Artificial Ideal
Tue., February 17, 11:59 AM
The ideal household of the Fifties – father works, mother stays at home and cares for the children. The house is spotless, beautifully decorated. Mother cooks three delicious, nutritious meals a day, and supper is served to the entire family at six on the dot. It’s the Nelsons, it’s Donna Reed, it’s Father Knows Best, it’s Leave It to Beaver. It never really existed, of course.
We all followed it. It was the advice in the ladies magazines and on women’s radio. The women’s page of the newspaper was full of fancy recipes and household hints. Every girl’s ambition was to be a housewife and mother. Unless, of course, there was something wrong with her.
Even those of us who were a little suspicious of the entire concept embraced the ideal. Girls like me, who wanted more education or training after high school, still factored in husbands and babies. I was interested in science, but I decided against being a doctor because it would take too long… The propaganda – that women belonged at home – worked so well that shortages developed in professions that were traditionally for women, like schoolteachers and hospital nurses.
Why the propaganda? I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Men started coming back from military service, and they needed their jobs back. And somebody somewhere decided the best way to make jobs available for men was to persuade the women that they’d rather be at home.
Women who worked were nothing new, even though they were usually underpaid or worse, if they were helping to run a family concern, not paid at all. (Why would you pay a housewife extra if she milked the cows and fed the chickens before she started a woman’s day of making breakfast and cleaning the house? Or if she spent long hours helping her husband to run a store? Or… whatever.)
During the war, however, women not only worked; they were recognized for what they did, and they were proud of it. You’ve heard of Rosie the Riveter, but remember that women did all kinds of men’s work. They were truck drivers, draftsmen and engineers, accountants and managers. They even played professional baseball, because baseball is America’s pastime and America wouldn’t want to give it up just because we were at war. (Morale, y’know.)
They did these jobs when the men were needed elsewhere, but it was time to turn around. Housewifely skills were praised. Your home should be so clean “you could eat off the floor.” (I’ve always hated that expression!) You cooked and you sewed and, above all, you had lots of babies. Even as we laughed at the concept of keeping women “barefoot and pregnant,” we believed that having babies was a good thing, because our population had to grow. No one ever said why it had to grow. We only knew that a woman could always get a big round of applause by announcing that she had five or more children.
Have you noticed, incidentally, that the “ideal” sitcoms usually had just two or three kids? On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Rob and Laura Petrie had only one, but there was something “strange” about Laura anyway; she wore Capri pants instead of a dress with an apron over it. The Brady Bunch, to be sure, had more children, but they were the result of blending two smaller families.
By the time Betty Friedan warned us in The Feminine Mystique, we were already programmed. I remember reading that a woman should have more ambition than just being a wife and mother and thinking, “but what’s wrong with that?”
To be continued…
