Read Online The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen - Free Book Online Page B

As the middle class expanded, the rich grew richer, while the poor slid further into grinding poverty. The nation’s wealth, moreover, rested, as one observer noted, “on Hydrogen bombs, B-52 bombers, a nuclear navy, guided missiles . . . the potential Armageddon . . . death supporting life.” The American Dream—a wife, children, ownership of a home, a car, and “the good things in life”—had finally come within reach of a critical mass of men.
    After the political demise of Joseph McCarthy in 1954, Americans caught their breath and began to settle down to enjoy the domestic affluence they had purchased—or so they thought—through such extremities of vigilance. But McCarthyism had seeped deep into the culture, like toxic waste that poisons the earth long after officials declare a hazardous accident is over. Dissent—supposedly the touchstone of a democratic society—became linked in the popular mind with Communist sympathizers. Anti-Communism also cast a shadow of self-censorship across the intellectual landscape, destroying a credible non-Communist Left, squelching intellectual and political opposition, and forcing a political consensus that glossed over America’s simmering racial, gender, economic, ecological, and social problems. 21
    In such an atmosphere, even marriage and childbearing became politicized. A majority of Americans judged men or women who did not marry as “sick,” thinking them either immoral, selfish, or neurotic. As “difference” became synonymous with “deviant,” people began to regard such men or women with suspicion, their refusal to mate hinting at some “antisocial” secret like homosexual or Communist tendencies. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even encouraged women to marry early and have children to fight “the twin enemies of freedom—crime and Communism.” 22
    Young couples married and bore children with an enthusiasm that confounded demographers’ predictions of a falling birthrate. Fueled by a pent-up desire for family life after the Depression and war, they married earlier, slowed the rising divorce rate, and reversed a century’s decline in the fertility rate by producing the biggest baby boom in history (from 1946 to 1964). At its peak in 1957, American women gave birth to over four million babies a year. A parade of baby carriages and bulging profiles transformed the landscape of America’s parks, leaving one stunned foreign observer to note that “every other young housewife I see is pregnant.” 23
    The feminine mystique also had a profound influence on popular culture. An unmarried woman was an embarrassment. Hollywood scripts of the time required career women to acknowledge marriage as the source of all happiness. In the 1955 film
The Tender Trap
, Debbie Reynolds successfully auditions for her first big acting job. Dismissing congratulations from her agent, Frank Sinatra, she dutifully repeats the catechism of those years: “Marriage is the most important thing in the world. A woman isn’t really a woman until she’s been married and had children.” Later, the poet Adrienne Rich would express the pressure that so many actual women felt at the time.
As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial.
This is what women have always done.
24
    Fashion played an important role in constructing and constricting the new feminine and maternal image of the postwar era. The simple, broad-shouldered, man-tailored clothing of the war years gave way toChristian Dior’s “New Look,” a style that exaggerated feminine curves and a womanly silhouette. Lacquered bouffant hairdos and starkly outlined