Mom at Home and at Work
Middle-class women’s lives grew increasingly complicated in the postwar decades. They may have dreamed of a suburban home with a brand-new kitchen, like the one shown in this 1955 photograph (left), but laboring all day over children, dirty dishes, and a hot stove proved dissatisfying to many. Betty Friedan called the confinement of women’s identities to motherhood the “feminine mystique,” but did the working woman have it much better? Hardly. Most women in the 1950s and 1960s were confined to low-level secretarial work (right), waitressing, and other service-sector work — or, worse, factory or domestic labor. By the end of the 1960s, women had begun to crack the “glass ceiling” and enter the professions in larger numbers. But regardless of their occupation, the majority of working women performed the “double day”: a full day at work and a full day at home. Such were the expectations and double bind women faced. Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos./Inge Morath © The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum Photos.