history

CHAPTER 10

Beyond the Feminine Mystique

WOMEN’S LIVES, 1945–1965

IN DECEMBER 1955, A MIDDLE-AGED AFRICAN AMERICAN woman in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Rosa Parks’s protest against segregation sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the pivotal events of a resurgent postwar civil rights movement. Parks’s story signals the importance of women in the civil rights movement, certainly, but Parks, a department store seamstress, is also significant because she was a working woman. In the postwar era, female participation in the paid labor force expanded dramatically and became a defining characteristic of many more women’s lives.

Parks’s life is one indication of how the period of 1945 to 1965 was rife with tensions and contradictions. Mainstream cultural values of the “feminine mystique” emphasized women’s domestic and maternal roles. Yet women worked outside the home and participated in civic activism that encompassed labor unions, politics, and civil and women’s rights. Other contradictions are evident in the contrast between Americans’ celebration of unprecedented prosperity and their deep anxieties about the Cold War and nuclear arms race. Cold War fears contributed to a repressive social and political climate that inhibited dissenting voices and reinforced traditional expectations about women’s familial roles. Yet despite the conservative temper of this era, women activists helped to launch the civil rights movement and began to challenge the discrimination women faced in the workplace and public life.

1945

Harry S. Truman becomes president after Franklin Roosevelt’s death

1945

United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1945

World War II ends

1945

Employers lay off women from wartime jobs

1946

First stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union

1947

Mexican American rights group, Community Service Organization, founded

1948–1950

Number of television stations increases rapidly

1949

Soviet Union detonates atomic bomb

1950

U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas red-baited by Richard M. Nixon

1950–1953

Korean conflict

1951

I Love Lucy begins

1952

Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president

1953

Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female published

1953

American Council on Education creates Commission on the Education of Women

1954

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka overturns “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson

1955

Rosa Parks’s arrest sparks Montgomery bus boycott

1955

National Manpower Council begins investigations of women’s employment

1955

Daughters of Bilitis founded

1957

Eisenhower sends U.S. troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure school integration

1957

Peak of postwar baby boom

1957

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) founded

1960

John F. Kennedy elected president

1960

Sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina

1960

Ella Baker helps to found Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

1961

Freedom Rides seek to integrate interstate bus travel

1961

Diane Nash and others jailed during Freedom Rides

1961

Women Strike for Peace founded

1961

President’s Commission on the Status of Women created

1962

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring

1962

Frances Kelsey receives Distinguished Service medal for blocking American distribution of thalidomide

1962

Dolores Huerta and César Chávez found United Farm Workers

1963

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique published

1963

Equal Pay Act makes wage disparities based solely on gender illegal

1963

March on Washington draws over 250,000 civil rights activists to nation’s capital

1963

John F. Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson assumes presidency

1964

Freedom Summer

1964

Mississippi Freedom delegate Fannie Lou Hamer speaks at Democratic National Convention

1964

Casey Hayden and Mary King distribute “Women in the Movement” paper at SNCC retreat

1965

Voting Rights Act bans literacy tests and authorizes federal intervention to enable African Americans to register and vote

FAMILY CULTURE AND GENDER ROLES

Two overarching themes shaped Americans’ lives in the postwar era. The first, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a sense of insecurity and anxiety that encouraged conformity to political and social norms. The second, the United States’s extraordinary prosperity, prompted tremendous optimism about the nation’s material progress. Both anxiety and affluence contributed to a popular conception of the family as a source of social stability and prosperity and reinforced traditional notions of women’s place in the home.

The New Affluence and the Family

One startling measure of the nation’s post–World War II prosperity was the growth in the gross domestic product (GDP), from $213 billion in 1945 to more than $500 billion in 1960. Not everyone enjoyed this new affluence. Many Americans, but especially nonwhite minorities, continued to live economically marginalized lives, and in 1959, 22 percent of all Americans still lived below the poverty line. Yet most Americans experienced a rising standard of living, with average family income almost doubling in the years between 1945 and 1960. Veterans pursued upward mobility through the Servicemen Readjustment Act of 1944, or GI Bill, which provided federal assistance through home and student loans to returning military personnel. The GI Bill was particularly significant for assisting children of European immigrants in leaving behind the poverty of urban ethnic enclaves to become middle-class suburbanites. Although educational and economic differences still created clear class distinctions between blue-collar and white-collar workers, many of the former benefited from their unions’ success in negotiating improved benefits, such as health insurance and automatic cost-of-living wage adjustments.

Affluence contributed to an emphasis on domesticity and the nuclear family. With more discretionary funds, Americans spent money on homes, raising the percentage of homeownership in the country from 43 percent of families in 1940 to 62 percent in 1960. Many of these homes were located in new suburban developments that created a haven for the new domesticity. However, much postwar housing remained racially segregated both by law and custom. To furnish their homes and garages, families bought electrical appliances, cars, and the exciting new form of at-home entertainment, televisions. New housing construction, road building, and consumer goods fueled the burgeoning postwar economy. Advertisers, manufacturers, and public policy makers all considered consumer purchasing power crucial to prosperity. They extolled the family as the bedrock of the nation’s economic well-being and targeted women as its purchasing agent. Life magazine captured the essence of this understanding with a 1958 cover that featured thirty-six babies and the caption “Kids — Built-in Recession Cure.”

Figures on marriage and fertility for the postwar era suggest Americans’ enthusiasm for family and domestic life. Temporarily reversing the long trend since early in the nineteenth century toward fewer children, family size between the war and the early 1960s went up, creating a “baby boom” (see the Appendix, Chart 1, p. A-17). More Americans married and married younger, further spiking the birthrate. In the 1930s, women gave birth to 2.4 children on average; in the 1950s, that number increased to 3.2. More babies were born between 1948 and 1953 than had been born in the previous thirty years. In these years, the divorce rate briefly turned downward, a pattern unique in the twentieth century. Pent-up desires for traditional family life denied to many in the Great Depression and war years undoubtedly played a part, while the pervasive celebration of family life in popular culture may also have shaped young couples’ decisions.

The Cold War and the Family

While prosperous families lay at the heart of America’s material success, a stable family order was also credited with a crucial role in giving the United States the upper hand in the Cold War. World War II had barely ended before the two former allies, the Soviet Union and the United States, began facing off for what became a global struggle lasting almost fifty years. Representing the conflicting systems of capitalism and communism, each side attempted to achieve dominance in world geopolitics. In the United States, President Harry S. Truman articulated the doctrine of “containment,” which called for resisting the spread of Communist governments in countries around the world. The Cold War became hot in Korea between 1950 and 1953, in the first major overseas armed conflict in American history not authorized by congressional declaration. The newly formed United Nations sent troops, primarily supplied by the United States, to defend the U.S.-backed government in the south of Korea against encroachment by the Communist regime in the north. The war ended with a cease-fire that left Korea divided by a demilitarized zone between North and South Korea that is still in existence. The Cold War also spawned an escalating nuclear arms race. The terrible power of atomic destruction unleashed when the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and became a mushrooming threat to the peoples of the world as the U.S. and Soviet governments matched their militant rhetoric with competition to stockpile nuclear weapons.

Family Togetherness in the Cold War Era

As the Cold War spread fears of nuclear warfare, many Americans, encouraged by the federal government, built fallout shelters in their front and backyards. Magazines and newspapers frequently ran articles that featured pictures of 1950s families posed in their shelters, reflecting the strong emphasis on family culture in the era. This 1955 image depicts mother, father, and daughter in a “Kidde Kokoon,” a shelter manufactured by Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories of Garden City, New York. The shelter cost $3,000 and was outfitted with such items as canned food and water, a chemical toilet, a radiation detector, and a face respirator.

The Cold War had a chilling effect on U.S. domestic politics. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the nation was immersed in a hunt for Communists within its borders, led by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy’s search for Communists in high places was more symptom than cause of the new witch hunts. Other politicians and leaders also called for purging American institutions of “internal subversives.” The most notorious manifestations of the period’s “Red Scare” were a federal loyalty program that scrutinized thousands of public employees and widely publicized congressional hearings held by the HUAC to investigate Communist influence in American life. Women and men lost jobs and had their civil liberties violated based on flimsy evidence.

In 1950, U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas was red-baited (accused of being a Communist) and pushed from politics because she supported causes such as rent control laws and federal regulation of oil drilling. Douglas lost a hotly contested U.S. Senate race in California to future president Richard M. Nixon, who hinted at what he thought were her pro-Communist sympathies by saying that “she was pink down to her underwear.”1 Unions and mainstream liberal organizations, including the American Association of University Women and the National Council of Negro Women, purged their membership of Communists and “fellow travelers” — people deemed sympathetic to communism. The intensity of the Red Scare began to ebb after 1954, when Senator McCarthy, overreaching by investigating the U.S. Army, was formally censured by the Senate for unbecoming conduct. But anxieties about subversion and dissent continued to shape the political climate for many years to come.

The Red Scare targeted a great many others as well. The hysterical hunt for Communists was accompanied by an attack on lesbians and gay men as alleged security risks and subversive presences in government employment. Executive Order 10450, issued in 1953, tightened the federal government’s loyalty program (established in 1947) and explicitly included “sexual perversion” as grounds for dismissal. Applicants for federal jobs were asked, “Have you ever had, or have you now, homosexual tendencies?” and a rule in the Federal Personnel Manual read, “Persons about whom there is evidence that they have engaged in or solicited others to engage in homosexual or sexually perverted acts with them, without evidence of rehabilitation . . . are not suitable for Federal employment.”2 While the majority of people fired or not hired under these loyalty investigations were men, women felt the pervasive risk of exposure, too. Private employers also were unwilling to hire or retain homosexuals. Middle-class lesbians kept their sexual identity private if they wanted to keep their jobs. Those lesbians who did not want or could not afford such closeted privacy, especially working-class women, began to form an identifiable subculture in the 1950s and early 1960s. In large and midsize cities, bars known to tolerate lesbians provided a semipublic space where women could socialize and identify potential partners. On the one hand, lesbian life reflected much of the extreme emphasis on gender roles in these years. In their public presentations, lesbians mirrored the decade’s insistence on clearly defined masculine and feminine roles. Often they fell into two groups: the “butches” and the “femmes.” On the other hand, fifties lesbians also began to challenge the dominant heterosexual culture by insisting on their right to live and love in the open. In the face of outside threats such as police raids and hostile encounters with passersby on the streets, lesbians defended their turf. The first lesbian rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis, formed in San Francisco in 1955.

In addition to anxieties over homosexuality, the postwar era witnessed a continuation of fears about women’s sexual promiscuity. The 1953 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the follow-up to Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), shocked many Americans with its statistics: 50 percent of the women surveyed admitted to premarital intercourse, 90 percent to “petting” (sexual play short of intercourse), and 28 percent to what Kinsey termed “homosexual tendencies.” Kinsey’s findings signaled changes in sexual behavior. Further evidence for the shift is the substantial increase in unwed pregnancies, which almost doubled during the 1940s and 1950s.

The Kinsey Report

Despite the report in Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) that 50 percent of American women admitted to engaging in premarital intercourse, taboos against women’s sexuality outside of marriage remained strong. At the same time, the report signaled a real change in Americans’ sexual behavior. Kinsey’s findings were widely publicized, as is evident in this cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Scholars, however, do not think these changes came about as a result of an increase in promiscuity, but rather because of the cultural norm of “going steady” in the postwar years. A couple’s agreement to see each other “created space within youth culture for girls to minimize stigma while sexually experimenting.”3 However much young women may have enjoyed expanded sexual experiences, in the era before legal abortion and reliable birth control, the fear of unwanted pregnancy always loomed over them. Pregnant teenagers were ousted from schools for fear they might corrupt their presumably innocent classmates. Although some married, many did not. Nor were adoption opportunities equally distributed. White girls had access to institutions for unwed mothers that funnelled the infants into adoption agencies, where they became much sought after commodities. Social workers felt that once these white women relinquished their babies, they could be rehabilitated, cured of their inappropriate sexual behavior. However, racist assumptions about black women’s sexuality as somehow pathological and cultural norms that made women unwilling to give up their babies to strangers meant that relatively few options were available to women of color. They or their families usually cared for the children.

Clearly taboos against female sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage remained strong, as did a double standard that excused male sexual adventures before marriage while prizing premarital female virginity. In the face of challenges to these norms, leading experts championed early marriages to reduce premarital experimentation and firm gender roles in the home to ensure the heterosexuality of children.

Indeed, one key aspect of the postwar culture of conformity was an emphasis on the nuclear family as a bastion of social order, one that would help Americans resist the menace of communism and provide shelter in the midst of an uncertain world. Employers and returning soldiers had been eager to send women back to the home to restore traditional gender patterns. Meshing with anxieties flowing from the disruptions of World War II, Cold War fears of atomic annihilation and Soviet expansion reinforced what was a revised and revived cult of domesticity. And just as social stability presumably led to family order, family dysfunction was deemed responsible for social problems. An apparent postwar rise in crime among children, referred to as “juvenile delinquency,” was blamed on working mothers and weak fathers. (See Primary Sources: “ ‘Is a Working Mother a Threat to the Home?’ ” pp. 606–10.)

With this concentration on the family came a strong emphasis on rigid gender roles — on men’s role as breadwinners and women’s as wives and mothers. Many psychologists insisted that “maturity” entailed a willing acceptance of one’s biologically determined social roles. Parents who turned to the best-selling childrearing book Baby and Child Care (1946), by Dr. Benjamin Spock, learned that working mothers damaged their children: “If a mother realizes clearly how vital [a mother’s] care is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important, after all.”4 In educational films such as A Date with Your Family, high school students viewed a mother and daughter dutifully catering to men as they prepared and served a meal. And in movies such as The Best of Everything (1959), filmgoers followed a plot that not only depicted career women’s sterile lives but also warned young women that “love, even when it’s bad, is the best of everything.” While some television shows pictured men struggling to control their scheming and adventuresome wives, most portrayed women as content wives and mothers. (See Primary Sources: “Television’s Prescriptions for Women,” pp. 590–605.)

Rethinking the Feminine Mystique

In 1963, Betty Friedan captured the essence of this postwar ideology of female domestic containment in her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique. Arguing that millions of American women were suffering from “the problem that has no name,” a malaise brought about by the limited aspirations to which society restricted women, Friedan indicted the “feminine mystique” of popular culture. Excoriating mass media for encouraging women to develop a sense of personal creativity through the use of cake mixes and floor waxes, she similarly lambasted psychologists for prescribing tranquilizers for “neurotic” women rather than examining the social bases of their unhappiness. She criticized popular magazines for disseminating the feminine mystique at every turn, while denying that women were interested in reading about political, international, and social issues. Friedan argued that such attitudes denied women a sense of an autonomous self. The Feminine Mystique sold over 3 million copies, a clear indication that Friedan had tapped into many women’s frustrations over their prescribed roles. Letters to Friedan, as well as interviews conducted by sociologist Stephanie Coontz, confirm the life-changing impact the book had on many American women.

Despite the impact of Friedan’s book, recent critics have pointed out that she vastly overstated the pervasiveness of this restrictive domestic ideal. Rarely acknowledging that the women she described were affluent and white, she glossed over the significant differences that class, race, and ethnicity produced and neglected the increasing number of women entering the paid workforce. Among black women, working wives and mothers had long been valued and understood as virtually essential to families hoping to achieve middle-class status. Images and articles promoting the feminine mystique were largely absent from Ebony, the major African American popular magazine of the period. Instead, Ebony featured women who fought racial discrimination and achieved success in business, politics, and the arts, although it was careful to note the importance of these women’s family roles and their attention “to the needs of their husbands and children.”5

Even among middle-class white women, Friedan overstated her case. Articles in popular magazines directed at white women often depicted successful career women, including those who combined work and marriage. Writers encouraged women to be active in community affairs and held up as models women who achieved “great pride and accomplishment and the satisfaction of ‘doing a job.’ ”6 Moreover, in contrast to Friedan’s claim that magazines ignored women’s discontent, they gave extensive attention to wives’ dissatisfaction with their married lives and their housework obligations. In advice columns like the Ladies’ Home Journal’s “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” letter writers testified to the drudgery of household chores and the stresses entailed in unrelenting domesticity. Nevertheless, the advice dispensed uniformly encouraged women to find psychological tools to help them adjust to the gendered expectations of middle-class marriage, rather than challenge the expectations themselves.7

The most ironic corrective to Friedan’s assessment is that the author was not the simple housewife and unwitting victim of domestic confinement that she claimed to be. Friedan had a background in radical politics; had been a journalist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union; and in the 1940s and 1950s had frequently written about racial and gender discrimination in the workforce. Thus she knew about women workers but chose not to discuss them in her book. She obscured her past probably because of the anti-Communist preoccupations of the era and because portraying herself as an angry casualty of the feminine mystique made for a more marketable book.

These limitations do not decrease The Feminine Mystique’s value as a historical source. Not only was the book important in the revival of feminism in the 1960s, but it also captured a crucial aspect of mainstream Cold War cultural values about women. The ideology of the feminine mystique is best understood as a prescription for female behavior promulgated by those Americans most eager to reinforce rigid gender roles as a means of creating social order. This eagerness may well have stemmed from the challenges posed by working women to conventional expectations.

Women and Work

These challenges were most evident in women’s changing employment patterns. As the baby boom suggests, women embraced motherhood in the 1950s, but they also poured into the paid labor market in what many observers at the time called a revolutionary development. In 1940, 25 percent of women worked; by 1960 the figure had climbed to 35 percent (see the Appendix, Table 2, p. A-19).

More dramatic was the growth in the percentage of married women in the labor force. In 1940, only 17 percent of wives worked; by 1960, 32 percent of wives earned wages, constituting fully 61 percent of the female labor force. While all groups of women held jobs outside the home, particularly significant was the growth in wage earning of middle-class white married women, the very group assumed to be most in the grip of the feminine mystique. White wives’ participation in the workforce more than doubled between 1940 and 1960, rising from 14 to 30 percent, while for black wives the increase was smaller but began at a higher level, going from 32 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960. In a reversal of older patterns, educated women were more likely to work than those without high school and college degrees.

Mothers also increased their participation in the workforce. One of the most significant developments was the trend toward older women entering the workforce when their children reached school age. By having children at younger ages, mothers found themselves positioned to join the labor force. Because advances in health care meant Americans were living longer, women could expect to work for twenty or more years after their children began going to school.

The expanded availability of jobs, created by a burgeoning economy and fueled by the growth of the consumer culture, also affected women’s work patterns. White-collar fields dominated by women for decades — clerical work, sales, nursing, social work, and teaching — grew dramatically. In blue-collar employment, women had lost many skilled positions in heavy manufacturing at the end of World War II, but they found other fields opening up: the lower ranks of the printing industry, positions in industrial assembly, and jobs as delivery personnel and bus and taxi drivers. Service sector jobs — so-called pink-collar work, such as food service, personal care, and beauty salon work — also multiplied and became increasingly feminized. Food service employment was especially sex-segregated. While in 1900, approximately 33 percent of the 100,000 people who waited tables were women, by 1970, 92 percent of the 1 million food servers were women. Unlike other pink-collar workers, waitresses were well represented in unions, with about 25 percent of them organized in the 1950s.

Clerical Workers

The booming economy of the postwar era created a strong demand for office workers. Technological changes of new machines and automated processes meant that types of jobs formerly held by men became “feminized,” most notably in the fields of bookkeeping. A tight labor market also made employers more willing to hire older and married women, but patterns of racial discrimination persisted. While Asian American and Mexican American women made inroads into clerical jobs, African Americans still found fewer opportunities. In 1960, for example, only 8 percent of working black women held clerical jobs compared to 34.7 percent of white working women. This 1952 photograph shows women in a New York City office building.

Improvements in the opportunities for women of color were particularly notable. Latinas and Chinese American and Japanese American women increased their participation in white-collar work in the postwar decade. Because of their high degree of education, Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) women also made strides in teaching, social work, and civil service. Although the absolute numbers were small, black women in the 1950s attended college at a rate higher than either white women or black men. They made modest gains in the clerical field and in the teaching and nursing professions.

For all these improvements, poor women of color still had limited options. Although the percentage of black women workers employed as domestics dropped significantly, from 60 percent in 1940 to 42 percent in 1950, a substantial minority continued to work in low-paid, devalued labor, as did many Latina and Asian women. Immigrant women, because of lack of language and other skills as well as discrimination, found few jobs available to them. In 1943, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, in deference to America’s World War II alliance with China. As a result of this and the War Brides Act of 1945 and the 1953 Refugee Relief Act, between 1948 and 1965, approximately forty thousand Chinese women immigrated to the United States. Most clustered in Chinatowns in the nation’s cities, especially New York and San Francisco. There they worked in family enterprises as well as the garment industry, which was a crucial source of income. Puerto Rican women, part of a vastly expanded post–World War II migration from Puerto Rico mostly to New York City, also concentrated in the garment trade, an industry that was in decline. The results were low wages, poor working conditions, and erratic employment. These poorer women’s restricted options underline an important characteristic of the “revolutionary” aspect of women’s work after World War II. While certainly many women of color had new opportunities, the most dramatic change was the entrance into the labor market of white married women who could take advantage of new service and clerical jobs that offered “respectable” employment.

Women’s increased employment also stemmed from changes in employment practices. Well aware of the expanding labor market and concerned about finding qualified workers, employers not only willingly hired women but also dropped the “marriage bar” that had operated in many fields. Moreover, they restructured the nature of the work market by making part-time jobs widely available for the first time to tap a rich vein of labor power.

Employers who enticed married women with more flexible schedules and other incentives had encouragement from administrators in the U.S. Department of Labor, including its Women’s Bureau, and other public policy makers. Maintaining economic prosperity and keeping the upper hand over the Soviet Union in the Cold War motivated employment experts to evaluate the labor market carefully. Many insisted that “womanpower” needed to be exploited efficiently as a means of promoting U.S. productivity and competitiveness. Alice Leopold, head of the Women’s Bureau in the mid-1950s, emphasized the need to compete with communism by training American women in new skills. “Women,” she noted, “are becoming increasingly important in the development of our country’s industry, in scientific research, in the education field, and in the social sciences.”8

This recognition framed the work of two important agencies in the 1950s. The National Manpower Council (NMC), a private group with close ties to government agencies and corporations, used conferences and publications to draw attention to women’s employment. At a 1951 conference on “Women in the Defense Decade,” held in the midst of the Korean War, the American Council on Education tackled the “urgent question . . . about just how and in what respects women could serve the defense of the nation,”9 leading to the 1953 creation of the Commission on the Education of Women (CEW).

In both groups, organizers walked a tightrope between what they viewed as national needs and the dominant ideology about women’s place. Sensitive to the prevailing gender norms, they took care not to be viewed as undermining traditional roles. A 1955 CEW report explicitly stated that its recommendations concerning women “must not detract from the importance of their roles as wives and mothers.”10 Yet both groups also encouraged training and education for women and criticized discriminatory labor patterns that limited full use of the nation’s womanpower.

These groups legitimated married women’s participation in the workforce but barely scratched the surface of the discrimination women faced. Neither the NMC nor the CEW addressed the limited economic opportunities for women of color, focusing their attention almost exclusively on white women, whose education in public schools continued to track them into traditional female occupations such as clerical work. Although Cold War imperatives called for more American engineers and scientists, women were often shunted into high school science teaching and experienced pervasive discrimination in graduate programs, corporations, and government employment. There were notable exceptions. Frances Kelsey, a pharmacologist for the Federal Drug Administration, received the government’s Distinguished Service medal for her steadfast refusal in the face of pharmaceutical industry pressure to approve the sleeping pill thalidomide, which had been shown to produce birth defects among European women. Kelsey came to public attention in 1962, the same year science naturalist Rachel Carson published her pathbreaking Silent Spring, an exposé of pesticide usage, which helped spark the modern environmental movement. Carson, who had a master’s degree in zoology and had worked for sixteen years for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, had done meticulous research and consulted with well-established scientists every step of the way. However, her critics, including the chemical industry, vigorously condemned her work with gendered terms, describing her as a “hysterical” or “emotional” woman. Hundreds of women mathematicians also found work in government agencies and research institutions, working first as “human computers” and later as computer programmers and engineers. Although crucial to the early development of computer technology and the aerospace industry, their role has only recently been acknowledged.

Rachel Carson

A year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, another woman, Rachel Carson, published a controversial and pathbreaking best-seller. In 1962’s Silent Spring, Carson, a well-known natural science writer, traced the devastating impact of pesticides on plant, animal, and human life. The book expressed her outrage that the pursuit of profits and the thoughtless embrace of technology and science had undermined the natural environment. Carson’s work in spreading awareness of the toxicity of pesticides has led many scholars to view her as the impetus for the modern environmental movement, which gained strength in the late 1960s and 1970s and resulted in significant legislation to control chemical pollutants. Though Carson explicitly stated that she was not a “feminist,” a small group of women scientists and conservation activists helped support her as she finished her book amidst trying personal circumstances, including the cancer that would take her life in 1964. Many women’s organizations were among the quickest to acknowledge the significance of Carson’s contribution. The press generally avoided using this image of her at a microscope, preferring the “soft” images of Carson in nature.

Human Computers: Kathryn Peddrew Johnson at NASA

Beginning in World War II, women mathematicians found employment with the federal government’s NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which became NASA in 1958), where they were crucial to airplane and later space technological research. Before the advent of electronic computers, these women performed complex calculations using conventional calculators and airplanes and later became computer programmers. Of the many hundreds of women working at NASA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, at least fifty were African American. They enjoyed satisfying work but were frustrated by limited opportunities for advancement and the indignities of racial segregation at the research facility. As Mary Jackson, who became an engineer in 1958 after a struggle to get the training she needed in the segregated educational system of Virginia, put it, “I changed what I could and what I couldn’t I endured.”11 Once obscure, these women became the subject of a book and major motion picture in 2016 named, appropriately enough, Hidden Figures. This photograph features mathematician Katherine Peddrew Johnson sitting at her desk at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The globe is a celestial navigation aid. Johnson’s work was crucial to the success of astronaut John Glenn’s 1962 orbit, as well as the Apollo mission of 1969.

Despite slow-changing attitudes toward working women and the sex-segregated nature of their opportunities, women, including wives and mothers, persisted in entering the workforce. Changes in the labor market and encouragement on the part of employers and the government are crucial factors in understanding the growth in women’s work outside the home, but this development was also fundamentally a question of personal choice. Scattered evidence suggests the complicated processes that undergirded these choices. Nurses, the largest category of female professional labor, described themselves as taking advantage of new work opportunities to serve their community.12 At the same time, they emphasized that their home responsibilities came first, and it was only the flexibility of nursing that allowed them to work for wages. In contrast, many working-class women apparently felt less need to justify working, admitting that they took paid labor to get out of the house in addition to providing assistance to their families.

The degree of family need may have been the crucial factor in most married women’s decisions to seek employment. Poor women of color — as they had done for decades — worked to make ends meet. For others, paid labor made life easier for their families and, in particular, enabled them to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy and enter the middle class. A survey of unionized women indicated that a significant number of them took jobs to finance their children’s education or to make house payments. Contemporary observers echoed these explanations. A 1957 Ford Foundation study, Womanpower, reported that “the desire to achieve a richer life for the family has such widespread approval that it provides a generally acceptable reason for married women whose responsibilities at home do not absorb all their time and energy to go to work.”13 Similarly, in 1956 Look magazine concluded: “No longer a psychological immigrant to man’s world, she works rather casually as a third of the U.S. labor force, and less toward a big career than as a way of filling a hope chest or buying a new home freezer. She gracefully concedes the top job rungs to men.”14 Look’s assessment fittingly summed up prevailing assumptions about women’s work. Acknowledging a significant shift in labor patterns, the article minimized the impact of women’s work on their role in the home, reflecting a belief that sustained the persistent discrimination that the rising tide of working women encountered.

A MASS MOVEMENT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS

Women who supported the civil rights movement through their unions or through middle-class organizations like the YWCA were responding to one of the most potent movements for social change of the twentieth century, the civil rights campaign of the postwar years. Going against the tide of the era’s political conservatism, black women and men fought against the system of white supremacy in the South. Joined by white liberals sympathetic to their cause, they achieved substantial gains but met with much frustration as well. Both black and white women were major activists in the civil rights movement, and, although women’s rights took a backseat to the issue of race, the civil rights movement nonetheless proved a seedbed for the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s.

As late as a week before the most famous public moment of the civil rights movement — the August 28, 1963, March on Washington, which attracted an unprecedented 250,000 black and white demonstrators — no woman had been invited to speak from the platform. At the last minute, Rosa Parks and a few other women were added to the program, but their participation was clearly an afterthought. The charismatic Martin Luther King Jr. overshadowed all other speakers, male and female, with his “I Have a Dream” speech. Historians have only recently begun to reconstruct women’s substantial contributions to the postwar civil rights movement. Some were blue-collar unionists, others college and high school students; some were well-educated professionals, others illiterate sharecroppers. In their search for racial justice, they rarely focused on specific concerns of women, but their gender shaped the nature of the activism they engaged in — both creating opportunities and imposing limits — as they helped to forge the modern civil rights movement. (See Primary Sources: “Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” pp. 611–19.)

Challenging Segregation

At first the movement focused specifically on the South, where widespread racial violence and economic exploitation left millions of African Americans economically, socially, and politically deprived. Racism, moreover, was institutionalized. Since the late nineteenth century, southern states had enforced Jim Crow laws establishing a rigid system of segregation where everything from water fountains to public schools was designated for either “whites” or “colored.” In all southern states, the majority of African Americans were also disfranchised through poll taxes and stringent literacy requirements. This legalized apartheid system, which denied blacks virtually any protection under the law, came under relentless attack in the postwar era.

World War II helped to set the stage for radical racial change. Continuing migration out of the South, new job opportunities, and military service gave black men and women heightened expectations. By successfully lobbying the federal government to establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1941, African American leaders established a beachhead, albeit one with limited impact, in the struggle to force the national government to take responsibility for enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Further, as more African Americans moved outside the South to regions where they could finally vote, they expanded their political base and gained influence with national politicians in both parties. This influence helped to bring about the desegregation of the army during the Korean War. The Cold War, too, created a new climate, as the shocking inequities faced by African Americans became a common refrain in the Soviets’ argument that American democracy was a sham.

In the immediate postwar period, national organizations, especially the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, founded during World War II), battled disfranchisement and segregation, joined by unions that worked to counter economic discrimination against black people, such as the UPWA. The movement against segregation is usually dated from the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a case brought by the NAACP on behalf of elementary school student Linda Brown and others. The Brown decision effectively overturned the 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had legitimized the southern pretense of a “separate but equal” system (see pp. 303–4). The Brown decision found that segregated schools were inherently unequal and thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment, infusing African Americans with new hope. In the aftermath, their efforts to organize resistance to the southern racial system multiplied (see the Appendix, pp. A-9 to A-10).

Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court justice, led the NAACP team that won the Brown case. Constance Baker Motley, the first African American woman to be appointed to the federal judiciary (1966), was the only woman on the legal team. Black women were more in the forefront of the many local struggles to compel school boards to comply with the Court’s decision. Of all these confrontations, the one that drew the most national attention occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, with the support of the Little Rock Board of Education, nine black students, six of them young women, registered to attend the all-white Central High School. For their determination, the young people, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” and their families were subjected to considerable violence. One of the young women, Melba Patillo, later recalled that she was threatened with sexual assault as she walked back from school but did not dare tell her parents for fear they would withdraw her from the desegregation effort. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus sent the state National Guard to block the black students’ entry. Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, concerned about the defiance of federal law, sent U.S. troops to protect the students so that they were able to enter the school. Their victory, however, was only temporary. The following year, Faubus closed the school system rather than integrate it, a tactic that was not checked by the federal courts for several years. Although parts of the Upper South desegregated their school systems voluntarily, by 1964 only 2 percent of southern blacks attended integrated schools, a measure of the deep resistance Brown evoked among many southern whites.

Throughout the Little Rock students’ ordeal, one local woman organized their efforts and provided much-needed support. Daisy Bates was in many ways typical of black female activists throughout the twentieth century. A successful businesswoman and civic leader — she and her husband owned the local black newspaper, the State Press — Bates had long been active in the NAACP, serving as president of the Arkansas branch in 1953. While federal troops remained to guard the students throughout the school year, each day Bates ushered the students to their high school and provided crucial leadership within the black community (see Figure 10.13, p. 613).

Efforts to integrate higher education also were hard-fought battles in which women had high visibility. In 1956, Autherine Lucy became the first black student to be admitted to the University of Alabama, only to be expelled three days later “for her own protection” against relentless white brutality and official intransigence. Seven years later Vivian Malone, along with a black male student, succeeded in integrating that university. At the University of Georgia, Charlayne Hunter, later a nationally prominent television newswoman, broke the racial barrier of that state’s higher education system in 1961.

A year after the Brown decision, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott became the second great watershed in invigorating the postwar civil rights movement. African Americans stayed off the buses of Montgomery for 381 days until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the city’s system of segregated public buses. The boycott had its origins on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, a daily humiliation required of black bus riders. Parks was not simply a tired woman whose arrest unwittingly sparked a massive protest. She had been active in the local NAACP for fifteen years, and her decision to make this stand against segregation was part of a lifelong commitment to racial justice. For some time local NAACP leaders had wanted to find a test case to challenge Montgomery’s bus segregation in the courts. Parks, a respectable, hardworking, middle-aged woman, fit the bill perfectly (see Figure 10.12, p. 612).

On the night of Parks’s arrest, a group working independently of the NAACP sprang into action. The Women’s Political Caucus (WPC), consisting primarily of black professional women, had been founded in 1946 to focus on challenging disfranchisement and segregation in Montgomery. According to one member, well before Parks’s arrest, “We had all the plans and we were just waiting for the right time.”20 WPC president Jo Ann Robinson used the organization’s extensive network to duplicate and distribute flyers announcing a boycott. At a community meeting the evening after Parks’s arrest, the boycott was formally organized and endorsed. Shortly afterward a twenty-six-year-old minister newly arrived in town, Martin Luther King Jr., was selected to head up the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), an agency created in response to the boycott. (See Primary Sources: “Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” pp. 611–19.)

Men, particularly ministers, who traditionally were at the center of black southern leadership, predominated in the MIA, and women largely were excluded from formal leadership positions, an exclusion they rarely questioned. But women were nonetheless pivotal to the success of the boycott. They not only initiated the boycott but also formed its backbone. Ever since 1884, when Ida B. Wells (see p. 301) had challenged her ejection from a Tennessee railroad car, black women had been in the forefront of battles to desegregate public transportation. Much more than men, women depended on public transportation to travel to their jobs as domestic servants in white households. During the Montgomery bus boycott, some were able to take advantage of a carpool system created by women activists, but most walked. In addition to their personal sacrifices, other women helped the boycott by raising funds and providing food for mass meetings. As one WPC leader put it, the “grassroots support” was “a hundred percent among the women.”21

Women as “Bridge Leaders”

Montgomery women demonstrated a pattern repeated in other civil rights activities. Men monopolized the formal leadership roles and mediated among the community, the media, and government officials. Women were far more likely to have unofficial positions, yet they served vital functions in organizing and inspiring their local communities. One scholar terms this pattern “bridge leadership.”22 The role of bridge leader became increasingly significant as the struggle took on a new trajectory. While not neglecting the older methods of pursuing legal battles in the courts and lobbying legislators, the movement increasingly became a mass movement. In boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, and marches, women repeatedly served as bridge leaders.

Ella Baker exemplified the bridge leader. A well-educated southerner who migrated to New York in the 1920s, Baker became active in the NAACP, eventually becoming director of the branch offices. An extraordinary woman and gifted speaker, Baker was committed to bringing about social change by mobilizing grassroots resistance. In 1957, she began to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black ministers under the direction of Martin Luther King Jr. The SCLC reluctantly appointed Baker an “acting” executive director until a suitable male executive could be found. She accepted the position but clearly chafed at the male-dominated leadership structure and hierarchical style. She later said, “I had known . . . that there would never be any role for me in a leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I’m a woman. Also, I’m not a minister.”23

Perhaps Baker’s most lasting contribution was her central role in the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC had emerged from yet another kind of mass protest, the sit-in movement that started in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four black male students took seats at the “whites only” lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s store, determined to “sit in” until they were served. Their protest eventually drew in hundreds of students, women and men, blacks and whites. Their goal was both economic disruption and publicity for the movement. They showcased the tactics of nonviolent resistance, a doctrine popularized by King but originating with the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi. Students stoically withstood taunts and physical abuse in a steadfast determination to overcome oppression. The successful Greensboro sit-in sparked a wave of sit-ins in fifty-four cities that helped to desegregate many public facilities in the Upper South. The Deep South, however, especially Alabama and Mississippi, remained resistant.

In her role as SCLC acting director, Baker convened a meeting of over three hundred college students to help form an organization to orchestrate their future efforts. Following Baker’s precept that strong leaders were not necessary for a strong movement, SNCC emerged as a nonhierarchical organization, with rotating officers. Although women were active in all the civil rights organizations, SNCC gave women the greatest opportunity to participate and influence the civil rights movement.

SNCC men and women participated in the Freedom Rides of 1961, which CORE organized to challenge segregated interstate bus travel and bus terminals in the South. On May 14, 1961, a group consisting of black and white men and women boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., headed to New Orleans. In Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, the activists encountered vicious mob violence. A pivotal bridge leader in the Freedom Rides was Diane Nash, a young black SNCC activist who had earlier led the Nashville sit-ins. (See Primary Sources: “Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” pp. 611–19.) After the violence in Birmingham, some SCLC leaders called for an end to the rides, but Nash interceded, insisting, “[I]f they stop us with violence, the movement is dead.”24 The rides continued. The unwillingness of Alabama’s officials to protect the Freedom Riders eventually led President John F. Kennedy to send federal marshals to Alabama to protect them. He later ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce desegregation on interstate bus routes. Even though they never made it to New Orleans, the Riders had succeeded in integrating interstate bus travel.

Voter Registration and Freedom Summer

Women activists like Nash faced violence, harassment, and degrading jail conditions. By far the most challenging — and dangerous — activities were the voter organizing drives that took place deep in the rural South. In 1960, SNCC had begun a voter registration drive in Mississippi, where, although African Americans represented 45 percent of the population, only 5 percent of black adults were registered to vote. In 1962, registration efforts heated up after the SCLC, SNCC, the NAACP, and CORE established the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to oversee voting registration drives in Mississippi.

As they struggled to overcome the reluctance of local blacks to risk their livelihood or personal safety to register to vote, the activists also encountered stiff resistance from local whites. Viewed as outside agitators, they experienced harassment, intimidation, and deadly violence. But they were usually able to rely on a small number of local community leaders — often women — who provided shelter, moral support, and valuable personal contacts, at great personal risk to themselves. (See Primary Sources: “Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” pp. 611–19.)

The most famous of these local leaders was Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, Mississippi. Hamer worked on a large cotton plantation. There, despite having only a sixth-grade education, she exhibited natural leadership capacities that eventually elevated her to a position as a kind of forewoman for her boss and an influential person in the local black community. Motivated by the desire to make blacks full citizens, Hamer joined SNCC and, after a year of effort, finally registered to vote in 1963. “We just got to stand up now as Negroes for ourselves and for our freedom,” she insisted, “and if it don’t do me any good, I do know the young people it will do good.”25 Despite the loss of her job and threats to her life, she became an organizer and spokeswoman for the Mississippi voter registration effort. She was renowned for her outspoken and charismatic style and for her passion and skill as an inspirational singer. Hamer was an exemplar of the rural black southern women who were pillars of the southern civil rights movement. But appreciation for their strength must not obscure the considerable personal sacrifices these women endured. Until she died in 1977, Hamer suffered both physically and emotionally from the ramifications of a brutal 1963 beating she received as punishment for her commitment to the civil rights movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the most charismatic civil rights figures, was active in SNCC in Mississippi and came to national attention as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Under pressure from President Johnson, the networks cut off live coverage of Hamer’s passionate speech, in which she asked “Is this America?” but the speech later made network news. Standing next to Hamer are Eleanor Holmes (later Norton) and Ella Baker (far right).

Despite such heroism, southern black voter registration was stalled by fear, violence, and the determined resistance of white political leaders. In the spring of 1964, COFO devised a plan to import one thousand volunteers from outside the South, primarily white students, to register black voters in the Deep South. Freedom Summer, as the plan was called, was meant not only to infuse new energy into the voter registration drive but to use these white students to focus media and federal attention on southern recalcitrance. Trained in nonviolent resistance and warned about the dangers involved, the first volunteers arrived in June 1964. Violence overshadowed Freedom Summer. Four volunteers were killed, eighty beaten, and more than a thousand arrested. Thirty-seven churches were bombed and burned.

The recruitment of white northern students created tension within the movement. Some of these highly educated whites tried to assume leadership positions and had to be reminded that they had come to help, not to take charge. The presence of white women raised particular issues. A handful of southern white women had been active in the civil rights movement from the very beginning, including older women like Virginia Foster Durr and Anne Braden, who had a lifelong commitment to challenging segregation, and younger activists like Joan Browning, who was a Freedom Rider, and Casey Hayden, who was an early member of SNCC. During Freedom Summer, however, the number of white women, estimated at somewhere between one-third and one-half of the volunteers, increased dramatically. Any sort of closeness or intimacy between black men and white women constituted a highly charged trigger for white racists’ anger. White women and black men had their own reasons for engaging in these flirtations and sexual liaisons, but black women often resented them, and these tensions contributed to racial divisions in the early years of the women’s liberation movement.

The climax of southern voter registration efforts and Freedom Summer was a bold challenge to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. Mississippi blacks organized a delegation of the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to attend the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City in August 1964. They demanded that the DNC replace the all-white state group as the official Mississippi delegation. Hamer testified before the convention’s rules committee about the violence and beatings she suffered in order to register to vote. Despite the extraordinary power of her story, the party leadership, including President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with the tacit approval of more moderate black leaders, chose to seat the all-white delegation and to offer the MFDP two “at-large” seats. The MFDP rejected this proposal as a compromise that did not address the illegality of Mississippi’s systematic denial of blacks’ access to the political process. Deeply disillusioned, the MFDP delegates returned to Mississippi. Although Hamer and others continued their activism on behalf of southern black economic and political empowerment, the civil rights movement as a whole never recovered its optimism after the disappointment in Atlantic City.

Sexism in the Movement

When Hamer returned home in the fall of 1964, SNCC was faltering, beset by a wide range of tensions, including the influx of new white members who had stayed on after Freedom Summer and questions about the viability of nonviolent resistance in the face of relentless persecution. A discussion paper written by Casey Hayden and Mary King, two longtime, highly respected white members of SNCC, drew parallels between the subordination of blacks and the subordination of women in society. Hayden and King criticized SNCC for not “recognizing that women are the crucial factor that keeps the movement running on a day-to-day basis [or giving women] equal say-so when it comes to day-to-day decision making.”26 The paper received virtually no attention at the time, but historians now regard it as an important document linking women’s participation in the civil rights movement to the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s (see Reading into the Past: “Women in the Movement”).

Was SNCC sexist? Were women relegated to minor positions and not taken seriously by male leaders? Many black women had established themselves as a powerful presence in SNCC, but white women, especially the new student volunteers, were viewed, and usually viewed themselves, as playing supportive roles. In retrospect it seems that males monopolized formal leadership positions, but few women now claim that they experienced any resentment at the time. For black women, race was of utmost importance, and few acted in the context of bettering the position of black women specifically. Even those white women who criticized male domination of the movement remember above all that participating in the civil rights movement proved personally and politically liberating. Harriet Tanzman, a University of Wisconsin student who first went south during Freedom Summer, explained, “I was able to do things I never knew I could do. I mean it took the best of us, the movement, whether we were eighteen or twenty-five. It empowered our lives.”27

In numerous ways, the civil rights movement was fundamental in helping to revive the feminist movement, discussed in Chapter 11. It gave middle-class white women exposure to role models of female public activism and leadership, like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, and opportunities to envision themselves operating outside the rigid gender norms of middle-class culture. What might be called implicit feminist impulses underlay their willingness to undertake the risks of civil rights activism. Rita Schwerner Bender (the wife of Mickey Schwerner, one of four activists killed during Freedom Summer) was a member of CORE in Brooklyn before heading to Mississippi in 1964. In 1994, she recalled her decision to join the movement: “I did not see myself as saving anyone, but I did have a view of saving myself from a split-level house.”28 The empowerment that Tanzman and other women described later led many to challenge the patriarchal nature of their society.

Tensions within SNCC exacerbated by Freedom Summer and its aftermath were part of a larger change in the direction of the civil rights movement. The Atlantic City disappointment exposed the degree to which the Johnson administration temporized about protecting African Americans’ constitutional rights. Repeatedly, as activists faced violence and intimidation, the Justice Department intervened only when forced by massive media exposure of violence against peaceful demonstrators. Despite years of agitation, Congress resisted passing a Civil Rights Act until 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson pushed it through as homage to the assassinated John F. Kennedy. Brutality to demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, was followed by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which threw out the literacy tests used to keep blacks out of southern Democratic parties and authorized the U.S. attorney general to intervene in counties where less than 50 percent of the black voting-age population was registered. But for many young blacks, this was too little too late. Breaking from more moderate leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s, militant blacks turned from the goal of integration to “Black Power,” an explicitly male-dominated phase of the civil rights movement. Rejecting the “beloved community” of black/white unity that had emerged in the heady first days of civil rights radicalism, SNCC demanded that whites leave the organization so that it could be run entirely by blacks for goals of their own choosing.

READING INTO THE PAST

CASEY HAYDEN AND MARY KING

Women in the Movement

Casey Hayden (b. 1939) and Mary King (b. 1940) anonymously distributed a document titled “Position Paper: Nov. 1964” during a SNCC retreat in Waveland, Mississippi. The statement symbolizes the close connection between young white women’s civil rights activism and the emergence of the women’s liberation movement later in the decade.

Staff was involved in crucial [SNCC] constitutional revisions at the Atlanta staff meeting in October. A large committee was appointed to present revisions to the staff. The committee was all men.

Two organizers were working together to form a farmers league. Without asking any questions, the male organizer immediately assigned the clerical work to the female organizer although both had had equal experience in organizing campaigns.

Although there are some women in Mississippi projects who have been working as long as some of the men, the leadership group in COFO is all men. A woman in a field office wondered why she was held responsible for day-to-day decisions, only to find out later that she had been appointed project director but not told.

A fall 1964 personnel and resources report on Mississippi projects lists the number of people on each project. The section on Laurel, however, lists not the number of persons, but “three girls.”

One of SNCC’s main administrative officers apologizes for appointment of a woman as interim project director in a key Mississippi project area. . . .

Any woman in SNCC, no matter what her position or experience, has been asked to take minutes in a meeting when she and other women are outnumbered by men.

The names of several new attorneys entering a state project this past summer were posted in a central movement office. The first initial and last name of each lawyer was listed. Next to one name was written: (girl).

Capable, responsible, and experienced women who are in leadership positions can expect to have to defer to a man on their project for final decision-making.

A session at the recent October staff meeting in Atlanta was the first large meeting in the past couple of years where a woman was asked to chair.

Undoubtedly this list will seem strange to some, petty to others, laughable to most. The list could continue as far as there are women in the movement. Except that most women don’t talk about these kinds of incidents, because the whole subject is [not] discussible — strange to some, petty to others, laughable to most. The average white person finds it difficult to understand why the Negro resents being called “boy,” or being thought of as “musical” and “athletic,” because the average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior. And naturally he doesn’t understand the problem of paternalism. So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumptions of male superiority. Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro. Consider why it is in SNCC that women who are competent, qualified, and experienced, are automatically assigned to the “female” kinds of jobs such as typing, desk work, telephone work, filing, library work, cooking, and the assistant kind of administrative work but rarely the “executive” kind. . . .

This paper is presented anyway because it needs to be made know[n] that many women in the movement are not “happy and contented” with their status. . . . What can be done? Probably nothing right away. . . . [But] maybe sometime in the future the whole of the women in this movement will become so alert as to force the rest of the movement to stop the discrimination and start the slow process of changing values and ideas so that all of us gradually come to understand that this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.

November, 1964

SOURCE: Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45–47.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What are Hayden and King’s key concerns?

According to the authors, why is it difficult to discuss women’s position in the movement?

A Widening Circle of Civil Rights Activists

As African Americans mounted their civil rights struggle, Mexican Americans intensified their own drive to fight prejudice and attain legitimacy in American society. Here, too, women made significant contributions that have been obscured by the attention given to male leaders.

After World War II, Mexican Americans in Texas, California, and some states in the Midwest sought to improve their communities, increase their political influence, and challenge de facto segregation and economic and educational discrimination. One of the most dynamic organizations of the period was the Community Service Organization (CSO), founded in 1947 and based primarily in California. The CSO had wide-ranging goals of fostering civil rights, improving health care and living conditions, and developing leadership skills in urban Mexican communities. Historians estimate that close to half of the CSO’s members were women, most of whom participated with their husbands. Men dominated formal leadership positions, while women played subordinate but nonetheless vital roles, including most of the clerical work. Helen Chávez, wife of César Chávez, who became the most significant Chicano activist of his time, recalled that daily she recorded in longhand her husband’s dictated reports and that for meetings, “I would address all the envelopes and address the postcards.”29 Women also turned their energies to citizenship education programs, voter registration drives, and fund-raising. In the latter, their efforts reflected the gendered nature of their activism. They often raised money through sales of items such as Mexican tamales or pan dulce (sweet rolls). The CSO Reporter described another quintessential 1950s social gathering that these Mexican American women adapted to their cause: “A series of Tupper Ware parties with a percentage of sales given to CSO are being conducted under the able leadership of Ursula Gutierrez.”30

Some Mexican women worked outside these patterns of gendered activism. Dolores Huerta began her career doing volunteer work for the Mexican American community but later served as a paid lobbyist for CSO and, in 1962, cofounded the United Farm Workers with César Chávez. Another prominent woman, Hope Mendoza, had been active in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and, like women in the UE and UPWA, was militant in her defense of women workers. Chairing the CSO’s labor relations committee, she brought her labor expertise and extensive contacts to the CSO’s efforts to support Mexican American workers. Among other things, she educated workers to the value of unions, raised funds, and interviewed politicians seeking the CSO’s endorsement. Mendoza’s high-profile activities were exceptional, but many other women in the CSO shared her union experience. Although most women in the organization stayed within traditional female boundaries, many more women followed the more assertive paths of Huerta and Mendoza in the late 1960s and 1970s as the Chicano movement for Mexican American empowerment gathered force (see pp. 639–40).

Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta is most famous for her role as cofounder with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers in 1962. Huerta played a leading role in organizing workers and negotiating contracts. In the late 1960s, she spearheaded a national boycott of grapes that forced growers to sign a contract with the union. Here she is shown in 1962 registering farmworkers.

WOMEN AND PUBLIC POLICY

While the civil rights movement forged ahead, encouraging many young women to begin to question the cultural assumptions that reinforced women’s subordination, other women focused on public policy issues, especially discrimination in the workforce. The creation of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 proved a turning point. It not only focused renewed attention on the problems employed women faced but also helped to create a network of activists committed to addressing working women’s rights.

The Continuing Battle over the ERA

The community of women interested in promoting women’s legal rights and economic opportunities faced many obstacles in the years following World War II. With the feminine mystique holding sway over much of American culture and the Red Scare promoting conformity, the social and political climate hampered serious questioning of women’s roles. Nonetheless, professional lobbyists for organizations like the YWCA, the AAUW, and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (BPW) formed a female network attentive to policy developments in Washington that kept alive concerns over women’s rights. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, however, these women were divided by the long-standing debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Their division on this issue discouraged fresh approaches to questions concerning women’s growing, yet fundamentally unequal, participation in the workforce.

The battle lines were similar to those of the 1920s, when the ERA was first introduced (see pp. 484–89). The National Woman’s Party, with strong support from career women in the BPW, argued for the amendment as a device that would strike down all manner of laws and policies that fettered women’s rights as free and equal individuals. Opposing the ERA were most of the staff of the federal Women’s Bureau and the women’s organizations traditionally allied with it, such as the League of Women Voters and the YWCA. Women labor union leaders formed a particularly adamant group in opposition to the ERA.

All of these opponents believed that the ERA endangered protective labor legislation, which ever since its inception in the Progressive era had emphasized women’s distinctiveness, especially in their maternal function. By the 1950s, Women’s Bureau leaders had retreated somewhat from their emphasis on promoting more protective legislation in the various states and had moved toward fostering equal pay laws and challenging some discriminatory policies. They no longer had to defend special minimum wage and maximum hours laws for women since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had extended these protections to men. Under the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican politicians, including many women, joined with anti-union conservative business interests to support the ERA because they viewed protective labor legislation as an intrusion of the government into the labor market. Alice Leopold, appointed by Eisenhower as the new head of the Women’s Bureau, was a supporter of the amendment. Nonetheless, Women’s Bureau staffers and their traditional allies continued to condemn the ERA, their commitment heightened by the anti-union climate of the 1950s and by the affiliation of some with the Democratic Party, which remained resolutely anti-ERA.

A Turning Point: The President’s Commission on the Status of Women

It was in part to deflect attention away from the ERA that Esther Peterson, who became head of the Women’s Bureau in 1961, proposed a commission on the status of women. Appointed by Democrat John F. Kennedy, Peterson had strong union ties and enthusiastically supported the new president’s program for revived activism on the part of the federal government, especially on behalf of disadvantaged Americans. Kennedy pledged to “get this country moving again” with a “New Frontier” to continue the liberal reforms started by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Peterson prevailed on Kennedy to establish the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in late 1961, with the hope that it would particularly advance the cause of working women. (See Reading into the Past: “Esther Peterson and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.”)

Eleven men and fifteen women drawn from leaders in women’s organizations, unions, business, education, and politics composed the PCSW, which was chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Supplementing the commission were dozens of subcommittees that brought many women activists into the process of research and deliberation on issues ranging from inequities in wage rates and limited job opportunities to the particular problems of poor black women and of working mothers. As activists like Peterson pushed an agenda to assist working women, many members of the commission worried lest their efforts be interpreted as undermining women’s maternal roles by encouraging them to work. Indeed, the executive order creating the commission revealed the contradictions implicit in its task. The commission was responsible for “developing recommendations for overcoming discriminations in government and private employment on the basis of sex and for developing recommendations for services which will enable women to continue their roles as wives and mothers while making a maximum contribution to the world around them.”31

Not surprisingly, the PCSW’s final report, published in 1963, outlined moderate proposals for the most part. It recommended child care tax benefits for low-income working mothers and improved maternity benefits. It called for state and federal governments to promote women’s education and job training and endorsed equal pay for equal work. The PCSW recommended an executive order to require private employers to give women “equal opportunities,” a strikingly vague mandate already established for federal employment. It proposed expanding provisions of existing legislation to improve women’s Social Security benefits and bring more women under the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a change that would particularly benefit poor black and Chicana women. In keeping with the Women’s Bureau’s long-standing commitment to protective legislation, it endorsed a forty-hour workweek for women, with overtime pay beyond forty hours. The PCSW also addressed the need for states to repeal outdated laws that limited the rights of women to serve on juries or control their own property.

The commission did not endorse the ERA but offered as an alternative a recommendation that the Fourteenth Amendment be understood as protecting women’s equal rights. Pauli Murray, an African American civil rights attorney who served on the Subcommittee on Political and Civil Rights and had long been active in promoting black and women’s rights, formulated this argument for the PCSW, explicitly drawing a connection between the discrimination women faced and the civil rights movement, claiming that “arbitrary discrimination against women violated the Fourteenth Amendment in the same way racial bias did.”32 Despite Murray’s insightful analysis, the commission omitted any discussion of a race-gender analogy — presumably because it was too controversial — and simply urged the Supreme Court to legitimate the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability to women, which it did within the decade.

One legacy of the PCSW was passage of federal “equal work for equal pay” legislation. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered significantly less than the Women’s Bureau or its female union supporters had hoped for. It rejected the concept of equal pay for comparable work, substituting instead the proviso that women working in identical jobs with men — a relatively small class of workers — must be paid equally. The act also limited its applicability to those occupations already covered by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, a measure that failed to include women’s jobs in the agricultural and domestic service sectors. Despite its limits, the Equal Pay Act resulted in concrete gains for some women and at least theoretically committed the federal government to the recognition that women’s labor had equal value to men’s.

Still, few concrete results followed the commission’s recommendations. Its importance was in the way in which it focused attention, however ambivalently, on the varied discriminations that women faced. It was instrumental in encouraging many activists to retreat from an interpretation that emphasized sexual difference and the need for laws to protect women toward an approach that favored equal rights and promoted the government’s role in challenging discrimination against women. The PCSW’s deliberations also encouraged a network of women activists interested in promoting women’s rights and spawned dozens of state commissions on the status of women, which in turn created a community of women throughout the country addressing similar concerns. Pauli Murray explained, “Like-minded women found one another, bonds developed through working together, and an informal feminist network emerged to act as leaven in the broader movement that followed.”33

READING INTO THE PAST

Esther Peterson and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women

Esther Peterson served as both the director of the Women’s Bureau and the assistant secretary of labor in John F. Kennedy’s administration. In 1961, President Kennedy empowered her to establish the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, where she served as executive vice chairman. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee (see pp. 585–88). In this passage from a 1977 oral history interview, Peterson recalls her work for women’s labor rights in the early 1960s.

“Equal pay for equal work” became the policy of the Women’s Bureau, and, through its efforts, the law of the land. To help break down that notion that women workers were somehow different on the job from men, we abolished the practice in government of designating “job male - job female.” We helped win the end of sex-segregated help-wanted ads, and fostered the widespread use of day-care centers in federal facilities. Predominantly women’s jobs were also added to coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act, even domestic workers.

Our efforts at that time were concentrated on extending the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover more women workers, working for collective bargaining agreements in women-dominated industries, and seeking passage of the Equal Pay Act. We wanted equality for women, but we wanted bread for our low-income sisters first. Only after basic protection such as equal pay and federal wage and hours laws were in place, were we willing to consider the Equal Rights Amendment. I wanted to get consideration of women into the warp and woof of everything. Passage of the Equal Pay Act was an initiative the commission worked on. Mrs. Roosevelt and many commission members testified on behalf of the bill, and we were delighted to secure passage in 1963.

. . . [T]he issue of comparable worth, or “quality and quantity,” was hard fought at the time, and the . . . Republican women who supported the Equal Rights Amendment in 1960 were not with us. They had a part in our losing the comparable worth provisions. The commission position on the Equal Rights Amendment was a carefully worded compromise that strongly supported the principle of equality, but encouraged interest groups to seek a court case that would clarify the fourteenth amendment rather than seeking a new amendment.

SOURCE: Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices, 1915–1975, ed. Brigid O’Farrell and Joyce L. Kornbluh (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 81–82.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How does Peterson explain the dilemma the Equal Rights Amendment posed for women’s labor rights activists?

In what ways does her account help to explain the limited concrete results of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women?

CONCLUSION: The Limits of the Feminine Mystique

American women in the postwar era lived in conservative times. Cold War fears stifled dissent, labeled labor unions and civil rights activity “subversive,” and contained women and men in rigid gender roles to maintain family and social order. Certainly many women’s lives were limited by this dominant ideology, yet women’s lives were more diverse and complex than mainstream cultural prescriptions indicate. Women’s place might have been in the home, but it was also in the workforce, as both public officials and employers eagerly sought to fuel American productivity and achieve the upper hand in the Cold War. Women may have been shunted into sex-segregated jobs, but participation in the workforce and the discrimination experienced there would have long-term implications for their consciousness.

Other signs that women’s roles were not as constrained as popular images of the era suggest are evident in women’s central role as bridge leaders in the burgeoning civil rights movement, as well as the persistent efforts of working-class union women to fight for fair treatment on the job. Middle-class women, too, in a wide range of voluntary associations and political activity represented women’s desire to engage as citizens in the world outside their homes. These different forms of activism, combined with initiatives from the federal government’s Women’s Bureau, especially the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, helped lay the groundwork for the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s that would have a powerful impact on many women’s domestic and public lives.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Television’s Prescriptions for Women

THANKS TO YOUTUBE AND ONLINE CONTENT PROVIDERS LIKE HULU, viewers today have access to some well-known 1950s television programs and commercials. Some critics explain the popularity of these shows and advertisements by suggesting that for some present-day viewers they are camp entertainment, amusing in their outdated, unintended humor, but for others they evoke a nostalgic sense of simpler, more innocent times. Historians who study 1950s television delve more deeply into the medium and its message and, as with any other historical source, examine both the televised images and the assumptions of the people who created programming and advertising. This essay explores women and television in the 1950s by looking first at the way in which television programming and advertising targeted and understood the female viewer and second at the images of women conveyed in the decade’s situation comedies. While advertising tended to reinforce key aspects of the feminine mystique, especially a relentless depiction of white middle-class women’s role in the home, situation comedies of the 1950s displayed a more diverse and complex rendering of women and their families.

Television was a novelty until after World War II. Some national programming began to appear in 1947, and then during the years 1948–1950 the new medium took off: by 1951 there were 107 stations in 52 cities. Rising prosperity and a burgeoning consumer culture facilitated Americans’ eager embrace of TV. By 1955, 65 percent of the nation’s households had televisions, and by 1960 that figure had grown to 90 percent. National networks dominated television from the medium’s inception, and network executives, along with their programs’ sponsors, viewed television’s purpose as the selling of products. This commercial motivation encouraged the networks to promote television as family entertainment and in the process to reinforce conventional notions of women’s roles as housewives and mothers.

Many observers in the postwar years argued that television viewing would bring families together, thus stabilizing the home. Women’s magazines ran articles discussing how women might integrate the “box” into their homes. While some authors addressed decorating problems that arose in making room for a large appliance, others explored the placement of the television in the context of family leisure-time patterns. They noted that the TV set was quickly displacing the piano as a source of family entertainment and that it was usurping the role of the fireplace as the focal point for social interaction. The TV had become, many argued, an electric hearth, the heart of family “togetherness.”

ADVERTISEMENTS

The idea of the television as a means of bringing families together appeared in many advertisements for television sets. Figure 10.1 depicts a comfortable middle-class home with an elegant TV as part of its attractive furniture. The family clusters around the Motorola TV in a semicircle, watching a program designed for family viewing, the variety show starring singer Dinah Shore (who was the television spokeswoman for Chevrolet cars, suggesting another element of the flourishing consumer market of the period). That the mother alone is standing is typical of many depictions of television viewers. Why do you think advertisers chose to show the mother standing? What does the posture and position of the woman suggest about her role in the family? How does the text above the image reinforce the television’s familial function?

Figure 10.1 Advertisement for Motorola Television (1951)

Although the television industry generally assumed that its family audience was white and largely middle class, manufacturers did aggressively market television sets to African Americans and routinely ran ads in Ebony, a popular black magazine founded in 1942. Blacks were negatively stereotyped in television programming, but they were interested in buying sets, perhaps because they could enjoy entertainment in their homes rather than suffer the indignity of segregation in public venues. Some ads were identical to those that appeared in white mainstream periodicals, such as a May 1953 advertisement in Ebony that featured glamorous white brides framed by an Admiral TV set, with text noting that a television made a “memorable wedding gift.”

Other advertisers attempted to adapt to their black audience. Figure 10.2 is an example of one of a number of 1953 RCA Victor advertisements that featured African Americans watching television. Another ad in this series depicts the Dinah Shore television show (as in Figure 10.1), but this ad displays black singer Eartha Kitt, a frequent performer on network variety shows. Notice that the woman is once again standing, this time in the effort to help her husband select a station, now made easier by an automatic dial. Compare Figures 10.1 and 10.2. How do these advertisements for televisions reinforce conventional roles for male and female viewers?

Figure 10.2 Advertisement for RCA Victor Television (1953)

Televisions were often depicted as bringing families together, but some critics worried that the new medium would create new sources of familial conflict, as parents and children and husbands and wives collided over control of the set. Television advertisers themselves often tackled this theme. Their solution, as Figure 10.3 indicates, was multiple television sets! Consider the two-part construction of this 1955 General Electric ad. Why might the advertiser have chosen to use a cartoon to portray family conflict? How does the photograph depict stereotypical gender roles?

Figure 10.3 Advertisement for General Electric Television (1955)

Women’s primary roles as housewives became a predominant theme for network executives and sponsors in the early years of television. They were eager to attract women viewers because of their responsibilities as family purchasing agents. One executive noted, “We’re after a specific audience, the young housewife — one cut above the teenager — with two to four kids, who has to buy the clothing, the food, the soaps, the home remedies.”34 As the television industry saw it, the dilemma was whether daytime programming geared to this specific audience would be compatible with women’s patterns of household labor. Unlike radio, they feared, television needed to be watched with some degree of concentration. These hesitations were finally overcome by 1952, when the networks began to offer a full range of daytime programs that included soap operas, quiz shows, and magazine-style variety shows. As the 1955 Ladies’ Home Journal ad in Figure 10.4 indicates, they explicitly marketed their daytime lineup to women by emphasizing that the programs did not interfere with their household duties. Read the descriptions of the seven shows watched by the young housewife in a single morning. How do they attempt to persuade women that television watching hastens rather than hinders their household work? What assumptions does this advertisement make about women’s domestic labor?

Figure 10.4 Ladies’ Home Journal Advertisement for NBC (1955)

One program the ad in Figure 10.4 featured was Home, a magazine-style variety show modeled after NBC’s Today program, which debuted in 1952, aired between 7 and 9 A.M., and offered short segments of news and entertainment designed for the whole family, plus features on fashion and homemaking directed toward women. Inspired by Today’s success, NBC introduced Home, expressly for women, in 1954. Newsweek noted that NBC’s president, Sylvester Laflin (Pat) Weaver, sought to tap the advertising market that women’s magazines enjoyed. “It is inconceivable to me,” Weaver noted, “that all that advertising money spent on women’s products . . . has been allowed to escape [from television].”35 In keeping with that idea, Home segments were generally tied to specific sponsors and commercials, and indeed NBC described the program’s set as “a machine for selling.”36

The line between programming and commercials was often blurred in shows geared to “Mrs. Consumer.” This was evident in programs featuring Betty Crocker, General Mills’ mythical spokeswoman, who was portrayed by a series of actresses on both radio and television. Figure 10.5 features actress Adelaide Hawley, who appeared in the ABC daytime programs Bride and Groom and Betty Crocker Star Matinee beginning in 1952. In the former, a couple was married on-screen and Betty gave tips to brides on fixing their grooms’ favorite foods, foods that featured General Mills products. Her television appearances featured this verse:

American homemakers

Keepers of the hearth

Whose hands and hearts are filled

With the day-to-day cares and joys

That, taken with one another

Make homemaking a woman’s

Most rewarding life.37

How does Figure 10.5 illustrate this verse? What does it suggest about the relationship between popular media and the “feminine mystique”?

Figure 10.5 Advertisement for Betty Crocker (1957)

SITUATION COMEDIES

This section examines the depiction of women in situation comedies (sitcoms), which, in contrast to the genres discussed above, were shown in the evening and geared to the whole family. The images reproduced here, of course, do not adequately convey the dynamic medium of TV. They do not capture motion, dialogue, or laugh tracks. Missing, too, is the importance of audience familiarity with the shows’ characters, another crucial aspect shaping how Americans experienced sitcoms. These photographs, mostly publicity stills, nonetheless stand as emblems of popular sitcoms’ depiction of women and the family in this era. With a very few exceptions, such as Our Miss Brooks, a comedy starring Eve Arden as a schoolteacher, adult white women characters in sitcoms did not work outside the home and were portrayed as housewives, despite the number of married women entering the paid workforce. Beyond this common thread, these programs offered strikingly diverse images of the American family.

The networks adopted many sitcoms from successful radio programs. Two of these starred African Americans. Beulah aired on ABC from 1950 to 1953 and portrayed a maid and the white family she worked for, the Hendersons. Over the life of the series on radio and television, three well-known black actresses played Beulah: Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Ethel Waters. Figure 10.6 shows Louise Beavers as Beulah. Two other black characters appeared regularly in the series: Beulah’s boyfriend, Bill, an oafish man who ran a fix-it shop but seemed to spend most of his time in his girlfriend’s kitchen, and Oriole, her scatterbrained friend who worked for the white family next door. Although some of the comedy derived from Beulah’s persistent, yet fruitless, efforts to convince Bill to marry her, the major focus of the series was Beulah’s nurturing her white family and solving their small dilemmas. A classic “mammy” figure, she was known for her catchphrase “Somebody bawl fo’ Beulah?” In one episode her southern cuisine (she was described as the “queen of the kitchen”) helped Mr. Henderson impress a business client. In another, she taught Donnie, the family’s son, to jive dance.

Although some African Americans took pleasure in seeing an African American star on television, other individuals and groups, including the NAACP, criticized the series for perpetuating degrading stereotypes. Does Beulah appear to be part of the family? In what ways does Figure 10.6 reinforce racial hierarchies of the day? Contrast this image with the slave nurse in Figure 4.12 (p. 216).

Figure 10.6 Scene from Beulah

A more famous sitcom with black cast members was Amos ’n’ Andy (1949–1953), which starred men but featured a number of women. On the original radio show, two white men who had created the series played the title characters, but on television the cast was all African American. Even before the show aired, the NAACP launched a protest over bringing the radio program, which many blacks found degrading because of its racist stereotypes, to television. In response to this pressure, CBS modified Amos, one of the title characters, by making him and his wife, Ruby, models of middle-class propriety. To fill the comedic void, however, the series gave enhanced attention to George (“the Kingfish”) Stephens, with his fractured English and his scams to avoid work and get rich quick. The unambitious and none-too-smart Andy served as the victim of many of the Kingfish’s schemes.

The major female character was the Kingfish’s wife, Sapphire, played by Ernestine Wade, who had also performed the role in radio. For the most part Sapphire was a shrew, a caricature of the domineering wife who routinely threw her husband out of the house. In Figure 10.7, she is shown waiting to pounce on the Kingfish as he attempts to sneak into their home. An even more negative portrayal of black women emerged with Sapphire’s large and loudmouthed mother, “Mama.” As the Kingfish described her, “Andy, you take de venom of a cobra, de disposition of a alligator and de nastiness of a rhinoceros. . . . Put ’em all together dey spell Mother!”38 Partially as a result of NAACP pressure and partly because of declining ratings, CBS canceled the show in 1953. Compare Sapphire and her husband to the loving black couple shown in Figure 10.2. What might account for the striking differences in these two popular culture depictions? After at first perpetuating negative stereotypes of black women as either mammies or shrews, sitcoms subsequently treated them as invisible. African Americans would not reappear in sitcoms for another decade, and it was not until 1968, when Diahann Carroll appeared as a nurse in Julia, that a black woman starred in a series.

Figure 10.7 Scene from Amos ’n’ Andy

A number of early sitcoms featured white immigrant families, most notably The Goldbergs (1949–1954). CBS adopted the show from the popular radio program of the same name, which starred Gertrude Berg as Molly Goldberg. Berg also wrote the scripts for the program, which she said was modeled after the experiences of her mother and grandmother. The show explored the domestic crises of a Jewish family living in the Bronx and their circle of neighbors. Molly dominated the show, and part of the humor was her accented English and eccentric phrasing: “Enter, whoever. If it’s nobody, I’ll call back.”39

A stereotypical Jewish mother, Molly eagerly turned her nurturing skills to solve friends’ and family members’ problems. Each show began with Molly leaning out her apartment window to shout across the airshaft, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom.” Inside the family circle, a key theme was the aspiration for assimilation and the American middle-class dream. Significantly, assimilation was often cast in terms of consumption. In one show Molly disapproves of her daughter-in-law’s plan to buy a washing machine on the installment plan. “I know Papa and me never bought anything unless we had the money to pay for it,” Molly says. Her son convinces her she is wrong, and by the end she is suggesting that the family buy two cars in order to “live above our means — the American way.”40

Figure 10.8 shows Molly in her dining room, where she is serving the guest of honor, well-known television personality Arthur Godfrey. Molly is depicted as nurturing and the family as close-knit. The room’s decor is old-fashioned, as is Molly for the most part. At a time when many upwardly mobile Jews were leaving the crowded cities and the ethnic neighborhoods their parents and grandparents had created, the cozy world of the Goldbergs was increasingly anachronistic. Why might this disparity contribute to the appeal of the program?

Figure 10.8 Scene from The Goldbergs

A less sentimental rendering of the urban family was The Honeymooners (1955–1956), in which Jackie Gleason played bus driver Ralph Kramden, a dreamer who always missed realizing his hopes for a more comfortable life. Audrey Meadows played Alice, his long-suffering and practical wife. Marital bickering between the two was a constant in the series. The stance of Alice in Figure 10.9 as she looks disapprovingly at Ralph, with their friends Norton and his wife, Trixie, in the background, conveys some of this tension. One of Ralph’s catchphrases, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days, pow! Right in the kisser!” suggests even more. Plots frequently involved Alice’s disappointment over their limited income and the drabness of the apartment, completely devoid of the consumer goods that most Americans were eagerly acquiring in this period. The show generally closed with a harmonious resolution, but the overarching tone was nonetheless one of male-female conflict, with Alice fighting back.

Figure 10.9 Scene from The Honeymooners

Marital disputes also served as the focal point for the humor in one of the most beloved sitcoms of early television, I Love Lucy (1951–1961). Lucille Ball’s character, Lucy, is married to Ricky Ricardo, played by Ball’s real-life husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. In the process of the show, they have a baby, Little Ricky, whose TV birth coincided with the birth of the couple’s real son. Lucy seemingly represents a stereotypical dizzy female. Childish and impractical, she is juxtaposed with Ricky, whose demeanor is usually mature. She constantly is forced to defer to his decisions as head of the family and resorts to wheedling, deception, and “feminine wiles” to get her way. But like the Kramdens’ conflicts, the Ricardos’ marital disagreements prove fodder for most plots. Lucy eternally desires a job in show business and constantly hankers for consumer items, from kitchen appliances to Parisian frocks. Ricky proves the obstacle on both counts.

Many plots focus on Lucy’s schemes to get a job, yet repeatedly she humiliates herself as she fails in each attempt. A particularly revealing episode for its comments on male-female roles is the show in which Lucy and her best friend, Ethel, wager with Ricky and Ethel’s husband, Fred, that men’s work is easier than women’s labor in the home. They trade places, and while Ricky and Fred make a mess of homemaking (Figure 10.10, top), Lucy and Ethel look for work. In the middle image of Figure 10.10, a clerk in an employment agency reads a list of jobs, and the women realize they have no training for any of them except perhaps candy making. They get jobs making chocolates, but their incompetence leads to their demotion to packing on an assembly line. They do well at first, but they fall behind as the conveyer belt speeds up and they start eating the chocolate instead of packing it (Figure 10.10, bottom). At the end of the episode, both men and women agree to call the bet off and to return to their accustomed roles.

Figure 10.10 Scenes from I Love Lucy

Some critics argue that, far from reinforcing the feminine mystique, with its emphasis on women’s roles as housewives and mothers, Lucy subverts it. For if Lucy is a housewife, she is not a contented one, as her quest for employment suggests. Conversely, others maintain that despite her aspirations, she fails at her forays into the workplace, and the story lines generally end with her return to her housewifery role and her acceptance of Ricky’s authority. Do you think the images shown in Figure 10.10 suggest subversion or reinforcement of the feminine mystique? How do you suppose contemporary audiences interpreted the squabbles between Lucy and Ricky?

Sitcoms that featured working-class or minority families had almost disappeared by the mid-1950s. And, with the exception of I Love Lucy, so, too, had programs that traded on marital bickering and themes concerning domestic power. As more and more real American women went into the workforce, the networks offered up sitcoms that idealized the family and reinforced women’s prescribed role in the home. Unlike Lucy, the mothers in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best lead contented lives with serene marriages. Their husbands are successful breadwinners, and their homes are spacious and well furnished. They are rarely depicted as performing arduous household labor, but their immaculate houses are a reflection of their womanly skills.

Although these sitcoms were ostensibly comedies, their humor was sometimes barely discernible. Plots usually revolved around the dilemmas of childrearing as parents strove to teach children social and moral lessons. Father Knows Best (1954–1963), the first of this genre, led the way among sitcoms that promoted middle-class family values. Figure 10.11 shows the mother, Margaret Anderson (played by Jane Wyatt), joining in a prayer around the family dinner table. In what ways are the Andersons similar to and different from the families shown in the earlier sitcoms?

Figure 10.11 Scene from Father Knows Best

Father Knows Best was aptly named. In the episode titled “Kathy Becomes a Girl,” the youngest daughter, Kathy, learns that boys do not like tomboys. As her father explains, “Being dependent — a little helpless now and then” was a sure ploy designed to win men.41 An even more telling statement about the ideal female role came in a show that uncharacteristically featured Margaret expressing a degree of dissatisfaction with her lot. As her children and her husband are winning trophies for various activities, Margaret is forced to acknowledge that she has never received a medal for anything. To compensate, she takes up fishing and plans to compete in a tournament. Her chances are good, her coach tells her, because so few women compete. Ready for the competition, she falls, injures herself, and misses the contest. Her children seek to cheer her up with a series of tributes to her motherly skills and homemade awards, such as a frying pan emblazoned with the title “Most Valuable Mother.” The episode received a 1958–59 directing Emmy.

Neither advertising nor sitcom images should be taken as an accurate reflection of American women. What they offer are insights into how television portrayed women. The inherently commercial nature of television facilitated advertising and programming that featured women’s role as housewives and the purchaser of consumer goods for her family. Sitcoms, too, had close commercial links. When Molly Goldberg left her window at the start of the show, she returned to her kitchen and launched into a commercial for Sanka coffee, the program’s sponsor. Although early sitcoms acknowledged some diversity among Americans, with a few exceptions most women were portrayed in their domestic roles. As the example of Lucy indicates, tensions over these roles often served as the comedic plot. But despite the reality of women’s increased participation in the workforce, by the second half of the 1950s, TV sitcoms idealized the middle-class family and the stay-at-home mother and thus served as a powerful reinforcement of the cultural prescriptions of the feminine mystique.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What messages do the spatial arrangements, figure positions, and clothing styles in the advertisements (Figures 10.1–10.5) suggest about popular perceptions of the middle-class family and women’s role in it?

Why did advertisers think these ads would sell consumer goods and network programming?

To what extent do the images from the sitcoms (Figures 10.6–10.11) reflect American diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, or class?

In what ways have television messages about gender roles changed since the 1950s?

PRIMARY SOURCES

“Is a Working Mother a Threat to the Home?”

DURING THE 1950S, PUBLIC POLICY EXPERTS extensively studied the question of the working wife and mother. While there was a widespread assumption that the growing number of mothers in the workforce was an irreversible phenomenon, officials and experts differed as to whether this new trend would have adverse effects on children, the family, and the social order in general. Popular magazines intently followed the debate and offered extensive coverage on working wives and mothers. The gamut of responses ran from the ex–working mother who reported, “I am now a better mother. I know I am a happier one,”42 to the office worker and mother of two who explained her decision to go back to work in part by noting, “Some vital part of me wasn’t being used.”43 Men chimed in as well. One man exulted over being married to a working mother who combined a successful career with a happy home, while another insisted that the career woman “may find many satisfactions in her job, but the chances are that she, her husband and her children will suffer psychological damage, and that she will be basically an unhappy woman.”44 In 1958, the Ladies’ Home Journal assembled a forum of experts and mothers to address the question of whether mothers of young children should work. The following is an excerpt from that forum.

Should Mothers of Young Children Work? (1958)

[MODERATOR] MISS [MARGARET] HICKEY: Traditionally, in our country, marriage and motherhood have been considered difficult, full-time jobs — as well as satisfying ones. Married women and mothers who worked outside the home did so only for really pressing reasons: because they had to support their families; because there was a war on; because they were driven by great ambition or talent.

But recently a change seems to be taking place. Women no longer are working entirely from necessity or to satisfy a driving ambition, but rather from choice. Today one out of three wives is a wage earner. And, even more startling — one out of five of the mothers of small children is now working outside the home.

This situation raises many questions, but the one most asked by mothers is the basic personal one: Should I or shouldn’t I work? Mrs. Easton, will you tell us what you wrote us some time back — in one of the letters that started us thinking of this forum today?

MRS. EASTON: Well, as you said, I always thought it was out of necessity that mothers went to work. Then, looking around me, I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of my neighbors didn’t have to work, but they did. So then I began wondering, who is right — are they or am I? Where are mothers needed? Are they needed at home or is it better to be out making some money? I want to feel I am someone who does the right thing. So I wrote to the JOURNAL. . . .

MISS HICKEY: Secretary Mitchell, what do you think the national need is — does the country need women jobholders today?

SECRETARY [OF LABOR JAMES P.] MITCHELL: Yes, it does. Our economy would suffer severely if women left the labor force. By 1965, we expect to have a population of 193,000,000 — an increase of 20,000,000 people. This means that if we are to have the standard of living we have now, and increase it, which we must, and if we are to maintain our defense, which we must, we will need a work-force increase of 10,000,000 people — half of which we expect will be women.

MISS HICKEY: So we have grown dependent on women workers. But from your statistics, Mr. Mitchell, do you think that this group will have to include the mothers of small children?

SECRETARY MITCHELL: Let me say first that I think it is very right that we in this country have freedom of choice, unlike the communist world, where there is no such thing. I would not want to say to anyone whether he or she should work or not. But it is my hope that the women workers we need will not be sought or encouraged to come from the group who are mothers. It seems to me that in our world a mother’s place — and I hope this is not heresy in this group — is in the home.

Of course, there are times in a nation’s history, such as war, when everyone has to be asked to work outside the home. But I believe strongly that no nation should ever forget that the very primary, fundamental basis of a free society is the family structure — the home — and the most vital job is there. . . .

[CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST] DR. [JOHN] BOWLBY: [on the impact on children whose mothers work] I don’t mean to say that all small children of working mothers are necessarily deprived of mothering, but clinical evidence shows clearly that you can’t bring up a child adequately if you leave him first with this person and then with that one in the first years of his life. The trouble is that we know there are serious risks, and as yet we have too little knowledge of the safety margin.

MRS. ERNEST LEE [A STENOGRAPHER AND MOTHER OF THREE]: My children are older now, six to nine, but in the past few years I have had four different sitters with them. They have shown no bad effects. Every once in a while they say, “Mommy, I wish you were not working,” but then they say, “When we get our house you won’t be.”

If I didn’t work to help pay the rent now and to save for a home of our own later — well, we’d have to live in one of those overcrowded cramped places where there are gangs and profane language and no safe place for the kids to play. Or my husband would have to work two jobs and the children would never see him. This way at least we all have the evenings together and a decent place to live. Isn’t this important? . . .

DR. BATUSKA: Well, I started out as just a career girl. In premedical school I thought I would never marry, and then, in medical school, my plans changed very drastically because I met my husband-to-be and almost before I knew it I was married. I was still in medical school when I had my first baby. . . . But things went well and I thought that as long as I had gotten that far, I might as well go ahead and get the state boards, so I did, and I had another child and still no trouble, so I decided I might as well get a specialty, so I did that and now I do cancer research and am a fellow in endocrinology, and have another child, and things still go along smoothly.

If the children had seemed to need me in some way really I would have just given all this up but for some reason I still cannot understand they appear well adjusted and the happiest children I know. I am amazed that it has worked out as well as it has. . . .

MRS. [ROY] DAVIS [A NURSE WHO WORKS AT NIGHT “AND RUNS HER HOUSE BY DAY”]: Until I had my first child I worked full time. Then I worked part time until I had my second child, then I retired for a while, but my husband had to let his profession slide — he is a lawyer — and take another job to supplement our income — so I went back to work.

I feel that the father is almost as important as the mother to the child, and by my working at night I saw the children in the daytime and he saw them in the later afternoon. Together we have done everything. We have not even had household help. We agreed on a ten-year plan ending in June, 1958, to get him through law school, to begin a family, and pay the ten-year mortgage on our home. Our family is here, our practice started. . . .

[SOCIOLOGIST] DR. [MIRRA] KOMAROVSKY: Unfashionable as it is today to defend women’s education, I think it is on the right track. All women’s colleges have courses in child psychology and in sociology of the family, and men’s colleges should follow suit. I don’t think it is the job of the college to teach housekeeping skills. The best preparation for family life, is, after all, a liberal-arts education. A woman has to have her own mind awakened before she can awaken the mind of her child, and I don’t think that colleges devalue homemaking. In any event, they don’t succeed! About 20 per cent of Barnard’s seniors are married by Commencement Day. . . .

SENATOR [FRANK J.] LAUSCHE: If our way of life is to survive, we must keep the family intact. We must give it importance.

A woman needs cultivation of the mind for a unified personality. She needs a vocation to turn to in times of need. But over and above everything else, she needs to give attention and devotion to the family.

Outside jobs are the symptoms of deeper problems. We must remove the forces which break down the home. The housewife, the mother, needs more than housework to keep her occupied. She needs education, books, intellectual companionship. In short, she needs a rounded life so that she will be a good influence on her children and a helpful companion to her husband. . . .

[EVANGELIST] DR. [WILLIAM F.] GRAHAM: I think all of us would agree that we do accept some of the principles at least of the Bible, and the most fundamental one is that the first marriage was performed by God Himself and God instituted the marriage relationship and the family relationship before the school and before the government and before any other institution.

And in instituting marriage, He also gave rules and regulations concerning marriage and the home and the family. Many of these regulations we have violated, and I think we are paying for these violations.

The Bible was not against women working outside the home; it recognized the necessity and the value of this in special cases. But the whole trend of the Bible is found in the second chapter of Titus, in which it says that a woman, a family woman, should be a keeper at home. . . .

In short, I agree with the Bible. A mother should be at home during the formative years of her children unless she is a widow or in some financial straits which make it absolutely imperative for her to earn something outside the home. . . .

DR. KOMAROVSKY: But good relationships are not incompatible with being a working mother. I asked a group of students who were children of working mothers whether they thought their relationships with their mothers were affected by her working. And one girl spoke very movingly about how proud she was that her mother was a teacher — that it made her proud to help her mother in the home care of her brother, and that it was awfully exciting when her mother came home and had fascinating things to say about what had happened to her that day. “I feel very close to my mother and we are a very close family. My ideal in life is to be like my mother,” this girl said.

[PSYCHOLOGIST] MRS. [FLORIDA] SCOTT-MAXWELL: This is the type of woman who is very valiant, but I would say is perhaps distorted by having her children and her career. She creates an atmosphere of activity, of achievement, but I think it very doubtful if she could teach her daughter any deep feminine wisdom this way.

The thing that is lacking is something that is very intangible but very real, very creative, that I can only call a feminine oneness with the depths of life. It isn’t something that can be organized into a lesson, but if you have had deep experiences of life, feeling experiences of its sorrow and meaning, then you are a woman and you can pass this on to your daughters, and give strength to your husband and sons.

MISS HICKEY: Mrs. Phillips, would you like to comment on this? You were trained to be a schoolteacher, but you chose instead to be a mother in the home.

MRS. [CHARLES R.] PHILLIPS [A STAY-AT-HOME MOTHER OF FOUR]: Well, I do feel that as a mother there are things I can give my children that no one else can, and there are moments when if you are not with them, the moment will never come again. I am glad that I have a career they could be proud of if I had to go to work, but since I don’t work, I feel that by staying home I am setting an example to my three daughters of what is right for a woman to do. . . .

[LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL EDITOR] MISS [JOAN] YOUNGER: There seems to be general agreement that ideally, mothers of small children should work at home. May I ask, then, who will pay the bills for those mothers whose only choice is to go out to work or starve?

SENATOR LAUSCHE: We have an aid-to-dependent-children program paid for jointly by the states and the Federal Government for those families who are deserted or left bereft by fathers. It works quite well in my home state of Ohio.

MISS HICKEY: In many states, however, it is most inadequate. Why, in Mississippi the average monthly payment to a recipient is only $7.53. In Washington State, with the highest average payment, it is $42.49 — a little less than $10 a week. It is no wonder that some mothers waive the public assistance payment in favor of a job outside the home. I have been watching with great interest the children’s allowance program in Canada. There, all parents, regardless of need, are given small allowances to aid in the care of their children, to buy shoes for school, to get medicine, that sort of thing.

SENATOR LAUSCHE: I think that basically this is regimentation. I think the more you take away from the individual the necessity of independent effort, the more you take away his character. . . .

MISS HICKEY: It is difficult to decide how many of America’s working mothers would see real deprivation by staying home. There are perhaps three million mothers of young children working. The majority of these are in low-income brackets — that is, under average. But what seems like an economic necessity to one family may not to another.

[COLLEGE PROFESSOR] DR. [LYNN] WHITE: The mothers I know who work do so either for self-expression or for a certain [rise?] in their standard of living rather than out of sheer necessity. . . .

MRS. DAVIS: Like all working mothers, I am constantly asking myself if I am doing the right thing. But, with us, it seemed either to wait for children until we were too old to have them, or for my husband to work at two jobs —

DR. WHITE: Mrs. Davis, I was filled with appalled admiration as I listened to your schedule of nursing at night and housework by day. But it is not in the proper sense an economic necessity. You are seeking what for you is the ideal physical setting of life. And I suspect that no matter what we say here, a lot of people will go on seeking this thing. . . .

MRS. SCOTT-MAXWELL: Meanwhile, we have come back to the responsibility of the individual mothers. There is an enormous responsibility upon them to become conscious of the situation —

MRS. GOULD: To feel the importance of their role and the value of it —

MRS. SCOTT-MAXWELL: Women need to live their public side, and their private side, and they must have every help in find[ing] the right balance of the two.

SOURCE: “Should Mothers of Young Children Work?” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1958, 58–59, 154–56, 158–61.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What do critics of working mothers suggest are the most serious drawbacks of their participation in the labor market?

What justifications are offered for the presence of mothers in the workforce?

How do you reconcile the extensive attention to working mothers in this era with Betty Friedan’s complaints about the “feminine mystique” (pp. 557–58)?

What is the significance of the discussion of aid to dependent children, and how does that discussion relate to the history of mothers’ pensions discussed on pages 429–30?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Women in the Civil Rights Movement

AS HISTORIANS EXAMINE THE LIVES of American women of the last half of the twentieth century, they are able to draw on a wider variety and number of sources than historians researching earlier periods can. As the documents offered here suggest, oral histories have been particularly important in capturing the experiences of activists in the civil rights movement. If oral accounts are recorded long after the events described, they are sometimes marred by faulty memories or influenced by the person conducting the interview. Nonetheless, they give invaluable insights into the experiences and feelings of historical actors whose voices are often unheard in more traditional documentary sources. In addition, we have a powerful photographic record that not only documents the actions of civil rights activists and their opponents, but also helped to sway public opinion by documenting the brutality civil rights workers encountered.

PHOTOGRAPHS

The most iconic pictures of Rosa Parks, whose arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955, show her either riding a bus or being arrested. These were images widely distributed at the time. Figure 10.12, however, is relatively unknown. Taken in Summer 1955, it documents Parks’s participation in a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, six months before her arrest. The biracial school, founded in 1938, first served as a training school for labor organizers and then, beginning in 1953, civil rights activists. In addition to its focus on desegregation tactics, the school promoted citizenship schools as part of a voter education strategy. The workshop shown here was probably being led by Septima Clark, the black woman farthest to the left in the photograph. Clark was the director of Highlander’s education program and was crucial in establishing the program of citizenship schools. Other notable women civil rights activists who attended Highlander included Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. How does this image of Rosa Parks help us to understand the planning that went into such tactics as the bus boycott? Is it surprising that most of the participants pictured here were women?

Figure 10.12 Rosa Parks at a Desegregation Workshop (1955)

Unlike the photograph of Rosa Parks, the image in Figure 10.13, from the Little Rock, Arkansas, school desegregation crisis, is well known (see p. 613). It shows sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, of the “Little Rock Nine,” walking to school on September 4, 1957, surrounded by hostile white women and girls. Governor Orval Faubus had announced that the state’s National Guard would block the black students’ entry, and Daisy Bates, of Little Rock’s NAACP, had provided escorts for the other students, who walked together in case of trouble. Elizabeth’s family had no telephone and could not be reached so she set out on her own. The girl behind Eckford was Hazel Bryan, a fifteen-year-old, who seemed to represent the face of vicious white racism. The legacy of that photograph was traumatic for her and in the early 1960s, Bryan called Eckford to apologize. In 1997, at the fortieth anniversary of Little Rock, the two women posed together in a smiling photograph. But in 1957, Elizabeth was terrified. When the guardsmen (who are pictured on the left) raised their bayonets and blocked her entrance to the school, she was pushed into the crowd. “They moved closer and closer,” she later said. “Somebody started yelling, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!’ ”45 Why is this image such an iconic photograph of the civil rights movement? How does the fact that Eckford and Bryan were young teenagers impact your reading of the image?

Figure 10.13 Elizabeth Eckford, Little Rock, Arkansas (1957)

ORAL INTERVIEWS

As you read these extracts of interviews, consider the following questions. How does the narrator’s commitment shape her recollection? Does she have an ax to grind? Is she anxious to justify or exaggerate her actions? Need we be concerned that her memory is accurate? Has the interviewer unduly influenced the narrative?

This first selection is drawn from a 1979 interview with Diane Nash (later Bevel), conducted as part of the pathbreaking documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965). Nash is one of the best known of the young women SNCC activists. Nash (b. 1938), an African American who left Chicago to attend Fisk University in Nashville, describes her early involvement in the movement at the Nashville sit-ins in 1960. Why is this account so powerful?

DIANE NASH

The sit-ins were really highly charged, emotionally. In our non-violent workshops, we had decided to be respectful of the opposition, and try to keep issues geared toward desegregation, not get sidetracked. The first sit-in we had was really funny, because the waitresses were nervous. They must have dropped two thousand dollars’ worth of dishes that day. It was almost a cartoon. One in particular, she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one, and she’d pick up another one, and she’d drop it. It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that laughing would be insulting and we didn’t want to create that kind of atmosphere. At the same time we were scared to death. . . .

After we had started sitting in, we were surprised and delighted to hear reports of other cities joining in the sit-ins. And I think we started feeling that power of the idea whose time had come. Before we did the things that we did, we had no inkling that the movement would become as widespread as it did. I can remember being in the dorm any number of times and hearing the newscast, that Orangeburg had demonstrations, or Knoxville, or other towns. And we were really excited. We’d applaud, and say yea. When you are that age, you don’t feel powerful. I remember realizing that with what we were doing, trying to abolish segregation, we were coming up against governors, judges, politicians, businessmen, and I remember thinking, “I’m only twenty-two years old, what do I know, what am I doing?” And I felt very vulnerable. So when we heard these newscasts, that other cities had demonstrations, it really helped. Because there were more of us. And it was very important.

The movement had a way of reaching inside you and bringing out things that even you didn’t know were there. Such as courage. When it was time to go to jail, I was much too busy to be afraid.

[As a SNCC activist, in 1961 Nash became involved in the Freedom Rides. Here, she describes her leadership role when violence threatened to stop the rides and Nash insisted that they go forward (see p. 576).]

A contingent of students left Nashville to pick up the Freedom Ride where it had been stopped. Some of the students gave me sealed letters to be mailed in case they were killed. That’s how prepared they were for death.

The students who were going to pick up the Freedom Ride elected me coordinator. As coordinator, part of my responsibility was to stay in touch with the Justice Department. Our whole way of operating was that we took ultimate responsibility for what we were going to do. But it was felt that they should be advised, in Washington, of what our plans were. Some people hoped for protection from the federal government. I think Jim Lawson cautioned against relying on federal protection.

I was also to keep the press informed, and communities that were participating, such as Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, and Nashville. And I coordinated the training and recruitment of more people to take up the Freedom Ride.

[Nash later became a rider herself and was jailed in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961.]

SOURCE: Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, comps., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1990), 57–59, 82–83.

CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS INCLUDED whites as well as blacks. Among them were many women. Vivian Leburg Rothstein, originally from Queens, New York, grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles. She first became active in the civil rights movement while at the University of California at Berkeley, where she participated in protests against local merchants who discriminated against black employees and customers. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley also shaped her growing radicalism. She was only nineteen when she went south. She went on from this experience to a lifelong commitment to social activism.

In this interview conducted for the PBS documentary People’s Century, Rothstein recounts her experiences when she was part of the contingent of northern white students who went to Mississippi in 1965. This was the second year of voter registration and school integration campaigns conducted by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Committee on Racial Equality. Young white activists were invited in part to draw national media attention to the violence that local activists were experiencing. Rothstein refers to several of these events, including the murder, in the summer of 1964, of three civil rights activists, two white and one black.

How does Rothstein convey her reaction to the profound segregation of the rural South, and how did the activism of young people like herself challenge that system? Why does she call it a personally transformative experience? What do you think motivated her to go south?

VIVIAN LEBURG ROTHSTEIN

Q: You traveled across the country to Mississippi . . . what was that like?

ROTHSTEIN: I’d never traveled anyplace. I had never really seen America. I mean, I’d only gone camping with my family. This felt like we were going into a different country really. I went with my boyfriend and we were on a Greyhound bus so it happened gradually. You’d stop at the bus terminal, have something to eat. You’re way out in the country. The whole physical sense of the country changed dramatically but the visible poverty that I started to see . . . particularly down in Louisiana . . . I had never seen anything like that. We’d see people living on the side of the road in shacks and it got worse and worse as we went further south. Then you’d notice that many of them were black and the blacks were separated . . . it was this gradual thing.

I don’t think I was prepared. It was a lot poorer than anything I’d ever seen. I had learned about racial discrimination but I’d never seen dirt-poor families . . . people living in shacks. That was really shocking to me. I worked in a very rural area and there had never been a white woman in any of these people’s homes before. People wanted to have me in their home overnight. It was really weird. I was special to them as a white person coming to their completely segregated community.

I had never had a personal connection like that with black people or with people who were that poor. Getting to know each other as people was what the whole civil rights movement was about. You couldn’t just talk about it, you had to do it. So you had these profound personal transformative experiences. I remember feeling I had to push myself to do this. When I went back 25 years later, this family still talks about me. It’s just incredible. I thought I had this incredible experience, but so did they and that movement was so important to them.

Q: Was it frightening?

ROTHSTEIN: Yeah, it was . . . it was scary. It was the summer after Chaney and Goodman were killed and so we actually knew that this could be a matter of life and death. Then Mrs. Luizza was killed, the woman who was driving to Selma. She was shot. She was driving demonstrators back and forth. There had been a number of deaths but when you’re 19 years old, you think you’re never going to die. It seemed worrisome but it didn’t seem real.

We went down and had an orientation session at Mt. Beulah, this religious campground, and then we went to Jackson, Mississippi. SNCC and CORE decided to organize a demonstration to challenge an ordinance against parading without a permit. So within a few days of getting there we were in this demonstration with Mississippi police officers with black jacks and dogs . . . people were getting beaten up . . . that was the scariest thing I’ve ever been in . . . it scared me to death and there was really nothing you could do. You were part of it and you just went along . . . you just didn’t know what was going to happen. That was really scary.

Then we were put in jail and we were segregated. The white women were put in the Heinz County Jail and everyone else — white men, black women and black men — were put in the country fairgrounds. We were in jail about two weeks. A parade of officials came to see us . . . they sent a rabbi who told us how bad it was for Jews in Mississippi. Once we were together in the cell, and we didn’t feel like we were going to get hurt, it was both boring and exciting. We had grits for breakfast with molasses on it and biscuits and we all got hugely constipated and really sick and then they gave us huge doses of laxatives. It was your classic jail experience. We didn’t think we had broken any laws . . . we thought we were . . . the innocent and righteous.

Q: Why did SNCC organizers want white college students to get involved?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I think it focused the attention of the whole country on what was happening in Mississippi. All of us had parents and our parents voted. We had access to the press. I think they also wanted the energy and the bodies.

It was a brilliant strategy in retrospect. It broke those separations between black and white, northern and southern, rich and poor because people worked together, lived together.

I think it helped the Mississippi black community to feel it wasn’t isolated, that the eyes of the world were on it because we were there helping them and of course it brought our eyes on their situation.

Q: How important was this exposure to the black civil rights struggle for white student activists?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, it was . . . it was life transforming. To be a part of the righteous social movement, fighting for something bigger than yourself . . . you were just elevated as a human being. You had incredible significance in the world . . . it was ecstasy. It’s really hard to explain it. It was the music and the singing that was used to build courage because everyone was afraid. It just lifted you up.

Q: This is a letter that you wrote from jail . . .

ROTHSTEIN: Thursday, June 17th, 1965. Dear Mom, I’m in jail in Jackson, Mississippi. You’ve probably already read about it. We were put in here Monday at 5 P.M. for marching on a sidewalk with no permit. We were protesting unconstitutional laws against demonstrations. On Tuesday, 200 people were arrested. On Wednesday 150 more people joined us and on Friday people will come from all over the nation to demonstrate in support of our actions and will be arrested. I am perfectly all right. The food is horrible and it’s boring but we’re all right. They segregated the white women from the black women. We have cells, eight in a cell and four beds, while the Negro women are in a hall at the state fairgrounds lying on the concrete floors with only two meals a day. The boys are in another building at the fairgrounds, segregated of course. Gregor was arrested too. I think he’s all right too. What we have to wait for now is donations for bail money. The bail is set at $100 dollars each. . . .

We really don’t know how long we will be in here. Maybe by the end of next week we could get out because there’s an injunction coming up in court next week to declare the laws against demonstrating unconstitutional. It is terribly boring. We have only one book and two pens. We made cards and carved soap . . . besides that we just talk and sleep. How is everything?

My finals were okay. I don’t know how well I did. I’m really all right. I’ll try to write again soon if this letter gets through. I love you. Don’t worry please. Love, Vivian.

SOURCE: Interview with Vivian Rothstein, “Young Blood,” People’s Century, PBS, June 14, 1999, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/youngblood/rothsteintranscript.html (accessed March 19, 2015).

ORAL HISTORIES ARE PARTICULARLY VALUABLE for capturing the stories of older rural women who offered indispensable aid to the activists who came to their communities. In this selection, published in 1977, Mary Dora Jones reminisces about taking in Freedom Summer workers in Marks, Mississippi. The interviewer is the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Howell Raines, who later became executive editor of the New York Times. What does Jones’s account convey about disagreements within the African American community and the dangers facing those African Americans who supported the civil rights activists?

MARY DORA JONES

MARY DORA JONES: I had about several blacks and four whites in my house, wouldn’t nobody else take ’em.

RAINES: In Marks?

JONES: Right . . . they really move. They comes in, they mean business. They didn’t mind dyin’, and as I see they really mean business, I just love that for ’em, because they was there to help us. And since they was there to help us, I was there to help them. . . .

RAINES: Did that cause you any problems in the community . . . opening your home up?

JONES: Oh, really, because they talkin’ about burnin’ my house down. . . . Some of the black folks got the news that they were gonna burn it down. . . . My neighbors was afraid of gettin’ killed. People standin’ behind buildin’s, peepin’ out behind the buildin’s, to see what’s goin’ on. So I just told ’em. “Dyin’ is all right. Ain’t but one thing ’bout dyin’. That’s make sho’ you right, ’cause you gon’ die anyway.” . . . If they had burnt it down, it was just a house burned down.

RAINES: That’s the attitude that changed the South.

JONES: So that’s the way I thought about it. So those kids, some of ’em from California, some of ’em from Iowa, some of ’em from Cincinnati, they worked, and they sho’ had them white people up there shook up.

RAINES: . . . [Y]oungsters that came in, particularly the white ones from outside the South, did they have a hard time adjusting . . . ?

JONES: They had a hard time adjustin’ because most all of the blacks up there didn’t want to see ’em comin’ . . . said they ain’t lettin’ no damn civil rights come. “If they come up here to my house, I’m gon’ shoot ’em.”

See this is what the black folks were sayin’, and those kids had went to the preachers’ houses, they had done went to the deacons’ houses, they had done went to the teachers’ houses, all tryin’ to get in. Some of ’em come in around five o’clock that evenin’, landed in my house. I give ’em my house, “My house is yo’ house.” I was workin’ for a man, he was workin’ at the Post Office, and he and his wife was beggin’ me everyday, “Don’t fool with them Communists.”

RAINES: The white people?

JONES: That’s what they was tellin’ me, those kids was Communists. I said, “Well, I tell you what. I don’t think they no more Communist than right here where I am, because if they Communists, then you Communists. They cain’t hurt me no mo’ than I already been hurt.” Anything that helped the peoples, then I’m right there. So I didn’t stop, although I got him scared to fire me. He would have fired me, but I got him scared to fire me. . . .

RAINES: This was your white boss?

JONES: This was my white boss I was working for. His wife was sick, and every day the wife would talk to me about those people, askin’ me where they lived. I said, “Well, they ain’t livin’ at yo’ house. Why you want to know where they live?” So she said, “They ain’t livin’ with you?” And I said, “Well, I’m payin’ the last note on the house,” just like that. And I never did tell her.

Finally one day she brought me home, and it was a car sittin’ there in my driveway, and two white men was in there, and there were some sittin’ on the porch. She put me out and she went on back. When I went to work the next morning, she say, “Mary, was them, ah, civil rights people at yo’ house?” I said, “Now when you turned around and stopped and they were sittin’ there, you oughta been askin’ ’em what they was. They’da told you.”

And I never did tell ’em anything. So it went on some, she said, “Ain’t but one thing I hate about it, this intermarriage.” And I said, “Well, ain’t no need in worryin’ about that, because if you wanna worry about that, you oughta been talkin’ to your granddaddy.”

SOURCE: Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South (New York: Putnam, 1977), 279–81.

EARLINE BOYD of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been involved in the NAACP in her community even before civil rights activists came to her town for the voter registration drive. In this interview, conducted in 1991 by Dr. Charles Bolton of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Civil Rights in Mississippi Oral History Project, she describes some of the harassment African Americans active in civil rights faced. What insights does she offer about women’s participation in the movement?

EARLINE BOYD

EARLINE BOYD: There was the pressure on people about jobs or they would try and intimidate them in different ways.

I remember one man lost his job. He had been working for one of the white funeral homes here and his wife was very active in it. When they found out that she was marching that day going to the courthouse — that’s where we were marching to that particular day — when he went back to work the people — I don’t remember exactly what they said to him, but I do know that she his wife told him just to give that job up and not to go back anymore. So evidently they had said things to him, had made him know that they did not want him. He didn’t go; it was his wife who was doing the marching and was active in the movement.

So it was hard on people and a lot of people was afraid, you know, to take a step towards trying to work with the movement. I don’t remember where I was working then, but it didn’t have any effect on me, on my job at the time. And I would just go whenever they had it and it was kind of hard. Now some people probably, well, the ones that was working for people who didn’t want them to go, I’m sure they gave them a lot of hard times. So that was my way of getting started in the movement.

DR. CHARLES BOLTON: Were a lot of women involved? It sounds like the women maybe were more involved than the men.

BOYD: There were more women involved than men in the movement.

BOLTON: Why do you think that is?

BOYD: Well, I guess the man was the person who was really head of the household and needed a job. Women worked but I guess they felt like it would be easier for them to go and not lose their job than for men. Even so, like I said about this man who lost his job when the person that he was working for found out that his wife was going, then he started talking to him. And of course, his wife was working for herself and had her own day care center. So it wouldn’t bother her. And he stopped working there, and I don’t know where he went to work after that. But later on I do remember that he started working for himself too.

SOURCE: “Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive,” Mississippi Oral History Program of the University of Southern Mississippi, interview conducted August 29, 1991, http://anna.lib.usm.edu/%7Espcol/crda/oh/ohboydrp.html (accessed January 29, 2003).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What insights do these sources offer about the distinct experiences of women in the civil rights movement?

What kinds of leadership skills did these movement women display?

Can you find specific examples in the interviews that suggest any of the pitfalls historians face in drawing upon remembrances as sources?

To what extent do these documents reveal the obstacles facing civil rights activists?

What clues do these documents provide as to the relationship between the civil rights movement and the emergence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s?