Families where the wife intends to pursue a definite professional goal are less likely to move to the suburbs. In the city, of course, there are more and better jobs for educated women; more universities, sometimes free, with evening courses, geared to men who work during the day, and often more convenient than the conventional daytime program for a young mother who wants to finish college or work toward a graduate degree. There is also a better supply of full-or part-time nurses and cleaning help, nursery schools, day-care centers, after-school play programs. But these considerations are only important to the woman who has commitments outside the home.
There is also less room for housewifery to expand to fill the time available, in the city. That sense of restless “marking time” comes early to the educated, able city housewife, even though, when her babies are little, the time is more than filled with busyness—wheeling the carriage back and forth in the park, sitting on the playground bench because the children can’t play outside alone. Still, there’s no room in the city apartment for a home freezer, no garden to grow beans in. And all the organizations in the city are so big; the libraries are already built; professionals run the nursery schools and recreation programs.
It is not surprising, then, that many young wives vote for a move to the suburbs as soon as possible. Like the empty plains of Kansas that tempted the restless immigrant, the suburbs in their very newness and lack of structured service, offered, at least at first, a limitless challenge to the energy of educated American women. The women who were strong enough, independent enough, seized the opportunity and were leaders and innovators in these new communities. But, in most cases, these were women educated before the era of feminine fulfillment. The ability of suburban life to fulfill, or truly use the potential of the able, educated American woman seems to depend on her own previous autonomy or self-realization—that is, on her strength to resist the pressures to conform, resist the time-filling busywork of suburban house and community, and find, or make, the same kind of serious commitment outside the home that she would have made in the city. Such a commitment in the suburbs, in the beginning at least, was likely to be on a volunteer basis, but it was challenging, and necessary.
When the mystique took over, however, a new breed of women came to the suburbs. They were looking for sanctuary; they were perfectly willing to accept the suburban community as they found it (their only problem was “how to fit in”); they were perfectly willing to fill their days with the trivia of housewifery. Women of this kind, and most of those that I interviewed were of the post-1950 college generation, refuse to take policy-making positions in community organizations; they will only collect for Red Cross or March of Dimes or Scouts or be den mothers or take the lesser PTA jobs. Their resistance to serious community responsibility is usually explained by “I can’t take the time from my family.” But much of their time is spent in meaningless busywork. The kind of community work they choose does not challenge their intelligence—or even, sometimes, fill a real function. Nor do they derive much personal satisfaction from it—but it does fill time.
So, increasingly, in the new bedroom suburbs, the really interesting volunteer jobs—the leadership of the cooperative nurseries, the free libraries, the school board posts, the selectmenships and, in some suburbs, even the PTA presidencies—are filled by men.5 The housewife who doesn’t “have time” to take serious responsibility in the community, like the woman who doesn’t “have time” to pursue a professional career, evades a serious commitment through which she might finally realize herself; she evades it by stepping up her domestic routine until she is truly trapped.
The dimensions of the trap seem physically unalterable, as the busyness that fills the housewife’s day seems inescapably necessary. But is that domestic trap an illusion, despite its all-too-solid reality, an illusion created by the feminine mystique? Take, for instance, the open plan of the contemporary “ranch” or split-level house, $14,990 to $54,990, which has been built in the millions from Roslyn Heights to the Pacific Palisades. They give the illusion of more space for less money. But the women to whom they are sold almost have to live the feminine mystique. There are no true walls or doors; the woman in the beautiful electronic kitchen is never separated from her children. She need never feel alone for a minute, need never be by herself. She can forget her own identity in those noisy open-plan houses. The open plan also helps expand the housework to fill the time available. In what is basically one free-flowing room, instead of many rooms separated by walls and stairs, continual messes continually need picking up. A man, of course, leaves the house for most of the day. But the feminine mystique forbids the woman this.
A friend of mine, an able writer turned full-time housewife, had her suburban dream house designed by an architect to her own specifications, during the period when she defined herself as housewife and no longer wrote. The house, which cost approximately $50,000, was almost literally one big kitchen. There was a separate studio for her husband, who was a photographer, and cubbyholes for sleeping, but there wasn’t any place where she could get out of the kitchen, away from her children, during the working hours. The gorgeous mahogany and stainless steel of her custom-built kitchen cabinets and electric appliances were indeed a dream, but when I saw that house, I wondered where, if she ever wanted to write again, she would put her typewriter.
It’s strange how few places there are in those spacious houses and those sprawling suburbs where you can go to be alone. A sociologist’s study of upper-income suburban wives who married young and woke, after fifteen years of child-living, PTA, do-it-yourself, garden-and-barbecue, to the realization that they wanted to do some real work themselves, found that the ones who did something about this often moved back to the city.6 But among the women I talked to, this moment of personal truth was more likely to be marked by adding a room with a door to their open-plan house, or simply by putting a door on one room in the house, “so I can have someplace to myself, just a door to shut between me and the children when I want to think”—or work, study, be alone.
Most American housewives, however, do not shut that door. Perhaps they are afraid, finally, to be alone in that room. As another social scientist said, the American housewife’s dilemma is that she does not have the privacy to follow real interests of her own, but even if she had more time and space to herself, she would not know what to do with it.7 If she makes a career of marriage and motherhood, as the mystique tells her, if she becomes the executive of the house—and has enough children to give her quite a business to run—if she exerts the human strength, which she is forbidden by the mystique to exert elsewhere, on running a perfect house and supervising her children and sharing her husband’s career in such omnipresent detail that she has only a few minutes to spare for community work, and no time for serious larger interests, who is to say that this is not as important, as good a way to spend a life, as mastering the secrets of the atoms or the stars, composing symphonies, pioneering a new concept in government or society?
For the very able woman, who has the ability to create culturally as well as biologically, the only possible rationalization is to convince herself—as the new mystique tries so hard to convince her—that the minute physical details of child care are indeed mystically creative; that her children will be tragically deprived if she is not there every minute; that the dinner she gives the boss’s wife is as crucial to her husband’s career as the case he fights in court or the problem he solves in the laboratory. And because husband and children are soon out of the house most of the day, she must keep on having new babies, or somehow make the minutiae of housework itself important enough, necessary enough, hard enough, creative enough to justify her very existence.
If a woman’s whole existence is to be justified in this way, if the housewife’s work is really so important, so necessary, why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be th
e essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forget to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.
The most glaring proof that, no matter how elaborate, “Occupation: housewife” is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin, arose from the comedy of “togetherness.” The women acting in this little morality play were told that they had the starring roles, that their parts were just as important, perhaps even more important than the parts their husbands played in the world outside the home. Was it unnatural that, since they were doing such a vital job, women insisted that their husbands share in the housework? Surely it was an unspoken guilt, an unspoken realization of their wives’ entrapment, that made so many men comply, with varying degrees of grace, to their wives’ demands. But having their husbands share the housework didn’t really compensate women for being shut out of the larger world. If anything, by removing still more of their functions, it increased their sense of individual emptiness. They needed to share vicariously more and more of their children’s and husbands’ lives. Togetherness was a poor substitute for equality; the glorification of women’s role was a poor substitute for free participation in the world as an individual.
The true emptiness beneath the American housewife’s routine has been revealed in many ways. In Minneapolis recently a school-teacher named Maurice K. Enghausen read a story in the local newspaper about the long work week of today’s housewife. Declaring in a letter to the editor that “any woman who puts in that many hours is awfully slow, a poor budgeter of time, or just plain inefficient,” this thirty-six-year-old bachelor offered to take over any household and show how it could be done.
Scores of irate housewives dared him to prove it. He took over the household of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dalton, with four children, aged two to seven, for three days. In a single day, he cleaned the first floor, washed three loads of clothes and hung them out to dry, ironed all the laundry including underwear and sheets, fixed a soup-and-sandwich lunch and a big backyard supper, baked two cakes, prepared two salads for the next day, dressed, undressed, and bathed the children, washed wood work and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Mrs. Dalton said he was even a better cook than she was. “As for cleaning,” she said, “I am more thorough, but perhaps that is unnecessary.”
Pointing out that he had kept house for himself for seven years and had earned money at college by housework, Enghausen said, “I still wish that teaching 115 students were as easy as handling four children and a house…I still maintain that housework is not the interminable chore that women claim it is.”8
This claim, periodically expressed by men privately and publicly, has been borne out by a recent time-motion study. Recording and analyzing every movement made by a group of housewives, this study concluded that most of the energy expended in housework is superfluous. A series of intensive studies sponsored by the Michigan Heart Association at Wayne University disclosed that “women were working more than twice as hard as they should,” squandering energy through habit and tradition in wasted motion and unneeded steps.
The puzzling question of “housewife’s fatigue” sheds additional light. Doctors in many recent medical conventions report failure to cure it or get to its cause. At a meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a Cleveland doctor stated that mothers, who cannot get over “that tired feeling” and complain that their doctors are no help, are neither sick nor maladjusted, but actually tired. “No psychoanalysis or deep probing is necessary,” said Dr. Leonard Lovshin, of the Cleveland Clinic. “She has a work day of sixteen hours, a work week of seven days…. Being conscientious, she gets involved in Cubs, Brownies, PTA’s, heart drives, church work, hauling children to music and dancing.” But strangely enough, he remarked, neither the housewife’s workload nor her fatigue seemed affected by how many children she had. Most of these patients had only one or two. “A woman with one child just worries four times as much about the one as the woman with four children, and it all comes out even,” Dr. Lovshin said.
Some doctors, finding nothing organically wrong with these chronically tired mothers, told them, “It’s all in your mind” others gave them pills, vitamins, or injections for anemia, low blood pressure, low metabolism, or put them on diets (the average housewife is twelve to fifteen pounds overweight), deprived them of drinking (there are approximately a million known alcoholic housewives in America), or gave them tranquilizers. All such treatments were futile, Dr. Lovshin said, because these mothers were truly tired.9
Other doctors, finding that such mothers get as much or more sleep than they need, claimed the basic cause was not fatigue but boredom. This problem became so severe that the women’s magazines treated it fulsomely—in the Pollyanna terms of the feminine mystique. In a spate of articles that appeared in the late 1950’s, the “cures” suggested were usually of the more-praise-and-appreciation-from-husband variety, even though the doctors interviewed in these articles indicated clearly enough that the cause was in the “housewife-mother” role. But the magazines drew their usual conclusion: that is, and always will be woman’s lot, and she just has to make the best of it. Thus, Redbook (“Why Young Mothers Are Always Tired,” September, 1959) reports the findings of the Baruch study of chronic-fatigue patients:
…Fatigue of any kind is a signal that something is wrong. Physical fatigue protects the organism from injury through too great activity of any part of the body. Nervous fatigue, on the other hand, is usually a warning of danger to the personality. This comes out very clearly in the woman patient who complains bitterly that she is “just a housewife,” that she is wasting her talents and education on household drudgery and losing her attractiveness, her intelligence, and indeed her very identity as a person, explains Dr. Harley C. Sands, one of the co-heads of the Baruch project. In industry the most fatiguing jobs are those which only partially occupy the worker’s attention, but at the same time prevent him from concentrating on anything else. Many young wives say that this mental gray-out is what bothers them most in caring for home and children. “After a while your mind becomes a blank,” they say. “You can’t concentrate on anything. It’s like sleep-walking.”
The magazine also quotes a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist to the effect that the major factor which produces chronic fatigue in patients was “monotony unpunctuated by any major triumph or disaster,” noting that this “sums up the predicament of many a young mother.” It even cites the results of the University of Michigan study in which of 524 women asked “what are some of the things which make you feel ‘useful and important,’” almost none answered “housework” among the women who had jobs, “the overwhelming majority, married and single, felt that the job was more satisfying than the housework.” At this point the magazine interjects editorially: “This, of course, does not mean that a career is the alternative to fatigue for a young mother. If anything, the working mother may have more troubles than the housebound young matron.” The magazine’s happy conclusion: “Since the demands of housework and child-rearing are not very flexible, there is no complete solution to chronic-fatigue problems. Many women, however, can cut down fatigue if they stop asking too much of themselves. By trying to understand realistically what she can—and, more important, what she cannot—do, a woman may, in the long run, be a better wife and mother, albeit a tired one.”
Another such article (“Is Boredom Bad for You?” McCall’s, April 1957) asked, “Is the housewife’s chronic fatigue really boredom?” and answers: “Yes. The chronic fatigue of many housewives is brought on by the repetition of their jobs, the monotony of the setting, the isolation and the lack of stimulation. The heavy household chores, it’s been found, aren’t enough to explain the fatigue…. The more your intelligence exceeds your job requirements, the greater your boredom. This is so to such an extent that experienced employers never hire above-average brains for routine jobs…. It is this boredom plus, of course, the day-
to-day frustrations which makes the average housewife’s job more emotionally fatiguing than her husband’s.” The cure: “honest enjoyment in some part of the job such as cooking or an incentive such as a party in the offing and, above all, male praise are good antidotes for domestic boredom.”
For the women I interviewed, the problem seemed to be not that too much was asked of them, but too little. “A kind of torpor comes over me when I get home from the errands,” one woman told me. “It’s as if there’s nothing I really have to do, though there’s plenty to do around the house. So I keep a bottle of martinis in the refrigerator, and I pour myself some so I’ll feel more like doing something. Or just to get through till Don comes home.”
Other women eat, as they stretch out the housework, just to fill the time available. Obesity and alcoholism, as neuroses, have often been related to personality patterns that stem from childhood. But does this explain why so many American housewives around forty have the same dull and lifeless look; does it explain their lack of vitality, the deadly sameness of their lives, the furtive between-meal snacks, drinks, tranquilizers, sleeping pills? Even given the various personalities of these women, there must be something in the nature of their work, of the lives they lead, that drives them to these escapes.