temporarily—at a very early age. “All the guys go steady ’cause it wouldn’t be right to leave your best girl home on Saturday night,” sang the Beach Boys in 1962, when most of America was still deep into the culture of the 1950s. Instead of a long stag line waiting to break in at the dance, or a string of “beaux” hoping for a date, the proof of a girl’s popularity was a pin or ring from one desirable teenage boy who was pledged to date her, and only her, and protect her against the horrors of homebound Saturdays. Some girls began going steady as early as twelve years old and started shopping around for a boyfriend much earlier. A study in one Pennsylvania school district in 1961 found that 40 percent of the fifth graders were already dating.
Girls in earlier generations had been able to keep sexual pressure at bay with a fast turnover of boyfriends. But for teenagers in the 1950s, who were engaging in necking and petting every weekend with the same person, the dangers were obvious. There was still a strong cultural bias in favor of girls keeping their virginity—Carol Cornwall, who grew up in the 1950s, recalled constantly being told “If you go all the way with someone, he’ll leave you and marry a ‘nice’ girl.” The girl was supposed to keep her boyfriend under control, and adult authorities continued to delude themselves that all she had to do was send out the right signals. “No boy—no matter whether he’s Head of the Wolfpack—will persist in affectionate attentions if he gets a positively negative response,” said Senior Scholastic assuredly. But in the real world, girls spent a great deal of their time in an exhausting and dispiriting battle to keep their steadies from going too far. “He’d push, push, push. I’d say stop, stop, stop,” said one veteran of the backseat wars. The goal, for many girls, was “technical virginity,” in which they managed to avoid penetration while allowing their boyfriends every other imaginable liberty. An obvious answer to the sexual pressures involved in going steady was the altar. In the end, it’s hard to say whether the desire for early marriage triggered the going steady or the going steady triggered the need for early marriage.
Women weren’t actually following different rules than they had in other recent generations—although the amount of activity the technical virgins put up with may have been a new wrinkle. Alfred Kinsey, a bookish and rather sweetly retiring biologist, had spent the war years conducting surveys on the sexuality of American men and women. In 1953, he released his second groundbreaking study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which reported that about half of white American women had sex before they married—mainly with the men who would become their husbands—and that a quarter committed adultery afterward. “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” said the Reverend Billy Graham. The thing that seemed to trouble critics most was that Kinsey reported his findings in dry academic prose without editorial outrage.
Birth control, mainly in the form of diaphragms, was readily available to married women in most states, but few doctors prescribed them for unmarried girls, and few unmarried girls would have asked. “To go out and actually get it would mean that I planned to do these things,” explained one woman who had been sexually active as a teenager. “Therapeutic” abortions had been reasonably easy to obtain in hospitals in the 1930s, under the theory that a pregnancy was dangerous to the woman’s mental health. But after the war, hospitals became much more rigorous in monitoring what their doctors were up to. As a result, an estimated 250,000 to 1 million illegal abortions were performed every year, in everything from doctors’ offices to tables in the back room of a mysterious man or woman with no medical training. (The numbers are actually not much more than educated guesses, although the Kinsey report estimated that 24 percent of married women had had an abortion at one time or another.)
“IT WAS…SO OUT OF CONTROL”
The physical ideal for 1950s women was Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate blond bombshell. (Americans developed a weird tendency to connect nuclear explosions with sexy women. A photograph of actress Rita Hayworth was attached to the hydrogen bomb dropped in a test on the Bikini Islands, and a swimsuit designer, inspired by the event, named his new skimpy bathing suit in honor of the site of the blast.) But women did not like Monroe nearly as much as men did. Teenage girls, who were among the most avid moviegoers, preferred actresses who were small and childlike—like Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and the Bachelor or Sandra Dee in Gidget, the movie in which a “gidget” is defined as part girl, part midget. They played perky young women who the leading man overlooked during the early action, when he lusted after a larger, older, and more aggressive seductress who failed to see his true inner worth. The audience waited for that moment of recognition in which the wealthy bachelor or the handsome fraternity boy suddenly realized that the little bit of a thing in the corner was really the right woman for him. This theme was replayed in the girls’ novels of the era, which went from being about sleuthing to being about dating.
In 1956, the average teenager had an income of $10.55 a week, mainly from her allowance and jobs like baby-sitting. It was the equivalent of an entire family’s disposable income in 1940, and it gave very young girls an unprecedented power as consumers. Record companies became obsessed with finding young male singers like Elvis Presley, who could cause teenage girls to scream and buy records. Presley was actually far from the first performer to send girls into fits of sexual sublimation. Back in the nineteenth century, when Ignacy Paderewski played the piano, one observer reported, “The women would leave their seats and press forward like a besieging army. They’d tear off their corsage bouquets and fling them, hundreds of bunches of violets, on the stage.” During World War II, teenage girls terrified their parents by writhing and screaming over Frank Sinatra; and in the early 1950s, Johnny Ray, a slight young singer who had to wear a large hearing aid because of his partial deafness, became a sensation by weeping hysterically when he sang. (His hits tended to have names like “Cry.”) The more parents expressed outrage about these heroes, the more enticing the whole thing became. When Presley was drafted into the army, he was succeeded by a veritable army of housebroken boy singers with names like Ricky and Bobby and Frankie who were selected almost exclusively because of their ability to send young girls into paroxysms. The sixteen-year-old Fabian Forte was discovered while his father was being rushed to the hospital with a heart attack and a record promoter, attracted by the crowd and the ambulance, decided the boy looked like a teenage idol. His handlers produced his records by stitching together bits and pieces of Fabian’s singing until they got one recording in which he hit all the right notes. “I could hardly recognize my own voice,” he said later. The terrified teenager was transported from one appearance to another, where he lipsynched his current record in front of a room full of shrieking girls. “It was terrible,” the middle-aged Fabian recalled years later. “You’d think it would be flattering but it was…so out of control.”
“SOME VERY SENSIBLE GIRL FROM A NICE FAMILY”
Television was the single greatest cultural influence of the postwar era, and it invaded the country almost overnight. In 1946, there were only 7,000 TVs in use in the country, but by 1950, there were 4.4 million, and Americans were buying 5 million new sets every year. The great success of early television was I Love Lucy, which debuted in 1951 and quickly became such a hit that Marshall Field’s, the big Chicago department store, moved its sale night from Monday, when Lucy was broadcast. “We love Lucy, too,” the announcement conceded. The series starred Lucille Ball, a semisuccessful movie actress with a talent for physical comedy, and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, a Cuban American bandleader. Many of the plots turned around Lucy’s desire to work—to “be in the show” at Desi’s nightclub or to pursue a harebrained plan to make money. “I want a wife who’s just a wife,” her husband protested in the first episode. Lucy was virtually the only TV wife who didn’t seem entirely content at home. But her attempts at working always led to disaster, and by the final curtain she had learned her lesson, at least until next week. A few of the other early TV series involved single women who worked, in jobs like secretary or teacher, although it was always a given that they were hoping to get married, with varying degrees of desperation.
Television in the fifties was famously bland, particularly when it came to situation comedies. Married couples always slept in twin beds, with no suggestion that they ever had sex. When Lucille Ball became pregnant in real life, scriptwriters wrote her condition into the series, although the word pregnant was barred from the air. (Lucy was only referred to as “expectant.”) CBS got a panel of clergymen to vet the scripts, and in 1953, 44 million people watched the episode when Lucy had her baby—twice as many as watched Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day.
As the decade went on, the comedies all focused on families, and the mother never did much but help her children get out of innocuous jams. In Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver was famous for wearing high heels and pearls while she worked in the kitchen. When her husband asked June what kind of girl she would like to see their older son, Wally, marry someday, June replied: “Oh, some very sensible girl from a nice family…who’s a good cook and can keep a nice house and see that he’s happy.” In Father Knows Best, Kathy, the tomboy, discovered how to act dependent and helpless after Dad explained: “The worst thing you can do is try to beat a man at his own game.” Betty, the older daughter, learned that pretty girls aren’t hired for jobs with a future because they’ll leave soon to get married. She happily gave up her hopes for a career in marketing to model bridal gowns. The adventure shows hardly had any women in them at all. The great TV craze of the late 1950s was westerns, which were invariably about men who were unmarried or widowed—sometimes with a young son, but never a daughter. The hero occasionally acquired a girlfriend or fiancée, but she generally died suddenly before the final commercial. The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.
“WOMEN CAN STAND THE SHOCK AND STRAIN
OF AN ATOMIC EXPLOSION”
Jean Wood Fuller, one of the most enthusiastic members of the federal Civil Defense Administration, arranged to be one of several “female guinea pigs” when the military tested a nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert in 1955. “The normal feminine excitement prevailed amongst us all,” reported Fuller, who was sitting in a trench less than two miles from the blast. But the experience, she told reporters, “shows conclusively that women can stand the shock and strain of an atomic explosion just as well as men.” She praised the beauty of the mushroom cloud and called the experience “terrific, interesting and exciting.” Fuller’s mission in life was to carve out a role for women in nuclear preparedness. Church women who were used to putting on big dinners were “just perfect naturals for our mass feeding groups,” she theorized. She urged women to learn home nursing, to play civil defense games with their children, and to stock their bomb shelters with home goods like “grandma’s pantry.”
The Cold War and anti-Communism overshadowed almost every other aspect of public life in the 1950s. During his famous “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon equated social progress with kitchen appliances, and J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly reminded American women that the only good female was a domestic female. Partly as a result of the us-versus-them mood of the era, the country developed a very strong, and unpleasant, tendency to regard anything outside the norm as subversive. The national impulse toward marriage and family was coupled with a wild-eyed rejection of any different path. “You all know women who lack warmth, tenderness, delicacy and sweetness…. They do not want to be homemakers, they do not want to be mothers. They want to be presiding judges of the Supreme Court,” said a psychiatrist lecturing in New York, who went on to warn that such women were in danger of toppling into frigidity, homosexuality, and psychosis.
The worst side of the 1950s, the fear of being different or of anyone else who might look different, was epitomized by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who terrorized the country with his wildly imaginative claims of secret cells of Communists in every branch of the government. The other members of Congress were as frightened of McCarthy as the hapless public servants whose careers he ruined. The first elected official with the spine to stand up to him was Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine and the only woman in the U.S. Senate. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” she told the Senate. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.” Bernard Baruch, an adviser to several generations of national leaders, said if the speech had been made by a man, he would have been the next president.
Smith got into Congress in the normal way, succeeding her late husband in the House. She served during World War II, when the number of women in Congress was in single digits, and the men did most of their business in drinking sessions in the leaders’ offices, in the gym, and other places where women weren’t invited to go. During meetings of the Naval Affairs Committee, one of the staff members took Smith for a walk after dinner so that the other legislators could have a break from the discomfort of female company. She had to stand in line in the public bathroom on the floor below the Senate because she wasn’t allowed in the lounge off the Senate chambers. But she developed a reputation for meticulous preparation and unflappable grit. During a flight home from a fact-finding tour of Europe, when the plane experienced trouble and the legislators were given life jackets and told to prepare for the worst, Smith brought out harmonicas she had purchased for her nieces and nephews and persuaded the other congressmen to start singing. When the Maine newspapers went into raptures over the story of her bravery, Smith told them she had been as frightened as the others. “Only as a woman I couldn’t have the luxury of showing my fear.”
A widow with no children, Smith managed to soldier on through the fifties, but there was no popular sense that any other women should want to emulate her. The women’s magazines embarked on a twenty-year campaign dedicated to the proposition that American women were interested in absolutely nothing except housekeeping, child care, and their marital sex life and that they needed to protect all those good things by following a rule of utter submissiveness. These magazines had never been particularly profound, but never before had they reflected such a narrow view of what women were like. Betty Friedan theorized that they had been transformed when many women writers dropped out to have children after the war ended and were replaced by males who poured their own vision of domestic bliss into the copy. Ladies’ Home Journal’s celebration of a woman who said she “never tried to enter into a discussion when the men were talking” and “never disputed her husband in anything” echoed those early-nineteenth-century southern women who were taught to repress their own opinions and sit erect on a straight-backed chair in silence while the menfolk talked about crops. The heroine in one 1958 McCall’s story almost lost her husband to an attractive widow with a genius for looking helpless. The wife saved the day by becoming terrified of a noise in the night, and once she was clinging appropriately, marital harmony was restored. The magazines ran endless short stories about housewives who find themselves momentarily unhappy until they learn once again the lesson of docility, the same way that poor Lucy learned over and over that she was not allowed to be in the show.
“THEY’VE MESSED WITH THE WRONG ONE NOW”
Black communities that had sent their sons to die in two world wars were losing patience with the rigors of the Jim Crow South, and they started to fight back, with court suits and, later, direct action in which they dared officials to arrest them for exercising their rights as Americans. It was fitting that the first of the civil rights struggles to capture the nation’s attention involved a woman on a bus. Ever since the Civil War, the humiliation of boarding a train in one’s best clothes, only to be herded off to a dirty and smelly segregated car, and the frustration of having to wait for a “colored-only” trolley while cars for whites sailed by, had caused black women to explode in acts of defiance. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells-Barnett, and dozens of less famous names had gone to court—or to jail—over their right to equal use of public transit. It was the sorest of sore points, and if there was a perfect example of the way segregated transportation demeaned black patrons, it was the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Two-thirds of its patrons were black, and most of them were women who traveled to and from jobs as domestic workers. The first ten rows of seats were reserved for whites. Beyond that, the bus driver made up the rules, backed by the authority of a gun. “Some drivers made black passengers step in the front door and pay their fare, and then we had to get off and go around to the black door and get on,” said Rosa Parks. “Often before the black passengers got around to the back door, the bus would take off without them.” If the bus was crowded and a white passenger was forced to stand, the drivers made one of the black riders give up a seat, even if an elderly woman was giving way to a white teenager.
The arbitrariness of it all made degrading incidents inevitable. Jo Ann Robinson, a teacher at the local black college, Alabama State, was one of the lucky people who owned a car and never had to ride the bus. But she decided to leave her car home when she went to catch a flight to Cleveland for the 1949 Christmas holidays. She was “happy as I had ever been in my life” when she dragged her two suitcases on the bus, which had only two other passengers, and unthinkingly walked back and took a seat in the fifth row. The driver stopped the bus and screamed at her to get up, sending her, weeping, out the door. The experience haunted her for the rest of her life. Robinson became a member of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of middle-class black Montgomery residents that had been pressing the city to end some of its most hated practices. By 1955, the women were ready to take on the bus system, mobilized by the arrest of two black teenage girls who had been dragged off to jail for refusing to obey drivers’ dictates. They organized for a bus boycott, preparing fliers and press releases, but Montgomery’s black male leaders found the girls too socially downscale to qualify as proper test cases. Then in early December, Rosa Parks, an eminently respectable seamstress, the kind of lady who wore white gloves and rimless glasses, was riding home from work when the white section of the bus filled up and the driver told her to move. She stayed where she was and the driver threatened to have her arrested.
“You may do that,” Parks said.
The legend that built up around the incident, which would turn out to be one of the critical events in the American civil rights movement, was that Parks, a simple woman exhausted from a hard day at work, took her stand because she was tired. In truth, she had been moving toward that moment of defiance all her life. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she explained later. Parks was the product of everything that had happened to black women in American history, and one of the results was that she may have had as many white ancestors as black. Her family tree included a Yankee soldier and at least one Indian. Her grandmother’s father was a Scotch-Irish indentured servant who married an African American slave. Her grandfather was the son of a white plantation owner and a mixed-blood slave, both of whom died when he was young. The overseer treated the orphan boy with particular brutality, beating and starving him until Parks’s grandfather developed an intense resentment of white people, even though he could easily pass for white himself. Under his influence, she chafed at facts of black life in the South that many of her friends simply tried to ignore. Her husband, Raymond Parks, won her by telling her about his efforts to raise money for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths who had been sentenced to die in a trumped-up rape case. She began trying to register to vote in 1943, when only a few dozen blacks in Montgomery had managed to overcome the hurdles of shifting office hours, complicated qualification tests, and poll taxes that had been set up for the very purpose of excluding them. She had also attended the Highlander Folk School in Mississippi, where civil rights organizers were trained.
The petite, tidily dressed middle-aged lady on the bus in Montgomery was, in a word, more of a powerhouse than she seemed. Parks said later that she had no intention of challenging the system that day when she started the ride on the Cleveland Avenue bus and wound up in a jail cell, listening to the romantic problems of a cellmate until her husband and friends came to bail her out. But the leaders of the black community knew they had found in her the perfect test case. “My God, look what segregation has put in my hands,” said her euphoric lawyer. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council began mimeographing 35,000 handbills, calling for a one-day boycott on the day of Parks’s court appearance.
The perfect client went to court on Monday, December 5, 1955, wearing a long-sleeved black dress with white cuffs and collar and a small velvet hat with pearls across the top. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” trilled a girl in the crowd. At a mass meeting that night, local black residents packed the Holt Street Baptist Church, where a reporter for the city’s white daily found a crowd with “almost military discipline combined with emotion” listening passionately to a local minister who the reporter did not recognize, but would learn later was Martin Luther King Jr. They voted to boycott the city bus system indefinitely, sang hymns, and scrambled for the chance to put money in the hats that were being passed around. Rosa Parks was given a standing ovation, but she was not given a chance to speak on a night in which virtually every black man in Montgomery wanted a moment in the spotlight. “You’ve said enough,” one of the leaders assured her.
The boycott lasted for more than a year, as the blacks of Montgomery stunned the nation, and probably themselves, with the depth of their determination. It made Martin Luther King a national name. In later years Reverend King always acknowledged that the boycott was actually organized by other people, although he never went out of his way to identify them. He rose on the shoulders of women like Jo Ann Robinson, who risked losing the university teaching job she loved in order to get the boycott under way, and the thousands and thousands of black women who walked to work rather than break the strike, braving not only the elements but also white motorists who pelted them with water balloons, rotten eggs, and vegetables. King urged one old lady to go back to riding the bus because he felt she was too frail to keep walking, but the woman insisted she would honor the boycott like everyone else. “Yes, my feets is tired, but my soul is rested,” she said. Many years later, E. D. Nixon, the black Montgomery lawyer who represented Rosa Parks, met a woman on an airplane who told him she couldn’t imagine what would have happened to black people if Martin Luther King had not come to Montgomery. “I said, ‘If Mrs. Parks had got up and given that white man her seat you’d never aheard of Rev. King.’”
Although de facto segregation held sway in the entire nation, it had been codified in law and blood in the South—Ruby Hurley, a black New Yorker who moved to Birmingham in 1951, discovered a city ordinance that banned blacks and whites from playing checkers together. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that the concept of segregated school systems was unconstitutional, a few young southern African Americans—mainly women—attempted to enroll in the far superior white schools in their towns. The result was a series of violent images that shocked the rest of the nation. Autherine Lucy, who became the first black student ever to enter the University of Alabama, had to be driven from one class to the next through a crowd of people yelling, “Let’s kill her.” They shattered the car window and threw things at her when she jumped out to run into the building. She prayed, she said later, “to be able to see the time when I would be able to complete my work on the campus, but if it was not the will of God that I do this, that he give me the courage to accept the fact that I would lose my life there….” Neither came to pass—the university administration suspended her, saying it was for her own safety, and then expelled her for insubordination when her lawyer criticized the suspension.
Daisy Bates, the head of the NAACP in Little Rock, Arkansas, recruited black students to enroll in the city’s all-white high school, and in 1955 she and some local ministers escorted five girls and three boys through a howling crowd to the steps of Central High School, where a federal judge had ordered that they be admitted. A ninth student, tiny fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, came by herself due to a mixup in arrangements. She struggled through a crowd of angry whites waving bats and screaming, “Lynch her!” A photographer caught a picture of Eckford, looking stolid behind her glasses, clasping her books with her thin arms, while behind her a young woman named Hazel Bryan shrieked, “Go back to Africa.” The students eventually attended the school under the protection of federal marshals, and when they were not ignored and snubbed, they were assaulted and harassed. Every morning they met at Daisy Bates’s home to prepare themselves for the day, and every evening they went back to discuss what had happened. Bates, the daughter of a woman who had been raped and murdered by a group of never-identified white men, was the heroine of the Little Rock story, an integration effort that Harry Ashmore, editor of the Arkansas Gazette, said often depended almost entirely on her “raw courage.” It cost her the newspaper business that she and her husband had spent sixteen years building. She was jailed and threatened, and the Ku Klux Klan burned an eight-foot cross on her front lawn.
Years later, the country would look back on those battles of the 1950s as a time when people fought for such obvious justice—the right to sit on a public bus or to go to a public school. But neither Rosa Parks nor Autherine Lucy nor Daisy Bates and the Little Rock students knew that the victories they sought against what seemed like almost universal white opposition would be won so completely. Years later, Montgomery officials honored the day a forty-two-year-old seamstress refused to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus by changing the street’s name to Rosa Parks Boulevard. Autherine Lucy would return to the University of Alabama to lecture to a history class, and her presence on campus seemed so natural that the local papers never even noticed it occurred. In 1999, the Little Rock students received congressional medals from President Bill Clinton, a former Arkansas governor. Elizabeth Eckford, who had a career in the army, exchanged salutes with her commander in chief. On the fortieth anniversary of her walk to school through the shrieking crowd, Eckford posed for newspaper photos outside the school with Hazel Bryan Massery, her former tormenter. Massery had called Eckford in 1962 “to apologize for my hateful actions.” Later, the two women became friends.
The only person absent from the ceremony was Daisy Bates, who had died a few days earlier at age eighty-two and been buried only a few hours before. Ernest Green, one of the students she had nurtured and counseled, who had grown up to become a managing director at a Washington brokerage firm and a confidant of the president, laid a wreath on behalf of the Little Rock Nine at the foot of her coffin, which lay in state in the Arkansas capitol.