1 gen 1946 anni - First edition of Dr. Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

Descrizione:

To keep boom babies healthy and happy, middle-class parents increasingly turned to expert advice. Published in 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sold more copies in the postwar decades than any book other than the Bible. Spock urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding and baby-care schedules of an earlier generation, embracing instead their own instincts and a flexible, “common sense” approach. New mothers found Spock’s commonsense approach liberating. “Your little paperback is still in my cupboard, with loose pages, rather worn from use because I brought up two babies using it as my ‘Bible,’” a California housewife wrote to Spock. But the advice of experts like Spock did not always reassure women. They cautioned mothers of the risks of overprotecting their children, but also urged them to be constantly available. As American mothers puzzled over such mixed messages in the 1950s, a resurgence of feminism simmered. It would boil over in the next decade.

The middle-class domestic ideal of the postwar decades defined the responsibilities of women: raise children, make a home, be a devoted wife. This vision of womanhood was so prevalent that in 1957 the Ladies’ Home Journal wondered seriously, “Is College Education Wasted on Women?” But this ideal did not agree with the reality of working-class women, who had to earn a paycheck to help their family. Contrary to the stereotype, women’s paid work often helped lift many families into the middle class — the additional income made buying a home or car possible. Middle-class women faced their own barriers. Most of them, college educated or not, found professional fields closed off, for men only. For both groups, the market offered mostly “women’s jobs” — in teaching, nursing, and other areas of the growing service sector — and little room for advancement (see “Firsthand Accounts”).

Middle-class women’s lives grew increasingly complicated in the postwar decades. They may have dreamed of a suburban home with a brand-new kitchen, but laboring all day over children, dirty dishes, and a hot stove proved dissatisfying to many. Betty Friedan called the confinement of women’s identities to motherhood the “feminine mystique,” but did the working woman have it much better? Hardly. Most women in the 1950s and 1960s were confined to low-level secretarial work (as pictured), waitressing, and other service-sector work — or factory or domestic labor. The majority of working women also performed the “double day”: a full day at work and a full day at home. Such were the expectations and double bind women faced.


The idea that a woman’s place was in the home was not new. The postwar obsession with femininity and motherhood bore a remarkable similarity to nineteenth-century notions of domesticity, but the updated version drew on new elements of twentieth-century science and culture for justification. Psychologists equated motherhood with “normal” female identity and suggested that career-minded mothers needed therapy. “A mother who runs out on her children to work — except in cases of absolute necessity — betrays a deep dissatisfaction with motherhood or with her marriage,” wrote one leading psychiatrist. Television shows and movies depicted career-minded women as social misfits. The postwar consumer culture also emphasized women’s domestic role as purchasing agents for home and family. “Can a woman ever feel right cooking on a dirty range?” asked one advertisement.

The nuclear family, meaning a married couple plus children, stood at the heart of middle-class American culture in the postwar years. The “domestic ideal” held that men worked for wages and women labored in the home. A new generation of Americans, such as the African American family pictured here, aspired to this cultural ideal, which came within reach for many for the first time. Here a couple and their children look over blueprints of their new home in the early 1960s.

Despite the power of domestic ideals, financial necessity increasingly pushed women into the paid workforce. In 1954, married women made up half of all women workers. Six years later, the 1960 census reported that the number of mothers who worked for wages outside the home had increased four times, and over one-third of these women had children between the ages of six and seventeen. In that same year, 30 percent of married women worked, and by 1970, it was 40 percent.

Despite rising employment rates, when women sought paid work, occupational segmentation — and the inequality that came with it — still confronted them. Until 1964, the classified sections of newspapers separated employment ads into “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” More than 80 percent of all employed women did stereotypical women’s work as sales clerks, health-care technicians, waitresses, stewardesses, domestic servants, receptionists, telephone operators, and secretaries. In 1960, only 3 percent of lawyers and 6 percent of physicians were women, while 97 percent of nurses and 85 percent of librarians were women. Along with women’s jobs went women’s pay, which averaged 60 percent of men’s pay in 1963.


When mothers took jobs outside the home, most also bore full responsibility for child care and household management, contributing to a “double day” of paid work and family work. As one overburdened woman noted, she now had “two full-time jobs instead of just one — underpaid clerical worker and unpaid housekeeper.” Even so, heterosexual nuclear families with breadwinning fathers and domestic mothers were held up as symbols of a healthy nation — and paragons of American ideals in the Cold War rivalry. Americans wanted to believe in their own domestic ideal, even if it did not describe the reality of their lives.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: