Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (5 page)

This grim picture tends to focus only on discrimination and therefore to underplay the sense of possibility that many blacks nonetheless cherished at the time. More black people than ever before, after all, were escaping the specially vicious world of Jim Crow in the South. The North
was
different! Millions of blacks, at last, had jobs in the industrial sector, which seemed prosperous in the late 1940s. For such people a stable family life, with a future for the children, seemed within reach: most Negro families at that time were headed by two parents. Blacks who wanted no part of whites—thousands felt this way—could find a variegated world of black institutions in the growing Negro neighborhoods of the major metropolises. To many blacks who remember those times, in fact, places like Harlem or Chicago's South Side were neither slums nor ghettos; they were black
communities
that nearly glittered with promise, especially by contrast to the rural South. Northern blacks, moreover, could vote. Chicago's South Side had sent a black man, Oscar DePriest, to Congress as early as 1928. Charles Dawson, also black, represented Chicago on Capitol Hill from 1942 to 1970.
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In 1945 the erratic, militant Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a Negro, began his long and tempestuous career as a congressman from Harlem.
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There and elsewhere in urban areas of the North the rising number of black voters forced white politicians to take notice, thereby transforming the patterns of city politics.
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A wholly negative picture of race relations, by focusing on oppression, also tends to slight the vibrancy of certain aspects of black cultural life during the 1940s. These were years of notable vitality and creativity among black artists, writers, intellectuals, and—most audibly—musicians. Charlie "Bird" Parker, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat "King" Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others experimented with a range of musical forms—jazz, blues, gospel, bebop—that had distinctly African-American roots. They drew whites as well as blacks to the cabarets and nightclubs in black sections of the city. Contemporaries identified much of this as "race music." Some of it had a hard and driving beat, lyrics that were sexually suggestive, and talk about "rocking and rolling," a phrase (like "jazz") that blacks understood to signify sexual relations.

Given these many variations of race and ethnic relations, it is risky to offer sweeping generalizations about their essence in America during the late 1940s. Still, two developments seem irrefutable. First, many people—from liberals like Myrdal to ethnics and blacks themselves—anticipated the possibilities of progress: World War II seemed a turning point in the nation's quest for greater ethnic acculturation and racial equality. Like the veterans who considered 1945 a chance—at last—for the Good Life, many Negroes and "new-stock" Americans of the era were decidedly hopeful, especially in contrast to the discouraging years of the immediate past. They were developing unusally high expectations.

Still, and second, it is foolish to wax romantic about the rate of ethnic acculturation, or especially about the status of black people in the 1940s. Most blacks, northern as well as southern, remained very poor; the vast majority never went to a nightclub or stayed in a hotel; many lacked radios—or even electricity; they encountered discrimination and rejection almost every day of their lives. Even their music was segregated: only in 1949, when the popularity of "race music" was becoming increasingly obvious, did
Billboard
magazine drop this category, refer to it instead as "rhythm and blues," and print charts of its best-sellers.
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By the early 1950s, Antoine "Fats" Domino, Chuck Berry, and others were slowly leading "race music" into a larger mainstream that swept popular music from its moorings and placed rock 'n' roll on the high seas of American popular culture.

Americans who turned on the radio—the major purveyor of popular culture in the 1940s—also encountered a widespread marginalization of black people. Many listeners regularly tuned in "Amos 'n' Andy," one of the top programs of the era, or Jack Benny, a leading radio comedian. Amos and Andy were black characters portrayed in "colored" dialect by white announcers. They had redeeming qualities, and many blacks as well as whites greatly enjoyed their antics from the 1930s into the 1950s. The program, however, mainly presented blacks as unreliable and hapless. It remained on the radio until November 1960 and even found a life (this time with black actors) on national TV in 1951–52. Rochester, Benny's Negro valet, was similarly a complex character. He was shrewd and manipulative in his own way, and he became more assertive as the Benny show (which enjoyed a long run on TV) tried to keep pace with rising black militancy in the late 1950s and 1960s. But especially in the 1940s Rochester often came across as servile, more a butt than a source of humor.
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The consistently enthusiastic response by whites to shows such as these, featuring mostly denigrating stereotypes of African-Americans, was yet another indication that Myrdal's optimism about the potential for liberalization of white attitudes was exaggerated.
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Not until the 1960s, when blacks succeeded in shaking off some of the yoke of inequality, did the popular media begin to take them a little more seriously.

R
EADING ABOUT
American women in the immediate postwar years, one quickly encounters polar interpretations. Conservative writers tend to celebrate the late 1940s (and 1950s) as a wonderful era of domesticity, in which women happily accepted the rewarding duties of child-rearing and home management. Most feminists disagree, perceiving instead a world of widespread gender discrimination. Millions of women, they say, chafed as wives and mothers in homes that, in Betty Friedan's memorable phrase, were little more than "comfortable concentration camps."
⁵⁹

One trouble with both these polar views, as most writers readily acknowledge, is that generalizations fail to catch the varied histories of individual women. In 1945 (the last year in which men outnumbered women in the United States), there were 69.9 million women in the forty-eight states. They differed greatly in age, class standing, race, regional background, and family situation. Their attitudes were naturally complex and often ambivalent, and their experiences obviously changed over time. It will not do to erect some transhistorical "model types" by which most American women can be categorized.

These caveats in mind, four generalizations about women's experiences in the 1940s seem valid. First, World War II—in so many ways a driving social force—changed the lives of millions of women, bringing them into the marketplace in record numbers and into new and sometimes better-paying kinds of jobs. Second, demobilization drove many of these women from such jobs, but it only briefly slowed what was already a powerful long-range trend toward greater female participation in the market. Third, neither during the war nor afterward did most women think they were making an either-or choice between family and work. The majority gradually came to need both, at least for stretches of their lives, and encountered all the satisfactions and tribulations of juggling the two. Fourth, American women did such juggling amid a dominant cultural milieu that continued to place traditional notions of femininity above feminist quests for equal rights. As in the past, it was ordinarily expected that women be nurturant, deferential, and maternal. Some things change, some remain pretty much the same.

The war indeed accelerated the paid employment of women. The percentage of women (14 and older) who were part of the work force increased from 26 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 1945. This was a jump in numbers from 13 million to 19.3 million. Prior to the war, working women had been predominantly young, single, and working-class. They had mainly found jobs in sex-segregated "women's work," ranging from poor-paying employment as laundresses, cleaners, farm laborers, and waitresses to jobs as office workers, nurses, and grade school teachers. Only a small percentage cracked gender barriers to work in business management or the professions. The war changed some of these patterns, accelerating the numbers of middle-class married women who for the first time entered the work force. While some of these tendencies had arisen prior to the 1940s, the war nonetheless represented a turning point of some magnitude in the modern history of American women.
⁶⁰

Some wartime work available to women was unprecedented. For the first time women in large numbers found better-paying factory jobs. Pioneers like the much-fabled "Rosie the Riveter" worked alongside men at welding, ship-building, and a few other blue-collar trades formerly reserved for men. Probably the majority of these women were from the working classes; they had been elsewhere in the market before the war. Now they left their poorly paid jobs in large numbers; as early as 1942 more than 600 laundries had to close for lack of help. The number of black women employed as farm workers declined by 30 percent between 1940 and 1945 while the number employed in the metals, chemicals, and rubber industries jumped from 3,000 to 150,000, an increase of 5,000 percent. Black female employment in government rose in the same years from 60,000 to 200,000.
^6l
Women doing this kind of work often felt proud and empowered. No wonder that Irving Berlin, composing for
Annie Get Your Gun
in 1946, has Annie Oakley sing out, "Anything you can do, I can do better."

The sudden end to war quickly changed these patterns. By early 1946 approximately 2.25 million women workers had quit their jobs, either because they wanted to or because they saw the handwriting on the wall. Another million were laid off. The biggest losers were the women who had found industrial work during the war: these jobs either disappeared amid the rush of demobilization or were given to veterans who returned to civilian life. Sex-segregated employment, still widespread during the war, became ever more the norm: by the late 1950s, 75 percent of women worked at female-only jobs, especially in the rapidly growing service sector. As one historian put it, "Rosie the Riveter had become a file clerk."
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Gender segregation at work was by then greater than in 1900 and sharper than segregation by race.
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All of these trends confirm the influential lament of Friedan, whose
The Feminine Mystique
(1963) exposed the gender discrimination of postwar American life. But this was only part of the story, for the trends were complex. While demobilization adversely affected many women workers, it did not stop the steadily increasing desire of women, especially middle-aged and married women, to test the marketplace. By 1950 there were 18 million women working for pay, only a million or so fewer than in 1945. More than half of them, for the first time in American history, were married. By then the percentage of women who worked had risen to 29, three points higher than in 1940. The percentage kept going up, to 35 percent in 1960 and 42 percent in 1970. The rise in female employment was one of the most powerful demographic trends of the postwar era.

Few of these women, polls suggested, went to work because the war had begun a process of consciousness-raising that turned housewives into career women. On the contrary, even during the war few homemakers showed much enthusiasm for entering the job market. Most did so because they needed the money, because they were patriotic, or, with husbands or boyfriends in the service, because they were bored or lonely. The government, concerned over impending labor shortages, had to launch a propaganda campaign about patriotic duty in an effort to get many women out of their homes.
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These women appear to have been numerous among the 2.25 million who gave up their jobs once the war was over.

Similarly varied motives impelled the millions of women who entered the job market in the late 1940s (and later). For many, work was a means to greater self-esteem. But for most, especially the large number of married women, the decision to work for pay rested mainly on economic needs. These were baby boom years. Women in the 1940s were marrying younger, having more children, buying an ever-greater variety of consumer goods, and looking for ways to supplement household income. Once their youngest child was in school, millions went to work to help with the bills. This is not to argue that women considered "feminist" reasons and rejected them; motives are not so easily disentangled. It is rather to say that most women continued, as they normally had done throughout American history, to place family concerns first.

Women who felt this way echoed cultural values widely held in American life at the time. A much-noted poll in 1945 concluded that 63 percent of Americans did not approve of married women working if their husbands could support them. (A similar poll in 1973 showed that 65 percent of people
did
approve).
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Americans in the 1940s showed a similar lack of enthusiasm about women in politics: in 1949 fewer than 3 percent of state legislators were women. There were eight representatives (of 435) on Capitol Hill and one woman senator, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. She had replaced her husband, who died in office.
⁶⁶
President Truman expressed a common view in 1945. Women's rights, he said, were "a lot of hooey." When asked whether women might become President, he had a stock one-liner in reply: "I've said for a long time that women have everything else, they might as well have the presidency."
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