from When Everything Changed

The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1950 to the Present

Gail Collins

With a BA in journalism and an MA in government, Gail Collins (b. 1945) became the first woman to serve as editor of the New York Times editorial page (2001–2007). She continues today as an op-ed columnist. Collins is the author of several books, including Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics (1998); and America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (2003). The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of her 2009 book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1950 to the Present.

1. Repudiating Rosie

“Some of you DO wear a cautious face.”

In January 1960, Mademoiselle welcomed in a new decade for America’s young women by urging them to be…less boring. “Some of you do wear a cautious face,” the editors admitted. “But are you really—cautious, unimaginative, determined to play it safe at any price?” Mademoiselle certainly hoped not. But its readers had good reason to set their sights low. The world around them had been drumming one message into their heads since they were babies: women are meant to marry and let their husbands take care of all the matters relating to the outside world. They were not supposed to have adventures or compete with men for serious rewards. (“I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” said Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby book had served as the bible for the postwar generation of mothers.) Newsweek, decrying a newly noticed phenomenon of dissatisfied housewives in 1960, identified the core of the issue: menstruation. “From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman’s role,” the newsmagazine wrote. “As Freud was credited with saying: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’”

Though no group of women has ever pushed aside these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them in good grace. Most girls grew up without ever seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver. Jo Freeman, who went to Berkeley in the early ’60s, realized only later that while she had spent four years “in one of the largest institutions of higher education in the world—and one with a progressive reputation,” she had never once had a female professor. “I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.” If a young woman expressed interest in a career outside the traditional teacher/nurse/secretary, her mentors carefully shepherded her back to the proper path. As a teenager in Pittsburgh, Angela Nolfi told her guidance counselor that she wanted to be an interior decorator, but even that very feminine pursuit apparently struck her adviser as too high-risk or out of the ordinary. “He said, ‘Why don’t you be a home-economics teacher?’” she recalled. And once Mademoiselle had finished urging its readers to shoot for the sky, it celebrated the end of the school year with an article on careers that seemed to suggest most new college graduates would be assuming secretarial duties, and ended with tips on “pre-job hand-beautifying” for a new generation of typists.

Whenever things got interesting, women seemed to vanish from the scene. There was no such thing as a professional female athlete—even in schools, it was a given that sports were for boys. An official for the men-only Boston Marathon opined that it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.” When Mademoiselle selected seven “headstrong people who have made names for themselves lately” to comment on what the 1960s would bring, that magazine for young women managed to find only one headstrong woman to include in the mix—playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who did double duty as the panel’s only minority.

“Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men.”

Nothing sent the message about women’s limited options more forcefully than television, which had just finished conquering the nation with a speed that made Alexander the Great look like an underachiever. In 1950 only about 9 percent of American homes boasted a set, but by 1960 nearly 90 percent of families had a TV, and those who didn’t were feeling very deprived indeed. Beverly Burton, a Wyoming farm wife, had been estranged throughout the 1950s from a mother who had once told her she was sorry Beverly had ever been born. When her mother decided to mend fences, she sent Burton a note saying, “I hope this will cover the past”—attached to a television set. And it did indeed become a turning point in the relationship.

5

The postwar generation that was entering adolescence in the 1960s had grown up watching Howdy Doody, the must-see TV for the first wave of baby boomers. Howdy was a raucous puppet show in which the human performers interspersed broad physical comedy with endless pitches for the sponsors’ products. “But all the slapstick stopped when they brought out Princess Summerfall Winterspring,” remembered Stephen Davis, a childhood fan whose father worked on the show. The princess, played by a teenage singer named Judy Tyler, was the only long-running female character in Howdy Doody’s crowded cast. The role had been created when a producer realized “we could sell a lot of dresses if only we had a girl on the show,” and the princess spent most of her time expressing concern about plot developments taking place while she was offstage. Adults approved. “The harshness and crudeness which so many parents objected to in Howdy Doody now appears to have largely been a case of too much masculinity,” said Variety. But the stuff that made kids love the show—the broad comedy and bizarre plots—was all on the male side of the equation. Princess Summerfall Winterspring sang an occasional song—and watched.

The more popular and influential television became, the more efficiently women were swept off the screen. In the 1950s, when the medium was still feeling its way, there were a number of shows built around women—mainly low-budget comedies such as Our Miss Brooks, Private Secretary, and My Little Margie. None of the main characters were exactly role models—Miss Brooks was a teacher who spent most of her time mooning over a hunky biology instructor, and Margie lived off her rich father. Still, the shows were unquestionably about them. And the most popular program of all was I Love Lucy, in which Lucille Ball was the focus of every plotline, ever striving to get out of her three-room apartment and into her husband Ricky’s nightclub show.

But by 1960 television was big business, and if women were around at all, they were in the kitchen, where they decorously stirred a single pot on the stove while their husbands and children dominated the action. (In 1960 the nominees for the Emmy for best comedy series were The Bob Cummings Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Phil Silvers Show, and Father Knows Best.) When a script did turn its attention to the wife, daughter, or mother, it was frequently to remind her of her place and the importance of letting boys win. On Father Knows Best, younger daughter Kathy was counseled by her dad on how to deliberately lose a ball game. Teenage daughter Betty found happiness when she agreed to stop competing with a male student for a junior executive job at the local department store and settled for the more gender-appropriate task of modeling bridal dresses.

In dramatic series, women stood on the sidelines, looking worried. When Betty Friedan asked why there couldn’t be a female lead in Mr. Novak—which was, after all, a series about a high school teacher—she said the producer explained, “For drama, there has to be action, conflict… . For a woman to make decisions, to triumph over anything, would be unpleasant, dominant, masculine.” Later in the decade, the original Star Trek series would feature a story about a woman so desperate to become a starship captain—a post apparently restricted to men—that she arranged to have her brain transferred into Captain Kirk’s body. The crew quickly noticed that the captain was manicuring his nails at the helm and having hysterics over the least little thing.

Cowboy action series were the best-loved TV entertainment in 1960. Eleven of the top twenty-five shows were Westerns, and they underlined the rule that women did not have adventures, except the ones that involved getting kidnapped or caught in a natural disaster. “Women used to be the big stars, but these days it’s men,” said Michael Landon, one of the leads in Bonanza, the long-running story of an all-male family living on a huge Nevada ranch after the Civil War. Perhaps to emphasize their heterosexuality, the Cartwright men had plenty of romances. But the scriptwriters killed their girlfriends off at an extraordinarily speedy clip. The family patriarch, Ben, had been widowed three times, and his three sons all repeatedly got married or engaged, only to quickly lose their mates to the grim reaper. A rather typical episode began with Joe (Landon) happily dancing with a new fiancée. Before the first commercial, the poor girl was murdered on her way home from the hoedown.

(2009)