SITI WRITES:

I’m a student at Dekalb High School, Illinois, and I’m doing a project on women in the fifties for my U.S. History class. I came across The Thinking Housewife, and was wondering what you would have to say about women then — the education of, the roles of, etc. I kind of assume you draw inspiration for your ideas from that time period, and I think your opinions would be relevant. Of course I’ll cite you and your website.

Laura writes:

The word housewife conjures images of that era, doesn’t it? I live in a suburban house built in the early fifties so I guess that makes me an authority on the decade. When we moved in years ago, I decided any era that produced this house couldn’t be all that good. What other era would have come up with the idea of metal windows? Or a carport? What other era would have put commercial and residential areas so far apart that you had to drive to get a newspaper or a quart of milk? So I’ve never idolized that time, though objectively speaking, life was better for both men and women during the fifties. The world had just emerged from a stunning catastrophe, an apocalypse of horror in Europe and Asia, and the fifties will always be known as a time of relief. All was not lost. Good had triumphed in the end.

Family life was certainly much better. My husband grew up in an urban working class neighborhood in the fifties. Many of the men worked in the local shipyard or in factory jobs. The American manufacturing economy had not been destroyed by the worship of free trade and globalization.

There were a few distinct things about his neighborhood as compared to today. First, there were those jobs and second, the men acted like men and the women acted like women. Though no one was rich or even safely middle class, women with children did not work. They stayed home and made sure their children were well-dressed for school, went to church on Sunday, and ate homecooked meals. Both men and women drank at the local tavern on weekends and the weddings were in fire halls with boiled ham and rolls. The neighborhood was homogeneously white and no one thought that was a bad or sinful thing. On a summer night, you could hear couples yelling at each other through opened windows. “Shut your damn mouth,” was one frequently quoted line, but there were almost no divorces. My husband does remember one neighbor summoning the police. She said her husband was beating her and told the police to arrest him. She weighed about a hundred pounds more than him and he was disabled with a work injury so he was never arrested. The divorce rate in working class communities today is about 40 percent in the first ten years of marriage. There were no single mothers back then, but there were widows.

So even though the children in his neighborhood grew up in conditions we would consider quite modest, and almost poor, they had a very high quality of life. There was a stable and unshifting backdrop to their lives. That’s what children want most. They want the characters in the play to stay the same. One of my husband’s neighbors was a woman who had lost her legs while trying to hop a train as a child. She lived on disability and my husband used to go to her house and sit at her kitchen table, eating brown ‘n serve rolls and drinking coffee. She was just one member in the unchanging cast of characters of his childhood. The issue of what the fifties were like for women doesn’t particularly interest me. I care about how they were for children and by that standard they were relatively good.

But America was living on borrowed time. Though it had a much stronger family life, it didn’t really believe in it. America didn’t appreciate the best things or it wouldn’t so readily have given them away. Many people think of the fifties in terms of the way people lived, of the growing suburbanization of America, but it also was marked by certain ideas, an inner universe. I want to ask that whole era, What were you thinking? They would have a hard time defending their ideals because they weren’t sure. They weren’t convinced these ideals were true. 

The unthinkable nature of the war, of all that destruction, probably had an influence here. But, this inability to defend their way of life was mostly due to the progressive breakdown in conviction that had come to haunt all of Western culture. Anything  transcendent, anything that could not be explained by thoroughly naturalistic causes such as nation, community, race or family, was suspect. Only the principles of equality and individual freedom were destined to survive. There would be a progressive coarsening of civility and form in the fifties that stemmed from this lack of conviction about truths that cannot be thoroughly rationalized. The people of the fifties fell in love with the machine. They fell in love with the machine to the point of mistaking human beings and society for machines. You see this in their infatuation with Freudian psychology, which attempts to reduce the psyche to a mechanism.

The fifties housewife was doomed, as was the “dad who knows best.” The housewife’s life wasn’t really about linoleum floors, casseroles or new toasters and refrigerators. People like to say it was but it wasn’t. Her world was held together by non-materialistic values and once those were thoroughly assaulted, she could not defend it. She could no more explain what she did or why she deferred to men in many areas of life than a prayer or a poem could say, “This is what I am.” When people accused her of materialism or vacuity, of weakness, she did not know what to say to counter the complete falsity of this charge. The sacred was no longer defensible. For that reason – not because of economic and technological change  – the things she valued most were about to disappear. 

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