00:00:00.000Welcome back to another episode of Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that wishes you a happy Indigenous Peoples Day, and would like to remind you that...0.92
00:00:08.180Fun fact, Columbus is in the bad place because of all the raping, slave trade, and genocide.0.92
00:00:12.860so we're back today with another episode where i destroy your fond nostalgia of the bygone days
00:00:33.260of americana today we're talking about the 1950s those quaint days of poodle skirts
00:00:38.040sock hops drive-in movies and dates at the soda fountain
00:00:41.060we have an obsession with this period's aesthetic in america to a nearly unhealthy degree i think
00:00:56.940even i have to admit to a certain fondness for the hair the clothes and the music the 1950s was
00:01:02.500a real happen in time the birth of rock and roll and television the so-called golden age of americana
00:01:08.040but who was it actually the golden age for? It should surprise no one that the answer to that
00:01:13.500question is the traditional white middle class family with 2.5 kids and a Chevrolet in the
00:01:19.060driveway of their suburban home. Of course it was also the golden age for the very wealthy but since
00:01:24.500when is any period not the golden age for them? But for anyone not a white heterosexual Christian
00:01:30.380this period was decidedly less golden. The neat suburban homes with cookie cutter white picket0.86
00:01:35.980fences were usually governed by racial covenants that kept homes from being sold or even rented to
00:01:40.980people of color. Jim Crow laws covered the land, and the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare were
00:01:45.900galloping along at an almighty pace, putting the fear of being different into everyone. And despite0.66
00:01:51.380the perceived economic boom in America, poverty was impacting more and more Americans, just not
00:01:56.740the ones that you saw in magazines and on the newsreels. So yeah, all in all, not exactly an
00:02:01.900ideal situation. But even the life of the white middle-class family wasn't the picture-perfect0.77
00:02:07.520concept that reruns of Leave it to Beaver and the Donna Reed show sold to us. And they were0.98
00:02:12.600selling something. The sitcoms and dramas of the 1950s were propaganda for an American dream that
00:02:17.980consisted of simple, distinct gender roles and the supremacy of capitalism. But I'll get into
00:02:23.020the impact of the Cold War on American culture in a future episode. For today, I want to focus on
00:02:28.000one particular myth of the golden age of America, the happy housewife.
00:02:33.140Well, it's sort of traditional, I guess.0.96
00:02:35.620You know, they say a woman's place is in the home, and I suppose as long as she's in the1.00
00:02:40.020home, she might as well be in the kitchen.1.00
00:02:42.920Think June Cleaver or Donna Reed, the wives and mothers who always have a string of pearls0.98
00:02:47.580around their neck, a dress with a flouncy petticoat, a bright red lip on their smiling face, fresh0.94
00:02:52.980baked cookies for her children after school, and a whiskey neat ready for her husband when
00:02:56.820gets back from a long day at work. Given the archetypes of women prior to the 1950s in America,1.00
00:03:02.420this was a marked regression in how women's roles in American society were viewed. The suffragettes0.99
00:03:07.620of the first two decades, the flappers of the 1920s, the tough-as-nails women who did what they
00:03:12.680had to do to feed their families in the 1930s, and the rosy riveters of the 1940s. All of these
00:03:18.440suddenly gave way to Susie Homemaker in the 1950s. Why? Misogyny, mostly. But to understand how this
00:03:26.460took shape, let's rewind a bit back to the 1940s. In 1940, only about 15% of married women were
00:03:38.040employed. This stemmed from a stigma during the Great Depression that women should stay home and0.96
00:03:42.500allow their husbands to take on the limited jobs that were available during the decade.
00:03:46.920On the other hand, nearly 50% of single women were working. But as World War II dragged on and
00:03:52.780America joined in, the stigma around married women, and women in general, taking jobs away
00:03:58.380from men is set aside. As men are deployed overseas, women are called to take their places
00:04:03.460in the manufacturing roles on the home front. But what happens when the war ends and the men
00:04:19.160come home. Unsurprisingly, the men want their jobs back, and while there's no explicit, coordinated
00:04:24.960legal move to force women out of the workplace, the social pressure is definitely on. As a strange
00:04:30.840side note, this is also the period where we see the script really flip on pink versus blue as
00:04:36.360gendered colors. For many long years in European-based societies, pink had been a boy's color,
00:04:41.800and blue, for its association with the Virgin Mary, had been a girl's color. In the wake of
00:04:46.780World War II, the color pink begins to be marketed as the perfect color for women, while blue became
00:04:52.160a manly masculine color. Why? Well, mostly because First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's favorite color was
00:04:58.920pink. Not for any special reason, she just supposedly liked the way it looked on her skin0.99
00:05:03.660and how it set off her eye color. The full-skirted, rhinestone-covered, pale pink ball gown and opera
00:05:09.180gloves that she ended up wearing to her husband's 1953 inauguration was the complete antithesis of
00:05:15.000the overalls that women had been wearing to work in factories during the war. It gave off a message0.70
00:05:20.100that the men are home now and you can return to your traditional roles. Mamie certainly embodied0.98
00:05:25.760that notion. She tossed off quotes like, Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops, and I have a1.00
00:05:31.660career. His name is Ike. As a result, Pink became associated with the feminine and became part of
00:05:37.740the societal pressure for women to conform to certain feminine roles in society. One of the0.81
00:05:43.440best, or worst, depending on your perspective, primary sources on this social pressure is the
00:05:48.940book The Modern Woman, The Lost Sex, which was written by Ferdinand Lundberg and Dr. Marina
00:05:54.120Farnham and published in 1947. The book would become a national bestseller and contribute to
00:05:59.680a growing pressure for women to return to the domestic sphere after the end of the war.0.99
00:06:04.080The Modern Woman argued that the contemporary woman in very large numbers are psychologically
00:06:09.300disordered, and that their disorder is having terrible social and personal effects involving
00:06:14.320men in all departments of their lives, as well as women. The book claimed that women's issues
00:06:19.580were caused by the loss of the self-contained traditional home, which had disastrously upset0.96
00:06:25.620women's natural inner balance. The cure for all that ailed women in society? Passivity,1.00
00:06:32.060sexual submission, and motherhood, obviously. Here's a contemporary newsreel discussing the book.
00:06:39.300The family was solidly founded on the father as patriarch and breadwinner, and on the mother
00:06:44.400as cook, housekeeper, and nurse of the children.
00:06:48.020One of the trends of modern life which has been cited as most disruptive of marriage1.00
00:06:53.980is the increasing economic independence of women.0.91
00:06:57.340Today, U.S. industry is employing hundreds of women who before the war were homemakers,0.98
00:07:03.740devoting their full time to their families and their family responsibilities.
00:07:08.620Be aware, children of working parents are being left without adequate supervision or restraint.
00:07:19.620Today, the woman with a position in business equal to a successful man's
00:07:23.620is economically able to terminate her marriage if she is so minded,
00:08:23.700Here's one particularly fun quote from the book.0.95
00:08:26.320The dominant direction of feminine training and development today discourages just those traits necessary to the attainment of sexual pleasure, receptivity and passiveness, the willingness to accept dependence without fear of resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness to accept the final goal of sexual life, impregnation.0.97
00:08:46.300It was the essential error of feminists that they attempted to put women on the essentially male road to exploit, off the female road to nurture.
00:08:55.340Lundberg and Farnham's work was discussed by many magazines in the 1940s and 50s,
00:09:00.440and its themes were alluded to and discussed in many more.
00:09:03.840Women even used Lundberg and Farnham's book as a self-help text in advice columns in large newspapers.
00:09:10.000One advice columnist consistently referred readers to the book in the Washington Post in their column.
00:09:15.900Needless to say, it had a societal impact.
00:09:19.100The book is now out of print, by the way, but I do happen to own a 1947 copy of the
00:09:24.380book, and it's every bit as awful as it sounds.0.97
00:09:27.500And The Modern Woman wasn't the only book pressuring women to remain in the home as1.00
00:09:51.300Women were advised to stay at home with their children.
00:09:54.360Dr. Spock popularized the concept of a child-centered family,
00:09:58.460and he, and many other psychiatrists at the time,
00:10:01.320pushed the idea that the central focus of a woman's life was meant to be motherhood.
00:10:06.300And then there came the boom of television.0.50
00:10:08.600Now it wasn't just books and psychiatrists showing the happy ideal of the nuclear family,
00:10:13.160even the popular media pushed the same idea. By 1957, there were 40 million television sets in
00:10:19.620the United States. Nine out of ten American families owned at least one set by the end of
00:10:24.820the decade. By the mid-1950s, situation comedies and family dramas presented a very traditional
00:10:31.100family structure, a nuclear family with two biological parents and their children. Families
00:10:36.780in which, as the title of one of the popular shows put it, father knows best, and in which women were0.95
00:10:42.660mothers and housewives striving to serve their children and please their husbands. Magazines and
00:10:48.060advertisements sold the same idea. Articles had headlines like have babies while you're young and
00:10:54.240are you training your daughter to be a wife? In 1953 Look magazine celebrated the housewife as
00:11:00.700this wondrous creature who marries younger than ever, bears more babies, and looks and acts far
00:11:06.980more feminine than the emancipated girls of the 1920s or even the 30s. She gracefully concedes1.00
00:11:12.900the top job rungs to men. Tide laundry detergent was advertised as what women want, and the Hoover1.00
00:11:19.540Vacuum Company assured men that what their wife really wanted for Christmas was one of their
00:11:24.220vacuums. Quick pause for a little bit of advice. Unless a woman specifically asks you for an
00:11:30.500appliance for their birthday or Christmas, just don't. Just don't. It's a really bad idea.1.00
00:11:36.980Everything from textbooks to advertisements told women what they needed to do in order to be the ideal woman that men would want to marry.
00:11:44.960Men valued women who could cook, were a good housekeeper, and wanted children.
00:11:49.120In the 1950s, women felt tremendous societal pressure to focus their aspirations on getting a wedding ring.
00:11:54.880After all, society told women that marriage and motherhood was the most fulfilling thing they could do with their life.
00:12:00.480The U.S. marriage rate was at an all-time high, and couples were tying the knot, on average, younger than they ever had before.
00:12:06.980But it wasn't just in finding a man that a woman had to work hard, it was also in keeping him.0.87
00:12:13.260Women had to keep up their looks, lest their husbands become disgusted by any sign of letting yourself go,1.00
00:12:18.860or, God forbid, aging, and go out and look for a new, better woman to put their attentions on.0.92
00:12:25.580The creation of the ideal woman gave a clear picture to women of what they were supposed to emulate as their proper gender role in society.0.85
00:12:33.860In effect, women began to construct their identities around this media image.0.74
00:12:38.380The problem with this is, the image was all an unachievable lie.0.85
00:12:42.100The traditional family that the books recommended and the media presented
00:12:46.300wasn't something that most people could actually manage realistically in the 1950s,1.00
00:12:51.240which meant women were killing themselves to live up to an ideal that never existed.1.00
00:12:56.360That image we have of stay-at-home moms with no job other than looking after their husband and children?1.00
00:13:04.200The number of married women working outside the home actually increased in the post-war years.1.00
00:13:08.640The consumerism of the post-war period and the pressing need to keep up with the Joneses left most families needing two incomes.
00:13:16.500By 1960, nearly a third of all married women were part of the paid workforce.0.76
00:13:21.000But of course, in true patriarchal fashion, that doesn't mean that their husbands took up a fair share of the household work or child-rearing activities.
00:13:28.620Much like today, women who worked were still taking on a large majority of the domestic chores.0.70
00:13:33.760Cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and of course their marital duties.1.00
00:13:37.700How does a woman manage all of that?1.00
00:13:41.920mother needs something today to calm her down and though she's not really ill there's a little
00:13:50.820yellow pill she goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper yeah the rolling
00:13:57.960stones weren't writing about some sort of hypothetical social situation barbiturates
00:14:02.680and amphetamines once used liberally by soldiers in world war ii became the tools for women to get
00:14:07.860through their day-to-day lives. Drugs like Miltown, Butasol, and Cerax were advertised to help women
00:14:13.460cope with daily stress and anxiety. Methadrine, the store name for methamphetamine hydrochloride,
00:14:19.360was used to treat depression, lose weight, and give women enough energy to get through the day.
00:14:24.240Medical columnists in magazines like Cosmo and Ladies Home Journal told women that sedative0.67
00:14:29.240drugs were the cure for anything that ailed them. By 1960, women were twice as likely as men to be
00:14:35.060taking tranquilizers. In a 1956 article in Cosmopolitan, one doctor reported that after
00:14:40.840taking the drug, frigid women who abhorred marital relations reported they responded more readily to
00:14:47.100their husbands' advances. Because straight men will do anything, up to and including encouraging0.81
00:14:52.580their wives to roofie themselves before sex to avoid going to even one marriage counseling0.93
00:14:57.840session or learning how to give their wives even one single orgasm. So I don't know, maybe it's just0.88
00:15:03.900me, but I don't feel like women were feeling very fulfilled by these lives. I think Lundberg,
00:15:09.760Farnham, and Spock might have been a little bit off. In reality, this period of Americana was only
00:15:15.660the golden age for the smallest of small subsets of humanity, white middle-class men, which is0.87
00:15:22.300unsurprisingly usually the ones you see waving a giant red flag around as they talk about how much0.80
00:15:27.560better life was in the 1950s when all you had to do to get ahead was be a mediocre white man.
00:15:32.740The connection between the anti-feminist and MRA movements of today and the ideology that the 1950s was the golden age of America is the straightest and shortest of all lines in existence.
00:15:44.780And just so you can't say I'm making that up, here's some proof.
00:15:48.040In 2014, well-known anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly published her book, Who Killed the American Family?
00:15:54.300In it, she wrote that the 1950s were the high watermark for the American nuclear family.
00:16:00.020Social policies favored it, evidence supported it, and no one apologized for it.
00:16:05.080In a 2011 video for TV Ontario's The Agenda, which was titled Goodbye to Good Men, Jordan Peterson said,
00:16:12.600Remember those 50s hat-sporting fathers who stayed married, supported their families, and repressed women?
00:16:18.820Well, they're headed for extinction.0.86
00:16:21.120In 2022, a TikTok creator named Jennifer Mock created a video in which a 1950s housewife
00:16:26.920and a modern woman discussed what life was like for women in the modern era, and the
00:16:31.120housewife decides that she prefers it in the 1950s.
00:16:34.800These voices, among others, are pushing for a return to the traditional family values
00:16:39.400of a nostalgic 1950s that never really existed in the first place, except in the fever dreams
00:16:45.260of conservative politicians who churned out the propaganda about America being the greatest
00:16:49.860nation in the world. But the worst part about all of this is they know that world never really
00:16:55.620existed. It doesn't take a historian to tell you that the adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and the
00:17:00.780Honeymooners weren't documentaries. They don't actually care that the 1950s was a miserable
00:17:06.500time for women and minorities because that's a feature for them, not a bug.0.68
00:17:11.380thank you for tuning in one more time to hear me bitch about history some of this episode
00:17:20.400might have sounded a little bit familiar to you first because i think i used a few bits of it
00:17:25.280in an episode last season and second because bits of it came from my phd proposal which a couple of
00:17:31.240you have definitely read oh well i wanted to do a topic i love and my love-hate relationship with
00:17:37.380the 1950s is always a fun topic to delve into. Please remember to subscribe to the Bitchy History0.74
00:17:42.560Substack for additional reading and resources related to this episode, and I'll see you back1.00