Authors: Betsy Israel
Tags: #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Media Studies
A little less than a year later, women had lost well over a million factory jobs, half a million clerical positions, 300,000 jobs in commercial service, and 100,000 in sales. Women’s share of all jobs had dropped from 36 to 28 percent. Married women who could not coordinate the demands of child care and household work, women who were chronically late or exhausted, became “voluntary withdrawals”—whether they wanted to leave their jobs or not; single women rated no such sacrificial titles. They were fired. Women who remained in the expanded postwar workforce—about 17 million, more than half of them single—found themselves seemingly quarantined within a tiny range of jobs. During the first quarter of 1946, writes historian Susan Hartmann, “government employment agencies placed 40 percent of female applicants in household and other service jobs, 13 to 15 percent in semiskilled positions, and less than 5 percent in pro
fessional managerial or skilled work. In June of that year, 70 percent of jobs open to women paid less than .65 an hour.”
A 1946 survey of former WACs revealed that less than half of those employed had been able to find work that in any way related to their extensive wartime training.
Of course they had not really been expected to. In 1944, one radio executive had publicly predicted, “For nearly every man returning to his former job, there will be a woman returning to her former (or future) occupation—caring for the home.” The chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers urged women to leave “for the sake of their homes as well as the labor situation.” The president of TWA reiterated what was fast becoming common knowledge: Most women in business had been there only temporarily. “They intended, and rightfully, to return home after the war or marry and make new homes.”
HOMESICK
Immediately be for the war, marriage had undergone a mass revival due to the Selective Service Act, the 1940 draft law that raised bridal terror to new levels of intensity. (Will he come back, and if not, will I ever meet anyone else?) Among these rushed unions, there were many casualties—prewar, the divorce rate stood at 2 per 1,000 and by 1946 it had doubled. But many of these instant early weddings had been more like extended blind dates and the divorces that followed were as predictable and as unavoidable as schoolyard breakups. At war’s end, marriage was still an essential and blessed institution. Whatever else you’d done—worked, begun to smoke, learned to drive—the next obvious and necessary step into adulthood was to wed.
“What else was this stupid war fought for?” asked an “engaged girl” in
Mademoiselle
magazine in 1945.
In a national poll conducted two years before, young women were asked to choose between three distinct life options: (1) home and husband, (2) the hard-to-imagine career/marriage combination, and (3) the single career
woman. Three quarters of the participants answered “home and husband,” while 18 percent sought having both the man and the job. Only one in nine envisioned an independent life and a career as opposed to a job.
There was, however, a problem, and that was the verifiable man shortage. It was drastically bad form to say so, but 250,000 men had died overseas, and—this part could be said—thousands had returned with foreign brides. Those who returned solo seemed “resistant” or “reluctant” to wed, or, more to the point, a little scared of the American women they’d found at home. A former correspondent for
Stars and Stripes,
the army newspaper read throughout the Allied universe, told
The New York Times Magazine
in March 1946: “Being nice is almost a lost art among American women…. After three months in the land of challenging females, I feel that I should go back to France!” That same year
Harper’s
reported, “Many American war veterans are bearing some unexpected rehabilitation difficulties in coming home to what used to be a pleasantly pliable and even appealingly incompetent little woman and finding a masterful creature recognizing no limit to her own endurance.”
That is to say, she’d had a job, she’d lived alone or with a group of other working women and had somehow mislaid her supply of charming helplessness.
One World War II veteran I interviewed recalled:
When we came back from the war, yes, my God, there was a sense that [even] if we’d changed, we hadn’t expected women to change…. There were lots of women everywhere, very breezy, confident. It was…a little shocking at first, but not really a bad thing. I remember being on a subway and this woman just sitting down next to me and starting a conversation, and all I remember thinking is, she’s not even going here for a pickup, she was chatting. Women didn’t do things like that before…. Now they were different, more of a presence.
He might have added that there were just
more
of them. As actor Glenn Ford spat at Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
(1946): “Ha!…There’re more women out there than there are insects!”
Cursory reports from the Census Bureau confirmed that women had become the majority sex in the United States. Obviously there’d been war losses. But medical data was also starting to show that men had a higher susceptibility to disease and infection and that women in general had stronger immune systems.
In the spring of 1948
The New York Times Magazine
devoted a cover to the news that women were “The Stronger Sex.” They had stronger hearts. They faced far fewer bar brawls, stressful commutes, industrial accidents, et cetera, but the news still was not good. Because of their newly discovered strength, women were more likely than ever to end up alone—widowed and unable to beat out the competition for a replacement—a condition that was made to sound far worse than that of all the many men who would simply be dead. (The piece led with an illustration showing buxom ladies with butterfly nets desperate to catch their weak, elusive prey.) The
Times
had in ways been covering this story since late 1945, when it first reported that because of war losses, population shifts, and female longevity, 750,000 women would most likely have to live without husbands. Three years later it was time to assess damages and ask the important questions: What was going to happen to all these women? What would it mean for society if there was suddenly a permanent single class? Would government, at the local or federal level, in some way be responsible for their welfare, and how would such women fare emotionally?
Everyone at least had an answer for that last one: very poorly.
This conclusion was rooted in a kind of pop-Freudian mandate that had evolved during the war. According to the tenets of this new “understanding,” modern woman was no longer merely frigid or heartless; she was a full-scale neurotic. In
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(1947), a bible of sex-role hysteria, authors Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg labeled the twentieth century a time of “epidemic neurosis” and characterized women as its most appalling victims. Theirs was an existential crisis, for they had lost their essential identity and purpose. That is to say, females had been torn from their place in the home, metaphorically removed from the hearth. As the two doctors explained in both the book and in a series of stern filmed lectures:
Thousands of women became deeply and genuinely uncertain about whatever they undertook. More and more conscious of themselves as “drags” upon their husbands in the competitive struggle for place and prestige, frustrated at the inner core of their beings, they proceeded to react in a number of ways—as male-emulating careerists, as overdoting, restrictive or rejecting mothers, or as a combination of career women and women suspiciously placing too much stress in one way or the other on the natural maternal function. In short, they became neurotics.
And those were the healthy married ones. The mid-twentieth-century single woman presented a scarier case. As the authors saw it, the country had already faced down the feminists, bohemian nuts, and, worst of all in retrospect, the suffragettes, whose “ferocity…led to property destruction on a large scale; damages ran into the millions. The government seemed powerless to deal intelligently with the situation. Women had truly gone berserk.” And now came the lost woman, plagued by a “bundle of anxieties” all of which were grotesquely heightened in the unwed woman. “If she hasn’t a husband and is seeking one she is fully aware that others of her kind have the same primal purpose…. She cannot help but observe[women] scattered about profusely…stenographers, secretaries, hat-check girls, models, fashion designers or female riveters…they are no longer secluded, hidden away, but out hunting, as it were, in packs.”
These edicts had to be viewed in their proper Freudian context. As explained in numerous books but most forcefully in
Modern Woman,
all women had a biological and social imperative to mate, then to reproduce. Throughout her life, in other words, a woman was really no more than half of a human unit, who alone could not evolve and maintain her own superego. As a “half,” she would not ever be able to make up her own mind—a primary trait of many fifties TV heroines. And never would she possess a fully formed conscience. Only a man could provide the already unsteady, unmoored modern woman with moral balance.
Of course women did not walk through life upset because their “primordial rhythms” had “broken,” nor did they believe—not really—that
they inherently lacked some essential mental component. But many beleaguered single women believed they now had not only a personal but a societal obligation to find a man. This led to an epic outburst of tension—at least as it was reported in magazines—and especially between friends who had come to share the same (nagging, anxious) suspicion: Wasn’t every woman a potential “other”?
Many books appeared to help her in battle—“finding,” “attacking,” “getting,” “securing,” “safeguarding.” Reading about single life circa 1948 is like browsing through a collection of busy war strategies that alternate with wordy, scolding conduct guides. A great example of the latter genre is
Anything but Love
by Elizabeth Hawes (1948), a thick book that was to serve as “a complete digest of the rules for feminine behavior from birth to death, given out here in print, but also put forth by the author…over the air…in popular magazines and on film…[advice] seen and listened to monthly by some 340,000,000 American women.”
A few of her dictates, all eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth century:
All girls want to be whistle-worthy, and that raises what is…the biggest worry in your life: Does he see you as pretty?…One of the miracles which mass production has wrought is that every single American girl can be seen as pretty. Our ugly ducklings can be turned into beautiful swans.
The main purpose of girls getting jobs is to meet men they may subsequently marry. A girl may continue to hold a job and earn her living in whole or part to age 23. Thereafter, only if she has become a successful star of stage and screen.
Occasionally something appeared that single female life as pitiable, it went without saying, but manageable for a reasonable amount of time. Jean Van Ever, in 1949, published
How to Be Happy While Single,
a practical guide to living life alone before marriage. As she wrote: “Meal planning, marketing, vacuuming, and the wear and tear of housekeeping…these skills are worth the struggle to master, so, while you have the
chance, practice up. Even if you have a job and you are tired at the end of the day. Practice.”
But increasingly the “authorities”—and they were everywhere—didn’t bother with the particulars of single life (the hunt, the frustration, the outfit changes). They cut to the point and the point was to marry. To reproduce. And, of course, to consume. In 1947 the Daughters of the American Revolution released a statement that echoed those issued by far less conservative organizations: “The social order must now reassert itself. That is our job. That is our purpose. Those who follow their own paths, no matter how worthy, those who do not participate in the reconstruction of the society, to marry, to bear American children, must be labeled ‘Selfish.’”
In 1948 the U.S. Women’s Bureau held a conference to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, calling it “The American Woman, Her Changing Role: Worker, Homemaker, Citizen.” The keynote speaker was Harry Truman, who changed the order of the roles in the title; “homemaker” went first and “worker” last. It had been psychological doctrine. Now it was an executive order.
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Despite the at times surreal amount of cheerleading for marriage, for home and “womanhood,” the divorce rate was actually rising.
It had become much easier to accurately count the number of divorces nationwide. Before the era of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and primitive computerized records, the actual number of failed marriages remained hazy. A 1995 edition of the
Monthly Vital Statistics Report
explained that after the war—well beyond the initial 1946 surge—there was a steady rise in the divorce rate. Ultimately, between 1946 and 1950, the number of divorces and annulments would total 4,020,000.
Magazines, newspapers, dime novels, even newsreels were quick to jump on the rising divorce story. One anonymous woman interviewed for
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1946 wrote, “It seems like everyone is getting divorced and, yes, that does scare a lot of women, including me on occasion…[but]
I think what it comes down to is keeping up an interest in all areas of your marriage. Even if you are dishwater tired.”
But if a woman happened to be dishwater tired, how was she to recognize what the
Reader’s Digest
called “separation signs”? And what was she to make of the sudden presence of so many obvious divorcées?
Suddenly, in good communities, in any community across America, there were newly divorced women seen committing basic acts of daily life—smoking, retrieving the newspaper or mail, putting out trash, shopping, chasing kids. Divorcées had always seemed a little tarnished and sad, but in a certifiable man crisis they took on new characteristics. They were now directly threatening. Sexual. (As the divorce rate began its brief but dramatic decline during the monogamous fifties, the divorcée portrait—floozy blonde; blinds down at 2 P.M.—would become more of a gross sexual parody.)