Gender Studies -- the World Split Open
Why were American women unhappy? In building her case regarding the unhappiness that women in America experienced in the 1950s, the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America -- Ruth Rosen -- goes into great detail. On page 13 Rosen points out that after WWII in the American culture, women getting pregnant and having babies, was extremely common and normal. In fact, a woman who was not married was "an embarrassment," and the author quotes actress Debbie Reynolds (from the film The Tender Trap) as saying that marriage is "the most important thing in the world" and that a woman is not "really a woman" until she has a wedding and babies (Rosen, 13).
But after taking care of babies all day, doing housework, running errands and cooking dinner for the family -- all the while using the products and appliances that would help make her a "professional homemaker" (Rosen, 14) -- the wife of the 1950s still had to slip into something a little more sensual at bedtime so her husband would be attracted to her in a carnal way. In addition to just being a good sexual partner in bed, popular "how to" literature of the era laid down the law that a blissful marriage required man and wife to have orgasms simultaneously (Rosen, 16). And further, a book called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, asserted that if a woman was stimulated sexually yet did not achieve a climax, this then results in "an injury," and if this happens often, it can lead to "permanent -- or very obstinate -- damage to body and soul" (Rosen, 16).
Main Turning Points, Forces for Change, Job Reforms:
One of the first turning points towards women gaining more power (re-entering the labor force) over their lives and their families that was mentioned by Rosen was women getting back into the workforce about ten years after the men returned from the war in Europe and Asia; at the end of the war, women pretty much were pushed out of their jobs so the men could go back to work. But in the mid-1950s, businesses and corporations began hiring single women -- and educated married women -- as a source of inexpensive labor, to fatten corporate profits. This hiring process resulted in married women accounting for 52% of the female workforce by 1960 (Rosen, 20), up from 36% in 1950. More importantly, by the end of the Fifties, families with two incomes had jumped 222% in the past 20 years (Rosen, 20).
The bad news was that it was a "sex-segregated" workforce, and that even when women carried out the same tasks as men, with the same job titles and job descriptions, "they received substantially lower wages" (Rosen, 25). But this injustice became in fact a turning point, as it became a main point in the platform that would be built to advance the women's liberation movement. On page 36 Rosen notes that women began to gain'awareness" as to how their image as females had become "the basis for their exclusion" in the American good life.
The second main turning point (rebellion and education) that is reflected in Rosen's book happened in the early Sixties, as the female children born immediately after the war were coming of age during the period of social unrest, anti-war marches, youth rebellion, and questioning of old values. These young women, Rosen explains (39-40) saw how unhappy their mothers were, and began to fear becoming an "ordinary housewife" (39), which would mean being as miserable as mom (and older sisters), and would mean of life of being controlled by husband, job, family and society's expectations.
With these above-mentioned dynamics as a backdrop, young women in droves went to college, postponed marriage, got involved in political movements that espoused a rejection of the "feminine mystique" (Rosen, 45). And even though the media tended to describe all feminists as "white middle-class women" (Rosen, 46), but in fact many of the women who became activists came from blue collar or secular working-class Jewish families where the parents had been politically active.
The third main turning point was the birth control pill, the sexual revolution, the involvement of women in the peace movement. Women "eagerly embraced their sexual freedom" (Rosen, 55), but still sought a language though which to express their antipathy for the seeming servitude of marriage; women read The Second Sex and were impressed and moved by the "brilliant and daring analysis of women's condition" (Rosen, 57). The peace movement at that time was spurred on by nuclear fallout from testing, by poverty, pollution,...
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