Essay On Women In The 1950's

The 1950s were a decade of major cultural shifts in all facets of American culture. The prosperity of a post war economy gave rise to a middle class and an aptly named “baby boom.” These growing families were living a very different life from that of generations before them. Urban centers fell out of vogue and were replaced by suburbs. This change furthered the already disrupted model of separate spheres which American society had operated in. The domestic sphere women have historically operated in has not always been one of isolation. The century prior most women spent their days sharing domestic labor: sewing, quilting, cooking, childcare, etc. The drastic shift from women’s focus on community to a single independent household was driven

Domestic labor has always been necessary. Enforcing women’s role in the home to complete this labor allowed familial stability. The new myth of the suburban housewife was created, not to create instability, but to find a new way to mend it. The world had just experienced a severe disruption in the form of World War II. The changes of the War were the catalyst for the shifts of the following decades. Historian Brett Harvey explains this in her oral history focused on Women’s experience in the

The nuclear family model believes a woman should rely on her husband and children to fulfill her rather than friendship with another woman. Harvey’s book explores this, saying “Women were expected to seek--and find everything in marriage and family: love, identity, excitement, fulfillment” (Harvey 1993, 71) Under that assumption, a woman who finds love and identity outside of a heterosexual relationship or deviates from this model in any way is a threat to the carefully crafted narrative. This fear-mongering that if a wife was too close to other women she may become a lesbian furthered the cultural shift away from close community and friendships. The rhetoric was focused on lesbians who appear in other ways to be meeting gendered expectations– white, middle class, straight, feminine– the fearsome “lesbian housewife.” Beneath the outright homophobia of this rhetoric also masked an even more pervasive racial motivation. The existence of these women “suggested that beneath the surface, white middle-class wives and mothers were not so different from the emasculating black ‘matriarchs’… accused of perpetuating black poverty in [a] 1965 policy report…as politicians expanded and institutionalized New Deal social welfare policies that privileged a male-breadwinner family model, both white and black