In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan selectively quotes from a 1960 Ladies Home Journal feature article about a Dallas housewife who leads a perfect suburban housewife life that includes four afternoons a week playing bridge (always finishing in time to be home when her two children return from school). The above picture is an illustration in the article, which is provided in full in the reference page linked at the bottom of this post.It was probably the evening of the bridge party that my mother angrily upbraided me. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something to the effect that I had destroyed her friendship with Mrs. Williams, because I was so selfish, and I better keep in mind in the future that I should never again do anything that would damage her friendships with her friends. I accepted her reprimand and slunk away, but what was unsaid was what I had done wrong. I knew enough about Kenny, his mom and my mom to intuit that this is probably what had happened: Kenny, as always, got into one of those intimate, confessional talks with his mother, explaining (and probably distorting the facts) that I had insulted him, then fought him, all over my preference for the hoods who hung out on the corner. And Mrs. Williams, as always, after drawing out the confessional, would provide wise counsel and possibly a behavioral plan to correct the problem and get her son on the right track. On this occasion, Mrs. Williams apparently also felt she should advocate on her son’s behalf to my mother at the bridge party. The added social dimension was that my mother had not been part of Mrs. Williams’ social set. I don’t know that she had any great ambition to be a friend--she had others--but it must have been a difficult encounter for both of them.
I’ve approached this memory as a study to better understand my mother, Mrs. Williams, and the world they lived in. I don’t in any way intend to denigrate the social activity of bridge parties in the fifties. My wife, age 58 and the daughter of a Dallas fifties housewife, is a member of a women’s book club. It is by invitation only, made up of women in their fifties, bound by having raised children together and sharing in various social and political values. They don’t seem to talk about books much, and their club meetings seem very similar to Mrs. Williams’ bridge parties. They just don’t dress up so much and do it on weekday afternoons. Bridge is not a game for dummies (my mother is still an imposing bridge player at age 87), and those fifties women may well have been able to run intellectual circles around my wife’s social group.
I don’t buy all of Betty Friedan’s characterization of the fifties suburban housewife as uniformly focused on the question of
"Is this all?" At midcentury, said Friedan. such was the question forming on virtually every middle-class American housewife's lips. Or, perhaps as often, they just spoke of the problem as "the problem" : the "mystique of feminine fulfillment" that from 1945 onward "became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture" "the problem," that is, called "Occupation: housewife." Ironically, in the most affluent country in the world, the problem was precisely affluence and the adjustment it facilitated to convenient social roles. Moreover, especially for women of advanced educational status in the best educated country in the world, it was even more ironically a problem of education. [Beidler]
But I do think it was true in my neighborhoods, for a short time in history, many women were full time housewives, with much leisure time, in a booming post World War II economy, where women had few professional or even unskilled work opportunities. The social and home lives of many women likely were real pressure cookers. And they were bombarded as we are today by Madison Avenue hype that is insulting to our intelligence. Much was unspoken in my home, but I don’t think I’m projecting to say that across the neighborhoods, everyone strove for an image of the perfect nuclear family and avoided topics such as divorce, adoption, social and racial injustice, mental retardation, alcoholism, physical abuse of women and children, sexual orientation, and other sensitive issues that we are much more open about today. When my mother did obtain part time employment, after 18 or so years as a housewife, her job as a department store credit department clerk brought on remarkable gains in her confidence and self worth.
For more authoritative discussion of some of the issues Friedan raised, click here.
