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1 Postwar Gender Expectations and Realities
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Postwar Gender Expectations and Realities c h a p t e r o n e In 1964 Kathryn Greeley had three children (ages 7, 9, and 10), a physicianhusband teaching pharmacology at a southern university, a master’s degree in social work, and a résumé that included a few years’ work with the YWCA, a half-year in France as a social worker, and a host of volunteer positions with local community and interracial groups. She described herself as feeling “safe at home with family and community work, [and] the right husband and a home and children that I really enjoy.” She noted how her life resembled that of her parents: she was a professor’s wife with a steady family income and a pleasant lifestyle. Her friends repeatedly reminded her how lucky she was.1 Although Greeley felt satisfied at home, she acknowledged that this might change as her children grew older. She suspected she might eventually join the many women who “get restless after their children go off to school and seem to need something to fill their lives,” further noting that “jobs make me feel alive and important.” Greeley explained that the best plan was the one she suggested to her own daughters: “If possible, don’t meet the right man to marry until you have packed in plenty of school, and travel, and men, and jobs, and living.” She recommended finding “some interesting career,” observing that nursing and teaching offered real advantages for married women because they could work part-time as circumstances dictated. And science was the best choice of all because “there will be so many men in that field.” For Greeley, the key to a woman’s happiness was meeting the right man at the right time because it provided the ultimate flexibility for a modern female life.2 Kathryn Greeley was one of 311 female graduates from advanced studies at 12 h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n f o r w o m e n i n p o s t w a r a m e r i c a Columbia University who, in 1966, answered a questionnaire about how their lives had progressed in the fifteen years following graduate study. Although better -educated than many of their contemporaries, Greeley and others in this study had shifted away from careers in favor of home responsibilities. While recognizing the appeal of the labor force, the women generally felt content concentrating on family and community. Greeley and women like her became pivotal to rebalancing American life after the war’s disruptions of the economy, international affairs, and family relations. Women—who had responded so patriotically during the war—became key to postwar readjustment. They could ease the economic strain of returning veterans by giving up jobs they had held during the war. They could affirm the American way of life against a communist threat by supporting their local communities. And they could reassert normal domestic relations by starting families, building homes, and enjoying a prosperous life.3 In short, women were important players on the Cold War scene. However, enormous changes had occurred during the war in the economy, in education, and in gender relationships, provoking a dissonance between cultural norms for women and their behavior at home and in the workplace. Images from the late 1940s and 1950s lauded a white, middle-class, suburban ideal, where an at-home mother like Kathryn Greeley managed home and family in full support of her husband’s preeminent economic role.4 But such images rarely reflected reality in an increasingly urbanized and industrialized nation, where people’s awareness of racial and class diversity had sharpened during the war and women’s ability to stay home with children was often possible only for the upper-middle class. From the national need to reestablish familiar domestic and economic relations , a set of four ideologies emerged, shaping expectations for women’s behavior in terms of patriotic duty, economic participation, cultural role, and psychological needs. Each of these ideologies addressed a particular concern in American life while also revealing ways in which postwar women were challenging or ignoring those norms, sometimes by choice, and often by necessity. The ideologies cast a particularly strong influence on middle-class women, leaving them with difficult decisions about how to spend their time, energy, and work force involvement. For women of lesser means—including many women of color...